Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (5 page)

"Resistance to change isn't an automatic virtue," Burke said. "Forget about the Inquisition, episodes like that. Those are easy criticisms, and just as easy to distance ourselves from, because they were centuries ago. No, let's look at our own lifetime. In Ireland, the Church ran a network of what were called the Magdalene Asylums. Basically, slave labor prisons where families would send young women for perceived moral infractions. Like getting pregnant out of wedlock. Or being too interesting to the boys. Terrible places, physically and morally appalling...the ruin of countless lives. And the last of them wasn't closed until earlier this year."

"I'm not saying the Church
shouldn't
change, ever. Just playing the Devil's advocate." Hellboy looked at the other smoker, who looked to be the youngest of the lot, and who'd been hanging back the farthest the whole time and showed no inclination to step any closer. "Hey. You knew I had to sooner or later."

"If the Church is to survive the coming century as anything more than a folk religion and a museum relic, change is essential. Especially throughout Europe, where people have very long memories of its history of intellectual repression, and still see us as a force for irrationality," the monsignor said. "That's finally being admitted, and in unexpected places, too. Many prominent cardinals. They see what's happening and they know it can't continue. Not everyone is comfortable with the way I choose to put it, but we're rotting from the inside. In America, even non-Catholics can see the obvious...that we're not adequately replacing the priests we lose to retirement and death, and as a result, parishes are being consolidated and churches are closing. Plus we're just now starting to see the tip of another coming iceberg: lawsuits against the Church caused by a few priests who couldn't keep their hands off children, and bishops who were too cowardly to do anything other than shuffle the offenders off to other parishes and hope they'd stop. The only places the Church is really growing right now are Latin America and Africa."

"And that's not where the money is," Hellboy said.

Burke looked as though blood had been drawn. But he didn't refute it. "Nobody can say how much longer His Holiness will remain in office. But only a hopeful few can see many more years ahead of him. When that throne is vacant again, and the next conclave is convened to choose a successor, there's a very good chance that the more progressive factions within the Church will prevail. And set the stage for the most comprehensive set of modernizations since John the Twenty-Third called the Second Vatican Council more than thirty years ago."

Whether the monsignor knew it or not, and there was no reason he should've, it was the right thing to say. Of the five popes who'd held the office during Hellboy's lifetime, John XXIII was the one he'd always wished he could have met. Down to earth, with the easy touch of a parish priest, and downright impish at times--a pope as imagined by the lighter side of Charles Dickens. Somebody had once asked the man how many people worked in the Vatican.
About half of them
was his answer. You had to love a guy like that.

"Assuming your side maneuvers into position," Hellboy said, "what then? What's up your sleeve?"

"Nothing radical. There are certain hot-button issues that we still would never touch, and those should be obvious. But, for starters, more defensible positions on birth control. And permitting priests to marry. There's no reason they shouldn't, other than tradition. It wasn't a mandate until halfway through the Church's existence, and even then it was a power play...more to do with property and potential heirs than moral authority. So let them marry if they wish. There are many more men who would answer the calling to the priesthood if it didn't mean a choice between a flock and a family. God knows it hasn't been the downfall of the Anglicans."

"How about the ordination of women?" Kate asked. "You've got women who feel the calling too. That hasn't been the downfall of the Anglicans, either."

"Still under discussion," Burke said, a little too quickly.

"So far it doesn't seem to call for a fire-from-heaven kind of response. What else is on the agenda?" Hellboy wanted to know. "Anything to do with the Masada Scroll?"

"We plan on making it public, possibly available for outside study. Not endorsing it, of course, but not refuting it, either...mainly putting it out as a historical relic, much the same as all the additional gospels and other texts that weren't chosen for inclusion in the Bible. If it proves to be another way of expanding the faith, or broadening the permissible concepts of Jesus and enhancing the sense of his humanity, then so much the better."

"And what happened upstairs the other night," Hellboy said, "you didn't take that as a sign from above to rethink your plans?"

"No," said a man who, until now, had been content to listen. Father Laurenti, they'd called him. "The attack on the Archives may have come from above...but it was not the work of Heaven."

Like the monsignor, Laurenti too wore a black suit instead of a cassock, but in contrast, his looked old and worn, mended a few too many times. His olive face had a weary gauntness that came from more than just a sleepless night or two, and his hair was a tall shock of loose, unruly curls, very black.

"You may think of angels in their work as being dispatched, and they can be," he said. "But these that came for the scroll...they were not dispatched, but
summoned
. There is a difference. The decree came not from God, I believe, but from somewhere within the Church itself."

"Who's got that kind of pull?"

Laurenti shook his head. "Even if I could tell you--or any of us could--I would not. For now, it is enough to recognize that nobody who seeks change can bring it about without making enemies. Even enemies of those they believed to be their brothers. But this is not your struggle. It is ours."

"Then let me be the first to ask the obvious," Abe said. "What
are
we doing here?"

Hellboy had been thinking the same thing. The reasons for the bureau's existence were explicit in its name: Paranormal. Research. Defense. But they already seemed to know what they were up against here, and wanted no help ferreting out the individual or the cabal that had done the summoning.

"Take the scroll," said Father Artaud, with the quiet desperation of a parent asking someone to whisk his child out of a war zone. "Its value may be inestimable. So take it with you. Please."

Ranzi nodded. "I understand that you can protect it better than we are able."

Hellboy glanced over at Kate, ticked his brow upward in question.

"I told them about the containment facility that the bureau had built for Liz when she was a girl," Kate said. "She hasn't needed it for more than ten years, so it's sitting there idle. But: If it could keep that kind of fire
inside,
then it should be able to withstand the same kind of fire from the
outside,
too."

"And I understand that you will treat this scroll as the important relic it is," Ranzi went on, "and that no matter what may happen here in Rome, your group's neutrality will not be compromised."

He was right on that count. The BPRD's most overtly political days were in the beginning, when the bureau was founded during World War II, a countermeasure to the Third Reich's attempts to use the occult to turn the tide of battle. Since then, the bureau had largely stayed out of affairs of state. The things they encountered most often neither knew nor respected national boundaries.

The monsignor took another step forward, like a salesman trying to close a deal. "You came here to investigate an attack, and your reputation precedes you. I know you're very good at what you do, and that if something gets on your bad side, it usually doesn't last long. But I have to question whether or not these particular assailants are something you could ever defeat."

"Now you're just being insulting."

"Using your usual approach, then," Burke amended. "But in our case, I don't think that's what's called for. Remove the object of the attack, and you remove the likelihood of further attacks."

"Attacks here, you mean," Hellboy said. "If I take your scroll home, it's like taking a lightning rod back to the place and people that mean the most to me."

The shabby Father Laurenti raised a conciliatory hand. "It's true, you may run that risk. But these seraphim, they are not all-knowing. They go where they are sent and do what they are told. As long as this knowledge is kept from those who would control them, then the risks to you may be not so great after all."

Hellboy gave it a few moments of thought, and finally agreed.

"A courier run, that's really all we're talking about here," he said. "Point A to Point B...how hard can
that
be?"

L
iz pushed the whistle across the tabletop and let the young man stare at it a few moments, bolstering his nerve with a few deep breaths. Most people, all they'd see would be a silver whistle, the kind you'd find hanging around the neck of any coach worth his jock strap or her sports bra. It was all Liz saw, for that matter.

But Campbell Holt wasn't most people. Much like Liz wasn't most people. They just weren't like most people in very different ways.

In a sparely furnished room whose walls still smelled of their fresh coat of cerulean blue paint--the color Campbell found most relaxing--he reached for the whistle as though about to touch a skillet that may or may not have been hot. Resting one finger on it, two fingers...then he had it in his palm...and finally his hand closed around it. He let his eyes drift shut and the magic--or whatever it was--happen.

"Oh, okay, I know him. This belongs to...Agent Garrett?" Campbell said.

Liz shrugged. "You tell me."

His head tipped downward, chin toward chest, as he seemed to fall into the whistle, deeper and deeper, following its curves and filling its hollow.

"Yeah...definitely Agent Garrett. He coaches his son's peewee football team. He...he's a good coach. No yelling at the kids. I mean, he
yells,
he just doesn't insult them. Like he knows exactly how tough he can be with each kid and where the line is between motivation and bullying. For each one of them. And he's careful to never cross it."

Campbell was doing well. Relaxed, into it, letting it flow, no agitation. Although she wouldn't expect any psychic turbulence to come from anything belonging to Dion Garrett. The man was a career bureau agent--fairly low-level abilities, your basic garden-variety empath, although it gave him awesome people skills--and as devoted a family man as she'd ever known.

Campbell's brow furrowed. Not deep, and it didn't spread to the rest of his face; just enough to let her know that he'd hit something that made him wince a bit.

"He wanted to play pro and probably would've. Only...he blew out his knee in college. So that was that. Losing his chance, it still bothers him sometimes when he's watching the boys play. He tries...but he can't stop himself from having all those what-if thoughts."

"I never knew that about him," Liz said, and maybe shouldn't have, but it was out before she could reconsider. She was supposed to be in charge of this session,
all
of it; couldn't afford to have Cam thinking she was ignorant about the items she was shoving at him. That she might accidentally give him more than he was ready for.

"No reason you should've," he said, and didn't appear to hold it against her. "He keeps all that to himself."

Campbell returned the whistle to the tabletop, pushed it back to her with a nod.

"That was really good," she said. Next, from the box on the chair at her side, she selected a handbell that had spent decades in the tranquil grasp of a Tibetan Buddhist monk who sometimes came to visit. "Now try this one."

Psychometry, it was called. The ability to hold an object and see into the life of the person who possessed it. Cam wasn't sure how it worked, and certainly Liz didn't know, any more than she could give a logical explanation of how her own so-called gift worked. Nobody could, really. It was like trying to tell somebody how to balance on a bicycle. His gift, hers...they defied rational explanation, which was just as well, because if they were explainable, then sure as hell somebody somewhere would develop an agenda to engineer them in people lucky enough to have been born normal.

Neither she nor Campbell had been so fortunate. And yet sometimes people who found out--blissfully ignorant
normal
people--envied them:
Wow, I'd love to have that. Love to be able to do what you can do. Nobody would mess with me then. Nobody'd get away with anything around me.
Blah blah blah. These so-called gifts only looked good on paper. Living with them, waking up with them, walking around with them like parasitic lovers who only demanded and rarely gave...

This was the existence that nobody ever stopped to imagine.

She'd been working with Campbell for the past six weeks, ever since his discharge from an Omaha hospital at summer's sultry end. Liz had paid him a visit several days earlier, Cam still plugged into the intravenous tubes reversing his dehydration and malnutrition, and his left forearm swathed in a fat muffler of gauze. The day before that, he'd turned up as a promising blip on the radar--the low-key, informal human resources network that the BPRD maintained with reliable members of various law enforcement agencies and the medical community.

"Hey. I'm Liz," she said. "Liz Sherman. I flew here from a place in Fairfield, Connecticut, to see you. It's...kinda hard to describe, but I guess you could call it a sort of institute."

"Psychiatric?" he muttered, as if already convinced it couldn't be anything else.

"You wish. No, it's a place where you might actually have to work instead of sitting around the dayroom watching TV and waiting for your meds."

Maybe four degrees warmer in interest: "What kind of work?"

"That depends on your area of expertise."

She took a couple of steps closer and leaned on the chrome rail of his hospital bed. Blood loss and trauma and other maladies aside, he appeared much the same as he did in the pictures she'd reviewed, his sandy hair clipped ascetically short, as though he couldn't bear to risk catching it in something he wouldn't want to tangle with. Underneath his sheet, he looked as if when standing he would be tall and thin, lots of angles; that he'd never filled out the way young men often do when they make the transition from their teens into their early twenties.

"Look, I know why you're here," she said. "Not the obvious medical reasons. Those are just symptoms. I mean the
big
why...
your
area of expertise. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. Because I've got one too." She glanced around the room. "Not using an oxygen tank in here that I haven't spotted, are you?"

He shook his head no, so she raised her hand from her side, gave a gentle flex to the indefinable, immaterial thing that hovered somewhere in the vicinity of her solar plexus, and let a tongue of blue-orange flame lick the air above her palm. Then reined it back in to snuff it.

He looked wildly unimpressed. "You do magic tricks, big deal. What's next--doves are gonna fly out of your ass?"

"Do you see me wearing a clown suit here? Do I look like I'm stopping in every room to entertain the kids?" Then she flashed a quick rope of fire across the room that might've toasted the windowsill had she let it live long enough.

And
now
she had his attention.

His story came in fits and starts, from his hospital bed as well as during their talks after he'd accepted the invitation to come to Connecticut...

While most adolescents grow up plagued by the notion that they're not like everybody else, in all the wrong ways, for Campbell Holt it was a stark reality that first manifested when he was fourteen. No dramatics, nothing remotely like Liz's involuntary and apocalyptic initiation. It was, in fact, sweetly innocent and benignly kinky. One Saturday morning, while home alone, he'd picked a pair of his older sister's panties off the bathroom floor, given them an experimental fondle...and suddenly found himself bowled over by the delirious sensation of some other guy's fumbling hands tugging them down her thighs the night before. A quick spiral into all possible explanations of what had just happened:
I'm an incestuous pervert, I'm going insane, I'm gay, I'm a transvestite, I'm gay AND a transvestite.

Further episodes were quick to follow, never predictable, rarely welcome. At sixteen, he'd narrowly avoided a head-on collision while driving a friend's car and finding himself helplessly plunged into intimate knowledge of what her father had for years been doing to her after witching-hour drinking.

And it wasn't always personal possessions, either. It may have been rare, but public property could also pose a risk, objects tainted by recent essences so negative their power was akin to contamination. In a restaurant, a ketchup bottle might be merely glass...but then again, it might flood him with a toxic distillation of hatred left by a misanthropic hand that had clutched the bottle before him. This helped explain his spare frame, too: He'd once nearly dropped a barbell onto his neck after tapping into a psychic whiff of some steroidal date-rape predator who'd preceded him on the weights, who'd felt he
owned
the barbell.

By seventeen it was becoming a party game, guaranteed to freak out his classmates and humiliate the more insufferable ones into keeping their distance...not an unwelcome development, maybe even deliberate, since he was getting a reputation as a resident headcase based on his increasingly cavern-eyed appearance.

By nineteen, the police knew about him. Not for crimes he'd committed, but by reputation. Word-of-mouth, fellow graduate tells fiancee who mentions it to her uncle in the department, who scoffs until the next questionable death. A visit to the home Cam still shared with his parents, except by now he'd moved to the basement and wasn't going out much, and even the crappy McJobs never lasted long, and the drop-in was strictly unofficial, understand, but still:
So anyway, Campbell, suppose I let you hang onto this gun for a minute. You could maybe tell me if the scene it came from was a murder or a suicide, right?

He could. So why would they stop there?

Umm, Campbell, got this pair of shoes here. The girl who owns them, her parents really miss her, and...did she just walk off and leave 'em sitting on the riverbank because she didn't want 'em anymore...?

No. No, she hadn't.

Sorry, son, but think you might be able to tell me a little something about the person who used this hacksaw?

Soon after that he took a running leap into self-medication, giving the extrasensory impressions plenty of fogs and tides to work against, which worked well enough that there wasn't much point in going home at all anymore, not when the worst blocks of Leavenworth Street offered all the neon-smeared dives he would ever need to keep him distracted, places that Bukowski at his worst would've been proud to patronize. That and a pair of gloves did wonders, except sometimes he lost them in the summer and they were stolen in the winter. Mostly he was just relieved to be away from home these days; all those trinkets of his parents just lying around waiting to be touched, to rub his nose in the worry and fear and peculiar loathing they had begun to feel for him.

Good to be on his own.

A couple years of that and one night he made it back to the old neighborhood anyway, not that anyone was awake at that hour. It had been a week since he'd last had a pair of gloves, and his hands felt raw with the accumulated weight of ten thousand souls, some of whom he'd met but most of them strangers, their violence and their sorrows coagulating in him like oil from a tanker that had broken apart on a reef.

To pass the rest of the August night, its air as thick as boiled blankets, he broke into the neighbor's storage shed, shoved the lawn mower out of the way so he'd have enough room to stretch out. While lying on cool concrete he looked up at a blue square of moonlight on the wall, crosshatched by the windowpane, and in a moment of epiphany he saw the hatchet hanging from a pair of pegs.

He fumbled it down from the pegboard and ran a finger along the honed silver edge of the blade. It told him nothing, except for how much it wanted to meet the flesh and bone of his wrist.

After she'd run him through the whistle and the prayer bell and a half-dozen other items, Cam looked visibly tired and Liz decided that was enough for one session. All of this was as new to her as it was to him. She was going mostly on instinct here, but Director Manning had professed nothing but faith in her, kept telling her,
"You'll do great, you'll do great."
She wasn't convinced his blind faith in her was warranted, but one thing was sure: She damn well
needed
to do great.

The program she'd put together for Campbell was an extrapolation from aversion therapy, with a side helping of creative visualization. Under controlled, serene circumstances, within the cerulean walls, she would present him with a series of objects--early on, items whose backgrounds and owners could be fully accounted for, to minimize the risk of nasty surprises--and while holding them in his remaining hand he would "read" them at his leisure. Little by little, she would teach him to build filters inside, between his perceptions and the external impressions that sought to impinge on them. They would be like membranes, never more permeable than he wished them to be.

He could be in control; he
had
to know that. If the reading was pleasant, non-threatening, then fine; let it in. If abhorrent, then close the filters, thicken the membranes, stop the assault...and eventually he could explore whatever was there without letting it ruin him.

But they were at the easy part now. Whistles, prayer bells, old hairbrushes. What would be rough was when she had to take him back to the ugly stuff, bringing in items like the firearms and hacksaws that had put him on his downward spiral. Because he had to be able to handle it all, whatever the world and its darker corners might drop in his path.