by Brian Hodge
I don't want this power, she thought. I have more than enough trouble with my own.
But here, things were different.
She let the flame come, just a little, flickering down the length of her arm like a glove, until it wreathed the heart as well. The crust began to slough away and reveal the raw pink meat beneath--none of this planned, just going by instinct and impulse, but sometimes that was where the strongest magic hid. She had no words for them, either, nothing to call them with other than pure, unscripted yearning.
It was enough.
They came in glory, if not in grace, and this time she was glad to see them.
Winged and achingly beautiful, they looked the same as before--no reason they shouldn't, her memories and dreams were still the same--but now there were only six. They faced her in a semi-circle where they'd descended onto the statue's hand, waiting, as the distant cavern walls went pale, sheathed in a rime of ice.
From the corner of her eye, she saw H.B. give Abe his coat. Abe was shivering, and Liz imagined she would be too if the fire was not upon her.
With the heart now burning in her hand, she shut her eyes and saw what she wanted most--a fever dream of devastation, this place of cruelty and hubris humbled and brought low, machines melted, cathedral walls shattered, carvings broken into rubble, and the bodies of the near-dead granted a last kiss of mercy before the pyre...all but one--Hellboy had spoken his wish for Herzog, and she would have it granted, along with any other wishes he might have.
She saw safe passage for herself and her friends.
After that, and only after, did she see the portals sealed, all of them, large and small. And if they couldn't be sealed, then guarded, like the east gate of Eden.
Could they do it? Would it be too much even for them?
Maybe. But if they had anything, the seraphim had time.
She turned her back to them and threw the heart as hard as she could, over the ring of ugly machines. She'd never thrown like a girl in her life, even her brother had said so, shaking his stinging hand in those better days before the fire. High praise--it just didn't get any better than that.
Like a shooting star, the heart fell from sight, a tiny blaze swallowed by the dark. Maybe it would tie them to this place. She could imagine worse outcomes than that.
They took to the wing then. They prepared for war.
Hellboy kept one eye on Moloch, the other cast above, where the first plumes of fire soared overhead like the crisscrossing paths of meteors. He watched them work with ambivalence, knowing too well the pain and death they'd caused, yet still finding them magnificent in their way--these strange destroyers that he continued to see as perfected versions of himself.
For now, it was enough to know that they were finally on the same side. There was Liz to thank for that, and moments later she returned with a faraway look in her downcast eyes, as though what she'd set into motion was not worth watching.
He supposed he should have been expecting it, that with a flick of the French girl's green eyes, Moloch--who had seemed no less absorbed by the spectacle of such devastation raining down--noticed Liz's return and without warning sprang toward her. Or tried, at least. Hellboy was still faster, his hand quick as a cobra as he caught the girl's upper arm and snatched her out of mid-air. As he whirled her around, her limbs flailed with a frenzy worthy of the beast inside her, and he brought her down with him to the stone floor.
Hellboy lay on his back and pinned Moloch atop himself, reaching around the girl's body from back to front to hold it immobile so that it too faced upward. And Moloch was forced to watch.
"What's the matter?" he said into its ear. "Not such a small victory this time?"
From somewhere in the abattoir came a screech of metal, then a crash as some structure sagged and toppled.
"H.B.?" Liz, hunkering nearby. "Tell them if there's anything you want. They'll listen to you. I asked them to."
For a moment he wondered how the seraphim were supposed to hear him over the searing flames, and what words he might use to make himself understood...but then he realized that they were with him already, on the other side of will and intention, imagination and desire.
He knew what he wanted. Easy. All he had to do was look at what was already in front of his eyes, then envision it in a new and different way.
They heard, and rose to the challenge far above.
"I can't hurt you in that body, any more than you can hurt me," Hellboy said. "But your pride has a long reach, doesn't it? So let's watch the show...unless you don't think you can handle it."
There were no words for Moloch's outrage, only the straining of muscle and bone that could never overpower him, and a snarl that sounded as though it were flaying the throat into strips. But he had the devil now. Pride was on the line no matter what, and would not let it retreat from this body it had claimed.
And in this way Hellboy made it witness the fall of its world.
The seraphim, Kate had guessed, drew their power from the environment around them. Again, the plunging temperature was proof of that, and what he first thought was ash sifting down from the murky haze of the cavern's ceiling was, instead, snow. It drifted to the cavern floor in swirling clouds, and through it, Hellboy could see that the bull's head of the great statue, looming over its domain, was growing pale. Patches of frost spread across it like white moss as the seraphim leeched it of all the warmth and energy it had to give.
Ice...and fire. They poured it on like ten thousand years of accumulated wrath.
At first the effects were subtle, barely seen from this distance, the statue's face webbing with fractures and fissures that released showers of small stones as they flaked away under such a rapid change in temperature. But Hellboy had faith in greater things to come, and soon enough they did.
It sounded like thunder--a sharp crack that rebounded from wall to wall, from ceiling to floor, like the splitting of the world on doomsday. He'd heard of such sounds preceding earthquakes sometimes, a huge subterranean slab of rock stressed to the breaking point, then giving all at once.
But here it was the horn, the statue's left horn, the same one he'd snatched away in Glasgow. Under the onslaught of fire and ice, its own weight turned against it now, and it split from the head in a cloud of dust and the rumble of a falling mountain. It plummeted in a freefall that looked absurdly slow, then smashed onto the inner elbow of the statue's outstretched arm. It broke apart, spewing boulders the size of houses that rumbled the cavern underfoot when they struck ground. Some made it as far as the opposite side of the abattoir, crushing machinery in a cacophony of grinding metal before the wreckage of stone and iron alike tumbled into the dark well. If they struck bottom, he could not hear the sound above the rest.
Within Hellboy's arms, Moloch strained in impotent fury, heedless of the body that he had stolen and was now pushing to the breaking point. Bones snapping, joints popping, ligaments and tendons tearing. It was the last weapon left to him, the final show of petulance and rage--Moloch would know that, wouldn't he, that Hellboy could never let the girl's body go while the demon still laid claim to it. And so they both would ruin her, together.
For Hellboy's part, he held on because it was the one thing he could do for her--sparing her the worse dishonor of being used to harm those who had come here to learn her fate, to set her free.
He lay on the stone and watched the snow until it was done, and the body could break no more.
When it was over, and the body of Noemi Kivits once again knew peace, Liz stepped closer, closer, until she could kneel beside the poor lost girl with the black-bruised throat and the cherry red hair.
She straightened the contorted limbs the best she could, then placed both hands upon her--one on Noemi's shoulder, another at her waist. As the destruction raged around them, Liz found a moment of calm, and knew that it would be wrong somehow to leave this body for the wrath and ruin of angels.
This one would be hers and hers alone...this girl who had blundered onto
the wrong path and found herself trapped in a Hell she didn't know how to leave. So with tenderness, and with grief, Liz let the fire come and take her.
And once the body was burning, she rushed to Hellboy and Abe, and they all three ran for the cavern floor, the way out, something better.
Unlike Lot's wife fleeing Sodom, as the flames bloomed high behind them, she had no desire to look back.
Chapter 31
As far as Hellboy was concerned, Campbell Holt had sacrificed himself in the line of duty the same as any agent who'd fallen to violence. There were no disagreements from the bureaucrats; they were just more accustomed to patching up broken bodies.
A broken mind? It took a lot of loud arguments before they could be convinced not to send him to the mental health center up at Hartford Hospital. Campbell didn't need the company of schizophrenics. They could still get him whatever psychiatric care he might need. But for bed and board and company, the ones who'd been there when he'd fallen felt him more likely to improve under the touch of someone who could better understand what had burned him from the inside.
Maybe it was prejudice, but if Campbell could come back to his mind at all, Hellboy didn't know a more conducive, restful place to do it than the Cotswolds.
"Bring him," Father Simon Finch said. No hesitation, no wait-and-see. Just, "Bring him, and we'll do what we can."
So Hellboy and Liz took him to the vicarage at Winograd Heath and got him settled into a spare room, where he folded himself into corners or drew shaky-handed pictures or trembled where he sat, and sometimes muttered things under his breath with the urgency of incantations, and not once seemed to respond to anything said to him in a way that made sense.
But under this roof, they would try.
This one's on me, Hellboy thought. No matter what came of it, there was probably another way to get there. So this one's on me.
He and Liz spent a few days and nights at the vicarage, didn't want the transfer to be a simple drop-and-run, and to be honest about it, he needed a little of Father Simon's time too. On the third afternoon, while Liz was inside with Campbell, and he was out back with Simon hauling firewood, he decided the time was right.
"Bless me, Father," he said, "for I have sinned."
Simon's white eyebrows nudged upward a millimeter. "Have you, now?"
"I lied my ass off. You're only the third person who knows we got the Masada Scroll back. Everybody else? I told 'em I was pretty sure it was lost for good. The bureau, the Vatican's people, all of them."
"That's a big one, then, isn't it?"
They let the firewood go for now and wandered toward the garden, or the ghost of the garden--November, after all, with England in the bare-branched grip of wind and drizzle that turned even the beauty of the Cotswolds damp and dreary.
"Appointed yourself its guardian and keeper, have you?" Simon asked.
"More like I just don't know what to do with it. I saw how the other side wanted to use it. That could still happen. Nothing we did changed that. I could give it back to the Vatican, and the guys in control of it might be the most well-meaning people in the world, and some of them are, I think...but all that still could happen."
"Any plans you're kicking around, then?"
"Part of me wants to burn it. The exact thing I was brought on board to prevent."
"Why don't you?"
"I don't think I've got the right to do that. Authentic or not, it's a little piece of the past that can never be replaced. Besides," and he shook his head, "Abe would never forgive me."
He supposed it would be easier to come to a decision if he knew for sure that the scroll was no more than some early bit of creative writing. Pseudepigrapha, he'd learned such things were called: work by an anonymous scribe that claims to have been written by someone with name value.
Like Liz, like Abe, like anyone with a little leap of imagination, he had wondered what Campbell would make of the scroll if given the chance to hold it. If he would've merely gotten insights into archivists, or if the link would have been strong enough to carry him back to someone nearly 2000 years ago, the original owner, the true owner, who'd daily faced his death on a besieged plateau in the Judean desert.
Place it in Campbell's hand anyway? He'd done it. Gotten nothing.
"You could always leave it here while you're giving the matter a hashing through," Simon offered.
"I don't think so. That'd be like leaving Sauron's ring at Bag End for good. It could bring you some bad trouble." Hellboy gave him a hopeful look, this trim, white-haired man who sometimes measured his words a little too carefully. Typical English understatement, or a genuine distaste for telling people how to live? Probably some of both. "Any ideas what I should do?"
"Comes down, I think, to where your allegiances lie: with the past or with the future. Which sounds like an easy one at first, but it's not. I think we owe the past a measure of respect for getting us where we are today, and the shape of the future depends on it." He laced his fingers and tapped his thumbs together. "I'm with Abe on this one, I'm afraid. You burn it, and I'll have a bugger of a time forgiving you too."
"That makes it harder. That makes things a lot harder."
Simon nodded. "If you wanted things easy, friend, you picked the wrong world to come to."
And the next day, when Liz quit again, for the thirteenth time, he was reminded in the starkest possible terms just how hard it all could be.
By early December, her newly rediscovered freedom had taken her to the north of France, to Reims, where no matter how hard she tried to find other diversions, Liz couldn't keep herself from making daily trips to the cathedral in the heart of the city. With its twin bell towers and all the spires bristling from the transepts and apse, this Gothic monolith could have been an uncomfortable reminder of what she'd seen in Tartarus, just how far such beauty could degenerate. Yet it was no such thing.
With bombs and shells, they'd destroyed it in the First World War, the labors of seven centuries before, but today you'd never know it. It drew her as a reaffirmation that something could rise from ruin, and in its pews she prayed for Campbell, mind and soul alike, that the pieces could find their way back together again.
She prayed for Hellboy, too, for all he was and wasn't. Over the last few years she had come to better understand her role in his life, as a sister and a friend. With so much of his origins a mystery yet, she'd wondered how he could truly know himself...although gradually she'd realized that maybe this didn't matter so long as she was in his life, and he might come to know himself better through her eyes.
By her absences, did she condemn him to forget, if only just a little?
I'm sorry, H.B., but it just doesn't work the same way for me...
Thirteen times. There had to be something pathologically wrong with that.
For now, though, each day she would turn loose of her prayers, and light votives in the racks for the living and the lost. She would leave the cathedral then to walk in the snow and discover another long route back to the hostel where she was staying, and in her devotion to this routine postpone for one more day the real reason she'd traveled to Reims.
This was where Noemi Kivits had come from, and where her family still lived, no doubt worrying each day where she had gone. They deserved her backpack returned, at the very least, and the closure of the news that their daughter would never be coming home.
Though quit of the bureau again, she'd still gotten Kate to tap its international law enforcement agency database, found that Noemi had vanished in the spring. During her second year at the University of Strasbourg, she'd taken a weekend trip to Paris, joining friends for an illegal late-night exploration of the city's catacombs, miles and miles of tunnels that originated as Roman stone quarries. With them one minute, her friends had reported, and gone the next.
Half a dozen times now, Liz had stood on the sidewalk across the street from Noemi's parents' apartment on Rue St. Brice, wrestled with her conscience, and moved along once again. She still ha
d no idea what to tell them. Abhorred the truth and couldn't stomach the lies she'd devised so far. She told herself that maybe the clue to something better would be in the girl's belongings, the notebooks and journals Noemi had been filling up in classrooms and cafes.
Was it wrong to want to read them, these last things a stranger had written?
She collected quotations, Noemi did, pages and pages of them, from Shakespeare to Liz Phair, and somehow the words of others that had resonated with her provided a fuller portrait of Noemi than her own, and the world seemed lesser for her absence.
Liz Sherman kept returning to one quote in particular, attributed to something called The Book of Thirst, which she'd never heard of but would have to seek out soon:
Nul ne sait de quoi le monde sera fait une fois passe le tournant de la route.
Nobody knows what the world is made of around the corner.
She hoped she could learn to like the sound of that better someday.
About the Author
Brian Hodge is the author of nine novels spanning horror and crime-noir. He's also written close to one hundred short stories and novellas, many of which have been sentenced to life without parole in three highly acclaimed collections. Forthcoming works include a new collection to be titled A Loving Look of Agony, a short novel called The Other Halves of Heaven, and another crime novel, Mad Dogs.
He frequently wanders the hills around Boulder, Colorado, shoots photographs of green things and decaying things, and sequesters himself in a home studio emitting dark electronic music and other rude noises.
