by Mark Morris
It was only after noticing the first symbol that Abe glanced to his left and realized that, in fact, the wall was covered with them. Further scrutiny revealed that not only was this wall covered, but all four walls, the floor, and the ceiling were similarly daubed.
A thousand eyes, he thought, noting that this solved the mystery of what the drained blood of the victims had been used for. He wondered what purpose the symbols served. Perhaps they were focusing prisms for psychic power, or a pictorial form of invocation, or they might even constitute some mystical kind of surveillance system. Abe had certainly come across stranger things in his time, and if his latter theory was correct, then perhaps his arrival hadn’t gone undetected. He would have to remain vigilant — not that he wouldn’t have been anyway.
Silent as a shadow, he slipped across the room and ascended the stone steps. At the top was a door, the wood so warped that it barely fit its frame. It had either swollen or been forced into place, but by putting his shoulder against it, Abe was able to shove it open. He winced at the squealing scrape of wood, but no one came running to investigate his intrusion.
He quickly worked out that the building he had entered was an abandoned mill or factory. The rooms were vast, high ceilinged, and deserted, and the corridors and staircases had the functional angularity Abe associated with institutional edifices such as schools, hospitals, and office blocks. The worn wooden floors of the largest rooms were marked with lighter patches where machinery had once stood. The walls of these rooms were lined with rows of long windows, each of which was divided into smaller panes. The windows had evidently let in plenty of light at one time, but now they were caked with soot and grease. Many were boarded up.
Abe walked through the place with an increasing certainty that it was deserted. Even so he remained on his guard, not least because the symbol of the eye was everywhere. There was not a door, wall, floor, or ceiling that had been left untouched. The artist (or artists) was either very dedicated, or crazy, or both.
Despite the silence, Abe found it unnerving to be stared at by so many eyes. He was being foolish, he knew, but he couldn’t shake off the notion that he was constantly under surveillance. As he slipped from room to room, his own eyes darted everywhere. He moved as he always did when expecting trouble — with a balletic poise, so light-footed that not even the old floorboards creaked beneath him.
On the fifth floor he found signs of occupation. In what might once have been a boardroom, beyond a row of offices which resembled a linked series of boxes constructed mostly of smoked glass, were three rolled-up sleeping bags and an equal number of grubby pillows. Beside each of the sleeping bags was a sports bag or duffel stuffed with clothes and other belongings. Half-melted candles mounted in wax-caked bottles were perched on window sills or simply stood on the floor. In one corner of the room was a camping stove, next to which stood a box full of food. Most of the food was canned, but there was also a half-finished loaf of bread and, on a shelf above, a quarter-full pint of milk, ajar of coffee, and a bag of sugar.
Aside from the eye symbol, which even in here proliferated on every surface, it all seemed so parochial. Abe took the milk down from the shelf and sniffed it. It was still fresh, which meant that whoever lived here could not have been gone long. What should he do? Fetch reinforcements? No, he didn’t want to risk his quarry giving him the slip. It was a pity he had neither his gun nor his phone, but that couldn’t be helped. He would simply have to be careful.
He retraced his steps to the door of the next office along the corridor. For a normal man it would have been almost pitch black, but Abe was able to make out a little definition. He tried the handle of the door, whose smoked-glass panels were surprisingly intact, and found that it opened easily. He slipped into the office, empty aside from a brittle-paged, out-of-date calendar which hung lopsidedly on the wall. Murky yellow light, which shone through the filthy windows, gave a jaundiced look to Miss October, who was happily sprawled across the gleaming hood of a red Porsche.
Abe closed the door softly, then sat in the middle of the floor, assuming the lotus position, and closed his eyes. To an observer it might have seemed as though he were meditating, or perhaps even asleep. However, he was not; he was simply entering a different state of consciousness. It was a technique he sometimes employed both to conserve his energy and stop himself becoming bored and restless. Contrary to appearances, both his mind and body were as alert as ever. Aware that he might have a long night ahead of him, Abe settled down to wait.
———
Hellboy landed on bones.
It wasn’t a long fall. Five seconds, maybe less. He winced as he landed, the impact jarring through both hooves and meeting in a bright, brief starburst of pain in the sore but rapidly healing wound where the fire-worm had strafed him. Ruefully he rubbed the small of his back through his duster, then looked around, sniffing the air.
His senses didn’t tell him much. Hellboy could see just enough to ascertain that he had landed in an earthen-walled pit, from which a tunnel led off that seemed to plunge even deeper into the earth. He reached for his belt — first, out of habit, patting the pouch which contained his gun to ensure it hadn’t been dislodged by the fall — and extracted a pencil-thin flashlight. It was a fiddly thing, almost too dainty for even his left hand, but he shone it into the tunnel and around the walls.
The extra light didn’t tell him much either — aside from the fact that he hadn’t landed on bones at all. What had crunched beneath him had been a combination of rubble and lengths of dry timber, not that that afforded him much comfort. More than likely it simply meant that his prey scoffed its victims, bones and all (Hellboy somehow couldn’t imagine a great ugly lunk of a monster delicately picking clean the skeletons of rats), or alternatively that its larder was located elsewhere. He was about to head into the downward-sloping tunnel when a voice echoed from above.
“Hellboy?You okay?”
It was Sean. He sounded concerned, but not in a nervy way. Hellboy liked the kid — and Louis too. He was glad they weren’t down here with him, to get taken apart like that poor bastard whose arm they had found.
“Fine,” he rumbled. “There’s a tunnel here. I’m gonna check it out.”
“Gotcha,” Sean called. “Be careful.”
“My middle name,” Hellboy answered. “Catch you guys later.”
Still shining the flashlight ahead, he tromped into the tunnel. It was cool, but there was no wind, and for once it smelled of nothing but earth, which made a nice change; the stench of sulfur and rotting flesh could get a little galling after a while. He let the torch play over the walls, but couldn’t tell how the tunnel had been created. It could have been scooped out by the claws of a giant mole for all he knew.
Bored with the cautious approach, he yelled, “Hey! Anyone home?”
No answer, but had he heard a faint scraping in the darkness ahead? He tried again.
“If you’re there, come on out where I can see you. I just want to talk.”
Yeah, right. The number of Big Bads Hellboy had encountered over the years with whom he had ended up having nothing more than a cozy chat could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Hell, they could be counted on the fingers of one elbow.
Another scrape from the darkness, this time accompanied by a brief grating squeal. Hellboy thought of some unyielding material — stone or metal — being put under intense pressure.
The girl who had encountered the creature and lived had been in such a state of shock that she had been unable to remember anything about it except its eyes, which she had described as “burning like fire.” Hellboy had heard Abe read those words and shrugged. When it came to monsters, burning eyes were a dime a dozen.
He didn’t much care what the creature looked like. Or what it could do. Or how big it was. Abe and Liz always liked to be as prepared as possible, but Hellboy’s approach was so straightforward that Abe had once described it, only half jokingly, as “positively Zen-like.” If the beast was ther
e, and it was mean, then Hellboy would do his utmost to batter its lights out, to hit it until it was no longer a threat. No frills. No complications. No fancy plans. His tendency to wade in annoyed the hell out of his superiors sometimes, but Hellboy suspected it was also partly what they employed him for, that they only raised a ruckus at his lack of subtlety because they felt it was expected of them.
When it came down to it, he thought the high-ups in the B.P.R.D. were simply scared of exposure, of people finding out that, for all their strategy and high tech, their job was really very simple. The man he thought of as his late father, Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, had understood that implicitly. As founder of the B.P.R.D., he was a highly educated and intelligent man, and he had had the knack of cutting through the crap, of providing the simplest and clearest of solutions to what often seemed the most convoluted of problems.
“You coming out or am I gonna have to come in there after you?” Hellboy growled, his words echoing around him.
He didn’t really expect a response, and so was surprised when a voice both sludgy and gritty, and only barely discernible, came grinding out of the darkness:
“Leave Me Be.”
Hellboy paused — but only for a moment. “What, after taking all this trouble to come see you? Not gonna happen, buddy.”
There was no reply this time, but Hellboy was sure he could hear faint, stertorous breathing from the tunnel ahead. He swung the flashlight beam, but saw nothing except more of the same — a wide passage flanked by walls of compacted earth. Just beyond the range of the flashlight the composition of the left-hand wall seemed to change from brown earth to black rock. The jagged rock seemed to bulge inwards at this point, causing the passage to narrow.
Hellboy wondered whether the creature was beyond that, lurking in the shadows. If so, it couldn’t be that big. Jeez, he himself was not sure whether he would be able to fit through a gap that narrow. Not that that would be a problem, of course. If he couldn’t squeeze through, he would simply punch his way through.
He strode forward, the light dancing ahead of him. He was clenching his big stone fist, making ready to widen the passageway, when the voice, louder and closer and angrier this time, boomed, “Leave Me Be, I Say!”
The black rock wall to his left creaked and shifted. Maybe it was just the acoustics in the tunnel, but the voice of the creature had sounded as if it were somewhere above him. Hellboy glanced up, aiming his torch in that direction. The light latched onto two fiercely glowing lumps of molten lava way up near the ceiling. For a moment Hellboy was puzzled, and then the bulging, jagged rock wall shifted again — seemed, in fact, to somehow unfurl itself- — and all at once he understood.
The black rock wall wasn’t a wall at all; it was the creature. It had been slumped against the earthen wall, looking like nothing but a huge black landslide of barnacled stone. It was bigger than Hellboy. Considerably bigger. Maybe twice as tall and twice as wide. Whereas Hellboy could stroll through this underground passage with relative ease, the ceiling still a couple of meters above his head, this creature would surely have to crawl along it, its own head scraping the ceiling, its shoulders rubbing the walls on either side.
Hellboy barely had time to take this in before what looked like the clawed scoop of a mechanical digger was swinging out of the darkness towards him. He understood, even as he flew backwards down the tunnel, that the creature had simply swatted him away as if he were no more troublesome than a fly. It was several seconds before he landed on his back on the tunnel floor. Even then he didn’t stop, but skidded backwards for several more meters, his red-skinned bulk cutting a groove through the earth.
It was the curving wall which finally brought him to a halt. His head hit it with an impact that would have shattered the skull of a normal man. He clambered to his feet, scowling, his duster torn and covered in dirt.
“Now, that was just plain rude,” he said, and stomped back into the fray.
As the creature turned round in the tunnel to face him, it sounded like a huge rusty machine that was slowly and tortuously coming to life. Unable to rise to its full height, it planted its massive clawed fists on the ground and glared down at him, lava eyes blazing. It looked, thought Hellboy, like some monstrous black statue to a simian god. The words that boomed from the vast and twisted outcrop of its jaw, however, no matter how full of grating fury they seemed, constituted not a threat but a plea:
“Leave Me Be ... I Beg You.”
“Yeah?” Hellboy snarled. “Is that what the guy you killed said to you? Is that what he was screaming as you took him apart?”
The creature paused, perhaps trying to remember. Finally it grated:
“I Was Lost. I Wanted Only To Talk. To Ascertain My Whereabouts. But He ... Broke. I Did Not Expect Him To Be So Fragile.”
The creature sounded almost wistful. Maybe not contrite, but certainly confused. Hellboy had come here spoiling for a fight, but it didn’t look as though things were going to turn out as he had expected. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He wasn’t a negotiator. Abe was better at this kind of thing.
“So ... where you from?” Hellboy said, thinking he sounded like some guy in a bar, chatting to a stranger who had just breezed into town.
The lava eyes blinked, flickered.
“Somewhere Deep“ the creature said.”Somewhere Dark.”
“So why’d you come up here?”
“I Know Not.”
“Whaddya mean, you ‘know not’? You must know. Did someone send you or what?”
Hellboy was not big on body language (again, that was Abe’s area of expertise), but it was obvious the big rock guy was flummoxed by the question. The creature’s shoulders slumped. Its head began to shake from side to side with a sound like slowly compacting granite.
“I Was Sleeping,” it said. “I Have Been Sleeping For A Long Time.”
“Okay,” Hellboy said slowly. “But there must be some reason why you’re here now. Don’t tell me you’ve come just to sit in a pit and pull the arms off commuters?”
Again the creature shook its head confusedly from side to side. “I Was Caught“ it said.”The Net Caught Me.”
“What net?” growled Hellboy. “What the hell are you, a fish?”
“The All-Seeing Eye,” the creature rumbled.”The All-Seeing Eye Begins To Open.”
“Thanks,” Hellboy said flatly. “That makes everything much clearer.”
The creature’s lava eyes seemed to dim. “So Lost“ it rumbled. “So Cold.”
Hellboy sighed. “What are we gonna do with you?”
One thing was sure. He couldn’t just leave the poor guy to rot down here. He guessed that the creature had been scooped up — maybe on purpose, maybe by accident — from whatever realm it happened to inhabit and had fetched up on these dubious shores.
“Tell me about this eye,” he said.
“It Opens,” replied the creature.
“Yeah, so you mentioned. But what is it exactly?”
“It Sees All“ the creature rumbled.
“Does it now? Pretty useful if you’re looking for your car keys or the TV remote, I guess.”
The joke was born of frustration more than anything. The pseudo-mystical crap was starting to piss Hellboy off.
“I Shared Their Likeness Once Upon A Time“ the creature said suddenly.
“Huh?” said Hellboy. “Whose likeness?”
“The Fragile Ones“ the creature said.
“Humans, you mean? You telling me you were once human?”
The creature inclined its head with a rumble that echoed like a subterranean earthquake.
“When was this?”
“Before The Eye.”
“That damn eye again,” Hellboy said. “Listen, buddy, can you tell me anything that makes sense?”
“My Memory ... Fails Me“ the creature said forlornly. “We Looked Into The Eye And We Slept. The Eye Closed. And Now It Opens Once More.”
“Bringing you with it,” Hellboy said
. “Okay, buddy, listen up. You sit tight. I’m gonna speak to my people, get them to come down here and talk to you. Maybe when you’ve told them what you know, they’ll even be able to figure out a way to send you home. But you’ve gotta promise you won’t pull any more people apart in the meantime. It’s not nice for them, and what’s worse for you is that if you hurt anyone else you’ll make me angry. Got that?”
Hellboy had no idea whether the creature got it or not. It seemed to be able to handle simple questions, but too many words just seemed to bewilder it. It was like a lost child, and despite what it had done he couldn’t help but feel sorry for it. Maybe it had been human once, but if so whatever it had got involved in, whatever process had transformed it into the creature it now was, seemed to have affected not only its body but its brain too.
Rocks in its head, Hellboy thought. Literally.
“Behave,” he said.
Then he turned and walked away.
Chapter 6
Liz wanted to follow up some of the names on Kobus’s list immediately, but Richard dissuaded her.
“Let’s leave it till morning,” he said. “It’s not a good idea to venture into most of those neighborhoods at night.”
She snorted, more derisively than she had intended. “You wouldn’t be saying that if you knew some of the places I’ve been in my time.”
“Why don’t you tell me about them?” Richard said. “Over dinner.”
Liz arched an eyebrow. “I have work to do, Dr. Varley.”
He looked at his watch. “Come on, it’s almost nine. You’ve been up God knows how long. Surely you’re entitled to some time off?”
Sitting in the passenger seat of Richard’s car, Liz rotated her head on her shoulders, grimacing at the bony crunch of her vertebrae. “True enough,” she said. “But I should get back to the hotel, catch up with Hellboy and Abe.”
“Just let me buy you dinner first,” Richard said. “Then I’ll run you back to your hotel afterwards. After all, you do need to eat.”
She laughed.”Okay, okay,you’ve worn me down. Jeez, I thought you English guys were supposed to be shy, retiring types.”
