The Ice Wolves

by Mark Chadbourn

  Finally, the storm passed, as quickly as it had come. The last wolves loped by the monastery windows, and the howls and snarls slowly disappeared like fading thunder. How many more villages would fall beneath the unstoppable plague before they reached their destination, Hellboy wondered. How much more blood, how much death?

  A silence fell over the village as if the world was still coming to terms with what had taken place. No bird sang. Even the breeze had fallen. As the priest threw open the doors and ran out to check on his flock, Hellboy ventured out into the public area which was now a churned-up sea of mud, stained here and there with blood, the half-gnawed bones of pigs protruding from the ground like the wrecks of ships.

  “My God,” Lisa said in terrified awe. “How do we stand a chance against that?”

  One by one the surviving villagers emerged from their homes, blinking and befuddled, some crying from the shock, others fighting to hold on to sanity, driven to the edge by mortal dread. Some houses had lost half their roofs. Chimney stacks had come crashing to the ground here and there. Fences were flattened.

  “The Devil has passed through here this day,” the Priest said. He knelt in the mud and uttered the Lord’s Prayer in Latin.

  “Tell me we’re going to come away from this with something that can help us,” Brad said quietly.

  Hellboy looked around slowly. “Up till now I was just pacing myself. But now they’ve pissed me off.”

  Filled with emotion, Lisa wandered over to watch a woman trying to comfort her children. Brad’s gaze followed her. “You know, she’s really good,” he said. “I don’t think I’d have kept going without her.”

  “I’ve been watching you two. I figure she needs you just as much.”

  Brad was taken aback. “No, she’s strong. I’m the weak one.”

  “We all need a helping hand sometimes.”

  “Even you?”

  “Even me.”

  Lisa followed the woman and her children into her house. When she didn’t come out after a few minutes, Hellboy began to get worried. “Come on,” he said to Brad. “Let’s check it out.”

  Ducking down to step through the tiny door of the cottage, they found themselves back on the cold, dark landing of the Grant Mansion. The house was silent.

  “I never saw that coming,” Hellboy said.

  CHAPTER 14

  —

  In the impenetrable dark, it took a few seconds for Lisa to orient herself. She thought she might even have let out a cry of shock when she had found herself back in the Grant Mansion, and that embarrassed her. She knew it was the house because she could smell the old wallpaper and the wood, and the subtle aromas of great age that had settled across it over the generations.

  It seemed to be the act of passing through the cottage door in the village that had flung her back ahead of the others, as though she had crossed some invisible barrier now they had been shown what they needed to see. She wondered briefly if there could possibly be some kind of intelligence in the Kiss of Winter guiding them, or if it really was one of the presences in the house, influencing the Kiss. The rules were so obscure it made her head spin; perhaps they’d never find out.

  As her pounding heart calmed, she realized she was alone. It was too dark to tell if she’d come back to the floor from which they’d departed, or if she was on a different floor under the house or one of the upper levels. It was too dark to tell if something awful was standing a whisper away from her, waiting to strike, or if she was completely surrounded, malignant eyes seeing where she could not. She wanted the comfort of Hellboy or Brad, but she knew she was strong enough to cope on her own, as she always had coped. Nothing defeated her; nothing hurt her.

  Backing against the wall, she spread out her arms and began to edge very carefully to her right. Despite everything else, she didn’t want to allow panic to drive her to run blindly so that she fell down unseen stairs. The trick, she told herself, was staying calm.

  Eventually she came to the familiar, smooth wood of the banister and the shift in air currents and resonance that told her she had reached the stairs. But did she go down, or up?

  Steeling herself, she decided to gamble that she was in the subcellars and the steps would take her up toward the relative safety of the real house.

  I feel like Alice in Wonderland, she thought. The world turned on its head. Or a dark reflection through the looking glass.

  The thought was random, but it had an odd resonance that gave her pause. Something in it made her senses tingle. But what? It had to do with the puzzle of the house and the Kiss of Winter, she was sure.

  Steadily, she climbed the stairs, hoping she would find herself in the hall. Instead, she was on another landing, just like the one she had left. Wooden floorboards, the smell of old wallpaper, dust, and echoes. Her heart fell, but she told herself she was doing fine.

  Don’t think about the ghosts, don’t think about anything; just get up those stairs.

  Yet the minute she told herself not to think about the ghosts, she couldn’t get out of her head the shudderingly awful sensation of coming to her senses beneath the floorboards with the light of Hellboy’s lamp glittering what seemed like miles away at the end of a long tunnel, and the sickening sensation of the gray, papery hands upon her. In her half-conscious daze, she had gradually become aware of the hate and bitterness of those that had taken her, so strong it was like an enveloping cloud. She could sense their desire to punish her for the act of being alive, to make her suffer and then to make her like them. What were they? What had they been? When her thoughts touched upon the answers, her mind seesawed wildly and panic threatened to surge through her.

  Stay calm, stay calm.

  She moved on to the next flight of stairs. When she had edged up three steps, a low moan rolled out from somewhere nearby, but whether ahead or behind she could not tell. Her blood ran cold and she thought her heart would burst out of her chest.

  Stay calm.

  And then she heard her name. It was clear and resonant, and followed by a smacking of lips that was faintly obscene. She couldn’t help herself; she scrambled up the stairs, bouncing off the walls and banister before sprawling across the landing. She threw herself to her feet quickly, but she had already lost her bearings. Ranging around, she crashed against wall after wall. Where were the stairs?

  Before she could move, she caught sight of a tiny, faint light further down the long landing. It looked like a firefly hovering at chest height, hypnotic in the way it danced. Slowly, it moved toward her. Barely able to breathe, she prayed it was Hellboy or Brad come looking for her, scared to call out in case it wasn’t.

  As the light neared, she saw it was a candle flame. It flared on the wall in passing, revealing a portrait, a door, but not the person who held it. It’s shielded, she thought.

  Torn between staying and fleeing, Lisa was frozen. The floating light mesmerized her.

  The trance was only broken when she heard the voice again: “Lisa. Come to me.” Her blood drained away.

  From the dark, the figure emerged, a huge bulk lumbering from side to side, the candleholder gripped in pink, chubby hands. A long black jacket flapped behind the figure like wings, a gold and white brocade waistcoat stretched across the huge girth over a white wing-collar shirt finished with a black bow tie. On the surface, the clothes were the picture of expensive elegance, but when she looked closely she saw a smudge of mold or dirt, fraying edges and small rips, as if the owner had fallen on hard times.

  And then those chubby fingers raised the candle so the face was illuminated, and Lisa screamed. It was Piggly Grant, his face grotesquely fat and apple-cheeked, his lank, greasy black hair hanging in strings. But it was the gaping sockets that made her reel, still blood-caked where the eyes had been torn out.

  “Lisa,” he said, smacking his lips. “I have been waiting for you. Little girl, locked away, unloved. Spend the rest of your days with me.” He reached his fat arm toward her in an obscene mockery of a romantic gesture.
>
  Throwing herself back, Lisa stifled a cry. Behind the specter, the stairs appeared from the gloom in the candle’s flickering light.

  As Piggly Grant moved toward her, Lisa realized he was floating at least an inch above the boards, yet she still heard the heavy tread of his feet. Her head spun, unable to tell what was real and what was the spirit’s subtle manipulation of her senses.

  “You will never solve the puzzle of this house,” he said sibilantly. “You cannot be allowed to remove the chain that keeps us locked here.” His voice grew harder, his features becoming filled with malice. “I am fed by my bitterness. I have suffered, and suffered, and now I do not care about my suffering. I only wish to spread it to those who live, ignorant of the darkness at the heart of all existence.”

  “No!” Lisa shouted defiantly. She threw herself past Grant, ducking as his arm swung for her wildly. In passing, her skin bloomed with the coldness he radiated.

  At the stairs, she grabbed the banister and propelled herself up two steps at a time, but it wasn’t long before the dark had swallowed her again and she had to slow her pace for fear of falling. As she rounded the turn in the stairs, she saw the candle flame was rising smoothly in her track. Piggly Grant’s wheezing breath echoed off the walls.

  Scrambling up the remaining steps, she found herself on another

  landing, but the hallway had to be the next one up. She skidded across the boards, crying out as she turned her ankle, but forcing herself up the next flight.

  The shimmering candle continued to follow, a pool of light moving across the peeling wallpaper. “Here comes a candle to light you to bed,” Grant sang in a flat, hollow voice.

  Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.

  Racing, tripping, falling, picking herself up, Lisa made it to the next level only to be shattered by the realization that she had not been in the subcellars at all. She was now at the top of the house, outside the door to the attic room, with nowhere else to go.

  Fighting back tears of frustration, Lisa ducked into the attic room and slammed the door, pressing her shoulder against it.

  “Get away from me!” she yelled.

  Beyond the door, Piggly Grant’s wheezing breath died away and silence descended. Lisa strained to hear, and after two minutes, she started to feel easier. But then, despite the weight she had put against it, the door began to open. Planting her feet, Lisa drove her shoulder harder into the door, but inch by inch she was forced back. Through the widening gap, she heard Piggly Grant’s snickering laughter as the light from the candle illuminated the row of portraits on the wall. Piggly Grant was there, looking back at her, alongside the girl and all the others.

  Amid her fear, she had another burst of revelation, still unfocused. Something about the paintings.

  Suddenly the door flew open and Lisa was propelled backward against the far wall. Briefly, she glanced at the row of snow-plastered windows, wondering if she should clamber out onto the roof. It would be suicide, she was sure; she would likely slip and fall, or the wolves would get her. But in her mounting fear, it felt like her only option. She ran to the window next to the one that William had boarded up after Carnifex had shattered it, but the handle was frozen, and it wouldn’t budge.

  Candlelight flooded the attic room. The huge silhouette of Piggly Grant now filled the doorway. There was no way past him.

  Frantically, Lisa rattled the handle on the window and then shoved it forcefully. The ice cracked and it eased a little. Once again she tried, and this time the window flew up, admitting a blast of freezing air. The tiles were thick with snow, and the wildly gusting wind was blasting flakes horizontally. Beneath the gale, she could hear the intermittent howls of the wolves. Thrusting her head out, she glanced around and withdrew quickly. A wolf was hunched on the pitch of the next roof, watching her. Its snarling rose up in a frenzy.

  Piggly Grant drifted slowly through the doorway, the shadows sweeping away from the candle flame. Lisa put one knee on the windowsill, torn. Death one way, or the other. After a moment, she prepared to clamber out.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes! Soon you will be joining us!”

  A brilliant white light suddenly flooded the attic room, and Piggly Grant shrieked like a sow in an abattoir.

  “Come now! This way!” It was William, holding a lantern decorated with feathers and bones, which she recalled seeing among the artifacts in the subcellars.

  Piggly Grant had become distorted, as if he were being stretched like taffy, with rays of the white light punched through his form at several points. His face was contorted by rage, his fat hands flailing impotently as he attempted to pull himself together; he was succeeding. Knowing she only had a moment, Lisa ducked beneath his grasping hands and darted out of the door. William dragged the door shut behind her, and together they scrambled down the flights of stairs until they reached the sitting room.

  “Are we safe here?” Lisa gasped.

  “Safe? We’re not safe anywhere.” William dumped the lantern onto a side table and slumped into a leather chair, covering his face with a hand.

  It was the first time Lisa had seen him anything other than impassive; the strain was starting to tell. She was still reeling from her own encounter with Piggly Grant, and found it hard to shake her impressions of what he had planned to do to her. “What is that lamp?” she asked.

  “It’s called the Spirit Lance,” he muttered, distracted. “It was developed by a Native American medicine man and a frontier guide during the Civil War. They used it to find some hidden secret in an Indian burial ground guarded by some particularly evil spirits.”

  “You fetched that from the subcellar to help us?”

  “Brad would have said I fetched it to help myself.”

  There was a note of profound sadness in his voice that troubled her. It seemed like he was starting to come apart. “I’ve spent the last hour or so in some medieval nightmare. What happened to you?” she asked.

  “When the light went out, I came as quickly as I could. I’ve seen what the ghosts can do when they’re active. But this is much worse.” He glanced toward the door as if he’d heard something. “Normally it’s just the . . . I would say friendly . . . unthreatening spirits who contact me, in this part of the house, anyway. But the things that are moving now.” He swallowed. “I heard them whispering in the walls. Moving beneath the floorboards. The things they said . . . I knew what I was letting myself into when I bought this house, but I thought I’d have been able to find what I wanted and get out before it got really bad.”

  “I think they feel we’re getting close to solving the puzzle of the house. They want to stop us.”

  “Are you close?” he asked forcefully.

  “Not that I know.” She tried to work out what it was about the paintings that had sparked her intuition in the attic room. “The ghosts must be seeing something I can’t.”

  “This place has been sleeping for a long, long time. But now the evil that’s locked inside here is waking as the house gets untethered in time.”

  “Untethered. I like that.” Her smile faded when she saw his haunted expression.

  “Where’s it going to end?” he said. “Now that they’re awake, they’re not going to stop. They’re going to want blood before they return to the other side.”

  “You showed you could deal with Piggly Grant—”

  “You know there’s something much worse than him in here.”

  Falling silent, Lisa let this sink in, but decided she didn’t really want to know the answer to any of the questions that were starting to coalesce. Instead, she asked, “What’s the deal with you and Brad?”

  He looked surprised by her question. “Brad walked away from me a long time ago.”

  “That’s not true. He’s devastated by how things have turned out between the two of you. Ever since I’ve known him it’s cast a shadow over everything. He might not talk about it much, but I can see it in his face, hear it behind the things he says.”

  His sh
oulders slowly sagging as he considered Lisa’s words, William finally looked his true age. “Things were ruined between Brad and me a long time ago. There’s no going back.”

  “Yes, you can! He needs you, William. He’s felt alone all his life. I know how terrible it is to feel like that. We all need someone to help us through the storm.”

  His expression had grown impassive once again, but that only served to irritate Lisa.

  Her voice cracking with passion, she said, “If you only knew what he’s been through the last few years. What happened to him out in Iraq. It almost destroyed him. It still might. He’s hanging on . . . and I’m trying to do my best, but . . . I’m worried it’s not enough.” A pang shot through her. Giving voice to what she had unconsciously known for a long time made her realize its truth. “Everything goes back to what happened with you, and your wife, and Brad. It took the heart out of his life, and he’s never been able to get things together. And now I’m worried he’s going to use all these awful things that are happening to just . . . give up.” She couldn’t use the real word that burned in her mind.

  William shook his head. “It’s too late.”

  Before Lisa could plead with him, she was shocked by the door crashing open as Hellboy and Brad burst in. “Thank God,” Brad said.

  “Thank God, yourself. What happened to you?” she asked.

  “We came through the door straight after you,” Brad replied, baffled. “We thought the ghosts had gotten you.”

  “They nearly did. Your father saved me.”

  Taken aback, Brad glanced at William, but said nothing.

  “Time is a screwy thing. Don’t waste energy thinking about it.” Hellboy held up the opera glasses. “The spooks are out in force. Looks like we’ve really rattled their cage.”