Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell Page 13

  He looked at Abe, then tipped his chin at the waters. That other world out there, that dimension beneath waves and tides and whirlpools.

  "That's more your zone than mine," he said.

  From the corner of his eye he saw Liz hurrying to the foredeck after emerging from below, hugging close to the side of the wheelhouse, and for a moment he held his breath, because what if she slipped, what if she slid into the water with whatever was out there...

  But she kept her footing, and drew up close enough to grip the edge of his hand. Except he had his doubts that stone was the best thing to hold onto in the middle of a treacherous sea.

  Back to Abe: "So do you know what it is?"

  Abe looked hesitant to commit to an answer. "I can guess," he said...then did.

  At almost any other time, Hellboy might have even felt privileged. He had hunted things of monstrous births and evil intentions, had stood between reality and the things that hungered to rip holes in its fabric. He had battled folklore's worst abominations, killed offspring spawned by human madness. After nearly half a century of this, it had become almost routine.

  But if Abe was right, this...out there...was like the coming of royalty.

  The Leviathan.

  In all his days and travels he'd known of no one who could say for sure that it was anything more than a myth. Ancient stories, legends woven together from threads of truth and yards of imagination. Even the freshest of them was over a thousand years old. Meaning if this truly was what was circling them, it had slumbered for the last millennium, and then some.

  Yet that wasn't what worried him. Worse to contemplate was that it had been roused by someone, or some thing, capable of reaching it in its state of dreaming death. To do that took some serious mojo, and was likely beyond the capabilities of any mortal necromancer that he was aware of.

  This, he feared, was not the work of men, but of gods. Or devils. There were times when he had to confess that it was difficult to tell the difference.

  Somewhere just beyond the reach of light, it emitted a bleating groan that dissolved into liquid thunder that rumbled up through the yacht's hull.

  One of the crew hurried forward with three puffy orange life vests. Liz tied hers on without hesitation. Abe simply stared at the one offered to him without reaching for it; he rippled his gills, a little indignantly to Hellboy's eyes, until the guy got the message. Liz snatched it and shoved it toward Hellboy with a stern look.

  "Come on, H.B.," she said. "How easy do you think it's going to be to tread water with your hand chained to that case?"

  "Hey, I'm not proud," he said. "I just can't fit into that thing."

  "Then improvise," she snapped, and grabbed the third vest and lashed one around each of his upper arms.

  Okay, now the pride was starting to kick in. He feared he looked like a big ugly kid with inflatable water wings, ready for his first trip into the grownup pool.

  As she looked past his shoulder, Liz's eyes widened and her lips parted with something she had no words for. He knew from all the years between them that she was not easily impressed. Yet now, in the span of a heartbeat, he could see that she was awed.

  He turned.

  It was forty yards off the port bow, and its movement seemed familiar enough, like the graceful curving length of a whale beginning a slow dive, never seen whole, but as an evolving mound. Any resemblance ended there. It was finally in the pool of light, giving a brief glimpse of its upper back, looking like the overturned hull of something ancient and armored, dark as slate and bristling with scales the size of dinner plates. It went on and on, a rising hump that began to look less like a beast than a land mass, the profile of its back now and again showing a low, spiny fin. Just as he was beginning to think there was no end to the thing, an ouroboros spinning in place, its vast fluked tail breached the surface of the sea like twin scythes and followed it downward, and the Leviathan was gone, another vortex in its wake.

  Near the port stern, one of the crew was clutching the rail. He laughed, a sound terrible in its exultation. Yet Hellboy understood. There must have been a time when men had worshipped this thing, a place where it too had been a god. Let it rise from the depths, and so would the veneration.

  Moments later the Calista was jolted from below, her hull shuddering, then continuing to groan as the Leviathan rasped along it like a file, tipping the vessel sharply to starboard. She had just enough time to settle before it came again, harder this time, and now the collision threw everyone off their feet and to the deck. They grappled for handholds, or crawled away from the railings and toward the center...

  Except for the crewman Hellboy had seen laughing, who hurled himself over the side.

  The Calista gave a forward surge as Bastiaan revved the engines, but it was a doomed effort, an eruption of foamy water cascading over the transom as the yacht was just as suddenly shoved backward into her own wake, and this time Hellboy heard the hull rupture. It was a vintage vessel, after all, her hull crafted from wood instead of fiberglass, and it gave with the splintering sound of a falling tree.

  Above it all, he could hear Bastiaan's howl of grief.

  Hellboy reversed direction, scrambling for the rail instead of away from it. He held on with his right hand and drew his revolver with the left, popping off three shots down into the side of the thing when a length of it flashed along just under the surface. Then he reined back his impulse to empty the gun, reload, and keep firing. To do any good, with something of this size, he would need to pick his targets more carefully.

  Don't fire until you see the black of its eyes.

  Maybe use those stun grenades from the armored car, too, if he could retrieve them from the locker in the cockpit where he'd stowed them. He saw Nikos over Bastiaan's shoulder, called for him to bring the flash-bangs.

  He held on as the Calista began to tip and spin, sparing a frantic look to check on Liz and Abe. They were working their way toward the rear deck, where someone had just pulled the ripcord on a self-inflating raft.

  Hellboy glared down into the water again and saw a slow-motion pass of scales just before the ship reared upward with such force it nearly threw him across the deck. It wasn't just scales this time, though. There was the angular suggestion of a head, or the plating of a hinged jaw, so he held on, aiming, waiting for something soft to shoot at. But all that appeared was the body of the crewman who'd plunged in, now impaled through the midsection on some spiny projection that looked like a spike of living obsidian.

  Then he sank from view, still pinned to the thing, his limp arm seeming to wave Hellboy onward, downward, to join him.

  Even when she wasn't being rammed, the Calista was no longer sitting level, her deck tilting toward the front as water poured in through her imploded bow. Bastiaan had called for one of the crew to start the bilge pump, but he was merely commanding out of instinct. This ship was going down, and no pump or bucket brigade was going to stop it.

  Maybe the rest of them had no choice but to hold on waiting to sink...but Hellboy knew there had to be more he could do, at least.

  With the sound of splitting timbers, the front end heaved skyward. As the Calista tipped up like a toy he saw an ocean of stars, then he rode the deck as it slapped back into the sea and seemed to keep going down, down, down. Arms and legs flailing, Nikos came hurtling over the cockpit and fell past him into the foam, all three grenades skittering across the teakwood after him.

  Even the foredeck was coming apart now, boards popping loose underfoot and peeling away from one another. He holstered the revolver and grabbed for one of the loosened boards instead, wrenching it free from the deck and coming away with a long, sharp-tipped plank, an eight-foot shard that he took to the very front of the bow. Water churned white up to his knees as he gripped the makeshift spear with both hands, the titanium case banging loose against his elbow, and jabbed it into the mass of scales before him. The tip scraped across them like a stick on stone, so he shifted his stance and attacked again, trying to wo
rk the point between the scales, under them, anywhere--this creature had to have a softer hide somewhere and by god he was going to find it, then shove it full of splinters the size of saplings.

  He found a brief moment to fear for everyone but himself, and another to regret the loss of this ship that hadn't just been Bastiaan's home for so much of his life, but his life itself, and the greatest link to his father. Rogues they may have been, but certainly not without honor.

  Then the fury overtook him again, and the water was up to his waist. Bastiaan stumbled forward to seize his own shard of teak and join the fight, however futile, driving it at the Leviathan and bellowing vengeance as the Calista groaned in death from the deepest fibers of her wood.

  As the water rose and the mainmast began to topple like a log, they struggled back toward the aft deck, clambering along the rail and any other handhold they could find. Although Bastiaan had given up the fight, his hands bleeding and raw from the fractured wood, Hellboy had not, and continued to jab his pike overboard, the beast alongside them now--he had to hit its eyes soon, had to find some vulnerability.

  But as the ship was lost, so was his base from which to fight.

  As if suffering one final spasm, the Calista rolled to her starboard side and hurled them into the sea, then she gave up her ghost with a surge of air trapped belowdecks. The surface of the water seemed to boil, littered under the moonlight with flotsam large and small.

  Hellboy bobbed in the turbulence, kept afloat by the vests cinched around his arms, but he still retched--must have swallowed a pint of seawater and foam. Once he'd finished sputtering he glanced around, nearly at eye level with the rise and fall of the sea. So quiet now, so eerily quiet after so much uproar, worse somehow than the screaming of survivors.

  "Liz!" he shouted.

  "Over here!" he heard her call from behind him.

  He kicked to spin around and followed the sound of her voice; saw a small, dark shape waving one arm maybe sixty feet away--Liz, hunched in the life raft. Another silhouette beside her. Abe, was it? Or one of the crew? He couldn't tell, not at this distance, in this light.

  His first impulse was to start swimming for the raft. Case or no case latched to his wrist, when he held his right hand flat it was better than a canoe paddle. He'd be there in less than a minute--

  But stopped after a few strokes. He had no reason to believe that the Leviathan had sunk the Calista for any reason other than himself, and what he carried. He could not endanger the raft so long as they shared the sea with the thing that had dumped them into it.

  He still had hold of the teakwood shard, gripped it hard as he looked around for a thrashing tail, a breaching fin...

  Nothing. For the moment, it was staying down.

  Someone else was moving close by, though--Bastiaan, from the sound of the waterlogged cough. Clinging to the cushion of a deck chair, Bastiaan kicked up beside him, sodden hair hanging into his eyes.

  "You see the raft over there?" Hellboy asked.

  "Yes," he said.

  "Can you make it?"

  "I think so, yes. But I think...it should matter to me more than it does."

  "It matters to me," Hellboy said. "I got a friend over there, and I want to make sure she gets back to land."

  "All right. All right," Bastiaan sputtered. "What about you?"

  "I'm gonna stay here a little longer, see what happens." He reached out and put his hand on Bastiaan's shoulder. "Would it do any good to tell you I'm sorry?"

  Bastiaan had nothing to say to that, for good or for ill. As he clung to debris and treaded water, his heart and soul seemed to be somewhere else.

  "It was all borrowed time, wasn't it?" he finally asked, no longer the captain of his ship, but once again his father's son. Thirty years younger on the southern shores of Malta.

  "If you enjoyed it, what's it matter if it was borrowed?" Hellboy dropped his hand to the cushion and gave a shove toward the raft. "I think you better get away from me right now."

  Hellboy waited, aware of every sloshing wave and bubble of air bursting up from the sinking wreck...but when it came, there was no mistaking it, so enormous it might send sharks fleeing like minnows. Off to his left it rose from the sea, gently this time, taking shape and form like a living island, and finally, he thought he saw the glint of its eye.

  And behind that eye would be its brain.

  He held his spear and shouted for it to come.

  Again it dove, tidal waves churning in its wake, and moments later he was aware of something rushing beneath him with the mass of a train and the cold vicious arc of a reaper's scythe.

  He'd been hit before, hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. Hit by things whose blows could demolish walls. But never quite like this. He imagined this was what it must be like for someone caught by a cyclone, that final instant of agony and awareness when struck full-on by the house that the winds have thrown.

  And yet he lived.

  It catapulted him from the water, and he saw stars and the moon, and the water again, and when he slapped against it its surface felt as hard as steel, and he lay floating for a moment, but only just, and then the great toothed mouth closed over him, gulping him down with the tide.

  Chapter 13

  It had been years since she'd been in a morgue, and if it was years before she set foot in another, that would suit her fine. Kate Corrigan was no stranger to death--a part of her had always longed to know the secrets people took with them to their graves--but death knew many forms, many faces.

  She had been one of those peculiar children who didn't fear graveyards. Instead, they were the most peaceful places she knew. She would read the names of the dead, the too-brief engravings that memorialized their lives or crystallized the anguish over their loss; she would do the math to work out how long they'd lived, and how long ago; she would sit for hours and stare at their stones. I'll be here too one day, she would tell herself, but the thought held no terrors for her, only the possibility of getting answers to so many questions. At the time, she'd believed she might get to meet them all, down to the last infant. From the clues and tidbits of their inscriptions, they had seemed so much more interesting than the living.

  Even as a girl she'd been fascinated by history...and who made history if not the dead?

  As she had grown older, and her life and career had taken their odd turns, she sometimes thought of herself--in jest usually, but not always--as a haunter of the dead. Ruined buildings, lifeless villages, forgotten customs, and, yes, the dearly and not-so-dearly departed...although she now understood that death and tranquility did not always go hand-in-hand. She'd explored too many places where too many terrible things had happened to believe in a truly peaceful death anywhere outside of a feather bed. But she still envied them their secrets, and probably always would. Every grave held a piece of history, a bookful of stories that deserved to be heard.

  She just wasn't used to seeing the dead quite so...fresh.

  And as she looked--not too closely--at the volcanic crater of meat and bone that had been the face of a stranger, Kate couldn't help but think he'd damn well better have secrets worth knowing.

  He and four others, all of them lined up on rickety gurneys in a chilly room whose air hung heavy with preservatives and disinfectants--this was all that remained of the men who'd been involved in the other night's episode with the armored car. From the alleyway, as well as from the car itself. Victims, perpetrators, or something in between--they were all in the same position now, weren't they? Horizontal, and draped in dingy sheets.

  Nice to have connections, at any rate. It had taken a couple of days to arrange for approval, but if she hadn't been working with people who could pull a few strings, this little trip might never have taken place at all. Now, if they could just get a fix on how all this carnage had happened.

  "Are you not feeling well?"

  The priest's voice slapped off tiles, metal doors and drawers, sounding even more like an accusation than it was already.

&nb
sp; She turned back to Father Laurenti, her impromptu partner in this foray into...what would you call it, really? Spiritual forensics? That was as fitting as anything. She'd have to remember that one.

  "Why do you ask?" she said.

  "Because I have seen bad cheese that had a more healthy color than you have now."

  "Careful, Gino," she told him. "Even if your side does get its way...? If you don't learn to talk to women any smoother than that, you're going to be one of the guys who stays celibate."

  Not that she could see him caring. It just felt good to say.

  Over the years Kate had met priests who, though they'd been gentlemen who hadn't uttered one risque word or given any indication of having broken their vows, had nonetheless come across as intensely sexual beings. They touched things--food and books, rosaries and piano keys--as if they wanted to consume them, be consumed by them. Their eyes shone with a healthy hunger for experience, even when they knew they couldn't have it.

  Father Laurenti was not one of them.

  Just before coming here, she had met him at a nearby cafe, where he'd been content with water. And on the short walk together, they had passed no less than half a dozen women so gorgeous they left Kate feeling frumpy even in the new thigh-length Piero Tucci leather jacket she'd bought while here. Had Laurenti noticed? Not a one of them, she was sure of it. He seemed to have little use for women, although it was not misogyny. He seemed to have little use for most men, either, and few creature comforts, for that matter. His insistence that she call him Gino appeared less an attempt toward familiarity than a simple distaste for standing on irrelevant ceremony.

  But put him in a roomful of corpses where violent death was the rule, and just watch him come alive. He hunkered down with each of them, getting so up close and personal you might think he believed a few lives could still be saved. She suspected it wasn't the first time, either. After the morgue's pair of attendants had lined up the last of the five gurneys, they had slipped quietly away, as if they'd been through the same routine with Laurenti before.