“You would think there would be a lot more fish now,” Arun explained. “Instead, there are none as far as we can tell. Of course it’s possible that the lake was fished out, and the village had to move on because of it. But these were not foolish people. To move a whole village hundreds of miles across the Sahara would be suicidal.”
“So, then, what happened to the fish?” Anastasia asked.
Arun shrugged. “I wish I knew. As I said, just another mystery we have to solve.”
Anastasia was still looking at the calm surface of the water.
“Just another piece of unexplained phenomena,” she said quietly. “I’m sure Hellboy will be thrilled.”
“He’s been down there a long time,” Arun observed.
“He can take care of himself,” Anastasia explained. “Hellboy can hold his breath an awfully long time.”
“You never did tell me how you two first became acquainted,” Arun pointed out.
“You’re right, I didn’t,” Anastasia replied, then turned her attention back to searching the shoreline, walking away from Arun.
“I didn’t mean to intrude,” he said, but his curiosity was piqued. He couldn’t help but wonder why Anastasia was so sensitive about her association with Hellboy.
“Anastasia, I’m sorry,” he said.
She took several more steps away from him without acknowledging that he had spoken. Finally, she turned around and gave him a hard look.
“That’s okay,” she replied. “I’ve just had to deal with too many bloody morons in this world, and a lot of them because of my relationship with Hellboy.”
They looked at one another. In that moment’s pause, Arun knew what Anastasia was going to say.
“He used to be my boyfriend,” she said, and smiled. “He’s the most loving man I’ve ever known.”
Arun was at first astonished, and then disgusted. He had pined for Anastasia since the day they first met. She was everything he could ever dream of in a woman: brilliant, beautiful, witty, and confident. Now, Arun didn’t dare close his eyes for fear his subconscious might conjure an image of the woman he had secretly longed for in the arms of . . . Christ, he didn’t even know what to call Hellboy!
“He isn’t even human!” Arun finally said.
Anastasia blinked, and he expected her to recoil with the insult. She did not. Rather, she breathed deeply and shook her head very slowly. Her lip curled up with the only visible sign of her anger, and she spoke with severity and finality.
“You are an historian, Professor,” she said. “You are not a physician, or a biologist, or an anthropologist. It is not for you to judge who is and is not human.”
“I’m . . . I’m sorry, Stacie,” he stammered. “I didn’t mean to . . .”
“We’ve known one another a long time, Arun,” Anastasia said grimly. “I hoped a man of your academic stature would be more open-minded. Now I see you’re just another judgmental asshole.”
“Stacie, I . . .”
“Hush now, Arun,” she said. “Before I decide to hate you.”
Arun was torn. He had made a mistake, stepped over a line that he had known existed despite its invisibility. And yet he could feel little remorse. The idea of Anastasia and Hellboy together as lovers was repulsive to him. Not merely because Hellboy was so bizarre, in Arun’s mind as freakish as the Elephant Man or Siamese twins, but because it was Anastasia Bransfield.
A sudden, terrible, and nearly overwhelming urge came over him. He opened his mouth to ask the current nature of Anastasia’s relationship with Hellboy. But she turned and splashed away down the lakeshore toward the spot where Shelby Claremont, their preservation expert, searched for clues.
He was relieved when she had gone. If he had opened his mouth again, he knew their relationship would have been severed forever. Regret overwhelmed him. Arun admired Hellboy and enjoyed his company. But so much mystery surrounded him that it was impossible not to wonder what he truly was. And the idea that Stacie could choose a . . . beast like Hellboy over a normal man, over Arun himself, simply nauseated him.
Distracted, he turned his attention back to the work at hand: the search for the madman who had slain or ordered Lady Catherine and her team to be slain. He had sublimated his feelings for Anastasia as best he could for years. He would simply have to add his reaction to this new knowledge to the long list of emotions and urges he did not dare reveal publicly. Particularly to the primary object of those emotions.
He continued along the shore. Sunlight glinted off something in his peripheral vision. Arun looked down at the sand, scanning it for something that might have reflected the sun. He found nothing, shrugged, and was about to move on, when he saw that glimmer again. A tiny sparkle of sunlight. Right at his feet, now. Jutting from the sand was the edge of some kind of golden disc.
Arun knelt, excited by this discovery. It could have been anything, the pocket watch of some archaeologist, he thought. But somehow he knew it wasn’t. Somehow he knew it was important. He had the inescapable feeling that it was meant exclusively for him. As if it were his own pocket watch, or some other treasure that had always belonged to him.
The professor reached out with his right hand, touched his fingertips to the metal, and a jolt ran up his arm. The air expelled from his lungs with a gasp and he nearly fell on his face in the sand.
“Arun?” Anastasia called from behind him. “Are you all right?”
He wanted to respond. Desperately wanted to tell her that no, he was not all right. That he’d been stricken by some kind of seizure, or electrocuted, if that’s what it was. But he didn’t say anything of the sort. For the moment he thought of Anastasia; all of his feelings for her and about her relationship with Hellboy boiled up within him again.
His fingers seemed to jitter where they made contact with the metal disc. And then all of those thoughts and feelings inside him roiled like acid in his stomach, bilious and sickening.
Remorse became disgust. Guilt became anger. Affection became a punishing lust. He was no longer capable of thinking about Anastasia Bransfield as his friend. The only term that came to mind along with her image was “slut.” Filthy slut.
He tried to push the words away from his mind, but he could not ignore the pulse of those three syllables.
Filthy slut.
Nearly in tears, Arun could not understand the vehemence of his reaction. No matter how often he had fantasized about Anastasia, he had never truly believed he would have her. Particularly not in the disgusting ways he now imagined.
And yet now it occurred to him that for a woman who would lie with a creature more animal than man, many of his darkest new fantasies might be entirely possible. That such things could be real had never occurred to him. And the very idea drove Arun Lahiri into a moral abyss.
Filthy slut!
He could barely control the urge to turn, to chase Anastasia down and savage her with pain and pleasure. A grin spread across his face.
“Filthy slut,” he whispered to himself through that painful smile.
Something happened then. Hearing his own words, Arun recoiled. Whatever moral regulator existed within him to stem the tide of such violent, perverse, irrational thoughts, finally and belatedly intervened.
He drowned in guilt, and it saved his sanity. He bit his lip, drawing blood, to keep himself from weeping openly.
“Arun?” he heard Anastasia call again behind him. “Arun, what’s the matter?”
There was splashing, as she came toward him. Part of him panicked at the idea that she might see and desire the object buried just beside his right knee, and he yanked it free of the sand. It came away with hesitation. An engraved bronze medallion on a long chain.
He was entranced by it.
Filthy slut! The words came into his head again, but now it almost seemed as if somebody else had said them. Arun glanced around quickly, but there was only himself and Anastasia approaching him from behind, splashing, coming nearer.
Coming nearer and he could d
o whatever he wanted to the filthy slut!
He shook his head, and bit into his lip again, but not to keep from crying this time. Arun’s mind cleared for a moment, and he stared at the medallion again. It was etched with unfamiliar symbols and the image of a jackal, infamous scavenger of Egyptian history and mythology.
Without another thought, he slipped the medallion in his pocket. He ought to have presented it to Anastasia immediately. It was, after all, the first significant artifact they had found in their investigation. But the urge to pocket it was uncontrollable.
It felt warm in his pocket, with only light cotton separating the medallion from his flesh. Arun smiled again, but felt more in control than he had moments before. Stronger.
“Arun?” Anastasia said softly, her hand on his shoulder sending a shock through his entire body. “What happened? Are you all right?”
He stood, turned to face her. The words, the terrible, hateful words, lingered in the back of his mind. But now he felt as though he controlled them as well. They were under his power now.
Arun studied Anastasia’s face. She had taken off her glasses and her features were creased with concern. He felt the heat of the sun on his neck, a minor distraction, and he wished it away. He would not allow his neck to burn. A breeze, cool and innocent, rolled off the lake. He smiled.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Just stumbled on something, maybe my own feet. I’ve always been a bloody oaf, Stacie. You know that.”
Anastasia frowned, and tilted her head as she looked at him quizzically.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.
“I’m perfect,” he answered. “And I’m sorry for what I said. I never meant to offend you. We’ve known one another too long for that.”
Anastasia smiled warmly. “That’s okay. I know it seems odd. Odd for anyone to imagine that Hellboy is as human as you or I, no matter what he looks like.”
“Not at all,” Arun replied, still smiling that confident smile. “He’s warm and kind and fabulously sincere. I’ve dealt with prejudice in my own life. Now I’ve got to learn not to allow appearance to come before character in my own judgment of others.”
“Still friends, then?” Anastasia asked.
“Never more so,” Arun answered.
“I’m glad,” she said, and gripped his shoulder with her hand, affirming her words. “It’s crazy enough out here without conflict between us. We’ve got to work together or this thing is going to drag us down.”
Anastasia turned to splash back toward Shelby Claremont. The medallion pulsed warmly in Arun’s pocket. Completely in control of his facilities, he watched Anastasia move away, watched the way her flesh moved beneath her clothes.
A grin split his face and he became aroused.
“Filthy slut,” he whispered.
It was a hassle to carry the sword underwater. Hellboy slashed it back and forth several times, and was surprised at how slow and unwieldy it seemed. Even more so than an underwater hand-to-hand confrontation would have been, he believed. Still, he held on to it as he made his descent. No way to tell how many other members of the lost army might be lurking below.
When he had found what he believed to be the place where he was attacked, Hellboy swam south. He was certain he had seen some dark shapes in that direction. Now, he believed he could hear some kind of noise underwater. A high-pitched sound, almost like whale song.
Sword in his left hand, destruction in his right, he moved forward swiftly. A little more than a minute after he had touched bottom, he saw the lake begin to slope up toward the shore.
Then he saw the caves. A warren of black depressions in the ground, just like those he had seen pitting the hillside which ringed the oasis. Once more, he was intrigued. These must have been the dark shapes he had seen. It was only logical to think that the dead soldiers might have come from there. Though it didn’t seem likely the archaeological team had been transported that way. They would have drowned long before reaching whatever their destination was.
On the other hand, if the caves under and above the water were the same complex, that was an entirely different story. It was possible, even likely, that Lady Catherine and the others were taken through the hillside, and the soldiers, already dead, traveled beneath the lake. After all, he thought, they had yet to discover any other unexplored territory in that godforsaken desert.
Hellboy surfaced quickly to draw another, deeper breath. Then he dove again, ready to explore. Sword in front of him, he ventured several steps into the darkness of the cave. The squealing he had heard before was even louder, thrumming in the water that pressed in on his eardrums.
As he moved further into the cave, his eyes began to adjust to the darkness. After a moment, he realized that not all the light within the cave was refracted from the surface of the lake. A strange luminescence glowed dimly much deeper in the cave.
His right hoof struck something solid, and Hellboy glanced down. He blinked, attempting to see the object more clearly. It seemed to be a tablet of some kind, perhaps exactly the kind of artifact Lady Catherine’s archaeological expedition was meant to discover. It was about four inches wide, and perhaps three inches poked out of the sand, but he had no way of telling how long it might be. There was some kind of etching on the tablet, miraculously not worn away by the water.
Driven by curiosity, Hellboy momentarily forgot his search and the light ahead, and bent down to get a better look at the tablet. The noise in the water seemed to fade as he crouched and brushed sand away from its base, where it was embedded in the floor of the cave. Aware that he had perhaps three minutes before he must again surface, he traced the engraved lines with a finger.
Some kind of sea monster was depicted on the stone. Its tentacles whipped in a frenzy above water, lashed out at small human figures scurrying on the shore. Around and beneath the monstrous scene were glyphs and symbols which Hellboy assumed were some ancient language.
He brushed away more sand, then looked up in alarm. It might have been his imagination, but he thought that the eerie sound from deep in the cave had become louder. And either his eyes had adjusted even further, or the weird glow from the cave had grown brighter.
Still, no matter how strange things got, he needed to know what that tablet was. Hellboy brushed more sand away from the base of the tablet. It was buried quite deep. With several more lines of ancient writing, he still could not decipher any of it.
Perhaps Arun or Anastasia would be able to read it, he thought. It wasn’t as if he had put the necessary time into studying languages of the ancient world. He knew what Professor Bruttenholm would say. “Train the mind as well as the body, my boy.” Hellboy knew the professor was right, but that didn’t help him now.
Hellboy put down the sword and dug his fingers into the sand around the tablet. Beneath the loose granules was hard-packed sand and earth. The tablet went down into the ground. He said a silent prayer that he wouldn’t break it — of course with his luck, he could hardly avoid it — and pulled with all his strength.
Nothing.
He had perhaps a minute more before he would have to fill his lungs, with air or lake water, whichever was available. Already his lungs burned and his pulse beat loud in his ears.
Driving his hooves into the ground on either side of the tablet, he gripped it as tightly as he was able. He was careful not to clamp the fingers of his stone right hand too tightly, lest he crush the tablet to powder in his grip.
Then he pulled. At first he didn’t think anything was going to happen. Then the tablet gave slightly, and he was encouraged. He barely noticed the growing glow in the deep cave, or the heightening pitch of the wailing he could still hear under water.
Suddenly, the tablet came loose in his hands. Only eight or nine inches long, he was amazed it had been such a struggle to uproot.
Yes! he thought.
The green phosphorescence in the cave flashed like lightning up toward him, striking the tablet and playing harmlessly over its surface. Th
e noise that had been buzzing in his ears through the water abruptly ceased.
The ground began to shake.
What the hell is . . . ? he thought. And then he realized he had made a terrible mistake.
Hellboy knelt and tried to jam the tablet’s pointed end back into the sandy floor of the cave. It couldn’t be done. The rumbling inside the cave increased and the light grew even brighter. He used his right hand to claw a hole in the ground, but even when he stabbed the tablet into it, nothing changed.
The glaring green light was blocked for a moment. In the shadows thrown by the luminescence, long protrusions whipped back and forth like Medusa’s hair. And those were only the shadows. He didn’t want to see the real thing.
But it was coming. The water ahead in the tunnel churned, and then the green light was extinguished entirely.
Time to go, he thought.
With the tablet under his left arm like a football, Hellboy pushed off the ground with a mighty kick, propelling himself out of the cave. With his huge right hand, he pulled for the surface.
He was running out of breath, and running out of time.
Behind and beneath him, half a dozen caves in the gentle slope of the lake bottom erupted with dozens of massive red tentacles, raw and trailing gore as if newborn from a timeless womb.
Hellboy glanced back once, cursed himself and the tablet he had unwisely removed.
Crap! he thought.
Then the first of the tentacles twined around his waist. The thing could easily have dragged him down and drowned him then. But so ecstatic was the creature from its newfound freedom that it kept coming. The side of the lake erupted as the creature bulled its way out of the earth.
It continued to rise. Wrapped in its tentacles, Hellboy burst into the open air and gasped for breath. He was barely able to suck in a lungful before the creature began to squeeze. It continued upwards, holding him dozens of feet above the ground.
He tore at the thing with his stone right hand, and kept the tablet from being crushed with his left. He wished for the sword he had dropped below, but wasn’t sure what good it would have done.
The Lost Army Page 9
