Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (16 page)

Or something like that.

Hellboy had gleaned enough from Rasputin to understand that he was supposed to play some part in it all, but the madman's secrets had been his own, and had finally died with him a couple of years ago. Which ended it, as far as Hellboy was concerned. Ignorance may not have been bliss, but it got him through the night. He had no part to play in anyone's plans but his own.

Still, this island...

That he'd been brought here, spat up here, robbed here,
humiliated
here...it was impossible to believe there was no deeper message in it. Hell shoving his nose into his own history:
You forget who you are...what you are...whose you are.

"I never knew," he told the earth on which he lay, and whatever else cared to listen. "So there was nothing to forget."

And Abe was back.

"They're gone," he said. "I thought I heard a boat motor fading in the distance, but couldn't see anything."

Hellboy grunted and rolled over again, pushing himself to elbows and knees. Abe helped him the rest of the way, and together they made for the standing stones. Hard to say who was holding whom up now. Pull either of them away and they'd both go down. They sought shelter at the base of the broadest, flattest menhir. Between its tilt and the sideways slant of the rain, the stone gave them as much protection from the elements as they were likely to find on this desolate hump of land.

"One observation?" Abe said. "You've smelled better."

"Hey. You're no rose on a
good
day."

Abe clasped his shoulder for a moment, gave it a shake. "The ones that took the scroll--I know what I saw. What were
you
seeing?"

"Not men, that's for sure. Maybe they were wearing the
skins
of men. But definitely not men inside."

He supposed he should've known better, that if he'd been thinking more clearly, he might have known his eyes were being deceived. Maybe that was another reason for his having been brought to this place: He was already primed to believe that anything might be possible here.

Even so, the denizens of Hell didn't just roam the earth at will, at least not in their true forms, their true bodies. His uniqueness in the world was proof of that. They could be summoned into the confines of protective circles similar to the ones he'd seen at the observatory in Rome. In many cases, whether they were truly corporeal or just an extraordinarily powerful projection was still up for grabs, although if the latter, they were no less dangerous to the conjurer for it.

Their surest path into the world was in the bodies of servants and sycophants willing, even eager, to house them. But you could forget all that business about little girls with rotating heads and a gorgeful of pea soup--these people
wanted
to be taken. And when it served Hell's purposes, its principalities might call upon beasts such as the Leviathan...beings so ancient, so reclusive, they could only be regarded as surviving fragments of the chaos that had stirred the primordial seas.

"The one that took the cuff off my wrist," Hellboy said, "that one's called Surgat."

Abe shook his head. "I don't know the name."

"Minor, as demons go. But he can open any man-made lock."

"And the other one?"

"Moloch. I couldn't tell you firsthand whether it's true or not, but the old texts say he's a prince of Hell. I've got no reason to doubt that. In the Middle East, in Old Testament times, there were tribes that worshipped him as a sun god."

"And now he has the Masada Scroll," Abe said. "What Heaven wants to destroy, Hell wants to possess."

"Doesn't sound good, does it?"

"But if Hell is deceit, why be so obvious about it?" Abe asked. "They let you see them. They
wanted
you to see them. They may have worn men's skins, but they didn't try to hide behind them."

"Arrogance?" he guessed. "Make sure we knew they were able to succeed where angels failed? Never underestimate the power of pride."

But it would've been personal, too, wouldn't it? Anything between Hell and himself would be personal, always. Because he was Hell's own runaway.

What an affront to them his existence must have been. Yet he couldn't say they'd ever tried outright to kill him. Meaning they must have thought they needed him. Or maybe they tolerated him because the triumph of tempting him back would eclipse the shame of having lost him, with such rejoicing that the world would writhe.

Either way, he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction.

"We really need to get off this rock," he said. "Any ideas?"

He'd already noticed that Abe was as bereft of gear as he was. Abe was bereft of
everything
. Different reasons, though, probably. What Hellboy hadn't lost during the shipwreck, the Leviathan's belly had claimed. More likely Abe had shed everything on purpose, to eliminate surface drag during his phenomenal swim. Not that their global phones would necessarily even work by now, despite being waterproof, but it would've been nice to see that the bureau's R&D guys had gotten it right.

"If I remember correctly, the Scottish mainland isn't far off," Abe said. "I could swim for help."

"Show-off."

Abe grinned. "I've caught a second wind."

"Lots of fisherman along these coasts, so watch who you trust. Last thing we need is for you to end up in a bowl of cullen skink."

Now Abe just looked affronted.

"And promise me you'll find a blanket as soon as you can. You don't want to be scaring anybody with...whatever that is down there."

Abe asked if he had any other advice that wasn't totally unnecessary, and when Hellboy couldn't think of any, once more vanished from sight long before he reached the water's edge.

Hellboy stretched out with his head against the stone and let the rain have him. The elements he could handle fine. It was the solitude, at all the wrong times, that he never quite got used to.

A
s the days passed, Laurenti wondered if they both weren't captives here, he and the man in the cage. No progress--now on his tenth day behind bars in the old shell of a private zoo, Domenico Verdi had yet to provide any useful information on the
Opus Angelorum
. Their identities, where they might be found, what they might be scheming, attempting. If they'd ever had a contingency plan for what to do in case one of their numbers had been found out. Verdi was still without remorse, without repentance...and without any apparent desire to be free.

Laurenti had dwelled on his ominous words of a week ago--
I've already found my deliverers. I think maybe you'll meet them soon enough.
Dwelled on them a little too heavily, perhaps. It seemed certain that Verdi had meant the seraphim, implying that another attack was imminent.

But as each sunset came and each night gave way to another dawn with nothing happening, apprehension slowly subsided. If no retaliation had yet come from Verdi's unknown collaborators, maybe it never would. For a time, Laurenti feared that Verdi might be planning on initiating it himself. The rites that they'd successfully used to call down the seraphs were unknown to him, but Laurenti could think of no reason why one man couldn't do it instead of a group.

He'd gone to visit the
osservatorio
again, to examine the signs and sigils that had been used to accomplish the summoning. He could make little sense of them--they looked so jumbled, with layers upon layers--and he came away convinced that they were of such complexity that it seemed unlikely a man could remember them exactly, to recreate them verbatim...at least under these conditions. All the same, he made sure that Verdi's cell was kept free of things he could use for writing.

As well, if the stains on the old wood of the
osservatorio
's top floor were what they appeared to be, blood was a part of these rites. Perhaps not a sacrificial death--he found it difficult to believe that even they would tread this far into the forbidden--but nonetheless, blood was life, blood was energy, and its release was known to charge many a ceremonial stage.

So, after they'd shared wine last week, no more glassware went through the bars, and Laurenti made doubly sure to keep anything else sharp out of reach as well. No razors, not even with safety blades, and Verdi sprouted a coarse beard that began to mask the pits and pocks of his face.

So too had Laurenti dwelled on Verdi's reaction to his assertion that the scroll was beyond Rome and therefore safe:
I doubt that very much,
he'd said.
Once they are out in the world, things like this have a way of attracting attention no matter where they go.

An accurate but otherwise innocent assumption, or had he known something like this was imminent? Laurenti was inclined to believe the former, that he truly knew none of this; that, as the BPRD and nearly all his compatriots believed, the sinking of the yacht and the scroll's theft were the work of another faction entirely.

At first Laurenti saw no value in even mentioning it to their captive. Why give him a chance to gloat? Then Laurenti came to wonder if that wasn't his only reason for withholding the news--that he was motivated more by embarrassment than strategy. Perhaps some good
could
come of sharing this terrible news, if only for the chance it would give him to watch Verdi's reaction. Laurenti had looked into the eyes of all manner of liars, from those who lied to save face or spare feelings, to those who lied for power and gain. If Verdi knew something of this, regardless of his words, Laurenti felt sure he would sense it.

And when he finally told him, there was nothing in Verdi--to whom smugness and sanctimony seemed quite natural--that appeared anything other than sorrowful. None of what the Americans called
I-told-you-so
's. He sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap, and under the fuzz of new beard, like a dark moss, his face loosened and sagged.

"Now do you see," his voice a hush, "why we would rather have it destroyed?"

Laurenti nodded. He
did
recognize this, even if he couldn't agree with their intentions, much less their methods. "And do you see that it never would have been so vulnerable if you had not first tried that, and failed?"

"Only a matter of time," Verdi said. "The wrong hands...they never would have stopped groping."

As they sat in the rays of light slanting through the covered portals in the roof, Laurenti stirred in his chair. Pointed back at the faded mural on the wall behind him, the Peaceable Kingdom of lions and lambs.

"Can we put aside our antagonisms for a moment?" he asked. "I have something I want to ask you."

Verdi seemed to sniff the air for duplicity, then gave a conciliatory nod.

"What are they like?"

"Who?"

"You know what I'm speaking about."

"Ahh. The angels," Verdi said, and he tipped his head back with his eyes focused on nothing. "They are...the purest essence of magnificence and dread. Would you ever want to see one, meet one? I bet you were just like me growing up, and dreamed of it. But be careful what you wish for. I don't think you would want it at all."

He did not seem to gloat even now.

"The air, it grows cold around you, and then they descend. Different people see them in different ways, but I have seen them descend like huge doves with skin like glass, filled with a flame they will pour out on the heads of their enemies."

Except...

They didn't truly descend, Verdi told him. People only thought this way because people only thought in terms of up and down. But the seraphs didn't come from above, because they didn't come from a place you could get to if you climbed a tall enough tree. They came not down from above, but rather from the outside in, entering this world where its air was thinnest.

Laurenti thought of the Archives, the charred remains of people and property. "Do they not have any concept of mercy?"

"Why should they?" Verdi laughed. "They are...incomplete. Pure in what they are, but incomplete. Are there angels that are heralds, or guardians, or comforters? Maybe. Probably. But I've never seen
them."

"Then what are these?" Laurenti asked.

"Isn't it obvious? They are the perfect manifestation of His wrath, and nothing more," Verdi said. "And for so long, they have had nothing to do."

After the priest left, another of his captors brought the man in the cage the pair of wooden buckets filled with warm water--one sudsy, one clear--that they gave him for his daily washing, then stayed behind to make sure he behaved himself with them. They evidently did not trust him even with smooth-edged wood, or perhaps they feared he would try drowning himself in the water.

Wooden for wash water, plastic for his toilet--it was a system.

As he had done each day, Domenico Verdi carried both buckets into the corner of his cage, kept his back turned to the bars, stripped out of the loose slacks and shapeless pullover shirt they'd given him in place of his cassock, and began scrubbing himself down with the sponge floating in the soapy bucket. As he did each day, he took utmost care that his backside was all anyone could see from the other side of the bars.

They would have no reason to think it anything other than modesty.

Let them continue to think it.

His thumbnail, and what was becoming of it as it grew and he daily filed it against the stone--this he could hide easily enough, by curling his thumb behind the next two fingers.

Not so, this greater secret he wished to keep.

And as he washed, he thanked God for seeing fit to give him such a broad chest and big belly, wide enough to contain such a marvel.