by Brian Hodge
Neither she nor Campbell had been so fortunate. And yet sometimes people who found out--blissfully ignorant normal people--envied them: Wow, I'd love to have that. Love to be able to do what you can do. Nobody would mess with me then. Nobody'd get away with anything around me. Blah blah blah. These so-called gifts only looked good on paper. Living with them, waking up with them, walking around with them like parasitic lovers who only demanded and rarely gave...
This was the existence that nobody ever stopped to imagine.
She'd been working with Campbell for the past six weeks, ever since his discharge from an Omaha hospital at summer's sultry end. Liz had paid him a visit several days earlier, Cam still plugged into the intravenous tubes reversing his dehydration and malnutrition, and his left forearm swathed in a fat muffler of gauze. The day before that, he'd turned up as a promising blip on the radar--the low-key, informal human resources network that the BPRD maintained with reliable members of various law enforcement agencies and the medical community.
"Hey. I'm Liz," she said. "Liz Sherman. I flew here from a place in Fairfield, Connecticut, to see you. It's...kinda hard to describe, but I guess you could call it a sort of institute."
"Psychiatric?" he muttered, as if already convinced it couldn't be anything else.
"You wish. No, it's a place where you might actually have to work instead of sitting around the dayroom watching TV and waiting for your meds."
Maybe four degrees warmer in interest: "What kind of work?"
"That depends on your area of expertise."
She took a couple of steps closer and leaned on the chrome rail of his hospital bed. Blood loss and trauma and other maladies aside, he appeared much the same as he did in the pictures she'd reviewed, his sandy hair clipped ascetically short, as though he couldn't bear to risk catching it in something he wouldn't want to tangle with. Underneath his sheet, he looked as if when standing he would be tall and thin, lots of angles; that he'd never filled out the way young men often do when they make the transition from their teens into their early twenties.
"Look, I know why you're here," she said. "Not the obvious medical reasons. Those are just symptoms. I mean the big why...your area of expertise. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. Because I've got one too." She glanced around the room. "Not using an oxygen tank in here that I haven't spotted, are you?"
He shook his head no, so she raised her hand from her side, gave a gentle flex to the indefinable, immaterial thing that hovered somewhere in the vicinity of her solar plexus, and let a tongue of blue-orange flame lick the air above her palm. Then reined it back in to snuff it.
He looked wildly unimpressed. "You do magic tricks, big deal. What's next--doves are gonna fly out of your ass?"
"Do you see me wearing a clown suit here? Do I look like I'm stopping in every room to entertain the kids?" Then she flashed a quick rope of fire across the room that might've toasted the windowsill had she let it live long enough.
And now she had his attention.
His story came in fits and starts, from his hospital bed as well as during their talks after he'd accepted the invitation to come to Connecticut...
While most adolescents grow up plagued by the notion that they're not like everybody else, in all the wrong ways, for Campbell Holt it was a stark reality that first manifested when he was fourteen. No dramatics, nothing remotely like Liz's involuntary and apocalyptic initiation. It was, in fact, sweetly innocent and benignly kinky. One Saturday morning, while home alone, he'd picked a pair of his older sister's panties off the bathroom floor, given them an experimental fondle...and suddenly found himself bowled over by the delirious sensation of some other guy's fumbling hands tugging them down her thighs the night before. A quick spiral into all possible explanations of what had just happened: I'm an incestuous pervert, I'm going insane, I'm gay, I'm a transvestite, I'm gay AND a transvestite.
Further episodes were quick to follow, never predictable, rarely welcome. At sixteen, he'd narrowly avoided a head-on collision while driving a friend's car and finding himself helplessly plunged into intimate knowledge of what her father had for years been doing to her after witching-hour drinking.
And it wasn't always personal possessions, either. It may have been rare, but public property could also pose a risk, objects tainted by recent essences so negative their power was akin to contamination. In a restaurant, a ketchup bottle might be merely glass...but then again, it might flood him with a toxic distillation of hatred left by a misanthropic hand that had clutched the bottle before him. This helped explain his spare frame, too: He'd once nearly dropped a barbell onto his neck after tapping into a psychic whiff of some steroidal date-rape predator who'd preceded him on the weights, who'd felt he owned the barbell.
By seventeen it was becoming a party game, guaranteed to freak out his classmates and humiliate the more insufferable ones into keeping their distance...not an unwelcome development, maybe even deliberate, since he was getting a reputation as a resident headcase based on his increasingly cavern-eyed appearance.
By nineteen, the police knew about him. Not for crimes he'd committed, but by reputation. Word-of-mouth, fellow graduate tells fiancee who mentions it to her uncle in the department, who scoffs until the next questionable death. A visit to the home Cam still shared with his parents, except by now he'd moved to the basement and wasn't going out much, and even the crappy McJobs never lasted long, and the drop-in was strictly unofficial, understand, but still: So anyway, Campbell, suppose I let you hang onto this gun for a minute. You could maybe tell me if the scene it came from was a murder or a suicide, right?
He could. So why would they stop there?
Umm, Campbell, got this pair of shoes here. The girl who owns them, her parents really miss her, and...did she just walk off and leave 'em sitting on the riverbank because she didn't want 'em anymore...?
No. No, she hadn't.
Sorry, son, but think you might be able to tell me a little something about the person who used this hacksaw?
Soon after that he took a running leap into self-medication, giving the extrasensory impressions plenty of fogs and tides to work against, which worked well enough that there wasn't much point in going home at all anymore, not when the worst blocks of Leavenworth Street offered all the neon-smeared dives he would ever need to keep him distracted, places that Bukowski at his worst would've been proud to patronize. That and a pair of gloves did wonders, except sometimes he lost them in the summer and they were stolen in the winter. Mostly he was just relieved to be away from home these days; all those trinkets of his parents just lying around waiting to be touched, to rub his nose in the worry and fear and peculiar loathing they had begun to feel for him.
Good to be on his own.
A couple years of that and one night he made it back to the old neighborhood anyway, not that anyone was awake at that hour. It had been a week since he'd last had a pair of gloves, and his hands felt raw with the accumulated weight of ten thousand souls, some of whom he'd met but most of them strangers, their violence and their sorrows coagulating in him like oil from a tanker that had broken apart on a reef.
To pass the rest of the August night, its air as thick as boiled blankets, he broke into the neighbor's storage shed, shoved the lawn mower out of the way so he'd have enough room to stretch out. While lying on cool concrete he looked up at a blue square of moonlight on the wall, crosshatched by the windowpane, and in a moment of epiphany he saw the hatchet hanging from a pair of pegs.
He fumbled it down from the pegboard and ran a finger along the honed silver edge of the blade. It told him nothing, except for how much it wanted to meet the flesh and bone of his wrist.
After she'd run him through the whistle and the prayer bell and a half-dozen other items, Cam looked visibly tired and Liz decided that was enough for one session. All of this was as new to her as it was to him. She was going mostly on instinct here, but Director Manning had professed nothing but faith in her, kept telling her, "Y
ou'll do great, you'll do great." She wasn't convinced his blind faith in her was warranted, but one thing was sure: She damn well needed to do great.
The program she'd put together for Campbell was an extrapolation from aversion therapy, with a side helping of creative visualization. Under controlled, serene circumstances, within the cerulean walls, she would present him with a series of objects--early on, items whose backgrounds and owners could be fully accounted for, to minimize the risk of nasty surprises--and while holding them in his remaining hand he would "read" them at his leisure. Little by little, she would teach him to build filters inside, between his perceptions and the external impressions that sought to impinge on them. They would be like membranes, never more permeable than he wished them to be.
He could be in control; he had to know that. If the reading was pleasant, non-threatening, then fine; let it in. If abhorrent, then close the filters, thicken the membranes, stop the assault...and eventually he could explore whatever was there without letting it ruin him.
But they were at the easy part now. Whistles, prayer bells, old hairbrushes. What would be rough was when she had to take him back to the ugly stuff, bringing in items like the firearms and hacksaws that had put him on his downward spiral. Because he had to be able to handle it all, whatever the world and its darker corners might drop in his path.
"Question?" he said as she was boxing things up.
"Sure."
"What was it like with you? How'd it start?" he asked. "I mean, I overheard a couple of things, something about an accident, but..."
"Yeah. An accident. A really bad accident." And she wanted a cigarette, a really big cigarette, as she usually did when this subject came up. "Why not just leave it at that?"
"Because you've got just about the saddest eyes I've ever seen, and I'd like to know what made them that way, is all."
She snickered. "It might help get you somewhere if that didn't sound like the world's lamest pickup line."
He blushed, actually blushed. "I'll know sooner or later, you have to realize that. You'll leave a pen around, or your lighter, or something, and then I'll have it. Or I'll ask somebody else. I just thought it would be more upfront to ask you."
"Can't fault you there," she said, and reached for the Tibetan prayer bell, let it toll in the room, so delicate, like air condensed to a chiming note. Nothing at all like the clanging of fire bells. "I was eleven years old when it started. I was just playing in our yard and minding my own business. Then the neighbor boy came over from next door. He was a hateful little turd whose mission in life was making other people miserable. It's been more than twenty years and I should probably stop speaking about him that way, and if he was the only one who'd gotten hurt that day, then yeah, I'd probably be eulogizing him by now. But he wasn't the only one, so to me he's still a hateful little turd, because I haven't been able to forgive him for what he goaded out of me that day."
She set the prayer bell down, too sharply, metal on wood.
"I had my hair in ponytails, and he seemed to think that was the funniest thing he'd ever seen. He told me I looked like the ass-end of two horses. He started yanking on one and wouldn't stop. And I was so mad, you know? Something stupid like that, as an adult, it's just an annoyance--you tell the guy to piss off, you throw a drink in his face. But when you're eleven, all that anger and humiliation...they're so pure. So consuming. It feels like your world's coming to an end. So I guess what must've happened is, on some level, I decided to take the rest of the world with me...
"He started to burn," Liz went on, and could still hear the kid screaming, a climbing note, up up up, until it could've ruptured the eardrums of dogs. "It only took a couple of seconds before he was engulfed. Then he was running. A couple of seconds later his front door started to burn...then the rest of their house...and then my family's house...and it just kept going. I was standing in the middle of all this chaos and didn't know what to do, because no matter which way I turned, the chaos spread that direction, too. It was feeding on itself by that point. Because of me, the entire block looked like a jet crashed into it. Thirty-two people were dead before it was over. Twenty-five neighbors, three firemen...plus my mom and dad and brother. And one hateful little turd, too, I guess we have to count him."
She gauged the look on Cam's face, pale on his best days and now somewhere near the color of a mild cheese.
"Sorry you asked?"
He shook his head and mouthed the word no.
"Good. Don't be. And another thing: Understanding is fine out of someone, I appreciate understanding. But no pity. That's another thing you can eat up when you're eleven or twelve, but it's been a long time since pity does anything other than bug me."
"You don't have to worry," he said, and stuttered out a laugh. "I haven't quite gotten over the self-pity part yet, so it's not like I've got any to spare right now."
He really could be an asset here. A lot of potential, and it seemed almost irrationally important that she play a role in helping him realize it. For most of the twenty-three years since her childhood went up in flames, keeping her own head straight had been a full-time job. It felt good to be directing those intentions elsewhere for a change, toward someone who needed the same kind of salvage operation. You didn't have to be a firestarter to self-immolate.
"Is that wrong?" he asked then.
"Feeling sorry for yourself? Sometimes no, sometimes yes. I can't tell you when the transition should happen. The things inside us that make us so different, they take an adjustment period, and that can last years, because it seems like we never start out in a place that's conducive to it. But just going from personal experience...? If you're at a point where it even occurs to you to ask if it's wrong to feel sorry for yourself, then, yeah, maybe now it is."
He was resting both forearms on the table. Two arms, two wrists, one hand. She tried to imagine the resolve it must have taken to line up the hatchet in that space between the bones and perform the amputation--it had required more than one blow. And she wondered how it felt to him after the point of no return, when he saw that his orphaned hand and his bleeding stump had parted company at last. If it felt as though half a curse had been lifted.
The most hopeful thing about it, which no one seemed to have recognized? Before making the cut, he'd improvised a tourniquet out of a canvas strap from a leaf bagger, and used it to cinch off his forearm. He'd wanted to live. He joked about it later, saying that if he hadn't been so drunk, he would've held out for a table saw so he could've sliced off both hands. But still, even at his lowest, he had wanted to live.
"Used to be, I was the only freak I knew," he said. "In a weird way, that was convenient. It meant I had an excuse for just about anything I did to try to get away from it, and whenever I told somebody that they didn't understand, that they couldn't understand, I really got to mean it. Then I come here..."
"And it's a freak factory, right?" Liz finished for him.
He nodded. "So all the old excuses, they don't cut it anymore. Especially after I hear a story like yours. Or if I see somebody like Hellboy, or Abe, because then I start wondering what it must be like to look so obviously different--the two of them, they can't hide it for a second. It makes me feel selfish. Like, 'Okay, maybe life's been a bitch, but at least that didn't happen to me.' "
"Whenever my knack would get the better of me, it could be a genuine danger to anyone around me," she said, and thought of the year-plus spent shuffled among foster homes before the BPRD had found her, taken her in, helped her get control. The flare-ups under strange roofs, the bad dreams that could set the quilts aflame. Never an episode as serious as the first time--no one ever died--but enough to get her branded as a jailbait pyromaniac. "When yours gets the better of you, you're the only one that suffers. I don't think you could say one's any more isolating than the other. Bottom line? Okay, maybe somebody has a worse story than yours, but so what? You're the one that's got to live your own, and it's the first time you've done it, and most of the time you ha
ve to make it up as you go. I won't tell you it's easy, but if it couldn't be done, I wouldn't be here now."
And since he'd brought them up, what of Hellboy, of Abe? She too had often wondered what it was like to exist in such a different body. Although a breed apart, she was human, no different to the eye or in behavior than most any other woman. She had a smile that often left men wondering what she was thinking, and enjoyed that subtle control; had a habit of wearing a velvet choker and cross even though she wasn't a bona fide believer; had her periods with almost calendrical regularity. She could pass for normal any day of the week.
Not so, her closest friends.
But maybe, in some respects, it was easier that way. They had no footsteps to walk in, no molds to fill. They were strange pioneers, not so much defying expectations as writing the book on what those expectations could be, and if they were not strictly human, they could nevertheless give lessons on being human to those who were, yet who fell so very short of its ideals.
There was a soft knock at the door then, and she called for whoever was there to enter. The door opened just wide enough for a head to poke through, a big smooth dome that shone under the fluorescents like burnished walnut.
"You got a call. It's our man in Rome."
She wrapped up the pep talk with Campbell, then stepped out into the hallway.
"Here's your whistle back," she told Agent Garrett, and put it into his hand. "Thanks."
Dion grinned. "So now he knows all my shameful secrets, huh?"
"Yep. And he expects that first check by the end of the day," Liz said, then winked. "Take care of that knee, by the way..."
Down the hallway, she ducked into the wing's main office and picked up the waiting landline.
"H.B.? That you?"
