Hellboy: Odd Jobs

by Christopher Golden

  The high windows were blocked with crusty curtains, and partially obscured by expansive shelving that stretched from floor to ceiling. Nevertheless, the moonlight filtered through here and there, back-lighting the various beakers, scales, and specimen jars. Moonlit, the contents of some of the jars gleamed through the decades of dust that buried them, casting pale shadows and reflecting the odd glimmer of long-dead eyes, wings, teeth, fins, and embryos.

  Guy fumbled for the lights, finding the switch just as the distant ringing of a church bell deepened the gloom.

  Even with the lights on, the room seemed dark. Nevertheless, he had to start somewhere. The ceiling lights illuminated the topmost shelves best; besides, the scattered dirt and dust would settle onto everything. It just made sense to start with the uppermost levels and work his way down. Two step-ladders were braced together at the bottom of the window shelving. He separated them and propped the sturdiest of the pair alongside the shelving, and climbed as far up as he felt safe.

  In time, he had cleared two shelves. Their contents were strewn across the floor in roughly defined categories: paper, files, cardboard, instruments, and specimen jars. The latter were of some interest, though the glass was too filthy to clearly see what they contained. That would take some time, which he could indulge during another shift, after the sorting and disposal detail was further underway.

  As Guy dragged the step-ladder to a new location, he tipped it to avoid a clutch of specimen jars he'd just placed at the foot of the shelves. The top step clipped a box of files on the third shelf down and sent it tumbling. Guy steadied the ladder, preventing it from falling, but it was too late. Everything to the right of the toppled box of files went with it. Guy winced as something bulky hit the tiles, and glass shattered, scattering into the settling papers and files.

  Something that looked like oversized escargot and black purses slid over the floor, pooling in formaldehyde that soaked into one stack of papers. Hopefully, the documents weren't too important.

  Grumbling to himself, he set the ladder aside and hunkered down to pick up the mess.

  A half hour later, he had the spill in order, save for the spilled specimen jar that had shattered and scattered a potpourri of shark embryos and skate egg cases in one corner, and an odd collection of gray, desiccated pieces of what appeared to be metal, rock, or some painted substance he simply couldn't identify. They were unusually lightweight, despite their appearance. Their edges were irregular, though they seemed to have been precision cut, not broken, into their odd variety of shapes.

  Guy gathered the gray blocks and shards into a single corner of the floor and began to toy with them. There were well over two dozen in all, .some as big as his fist, others small and smooth as marbles. Only their color was uniform, indicating their relation to one another.

  Holding them up to each other to compare their contours, he found two of them seemed to fit together. With a flex of his wrist, he snapped them into place as they seemed designed to do. To his surprise, the fit was snug. He sorted through the rest and found a third which fit into place, too.

  And a fourth ...

  A fifth ...

  By the tenth piece

  a large marble which slipped smoothly into a rounded socket

  Guy became uneasy as

  he began to recognize the pattern of the puzzle.

  He held one of the unassembled pieces in one hand, the partially assembled mass in the other, and felt a cold shiver ripple up his neck.

  The piece in his hand was a nose.

  He dropped it as if it were a spider that had just landed on his palm.

  He nervously gazed at the mass he held in his other hand, and let the wave of recognition wash over him: the odd, disarticulated object was a human head, somehow mummified, preserved, and jig-sawed into pieces.

  As his realization reeled into revulsion, he impulsively snapped his fingers open, dropping the object.

  It hit the floor. One of the assembled pieces broke free, but the impact was felt in another way.

  The rounded marble

  an eye

  opened in the dusty relic, suddenly warm with color.

  It was alive.

  Guy scrambled to his feet as if stung by a bee. He stood frozen at an odd angle, legs akimbo, arms outstretched, as if to flee or fight. As the minutes ticked by, though, and the object simply lay still, Guy began to relax.

  A head. A human head, preserved and jig-sawed into pieces.

  As revulsion gave way to reason, he decided it was safe to sit back down next to the object. Surely, it was some kind of teaching tool, designed to instruct anatomy students. Why else would a medical university have such an obscenity in storage?

  Perhaps it was a game, a puzzle. A three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. But the detail, the sculpting no, it

  seemed to be a genuine human head. No artist could craft such an object complete with bristling brows, whiskers, and hair stubble.

  Mesmerized, Guy returned to the puzzle. He fondled the strangely weightless pieces and convinced himself it was just a trick of the light that the eye seemed to glower from within.

  Under the watchful gaze of the single, open orb, Guy continued to fit the metallic pieces together, solving the puzzle until the jaw and a portion of the tongue snapped into place.

  There was an impossible stirring beneath his hand, and then the head began to speak to him in a soft, barely audible whisper.

  "I will make of you a king ... "

  His hands spasmed open, dropping the gray mass to the floor. His every instinct was to flee, or to bring his foot down upon the dust ball and stomp it into oblivion.

  Still, it whispered, with a voice dry as wasp paper.

  "Restore me," it beckoned, "and I will make of you a king."

  Guy closed his eyes and threw the cleaning rag over the damned thing. He sat still, praying under his breath, finally daring to take a peek once more.

  The filthy rag completely covered the head. He was afraid to hold his gaze; if the rag should stir, drawn in by a breath, he would surely break down.

  Holding his breath, Guy scrambled towards it on his hands and knees and looked away as he tightened the wrap. Mercifully, it made no further sound. If he heard it speak again, he knew he would scream.

  Streaming with sweat, he frantically gathered up the various unassembled pieces and stuffed them into an unlabeled manila envelope among the paper debris he had thrown to the floor from the top shelf. He began to feel lightheaded, then remembered to take a breath.

  He shuddered when his nervous breathing was echoed from within the rag.

  Driven by fear

  of staying, of discovery, of the damned thing beneath the wrap

  Guy scrambled to his

  feet and grabbed the largest broom propped against the door.

  The urge to jab at the object or just smash it swept over him again, but he instead used the broom to keep the thing as far from reach as possible as he jammed it and the unlabeled manila envelope into the far corner beneath the towers of desks and chairs.

  Once it was out of sight, Guy began to calm down. He broke down the cardboard and stacked the flats against the corner where the damned thing was now hidden, as if to blot it out. Regaining some clarity of mind, he swept up the broken glass and the shark embryos, consigned them to the trash bag, and then proceeded to mop the floor.

  The pungent aroma of the spilled formaldehyde should have overwhelmed everything, but all he could smell was the head, a dry odor ripe with age, mold, and spores. He coughed and gagged, shook his head, and finished the mopping.

  Whenever possible, he averted his gaze from the end of the room dominated by the stacked desks and chairs.

  He jumped at the occasional echoes of his own breathing, couldn't put out the light or slam the door quickly enough.

  He had somehow finished the cleanup, though he couldn't remember the final minutes. He continued to sweat as he left the Faculté, entered the Metro, and started the long ride home
. As he got off at Richard'lenoir, he still felt anxious and afraid.

  What would he say to Francine? What would he tell himself?

  His heart sank as their appartement window came into view. The light was on inside Francine had waited

  up for him. He could not simply slip into the bed and close his eyes. She would see something was wrong.

  He'd never kept any secrets from her. How, where would he begin?

  For the first time, he noticed how badly he smelled. The stench of his sweat and the cleaning fluids was bad enough, but he could smell something else. He sniffed his hands, and shivered: He could still smell the thing.

  He was rubbing his hands against his pant legs when he staggered into the appartement, afraid of what he might say.

  Francine looked up at him from her perch at the edge of the bed, her eyes red and swollen.

  "Guy," she whispered, "Thomas is dead."

  "Welcome to La Table D'or. And your friend would be

  ?"

  "Abraham Sapien," Hellboy responded to the maître d'. "Dr. Kate Corrigan is expecting us. Private salon."

  "Bonjour," Abe managed between the coils of his scarf. The flustered maître d' gazed for only a moment, as if to penetrate the opaque shielding of Abe's mirror shades; he had no way of knowing the opacity of the lidless eyes beneath the lenses. If anything, the starched guardian of the restaurant's sanctuary seemed more disturbed by Abraham's guise in such muggy weather than he had been by Hellboy's trench-coated stature.

  They cut a mean rug, he and Abe, no doubt about it.

  "Yes, of course," the maître d' chirped, regaining his composure. "Your private salon is right this way we

  wouldn't want to disrupt the clientele. Dr. Corrigan had requested special attention be given, and I apologize we weren't quicker to recognize your arrival."

  "Lead on," Hellboy gestured, sorry he couldn't milk their entrance for a little more juice.

  Abe kept his gloved hand to his face as they were led into a separate dining chamber. Kate stood to greet them, brow cocked at the maître d'.

  "What's the soup de jour?" Hellboy asked.

  "I've ordered for us," Kate replied. "The food and wine is already here."

  "Thank you, madam. If I could be of any more service

  "

  The evident relief on his face coaxed a smile from Hellboy, who turned to close the salon door behind the efficient clicking of the maître d's polished shoes. Abe gasped as he slung the scarf away from his neck, quick to exchange greetings with Corrigan as he finished stripping away his disguise. Hellboy claimed his seat and managed a sip of wine before Abe was ready to join them.

  "You're looking good, Kate," Hellboy cooed. He rarely saw Corrigan dressed up for dinner, every dirty-blond hair brushed into place.

  Kate smiled at Hellboy and turned to Abraham. "Room comfortable at the Hotel de la Cathédrale?"

  Abe nodded. "Your choice? Very nice. Like the big bathtub. Good color, too."

  "Matches his eyes," Hellboy snorted. "Thanks for getting us out of there tonight."

  "Let's get to it, shall we?" Kate began. "Was this the symbol you saw in your dream?"

  "Yeah, huh," Hellboy grunted, cradling his wine goblet in his left hand. "Told you I wasn't much of an artist."

  "On the contrary," Kate whispered, "I found it with nary a blind alley."

  The rough arc, within a square, split by a single sword, point down: but the arc was, in the old woodcut reproductions, a serpent, split by the curving blade.

  "I've traced this back to a group of alchemists who made their mark in Southern France during the late sixteenth, early seventeenth century. I need more to go on, but it's a start, and you seem to be suffering more vivid dreams the closer you've come to the source: vague memories in Connecticut, more vivid dreams en route to the U.K. and in London, a narrative pattern to the dreams and increasing specifics now that you're in Paris."

  Hellboy shifted his glare to Abe. "Tattle-tale."

  Abe shrugged, sipping his bottled water. Kate leaned across the table toward Hellboy, gingerly placing her pale hand on his rough stone fingers.

  "You've had more nightmares since you've been here, haven't you?"

  Abe looked away as Hellboy cleared his throat, turning his slitted eyes from the amphibian's averted gaze to Kate's open, imploring look. He swished his wine thoughtfully and then swallowed it down in a single gulp.

  Bad form. No matter.

  "You both know how I hate this psychic stuff," he muttered. "It's worse when it's scrambling your own noggin."

  Kate closed her other hand over his massive paw.

  "Tell her about the head," Abe insisted.

  "I thought it was happening to you

  "

  "Yeah," he managed. "I've been completely sliced and diced and brazed. But now there's more. I can hear rug-rats wailing, men chanting. Latin, French, Spanish, Italian. I see babies cut from throat to crotch. I smell blood."

  Kate pulled a notebook from her bag and began writing.

  "I can see something else," Hellboy concluded. "A head, not mine, but jig-sawed, like what they've done to me there in the dream. It's been turned to stone or something. Last night it opened its eyes and spoke to me.

  German."

  "Did it speak of your father again?" Abe asked.

  Hellboy nodded, and poured a fresh glass of wine.

  The morning after Thomas's death, Guy quit the invalid's hospice. He made his apologies, and fled the building. For Francine, it was a loss upon a loss, with no time to catch her breath.

  Francine flinched when the Monsieur le Directeur used Guy as an example to all at the monthly staff

  meeting. He had grown too attached to one of the patients, the Directeur explained, an intimacy ill-advised in the medical and nursing profession. The Directeur gazed meaningfully at Francine, no doubt misinterpreting the tears she brushed away from her cheek.

  She missed Thomas, too

  but she missed Guy's attachment to the hospice even more. It created a sudden, irreparable vacuum that frightened her. For the first time, there were fissures in their life together.

  Days later, he still would not speak of what had happened in the medical lab the evening that Thomas had died. He never explained the odd smell, or what had already shaken him so, before he'd learned of Thomas's passing. She had laundered the uneasy stink of that night from the bedclothes, but Guy's sleep was still restless and punctuated with inexplicable shivers.

  That she planned to clock extra hours at the hospice only aggravated the unspoken rift. As if goaded to match her distance, Guy secured extra evenings at the Faculté de Médecine, claiming he needed to make up for the loss of once-dependable income and had to cover the additional Metro fees necessary to the longer commute.

  She didn't like it; the Faculté was a mystery to her. She'd never laid eyes on its doors, much less its expansive halls and cluttered rooms. He'd made no friends there as yet to speak of, and rarely had any anecdotes to share. He hardly ever spoke about the university, really, dismissing it to ask instead after her favorite patients at the hospice.

  It was as if her job meant more to him than his own, and she enjoyed the attention, though that attention quickly waned in the days after Thomas's death.

  Through it all, a week

  just a week!

  passed without their sharing a waking moment together.

  Ah, but Sunday remained their own. She still had him that Sunday morning. She roused him, and they made love, and he finally cried and spoke of Thomas, and she eased him back into the slumber where he was hers and hers alone, if only for a few hours.

  Come Monday, they returned to work again, and the gulf between them widened.

  Guy had avoided the room all week, despite the notes from the Faculté Directeur urging him to at least start with the cleanup of the archives.

  He had dreamt of the thing in the corner all week; horrible, unspeakable dreams, in which it was his own head being cut into
sections, while birds and babies cried around him. He had never dreamed of blood before in his short life. Never. Ever.

  Playing the radio wherever he worked in the Faculté, Guy braced himself to go back.

  He would go there, as soon as he was finished in the offices.

  Once the bibliothèque was clean.

  After he had swept the hall, he would do it.

  He would open the door.

  He would go in.

  He would switch on the light.

  Moving stiffly, carefully keeping his back to the wall stacked with the desks and chairs, Guy slid the more dependable looking of the two ladders over to the shelves. He was about to lift it up to brace it against the shelving supports when he heard the willowy rasping from the far corner.

  Paper thin, dry as dust, a breath.

  A half hour later, he re-entered the room. Soaked in sweat, he stared balefully at the flats of cardboard he had stacked over the hollow beneath the desks, where he had hidden the damned object.

  Again, the breath, unmistakable.

  Guy began to tremble. He rubbed his face and eyes, then steeled himself for the worst. Hesitantly, he shuffled to the cardboard and carefully set it aside. He bent down, sobbing, and forced himself to reach into the darkness beneath the desk.

  It was still there, beneath the filthy wrap. Guy tenderly picked the bits of dust and dirt away, and slowly peeled back the rag. Its lone eye fixed him, a reservoir of unspeakable sorrow.

  Is this all he had feared?

  He held it just so for a long, long time. Gradually, his breathing steadied, and he continued to unwrap the thing.

  Guy cradled the head in his arms, studying its features. It was handsome, in its way, he thought. There was a coppery burnish to the skin that made it seem strong, ageless.

  The eye held its gaze, and Guy met it, now unafraid.

  This time, when it spoke, he did not drop it or flee.

  He listened.

  It promised him much he'd never had, many things he'd always wanted.

  It promised him things he'd never dreamed of. Never. Ever.

  It wanted so little in exchange.

  As if in a dream, Guy reached for the unlabeled manila envelope he had hidden away with the object that fateful night of discovery. He reached inside, and as the head whispered to him, Guy methodically coaxed each one of the remaining gray pieces into place. As he felt the round gray piece shift into position in the socket opposite the single eye, sliding between calloused lids with a satisfying pop, he looked down with pride on his work.