To Hold the Bridge

by Garth Nix

  ‘Okay, guys, the sonar buoy says there’s a sub in the loch. Gotta be the Russians. Mac, what’s the deal with the silver road?’

  My father looked out the window.

  ‘The road is forming. They will be able to enter it, from the mouth of the loch, as will you. We had best deploy.’

  ‘Yeah, we’d best,’ said Hellboy. ‘Remember, you hold ’em off from the circle, while I come at them from behind.’

  ‘They will not reach the keystone,’ said my father grimly. ‘Not alive, at any rate.’

  ‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ growled Hellboy. ‘I don’t want any of them reaching the keystone dead, either.’

  ‘None of the unworthy will gain a boon from Maponos,’ added my father. ‘Dead or alive.’

  ‘They’d better not or we’ll all be into some serious regretting time. Those old gods ought to be more choosy who they dish the goods out to. I’ll see you later. Good luck, guys.’

  Pausing only to throw his cigar butt into the fireplace, Hellboy left. He moved very swiftly, I noted, weaving through the men with deft, precise movements that belied his bulky chest and that massive fist. I thought then that he would be a very interesting subject to examine more closely, before I even knew about his immense strength and durability.

  We all left the house soon after Hellboy. I carried my doctor’s bag and one of the gilded pruning hooks. I had declined the offer of a Browning Hi Power pistol, having a somewhat romantic notion of being true to my Hippocratic oath. I wished I had taken it soon enough.

  The moon was not quite completely risen, but its light was bright enough to cast shadows. By virtue of the surrounding mountains or some meteorological phenomenon it did shine most brightly on the surface of the loch, lighting a silver trail that extended from the sheltered waters far out to sea.

  ‘The silver road is present,’ pronounced my father, and he added something in Gaelic that I didn’t catch, but was repeated by the men around me.

  We marched down to the water’s edge. I had no idea what was to happen next, but given the earlier events of the night, I was not overly surprised when we just kept going into what should have been water, but was not. My father gestured, and the men spread out into a skirmish line and I followed them into the strange, silver-lit atmosphere that was neither air nor water.

  After a few yards I noted that though I could see a membrane above my head that was where the water level should be, and the ground beneath my feet was by turns both weeded and stony, there were no fish sharing this temporary environment we had entered. The water had not been made breathable to us, it had been transformed entirely, and that transformation had also removed the usual inhabitants of the loch’s waters.

  We continued down the slope of the loch floor for several minutes, in watchful silence. I found it both frightening and wonderful, that I should be walking deeper and deeper into the heart of the sea. But even this strange experience could not hide the underlying fear I felt, that soon I would be under fire, that I would be taking part in a battle and my father would see that I had not chosen a medical career because of some deep calling to the profession, but because it represented a respectable way for me not to become a soldier like him. It had even allowed me to avoid National Service, and I had fully expected that my occupation would keep me safe even in the event of another world war.

  It was not being wounded that I feared. I had treated all kinds of wounds, and could easily imagine myself being shot, or peppered with shell fragments, or burned. I was afraid of being put in a position where I might show my fear, where my natural instinct to run would take over.

  I knew that my father would soon know I was a coward. But I had no choice. I was under his eye and, deeply programmed from my earliest years, I knew no other course but to obey.

  Half a mile from the shore, at the deepest part of the loch, I saw the ring of standing stones. We were easily six hundred feet below the notional surface, but the same soft moonlight continued to illuminate everything. My father gestured again, and his troops quickened their pace as he circled his hand and indicated that we should form a defensive ring, mimicking the posture of the stones themselves.

  ‘The enemy have to take the longer way, coming from the western end of the silver road,’ said my father quietly as the two of us continued on and entered the ring of stones. ‘We may take a quicker path, as befits the children of Maponos.’

  ‘Where is Hellboy?’ I asked. I could see no sign of our fire-skinned friend.

  ‘He, too, must take a longer path. He is not a child of Maponos. Now, we must pay our respects, before the hurly-burly starts.’

  There was a single stone in the middle of the circle. It was no higher than the others, and in fact all the stones of the ring were quite modest sarsens, little taller than myself, and of a not particularly inspiring gray-green color.

  Even so, I knew that central stone was different. If I looked at it from the corner of my eye, it was not a stone I saw, but a hunched figure, with the hint of a grin too wide for a human face, and clasped hands that were not hands, but taloned claws.

  I fell back as we drew closer. My father stopped and looked at me.

  ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. Maponos knows his own. Those others who come, they will seek to bend him to their will. He would never turn against us of his own accord.’

  I felt six years old again, listening to my father explaining why I should not be afraid of a cow in a field, because it was not a bull. Only when we did cross the field, there was a bull there that we hadn’t seen and it had frightened me so much I dreamed of it for years afterward. He’d thought it was funny at the time and, of course, was not the parent who responded to a small boy’s nightmares.

  ‘We need merely grant him a small taste of our blood,’ continued my father. He lifted his pruning hook and sliced the end of his finger, and wiped the blood upon the stone.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tongue curl and lick it off, and then there was no blood.

  ‘Hold your finger up.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I am a surgeon,’ I answered. ‘I can cut my own finger when necessary.’

  I did it too, clumsily enough that if I’d been doing a prac I would never have passed my finals. Without looking, I wiped my finger on the front of the stone and suppressed a shudder as I felt a warm, soft touch upon my flesh.

  My father recited something in Gaelic and stepped back. I stepped back too, very readily.

  The stone was the same, but there was no blood, and I saw that grin again.

  ‘Right, that’s done. I wonder where these Reds are?’

  He sounded confident, as perhaps he had every right to be, with some forty heavily armed men in position, their ammunition blessed by ancient ceremony, and the god Maponos along for the ride.

  Then we saw the first of the approaching enemy. I don’t know what my father expected, but I had a hazy idea that some sort of Soviet marine force would be attacking, that apart from our strange location, it would be a relatively conventional battle.

  But the figures who came toward us did not walk across the loch floor as we had, but descended from above, floating down as if they still moved through sea, not the silver atmosphere we experienced.

  They were not Soviet marines either, but the rotten, skeletal remnants of long-dead men, clad in waterlogged rags that had once been the working uniforms of Hitler’s Kriegsmarine.

  They were dead U-boat crews from the last war, and they were coming for us.

  ‘Aerial targets! Open fire!’ shouted my father, and before even the word ‘open’ was out of his mouth, the sharp crack of rifles and the chatter of the Stens and the deeper beat of the Brens exploded all around us. I kneeled down and opened my bag, but continued to look up at the enemy. They looked like target dummies, or puppets on long, loose strings being lowered to a stage, jumping and dancing as they were struck by bullets, bits of uniform and bone and faint fragments of decayed flesh spraying out abov
e them.

  ‘They have some protection,’ muttered my father, who was watching them intently. ‘The bullets are charged with the power of Maponos. They should be falling apart.’

  But the dead sailors kept coming, inexorably drifting toward us. The first of them touched down some twenty yards distant, and for a moment I thought it would just settle in place, a sodden, long-drowned relict, its flesh long stripped away. But it jerked upright, as if those puppet strings were suddenly under command, and advanced upon the nearest of our defenders. He emptied the magazine from his Sten into its head, but even though its skull was blown to pieces, the headless thing kept coming, skeletal hands grasping as he chopped at it with his gilded pruning hook. He took one arm off, but it got a grip on the blade and pulled it from his grasp and before he could retreat, another revenant fell upon his head and thrust its long fingers through his eyes and into his brain.

  ‘We must call the god himself,’ said my father quickly. He looked down at me. ‘We will need a sacrifice.’

  I gaped up at him as he loomed over me, his sickle in hand. Long-dead German submariners sank like falling flowers behind and above him, far too many for us to fight off, even if they had been susceptible to our weapons.

  ‘Dad—’

  ‘Not you, Malcolm!’ exclaimed my father testily. He pulled me to my feet and forced the sickle into my hand. ‘Do you really know me no better than that? Now cut my throat and let the blood fall upon the stone!’

  Those taloned hands were cupped now, ready to catch my father’s blood and drink it up.

  ‘Hurry!’

  I raised the sickle. My father quickly gripped it and tried to bring it down across his throat. But I was faster, and held it back. I had seen something, beyond the outer stones. A red shape, moving fast, accompanied by a sound like a miniature sonic boom, or a mallet struck against a giant kettledrum – or the sound of an arcane fist smashing undead skulls.

  Hellboy came charging through the undead sailors, smiting them as he advanced. Where his fist hit, the enemy simply blew apart, the fragments being carried away on unseen tides.

  I dragged the sickle back, and the grin on the stone became a scowl, and the clawed hands twisted together in annoyance.

  ‘Hellboy!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘What?’ asked my father. He craned his head around to look, and stopped trying to drag the sickle down. I let my own grip ease, and the sickle suddenly moved of its own accord, falling across my father’s throat.

  At almost the same moment, two of the undead sailors threw a net of steel mesh and heavy lead weights over Hellboy’s head, and down he went.

  I threw the sickle away and held my father as he slowly fell. The cut to his neck was deep, but I saw in a moment that it had missed the major blood vessels. I pressed my hand against the wound and lowered him down as I groped about for my bag.

  I so badly wanted to run, but while my father no longer held me back, I was holding him. His right hand scrabbled at his neck, painting his fingers with blood, and then he splayed that same hand against the stone.

  I felt a voice speak to me, a voice that felt as if it was coming from deep inside my own heart, the words rushing to my head with the pulse of my blood.

  ‘There,’ said Maponos angrily. ‘Our foe! Strike him down!’

  I looked and saw that amid the melee of our few remaining men and the undead sailors, there was one who I knew was different. He looked like a ragged skeleton, but he hung back from the fray, and when he walked, he did not bounce and glide as if he moved through some other more buoyant medium.

  Hellboy had torn the steel net apart and was using it to snag enemies and drag them into smashing range, but there were just too many of them. From the look of things he’d definitely beat them, but it would be too late for me, and far too late for my father. I needed to investigate and suture the wound, and there was no time to lose.

  ‘Hellboy!’ I shouted, pointing with my free hand. ‘Maponos says shoot that one at the back!’

  ‘You got it!’ replied Hellboy. His hand-cannon boomed out, and this time I saw the bloom of real red blood. The man fell, and so did the U-boat crews, all at once, before the echo of Hellboy’s shot even came back from the sides of the loch.

  ‘Mine,’ said the voice inside me.

  ‘Drag that one Hellboy shot over here!’ I shouted, not looking to see who heard. I was busy, plying my trade, my hands bloody in a different way.

  I had just finished stitching up my father’s wound when Hellboy himself dumped the still-bleeding corpse at the foot of the keystone. I saw the talons reach, but also saw nothing, the stone completely still. But the body was gone, and I heard a self-satisfied chuckle that slowly faded.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said to Hellboy as I stood up and looked around for other wounded. My father raised a finger at me from where he lay, by way of a salute.

  ‘No trouble, kid,’ said Hellboy. But it was a distracted answer and I saw that he was looking at the sole small remnant of the man Maponos had consumed. A metal badge, which the man had worn on his tunic, a swastika variation that incorporated some kind of serpent.

  Hellboy suddenly stomped on the badge, mashing it beyond recognition. One of our men called to me, and I picked up my bag. At the same time, my father croaked, his voice barely understandable.

  ‘Moonset … early … feel it. Get … moving!’

  We moved. I stabilized the few wounded who had managed to survive, but we had to leave our dead. There were only ten of us left, eleven counting Hellboy. He carried my father, and Maponos made no trouble about all of us taking the short way back.

  We went fishing the next day, just Hellboy and I. Hellboy had a purpose-made strap to lash a rod to his fist, so he could wind the reel with his left hand. A friend of his called Abe had made it for him, or so he said. He caught a dozen salmon to my three sea trout, the fish teeming on his side of the boat, which was certainly unnatural, but by that point I did not find it particularly strange. We didn’t talk, but I believe he enjoyed the shared solitude.

  He must have done, for we have been fishing a dozen times or more since then, not always when there is also business to be done for the BPRD, though always at the loch.

  Hellboy is quite a regular visitor here, and has become known to some of the locals as a lucky fisherman, which stands him in even better stead than being known as the friend of the only doctor for miles, or even for those who know that I am more than a country doctor, but also the Sentinel of the West and the Isles, and favored son of the sunken god Maponos.

  Who, I think, should work much harder to help me catch more fish than Hellboy.

  Old Friends

  I’D BEEN LIVING IN THE city for quite a while, lying low, recovering from an unfortunate jaunt that had turned, in the immortal words of my sometime comrade Hrasvelg, ‘irredeemably shit-shape.’

  Though I had almost completely recovered my sight, I still wore a bandage around my eyes. It was made from a rare stuff that I could see through, but it looked like dense black linen. Similarly, I had regrown my left foot, but I kept up the limp. It gave me an additional excuse to use the stick, which was, of course, much more than a length of bog oak carved with picaresque scenes of a pedlar’s journey.

  I had a short-lease apartment near the beach, an expensive but necessary accommodation, as I needed both the sunshine that fell into its small living room and the cool, wet wind from the sea that blew through every open window.

  Unfortunately, after the first month, that wind became laden with the smell of rotting weed and as the weeks passed, the stench grew stronger, and the masses of weed that floated just past the breakers began to shift and knit together, despite the efforts of the lifesavers to break up the unsightly, stinking rafts of green.

  I knew what was happening, of course. The weed was a manifestation of an old opponent of mine, a slow, cold foe who had finally caught up with me. ‘Caught’ being the operative word, as the weed was just the visible portion of my enemy’s activities
. A quick examination of almanac and lodestone revealed that all known pathways from this world were denied to me, shut tight by powerful bindings that I could not broach quickly, if at all.

  I considered moving to the mountains or far inland, but that would merely delay matters. Only the true desert would be safe from my foe, but I could not go there.

  So I watched the progress of the weed every morning as I drank my first coffee, usually leaning back in one white plastic chair as I elevated my supposedly injured leg on another. The two chairs were the only furniture in the apartment. I slept in the bath, which I had lined with sleeping moss, which was comfortable, sweet-smelling, and also massaged out the cares of the day with its tiny rhizoids.

  The day before I adjudged the weed would reach its catalytic potential and spawn servitors, I bought not just my usual black coffee from the café downstairs, but also a triple macchiato that came in a heavy, heat-resistant glass. Because I lived upstairs they always gave me proper cups. The barista who served me, a Japanese guy who worked the espresso machine mornings and surfed all afternoon, put the coffees in a cardboard holder meant for takeaways and said, ‘Got a visitor today?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But I will have shortly. By the way, I wouldn’t go surfing here this afternoon … or tomorrow.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That weed,’ I replied. ‘It’s toxic. Try another beach.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked as he slid the tray into my waiting fingers. ‘I mean, you can’t …’

  ‘I can’t see it,’ I said as I backed away, turned, and started tapping toward the door. ‘But I can smell it. It’s toxic all right. Stay clear.’

  ‘Okay, thanks. Uh, enjoy the coffee.’

  I slowly made my way upstairs and set the coffees down on the floor. My own cup in front of one white chair, and the macchiato at the foot of the other. I wouldn’t be resting my limb on the spare chair today.