Hellboy, Vol. 2: The All-Seeing Eye (22 page)

But did he
want
to head back to his hotel? He had half a mind to jump in a cab and go visit his pal Father Simon Finch at his vicarage in the beautiful Cotswolds village of Winograd Heath. He often went there when he wanted solace from dealing with the endless stream of demonic manifestations and supernatural visitations that seemed to define his existence. He went there to find peace, equilibrium; to breathe good, clean air and remind himself how sweet and simple and downright idyllic an ordinary, uneventful life could be. He also went there to remind himself exactly what he was fighting
for
, because sometimes it was hard to keep track of that; hard to remember what, ultimately, was the point of his endless daily struggle.

Yeah, the thought of hailing a cab now, of dozing in the back while the miles unspooled behind him, of leaving all the crapola behind ...

Unrealistic, of course. He was needed here. As if to underline the thought, the beeper on his belt went off. He undipped his satellite phone from its pouch and put it to his ear. “Yeah?”

Liz’s voice was tinny. “HB, it’s me. I’ve been trying to call you.”

“Yeah, sorry. Been kinda busy,” Hellboy said.

“Getting arrested — I heard. So where are you now?”

“Heading back to the hotel, I guess. I’ve just been released back into the community. What’s happening with you?”

She told him about Credo Olusanya and Kobus Labuschagne.

“Sounds like you guys have been getting all the fun jobs,” he said.

“Yeah, it’s been a riot. Listen, we’re meeting for lunch. Abe’s got some stuff to tell us about these eye people. You up for that?”

“Sure,” he said. “Where?”

He heard her voice change, become slightly hesitant. “Please say if you think this is a bad idea, but we thought... well, you know the Three Cups just off Great Russell Street, don’t you?”

He was silent for a moment. The Three Cups. He hadn’t been back there since the summer of ‘79. It was where he had met Anastasia.

“HB?” Liz said.

“Still here.”

“You
do
think it’s a bad idea, don’t you? Listen, we’ll meet somewhere else. I just thought... since it’s a place you know — “

“The Three Cups is fine,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Why shouldn’t I be? That place holds nothing but good memories for me.”

He arranged to see her there in a half hour, then resumed his walk. On this quiet street, it was weird to think of all the stuff going down in London, weirder still to think that somewhere beneath these cracked pavements and patchy roads was a bubbling volcano of malign energy — a volcano which, if they didn’t prevent it, might well erupt and engulf the entire city.

It was hard to believe all of that when birds were singing away, and cars were hooting their horns at each other, and people were just getting on with their daily business. But then again, that was always the way, wasn’t it? When it came to stuff that couldn’t be seen or properly understood, people tended to turn a blind eye to it until it was right in their faces. They denied and denied until they could deny it no longer.

Hellboy himself was a case in point. He had been famous since the late fifties, and yet the majority of people never
actually
seemed to believe in him until they saw him in the flesh. Even now, even though he’d been on the front page of that morning’s newspaper, he was aware of people staring at him in wonder as he passed by. Some pointed; some shouted; some grinned and whooped. Someone even yelled,”Freak,” but Hellboy refused to favor
that
particular individual with the satisfaction of a response. Wherever you went in the world there was always at least one idiot.

As he turned from the relative quiet of Down Street onto the main route through Piccadilly, Hellboy caught the eye of a little kid who was walking towards him along the sidewalk, clutching his mom’s hand. He saw the little kid’s eyes turn to saucers and he winked.

“Hey, little buddy, how ya doin’?” he said.

The kid said nothing. He was struck dumb with awe. The kid’s mother stared up at Hellboy with a nervousness he was familiar with and asked, “Excuse me ... Hellboy?”

She used the name shyly, deferentially. In his gentlest voice, Hellboy said, “Yeah?”

“Er ... I hope you don’t mind,” said the woman, “but Dale here is a big fan of yours.”

“Really?” Hellboy said, surprised.

“Oh yeah. Ever since he saw your photo in a magazine, he’s been obsessed. Got pictures of you plastered all over his wall.”

Hellboy looked down at the kid, who was gazing at him like he was Father Christmas. “Well, how about that,” he said, touched.

“And we wondered ... that is,
I
wondered ... would you mind if I took a photo of you and Dale together? It would really make his day.”

“Sure,” Hellboy said. “How do you want us?”

“Could he maybe sit on your knee?”

“Would he be happy to do that?”

“Oh yeah.” She turned to her son, bent down so that her face was level with his. “Dale, would you like a photo with Hellboy?”

The kid nodded slowly. The look on his face suggested that all his dreams had come true.

Without hesitation Hellboy sat cross-legged on the pavement. He was attracting quite a crowd now, but he studiously ignored the rubberneckers. He patted his left knee. “Hey, little buddy, you wanna take a seat?”

Dale nodded again, moved across to Hellboy, and perched on the vast red boulder of his knee. Hellboy put his hand gently on the kid’s shoulder (he could have held the kid’s head in his hand like an apple) and then Dale’s mom produced a little instamatic from her bag and began snapping away.

Next moment Hellboy heard a bunch of young, excited voices calling his name. He half turned and saw a crocodile of nursery kids on the opposite side of the road, shouting and waving. He waved back, eliciting squeals of delight. The kids surrounded the nursery assistant and Hellboy heard them imploring her to let
them
have their photo taken too.

“You see what you’ve started?” Hellboy said softly to Dale, ruffling the kid’s hair.

Dale smiled at him. Hellboy beckoned to the nursery assistant. “Bring them over if you want.”

Pretty soon he had kids scrambling all over him. They rapped on the sawn-off flats of his horns; they clambered up onto his shoulders. People grinned and took photos. Dale’s mom and the nursery assistant struck up a conversation, like neighbors meeting in a playground. Traffic slowed as car, bus, and van drivers leaned out of the windows of their vehicles to stare and laugh at what was going on.

Eventually a car pulled up to the curb beside him. It was a car Hellboy recognized, one he had sat in earlier that day. The passenger window slid down and Cassie Saunders leaned across. She was grinning too.

“I can see you’re busy,” she called, “but I just wondered whether you needed a lift?”

“Daddy, you’re here!” Jasmine screamed, running up and flinging her arms round him.

Proctor laughed. “Well, of course I’m here. You didn’t think I’d miss your birthday, did you?”

“Do you like my new rollerblades?” she asked, tilting her feet back and forth so that he could view them from all angles.

“Very smart,” he said. “Did Mummy buy you those?”

“Yep. And this new top. Look, there’s sparkly bits round the collar.”

“Wow,” said Proctor, and handed over the large white plastic bag he was carrying. “Here’s my present, sweetheart. Happy birthday.”

Jasmine took the bag from him, eyes shining. Her friends crowded round as she put it down on the wooden floor of the school hall and lifted out the box inside. The present was wrapped in pink Barbie paper, which prompted one of her friends — earrings, lipstick, eye shadow; no doubt destined to become the class bitch, Proctor thought — to make a gagging noise. However, hers was the only dissenting voice. Jasmine looked up and asked, “Can I open it now?”

“ ‘Course you can,” he told her.

A little anxiously she asked, “You are staying for the
whole
party, aren’t you, Daddy?”

“As long as you promise me a bit of cake,” he said, winking.

Jasmine ripped the paper off her present, her friends crowding round to see. “Oh, wow, a Walkman!” she exclaimed.

To Proctor’s satisfaction, his gift met with a universal chorus of approval:

“
Amazing
!”

“You are
so
lucky!”

“I wish
I
had a Walkman.”

He was still basking in the glory when a voice behind him said, “Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.”

He turned. Tina was all glammed up.

“Hello, Tina,” he said, “you look lovely.”

Sotto voce, she replied, “You look like shit — as usual.”

“How gratifying that you’re making the effort to be nice for the sake of our daughter’s birthday,” he said with a smile. “I’m touched.”

She ignored the barb. “I suppose it was Jasmine who told you we’d be here?”

Before their exchange could escalate into a quiet war of bitterness, Jasmine burst from her circle of friends and held up her present.”Look, Mum!” she cried.”Look what Dad bought me! And some CDs too! Isn’t it fantastic!”

Tina tried, for Jasmine’s sake, to share her daughter’s enthusiasm, but her face seemed unfamiliar with the muscles required. “It’s lovely, Jas. Have you said thank you?”

Jasmine placed the now-opened box carefully on the floor, then flew at Proctor again with enough force to knock the wind out of him. “Thank you, Daddy! It’s a brilliant present! And you’re a brilliant dad!”

Proctor flashed his ex-wife a point-scoring smirk. She flared her nostrils at him before stalking away.

As Jasmine had told him on the phone last week, hers was to be a rollerblading party. This basically involved Jasmine and her friends whizzing round and round the school gymnasium all afternoon, to the accompaniment of blaring music provided by a DJ in a silly hat. Tina had been able to hire the gymnasium because it was half-term. Proctor had previously promised his daughters that sometime this week, while they were off school, he would take them shopping on Oxford Street, and then to a proper West End show. However, this Hellboy story had gobbled up his time, and would no doubt continue to do so for the foreseeable future. His only hope was that the girls had forgotten his rash promise.

No such luck.

The first thing his eldest daughter, Chloe, said to him when she saw him was: “So what show are you taking us to, Dad?”

Proctor put his arm around Chloe’s shoulders. She was a snub-nosed ten-year-old, with long, dark, glossy hair. It was already abundantly clear — to him at least — that she was going to be a heart-breaker.

“Not sure, sweetheart,” he said. “I’m still working on it. With it being half-term, tickets are a bit hard to come by.”

“But I thought you knew people? I thought you said it would be no problem?”

“I
do
know people. And I
will
get tickets, I promise. It’s just ... it might not be this week.”

Chloe looked disappointed. “We
can
still go shopping, though, can’t we?”

Crossing his fingers, Proctor said,” ‘Course we can.”

“When?”

“I’ll give your mum a ring about it,” he said glibly, “sort something out.”

He spent most of the next hour standing aimlessly on the sidelines and raising a hand in response to Jasmine’s excited waves each time she sped by. There were plenty of other parents there — some helping out, some filming the event for posterity on their chunky camcorders — but none of them spoke to him. Proctor could only assume they’d been pre-warned about his wicked ways by Tina. He wondered what Hellboy was doing now, and whether he was missing anything by being here. In truth, he was itching to get back to his story. He already had the angle. He would be asking how, when Hellboy had been brought into the country at the British taxpayer’s expense, he had the time to sit around, chatting up women. He would report how Hellboy had reacted violently when asked this very question. As evidence, the article would feature photos of Proctor’s damaged car. So clear was the story in his mind that Proctor could actually see how it would look on the page — the layout, the positioning and size of the photographs ...

It was Chloe who snapped him from his reverie. She gripped his arm and pointed. “Dad, what’s that?”

Proctor blinked, tried to focus. Chloe appeared to be pointing at the opposite wall of the gymnasium. But for some reason he couldn’t see it properly; there was a haze in front of his eyes. He blinked again ... and then he realized that Chloe was pointing
at
the haze. It was there in the room with them, hovering a meter or so beneath the high ceiling. It was like and yet unlike smoke, a grayish, pearly iridescence. Proctor found himself having to adjust and readjust his eyes to keep it fixed in his vision. It seemed almost to be not quite there, not quite real, like a ghostly image clumsily overlaid onto film.

Chloe repeated her question. There was no fear in her voice, only curiosity. “What is it?”

Proctor glanced around, searching for a rational explanation. Was someone smoking? Or cooking maybe? Maybe someone had burned the sausages intended for the party tea afterwards? Other people were looking at the haze now, some of them pointing at it or filming it, many pulling their faces into uncomprehending expressions. Even a few of the rollerbladers had stopped to peer at the grayish cloud above their heads.

There was a sudden sound. A crackling and tearing, audible even over the pounding music. It sounded like a bad scratch on an old vinyl record — or the hugely amplified noise of someone ripping apart a gristly bit of chicken.

This thought had barely entered Proctor’s head when the “haze” split open. It split horizontally, revealing a thin and jagged black gash, edged with purplish-blue light.

Some people gasped, as though witnessing a particularly fine firework display. A few of the younger girls let out squeals of surprise. Some of the rollerbladers, distracted by the phenomenon, either slowed right down to look up at it or carried on going and crashed into fellow rollerbladers and fell over.