Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell

by Brian Hodge

  This church was close enough to the cities and towns of the Western Midlands that you'd think it would draw the young, the curious, the daring. But it didn't. He saw no graffiti, no empty cans. No signs of tourists tramping through with cameras. He couldn't even spot a bird's nest up in the surviving wall tops and rafters. It seemed to repel them one and all, as if they instinctively knew that this place was not picturesque, but poisoned.

  He'd been here twice before, with no recollection of the first time, but then, no one he knew could remember his or her delivery room. Professor Bruttenholm had told him he'd entered the world in a huge welder's arc of flame and a shower of broken stone...an infant as big as a human toddler, his right hand already full-sized; he'd had to grow into it.

  Cause and effect: On that cold, wet island in the north, they'd managed to rip a hole between worlds, dimensions, whatever...and he'd popped out here.

  Cause and effect redux: He had created his own destiny, wholly in defiance of his conjurers, simply by being himself. There may have been a BPRD without him, but it wouldn't be the same today. He had become, at the moment of his birth, the world's foremost living, breathing, concrete-chewing proof that lurking beyond the veil of everyday reality were threats that really must be dealt with. He'd managed this just by showing up.

  Some good had come out of this place, at least.

  He wandered until he found a spot along a surviving wall in what appeared to have been the church's nave, near the west end entrance. Right where he remembered: a shadowed suggestion of faces peering out at him from behind a ragged curtain of ivy. He brushed it aside for a better look.

  There were two of them carved in the old limestone. With his imperious beard and the cross on the chest of his tunic, the male had the look of a medieval crusader. The woman at his side, her face a perpetual balance of serenity and woes, was likewise cloaked against the world. Whether they were here by coincidence or some far-reaching design, he had come to associate them with a brother and sister, priest and nun, whose souls had been ensnared here for centuries in a cold gray limbo.

  He'd seen them die.

  That was on his other visit, just last year.

  He'd come, finally, after five decades spent ducking the place, dismissing it as irrelevant to who and what he now was. Kate had called his longstanding refusal to set foot on these unhallowed grounds again a form of denial. Liz, ever more blunt, called it chickenshit. And Professor Bruttenholm, in his fatherly wisdom? He'd never called it anything, barely acknowledging it, as if he had known that Hellboy would visit when the time was right.

  Had the man ever been wrong about things that mattered?

  And so he'd come last year to wander the maze of ruins, seeing it all for the first time because not a bit of it stirred a single memory. Come night, he'd slept, and soon dreamed...

  Dreamed of a dying old woman repenting the sins of her vain and impetuous youth, and the shadow-walking demon she had worshipped, loved, bedded. Begging her children--the elder a priest, the younger a nun--to intercede on her behalf and save her soul from damnation.

  Their efforts had been in vain.

  Hellboy knew better than to trust dreams without question, even when they were so vivid they came to waking life around him like echoes of history. Because it was possible they were only echoes of things that might have been, not things that had. Still, he feared his hopes were as doomed as those poor wretches who'd been blasted apart by the claimant of their mother's soul.

  The horned titan that came for his due had spoken tenderly to her of a child they'd conceived together, still growing inside her. He'd turned and looked at Hellboy and spoke of their coming son. Then skewered the woman on a chained hook and left her dangling from his steed.

  Yeah, just go and try explaining that one away as indigestion. A blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese.

  He touched the pair of limestone faces carved into the wall and let the curtain of ivy fall back into place.

  Dreich Midden, East Bromwich...so linked were these two places, by the simultaneous events of 1944 if nothing else, that after having been spit out on the island again, he'd shown up here today half expecting to find...something.

  But nothing had changed. Same old mysteries, same old questions, same old legacy of lies.

  Although if he shut out everything else and listened very closely, he thought he could hear the sound of laughter.

  One day he was going to come here and, with nothing more than his two hands, hit this place like a force of nature and not stop until the last two stones still joined together were wrenched apart.

  But not today.

  He had promises to keep, and one more stop to make along the way.

  Chapter 17

  She was on her fourth cigarette when the car was checked through the gate and appeared at the end of the long, long drive. Only then did Liz's heart start to race. Not the good race, either, the kind of quickened pulse that could pave the way for rumpled sheets and a languorous breakfast--rare enough even at her best times, but not so long in the past that she didn't remember what it was like.

  No, this was more like the feeling of tipping backward in a kitchen chair and realizing you're within a millimeter of the point of no return.

  From the front terrace, she watched the car roll closer, a black sedan dour against the green meadows and the golds and reds of autumn. She'd been here at the house in Bodmin, Cornwall, enough times over the years that she couldn't remember what it was like to see it through the windshield for the first time. Safehouse, they called it, and technically speaking that was true, but she'd always thought the term failed to do the place justice. No stables, and a wine cellar that had been converted into a reinforced bunker, but from the outside it looked like the kind of Georgian manor house where you might expect a proper foxhunt each Christmas morning.

  The sedan rolled halfway through the circular drive that looped around a fountain where a group of Greco-Roman nymphs in mid-frolic had been waiting years for the water to be turned back on. They now stood in what looked like a dirty round bathtub. She'd always felt sorry for them.

  Liz tossed her cigarette and ground it to death with her boot tip as the sedan's back door popped open and Campbell Holt stepped out. He wore a long dark coat that hit him at the knee, the empty left cuff flapping, flapping. He flipped her a nonchalant wave with his right hand.

  "Hullo, luv!" he called out in a voice that clearly wasn't his. It took her a moment to place it as a decent Liverpudlian fake. He patted the sedan and grinned, and his voice returned to normal. "I feel like one of the Beatles, only going the opposite direction."

  "Your hair's too short," she said.

  His eyes performed a disappointed pan-and-scan across the terrace and grounds, empty but for her. "I really was hoping for more screaming fans."

  Nice to see that one of them wasn't sweating this out.

  Hellboy's idea, this was, and whether it would prove to be a good one or a bad one, they'd know soon enough. If it worked out, there would be enough credit to go around. And if it didn't? Well, put it this way: She'd never seen anyone blame H.B. for anything. Because he did so much right. Because he did so many things that nobody else could. And because he was so utterly unique. She didn't have the same star status, never would, and while she honestly didn't care about that crap while it remained on the level of shallow adulation, at times like this she felt the disparity more keenly.

  If it didn't work out, Liz knew that, even if nobody said anything, they'd be looking at her as if she were the mother of this particular failure. Because Campbell Holt was her boy, her charge, the challenge she'd gone out of her way to take on--so who else to blame if he couldn't hack it in the field?

  Nobody would remember her objections. Nobody had heard them except for Hellboy. He'd been discreet enough yesterday to present his idea to her while they were alone.

  "I don't know, H.B.," she'd said. "I've only been working with Cam for about seven weeks. And the first month I was time-
sharing him with his detox and rehab program. There's a lot of work we still have to do before he's on solid ground."

  "You sounded pretty proud of him on the boat the other day," Hellboy had countered.

  "I think I sounded protective of him, too," she'd said. "Yeah, he's come a long way from the guy I first saw plugged into tubes in his hospital bed. But there's a lot more progress to make before he gets his diploma."

  "Liz, I don't want to come off like I'm second-guessing you on this, but this kid's got a talent we can use now. We don't have the time for you to bring him along slow anymore."

  Was it Hellboy's fault if he had the sort of chin that made him look stubborn every moment of his life?

  "I respect psychics and all that," he'd said. "It's just that they never seem to do much of the heavy lifting. So the fact that I'm asking at all should tell you how important I think this is."

  More arguments, back and forth, pro and con. The two of them could quarrel like siblings because, well, that's what they were, weren't they? She'd grown up with him, known him since she was a child, and although he'd reached his full towering height years before she'd been born, in a sense he'd grown up with her, too.

  He was playing on emotion here and didn't even realize it--Hellboy surviving in the GI tract of something believed to be ancient enough to have swum the seas when the continents looked different than they did now, while she'd spent those days fearing she might have finally seen the last of him.

  After the sinking of the Calista, she'd leaned against the low rubber wall of the life raft, the only thing between her and the hungry sea, saying little to Bastiaan and the lone surviving crewman. As she'd watched the waves and tried to ignore the growing thirst from having to ration the last of the fresh water, she'd felt hope curl inside her chest and die like a starved child. If she'd been with someone other than strangers, if Abe had been beside her, maybe he could've talked her through it...but for all she knew, Abe was dead too. Thirty hours in the raft, three more on a rescue ship, overnight in a spartan hotel room on Majorca, a turbulent flight to England, and during the whole interminable span, she had careened through a crash course on the stages of grief.

  And now he was back, he and Abe both, and all he wanted was to send an agent out into the field. Where they all went eventually, at least the ones with talents.

  Who was she to deny him?

  There was more than just success and failure on the line for the bureau as a whole. There was also, even though no one had spoken of it and never would, redemption. Hellboy may have survived something that no one else could've, but he had still been bested. He'd lost what he'd been entrusted to carry.

  Could anyone else see what that did to him? Could anyone who hadn't grown up with him look past the unearthly gold of his eyes and see the new imbalance there, the overturning of his natural order?

  He would save himself by saving the world...or whatever corner of it was threatened this time. He'd been doing it all his life.

  And then, in their debate yesterday, he'd put the knife in:

  "Campbell will do fine, he'll be fine. You know how I know that?" he'd said. "He'll have you with him the whole time."

  She wished she could share the same confidence.

  And now that Campbell was here, she wished she could spin him around and put him in the car again and send him back across the ocean. His coat fit him and still looked too big. He looked so young, so godawful young.

  I got you into this, she thought, and maybe it really wasn't the best thing at the time, maybe you really might have been better off in some half-decent mental ward...

  "So the big red guy really asked for me, huh?" he said.

  Campbell was alongside her now, carrying the single bag he'd packed for the trip. She wondered how difficult it was to fold clothes with one hand. If he'd walked through the airports with his left wrist in his coat pocket to conceal the stump. It's what she would do. Freak is as freak does, so don't give the normals any excuse to stare.

  "That's a good thing, right?"

  "It shows a certain level of confidence, yes," she said.

  "Cool," he said, sounding genuinely pleased, before getting to the flipside. " 'Cause I know the bureau isn't without, um, casualties."

  "Don't worry. You're not going in with the lions anytime soon."

  "Cool." A moment later they were through the safehouse's front doors, and Campbell went back on pan-and-scan. "Is he here now? It's not like I've actually met him yet."

  "No, he's a few hours north of here. Taking care of some things."

  She left it unsaid that H.B. was on walkabout again, if only for a day or so. Not that he could lose himself in the forests and fields, the way he normally liked to. He had an assigned driver this time, which to her mind defeated the purpose of walkabout, but it was an essential compromise; none of them knew when something crucial might break. And if it did, what, he was going to take the trains? Only if he wanted to get bogged down somewhere signing autographs.

  He'd been a public figure since the late 1950s--had even been on the cover of Life magazine, among others--but the novelty and the paranoia factor had worn off long ago. He'd evolved into the world's most unique celebrity: intimidating yet approachable, with no need of plastic surgery to keep him looking the same over the decades, and forever denied the ability to duck an encounter by telling people, "Sorry, you've mistaken me for someone else."

  She envied him his sanity through it all.

  Campbell was still taking everything in from the foyer. The place resembled a cross between a hunting lodge, a corporate retreat, and a crypt full of oddities and curios. Once he'd finished marveling over the suit of armor standing guard--she'd heard it used to move quite on its own until Professor Bruttenholm put a stop to it twenty-odd years ago--Cam began craning his neck to peer down hallways.

  "Let's show you around, get you introduced--really small staff compared to Fairfield, so it won't take long," she said. "And get you something to eat if you're hungry. But don't get too settled in. We'll be off for Rome in the morning."

  "We'll be staying someplace like this there, too?" he asked. Ah, such naive hope in his voice.

  "I haven't seen the place," she confessed, "but don't count on it."

  They'd barely gotten into the nickel tour, and were standing in the middle of the library, when Kate interrupted. She said hello to Cam--had first met him weeks before--and pulled Liz back out into the foyer.

  "This better be good," Liz said. "I was about to regale him with tales of the phantom librarian."

  "Huh?" Kate's face pinched with bemusement. "There's no phantom librarian here."

  "I know. I just thought it might keep things lively. What's up?"

  "A few minutes ago we got an ID on one of the two John Does from the armored car attack. Fingerprints routed from the Rome polizia to the BPRD and from there to the FBI and NCIC database."

  "So he was an American?"

  "His name was Michael Clark Boddicker." Kate handed her a photo. "Here's the morgue close-up. Obviously, of the two unidentifieds, he's the one with his face still intact."

  "Such as it is," Liz said. He'd obviously seen better days.

  "He's the one who dropped dead on the street. According to Father Laurenti, he was used up and discarded by a malign entity. The best the autopsy could confirm was heart failure. Now: Here's a fresh printout of a photo we were just sent. It's the last known picture taken of him while he was still alive, about two weeks before he disappeared. It's a mug shot."

  Liz nodded. "Yeah, I thought it had that 'I'm-screwed' vibe."

  "He's twenty-two years old here. He'd been working on a master's degree in political science at the University of Illinois, and he'd just been arrested in Chicago during a violent anti-war demonstration."

  "Gulf War?" Liz asked. Although she couldn't even remember any particularly violent protests staged against that one.

  Kate shook her head. "Vietnam."

  "No way."

  "You s
ay that even after you've seen a series of a guy growing his arm back like a salamander?" Kate laughed. "Boddicker was arrested in the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He was charged with conspiracy, so he wasn't looking at just a slap on the wrist. After his parents made his bail, he apparently left for Europe. Whereabouts unknown ever since."

  Liz held the photos, one in each hand, and stared back and forth.

  "So he's twenty-two here," she said, and waved the mug shot. Next the morgue shot. "And he's supposed to be fifty here?"

  The photos showed the same young man with longish dirty-blond hair, and even accounting for the gauntness of his face and the effects of death, you'd never guess the two photos had been taken more than two or three years apart.

  "This is no dead middle-aged man. This is a dead college student who's hit the skids. Those times I ran away from the bureau when I was in my teens? I spent plenty of days and nights with kids who didn't look much better, and there were probably times I didn't either." Liz handed the pictures back. "Where's he supposed to have spent the last twenty-eight years?"

  "I don't know," Kate said, "but it looks like a pattern is starting to develop. There's young Mister Boddicker here, there's the antique Luger that Hellboy recovered, there's an entire cult of hundreds that disappeared from Weimar-era Berlin. I'd love to get an ID on the other John Doe, just to find out where and when he came from. Because it sounds to me like there's a crack somewhere that people and things fell into...and now they're starting to fall out again."

  Chapter 18