Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (26 page)

T
hey'd made him as comfortable as possible, but it didn't take a lot. Nice plush chair, a footstool, a couple of blankets. Soft surfaces all around. You'd think they were worried he was going to catapult straight into epileptic fits. No cerulean blue walls, but mottled umber wasn't bad either. He thought about asking Liz to go out and find a can of paint and a roller, just to see which she'd get--the goods or the joke--but decided that now wasn't the time. She looked like she was stressing plenty already.

Handling it well, though. She'd pitched a twenty second fit when she found out, during which she gave Hellboy the mother of all dirty looks, but that was it. No more objections, no more worst-case scenarios, no reminders that he didn't have to do this and could back out any time he wanted.

"Remember what I've told you," was all Liz would say now that he was in the chair, secure as an astronaut before launch. "Remember what I've told you every single time."

He pretended not to remember. "Look both ways before crossing the void?"

Tough room. Not a flicker. Just three of them standing around him like dental hygienists, three grave faces looking down at him, red, white, and green, and the priest in the background clearly unaccustomed to milling around with nothing to do.

Hellboy hunkered down beside the chair. "You ready?"

Campbell gave a terse nod. Knew what he was supposed to look for--the trick would be to try his best to isolate it and keep the rest at a distance. Get in, get what they wanted, and get out, a psychic smash-and-grab. Easier said than done? Well...yeah.

He peered at the horn as Hellboy held it at the ready. A familiar thing, he'd seen plenty of cattle drives in movies, yet at the same time unnatural. Ten inches long with a ragged, blood-caked base more than two inches in diameter, tapering in a gentle curve until it hooked sharply at the tip. It looked a thousand years old and loathsome, the texture dark as mummified skin and full of fissures.

He braced his hand along his thigh, palm up but tightened into a fist. Easier to keep it steady that way.

"Okay," he said. "Just...put it in my hand."

Hellboy moved it closer. Waiting. The thing was just inches away now. "Uh, Campbell...your fingers? You gotta open them..."

He knew that. Just wanted to keep his fist jammed against his leg for as long as he could. Damned if he would let them see his hand tremble. He sprang his fingers open like a trap and snatched the horn away before anyone could notice.

In that final moment, when he could still think of the outer world, the world he knew, the experience was like plunging a hand into a kettle of boiling water. Not in temperature but in time, that fraction of a second before the nerves get the message, the water even feeling cool at first, and then the shock, the all-consuming shock of it rocketing up the arm and into the brain that can't believe what the hand has been stupid enough to do,
GET OUT OF THERE!,
except there was no pulling out yet, it had him, as though another hand at the bottom of the pan had latched on and yanked the rest of him in, where boiling alive was just the beginning.

The man first--the horn made of Gilmour's bone after all, Gilmour's flesh, and how he'd
hated
them, their fragility, their mortality, their tendency toward weakness and dissolution. There had to be something more, and there was, he'd found it, or it had found him, the path paved with the rabbit-fast hearts and blackened bones of--

ENOUGH

Nothing to learn here, only contamination, the toxicity of a life long since given over to the theory and practice of suffering. The man was only the tool; there was still the hand that swung it. The man was but the outer skin over the layers of the horn.

And the gates of Hell creaked open.

It roared up beneath him and he tried to dodge it, as futile as dancing on the breath of dragons--a vast and towering entity with a shadowed head that blotted out the sun and moon, and horns that gored the stars--not its true form but this one served it well, a gift from ancient tribes carried on the smoke of sacrificial fires. Screams from the embers were its symphonies, and sour tears its wine, and if it had been drunk on them before, in the next age it would bathe in salted rivers.

He was in a firestorm of its hatreds and its appetites. Nothing could demand this much, nothing could consume this much, but it did, and had, its heart a chasm that the history of human anguish had barely begun to fill. And so it wanted more, a world not destroyed but overrun and subjugated--the human race would never go extinct as long as it suffered so exquisitely. New jihads and genocides? A good start, yes, and worst of all was understanding that Moloch spoke for legions.

They clamored, their teeth like rows of spears.

No idea...he'd had no idea it all could be so close...

ENOUGH

But he was failing, the pressure too strong, valves bursting and filters rupturing, yet he knew it was here somewhere in the maelstrom, so grab a thread and hang on, follow it to its source--

No, not a thread, a hand, a hand to replace the one he'd hacked away, a reborn hand at the end of a regrown arm--who knew the longing to be whole again better than one who wasn't?

I've got you.

Vicious triumph

I've got you...

even if it felt

...and I know what you did...

like coming apart in a whirlwind of razors

...and I know where you went

and waving goodbye

...and I know how to find you again.

to the ribbons of your face.

Liz's voice,
Remember what I've told you,
past and present,
Remember what I've told you every single time...

I'll be there to catch you if you fall.

I remember.

And even though you couldn't, please don't blame yourself, because by now you should know better, that some of us are born for the furnace, and destined to

Hellboy knew he'd be a long time wondering which was worse: the screaming or the silence; his own sense of guilt or seeing the anguish in Liz's eyes. A long time questioning whether this had been worth it.

Answers? He supposed they were there, somewhere in the babble. They'd recorded it, of course, Abe manning the microphone, and at one point, during the godawful spasms near the end, when they'd pulled Campbell from his chair and laid him out on the floor, the horn yanked from his grasp a minute earlier but apparently failing to have severed the connection, he'd made frantic motions with his hand until Liz realized he was demanding something to write with. She'd pushed a marker into his hand and slid a pad of paper under its tip. They'd all seen experiments in automatic writing, thought this might have similar results, but it soon became dismayingly obvious that no words were taking form here. They weren't even letters. Just lines, rendered in jerks and spasms. Meaningless.

Except...

He was doing the same thing over and over.

There was a pattern to it: straight lines and curved lines, one set overlaying the other. Let him finish one, rip away the sheet, and he would attack the next blank in the same way, page after page, until he suddenly tore his hand away from his side and started to plunge the marker toward one eye. Hellboy caught his forearm before he could do it and took the pen away from him. When he then made as if to attack his eyes with his fingers, Liz threw herself across him, pinning his shoulders and holding his arm down until Abe, having abandoned the microphone, could get back with the medic's kit and administer a shot of Thorazine.

The silence, or the screams...they both seemed too loud.

Later, Hellboy slipped a pair of earphones on and listened to the tape a dozen times, transcribing and taking notes, drawing arrows between fragments that seemed to belong together, but the tape was what it was: a stream of disintegrating consciousness, bursts of observation and little of it in any particular order.

Tartarus
--that came up more than once, and it had been a long time since he'd heard the word, but it was not something he would forget: one of the Greeks' names for the underworld, the lowest level where the worst of humanity went after death.

As near as he could discern from the tape, even if the realm of Tartarus was just a myth before, it was real enough now, and he supposed that there were people who would speak the name with reverence.

Matthias Herzog, for one? His name had come up too. The so-called German Aleister Crowley.

If he was putting it all together correctly, the bits and pieces of what Campbell had dug into, the professed goal of
Der Horn-Orden
to usher in an era of Hell on Earth had not just been a delusional dream they'd shared before disbanding into obscurity. Instead, it was a process that was still underway.

When he could do no more with the tape, he took the cleanest of the sheets that Campbell had scribbled on and faxed it to Kate at the Cornwall safehouse. Gave her a call a few minutes later.

"Does this mean anything to you?" he asked. "Go as wild as you want. There's gotta be something here, I just don't know what it is."

He could hear the flimsy fax paper rustling over the line, then Kate asked, "How many of these did he draw?"

"Seventeen. All of them pretty much the same."

"Well, he was obviously being emphatic about it." Now he could hear her slurping at coffee, tea, something that would keep her going until the late hours. "Maybe an emblem of some kind, a sigil? A talisman?"

"That's the first thing I thought of. Except I don't get the feeling that's what he was trying to get across. Seems like if that's what it was, it's simple enough he could've said so. He could still get out a word or two at a time at this point."

"Did he say
anything?"
Kate asked, and he heard her blowing at a cup, or mug.

"Yeah. 'Steps,' is what I think it was," he said. "What are you drinking?"

"Cuppa Earl Grey. Okay, steps...any numbers along with that?"

"Just once, he could've said 'ninety-eight,' but I wouldn't swear to it."

"Well, it definitely doesn't look like a stairway, this drawing." A sigh, more rustling. Kate tapping a pen on her desk. "You said to go wild?"

"Absolutely."

"What if it's a diagram for a way of moving? Instead of looking at all these lines as being part of the same thing, maybe what we've got here is two
different
things: a place, and a way of walking through it."

Hellboy spun the picture this way, that way. "Okay...I see what you mean."

"Say the straight lines are established paths. Like hiking trails or sidewalks or something. Or if they're inside, hallways maybe. And the line that's mostly curved, and those places where it loops before going on--you'll notice that's the only unbroken line here, looks like he drew it in a single pass. Are they all like that?"

Hellboy shuffled through the stack. She could be onto something here. "Yeah. They are."

"Then maybe that's the way of moving through the space. Intent could be a part of it too, but maybe the main thing he was trying to get across was here's your path, and here's the way you walk it."

"And then you wind up...?"

"Someplace else. Probably not good. Tartarus, this
new
Tartarus, if the two are connected," she said. "Again, if only for comparison, this brings us back to the Faerie realm. Like the glamour used against the armored car crew, if that's what happened there, but I can't think of a better theory. What this drawing makes me think of are accounts in Celtic folklore where you have this hapless guy walking through the countryside, minding his own business, and all of a sudden he finds himself in this new landscape--similar, maybe, but new. The people are different, the music's different, and they all seem to be in on this big joke that he's not. He's crossed over into Faerie. He didn't mean to, he just took the right path into the place where the worlds overlap. And if he gets back, he usually finds that time passed very differently there."

"Right, right," Hellboy said. "He was only there a night or two, maybe had a good time dancing, but he gets back and everybody's telling him--"

"That he's been gone for years," Kate finished.

Hellboy could feel the pieces starting to click together. "Like that kid from the armored car, dropped dead on the street. Left Chicago for Europe in 1968, nobody sees him again, and now he pops up here looking hardly any older."

"Except he's not been in Faerie, that's for sure," Kate said. "There are these types of magic, and maybe they're most often associated with the Faerie folk, who are more mischievous than malevolent, but they don't
own
them, you see. They're just principles. And if that's what this drawing of Campbell's is, then that's the principle it's using. A whole other intent behind it, sounds like, but there you have it. This diagram...if you think of it as an overhead view, is there anyplace it reminds you of?"