Myers got out of his cab and paid the driver, going for the “hide-the-agent-in-plain-sight” route. No stiff FBI suit for him, at least not tonight; a nondescript sport jacket over a soft, dark shirt and a rather gaudily patterned tie, khaki pants, and Nikes made him look like someone’s visitor, or maybe an office worker coming in to check on what kind of damage had been done to the computer systems.
A security guard checked his name against a clipboard, then let Myers inside, where Dr. Marsh was waiting for him at the reception desk. Everything down on the first floor smelled of smoke, although there was no visible damage, and all the nurses and maintenance personnel had this vaguely terrified visage—their eyes darted back and forth, and they jumped at noises that were just a shade louder than normal.
“Second floor?” he asked as he and the doctor headed down the hall.
The white-haired woman shot him a sideways glance. “There is no second floor anymore, Agent Myers. Not to any usable degree, anyway. It’s burned away right down to the metal reinforcing studs—a brilliant idea implemented during the renovation done in the eighties—and the outside brick and mortar work.”
“Oh,” was all Myers could think of to say.
The doctor stopped at a locked set of double doors with narrow, wire-reinforced windows and motioned to the two security guards on the other side. A buzzer sounded, disengaging the lock, and Myers followed her through. Dr. Marsh led him to the second window in a row of five, and when he looked through it, Myers realized he was seeing through one-way glass. The room before him was padded heavily and, except for the silver camera high in the corner, completely white. There’d been monitors at the guard station he’d passed, so it was obvious where the feed from the camera went.
“She’s been like this since it happened,” Dr. Marsh said as they looked through the window at Liz Sherman. The woman’s face was lined with shock and tension. “There were no casualties, but it’s put a big dent in our Thorazine supply.” She gave him a dubious look. “Are you sure you want to go in?”
He nodded, then reached up and yanked on his tie to loosen it. A final, worried look, then Dr. Marsh inclined her head toward the guard back at the door; he must’ve pushed a button because a second later the door to his right clanked and opened slightly.
He pushed through, then pulled it closed behind him until he heard the lock catch. Dressed in a clean gown, Liz was sitting on a heavily upholstered chair and staring into space; she didn’t acknowledge his presence or even blink as Myers knelt in front of her.
“Miss Sherman? I’m Agent Myers, FBI.” Instead of responding, she purposely turned her head away. While someone else might have taken this as a rejection, Myers was heartened. Any response other than catatonia was a plus. “Miss Sherman, I’m Agent Myers of the FBI,” he repeated. He paused, then told her something she likely already knew. “The hospital called us. They don’t feel they’re capable of caring for you any longer.”
Silence.
“Liz,” he said, then paused, trying to think of something that might soften her up. He went for the obvious. “May I call you Liz? It’s a beautiful name—”
She sighed, and he heard a hint of impatience in the sound. “Sixty percent of the women in this world are named Liz.”
Myers smiled to himself. He’d actually expected a comment like that. Aloud, he said, “It’s still impressive by my standards. My name’s John.”
She gazed at him dully and he took a chance and offered his hand. When she turned away, he shrugged and dropped it back to his knee. He was way too smart to take that as a personal insult. “Listen,” he said. “Dr. Broom asked me to invite you back to the Bureau. No special precautions, no security escorts. You and me in a taxi, like regular folks.”
Liz looked down at her wrists thoughtfully. “Doesn’t sound like him.”
Myers let her consider his words for a few moments, then told her, “Miss Sherman, he’s asking you back, but it’s entirely your choice.”
“Choice, huh?” As Myers watched her, she seemed to be looking at something over his shoulder. Finally, he turned around and saw her staring at both their reflections in the surface of the one-way glass. In here, the image was slightly distorted because the glass was covered by a protective layer of heavy Plexiglas. “That’s cute,” she said softly. “I’ve quit the Bureau thirteen times. I always go back.” She returned her gaze to the thick rubber bands encircling each wrist, then gave each of them a hard enough snap to make Myers wince. She stared at the reddening skin around each of her wrists.
“Where else would I go?”
13
THE LIGHT AND SOUND OF THE SUBWAY TRAIN SCREAMING past was more like an explosion than anything else. It roared through the tunnel with a blast of high beams, and then it was gone, leaving behind a sudden, teeth-jittering emptiness and a ringing in the ears.
Circles of light abruptly swept the space, revealing walls encrusted with mildew and rusting steel columns dripping with moisture and stains. Here and there rats chittered and scurried through the filthy, trash-filled puddles in the center of the tracks, their clawed feet making erratic trails among the debris. Agent Clay swung his own flashlight from side to side, occasionally kicking out at a rodent that dared to get too close; another half dozen agents followed behind him with two of them, Moss and Quarry, armed with heavy-duty flamethrowers. Trailing to the rear and taking in the not-so-touristy sights in companionable silence, were Hellboy and Abe.
Finally they turned off the main subway tunnel and filed into a side tunnel that was too narrow to let pass more than two men at a time. After about twenty feet it widened into a small alcove, itself ending at a couple of double metal doors hanging crookedly on what was left of rust-eaten hinges. Clay kicked the doors open and shone his light inside, then motioned for the others that it was okay to follow.
Inside was a storeroom of sorts, piled high with abandoned filing cabinets, old-fashioned typewriters, and stained school desks with thousands of names and figures carved into the humidity-soaked wood. Although the walls in here were just as moisture-damaged as the tunnels, the agents could see the remains of a hundred-year-old mural that ran the full width of the side wall. On it, happy boys were doing charitable acts—one was helping old ladies with groceries, another coaxed a cat from a tree, yet another tied a shoe for a child smaller than him. It was all very holier-than-thou, and beneath the painted Latin phrase declared Viriliter Age, the translation of which encouraged the viewer to act like a man.
Quarry shook out a triple-wide map, then shone his flashlight on it. “We’re in the cellar of the Benjamin Institute, a turn of the century orphanage,” he told the others as he pointed at a spot on the paper. “It’s been closed since they moved the sewers in 1951.” He re-folded the map and put it away; the sound of the paper crinkling was unpleasant, magnified by the high ceiling and the air currents of the close-by tunnels. The long beams of the agents’ flashlights bobbed and left tracer images as the men constantly aimed them at the lightless corners and the blacker areas beneath the junked pieces of furniture.
Next to Hellboy, Abe pulled off his gloves, set them aside, then extended one hand to test the air. He tilted his head thoughtfully, then nodded. “There’s a pulse,” he said. Then he knelt in front of an oily-looking puddle and lightly skimmed the top of it with his palm. Dust and tiny pieces of debris on the dark surface floated idly toward his skin. “And it’s coming from…” Eyes glittering, he raised his other hand and pointed. “There.” The agents immediately turned the beams of their lights in that direction. “There’s a cistern on the other side,” Abe said. “Most of the eggs are there.”
Several of the men moved forward and shouldered aside a couple of filing cabinets that were in the way, but all they found was a blank concrete wall, as stained and dirty as the rest of the room. “No way in,” said Agent Quarry.
Clay nodded and faced the others. “We should go back and request permission to—”
BAM!
Clay
jumped back as behind him Hellboy’s stone hand smashed into the wall blocking their progress. Cracks spider-webbed from the point of impact and a small chunk of concrete flew outward. Before the agent could protest, Hellboy raised his hand and beat on the wall again, then again, faster and faster until his stone hand was a jackhammer blur and the wall just couldn’t stand up to the assault.
The ticking of the clocks around him was comforting. Stable, calming, exactly what he liked to hear while he was engaged in a project.
Sitting quietly at a table in the lower level furnace room of the sugar factory, Kroenen methodically worked on repairing his mechanical hand. Normally it worked fine, but the humidity and the grime down here had worked their way into a couple of the gears and made two of the finger joints stick. He wanted it to work like the scores of clocks around him—steadily, reliably, no break in the routine.
This was a good place, a private place. For a change he could loosen the leather mask that normally covered his face, not worry about keeping his deformities covered. Ilsa and Grigori were used to it and didn’t care anyway, but occasionally he had to interact with others; rarely could those people handle the sight of his wet-looking eyes, bulging and lidless, the raw-gummed skull grin that was exposed by taut skin and a mouth that had no lips. Down here it was different—
Something pounded through the layers of concrete walls that separated him from the cistern and the orphanage.
Kroenen grimaced and abandoned his work on the hand as he listened to the dull hammering. It sounded far away but sound could be deceiving down here; one moment it could seem muffled by the heavy architecture, another it could echo as though overhead. This time, though, he could go on the physical—on the tabletop the mechanical hand rattled with every blow.
Kroenen snapped the hand back into place, quickly strapped his mask back on, and rose. With quick, spiderlike movements, he retrieved an ancient leather folder and opened it. Inside, engraved on a stiff piece of papyrus, was an image of Sammael; he took it out and carefully placed it on the table, then took two torn pieces of paper from a separate envelope. Working quickly, he rolled them together and placed them in a pouch on his belt.
With a last, regretful look at his collection of faithfully ticking clocks, Kroenen turned and hurried out of the furnace room.
There was enough concrete dust in the air to choke a horse, but Hellboy waved it away and gestured toward the ragged, man-sized hole he’d beaten through the wall. “You coming or not?” he asked Clay. The agent gave him an uncertain look, watching as Hellboy pushed through the opening, his massive shoulders scraping the sides. Finally Clay followed him through, turning back to give Quarry and Moss instructions. “You two, check this dump. Then join us.” They nodded and moved away.
When Abe ducked through the hole, he found Hellboy and Clay standing in the middle of an abandoned shower room. The area was finished with mildewed tiles that might have once been white but were now cracked and blackened, the stains showing patterns where water had leaked through the years. The showers formed a sort of large oval, ringed with rusting metal pipes that were still spilling water onto the floor after all this time. The floor itself was slanted down to a large metal grate in the center.
Abe studied the grate, looking at it intently as he tried to read the air around it. Eventually he glanced at Hellboy and nodded; immediately Hellboy leaned down and with a chesty “Hmmmphf!” yanked the grate free and spun it off to the side, where it banged loudly against the wall and wobbled to a stop. A second later, hundreds of roaches streamed out of the newly opened hole, fleeing from the unexpected intruders.
Abe made a face as they watched the bugs scurry for new hiding places. “I’m glad I’m not human,” he commented. “This place would be an embarrassment.”
Hellboy didn’t say anything. He was too busy peering into the dark hole in the floor, trying to see into the vast cistern below. It was useless, like trying to see to the bottom of an ink well. Abe gave it a shot, then pulled two chemical flares from his belt, lit them, and dropped them into the blackness. He and Hellboy peered after them, but they could see little—a few pieces of furniture and floating paper close to the surface, but nothing else.
Readying himself, Abe pulled off the breathing apparatus that let him walk around the dry side of the world, then he activated the small locator pack on the left side of his belt. Hellboy followed suit, and with a muted beep the devices synchronized, their tiny lights—Abe’s blue, Hellboy’s red—now blinking in unison before they dimmed to normal mode. As Abe stepped forward, Hellboy held out his big hand and opened it. On his palm was an undersized receptacle containing a small bone.
“Here you go, Doctor. This should cover your tail fin—it’s a bone from Saint Dionysius, on loan from the Vatican. Looks like a pinkie.”
Abe nodded and took the offered gift, then tied it, bone and holder and all, to his wrist. He looked at the hole again, sitting there and waiting for him like a big, black mouth, trying not to think about all the crap he was going to be running through his gills in only a few seconds. “Remind me why I keep doing this.”
Hellboy looked at him from beneath his horns. “Rotten eggs and the safety of mankind.”
“Oh,” Abe said. “Right.”
Transparent membranes slid into place over both of Abe’s eyes, and without another word, he dove into the cistern.
Down, down, down, slicing through the water with a feeling of freedom that could never be gained in his tank. For this freedom, however, he paid a price; tension etched through his smooth muscles, every dark spot and bubble in the filthy water caught his attention and made him veer. In a wide open space like this, he could be prey just as well as predator—one of the reasons he’d dismissed the notion of a permanent life in the oceans a long time ago.
Still, Abe kept going. As always, he found it interesting that he could see so easily in dark water. He supposed he was no different from the fish in the deeper parts of the ocean; maybe without his knowledge, he was using a hidden form of sonar in addition to his psychic abilities. All in all, it was a pretty good perk that kept him from running blindly forward and bashing his head on something he hadn’t seen coming.
Down here, he could tell that everything was usually a shade of dirty black-blue. At the bottom—which really wasn’t all that far down—Abe found an entire control room, reduced to eternal silence by the suffocating water. As Abe examined his surroundings, magazines from as far back as the 1940s floated past, swaying with the currents like paper jellyfish. The chemical flares were still burning, mingling with the natural bluish color of the water and casting a sickly yellowish glow over everything that only added to the eerie, otherworldly feel of the place.
But even the best of the best cannot do everything, cannot know everything, cannot see everything.
And, as still and silent as the inanimate objects that camouflaged him, Sammael watched the approach of the faraway fish man, and waited for his arrival….
14
HE HATED NOT KNOWING WHAT WAS GOING ON DOWN there.
Pacing around the shower room, Hellboy chewed on a Baby Ruth bar and stomped on a few roaches. The other bugs ran for cover, leaving him bored, so he stuffed the rest of the candy into his mouth, then climbed through the broken concrete hole and back into the orphanage’s storage room. He poked around the rubble curiously, trying to pass the time with what he could find by the not-so-helpful beam of his flashlight. The place was full of weird stuff, like a pile of battered, mismatched children’s shoes, under which Hellboy found a bunch of yellowing photo albums. These he pulled out and flipped open, and for his trouble he got a couple dozen fleeing silverfish and myriad sad-eyed faces, the orphans of a hundred years past. Strangely, some of the faces had been cut from the photos, while others had been left intact. Tucked into the back of one of the books was a yellowing, unfinished letter to Father Christmas, dated 1866, a sad testament to the unfulfilled wishes of a child abandoned by the rest of the world. Had this boy gro
wn to be a man with those same dreams gone unrecognized? Or had he died as a child, never knowing so many of the simple things that people, Hellboy included, took for granted, like love and food and the warm and stable shelter of a home every evening.
“See? It’s thicker, isn’t it?” Hellboy looked up as Clay’s voice interrupted his morbid reverie. The agent was standing below a grate, holding up a small hand mirror and, incredibly, admiring his hair implants. Vanity apparently knew no time constraints. “It’s not that doll-hair thing.”
Hellboy was about to say something sarcastic about men who carried hand mirrors when suddenly something moved just out of the range of his peripheral vision. He jerked his flashlight to the left and shone it down the darkness of an adjoining tunnel—
Kroenen was standing there, caught like potential roadkill in a car’s headlights.
“Son of a—” Hellboy began, but Kroenen’s whip-thin figure had already darted away. Yanking the Good Samaritan free of its holster, Hellboy tore down the corridor after the creep.
“Red—wait!” Agent Clay yelled.
Hellboy barely heard Clay’s words and had no intention of stopping anyway. The static of Clay’s radio carried to his ears on the drafts, then Clay shouted again, this time into what sounded like a pretty useless piece of radio equipment. “He’s on the move! I’ll cover him!” No doubt Clay had his own gun drawn and was barreling after Hellboy even as Hellboy lengthened his stride, determined to catch up with that skinny little Nazi zombie. Hellboy hoped Clay had the sense to watch for the bobbing flashlight beam when he came to the intersection of tunnels that Hellboy was passing now. The FBI man already sounded significantly far away in this labyrinth of abandoned sewer tunnels.
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