Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell

by Brian Hodge

  "This one," he said, standing over a thickset man whose heavy dark stubble made his blood-drained face look that much more pallid. "How did he die?"

  "It's kind of obvious, isn't it?"

  Seriously. He was talking about a man with five or six entry wounds in his torso.

  "Please," he said. "What is obvious does not always explain all there is to know."

  He had a point. Kate double-checked the name on the toe tag and consulted her notes.

  "This was the driver," she said. "Hellboy insists that his cooperation during the takeover was due to coercion. That he feared for his life, or maybe there had been some threats earlier--that's impossible to know. As for his death, there was a moment in the struggle when there were some ricochets inside the cab. Hellboy didn't witness it, but thinks that's when he was hit."

  Laurenti moved to the next in the lineup, the guard who'd been the first to die. "And this one?"

  "What you see is what you get. Shot through the eye, stripped of his uniform, and covered up with his topcoat against the alley wall," she said. "According to the ballistics report, the bullet exited the back of his head and was further damaged by the same wall, but they think it was a nine-millimeter Parabellum. Hellboy recovered an antique Luger from this one"--she pointed to the gurney bearing the unidentified corpse whose face had turned into an exit wound--"and that's the type of bullet it fires. We don't have any way of verifying it right now, but it seems a reasonable conclusion that he was the one who shot the guard."

  "And stole his clothes to take his place."

  She wished that Hellboy had left the Luger behind to at least resolve this much of the puzzle, but he could be like that sometimes, wanting to remain in control of things even when control might be better shared. But enough misgivings for now. It felt uncomfortably close to criticizing the dead.

  Stop that, she ordered herself. He is not dead.

  But it didn't look good. She'd gotten word late this morning. Liz and two surviving crewmen from the wreck of the Calista had, after floating in a raft for close to thirty hours, been picked up by another pleasure craft and taken to the nearest port: the city of Palma, on Majorca.

  It was beyond doubt that Hellboy had been swallowed by some deep-sea beast far larger than even a blue whale. All three survivors had seen it happen. Although Hellboy had gone up against things that dwarfed him before, and prevailed, hope was a little harder to cling to this time--Abe was not among the witnesses. He'd neither made it to the life raft, nor been found among the wreckage. Of course, Abe had no need of the life raft, but his failure to resurface after going into the water...not good.

  If any two friends of hers were to go missing in the middle of the sea, she would have to say that Hellboy and Abe Sapien were the ones best equipped to survive it. But that didn't make their sudden absence any easier to bear. She could hear it in Liz's wrung-out voice as she'd relayed the news--the losing struggle against grief, the guilt that could so easily take hold of a survivor's heart.

  He's not dead. They're not dead, Kate told herself again. It's just like Gino said. There's what's obvious, and then there's the rest of the story. So do your job...

  Right. The morgue. Body by body, down to the last two...

  The other nameless mystery man, found in the alley with the guard who'd been shot through the eye, had died without a mark on him. Although if you ignored their wounds and considered their overall physical condition, he looked by far the worst of the lot. He appeared to be American or Western European, and she guessed him to be a young man, perhaps a few years past college age, despite the fact that his fair hair was so lank and stringy his scalp was visible, and he'd evidently been eating so poorly that his muscle tone had wasted to the point that his skin had begun to tighten over his bones.

  Heart failure? Malnutrition could cause that. They should know soon. He was due for an autopsy later today.

  Laurenti seemed to find him of particular interest. After two or three minutes of visual inspection, he snapped on a pair of latex gloves and pried open the corpse's jaw, peeled back the upper and lower lips. Probed around the leathery flap of tongue, then pushed the mouth shut again without a word of explanation.

  Then he moved on to the last of the five.

  "His name was Tokunbo Ogundana," she said. "He was a Nigerian immigrant, although that was over fifteen years ago, when he was a student. According to his employers, his work record was exemplary. Which, on the surface at least, makes his betrayal of his co-workers and attempt to kill my team members even more puzzling."

  Except for the man missing his face--a single devastating wound--Ogundana had been the most grievously injured, having caught several ricochets too, then being done in when his damaged weapon had exploded in his hands.

  She went on, assuming that Laurenti was still listening, just doing a spectacular job of pretending to ignore her. "Hellboy's assessment was that Ogundana wasn't in complete control of his actions. That he was being controlled by someone else."

  Laurenti nodded, otherwise engrossed in the man's corpse, the dark brown skin now a mottled gray peppered with ugly wounds.

  "Or some thing else," Laurenti said, then scowled at the body. "This would be not so difficult if he were not so much of a mess."

  "I'm sure he'd apologize if he could."

  One corner of Laurenti's mouth ticked. What do you know, looked like he was finally warming up to her. Then he got busy again probing a particularly nasty wound, as ragged as it was deep, that had mangled Ogundana's left shoulder.

  "Gino, I have a question that may sound a little naive. Or maybe a little insulting, so please don't take it the wrong way," she said. "But...what are you?"

  Hunched over the gurney, he appeared to give the question some thought before answering. Coming up with a lie? If that were what he was doing, she wouldn't expect him to be quite so obvious about it.

  She'd been wondering about him all along. The other morning, during the hastily convened meeting in the room beneath the museum complex, Father Laurenti had appeared to be the sore thumb of the group, the one who stood out among his fellow priests as...well, as a biker might stand out against businessmen.

  "I am--" He seemed to be clawing for the right word, something he probably knew perfectly well in Italian but not in English. "--an embarrassment."

  "A newer suit of clothes, a barber who can see out of both eyes, I'm sure you'd clean up nicely."

  Of course she hadn't really thought that was what he meant. And, personally, she'd found his disheveled motif rather charming. The old, worn clothes, the unruly hair...he'd reminded her of Albert Einstein, of all people, letting the outer man go while his mind was occupied with higher things.

  But it took her a few moments to catch onto what he was really telling her about himself, and then she had it: My god...he's one of us. In his own way, he's one of us. She remembered something she'd said to Hellboy about the Church the other day, shortly after he and Abe had linked up with her at the Archives: For all their legacy of mysticism, they don't seem particularly experienced with it, overall...not anymore. You can barely get them to admit they still have exorcists.

  "You're...an exorcist?" she asked. Somehow it suited him...near-pariah status as a throwback to an earlier age; maybe a living reminder of the sins the Church had committed once upon a more superstitious time.

  "If I need to be, I am." He swept his arm along the row of corpses with a dismayed and resigned expression that this was how things always had been, were now, and always would be. "I look at things like this, and yes, most of the time they are the work of men. But they sometimes are crimes against men, all men, and women, and against God too. If this is what they are, I sometimes can see things most priests cannot. Or will not. But most of the time," he said, "I would prefer to read."

  "Wouldn't we all." Kate pointed at Ogundana's corpse. "What are you reading into all this?"

  "The Nigerian...he was bitten by this one." Laurenti thumped his hand on the gurney with th
e emaciated westerner. "The bite is hard to see now because a later wound made it worse. But if they measure that man's teeth, I believe they will find it matches a tear in this man's shoulder."

  "Okay. He bit him," Kate said. Not terribly impressive in a situation where they were shooting each other. "So?"

  "It was not an ordinary bite. This one..." Back to the malnourished young man. "He is what some call a portatore. Like someone with a disease, who walks around the streets, what would you call him...?"

  "A carrier?"

  "Yes. Carrier. But no disease. What he carries is a devil, a spirit not his own..."

  And she was going to have to get this man to sit down with her and her tape recorder, and go over everything one more time. Because while it dovetailed nicely with incidents and attacks she was familiar with from at least a dozen folkloric traditions, it was also unique unto itself. She smelled a new book here--a revisionist examination of spirit possession in relation to creatures of folklore--and her heart began to race in agreement.

  For the time being, at least, it was almost enough to make her put aside her worst fears for Hellboy and Abe.

  The portatore, Laurenti told her, had been host to the entity inside for quite a long time, judging by his appearance. Years, perhaps. Although not as long as the one now missing his face; judging by the condition of his remains, and the glimpse that Hellboy had gotten in the mirror, that one had likely been enslaved even longer.

  Laurenti compared the experience to living with a tapeworm: The host may eat, but so too is he eaten. Not quite the same way a tapeworm behaved, Kate noted, but she found the analogy valid. Laurenti claimed to have twice before seen men in the advanced stages of this sort of possession, in even worse condition yet still alive, the flesh tightened over their bones as though it had been slowly sucked out of them.

  "But they're still mobile?" she asked. "Even then?"

  "If it pleases the parasite, yes."

  And like any parasite, it regarded the body it was in as existing only to serve its own needs: discord and terror, strife and death...and in some instances, more specific objectives.

  Demon, spirit, parasite--Laurenti did not seem comfortable with any one term. But whatever it was, it would eventually drain the host body of so much vitality and physical mass that a new body was needed if it wished to continue existence on the earthly plane. It was extremely rare, though, that disembodied entities were able to force their way into innocent victims. One's flesh and soul provided a natural barrier that was very hard to breach. Such spirits required a willing host, an invitation from one who wished to serve as a vessel.

  But they could, on occasion, transfer into an unwilling body during a physical assault by the original portatore.

  "Through a bite, you mean," Kate said.

  Laurenti nodded. "The teeth pierce both bodies...the physical and the etheric. For a few moments, in the confusion of the attack, a path inside opens."

  It was, in his opinion, the reality behind such supposed creatures as werewolves, notorious for creating more of their kind by biting the innocent. But men did not truly become wolves, or some hybrid race between species. Rather, they might be reshaped into similar forms by malevolent devils that found those forms pleasing or useful.

  She wanted to throw her arms around Laurenti and kiss his rough cheek. This may not have been the definitive word on the subject, yet for Kate, it still resolved so many contradictions she had encountered in both folklore and direct experience: Two-legged man-wolves walking upright in the Balkans; four-legged changelings virtually indistinguishable from Canadian wolves born in deep forest dens. Vampires of such refined aesthetics and keen intellect that they fashioned themselves aristocrats, and others that subsisted in the basest of squalor, aware only of their hunger. If Laurenti was right, there was no consistency because there were no true species to begin with, only the whims of demons that liked to play with flesh the way children might mold monsters from clay.

  They could even ride more than one to a body, invading new hosts while the first remained occupied.

  Not what happened in this case, obviously. By all indications, the portatore sank his teeth into Ogundana's shoulder, and was then discarded as a spent husk. It seemed plain enough that the new body, and its owner's place in the armored car's crew, was more useful to some greater plan. In that respect, Laurenti noted, the portatore had played a role not unlike the suicide bombers that were starting to become such a deadly plague in conflicts of the Middle East.

  Yet despite Laurenti's appearing convinced of the part the bite had played, he nonetheless looked nagged by other doubts.

  "What is it?" Kate asked.

  "He bit, he fell to the bite," Laurenti said, gesturing to each corpse in turn. "But no matter...this should never have happened."

  "A lot of things that shouldn't happen do."

  "No, no, this is not how I mean. They should have been safe, very safe. These good men were in the sanctuary of their vehicle. They had no reason to leave it. The Nigerian, he had no reason to put himself at risk."

  "Maybe I can kick in a hypothesis here," Kate said. "Glamour."

  Laurenti ran it through his filters and, judging by his puzzled expression, came up with the wrong sense of the word. She resented it, too: a perfectly fine old word whose meaning had been watered down by changing times into something vapid enough to suit runway models and cosmetics ads.

  "Not the glamour you're thinking. The old kind, the original kind," she said. "The power to weave a spell or enchantment that affects someone's vision. If you're under the influence of a glamour, you might see something that's not there...or fail to see something that is...or see something as completely different from its true appearance."

  "So the Nigerian, he could have been lured out in the open by some sight he trusted?" Laurenti said.

  "Or all of them. Each of the guards might have looked out their windows at this pair and seen something totally unlike what the others saw." She glanced at the culprits under their sheets. Mangled and spent, they didn't look like much now, did they? "Glamour is normally associated with the Faerie folk of the British Isles, but there's no reason to think that the underlying principle couldn't have roots that are even deeper and older."

  "It is a weapon against us," Laurenti said, its worst implications clear: Weapons always seemed to get into the hands of those most willing to use them, and where they could do the most harm.

  And this one seemed so terribly pernicious...turning someone's eyes against him. She wondered what the men in the armored car had seen. Wives or mothers or children in need. Divine virgins, radiant saviors. Whatever it took to make dedicated men forget their duty and give themselves over to the teeth of the enemy.

  Laurenti drew the sheets back over the corpses and made for the door, but she stayed behind awhile, waiting for the sheets to move again, wondering if she could trust her eyes that they were really, truly dead.

  Chapter 14

  Pressure...he was aware of that much, at least, and by now, not much else. Ever since the lights had gone out, moon and stars eclipsed by the great head that surged from the sea and descended in a roar of teeth and foam, when was he not aware of pressure?

  From the moment he'd been washed down the Leviathan's gullet, he'd tried to fight, but it did no good. He quickly found that pounding the inner wall of its belly was like beating his hand against a wall of thick, wet rubber that might ripple and flex, but never tear. Stone, metal--these he could smash through, because they resisted. But this waterlogged cocoon of muscle absorbed the blows, swallowing the force of them and spreading it around until it dissipated.

  He'd gone for his gun next, getting off a single shot before the Leviathan reacted. He was blind here, of course--the darkness was as total as if he'd gone deep into a cavern underground--with no clear idea of the size of the sac he'd been caught in. He could touch one slick wall and reach in the opposite direction and feel only the stew of seawater and bile in which he was submerged, jo
stled by the man-sized fragments of its meals. Things with fins, things with tentacles, things that sloshed and stirred as though still alive.

  But once Hellboy had fired that first shot, the organ walls suddenly closed in around him and squeezed, pressing him into a bent, cramped submission in which he had no leverage, could scarcely even move. Flies in amber would feel this way before they suffocated.

  Eventually he'd relented, his struggles futile, and reasoned that there had to be some greater purpose behind this. He was not being devoured, but delivered. He would deal with whoever was there to receive him.

  Yet as the hours went on, he could feel himself fading into a stasis that lingered somewhere halfway to death. It would take more than this to kill him, but he needed more than he had here to feel truly alive. Everything took its toll--the unrelenting pressure, the loss of movement, the submersion in acid and brine, the lack of air. Now and again he found himself in a fleeting pocket of gas, caustic and smelling like centuries of rotting fish, and he made do with that, even if it brought him little more than the satisfaction of flexing his aching lungs before sinking back into a delirium that deepened as the hours wore on.

  Or maybe days. Or weeks. Or eternity.

  Time, like light, had no meaning here.

  There was sound, though, and it played tricks on him, as he could hear his blood running through his veins, and the blood of the Leviathan through the miles of arteries wrapped around him, and the ocean beyond that. He thought he could hear tectonic tremors rising from the ocean floor, and the songs of whales an ocean away, and the churning of propeller screws on ships passing overhead. He listened to them until he thought he could feel the pull of tides, and began to dream that he was no longer something separate from the sea but a part of it, digested and reborn as a piece of the Leviathan itself.