The Bones of Giants

by Christopher Golden

  The thing stood boldly in front of them and lifted its chin with an arrogant swagger that conjured images of the proud warrior it might have been in life. Klar shook those images from his head. It was a monster, a dead thing.

  “There is only one God,” he whispered. “You are just a soldier. And your time was long ago.”

  Klar lifted the VP70 and held it in both hands. With a twitch of his finger upon the trigger, he fired six rounds. The thing staggered backward as bullets chipped the dense bone of its skull. One punched right through an empty eye socket and sent shards flying as it burst out the back of its head. Another cracked off teeth as it disappeared into its maw.

  More glass shattered as it stumbled back into the autopsy room. His men followed suit, now that the moment of their initial terror had subsided, and drew their weapons. The small room echoed with gunshots, too loud and close, slamming pressure against his eardrums in that enclosed space.

  The dead thing’s skull and ribcage were obliterated under the hail of bullets. Someone fired at its legs and the bones cracked. It went down and they kept firing until nothing was left of its head but pale shards that might have been the remains of an antique china tea set.

  It twitched once and went still.

  The gunfire ceased, but its echoes still ricocheted about the room, pounding his ears. Klar simply stood there, the Heckler and Koch too hot in his grip, and stared at what was left of the body they had found on the banks of that river far to the north, beneath the striking lightning. Where had it come from, this corpse? Why now? Though he believed in one God, he could not help but think that the dead thing’s appearance at that time had not been mere happenstance. And now they had destroyed it. If they had not, it might have killed them.

  But if his intuition was correct, and it had returned to life with some purpose, what now? Then such thoughts were driven from his mind, but another, more overpowering. The Prime Minister is not going to be happy.

  If these remains truly belonged to another race, even to some ancient tribe that split off from humanity millennia past, it was one of the most important scientific finds in history. But the bones dated only a century old. Klar nodded as the structure of his report to the PM began to form in his mind. Despite what it would mean for theology and anthropology, this thing could not be what appearances suggested. Tests had proven it could not.

  Klar smiled. If it was not the genuine article, its destruction would not cost him his job. Not as long as he managed to get the hammer back from Hellboy.

  On the other hand, given that he did not know what tests upon the hammer would reveal, in some ways it might be better if Hellboy never returned the hammer. Klar would have to see what could be arranged.

  “Clean it up,” he ordered his men. He holstered his weapon and wiped a hand across his forehead. Then he gestured toward the two pathologists who lay on the floor. Milles had died instantly, but Tegner was dead as well, probably of shock. “Cover them up while I try to explain what happened here. Let me see. Dr. Milles was in league with black marketers, tomb raiders who wanted to steal this archaeological discovery. He attacked Dr. Tegler, who fought back, broke Milles’s neck. In the process, the remains were destroyed.”

  Several of the men turned to glance at him as though he were out of his mind. Klar put his hands on his hips.

  “I suppose you’ve got a better idea?”

  None of them said a word. Klar nodded, still working the details over in his head. After a moment, he went back out into the foyer. The door to the corridor was ajar and he went to close it. The last thing he needed was unwanted witnesses, and given the noise they had made, people were sure to arrive soon to investigate.

  He pushed the door. It stopped abruptly several inches before it could close.

  Klar frowned and hauled it open. Just outside the door stood a tall, red-haired woman clad in armor and thick furs. Though he could see her dark eyes, the rest of her face seemed somehow out of focus to him.

  “I have come to claim the shell,” she declared in a voice like the whistle of the winter wind.

  Oddly enough, Klar did not really even notice the wooden spear until its metal tip punched through his chest.

  Chapter Eleven

  On the day of Edmund Aickman’s funeral, Hellboy and Abe paid their respects before the ceremony, when nobody else was around. At the cemetery they waited in the limousine, just one in a long line of vehicles parked in a snaking line that stretched up through the graveyard. The windows were tinted, but Hellboy had his rolled down a few inches, and the sky didn’t look much different with or without the tint. It was not the black of approaching thunderstorms, but the persistent, stubborn, steel gray that refused to break for sunshine, but neither would it deliver rain. A shroud.

  That morning, the day of Edmund Aickman’s funeral, the sky was a death shroud.

  Hellboy sat in the back of the limousine, taking up most of the rear seat, with Abe squeezed in beside him. Opposite them were Karin Ogilvie from the American embassy and Erik Wilton, who worked in some capacity for the Prime Minister of Sweden, though he mentioned the king frequently, as if that would hold more sway.

  Wilton was on the cellular phone with Dr. Manning back at BPRD headquarters in the States. Miss Ogilvie watched him, rapt with attention. Hellboy fidgeted restlessly, his tail turned uncomfortably against the leather seats. Sometimes when he moved, it squeaked against the upholstery. For his part, Abe only gazed out the window across the well-kept lawn of the cemetery, to the gathering of black-garbed mourners who seemed somehow less than three-dimensional against that gray sky.

  Abe wanted to be with Pernilla, that much was clear. Hellboy didn’t think there was anything romantic going on between the two of them, though anyone who knew him knew he wasn’t the most perceptive guy in the world when it came to that kind of thing. But he figured that wasn’t it. It was just that Abe and Pernilla had been through a lot together in a very short time, shared some forced intimacy, and become friends. Now here she was burying her father, and she was surrounded by a crowd of people who had known her most of her life, who most assuredly loved her deeply, but who could never understand what she was going through.

  Ancient myths come to life. Ragnarok. The hammer of the gods. How could she have a conversation with her great aunt or her third cousin about the bones of giants? The answer was, clearly, that she couldn’t.

  But Abe sat in the back of the limousine with Hellboy. After all, he and Abe weren’t going to be any easier to explain to these people. Chances were none of them had ever met a paranormal investigator from America before.

  So they sat in the back of the limousine and waited for the graveside service to be over.

  Not the grief, though. That was going to go for a very long time.

  Hellboy had never known his father, but Trevor Bruttenholm had been the man who had adopted him, had raised and taught him. When Trevor had died, part of Hellboy had been interred along with him, an innocence he would never be able to retrieve. It was ironic, in a way, that he should think so much now about his adoptive father, for it had been Trevor who had first given him an introduction to Aickman. And the last time Hellboy had seen Pernilla’s father—before this past week of course—had been at Bruttenholm’s funeral. Despite the greed and pettiness, Hellboy felt himself mourning Aickman’s death. Every time someone who had known Trevor Bruttenholm died, a little bit more of the man was erased from the world.

  Hellboy frowned and glanced out the window, across the sea of gravestones, to where Pernilla stood by the priest on the lawn. Selfish, he thought. Thinking about Professor Bruttenholm. She’s the one who just lost her father.

  Erik Wilton flipped the cell phone shut and cleared his throat as he glanced over at them. Abe did not seem to notice, fixated as he was on the events outside the limousine. Or maybe he was ignoring the man on purpose. Hellboy thought that was entirely possible.

  “What did he say?” Hellboy asked.

  Wilton glanced at Ogilvie,
and it was obvious they had known one another for a long time. The American woman sighed and offered a half smile, but Wilton did not seem pleased. He sat forward, a bit too far, uncomfortably close, and he stared down at Mjollnir where Hellboy had the war hammer on his lap.

  “Dr. Manning has spoken to the Prime Minister directly, and the Prime Minister has heard from your Secretary of State, as well as a representative from Great Britain,” Wilton began. His mouth twisted up as though he had swallowed something distasteful to him. “Apparently, in spite of how badly you’ve bungled this situation, in spite of the loss of the Skellesvall remains and the murders of Fredrik Klar and his team, not to mention the death of Professors Aickman and Aronsson, we are to continue to offer you whatever cooperation you require.”

  Hellboy did not smile. He did not have the heart to be amused by the man’s discomfort today. He had not liked Klar at all, but Wilton seemed an all right sort. Put into the same situation, he doubted he would be handling it with any more grace than the Swede.

  On the other hand, his ire rose at the insult. Wilton might not have meant to be offensive, but he was. Another time Hellboy might have brushed it off. But not now.

  “Bungled?” he asked.

  At the tone in his voice, Abe twitched and glanced over, his attention torn from the funeral proceedings for the first time.

  The Ogilvie woman sat up a bit straighten “Hellboy, I’m sure Erik didn’t mean—”

  Hellboy narrowed his eyes so that his brows knitted together. He lifted his chin as though he expected Wilton to try to hit him in a second. The urge for that kind of posturing came out of nowhere, but he could not deny it.

  “You’ve got a cadaver between thirty-five and forty feet high wandering across your country right now, Mr. Wilton,” Hellboy said. “It’s been three days since Thrym tore himself outta the ground, and your people haven’t been able to find a single trace of him beyond the city limits. After that first night, when he left Stockholm, nobody’s seen a thing.”

  Wilton sniffed and crossed his legs. His wool pants hissed across the seat of the limo. “It doesn’t appear you and your friend are faring any better.”

  Hellboy lifted Mjollnir slightly—only so that he could comfortably lean forward—but Wilton’s eyes went wide and he flinched. Now Hellboy did smile, a hard look despite the humor in it.

  “We’ve been waiting for Miss Aickman to bury her father, Wilton. Now that’s done. We know what direction our target went, but nobody’s seen it since, so the delay hasn’t cost us anything. And it has gained us the expertise of a folklorist whose knowledge may be invaluable to our efforts. Our supervisor is aware that we’ve put off searching for Thrym until we can be assured of Miss Aickman’s help. They’re relying on us, and you can too. But unless and until you can do our jobs better than we can, why don’t you keep quiet and out of the way?”

  Wilton turned quickly to Miss Ogilvie, as though he expected her to come to his defense. The woman did not even glance at him.

  “So you expect to leave soon?” the American woman asked.

  “Soon enough,” Hellboy replied. “Tomorrow morning at the latest.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand. Do you already know where this creature has gone?”

  “No. But we will. Call it intuition.”

  Abe had turned to look back out the tinted window again, so that when he spoke, his soft, almost foreign-sounding voice and clipped words seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere in the vehicle at once.

  “There’s a village on the Ume River that has completely disappeared. Only a little over a hundred people. But all that’s left now are bones and ghosts.”

  “Sort of a poetic way to talk about a massacre, don’t you think?” Miss Ogilvie asked.

  “He’s not being poetic,” Hellboy replied. “The ghosts are there. You’re welcome to go up and try to talk to them. Most of them are insane, though. Minds just snapped.”

  For a long moment Wilton stared at Abe, perhaps thinking he would face them. He did not. At length, the broad-shouldered Swede turned to Hellboy instead. “How do you know this?”

  Hellboy turned away from him. In the cemetery, mourners had begun to drift en masse from Edmund Aickman’s grave. The old folklorist had been laid to rest beside Pernilla’s mother, and it seemed sort of a prosaic end for a man who sought to peer into the arcane heart of the world, no matter the cost.

  “Did you bother to check what BPRD stands for, Mr. Wilton?” Hellboy asked. “We’re the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. It’s our job to know crap like that.”

  Late the following morning, Hellboy, Abe, and Pernilla found themselves pressed uncomfortably close together in the cabin of a helicopter, searching the landscape below for a village of ghosts. All of them wore headsets that eased communication and cut down on the thudding noise of the helicopter’s rotors. Modern helicopters were generally not as loud as they had once been, but this machine was the exception. Even with the headset covering his ears, Hellboy had a headache from hours of being pummelled by the rhythmic noise of the thing.

  The BPRD had arranged for the Swedish government to continue to offer them support wherever possible. Mr. Wilton had instructions from his Prime Minister to do just that. But Wilton was a sneaky little twit, and so when Hellboy had asked for helicopter transport, instead of sending military personnel, the guy had actually arranged for a charter.

  Asshole.

  The pilot, Gustaf, had been mercifully silent for nearly the entire trip, and Hellboy had wondered more than once if it was because the guy didn’t speak English, or because he was deaf from spending so much time in the chopper. They had flown on a small plane the night before to Sundsvall, then been trans­ported by bus to the Ostersund. Pernilla had slept on the bus, but Hellboy and Abe had only managed a few brief hours of sleep early this morning, before Gustaf had arrived. They had flown north until they reached the Ume River, and then turned west to follow along its path.

  The river rolled along beneath them, its ripples and rapids reflecting the sunshine back into the sky, catching them at times with its glare. In places it was impressively wide, and at others seemed almost narrow and placid enough not to be called a river at all. Many settlements existed along the Ume, but each time Gustaf began to slow above one of them Hellboy would glance out the window and then urge him on.

  “Not here. Not yet.”

  Now Gustaf complained in heavily accented tones about running out of gas—apparently he could speak English after all—but he had more than enough to make it back to the Ostersund. For now. If it was much further they would have to let him set them down and continue on foot.

  A little while after noon, Hellboy spotted it.

  “Have a look down there,” he instructed.

  Gustaf nodded and brought the chopper in lower. His passengers all peered through the glass down at the village below. It was little enough to speak of. There was one road that followed the curve of the river, bisecting the little township, and several other smaller ways barely wide enough for two cars to pass one another. Several dozen homes were built up around a square at the center of the village, but there were only a few stone structures there, and those seemed long faded.

  One of them had collapsed into the street, as though an earthquake had come by and somehow disturbed nothing else.

  There were other signs of Thrym’s passing, however, now that they looked more closely. Houses with their walls caved in, cars torn open, laying on their sides like discarded toys. There were fishing boats in the water, moored at the river’s edge. Most of them bobbed there, unmolested, but several of them had been shattered against the banks of the river, pieces jutting from the earth at jagged angles.

  As the helicopter circled, Hellboy saw that one of the boats protruded from the rear of a two-story house at the edge of the village that was furthest from the river.

  “Set it down, Gustaf,” he said.

  The pilot shot him a wild look. Apparently he
wasn’t deaf, either. “You must be crazy. You don’t want to land here. Something terrible has happened here. Don’t you have eyes?”

  “That’s why we came,” Hellboy explained. “Set it down. You can go as soon as we’ve got our gear.”

  For a long time, Gustaf just circled. He made as if he was looking for a place to land, but just about any street would do, or the riverbank for that matter. At length, he glanced back at Pernilla.

  “What if the… the evil that did this… what if it’s still here?”

  “You’d see it,” Pernilla assured him. “We want to stop it, Gustaf. To try to make sure it doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

  That seemed to satisfy the pilot, for he swung the chopper around in one final arc and then set it down easily in the center of the village, not far from where the stone building had been demolished.

  “I am not supposed to know why you are here,” he said. “They told me not to ask questions. So I will only wish you luck.”

  “We’ll take it,” Abe replied. “Thanks.”

  Several minutes later they had unloaded their gear from the helicopter. Hellboy searched the street for a suitable vehicle and spotted a delivery truck a short distance away, in front of what appeared to be the only market in the little village. He made several trips, carrying all their gear over to it while Abe and Pernilla said their goodbyes to Gustaf, who had turned out to be both more reliable and more amiable than Hellboy had expected.

  When Hellboy shook his hand—using his own left: as always—Gustaf stared down at Mjollnir.

  “That is impressive,” the man said. “Where did you get it?”

  “You’re not supposed to ask questions, remember.”

  Gustaf smiled and nodded. Then, as if remembering how unnerved he had been while in the air, he glanced around anxiously and then back at his helicopter.

  “You want me to come back and get you? Tomorrow? The day after?”