Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (21 page)

"Does it remind you of anyone?" it asked.

"I may look like one of yours," Hellboy said, "but the resemblance ends there."

"Now you lie to yourself. Hell is more than skin deep." Upon its makeshift throne, the Moloch twisted as if in discomfort. Grunting, it reached around to dig into ribs, spine, something. It brought its hand back around and, with casual interest, examined the palmful of blood and suppurating tissue before slinging it spattering to the floor. "You shot me in the back. Was that an act of Christian mercy? Was it even an act of heroism?"

"You turned your back to the bullet." Hellboy felt his teeth grit. "I'd've shot you in the face if you hadn't been running away."

"Did I offend you?" The Moloch feigned an ugly parody of surprise. "That helpless red carcass on the ground that gave up his prizes so easily...I thought he had no more fight left in him. He struggled so weakly under this"--the Moloch jerked one leg up and peered at the boot it wore before letting it thud back to the floor--"this small bony foot I borrowed."

Hellboy decided to quit rising to the bait. "The scroll...why go to all that trouble to take it? You don't strike me as much of a reader."

It ignored him, tipping its head upward to sniff the air with nostrils gone grotesque, seeming to pull in one last whiff of ambrosia. Leaning in the direction of the bathroom turned charnel house.

"The fires have gone out here," it said, sounding almost wistful. "But there are others...always others." Now it craned its head toward the papered-over window, the streets beyond. "Can you hear it? The weeping of mothers and the splashing of their tears? They were never told their children's fate, but in their dreams they know..."

"The scroll,"
Hellboy tried again. "What's it mean to you?" Because if he didn't remain focused on the job, he'd give in to temptation and tear this meat-puppet apart, lose whatever tenuous connection he had with the force behind it--probably what it wanted, another taunt. "You don't gain anything by keeping the scroll a secret. Why not let the Church have it, make it public?"

Now he had its attention. The Moloch seemed to entertain itself by pretending to muse things over.

"In
our
time and way. Not theirs," it said. Then it fixed him with its eyes, so much less than human now. "Your blindness does you shame. Do you truly not see that even as you try and fail to correct this situation, it is of your own making?"

His hand itched--his
right
hand. It had never itched before, not that he could remember. Had never wanted so badly to crush words, and the mouth that formed them.

"You belong to two worlds--the world of weakness and squalor I see before these eyes, and, though you deny it, the world of black flame behind them. You deny this because you forget you exist to open the doorway between them, so the world where you now walk may be perfected." With Gilmour's eyes, it tried a paternal look, all wisdom and good sense. "That doorway has never been closer. If I were to tell you where to find it, and how to open it, you could save so many millions of lives."

Hellboy almost laughed. But not here. "Whenever you guys start talking about doorways, they're always something that's better off staying shut."

"There are other ways of opening the door. And it
will
open. What you must do, and do soon, is decide how you will be greeted by what comes through." It leveled a warning gaze at him. "Never think yourself such a favored son that if found to be obsolete, you could not be cast into Oblivion as Hell's own Judas."

Hellboy leaned in close, closer, as if they shared secrets. What this thing would not give him he realized he still might be able to take.

"Oblivion, yeah? How's the decor there?" he asked. "Can I get a little something to hang on my wall?"

He grabbed the left horn and ripped it from the Moloch's head. It came away with a thick cracking sound, in splinters and blackened blood. After a brief spasm--right or wrong, Hellboy wanted to think it a reaction of outrage--the demon retreated from the body, leaving only the man behind.

And Gilmour breathed. Just not very well.

Stained crimson with burst capillaries, his eyes roved, struggling to see beyond the flashlight's beam that must have seared like the noonday sun. He seemed to be taking stock of where he was. If he was yet in the Hell he must have been promised.

No, he seemed to realize, he wasn't. Worse. Much worse.

"...what year is it...?" he asked in his ruined voice.

Hellboy told him nothing, content to wait and bear witness, as long as it took, until Gilmour carried the question with him to the Hell he deserved.

A
uburn-haired woman in a glassless window, green shutters thrown wide against burnt-orange plaster--Liz had been sitting there so long that she had to figure anyone watching would think she was contemplating a jump. Sorry to disappoint. Even if she were so inclined, there were more efficient ways of offing yourself than flinging your bod from a third-floor window. At best, from this one, you'd only smash your legs on the flat-topped cobblestones of the street.

And why spoil such a perfectly fine afternoon, anyway.

How good was it? It had been hours since she'd felt much of an urge to fire up a cigarette. That good.

Liz had felt cheated on her brief stay in Rome ten days ago. A pop-in under the cover of darkness and a tumultuous ride in an armored car--that was no way to see the Eternal City. She still wasn't seeing much of it, but this would do. This would do just fine.

She and Campbell had come to a bustling neighborhood called the Borgo, in the shadow of the Vatican's eastern walls. Since the sixth century this place had catered to the needs and wants of pilgrims, priests, and penitents alike, as well as plain old secular travelers--meals and lodging and souvenirs of all sizes, and always cheaper than what was charged by the merchants in St. Peter's Square.

The BPRD had quietly maintained a six-room apartment here since the first year of its founding...one of the easiest arrangements the bureau had ever finagled. The liberation of Rome in June of 1944--the German army retreating to the north while the Allies marched in from the south--had earned the U.S. government, even its youngest agency, tremendous capital with a populace elated to see the Nazis leave. Credit the young Trevor Bruttenholm with having the foresight to press for a low-key base that not even the Vatican was to know about.

Now that she was here, Liz had to wonder if a part of him hadn't wanted the place as a quaint little getaway spot, like a time-share condo that he'd get to use year-round. She could understand, and blessed him for it, though he was two years in the grave. Even now it felt like a bequeathal, the kind of place into which she would love to disappear and live on the cheap, spending her money mostly on coffee and oil paints; pick the sunniest room and set up an easel and see if anything that hit the canvas was worth keeping.

Although if she were going to be playing house this way with a man twelve years her junior, she would want it to be later in life, when she could
really
count it as an accomplishment.

"When's the guy going to be here, again?" Campbell asked from the kitchen, where he was getting a bottle of mineral water.

"No quicker than he was since the last time you asked," Liz said.

Antsy--who could blame him? The first time he'd be proving himself to the bureau for real, an ocean away from its cloistered walls.

Ever since they'd gotten here yesterday afternoon, she'd kept finding excuses to leave, coming back after each excursion with bread or wine, cheese or olives. Nothing to do with Campbell's company--she just loved wandering in the Borgo. Church bells pealed near and far, and on the edges, there was even something fun about watching the smelly tour buses, almost as plentiful as the pigeons, forced to contend with the chaotic, random way that modern-day Romans had of parking their cars.

But inside, in the heart of the place, where there was no such distinction as street and sidewalk...that's where the life was. You walked pathways and touched walls, both bright and somber, that had been walked and touched by the feet and hands of the Renaissance. On a sunny day like today, laundry dried overhead like the flags of a hundred nations, while you dodged soccer balls and motor scooters and were wise to regard them as equal dangers, and passed benches where old men sat and smoked and rued the modern age, as old men did everywhere she'd ever been. It was village life, in the middle of one of the world's oldest cities.

"You want a water?" Cam asked.

"No thanks. I've got one."

"How about an apricot? These are the best apricots I've ever had in my life."

"No, I'm good. And no bread right now either," she told him, and finally turned from the window. "Why don't you spit out what's
really
on your mind?"

He looked flustered at having been found so transparent, but when she'd first started working with him, it hadn't taken long to catch onto the pattern of his evasions, his deflections, his stalling tactics. Her own, back in the day? Or a skill that she'd honed with normal people uncomfortable around her, subsurface freak that she was? Maybe a bit of both.

"I was talking to somebody at HQ after you left," he said. "I had a few days to myself there, you know, not much to work on if I didn't feel like it..."

"Better watch that. An idle hand is the devil's workshop." Amputee humor; he quite liked it most of the time.

"It's just that you kept telling me how if I worked hard and applied myself to doing my visualizations and keeping a clear head that I could get a handle on my life, on my
gift"
--he spat the word with no little irony--"on everything. You said that if I'd let it, the BPRD could be my salvation."

"That's really the word I used, huh?" Liz thought she knew where this was going. Not that she'd seen it coming, but come to think of it, it would be due anytime now, Campbell away from Fairfield just about long enough for the first-time excitement to wear off and let him get back to whatever fresh misgivings he'd been nursing.

"Yeah. Salvation. That was definitely the word."

He was pacing the hardwood floor, looking angular and lost inside ancient jeans ripped through at the knee and a sweatshirt under horse-blanket flannel that flapped around his frame like a sail. The look out of Seattle that you just knew would start dying not long after Kurt Cobain had a couple of years ago, although you had to figure that the ripple effect would've been slow in getting to Nebraska. She found it endearing on him, actually.

"And you no longer believe that's true?" she asked.

"I don't know. You tell me. If it's such a salvation, then why have you left the bureau
twelve times?"

Her first impulse was to tell him, as diplomatically as possible, that it was none of his damned business. But she bit down that one, and was glad of it. It wouldn't help a thing, and she supposed that there was no way this discovery wouldn't make her look like a hypocrite.

"Some of those bailouts, you can write them off to youthful indiscretion," she said. "I really was a kid when I first came to the bureau. Much younger than you are. I still hadn't even had my first fit of self-righteous teenage angst. I've lost my family and now I'm around all these strangers telling me what to do and trying to figure out what makes me tick? It would've been weird if I
hadn't
run away."

She popped her head out the window for another glance up and down the street. Still clear, looked like. If their visitor wasn't here in another hour, okay, maybe then it would be time to worry.

Liz pressed her hands together and frowned at them a moment, looking for the words, the
right
words.

"I don't think there's anything that describes life at the bureau any better than
family
. That's what we have there, for better or worse...usually for the better. I know there are lots of places a person can work where they'll tell you you're joining a family, and I suppose at some of them that's the truth, but in most of them, it's just another con job. But in the core of the bureau, it's no lie. That's what we have because we're all we've got, really.

"Hellboy, he's the big brother who's always watching out for everyone," she went on. "Abe's the cousin from that branch of the family that you're not too sure about. Kate, she's the cool aunt who'll level with you about the world in a way your parents would never dream of. And Professor Bruttenholm..." This was the only part that had the power to make her eyes burn, her throat catch. "Well, you missed a gem there. He was the father, or maybe the grandfather, who knew more than you thought any one person could, and who would never give up believing in your highest potential even when you'd let him down."

"I wish I could've met him," Cam said, sounding painfully sincere. He had to have heard talk about the Professor around Fairfield,
had to,
and plenty of it.

"Maybe you can, in a way." The solution was so obvious, she couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it until now. "We've all got things that belonged to him, things that he cherished. I think it'd be a good idea, after we all get back, to round them up and let you spend some time with them. With
him."

"I'd like that," Campbell said. Then looked at her with raised eyebrows and expectation:
Your turn.

"Right. Family. Me." Stalling tactics and evasion? Perish the thought. "I guess I'm the sister who, no matter how much she may love the rest of her family, still can't help thinking there's something better for her out there. So she has to go off and have a look, or..."

Great, speaking about herself in the third person now. How's that for deflection?

"...or I'll go crazy thinking I'm missing out on something that's probably not even there for me."

Judging by the sagging appearance of his face, that last admission hadn't really helped the cause.

"Look," she said, "we've got some overlap, you and I. But some fundamental differences, too. I carry something around inside me that can hurt people, no matter how much I might love them. It's been a long time since I've had an accident, but it's there. And every so often, I've gotten this idea in my head that I can leave it behind. I don't really believe that, of course, I just act like it's true.

"You, though...what gradually consumed you until you almost let it kill you...you can impose restrictions on that in a way I never could with mine. As long as you're in a place where you can control your environment and the objects in it, then you can keep the bad shit at arm's length. Literally. You can
do
that at the bureau. Now, it's not free. They'll need your help sometimes, like we do now--hey, they'll demand it sometimes--and yeah, there'll be bad shit involved. That's the nature of the beast. But you won't be facing it alone. I
will
be there to catch you if you fall, I've always promised you that. So the BPRD...maybe it won't be your salvation, because that's something you'll have to find in yourself. But it
can
be your sanctuary. And that, I guarantee you."

Spoken as one who'd come crawling back to sanctuary a dozen times--was that good or bad? She didn't know, but she'd at least spoken from the heart.

"So...are we okay here?" she asked.

"Yeah, we're good." He shoved back the sleeves of his sweatshirt and flannel and, with a grin, held out the knobby stump of his left arm. More amputee humor. "Shake on it?"

Half an hour later she noticed Father Artaud coming up the street. The sight of a man in a black cassock riding a bicycle--she'd seen it at least a dozen times just since yesterday and it never looked any less ungainly. As Artaud dismounted, she leaned out to watch him chain the bike to a wrought iron railing on the front of the building.

"I see that!" she called down; startled, he looked up as if expecting to see the finger of God. "What kind of message does that send about your faith in your fellow man?"

As usual, he seemed to have no idea how to answer her, and she rather liked the feeling, however fleeting, of having that effect on a man. The fact that it was a priest, though...she couldn't decide if the whole business was playful, irreverent, or just plain pathetic on her part.

After he'd jogged up the four flights of stairs--scarcely breathing harder, okay, impressive--she got Rogier a water and introduced him to Campbell, who, she was relieved to see, refrained from offering to shake with his stump this time. Refrained from offering to shake at all, she noticed, but he was subtle about it, standing a couple of feet out of reach behind the two-sided kitchen counter. Not all of his coping skills had come from the bureau. He'd brought a few with him.

Rogier unburdened himself of a bag that he'd carried looped over his shoulder and across his chest. He set it on the amber tiles of the countertop and spread out its contents: a ring, an ornate pen that looked made of walnut, a missal, several more items.

"Wow, good job," Liz said. "You know, if this priest thing doesn't work out, you could have a solid career as a pickpocket."

"Please..." He looked as though he needed an antacid. "I don't feel good about this, not a bit."

"You'll be returning them on the sly, so I think you'll be in the clear. I'm pretty sure the commandment is 'Thou shalt not steal,' not 'Thou shalt not borrow without permission,' " Liz said. "So...let's see if we can't find out who's been breaking 'Thou shalt not kill.' "

It was Hellboy's idea, and a calculated risk, but his gut feeling was that among all those they had dealt with, Father Artaud was the one who kept the best interests of the Masada Scroll closest to his heart. That the Belgian archivist cherished it first and foremost as an artifact that had survived two millennia, not what it might represent between opposing factions.