Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (11 page)

But chaos rarely served a master. It sought entry anywhere it could. And surely that was the only reason an agency like theirs remained funded, even tolerated at all. They didn't so much defend the country as they defended reality itself.

Easy, then, to forget that there was still a bureaucratic hammer over their heads, however unobtrusive it may have been most of the time.

Hellboy glanced back past the cockpit, in the direction of the companionway, the stairs leading belowdecks. "Was Liz awake when you came up?"

"Definitely not," Abe said, then stood and stretched out his long, lean body, sleek as an eel. He took a couple of steps toward the rail, gazing off across the water, a plain of gunmetal gray with a light chop starting to hurl back the highlights of the rising sun.

"Go on, you know you want to," Hellboy told him. "But I'm not giving you mouth-to-mouth if you overdo it."

Abe tossed a look of friendly scorn over his shoulder and then was gone in the snap of a finger. Even if the boat had been anchored in the middle of a glass-calm sea, Hellboy doubted that he would have heard a splash. Abe Sapien usually hit water like a knife.

Hellboy left his deck chair and stepped over to the railing, stood there awhile staring down at the surface of the sea, where Abe kept pace with the prow of the yacht as it sliced westward. Agile as a porpoise, Abe moved through the water with a speed and grace that made even Olympic medalists look like dog-paddlers.

It was moments like this in which he envied Abe a little.

What, seventy-five, eighty percent of the earth's surface was covered in water?

No wonder there were times when Abe seemed to belong in this world a lot more than he did.

Later he dug into one of the deeper pockets of his trench coat--draped now over the back of the deck chair in deference to the warming day--and pulled out the Luger he'd taken off the dead hijacker. He turned it over and over in his hand until he got tired of looking at something that he couldn't interrogate, frighten, or wheedle into giving up any secrets.

He walked it back to the cockpit, where the captain was taking another turn at the wheel. Bastiaan Karabachos was one of those men who looked as though he might as well be welded to the wheel of his ship, his veins running with the blood of mariners who, so he claimed, went all the back way to the time of Homer. Hellboy allowed him his fantasies--it was a good marketing ruse for the more naive among his legitimate customers. Even so, with his weathered face--the skin roughened by the elements and the corners of his eyes cut deep by squinting into fifteen thousand suns--and his bush of hair that looked windblown even indoors, you could imagine Homer taking a gander at some ancestor of his, nodding, and saying, "Yes,
here
is my Odysseus."

"Hey. Bastiaan," Hellboy said. "Knowing what I do about the rest of your business, you're going to disappoint me if you don't have someone on this boat who knows as much about guns as he does rigging sails."

With a grin, Bastiaan nodded at the Luger in Hellboy's hand. "What is this, you're traveling lighter these days? For a hand like yours, that thing isn't any more than a derringer." He laughed, then yelled over his shoulder to a younger crewman he called Nikos, who was standing at the stern rewinding a thick coil of rope they'd used to haul Abe back aboard after his morning swim.

"Don't let his face fool you," Bastiaan said. "Nikos has some expertise."

Up close, in the daylight--Hellboy hadn't seen him very clearly when they'd boarded last night--Nikos seemed not much more than a kid, with the large, dark eyes and flawless skin that gave some young Mediterranean men an almost feminine appearance. That he'd buzzed his hair down to stubble seemed like nothing so much as an attempt to look older, tougher.

But damned if he didn't know guns. A boyhood obsession, maybe, fixated on firearms instead of something healthier, like soccer. When Hellboy handed the pistol over for a look, Nikos gazed upon it the way other men might stare at Ming vases, handwritten Mozart manuscripts.

"Something interesting about this?" Hellboy asked.

"A Luger in general, no," he said. "But the age and condition of this one...where did you get this?"

"Nazi gun, right?"

Nikos curled one corner of his mouth. "This is possible. But just as possible not. Yes, Lugers were used then, but very early in that war the German military replaced them with Walther P-38s. Lugers were in much more common use in the First World War."

"That early, huh?"

"And this one, she was made even
before
the war. Here, look, look at this." Nikos tilted the top of the pistol toward him and pointed to the rounded toggle lock near the back, ran his finger along a monogram--
DWM
. Hellboy had noticed it already, just hadn't thought much about it. "As good as a fingerprint. This was a private munitions company that manufactured them before the war, along with the German government. You have a real antique. I never saw one this old, not with my own eyes, only pictures. It's seen
some
use, but the condition...beautiful...it could have been in a museum most all this time."

"Not likely," Hellboy said. Giving serious thought to what the hijacker of an armored car was doing with a well-preserved firearm that was eighty-five, ninety years old.

"Maybe a time capsule, then, eh?" Nikos said, and over the next half hour offered to buy the thing four or five times before deciding his effort was futile. Unless it had something to do with Hellboy's musing aloud if it would take a good solid backhand to get him to take no for an answer.

Sometimes it could be so hard to tell.

L
iz was up at midmorning, emerging from below with both hands wrapped around a gargantuan and copiously steaming mug of coffee. She scuffed over to him, her bare feet making soft slaps across the deck and her reddish-brown hair straight as a stick and blowing loose around her shoulders.

"My god, just look at you," she said. "You've been sitting out here so long you've gotten the worst sunburn I've ever seen."

He pretended to glare but unfortunately had the kind of face that didn't show much distinction between pretend and the real thing. He thought Liz got it this time.

She had him hold her coffee and forbade him to drink it while she retrieved another deck chair from the rack along the front of the cockpit, dragged it over next to him, and settled in.

"Nice cozy little cabins down there and I bet you haven't even seen one yet."

"I don't do cozy," he said.

She tipped her head back for a long, sighing look toward the day's few clouds. "If it wasn't for the constant threat of death, this really would be the life." Now a peek over at him. "Clear skies, I assume?"

"Unless you count the gull that nailed Abe. Heard him say a couple words I didn't even realize he knew."

She laughed. "Sorry I missed that. He's normally so unflappable." Coffee next, and lots of it. "I'm glad everything's been quiet. Some secret weapon I've been since last night, huh?"

"You gotta sleep sometime. You're only human."

"Rub it in, why don't you."

She sank down deep in the chair and stretched out, legs long inside the gray sweatpants she was wearing, and kicked her feet up onto the railing. He gazed at them for a few moments, and they seemed so small, childlike almost, and in the moment he found it hard to associate them with a person that harbored the kind of power she did, something so apocalyptically destructive. Although there were many at the BPRD--and for now Liz was one of them--who had come to believe that she was not its cause, but merely its conduit. That the fire was a living element that existed, if not quite a part of her, not apart from her, either.

A fine distinction, maybe, but an important one.

"Tell me something." She glanced around at the yacht. "Am I totally off base in the feeling I've been getting that this, umm, charter operation isn't completely on the level?"

"What gave you that idea?"

"They leer," she said. "I mean
really
leer."

"At you, you mean...?"

"Yes, at me. A couple of them anyway. It doesn't seem like it would be good for business if your boat is crewed by guys who can't keep their eyes in their heads. But there's something greedy about it, too. A hey-wouldn't
-she
-fetch-a-nice-price kind of leer."

He had to take a few moments to think about the right thing to say here. Offer to have a few words with Bastiaan? Not on your life. With Liz, you didn't offer to intercede on her behalf as though she were some helpless little thing in need of rescue. Because she was anything but, and would resent the hell out of him for the rest of the day and probably tomorrow. Couldn't just dismiss it, though, because then she would think he didn't care.

Then he had it.

"It would be almost worth it to see them try you," he said...and yes, it was just the right thing. "Anything else, or is that your sole evidence against them?"

"Plus when I was down in the galley getting ready to make coffee, I opened the wrong cabinet door and found a suspiciously large number of Rolexes."

"It really is a charter boat. The last I heard, it goes for $3700 a day during peak season," he said. "But Bastiaan has...sidelines, I guess you'd call them."

"I figured as much."

"You don't sound disapproving."

"Well, I really wanted that coffee something fierce." She shrugged it all off. "Underneath the spookshow trappings, what
is
the bureau, anyway, but another intelligence agency? Isn't the first rule of the intelligence business that sometimes you have to deal with some shady people?"

"I think the first rule is don't get caught, but the other probably comes in a close second."

"So how do you know these people, and how is it that they apparently dropped everything to come to our aid as fast as they did?"

"Bastiaan, he's the only one I know. I never met the other guys," Hellboy said. "The boat, the business...the sidelines...all these were things that got passed down from father to son. Along with an obligation."

"So you two go back a long way, then."

"He was just a boy then. Really close to his old man--Zosimo was
his
name. So the obligation, there was never any doubt that Bastiaan would honor it. I kept in touch with him enough over the years that he had to know I'd hold him to it one day. I knew he was in Naples, so the time finally came."

"You're worse than the Godfather sometimes, you know?" she said. "What was the link?"

It all went back to a rogue archaeological dig near the site of Catal Huyuk, in Turkey, he told her. More than thirty years ago. Catal Huyuk dated back around 8500 years, making it one of human civilization's oldest known cities. The BPRD knew of at least three cities that were far older, although not by the quantifiable means that kept orthodox archaeologists happy.

The rogue dig had been financed by an Algerian businessman, and through means that the BPRD had never been able to discern--after things went wrong, he'd made himself as inaccessible as a despot--the man knew approximately
where
to dig, but not exactly what he would find. And indeed, in less than two weeks the site had yielded one of those items the earth periodically coughs up--artifacts that, according to traditional learning, should not be where they are found, or should not be at all. In this instance, it was a statue that stood over seven feet tall, carved from a substance that was, while not identical with, every bit as mysterious as Hellboy's hand. It appeared to represent some unknown life-form, rendered in a triumphal pose that was as majestic as it was grotesque, even if it bore no resemblance to any known anatomy.

It had been crated and, in violation of the Turkish laws concerning indigenous antiquities, had been trucked to the coast, where the
Calista
awaited, Zosimo Karabachos having been hired to transport the thing to Algiers. At which point, as far as anyone knew, it would join the private collection of the man who had paid handsomely for its recovery.

Except they'd never made it. Throughout a long night in the deep waters south of Greece, the crate had been opened by hands unknown, and some of the statue's limbs--if they could accurately be called that--had
detached
from the main body to graft themselves onto the bodies of the crew. Zosimo had described seeing one of his men curled against the stern, wracked by violent spasms as parts of his body began to solidify with spreading veins of the same stonelike substance that had comprised the artifact.

Soon after, it had begun to work on reshaping his bones.

The crewman had smiled throughout, though...smiled with a beatific radiance and, with the ardor of a prophet, spoke of the frozen perfection of dead worlds. Until his tongue, too, turned to stone in his mouth, and so, wordlessly, he had begun to sing. The sound of it, the ferocious
joy
of it, had driven Zosimo to find first a filleting knife from the galley, and then the softer parts that still remained in his crewman's body.

He had long since locked Bastiaan, then just eleven years old, down below, where he'd been trapped after another of the crewmen grew solidified and malformed over the companionway entrance, like a misshapen latticework of unbreakable stone.

Zosimo had pushed the
Calista
as far as the southern tip of Malta, where he sought refuge in the fishing village of Birzebbuga...and was quickly quarantined on the beach by the normally welcoming locals once they'd gotten a look at his cargo and what remained of his crew.

And it was from here that an old colleague from England, on Malta to study the Neolithic temples of nearby Hagar Qim, had called in Professor Trevor Bruttenholm. One of the founders of the BPRD, and the man Hellboy had gladly called Father.

"It was one of the first times I'd seen him work," he told Liz. "I mean
really
work. Not just academics and research. Fieldwork, the dangerous stuff. It'd already been, what, twenty or so years since I'd come into the world and he'd taken me in...helped raise me, train me. But this was something new to see. This could've killed him."

There was no single word for what Professor Bruttenholm--tall and slender and in nearly all respects the quintessentially proper Englishman--had performed at the southern tip of Malta. It was a hybridized working of his own devising, equal parts exorcism, banishment ritual, and shamanic journey. It had been a spiritual combat that required days before the statue's spreading contagion had been contained and then reversed, yet even then all but one of the afflicted crewmen had perished.

But Zosimo's son Bastiaan had been spared. A debt that the elder had vowed would not go unpaid, no matter how long it took.

"The way he was," Hellboy said, "I don't think Professor Bruttenholm ever had any intention of collecting. For him, what he learned from the experience...that's what he considered payment."

Two years dead now, he was. A respectful enough time to wait before calling in old markers on the favors the great man was owed.

Two years dead, and still there were days when Hellboy missed him so much he could just about feel the pain of it all the way into his big right hand.

"What happened to the statue?" Liz asked. "Is it down in the basements back in Fairfield with all the other oddities?"

When she was a kid, Liz used to joke that the bureau could hold the scariest yard sale in the world.

"Nah," Hellboy said. "There's nothing left. I don't know why...but it rotted. Just like a big frozen beef carcass left out in the sun."

"Yum," she said, and drained the last of her near-bucket of coffee. "Who's ready for breakfast?"

During those times when Liz decided she'd had enough of bureau life and struck out for parts unknown, he didn't know which was worse: his dread that something would happen to her, or maybe
because
of her...or the fact that he was once more missing out on times like this. Talking about things that the average person had never seen, never experienced, could never even relate to.

You needed that to keep yourself sane, to remind you that no matter how deep the darkness, you still shared the light with someone. Professor Bruttenholm had always been good for it. Abe too. Nothing against them. But sometimes you didn't need a surrogate father, a surrogate brother. Sometimes you needed a Liz in your life, the surrogate sister in the family you'd gathered about yourself.

No question about it: Whenever she wasn't around, while this world may still have had its wonders, its beauties, they seemed dimmed and diminished.

"With everything that's been going on since you came in last night," he said, "I didn't get much chance to ask how your project's going back in Fairfield."

"My
project?"
Liz gave him one of those looks that she sometimes turned on him whenever she found his choice of words to be less than optimal. "My
project
has a name. Campbell Holt. Remember him? He's the one whose wrists aren't as durable as yours."

"Sorry," he said. "I just forgot his name, that's all."

"He's...coming along well. He's getting a handle on it. Controlling it, not letting his quote-unquote gift control him. Slow steps, but he'll get there."

"Sounds like somebody else I used to know."

"Did you know they've offered--more than once--to fit him with a prosthetic for the hand he cut off? He doesn't want it. He says he'd rather look at the stump every day, because he wants a constant reminder, in the starkest possible terms, that he's got to remain in control. I admire that. It'd be like if I wore a glass locket around my neck that was filled with ashes from the neighborhood where I grew up."

She tipped her head back as though it had suddenly doubled in weight.

"I need this, H.B. I need this to work. I know what it's like to be on his side of the desk...or the straitjacket...and realize that the person who thinks they're helping you doesn't have a
clue
what it's like to be in your skin. So when I think of the difference in the way Campbell looks now compared to the way he looked a few weeks ago when I first visited him in the hospital...I see that change in him and I
know
that it's something I helped to make happen. It's something I helped build instead of burn."

Liz looked across at him, eyes so open it was like he could see all the way to the bottom of a well...a Liz filled with renewed purpose. With a familiarity both idle and tender, she slapped her hand atop his right one. Left it there as she turned her gaze once more toward the sea and the sky.

"If I can help him get to the place he needs to be," she said, "everything I've been through...maybe it'll seem like it had a purpose after all."