The Ice Wolves

by Mark Chadbourn

  He struggled to put his sweeping feelings into words.

  “And it’s ridiculous it’s taken a place like this, and awful things like this, to get me to see how much you mean to me. I’d never get the chance to say this to you face to face, in the light. You’d turn it into a joke. And they say men are bad with emotions. You keep it light all the time, stop it getting heavy. But the truth is, it has gotten heavy. It’s gotten really serious, without either of us seeing. It’s like it crept up on us in the dark. I’ve always felt so cold inside, and now . . . now . . . maybe I’m not. Maybe I can finally let myself . . . ” He paused. “What I’m trying to say is . . . Lisa, I—”

  The door swung open loudly, and light flooded the room. Hellboy was framed in the doorway, holding the lamp high.

  “Brad, who the hell are you talking to?” he said.

  Brad blinked at Hellboy stupidly, and felt for the arms around him, no longer there, the head against his back, no longer there. Turning in a slow, disbelieving arc, he looked around the nursery. It was empty. His stomach churned queasily, and he thought he might be sick.

  “And where’s Lisa?” Hellboy asked.

  CHAPTER 8

  —

  Chairs crashed over in front of Lisa. Bruises flared on forearms, elbows, knees as she stumbled wildly through the impenetrable dark, bouncing off the hard edges of tables and shelves, crashing against walls and doors. Her heart thundered and her ragged breathing brought a fiery band across her chest.

  All she could see was that wolf’s hideous face and the look in its glaring eyes that suggested there was no hope for her, for any of them. The terror consumed her just as that beast would when it finally caught her. What was it? Why did it even exist? The world was horrible enough already.

  Finally her blind panic began to subside, and her fractured thoughts gradually coalesced. Grasping onto a doorjamb for support, she regulated her breathing. How could she be so scared, after all she’d experienced? A gun pressed against her temple. Bombs exploding all around, buffeting her with the shock waves, shrapnel flying by with only good fortune preventing her losing limbs or life. But the wolf, and the eyes, and everything it represented: a world that could not be measured or defined, that undercut everything she knew . . . it was too much.

  As her primal fear of the unknown slowly dissipated, another fear rose in her: of being trapped, no place to turn, either in the house or outside. A stifling claustrophobia bound around her tightly, and she had a desperate urge to throw open a window and breathe deeply of the icy air, although she knew how foolish that would be.

  Gradually, her eyes adjusted to the faint light filtering through the snow-covered windows. As shapes formed out of the gloom, she saw she was in the drawing room amid the glass cases of stuffed animals. The stoat still eyed her menacingly and next to it the empty case loomed. The house was still, no sounds of pursuit, no bestial growls.

  With relief, she ran a hand through her hair and laughed quietly at her panic, but the noise sounded eerily distorted in the silence. Get back to Brad and Hellboy, she thought to herself. There’s safety in numbers, girl. What were you thinking?

  Movement caught her eye, dark against dark, low, fast, behind the tables with the glass cases, and she shrieked despite herself. A cat, she thought, although she’d seen no sign of one. A rat? Too big for that.

  Instinctively backing away from the center of the room, she heard claws rattle on the bare boards to her left. So fast! Not a cat, she decided. What was it?

  It bounded from the floor to a table, and then onto a high shelf, disappearing before her eye could alight on it.

  Edging cautiously, she suddenly broke for the door to the sitting room, but the creature bounded in front of her in the blink of an eye. Echoing from it came a low, gurgling noise deep in its throat. The sound wasn’t threatening, as such, but she couldn’t place it.

  Rapidly, she changed direction and raced toward the door to the kitchen. The thing was ahead of her just as quickly, but this time sharp claws raked her as it passed. Recoiling, she cried out, her hand going to her cheek. Blood smeared her fingers.

  Her heart beat faster. What was in the room with her?

  At the empty grate, her hand closed around a brass poker. She took a step toward the door again, and as the thing hurled toward her, she lashed out. At the last, it turned in the air with astonishing agility. The poker came down hard, shattering one of the glass cases. A stuffed squirrel was propelled in an arc against the wall.

  “Come near me again and I’m going to smear your brains on the floor,” Lisa snarled.

  The creature launched itself at her head in a frenzy of spitting and thrashing of limbs. Ducking, Lisa caught it a glancing blow that sent it spinning across the room into another glass case, which crashed onto the floor.

  “There you go, you bastard!” she said. “I’m in the mood to take out all this pent-up frustration.”

  “Was it frustration that drove you when he came at you with the bottle?” The voice was wheedling and laced with bitter humor. A chill ran through Lisa.

  “What are you?” she whispered.

  “I am the cold wind of a winter’s day. I am a little girl crying in a bare room. I am the voice of guilt and anger and lost days.”

  Gripping the poker with both hands, Lisa stalked toward the sound of the voice. “I know what you’re trying to do. I’m not going to listen.”

  “We all have something frozen inside us, fighting to get out, something pumping with the hot blood of ancient days. Heat and ice. Ice and heat. That is the way of humanity.”

  As she neared, the creature flung itself away again, onto another high shelf, to a desk, a chair, the floor, before disappearing into the dark.

  “Do you think it hurt him, when you slipped the knife between his ribs?” A little chuckle that had the unsettling tone of an old man. “Did his drunkenness mute the pain, as it did the time he put his fist through your door? Nothing dulled your pain, did it, little girl?”

  As all the long-buried emotions surged to the surface, Lisa flew into a rage. Wielding the poker like a sword, she crashed across the room, shattering glass, knocking over tables, hammering the iron down hard on the floorboards. But the creature was always an inch or two away, flying this way and that with a throaty laugh or a foul curse.

  “You will not get to me!” she shouted, lashing out randomly. Tables and chairs cracked, shards of wood flew. For the briefest moment, she saw the man who had taken her in after her parents died, pleasant and decent until his wife left, and then something else when the drink enveloped him, something bestial, with an anger that could not be satiated, rising from someplace inside him that she could not envision.

  Heat and ice. The way of humanity.

  Through her own rage, she felt every blow as if it had just happened, recalled every hospital trip, every lie, the belt and the bottle and the hand, the days and nights locked in her room, pleading for food, fed only punishment for crimes she did not recall doing.

  It had taken her years to escape those days. It had been her worst nightmare that they still lived inside her, waiting for the moment to surface—perhaps with her own children, conditioned to hurt like a hungry rat in a maze. And here was the proof, pulled from her in seconds by something she couldn’t see; something that could well be her corrosive imagination. No, she thought. Pulled from her by the damned spirits that lived in that place.

  She shattered another glass case for no other reason than that she could; the creature was nowhere near.

  “I won’t let it out!” she said, aware of the brutal irony. “I am not that person. I can beat it!”

  The poker came down one more time on a table, so hard that the vibrations surged through her arms like electricity, and then she was spent. The anger faded and she felt only a mounting despair. Sagging into a chair, she covered her face, trying to force the memories back down inside, knowing it would not be that easy.

  She heard the creature bound onto a table nearby,
and saw it positioned itself in the only beam of light breaking through the window. It was a monkey, but the way it held its body was queasily human. The black eyes sparkled with a malicious intelligence.

  Leaning toward her, it hissed, “Sad, so sad. A life forever scarred by events beyond your control. Is there any hope for you? The little girl who will never grow up, forever hurting, forever locked in that bare room.”

  “Shut up,” she said flatly.

  “What is the point of living like that? Forever trapped. Without hope.” The monkey leaned forward further, its voice now honeyed, its dark eyes urging Lisa to listen, to consider. “There is no hope in living.” The monkey paused. Its tongue slapped eagerly against the roof of its mouth. “Why suffer?” it added gently. “You could end it all. Find peace.”

  A long silence as Lisa wrestled with the terrible memories. “Yes,” she said. “I could.”

  The monkey’s voice became silky-soft. “The soft pressure of rope at your throat. A passing moment of ecstasy, and then the long, warm darkness, making you safe, erasing all your fears, all your pain.”

  “I could,” Lisa replied. “But I won’t.”

  Propelling herself from the chair, she rammed the poker into the monkey’s gut, continuing forward with such force that it embedded deep in the wooden paneling. Skewered, the monkey thrashed like a wild thing, shrieking with an impotent rage that made her ears hurt.

  “You wait!” it screamed. “When Piggly Grant comes for you, feeling his way, with his no-eyes and his grasping, sharp fingers, then you’ll see! Then you’ll hurt!”

  “Threats from a monkey kebab. Like that’s going to bother me.”

  The door swung open and light flooded in. With deep concern, Hellboy and Brad rushed over when they saw her.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Brad asked.

  Lisa was surprised when he took her in his arms and hugged her tightly.

  “I’m fine.”

  Hellboy looked around at the wreckage of the cases. “So what have you got against stuffed animals?”

  “Nothing, unless they speak to me.”

  “Huh?” Hellboy said. He eyed the poker embedded in the wall paneling. “Jeez, you really had it in for that one.”

  The monkey hung limply, all life gone from it. But its last words and the thought of Piggly Grant, his own eyes torn out, searching for her, still haunted Lisa.

  CHAPTER 9

  —

  At the kitchen table, illuminated by a candle in a wax-coated wine bottle, William stared into the depths of his coffee mug. An air of deep despondence hung over him.

  “Where were you during all that trouble?” Annoyed, Brad pushed his way past Hellboy and Lisa to confront his father.

  “What trouble? I didn’t hear anything.”

  “You didn’t hear Lisa trashing the drawing room with a poker?”

  “That’s right, Brad. Break it to him gently,” Lisa said.

  “What happened in there?” Hellboy asked to divert Brad from his clear desire to pick a fight with his father.

  Hesitantly, Lisa recounted her battle, and at the end Hellboy could see her victory had given her a new strength. What was in the house still terrified her, yet now she knew she was not a passive victim. But her description of the animated stuffed monkey disturbed him.

  Lisa noticed his concern. “That wasn’t a ghost?”

  Hellboy shook his head slowly. “They don’t act like that. Whatever got into that monkey was something worse.”

  “Worse, how?” Brad asked. “Worse than ghosts? Worse than werewolves?”

  “Okay, different,” Hellboy replied. “There’s a lot of screwy stuff out there . . . things you don’t need to know about. There aren’t just ghosts here, there are other . . . entities.”

  “Demons,” William interrupted.

  Hellboy sighed. “You know when I said, things you don’t need to know about?”

  “Demons!” Lisa said incredulously.

  “Let’s just call them entities for now,” Hellboy said. Lisa fixed an eye on him and he continued, “Some kind of demon. Low level. Hard to know exactly what it is unless you know its true name.”

  Lisa sagged into a chair desolately. “Demons,” she whispered.

  Hellboy turned to William. “It’s this house, it’s gotta be. Something here is like a magnet, sucking in the supernatural and holding them fast. Am I right?”

  William said nothing.

  “Yeah, I’m right. So what else is here?”

  Again, William didn’t respond. “You’re wasting your time,” Brad snapped. “I’ve seen him like this before. If he knows something, he’s not saying. You’ll never get it out of him.”

  Hellboy could tell Brad was talking about more than the current conversation.

  William finished his coffee. “You need to leave soon.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Brad said with exasperation. “You’re throwing us out, at night, in the middle of the worst snowstorm Boston’s had in years, and with a pack of wolves circling the house? What’s wrong with you?”

  “You can’t stay here. You’ve stirred things up in the house. The presences don’t like what you’re doing, and they’re only going to get worse.”

  “You have a hotline right to them, do you?”

  Hellboy rested a hand on Brad’s shoulder and eased him away from the confrontation. “Mr. Lynch, we’re not gonna leave the house till we’ve got what we came for.”

  “You’ll never find the Kiss of Winter. Believe me, I’ve tried!” In frustration, William hurled his mug across the kitchen. Stunned by his outburst, Hellboy and Brad could only stare at him, while Lisa picked up the pieces of the shattered mug.

  “I’m heading down into the subcellars,” Hellboy said.

  “We are,” Lisa corrected.

  Hellboy saw there was no arguing with her. “The Kiss of Winter has gotta be down there somewhere,” he continued.

  “Then you’ve only got yourself to blame for what happens,” William replied bitterly. “I wash my hands of you.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Lisa asked once William had stalked out of the kitchen.

  Brad stared after his father. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him like that before.”

  “We’ve all got things frozen inside of us, waiting to come out,” Lisa said. She winced as she recalled what the monkey-thing had said to her.

  “Your father seems pretty obsessed with getting his hands on the Kiss of Winter,” Hellboy noted. “That opens up a whole bunch of questions. Why does he want it so bad? What does he know about it? And is there any connection between his reasons and the wolves’?”

  “You won’t get any answers out of him,” Brad said. “If he doesn’t want to talk, he doesn’t talk.”

  “You think he bought the house because he knew the Kiss of Winter was here?” Lisa mused. “Or did he find out after he moved in? Maybe one of those things haunting the place whispered it to him.”

  “A cozy fireside chat,” Brad said bitterly. “He’s happier hanging around the dead than he ever was the living.”

  “We can take shots in the dark till the cows come home. Time to have a poke around in the cellar.” Hellboy went over to the door marked with the Black Sun. “Still think you oughta stay up here.”

  “With the talking monkeys? No chance.”

  Lisa and Brad joined Hellboy at the door. When Hellboy opened it, there was a blast of cold air, as if someone had opened a corresponding door far below.

  Stone steps wide enough for one person disappeared into the dark. The walls were damp and salt encrusted, and an aroma of great age drifted up from the depths. With the flame of the lamp flickering in the slight breeze, Hellboy led the way down. The dark pressed against them heavily, and very quickly it felt like the lamplight was reaching less and less into the gloom. The temperature plummeted until it felt as cold as it had outside.

  The steps ended at a cellar, a series of small, maze-like rooms cluttered with discarded h
ousehold items—rugs, broken chairs, dried-up paint tins and brushes in jam jars, battered pots and pans, tea chests, wooden filing cabinets, and shelf upon shelf of tin cans, green glass bottles, pickling jars, biscuit and cake tins, rusty saws, hammers, chisels, and pots of nails and screws—interspersed with the occasional mysterious object that appeared to have some occult significance. The air was heavy with the odor of damp, dirt, and decay. Hellboy’s eye was caught by a skull with a strangely elongated brow that glowed with its own luminescence, and a sword on a shelf, rusty and shattered on first glance, but which made his consciousness squirm each time he looked, so that he thought he was examining a slowly revolving crystal, a portion of a giant machine of cogs and gears, a pure white light, and then the broken sword once more.

  “It would help if we knew what the Kiss of Winter looked like,” Lisa muttered. “I’m guessing it’s probably not a big pair of lips.”

  “I’m hoping I’ll know it when I see it,” Hellboy said. “If William couldn’t find it, it’s not gonna be on display. If it is so important, Abraham Grant would have locked it away out of sight. And made it really hard to find.”

  “What are you saying? We need to rip this place apart?” Brad asked.

  “Let’s see how the land lies first. Depending on how many subcellars there are, that could be a lot of ripping.” Hellboy picked a slow path through the debris, sometimes having to double back when the route was blocked. The cellar was so cluttered, it was difficult to see more than a few feet in either direction, and there was always a sense that they were being watched from just beyond the tight circle of light.

  “I can’t imagine what it must have been like for your dad living in this place for the last year,” Lisa said. “Whatever brought that stuffed monkey to life said some horrible things . . . ” Her voice trailed off, her features growing taut.

  “Like what?” Brad asked, concerned.

  “It doesn’t matter. But if it was whispering the same kinds of things to your dad night after night . . . ” She shook her head. “I think I might have gone mad.”