Hellboy, Vol. 2: The All-Seeing Eye (36 page)

“No,” he moaned suddenly, his head thrashing from side to side, and even in that single word Hellboy could hear the terrible strain he was under. “No, I ... control you ... I control ...”

All at once Varley’s body went rigid. His head snapped back, as if he had been punched on the jaw.

“I think it’s showing him who’s boss,” Liz said grimly.

“And I think that now might be a good time to say I told you so,” Hellboy rumbled.

“Far be it from me to sound a note of false hope here, guys,” said Liz, “but I think I can move a little.”

Abe nodded. “Me too. The holding charm is breaking down.”

In front of them, Varley was not merely dying, but diminishing, his body fragmenting as the light picked it apart. He did not scream in pain as he died, or rant in anger, or beg for mercy; neither did he twist or writhe or struggle. Instead he went quietly, seeming simply to let go, to fade away. Hellboy was not sorry that the man who had slaughtered Cassie was dead, but he felt cheated that he himself had had no hand in it.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Abe said.

Hellboy scowled. “Is that so?”

Abe said softly, “If you’d have killed him, Hellboy, you’d never have been able to live with yourself.”

“You must think I’m a better guy than I am,” Hellboy muttered.

Abe shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said simply.

There was hardly anything left of Varley now. He had been reduced to an indistinct core of darkness in the midst of the blazing ball of energy. As the three of them watched, even that was consumed, until there was nothing left but light, which began to swirl and writhe and probe around the cavern once more, restless and without direction.

Hellboy found he was finally able to step down off the stone platform. As the feeling flooded back into his body, he hunched his stiff shoulders and stamped his hoofed feet on the ground.

Liz came up beside him and touched him gently on the arm. “Sorry about Cassie,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Hellboy gruffly “me too.”

“So ... what happens now?”

Hellboy looked at the light swirling around the chamber like a mass of tangled ghosts. “Anyone got a big net?”

“Yeah, I thought this stuff’d be ... I dunno ... more impressive somehow,” said Liz. “I thought it would erupt out of the earth like molten lava or something.”

“I think what we’re seeing here is just a drop in the ocean,” Abe said. “The lodestone is only a
tap
for the mains. Once the tap has been turned on ...” his voice trailed off.

Liz sighed. “Yeah, I guess I kinda knew that.” She pointed upwards. “The faucets are all up there, right? All those little breaches we saw this afternoon? I guess they’re going to widen, aren’t they?”

Abe nodded.” ‘Fraid so.”

Liz moved towards the lodestone, carefully stepping over the strewn bodies of the acolytes, avoiding the pools of blood and clots of brain matter.

“So how do we turn the tap off?” she asked.

“I don’t know if we can,” said Abe.

As the two of them examined the lodestone, Hellboy stayed where he was, peering up at the still-swirling light suspiciously. He had the feeling it was circling him like a shark, sizing him up. He watched as it coagulated in one area, close to the ceiling. After a moment it extended a tentative tendril in his direction.

“Er ... guys,” he said.

Before he could say anything else, the light swooped down at him. Hellboy swore as it coiled around his body, burning like acid through his physical and mental defenses. He felt it pouring into his mind, overhauling his thoughts. The sheer physical intensity of the assault was so immense that he could easily comprehend how the less-robust bodies of the acolytes had simply ruptured under the pressure.

Even Hellboy was not sure he had ever felt pain
quite
like this. It was crippling, breath snatching, all encompassing. It was like having steel hooks embedded in his brain, like liquid fire pouring through his veins. It was only sheer force of will that stopped his legs from buckling beneath him, that prevented him from retreating to a tiny, dark place within himself and succumbing instantly. He gritted his teeth and roared and fought back and thought about Cassie, who had died in order that this abomination could be released into the world.

But, hard as he fought, Hellboy knew deep down that it would not be enough. The light was vast and ancient and far more powerful than he was. His only faint chance of defeating it was to attack it at its source — to switch off the tap, as Abe had said.

But how?

Liz floated into his field of vision. Instantly Hellboy felt the impulses and urges of the thing inside him, felt its desire to hurt her, to possess her, to feed on her suffering, to drain her dry.

“
Go
!” he roared, his voice already roughened by the lights influence. “
You and Abe go now, before I... before it makes me ... hurt you
...”

“We’re not leaving you,” Liz said.

“
GO
!” Hellboy bellowed at her.

He waved his massive right hand in a gesture of dismissal. Through the cracks and grooves in the red stone he saw the swirling, fiery light pouring out of him. And all at once, as though for a split second he had glimpsed the heart of the light itself, he knew what he had to do.

He lurched up to the lodestone, forcing himself to plant one hoof in front of the other. With each step, he felt the light trying to drag him back, trying to gain mastery over the mental impulses that powered his body.

Eventually, however, he was standing on the spot where Varley had been devoured just minutes before. Gathering his resources, forcing his body to move in the way
he
wanted it to move, he drew back the clenched fist of his stone hand, and then pistoned it forward, as hard as he could, into the floor.

The sharp, almost musical clash of rock against rock reverberated around the cavern. Fighting every inch of the way against the force that was trying to subsume his mind, he drew back his fist and smashed it into the floor a second time.

This time the rock gave a little where his fist impacted with it, and a thread of a crack appeared. Hellboy punched again, and the crack widened and spread; blood began to run down into it.

He hit the floor a fourth time, and on this occasion his fist smashed right through, encountering nothing on the other side but a cold subterranean breeze. As he drew back his hand for another punch, a sizable plug of rock on the edge of the small hole broke loose, and with a grating squeal it fell downwards, leaving Hellboy peering into a jagged triangle of darkness.

Vaguely he heard Liz’s voice once more. It sounded like a faint radio signal from some unimaginably distant land, reaching him through a furious swarm of static.

“Oh my God, Abe, look,” she was shouting. “Look at what he’s doing!” He sensed her coming closer, yelling at him, though even now she still seemed a long way away.

“Stop, HB! If you can hear me,
stop this right now
! This floor isn’t solid. It’s like a ... a crust, or a bridge, or something. If you weaken it any more, it’ll collapse, and we’ll all fall. We’ll all
die. Do you understand?
“

Hellboy
did
understand. Despite appearances to the contrary, he knew exactly what he was doing. He dragged his head up, aware that the light was pouring like fire out of his mouth and eyes, that to her he must look utterly possessed.

“
Go
!” he roared again. His voice emerged as a gurgling, tortured parody of itself, but he hoped she would realize that the words were still
his.” You and Abe ...get out of here ... NOW
!”

Through his burning, swimming vision, he saw her staring at him, anguished and uncertain. Then Abe appeared by her side and took her arm. “Come on,” Hellboy heard him say. “Let’s do as he says.”

Liz did not cry often, but Hellboy could see she was fighting back tears. “But we can’t just leave him,” she wailed. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

Abe nodded. “I think he does. I think he’s still in there somewhere, and I think he’s doing the only thing he can.”

Liz looked ready to protest further, but she had been in enough desperate situations with him and Abe to know that the one thing you
didn’t
do when the shit hit the fan was stand there arguing. So instead she simply glared at Hellboy, and shouted angrily, “Don’t you dare die, you big idiot!”

Then she and Abe were gone. One minute there, the next not, as if they had simply disappeared.

Hellboy returned to his task. Remorselessly he drew back his stone fist and pummelled the floor a fifth time, and then a sixth. More rock broke away and fell into the chasm. The darkness within the widening hole was so impenetrable that if it hadn’t been for the stagnant flow of air gouting up like a foul exhalation of long-held breath, Hellboy might have believed it was nothingness.

He hit the floor again. Again. Under constant siege from the light, he felt himself diminishing with each blow, reduced to a tiny knot of resistance. He was operating almost on instinct now. He hit the floor again. Again. Again. More cracks appeared, zigzagging across the floor. More rubble broke away and toppled into the depthless dark. Just another few blows, he thought, and the hole would be wide enough to accommodate his massive body. Trying to ignore the burning agony of the light scrabbling frantically at his thoughts, he pulled back his fist and brought it smashing down once more.

With shocking suddenness the floor gave way beneath him.

Spider-webbed with cracks, all at once it simply caved in with a great rumbling crash, and a split second later Hellboy was falling into darkness. His body twisted and turned as he fell, a red speck among the rain of tumbling rock and human cadavers. With his extra weight, he quickly outpaced the corpses of the acolytes, though he couldn’t outpace the larger chunks of rock, many of which collided with his spinning body on the way down, bouncing off his head, his shoulders, his back.

He fell for a long time — far longer than he’d ever fallen before. He didn’t exactly feel scared as he tumbled through the darkness, though he did feel apprehensive. Tough as he was, Hellboy didn’t
enjoy
pain, and landing after a long fall was never much fun. Plus he knew that if he didn’t manage to get out of the way almost as soon as he hit bottom, he would quickly find himself caught in a very nasty downpour of rocks and human remains.

Although this was not the best situation in which he had ever found himself, at least there was
one
positive aspect to Hellboy’s descent. As soon as the floor had given way, he had felt the light sliding out of him, vacating his body. Maybe it was reluctant to return to the darkness in which it had been trapped for so long, or maybe it had simply given him up for dead as soon as he had started to fall. Either way, Hellboy was grateful that the light had decided he would no longer make a suitable host. At least it would be one less battle to fight.

His duster billowed around him as he plummeted downwards, falling end over end with no immediate prospect of landing. Sharp-edged boulders slammed into him. He was just wondering whether Liz and Abe had gotten out okay, and whether they were having an even tougher time up top than he was down here, when the ground rushed up to meet him.

He didn’t see it, of course, or even sense that it was coming. One second he was simply falling through the air and the next he wasn’t. As expected, the impact was not pleasant.

“Aw, crap,” he moaned. He was hurting all over. Feeling as though he had just been in a week-long fistfight with an opponent as tough as he was, he forced himself to stand and broke into a staggering run. He had no destination in mind, or even any idea of what lay ahead of him. His main priority was simply to get out of the way of all the stuff that, sooner or later, would be falling to earth in his wake.

Some of the heavier rocks were already landing around him, hitting the ground hard enough to partially bury themselves. For maybe ten seconds he heard big chunks of rock landing behind and around and even in front of him. And then, in addition to the rocks, he heard softer things beginning to land, each one making a sound like a vast rubbery bag of liquid bursting open as it hit the ground. Yet although he was splashed a couple of times, it seemed that
someone
at least was smiling on him tonight, because within a few seconds Hellboy was out of the danger zone, having been struck by nothing worse than a few fist-sized chunks of falling debris.

He stopped, listening to the pattering sounds of the stuff still falling behind him, and leaned forward, hands on knees, to take a breather. He couldn’t pinpoint a single part of his body, either inside or out, that was currently without pain. Man, this had been a bruising assignment. Not that he was complaining. He might bitch about the bumps and bruises occasionally — and was frequently ribbed by Liz and Abe for doing so — but he never let them slow him down. He had never encountered a pain yet that stopped him from doing his job.

Eventually he straightened up, wincing, and patted the pouch on his belt which contained his torch. He half expected to hear the loose jangle of shattered metal and plastic, but to his surprise it seemed okay. He undipped the pouch, drew the torch out, and thumbed the switch. Nothing happened. “Crap,” he murmured, and gave the torch an experimental shake — and suddenly a bright beam of light flared from it, illuminating the area around him.

Hellboy flashed the torch in every direction, getting his bearings. He didn’t linger on what was behind him; the mass of pulverized corpses was not pretty. With no ceiling above him, and whatever walls might exist to his left and right beyond the range of the beam, he could almost have believed he was outside. It was only the close air and the dank, earthy smell that ruined the illusion that he was standing on a huge plain or in a vast desert beneath a starless sky, with nothing to see but the base of a colossal mountain some twenty or thirty meters ahead of him.

He wondered briefly whether he had fallen through some transdimensional gateway or whether this was simply some vast cavern, miles and miles beneath the streets of London, far below the tube tunnels and the bomb shelters. Then he pushed the thought aside, thinking that it didn’t much matter either way, and walked across to the mountain. He reached out and placed the palm of his stone hand on its bare vertical surface. It was cold, almost freezing to the touch. He looked left and right, wondering how long it would take him to walk all the way round. Considering the distance he had fallen, he guessed it would take hours, maybe days. The circumference must stretch for so many miles that he probably wouldn’t even get the sense he was walking in a circle.