Read Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell Online
Authors: Brian Hodge
Tags: #Science Fiction, #General, #Media Tie-In, #Fiction
H
ellboy got as much of the background from Kate Corrigan as seemed relevant--he would skim the reports later, maybe--then decided to push on and inspect the wreckage for himself.
Stone columns and archways, fluted ceiling joists, old oak cabinets and tables...most of it had probably looked much the same for centuries, and the only way he could tell it had once been beautiful was by context, the hallways and the rooms he and Abe had passed through to get here. There was nothing beautiful about it now; it was like the inside of a kiln that had been used too many times without cleaning. They'd be scraping this place out for weeks. Even the lighting was harsh now, most of the normal fixtures destroyed and, for the time being, replaced with cable-fed portables with the same harsh glare as a mechanic's garage.
"How hot would you say it got in here?" he asked.
"You can cremate a body in half an hour at 1300 degrees or so," Abe said. "So in excess of that. Because these look more like flash fires. They don't seem to have burned for long. They cooked everything in their path, but..." With a gray-green hand mostly concealed within the sleeve of his topcoat, he pointed to the ceiling, the floor. "They didn't spread beyond this section of the Archives. Those kinds of temperatures, for any duration...this could've been worse."
As they walked along a row of oak cabinets charred down to kindling, Hellboy felt, heard things grind underfoot. They could be walking on bones, or what remained of them, and never know.
"Spontaneous human combustion," he said. "That's what it reminds me of. I've seen it twice. Not while it was happening, but after. There's some freaky selectivity in that kind of fire. One guy burned so hot it melted candles in their stands across the room, but the easy chair he was sitting in...give it a good cleaning and you might've been able to use it again."
"What it reminds me of is gang warfare," Abe said. "An assassination, except they were using fire instead of bullets. And weren't a bit concerned who got caught up in it."
Hellboy nodded. Some of that, yeah, he thought...but part spree killing, too. Like the guy who walks into the place where he used to work and starts unloading, and it no longer matters who he does and doesn't have grudges against. If it catches his eye, it's a target.
You could follow the paths of some of the flames, trenches dug and melted into the patterned tiles of the floor, as though concentrated bursts had generated on the spot, then coursed after their targets. Most of the paths were straight, like third-degree burns that slashed across rooms, down hallways, along ceilings. But a couple of them had altered course...one curving in a broad arc, the other hooking a sharp left after twenty or so feet and reducing a display case to a pile of slag.
No concern for who got caught in the crossfire, Abe had said. Hellboy didn't doubt he was bothered greatly by the human loss--seven casualties was the estimate so far, and the number would've been a lot higher had this attack occurred during the day instead of late at night--but Abe would be mourning more than life. This place had been called a decanting of history, and Abe Sapien would be mourning that, too. He wasn't strictly human, Abe wasn't--or not entirely--but he read more than just about any five other living souls that Hellboy knew. If Abe had been in some other kind of skin, this might have been the sort of place he would've ended up, and happily so, tending to the past so that it would continue to live and speak.
They were just things, that's all,
someone might have said. Just books, just papers, just manuscripts and ornaments and trinkets. Nothing when compared to the value of a human life. They'd never drawn breath, all these inanimate things. They didn't scream as they burned. But
things
often survived the people who owned them, then outlived everyone who'd remembered their owners, until the day came when
things
were all that were left to speak for lives long gone.
The two of them were stepping around the crusted remnants of a large, square, frescoed column when Hellboy felt Abe's touch on his arm. He followed Abe's other hand, pointing off to their left, a spot on the nearest wall they might have overlooked because it blended so well with the rest of the destruction.
Optical illusion--when you first looked at it, you didn't see it for what it really was. No, that took a few moments. At first, all you saw was a wide circular area more than halfway up the fifteen-foot wall that had been turned into a blackened cinder. Stone, plaster, wood--whatever was there had been blowtorched into some crumbling alloy that faded into the pigments of the mural painted there centuries ago.
Look deeper, though, and then you would see it: the desiccated suggestion of a man blown off his feet and hurled high against the wall--fused
into
the wall, a charcoal man outstretched in his final agonies and joined to the architecture in bas-relief. Stand in the right place and you could picture how it probably happened: The guy's running when he catches his assailant's attention; no chance of dodging the fireball, but it's partially deflected and absorbed by the square pillar standing between them...the only reason there's as much left of the guy as there is, why he wasn't rendered even further down to ash.
Something like that, stuck to the wall, you don't do it just because you have to.
You don't do it out of a sense of duty.
You do it because a part of you likes it, the sport of it.
"Hellboy...?" said Abe. "What can
do
this?"
"There's Liz, for starters. But she's on the other side of the ocean right now, and it's not her style anyway, so we can rule her out," he said. "Other than that, plus what my nose tells me? My guess is seraphim."
Abe had one of those faces that could be hard to read a lot of the time. Not his fault. He didn't have the full set of features that helped with all the nonverbal cues. Like eyebrows. Or a brow ridge, for that matter. Still, he sometimes had this way of looking at you, and you just knew how much he hated what he was hearing.
"Seraphim," Abe said flatly. "And here I thought that, of all places, this one was on the side of the angels."
"If there's any truth to the old stories, seraphim are a breed apart. I've heard them called Heaven's stormtroopers. Never saw one, but I've always gotten the idea they do what they're told without a lot of questions. Not that it's going to make you feel any better, but the last I'm aware of them unleashing this kind of firepower was in Sodom and Gomorrah."
And the question hung in the air unasked, because neither of them had to: What could possibly have come along, after upwards of 3500 years, to pose enough of a threat that would warrant this level of response?
"Dresden." Kate's voice, behind them. He hadn't seen her rejoin them. "You forgot Dresden, Germany. Near the end of World War Two."
"That's just a rumor. Not even a convincing one," Hellboy said. "One Allied phosphorous bomb for every two people? You don't need seraphim with that kind of payload raining down."
"You're looking at it wrong. If it's true, Dresden wasn't cause-and-effect. It was opportunity seized," Kate said. "Where better to blend in and cover their tracks?"
On this one, at least, they could agree to disagree. Kate Corrigan definitely knew her business...and if it was weird, well, then it was her business. A fortyish woman with a tousled bob of sandy hair, she'd been consulting for the bureau for the past dozen years, when she wasn't teaching history classes at N.Y.U. Or hunched over a keyboard. The woman wrote books almost as fast as Abe could read them--sixteen at last count, her own ever-growing shelf in the folklore and occult section.
She'd beaten him and Abe here by a full day. Had been on some unspecified sabbatical at the Paulve Institute in Avignon, France, when the summons came in that the Vatican, of all places, was asking for a discreet outside opinion.
"It's taken awhile, but I'm finally getting somewhere with these guys," she said. "You know, I'd hoped that maybe, just
maybe,
this place would've been different...but no, you show up and it's the same as any other bureaucracy. They beg for your help, they tell you how glad they are you're here...and then it practically takes a case of whiskey and a pound of laxatives to get the relevant truth out of them."
"A lovely image," Abe said.
And Kate was beaming. She didn't do that often. She frowned, she scowled, she had a whole closetful of thoughtful looks, but she hardly ever
beamed
. Especially in places like this, where death was still so fresh.
"What's going on here, Kate?" he asked.
"The confirmation of a legend," she said. "They just gave up what that hit squad must have been after: the Masada Scroll."
BUREAU FOR PARANORMAL RESEARCH AND DEFENSE
Field Report Supplement EU-000394-59supA
Date: October 16, 1996
Compiled by: Dr. Kate Corrigan
Classification: Restricted Access--Need To Know Subject: Vatican Secret Archives Document s/00183/1966
Although the Masada Scroll has for the past thirty years been a quiet but persistent rumor, impossible to substantiate, its existence has finally been verified by a physical artifact. At this early stage the BPRD cannot take a position one way or another on its authenticity, only cite the claims made about it.
Background: According to the only known contemporaneous first-century source
(The Jewish War,
by Josephus Flavius), Herod the Great, King of Judea, built the fortress known as Masada in the fourth decade B.C.E. Installed as a puppet ruler by the Romans, Herod was reviled by the Jewish populace, and thus intended Masada to be a personal refuge in the event of an uprising.
For strategic purposes, the location was well chosen. Herod utilized the natural features of a remote mesa and cliff structure located at the western end of the Judean Desert. The eastern side plunges hundreds of meters straight into the Dead Sea. At the western side, the plateau is still roughly a hundred meters above the desert floor. The pathways up were few, openly exposed, precarious to navigate, and thus could be easily defended by a relatively small group.
Nevertheless, in the year 66 C.E., during the Jewish Revolt, a group of rebels defeated the Roman garrison at Masada and took control of the site. After another four years of conflict, following the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, Masada became a final stronghold for hundreds of militant Zealots who left Jerusalem with their families. For two years they used Masada as a base from which to launch incursions against the Romans.
All that came to an end in 73 C.E., when Roman governor Flavius Silva besieged Masada with the Tenth Legion and additional units. After establishing camps and closing off the immediate area with a wall, they began a mind-boggling feat of engineering: using thousands of tons of stone and packed earth to build an enormous ramp from the desert floor up to Masada's western side. After it was completed in the spring of 74 C.E., they wheeled a battering ram up the ramp and broke through the fortress wall.
However, the Roman victory was Pyrrhic at best. They were met not with further resistance, but by the corpses of 900 to 1000 men, women, and children. Rather than be taken alive, Masada's defenders opted for death at the hands of their family members and compatriots, until the last man alive committed suicide. They also burned everything but the food supplies, to make certain the Romans knew that they hadn't been driven to their deaths by starvation. Josephus Flavius' account of Masada's last hours was allegedly based on testimony taken by him from the only known survivors: two women who hid to escape the carnage.
While Masada's location was verified in the modern era as far back as 1842, it wasn't until the mid-1960s that international teams of archaeologists undertook a serious excavation of the site. It was during one of these digs that the purported Masada Scroll was unearthed by a joint British-Israeli team, although it has never been a part of any official inventory of artifacts from the site, much less offered up for public study, like the Shroud of Turin. It has, for all intents and purposes, been a phantom find, the archaeological equivalent of an urban legend...spoken of by various sources, but its existence uncorroborated by any scholar connected with the Masada excavations.
[Note: Fr. Rogier Artaud's informal checks into the background of the scroll, as detailed in the Vatican Archives documentation (see attachment Field Report Supplement EU-000394-59supB), have without exception led to dead ends, all traces of the personages involved seeming to end by no later than 1968. Because Artaud's resources are limited, I recommend that the BPRD conduct a more thorough follow-up, although it's difficult to avoid drawing conclusions from Artaud's lack of results, however informal his efforts.]
The Masada Scroll: According to the aforementioned copy of Vatican Archives documentation, the scroll was found in the floor under the remains of a structure that has come to be known as the Administrative Building, from its Herodian origins. It had been secured inside two clay jars, one nested inside the other and cushioned by an inner layer of soil, with the opening of the larger jar sealed over with pitch. These jars had in turn been buried .8 meter down in a natural hollow of rock, the remainder of the space filled in with additional earth that had been tamped into sufficient compactness to blend it with the natural floor. Thus protected, it survived the conflagration that burned directly above it, and the 1890 years that followed. Both of the jars and the outer seal remained intact until after their discovery.
The scroll itself consists of five inconsistently sized sheets of parchment, which had been rolled and bound with a leather thong. The state of preservation of all materials was regarded as remarkable--although the same could be said of many finds at Masada--due to two primary factors: the site's remoteness and inaccessibility, and the dry climate.
The text's authorship is, in the salutation, attributed to Yeshua (Jesus) the Nazarene. Its intended audience, also established in the salutation, is a group in Ephesus, on the western coast of what is now Turkey. A full translation of the text will follow, pending approval by Fr. Vittorio Ranzi, Artaud's immediate superior, but according to Fr. Artaud, it is not an earlier document brought to Masada, but was written at the site, with clear references to the Roman siege. It appears to have been begun relatively early in the siege, with hopes expressed that the Romans would fail in their endeavor. A current of pessimism enters later and the letter remains unfinished, as its author appears resigned to the fact that it will never be delivered or read by its intended audience...although the author, or someone else, obviously had optimism that it might be discovered later.
The majority of the text, according to Fr. Artaud, portrays the bittersweet reflections of a Jesus knowing he is at the end of a long and painful life...not specifically denying his divinity, but coming to the understanding that he is just "one of many sons of God." He also hopes to refute what he clearly considers distorted and divisive interpretations of his original message by Paul (ne Saul of Tarsus), and reconcile the schisms that were, even in his lifetime, starting to violently oppose one another.
That Jesus could have survived crucifixion and lived into old age is considered possible by medical science, with various theoretical scenarios citing biblical as well as forensic details. And, while most often condemned as heresy, the premise that Jesus lived into old age appears in different forms, including one legend that he and Mary Magdalene and other followers fled Palestine and eventually settled in the British Isles, with his descendants alive today in Western Europe. However, the "Masada theory" is thus far the only one that comes with potential physical proof.
The Vatican takes no official position on the scroll's authenticity--or even a consistent unofficial position, for that matter--preferring to instead quietly relegate it to permanent exile in archival storage like any other historical artifact. However, they have, in strict secrecy, subjected it to analysis by various scientific tests that have emerged since its discovery (after, it bears noting, the as-yet unknown and undocumented means by which the document came under Vatican control).
Paleography, spore analysis, and radio carbon dating of the leather binding have all indicated that the document does indeed date to the first century, and thus is unlikely to have been buried at Masada at some later date. However, its authorship--certainly a deeper and more vital authenticity--cannot be proved, only disproved...and thus, with the scroll certified as a first century relic, its custodians have arrived at a stalemate.