by Brian Hodge
The two of them were stepping around the crusted remnants of a large, square, frescoed column when Hellboy felt Abe's touch on his arm. He followed Abe's other hand, pointing off to their left, a spot on the nearest wall they might have overlooked because it blended so well with the rest of the destruction. Optical illusion--when you first looked at it, you didn't see it for what it really was. No, that took a few moments. At first, all you saw was a wide circular area more than halfway up the fifteen-foot wall that had been turned into a blackened cinder.
Stone, plaster, wood--whatever was there had been blowtorched into some crumbling alloy that faded into the pigments of the mural painted there centuries ago.
Look deeper, though, and then you would see it: the desiccated suggestion of a man blown off his feet and hurled high against the wall, fused into the wall, a charcoal man outstretched in his final agonies and joined to the architecture in bas-relief. Stand in the right place and you could picture how it probably happened: The guy's running when he catches his assailant's attention; no chance of dodging the fireball, but it's partially deflected and absorbed by the square pillar standing between them...the only reason there's as much left of the guy as there is, why he wasn't rendered even further down to ash.
Something like that, stuck to the wall--you don't do it just because you have to.
You do it because a part of you likes it...
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS
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Copyright (c) 2005 by Mike Mignola
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Acknowledgments
This novel came together much more quickly than I'm used to, and thanks are due to those who helped keep it proceeding smoothly and on track: to Christopher Golden and editor Jennifer Heddle, for savvy and constructive overseeing; to Wildy Petoud and Frank Festa, for translating bits of text into languages I don't speak; and to Mike Mignola, for once again letting me poke around in his world. It's a great place to visit and, who knows, I might even enjoy living there.
Berlin,
April 30, 1924
He believed in God once. And could again, provided he found the right one, a god to replace the one that had been pounded out of him by the artillery barrages of the Battle of the Somme. The one that had bled from him into the mud of the trenches bordering No Man's Land, that had peeled away with the skin of his feet. After all, gods die easier than the need for them.
Here on the north side of Berlin's Friedrichstadt quarter, people still seemed to run from the war years after the guns had fallen silent. They just didn't know it, and most never would. Let them live long enough and perhaps a few might, if they were lucky enough to keep their wits into old age, looking back over all they had done and all they hadn't. Yes, it makes sense from here, they might say. So that's what we were doing--trying desperately to prove we were still alive even though our souls were dead.
In these years in the shadow of the Great War--the War to End All Wars--Ernst had heard Berlin called the wickedest place on earth, and he believed this was true. To look at them in the streets, in the clubs and cabarets, the theaters and brothels and dance halls, you would never know these were a beaten people. Berlin had become a crucible of the kinds of lust and abandon that must have gotten Sodom scorched from the face of the earth.
Good. Things could grow here. New things always grew from ashes and decay.
Ernst Schweiger was still a young man, born just two years before the twentieth century, but he looked older. And now he felt older when he moved. Shrapnel, bullets, bayonets...these could not pierce the body without altering time, injecting years or leeching them away. He'd been born old, too, or so his sister had told him when he'd come home from the trenches and could barely hobble from his bed to the chair by his window, to look out over the hills and steeples of Heidelberg. He never wanted it but she cried for him anyway--cried for the solemn little boy she remembered helping raise, and for the wounds and rot that had brought body and soul so much closer together.
Gerda's tears--how could he have felt such scorn for a reaction so heartfelt, so human?
But however old he was, however old he felt...how could he possibly explain to anyone the degree to which a man like Matthias Herzog made him feel like a child?
Go, Herzog could say. Bring. And there were people who would kill each other for the privilege.
Ernst hadn't had to kill. Just say yes.
Could anyone say it wasn't an honor to be so trusted?
At the Kamm-Revue, where the air was thick with sweat and smoke and lager, Ernst worked his way through a crowd that clamored its approval toward the stage where twenty women danced, half-dressed in cheap-looking Egyptian garb.
He watched the audience at their tables: officers and gentlemen and those who could never aspire to either, men who had known fighting, men who hadn't, and men who had been ruined by it, and the painted women who still found something in them that they could desire. The loud, ravenous thugs were the least of Ernst's fears; you knew where they stood and how hard they might fall. It was the self-contained ones that scared him, sitting quiet and sober and still, moving only to bring their cigarettes to their thin dry lips. They wore their scars like men who had transcended the need for dignity. Any one of them, behind his watchful eyes, might be capable of leaving a lustmord splayed in an alley or flayed on a roof, then sleeping well. Your gaze could meet theirs from ten, twenty paces away and you could see everything that war had taught them, beyond courage and cowardice, victory and defeat. You could see what war had taught them to enjoy.
At the stage door, he exchanged a few words with a stubble-headed man who guarded it with his arms crossed over his barrel chest. The money came next--he may have been expected tonight, but nothing was ever free--and the man let him through.
Backstage, Ernst wormed through the performers, some coming, others going, and into a tight network of hallways branching into offices and dressing rooms. Up a flight of splintering stairs, there was more of the same. Water stains had faded the walls to a moldy green, and clots of plaster gathered around the baseboards. When you passed someone in the halls up here, they avoided looking you in the eye.
Room 28. He knocked, heard a voice telling him to enter.
"Fraulein Kiefer?" he asked.
She nodded as if no longer interested in what she was called. Angelika was her Christian name--he knew only that about her, and that the placard out front billed her as a chanteuse--although she looked neither Christian nor angelic. She too could not have been very old, but had been aged by war, if not directly, then by soldiers and deprivation. He could see only one eye, the other shadowed behind a mass of dark curls. Against a backdrop of deep blue curtains pulled across the window, she sat slumped into a wooden chair, ankles wide, her dressing gown parted over a brassiere and the slack little bulge of her belly. A garter cut into the plump skin of her thigh, as pale and soft as cheese.
"You're the one they said would be coming about Erich?"
Ernst said he was.
"You have the money?"
He gave her the envelope of Rentenmarks. Sealed, it felt slim, not all that much inside, but at least Germany's currency was worth something again. When she slit the envelope open with her thumbnail and counted, Angelika seemed content. She slid it under a pile of yellowed newspapers stacked on her mirrored dressing table, near an ashtray where smoke curled from a cigarette stained with her lipstick. Beneath the smoke, the room smelled sour, like a heap of unwashed sheets.
"And the child...?" Ernst said. "Where is he?"
She jerked her thumb toward a corner.
The room may have been cramped, but it was cluttered, too--he hadn't noticed the baby until now, nesting in rubbish and shoes and the ruins of old costumes. In silence, too. Erich was awake, but he'd yet to make a sound.
And now Angelika was looking at the infant with regret. "I should never have named him. It's easier to let loose of them when they have no names."
"You've done this before?" He looked at the slack skin of her belly, the full breasts sagging inside her gown. He'd told himself many times on the way here that he would resist temptation, but still...he wanted very much to touch them.
"No. But I've had friends." She shook her head. "I was stupid to name him." She watched Ernst stand in the same spot and stare at the baby as if it were an unexploded shell that had landed in front of him. "Well? Are you going to take it or not?"
Bright eyed, Erich watched him too. He may have been underfed, but this was no newborn. His eyes had strengthened. He could see across the room. Maybe he was accustomed to a parade of unfamiliar faces.
"When was he born?"
Angelika counted on her fingers. "A little more than five months ago."
"And his father?"
She laughed, a sound as bitter as herbs. "I was hoping you might tell me."
Ernst stooped before the quiet bundle, let the baby squeeze his fingers while he smiled down at him, made silly faces, tried to make him laugh but couldn't. He was still giving it his failed best when Angelika's foot scraped toward him across the floor, the tip of her high-heeled shoe tapping on the scuffed wood.
"When I told you I had never done this before, I didn't mean I never would again," she said, smiling at him from beneath her curls. One hand was stroking the inside of her thigh, just above the top of her garter. "We could make another, you and I. You could maybe guarantee the sale that way, and then share a little in the money."
Two fingers still clutched in the baby's fist, Ernst stared at her legs, now stretched and parted to either side of him. For a long moment he felt lured in, mesmerized by the caressing movements of her hand and the smug, satisfied way she had of touching the tip of her tongue to the corner of her mouth. Except none of it, he noticed then, seemed to touch her eyes. They may as well have been the eyes of something posed in a wax museum. His gaze returned to her hand, and to the way the skin of her thigh now seemed so loose, as though if she kept rubbing it, it might tear open over the muscle and fat.
He scooped the infant into his arms and stood, and turned for the door.
She was on her feet and at his side then, with both hands clutching at his arm, enveloping him in a miasma of tobacco and perfume.
"He'll have a good home, won't he?" she asked. "They'll place him with an officer with a home in the countryside, where the air is better, right? He'll be able to climb trees and hills there, won't he?"
Ernst didn't know the specifics of what they'd told her. Just that she was selling her child to a broker who specialized in placing babies with war-wounded officers who had lost their ability to father children. Beyond that, they'd probably told her whatever she'd wanted to hear.
He leaned in and kissed her once on the forehead, above the furrow that had appeared between her eyes.
"He'll swim in lakes, too," Ernst said, "and have all the dogs to play with that a boy could want."
She nodded. Maybe she even believed it.
He pulled his arm from her grasp and left the room, and wondered if she might have come running into the hallway if she'd heard her baby cry even once.
That Erich didn't make a sound--just smiled up at him--made him think it really was better this way.
Even though he'd had a driver for this last leg of the journey, he'd still done too much walking tonight. He felt he might slough off the skin of his feet all over again by the time he and his bundle made it to the warehouse.
He'd been here only once, two days ago, and then not very far inside. It was a functional stop, so they could be sure he knew where to come when it mattered. Before that moment, even knowledge of this place had been denied him. Initiates of Der Horn-Orden met in a handful of lodges around the city, and he'd been led to believe that that was sufficient for their studies.
Did it not make sense, though, that they would require a more private place for experiments and ceremonies?
And private it was. The warehouse was a hollow giant in an eastern sector that still wore the grime belched by smokestacks of factories that had fallen silent by the end of the war. In the light of the moon and street lamps, he could see nothing that hadn't one way or another fed a war machine that had broken apart in the end. Ernst wondered what it had held, this warehouse of brick and timbers. He wondered if anything from here had found its way to him in the trenches, to save his life or make it worse: cartridges he'd loaded into his rifle, or shells that had whistled overhead and fallen too short, showering him with earth and slivers. Maybe the tires on a truck that had carried him to the front, or the ambulances that had driven him away. Or the roll of barbed wire in which he'd become entangled after a failed charge and for the rest of the day pretended to be dead, wearing the rotting entrails stolen from an even unluckier man within reach, in hopes that the British soldiers passing through would be less likely to bayonet him where he hung.
Strange, to look upon so silent a building and know it must have been complicit in so much death. Stranger still, to bring to it so tender a life, rescued from squalor it would never remember, to share in the higher glories of the only life it would know.
Initiates who came to Der Horn-Orden as grown men and women were fine, and welcome, Herzog had said. But it was best of all to get them young, before they could accumulate worldly corruption that would first have to be undone. It was a lesson that Herzog claimed he'd taken from the Jesuits.
At a far corner of the warehouse, Ernst knocked on a wooden door stout enough for a stockade. A small grill slid back at eye level, but the opening showed only blackness. He hesitated, having no idea if what he couldn't see recognized him or not, so he held up the baby who'd been sleeping in his arms. His burden. His ticket.
The grill clacked shut again and he heard locks disengaging on the other side of the door, like the mechanism of a vast clockwork; the grind of a beam heaved from its brackets, one end thudding to the floor with a cavernous echo. The door whispered inward on hinges so carefully oiled they were nearly silent, then he stepped through into a dimness where nothing was louder than his heart...one of those moments made precious by how rare they were, when it seemed his whole life had led to this point.
From his side, a hand on his shoulder and someone's breath, enough garlic and schnapps to burn the nose, and it brought him down to earth again.
The man welcomed him, called him brother.
Another came from the other side, bulky shapes in the gloom--the only light came from a few scattered lanterns whose reach was feeble here--and the men had nothing else to say as they ushered him through the warehouse, footsteps swallowed by the dark. To this place even the moon was more blind than not, the skylights obscured with soot.
Again, a hand on his shoulder, holding firm this time.
"Stop," he was told. "Wait here a minute."
They moved in front of him and with his eyes growing accustomed to the gloom, Ernst was surprised he hadn't noticed it...a low hou
sing set in the floor with two wide doors angled toward them, like the entrance to a storm cellar. When his escorts flung them open, he was bathed in the yellow-orange light that shone from below. A broad wooden staircase, planks as old and heavy as a ship's deck, led down...
...and behind him, above him, the doors thudded shut, and once again he heard the sound of locks.
If they were waiting for him below, they gave little sign of it--dozens, maybe even more than a hundred, who looked no different from the revelers at the cabaret. Here to learn, or here to worship, and, he suspected, some were here only because they found it the fashionable thing to do; had tasted everything else that Berlin had to offer and pronounced themselves bored with it already, so now they found themselves here. Some of them held wooden flutes, and others drums--for what, he couldn't say. His arrival, with babe in arms, seemed a minor curiosity, nothing more.
The place was lit by a thousand flickering gas lamps and candles, and he'd never been anywhere that looked so warm yet felt so chilled. Not even the amassed body heat seemed to make a difference. With its rough wooden walls and packed earthen floor, the cellar had all the charm of the trenches.
The baby had awakened again and was starting to squirm, and though Ernst had rather liked the soft, warm weight tucked against his chest, he was glad to turn it over to Herzog when the man shouldered through and appeared at his side.
"He's a puny thing," Herzog said in appraisal, holding the infant aloft, at arm's length, "but I think his heart is stout enough." Then he drew the baby close, doing it all with one arm. One was all he had to work with.
For now.
And already, as they strolled from one end of the long, narrow cellar to the other, Ernst was forgetting whether he'd found Matthias Herzog or the man had found him...tonight, and in the beginning, too. He did that to you, seemed to dissolve your past simply by making your acquaintance, until you went to bed one night and stared at the shadows on the ceiling and realized that he'd always been there, always been in your life, and even if you could remember a time when you hadn't yet heard his name, you realized he was the piece of the puzzle you'd always known was out there, waiting to find you or be found. He was the one who could tell you he'd talked with things on the other side of death and you believed him, from no more than the look in his eyes. He was a big man who never tried to hide his height, with a face as sculpted by wind and rain as any mountainside rock, a face that you could recognize at once, yet never quite describe. A man who, more than any cleric in a flimsy pulpit, could make you see beyond the worst of your pain to understand that there truly could be a reason for it.
