To Hold the Bridge

by Garth Nix

  The road trip was uneventful, save that I drove toward bad weather rather than away from it, and regretted borrowing a convertible rather than something more sensible from one of my other friends, as while the car looked very fine and was quite fast, it also leaked and the heater was either too hot or completely ineffective.

  I arrived at Lower Diabaig around four o’clock and parked near the pier, which marked the terminus of the road. It was already quite dark, and the latest in a steady series of heavy showers was coming down, with the promise of more to follow. There were two fishing boats tied up at the pier, so I walked up to see if anyone was aboard who might take me to my father’s. If not, I would have to knock on some doors to see who might be at home in the village, as there was no pub or hotel where I might otherwise find a fisherman.

  I thought I was in luck when I saw someone aboard the first vessel, as I even knew the man slightly. His name was Toller, though I didn’t know if this was his Christian or surname. He had taken me to my father’s on several previous occasions, so I was rather surprised when he answered my cheerful greeting with a grunt and immediately returned his attention to coiling a rope that he had in fact just perfectly coiled, only to unroll it at my approach.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr. Toller,’ I called. ‘I was hoping you might be able to take me over to Owtwauch House.’

  Toller turned away from me, ignoring me completely, as I stood stupidly in the rain looking at his broad, oilskin-clad back. I was surprised, for Toller had never shown me any animosity before. True, he was a Highland Scot, and I a Lowlander born and bred, and an Anglified one at that, but I’d never felt that this was a problem before, though I’d heard of such prejudices.

  I was momentarily tempted to step aboard his boat and give him a piece of my mind, but fortunately was prevented from doing so by a hail from the other fishing boat. A fisherman I hadn’t met before waved at me, so I left Toller and walked along the pier.

  ‘Old Toller’s having a Presbyterian sulk today,’ said the man, who was not much older than myself, though considerably more weathered. His accent was unusual. He spoke excellent English, and sounded Scottish most of the time, but he placed a different emphasis on the syllables of some words. ‘Did ye’ say you wanted to go over to the Owtwauch?’

  ‘Aye,’ I answered. ‘It’s my father’s house, Colonel MacAndrew. I’m his son, Malcolm.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, then,’ said the fisherman. ‘I’m Erik Haakon. I’ll take you over.’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ I said, leaning down to shake hands as he reached up from the deck. ‘I’ll just nip back and get my things. You don’t think the weather’s too tough to cross, then?’

  Erik looked startled, following this by a glance at the sky.

  ‘Ach, no! There’s plenty of rain, but the wind’s dying already. Full moon tonight, and all.’

  I’d forgotten it was a full moon. If it cleared, it would be a beautiful night. The view from my father’s house was particularly spectacular on a moonlit night, with its panoramic vista of the loch and the western sea toward Skye. I supposed that was why it had been called Owtwauch House, ‘Owtwauch’ being Gaelic for something like a sentry post. My father was very keen on the Gaelic and spoke it fluently, and it had been drummed into me as a small boy, but like any rarely used language it had faded from my mind. Mostly to be replaced by medical Latin, which I had been required to memorize far more than was really sensible in the modern age.

  Erik and I chatted a little as we chugged away across the loch. He was Norwegian, but had married a local girl, and was older than I thought, in his midthirties at least. We discussed the parlous state of the fisheries and the recent purchase by the National Trust of most of the land around Loch Torridon from one of the old estates. In fact my father’s property was one of the few remaining pockets of freehold not to go to the National Trust. It had been held by our family for a very long time, apparently all the way back to Somerled, King of the Isles, and perhaps before.

  We were bumping up against the rough wooden jetty that served as a landing stage for Owtwauch House before I noticed, through the curtain of rain, that there was a helicopter sitting on the front lawn, a broad expanse that ran down almost to the stony beach, ending in a retaining wall that was as green with tidal weed as the grass of the lawn. There were also many more lights than usual burning in the house, far more than the one generator could support.

  ‘Remember me to your father,’ said Erik, and he made a curious gesture, a fist hammering the air, as I gaped at the helicopter. ‘I’d best make for home.’

  Absently, my mind awhirl, I tried to pay him for the short voyage, but he would have none of it, instead helping me get my hamper onto the jetty and helping me out as well, as I continued to try to press a five-pound note into his hand.

  I had hardly taken four steps when I saw two men emerge out of the rain-hazed lights and block the end of the jetty. They were dressed in the typical style of country gentlemen, as I was myself, in Harris tweed, corduroy, and Wellingtons, and it would not have been too out of place if they had shotguns under their arms. But it was definitely out of place for them to be carrying Sten submachine guns, relics of the past war, instantly recognizable to me both from hundreds of comic books of commando adventures, but also from many visits to the various bases where my father had served the latter part of his thirty-five years under the colors.

  Fortunately, I half recognized one of the two men, and perhaps even more fortunately, he knew me.

  ‘Malcolm MacAndrew! What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to see my father,’ I stammered. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You’d better come inside,’ replied the man. He was a major, or had been when I had last met him, though I’d forgotten his name. He was one of my father’s former subordinates from his last posting before retirement, when he commanded the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.

  Cradling the Sten in the crook of his left elbow, he shook hands with me. I almost dropped the hamper in the process, and felt a clumsy fool in the presence of these soldiers.

  ‘Colonel Strahan,’ said the man, reminding me. ‘Call me Neil. This is Bob Mumfort.’

  The other man nodded, but it couldn’t be described as an overly friendly gesture. Reluctant acceptance at best.

  Strahan led us across the lawn, past the helicopter. It wasn’t a type I recognized, and the only marking on its dark gray hull was a small acronym in darker gray on the door.

  ‘BPRD? What’s that?’

  ‘Your father will explain,’ said Strahan. We continued past the helicopter, farther into the light. There were portable floodlights like those used in filmmaking rigged up around the house, encircling it with harsh white illumination, and I could hear the deep thrum of several diesel generators out the back.

  The front door was open, but guarded by two more men, this time with Lee-Enfield rifles, who looked familiar and were almost certainly some of my father’s former military colleagues.

  There were a lot more men inside the house, dozens of them in the reception rooms, all armed to the teeth, with rifles, submachine guns, and even a couple of Bren light machine guns. They stopped talking as I was led through to the kitchen.

  My father was there, tall and authoritarian-looking as ever, though I had never before seen him as he was now, with his face painted in strange whorls of a blue so dark it was almost black and a wreath of holly in his silver hair. He was also wearing a long white robe with the hood pushed back.

  He was waving a green stick, a branch recently torn from a tree, over a pile of .303 ball ammunition boxes on the kitchen table, tapping the boxes as he chanted something in what was not exactly Gaelic. There was also a pile of what looked like gilded pruning hooks under the table, thirty or forty of them, and every third tap he bent down to wave the stick over them as well.

  I started to go in, but Strahan held me back and emphasized his grip on my arm with an urgent whisper.

  �
�Wait! Not until he puts the rod down.’

  I opened my mouth, but shut it again before anyone needed to tell me. I suppose I was in mild shock, the kind of dissonance you experience when you see your extremely proper military father wearing a white robe while he performed something that could only be described as a rite or spell of some kind.

  Then I really did go into shock, as I took in the figure at the far end of the room. A man, or a manlike humanoid, whose skin was as red as a boiled lobster, and his head a strange confabulation of angular lines, with two circular growths sprouting from his forehead like opaque goggles of that same red flesh. He wore a khaki trench coat, and I was further staggered when I saw a tail twist out behind the coat, a tail that could only be described as demonic.

  I must have gasped, for Strahan pulled me back, and the strange red creature looked at me. He put down his pewter mug and waved, shocking me still further, as his right hand was a massive, oversize fist that, apart from being the same color as his flesh, would have been more in keeping on a mighty statue of some medieval hero.

  My father finished his chant and laid the wand upon the ammunition boxes. The branch withered as he did so, and crumbled into a light ash, which he bent down to blow off with three carefully controlled breaths. Then he turned to see who had almost interrupted him, controlled anger on his painted face, which eased as he saw me staring, the hamper clutched to my chest almost like a shield.

  ‘Malcolm! What are you doing here?’

  ‘I … I got some days off,’ I stammered. ‘Spur of the moment—’

  I was looking past him at the creature. I couldn’t think of him as a man, for he looked to be so far beyond the physical norm. In fact I didn’t know what to think, and a good part of my previously extremely secure worldview was crumbling.

  My father saw me looking and clearly understood.

  ‘Let me introduce you to a colleague,’ he said. ‘Hellboy, may I present my son, Dr. Malcolm McAndrew. A medical doctor, not one of those philosophers.’

  ‘Hi,’ growled the apparition. He sounded human enough, with the hint of an American accent. ‘How ya doing, Doc?’

  ‘Fine, thank you,’ I said automatically. Then I dropped the hamper. I heard the wine bottles break, but it didn’t really register.

  ‘But I don’t understand what is going on,’ I added, and suddenly felt ten years old again, and not at all a well-qualified professional with a grasp of every situation, which was how I liked to perceive myself. ‘Why is your face painted? And why are you wearing a … a robe?’

  ‘It’s not the right time to tell you,’ said my father slowly.

  ‘Got to tell the kid sometime, Mac,’ said the red apparition, this Hellboy. ‘Must be a shock to see your father wearing a dress.’

  ‘It’s not a dress, it’s a druidical robe,’ said my father. ‘As you very well know, Hellboy. But I wasn’t initiated into the mysteries until I was thirty-three, that is the proper age—’

  ‘What mysteries?’ I interjected. ‘Just tell me what is going on, please!’

  ‘We might need a doctor to come along,’ said Hellboy.

  ‘We have a doctor,’ replied my father.

  ‘Doc Hendricks is a bit old to be wandering across the bottom of the loch,’ said Hellboy. He looked at me and winked. ‘What say you come along, Doc?’

  ‘The bottom of the loch?’

  ‘Oh, very well, I suppose I don’t have much choice,’ grumbled my father. ‘You BPRD types just don’t respect tradition sometimes. Strahan, issue the blessed ammunition and the sickles to the men. You come upstairs with me, Malcolm, and I’ll fill you in. Hellboy … I don’t suppose there’s any point giving you any orders, is there?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Hellboy. He finished whatever he was drinking from the pewter mug, took a cigar from an inside pocket of his trench coat, and lit it up. ‘I might take a walk along the water’s edge, see if anything pops up.’

  ‘Nothing will happen till the moon is high,’ said my father.

  ‘The Russians might not know that,’ replied Hellboy. He bit down on his cigar and talked through a clenched jaw, while he busied himself checking the most oversize handgun I’d ever seen, at least outside the picture of a medieval hand-cannon that had adorned the cover of one of my childhood books.

  ‘The Russians?’

  I felt like I’d inadvertently taken some delirium-inducing drug. My father was apparently a druid in charge of some paramilitary organization in league with an American semi-human … I felt a strong urge to get out my medical bag and take my own temperature, except that I knew it would not indicate a fever. I had stumbled into a hidden world, but I knew it was a real one, as real as the discovery of my father’s secret relationship with my cousin Susan, after my mother died. That had been a shock too, but to some degree it had prepared me for this, the realization that my father had a number of layers to his life, many of them hidden from me.

  I followed him upstairs to his study, which was as orderly as ever, his books of military and natural history arrayed in alphabetical order by author behind the glass doors of the bookshelves, his desk devoid of paper, several pens lined up on the green baize top in order of size.

  We sat in his studded leather armchairs, and he looked at me with an expression I knew well, that of a gentleman of a certain age uncertain how to impart to his son the facts of life. He took a breath to start, stopped, let it out, took another breath, and started off all while not really looking me in the eye.

  ‘We come from a long line of what many people call druids, Malcolm. Uncle Andrew, your great-uncle, was in fact the Arch-Druid of Britain until his death and in due course I will probably succeed him. At present I hold the post of Sentinel of the West and the Isles, and it is in that capacity that I have gathered the lesser druids and deodars here and sought the help of the BPRD—’

  ‘Deodars? BPRD?’

  ‘Deodars are sworn laymen in our service. The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense is an organization that has a lot of experience in dealing with the kind of situation we’re facing. Particularly Hellboy, who is their chief operative—’

  ‘What situation? And what is Hellboy, anyway?’

  ‘Hellboy is a fine young man,’ replied my father stiffly. ‘Just think of him as having a different background. Like a Gurkha or a chap from Africa. I met him in Malaya during the Emergency, got a lot of respect for the fellow.’

  ‘He’s not a Gurkha,’ I protested weakly. ‘He’s got a tail, and he’s red—’

  ‘Hellboy is an absolutely essential ally in the fight we face tonight,’ interrupted my father grimly. ‘I expect you to show him the respect you would accord one of my brother officers.’

  ‘I don’t understand, but of course I will behave properly toward him,’ I said. ‘What exactly is the situation? What fight?’

  My father walked to the window and drew back the curtain. Beyond the floodlights, the surface of the loch glimmered silver, catching the light of the full moon, which had begun to climb up, half its disc now visible.

  ‘This house has been here a very long time,’ he said. ‘It is not called the Owtwauch for nothing, for it is indeed a sentry post, from where we druids have watched over the sacred circle of Maponos since time immemorial.’

  He gestured out toward the water.

  ‘When the moon is full, there is a silver road to the stone circle that now lies at the bottom of the loch. A silver road that we guard against those who would attempt to use the circle for evil ends. Hellboy has brought us word that just such evildoers will seek to enter the circle tonight, and we must prevent them.’

  ‘Russian evildoers?’

  ‘Their nationality is not their primary identification. They serve a Russian master, and have bent the power of the Soviets to their own ends. Now, there is little time, and I must prepare you. We cannot do the full initiation of course, but Maponos will need to know you as one of his own.’

  ‘I’ve heard that name before,’ I said. ‘I vague
ly remember…when I was a child…’

  ‘Aye, I’d forgotten you’d met a presence of the god,’ said my father, as matter-of-fact as if he were talking about the village grocer. ‘That will help. You were eight or nine at the time, it would have been 1946, when we were last all here.’

  ‘I thought he was a fisherman,’ I said. I had forgotten the name, but I remembered the occasion very well. There was a stream not far away that ran into the loch, and I had been paddling in it. A man had come out of the water and given me a very large and splendid sea trout, which I’d taken back to my mother, who had not been as thrilled as I was to receive it.

  ‘Well, he might remember you anyway, but we shall paint your face to make sure, and you can wear one of my spare robes.’

  I acquiesced to this without protest. It didn’t even feel particularly strange to have my father smear the curiously sweet-smelling dye upon my cheeks. He’d painted my face before, when I was a child. Perhaps those occasions had been more significant than I thought.

  The robe was slightly more troublesome, since it was extremely reminiscent of a large, loose dress. But if my battle-veteran father could wear one, I supposed I could too, and when we went downstairs I was not that surprised to see several others also wearing the white robes, though most of the younger men were not. I supposed they were the deodars.

  Hellboy was back inside too. A man wearing a similar trench coat was talking to him, reading from a clipboard. Hellboy nodded as the man spoke. When he’d finished, he stood up and raised that strange clublike fist. Everyone fell silent and looked at him.