by Tim Lebbon
"Can you see the Anderson Hotel?"
"In the distance, yes. What's left of it. Lots of fire, and smoke, and things flying around. I'm not sure I can even get any closer, there are roadblocks and ... things ... stopping the ... "
"Abe? You're breaking up." Hellboy reached out for the phone, but Liz shook her head. "Abe?"
Static.
"How's my favorite amphibian?" Hellboy asked.
"Worried about Abby. He's in London, close to the Anderson. It sounds bad. HB, we need to find Blake as quickly as we can."
"Yeah."
* * *
Thames Estuary — 1997
ABE DROPPED THE satellite phone back into the car and set off on foot.
He was relieved that Hellboy and Liz now knew where Abby was, but that relief was countered by his frustration at not being able to reach her himself. The only thing he could do was head east ... and hope that somewhere he would get lucky.
The road was a chaos of parked cars. Most people watched the confusion in the distance from the perceived safety of their vehicles, but a few sat on their car roofs. The police roadblock at the end of the street prevented them from going any farther. Abe's intention now was to find a way through.
The Anderson Hotel rose way above any surrounding buildings, yet it was all but obscured by smoke, buzzed by helicopters ... and attacked by other things. Abe saw dark shapes dipping and weaving between the helicopters, playing with them the way a cat plays with a wounded bird. The sound of explosions and gunfire was muted by distance, and he had the distinct impression that the observers thought they were watching a movie being made. There was interest on their faces, not fear; excitement, not trepidation. If they were closer, maybe the explosions would scare them away. If they could see what was going on, understand its implications, perhaps the true seriousness of the situation would be brought home.
"You people need to wake up," Abe muttered.
And as if his wish had made it so, the wake-up call screamed down from the sky.
The helicopter was ablaze. Its rotors still spun, fanning the flames, and even through the smashed windscreen Abe could see the pilots grim expression as he fought with the controls. But it was a losing battle. The aircraft lost height, spewing fire and oily black smoke behind it, and its rear rotor suddenly stalled and broke away from the tail, smashing into the fifth floor of an office block across the street from where Abe stood.
He backed into a doorway, watching a few other people do the same. And still some of them thought staying in their cars would help.
The pilot managed to steer the doomed aircraft away from the packed street and into a building just beyond the police roadblock. It struck the glass-sided office block and exploded, sending a million shards of glass glittering across the road, spinning through the air, reflecting the helicopter's demise, and forming a brief rainbow of fire as they fell.
Abe ducked into the doorway and covered his head with his hands. The sound of the crash went on and on, the helicopter's remains tumbling to the road and bringing half of the buildings façade down with it. When he looked again, the whole street beyond the roadblock was aflame. It all but obscured the view of the Anderson.
"That was close," he muttered. And then the dragon came through the flames and brought the danger closer.
It was small — perhaps the size of a small hatchback car — but when it breathed flames they were white-hot. It swayed its head left to right across the roadblock, and the police cars erupted into flame, policemen scattering and falling beneath it. A gas tank went, then another, and the dragon hopped from one burning car to the next.
"Get out!" Abe yelled. People were still in their cars. Some of them were taking pictures with their mobile phones. "Get out, get away!"
The dragon hovered for a few seconds and landed on a Range Rover. It stared through the windscreen at the occupants. The driver leaned back in his seat, but the passenger stretched forward, now separated from the dragons breath only by a sheet of safety glass.
Then the creature reared up and gushed flame straight into the Range Rover, incinerating its interior in one fiery breath.
Abe ran. There was nothing he could do here. The chaos was spreading, and he was just one man. He found an alley, worked his way in between buildings — a service yard, a parking lot, a delivery area — and when he emerged again, he found himself on an empty street. To his left lay London, to his right, revealed in all its blazing glory, the Anderson Hotel. From here he could see the areas around the hotel, and what he saw was all bad.
Before him the river.
Miles away, Hellboy and Liz could well hold Abby's fate in their hands. He trusted them with his life — indeed, he had done so quite literally many times before — but at the same time he felt impotent here. This battle was much larger than him, and its real cause lay beyond the Thames Estuary.
Perhaps if he could reach the Anderson and persuade someone of that, the New Ark could yet be in his reach.
Abe slipped into the Thames and began to swim.
* * *
The New Ark, English Channel — 1997
THEY MOVED TOGETHER toward the open hold doors, expecting the rukh to spring up at any moment. A cool breeze smoothed the deck of the old tanker, hushing between the doors, whistling past taut wires and coiled chains. "There'll be more than those dogs," Hellboy said.
"I'm sure."
"Liz ... if we find Abby and she's changed ... "
"Lets deal with that one if it happens," she said. "For now, Blake's our main priority. Abby has to look after herself."
Hellboy nodded. "She's a big girl."
Liz smiled, reached out, and touched his arm. He smiled back, past the blood and the hanging flaps of skin, past whatever was making him nervous. Liz knew him so well; something had got to him. He was tensed up, eyes shifting left to right, and even as the rukh finally powered from the hold and hovered before them, Hellboy's expression told Liz he had been expecting something else.
She looked at the monstrous bird and knew there was far worse to come.
* * *
"I spoke with you," Leh said. "Long ago when you were here, and more recently through the Memory. That place. That cold, dark place." Its words suggested fear, but Abby could not believe that Leh would be afraid of anything.
"That was you? You said he left you. You said Blake left you and ignored you, leaving you with the things too old and terrible to summon."
The demon sat in the corner of the room, arms around its knees. It had not stopped staring at the open door. It had the appearance of a person — tall, gaunt, thin. It looked like a man, but its eyes were deeper and darker than nothing. Darker than the Memory. And there was so much more to them. There was no way Abby should look at its eyes, and no way she could turn away.
"I'm a liar," Leh said. "And lies are simply truths yet to happen."
"He knew you," Abby said.
"He knew what his foolish sons had sent him, and he knew what he was bringing forth, and he knew to shut me in here with his magic and his invocations. Weak. Old." The demon trailed away, still staring at the shade of the open door. The weak artificial light from outside was filtering in, weaker than it should have been, as though struggling against shadows that should not be here.
"You mean Blake?"
"Me." Leh smiled, an open wound in its face. "Had my time. I was ... put down." It looked away from the door at last, shivering. Stared at its hands, steepled its fingers, looked inside. "And I want to kill him because he raised me again."
"I don't know you," Abby said. "You're a liar, you said yourself. I know the Voice, the friend I had. I don't know demons."
Leh shrugged and smiled, and when it looked at her, Abby could not turn away. She fell into its eyes and lost herself in there, adrift in the Memory, floating in so much nothingness that she thought its bulk would crush her soul right from her. She opened her mouth to scream, but she was only a mind. And in the distance, an eternity away, a form so large an
d old that it exacted a gravity on nothing. It was terrible, and more ancient than time, and so alone that she could almost see the universe it had built in its endless imagination. Alone, it had made itself everything.
Abby screamed and turned away, and when she next opened her eyes, she was looking at the floor of the cell, the stained metal rusted into magical words and sigils. And she realized that she was alone.
The light from the doorway faded as something passed the bulb outside, then brightened again.
"No!" Abby said. "He's not yours. He's mine!" She stood and walked toward the door, and for a terrible moment she sensed something of what Leh must have felt for so long: isolation, imprisonment, an awful elasticity to the air that prevented her from reaching the door. Then something sputtered out in the air around her, a mysterious charge dissipating in the presence of her animal heat, and she exited into the corridor.
"Leh!" she called, because she knew she could not pursue in secret. "Leh, he's mine. Blake's mine!"
"He'll always be mine in the end," the shadows said. Abby ran, but however fast she moved, Leh was far ahead.
One thing at least: the demon seemed to know where it was going.
Abby was happy to follow.
* * *
The rukh rose from the hold. Hellboy leaped, swiped its turning beak aside, grabbed the feathers of its neck, and fell back down with it. The hold swallowed them both, and shadows cooled his wounded skin. The bird screeched as Hellboy drove his fist into its throat, dipping its head to try and get at him with its beak. But Hellboy had judged the leap perfectly, and he was now well within the bird's fighting circle, able to punch and tear at its throat without any fear of retribution from its cruel mouth.
Its claws, though. He soon found that the bird could easily twist its claws.
They had landed on the remains of Abby's car, crushing it down into the deck. Explode! Hellboy thought, but of course that only happened in movies. As he concentrated on pummelling the creature's throat and sending it back to the Memory where it belonged, he did not see the claw reaching up for him. But he felt it, curling into the flesh of his thigh and meeting in the middle.
"Damn crap shit!" Hellboy screamed. He was tired of being hurt. He wanted to sit down with a beer and a cigarette and kick back, relax, have nothing to worry about for a few minutes. This just was not fun. Fifty miles away the leaders of the world were maybe even now being wiped out by cryptids, and here he was fighting a giant bird instead of beating the life out of the mad mastermind of all this weirdness.
Sometimes he wished weirdness would take a break. Maybe he should just chase thieves and murderers, a much more understandable class of villain.
"Hellboy!" Liz shouted. Looking up, Hellboy could see her head and shoulders silhouetted against the fading daylight. "Close your eyes!"
Cooking again, Hellboy thought, and he squeezed his eyes shut. A blast of heat, a scream from the rukh, the stench of singed feathers, and the claws ripped from his body as the bird retreated to a shadowy corner of the hold.
Hellboy rolled from the ruined car's hood and slumped to the floor, slipping in his own blood. That was never a good sign. He shook his head, felt around in his coat pocket for a cigarette stub, and when he found one, his fingers closed around it like an old friend. The rukh squealed in the corner, and he told it to shut up.
"You OK, HB?"
"Just dandy, Liz." He looked around the hold, hidden in shadow though much of it was, and tried to imagine what had happened to Abby down here. What had held her. Where she had gone. He glanced up again, and past the shape of Liz's head he could see the ghost of the moon forming in the dusky sky. "Abby won't be Abby for much longer," he said. "And the longer we leave Blake, the worse all this could turn out. Time's running out, Liz, and we need to move on. Jump. I'll catch you."
Liz launched herself into space. Hellboy held out his arms to catch her. Such trust, he thought, And that's why we'll win. He caught Liz and gave her a kiss on the forehead. "Bet Blake doesn't have anyone who'd catch him," he said.
"My hero."
Liz and Hellboy ran from the hold, leaving the squealing rukh behind them. The pain in the bird's voice set them on edge, but they hoped to be able to silence it soon.
If were right about all this, Hellboy thought. If Blake really is the center of things. If not ... hello, new world order.
* * *
The demon stood at the center of the birthing chamber, looking up at the great vat suspended from the ceiling. Abby hung back and watched. It looked very human, yet it exuded something inexpressible, an alien aura that human senses would never understand. She was aware that Leh knew she was there, but there was something about this moment that was very private, very much owned by Leh and Leh alone.
Now I'm being thoughtful toward a demon, she thought, shaking her head. She even smiled. It was a long time since she had done that.
"This is where I was brought through," Leh said. "And this is where I'll leave again. But not alone."
This had once been one of the tankers great oil cells, and even after so long, there was still a hint of oil on the air. Abby guessed it would never be cleaned away. Behind that, too, the tang of something else, something much more mysterious and distant. She looked up at the vat and the dried, salty crust around its lip. Unused now, perhaps for several years, but like the oil, its presence would always be apparent. The taint of the Memory would never wash away.
"How do you know he'll be here?"
The demon closed its eyes. "Blake is being chased here even now. An old man, a fool, a lamb to the slaughter." It opened its eyes again. "Lamb. I was once an enemy of sheep, but the shepherd put me down. Do I have the taint, Abby? Can you see his mark upon me?" It turned to her, this demon that was her friendly Voice, and she tried to look at its face without falling into its eyes once again. But she could not. She averted her gaze, looked down at her hands, noting how long her nails were now and how badly her body was shaking. She could not fight off the change for much longer. She was going to lose control very soon, and the last thing she wished for — the very last thing she wanted to see — was Blake taken apart. She wanted to do it herself, desperately ... and yet if fate had decided that a demon would be his end, so be it. Abby had argued with fate many times before, and it was ironic that now, at her strongest moment, she suddenly felt so weak. She could almost feel the puppet strings buried in her mind and soul, guiding her every movement since she had first fled the New Ark and leading her back here, now, to this exact moment, with Leh standing before her, blood coursing a monstrous change through her body, and Blake being chased toward them ...
But chased by whom?
"Who's chasing?" she asked, but her yoke crackled from the phlegm suddenly flooding her throat. Saliva dripped from her lips, pink from the blood of her wounded gums.
"Oh, I think you'll know them when you see them," Leh said.
Abe, Abby thought. Oh, Abe, I never wanted you to see me like this.
"Not Abe," the demon said. "But close enough."
Abby changed. The world retreated from her for a while, and despite the intense physical pain, this was the one moment when she found true mental peace. She was nowhere for a while, a place without dream or nightmare, with no Memory or reality. Simply a blank.
When she woke up, the world was a very different place.
* * *
"I can smell him," Hellboy said. "An old man. A fading man. He's almost passed into Memory, but we can't let him get away. Come on, Liz, run!" They pelted headlong along corridors, passing through huge rooms that had once held creatures of untold size and power. Maybe we've come up against some of them already, Hellboy thought. Maybe some we have yet to meet. But if we catch Blake soon, instead of letting him escape into this maze of rooms and corridors, we can hope we'll never have to meet them at all.
"Stop!" Liz said. Hellboy paused, glanced back at Liz. She was holding up her finger. "Hear that? Footsteps." Hellboy heard them, racing off way ahead. "
Our echoes?" Liz shook her head. "Only one set. Come on." The deeper they went, the more amazed Hellboy became. "Has Blake really been here for so long?" he said. "What about fuel, food, repairs?"
"There are a hundred ports where he'd get help with no questions asked," Liz said. "We can worry about the past later, after we've sorted out the present."
"Right," Hellboy said. But as ever, it was the future that worried him the most.
So they followed the echoing footsteps, and soon, far too quickly for Hellboy to think it was luck, they saw the shape of a shuffling man ahead of them. He looked back, eyes going wide, and skirted sideways into a narrower gap between walls. Liz followed him first, Hellboy squeezing in after her.
"Nearly there," Liz said. "Blake! Stop!"
"Yeah, like he'll listen," Hellboy said. "Stop, police!" he shouted, then laughed.
"Sarcasm doesn't suit you, HB," she said.
"I'm just trying it on for size." The smile suddenly slipped from his face, and he was glad that Liz was hurrying on ahead, unable to see his expression. That's cold, Hellboy thought. That's so cold, so empty, so wrong. That's not Blake. He's mad, he has magic, but he isn't ... evil. I smell evil. Black as pitch and stinking a hundred times worse.
They emerged into a huge chamber, a place that reeked of old oil and something else, something much more distant and unearthly. "Liz," Hellboy said, "get behind me."
"Don't you start with all that macho — "
"I mean it." The fact that Liz moved quickly behind Hellboy assured him that she had seen the look on his face. "This is so much more than Blake."
At the center of the chamber, suspended from the ceiling, hung a huge vat. Gray stuff had congealed around its rim and dripped down its sides like melted wax. Whatever this thing was, it hadn't been used for a while. It made Hellboy uneasy. He didn't like the smell coming from the thing, or the sight of it, and it felt so out of place in this world. This is where he brought them through, he thought. Then he heard the old man scream, and everything began to move very quickly.
