Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell

by Brian Hodge

  The air was warm and the light strong when he found it: a place in a cluster of pines that looked, and the closer he got, felt...

  Wrong.

  Piled branches and scattered pine needles lay over the side of a gently sloping plateau of earth, an extension of a hillside where mud had run in thick rivulets, and the turf had sloughed off like a shed skin and then been replaced. Not something he would've noticed by night, or even paid much attention to on most days, but on this day, in this frame of mind...

  He pitched the branches aside, then knelt and scraped through the scabbed earth and a weave of grass and vines until he found what felt like a heavy wooden door, still stout but going rotten with age.

  He'd barely begun to clear it of soil when his phone went off.

  "Burke's flight got in fifteen minutes ago," Abe said. "They're on their way. You better head back here."

  Some other time, Abe had called to him from the armored car that night, when his impulse was to chase them down, to root them out, to find out what they were. Abe was turning into the best friend this place ever had.

  "Next time finishes it," he promised the earth, as if the end of ages was at stake.

  Chapter 24

  Without his vestments, without his European tailored black suits, Aidan Burke seemed about as happy as any fiftysomething man would after he'd been seized in his pajamas, then spent the night in vans and a plane instead of his own bed. Back in Boston, his alarm clock wouldn't even have gone off yet.

  Now he sat in the north of Rome, midmorning here, hands resting before him on an oak table that could've served at a small banquet.

  "Do you have any idea how many laws and international regulations you must be breaking by doing this?" he said. "I don't, but I would genuinely like to know." His eyes, so blue within the bloodshot veins, tightened a millimeter. "I do intend to find out once this farce is played out."

  "Go on, Monsignor. You know you want to," Hellboy told him. "Threaten to have me busted down to writing parking tickets--I dare you."

  No comeback to that, but after a long, bumpy night, Burke could still pull off a simmering burn that might give rookie agents pause to wonder if they hadn't made a mistake. With his chiseled features and iron gray hair, clipped too short to muss, he still looked like a man who could demand heads on platters, and get them.

  "I can't say it surprises me that you look for someone nearby to blame for your own failures." He gave a slow, sweeping glance across the room. "When one's best efforts prove inadequate, or incompetent, scapegoating is a natural human tendency." His gaze settled on Hellboy and Abe, back and forth. "How about that, it must even transcend species."

  Had they expected him to cooperate? Hardly.

  "I would expect that your inborn nature might sometimes lead you to see your own worst potentials in others," Burke said to Hellboy. "Tell me: How many things from the outer dark will you have to kill before you're satisfied that you've killed it in yourself? Or will you ever get there?"

  Regardless, you were honor-bound to offer a guy the chance to get ahead of it. To take that first step toward putting things right.

  "And Miss Corrigan, she's not here, she's not part of this?" he said, with another look around. "I'm relieved by that." Settling on Liz now, whom he hadn't met before, even as he spoke of Kate. "I felt such pity for her. She hid it well, but it seemed to me she's come to that point when she's wondering if she hasn't sacrificed the better years of her life to something that can only bring her...emptiness."

  But you could only ask him so many questions that he ignored in favor of his own soliloquies before having to resort to sterner measures.

  "And you, Gino," he said to Laurenti, voice now taking on overtones of sorrow, like Julius Caesar to Brutus. "When did the sanctity of the confessional lose all meaning for you? I came to you for help, and you turn it into the basis for a witch-hunt?"

  But what if we're wrong...?

  Hellboy could not condone torture. But there were other methods. Sleep and sensory deprivation. And better yet, waiting a couple of rooms away, there was Campbell Holt.

  "Take off your top," Hellboy told him. "Hand it over."

  Burke gave him a quizzical look, then unbuttoned the silky pajama shirt and offered it at arm's length. A pretty good build underneath, pale skin taut over muscle and bone, the only concessions to age the gray hairs on his chest.

  "Be careful with it, if you would, please," he said. "It's new."

  He knows, Hellboy thought. He knows about Campbell, and why shouldn't he, because that thing on my back was there every time Liz and I talked about him on the boat.

  They tried anyway, for all the good it did, Campbell clutching the fabric in his fist and drawing a blank, nothing there, a couple faint flickers of the man's anger and resentment at being taken from his home like a criminal. Campbell shaking his head no, nothing here, no secrets to plumb--Burke had not lived in this garment, hadn't made it his own.

  "Is that it? Has he got anything else?" Campbell asked.

  Hellboy had already checked. No rings, no watch, no saints' medallions around his neck. The pajama bottom would be as new as the top. Strip him of his underwear, then? His socks? His slippers? He could see no point to it. They would all be the same. Empty of the past and unconnected to his soul.

  Hellboy returned Burke's top and let him put it back on.

  "If there was a purpose to that, I'd like to know what it was," Burke said. When he got no reply, he put his hands flat on the tabletop, as if ready to push up onto his feet. "Am I free to go?"

  "Just one more thing," Hellboy said, and of course they could always send a team back into his home, his office, to scoop up a few items and ship them over. There shouldn't be any trouble finding something that would work for Campbell; it would only take more time. For now, he wanted the satisfaction of pinning this man wriggling to a lie. "There's another prisoner here. In one of the buildings out back. You know that."

  "Obviously. Since I was the one who told you."

  "I got the feeling you expected me to do something about that, too. Maybe not for the reasons you made it seem like. But the more I thought about it, the more it sounded to me like you were hoping I'd kill that man in his cell because of what he'd helped unleash." Hellboy planted a fist on the table and leaned in closer. "Here's your problem: Inborn or not, that just isn't in my nature."

  Burke nodded patiently, eagerly, like a man hoping to put a misunderstanding to rest. "And I'm very glad for that. No matter what you thought you heard, I do not advocate murder."

  "The man in the cell...Father Verdi. I'll bet you've never seen him since he's been here." Hellboy looked at Father Laurenti. "Has he?"

  "If he has, I don't know about it."

  Back to Burke: "But I'll bet he'd recognize you right away, wouldn't he?"

  If that little tightening of Burke's mouth told them anything, it was that he was onto something here. Because deep in his gut, Hellboy had begun to suspect that Burke wasn't only a part of this group of progressives who had rallied around the Masada Scroll; he was also with their ideological enemies. Not because he cared about the aims of either...only the consequences of what would happen if their conflict boiled into a conflagration.

  So how had this happened? Put it together, one theory, or some variation of it:

  As one of the Opus Angelorum, Burke pushes for the most extreme response when it looks like a foregone conclusion that the scroll would go public one day. Through whatever means--a pair of eyes here, a pair of ears there--he knows when Father Artaud is going to be studying the scroll anew, using the upcoming paleography article from the archaeological journal. He's already seen to it that existing work copies have disappeared, forcing them to bring the scroll out to make new ones.

  Maybe he's played both sides for fools, too, warning each that the other is onto them, just to introduce more turmoil into the mix.

  But most of all he's sabotaged the seraphim's attack. Arranged for that warning to Artaud to ru
n when the air turns cold. Sounds like just another lunatic on the street until it actually happens. So Artaud gets away with the scroll. Because Burke never wanted it destroyed...only threatened.

  That way, you can put it into play. That way, you can send it into transit, where it will be most vulnerable.

  And we never saw Hell coming for it, he thought, because we never even knew Hell was involved.

  "What have they promised you, Burke? More power than you already have?" he asked. "Do you even know what Hell's going to use the scroll for?"

  "I don't even know what you're talking about. You lost me awhile back."

  He took Burke by the shoulder and pulled him to his feet.

  "Let's take a walk out back," Hellboy said. "Let's let Verdi get a look at you and see if we can't start cutting through the crap."

  For everything a season, for everything a reason.

  The man in the cage had had plenty of time to recognize the underlying order of the events that sent him here, the perfection of each set of circumstances.

  He had returned to the osservatorio when he should not have? This had only served to put him in the midst of the enemy.

  They took care to deny him anything sharp? This made no difference, because there was his untrimmed thumbnail, and what he had made of it against the rough stone of their walls.

  They thought themselves decent enough to allow him modesty as he turned to the corner to wash his body each day? It only left them blind.

  And they made sure he had nothing with which to write, to draw, to recreate the complex signs of summoning? Then their arrogance and ignorance were truly profound...because the signs were already here.

  Not long after he'd first stepped into this cell, Domenico Verdi had known what he was being called to do. The only question was when. Even in the darkest hours, as the days passed and the nights grew longer, when he was in danger of succumbing to their tactics, when he was tempted to find any kind of truth in what his jailer Laurenti had to say, when faith wavered and he feared the moment might never arrive...he had clung to the belief that when the time had come, the signs would be unmistakable.

  And so it had, and they were.

  Laurenti had mourned with him that they no longer lived in an age of miracles? Verdi was honored, humbled, exalted, to live in a new age of martyrs.

  The sun was high and warm outside when he heard the zoo's door open. Their footsteps clicked and echoed down the corridor, a small group this time, more than had ever come to see him together before--even this was a sign.

  And for the first moment when they came into view, his heart broke. The poor monsignor.

  "So they caught you too," he said.

  Then, emerging from the shadows, he saw the red thing that held his brother captive. He knew what it was, of course--few churchmen wouldn't. He knew what it called itself--as if it could render itself harmless by assuming a name that evoked a child. He was not fooled. A pity that Laurenti couldn't say the same.

  With them was another abomination, hairless and green, like something that had crawled from the sea after the Father of Lies told it that it was a man.

  "These creatures, these are what you call allies now?" Verdi shouted to Laurenti. "These are what you turned the scroll over to? And now you claim to be surprised it was lost? It was never lost...you made a gift of it to them!"

  Laurenti stepped forward as if to justify his actions, but there was nothing further to listen to. It would only be more lies, and maybe he would even believe them himself. So let him carry them on his lips to his judgment.

  "Join me, Aidan," said Verdi, and met the monsignor's eyes, only to see with his heightened clarity that deception lived there, too.

  It was time.

  He caressed his thumbnail and, speaking under his breath, began the recitation of summoning, the words in a tongue spoken so rarely on this plane that even to whisper them was to roar.

  As far as Hellboy was concerned, it couldn't have been more obvious. They'd gotten the reaction he had expected, plain as day. If ever there was any doubt that Burke had been in place to play both sides against each other, Verdi dispelled it the moment he opened his mouth.

  As for what he was doing now, though...

  Hellboy leaned forward over Burke's shoulder. "What's he saying?"

  "I don't know, I can't hear him either," Burke snapped. "But I can guess."

  And now the dread, like a chilly finger on the back of the neck. "He's not..."

  "It doesn't matter. Look at him. Right now he's no different than a schizophrenic on a streetcorner." Burke peered back over his shoulder with more condescension than he had any right to. "You saw the observatory floor. You saw the tools it takes. You don't see them anywhere in there, do you?"

  No. He didn't. What he saw was a man who'd been held captive long enough to grow a woolly scruff of beard, who didn't appear to have been abused but lived in a cage meant for animals, and who now seemed possessed by a singularity of purpose that transcended every human need.

  Fanatics doused in gasoline would look this way...

  Verdi ripped open the front of his simple pullover shirt. ...before they struck the match.

  For a moment, Hellboy could only stare. They all did. When first faced with such devotion to duty, such obsession with detail, it was all anyone could do. Forced to imagine the hours of cutting, the terrible willpower to achieve steadiness of hand. The effort and endurance, the precision and the pain.

  It was all there, Hellboy feared, written in scar tissue across the broad expanse of the man's chest and belly. The ornate and dauntingly complex circle rimmed with letters, Hebraic and Theban, Malachim and more, filled with seals, sigils, and talismans. They merged and overlapped, they melded into one.

  And as Verdi's voice suddenly turned from a whisper to a shout, he feared they waited for just one thing.

  He shoved Burke out of the way and sprinted forward, was ripping through the cage door when Verdi took his right thumb and made a twisting slash high on his gut, between the bottom of his ribs, and the blood pulsed bright and red.

  He lunged and caught Verdi's wrist, but the man's arm was unresisting, his smile beatific.

  Too late. Too late.

  He dropped Verdi and tore back out of the cage to the corridor, grabbed Burke by the shoulder. Squeeze a little harder and the collarbone would snap.

  "You were a part of them too," he said. "Can you call it off?"

  Burke started to laugh. "Why would you think people like that would ever have a reason to change their minds? No, you're about to be privileged to see something that few ever have."

  He let Burke go and snatched the radio from his belt to call back to the house. "Liz! Stash Campbell somewhere safe, tell anybody else to take cover or run, and get over here. We're about to need you."

  He sent Abe rushing off with Laurenti, anyplace out of the line of fire, then turned a withering glare on Burke.

  "You wouldn't call it off even if you could, would you?"

  Burke huffed a little laugh through his nose, then looked toward the floor as if it too were full of riddles. "I dream in German sometimes...isn't that the oddest thing?" he said. "For years now. I dream I'm growing back an arm that I lost. I doubt even you could believe the feeling of power in that." Eye to eye now. "A confused monstrosity like you will never know what it means to evolve."

  "Or maybe I'm perfect just the way I am," Hellboy said, then threw an arm around Burke, hoisted him off his feet like a bag of potatoes, and started running as the air around them turned cold.

  Chapter 25

  They came in glory, if not in grace, and she did not run to meet them.

  Out the doors, down from the patio, past walls where thick vines and ivy had sunk their tendrils into rock, Liz kept a measured pace across the flagstones. To run when the fire was upon her seemed not only wrong, but dangerous, as though she might run too fast, outpace the uncertain point at which they joined. She occupied the fire's center now. She belonged to it,
and it was hers.

  Past the arbors and through the trees--so much brown instead of green, this place like a tinderbox--and she knew they were here because the zoo was burning already. Until now, she didn't realize that a red clay roof could burn.

  Fire'll never lose a fight, the opening line of a song she'd first heard a few years ago and liked, and thought of it now because it seemed like an epitaph, even if she didn't know for whom. Was it even in her to survive such an encounter? Hellboy had thought so, too late to second-guess now, and she could only pray his faith was not misplaced.

  The zoo was a long building, like a stable of gray marble blocks, its walls veined with vines as well. At the near end, a door burst open and out came Hellboy in full sprint, someone tucked beneath his arm--Monsignor Burke, she realized. Moments later they were followed by a ball of flame that hit Hellboy from behind and exploded around him like a nimbus, the corona of fire blasting the trench coat from his back, sending it whirling away in flaming tatters. He staggered as if kicked, and the man beneath his arm simply erupted, there was no other word for it, whole one second, and in the next a squirming mass. They'd been near enough in front of her that she could feel the heat even if she couldn't feel her own, but in her zone no worse than a snap of wind on a desert summer day. It gave her a surge of hope--she could live through this.

  Their eyes met as he fell, and she ached to see in them so much anguish, Hellboy living through the kind of damage and pain than no mortal could bear. But she couldn't think about that now. Couldn't think about the charring bundle of limbs he dropped, or the long shriek trilling from inside the zoo, or who might be making this sound.

  And the work of angels sent smoke boiling to the sky.

  It stepped from the darkness of the doorway ahead of her, taking shape from behind the shimmering heat-haze between them. At first it appeared indistinct to her eyes, a shadow and a sigh, but as it stepped into the sunlight it seemed to coalesce all at once, gathering its body like a forgotten thought.