Hellblazer 2 - Subterranean by John Shirley

along—and then he’d run out of steps. And out of floor. He’d pitched into a hole. A moment of free fall and then—it was as if he’d been swatted like a fly. He’d supposed himself killed.
    No such luck. Only knocked out for a bit.
    He sat up, bones aching but intact, and got to his hands and knees, looking around for some source of light and finding none. Pitch black. The bottom of the chute was rough, stony, cold, and bone dry; the air smelled of mushrooms and, faintly, of decaying flesh. A chorus of unintelligible whispering was heard from not far away. Now and then, the dripping of water; the occasional low groan, and a sound that might have been something big and soft being dragged across a floor.
    Constantine had no other impressions, because he couldn’t see a damn thing. The words stygian and inky came to his mind and they seemed inadequate. It was darkness without relief.
    There was another quality to the blackness too—it seemed to have a palpable weight of its own, a fulsome presence that pressed against him. He remembered a line from the Bible, Exodus 10:21, Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward Heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be felt.”
    Constantine got carefully to his feet, waiting for his eyes to adjust, to give him some faint sense of the extent and shape of his surroundings. It never happened. He reached up above him, feeling about—and his hand came into contact with a damp stone ceiling a few feet over his head. To the right and left he felt nothing. “Lady!” he hissed into the darkness, hoping that the dripping water might put him in contact with her. “What happened to the light you gave me earlier?”
    Something in the darkness sniggered at that.
    “He thinks he wants to see! Oh but he don’t, he don’t!”
    Did he hear that with his ears or his mind—or his imagination? Constantine wasn’t sure.
    “Lady!”
    No reply.
    He thought of a spell of illumination that might work here. He yearned to try it out—he felt unspeakably vulnerable in this blackness. Something could be sniffing at him, opening its great toothy mouth for him right now, and he’d never know till it closed its jaws.
    And if the spell didn’t work, there was always his cigarette lighter, though he was reluctant to use its fuel up. How, after all, would he light his cigarettes if he ran his lighter fuel down?
    Some instinct warned him against creating light, magically or any other way, just now. If there were dangerous creatures about him in the darkness, they might be as unaware of him as he was of them. A light would only attract them.
    But without a light he might blunder into a pit, or into that toothy maw . . .
    Just wait, he told himself. Hold off.
    So he moved slowly ahead—he hoped it was ahead—with his arms outstretched, feeling his way with his feet.
    Fuck me, this could take weeks. I’ve only got five days.
    Still he tiptoed slowly forward, feeling his way. The ground seemed more or less flat, though now and then something brittle crunched underfoot.
    A dozen yards on he ran into someone else feeling their way along. Their fingertips touching his.
    Constantine recoiled, swearing, “Fucking hell . . . !”
    “Here, who’s that?” said a voice, accompanied by foul breath, close at hand. “I don’t know that voice. I thought I knew every voice in the deep dark.”
    The voice had an odd accent Constantine had never heard before. Almost British but not quite. “My name’s John,” he said. “Who’s that?”
    “Arfur, you can call me,” said the voice. A man’s voice, cracked, aged, laborious. “The Brits called me that.”
    Constantine took a step back from the smell—a stench of decay and never-washed feet and mold and feces. “How long have you been here?” Constantine asked, wondering how he could get some kind of directions to the Palace of Phosphor without revealing himself to be an intruder. Whoever he was