Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (15 page)

"Wouldn't we all." Kate pointed at Ogundana's corpse. "What are you reading into all this?"

"The Nigerian...he was bitten by this one." Laurenti thumped his hand on the gurney with the emaciated westerner. "The bite is hard to see now because a later wound made it worse. But if they measure that man's teeth, I believe they will find it matches a tear in this man's shoulder."

"Okay. He bit him," Kate said. Not terribly impressive in a situation where they were shooting each other. "So?"

"It was not an ordinary bite. This one..." Back to the malnourished young man. "He is what some call a
portatore
. Like someone with a disease, who walks around the streets, what would you call him...?"

"A carrier?"

"Yes. Carrier. But no disease. What he carries is a devil, a spirit not his own..."

And she was going to
have
to get this man to sit down with her and her tape recorder, and go over everything one more time. Because while it dovetailed nicely with incidents and attacks she was familiar with from at least a dozen folkloric traditions, it was also unique unto itself. She smelled a new book here--a revisionist examination of spirit possession in relation to creatures of folklore--and her heart began to race in agreement.

For the time being, at least, it was almost enough to make her put aside her worst fears for Hellboy and Abe.

The
portatore,
Laurenti told her, had been host to the entity inside for quite a long time, judging by his appearance. Years, perhaps. Although not as long as the one now missing his face; judging by the condition of his remains, and the glimpse that Hellboy had gotten in the mirror, that one had likely been enslaved even longer.

Laurenti compared the experience to living with a tapeworm: The host may eat, but so too is he eaten. Not
quite
the same way a tapeworm behaved, Kate noted, but she found the analogy valid. Laurenti claimed to have twice before seen men in the advanced stages of this sort of possession, in even worse condition yet still alive, the flesh tightened over their bones as though it had been slowly sucked out of them.

"But they're still mobile?" she asked. "Even then?"

"If it pleases the parasite, yes."

And like any parasite, it regarded the body it was in as existing only to serve its own needs: discord and terror, strife and death...and in some instances, more specific objectives.

Demon, spirit, parasite--Laurenti did not seem comfortable with any one term. But whatever it was, it would eventually drain the host body of so much vitality and physical mass that a new body was needed if it wished to continue existence on the earthly plane. It was extremely rare, though, that disembodied entities were able to force their way into innocent victims. One's flesh and soul provided a natural barrier that was very hard to breach. Such spirits required a willing host, an invitation from one who wished to serve as a vessel.

But they could, on occasion, transfer into an unwilling body during a physical assault by the original
portatore
.

"Through a bite, you mean," Kate said.

Laurenti nodded. "The teeth pierce both bodies...the physical and the etheric. For a few moments, in the confusion of the attack, a path inside opens."

It was, in his opinion, the reality behind such supposed creatures as werewolves, notorious for creating more of their kind by biting the innocent. But men did not truly become wolves, or some hybrid race between species. Rather, they might be reshaped into similar forms by malevolent devils that found those forms pleasing or useful.

She wanted to throw her arms around Laurenti and kiss his rough cheek. This may not have been the definitive word on the subject, yet for Kate, it still resolved so many contradictions she had encountered in both folklore and direct experience: Two-legged man-wolves walking upright in the Balkans; four-legged changelings virtually indistinguishable from Canadian wolves born in deep forest dens. Vampires of such refined aesthetics and keen intellect that they fashioned themselves aristocrats, and others that subsisted in the basest of squalor, aware only of their hunger. If Laurenti was right, there was no consistency because there were no true species to begin with, only the whims of demons that liked to play with flesh the way children might mold monsters from clay.

They could even ride more than one to a body, invading new hosts while the first remained occupied.

Not what happened in this case, obviously. By all indications, the
portatore
sank his teeth into Ogundana's shoulder, and was then discarded as a spent husk. It seemed plain enough that the new body, and its owner's place in the armored car's crew, was more useful to some greater plan. In that respect, Laurenti noted, the
portatore
had played a role not unlike the suicide bombers that were starting to become such a deadly plague in conflicts of the Middle East.

Yet despite Laurenti's appearing convinced of the part the bite had played, he nonetheless looked nagged by other doubts.

"What is it?" Kate asked.

"He
bit,
he
fell to the bite," Laurenti said, gesturing to each corpse in turn. "But no matter...this should never have happened."

"A lot of things that shouldn't happen do."

"No, no, this is not how I mean. They should have been safe, very safe. These good men were in the sanctuary of their vehicle. They had no reason to leave it. The Nigerian, he had no reason to put himself at risk."

"Maybe I can kick in a hypothesis here," Kate said. "Glamour."

Laurenti ran it through his filters and, judging by his puzzled expression, came up with the wrong sense of the word. She resented it, too: a perfectly fine old word whose meaning had been watered down by changing times into something vapid enough to suit runway models and cosmetics ads.

"Not the glamour you're thinking. The
old
kind, the original kind," she said. "The power to weave a spell or enchantment that affects someone's vision. If you're under the influence of a glamour, you might see something that's not there...or fail to see something that is...or see something as completely different from its true appearance."

"So the Nigerian, he could have been lured out in the open by some sight he trusted?" Laurenti said.

"Or all of them. Each of the guards might have looked out their windows at this pair and seen something totally unlike what the others saw." She glanced at the culprits under their sheets. Mangled and spent, they didn't look like much now, did they? "Glamour is normally associated with the Faerie folk of the British Isles, but there's no reason to think that the underlying principle couldn't have roots that are even deeper and older."

"It is a weapon against us," Laurenti said, its worst implications clear: Weapons always seemed to get into the hands of those most willing to use them, and where they could do the most harm.

And this one seemed so terribly pernicious...turning someone's eyes against him. She wondered what the men in the armored car had seen. Wives or mothers or children in need. Divine virgins, radiant saviors. Whatever it took to make dedicated men forget their duty and give themselves over to the teeth of the enemy.

Laurenti drew the sheets back over the corpses and made for the door, but she stayed behind awhile, waiting for the sheets to move again, wondering if she could trust her eyes that they were really, truly dead.

P
ressure...he was aware of that much, at least, and by now, not much else. Ever since the lights had gone out, moon and stars eclipsed by the great head that surged from the sea and descended in a roar of teeth and foam, when was he
not
aware of pressure?

From the moment he'd been washed down the Leviathan's gullet, he'd tried to fight, but it did no good. He quickly found that pounding the inner wall of its belly was like beating his hand against a wall of thick, wet rubber that might ripple and flex, but never tear. Stone, metal--these he could smash through, because they resisted. But this waterlogged cocoon of muscle
absorbed
the blows, swallowing the force of them and spreading it around until it dissipated.

He'd gone for his gun next, getting off a single shot before the Leviathan reacted. He was blind here, of course--the darkness was as total as if he'd gone deep into a cavern underground--with no clear idea of the size of the sac he'd been caught in. He could touch one slick wall and reach in the opposite direction and feel only the stew of seawater and bile in which he was submerged, jostled by the man-sized fragments of its meals. Things with fins, things with tentacles, things that sloshed and stirred as though still alive.

But once Hellboy had fired that first shot, the organ walls suddenly closed in around him and squeezed, pressing him into a bent, cramped submission in which he had no leverage, could scarcely even move. Flies in amber would feel this way before they suffocated.

Eventually he'd relented, his struggles futile, and reasoned that there had to be some greater purpose behind this. He was not being devoured, but delivered. He would deal with whoever was there to receive him.

Yet as the hours went on, he could feel himself fading into a stasis that lingered somewhere halfway to death. It would take more than this to kill him, but he needed more than he had here to feel truly alive. Everything took its toll--the unrelenting pressure, the loss of movement, the submersion in acid and brine, the lack of air. Now and again he found himself in a fleeting pocket of gas, caustic and smelling like centuries of rotting fish, and he made do with that, even if it brought him little more than the satisfaction of flexing his aching lungs before sinking back into a delirium that deepened as the hours wore on.

Or maybe days. Or weeks. Or eternity.

Time, like light, had no meaning here.

There was sound, though, and it played tricks on him, as he could hear his blood running through his veins, and the blood of the Leviathan through the miles of arteries wrapped around him, and the ocean beyond that. He thought he could hear tectonic tremors rising from the ocean floor, and the songs of whales an ocean away, and the churning of propeller screws on ships passing overhead. He listened to them until he thought he could feel the pull of tides, and began to dream that he was no longer something separate from the sea but a part of it, digested and reborn as a piece of the Leviathan itself.

Sound...

And pressure.

These had been constants, so steady they'd become background ambience, but now they evolved into something new, gathering force to swamp what remained of him. From all around emanated a liquid rumbling. It passed through him, vibrating his bones like tuning forks, and then the walls squeezed in as if no fate remained but to be crushed down to nothing--

But this time there was a sense of movement rather than grinding, a feeling of propulsion as the compacted mass he was part of began to rise, back in the direction he'd come from so long ago. He felt his hand skim over new surfaces. New, yet old. He had felt these before: the gray tongue he'd slid along, the teeth like crooked stakes he'd tried to grab. The bony plated roof of the Leviathan's mouth.

And in a geyser of flesh and foam, he was spewed out into another night as dark as the one he'd left.

He was hurtling aloft for a moment, arms and legs suddenly unconstricted, so loose he didn't know what to do with them. Air, too...it rushed at him, washed over him, cold and fresh and cleansing. Then he splashed into water so frigid it shocked the first-drawn breath back out of him.

He struggled to break surface again, let the choppy waves carry him toward shore. Finally he felt bottom, a rapidly rising slope, and as soon as he got his legs beneath him, he twisted around in time to see the last of the Leviathan's bulk sliding away from the shelf back into the deeper waters offshore, and with a sweep of its tail and a cascade of spray, it was gone.

Only now did he realize it was raining.

Legs unsteady, pushed and pulled by the breakers, he straggled inland through a slick of silvery carcasses and blubber, until he could stumble onto a rocky beach. Beaten by needles of rain from a threatening sky that grumbled with endless thunder, he had no idea where on the face of the earth he was. About all he could be sure of at this point was that it definitely wasn't the tropics.

He lurched ahead a few more painful yards, taking stock. Time for another new trench coat; this one hung from him in bleached, half-digested tatters. But the titanium case containing the scroll was still cuffed to his wrist, and appeared no worse for the wear. Afraid he couldn't say the same about himself.

The only thing going for him was how well he could see in this night, starless and with the moon cloaked behind a thick scum of clouds. His eyesight during daylight hours may have been superior to that of men and women--20/11, he'd been measured at--but his night vision was no better. Still, after the time he'd spent beyond the reach of so much as a spark, his eyes were sensitive enough to peer through the gloom.

Inland, step by exhausted step...

Inland, as the pounding of waves on rock receded behind him...

It began to take form on the crown of a hilltop rising gently in the distance before him: several shapes standing in a row--no, a ring--some tall and thin, others squat. At first they were men to his eyes, motionlessly awaiting his arrival...but no. They were far too tall for that, even the shortest among them. Some other race, then? Ancient giants, towering devils?

No, not those either.

Stones. A circle of standing stones, sunk deep into the earth by ancient hands.

Only now did he begin to suspect where he was.

He had, in one sense, come home. Swallowed whole and carried by force and vomited onto its shore, he was home again.

He pushed himself toward the ring of stones, and when his legs gave out and he tumbled to the soggy, rock-strewn ground, he dragged himself along. When his arms gave out too, he collapsed and lay with his face in the muck and the shreds of his coat wrapped around him like burial rags.

And the rain beat down.

Footsteps. Two pairs--one heavy, one light. They came crunching down from the hilltop as though someone had stepped directly from the stones. Closer, louder with every step, they came for him as though they'd never doubted he would be here.

His breath bubbled into the mud around his mouth, then he raised his head to see that they towered over him like gods. Or like devils who would never be content with anything less than to reign in Hell.

He started to lift his right hand, his fighting hand, but a gnarled hoof every bit its equal stamped it back to the ground and held it there. Teeth gritted in a silent snarl, he tilted his head toward the rain again, following the bristled leg up, up, like the trunk of a lone tree twisted by winds into a shape that should not stand, but does. Up, past the pendant gut and barrel chest to the silhouette of the head, dark and arrogant against the clouds.

And if the fight had, for now, been squeezed from him, gassed from him, he at least knew his enemy. Knew him by name. Knew him by his infernal title.

The other one, smaller but just as monstrous in its way, knelt beside Hellboy's pinned hand...and there were worse things than death, weren't there? There was the gnawing of promises he hadn't been able to keep. There were the growing ranks of men he'd led to their deaths for what was, in the end, nothing...

Because there was having to watch a pair of hands, each sprouting a dozen nimble fingers long and thin as spider legs, work at the cuff latched around his wrist and open it within mere moments.

There was
failure
.

Cuff and case, both were taken, and once the restraining hoof was removed from his hand, he tried to crawl after the pair of thieves as they ascended the hill. He glared at their backs, at the insulting leisure with which they left him behind, as if he were no more bother than a roach they'd stepped on...and worst of all, they were still outpacing him.

His hand went for his holster and he cursed when he found it empty. Right--he'd lost the gun in the Leviathan's belly.

Then he groped at the ruins of his trench coat and found the left pocket still intact...and the antique Luger inside.

Would it still fire? He switched hands for a moment, held it in his right while working the toggle with his left to jack a round into the chamber. Then, unsteady, he aimed through the rain at the larger of the two backs. Could he even hurt them? What did it matter, anyway? You had to try. You had to try.

He squeezed the trigger, and if the gun didn't have near the kick of his usual sidearm, that was okay, because it was still the most satisfying crack he'd ever heard.

He even thought he saw the big one stumble, just before the pair disappeared into the rain and mist.
Another time,
he promised them,
finish you off some other time,
then rolled onto his back and let the water sluice down his face.

After another minute or two he heard more footsteps, this time from the opposite direction. Up from the same beach where he'd come ashore. Just one pair of feet this time, and none too steady, either. He gripped the Luger, swung it upward when the footsteps crunched close enough...then let his hand fall back to the ground again.

"What are
you
doing here?"

"I thought...you might need...some help," Abe Sapien said, or tried to. Awfully hard to talk and suck wind at the same time.

"Don't I look like I've got everything under control?"

Abe dropped to the ground beside him, no grace, nor heed to the rocks, looking chilled and wrung out, like a runner after a marathon through a downpour. Only now did Hellboy start to comprehend the enormity of what Abe must have done: followed the Leviathan all the way here, swimming in relentless pursuit, every nautical mile between the western Mediterranean and the north of Scotland.

"You didn't," Hellboy said.

"I caught a ride sometimes," Abe told him. "There are places to grab onto that thing. Most of the time it wouldn't know I was there."

What about the times it did,
he started to ask, then decided it could wait. Right now he didn't want to imagine the close calls Abe must have endured when the Leviathan tried to shake off or swat away what it must've regarded as a clinging little parasite.

"They took the scroll," he said instead.

Abe nodded down at his bare wrist. "I see."

"I
lost
the scroll." And for all the pain and fury he felt, most of it was directed straight at his own heart.

"You shot one of them, didn't you?" Abe said, then pointed in the direction of the stones. "Maybe that one's dead, maybe--"

"You don't kill
them
with one shot. I don't know if you can kill them at all."

"Hellboy..." Abe said, in the tone of voice you'd use with someone rambling about how the sky had turned green. "They were only men. I saw them from a distance. Just two men."

"I saw them too. They were right on top of me. They..."

"Maybe...you saw what they wanted you to see. That's not easy to do to you, I know, but in your condition..." Abe snatched the Luger and pushed himself upright. "I'm going after them."

He had to be running on fumes, Abe did, every muscle screaming. But off he went, every step an effort, and was soon lost to the weather and the night beyond the standing stones.

Home again? Well, yes and no. Although this was not the place of Hellboy's birth--that had occurred many miles to the south, in England--this was where it had been facilitated: Dreich Midden, a small island off the coast of Scotland, blasted by North Atlantic winds and barren but for the Bronze Age ring of stones whose original purpose had been lost to the millennia.

That cabal of
Wehrmacht
soldiers and occultists who had gathered here on a December night more than fifty years ago...had they known something about this place that history had forgotten and archaeologists had never found? They must have. What else could have drawn them so far behind enemy lines in the waning days of the Second World War? Desperation, yes--Germany had exhausted itself from the inside out and was months from collapse. And
Der Fuhrer
's mania for an occult means to tip the momentum of the war. Hitler had long been keen on the subject; the looming specter of defeat had turned him into a true seeker.

But desperation and mania can be indulged anywhere. Why here?

The only thing that seemed certain was that all of them, from the Nazi's upper echelon down to the lowliest technician, had been exploited by the magus at the center of it all. As a mortal man, Grigori Rasputin had been known as the Mad Monk. Spared from death at the bottom of the River Neva, after as much treachery and butchery as any man had endured, he had become something else. Something worse, in thrall to powers that sought to lay waste to humankind and deliver the world to seven gods of chaos whose wrath would make the Third Reich's worst accomplishments seem like children's games.