Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell

by Brian Hodge

  "It's dirty laundry, I get that," Hellboy said. "You'd rather clean house from the inside, I get that too. But too many secrets, that's why we're in the mess we're in now. Plus we've got reason to think you have one of your own...that even you don't know about."

  Laurenti didn't understand. Who would? He insisted they had to be wrong. Who wouldn't? Hellboy reached into a pouch on his belt and pulled out a little bundle of cloth. He may not have stolen it personally, but he'd ordered it done, and felt stabbed by a pang of guilt when he unwrapped it and held up the man's ivory crucifix.

  "Don't ask how or who. We don't have time for that. My fault, it was my idea. We had to find out who passed on information about the route the scroll was taking." Hellboy hitched a thumb back at Campbell. "When he holds something that's important to someone, it's like a window into that person's life. If you don't want to take my word for it, he can demonstrate. But he picked up something in you. Only you."

  With disheveled hair and a three-day beard, Laurenti stared for a moment in disbelief, maybe a little fear, then nodded. "I think you come here to accuse me of something. So yes. I want to see that your methods don't lie."

  Hellboy handed the cross to Campbell, then faced Laurenti again. "Ask him something. That's important to you, or that stays with you, but that he couldn't know."

  Laurenti didn't have to ponder this long. "What would my mother have named my sister if she had not died at birth?"

  Hellboy looked at Campbell's face, then into Liz's, full of sudden pain, and he could read her thoughts because he could so easily see the evidence for himself.

  He doesn't want to. Because he knows he'll feel the grief, he hasn't learned to block that yet. Because the name has grief tied around it like a bow. So he doesn't want to...

  But he will.

  "Natalia," said Campbell.

  He thought he saw a tear glisten in the corner of Laurenti's eyes. Took the crucifix and put it into the hands where it belonged.

  "I'm sorry," Hellboy said.

  Laurenti ignored him, looking at Campbell now: "What else have you seen?"

  As they tried to make sense of the impressions that Campbell had picked up this afternoon--not one mind but three, yet not something inside the priest--Hellboy got a gut feeling that Laurenti truly was innocent. It was no act, no theater. The man didn't know he was being used. But worse, none of this made any sense to him. There was nothing in what Campbell was saying that Laurenti could connect to anything else, the big picture suddenly coming into view.

  Abe ticked a finger up for quiet. "Do you have incense here? Not sticks, but a larger amount. Like you'd burn in a censer?"

  It caught Laurenti by surprise--Hellboy couldn't say the request made much sense to him, either--but he said, yes, they did. As he sent one of the guards to find it, Hellboy wondered if they said Mass in this place, some consecrated spot where one of them would lead the way, swinging the smoke-spewing censer at the end of a sturdy chain.

  Hellboy leaned close to Abe. "What's on your mind?"

  "On the Calista...remember the fogbank we entered?" Abe said. "Remember what we saw in the fog?"

  That spectral form tethered to Hellboy's back, which they would never have seen at all if not for the mist. The eyes, maybe the ears too, of something that had been watching from afar. He'd had greater worries since then, but had never been able to figure out where the thing had come from.

  But if they found a connection here...

  Abe suggested they move to a smaller room, where closer walls would hold the smoke better. They fired up several small round charcoal bricks in an empty tomato can. When these were burning well, Laurenti dropped in a generous palmful of incense, in loose nuggets. Within seconds it began to smolder and smoke, the air filling with the fresh, sweet floral scent of Damascus Rose.

  Hellboy took the can in his right hand--no pain, no matter how hot the metal grew--and swept it around the room, especially around Laurenti, as the smoke poured out. It swirled, it billowed, it thickened the air, and soon grew denser than any fog at sea.

  Abe, who seemed to have an eye for these things, fanned the smoke this way, fanned it that, and pointed.

  Not obvious, seen more for what they weren't than what they were, as the smoke wafted around them rather than through them: two vaporous tendrils sunk into Laurenti's back, just inside his shoulder blades. Fan the smoke, follow the loops, the coils, blink and you miss it...but Abe had the eye for this in more ways than one, the protective film that let him see clearly in water now keeping the smoke from stinging.

  He followed the tendrils back to their sources: human forms again, but only barely, one cringing in the near corner, the other clinging halfway up a wall. From what the smoke suggested of their faces, Hellboy wasn't sure he wanted to see them any more clearly. Whether in anguish or madness, they seemed to scream. Maybe they really needed to. Or maybe it was the last thing they remembered doing.

  "My god," Laurenti whispered, after he'd turned to see what they'd found. Like anyone would, he reached both hands around his back, trying to grab hold of something his fingers could never feel. "What are they?"

  Good question. Prior to his own encounter, this was nothing Hellboy had seen. Even so, he had a few ideas. Not souls, but parts of souls, stripped free of the rest, then shackled and enslaved. He wasn't convinced anyone had truly plumbed the mysteries of the human essence, although he liked the depth and sophistication of the way the ancient Teutons had seen it: a complex entity comprised of many distinct aspects, just as the body was comprised of many organs. The hidge, the hyde, the fetch, the myne...maybe it was one of these that they were now looking at in the smoke, retaining just enough memory of themselves to hold onto ghostly echoes of the bodies to which they'd once belonged.

  And the umbilicals--so they wouldn't become separated from the unsuspecting targets they were attached to? Maybe. But maybe these tendrils also kept them alive, in their way, a means for draining away a small but steady reserve of vitality to keep them viable. Probably nothing Hellboy would have noticed...but a normal man or woman? You had to wonder if Laurenti had felt like himself lately.

  "I want these off me," he said.

  The one that had leeched onto Hellboy's back had come loose and disintegrated almost as soon as it was discovered. Cause and effect? More likely this was because, as they'd speculated, its job was done; the Leviathan had found them. This pair seemed to recognize that they'd been found out, but weren't going anywhere. They scrabbled at the ends of the tethers sunk into the middle of their chests, heaving with silent screams.

  "I want these off me now."

  Liz came shouldering past him and Abe, elbowing them both out of the way, her palms wreathed in flickering gloves of blue-orange fire. She homed in on one of the tendrils, a faint void in the smoke, and it seemed to writhe, wormlike, to evade her grasp. Yet she had it, catching what could not be caught, burning it to spectral ash while shoving her other hand into the center of the hazy chest, and then she was after the next one before the first had finished dissipating into the fumes.

  Smoke now. Only smoke, and nothing more.

  Hellboy caught her eye, watery and red in the haze. "How'd you know?"

  "I didn't."

  Good call, though. There was fire, and then there was fire. The combustion of a match, which burned only matter, and the searing purity of an elemental force, which usually trumped the unnatural. Little doubt which one Liz was connected to.

  Laurenti was coughing now. Hellboy braced him with one hand and pulled him out of the room and into fresh air.

  "Whatever those were, I had one too. Maybe I picked it up from you and maybe I didn't. But you don't just pick 'em up like brambles on your pantleg," he told Laurenti. "Now think."

  "I thought...I thought I was ill," he said. "Two months, I haven't been the same since..."

  "Since what?"

  "A deliverance. I performed a deliverance..."

  "An exorcism, you mean?"

  Laurent
i shook his head. "Not the full Rite, no, but...you do this thing, you still are vulnerable then...open to influences..."

  "What was it for?" Hellboy asked. "Who was it for?"

  "No. No, it could not be, that was nothing like this--"

  "Who was it?"

  "Aidan Burke," he said. "Monsignor Burke."

  They cleared out of the house onto a side patio, letting the crisp night air wash out their lungs, their eyes. Laurenti hunched over a wrought iron table and sipped a glass of wine.

  "Two months ago Aidan came to me," he said. "Across an ocean, he came to me. Yes, he comes sometimes to Rome for Church business, and comes sometimes to Rome for our Church business, the business that's not official...but he said this was not for either one. This was to be between us, only us. Would I hear his confession, he asked me. I knew it must be something terrible, if he would not tell his own confessor back home..."

  Except it hadn't been anything Burke had done--not willingly, at least--but rather something he wished to be purged of. He claimed his nights were marathons of torment, as if caught between sleep and waking, his body paralyzed while he helplessly watched his spirit rise and wander, to visit other bedrooms, to plunder other sleepers and gratify itself with their bodies. He was host to a spirit of lust, he feared; or worse, becoming one himself. If there was a term for it at all, the only one he could think of was incubus.

  "There was something wrong with him," Laurenti said. "I could sense it in him."

  "So you tried to help him," Hellboy said.

  "Of course, yes. It's what I do. Whether or not the Church grants permission, if I become convinced there is a need..." He opened his hands wide, as though to say he was helpless before duties he saw, not duties as they were defined. "And Burke, of all people? He would not request this lightly. He would never believe this of himself lightly. A very rational man...maybe too rational."

  And so they'd done it--prayers and recitations, banishings and holy water. Successfully? So Laurenti had believed. And very likely it had been, just not in the way he'd expected.

  So think this through a minute...

  As Laurenti had mentioned already, the rites of exorcism left the practitioner open, vulnerable. Hell, anyone who'd seen the Friedkin movie knew that much. But the risks, the underlying principles, were far older than the Church. Who were the first holy men if not shamans, primal mediators between worlds? Even now, from equatorial rain forests to the Siberian tundra, shamans took great care not to return from their trance-journeys to the Underworld with spirits holding to them.

  And what was a priest but a shaman in more somber clothes?

  But suppose this ordeal of deliverance they'd undergone was a sham, a ruse, not to drive something from Burke, but to attach something to Laurenti?

  And why? Because the monsignor was far from what he seemed. Because he was a man whose considerable power was being directed toward hidden aims. Because he knew that something would soon transpire that would put the Masada Scroll into play...maybe was even helping orchestrate it. And because he was planning ahead, planting seeds that would give him--or his masters--eyes, perhaps ears, with those who would oppose him.

  And knowledge, as they all knew, was power.

  It put their trip to the observatory in a whole new light, looking at it from this perspective. Burke's not-so-subtle suggestions that Hellboy should target the Opus Angelorum--an attempt to wipe out an enemy? Or cover his tracks? Both?

  Hellboy was even looking differently at that moment when Burke put his hand on his back and let it linger. A solicitous gesture from a priest, but now it was hard to shake the feeling that it had more sinister intentions. The spot he'd touched was exactly where the specter had joined to Hellboy's back. Had he planted it then, the task easier than with Laurenti because Hellboy--as he'd been told just this morning--belonged to two worlds already?

  Or maybe it was because they were standing in the middle of a place of fearsome power, the accumulated charge of centuries of rites and rituals. Burke had invited, and he had gone there of his own free will.

  I should've been more careful...

  "Burke's in Boston again now, right?"

  "Supposed to be," Liz said, sitting with Campbell on a concrete balustrade around the patio. "According to Father Artaud."

  Hellboy nodded. "We need to call Fairfield and have them scramble a takedown team. We've got to get this guy over here now. And we don't have time for subtlety."

  Chapter 23

  "Does the bureau do that often?" Campbell asked. "Go in, drag somebody out of his home in the middle of the night?"

  Liz shook her head. "Hardly ever. The directors hate it."

  "How come?"

  "It has the potential for looking really bad, even blowing up in our faces. We're not the FBI, you know. And we can't exactly follow due process. What Father Laurenti told us in there? You try taking that before a judge to get an arrest warrant. You'd be lucky if you made it out of there without being locked up yourself." She turned her head to blow a plume of smoke away from him. "So that pretty much puts us on the same level as the Men In Black. Whoever they are."

  "You mean you don't know?"

  "Let me tell you something, Cam. This job's not much of a front-row ticket to the secrets of the universe. All these mysteries are like the hydra. Feel like we get a handle on one, and pretty soon two more come along to take its place."

  They'd been greeting the dawn from the patio, with its tiles of green and cobalt blue, where the rising sun struck in pools of light that widened as the rays gained strength through the trees. Cam had slept inside earlier, and there had been his exhausted nap yesterday afternoon after reading the objects that Artaud had brought by. But Liz had been up all night on a tea and cigarettes jag, never quite able to back off the twisty feeling of apprehension while they'd awaited word that the takedown team had quietly, successfully raided Monsignor Burke's home and whisked him off to a hangar at Logan Airport and a chartered Lear jet flight.

  They must be somewhere over the Atlantic right now, closer to Rome than Boston.

  "I'd feel better if Hellboy was here right now," Cam said.

  "Everybody does. Even if it's just a safety thing." Liz shrugged under the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, although it was getting warmer now and she could take it off soon. "But he hates to waste time. Almost as much as he hates it when stuff eludes him. This is a two-for-one run for him."

  She fished for her lighter again. The patio table was littered with tea bags and its ashtray full of butts, and she thought she smelled coffee now, too, one of the guards brewing it in the kitchen. More caffeine, great--just what she needed.

  But better than the smell coming from the Tiber, when the breeze was right. Abe had gone off to spend some time at the river's edge in the predawn hours, then came back sooner than she would ever have expected, and he hadn't said a word since.

  "Is this one rough on you?" Cam wanted to know. "The scroll, the fight over it...everything?"

  "No more than most. Why?"

  He pointed at her throat. "The little cross on that velvet choker. You were wearing it the day you came to visit me in the hospital. And the day you met me in Bridgeport when I flew in to start training. I don't think I've seen you without it more than once or twice. I mean, I don't know what your beliefs are, but I figure if I ever wanted to know all about you, that's the thing of yours that would show me the most."

  "Yeah, well, unless you want to find yourself working psychic fairs, paws off," she said, then corrected herself, "Paw, singular," and this cracked them up in that silly way you can laugh when it's dawn and you should've slept and your throat feels as raw as your eyes and you have no idea what the day might bring, just that it probably won't be good.

  She brushed her fingertips along the choker, the cross. "I'll tell you what it's doing there," she said. "Where I grew up, it probably wasn't all that different from where you grew up. It was so secure. I was loved and my parents made sure I knew it. I was s
o protected. Then all that was gone...

  "It's not that I've forgotten all the old Sunday School lessons. I've just seen too much to still be able to believe that the world and whatever's beyond it works the way they all said...

  "But this reminds me of when I could," she said. "And that's something, isn't it?"

  They'd called it the Queen of Roads, and after 2300 years since its first stones were laid, it still cut a path out of Rome. The Via Appia Antica, the Old Appian Way, was once the empire's highway to the east, and now it was lined with fragments of the ancient past--churches and tombs, sepulchers and mausoleums--and led from the city to stretches of open countryside, where farmers still tilled their fields, and clusters of pines kept their green while the land around them browned with autumn.

  No question that he was in the right place. He could still see the tire ruts chewed into the ground.

  For a week and a half Hellboy had wanted to come back here as soon as he had the chance: the spot where, after that careening ride through southeastern Rome and beyond, the armored car had come to rest. No time to stand and fight that night, at least not with enemies that refused to show themselves. Yet he'd sensed they were out there, watching from the darkness and the trees, holding back only because the car's hijackers had failed to deliver its passengers in peace, unsuspecting.

  What was here, though, but a pastoral niche of countryside?

  He'd come hours before dawn, wandering amid the trees and the fields in hopes that the unfolding darkness would reveal something wrong with this place. He'd gazed at the stars and breathed the night air. He'd sat and watched, listened and waited. He'd wandered far enough away from the queenly old road to stand upon a hillside and look down upon a farm. He'd even crept onto the farm itself, but there was nothing wrong there either, only the warm breath of sleeping animals and a family left bone-weary by bringing in the harvest.

  And now that morning had come and the sun had banished night, he was doing it all over again.