The Bones of Giants

by Christopher Golden

  “If I was gonna bury the corpse of a giant frost monster, this is where I’d do it,” Hellboy said archly as he gazed out the window.

  “It does seem strange that they would have buried him here,” Abe said. “Not the location. I mean, here.”

  Pernilla kept her hands on the wheel, her eyes on the road. “Midgard. The human realm.”

  Abe nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Maybe not so strange,” Hellboy mused. Flashes of memory, savage bits of history, ricocheted around inside his head, and none of them were his own. “This was their dumping ground. Our world. Landfill of the gods. And who knows what might have spilled over into this place when the crap hit the fan for them? The Nidavellim and the Svartalves… who knows what else is still around?”

  The interior of the car was silent again after that. They drove along for several minutes and then Pernilla began to slow.

  “What’s wrong?” Abe asked.

  “Nothing. I am just not sure where to go from here. There are several places where we are more likely to find deer than others, but how do we know where to look? We could wander until nightfall and only have begun to search.”

  Abe sat forward and peered around the seat at Hellboy. “Anything?”

  Feeling foolish and self-conscious, Hellboy closed his eyes and tried to decide if he felt any sort of tug as he had above the Arctic circle, when some unknown force had led him to the cave where the Tankard of Thrym had been kept. Mjollnir seemed to tremble in his grasp, and it felt warm, even warmer than usual. But as to direction, there was none.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Sorry. I don’t know what to—”

  He opened his eyes, and he saw the ravens. They circled in the air off to the southwest, quite a ways away.

  Hellboy pointed. “That way.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No.”

  Pernilla took the next right, and they continued along an ever narrowing road until it began to loop back toward the east. A small path led into the wood from there, but a security chain was hung across the entrance. Hellboy assumed it was a passage meant for park rangers, or whatever the equivalent was in Sweden, but he did not spend very much time thinking about it. He climbed out of the car and snapped the chain off one of the posts with a single tug. Pernilla drove into the trees over a rutted, unpaved little road, and when the car was out of sight of the street, she pulled over and turned off the engine.

  With Abe’s help, Hellboy was able to get the chain strung again. It wouldn’t hold up to inspection, but it was not going to draw attention, either.

  As they began to walk down the path, which became more overgrown with every step, Hellboy heard a cawing above and glanced up. The ravens were impossibly large and sat opposite one another on thick tree limbs on either side of the path. For a long moment Hellboy stared at them, waiting to see if they would offer any other guidance. They did not.

  “What?” Abe asked, coming up beside him.

  Hellboy shook his head. “Nothing.” A rustle of leaves and heavy wings came from above and he did not need to look up to know they had gone.

  “You realize you are completely freaking me out,” Abe told him.

  “Sorry,” Hellboy replied, and then he set off along the path again with Pernilla and Abe in tow.

  The woods were dense and silent save for the rustle of the breeze in the leaves and the occasional sound of something moving in among the trees. Mjollnir still trembled in his hand, although the intensity of its quavering seemed to wax and wane.

  The path ended and they kept walking, and per­haps an hour after parking the car, Hellboy came to realize that the modulation in the humming sort of charge in Mjollnir might not be simple chance. He tested that theory by striking off several times from a central location and noting the subtle difference in the hammer’s quiver. Once before he had thought of it as a sort of tuning fork. Now that impression came to him again. He just had to find the right frequency.

  “What are we doing?” Abe asked. “This way,” Hellboy told him, ignoring the question.

  Behind him, as he struck off into the woods, he could hear Abe and Pernilla talking. They were hungry and Pernilla in particular was quite tired. Hellboy did not blame them, but it had long since become early evening and in a few hours it would be dark. He intended to find what they were looking for before nightfall.

  The forest floor was rutted and veined with thick roots and stones in some places. In others it was carpeted with a light grass that presented a tempting invitation to rest. Hellboy kept on. There was no further sign of the ravens and no further appearance by Ratatosk, but the thrum that passed through the hammer had grown so strong that his hand shook.

  Twenty minutes after they set off in pursuit of his frequency theory, a deer crashed through the woods off to their left, running in the opposite direction. With the trees blocking much of their view, Hellboy could only get the vaguest impression of the thing’s size, but he thought it had been rather large. They all paused and stared after it.

  “You do realize that was the first deer we’ve seen in here?” Abe ventured. Before either Hellboy or Pernilla could respond, two more of them bounded through the forest off to their right. One of them paused a moment. In the shade from the canopy of branches above, it looked almost unreal, a part of the forest. Its wide black eyes studied them. Then, as suddenly as it had stopped, it ran on again.

  “What are they running away from?” Pernilla asked.

  Hellboy raised his left hand. “Wait. Listen.”

  A low hum seemed to build and roll toward them across the forest floor like slow, rhythmic thunder. It lifted and fell, some­times harsh and others sweet and high. Slowly, quietly, Hellboy started forward again. After several more minutes of winding their way amongst the trees, his suspicion was confirmed.

  It was chanting.

  Mjollnir seemed now to pulse in time with its rhythm.

  Though the night could not possibly have fallen, it seemed to grow darker there in the woods of the Djurgarden. The branches above threw the forest into darkness, save for slashes of sunlight that seemed only to make the landscape more unnervingly surreal.

  Slowly, as quietly as they could, Hellboy, Abe, and Pernilla moved forward. Hellboy kept low, as most of the trees were not thick enough to hide him. As he crouched by a broad oak trunk, Abe tapped him on the shoulder and pointed upward.

  The tree he squatted by had no leaves on its branches. It was dead. Hellboy craned his neck back to see that most of the trees ahead were also dead, their bark gray and split, little more than wooden skeletons.

  Carefully they moved closer, sliding from tree to tree. Pernilla hung back, more cautious than the guys, afraid to give them away, though she was probably the stealthiest among them.

  Hellboy froze, then, Abe only a few feet away, standing behind another tree. There was a small clearing ahead, not very large at all, but several dozen Svartalves were gathered there, kneeling upon the ground. Within a ring of stones a fire burned, tendrils of flame licking the air. The sky seemed to darken even further, and Hellboy wondered if that was magic or if the weather had changed, if there was a storm coming in.

  With a whisper of motion, Pernilla crouched down behind Hellboy and tried to look past him at the chanting Svartalves. At the opposite end of the clearing, beneath the bare branches of a dead oak, Edmund Aickman stood with the Tankard of Thrym at his feet and a dagger in his hand. The old man seemed more withered than before, as though there was little more to him now than bones and shriveled skin, wisps of hair on his head. And yet there was nothing frail about him. His presence was somehow imposing and regal, and he stood calm and grave as he drew the blade across his palm, and his blood ran off his skin and splashed the ground. Most of it was caught by the tankard.

  Aickman raised it and tipped it back, drinking his own blood. Behind Hellboy, Pernilla hissed air into her lungs but said nothing. He thought she might have whimpered. Hellboy turned to gaze at her, raised his left hand, and lif
ted her chin. Pernilla’s eyes were rimmed with red and tears streamed down her face. Her black hair hung down, framing her misery.

  Damn it. We shouldn’t have brought her, he thought. He had known it, of course, but how could they not have? They needed her knowledge of the area and her expertise as a folklorist. And, if he were truthful with himself, Hellboy had also hoped that she could somehow get through to her father. He still hoped it. Despite the guilt he felt, he cupped her chin. “We need you,” he whispered. “You and Abe are going to have to get to your father. If he’s rational, fine. If not, he’ll have to be restrained while we get him out of here, figure out if he’s under Thrym’s influence, and, if he is, how to help him. While you two are getting to him, I’m going to keep the Svartalves away from you.”

  Pernilla nodded slowly and glanced over at Abe. He gave her a grim thumbs up, careful not to make any noise.

  Out in the clearing, the chanting halted abruptly. Hellboy glanced quickly around, afraid they had been heard, but the Svartalves were still focused on the task at hand. Each of them laid their swords across their oily hands and flayed open their flesh. Blood the color of rust dripped and ran and spattered to the ground, and the soil soaked it up greedily. The chanting started again.

  “All right,” Hellboy said quickly, dropping his voice even lower, to a ghost of a whisper. “Let’s hurry before they finish whatever malarkey they’re trying to pull now.”

  He stood up, unmindful now of being seen. His heart thundered in his chest as the anticipation of the battle washed over him. He raised Mjollnir and started around the tree and across the clearing.

  With a lurch, the ground began to shake, a tremor reverberating through the earth beneath them. Hellboy staggered backward, his hooves punching dirt. Abe and Pernilla held onto one another.

  An enormous crevasse opened in the center of the clearing. The Svartalves scrabbled away from the crack in the earth, some of them stumbling, thrown off their feet by the tremor. More cracks appeared, smaller, beneath the dead trees.

  Hellboy grabbed hold of a tree as the ground bucked and shifted under him. Not far from where he stood, dirt flew and was scattered across the ground by some sort of eruption.

  A giant, skeletal hand, little more than intricate bone structure and dry, flaking strips of flesh, thrust from the earth and grasped at the sky.

  Chapter Nine

  The ground bucked and heaved, and Hellboy listed across the clearing as though it were the deck of a ship. His hooves punched loosened dirt and his momentum became too much for him, the extra weight of the enormous war hammer in his right hand making it impossible for him to regain his balance. The forest floor convulsed, rose as though a hill were being born from the womb of the earth, and a skeletal knee shot up through the dirt. Hellboy fell and began to roll down this newly formed hill, even as the rest of that leg broke free.

  He tumbled end over end and slammed into a monstrous, skeletal arm that had thrust from the earth. It stank of fresh-turned graves and gardens left to rot.

  But along its length were also patches of icy frost, places where strips of flesh were still attached.

  Across the clearing, a second hand erupted from the ground, and the entire forest seemed to rumble with the strain of the giant cadaver attempting to wrest itself from the clutches of its ancient grave.

  In Hellboy’s grip, Mjollnir burned enough to sear even that stone-like right hand. Against his chest, the serpent pendant was cold enough to sting his flesh. Seconds, he thought. We were too late by seconds. Now the question was, what was he going to be able to do about it?

  He knelt, left hand against the ground to steady himself, and slowly rose. The ground still rumbled but he managed to stay upright. Fifteen feet away, the skull of the giant had begun to emerge from the soil. Sunlight slashed through the canopy of trees above and gleamed off smooth bone. Hellboy raised Mjollnir. As one, the Svartalves uttered an ear-piercing shriek of rage and then they began to come for him. Like spiders they scrambled across the uncertain ground, swords clutched carefully in their fists. Not spiders, though. Weasels. Their oily skin and dark clothing only lent to the illusion as they rushed at him. Suddenly there seemed to be more of them than he had noticed before, and he wondered if they had been lurking in the trees or out beyond the clearing. Twenty, perhaps thirty of the Svartalves bounded toward him.

  With a cry of battle in an ancient tongue he did not even understand, he swung Mjollnir at the nearest of them. The hammer shattered its skull and it fell. Sword and corpse alike were swallowed up by the undulating ground.

  Hellboy staggered back as a fissure opened in the earth. His tail snapped out and crippled a Svartalf. With his left hand he grappled for the gun in its holster at his side. Talons slashed at his fingers, scrabbled at his waist, and the gun was torn out of his grasp. He spun, kicked a hoof up to cave in the chest of a Svartalf, and then brought the hammer around in an arc that tore two of them apart in a spatter of inky mist.

  In his mind he ticked through an inventory of the various things he had in the pouches on his belt. Talismans and wards, holy water, religious icons, several shuriken, and a couple of incendiary grenades. He had no idea if any of the magical artifacts would help, but the incendiary grenades would come in damned handy. One of the weasels leaped upon his back and another hung onto his right arm, trying to hold Mjollnir back. They threw themselves at his legs.

  Searing hot in his hand, Mjollnir fell and the Svartalves were like nothing more than brittle, hollow shells. That black mist poured from them and they dissipated, leaving no corpses behind. Hellboy reached for the pouch at his left hip, inside of which were the two incendiary grenades he’d pocketed before this mission began. Even as he did, he glanced around, hoping to spot his gun in the midst of the tremors and the rush of Svartalves.

  Swords whickered through the air. They cut his hand and he pulled it back from the pouch. A blade slashed his lower back and he arched it. A roar of fury swept through him and he tore the Svartalf from his back and tossed it at several others. One of them hacked at it with his sword, out of reflex.

  Hellboy laughed loudly, triumphantly, a cruel bellow. It embarrassed him, for he had no idea where the laugh had come from. Then a wave of them swept upon him again. He was slashed and cut and he raised Mjollnir, but there were too many. The earth buckled and shifted violently under him, and again he lost his balance. He went down hard and they were upon him. A blade thrust into his side and he growled and arched his back, threw off several of the weasels.

  A gunshot cut through the loud groaning of the shifting earth. Abe, Hellboy thought. He wanted to look around, to check on his friend and the Aickman woman. But another of the weasels lashed itself to his face and began to claw him.

  “Hellboy!” shouted a gravelly voice.

  It wasn’t Abe. Hellboy tore the weasel off his face and rose to his feet, hammer swinging. He licked his thin lips and tasted his own blood from the cuts on his forehead and cheeks and glanced around. Perhaps three feet away, Eitri stood with a dagger in each hand. As Hellboy caught sight of him, the Nidavellim with the patch of stubble on his chin stabbed a Svartalf from behind even as he lashed out and cut the throat of another.

  An unearthly howl split the air and suddenly Brokk was leaping out from the trees beyond the clearing, a hammer raised in both hands. His war hammer came down and crushed one of the weasels. A cold wind kicked up and loose dirt was swept into the air, blew into their eyes. Hellboy wiped at his face, swung the hammer again, and shrugged off the creatures.

  Brokk and Eitri weren’t alone. With an ululating war cry, five other Nidavellim charged into the clearing with swords, double-sided axes, even spears. Hellboy felt a surge of pride within him, a siren song of glory that raced through him like adrenaline.

  “Destroy them!” he roared in the old tongue.

  As the weapons fell and the Nidavellim and Svartalves clashed, he frowned. The ground had ceased its motion. For a moment he was almost thrown off balance by the
sudden stillness of the earth. He staggered two steps as the dwarves and Svartalves battled around him, and then he looked across the clearing.

  Thrym’s left arm and right hand were free. The skeletal remains of the frost giant’s legs were partially visible, jutting up from the earth with volcanic newness. They were completely still.

  The giant’s skull was free of the ground. Strands of hair and beard still were tethered to it, but otherwise it was all bone and enormous picket-fence teeth, some of them yellow and pitted. Loose earth spilled across that bony chin. In the hollow shadows of its eye sockets, twin lights burned a sickly yellow that spoke of dark tunnels and rotting corpses and madness.

  As Hellboy stared at that horrible face, ice began to form on the skull, a slick coating that leaked from those eyes and spread like mercury across bone and fang.

  And it hissed. “Thunderer.” Its voice was like the out-rush of fetid air upon the opening of some ancient crypt.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Hellboy replied. One of the weasels slashed its sword at his chest, and he split it in two with the war hammer, then stared at the tainted yellow eyes of the giant again. “You want some?”

  With a roar that was more a whisper, a throaty, gargled rasp, the bones of the frost giant again bucked from beneath the earth. There were loud cracks and pops and Thrym planted his huge, skeletal fingers, each nearly the length of one of Hellboy’s arms, into the ground. Then the corpse of the frost king hauled himself up out of the earth with a single thrust.

  The darkling creatures that warred and slashed and drew blood atop his grave cried out and tumbled off and away from the clearing as he rose, tall as the trees. The soil began to slide back into the grave, and some of them were drawn down, under the earth, turned with the maggots that had feasted on the giant for millennia. Hellboy was nearly drawn down as well, but he leaped up and grabbed the limbs of one of the dead trees that had stood sparse and alone in that clearing.