The Ice Wolves

by Mark Chadbourn

  Other Hellboy books from Dark Horse Books

  —

  Hellboy Graphic Novels:

  Seed of Destruction (with John Byrne)

  Wake the Devil

  The Chained Coffin and Others

  The Right Hand of Doom

  Conqueror Worm

  Strange Places

  The Troll Witch and Others

  Darkness Calls

  Hellboy: Weird Tales Vol. 1

  Hellboy: Weird Tales Vol. 2

  Hellboy Junior

  —

  B.P.R.D. Graphic Novels:

  Hollow Earth and Other Stories

  The Soul of Venice and Other Stories

  Plague of Frogs

  The Dead

  The Black Flame

  The Universal Machine

  Garden of Souls

  Killing Ground

  1946

  The Warning

  —

  Novels:

  Hellboy: Emerald Hell by Tom Piccirilli

  Hellboy: The All-Seeing Eye by Mark Morris

  Hellboy: The Fire Wolves by Tim Lebbon

  —

  Short Story Collections:

  Hellboy: Odd Jobs

  (with Brian Hodge, Poppy Z. Brite, Nancy A. Collins, Gahan Wilson, and others)

  Hellboy: Odder Jobs

  (with Frank Darabont, Charles de Lint, Guillermo del Toro, and others)

  Hellboy: Oddest Jobs

  (with Joe R. Lansdale, China Miéville, Ken Bruen, Tad Williams, and others)

  MARK CHADBOURN

  —

  Hellboy created by Mike Mignola

  —

  Dark Horse Books®

  Milwaukie

  HELLBOY™: THE ICE WOLVES © 2009 by Mike Mignola.

  Dark Horse Books® and the Dark Horse logo are registered trademarks of Dark Horse Comics, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of Dark Horse Comics, Inc. Names, characters, places, and incidents featured in this publication either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, institutions, or locales, without satiric intent, is coincidental.

  Book design by Krystal Hennes

  Cover design by Lia Ribacchi

  Cover illustration by Duncan Fegredo with Dave Stewart

  Published by Dark Horse Books

  A division of Dark Horse Comics, Inc.

  10956 SE Main Street

  Milwaukie, OR 97222

  darkhorse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chadbourn, Mark.

  Hellboy : the ice wolves / Mark Chadbourn ; Hellboy created by Mike Mignola. -- 1st Dark Horse Books ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59582-205-5

  1. Hellboy (Fictitious character : Mignola)--Fiction. 2. Demonology--Fiction. I. Mignola, Michael. II. Title.

  PR6053.H23H45 2009

  823’.914--dc22

  2009028268

  First Dark Horse Books Edition: September 2009

  ISBN 978-1-59582-205-5

  ePub ISBN 978-1-62115-442-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedicated to Liz, Betsy, Joe, and Eve.

  “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

  —W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

  PROLOGUE

  —

  Breathe deeply: caught on the wind, the sour tang of blood. Listen: behind the steady rumble of modern life, the sound of ancient days and the savagery that still lurks in the lonely wilderness.

  Something has woken. Turning its eyes toward the distant horizon, slowly at first, but with increasing speed, it moves.

  —

  Cancún, Mexico

  Beneath the baking afternoon sun, the police cars race from the bumper-to-bumper airport traffic on Avenida Tulum toward the winding streets of El Centro. Blaring sirens disrupt the tranquility of the leafy roads until the four-car convoy comes to a halt outside La Casa del Sol, a whitewashed hotel the locals use for their celebrations.

  Heavyset, with hooded eyes, Adulio Zaragoza strides past the officers at the door to where Osias Bustamante waits, glowering beneath his black cap, one hand on his gun for comfort. Zaragoza can already smell the blood.

  “How many?” he barks.

  “Forty-three.”

  The number troubles Zaragoza, but he puts aside his concerns as Bustamante leads him to a large courtyard at the rear, where the swaying shadows from the trees cast shifting patterns of light and dark across the prone forms. Coming to a halt in the doorway, Zaragoza surveys the inch-deep crimson pool covering the entire courtyard.

  “The wedding of Maria Jimenez and Gilbert Herrera,” Bustamante says.

  Dressed in their finest clothes, the ragged bodies reflect the final moments of panic, piled near the door or at the foot of the enclosing wall. The members of a mariachi band are strewn around a low stage, their white suits splattered, their instruments shattered. Zaragoza’s attention falls briefly on the bride in her sodden dress, no longer white, and he takes small comfort that her face is covered by the mantilla veil.

  Yet at the center of the courtyard, the wedding feast remains pristine, the plates of chicken and beef tortillas and jugs of sangria untouched.

  “Critics of the cuisine?” Zaragoza notes with a sardonic humor that he hopes will mask his unease. “They were all fleeing that area.”

  “The killer was at the table when he turned on them, as the feast was announced.”

  “The bride and groom would have been first to the table.”

  Bustamante nods slowly. “We have not accounted for Gilbert Herrera.”

  Zaragoza’s forensic eye follows the single track of bloody footprints leading from the courtyard, through the hotel reception to the entrance, and then studies the incongruities of the crime scene. “The guests were killed so quickly that none of them escaped into the hotel.”

  “That is correct.”

  “I see no bullet wounds.”

  “No—”

  “Torn flesh. Broken bones. Dismembering. Disemboweling. A wild animal.”

  Bustamante says nothing.

  “A wild animal with the speed of a whirlwind.” Zaragoza laughs dismissively.

  “There are bite marks.” Bustamante’s hesitant voice gives Zaragoza pause.

  Kneeling down in the doorway, Zaragoza peers at what remains of the nearest body. Even the aftermath of a machete fight between drug gangs on the waterfront never looked like this.

  “A wild animal,” he repeats uneasily.

  —

  Dublin, Ireland

  Six pints of Guinness in the Foggy Dew in Temple Bar, and Jamie Donaghy still can’t take the edge off his seesawing emotions. Beside him, Carla Donlon, his girlfriend of two years, explains in her matter-of-fact, singsong voice why she had decided to sleep with Dean Brassel three nights ago while Jamie waited for her outside the Savoy Cinema.

  “I was drunk,” she says. “He was drunk. And he was lonely.”

  “So that homeless guy down on Wexford Street who always smells of urine stands a chance too?”

  “Don’t be immature, Jamie. It’s not becoming.”

  The banks of the Liffey had always seemed romantic to Jamie, with the strings of golden lights reflecting off the black, slow-moving water, and the salty aromas of the sea caught on the wind; now it makes him feel even worse.

  As he leans over the wall to peer into the depths, he catches sight of a bundle of torn clothes drifting in the current, and then an
other, and another. It isn’t surprising; he’d glimpsed all sorts of things washing down to the ocean: a bicycle, an umbrella, even a deer carcass once.

  “So do you forgive me?” Carla asks.

  He counts twenty bundles in the flow, drifting from one of the party boats moored a little way upriver, but although the lights blaze on deck, and the speakers thump-thump-thump into the night, there is no sign of life.

  “Don’t you even care?” Carla presses.

  Before he can answer, she screams and points toward the water.

  “Mary, Mother of God, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” he snaps.

  But then he follows the line of her finger, and sees the trailing white hand, and the pale face drifting by, and all the other faces, and he knows the truth.

  —

  Nagaoka, Japan

  Not long after dawn, and the station platform is already crowded with commuters waiting for their eighty-minute hop to Tokyo on the Joetsu Shinkansen. Shivering against the cold wind blowing off the Higashiyama Mountains, Isamu stands in his usual spot, briefcase tucked close to his legs like a faithful dog. Today is the day he will discover if he finally got the promotion.

  Despite his anticipation, his attention is drawn by the pretty girl who always sits in his carriage. She had looked at him three times in the last week; two more times, and he thinks he might pluck up the courage to talk to her.

  So engrossed is he in the sheen of her long hair that the arrival of the bullet train is just a rumble on the edge of his consciousness. He doesn’t smell the wind; he doesn’t hear the sounds behind it. His attention is only drawn when the screams rise up, rippling along the platform in pace with the train like the first signs of an earthquake.

  As the train slides to a whispering halt, he sees all the windows of his carriage are drenched with blood, and when the doors hiss open more washes out onto the platform.

  Amid the screams and the swooning and the panic, Isamu is still, his breath tight in his chest. The open door, like the mouth of some great beast, beckons.

  Run, he thinks instinctively, not knowing why.

  Within the carriage, a shadow, moving.

  CHAPTER 1

  —

  After hours, the folklore department of New York University was a silent maze of dark corridors and tiny offices. Through the windows, the lights of Greenwich Village gleamed on a balmy, late summer night, but the displays in the glass cabinets lining Hellboy’s route were a far cry from the modern world. Skulls and athames jostled for place with tribal idols, crystals, jewels, and amulets from every corner of the globe. They told of the truth: behind the sleek lines of the twenty-first century, the chaotic, fearful darkness of the primal unconsciousness still lurked.

  It had been many years since Hellboy had last visited, but he hadn’t forgotten the way. He moved quickly along the winding corridors until he located the familiar door that still bore the imprint of the long-since-removed brass nameplate and carried the aroma of lime and cardamom he recalled so well. He knocked once and entered.

  Kate Corrigan sat on the floor in the middle of the room, surrounded by a jumble of cardboard boxes with papers spilling out. Her old office carried the air of absence; there was a desk and chair, but the bookcases were bare, and there were none of her personal items. One wall was filled with file boxes crudely stacked. So intent was she on an old yellow legal pad that she barely raised her head to greet him.

  “Where do you get that great room freshener?”

  “Hmm?” she replied, distracted. “It’s not room freshener. It’s a ritual paste from the Uxtli tribe. Fish entrails, guano, and human urine. And lime and cardamom, of course.”

  “Forget I mentioned it.” He looked round. “I came.”

  “So I see.” She tossed the pad back into one of the boxes and tipped the contents of another out before her. Notebooks, buff folders, envelopes, newspaper cuttings, and faded photocopies sprawled across the boards.

  “I didn’t have to,” he said.

  “I know. But you’ll be interested in what I have to tell you. And your help is needed.”

  “By you or the Bureau?”

  “By the world.” She batted a hand toward a wing-backed leather chair, but he propped himself against the empty desk.

  “You know how to play on my sympathies,” he said.

  “That’s not hard. You’re a sentimentalist, Hellboy. You always cry when George Bailey finds Zuzu’s petals.”

  “And sometimes you’re too cynical for your own good. Why aren’t you in Connecticut?”

  “Because everything I need is here.” She indicated the haphazard spread of boxes.

  “The university let you keep your old office?”

  “One of the perks of being special liaison to the B.P.R.D.’s Enhanced Talent Task Force. Here!” Kate pulled a dog-eared notebook out of the heap of documents and scrambled to her feet. Eagerly, she flipped through the pages.

  “What’s all this stuff?”

  “My research. Years and years of it. This particular load,” she kicked a muddle of boxes, “pertains to my first book.”

  Hellboy looked blank.

  “A study of werewolf trials in fifteenth-century France. I sent you a copy.”

  “Ah.”

  “You didn’t read it.”

  “I’m more of a thriller sort of guy. Don’t get me wrong—it’s on my to-be-read pile. Maybe I’ll take it on my next vacation. Get into it on the beach.”

  Shaking her head, Kate dumped the remaining contents of the box on the desk next to Hellboy. “Months of independent research in the archives in Paris and Chartres. Records that hadn’t been read for hundreds of years, in the original medieval French. Accounts of peasants, administrators, aristocracy . . . hundreds and hundreds of people who’d had firsthand experience of the werewolf problem. By the end of it, I’d had more than enough of damp cellars and silverfish, but the material . . . !”

  Hellboy picked up a notebook, which Kate had filled with scores of drawings of werewolves. Some could have been mistaken for regular wolves, loping on all fours or sitting among trees and staring out at the viewer. Others were unmistakably human shaped, covered in fur but with a wolf’s head, incongruously wearing the clothes of their former lives. “Hang on,” he said. “Most of it was just peasants accusing their neighbors, right? Same as with the witch trials.”

  “Some of it. The records suggest there was a highly localized epidemic of lycanthropy, which doesn’t make sense. Between 1520 and 1630, thirty thousand people were branded as werewolves. They were interrogated, tortured, and whether they confessed or not, most of them died at the stake.”

  “Sick.”

  “But where did it all start? Why did it spread? Some of the cases are famous because they’re so colorful. Jacques Rollet, the Werewolf of Caude. He was convicted of killing and eating a fifteen-year-old boy in 1598. More children were killed by Gilles Garnier in 1574, so many that the village of Dole in Franche-Comté put a price on the werewolf’s head. There was even a boy werewolf, Jean Grenier of Aquitaine, who ran off into the woods after his father beat him, and spent the next few years eating other kids. He was caught in 1603. Because of his age and his limited mental capacity, he was imprisoned in a monastery in Bordeaux. A few years later, he’d grown long canines and claws, and was gaunt, lean, and lupine.”

  Hellboy always loved it when Kate got caught up in the passion of her work. It reminded him of long conversations on cold nights, their friendship slowly taking shape. “Why have you dragged me out here for a history lesson? Stories of werewolves go back nearly four thousand years.”

  “Exactly.”

  Hellboy eyed Kate curiously. “You’re saying we’ve got a wolf problem? Because after those fire wolves over in Amalfi recently and that business in Griart in the Balkans, I’ve had my fill for a while.”

  “This is something new. You know there are all kinds of werewolves. Different origins, different causes.”

  “Yeah, but they a
ll smell the same.”

  In the pile of documents, Kate located a particular sheet and fastened it to a board on the wall: a simple drawing of a black circle on a white background. “Have you seen that before?”

  “Is this like one of those Rorschach tests? If you’re just looking to find out my state of mind, I can save you some time—I’m pissed off that I’m sitting here when I could be having a beer in McSorley’s.”

  “The Black Sun. How about that? Ring any bells?”

  Crossing the room, Hellboy saw the circle was surrounded by barely visible flames.

  “I copied that from the account of a priest who gave evidence during a werewolf trial in 1525. He talked about a prophecy . . . the Time of the Black Sun.” Kate flicked through her notebook until she found the correct page. “It was mentioned again in 1541, in 1545, 1559, 1562, and . . . well, you get the picture. I didn’t mention it in my book because I couldn’t find any reference to what the prophecy actually was. But I always intended to come back to it.”

  Through the office window that overlooked the campus, a movement caught Hellboy’s eye, fast and low, darting in the shadows between the pools of light. He moved over to get a better look, but all appeared still in the deserted quad.

  Engrossed in her research, Kate was oblivious. “Last year, a new collection of ancient occult texts came to light in the Czech Republic,” she continued. “My work at the Bureau stopped me from giving it any attention until two months ago, when I got a call from one of my old tutors here at the university, Daniel Pleasance. Daniel specializes in occult symbolism in medieval art—”

  “I bet he was fun at parties.”

  Kate ignored him. “And he’d flown over to Prague to examine some paintings and sketches that formed part of the collection. Naturally, he couldn’t help having a look at the texts.”

  “Yeah, who could?”

  “In the codex, Daniel found a reference to the Time of the Black Sun, and it was linked to a separate account. During the Dark Ages, a plague of werewolves swept across northern Europe and disappeared into what we now know as Siberia. It was always my theory that the French werewolf trials were caused by a group of lycanthropes who got separated from that massive migration.”