Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell

by Brian Hodge

  They clamored, their teeth like rows of spears.

  No idea...he'd had no idea it all could be so close...

  ENOUGH

  But he was failing, the pressure too strong, valves bursting and filters rupturing, yet he knew it was here somewhere in the maelstrom, so grab a thread and hang on, follow it to its source--

  No, not a thread, a hand, a hand to replace the one he'd hacked away, a reborn hand at the end of a regrown arm--who knew the longing to be whole again better than one who wasn't?

  I've got you.

  Vicious triumph

  I've got you...

  even if it felt

  ...and I know what you did...

  like coming apart in a whirlwind of razors

  ...and I know where you went

  and waving goodbye

  ...and I know how to find you again.

  to the ribbons of your face.

  Liz's voice, Remember what I've told you, past and present, Remember what I've told you every single time...

  I'll be there to catch you if you fall.

  I remember.

  And even though you couldn't, please don't blame yourself, because by now you should know better, that some of us are born for the furnace, and destined to

  keep

  on

  falling

  Hellboy knew he'd be a long time wondering which was worse: the screaming or the silence; his own sense of guilt or seeing the anguish in Liz's eyes. A long time questioning whether this had been worth it.

  Answers? He supposed they were there, somewhere in the babble. They'd recorded it, of course, Abe manning the microphone, and at one point, during the godawful spasms near the end, when they'd pulled Campbell from his chair and laid him out on the floor, the horn yanked from his grasp a minute earlier but apparently failing to have severed the connection, he'd made frantic motions with his hand until Liz realized he was demanding something to write with. She'd pushed a marker into his hand and slid a pad of paper under its tip. They'd all seen experiments in automatic writing, thought this might have similar results, but it soon became dismayingly obvious that no words were taking form here. They weren't even letters. Just lines, rendered in jerks and spasms. Meaningless.

  Except...

  He was doing the same thing over and over.

  There was a pattern to it: straight lines and curved lines, one set overlaying the other. Let him finish one, rip away the sheet, and he would attack the next blank in the same way, page after page, until he suddenly tore his hand away from his side and started to plunge the marker toward one eye. Hellboy caught his forearm before he could do it and took the pen away from him. When he then made as if to attack his eyes with his fingers, Liz threw herself across him, pinning his shoulders and holding his arm down until Abe, having abandoned the microphone, could get back with the medic's kit and administer a shot of Thorazine.

  The silence, or the screams...they both seemed too loud.

  Later, Hellboy slipped a pair of earphones on and listened to the tape a dozen times, transcribing and taking notes, drawing arrows between fragments that seemed to belong together, but the tape was what it was: a stream of disintegrating consciousness, bursts of observation and little of it in any particular order.

  Tartarus--that came up more than once, and it had been a long time since he'd heard the word, but it was not something he would forget: one of the Greeks' names for the underworld, the lowest level where the worst of humanity went after death.

  As near as he could discern from the tape, even if the realm of Tartarus was just a myth before, it was real enough now, and he supposed that there were people who would speak the name with reverence.

  Matthias Herzog, for one? His name had come up too. The so-called German Aleister Crowley.

  If he was putting it all together correctly, the bits and pieces of what Campbell had dug into, the professed goal of Der Horn-Orden to usher in an era of Hell on Earth had not just been a delusional dream they'd shared before disbanding into obscurity. Instead, it was a process that was still underway.

  When he could do no more with the tape, he took the cleanest of the sheets that Campbell had scribbled on and faxed it to Kate at the Cornwall safehouse. Gave her a call a few minutes later.

  "Does this mean anything to you?" he asked. "Go as wild as you want. There's gotta be something here, I just don't know what it is."

  He could hear the flimsy fax paper rustling over the line, then Kate asked, "How many of these did he draw?"

  "Seventeen. All of them pretty much the same."

  "Well, he was obviously being emphatic about it." Now he could hear her slurping at coffee, tea, something that would keep her going until the late hours. "Maybe an emblem of some kind, a sigil? A talisman?"

  "That's the first thing I thought of. Except I don't get the feeling that's what he was trying to get across. Seems like if that's what it was, it's simple enough he could've said so. He could still get out a word or two at a time at this point."

  "Did he say anything?" Kate asked, and he heard her blowing at a cup, or mug.

  "Yeah. 'Steps,' is what I think it was," he said. "What are you drinking?"

  "Cuppa Earl Grey. Okay, steps...any numbers along with that?"

  "Just once, he could've said 'ninety-eight,' but I wouldn't swear to it."

  "Well, it definitely doesn't look like a stairway, this drawing." A sigh, more rustling. Kate tapping a pen on her desk. "You said to go wild?"

  "Absolutely."

  "What if it's a diagram for a way of moving? Instead of looking at all these lines as being part of the same thing, maybe what we've got here is two different things: a place, and a way of walking through it."

  Hellboy spun the picture this way, that way. "Okay...I see what you mean."

  "Say the straight lines are established paths. Like hiking trails or sidewalks or something. Or if they're inside, hallways maybe. And the line that's mostly curved, and those places where it loops before going on--you'll notice that's the only unbroken line here, looks like he drew it in a single pass. Are they all like that?"

  Hellboy shuffled through the stack. She could be onto something here. "Yeah. They are."

  "Then maybe that's the way of moving through the space. Intent could be a part of it too, but maybe the main thing he was trying to get across was here's your path, and here's the way you walk it."

  "And then you wind up...?"

  "Someplace else. Probably not good. Tartarus, this new Tartarus, if the two are connected," she said. "Again, if only for comparison, this brings us back to the Faerie realm. Like the glamour used against the armored car crew, if that's what happened there, but I can't think of a better theory. What this drawing makes me think of are accounts in Celtic folklore where you have this hapless guy walking through the countryside, minding his own business, and all of a sudden he finds himself in this new landscape--similar, maybe, but new. The people are different, the music's different, and they all seem to be in on this big joke that he's not. He's crossed over into Faerie. He didn't mean to, he just took the right path into the place where the worlds overlap. And if he gets back, he usually finds that time passed very differently there."

  "Right, right," Hellboy said. "He was only there a night or two, maybe had a good time dancing, but he gets back and everybody's telling him--"

  "That he's been gone for years," Kate finished.

  Hellboy could feel the pieces starting to click together. "Like that kid from the armored car, dropped dead on the street. Left Chicago for Europe in 1968, nobody sees him again, and now he pops up here looking hardly any older."

  "Except he's not been in Faerie, that's for sure," Kate said. "There are these types of magic, and maybe they're most often associated with the Faerie folk, who are more mischievous than malevolent, but they don't own them, you see. They're just principles. And if that's what this drawing of Campbell's is, then that's the principle it's using. A whole other intent behind it, sounds like, but there
you have it. This diagram...if you think of it as an overhead view, is there anyplace it reminds you of?"

  "Not exactly," he said. "But I'm pretty sure I know the place to start looking."

  "Good. Send me a memo on it soon, would you? And a rough map? If we've got ourselves a thin spot, or some other kind of portal, especially into the kind of place all of this seems to be indicating, we need to get it charted." He could hear the pen tapping on her desk again. "Umm...how is Campbell, really? Is he going to be okay?"

  "I wish I had an answer for you," he said. And that he was a better liar, while he was at it. "I wish it was a good one."

  "What about Liz--how's she? I know she'd really bonded with him."

  "I can't tell, Kate. One minute I think she hates me, and the next I think maybe she understands. Not that it was the right decision, necessarily, just...the direction things took."

  "Cam threw himself on a grenade, is what it sounds like to me. That's your job, usually. But not this time. This one only he could handle," Kate said. "Liz gave him the courage to do it. Maybe she should hear that."

  "No. She shouldn't." He didn't often disagree with Kate, but this was one time he did. "I can tell that much, at least."

  "I was a closet kid for a while. Before the bureau, when I was living in foster homes. Did I ever tell you that? Probably not. Probably never seemed like it had much to do with anything before."

  If she was repeating herself, he didn't seem to mind.

  "I figured if I just stayed in the closet, with my head on my knees, that would be the safest thing for everybody. An isolation chamber...I may not have known what it was called then, but I had the instinct for it. So I'd crawl in all the way to the back where I'd shoved the shoes and stuff out of the way, and I'd curl up and tune everything out until I had to pee so bad I couldn't hold it anymore. All the rest of the world stopped at that closet door."

  Campbell had found a corner in one of the bedrooms, driven by some self-protective instinct that kept going even if his need for speech had gone.

  "One foster family told people I was retarded. Autistic, they probably meant, but that was at a time and place when retarded pretty much covered everything."

  As she looked at him pressed into the corner, holding his knees together with one hand and the knob of his other wrist, and his eyes like two pits into which she could stare without ever finding bottom, she wondered how long the Thorazine would last, and if she would even know when it wore off.

  "I'm sorry I made a promise to you I couldn't keep. I really thought I could..."

  And with her legs drawn up and her chin on her knees, Liz sat with an arm around his shoulder, hoping he knew she was there, so that if he was trapped with something else in that closet, he might at least know he wasn't all alone.

  Chapter 28

  They waited for the break of day before breaking ground.

  Here in the stretch of countryside to which the Old Appian Way had led him twice before, Hellboy had no idea if anything was going to be coming up out of that hole. But if it did, this time he wanted sunlight and a clear view on their side.

  As the sun gathered strength, shuttered through the pines, a fine haze rose from the hills beyond them, and he took up the shovel he'd brought. Its blade was wide and flat across, better for scraping than for ditches or postholes. He used it like a turf-cutter in the bogs of Ireland, hacking through the vines and the great scab of earth plastered with thick mud across the door he'd found underneath it yesterday morning. He and Abe and Liz...they peeled and pushed and pulled, until they'd cleared the site one slab of loamy soil at a time, and it was revealed from the middle outward, to the heavy plates of the hinges: a pair of doors, each three feet by five, angled across the slope of a low plateau jutting from the nearest hill.

  They were moist and stained with earth, their centers bristling with bolts that implied they were braced inside with heavy crosspieces. Absent handles, they seemed meant to be opened only from the inside. They didn't look terribly old, at least not what he thought of as old. But could they have been there for sixty, sixty-five years--say, since the early thirties? When Der Horn-Orden seemed to vanish in Berlin? Yeah. He could see that easily enough.

  He dropped to one knee before the doors and threw his fist into the middle where they met. The wood may have been spongy on the outside, but it was still dense underneath, and felt thick. He pounded them until the heavy boards began to come apart and fall away from one another, clattering on what sounded like stone. When he'd cleared enough of a hole, he could see crudely makeshift steps descending to what appeared from above to be a corridor five feet wide.

  He ripped the rest free as the stale air of ages rose past his face.

  Hellboy went first, kicking the shattered boards to either side, stepping down, down, down to the corridor floor. It appeared original while the stairs did not, the steps seeming to have been added later as a way out. Stonework, all of it, the floor as far as he could see paved with flat, irregularly shaped pieces that had been fitted together with time and care. How long ago? If it was much younger than 1700 years, he'd be amazed.

  "What is this?" Liz asked, her voice in a hush, the way you instinctively spoke in such places.

  "One big grave, I think," Hellboy said. "Catacombs."

  "By the look of them, unknown to the rest of the world," Abe said, and shined his flashlight ahead.

  The beam glanced along rough walls, with hollows cut in their sides, five and six atop one another like berths on a ship. Overhead, the ceiling was arched, and even at the sides high enough to let Hellboy pass through without stooping.

  Every time he had traveled out this far, they'd passed the Catacombs of Saint Callisto and others, all of them known for centuries, where every day tourists were guided down into the distant past. But these appeared to have evaded discovery by archaeologists and excavators...although that wasn't to say they'd escaped violation. When they reached the first rank of recesses cut into the wall, Hellboy could see that someone had smashed the thin marble slabs that had been fitted across the hollows like seals. Shards of stone littered the inside of each compartment, in fragments and dust over bones and linen wrappings so old and dry they might fall apart at a touch.

  "Grave robbers?" Liz asked.

  "Maybe. But I doubt it. I don't think these bodies would've been buried with much of value," Helboy said. "My guess is desecration."

  "But why?"

  "It's a powerful place. Some people would consider it holy ground, even today. So there's power in defiling it, too. What we've got here...?" he said. "It's a mass burial site of some of the earliest Christians."

  While the pagan Romans cremated their dead, Abe told her, the first Christians sought to bury theirs whole, confident of a resurrection of the same bodies that had served them in life. Because Rome forbade burying corpses within the city, the Christians went outside it, where they dug underground into soft volcanic rock, cutting elaborate networks of passages and galleries through hundreds of acres, so their dead could lie undisturbed in the walls. They buried them here, memorialized them here, and in times of persecution, they let the dead protect them here--Roman law regarded burial sites as sacred.

  But in time, as happens to all such places, they were forgotten.

  When the more famed catacombs were rediscovered late in the sixteenth century, after over a thousand years since they'd been lost, they were first believed to be the ruins of an ancient city.

  And they were, Abe said. Just a city of the dead.

  It was silent here, the close walls wrapping their footsteps and their breath tightly around them. The farther in they went, flashlight beams sweeping ahead and from side to side, the more elaborate the layout became, with other galleries branching off this one, and breaks in the burial tiers where their builders had decorated the walls with painted frescoes of patriarchs and saints.

  While the dust of so many centuries may not have been thick down here, in such an airless place, you'd think it would at
least lie undisturbed. But it didn't. Footprints were smudged along the floor, and as soon as Hellboy realized they were there, he took care to follow them back where they led, lest they get sidetracked and risk confusing prints that were already here with those left by their own feet.

  With Liz and Abe at his shoulders, he followed the tracks past one intersection, then another, and another, then around a bend where a new gallery skewed off from the main corridor. The deeper in the tracks led, the closer the layout seemed to match what Campbell had drawn. Not all of it, certainly, but the landmarks that he'd deemed most important.

  The dead and more dead, lying amid shattered stone--the tracks led past them to a chamber that opened off the new gallery like a small room, black as the night of a new moon until he shined his light within. And here the tracks simply ended, a couple of steps inside the doorway, as if whatever made them had come and gone from nowhere.

  He pulled one of the drawings from a pocket and checked it against the route they'd come. It fit. As well as he could have expected, it fit. All but for the approach, the pathwalking that became its own key.

  "Ninety-eight steps, walked a particular way--that's what Campbell was trying to get across, I think," he said. "Let's count off and backtrack, see where that puts us..."

  Very near the entrance, as it turned out. Was the entrance itself the crucial point of origin? Or was some other nearby spot the designated beginning? They examined the stones of the floor a few paces in both directions, to allow for differences in stride; checked the walls, too, for markings that might have been added later. But nothing stood out. Nothing looked as though it hadn't been here since the corridors echoed with prayers for the dead.