Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (23 page)

"It takes a lot out of him, does it?" Rogier said, fumbling the question out in an awkward way that told her he'd wanted to help and wasn't sure how, because he was so far out of his element.

"When it's like that, it does," Liz said. "I don't know about you, but whenever I have these dragged-out, super-emotional confrontations, it's so draining, it saps me so bad all I want to do is go to sleep. He's the same way, I guess. He told me that when it's like that, really ugly or just really challenging, he said, 'Imagine the worst, most heart-breaking fight you ever had in your life, then multiply by ten.' "

He looked her in the eye, then shyly away, then back again with a contemplative smile that suggested to her he considered himself largely exempt from such things, and that he wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not.

"What does all this mean?" he asked. "I know what I heard him say but I don't know what it means."

She had to tell him she didn't know, either, she just lived here. This world where less and less made sense to her, and very little seemed fair.

After Artaud left, with the bag of stolen items slung over his shoulder--all but the crucifix--and the task of clandestinely returning them still ahead, Liz returned to her chair by the window and watched him pedal away. And since Hellboy was not here, she decided she would be the one to watch the sky, on guard against avenging angels, but ready to extend welcome if any benevolent ones felt like winging by.

But there were only clouds, until the sky went black.

O
n the way in, the old prophecies drifted through his mind, although he couldn't say why. The seven hills of Rome equating with the seven heads of the beast that would rule over the end times, trampling upon the righteous for a few years before the host of Heaven got riled enough to get down to some serious smiting. One long-ago man's view of the end of the world, and certainly open to interpretation. Live long enough on a rocky, sun-blasted Greek island, and he supposed you'd say a lot of things that were open to interpretation.

Didn't look so menacing from the air, Rome didn't.

Didn't look so menacing on the ground, either, on the ride from the airport.

Under the surface, though...that's where things always boiled the hottest, in the hidden places, the places that people could never see and were just as happy to forget existed at all...even when the portents bubbled menacing and violent.

He thought of Pompeii, hours south of here, and the day it disappeared from the face of the earth, buried in tons of ash that baked thousands in their homes and in the streets. Yet they had chosen to live in the steaming shadow of Vesuvius all the same.

It possesses craters of fire that only go out when they lack fuel,
a Greek geographer had written decades earlier.

There were times when he found it too easy to imagine a Vesuvius that would cover not just a city, but the world...and the people who would stand by and watch it happen.

It was after dark when he and Abe reached the apartment in the Borgo. Liz told him that her protege's readings of the nicked items had gone well, and he assured her they'd get to that soon. For now he just wanted to meet the kid she'd been working with all these weeks, whose input had so quickly become so crucial.

He'd felt bad ever since that exchange on the boat when he'd called Campbell Holt her project, as if he were sticks she was putting together with glue. He never used to do that--ignore that there was a human being, usually in pain, behind the labels that the bureaucrats slapped onto them:
Pyrokinetic. Psychometric. Suicidal.

"How are you doing?" he said in greeting. "I'm Hellboy."

"No--really?" Campbell said. "I was expecting somebody...redder."

Okay...bit of a smartass. It went with his age, probably. Probably a stupidly obvious introduction, too.

They'd gotten here at dinnertime--Campbell's, at least. Liz was content to have a smoke by the window as the kid wolfed down a plateful of pasta that appeared to have been dumped from a large take-out carton. Four-cheese ravioli, on inquiry. Hellboy grabbed a fork from the kitchen and speared four in one go, slurped them off the tines one at a time.

"You don't mind, do you?" Because there was no way he was going to be able to stop at four, not with these gooey babies.

"Oh. I get it. Hazing the new guy, right?" Campbell said. "I finally meet the BPRD's star agent and he steals my dinner? Pardon my disillusion."

"Just keep your hand at least two feet away from his mouth at all times," Abe said from a chair near Liz. "You'd hate to end your bureau career before it really gets off the ground."

"Did you ever think of changing your name?" Campbell asked, this time in all seriousness. "You seem to have kind of...outgrown it. I know, Hell
man
is already taken by the mayonnaise, but still..."

"I think by now I'm stuck with it," he said. "What are they gonna call me--Steve?"

Liz blew a plume of smoke out the window. "It was the only thing Professor Bruttenholm would ever admit failing to plan ahead for."

They talked awhile longer--he filched only ten ravioli total, an exercise in moderation--then he got down to business, asked Campbell for a quick overview of how this wild talent of his worked.

"It's all in my dossier. Have you read that?"

"Humor me. I'm a little behind on my reading."

"Which is like saying a little water goes over Niagara Falls," Abe had to add.

Campbell was mopping up the last of some sauce with a crust of bread but set it aside and held up his hand, palm up and fingers spread. "An object goes in here, and I can read into the life of who owns it. Usually the stuff that's been uppermost on their minds lately. Or if they're dead, the important stuff at the end of their life. But if I hang with something long enough, I'm learning how to root around and dig deeper."

"What about something with multiple owners?"

Campbell nodded. "If the thing's changed hands along the line, I can usually pick up on the previous owner, or owners. They may be weaker, but they're there. It's sort of like deciding which channel to leave the TV on...

"The main thing is that someone's really
lived
with it. I hardly ever get a hit off public property, or something that's passed around all the time. Like coins. It happens, but not very often. So just in case"--he tapped his fork, his plate--"I try to always use the same silverware and table service. But most of the time, the object has to have been in someone's possession to build that strong of an association. They really have to have made it theirs."

Hellboy dug into one of his topcoat's big pockets and drew out the rag-wrapped bundle. Peeled away the cloth and dropped onto the table the dark gnarled horn he'd ripped from the Scotsman's skull that morning.

"You think you can tell me about what used to possess
that?"

He was on the roof almost before he knew it.

The horn had barely hit the table when Liz came vaulting out of her chair, snatching it up and handing it off to Abe and demanding--not asking,
demanding
--that he hang onto it and not let it anywhere near Campbell. She'd grabbed his sleeve next and yanked him toward the door, up two flights of stairs and out onto a small walkway surrounded by gently sloping red clay tiles.

"Are you out of your mind?" she asked. "Because if you expose him to that, there's a good chance it'll drive Cam out of his."

This, he felt pretty sure, was called the riot act, and she was reading it to him loud and clear.

"We can't do this downstairs, like a team?" he asked.

"There's a rule of thumb in all the better families," she said. "The parents don't let the kids see them fight."

"He's not our kid, Liz."

"In our world he is. In our world he's a wet-assed babe in the woods."

She stamped off a frustrated six paces away, as far as she could get before the flat roof ran out, then turned around and stamped back. They may have been few, but there were occasions when he wondered how it was that a woman who probably didn't weigh even a third of what he did could make him feel so small.

"I read Kate's briefing on what you came across in Glasgow this morning," she said. "If that ugly thing you dropped on the table has even a
residue
of the malevolence I know has to be behind it, then, psychologically speaking, you might as well be strapping Cam into an electric chair, because I don't have any doubt that it would fry his mind."

"You don't know that. And we still don't know what's going on around us. I just know we better figure it out soon. This would be the quickest way. We can always take the horn away from him if it's too much."

"What 'if'? There's no 'if'--trust me, it
will
be."

"You didn't want to bring him to Rome in the first place, either, but he looks like he's handling it fine."

"You weren't here this afternoon when he tapped into one of the priests. He got through it, but it put him down the rest of the afternoon. If that happens to him with one of the
good
guys--supposedly good--what do you think'll happen if he starts sniffing around your--"

Abruptly, Liz clamped down on whatever she'd been about to say. But she didn't have to say it. He could finish for her, or near enough.
Your family tree. Your relatives. Your hometown.
Something like that. Not exactly a cheap shot, and nothing he would hold against her, but it was something that wasn't ever going away. Despite their similarities, and no matter how much history they shared, their births--and all that their births implied--were poles apart.

"Look, H.B.," she said. "You call the shots and there's nobody I'd rather have do that. But this is the one where you and I..."

She didn't want to say it. They weren't used to this, opposite sides of a divide. So he said it for her: "Lock horns?"

One corner of her mouth ticked. "We have to find another way. We may have already. But this one's non-negotiable. Promise me you'll lock that thing up in the wall safe downstairs until we can get it back home."

She was probably right. There were plenty of men and women who had, across the centuries, divined various secrets of Hell and lived to tell the tale. He'd hoped that Campbell Holt might have their kind of fortitude, their inner strengths. But there was a difference, too. The Hell that most dark mystics had encountered had been sought. Campbell's insights would come from a Hell that would be forced on him. So maybe it wasn't the way.

"Supposedly good guy, you said a minute ago. What did you mean by that?"

"So
now
you're ready to hear about that. About time," she said. "Father Laurenti's unwitting donation to this afternoon's roundup. A crucifix. Cam got this weird hit off it."

As Liz told him what had happened in front of her and Father Artaud, she had his ears but St. Peter's had his eyes, as he gazed toward the colossal dome that still seemed to see all, dominate all, even though it was many blocks away, with a small town's worth of rooftops in between. He wondered if he would live to see a day when it too had sunk into a state of wreck and ruin, like so many of Rome's monuments to its own past--once lustrous forums and temples, the pride of empire and republic, today just a few crumbling blocks in the weeds and clusters of chipped columns.

A house divided against itself cannot stand,
a president had once said about the land Hellboy now called home, but the lesson was universal.

"Okay," he said when Liz had finished. "You're right, we should check that out right away."

"Do you even know where to find Father Laurenti?" she asked.

"Matter of fact, I think I do."

H
e'd had an address to go on, and a general description of the grounds. After a few passes up and down a secluded stretch on the northern fringes of Rome, the driver of their panel truck determined that the place was an unmarked estate barely visible behind rusty gates and stone walls draped with vines. Easier to have identified it by daylight, maybe, but Hellboy hadn't felt like waiting until morning.

Monsignor Burke had given him this address at the end of their trip to the observatory...the place where rogue churchmen had sought to punish the wicked by summoning down angels and, according to legend, calling up devils. Burke had pointed him here immediately after revealing that he and his compatriots had finally accomplished what opponents of the
Opus Angelorum
hadn't managed in centuries:

A close encounter of the third kind,
Burke had said.
We caught one of them.

"They're holding a priest by the name of Domenico Verdi," Hellboy told them. "True or not, I don't know, but Burke said they caught the guy coming back to get one of the old torture devices hanging all over the place. A piety belt. Fits around your gut like a weightlifter's belt, except it's got two or three hundred barbs poking inward."

Liz looked appalled as only she could. "I'm afraid to ask, because there's just no good answer to this, is there, but...?"

"Himself," Hellboy said. "He wanted it for himself. And, according to Burke, Father Laurenti practically moved in here where they've been holding him."

Abe's eyes narrowed. "Why should Burke tell you where to find either one of them? Especially after Laurenti told us to stay out of their fight?"

"Same reason he showed me the observatory. He thinks this
Opus Angelorum
group is a plague that needs to be taken out in a way he doesn't think his own people have the stomach for. This Verdi guy...I figure he gave him to me either as a place to start, or a loose end to tie up."

"He does know you're not a hired killer, doesn't he?"

"Maybe he has faith in my powers of persuasion."

The four of them slipped from the panel truck and had it continue onward, find someplace to wait out the duration, out of sight but no more than a couple minutes away at the other end of the radio. In the moonlight, they moved along the wall until they came to a round-topped doorway inset into the stone, the door a heavy iron frame full of byzantine designs and sealed by a wrapped chain and padlock.

No more problem than pulling a loose thread off a shirt, really. The chain and its broken links hit the ground like a handful of coins.

Trees loomed large on the other side of the wall, and breezes rustled through a low-lying jungle of vines and creepers turned brittle by autumn. They carried the scents of water and contamination. The Tiber. They must be near one of the many bends of the Tiber.

Hellboy glanced over his shoulder at Campbell. "You doing okay back there, rookie?"

"Sure," he whispered back. "Hey...you're not going to hurt this guy, are you? This priest, Laurenti--whatever's up with him, Liz told you I said it's not his fault, right?"

"I got the message, yeah."

A few yards closer and the house began to take form in the night. With staggered tiers of tiled roof, and haphazard arrangements of columns here and archways there, it had the rambling look of a country villa, and may well have started out that way, built long before the spreading city eventually caught up with it.

"How are we going in?" the kid whispered. "Should I have a gun? Nobody ever issued me a gun."

"Anybody ever train you how to
use
a gun?"

"No."

"Then I'll bet you can figure out the connection there."

"Relax, Cam," Liz told him. "These people are on our side."

"Uh huh." He didn't sound convinced. "Do they know that?"

"Anyway," Hellboy said, "I figured we'd do the polite thing for a change and knock."

As expected, Laurenti wasn't the least bit happy to see them. He spent the first couple of minutes fretting over how they'd learned of this place, whose gilded edges may have been dulled by dust, but whose past splendor wasn't entirely hidden under renovations and repairs. As near as Hellboy could tell, three guards were on duty, armed with handguns and, by the looks of them, certainly not priests. Probably the outside help that Burke had alluded to.

At first Hellboy refused to name the tipster who'd sent him here, until it became clear to him that the only way they were going to get anywhere with Laurenti was full disclosure: Monsignor Burke, who'd had different ideas on what the BPRD should and shouldn't be privy to. And, while they were at it, the bureau was aware of the observatory, too, and who had used it, and for what.

"These things...you should not know them," Laurenti said. "He should never have told you."

"It's dirty laundry, I get that," Hellboy said. "You'd rather clean house from the inside, I get that too. But too many secrets, that's why we're in the mess we're in now. Plus we've got reason to think you have one of your own...that even
you
don't know about."

Laurenti didn't understand. Who would? He insisted they had to be wrong. Who wouldn't? Hellboy reached into a pouch on his belt and pulled out a little bundle of cloth. He may not have stolen it personally, but he'd ordered it done, and felt stabbed by a pang of guilt when he unwrapped it and held up the man's ivory crucifix.

"Don't ask how or who. We don't have time for that. My fault, it was my idea. We had to find out who passed on information about the route the scroll was taking." Hellboy hitched a thumb back at Campbell. "When he holds something that's important to someone, it's like a window into that person's life. If you don't want to take my word for it, he can demonstrate. But he picked up something in you. Only you."

With disheveled hair and a three-day beard, Laurenti stared for a moment in disbelief, maybe a little fear, then nodded. "I think you come here to accuse me of something. So yes. I want to see that your methods don't lie."

Hellboy handed the cross to Campbell, then faced Laurenti again. "Ask him something. That's important to you, or that stays with you, but that he couldn't know."

Laurenti didn't have to ponder this long. "What would my mother have named my sister if she had not died at birth?"

Hellboy looked at Campbell's face, then into Liz's, full of sudden pain, and he could read her thoughts because he could so easily see the evidence for himself.

He doesn't want to. Because he knows he'll feel the grief, he hasn't learned to block that yet. Because the name has grief tied around it like a bow. So he doesn't want to...

But he will.

"Natalia," said Campbell.

He thought he saw a tear glisten in the corner of Laurenti's eyes. Took the crucifix and put it into the hands where it belonged.

"I'm sorry," Hellboy said.

Laurenti ignored him, looking at Campbell now: "What else have you seen?"

As they tried to make sense of the impressions that Campbell had picked up this afternoon--not one mind but three, yet not something inside the priest--Hellboy got a gut feeling that Laurenti truly was innocent. It was no act, no theater. The man didn't know he was being used. But worse, none of this made any sense to him. There was nothing in what Campbell was saying that Laurenti could connect to anything else, the big picture suddenly coming into view.

Abe ticked a finger up for quiet. "Do you have incense here? Not sticks, but a larger amount. Like you'd burn in a censer?"

It caught Laurenti by surprise--Hellboy couldn't say the request made much sense to him, either--but he said, yes, they did. As he sent one of the guards to find it, Hellboy wondered if they said Mass in this place, some consecrated spot where one of them would lead the way, swinging the smoke-spewing censer at the end of a sturdy chain.

Hellboy leaned close to Abe. "What's on your mind?"

"On the
Calista
...remember the fogbank we entered?" Abe said. "Remember what we
saw
in the fog?"

That spectral form tethered to Hellboy's back, which they would never have seen at all if not for the mist. The eyes, maybe the ears too, of something that had been watching from afar. He'd had greater worries since then, but had never been able to figure out where the thing had come from.

But if they found a connection here...

Abe suggested they move to a smaller room, where closer walls would hold the smoke better. They fired up several small round charcoal bricks in an empty tomato can. When these were burning well, Laurenti dropped in a generous palmful of incense, in loose nuggets. Within seconds it began to smolder and smoke, the air filling with the fresh, sweet floral scent of Damascus Rose.

Hellboy took the can in his right hand--no pain, no matter how hot the metal grew--and swept it around the room, especially around Laurenti, as the smoke poured out. It swirled, it billowed, it thickened the air, and soon grew denser than any fog at sea.

Abe, who seemed to have an eye for these things, fanned the smoke this way, fanned it that, and pointed.

Not obvious, seen more for what they weren't than what they were, as the smoke wafted around them rather than through them: two vaporous tendrils sunk into Laurenti's back, just inside his shoulder blades. Fan the smoke, follow the loops, the coils, blink and you miss it...but Abe had the eye for this in more ways than one, the protective film that let him see clearly in water now keeping the smoke from stinging.

He followed the tendrils back to their sources: human forms again, but only barely, one cringing in the near corner, the other clinging halfway up a wall. From what the smoke suggested of their faces, Hellboy wasn't sure he wanted to see them any more clearly. Whether in anguish or madness, they seemed to scream. Maybe they really needed to. Or maybe it was the last thing they remembered doing.

"My god," Laurenti whispered, after he'd turned to see what they'd found. Like anyone would, he reached both hands around his back, trying to grab hold of something his fingers could never feel. "What
are
they?"

Good question. Prior to his own encounter, this was nothing Hellboy had seen. Even so, he had a few ideas. Not souls, but
parts
of souls, stripped free of the rest, then shackled and enslaved. He wasn't convinced anyone had truly plumbed the mysteries of the human essence, although he liked the depth and sophistication of the way the ancient Teutons had seen it: a complex entity comprised of many distinct aspects, just as the body was comprised of many organs. The hidge, the hyde, the fetch, the myne...maybe it was one of these that they were now looking at in the smoke, retaining just enough memory of themselves to hold onto ghostly echoes of the bodies to which they'd once belonged.

And the umbilicals--so they wouldn't become separated from the unsuspecting targets they were attached to? Maybe. But maybe these tendrils also kept them alive, in their way, a means for draining away a small but steady reserve of vitality to keep them viable. Probably nothing Hellboy would have noticed...but a normal man or woman? You had to wonder if Laurenti had felt like himself lately.

"I want these off me," he said.

The one that had leeched onto Hellboy's back had come loose and disintegrated almost as soon as it was discovered. Cause and effect? More likely this was because, as they'd speculated, its job was done; the Leviathan had found them. This pair seemed to recognize that they'd been found out, but weren't going anywhere. They scrabbled at the ends of the tethers sunk into the middle of their chests, heaving with silent screams.

"I want these off me now."

Liz came shouldering past him and Abe, elbowing them both out of the way, her palms wreathed in flickering gloves of blue-orange fire. She homed in on one of the tendrils, a faint void in the smoke, and it seemed to writhe, wormlike, to evade her grasp. Yet she had it, catching what could not be caught, burning it to spectral ash while shoving her other hand into the center of the hazy chest, and then she was after the next one before the first had finished dissipating into the fumes.

Smoke now. Only smoke, and nothing more.

Hellboy caught her eye, watery and red in the haze. "How'd you know?"

"I didn't."

Good call, though. There was fire, and then there was fire. The combustion of a match, which burned only matter, and the searing purity of an elemental force, which usually trumped the unnatural. Little doubt which one Liz was connected to.

Laurenti was coughing now. Hellboy braced him with one hand and pulled him out of the room and into fresh air.

"Whatever those were, I had one too. Maybe I picked it up from you and maybe I didn't. But you don't just pick 'em up like brambles on your pantleg," he told Laurenti. "Now
think."

"I thought...I thought I was ill," he said. "Two months, I haven't been the same since..."

"Since what?"

"A deliverance. I performed a deliverance..."