Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (24 page)

"An exorcism, you mean?"

Laurenti shook his head. "Not the full Rite, no, but...you do this thing, you still are vulnerable then...open to influences..."

"What was it for?" Hellboy asked.
"Who
was it for?"

"No. No, it could not be, that was nothing like this--"

"Who was it?"

"Aidan Burke," he said. "Monsignor Burke."

They cleared out of the house onto a side patio, letting the crisp night air wash out their lungs, their eyes. Laurenti hunched over a wrought iron table and sipped a glass of wine.

"Two months ago Aidan came to me," he said. "Across an ocean, he came to me. Yes, he comes sometimes to Rome for Church business, and comes sometimes to Rome for
our
Church business, the business that's not official...but he said this was not for either one. This was to be between us, only us. Would I hear his confession, he asked me. I knew it must be something terrible, if he would not tell his own confessor back home..."

Except it hadn't been anything Burke had done--not willingly, at least--but rather something he wished to be purged of. He claimed his nights were marathons of torment, as if caught between sleep and waking, his body paralyzed while he helplessly watched his spirit rise and wander, to visit other bedrooms, to plunder other sleepers and gratify itself with their bodies. He was host to a spirit of lust, he feared; or worse, becoming one himself. If there was a term for it at all, the only one he could think of was incubus.

"There was something wrong with him," Laurenti said. "I could sense it in him."

"So you tried to help him," Hellboy said.

"Of course, yes. It's what I do. Whether or not the Church grants permission, if I become convinced there is a need..." He opened his hands wide, as though to say he was helpless before duties he saw, not duties as they were defined. "And Burke, of all people? He would not request this lightly. He would never
believe
this of himself lightly. A very rational man...maybe too rational."

And so they'd done it--prayers and recitations, banishings and holy water. Successfully? So Laurenti had believed. And very likely it had been, just not in the way he'd expected.

So think this through a minute...

As Laurenti had mentioned already, the rites of exorcism left the practitioner open, vulnerable. Hell, anyone who'd seen the Friedkin movie knew that much. But the risks, the underlying principles, were far older than the Church. Who were the first holy men if not shamans, primal mediators between worlds? Even now, from equatorial rain forests to the Siberian tundra, shamans took great care not to return from their trance-journeys to the Underworld with spirits holding to them.

And what was a priest but a shaman in more somber clothes?

But suppose this ordeal of deliverance they'd undergone was a sham, a ruse, not to drive something from Burke, but to attach something to Laurenti?

And why? Because the monsignor was far from what he seemed. Because he was a man whose considerable power was being directed toward hidden aims. Because he knew that something would soon transpire that would put the Masada Scroll into play...maybe was even helping orchestrate it. And because he was planning ahead, planting seeds that would give him--or his masters--eyes, perhaps ears, with those who would oppose him.

And knowledge, as they all knew, was power.

It put their trip to the observatory in a whole new light, looking at it from this perspective. Burke's not-so-subtle suggestions that Hellboy should target the
Opus Angelorum
--an attempt to wipe out an enemy? Or cover his tracks? Both?

Hellboy was even looking differently at that moment when Burke put his hand on his back and let it linger. A solicitous gesture from a priest, but now it was hard to shake the feeling that it had more sinister intentions. The spot he'd touched was
exactly
where the specter had joined to Hellboy's back. Had he planted it then, the task easier than with Laurenti because Hellboy--as he'd been told just this morning--belonged to two worlds already?

Or maybe it was because they were standing in the middle of a place of fearsome power, the accumulated charge of centuries of rites and rituals. Burke had invited, and he had gone there of his own free will.

I should've been more careful...

"Burke's in Boston again now, right?"

"Supposed to be," Liz said, sitting with Campbell on a concrete balustrade around the patio. "According to Father Artaud."

Hellboy nodded. "We need to call Fairfield and have them scramble a takedown team. We've got to get this guy over here
now
. And we don't have time for subtlety."

"D
oes the bureau do that often?" Campbell asked. "Go in, drag somebody out of his home in the middle of the night?"

Liz shook her head. "Hardly ever. The directors hate it."

"How come?"

"It has the potential for looking really bad, even blowing up in our faces. We're not the FBI, you know. And we can't exactly follow due process. What Father Laurenti told us in there?
You
try taking that before a judge to get an arrest warrant. You'd be lucky if you made it out of there without being locked up yourself." She turned her head to blow a plume of smoke away from him. "So that pretty much puts us on the same level as the Men In Black. Whoever
they
are."

"You mean you don't know?"

"Let me tell you something, Cam. This job's not much of a front-row ticket to the secrets of the universe. All these mysteries are like the hydra. Feel like we get a handle on one, and pretty soon two more come along to take its place."

They'd been greeting the dawn from the patio, with its tiles of green and cobalt blue, where the rising sun struck in pools of light that widened as the rays gained strength through the trees. Cam had slept inside earlier, and there had been his exhausted nap yesterday afternoon after reading the objects that Artaud had brought by. But Liz had been up all night on a tea and cigarettes jag, never quite able to back off the twisty feeling of apprehension while they'd awaited word that the takedown team had quietly, successfully raided Monsignor Burke's home and whisked him off to a hangar at Logan Airport and a chartered Lear jet flight.

They must be somewhere over the Atlantic right now, closer to Rome than Boston.

"I'd feel better if Hellboy was here right now," Cam said.

"Everybody does. Even if it's just a safety thing." Liz shrugged under the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, although it was getting warmer now and she could take it off soon. "But he hates to waste time. Almost as much as he hates it when stuff eludes him. This is a two-for-one run for him."

She fished for her lighter again. The patio table was littered with tea bags and its ashtray full of butts, and she thought she smelled coffee now, too, one of the guards brewing it in the kitchen. More caffeine, great--just what she needed.

But better than the smell coming from the Tiber, when the breeze was right. Abe had gone off to spend some time at the river's edge in the predawn hours, then came back sooner than she would ever have expected, and he hadn't said a word since.

"Is this one rough on you?" Cam wanted to know. "The scroll, the fight over it...everything?"

"No more than most. Why?"

He pointed at her throat. "The little cross on that velvet choker. You were wearing it the day you came to visit me in the hospital. And the day you met me in Bridgeport when I flew in to start training. I don't think I've seen you without it more than once or twice. I mean, I don't know what your beliefs are, but I figure if I ever wanted to know all about you, that's the thing of yours that would show me the most."

"Yeah, well, unless you want to find yourself working psychic fairs, paws off," she said, then corrected herself, "Paw, singular," and this cracked them up in that silly way you can laugh when it's dawn and you should've slept and your throat feels as raw as your eyes and you have no idea what the day might bring, just that it probably won't be good.

She brushed her fingertips along the choker, the cross. "I'll tell you what it's doing there," she said. "Where I grew up, it probably wasn't all that different from where you grew up. It was so secure. I was loved and my parents made sure I knew it. I was so protected. Then all that was gone...

"It's not that I've forgotten all the old Sunday School lessons. I've just seen too much to still be able to believe that the world and whatever's beyond it works the way they all said...

"But this reminds me of when I
could,"
she said. "And that's something, isn't it?"

They'd called it the Queen of Roads, and after 2300 years since its first stones were laid, it still cut a path out of Rome. The Via Appia Antica, the Old Appian Way, was once the empire's highway to the east, and now it was lined with fragments of the ancient past--churches and tombs, sepulchers and mausoleums--and led from the city to stretches of open countryside, where farmers still tilled their fields, and clusters of pines kept their green while the land around them browned with autumn.

No question that he was in the right place. He could still see the tire ruts chewed into the ground.

For a week and a half Hellboy had wanted to come back here as soon as he had the chance: the spot where, after that careening ride through southeastern Rome and beyond, the armored car had come to rest. No time to stand and fight that night, at least not with enemies that refused to show themselves. Yet he'd sensed they were out there, watching from the darkness and the trees, holding back only because the car's hijackers had failed to deliver its passengers in peace, unsuspecting.

What was here, though, but a pastoral niche of countryside?

He'd come hours before dawn, wandering amid the trees and the fields in hopes that the unfolding darkness would reveal something wrong with this place. He'd gazed at the stars and breathed the night air. He'd sat and watched, listened and waited. He'd wandered far enough away from the queenly old road to stand upon a hillside and look down upon a farm. He'd even crept onto the farm itself, but there was nothing wrong there either, only the warm breath of sleeping animals and a family left bone-weary by bringing in the harvest.

And now that morning had come and the sun had banished night, he was doing it all over again.

The air was warm and the light strong when he found it: a place in a cluster of pines that looked, and the closer he got, felt...

Wrong.

Piled branches and scattered pine needles lay over the side of a gently sloping plateau of earth, an extension of a hillside where mud had run in thick rivulets, and the turf had sloughed off like a shed skin and then been replaced. Not something he would've noticed by night, or even paid much attention to on most days, but on
this
day, in this frame of mind...

He pitched the branches aside, then knelt and scraped through the scabbed earth and a weave of grass and vines until he found what felt like a heavy wooden door, still stout but going rotten with age.

He'd barely begun to clear it of soil when his phone went off.

"Burke's flight got in fifteen minutes ago," Abe said. "They're on their way. You better head back here."

Some other time,
Abe had called to him from the armored car that night, when his impulse was to chase them down, to root them out, to find out what they were. Abe was turning into the best friend this place ever had.

"Next time finishes it," he promised the earth, as if the end of ages was at stake.

W
ithout his vestments, without his European tailored black suits, Aidan Burke seemed about as happy as any fiftysomething man would after he'd been seized in his pajamas, then spent the night in vans and a plane instead of his own bed. Back in Boston, his alarm clock wouldn't even have gone off yet.

Now he sat in the north of Rome, midmorning here, hands resting before him on an oak table that could've served at a small banquet.

"Do you have any idea how many laws and international regulations you must be breaking by doing this?" he said. "I don't, but I would genuinely like to know." His eyes, so blue within the bloodshot veins, tightened a millimeter. "I do intend to find out once this farce is played out."

"Go on, Monsignor. You know you want to," Hellboy told him. "Threaten to have me busted down to writing parking tickets--I dare you."

No comeback to that, but after a long, bumpy night, Burke could still pull off a simmering burn that might give rookie agents pause to wonder if they hadn't made a mistake. With his chiseled features and iron gray hair, clipped too short to muss, he still looked like a man who could demand heads on platters, and get them.

"I can't say it surprises me that you look for someone nearby to blame for your own failures." He gave a slow, sweeping glance across the room. "When one's best efforts prove inadequate, or incompetent, scapegoating is a natural human tendency." His gaze settled on Hellboy and Abe, back and forth. "How about that, it must even transcend species."

Had they expected him to cooperate? Hardly.

"I would expect that your inborn nature might sometimes lead you to see your own worst potentials in others," Burke said to Hellboy. "Tell me: How many things from the outer dark will you have to kill before you're satisfied that you've killed it in yourself? Or will you
ever
get there?"

Regardless, you were honor-bound to offer a guy the chance to get ahead of it. To take that first step toward putting things right.

"And Miss Corrigan, she's not here, she's not part of this?" he said, with another look around. "I'm relieved by that." Settling on Liz now, whom he hadn't met before, even as he spoke of Kate. "I felt such
pity
for her. She hid it well, but it seemed to me she's come to that point when she's wondering if she hasn't sacrificed the better years of her life to something that can only bring her...emptiness."

But you could only ask him so many questions that he ignored in favor of his own soliloquies before having to resort to sterner measures.

"And
you,
Gino," he said to Laurenti, voice now taking on overtones of sorrow, like Julius Caesar to Brutus. "When did the sanctity of the confessional lose all meaning for you? I came to you for help, and you turn it into the basis for a witch-hunt?"

But what if we're wrong...?

Hellboy could not condone torture. But there were other methods. Sleep and sensory deprivation. And better yet, waiting a couple of rooms away, there was Campbell Holt.

"Take off your top," Hellboy told him. "Hand it over."

Burke gave him a quizzical look, then unbuttoned the silky pajama shirt and offered it at arm's length. A pretty good build underneath, pale skin taut over muscle and bone, the only concessions to age the gray hairs on his chest.

"Be careful with it, if you would, please," he said. "It's new."

He knows,
Hellboy thought.
He knows about Campbell, and why shouldn't he, because that thing on my back was there every time Liz and I talked about him on the boat.

They tried anyway, for all the good it did, Campbell clutching the fabric in his fist and drawing a blank, nothing there, a couple faint flickers of the man's anger and resentment at being taken from his home like a criminal. Campbell shaking his head no, nothing here, no secrets to plumb--Burke had not
lived
in this garment, hadn't made it his own.

"Is that it? Has he got anything else?" Campbell asked.

Hellboy had already checked. No rings, no watch, no saints' medallions around his neck. The pajama bottom would be as new as the top. Strip him of his underwear, then? His socks? His slippers? He could see no point to it. They would all be the same. Empty of the past and unconnected to his soul.

Hellboy returned Burke's top and let him put it back on.

"If there was a purpose to
that,
I'd like to know what it was," Burke said. When he got no reply, he put his hands flat on the tabletop, as if ready to push up onto his feet. "Am I free to go?"

"Just one more thing," Hellboy said, and of course they could always send a team back into his home, his office, to scoop up a few items and ship them over. There shouldn't be any trouble finding something that would work for Campbell; it would only take more time. For now, he wanted the satisfaction of pinning this man wriggling to a lie. "There's another prisoner here. In one of the buildings out back. You know that."

"Obviously. Since I was the one who told you."

"I got the feeling you expected me to do something about that, too. Maybe not for the reasons you made it seem like. But the more I thought about it, the more it sounded to me like you were hoping I'd kill that man in his cell because of what he'd helped unleash." Hellboy planted a fist on the table and leaned in closer. "Here's your problem: Inborn or not,
that just isn't in my nature."

Burke nodded patiently, eagerly, like a man hoping to put a misunderstanding to rest. "And I'm very glad for that. No matter what you thought you heard, I do not advocate murder."

"The man in the cell...Father Verdi. I'll bet you've never seen him since he's been here." Hellboy looked at Father Laurenti. "Has he?"

"If he has, I don't know about it."

Back to Burke: "But I'll bet he'd recognize you right away, wouldn't he?"

If that little tightening of Burke's mouth told them anything, it was that he was onto something here. Because deep in his gut, Hellboy had begun to suspect that Burke wasn't only a part of this group of progressives who had rallied around the Masada Scroll; he was also with their ideological enemies. Not because he cared about the aims of either...only the consequences of what would happen if their conflict boiled into a conflagration.

So how had this happened? Put it together, one theory, or some variation of it:

As one of the
Opus Angelorum,
Burke pushes for the most extreme response when it looks like a foregone conclusion that the scroll would go public one day. Through whatever means--a pair of eyes here, a pair of ears there--he knows when Father Artaud is going to be studying the scroll anew, using the upcoming paleography article from the archaeological journal. He's already seen to it that existing work copies have disappeared, forcing them to bring the scroll out to make new ones.

Maybe he's played both sides for fools, too, warning each that the other is onto them, just to introduce more turmoil into the mix.

But most of all he's sabotaged the seraphim's attack. Arranged for that warning to Artaud to run when the air turns cold. Sounds like just another lunatic on the street until it actually happens. So Artaud gets away with the scroll. Because Burke never wanted it destroyed...only threatened.

That way, you can put it into play. That way, you can send it into transit, where it will be most vulnerable.

And we never saw Hell coming for it,
he thought,
because we never even knew Hell was involved.

"What have they promised you, Burke? More power than you already have?" he asked. "Do you even know what Hell's going to use the scroll for?"

"I don't even know what
you're
talking about. You lost me awhile back."

He took Burke by the shoulder and pulled him to his feet.

"Let's take a walk out back," Hellboy said. "Let's let Verdi get a look at you and see if we can't start cutting through the crap."

For everything a season, for everything a reason.

The man in the cage had had plenty of time to recognize the underlying order of the events that sent him here, the perfection of each set of circumstances.

He had returned to the
osservatorio
when he should not have? This had only served to put him in the midst of the enemy.

They took care to deny him anything sharp? This made no difference, because there was his untrimmed thumbnail, and what he had made of it against the rough stone of their walls.

They thought themselves decent enough to allow him modesty as he turned to the corner to wash his body each day? It only left them blind.

And they made sure he had nothing with which to write, to draw, to recreate the complex signs of summoning? Then their arrogance and ignorance were truly profound...because the signs were already here.

Not long after he'd first stepped into this cell, Domenico Verdi had known what he was being called to do. The only question was when. Even in the darkest hours, as the days passed and the nights grew longer, when he was in danger of succumbing to their tactics, when he was tempted to find any kind of truth in what his jailer Laurenti had to say, when faith wavered and he feared the moment might never arrive...he had clung to the belief that when the time had come, the signs would be unmistakable.

And so it had, and they were.

Laurenti had mourned with him that they no longer lived in an age of miracles? Verdi was honored, humbled, exalted, to live in a new age of martyrs.

The sun was high and warm outside when he heard the zoo's door open. Their footsteps clicked and echoed down the corridor, a small group this time, more than had ever come to see him together before--even this was a sign.

And for the first moment when they came into view, his heart broke. The poor monsignor.

"So they caught you too," he said.

Then, emerging from the shadows, he saw the red thing that held his brother captive. He knew what it was, of course--few churchmen wouldn't. He knew what it called itself--as if it could render itself harmless by assuming a name that evoked a child. He was not fooled. A pity that Laurenti couldn't say the same.

With them was another abomination, hairless and green, like something that had crawled from the sea after the Father of Lies told it that it was a man.

"These creatures,
these
are what you call allies now?" Verdi shouted to Laurenti. "These are what you turned the scroll over to? And now you claim to be surprised it was lost? It was never lost...you made a gift of it to them!"

Laurenti stepped forward as if to justify his actions, but there was nothing further to listen to. It would only be more lies, and maybe he would even believe them himself. So let him carry them on his lips to his judgment.

"Join me, Aidan," said Verdi, and met the monsignor's eyes, only to see with his heightened clarity that deception lived there, too.

It was time.

He caressed his thumbnail and, speaking under his breath, began the recitation of summoning, the words in a tongue spoken so rarely on this plane that even to whisper them was to roar.

As far as Hellboy was concerned, it couldn't have been more obvious. They'd gotten the reaction he had expected, plain as day. If ever there was any doubt that Burke had been in place to play both sides against each other, Verdi dispelled it the moment he opened his mouth.

As for what he was doing now, though...

Hellboy leaned forward over Burke's shoulder. "What's he saying?"

"I don't know, I can't hear him either," Burke snapped. "But I can guess."

And now the dread, like a chilly finger on the back of the neck. "He's not..."

"It doesn't matter. Look at him. Right now he's no different than a schizophrenic on a streetcorner." Burke peered back over his shoulder with more condescension than he had any right to. "You saw the observatory floor. You saw the tools it takes. You don't see them anywhere in there, do you?"

No. He didn't. What he saw was a man who'd been held captive long enough to grow a woolly scruff of beard, who didn't appear to have been abused but lived in a cage meant for animals, and who now seemed possessed by a singularity of purpose that transcended every human need.

Fanatics doused in gasoline would look this way...

Verdi ripped open the front of his simple pullover shirt.
...before they struck the match.

For a moment, Hellboy could only stare. They all did. When first faced with such devotion to duty, such obsession with detail, it was all anyone could do. Forced to imagine the hours of cutting, the terrible willpower to achieve steadiness of hand. The effort and endurance, the precision and the pain.

It was all there, Hellboy feared, written in scar tissue across the broad expanse of the man's chest and belly. The ornate and dauntingly complex circle rimmed with letters, Hebraic and Theban, Malachim and more, filled with seals, sigils, and talismans. They merged and overlapped, they melded into one.