HELLBLAZER #194
Ward 24
Writer : Mike Carey
Art : Leonardo Manco
Cover Artist : Tim Bradstreet
Colors : Lee Loughridge
Letters : Clem Robins
Editor : Will Dennis
Assistant Editor : Casey Seijas
Solicitation Text : Constantine's war with the Beast is done, but the repercussions go rolling on — not the least
for John himself, as he wanders wounded through a shattered, shell-shocked London where an insane killer and a very
strange little girl both take a deadly interest in his fate.
Issue Synopsis :
Deep in the heart of London, a businessman is accosted in some public toilets. His attacker, a large, well
built man binds his hands and feet with restraints before pulling a knife from his jeans. The assailant taunts
his victim with intimate knowledge of his family, including the fact that his daughter was carrying on
behind his back. The man's captor punctuates his sentences with viscous lunges of his knife, leaving the
businessman a bloody, ruined corpse.
John Constantine, suffering from amnesia, wanders down along the banks of the Themes as the city around
him tries to recover from the bloodshed wrought in the wake of his inadvertent release of the Beast.
Constantine's travels bring him to a young girl who has a badly burnt arm partaking of a little fishing while
a corpse floats face down past her. The girl introduces herself as Rose and John takes her to a nearby
hospital but his good deed doesn't go unpunished when she tells the staff that he can't remember his own
name. When pushed by surrounding orderlies for his personal details, Constantine claims the name he can
see written down on a nearby form, Leo Sumner. John's lie is overheard by a burly man sitting nearby, the
one responsible for the earlier murder. Unconvinced, one of the orderlies brings John upstairs to the
psychiatric ward.
The murderer approaches the orderly who questioned Constantine and tries to convince him that he's there
to pick John up. The orderly tells him to take it up with the doctor John's been sent to see. The man
responds by telling the orderly that he was right to think that his dad might have been raping his younger
sister.
John is brought to see Doctor Miles Bradshaw and admits that he took the name off a chart downstairs
when he couldn't remember anything about his own life. Bradshaw has Constantine admitted onto his
ward and tells one of his staff to run a missing persons check on him.
Rose it taken to the burns ward and bandaged up by a specialist, when she asks the young girl where the
fire that burnt her was, she points to her heart.
On the psychiatric ward, the murderer approaches Constantine. He demands to know who John is,
claiming that he knows everyone on the planet but him - to prove his point, he starts rattling off personal
details for the staff and patients around them. Frustrated with Constantine's protests of ignorance, the
murderer is about to get violent when several staff members come to John's aid. Unperturbed, the
murderer smacks the nearest orderly with a bedside locker and quickly makes his escape.
Miles is surprised when one of his staff turns up some information on John from a years old police APB.
He tells Miles that John once did time for murder in the States and that he's now listed as being dead.
Elsewhere in the hospital, Rose burns a hole in a supply cabinet and walks off with a nasty looking pair of
surgical scissors.
Bradshaw hypnotises Constantine. First he tells John to think back to his earliest memory but he can't
remember anything prior to seeing the mist on the river that morning. Miles then tells Constantine to think
of a face, a name or a voice, anything that he can remember from his past. John remains blank, so the
doctor leans in close and utters "John Constantine" out loud. Constantine's mind is suddenly flooded with
terribles memories of the past - Gabriel, Jack Of The Green, Nergal, Astra, Ironfist, Slag and his own red eyed
demon self. Rose wanders into the room as Miles brings John out of his trance. Bradshaw tries to escort
the young girl out of his office but she attacks him with the scissors.
Constantine comes to, with the bloodied scissors in his hands and the eviscerated corpse of Bradshaw in
front of him. Rose stands behind John, licking blood from her fingertips as she tells him that he'll get the
blame for the doctor's murder. Terrified, and still mired in the depths of his amnesia, Constantine flees the
hospital.
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Murderer.
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Rose
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Constantine struggles with Amnesia.
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Oh shit!
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