by Brian Hodge
Sound...
And pressure.
These had been constants, so steady they'd become background ambience, but now they evolved into something new, gathering force to swamp what remained of him. From all around emanated a liquid rumbling. It passed through him, vibrating his bones like tuning forks, and then the walls squeezed in as if no fate remained but to be crushed down to nothing--
But this time there was a sense of movement rather than grinding, a feeling of propulsion as the compacted mass he was part of began to rise, back in the direction he'd come from so long ago. He felt his hand skim over new surfaces. New, yet old. He had felt these before: the gray tongue he'd slid along, the teeth like crooked stakes he'd tried to grab. The bony plated roof of the Leviathan's mouth.
And in a geyser of flesh and foam, he was spewed out into another night as dark as the one he'd left.
He was hurtling aloft for a moment, arms and legs suddenly unconstricted, so loose he didn't know what to do with them. Air, too...it rushed at him, washed over him, cold and fresh and cleansing. Then he splashed into water so frigid it shocked the first-drawn breath back out of him.
He struggled to break surface again, let the choppy waves carry him toward shore. Finally he felt bottom, a rapidly rising slope, and as soon as he got his legs beneath him, he twisted around in time to see the last of the Leviathan's bulk sliding away from the shelf back into the deeper waters offshore, and with a sweep of its tail and a cascade of spray, it was gone.
Only now did he realize it was raining.
Legs unsteady, pushed and pulled by the breakers, he straggled inland through a slick of silvery carcasses and blubber, until he could stumble onto a rocky beach. Beaten by needles of rain from a threatening sky that grumbled with endless thunder, he had no idea where on the face of the earth he was. About all he could be sure of at this point was that it definitely wasn't the tropics.
He lurched ahead a few more painful yards, taking stock. Time for another new trench coat; this one hung from him in bleached, half-digested tatters. But the titanium case containing the scroll was still cuffed to his wrist, and appeared no worse for the wear. Afraid he couldn't say the same about himself.
The only thing going for him was how well he could see in this night, starless and with the moon cloaked behind a thick scum of clouds. His eyesight during daylight hours may have been superior to that of men and women--20/11, he'd been measured at--but his night vision was no better. Still, after the time he'd spent beyond the reach of so much as a spark, his eyes were sensitive enough to peer through the gloom.
Inland, step by exhausted step...
Inland, as the pounding of waves on rock receded behind him...
It began to take form on the crown of a hilltop rising gently in the distance before him: several shapes standing in a row--no, a ring--some tall and thin, others squat. At first they were men to his eyes, motionlessly awaiting his arrival...but no. They were far too tall for that, even the shortest among them. Some other race, then? Ancient giants, towering devils?
No, not those either.
Stones. A circle of standing stones, sunk deep into the earth by ancient hands.
Only now did he begin to suspect where he was.
He had, in one sense, come home. Swallowed whole and carried by force and vomited onto its shore, he was home again.
He pushed himself toward the ring of stones, and when his legs gave out and he tumbled to the soggy, rock-strewn ground, he dragged himself along. When his arms gave out too, he collapsed and lay with his face in the muck and the shreds of his coat wrapped around him like burial rags.
And the rain beat down.
Footsteps. Two pairs--one heavy, one light. They came crunching down from the hilltop as though someone had stepped directly from the stones. Closer, louder with every step, they came for him as though they'd never doubted he would be here.
His breath bubbled into the mud around his mouth, then he raised his head to see that they towered over him like gods. Or like devils who would never be content with anything less than to reign in Hell.
He started to lift his right hand, his fighting hand, but a gnarled hoof every bit its equal stamped it back to the ground and held it there. Teeth gritted in a silent snarl, he tilted his head toward the rain again, following the bristled leg up, up, like the trunk of a lone tree twisted by winds into a shape that should not stand, but does. Up, past the pendant gut and barrel chest to the silhouette of the head, dark and arrogant against the clouds.
And if the fight had, for now, been squeezed from him, gassed from him, he at least knew his enemy. Knew him by name. Knew him by his infernal title.
The other one, smaller but just as monstrous in its way, knelt beside Hellboy's pinned hand...and there were worse things than death, weren't there? There was the gnawing of promises he hadn't been able to keep. There were the growing ranks of men he'd led to their deaths for what was, in the end, nothing...
Because there was having to watch a pair of hands, each sprouting a dozen nimble fingers long and thin as spider legs, work at the cuff latched around his wrist and open it within mere moments.
There was failure.
Cuff and case, both were taken, and once the restraining hoof was removed from his hand, he tried to crawl after the pair of thieves as they ascended the hill. He glared at their backs, at the insulting leisure with which they left him behind, as if he were no more bother than a roach they'd stepped on...and worst of all, they were still outpacing him.
His hand went for his holster and he cursed when he found it empty. Right--he'd lost the gun in the Leviathan's belly.
Then he groped at the ruins of his trench coat and found the left pocket still intact...and the antique Luger inside.
Would it still fire? He switched hands for a moment, held it in his right while working the toggle with his left to jack a round into the chamber. Then, unsteady, he aimed through the rain at the larger of the two backs. Could he even hurt them? What did it matter, anyway? You had to try. You had to try.
He squeezed the trigger, and if the gun didn't have near the kick of his usual sidearm, that was okay, because it was still the most satisfying crack he'd ever heard.
He even thought he saw the big one stumble, just before the pair disappeared into the rain and mist. Another time, he promised them, finish you off some other time, then rolled onto his back and let the water sluice down his face.
After another minute or two he heard more footsteps, this time from the opposite direction. Up from the same beach where he'd come ashore. Just one pair of feet this time, and none too steady, either. He gripped the Luger, swung it upward when the footsteps crunched close enough...then let his hand fall back to the ground again.
"What are you doing here?"
"I thought...you might need...some help," Abe Sapien said, or tried to. Awfully hard to talk and suck wind at the same time.
"Don't I look like I've got everything under control?"
Abe dropped to the ground beside him, no grace, nor heed to the rocks, looking chilled and wrung out, like a runner after a marathon through a downpour. Only now did Hellboy start to comprehend the enormity of what Abe must have done: followed the Leviathan all the way here, swimming in relentless pursuit, every nautical mile between the western Mediterranean and the north of Scotland.
"You didn't," Hellboy said.
"I caught a ride sometimes," Abe told him. "There are places to grab onto that thing. Most of the time it wouldn't know I was there."
What about the times it did, he started to ask, then decided it could wait. Right now he didn't want to imagine the close calls Abe must have endured when the Leviathan tried to shake off or swat away what it must've regarded as a clinging little parasite.
"They took the scroll," he said instead.
Abe nodded down at his bare wrist. "I see."
"I lost the scroll." And for all the pain and fury he felt, most of it was directed straight at his own heart.
&nbs
p; "You shot one of them, didn't you?" Abe said, then pointed in the direction of the stones. "Maybe that one's dead, maybe--"
"You don't kill them with one shot. I don't know if you can kill them at all."
"Hellboy..." Abe said, in the tone of voice you'd use with someone rambling about how the sky had turned green. "They were only men. I saw them from a distance. Just two men."
"I saw them too. They were right on top of me. They..."
"Maybe...you saw what they wanted you to see. That's not easy to do to you, I know, but in your condition..." Abe snatched the Luger and pushed himself upright. "I'm going after them."
He had to be running on fumes, Abe did, every muscle screaming. But off he went, every step an effort, and was soon lost to the weather and the night beyond the standing stones.
Home again? Well, yes and no. Although this was not the place of Hellboy's birth--that had occurred many miles to the south, in England--this was where it had been facilitated: Dreich Midden, a small island off the coast of Scotland, blasted by North Atlantic winds and barren but for the Bronze Age ring of stones whose original purpose had been lost to the millennia.
That cabal of Wehrmacht soldiers and occultists who had gathered here on a December night more than fifty years ago...had they known something about this place that history had forgotten and archaeologists had never found? They must have. What else could have drawn them so far behind enemy lines in the waning days of the Second World War? Desperation, yes--Germany had exhausted itself from the inside out and was months from collapse. And Der Fuhrer's mania for an occult means to tip the momentum of the war. Hitler had long been keen on the subject; the looming specter of defeat had turned him into a true seeker.
But desperation and mania can be indulged anywhere. Why here?
The only thing that seemed certain was that all of them, from the Nazi's upper echelon down to the lowliest technician, had been exploited by the magus at the center of it all. As a mortal man, Grigori Rasputin had been known as the Mad Monk. Spared from death at the bottom of the River Neva, after as much treachery and butchery as any man had endured, he had become something else. Something worse, in thrall to powers that sought to lay waste to humankind and deliver the world to seven gods of chaos whose wrath would make the Third Reich's worst accomplishments seem like children's games.
Or something like that.
Hellboy had gleaned enough from Rasputin to understand that he was supposed to play some part in it all, but the madman's secrets had been his own, and had finally died with him a couple of years ago. Which ended it, as far as Hellboy was concerned. Ignorance may not have been bliss, but it got him through the night. He had no part to play in anyone's plans but his own.
Still, this island...
That he'd been brought here, spat up here, robbed here, humiliated here...it was impossible to believe there was no deeper message in it. Hell shoving his nose into his own history: You forget who you are...what you are...whose you are.
"I never knew," he told the earth on which he lay, and whatever else cared to listen. "So there was nothing to forget."
And Abe was back.
"They're gone," he said. "I thought I heard a boat motor fading in the distance, but couldn't see anything."
Hellboy grunted and rolled over again, pushing himself to elbows and knees. Abe helped him the rest of the way, and together they made for the standing stones. Hard to say who was holding whom up now. Pull either of them away and they'd both go down. They sought shelter at the base of the broadest, flattest menhir. Between its tilt and the sideways slant of the rain, the stone gave them as much protection from the elements as they were likely to find on this desolate hump of land.
"One observation?" Abe said. "You've smelled better."
"Hey. You're no rose on a good day."
Abe clasped his shoulder for a moment, gave it a shake. "The ones that took the scroll--I know what I saw. What were you seeing?"
"Not men, that's for sure. Maybe they were wearing the skins of men. But definitely not men inside."
He supposed he should've known better, that if he'd been thinking more clearly, he might have known his eyes were being deceived. Maybe that was another reason for his having been brought to this place: He was already primed to believe that anything might be possible here.
Even so, the denizens of Hell didn't just roam the earth at will, at least not in their true forms, their true bodies. His uniqueness in the world was proof of that. They could be summoned into the confines of protective circles similar to the ones he'd seen at the observatory in Rome. In many cases, whether they were truly corporeal or just an extraordinarily powerful projection was still up for grabs, although if the latter, they were no less dangerous to the conjurer for it.
Their surest path into the world was in the bodies of servants and sycophants willing, even eager, to house them. But you could forget all that business about little girls with rotating heads and a gorgeful of pea soup--these people wanted to be taken. And when it served Hell's purposes, its principalities might call upon beasts such as the Leviathan...beings so ancient, so reclusive, they could only be regarded as surviving fragments of the chaos that had stirred the primordial seas.
"The one that took the cuff off my wrist," Hellboy said, "that one's called Surgat."
Abe shook his head. "I don't know the name."
"Minor, as demons go. But he can open any man-made lock."
"And the other one?"
"Moloch. I couldn't tell you firsthand whether it's true or not, but the old texts say he's a prince of Hell. I've got no reason to doubt that. In the Middle East, in Old Testament times, there were tribes that worshipped him as a sun god."
"And now he has the Masada Scroll," Abe said. "What Heaven wants to destroy, Hell wants to possess."
"Doesn't sound good, does it?"
"But if Hell is deceit, why be so obvious about it?" Abe asked. "They let you see them. They wanted you to see them. They may have worn men's skins, but they didn't try to hide behind them."
"Arrogance?" he guessed. "Make sure we knew they were able to succeed where angels failed? Never underestimate the power of pride."
But it would've been personal, too, wouldn't it? Anything between Hell and himself would be personal, always. Because he was Hell's own runaway.
What an affront to them his existence must have been. Yet he couldn't say they'd ever tried outright to kill him. Meaning they must have thought they needed him. Or maybe they tolerated him because the triumph of tempting him back would eclipse the shame of having lost him, with such rejoicing that the world would writhe.
Either way, he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction.
"We really need to get off this rock," he said. "Any ideas?"
He'd already noticed that Abe was as bereft of gear as he was. Abe was bereft of everything. Different reasons, though, probably. What Hellboy hadn't lost during the shipwreck, the Leviathan's belly had claimed. More likely Abe had shed everything on purpose, to eliminate surface drag during his phenomenal swim. Not that their global phones would necessarily even work by now, despite being waterproof, but it would've been nice to see that the bureau's R&D guys had gotten it right.
"If I remember correctly, the Scottish mainland isn't far off," Abe said. "I could swim for help."
"Show-off."
Abe grinned. "I've caught a second wind."
"Lots of fisherman along these coasts, so watch who you trust. Last thing we need is for you to end up in a bowl of cullen skink."
Now Abe just looked affronted.
"And promise me you'll find a blanket as soon as you can. You don't want to be scaring anybody with...whatever that is down there."
Abe asked if he had any other advice that wasn't totally unnecessary, and when Hellboy couldn't think of any, once more vanished from sight long before he reached the water's edge.
Hellboy stretched out with his head against the stone and let the rain have him. The elements he could handle f
ine. It was the solitude, at all the wrong times, that he never quite got used to.
Chapter 15
As the days passed, Laurenti wondered if they both weren't captives here, he and the man in the cage. No progress--now on his tenth day behind bars in the old shell of a private zoo, Domenico Verdi had yet to provide any useful information on the Opus Angelorum. Their identities, where they might be found, what they might be scheming, attempting. If they'd ever had a contingency plan for what to do in case one of their numbers had been found out. Verdi was still without remorse, without repentance...and without any apparent desire to be free.
Laurenti had dwelled on his ominous words of a week ago--I've already found my deliverers. I think maybe you'll meet them soon enough. Dwelled on them a little too heavily, perhaps. It seemed certain that Verdi had meant the seraphim, implying that another attack was imminent.
But as each sunset came and each night gave way to another dawn with nothing happening, apprehension slowly subsided. If no retaliation had yet come from Verdi's unknown collaborators, maybe it never would. For a time, Laurenti feared that Verdi might be planning on initiating it himself. The rites that they'd successfully used to call down the seraphs were unknown to him, but Laurenti could think of no reason why one man couldn't do it instead of a group.
He'd gone to visit the osservatorio again, to examine the signs and sigils that had been used to accomplish the summoning. He could make little sense of them--they looked so jumbled, with layers upon layers--and he came away convinced that they were of such complexity that it seemed unlikely a man could remember them exactly, to recreate them verbatim...at least under these conditions. All the same, he made sure that Verdi's cell was kept free of things he could use for writing.
As well, if the stains on the old wood of the osservatorio's top floor were what they appeared to be, blood was a part of these rites. Perhaps not a sacrificial death--he found it difficult to believe that even they would tread this far into the forbidden--but nonetheless, blood was life, blood was energy, and its release was known to charge many a ceremonial stage.
