Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell

by Brian Hodge

  "And you no longer believe that's true?" she asked.

  "I don't know. You tell me. If it's such a salvation, then why have you left the bureau twelve times?"

  Her first impulse was to tell him, as diplomatically as possible, that it was none of his damned business. But she bit down that one, and was glad of it. It wouldn't help a thing, and she supposed that there was no way this discovery wouldn't make her look like a hypocrite.

  "Some of those bailouts, you can write them off to youthful indiscretion," she said. "I really was a kid when I first came to the bureau. Much younger than you are. I still hadn't even had my first fit of self-righteous teenage angst. I've lost my family and now I'm around all these strangers telling me what to do and trying to figure out what makes me tick? It would've been weird if I hadn't run away."

  She popped her head out the window for another glance up and down the street. Still clear, looked like. If their visitor wasn't here in another hour, okay, maybe then it would be time to worry.

  Liz pressed her hands together and frowned at them a moment, looking for the words, the right words.

  "I don't think there's anything that describes life at the bureau any better than family. That's what we have there, for better or worse...usually for the better. I know there are lots of places a person can work where they'll tell you you're joining a family, and I suppose at some of them that's the truth, but in most of them, it's just another con job. But in the core of the bureau, it's no lie. That's what we have because we're all we've got, really.

  "Hellboy, he's the big brother who's always watching out for everyone," she went on. "Abe's the cousin from that branch of the family that you're not too sure about. Kate, she's the cool aunt who'll level with you about the world in a way your parents would never dream of. And Professor Bruttenholm..." This was the only part that had the power to make her eyes burn, her throat catch. "Well, you missed a gem there. He was the father, or maybe the grandfather, who knew more than you thought any one person could, and who would never give up believing in your highest potential even when you'd let him down."

  "I wish I could've met him," Cam said, sounding painfully sincere. He had to have heard talk about the Professor around Fairfield, had to, and plenty of it.

  "Maybe you can, in a way." The solution was so obvious, she couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it until now. "We've all got things that belonged to him, things that he cherished. I think it'd be a good idea, after we all get back, to round them up and let you spend some time with them. With him."

  "I'd like that," Campbell said. Then looked at her with raised eyebrows and expectation: Your turn.

  "Right. Family. Me." Stalling tactics and evasion? Perish the thought. "I guess I'm the sister who, no matter how much she may love the rest of her family, still can't help thinking there's something better for her out there. So she has to go off and have a look, or..."

  Great, speaking about herself in the third person now. How's that for deflection?

  "...or I'll go crazy thinking I'm missing out on something that's probably not even there for me."

  Judging by the sagging appearance of his face, that last admission hadn't really helped the cause.

  "Look," she said, "we've got some overlap, you and I. But some fundamental differences, too. I carry something around inside me that can hurt people, no matter how much I might love them. It's been a long time since I've had an accident, but it's there. And every so often, I've gotten this idea in my head that I can leave it behind. I don't really believe that, of course, I just act like it's true.

  "You, though...what gradually consumed you until you almost let it kill you...you can impose restrictions on that in a way I never could with mine. As long as you're in a place where you can control your environment and the objects in it, then you can keep the bad shit at arm's length. Literally. You can do that at the bureau. Now, it's not free. They'll need your help sometimes, like we do now--hey, they'll demand it sometimes--and yeah, there'll be bad shit involved. That's the nature of the beast. But you won't be facing it alone. I will be there to catch you if you fall, I've always promised you that. So the BPRD...maybe it won't be your salvation, because that's something you'll have to find in yourself. But it can be your sanctuary. And that, I guarantee you."

  Spoken as one who'd come crawling back to sanctuary a dozen times--was that good or bad? She didn't know, but she'd at least spoken from the heart.

  "So...are we okay here?" she asked.

  "Yeah, we're good." He shoved back the sleeves of his sweatshirt and flannel and, with a grin, held out the knobby stump of his left arm. More amputee humor. "Shake on it?"

  Half an hour later she noticed Father Artaud coming up the street. The sight of a man in a black cassock riding a bicycle--she'd seen it at least a dozen times just since yesterday and it never looked any less ungainly. As Artaud dismounted, she leaned out to watch him chain the bike to a wrought iron railing on the front of the building.

  "I see that!" she called down; startled, he looked up as if expecting to see the finger of God. "What kind of message does that send about your faith in your fellow man?"

  As usual, he seemed to have no idea how to answer her, and she rather liked the feeling, however fleeting, of having that effect on a man. The fact that it was a priest, though...she couldn't decide if the whole business was playful, irreverent, or just plain pathetic on her part.

  After he'd jogged up the four flights of stairs--scarcely breathing harder, okay, impressive--she got Rogier a water and introduced him to Campbell, who, she was relieved to see, refrained from offering to shake with his stump this time. Refrained from offering to shake at all, she noticed, but he was subtle about it, standing a couple of feet out of reach behind the two-sided kitchen counter. Not all of his coping skills had come from the bureau. He'd brought a few with him.

  Rogier unburdened himself of a bag that he'd carried looped over his shoulder and across his chest. He set it on the amber tiles of the countertop and spread out its contents: a ring, an ornate pen that looked made of walnut, a missal, several more items.

  "Wow, good job," Liz said. "You know, if this priest thing doesn't work out, you could have a solid career as a pickpocket."

  "Please..." He looked as though he needed an antacid. "I don't feel good about this, not a bit."

  "You'll be returning them on the sly, so I think you'll be in the clear. I'm pretty sure the commandment is 'Thou shalt not steal,' not 'Thou shalt not borrow without permission,' " Liz said. "So...let's see if we can't find out who's been breaking 'Thou shalt not kill.' "

  It was Hellboy's idea, and a calculated risk, but his gut feeling was that among all those they had dealt with, Father Artaud was the one who kept the best interests of the Masada Scroll closest to his heart. That the Belgian archivist cherished it first and foremost as an artifact that had survived two millennia, not what it might represent between opposing factions.

  Hellboy trusted Artaud in a way that he wasn't now prepared to trust the others who'd been instrumental in arranging for the scroll's departure from Rome. Not that they were all corrupt, but because it appeared that one among them was not what he appeared to be. One of them was in league with forces that, rather than see the scroll destroyed, would steal it for their own purposes.

  So who was it?

  For Hellboy, the quickest way to the heart of this mystery was Campbell Holt. And for someone on the inside they trusted to surreptitiously round up a few personal items from the rest of the inner circle.

  "However you want to do this, it's your call," she told Cam. "We're not in the blue room anymore."

  "Can't spend my whole life in the blue room, can I?" He puffed out a tense sigh and stepped from behind the kitchen counter.

  Liz pointed at the scattering of purloined items. "You want to take them into one of the other rooms? Or do you want the two of us to leave you alone, or..."

  He gave the main room a once-over and decided he wanted to stay out here. Made sense
. This was where they'd spent the bulk of their time, around the fireplace and the old plush furniture, most of which had seen better days but had a homey feel. He'd grown comfortable here. His only request was to pull the windows' shutters to, and the glass down, to minimize distractions from outside.

  With that done, Cam settled into the biggest chair. "Just bring them to me one at a time, and I'd rather you not tell me anything about who they belong to."

  "The privacy, the intrusion..." Rogier still seemed queasy about moral issues. "Does this process of yours reveal...intimate details? Things that deserve to remain personal?"

  "What, you mean like how many times a day a guy might beat off?" Cam said, and she wanted to smack him. "Sorry, what's there is there."

  He must have noticed the look on her face, because Cam immediately looked as though he realized this was no time to cop an attitude.

  "Umm, look...if it makes you feel any better," he told Rogier, trying for a hasty salvage, "what I'm looking for, if it's here at all, if the guy has this whole other side to his life that none of the rest of you knows about, it should give off a pretty big hit. Whatever else is there...if it doesn't look and feel like the big sharp needle, I throw it back in the haystack, because it doesn't matter."

  Well done, she told him with a discreet smile and tip of her head. Nice save. Then a reversion to stern mentor: Now don't ever ever ever do that again.

  She brought him the ring first, silver-banded with a black stone in the middle--onyx, maybe--that was engraved with a red cross. He curled his fingers around it and let his head drift toward his chest, the usual pose he went into when it was time to work. She'd never been able to discern whether it came from concentration, or was an unconscious defensive posture he'd evolved, but didn't want to ask. It didn't seem worth calling attention to. When it came to psychics, in her experience, the least little thing that made someone self-conscious could contaminate the reading, throw it off.

  "This guy could stand to lose some weight. I'm not kidding..." Campbell said.

  Liz gave Rogier a sideways glance.

  "Archbishop Bellini," he whispered with a grin. "True, he could."

  "...but he's clean." Campbell opened his eyes and returned the ring directly to Rogier. "Seriously. Have a word, dude. This guy's having chest pains and thinking he can ignore them forever, and they're probably not going to stay minor much longer."

  Next she gave Campbell a white glove; it looked like the kind of dress glove a drum major might wear. She leaned in close to Rogier.

  "You didn't," she whispered. "One of the, what are they called...?"

  "The Swiss Guard?" he said. "Yes."

  "Oh, you are good."

  Campbell held the glove crumpled in his hand for a moment longer, then gave it back with a shake of his head and a snicker, as if to ask how anyone could ever have suspected this guy? "He's so conscientious about duty he probably does marching drills in his sleep."

  He went through a couple more, and on the fourth got something that gave his face a pained twist as he was taking it in, but he waved them off, no problem, nothing that had any bearing on their business here, and then said he wanted to give it a rest for a few minutes.

  Throughout this process, Rogier had gone from mild skepticism to interest to rapt fascination. He was clearly grateful for the break, because it gave him a chance to pose the question he seemed increasingly anxious to ask, without interrupting:

  "How do you do this?" Rogier wanted to know. "How does this work?"

  Campbell studied the floor a moment, then looked up with an apologetic smile. "I'm not really sure. A few days ago, I learned a couple of theories from some people, but I can't say which one feels more right to me. I don't guess one has to be totally wrong for the other to be right."

  "Not that either of them has to be right," Liz added.

  "In one theory, the objects we own, that have a real presence in our lives and aren't just forgotten in the back of a closet somewhere," he said, "it's like they're psychic sponges. We imprint them with what happens to us, and our strongest memories, and our feelings about whatever we love and hate, the stuff that really makes an impression...and for some reason, I can pull all that out of them.

  "The other theory," he said, then backed up a moment. "Have you ever heard of the Akashic Records?"

  Rogier said he hadn't.

  "Don't feel bad, it was a new one on me, too. But if you think of everything we do as expending some kind of energy...our actions and thoughts and emotions...that energy's got to go somewhere, because you can't destroy energy, it can only change form. Well, supposedly, a part of it touches this higher plane of existence and makes a permanent impression. And that's what the Akashic Records are, if you believe in it: this master record of everything that's ever happened, no matter how small. And those personal objects I was talking about? They're nothing by themselves. But they're like"--he stopped, clawing for a comparison--"links on a web page. And for someone like me, what they do is point me to their owner's record."

  Rogier seemed quietly enthralled, with an obvious preference for this theory. Beneath his wide brow and balding pate, he had the look of a boy hearing about dinosaurs for the first time.

  Yeah, Liz thought, that's the one that would appeal to a librarian.

  "Except I don't have the skill to read it the way I would a book yet," Cam said. "I mostly have to take what jumps out at me. And it's usually not subtle."

  After pondering this for a few moments, Rogier asked where the lavatory was. She'd really been pushing the bottled water on him. A warmish afternoon, pedaling his bike around in Rome traffic...go on, go on, rehydrate. Liz pointed down a hallway and told him which door, and he excused himself. She followed the progress of his footsteps, the clunk of the closing door.

  Hurriedly now, she grabbed his shoulder bag off the kitchen counter and dropped it into Cam's lap. He looked up at her from the chair as though she'd given him a dead fish.

  "Yeah. Him too. Don't look so surprised," she whispered.

  Wide-eyed: "I thought you all trusted him..."

  "And we want to keep trusting him, so do it."

  With a flash of bitterness across his face, Campbell snatched the bag in his hand, opened himself to the ebb and flow...then tossed it back at her.

  "Nothing wrong with him, either," Cam said, and wouldn't take his eyes from hers, a glare that bordered on accusation. "You want to know what his big secret is? He likes you. I mean likes you. And that's really eating at him because he knows he can't do a thing about it. So he's trying hard to fight it. It's filling him up with guilt that, personally, I don't think he should feel, but he does, and now I can feel it too."

  They heard the toilet flush.

  "Please don't ask me to blindside somebody again when they leave the room," Cam said. "It really makes me feel like an asshole."

  She nodded, and this time felt like not only was she the one chastened, but deserving of it. Not that the subterfuge wasn't necessary, but she should have warned him in advance that it was the only way to be sure.

  They were both winging it here, weren't they? And Campbell knew it.

  Rogier was back after a few moments, and she started getting the cleared items out of the way before they moved on to finish the rest. Putting them back in his bag and marking them off on her list, dictated from Hellboy, and checking them against Artaud's list of who owned what.

  "Hey," she said. "We're missing somebody. There's one name not on your list."

  "Yes, Monsignor Burke. He's since gone back to theU.S., many days ago."

  Liz scowled at the paper in her hand. "I know you can't help it, but Hellboy's not going to like that. If we don't find what we're looking for in the rest of these things, the suspicion's naturally going to fall on Burke's head. Except we'll have to figure out another way of verifying it, and that's going to take time, and be that much trickier to pull off."

  Nothing they could do about it now, though, and Cam still had three items to go...<
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  The walnut pen, explored and returned...and another was cleared. She next gave him a crucifix, on the understated side rather than garish, carved from ivory and small enough to fit in the palm of the hand. A moment after it went into Cam's, he jolted, as though he'd been physically shoved back into the chair, and she was at his side in a heartbeat, her hand cool and soothing and pressed against his forehead--

  I'll catch you if you fall

  --because they had already rehearsed for moments like this, like breaking the emergency glass: Feel the cool of her palm, the temperature of blue, and he would be back in the blue room with its cerulean walls, his sanctuary, where he had control and nothing could reach him...

  "Cam?" she said. "You okay?" Her other hand was poised to grab. "You want me to take it from you?"

  He thrashed his head back and forth. "No...no, I'm on top of this...I've got this by the short hairs..." Sucking down a few deep breaths to calm himself and stabilize, and in his mind he would be cranking valves, adding filters, regulating the flow. "It's just that...this guy's seen and been through some heavy stuff."

  Liz glanced back at Rogier. "Whose crucifix is that?"

  "Father Laurenti. Do you know of him?"

  "Anecdotally," Liz said--Kate's new friend, or at least newfound fascination. She was still talking about the man when Liz had met up with her again at the Cornwall safehouse, nearly three days after the wreck of the Calista. A priest who looked like a pauper and had given Kate an insight or two into spirit possession that she'd never encountered.

  Campbell was easing back to a more relaxed state and hadn't once seemed willing to break the connection. She was proud of him, proud of herself for having brought him this far in just a few weeks.

  "Except..." he said, and his brow began to furrow. "Maybe it's not such a big deal now that you didn't get anything from that Burke guy you mentioned." Eyes still closed, head still down, he had a look of bewilderment. "Oh, this is weird..."