Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (27 page)

"Not exactly," he said. "But I'm pretty sure I know the place to start looking."

"Good. Send me a memo on it soon, would you? And a rough map? If we've got ourselves a thin spot, or some other kind of portal, especially into the kind of place all of this seems to be indicating, we need to get it charted." He could hear the pen tapping on her desk again. "Umm...how
is
Campbell, really? Is he going to be okay?"

"I wish I had an answer for you," he said. And that he was a better liar, while he was at it. "I wish it was a good one."

"What about Liz--how's she? I know she'd really bonded with him."

"I can't tell, Kate. One minute I think she hates me, and the next I think maybe she understands. Not that it was the
right
decision, necessarily, just...the direction things took."

"Cam threw himself on a grenade, is what it sounds like to me. That's your job, usually. But not this time. This one only he could handle," Kate said. "Liz gave him the courage to do it. Maybe she should hear that."

"No. She shouldn't." He didn't often disagree with Kate, but this was one time he did. "I can tell that much, at least."

"I was a closet kid for a while. Before the bureau, when I was living in foster homes. Did I ever tell you that? Probably not. Probably never seemed like it had much to do with anything before."

If she was repeating herself, he didn't seem to mind.

"I figured if I just stayed in the closet, with my head on my knees, that would be the safest thing for everybody. An isolation chamber...I may not have known what it was called then, but I had the instinct for it. So I'd crawl in all the way to the back where I'd shoved the shoes and stuff out of the way, and I'd curl up and tune everything out until I had to pee so bad I couldn't hold it anymore. All the rest of the world stopped at that closet door."

Campbell had found a corner in one of the bedrooms, driven by some self-protective instinct that kept going even if his need for speech had gone.

"One foster family told people I was retarded. Autistic, they probably meant, but that was at a time and place when retarded pretty much covered everything."

As she looked at him pressed into the corner, holding his knees together with one hand and the knob of his other wrist, and his eyes like two pits into which she could stare without ever finding bottom, she wondered how long the Thorazine would last, and if she would even know when it wore off.

"I'm sorry I made a promise to you I couldn't keep. I really thought I could..."

And with her legs drawn up and her chin on her knees, Liz sat with an arm around his shoulder, hoping he knew she was there, so that if he was trapped with something else in that closet, he might at least know he wasn't all alone.

T
hey waited for the break of day before breaking ground.

Here in the stretch of countryside to which the Old Appian Way had led him twice before, Hellboy had no idea if anything was going to be coming up out of that hole. But if it did, this time he wanted sunlight and a clear view on their side.

As the sun gathered strength, shuttered through the pines, a fine haze rose from the hills beyond them, and he took up the shovel he'd brought. Its blade was wide and flat across, better for scraping than for ditches or postholes. He used it like a turf-cutter in the bogs of Ireland, hacking through the vines and the great scab of earth plastered with thick mud across the door he'd found underneath it yesterday morning. He and Abe and Liz...they peeled and pushed and pulled, until they'd cleared the site one slab of loamy soil at a time, and it was revealed from the middle outward, to the heavy plates of the hinges: a pair of doors, each three feet by five, angled across the slope of a low plateau jutting from the nearest hill.

They were moist and stained with earth, their centers bristling with bolts that implied they were braced inside with heavy crosspieces. Absent handles, they seemed meant to be opened only from the inside. They didn't look terribly old, at least not what
he
thought of as old. But could they have been there for sixty, sixty-five years--say, since the early thirties? When
Der Horn-Orden
seemed to vanish in Berlin? Yeah. He could see that easily enough.

He dropped to one knee before the doors and threw his fist into the middle where they met. The wood may have been spongy on the outside, but it was still dense underneath, and felt thick. He pounded them until the heavy boards began to come apart and fall away from one another, clattering on what sounded like stone. When he'd cleared enough of a hole, he could see crudely makeshift steps descending to what appeared from above to be a corridor five feet wide.

He ripped the rest free as the stale air of ages rose past his face.

Hellboy went first, kicking the shattered boards to either side, stepping down, down, down to the corridor floor. It appeared original while the stairs did not, the steps seeming to have been added later as a way out. Stonework, all of it, the floor as far as he could see paved with flat, irregularly shaped pieces that had been fitted together with time and care. How long ago? If it was much younger than 1700 years, he'd be amazed.

"What
is
this?" Liz asked, her voice in a hush, the way you instinctively spoke in such places.

"One big grave, I think," Hellboy said. "Catacombs."

"By the look of them, unknown to the rest of the world," Abe said, and shined his flashlight ahead.

The beam glanced along rough walls, with hollows cut in their sides, five and six atop one another like berths on a ship. Overhead, the ceiling was arched, and even at the sides high enough to let Hellboy pass through without stooping.

Every time he had traveled out this far, they'd passed the Catacombs of Saint Callisto and others, all of them known for centuries, where every day tourists were guided down into the distant past. But these appeared to have evaded discovery by archaeologists and excavators...although that wasn't to say they'd escaped violation. When they reached the first rank of recesses cut into the wall, Hellboy could see that someone had smashed the thin marble slabs that had been fitted across the hollows like seals. Shards of stone littered the inside of each compartment, in fragments and dust over bones and linen wrappings so old and dry they might fall apart at a touch.

"Grave robbers?" Liz asked.

"Maybe. But I doubt it. I don't think these bodies would've been buried with much of value," Helboy said. "My guess is desecration."

"But why?"

"It's a powerful place. Some people would consider it holy ground, even today. So there's power in defiling it, too. What we've got here...?" he said. "It's a mass burial site of some of the earliest Christians."

While the pagan Romans cremated their dead, Abe told her, the first Christians sought to bury theirs whole, confident of a resurrection of the same bodies that had served them in life. Because Rome forbade burying corpses within the city, the Christians went outside it, where they dug underground into soft volcanic rock, cutting elaborate networks of passages and galleries through hundreds of acres, so their dead could lie undisturbed in the walls. They buried them here, memorialized them here, and in times of persecution, they let the dead protect them here--Roman law regarded burial sites as sacred.

But in time, as happens to all such places, they were forgotten.

When the more famed catacombs were rediscovered late in the sixteenth century, after over a thousand years since they'd been lost, they were first believed to be the ruins of an ancient city.

And they were, Abe said. Just a city of the dead.

It was silent here, the close walls wrapping their footsteps and their breath tightly around them. The farther in they went, flashlight beams sweeping ahead and from side to side, the more elaborate the layout became, with other galleries branching off this one, and breaks in the burial tiers where their builders had decorated the walls with painted frescoes of patriarchs and saints.

While the dust of so many centuries may not have been thick down here, in such an airless place, you'd think it would at least lie undisturbed. But it didn't. Footprints were smudged along the floor, and as soon as Hellboy realized they were there, he took care to follow them back where they led, lest they get sidetracked and risk confusing prints that were already here with those left by their own feet.

With Liz and Abe at his shoulders, he followed the tracks past one intersection, then another, and another, then around a bend where a new gallery skewed off from the main corridor. The deeper in the tracks led, the closer the layout seemed to match what Campbell had drawn. Not all of it, certainly, but the landmarks that he'd deemed most important.

The dead and more dead, lying amid shattered stone--the tracks led past them to a chamber that opened off the new gallery like a small room, black as the night of a new moon until he shined his light within. And here the tracks simply ended, a couple of steps inside the doorway, as if whatever made them had come and gone from nowhere.

He pulled one of the drawings from a pocket and checked it against the route they'd come. It fit. As well as he could have expected, it fit. All but for the approach, the pathwalking that became its own key.

"Ninety-eight steps, walked a particular way--that's what Campbell was trying to get across, I think," he said. "Let's count off and backtrack, see where that puts us..."

Very near the entrance, as it turned out. Was the entrance itself the crucial point of origin? Or was some other nearby spot the designated beginning? They examined the stones of the floor a few paces in both directions, to allow for differences in stride; checked the walls, too, for markings that might have been added later. But nothing stood out. Nothing looked as though it hadn't been here since the corridors echoed with prayers for the dead.

"Maybe it doesn't matter," Liz said, "as long as there are ninety-eight."

"Gut instinct? It matters," he said. "Magic's not open-ended. There are balances. Cause, effect. You've got a definite destination? You've got to have a definite origin."

Behind him, Abe tapped his flashlight against the edge of one of the cubicula closer to the floor, on the left side of the corridor.

"This gets my vote," he said.

Hellboy and Liz squatted down for a look. The human bones had been disturbed more here than inside the other recesses they'd checked. The skull had been shattered against its bed of stone, and in its place sat the skull of a bull. However long ago, it looked to have been put in place when fresh, scraps of leathery hide shriveled back from the muzzle and over the broad ivory dome, and the rock beneath it stained with blood and decay.

"I'll go first," Hellboy said. "We don't know one thing about what's on the other end of this. Neither of you have to follow."

"You know better than that, H.B.," Liz told him.

For better or for worse, he did.

Diagram in hand, he began,
one two,
counting under his breath as he measured each pace along the way,
eighteen nineteen,
doing his best to follow the path set down by Campbell's hand. The broad curves, the tighter zigzags,
thirty-four,
the double-backs before continuing ahead. Would anyone walk this way by accident? They might, and probably had somewhere,
sixty-six,
but if intent were a part of it too, as Kate had suggested, he had this covered as well,
eighty-three,
his will focused on making the crossing and nothing else, making the turn, pacing down the branching gallery and toward the side chamber,
ninety-six

ninety-seven

ninety...

...eight.

Considering the totality of the displacement, the moment was remarkably calm, but he supposed it helped that he'd been walking in near-darkness, confined to a small battery-thrown pool of light. He didn't find the transition itself any more disorienting than he might have if he'd kept his head down while indoors, then lifted his gaze once he was outside.

Then his eyes truly registered the
scale
of the place.

Before he took another step, he grabbed a fat stub of chalk he'd stuffed into a pocket back in the apartment, stooped, and thickly marked the point of his entrance on the rocky floor. Pulled out a handful of chemical lights and snapped them into glowing life, scattered them into a soft blue circle, then moved out of the way.

Staring, impossible to take it all in at once, and he had to admit: Nothing could have prepared him to find
this
.

Footsteps behind him. Friendly, he assumed.

"Oh my god," Liz said. "This can't be real."

"It may not be real," Abe said, "but it's here."

T
his would always be the greatest power of the unknown, the unknow
able,
Liz thought: to root your feet to the ground so thoroughly that the mere idea of movement seems impossible.

With a single step she'd crossed a threshold from one realm into another, from claustrophobia to agoraphobia, but that was the least of it. There were things the mind resisted, could barely begin to process...and
this
was one of them. Hubris and cruelty and decadence on a magnitude that defied imagination.

A few moments in and the panic started to hit, Liz whirling to look behind and realizing there was no doorway there anymore, no corridor either, no stone walls cut into file cabinets for the dead--
How do I get back? How will I ever GET BACK?
--and she imagined being trapped here forever. Abe must have sensed her sudden alarm and grabbed her wrist.

"If we walked into this place," he told her, fixing her with his aqua eyes as calm as a summer lake, "then we can walk out again...and
will."

If you had to call it anything, you could call it a cavern, its distant rock walls gleaming with a black sheen like coal or wet obsidian...but no cavern this size could have existed near the undetected catacombs outside of Rome. This could have
swallowed
the catacombs, and maybe Rome too, if not for one thing: This place was not of the earth, nor in it, but
alongside
it, a few steps away in places where the borders between worlds had been rubbed thin. You couldn't fly to Heaven, you couldn't dig to Hell, and, as with Kate's oft-referred-to Faerie, the only way to get here was knowing where and how to walk.

But right now, her impulse was to run the other way.

She supposed it was large enough to contain its own weather. The roof was far enough above that it dissolved into a murky haze--not quite clouds, nor mists either--a veil over a weak source of light that cast this world into perpetual gloom.

So maybe it was a mercy that she couldn't see the Moloch any clearer.

It rose before them, above them, something a colossus could only aspire to be. It looked cut from the rock, and where rock was not enough, cast from ores that gleamed cold in the meager light. Its head was an eclipsing shadow, and the statue squatted upon the cavern floor as if poised to spring upright, so the horns might rip bleeding gashes between worlds.

And the arms. Dear god, the arms...

Passing between its knees and either side of the cauldron of its belly, its arms stretched down toward them, each hand resting palm-up on the cavern floor. Its right hand held a network of temples that intimidated with spikes and spires, battlements and buttresses. Its left hand...she couldn't tell. Whatever it held was smaller, lower, and from this distance all she knew was that they could only be a greater or lesser degree of terrible.

And so far, it all looked deserted.

"That's
the best they could do?" Hellboy said, and whether he knew it or not, it was just the thing she needed to hear, that could pry her feet from the cavern floor.

He decided they should check out the structures built upon the left hand, since it wasn't as obvious what they were. They hadn't yet gotten there--hadn't even reached the terraced stairs at the tips of the spread fingers--when they started to find the first bodies.

Eight of them lay scattered on the cavern floor, and immediately reminded him of the armored car's hijackers, all bones and sinew, but in worse condition, much worse, as if most of the flesh and fat had been sucked out of them, to leave behind skeletal shells in a shrink-wrap of skin.

Except they still weren't dead.

They'd been on the verge of it for a very long time, and he wondered if it would ever truly arrive, even after their bodies started to fall apart, their term of servitude to the devils they'd courted never considered complete.

He knelt beside one of them, drawn by the clothing: filthy, ragged, blue-and-white remains of an old sailor shirt...fetish wear among certain young men in Weimar Berlin, Hellboy had learned. This one--aged hideously, unnaturally--must have been here since the very beginning.

Hellboy hauled him up by the shoulder, looked him in the face, could smell the stale dust of his breath. He looked at the hands and forearms, worn raw and callused so many times that they looked as though they'd been dipped in a yellow, cracking glaze. He looked into the eyes, red and runny and still trying to find what was right in front of them.

"Hey," Hellboy said. "Was it everything you hoped for?"

No answer. Hellboy laid him back onto the stone with more care than he probably deserved.

"I bet we're gonna find hundreds of these before we're through here," he said. "Maybe thousands."

"Even with tens of thousands--this?" Abe said, and pointed at everything that towered overhead. "They could do
this?"

"They're slaves, Abe. They just had the whips put to them on the inside."

He thought of the Egyptians who had built the pyramids, so many of them that today their graves were like a city in the desert. Frightening to speculate on what they might have built had they been hosts to devils.

"But watch yourselves," he warned. "There must be
some
left around here in better shape than the rest. Newer ones, maybe, haven't been used up like the oldest. Those are the ones they must've thrown at us on the outside."

They pushed on, ascending the steps to the plateau of the left hand, walking the length of one finger until the structures here began to gel into context. Machinery, it all turned out to be, dark and oiled, still gleaming with the kind of newness that can only be preserved with a lack of use, and the greatest hope he could extend toward it was that it never would be. It was an open-air slaughterhouse, an abattoir turned inside-out and rebuilt in a ring around the outer edges of the palm. An elaborate network of drains and gutters had been built to channel the runoff toward the center, where it would spill over the sides and...

Disappear.

There
was
no center of the palm. Just a hole. No, not even that. A hole implied edges, inner walls, and this, after a certain depth, had none. Bottomless? Probably not, but who could tell? It was a well as big around as a stadium, descending into a vortex that churned and swirled with infinite shades of darkness. He could think of nothing worse than what might one day be drawn from it.

You belong to two worlds,
Moloch had told him through a borrowed throat.
You exist to open the doorway between them.

Holding onto the housing of a contraption built for a crosscut saw the length of a telephone pole, he stared out into it, like a lake of blackest storm clouds.

That doorway has never been closer...

He wondered if it was just his imagination...

There are other ways of opening the door. And it
will
open.

...or if Abe and Liz heard it whispering too.

What you must do, and do soon, is decide how you will be greeted by what comes through.

"With fear, I hope," he whispered back. "That'll do just fine."

He became aware of a closer voice, and turned to find Abe and Liz wearing expressions edging toward concern, as if they'd had to call him a few times to get his attention. He gave it now, full and undivided.

"What exactly have they
done
here?" Liz asked.

"I doubt we'll ever know it all," he said, "but my take? This whole place is an antechamber to Hell. A way to connect Hell and Earth, even though they're never supposed to be connected." He gestured toward the cavern. "This space and time here...I think it already existed. Parallel world, whatever--possible to get to from our side. They just reworked it to what it is now....

"That group from Berlin wanted Hell on Earth?" He shook his head. "Hell has its own timetable, and doesn't tolerate rivals. But it wasn't above using those people to put Hell one step closer." He pointed at the vortex, surrounded by its engine of suffering. "Once they're able to put this all the way through, the rest would probably be easy. It's the back door into our world."

Not just through the catacombs that had led them here, either, Hellboy thought. He had a feeling that another passage dumped out somewhere in the heart of Rome, if only because of how quickly the hijackers had ended up at the armored car.

In fact, it wouldn't have surprised him to learn that there were several portals to and from this realm, in the hidden places beneath the surface of the earth. The sewers of Berlin and Moscow, maybe; the subways of London and New York. And if there were, it seemed reasonable to believe that they'd been swallowing the innocent, as well as those who came willingly to serve.

They found the proof of this a little later, along another section of the abattoir, where a body hung by the neck from a framework of pipes surrounding gears and grinders. An obviously new arrival, she wore jeans and a bright pullover top, and had fashioned her noose from the straps of a nylon backpack that lay near the dangling tips of her shoes.

If you'd come to surrender your soul, would you bring it in a backpack?

They took her down, even though there was no soil here to bury her. They took her down because it seemed the only thing to do, unknotting the strap from around her bruised and purple throat. With a careful fingertip, Liz pulled free the strands of hair, dyed a cheerfully unnatural red, that had caught in the corners of her mouth. She looked dead only a day or two, but that might have been an illusion, because in this place, this new Tartarus, decay seemed to come in its own interminable time.

In her backpack they found a university ID and three books, plus notebooks and pens, a portable CD player and discs and headphones, lipstick and more. Liz folded it up, pack and all, and put it in her own backpack.

And in one pocket of the girl's jeans was the last thing she must have written:

Si je suis deja en enfer, est-ce encore un suicide?

Hellboy handed the note to Liz. "You know French, don't you? A little?"

She took it, even though she looked as if he were handing her a bouquet of thorns. She gave it a long perusal.

So much for needing intent to walk the path into this place.

" 'If I'm already in Hell, is it still suicide?' " she read aloud, and her eyes never moved, and her expression didn't change, as her hand flickered blue and orange, the paper slowly curling to brown and black, then sifting into fine gray ash.

They made the crossing from left hand to right, one ebony mesa to the other. To Hellboy it felt like they'd done it in less than two hours, but he allowed that time passed strangely here. At their right, the Moloch statue was a constant presence, an eternal threat. He wondered if its pendulous belly was hollow, a furnace that could burn entire forests and send flames roaring up a throat and out the mouth so far above.

More bodies? Those too, in ones and twos and by the dozen, and at their worst it became like walking through the site of a mass suicide, another Jonestown Massacre, except these sometimes twitched or tried to crawl, to reach, to bite. It was worse than if they'd been able to attack--he could
deal
with that, had been dealing with things trying to kill him all his life. Not this, though, these fields of bodies wallowing in the rags of clothing last in style before the Nazi Party came to power. Whenever he and Liz and Abe left them behind, in the unearthly quiet on echoing stone, they continued to hear the clicking of nails and teeth for a long time after, and the wheezing of desiccated lungs.

If these people, and the things that wore their skins, had succeeded in obtaining the scroll from the armored car, he had no doubts that they would have brought it back here. He couldn't think of any reason why they still wouldn't. And if he didn't yet understand what the scroll meant to them, why they wanted it so fiercely, he had a feeling he was getting closer to it with every step.

Now that they were here, the right hand held what looked to him like a city center of cathedrals run amok, architectural cancers meant to petrify instead of uplift. They wandered its streets, the bodies even more abundant here, a hellish Calcutta where they were
all
dying, eternally, sprawled in streets and propped against walls like beggars too weak to lift their hands.