by Brian Hodge
He decided he was going in alone. The others could act as backup in case anything tried to slip out ahead of or behind him. He sent Abe off with Muir to cover the basement flat's rear entrance, had Kirsten and Ormston stay put in the van and continue monitoring the front. He watched the second screen until, in grainy black and white, he saw the pair of them flash past the camera, Muir pointing it out and Abe lifting a single finger: One more minute to get into position.
Hellboy watched the time tick down on the van's clock, then heaved himself out the back of the van. Nothing else was moving out here other than the downpour--it was raining hard enough to drown even Abe--and he paused for a better look around. Tenements and row houses, mostly, their gray walls shedding bricks that would slowly work their way loose like rotting teeth, to fall in the middle of the night.
He splashed across the street and down the block; could hear the muffled peal of a distant church bell calling whatever brave souls might care to venture out for early Sunday Mass. Normally he enjoyed the sound, but this morning it sounded funereal and forlorn, an afterthought in a world where God and Man alike had forgotten one another. Dawn seemed to be taking forever to get here, too--just latitude, lateness of the year, and the clouds, he knew, but this dismal place could use some light this morning.
He swung around an iron railing and down a three-quarter flight of stairs to the doorway of Calum Gilmour's basement flat. Beneath an old coat of green paint that was peeling away in filmy strips, the door looked thick and sturdy, as though it might stand up to the first blow from a police battering ram.
Not so, his right hand.
He drew his revolver, a replacement for the one lost to the Leviathan, fetched from the armory in the Cornwall safehouse. A flashlight next--it looked dark in there. He pushed the fractured door aside and stepped in, slid through a tight entry hall that doglegged to the left.
Hallway by hallway, room by room...the maze unfolded around him, a dank burrow that looked as if years of moisture and decay had taken hold all at once. The doors were half-sealed, stuck in warped frames. Wallpaper crawled with new patterns of fungus and mold, and wept trickles of water from ceiling to floor. Elsewhere, clotted plaster had sloughed away like wet scabs to reveal the rotting boards inside the walls. When he pinched one with his fingers, it came away in splinters and pulp.
And the farther back he went, the more the place seemed to flicker around him. It was not light on the walls, but the walls themselves, and the floors, the dilapidated furnishings--all of it putrefying one instant, then a feeble pulse of cleanliness and order, like an acetate overlay in a book. A glamour, he thought, coming apart as if the spell's connection to its power source were quickly eroding, weakened but struggling to maintain its illusion.
It could fool no one now...and with him aware of the trick, it seemed to diminish all the more.
He estimated that he had to be getting close to the rear of the flat when he wrenched open another bloated door and came upon the bathroom. Or what had once been the bathroom. The floor was a deathtrap here, its tiles slick with mildew, and its walls had been slathered with unknown substances to create a repeating pattern of symbols as old as Solomon. And when he shined the flashlight inside the hulking clawfoot tub, he saw what must have been the source of that last irate report of smoke.
The blackened tangle of small limbs, the charcoal nubs that would've once been fingers...Hellboy had to shut his eyes for long moments and quell the boiling of his blood. He would smash nothing. He would not bellow loud enough to drown out church bells and rain. No, this was a rage better channeled toward its most fitting end...and the impulses passed like a seizure.
Onward, through the rest of this fetid cistern.
The main room was just beyond, and here he found them: three bodies, graylit by the strobing glow of a television that managed to still work in the swampy air, even if it showed nothing but static. The pair from the night on Dreich Midden, and some unknown assistant? For now, as good a guess as any. They appeared quite dead, the two smaller men for sure.
One sat at rigid attention in a spot of open floor space, his head tipped upward and back as he seemed to stare at the yard's length of two-inch copper pipe protruding from his mouth. From the look of things, the pipe hadn't entered there; this was only the point of exit.
The other was a wiry fellow, slumped to one side of a sofa that smelled of rodents that now seemed to be nowhere around; even vermin were smarter than people sometimes. Something was terribly wrong with his fingers--stretched and lengthened, hardened and multiplied, like slivers of blue steel and bone. The fingers of Surgat, to whom locks were child's play...at least as Hellboy had seen them the other night. One hand lay palm-up at the man's side. He'd plunged the other into his throat, ramming the handful of spikes and needles in up to the malformed knuckles.
His eyes still shone with a hideous rapture.
Hellboy knew, even before he retraced his steps for a more careful search, that the case and cuff removed from his wrist were no longer here, if they'd even made it this far.
He took a moment to radio the team outside and tell them to stand down. That nothing was coming out of this place unless it was dragged or carried.
Back to the main room then, where he took a closer look at the third body. This was Calum Gilmour, no mistaking it. Wreathed in the odors of sepsis and infection, he leaned against a wall, propped into the corner atop a bloodied heap of newspapers and magazines that had been molded by seepage into a fused mound, a paper throne.
Used up, thrown away by the devils they had courted...he felt no pity for either of these two from the island, got no sense that the third man was in any way deserving of pity either. Maybe they hadn't known where it would lead, but they had wanted this all the same. They'd chosen, and badly.
He swept the flashlight from body to body, and when he looked at Gilmour again, saw that the eyes that had been closed moments before were now open. He shined the light directly into them and watched the pupils constrict.
Behind him, the TV died a sudden, silent death, depriving the room of its sickly gray flicker. What the flashlight didn't reveal, he could no longer see. The rest was eaten by shadow.
Gilmour's jaw dropped, strained, and after a creak of air and phlegm, out poured a guttural inundation of words never meant for human ears to hear, much less throats to speak. Calum Gilmour's throat, but not his words. Not anymore.
Hellboy wasn't having it. "You got something to say to me, say it in a language I understand."
The voice abused the throat through a series of variations, as though cycling through a sequence of dialects. Just taunting him now, a babble of blasphemies, until he huffed what sounded like a sigh of resignation. Finally:
"English, if it must be. It holds few words for what is truly important, but if they only fall on ears that refuse to hear..." The voice was still wrong, somehow, as though the vocal cords had been stretched and frayed beyond repair. "Have you forgotten the tongues of home, the barbarous tongues?"
"Anything that matters, I can remember that just fine."
Gilmour's eyes, or the eyes behind them, looked him up and down with open disdain, the poisonous gaze lingering on the stumps upon his forehead. "You seem to have forgotten yourself. If it is a reminder you need, then it is a reminder I should give you..."
The neck began to twist, the head to tremble, the teeth to grind in their sockets. Gilmour's mouth--although it was hard to regard it as his anymore--began to stretch wide, pulled down at the corners as if by hooks and wires. The eyes, like slits already, narrowed further, showing only the whites as the forehead began to break a river of sweat...and one to a side, protrusions began to form in the skin. They grew, thickened, lengthened, the sharp points beneath stretching the thin skin of the forehead but never breaking through, as inch by slow inch, the pair of fledgling horns sprouted from the skull. Further and further, until at last the skin, pulled taut and shiny red, began to darken, atrophying over the fresh bone into a su
bstance like keratin and bristled hair.
"Does it remind you of anyone?" it asked.
"I may look like one of yours," Hellboy said, "but the resemblance ends there."
"Now you lie to yourself. Hell is more than skin deep." Upon its makeshift throne, the Moloch twisted as if in discomfort. Grunting, it reached around to dig into ribs, spine, something. It brought its hand back around and, with casual interest, examined the palmful of blood and suppurating tissue before slinging it spattering to the floor. "You shot me in the back. Was that an act of Christian mercy? Was it even an act of heroism?"
"You turned your back to the bullet." Hellboy felt his teeth grit. "I'd've shot you in the face if you hadn't been running away."
"Did I offend you?" The Moloch feigned an ugly parody of surprise. "That helpless red carcass on the ground that gave up his prizes so easily...I thought he had no more fight left in him. He struggled so weakly under this"--the Moloch jerked one leg up and peered at the boot it wore before letting it thud back to the floor--"this small bony foot I borrowed."
Hellboy decided to quit rising to the bait. "The scroll...why go to all that trouble to take it? You don't strike me as much of a reader."
It ignored him, tipping its head upward to sniff the air with nostrils gone grotesque, seeming to pull in one last whiff of ambrosia. Leaning in the direction of the bathroom turned charnel house.
"The fires have gone out here," it said, sounding almost wistful. "But there are others...always others." Now it craned its head toward the papered-over window, the streets beyond. "Can you hear it? The weeping of mothers and the splashing of their tears? They were never told their children's fate, but in their dreams they know..."
"The scroll," Hellboy tried again. "What's it mean to you?" Because if he didn't remain focused on the job, he'd give in to temptation and tear this meat-puppet apart, lose whatever tenuous connection he had with the force behind it--probably what it wanted, another taunt. "You don't gain anything by keeping the scroll a secret. Why not let the Church have it, make it public?"
Now he had its attention. The Moloch seemed to entertain itself by pretending to muse things over.
"In our time and way. Not theirs," it said. Then it fixed him with its eyes, so much less than human now. "Your blindness does you shame. Do you truly not see that even as you try and fail to correct this situation, it is of your own making?"
His hand itched--his right hand. It had never itched before, not that he could remember. Had never wanted so badly to crush words, and the mouth that formed them.
"You belong to two worlds--the world of weakness and squalor I see before these eyes, and, though you deny it, the world of black flame behind them. You deny this because you forget you exist to open the doorway between them, so the world where you now walk may be perfected." With Gilmour's eyes, it tried a paternal look, all wisdom and good sense. "That doorway has never been closer. If I were to tell you where to find it, and how to open it, you could save so many millions of lives."
Hellboy almost laughed. But not here. "Whenever you guys start talking about doorways, they're always something that's better off staying shut."
"There are other ways of opening the door. And it will open. What you must do, and do soon, is decide how you will be greeted by what comes through." It leveled a warning gaze at him. "Never think yourself such a favored son that if found to be obsolete, you could not be cast into Oblivion as Hell's own Judas."
Hellboy leaned in close, closer, as if they shared secrets. What this thing would not give him he realized he still might be able to take.
"Oblivion, yeah? How's the decor there?" he asked. "Can I get a little something to hang on my wall?"
He grabbed the left horn and ripped it from the Moloch's head. It came away with a thick cracking sound, in splinters and blackened blood. After a brief spasm--right or wrong, Hellboy wanted to think it a reaction of outrage--the demon retreated from the body, leaving only the man behind.
And Gilmour breathed. Just not very well.
Stained crimson with burst capillaries, his eyes roved, struggling to see beyond the flashlight's beam that must have seared like the noonday sun. He seemed to be taking stock of where he was. If he was yet in the Hell he must have been promised.
No, he seemed to realize, he wasn't. Worse. Much worse.
"...what year is it...?" he asked in his ruined voice.
Hellboy told him nothing, content to wait and bear witness, as long as it took, until Gilmour carried the question with him to the Hell he deserved.
Chapter 20
Auburn-haired woman in a glassless window, green shutters thrown wide against burnt-orange plaster--Liz had been sitting there so long that she had to figure anyone watching would think she was contemplating a jump. Sorry to disappoint. Even if she were so inclined, there were more efficient ways of offing yourself than flinging your bod from a third-floor window. At best, from this one, you'd only smash your legs on the flat-topped cobblestones of the street.
And why spoil such a perfectly fine afternoon, anyway.
How good was it? It had been hours since she'd felt much of an urge to fire up a cigarette. That good.
Liz had felt cheated on her brief stay in Rome ten days ago. A pop-in under the cover of darkness and a tumultuous ride in an armored car--that was no way to see the Eternal City. She still wasn't seeing much of it, but this would do. This would do just fine.
She and Campbell had come to a bustling neighborhood called the Borgo, in the shadow of the Vatican's eastern walls. Since the sixth century this place had catered to the needs and wants of pilgrims, priests, and penitents alike, as well as plain old secular travelers--meals and lodging and souvenirs of all sizes, and always cheaper than what was charged by the merchants in St. Peter's Square.
The BPRD had quietly maintained a six-room apartment here since the first year of its founding...one of the easiest arrangements the bureau had ever finagled. The liberation of Rome in June of 1944--the German army retreating to the north while the Allies marched in from the south--had earned the U.S. government, even its youngest agency, tremendous capital with a populace elated to see the Nazis leave. Credit the young Trevor Bruttenholm with having the foresight to press for a low-key base that not even the Vatican was to know about.
Now that she was here, Liz had to wonder if a part of him hadn't wanted the place as a quaint little getaway spot, like a time-share condo that he'd get to use year-round. She could understand, and blessed him for it, though he was two years in the grave. Even now it felt like a bequeathal, the kind of place into which she would love to disappear and live on the cheap, spending her money mostly on coffee and oil paints; pick the sunniest room and set up an easel and see if anything that hit the canvas was worth keeping.
Although if she were going to be playing house this way with a man twelve years her junior, she would want it to be later in life, when she could really count it as an accomplishment.
"When's the guy going to be here, again?" Campbell asked from the kitchen, where he was getting a bottle of mineral water.
"No quicker than he was since the last time you asked," Liz said.
Antsy--who could blame him? The first time he'd be proving himself to the bureau for real, an ocean away from its cloistered walls.
Ever since they'd gotten here yesterday afternoon, she'd kept finding excuses to leave, coming back after each excursion with bread or wine, cheese or olives. Nothing to do with Campbell's company--she just loved wandering in the Borgo. Church bells pealed near and far, and on the edges, there was even something fun about watching the smelly tour buses, almost as plentiful as the pigeons, forced to contend with the chaotic, random way that modern-day Romans had of parking their cars.
But inside, in the heart of the place, where there was no such distinction as street and sidewalk...that's where the life was. You walked pathways and touched walls, both bright and somber, that had been walked and touched by the feet and hands of the Renaissance. On a
sunny day like today, laundry dried overhead like the flags of a hundred nations, while you dodged soccer balls and motor scooters and were wise to regard them as equal dangers, and passed benches where old men sat and smoked and rued the modern age, as old men did everywhere she'd ever been. It was village life, in the middle of one of the world's oldest cities.
"You want a water?" Cam asked.
"No thanks. I've got one."
"How about an apricot? These are the best apricots I've ever had in my life."
"No, I'm good. And no bread right now either," she told him, and finally turned from the window. "Why don't you spit out what's really on your mind?"
He looked flustered at having been found so transparent, but when she'd first started working with him, it hadn't taken long to catch onto the pattern of his evasions, his deflections, his stalling tactics. Her own, back in the day? Or a skill that she'd honed with normal people uncomfortable around her, subsurface freak that she was? Maybe a bit of both.
"I was talking to somebody at HQ after you left," he said. "I had a few days to myself there, you know, not much to work on if I didn't feel like it..."
"Better watch that. An idle hand is the devil's workshop." Amputee humor; he quite liked it most of the time.
"It's just that you kept telling me how if I worked hard and applied myself to doing my visualizations and keeping a clear head that I could get a handle on my life, on my gift"--he spat the word with no little irony--"on everything. You said that if I'd let it, the BPRD could be my salvation."
"That's really the word I used, huh?" Liz thought she knew where this was going. Not that she'd seen it coming, but come to think of it, it would be due anytime now, Campbell away from Fairfield just about long enough for the first-time excitement to wear off and let him get back to whatever fresh misgivings he'd been nursing.
"Yeah. Salvation. That was definitely the word."
He was pacing the hardwood floor, looking angular and lost inside ancient jeans ripped through at the knee and a sweatshirt under horse-blanket flannel that flapped around his frame like a sail. The look out of Seattle that you just knew would start dying not long after Kurt Cobain had a couple of years ago, although you had to figure that the ripple effect would've been slow in getting to Nebraska. She found it endearing on him, actually.
