Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (20 page)

Father Simon turned and looked him in the eye. "I don't know if God made you. I suspect not. But you still seem to fit right into His plan...and in such a way as to leave me feeling awfully hopeful for the way it all ends."

And again, Hellboy remembered why he always liked coming to England to clear his head.

F
rom the sun-dappled Cotswolds to a rain-soaked Glasgow slum...

What a difference a weekend could make.

With no trace of dawn in the sky yet, Hellboy and Abe bailed from the car that had delivered them from the airport, sprinted half a block along a row of battened-down shopfronts, and clambered into the back of the unmarked van. Quick hellos all around with the three-agent team pulling surveillance duty--two Scots and a British medium from just over the border in Northumberland, with scarcely a decipherable accent among them.

"Anything happen since I talked to you from the plane?" Hellboy asked.

"No' a move in the four hours we been here," one of the two Scots answered, the male of the pair. Muir, his name, and he kept watch on a pair of monitors. One screen showed the feed from a small roof-mounted camera aimed at the target's front door, the other a remote signal from a camera that appeared to be secured in an alley and trained on the exit.

"But there's
something
in there...?" Hellboy said. "Not just some cranked-up loser with an antisocial attitude."

"Oh, aye." Ormston, the Brit, gave a disgusted nod and wrapped both hands tight around a mug of coffee poured fresh from one of several thermos bottles. "And the foulest thing it is that I've ever sensed from a block away."

"You got a photo on the guy yet?"

Kirsten, the other Scot on the team, said they did. She slid it from an envelope and handed it over while trying to tame her reddish hair, turned by the humidity into a bumper crop that exploded from beneath her watch cap.

Hellboy gave it a look, saw a dark-haired man in his mid-thirties with a broad, open face that might've been called friendly if not for his eyes, as cold and narrow as archers' slits in a stone tower. He handed it to Abe.

"Could that be the main guy you saw on the island the other night?"

Abe held it for a long study while rain hammered the van's roof like hailstones. Actually, they could all stare at the photo. The back of the van would have been close quarters for three, and with five now--particularly with someone of Hellboy's size--it was claustrophobic, everybody bumping knees and feeling the cloying wet air of rising body heat.

Ormston gave a suspicious sniff. "Swear I can smell roast monkey-nuts."

Hellboy grimaced. "That'd be me."

"You should've smelled him a few nights ago," Abe said, then gave the photo back to Kirsten. "Could be, yes. But 'could be' and 'was' are two different things. Sixty paces in rain and lightning...that was the closest look I ever had."

The man's name was Calum Gilmour, and he'd surfaced during the BPRD's last few days of database frenzy--cross-referencing names, known occult registries, odd police reports...anything that could be triangulated into a plausible pattern that would give them someplace to begin.

They'd already been checking leads since Friday night, around the time that he would've been having his impromptu consultation with Father Simon. But this one was made up of component bits that, when reviewed together, sent up a red flare.

Gilmour had, in the past few months, entertained at least two visits from the police following up on neighbors' complaints about a smoky smell and emanation from his apartment. Nothing came of either visit; the officers had given the place a look-see and could find nothing that would cause whatever his neighbors were blaming on him. A total non-event on the surface, but in context, and the way Hellboy's own eyes had been fooled on Dreich Midden, plus Kate's theory about a glamour being used against the armored car crew, Hellboy had to wonder if the police hadn't missed something right under their noses because they honestly couldn't see it.

Worse, the area in a three-mile radius around his home had, in that same period, experienced a slight increase in the number of children reported missing. Maybe a statistical blip, but...look at the big picture.

Calum Gilmour was already on the BPRD's watch-list, albeit at the lowest, most plebian classification. He had, four years ago, served a jail term of several months for a failed attempt at burglarizing a rare books dealer in Edinburgh. Just one volume, that's all he was after: Ernst Schweiger's
Things Better Forgotten
.

Word went north out of Cornwall, and in the follow-up drive-by, Ormston, the medium, had gotten such a hit off Gilmour's place that he'd doubled over in nausea that still hadn't entirely passed.

Something seriously wrong was going on behind that door.

"What's the layout like, anybody know?" Hellboy asked.

"A basemen' fla', but iss a big'n, doon the whole lef' side o' the buildin'," Kirsten said. "No way o' seein' in. I coun' three skinny wee garden windows, but I tried to hae a keek inside earlier and couldnae. He's go' 'em all blocked o'er."

Hellboy blinked. "I'll take that as a no."

"Everything that pointed us here, it could still be coincidence," Abe said. "I'd feel better if we had one totally solid thing to go on before we start kicking down doors."

"Like his membership card from Campus Crusade for Moloch?" Hellboy said. "It's hardly ever that clear when we're talking about citizens."

He decided he was going in alone. The others could act as backup in case anything tried to slip out ahead of or behind him. He sent Abe off with Muir to cover the basement flat's rear entrance, had Kirsten and Ormston stay put in the van and continue monitoring the front. He watched the second screen until, in grainy black and white, he saw the pair of them flash past the camera, Muir pointing it out and Abe lifting a single finger:
One more minute to get into position.

Hellboy watched the time tick down on the van's clock, then heaved himself out the back of the van. Nothing else was moving out here other than the downpour--it was raining hard enough to drown even Abe--and he paused for a better look around. Tenements and row houses, mostly, their gray walls shedding bricks that would slowly work their way loose like rotting teeth, to fall in the middle of the night.

He splashed across the street and down the block; could hear the muffled peal of a distant church bell calling whatever brave souls might care to venture out for early Sunday Mass. Normally he enjoyed the sound, but this morning it sounded funereal and forlorn, an afterthought in a world where God and Man alike had forgotten one another. Dawn seemed to be taking forever to get here, too--just latitude, lateness of the year, and the clouds, he knew, but this dismal place could use some light this morning.

He swung around an iron railing and down a three-quarter flight of stairs to the doorway of Calum Gilmour's basement flat. Beneath an old coat of green paint that was peeling away in filmy strips, the door looked thick and sturdy, as though it might stand up to the first blow from a police battering ram.

Not so, his right hand.

He drew his revolver, a replacement for the one lost to the Leviathan, fetched from the armory in the Cornwall safehouse. A flashlight next--it looked dark in there. He pushed the fractured door aside and stepped in, slid through a tight entry hall that doglegged to the left.

Hallway by hallway, room by room...the maze unfolded around him, a dank burrow that looked as if years of moisture and decay had taken hold all at once. The doors were half-sealed, stuck in warped frames. Wallpaper crawled with new patterns of fungus and mold, and wept trickles of water from ceiling to floor. Elsewhere, clotted plaster had sloughed away like wet scabs to reveal the rotting boards inside the walls. When he pinched one with his fingers, it came away in splinters and pulp.

And the farther back he went, the more the place seemed to flicker around him. It was not light on the walls, but the walls themselves, and the floors, the dilapidated furnishings--all of it putrefying one instant, then a feeble pulse of cleanliness and order, like an acetate overlay in a book. A glamour, he thought, coming apart as if the spell's connection to its power source were quickly eroding, weakened but struggling to maintain its illusion.

It could fool no one now...and with him aware of the trick, it seemed to diminish all the more.

He estimated that he had to be getting close to the rear of the flat when he wrenched open another bloated door and came upon the bathroom. Or what had once been the bathroom. The floor was a deathtrap here, its tiles slick with mildew, and its walls had been slathered with unknown substances to create a repeating pattern of symbols as old as Solomon. And when he shined the flashlight inside the hulking clawfoot tub, he saw what must have been the source of that last irate report of smoke.

The blackened tangle of small limbs, the charcoal nubs that would've once been fingers...Hellboy had to shut his eyes for long moments and quell the boiling of his blood. He would smash nothing. He would not bellow loud enough to drown out church bells and rain. No, this was a rage better channeled toward its most fitting end...and the impulses passed like a seizure.

Onward, through the rest of this fetid cistern.

The main room was just beyond, and here he found them: three bodies, graylit by the strobing glow of a television that managed to still work in the swampy air, even if it showed nothing but static. The pair from the night on Dreich Midden, and some unknown assistant? For now, as good a guess as any. They appeared quite dead, the two smaller men for sure.

One sat at rigid attention in a spot of open floor space, his head tipped upward and back as he seemed to stare at the yard's length of two-inch copper pipe protruding from his mouth. From the look of things, the pipe hadn't entered there; this was only the point of exit.

The other was a wiry fellow, slumped to one side of a sofa that smelled of rodents that now seemed to be nowhere around; even vermin were smarter than people sometimes. Something was terribly wrong with his fingers--stretched and lengthened, hardened and multiplied, like slivers of blue steel and bone. The fingers of Surgat, to whom locks were child's play...at least as Hellboy had seen them the other night. One hand lay palm-up at the man's side. He'd plunged the other into his throat, ramming the handful of spikes and needles in up to the malformed knuckles.

His eyes still shone with a hideous rapture.

Hellboy knew, even before he retraced his steps for a more careful search, that the case and cuff removed from his wrist were no longer here, if they'd even made it this far.

He took a moment to radio the team outside and tell them to stand down. That nothing was coming out of this place unless it was dragged or carried.

Back to the main room then, where he took a closer look at the third body. This was Calum Gilmour, no mistaking it. Wreathed in the odors of sepsis and infection, he leaned against a wall, propped into the corner atop a bloodied heap of newspapers and magazines that had been molded by seepage into a fused mound, a paper throne.

Used up, thrown away by the devils they had courted...he felt no pity for either of these two from the island, got no sense that the third man was in any way deserving of pity either. Maybe they hadn't known where it would lead, but they had wanted this all the same. They'd chosen, and badly.

He swept the flashlight from body to body, and when he looked at Gilmour again, saw that the eyes that had been closed moments before were now open. He shined the light directly into them and watched the pupils constrict.

Behind him, the TV died a sudden, silent death, depriving the room of its sickly gray flicker. What the flashlight didn't reveal, he could no longer see. The rest was eaten by shadow.

Gilmour's jaw dropped, strained, and after a creak of air and phlegm, out poured a guttural inundation of words never meant for human ears to hear, much less throats to speak. Calum Gilmour's throat, but not his words. Not anymore.

Hellboy wasn't having it. "You got something to say to me, say it in a language I understand."

The voice abused the throat through a series of variations, as though cycling through a sequence of dialects. Just taunting him now, a babble of blasphemies, until he huffed what sounded like a sigh of resignation. Finally:

"English, if it must be. It holds few words for what is truly important, but if they only fall on ears that refuse to hear..." The voice was still wrong, somehow, as though the vocal cords had been stretched and frayed beyond repair. "Have you forgotten the tongues of home, the barbarous tongues?"

"Anything that matters, I can remember that just fine."

Gilmour's eyes, or the eyes
behind
them, looked him up and down with open disdain, the poisonous gaze lingering on the stumps upon his forehead. "You seem to have forgotten yourself. If it is a reminder you need, then it is a reminder I should give you..."

The neck began to twist, the head to tremble, the teeth to grind in their sockets. Gilmour's mouth--although it was hard to regard it as
his
anymore--began to stretch wide, pulled down at the corners as if by hooks and wires. The eyes, like slits already, narrowed further, showing only the whites as the forehead began to break a river of sweat...and one to a side, protrusions began to form in the skin. They grew, thickened, lengthened, the sharp points beneath stretching the thin skin of the forehead but never breaking through, as inch by slow inch, the pair of fledgling horns sprouted from the skull. Further and further, until at last the skin, pulled taut and shiny red, began to darken, atrophying over the fresh bone into a substance like keratin and bristled hair.