Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell Read online

  He returned to the front of the cage and poured more wine.

  "The Opus Angelorum has not always worked with angels, has it?"

  Glass in hand, Verdi assumed a haughty demeanor. "In the past, yes, we took the tools of the enemy--of the sorcerer, the witch, the conjurer--and turned them against him. What could be more fitting for such blasphemers?"

  "In your lifetime, Domenico, have you done this?"

  His thick face turned sad a moment, nostalgic for something he'd never known. He tried to hide it, but too late, had given himself away. "No. I've seen things, but...no. Our path today has been back to the angels. It was lost for a long, long time. We were intent on finding it again." Now, once more, the pride. "And we did."

  "No matter. Could a group such as yours really believe itself uncorrupted by the influence of demons and evil spirits when that was all that would answer? Could your motives still be pure when you found your way back to the angels?"

  Verdi insisted they could...but his eyes suggested that he knew better.

  "You called yourselves 'The Work of Angels,' yet you trafficked with devils. If not you personally, then your predecessors. Did none of you, in all that time, realize that this is like labeling something 'The Work of Virgins,' then delegating it to whores?"

  On the other side of the bars, Verdi drew himself up into a pillar of cold disdain. "We fought the enemies of the Church with the weapons that we had...not those we longed for."

  "And what was lacking?" Laurenti was aware that he was asking one man to speak for generations. Not fair, but he might never get this chance again. "What kind of strength could you have longed for that faith and scripture did not provide?"

  Verdi's face twisted with anguish, then fury, as he gripped the bars. "God!" he shouted. "We wanted God on our side! But where was He? He was...silent. If He heard our prayers, then He took no notice of them. Even if He saw us at our best, then it was still not good enough for Him."

  Verdi's eyes were hollow with the miseries and doubts they all encountered, but most had learned to overcome: Where was God when the oceans rose and the earth shook? When the evil prospered and the innocent suffered? If He was aware of each sparrow falling from the sky, why did He seem to take no notice when His children died by the thousands, the millions, and in the most terrible ways?

  "We wanted God, we hungered for God," Verdi murmured. "And in His silence we took what we could get."

  "I wish..." Laurenti said, and if he denied having thought these very things, he'd be a liar. "I wish as much as you that we lived in an age of miracles. But we don't. If you don't find God in your heart, where else can you expect to find Him?"

  "I don't know." Verdi ran a hand up and down the bar, as if seeking a weakness he knew he wouldn't find. "But I know He's there somewhere. If there was only an empty void, it would not feel this cold."

  Laurenti reached across to clamp his hand over Verdi's, clenched around the bar. "Do you speak for all of them? All of them today, all of them who came before you, down through the centuries? Or do you speak only for yourself?"

  Verdi snorted. "There is no difference anymore."

  "You're not bound to their fate...even though it clings to you like a wet rag." Laurenti leaned closer, imploring through the bars. "Let me deliver you. Let me cast this legacy off you. I've met many souls in the grip of things they thought they could control. Let me pry you out of theirs."

  "Beat the devils out of me, would you?" Verdi grinned, square teeth clenched like a little ivory wall. "And until now you sounded like such a man of reason."

  Would it do any good to tell Domenico Verdi that he had done such things a dozen times before? In truth, he could not say in any particular case whether what he had faced was a true demon, eons old, or a lost and angry spirit laying siege to the flesh of the weak. He'd seen many strange things, and the more of them he saw, the stranger the whole world and the axis on which it spun seemed to be...bearing less and less resemblance to the orderly realm he was taught in catechism.

  But I helped them, every one, he thought, as if Verdi could hear him, from strangers, to one of my own brothers in this struggle against you and what you stand for, and if you would let me, I could help you too...

  "I've already found my deliverers," Verdi said, snatching his hand away. "I think maybe you'll meet them soon enough."

  And as Laurenti turned to leave Verdi to his solitude and his strangely muttered prayers, he felt as if he were dragging chains, and couldn't decide which weighed upon him more: the successes or the failures.

  A minute or two after the priest left, giving no sign of returning any time soon, the man in the cage sank down along the back wall where, in the tiny cracks between stone and mortar, you could still find short coarse hairs where some animal had rubbed itself many ages ago.

  An omen--could it be anything else? The past was never truly dead. Only dormant, waiting to be rediscovered.

  He knew it well, this wall. Had searched its every inch looking for the best patch of stone for his needs: abrasive, neither too coarse nor too smooth.

  On the afternoon they'd caught him, he had a thumbnail that had gone too many days without being trimmed...and now he understood there was a plan in even this.

  With short, quick strokes, he filed the overlong nail against the wall, as though honing the edge of a blade.

  Chapter 12

  It had been a grand day for sailing and he'd seen it all, from sunup to sundown, only rarely leaving his post at the front of the Calista. Late in the morning they had cleared the passage between Corsica and Sardinia, and in the early afternoon, having reached the deep waters beyond the almost-kissing pair of islands, had turned toward the southwest.

  Travel was not fast this way--they never broke thirty knots--but it was steady and calm, better than risking a plunge from the sky, and the farther behind they left Rome and its intrigues, the safer the journey felt. Yet the calm was not lulling. He didn't find it a struggle to remain watchful and alert, felt no complacency in the constant presence of the sun and wind and waves. To the contrary, he found them fortifying after so much time spent breathing the musty air of the danker places of the earth, and under it.

  They lost the wind late in the afternoon, so the crew fired up the craft's twin diesel engines. Not as quiet, but just as steady.

  Near twilight, Bastiaan came onto the foredeck and stood with him, and they gazed starboard in the direction of lands they could not yet see, smoldering under the last of an orange sunset smeared like marmalade across the blue-black horizon.

  "Hey, you stay here much longer," Bastiaan told him, "we might as well tie you onto the front of my ship as a figurehead."

  "Probably kill off your business, wouldn't it? Scare the tourists?"

  "Or maybe attract a whole new class. Everybody else, look how fast they get out of our way."

  And it was happening again: Bastiaan seeming not to want to talk with him so much as simply stand nearby and stare at him, without being obvious about it. It wasn't so much his otherness, Hellboy decided, as it was the fact that, after thirty years gone by, one of them had so obviously changed and the other so obviously hadn't.

  He knew they were one and the same--this agreeably weathered man and the boy who'd been pulled back into the sunlight after days trapped belowdecks, frightened but with body and soul intact--yet Hellboy still found it hard to connect them. For most of these years, Bastiaan Karabachos had only been a voice on the phone, a quick note, a postcard, or, more recently, an e-mail...but foremost, a contact to be maintained because the marker would one day be called due. Finishing old business their fathers had begun. Bastiaan did not appear to resent it in the least.

  And so Hellboy had to wonder what it was, exactly, that Bastiaan saw whenever the man looked at him with such quiet scrutiny. A link to the past that proved he had not dreamed his childhood ordeal? Maybe. A reminder of the way, in this world, Hell could seem so much closer than Heaven? Yeah, probably hard to get around that one.
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br />   Or maybe what Bastiaan saw was a force of nature, supernature, untouched by the decades, seemingly as impervious to age as a face carved into a mountainside. A face outside of time that couldn't help but shove a man up against the fact of his own mortality.

  Except that one cut both ways, didn't it?

  Hellboy had every reason to believe that he would outlive everyone on this boat, with the possible exception of Abe. They knew of no precedent for him, much less when his days might come to an end. But for everyone else here, Hellboy knew he would walk the earth under which they slept, or with the winds that bore their ashes.

  He had already come to accept that; had, with Professor Bruttenholm's death, outlived everyone who had taken him in and made him a part of this world instead of its enemy. General Ricker and the others at that Air Force base in New Mexico where he had passed his accelerated version of childhood...gone, all gone now.

  "Got any kids?" Hellboy asked Bastiaan, suddenly thinking it wrong that he didn't know.

  Bastiaan nodded, but didn't dive for photographs the way most men would. Not that Hellboy would've minded.

  "Twin boys," he said. "Still too young yet for this life."

  "Maybe I'll meet them someday."

  "You may. Yes." Bastiaan's hands curled and flexed around the railing. "But you won't take offense if I say that I hope not."

  "No. No offense."

  It was times like this when he wondered how many more generations might come and go before he would want no more friends at all.

  He suspected he already knew whose death would seal off the world for good.

  When later that night they hit a patch of fog, Bastiaan throttled back the engines and eased them down to a slow chug. The bow lights cut through the mists, wafting past in silken clouds that clung to the skin like dew and brought with them the enclosing sense that the sea had become infinitely smaller.

  Instinctively, as he had done countless times since boarding last night, Hellboy turned his eyes skyward, wondering if seraphim might use fog as a cover, even control it...or if in their obedience and devotion it didn't matter whether they came openly or in stealth. The view above was unobstructed again, clear in all directions, the crew having furled the sails after the wind had died in the late afternoon. He had no blind sides they could exploit in the dark.

  And looking up into the mists, he saw it.

  At first he didn't even realize what he was looking at. Nothing that caught his eye because it was moving. Instead, it slowly took shape before his eyes, like an optical puzzle that has to be stared at awhile before it divulges the image hidden inside.

  He could see it in the diffused light from the cockpit and cabin windows that waned overhead along the masts. Motionless, it crouched in the angle where the gaff joined to the mainmast. Translucent, it seemed not to stand out against the mist so much as to be made of it. No...no, that wasn't it. Not made of mist, but displacing it somehow, or repelling it, a subtle void in the shape of a crouching man, holding casually to the mainmast with one arm and staring downward, watching, just...watching. Under almost any other conditions, he might not have seen it at all.

  And maybe hadn't, the entire time they'd been at sea.

  "Abe!" he called. "Get up here!"

  A moment later, Abe left his post along the stern, scrambling onto the cockpit roof and springing off toward the foredeck to land beside him with a thump. He gave Hellboy a quizzical look, seemed to be expecting something more obvious.

  Hellboy pointed upward. "You see that too, don't you?"

  There was, however remote--even if he didn't want to admit to it--the possibility that he'd been staring at the sky long enough to start inventing shapes out of nothing, seeing things that weren't there. The sea could do that to men, and while he liked to think of himself as immune to such frailties...well, a second opinion never hurt.

  To his relief, Abe nodded. "Plenty of ghosts at sea. It's as haunted a place as any battlefield."

  "Yeah, but what's that one doing there?" Hellboy asked. "Does it belong to the Calista? This boat's got a history."

  Abe stood absolutely still for several moments, peering into the billows of fog that thickened and thinned around them.

  "I don't..."

  --lifting a finger to trace something in the air that Hellboy couldn't see--

  "...think so."

  --Abe's finger following a broad path of loops and curves, starting high and dropping lower, lower--

  "Uh oh," he murmured.

  Maybe it was force of suggestion, or maybe Hellboy's eyes were growing accustomed to the murk and he could make out the finer distinctions of which Abe was capable--an advantage in the part of his life spent underwater. Either way, with Abe's help he was now seeing it too: a line, a filament that seemed to be anchored in the chest of the specter looming above them, descending like an unspooled cable--

  "Where did you pick this up, I wonder?" said Abe.

  --to finally connect with some unseen point behind him.

  Abe was pointing at his back.

  "That thing's grafted onto me?" Hellboy said. "I didn't even feel a tickle."

  You might try to grab the ethereal tether, but could never succeed. It was not there in any physical sense. Yet it was no less real for that. As real as the wind, and as hard to hold.

  "I've been dragging that thing behind me ever since somewhere in Rome?"

  "Probably." Abe looked almost apologetic. "But none of us realized until now."

  "I know one thing," Hellboy said. "It didn't stick there by itself. Somebody had to put it on me."

  The phantom stood up. It knew. It recognized their awareness. Still little more than a hole in the underlit mists, defined more by what it wasn't than what it was, supported by the gaff even though it surely didn't need to be; but then, that was the thing about spirits. So often they clung to their old familiar relationship with the world, continuing to relate to it by what was solid and what was not. Old habits, old memories, old fears of falling.

  By now it had the attention of the two crewmen on deck, and he heard one of them scrambling about down below, yelling for Bastiaan.

  "What's it doing?" Nikos called from the cockpit as he stared upward.

  Good question. Except an even better one--one that settled everything as far as Hellboy was concerned--was what could it do? About the only potency belonging to a specter like this was its presence, not its power. It was sentient, maybe a little stubborn, and not much more. A glimpse of it might give a passing fright to the uninitiated--Nikos clearly fell into that group--but as for the passengers on this boat...well, the pitiful thing was going to have to do a lot more than this before it put any kind of scare into them.

  Still standing, it let itself tip forward and fall, looking like nothing so much as the echo of someone committing suicide. Drawn perhaps more by the memory of gravity than the pull itself, it plunged to the deck, striking silently in front of them, splattering apart in wispy bursts and tendrils of displaced fog, and then there was nothing. Not even the spectral umbilical between them anymore.

  "Looks like we scared it more than it scared us," Hellboy said. "I wish it went that way more often."

  "Unless..." said Abe, and wasn't it just the most irritating thing the way he looked anything but relieved.

  "Yeah?" Hellboy gave him an impatient frown. "Unless what?"

  "Unless it just now finished what it was meant to accomplish all along."

  "Such as? Cut the boredom level for a couple of minutes there, but--"

  It came from somewhere out in the fog, far ahead of them and to the right: the sound that might have been made if a sunken ship had filled with air and surged to the surface, then crashed back to the water in a drenching concussion of impact and spray.

  "Aw, crap," Hellboy said. "Why do you always have to be right?"

  A few moments later the wave hit them front and starboard, nowhere near enough to swamp the Calista, but easily strong enough to lift her several feet and throw t
hem off balance, soaked by a ragged splash of brine.

  "I think it was a marker," Abe said of the specter, "a beacon..."

  "A tracking device, you mean," Hellboy said. "And we've just been found."

  As the Calista continued to bob in the last of the wave, they could hear a distant watery blast of breath, like a whale's gust of air expelled through a blowhole as big around as a truck tire. And then a rumbling of such depth and force that it was below the audible threshold, something they heard less than felt, the sonic equivalent of an iceberg, ninety percent of it lurking beneath the surface.

  Bastiaan was on deck by now, one hand gripping the wheel and the other holding fast to the cockpit rail as he craned forward to catch a glimpse of something, anything, in the lights shining from the bow. But for now, it was only more of the same gray fog and the dark, undulating murk of the sea.

  "Is that a whale out there?" Bastiaan shouted.

  "I wish it were," Abe murmured.

  From out in the dark came another heaving splash, and the next huff of bellows breath sounded from the port side. Once more, half a minute later, and it came from far beyond the stern.

  "It's circling us!" Bastiaan warned. A moment later he thought to hit the all-round lights installed on the top of each mast; suddenly the Calista was sitting in the middle of an encircling pool of white light. And beyond...still nothing to see but an unbroken horizon of water.

  Abe turned back toward Bastiaan, and this time meant to be heard. "If you have life rafts, I suggest you deploy them now."

  Hellboy gripped the rail and scowled at the sea. Above, always above, his head in the clouds...he'd been so concerned about an attack from above that he hadn't once considered an attack from below. Angels soared; they did not swim. But again, the same as the hijacking of the armored car...whatever this was, it didn't feel like the work of men who summoned angels. This was of the earth and water, not air and fire.

  Bastiaan had yet to shut down the engines entirely and the Calista was still creeping forward. The leading edge of the lights fell upon a disturbance in the surface of the sea...the violent swirl of a vortex just now beginning to die and fill in again. He had seen such a thing only once in his life, many years ago, standing on the bridge of a battleship and watching the wake of a diving submarine.