by Tim Lebbon
“We have to find Adamo,” he said.
“What about the others?”
“We’ll help if we can, but he’s the key, Franca. And he can tell us how to solve this. Stop it. That’s why we have to get to him before the fire wolf does. If it kills him, moves onto another family, we’ll lose it. Might take months, or maybe years before it rears its head again.”
“But the volcano, what about—?”
From somewhere in the house, a terrible scream rose up. It was shattering, a call of agony that raised Hellboy’s hackles and sent a shiver from his scalp to the tip of his tail. It was cut off quickly, and then came a noise like the house gasping a breath.
The curtains at the open door quivered as air moved.
“Fire,” Hellboy said. “Come on.”
Franca muttered something in Italian as she ran, and Hellboy recognized prayer.
—
They ran along a short corridor and then emerged into the large entrance hallway. The staircase was to their left, and to the right the dining room door lay open. Hellboy could smell breakfast, and the scent of some other cooked meat. He hurried to the door and flattened himself against the wall, not sure which hand to raise in protection; the gun hand, or the right hand? He decided on both, and as Franca paused behind him he ducked into the room.
The table had been set for breakfast, but it had been scattered and ruined. The tablecloth waved down on one side, and a slick of milk and fruit juice glittered on the marble floor. A wide swathe of blackened, charred food scarred the tabletop, and at the far end, behind a pile of tumbled chairs, lay several bodies. They had been burned so badly that they had merged as one, arms and legs protruding at agonized angles, hair scorched away. The sight of their jumbled, melted bodies reminded Hellboy of something he’d once fought deep below an old church in Moldavia, but this sight was much more sad.
Franca stood beside him and surveyed the ruins of the room. Hellboy guessed it was probably good that the corpses were beyond identifying.
“Upstairs to Adamo?” she asked querulously.
“Yeah, Adamo. If that wasn’t him screaming.”
Hellboy led them out of the room again and across to the foot of the stairs. Nothing burning, he thought. No curtains have gone up, no furniture . . . just those people. He juggled the problem for a second or two, then cast it to one side for later consideration. He had more immediate things to worry about right now.
Up on the second floor landing they found another body. It was facing away from them and still smoking slightly, and Hellboy guessed it hadn’t been this way for much more than an hour. Is that bastard thing hunting them all through the house? he thought. It must have struck just as Mario and the others left, and is it stalking the survivors even now? He imagined this huge, still home to contain a dozen people hidden away from the terror visiting itself upon them: wardrobes containing more than clothes; doors shut and barricaded; eyes wide in shadows, hearts thumping in fright.
“Here we are you son of a bitch!” he shouted, rage getting the better of caution.
“Hellboy!” Franca cried.
“Don’t worry, I know what I’m—”
“No, look!” She was pointing at the body. And it turned what was left of its head.
Hellboy went to his knees by the burnt woman, looking around to see what might answer his shout. She was keening through her ruined mouth, as if the heat was still inside her and whining for release. Franca shoved him to one side and he almost fell, and all her attention was on the burnt woman.
Hellboy stood again, watching and listening, sniffing the air, waiting for the roar of glare of danger to descend upon them. And he was dreadfully aware of just how exposed Franca would be if and when that happened.
“Hellboy, she’s . . .” Franca was leaning over the woman, trying not to touch her burned body. Hellboy wondered if she recognized her, and hoped not.
“What is it?” he asked. The woman was almost dead, he could see that, and he wished that she would die. An end to the agony, an end to the fearful pains she must be going through right now. When she turned, he had seen her eyes melted away.
“Ad . . . Ad . . . Adamo,” the woman muttered wetly.
“We’re going to find him,” Franca said, nodding. “We’re going to save him, and everyone else.” Her voice broke but she did not turn away. Even in his rage, that brought a lump to Hellboy’s throat. Franca did not turn away until the woman breathed her last.
She stood, hands pressed against her face as if to hold in the remains of her composure.
“Adamo,” Hellboy said. “Let’s go.”
They ran up the second flight of stairs, Hellboy sniffing the air as they went. The whole house was rich with the scent of cooked meat, and in one room they passed the bed was smoldering. Hellboy ran on, but Franca had paused outside the bedroom door, looking in with mouth agape.
“Franca, we—”
“Mother,” she said.
Oh hell. He went back to her and peered into the room again. The bed was burnt, and fire had scorched a terrible trail up the wall and into the curtained window. Cast into that blackened stain was the shape of a person, where they had been pressed against the wall as they were burnt to death.
“No,” Franca whined.
“Hey, we—”
She pushed past him and walked several steps along the corridor, before leaning heavily against the wall.
Hellboy took a quick step into the room, looked at the body slumped down beside the bed, and knew that there was nothing to be done.
Franca was facing him as he emerged. He approached her cautiously, ready to hold her if she fell or grab her if she tried to run. She never took her eyes from his, and he could see the grim determination on her face.
“I feel . . . numb,” she said, biting back tears. “Numb and empty. Will I feel it all later, do you think, or will it always be like this?”
“There’s no wrong way to handle grief.”
Franca nodded. “Numb.” And she turned and hurried along the corridor.
When they reached Adamo’s room Hellboy did not pause: he kicked open the door, barging his way inside and sweeping the room with his gun.
It was empty.
“Hellboy,” Franca said, and he was unsettled by the distant look in her eyes: they shifted left and right, but her mind was elsewhere. “The basements. In the war, they used the basements as—”
“A hiding place,” he said. “Damn it, I should’ve thought of that. Come on!”
There were no more screams, and as they reached the large entrance hall again Hellboy darted to the front door. He lifted a heavy curtain aside and looked out through the window, surveying as much of the gardens before the house as he could. There was no sign of Mario and the other, and Hellboy felt torn: leave the house to make sure they did not return? Or go down, deeper, pursuing whoever might have taken shelter down there to lead them out again?
And all this time, where was that damn fire wolf?
He thought briefly of sending Franca from the house to warn Mario, but he could not bear to leave her on her own.
“Down?” she whispered, glancing back at the door behind the staircase.
“Yes,” Hellboy said. “Down. You okay?”
“No,” Franca said, shaking her head and hugging her arms across her chest. “I’m not.”
“Stay with me,” he said. He went to her and touched her arms, and she dropped then and wrapped them around his chest. “Hey . . .”
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Franca said, and Hellboy could smell smoke in her hair. “My family . . . I don’t know who’s alive and who’s dead. Up there, in the corridor . . . I didn’t even know who she was . . . She died as I watched, and I still don’t know . . .”
“Adamo has the answers,” Hellboy said softly, still alert for danger. “I can fight that thing again and again, but to stop it, I need to speak to the old man.”
Franca nodded against his chest, but she did not let go
for a few seconds more. “Fine,” she said, wiping tears angrily from her face. She sniffed. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”
They went.
—
Someone had come this way recently, and the fire wolf had followed.
As they entered the first small storage room, Hellboy tried to map out the area ahead in his mind. He’d only been down here once, but there were several rooms, and with everything that had happened his memory was a little hazy. First room, storage boxes, with toys leaning over their rims as if killed trying to escape. Last time down here, none of the dolls had blisters across their pale skin, and none of the teddies had melted eyes and shrivelled fur.
“Hellboy, if he came this way . . .”
“If he did and he kept going, he might be hiding down in the caves. Or if not Adamo, there might be others left alive down here.”
“But the fire wolf?”
He shrugged and descended the steps into the next room, where the smell of wine was rich and heady. A hundred bottles lay smashed across the floor, and the racking against the long wall on the left was slumped as if something heavy had rested against it. The next room was where the old furniture was piled up, and there were fewer signs of disturbance or fire here.
Passing into the final room, Hellboy remembered the tapestries that had hung on the walls, and that old table at the room’s center where the book containing the history of the family’s curse had rested. He glanced that way first, not at all surprised to see that the book was still absent. And beyond the table, revealed in the low glare of the dusty bulb, sat Adamo Esposito.
For a second, Hellboy thought the old man was dead. His eyes were wide but dull, and his skin was as dark as a ripe plum’s. But wisps of hair lay unburned across his scalp, and though naked, the skin of his stomach and chest seemed untouched.
Adamo gasped, lowered his head and started crying into his hands.
Franca went to him. He had been terrible to her, turning family against her simply because she had left to choose her own path through life, but he was still the man responsible for her being alive. He was responsible for all the Espositos, and Hellboy could barely imagine the misery the old man must be going through right now.
“You brought it on yourself,” Hellboy said. When Adamo glared at him with a glimmer of bitter humor in his eyes, Hellboy’s sympathies flew.
“You know nothing, demon,” Adamo said.
Hellboy glanced at the tapestry covering the tunnel that led to the deeper caves. Its center had been completely burned away, and smoke still rose from the ragged edges.
“It let you live?” Franca asked, in English so that Hellboy could follow.
Adamo shrugged, eyes widening with fear again. But behind the fear there still shone that glitter of amusement, and Hellboy knew that the old guy was a good pretender.
“Lots of your family are dead up in the house,” Hellboy said. “Whatever you’ve got going on with that damned thing, you better tell me what it is.”
“I’d better? Really?”
“Adamo?” Franca said. Her voice was tinged with confusion, and she stood back from the old man. She had not quite moved close enough to hug him.
“So it’s through there,” Hellboy said, nodding at the burned tapestry.
Adamo sighed, wiping both hand across his sweating face. Franca still waited by him, but now she looked less inclined to kneel down by his side. She saw no sorrow at his dead family, and no regret at whatever he had done, and that accounted for the look of confusion on her face.
“Adamo,” she said, “my mother’s dead. If you know what’s happening here, Hellboy needs—”
“That tapestry,” the old man said, nodding at the wall and completely ignoring his young relative, “is over a thousand years old. It depicts the time when Amalfi drove the Saracens from her lands, after giving them Capri years before as payment for their war efforts. It was a special time for this great city. Amalfi was the most powerful force in the Mediterranean at one time.” He sighed almost wistfully.
Hellboy had a bad feeling about this.
“Adamo, the loss of a tapestry—”
The old man looked up at Franca then, as if noticing her presence for the first time. “Girl,” he said, but he followed it with nothing else.
“I can help you,” Hellboy said, but something was niggling at the back of his mind. He looked from the old man to the tapestry and back again. “Whatever it is between you and that thing, I can break it. Believe me, I’ve met a lot worse and beaten it in a fight.”
Adamo was staring at him, smiling.
“And the fire wolf?” Hellboy said. “Pretty damn dull, if you ask me.”
Adamo’s smile slipped, just a notch. And there it is, Hellboy thought, the old fool and that thing are more than just passing acquaintances. He glanced back to the tapestry again and moved closer to Franca at the same time.
Adamo stood, displaying none of his old man’s weaknesses.
Hellboy grabbed Franca’s upper arm and pulled her back, urging her behind him so that he was between her, the tapestry and the tunnel beyond. But when the fire wolf came, it was not from the tunnel.
It was from Adamo Esposito himself.
CHAPTER 11
—
Amalfi
—
At first, Franca thought that the fire wolf had appeared behind Adamo and was burning him alive. She clasped Hellboy’s arm, and was about to urge him to help when she saw Adamo’s eyes explode into twin pools of fire . . . and the smile grew on his face.
He was not being burned by the fire wolf; he was the fire wolf.
Naked, the old man stood and let fire become him. He held his hands up in a crucifixion pose, head slightly back and mouth open. His skin bubbled and split, and where in a normal person the result would be a rush of blood, from Adamo there flowed fire. It languished around him to begin with, gentle, almost loving flames moving across and around his body like burning snakes, meeting each other, merging and flowing again. His legs changed into pillars of fire, and his body bent at the waist, lowering to the ground as his arms extended and thickened. His head was the recognizable human feature, and Franca could not tear her eyes from his terrible, vicious smile. It was all too human on this monstrous face, and she was certain he was staring at her with his fiery eyes.
“Back up!” Hellboy told her. He didn’t seem surprised—ready for a fight, in fact, his face grim and hands fisting—and she wondered whether he’d already had an inkling of this.
Adamo is the fire wolf! Which means . . .
“You killed Carlotta!” she screamed, and the unfairness of it all struck home. “You bastard!”
The fire wolf roared. It was a sound she could not remember hearing from it before, on the two previous occasions when she had seen it, and in the confines of this small subterranean room, the noise was horrendous. It was the roar of flame amplified, an animal growl as hot as Hell. The thing rolled and shook its head, as if revelling in its true form again.
Hellboy put three bullets through its head, but if there had been a hope of stopping it that way—perhaps when part of it was still Adamo, still flesh and blood—he’d lost the opportunity. The slugs hit the wall behind it in melted splashes, and then it came for him.
Hellboy punched out at the fire wolf with his right hand, at the same time pushing Franca back with his left. She staggered and almost fell, keeping her balance by stumbling back against the few steps leading up into the previous room. But terrified though she was, she could not leave. Her skin stretched across her features, she smelled the acrid stench of singed hair, but she could not turn her back on this monster and let it scare her away.
And all the while, she was trying to come to terms with what this all meant for her, and what might be left of her family.
“Come on!” Hellboy roared, a wild war cry.
The fire wolf went at him. He fell beneath its assault, and Franca backed up three stone steps, crouched down so she could still observe.
>
Hellboy punched at the thing with his strange right hand, and it was driven sideways as his hand slipped through it, trailing flames behind like threads of treacle. It fell against the table and chair, and they immediately burst into flames. Franca wondered for a moment where that book had gone, and then she had an image of Adamo writing a name with a grin on his face. In her dreams, that name had been her own.
The fire wolf rolled across the burning furniture and fell against the wall. Hellboy advanced. He’s brave, Franca thought, but there was more to it than that. This was not bravery in the true sense of the word. Hellboy needed to fight this thing, just as he needed to do the job he did. There was something inevitable about the way he entered into combat with the fire wolf, as if this was all his life had ever been. She vowed there and then to talk to him later, if she had the chance; find out who he really was; discover, perhaps, his calling.
The burning thing was still thrashing against the base of the wall when Hellboy fell upon it. Franca could see the bubble blisters raising across the red man’s forearm and hand. His right hand was unaffected, and it was this that he thrust deep into the conflagration. He growled, then lifted, and the fire wolf rose from the floor.
It’s weak, she thought, maybe because it’s only just changed.
Hellboy battered the fire wolf against the second tapestry, the dried, old material bursting into flames.
Hurt it, she thought. Hurt it for everyone it’s killed, hurt it for Mother . . .
Franca knew she should be running back through the rooms, searching the house for survivors and then escaping this place of death. She should be leading whatever was left of her family to safety. But what she was witnessing was compelling. Terrible, horrifying, unbelievably compelling. She was seeing things that no one else had ever seen, and her whole world view had been blown wide open over the past couple of days. Run! she thought, but she could only stand and watch.
The remains of the tapestry fell in a swathe across Hellboy’s head, and he spluttered and blew the flames away from his mouth. The fire wolf curved blazing limbs around his neck, the fire brightening towards white, and Hellboy roared in pain.
