Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  The world was younger then, and wilder, governed by the horizon. They came from the cold forests of Northern Europe, astride the icy timbers of their ships. They came and they never left, fathering a lineage that still dominated England today, even unto giving the country her name. They came, and buried this Dark Age cache of artifacts, steeped in their blood and sweat and fury and honor.

  And somehow the place had become a womb. Seeded by … what?

  Belief? Fear?

  No such beast as coincidence.

  A few days ago he wouldn’t have expected it to be so literal, what Copplestone had said about the ancient ways, about old gods awakening to believers who have in turn awakened to them. Dried-up old riverbeds, he’d compared them to, lying in wait for a fresh infusion to come roaring back to life.

  Copplestone and his mates, they believed, all right. Said they weren’t alone, either, not by a longshot.

  And if they’d begun to bring their ancestral gods back home, well, who was to say one or two of the ancestral devils hadn’t hitched a ride in the bargain. For aren’t those things that mean you harm so much easier to believe in, in the long run, than those that mean you well?

  Now that Hellboy had a good idea who he was looking for, it considerably narrowed where he’d have to look.

  Spiraling.

  Fractal repetition, echoed in scale from infinitesimal to infinite. Twined helix of DNA and spinning sickle starfish-arms of galaxies. Spirals carved in megalithic rock at Newgrange, drawn by shamans in Ugandan dirt. Spiraldance of pagans at revel, round and round and round we go. And somewhere in between, blueprint for the search for the lost … this our hub, this our axis.

  Involution, evolution. The rise from the swirling waters of birth, the slow drift down into the waters of death. The path deciding all, while the pattern remains the same.

  Hellboy couldn’t have not found this place. The centuries had conspired to spin him to it.

  A small lake deep in the moors, its stagnant waters slopped quietly against the muck of its shoreline. With bark leprous and branches gnarled, the surrounding trees looked poisoned, not by substance so much as spirit, as though the soil from which they grew no longer remembered the specifics of some terrible event that had happened here, only the essence of it.

  Imagine, then, the heart of the being that would choose to call such a place home.

  Imagine having no other choice.

  Hellboy found it at dusk, this black oasis, and knew he was in the right place when within a mossy cluster of trees he spotted a great depression in the spongy green, along with a calcium-white heap. Something had rested here, had taken bones of the dead and passed a few idle hours by reducing them to chips and flakes. Grinding them, perhaps. It was said that, in some ancient Germanic tongue, this was what had given Hellboy’s quarry his name.

  Even then they had called him a roamer of the night, and it appeared that nothing had changed. Gone for this one already, Hellboy suspected, so he settled onto the cushion of moss to wait. When the moon rose high and the surface of the lake remained undisturbed, that confirmed it: This vigil would last until dawn.

  And a lonely vigil it was, the silence here so deep it was unnatural. No frogs, no crickets, no splash of fish from the ebony waters, and when the first soft blush of pink tinged the eastern sky he heard no birds around to greet it. The sole signs of life were those approaching footsteps that had been inevitable, and when their maker at last shambled into view through the trees and the dewy morning haze, Hellboy viewed him over the barrel of his gun.

  Grendel stopped, and though he came from an age ruled by another form of steel, seemed to understand precisely what it was.

  “Men I know. I do not know what manner of thing you are,” said Grendel, “but I see you have learned their lessons well.”

  “And you know what surprises me most?” Hellboy said. “I wasn’t expecting you to have the power of speech.”

  “Why should you have expectations of my ways at all?”

  “The man who killed you. Beowulf. Someone wrote about his life. Big long epic poem. It’s stood the test of time.”

  “But the poet had no words to give me?” Grendel asked. “Words only for the hero? It is no surprise. Poets save their best words for what they long to be or desire to possess … and cannot. And like all men, what they do not understand they fear, and what they fear they find convenient to kill.”

  “You mean like the way you handled those poor thirty-odd bastards a few days ago?”

  “They hungered for a life they never knew. I gave them a brief taste of it. They wanted dragons to fight. I gave them one. It was their yearning that drew me to them. The next morning may have been abhorrent to you, but the night before…? They lived as they had never lived before. They died as few are privileged.”

  Hellboy hadn’t been there, but he had his doubts. Had seen few die with the kind of savage exultation with which heroes died in the sagas and epics of old. Had they ever, really? They begged, they bargained, they shrieked and wept and bled, and he couldn’t think of a single shame in it.

  He imagined that the sight of Grendel would have been more than enough to send them running. Long muscled spidery limbs, sharp-tipped and coarse with gray bristles; primal simian face with the shearing teeth of a carnivore and eyes cunning as a cannibal’s. Would bankers stand and fight him; would architects and crossing guards? Never.

  Although he was not nearly so large that it would have required four men to carry his head back to Hrothgar’s mead-hall. Even then the tales of heroes’ exploits had needed help from their tellers, so that their boasts might be better winged to fly down through the ages.

  Grendel’s speed, though — by any standards it would be legendary.

  One arm lashed out, quick as a whip, and Hellboy would not have thought he could reach so far. A slashing blow, and the gun was ripped from his grip, knocked a dozen yards away, where it struck a tree, chipping away loose bark and lichens. And Grendel overhead then, his own limbs merging with those of the oak into which he’d hoisted himself, death from above as he bore down with gristle-flecked jaws. Hellboy reacted out of instinct, dodging and swiping an arc with his huge stone-like hand, and its grip found purchase, and wrenched, and the damage was done before he even realized it: Hellboy, standing there with Grendel’s arm dangling from his grasp.

  Again, the old wound.

  And rain, red rain from the emptied socket.

  Grendel bellowed into the rising day, launched himself from the branches and into the waters of the lake — a tremendous splash, and then a rapid rippling calm. For a moment Hellboy watched the wavelets, then retrieved his gun and waded in to follow.

  Awash in greenish murk, he swam slowly and, as any good hunter would, followed the threads of blood that swirled and eddied before him. Down and down and down, as the lake was graylit by the first spears of sunlight to pierce its surface, the thinning bloodtrail leading to a horizontal channel dug out of rock and clay. The breath ached against his lungs and an inky darkness enfolded him, total now, and still he kicked onward until a faint flickering orange beckoned overhead.

  Grendel’s lair. Another land, another aeon, but his habits persevered.

  Hellboy broke surface, found himself treading water in a small pool ringed by stream-smoothed stones. They had been chosen and placed with obvious care. As if their simple arrangement had been something that mattered.

  He dredged himself from the water, stood dripping in a small cavern far below the surface of the daylight world. Its earthen walls crawled with roots. The light from half a dozen torches shimmered on the moist sheen of its rocks and strobed a dance of shadows. In one corner, a heaped jumble of tooth-marked bones.

  And upon the walls, suspended from brackets of sticks, hung their swords.

  He plucked a torch from its seat of earth and back, back along a corridor where the light was loath to reach, followed the patters of blood upon the floor. Their size shrunk every step or two, until he could cle
arly see what they’d led him to.

  By all the gods that ever were, he had never seen anything like this.

  At first Hellboy thought it was a body sitting propped against the cavern wall, an enormous corpse somehow half-preserved from an epoch when its kind had walked above ground. But no, it had never lived … only its parts had.

  Bones made from branches — the trunks of saplings for its arms and legs and spine, stout curved branches for ribs. The wool of sheep wound like muscle mass around the makeshift limbs. For a head, a bale of hay stuffed into a large grainsack, with hair of plastered weeds and algae. And skin quilted together from the hides of at least a dozen men, fashioning from them this colossal hag’s pendulous breasts, matronly belly, her atrocious face.

  It weeps, the hanging man had said. In the night, it weeps.

  Hellboy understood now whom those tears were for.

  His mother. From the only tools at hand, Grendel had remade his mother.

  The telling of his slayer’s tale had come as news to Grendel. That much was apparent. Could he even know, then, that she too had fallen to Beowulf? Did he wonder, did he suspect? Or did he weep only because he had been spawned back into a world where she no longer existed?

  Hellboy squeezed shut his eyes, able to understand that feeling, his own mother never anything more to him than an echo, a phantom glimpsed in the desecrated ruins of a church in East Bromwich. Old deluded woman at the end of a lifetime shaped by devil’s lies.

  Or had he only hallucinated her to compensate for what he’d never known, making her outright from the fabric of his need?

  At his feet, there issued a turbid flow of blood from the juncture of the hag’s splayed and outstretched legs. Hellboy reached forward and, as if opening the flap of a tent, peeled back a drape of leathery skin on the sagging kettledrum of her belly. Behind it, Grendel sat curled double within the hollow, remaining hand clamped over the ragged socket of his shoulder.

  The fight now bled from him, Grendel stared back at Hellboy over the muzzle of his gun.

  “So plain it is in your eyes…” said Grendel. “You do not think I belong in this world or any other.”

  “I’m hardly alone in that,” Hellboy told him.

  “Others may look upon you and judge you the same.”

  “Not if they know enough to judge me by my actions.”

  “Ah, those,” whispered Grendel. “Protecting the very ones who would find you a fearful thing to look upon? Defending them from the rawheads and the bloodybones of a darkness that could not exist if they did not feed it … crave it in spite of their piety? Because even a hellspawn is better than their fears that there may be nothing for them beyond this life.”

  Lifeblood oozed over and between those trembling, spindly fingers. Surely there could not be much more left for his heart to pump. And it was said, Hellboy recalled, that the blood of Cain flowed in him, and this was why Grendel had turned against mankind. He was every man that killed his brother, no matter how loosely one defined the term.

  “Answer me one thing,” Grendel said. “Will Paradise welcome you any more than it would welcome me? Your heart may be a good one, but will the guardians of the Gate forgive you the birth you must have had?”

  He did not know how to answer this. Knew only what he hoped.

  “I thought as much,” said Grendel. “This, too, is so plain in your eyes.” And then he shut his own, and murmured, “Mercy.”

  Hellboy shook his head. “Even if I was inclined to give it, there’s no time and nothing I could do for you.”

  “You do not understand.” Slowly, slowly, Grendel craned his neck forward to bring his skull within a hair’s breadth of the gun. “I would not die the same ignoble death twice. So I ask you…”

  And some part of him — the same part which days ago, this mystery still unfolding as he walked in spirals, wondered if what the land had birthed might not in some way be his brother — didn’t want to do this.

  “…all I ask you…”

  Oh, but they all wore the mark of Cain, didn’t they?

  “…mercy.”

  He obliged, and pulled the trigger.

  Hellboy waited awhile before leaving the lair. Spent some time sorting amidst the bones for any trinkets that might be recovered for a grieving widow or child, to bring them the tiniest comfort — a necklace, a medallion — but there were none to be found. So he waited until the torches burned themselves out, one by one, and stared at the ruin of this son, this surrogate mother.

  Pondering, too, his own fate, his legacy. Wondering if after long centuries anyone, anywhere, might know of him, know the least thing about him, or care.

  And when the last torch remained, he touched it to those flammable parts of the mother’s vast body, the kindling wood and the hay, and when at last they caught, he hoped that it would burn the rest, as any funeral pyre should. And that some of the smoke, at least, would sift its way through the soil, up, up, to be sighed by the earth into the air, spirals of breath and vapor that would rise into the sky to meet the clouds, and linger there, and someday fall back with the rain.

  Now Day Was Fled As the Worm Had Wished

  We would know it as soon as we got there, Vanessa insisted — more than once. We would know the right place when we found it and not one moment before, so there was no point in second-guessing ourselves. Stop trying so hard. No formal itinerary and that was just the way we should keep it.

  “How about here?” Heather had suggested a couple of weeks ago at the Tower of London, before we’d left the city for the countryside. Forty-eight hours before that we would’ve still been somewhere over the Atlantic.

  “Absolutely not, you can’t be serious,” Vanessa had vetoed. “Are you?”

  No reply, just Heather and her puckish little smile, betraying nothing. Even I couldn’t be sure, when I’d known her so much longer. It wasn’t often you could catch Heather giving away anything more than exactly as much as she wanted.

  “It was the ravens, wasn’t it?” I asked her later, on the Tube, starting to feel as though I might be catching on to the way she was thinking here and now, in this world instead of the one we were trying to leave behind. Not that it looked all that different yet — those butt-ugly American fanny-packs and the murderous stress of business commuters look the same everywhere — but we at least felt the potential unfurling before us.

  Ravens live at the top of the Tower, we had discovered. Live up there under ceremonial guard. Very serious business, those ravens. Tradition holds that the fate of England hinges upon them. Should the ravens ever leave the Tower, fly away, England will be sure to fall.

  “Maybe something about them did make me think of my parents’ marriage,” Heather said.

  “I thought you wanted to do this.”

  “I do. I just don’t want to do any of it like they did.”

  “In that case, I’d say you’re off to a flying start.”

  See, the catch with the ravens is that they can’t soar away even if they want to. The feathers at the ends of their wings are clipped. They’re prisoners, as surely as any heretic or rightful heir to a stolen throne who’d ever been a guest of the Tower when it was operational. It’s possible that if one of them wanted out badly enough, it could tumble off the edge of the parapet and fall like a glossy black stone. But I suppose they’re more apt to simply spend their days pecking at the free buffet and eyeing the sky with longing.

  Naturally I hesitated to share this insight with her — the considerate thing to do, given the way her mother had leapt from a hotel window when Heather was fourteen, half her lifetime ago. Which hadn’t done her father’s political career any favors, coming as it did during a reelection campaign. He’d soldiered on in the race, claiming that this was what his poor beloved late wife would’ve wanted, but even his tarnished silver tongue couldn’t sell that one to anyone who wasn’t already lining his pockets. By election night, the Senator was a historical footnote.

  Heather had told me that it
was the only justice she’d ever really seen in the world, but wouldn’t you know: It’d had to hit so brutally close to home.

  Oscar Wilde referred to England and America as two countries divided by a common language. While it may not be the most conspicuous example, this is no more significant than in those words applied to the land. Words that you really don’t hear in the States, words like heath and hedgerow, glen and dale, moor and weald and bracken. It’s as though in crossing the Atlantic our ancestors undertook some great divestiture, stripping away the luxuriant wealth of how they might speak of what was beneath their feet and tilled by their plows. If it could be semiotically reduced, then it might that much more easily be plundered.

  But that’s America for you. Take what you need, then take as much as you can hold or lock away because God forbid anyone else should have it.

  Used to, once upon et cetera, when I thought about Europe and someday traveling there, as soon as I had the time, the only way I could imagine doing the Continent was in as much ostentatious style as possible. Five-star hotels, chauffeurs, restaurants that would break the wallets of everyone I ever wanted to prove I had surpassed, eclipsed, outshone. But now that I could afford it, I found that I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for this route. These were the dreams of a twenty-year-old, and a decade later as relevant as the telegraph.

  One decade later, the only thing making sense to me, to all three of us pale, long-boned Anglos — admittedly, at Vanessa’s prompting — was to instead walk this ancestral island of ours, and try to drum up any connection that might still be buried deep in our New World bones, along with the trace elements of arsenic and mercury and everything else we ingested without intending to or having much say in the matter.

  And so walk we did. We’d bought British rail passes to train our way into whichever area we felt like exploring, but once there, it was England at a grass roots level. Naïve dreamers, perhaps, hoping to find something that we feared might no longer exist, if it ever had, but we wanted an England of standing stones and the Cerne Giant and the Uffington Horse, not an England trampled by the same old cigar chompers who would just as soon bulldoze a burial mound as look at it.