by Mark Morris
Just as the two bumpers seemed destined to touch, the Rover peeled off to the right, looking for a space wide enough to overtake. A split second later Abe was gasping, thrown to his left, as Mancini swerved back in to avoid a traffic light mounted on a concrete island.
Behind them the patrol car was still flashing its lights, its siren screaming like some enraged animal.
Mancini tried again, putting on another spurt of speed, easing the Rover again to the right. The patrol car behind them aped their actions. Clearly the police driver believed they were trying to escape by overhauling the ambulance, perhaps intending to use it as a buffer between themselves and the pursuit vehicle.
The road they were on now was lined by tall Victorian houses. It had once been a residential area, but the buildings had long ago been converted into offices. There were cars parked on either curb, but no further obstacles immediately ahead. The Rover’s engine began to scream as Mancini coaxed yet more revs out of it. The car pulled out wider to overtake the ambulance, its nose edging along the ambulance’s flank, the hot metal of the two vehicles no more than a millimeter or two apart.
Hellboy wound down his window, and Abe half expected him to reach out and dig his fingers into the side of the ambulance as they eased past, perhaps in a crazy attempt to slow it down by sheer brute strength. Before he could ask him what he was planning, however, the ambulance sashayed sideways, its solid back end clipping the passenger side of the Rover.
Inside the car, the bang of impact sounded like a small explosion. The car skidded and slued sideways as Mancini hauled on the steering wheel, trying desperately to bring the vehicle under control. However, instead of stabilizing, it went into a screeching spin, its speed and momentum sending it careering towards the cars parked on the opposite curb. Mancini tried to prevent an impact by stamping on the brakes, but this simply locked the wheels, exacerbating the problem.
Abe was hurled sideways as the Rover crunched side on into the front wing of a parked BMW. He was only prevented from landing in Hellboy’s lap by his seat belt, which clamped across his chest with bruising force. He was vaguely aware of Mancini also being thrown sideways and banging his head on something, and of the ambulance veering wildly for a moment, before regaining its equilibrium and streaking away up the road. Then his senses were overwhelmed by the screech of tortured metal and the stink of burnt rubber. By the time it stopped, so abruptly that it was like jerking awake from a bad dream, Abe’s ears were ringing and his brain felt as if it had been rattled loose in his skull.
“You okay?” Hellboy’s voice seemed to echo up from the blanketing silence of an incredibly deep well.
Abe opened his mouth, his jaw aching from clenching his teeth so tightly, and instantly his ears popped.
Sound and clarity rushed back in. He heard a hissing like escaping steam, groans from the front seat, the siren of the police car whooping, as if in triumph, then falling silent.
He looked around, and for a moment was disoriented. Everything looked different, back to front somehow. Then he realized that the Rover must have spun all the way round in a circle, and had come to rest facing back in the direction it had come. The police car was now parked nose to nose with them. He saw the policemen get out, placing their peaked caps on their heads and pulling the brims firmly down, as if to cement their authority.
“Dammit,” Hellboy muttered, and reached out to open his own door. However, it was buckled with impact, jammed in the frame. With a snarl, he pistoned out his stone right hand and the door not only flew open, but was knocked clean off its hinges. The two policemen stopped and gaped as the door shot out into the road, pirouetted for a moment, then toppled over with a resounding clank.
As soon as Hellboy unfolded himself from the back seat and rose to his full height, the officers’ faces changed from grim intent to childlike shock. Through the cracked front windscreen, Abe saw them blanch, saw one of them take an involuntary step back. He undipped his own seat belt, scrambled across the back seat, wincing at the pain of his injuries, and climbed out through the frame of buckled metal where the door had been.
“Thank you so much,” Hellboy said heavily. “Do you morons realize what you’ve done?”
Evidently stung by the insult, the officer who had taken a step back now stepped forward again.
“With all due respect, sir, we were just doing our job,” he said.
“Your job,” Hellboy muttered. “Well, thanks to you guys, you won’t have a job tomorrow. And do you know why?”
The two policemen looked at each other. The one who hadn’t spoken shook his head.
“You won’t have a job because you won’t have a city. This time tomorrow there’ll be nothing left of London but a big smoking hole in the ground. So congratulations, gents. Nice work. Now get out of my sight before I really lose my temper.”
———
Liz knew that ringing Hellboy was a risk, but a calculated one. Like her, he hardly ever had his phone on when he was working. He’d only turn it on when he wanted to make a call, was specifically waiting for a call, or if he wanted to check his messages. However, she also knew he’d have been worried by her nonappearance after the Eye guys exited the refuge, and that he would call to check on her the first chance he got. She was not surprised, therefore, when she punched in his number and got his automated answering service.
“Hi, HB, it’s me. Just calling to let you know I’m okay, and on my way to meet you at the house in Ranskill Gardens. I had a little trouble at the refuge, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle. Turned out the Hipkisses, who run the refuge, are Eye members. Surprise, surprise, huh? I managed to persuade Mrs. Hipkiss to give me the Ranskill Gardens address. Plus she lent me her car and a London A-Z. Isn’t that nice? If all’s gone to plan at your end, I guess you must be nearly at the house now — that’s if you’re not there already. Call me if you get a chance. See you guys later.”
She dropped the phone on the passenger seat and concentrated on where she was going. She didn’t expect Hellboy to call her back anytime soon, and so was surprised when the phone bleeped three minutes later.
She picked it up. “Yeah?”
“Liz, it’s me.”
“Hellboy. What’s happening?”
“We lost ‘em,” he said tersely. “But you know where they’re heading for, right?”
“44 Ranskill Gardens, Crouch End,” Liz said. “That’s where the final ceremony will take place.”
“How sure are you of that?”
“Put it this way — -Jess Hipkiss wasn’t lying when she gave me the address. I was very persuasive.”
“I’m sure you were,” Hellboy said. “So where are you now?”
“Driving up Camden Road. I’ve just come through the army checkpoint. They stopped me, but I showed them my pass. One of the army guys told me the ambulance had gone through ten minutes before.”
“You should be with us in a few minutes then,” Hellboy said. “We’re on Holloway Road, not far from the Royal Northern Hospital. Can you pick us up?”
“Sure. What happened to your car?”
“It got kinda totaled. Long story.”
“Are you guys okay?” “Yeah, we’re fine.”
From the background Liz faintly heard Abe say, “Speak for yourself,” which made her smile, despite the situation. Hellboy went on as if Abe hadn’t spoken.
“Our driver’s gone to the hospital with a concussion, but he’ll be okay. See you in a few minutes.”
“Not if I see you first,” Liz said.
Even though the ambulance had given Hellboy and Abe the slip, it cheered Liz to think that the three of them would be together for what might turn out to be the grand finale. Sure enough, a few minutes after talking to Hellboy she came across a mangled car on the road, and her two friends standing on the pavement a little way beyond it. Solemnly Hellboy raised a thumb in the traditional hitcher’s manner.
Liz eased to a stop beside them and wound down her window. Adopting a southe
rn-belle accent, she asked, “Where you fme-lookin’ boys headed?”
“Apocalypse Central,” Hellboy said.
“Well, fancy that. That’s where I’m headed too. Hop in.”
Hellboy climbed in beside her, pushing the seat in the little Metro as far back as it would go to give himself some legroom. Liz noted how gingerly Abe moved as he eased himself into the seat behind her.
“How you doin’, Abe?” she asked.
“I’ve been better,” Abe said, “but it’s nothing terminal.”
They drove on, Hellboy navigating. “So what did you do with the couple at the refuge?” he asked.
“Tied them up, called the cops and left Duggie standing over them with instructions to bash them over the head if they tried to escape. They won’t phone ahead and warn the Eye we’re coming, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“ They might not, but thanks to the cops, the guys in the ambulance now know we’re onto them,” Hellboy said.
From the back seat, Abe said, “But they only know we know about the refuge, and they must have guessed we’d make that link sooner or later. From what we know now, tonight’s visit was clearly going to be their last. They must have decided it was worth taking the risk.”
“Won’t they worry that we’ve found out about Ranskill Gardens from the Hipkisses, though?” Liz asked.
“Why should they? As far as they’re concerned, we were waiting outside the building for them. There’s nothing to make them suspect any of us were inside.”
“Even so, they might consider it a possibility that we were — or even that we went back there after we’d lost the ambulance and made the Hipkisses tell us where the HQ is.”
“Liz is right,” said Hellboy. “If they’ve got any sense they’ll vamoose and set up elsewhere, just to be on the safe side.”
Abe was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe ... but what choice do we have? It’s not as if we’ve got a whole bunch of leads we could be following up. And besides, we’re only ten minutes behind the ambulance. They might not have time to go anywhere else.”
“Plus there’s a chance they’ve already put everything in place for the ceremony,” mused Liz. “Charms and stuff, I mean. Stuff they can’t redo easily.”
“And the house itself might be significant,” Abe pointed out. “This campaign has been characterized by occult placement, remember, so locations are important to them.”
“In which case, they’ll be on their guard,” said Hellboy.”Which means that we should be too.”
“When are we not?”
Ranskill Gardens was situated in the very heart of Crouch End, in a poorly lit, tree-lined street of what must once have been rather grand Victorian homes. Now the street looked a little shabby, a little bedraggled. A number of the expansive front gardens were overgrown, or uncared for, or strewn with litter, or had simply been concreted over to provide extra parking spaces. Around half the houses had evidently been purchased by landlords or housing corporations and converted into flats. Many of the buildings were in dire need of repair. Looking around as they cruised almost silently into the street, Hellboy saw paint peeling from doors and window-sills, roofs missing slates, drainpipes sagging from walls, stonework blotched with mold. Dotted here and there were houses which were just as grand and well maintained as they must have been in their heyday, but these buildings were few and far between, and stood out like occasional healthy teeth in a mouthful of rotted and broken ones.
Number 44 was even darker than most of its neighbors. Not a single light burned behind its tall, curtained windows. In fact, if the house had not been one of a row, a casual observer might not have known it was there at all. The building lurked behind a pair of huge, twisted trees, which flanked the central gravel path that led to the front door. The hooded streetlamps lining the pavement cast a limp, foglike sheen, which masked the building rather than illuminating it, seeming to drive it even further back into the blackness that enshrouded it.
Liz brought the car to a halt a little way up the road and turned off the engine. Instantly the silence rushed in. If Liz hadn’t been so pragmatic she might have described it as an expectant silence, a silence that was waiting for something to happen.
“There’s no sign of the ambulance,” Hellboy observed.
Abe shrugged. “I’d have been surprised if there had been. They’re not going to advertise their whereabouts, are they?”
“I guess,” Hellboy said.
“Okay, so how do we approach this?” Liz asked. “Split up or stick together? Go in with all guns blazing or adopt the cautious approach?”
“We stay together and keep it low-key for now,” Hellboy said. “Let’s find out what’s happening in there before we start busting heads.”
Abe and Liz nodded. “Around the back?” queried Abe.
“Around the back,” Hellboy confirmed.
“Right, then. Let’s go and save the world,” said Liz.
Chapter 14
The worst thing was the sense of helplessness, of vulnerability. Being trussed and gagged and blindfolded, and knowing that if her captors decided to torture or kill her she would be unable to do a thing about it, had sent Cassie into a cold, shaking panic on several occasions. Each time it had happened her imagination had gone into overdrive, and her craving to move — to run and scream and whirl her arms about — had been so overwhelming that she had begun to hyperventilate; had even, a couple of times, almost passed out.
Whenever the panic came, she had felt her mind dividing into two distinct parts. One part — the part that threatened to overwhelm her — was like a hysterical child, almost insensible with escalating terror. The other part, the part which desperately attempted to rein the child in, was the adult side — calm, rational, practical. It was this part which clung to the hope that even now people were missing her and looking for her, and which told the child that it had to remain calm and patient, and eventually — inevitably — release or rescue would come.
But where would it come from? Who even knew she was missing?
Hellboy, she thought. Hellboy knew. And Hellboy would come.
She tried to cling to this thought as the hours passed. Tried to cling to it even as the voice of the child grew louder, insisting that Hellboy didn’t know or care where she was, that he had far more important things to do than run around looking for her.
She wondered how long she had been here. It seemed like hours since she had regained consciousness. And how long had she been unconscious before that? Twenty minutes? Ten hours? Three days?
And where was she? Still in London? Still in England?
All she knew of her surroundings was that they were quiet and cold. And pitch black, of course, because of the blindfold.
What else? She knew that it smelled musty, dank, which might mean that she was belowground, in a cellar perhaps. And she knew that she had woken up tied to a hard wooden chair, and that she was dreadfully thirsty.
And was she hungry too? She supposed she was, in a way. Well, maybe not hungry exactly — she was too scared to be hungry — but her stomach was certainly growling through lack of food.
What else? As time went on it was becoming increasingly hard to think beyond her fear and her physical discomfort. Because she had been sitting in the same position for so long — her arms pinioned and trussed behind her, her ankles tied to the legs of the chair — her back was aching, her hands were numb, and her muscles were bunching and cramping. The pain, in fact, was becoming so intolerable that Cassie kept having to fight down bouts of panic caused purely by her inability to stand and stretch, to relieve the grinding throb in her back, the persistent clenching spasms in her arms and legs.
Oh God, how long would this go on for? How long would it be before something happened? Although Cassie was dreading what her captors might be planning to do to her, there was a part of her that thought the worst thing of all would simply be to be left here to die slowly in a dark agony of cramped limbs and gnawing hunger
.
When it finally came, however, the sound of footsteps somewhere above her head offered her no relief at all. Her head jerked up as a new fear gripped her, and she started to shake once again, her guts turning to water.
The footsteps were muffled, measured, ominous. They moved in a diagonal across the ceiling. And then, shockingly close, a door somewhere to her left clunked and creaked, making her jump.
And suddenly Cassie could hear breathing, the rustle of fabric, the faint sounds of movement. There was someone in the room with her! She whimpered, shook with terror, tried vainly to shrink into herself, as the footsteps came slowly across the room towards her.
———
Getting in was easy. At the back of the house was a conservatory, its glass panels speckled with green mold. The door leading in to it was flimsy. Hellboy simply leaned on it until the lock gave way with a soft crunch.
He went in first, and the others followed. All three had their weapons drawn. The conservatory was full of squashy, lived-in furniture. Well-thumbed magazines about gardening and home improvement were stacked on a small side table. There was a bookcase; a selection of pottery frogs on one windowsill; a cushion in the shape of a cat. It all seemed very ordinary, homely even. Liz hoped they hadn’t been sent on a wild goose chase, hoped Jess Hipkiss’s fear, which Liz would have sworn was genuine, hadn’t been an act, after all.
The door from the conservatory into the kitchen was unlocked. Again, Hellboy went in first. The kitchen was spacious, but unremarkable. There were a couple of rinsed-out milk bottles on the draining board, an up-to-date calendar on the wall with nothing marked on it. A red zero on the display panel of the dishwasher showed that the machine had been switched on earlier and had now completed its cycle. Liz opened a cupboard and saw breakfast cereal — Special K,Weetabix, Cheerios.
Abe glided across to Hellboy, silent as a fish through water, and pointed at a solid-looking door tucked into an alcove in the far right-hand corner of the room.
“I see it,” Hellboy whispered. He too could be remarkably quiet when required.
