by Mark Morris
Eventually, however, he was standing on the spot where Varley had been devoured just minutes before. Gathering his resources, forcing his body to move in the way he wanted it to move, he drew back the clenched fist of his stone hand, and then pistoned it forward, as hard as he could, into the floor.
The sharp, almost musical clash of rock against rock reverberated around the cavern. Fighting every inch of the way against the force that was trying to subsume his mind, he drew back his fist and smashed it into the floor a second time.
This time the rock gave a little where his fist impacted with it, and a thread of a crack appeared. Hellboy punched again, and the crack widened and spread; blood began to run down into it.
He hit the floor a fourth time, and on this occasion his fist smashed right through, encountering nothing on the other side but a cold subterranean breeze. As he drew back his hand for another punch, a sizable plug of rock on the edge of the small hole broke loose, and with a grating squeal it fell downwards, leaving Hellboy peering into a jagged triangle of darkness.
Vaguely he heard Liz’s voice once more. It sounded like a faint radio signal from some unimaginably distant land, reaching him through a furious swarm of static.
“Oh my God, Abe, look,” she was shouting. “Look at what he’s doing!” He sensed her coming closer, yelling at him, though even now she still seemed a long way away.
“Stop, HB! If you can hear me, stop this right now! This floor isn’t solid. It’s like a ... a crust, or a bridge, or something. If you weaken it any more, it’ll collapse, and we’ll all fall. We’ll all die. Do you understand?“
Hellboy did understand. Despite appearances to the contrary, he knew exactly what he was doing. He dragged his head up, aware that the light was pouring like fire out of his mouth and eyes, that to her he must look utterly possessed.
“Go!” he roared again. His voice emerged as a gurgling, tortured parody of itself, but he hoped she would realize that the words were still his.” You and Abe ...get out of here ... NOW!”
Through his burning, swimming vision, he saw her staring at him, anguished and uncertain. Then Abe appeared by her side and took her arm. “Come on,” Hellboy heard him say. “Let’s do as he says.”
Liz did not cry often, but Hellboy could see she was fighting back tears. “But we can’t just leave him,” she wailed. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
Abe nodded. “I think he does. I think he’s still in there somewhere, and I think he’s doing the only thing he can.”
Liz looked ready to protest further, but she had been in enough desperate situations with him and Abe to know that the one thing you didn’t do when the shit hit the fan was stand there arguing. So instead she simply glared at Hellboy, and shouted angrily, “Don’t you dare die, you big idiot!”
Then she and Abe were gone. One minute there, the next not, as if they had simply disappeared.
Hellboy returned to his task. Remorselessly he drew back his stone fist and pummelled the floor a fifth time, and then a sixth. More rock broke away and fell into the chasm. The darkness within the widening hole was so impenetrable that if it hadn’t been for the stagnant flow of air gouting up like a foul exhalation of long-held breath, Hellboy might have believed it was nothingness.
He hit the floor again. Again. Under constant siege from the light, he felt himself diminishing with each blow, reduced to a tiny knot of resistance. He was operating almost on instinct now. He hit the floor again. Again. Again. More cracks appeared, zigzagging across the floor. More rubble broke away and toppled into the depthless dark. Just another few blows, he thought, and the hole would be wide enough to accommodate his massive body. Trying to ignore the burning agony of the light scrabbling frantically at his thoughts, he pulled back his fist and brought it smashing down once more.
With shocking suddenness the floor gave way beneath him.
Spider-webbed with cracks, all at once it simply caved in with a great rumbling crash, and a split second later Hellboy was falling into darkness. His body twisted and turned as he fell, a red speck among the rain of tumbling rock and human cadavers. With his extra weight, he quickly outpaced the corpses of the acolytes, though he couldn’t outpace the larger chunks of rock, many of which collided with his spinning body on the way down, bouncing off his head, his shoulders, his back.
He fell for a long time — far longer than he’d ever fallen before. He didn’t exactly feel scared as he tumbled through the darkness, though he did feel apprehensive. Tough as he was, Hellboy didn’t enjoy pain, and landing after a long fall was never much fun. Plus he knew that if he didn’t manage to get out of the way almost as soon as he hit bottom, he would quickly find himself caught in a very nasty downpour of rocks and human remains.
Although this was not the best situation in which he had ever found himself, at least there was one positive aspect to Hellboy’s descent. As soon as the floor had given way, he had felt the light sliding out of him, vacating his body. Maybe it was reluctant to return to the darkness in which it had been trapped for so long, or maybe it had simply given him up for dead as soon as he had started to fall. Either way, Hellboy was grateful that the light had decided he would no longer make a suitable host. At least it would be one less battle to fight.
His duster billowed around him as he plummeted downwards, falling end over end with no immediate prospect of landing. Sharp-edged boulders slammed into him. He was just wondering whether Liz and Abe had gotten out okay, and whether they were having an even tougher time up top than he was down here, when the ground rushed up to meet him.
He didn’t see it, of course, or even sense that it was coming. One second he was simply falling through the air and the next he wasn’t. As expected, the impact was not pleasant.
“Aw, crap,” he moaned. He was hurting all over. Feeling as though he had just been in a week-long fistfight with an opponent as tough as he was, he forced himself to stand and broke into a staggering run. He had no destination in mind, or even any idea of what lay ahead of him. His main priority was simply to get out of the way of all the stuff that, sooner or later, would be falling to earth in his wake.
Some of the heavier rocks were already landing around him, hitting the ground hard enough to partially bury themselves. For maybe ten seconds he heard big chunks of rock landing behind and around and even in front of him. And then, in addition to the rocks, he heard softer things beginning to land, each one making a sound like a vast rubbery bag of liquid bursting open as it hit the ground. Yet although he was splashed a couple of times, it seemed that someone at least was smiling on him tonight, because within a few seconds Hellboy was out of the danger zone, having been struck by nothing worse than a few fist-sized chunks of falling debris.
He stopped, listening to the pattering sounds of the stuff still falling behind him, and leaned forward, hands on knees, to take a breather. He couldn’t pinpoint a single part of his body, either inside or out, that was currently without pain. Man, this had been a bruising assignment. Not that he was complaining. He might bitch about the bumps and bruises occasionally — and was frequently ribbed by Liz and Abe for doing so — but he never let them slow him down. He had never encountered a pain yet that stopped him from doing his job.
Eventually he straightened up, wincing, and patted the pouch on his belt which contained his torch. He half expected to hear the loose jangle of shattered metal and plastic, but to his surprise it seemed okay. He undipped the pouch, drew the torch out, and thumbed the switch. Nothing happened. “Crap,” he murmured, and gave the torch an experimental shake — and suddenly a bright beam of light flared from it, illuminating the area around him.
Hellboy flashed the torch in every direction, getting his bearings. He didn’t linger on what was behind him; the mass of pulverized corpses was not pretty. With no ceiling above him, and whatever walls might exist to his left and right beyond the range of the beam, he could almost have believed he was outside. It was only the close air and the dank, earthy smell
that ruined the illusion that he was standing on a huge plain or in a vast desert beneath a starless sky, with nothing to see but the base of a colossal mountain some twenty or thirty meters ahead of him.
He wondered briefly whether he had fallen through some transdimensional gateway or whether this was simply some vast cavern, miles and miles beneath the streets of London, far below the tube tunnels and the bomb shelters. Then he pushed the thought aside, thinking that it didn’t much matter either way, and walked across to the mountain. He reached out and placed the palm of his stone hand on its bare vertical surface. It was cold, almost freezing to the touch. He looked left and right, wondering how long it would take him to walk all the way round. Considering the distance he had fallen, he guessed it would take hours, maybe days. The circumference must stretch for so many miles that he probably wouldn’t even get the sense he was walking in a circle.
Hellboy supposed that the peak — the lodestone — must jut out at an oblique angle, otherwise when he had fallen he would surely have bounced off the sides of the mountain as it widened further down. He knew that the source of the energy was down here, that the true Eye from which all things flowed was somewhere in this vicinity. He had gleaned this from the energy itself, when it had tried, and almost succeeded, in subjugating him. When it had touched his mind — or rather, when it had torn into his mind, trying to strip his thoughts away — it had been unable to avoid unwittingly revealing a little of itself, a tantalizing glimpse of its origins, its nature, its unceasing and voracious hunger.
He closed his eyes and placed his stone hand on the rock face once more, trying to tap back into the burning memory of the moment when the energy had touched his mind and briefly revealed itself to him. Abe would have approved, he thought wryly. His friend was always encouraging him to get more in touch with his spiritual side.
Deep in his mind, lodged there like stubborn shreds of meat jammed between his back teeth, Hellboy was aware of a confusing jumble of images. He went deeper, down to where the pain was. He saw something blue — an egg, a crystal ... an eye! And he had the sense of a journey, of being released from the eye, of soaring up through the empty darkness and into a world full of busy thoughts, raw emotions, the juicy and delicious pulse of life ...
When he came to, his head spinning, he was walking around the base of the mountain. It was slightly disconcerting at first. He felt like a puppet, in thrall to thoughts that were not his own.
But then he realized he was simply following the energy to its heart, that he was being drawn to the source of the entity that had tried to possess him. It was an instinctive thing, his body merely obeying the instructions of his subconscious mind. And so he kept going, through the silence, and the heavy, dank darkness, his torch beam lighting the way.
He had been walking for maybe fifteen minutes when he came across the door. It was simply carved into the side of the mountain, an arch whose apex was twice the height that he was. The now-familiar sign of the eye had been gouged into the rock. There was no handle, no bell push, nothing. Hellboy gave the door an experimental shove. It seemed immovable, almost as if it had been drawn onto the rock rather than cut from it. He put his shoulder to it and pushed harder. It didn’t budge.
“Open sesame?” he muttered hopefully, then he banged on the door, the clash of rock on rock spiralling up through the blackness. Finally he growled, “Aw, to hell with this,” and drawing back his stone fist once again he slammed it directly into the center of the eye.
Most of the symbol imploded in a powdery mass of rubble. Cracks zigzagged out from it in all directions. Hellboy clenched his jaw and kept on punching, and although the muscles at the top of his right arm and across his shoulders hurt like hell, he didn’t stop until he had punched out a hole large enough for him to step through.
Dust sifted down through the beam of his torch as he looked around. He was in a tunnel, high and wide enough to drive a tank through. The walls of the tunnel were not smooth, and the ceiling was jagged, uneven. He shone his torch ahead, but darkness swallowed the beam with no end of the tunnel in sight.
He began to walk. His surroundings didn’t change much. He tramped confidently, unerringly, through a whole maze of tunnels, sometimes turning right, sometimes left, sometimes taking the tunnel that sloped downwards, and sometimes the one that required him to climb a slight incline before it leveled out.
Some of the tunnels had water dripping from the ceiling or trickling down the walls, but most were dry. Occasionally the tunnels would widen out before narrowing again, but never did they become any narrower or lower than the one he had started out from.
After about half an hour the batteries in Hellboy’s torch started to fade, so he replaced them. It always bugged him in movies when FBI agents were plunged into darkness because their torch batteries had died on them. In real life, properly trained agents always carried spares; stuff like this was never left to chance.
By the time he came across the second door he knew he had traveled deep into the heart of the mountain. He knew too that if the energy had not touched his mind just for that split second he would never have found this place.
The second door was similar to the first — maybe not quite as high and wide, but pretty much the same shape, and once again bearing the telltale eye symbol. Switching the torch from his right hand to his left, Hellboy didn’t even bother with the preliminaries this time. Ignoring the stiffening pain in his joints and muscles, he began to punch with just as much gusto and intent as ever. As before, the door cracked and crumbled and eventually caved in beneath his assault. Wafting stone dust out of his way, Hellboy stepped through the gap.
He found himself in a vast space, a natural cathedral. Stalactites and stalagmites, both hundreds of feet in length, had stretched to join in the middle, forming colossal pillars. The walls glittered with phosphorescence, illuminating the chamber to such an extent that Hellboy was able to put his torch away. Somewhere ahead of him, in the gloom and the shadows, something was glowing with a soft blue light.
He moved forward, the clack of his hooves echoing around him. As he neared the blue glow, the shadows seemed to recede, like a series of tattered veils drawing back to reveal the scene ahead.
The blue glow was coming from a huge crystal that was set into the forehead of a black statue standing in the center of the cavern. The statue was maybe thirty feet tall, and looked like a mummified corpse made massive and twisted by layer upon accumulated layer of glistening, coal-colored rock. The thing’s face was skeletal, its mouth, full of jutting black teeth, yawning open in an endless, silent scream. Its third, glowing eye (the Devil’s Eye, he remembered Abe saying over lunch at the Three Cups) was in marked contrast to the two beneath it, which were shriveled in deep sockets. Bulging growths of rock on the statue’s limbs and torso made it seem malformed, elephantine. Corkscrewing stalagmites of rock stuck up from its misshapen head like a pair of strange, crooked horns.
Hellboy approached the statue slowly, wary of traps. “Well, aren’t you a handsome devil?” he murmured softly.
It was only then he noticed the figures that were flanking the statue. Like their leader, they were black and misshapen, and the reason he had not noticed them immediately was because each was in a crouching position, and at first glance had resembled nothing but a massed formation of glittering black rocks. Now, Hellboy realized he had seen one of these creatures before. A few days ago, in the tunnels of the London Underground. And that one had been very much alive!
When the B.P.R.D. team had gone down into the tunnels to talk to the creature after Hellboy’s initial contact with it, they had not been able to find it. The assumption had been that it had returned to whatever realm it had appeared from. Hellboy now recalled what the creature had said to him, though. It had said that it had been human once. It had said that “they” had looked into the Eye and slept. Hellboy looked around at the ranks of glittering black statues and could only wonder what decades-long dreams the original members of the All-Se
eing Eye had had.
He turned his attention back to the leader, to the vast creature bearing the Devil’s Eye itself. He remembered what Abe had told him about the founder of the All-Seeing Eye, Maximus Leith — about how he had mysteriously disappeared one day, leaving all his worldly possessions behind.
“Well, I guess the cops can finally call off the search, huh, Maximus?” he said softly.
He stepped forward, clenching his stone fist ... but suddenly he remembered something else Abe had said during that interrupted lunch in the Three Cups. He had said, “If you fall into the Devil’s Eye, you become his forever.” Well, Hellboy had fallen, but he doubted whether the words had been meant so literally. Leith and his followers had fallen too, but they had fallen in a different way — by looking into the Eye, by opening themselves up to it mentally and physically.
Hellboy scowled. He was itching to smash the Eye, to drive his fist right into the center of the damn thing, but all at once it occurred to him that maybe that was exactly what it wanted him to do. And that maybe it wouldn’t therefore be such a good idea to bring the Eye and the so-called Hand of Doom together.
With a reluctant sigh, he looked around for a suitable rock with which to do the job. He spotted one behind him, a few meters away, and clomped over to pick it up. It was about the size of his head, and although it wasn’t particularly heavy, it was an awkward-enough shape that he had to use both hands. He bent down with a groan, his muscles aching, lifted the rock, straightened, turned.
“Oh, crap,” he said wearily.
The black stone figures were slowly unfurling. They made a sound as they did so, their joints squeaking and clicking, as if they hadn’t been used in a long time. Their mostly empty eye sockets were now lambent with the same iridescent light that had almost overwhelmed Hellboy. Dropping the rock, Hellboy spread his hands.
“Come on, guys, I’m sure we can talk about this,” he said.
