Unnatural Selection

by Tim Lebbon

  "Never did find that one, did you?"

  Abe stared. Blinked. "So what happened with the dragon?"

  Hellboy slapped his friend on the shoulder, and they both laughed. They had a close friendship, and when they went on separate missions, Hellboy was always pleased when they met up again. He guessed they saw something familiar in each other, some inexplicable thing that science had yet to unravel.

  "Hellboy, Abe, good to see you again."

  "Hi, Kate." Hellboy turned to the woman who had just walked into the conference room; Kate Corrigan, professor of the supernatural and consultant to the BPRD. He always enjoyed Kate's presence, though it usually meant that something big was going down. Tom Manning strode in behind her, face grim, and his single glance confirmed Hellboy's suspicions. "Tom," Hellboy said. "Good to see you again."

  "Abby is missing," he said. "I've asked Liz to get back here as soon as she can; she should be here by the end of this meeting." No questions about Abe's time in Venice. No questions about Hellboy's Rio adventure or how he felt after his drubbing by the dragon. All business and no small talk. This, Hellboy thought, could be bad.

  "When did you last hear from Abby?" Abe asked.

  "Yesterday. She was in Baltimore. She'd made contact with the werewolf and killed him. Out in the street, in broad daylight, I might add. She sounded confused and upset, and I told her to come in, but she never showed. Her satellite phone has been turned off ever since, and there's been no more contact. An hour ago I listed her as officially missing with the Baltimore Police Department, but ... "

  "But if she doesn't want to be found, she won't be," Abe finished.

  "Hey." Hellboy touched Abe's shoulder. He knew there was something special between Abe and Abby, though it was more of a paternal concern than anything sexual. Abe had pulled the werewolf girl from the bottom of the River Seine, dragged her back from suicide, and though it had taken time, her gratitude had grown. There was a love between them now, something profound and deep. "Hey, she'll be all right."

  Abe nodded. "I know she can look after herself," he said. "I'm just afraid that one day she won't want to. Some people accept the mystery of their lives, others never can."

  "We'll find her, Abe," Tom said. "In the meantime — "

  "Who have you sent after her?"

  "No one."

  "What?"

  "I can't spare the manpower." Tom stared at Abe and Hellboy and indicated that they should take a seat. They did so, waiting to hear what Tom and Kate had to say. Even Abe said no more. There was a heavy atmosphere in the room, loaded with awful potential like a breaking news item on TV. "You may all want to take a drink," Tom said. "This could be a long one."

  "Not thirsty," Hellboy said. "Abe?"

  Abe made a rude gesture.

  Tom sat at the head of the conference table, and Kate took the seat next to him, opening her briefcase and spreading a slew of papers across the polished oak surface. Photographs, photocopies, a few CDs; her eyes seemed to dance from one to the other and grow more serious with each second.

  "I've got a bad feeling about this," Hellboy said. He had a thing for bad feelings. His tail twitched and scratched at the timber floor.

  Tom rapped his knuckles on the table and sighed. "Guys, the shit has really hit the fan. The missions you've just returned from are the tip of the iceberg. Liz had what sounded like a nasty encounter with a phoenix in Greece, and other agents have been investigating other sightings across the globe. They've all been highly visible occurrences. Hellboy, the dragon you met was a case in point. It's been splashed across the media all over the world. Abe, the alligator you tackled is already on Italian TV. The list is long, but so far we've had unicorns running through the streets of Manila, a troll pulling trucks off the Sugg Gate Bridge, mandrake plants sprouting in banana plantations in South America, sirens luring ships onto rocks in Newfoundland ... and the list goes on. Very visible, very filmable, and all pretty nasty. Death tolls from each separate occurrence hadn't been high and were mostly a result of press or curious publics getting too close."

  "You said hadn't been high," Abe said. "Has that changed?"

  Tom bit his lip and looked down at the table. Kate shuffled papers nervously.

  "What?" Hellboy said. "Hey, Tom, we're big boys. Abe and I have been through enough crap — "

  "Not like this," Tom said. "Hellboy, this is all new. This is different. We're used to fighting things that are between the lines or below the radar of normal perception, powers that work behind or beyond reality to achieve their own ends. What we have now ... " Tom shook his head and rubbed his eyes. "Kate?"

  Kate Corrigan forced a smile and stood. "The shit that Tom talks about hitting the fan shouldn't be real, but it is," she said. "In the past twelve hours, four airliners have been brought down over Europe, one of them crashing into Zagreb. Almost two thousand people have been killed. Flight recorders and radio transmissions received from the first downed aircraft talked of little men running across the fuselage and smashing their way out of panels in the cockpit."

  "Little men?" Abe said.

  Hellboy frowned. "Gremlins."

  Kate nodded and continued. "Six hours ago in Paraguay, hikers entered a village to find its entire population dead, totally drained of blood. Many of them had been killed in their homes, but there were a few in the streets and a concentration of corpses in the village church. Several dead creatures also lay in the streets, brought down by gunfire. Bats. Huge, bodies as big as a fully grown adult, with unnaturally long canine teeth, and their stomachs were distended with the amount of blood they'd drunk."

  "Not good," Abe muttered.

  "Yeah." Hellboy stood and paced over to the window, looking out at the HQ's gardens. "Is there more?"

  "Believe it," Kate said. "More than a hundred men have vanished in the Azores in the last day. Some of their bodies have been washed up on beaches, minus their sexual organs — "

  "Ouch," Hellboy said.

  "Quite. Their throats are ripped out as well. The ones who hadn't already been got at by normal marine life displayed signs of human teeth marks on their wounds."

  "Human?" Abe said. "Mermaids?"

  Kate shrugged. "Who knows? But men are still disappearing, and women are patrolling the beaches with shotguns."

  "Daryl Hannah was never that nasty," Hellboy said.

  Tom stood. "We saved the worst until last," he said. "This one's ... "

  "Beyond belief?" Hellboy asked.

  Tom shrugged, then turned and used the remote control to open the doors on a digital projection screen. "I could tell you, but I think seeing it would be easier." He said no more, falling silent as he scrolled through commands on the screen and prepared the footage. It started to play — an aerial shot of a cruise liner, huge, long, sleek — and he paused the film. The picture froze, jerking subtly back and forth as if the ship sought to escape being viewed.

  Hellboy knew that it was going to be bad, and he wondered what every person on that ship was doing as the actual scene was shot. There would be couples making love in their cabins; people playing sports; others watching films in the ship's movie theater; families eating in the various restaurants onboard; mothers reading on deck while fathers showed their kids the wonders that such a cruise ship would contain. The frozen moment in time should have screamed happiness and joy, instead of dread and doom. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see, but knew that he would open them again when he heard Tom press play. That was his job: to see the doom and gloom of things, instead of the joy and happiness.

  "Here," said Tom Manning. "This is where it changes. This was shot by a press helicopter doing a feature on this new cruise ship. The footage was impounded before it could leak out. You'll see why."

  Hellboy opened his eyes.

  The cruise ship moved on its way, all instances of happiness on board moving on as well, and seconds later the scene began to shift from reality into disbelief. The sea around the liner — previously disturbed only by the boat
's wake — began to stir. Ripples turned to waves, and waves spun into swirling whirlpools that spat spray. It was as if the sea were heating up, reaching boiling point in a matter of seconds, and then something burst from its depths. Calmness gave way to violence. Peace gave way to terror. And the kraken surfaced.

  A huge gray tentacle rose from the water, tip waving, feeling up the side of the ship. It twisted onto the deck and slapped down among dozens of tiny shapes fleeing its appearance. As it rose it revealed several bright red splashes on the deck. It smashed down again, swatting a dozen more vacationers into the pale timber. Several more tentacles rose to join it, and then on the other side of the ship, three more came into view. They curved up and over the superstructure, slapping, waving, punching down. Glass exploded out from windows, scurrying shapes were crushed or sent plummeting into the sea, and several lifeboats were knocked from their moorings. They fell, crashing into the churning waters, saving no one.

  The liner, massive engines still powering at the waves, began to lift.

  A huge gray body surfaced beside the ship, and one eye — twenty feet across — clouded as it emerged into sunlight. The tentacles still raged across the decks, exploding parts of the superstructure and sending showers of timber and metal to splash into the sea. People ran here and there, sometimes in groups, more often alone and lonely in death. Tiny shapes floated in the sea around the emerging monster. Arms waved, but the unfortunates did not remain on the surface for long; the huge swells drove them down, and when they bobbed back up, they were lifeless, drifting at the mercy of the waves.

  The kraken rose further, the liner now firmly in its grasp. Only a minute had passed between the first tentacle rising and the monster basking in the sun with the liner lifted almost clear of the sea. The ship's huge turbines still pumped spray, forming a rainbow at its stern. The sea boiled as if in fury at the kraken's appearance. Or perhaps the fury was directed at the ship itself, an invader here, a construct slicing the ocean and leaving only an oily wake behind. Because as the kraken suddenly rose higher and slammed down — breaking the ship's back, crushing it, spilling passengers like innards for the carrion creatures of the sea to pick off — the waters seemed to rise in celebration. Huge spurts erupted on either side of the ship, driven by the unbearable pressures of air escaping the crushed hull. Shapes rose and fell, forming desperate waving stars with arms and legs. Several small explosions blew out sections of the hull, but the worst destruction belonged to the kraken, and the kraken alone. It shook like a crocodile trying to drown a gazelle. The liner — gleaming white and proud once, now broken and sad — came apart.

  After the kraken sank back below the waves, it took only a few minutes for the remains of the great ship to go under. None of those in the BPRD conference room spoke; none of them wanted to break the silence, because there was really nothing to be said. The helicopter must have swung in close then, because the view suddenly began to change. Instead of specks seen from a distance, the survivors in the water were suddenly real people — men and women, boys and girls. A few bobbed here and there — those flung free by the kraken's thrashing tentacles — but mostly the survivors clung on to ragged wreckage. The helicopter passed low across the disaster scene. Desperate faces turned upward, pleading to be saved.

  "Turn it off," Hellboy said. He had closed his eyes, but he still felt the thrum of tension in the room. "We don't need to see any more."

  Tom clicked the remote control. "That's about it. The helicopter left the area because it was running out of fuel. When the U.S. Coast Guard arrived three hours later, they found fewer than a hundred survivors."

  "How many were aboard?" Abe asked.

  "Almost three thousand, including crew." Tom's words hung in the room, accompanied only by the whir of the projection-screen doors enclosing it once again.

  Hellboy whistled, looked around the room at Abe, Tom, and Kate, but for a while none of them had anything else to say. Tom poured some water, Kate leafed through a file, and Abe stared at Hellboy, his big eyes more watery than usual.

  "So what's happening?" Abe said at last.

  Tom looked at Kate and nodded.

  "I don't need to tell you all just how wrong this is," she said. "All the creatures we've seen here are from myth and legend. Some of them go back thousands of years — the dragon, the phoenix — while others are more modern. Gremlins are a creation of the age of technology, an excuse for machines going wrong."

  "Not an excuse any longer," Hellboy said.

  "Maybe. We've all seen things here, things that most people wouldn't or couldn't believe. We know what exists beyond the everyday, behind the veil, and in the dark. And some of us can shift that veil. But what we're seeing here is a complete manifestation of a whole slate of myths, not just one aspect. It's not just a dragon or a demon, it's a Who's Who of world mythology, from the beginning of time up to the modern day. It's true. It's all here. There's a hundred hours of film of these things, and both of you have just returned from brushes with creatures of myth and legend."

  "Brush? More like a hammering." Hellboy flicked at his arm as if still clearing water from his skin. He struck the floor with his tail and looked down at the table, angry.

  "So where does all this come from?" Kate asked.

  "Memory?" Abe said. "Collective subconscious?"

  "Ah, the Memory." She picked up a sheaf of notes and began flipping through them, but Hellboy could not help thinking that she was not really seeing anything written there.

  "Kate?" he said. "Is it just me, or did you say that with a capital M?"

  She looked up at Hellboy and smiled. "There's a book," she said. "It's a map to the Memory, where humankind has relegated many of the most wonderful things that ever lived — allegedly. It tells its owners how to find that place, how to dig down through layers of the veil that overshadows this world until they break into the pure darkness of that other. It's a plane in itself, the Memory, a whole level of existence. A sad place but a temporary place as well, because one day it will be touched upon from this side, and those creatures shunned by humankind will find themselves once more."

  "Seems to me this Memory leaks," Hellboy said. "We've all been dealing with this stuff for years."

  "Maybe it does," Kate said. "But it's only a minor leak compared with today. The book is the key and the map. Again, allegedly. It was written by a man called Zahid de Lainree, but there's no proof anywhere that he ever existed."

  "A book is no proof?" Abe said.

  "Even if it existed, would it be proof enough? No one has ever seen it or met anyone who has seen it, but its existence is mooted by cultures and societies all across the world. Some think it's a guilt thing; having turned their backs on creatures of imagination, people have to manufacture a belief in something that can explain what happened. Others think it's just a story made up and carried down through time, designed to explain why these creatures of myth don't exist in this world anymore."

  "And you?" Hellboy asked. "You're a lady with strong opinions. What do you think?"

  "Yesterday I'd have said it was make-believe. Today ... ?" She shrugged and threw down a batch of photographs that fanned out across the table: a dragon, a herd of unicorns, a still from the destruction of the ocean liner by the kraken. "Today I'm starting to wonder."

  "But who could be doing this?" Abe said. "Supposing the book even exists, who would have the knowledge to know how to use it?"

  "A megalomaniacal madman," Hellboy muttered. Everyone turned to look at him, and he smiled grimly. "Isn't it always? Something I talked about with Amelia Francis down in Rio. For her, the dragon she saw was impossible, so she deduced that something impossible must have created it: magic. Reverse logic, I thought, but maybe — "

  "Benedict Blake," Kate whispered.

  "Huh?"

  Kate was not listening. As if she were alone in the room, she flipped the lid on her laptop and started tapping at the keys. A minute later she sat back, shaking her head. "But he's dead. He must be
dead. Especially after so long ... "

  "Sorry, Kate," Hellboy said. "I don't want to crash your party, but who the hell is Benedict Blake?"

  "An insane genius who knew magic, and mythologies were his love," she said. "After what was done to him and his family, it'd be only a small step to add 'megalomaniac' to his resume. If he were alive, of course."

  "Sometimes being dead's no obstacle. You know that," Hellboy said.

  "Tell us what you know," Tom said. "I'm tired, Kate. This could well be the worst time we've ever faced. So if there's any chance that you have any idea at all about what's going on here, stand up and cough up. Because I sure as hell don't. Abe?"

  "Lots of monsters, and we can't fight them all," he said.

  "Hellboy?"

  "Just got my ass kicked by a dragon."

  Tom nodded. "Right. Kate ... the floor's all yours."

  Kate Corrigan stood and opened her laptop wider. She glanced down at the screen for a few seconds, frowned, and then began.

  "You have to remember, this all happened when I was a little girl. Everything I know about this man comes from reports written at the time, and you'll see from what I say in a minute that those who wrote the reports ... well, they all had their own agendas. But I've read everything I can about Benedict Blake, and I know as much about him as anyone. A few years ago he became something of a fascination for me, though I haven't really thought about him for some time." Kate scrolled down the file she was looking at and turned the computer around. "Haven't really had cause to." She showed them all a photograph of Blake, standing behind a lectern, delivering a speech or lecture.

  "Looks like a regular guy," Hellboy said.

  "To start with, he was. Blake was a scientist and something of a magician. The scientist side people respected; his research into cell reconstruction was second to none, and he was one of the first to catalogue the genetic changes being caused in the natural world by humankind's pollution of the planet. A sort of roster of defects, which back then was pretty much doubted or ignored by many people. The magic ... well, that made people nervous. For such a serious scientist to dabble in arcane matters meant that he was effectively ostracized from the rest of the scientific community. It didn't stop his research, or his messing with magic, but it did mean that he lost several major grants from universities and government agencies. Blake went out on his own, and in 1969 he went underground."