Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (4 page)

H
ellboy and Abe kept to the trees while they waited. Behind the scenes, some sort of mid- to high-level meeting was going on, archivists and a few Church officials haggling over what to do next.

Hellboy hoped they weren't
too
high level. He'd met plenty of priests over the years and felt only fondness for most of them...but then, they'd nearly always been the grunts, never the glorified, the guys who dutifully put on their collars and took care of their parishes without much of anybody to take care of them. Start giving them pageantry, power, and positions to protect, though, and the distinctions between holy men and politicians started to become a lot less clear.

As dawn came, Vatican City started to awaken around them, lights winking on in buildings near and far...although nothing was truly far away here. Enclosed by a wall like a medieval city, all but the opening to St. Peter's Square, this was the world's smallest sovereign state--the beating heart of Rome, yet a world unto itself. Most of its buildings were clustered along the eastern side, and much of the interior was like a park, full of trees and gardens and green lawns. Here Hellboy and Abe lingered, facing the long, castle-like western wall of the museum complex that housed the Archives, the Apostolic Library, and art beyond price and artifacts beyond numbers. As the sky lightened, he could see the blackened scorch marks on the stone above several windows in the middle. To the south loomed the enormous gray dome of St. Peter's. No getting away from that one. It rose over all and saw everything.

A discreet fifteen paces away stood the member of the Swiss Guard that had been assigned to them. Invited into Vatican City or not, you didn't just stroll around the grounds like a tourist. An escort was mandatory, so whenever they weren't in the company of priests, a corporal by the name of Bertrand took over, stoic enough about this all-night duty but still seeming embarrassed about the formality. The Swiss Guard was a token unit, the last remainder of the papal armies of centuries past. Even in this day and age, they carried halberds.

Hellboy nudged Abe and kept his voice low. "Is this guy freaking you out a little?"

"Me? No," Abe said. "Maybe it's the uniform."

Strangest uniform Hellboy had ever seen. No camouflage here. You could see these guys coming a mile away. Their uniforms had big, bold, vertical stripes of saffron and maroon, with puffy sleeves and legs, and were topped off with a dark beret. The effect was like a cross between a soldier and a harlequin.

"He makes me nervous," Hellboy said. "He's like the guy that follows you around in the store because he's afraid you're gonna break something."

Abe just looked at him. "When was the last time
you
were shopping, anyway?"

Footsteps along a nearby path--as a man in a black cassock drew closer, Hellboy saw that it was Father Artaud, the Palestinian antiquities specialist who'd saved the scroll. He was Belgian, Kate had said earlier, and looked to be in his late thirties, early forties, and all that bike-pedaling must have paid off. A less athletic man may not have cleared the attack area in time.

"Come with me," the priest said. "Hurry."

They followed as he led them back into the museum complex...down palatial hallways, through further doors, up a flight of stairs. Then, along a deserted second floor corridor he stopped before what appeared to be just one more muraled panel in the wall, until he stooped and his fingers found pressure points in the lower corners. The panel ground open to reveal the rough stone blocks of an inner corridor.

"Not you guys too," Hellboy said.

Artaud motioned them inside. "The Vatican is honeycombed with them. These places were built in a more dangerous time. Who knew when these passages might be needed? And today...?" He almost smiled. "To waste them would be a sin."

Down again, as the panel ground closed after them, and Artaud led the way with a penlight.

By the time they stopped, they must have been well below ground level, in a plain stone-block chamber the size of a small chapel, lit with nothing more modern than a dozen candles. A hole bored into the floor of one corner might once have served as a crude toilet, mercifully unused in a very long time. Too inconvenient for storage, too dry for a dungeon, too unadorned for a ritual space, the place would once have been good only for hiding away from an invading army. Or, today, making sure that something spoken in secret remained that way.

At their arrival, all heads turned, and Artaud closed a thick wooden door that fit as tightly as a cork in a bottle.

"Why, Kate Corrigan," said Hellboy. "Tell me you're not down here corrupting an entire roomful of priests."

"If anything's getting corrupted, it's my lungs," she said quietly, and flicked her gaze toward a pair who stood along one wall conversing over cigarettes, taking rapid pulls off them as if in an agitated race to see who could finish first. If there was any means of circulation, Hellboy couldn't spot it, and the air was turning hazy.

Artaud included, there were six men in black down here--four in cassocks and two in suits. None of them appeared to have enjoyed a restful night, with bleary eyes and stubbled faces all around. A rotund fellow sat repeatedly nodding off in his chair; his heavy jowls would squash outward with every sharp droop of his head, then he'd bob upright again and blink. A thin man with a balding skull and the prize for the room's darkest shadow of whiskers was pouring himself coffee, black as oil, from a silver thermos. Artaud introduced him as Vittorio Ranzi, his superior in the Archives.

"I'm not much for ceremony, so it doesn't bother me," Hellboy said, "but if this is the best conference room you can come up with, it leads me to believe that whatever comes out of here won't have an official stamp of approval."

"Official can mean many things," Ranzi told him. "Whatever comes of this will have the support of many hundreds more than you see here. For now, it is best if that support is quiet. Away from eyes and ears that would be better off blind and deaf to it."

"Spoken like a true conspirator," Hellboy said. "Let me tell you something, just so we're clear on it: I
hate
doing other peoples' dirty work. And I hate it when people twist the truth to try and get me to
do
their dirty work."

Kate put her hand on his arm. "Hey. You're getting a little ahead of yourself. Hear them out."

The plump man in the chair, introduced as Archbishop Bellini, had jolted awake for good and struggled upright. "This place, this Church--if you know anything about her, then you know that no matter how tranquil she seems on the outside, underneath she always has some unrest. Always some struggle going on beneath her surface." He shook his head. "Dirty work? No, no, no. Where the Church is concerned, we here speak of evolution."

"I don't believe I've ever heard that word spoken in positive terms by the clergy," Abe said.

"And the reasons for that, the attitudes..." Bellini said. "Would you be the one to see them continue on, unchallenged? You especially, of all beings."

No secrets here. They knew what Abe Sapien was, all right, or near enough. He may have taken care, on a trip like this, to conceal himself in a high-collared topcoat, under a hat, and behind glasses, but there was only so much normality he could project. Come to a place like this, where so many spent so much time dwelling on higher things--on the Creator of the world and their place in it, convinced they knew the answers to everything that mattered--and you had to wonder what they
really
thought of their visitors. Of someone as unique as Abe.
Or,
Hellboy thought,
someone like me.

He figured the reactions split along a pair of likely polarities.

One:
God indeed works in mysterious ways, and must surely love infinite variety.

The other:
A pity it's not four hundred years earlier, when we might have killed these things with impunity and the thanks of a grateful city.

Bellini spoke of evolution? One look at an unconcealed Abe Sapien left you with the thought that Darwin had definitely been onto something. Abe had been found in the mid-'70s in Washington, D. C., deep in the basements beneath St. Trinian's Hospital. A plumbing crew had broken through a sealed door and happened upon a large room that not only predated anyone's living memory, but had also evaded replication on any known blueprints. Floating inside a tall, circular glass tank tipped back and resting at an angle, its base sunk into stagnant ooze, there he was: a long-slumbering fellow, humanoid in appearance, hairless and sleekly muscled, but with finned forearms and a neck that bristled with gills. The only clue to his origins--and scant evidence at that--was a note, penned by what appeared to have been an ornate Victorian hand and curled like parchment, affixed to a piece of the corroded and broken-down machinery near the tank.

Icthyo Sapien,
it read.
April 14 1865.

The same day President Lincoln had died.

For an uncommonly intelligent entity thus far denied understanding of where he'd come from, Abraham Sapien was as good a name as any. Although he had on occasion been known to get testy with people who called him a fish-man. Strictly speaking, he was amphibious, as at home on dry land as in water.

And Hellboy himself? No trench coat could hide his nonconformities either--if anything, it was even more of a lost cause than with Abe--but he wore one anyway. Had to wear something. The clothes make the man, it was said, to which he might have amended that the clothes
un
make the demon. No matter what else the rest of the world saw when they looked at him--built like a linebacker, tough skin as red as a lobster, prehensile tail, ground-down stumps where horns should've been, and a huge stonelike right hand that could crush bricks like beer cans--they saw the coat and, well, it just looked so
normal
it was downright disarming. Sometimes that was all that was needed to work past the prejudice.

Here, though, at ground zero of the Roman Catholic world, there was a two-millennium legacy of thinking long and hard about abominations and what to do with them. He'd answered their appeal, and maybe they really even needed him. But for some of them--not necessarily in this room, but surely somewhere on the grounds--he knew how he must be regarded, first and foremost: a living, breathing validation of everything they'd devoted their lives to opposing.

Except for one little problem: How he had ended up on their side.

Father Ranzi poured himself another coffee. "You understand about the scroll, what it is, yes?"

"Katie briefed me."

"You recognize the danger it poses."

"Contradiction of two thousand years of dogma--yeah, I get the picture."

"So then you understand why it was...shall we say...targeted."

"Now that's where I'm having some trouble," Hellboy said. "It doesn't add up. I've seen what happened, and it seems clear to me what did it. But why here, why now? If your tests are right, that scroll's been around for over 1900 years, whether or not it's what it claims to be. The fact that it drew this kind of attention and cost seven lives, that seems to give it
some
kind of legitimacy...

"But here's the red flag: For all but the last few decades, it was buried on a high plateau in the middle of a desert. Where it had already survived one inferno. Then it's discovered, it's transported, it's studied, it's stored away--thirty more years of that. And I'm supposed to believe these seraphim are only now taking notice? They had all the time in the world to burn that thing out of existence and no one would've ever known. But they didn't. Until a few nights ago. So no--I
don't
understand why it was targeted. But I bet somebody down here does."

The six churchmen exchanged glances, and finally one of them stepped forward from the background. One of the two who'd been smoking earlier, he wore a sober but well-tailored black suit over a charcoal gray turtleneck sweater. He had a tautly lined face and graying hair clipped just a little longer than stubble. Long, slender hands, like the hands of a pianist. Monsignor Burke, Artaud had called him earlier.

"A few minutes ago, I'm sure the well-fed Archbishop here didn't tell you anything you didn't already know," he said, the only American accent among the six. Upper East Coast, it sounded like. Not New York. Boston, maybe, and he'd spent a lot of time trying to get rid of it. "Something's always seething under the surface of the Vatican. But right now, there are undercurrents of some of the biggest divisions the Church has seen in decades. Now, the Church is slow to change, you know that..."

Hellboy was eyeing Ranzi's coffee. "Millions of its members
like
that about it. In a world that's always changing, here's this one anchor in their lives that's resistant to change."

And temptation got the better of him. He reached toward the thermos with his left hand, the normal one, and made a tipping motion. Ranzi looked as though he didn't dare refuse. Didn't pour, just gave it to him thermos and all. Hellboy guzzled straight from its mouth and nearly swooned. Have to find out where he got this and see if the person wanted a job in the States.