Hellboy: Odd Jobs

by Christopher Golden

  DARK HORSE BOOKS

  Scanned by SnipeIt

  OCR & Checked by Firebad; v1.3 (fully proofed)

  Introduction

  I am a cartoonist. Most of my storytelling I do with pictures. I can draw a house, if I have reference, and if I do a good job, I can

  maybe

  convey a sense of place, mood, atmosphere, whatever. Aided by my colorist, Dave, I can show you that it's night or day, winter, summer, or fall. Not bad, but I'm not a 'real'

  writer. A 'real' writer does all these things with words alone. That's beyond me. Chris Golden asked me to contribute a story to this book, and all I could come up with was, "On a good day, Hellboy smelled like a dry-roasted peanut." I think it best that I stick to what I do. Leave the 'real' writing to the professionals.

  In the following pages, you'll find some stories that have the same feel as the stories in the comics. Others are radically different. Most are somewhere in between. I'm happy with them all. What I hoped for is what I got.

  Different takes. Different voices. That's what an anthology is supposed to be.

  'The Nuckelavee' was originally something I was going to do as a comic, but I changed my mind. I wrote it up in rough plot form and gave it to Chris Golden. He, being a 'real' writer, turned it into a 'real' story. I want to thank him for that, and for assembling some of today's very best horror writers for this odd little project of ours. I want to thank regular Hellboy editor Scott Allie for all his help and patience, and for probably rewriting this introduction into something coherent. Last, a very special thank you to Gahan Wilson for providing that very special something extra.

  There you go.

  Mike Mignola, Portland, Oregon

  Medusa's Revenge

  Yvonne Navarro

  Because of the danger involved, Hellboy had thought it would be best to work by himself on this case. Now he regretted it.

  He didn't need help or research or someone else with supernatural powers at least not yet. What he

  wanted was someone to share what was spread out before him.

  He wanted Anastasia.

  Because below was a vista of paradise.

  Hellboy had been a lot of places, seen more things and countries and beauty than he could probably ever appreciate, but nothing had ever compared to this. He stood on the highest point in the area, and lush hills covered in knee-length grasses spotted with limestone boulders fell away both in front of and behind him.

  Directly below was a cliff that led to the Aegean Sea and water that sparkled like a blanket of diamonds stretched to an impossible horizon edged with barely visible mountains, the farthest end of the universe and beyond where surely the gods of former Grecian glory had stepped off this earth and left behind the puny mortals. More water lapped at the opposite side of the narrow cliff point, while to his right, hundreds of feet below, the tiny, whitewashed houses of fishermen

  too many to count

  crowded among the rocky nooks

  and crannies that eventually led to the boat docks and the sea. A warm, fresh breeze swirled around him, bringing with it the scents of saltwater and sunshine.

  But the beauty of this tiny, unnamed island to the east of Tghira was deceptive, and the water that should have carried sound, should have bounced it up to him like a child skipping rocks across the surface of a quiet pond, brought only silence. No one fished on the short coast below, or cooked, or swept the neat sidewalks in front of the shacks crowded together; no dogs barked and chased hissing cats among the stalls of the deserted marketplace. Even the seagulls seemed to have fled, left the village to the ruin of whatever heavy hand of evil had descended upon it. It was just as well that Anastasia was several thousand miles away and tending to the intricacies of her own life. Here, he was certain, she would find only danger.

  Hellboy shifted, trying to find a more comfortable spot to stand, one where the tiny pebbles and shells washed up here in the ocean storms didn't embed themselves into the bottoms of his hooves. He scratched at the stubble on his head, enjoying the heat of the sun as he peered down the hillside and tried unsuccessfully to spot movement. He had no doubt that there were still people down there somewhere, but they weren't stupid. Hiding probably, sequestered in their houses with heavy wooden bars thrown across the doors and the windows tightly shuttered, and be damned to the high summer temperatures or the desire for the cooling ocean wind. But wait

  There.

  Hellboy stood up straighter, straining to see. At first it was only a speck, but the moving object closed the distance rapidly along the upper outskirts of the village, picking its way nimbly among the boulders and grasses. It took Hellboy a minute or so to realize that the thing seemed to have a purpose, and when he figured it out, he was anything but pleased: it was obviously angling toward him, following a path up the side of the cliff that would bring it right to his feet. Of course; he must be like a big, red beacon standing up here.

  He might as well have beat on his chest and shouted, Here I am! at the top of his lungs.

  Another thirty or forty seconds

  the object was moving fast

  and Hellboy could finally recognize it for

  what it was: a horse.

  A stone horse.

  Hellboy felt no fear, only a sharp and detached sense of interest. Horse lovers worldwide would despise him for it, but he really didn't care about saving the oddity headed toward him with such single-minded purpose. It was surely beyond redemption, its flesh and heart petrified for all time, its thoughts, were he to believe what Dr. Manning had told him in his briefing at the Bureau's Fairfield, Connecticut office, turned solely to destruction.

  Another twenty seconds and he could see it in full detail, watch the weird play of muscles moving along the rocky surface of its hide. This was no fire-breathing anomaly

  it wasn't breathing at all, just moving with a

  sort of dead animation that reminded Hellboy of the earliest and crudest of the ancient stop-motion Willis O'Brien movies. The creature's eyes were as lifeless as the ground on which Hellboy stood and about as friendly; only the wide-open mouth portrayed its true intentions, the lips drawn back to reveal the horse's long, square teeth, a full set clearly aiming for a taste of Hellboy flesh.

  "Not today," Hellboy rumbled, and planted himself more firmly.

  The stone horse closed the last few feet and reared, pawing the air between them with hooves bigger and quite a bit sharper than Hellboy's own. Until he'd met it face to face, Hellboy hadn't registered how huge the horse was; raised on its hind legs, he wasn't thrilled to discover that his head came only to mid-ribcage level at the front of the moving statue.

  Great, Hellboy thought. Created by a sculptor who'd liked working big.

  He dodged the swipe of one hoof and backskipped as the front of the horse came down, landing heavily right where Hellboy had been standing only a second before. He swung at it and was surprised when he missed made of rock or not, the statue was considerably faster than he expected and it danced out of range with ease. It circled to the left and came back for another try, this time at an eerily soundless charge that put its full body weight into it.

  "You call this strategy?" Hellboy asked dryly, just before he threw himself sideways and out of the way. The world turned upside down as he slid and bumped his way a full twenty feet down the hillside before a rocky outcropping stopped his descent with a not-too-pleasant thud. There was a tremendous crash and Hellboy craned his neck to see back up the hill as he felt a vibration run through the ground. The horse statue was on its way, and any sense of surefootedness had disappeared: its own weight had gotten the better of it and the thing was rolling end over end

  Straight for him.
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br />   Hellboy yelped and clawed at the ground, found his balance at the last second, and scrambled sideways across the grass like a clumsy spider. He felt the breeze as the rock creature rumbled past and a shower of stinging, sharp-edged pebbles hit him, more gifts from the unlikely animal assassin. Trying to watch almost cost him his hold and he cussed and found it again, finally steadying himself as he saw the horse somersault a final time and crash against the boulders where the base of the cliff met the shoreline. Rock against rocks and it was all over; the thing's head shattered and the rest of it broke into four or five large pieces. Fascinated, Hellboy saw the pieces quiver for a few seconds, as though they were trying to work themselves back together before they realized a vital part was now forever missing. They stopped as Hellboy stared; from where he lay amid the rocks and grasses, the dust settling around the remains of the horse statue looked like a burial shroud, a final layer of gravel that should have remained undisturbed.

  "Great," Hellboy muttered to himself as he found his footing and dusted himself off. "Chased by stone horses in the first quarter hour

  what's next?"

  And what was next? He turned back toward the village and studied it, this time crouching so he wasn't such a target to more of the reanimated objects he knew were prowling the narrow streets and alleyways. He could see movement down there now, but thankfully nothing else, man, beast, or stone, seemed to be headed up the hill toward him; for a nervous few moments he'd wondered if these statues had some kind of telepathic link to one another. For now, though, it looked like he'd be okay on that count.

  Too bad Jayson Paras hadn't had the same luck.

  Dr. Manning had shown Hellboy a photograph of the amateur archaeologist and pre-doctorate student of ancient mythology. Tall, strong, and young

  no more than twenty-eight

  with the sort of dark hair and

  eyes that women craved set in a rugged face tanned golden brown by the Grecian sun. Hellboy had accepted what he was in this world a long time ago, but sometimes, when he saw a man like that, he couldn't help but wonder what his existence would have been like had he been born under more human circumstances.

  Be that as it may, Paras had come back from the Isle of Karpathos, and friends, family, and colleagues had listened with skepticism to his account of this latest in a series of summer trips. He had, he claimed, found a tomb buried deep in a cave on the coast of the Sea of Crete, the entrance to which had previously been only a fable, as mythical as the secret of the gods it was meant to conceal. It was in this cave that Paras discovered or so he insisted

  the Shield of Athena, the same one on which the Greek legends declared was imprisoned the deadly head of Medusa.

  If the ancient story of how the sight of Medusa would turn a person to stone was true, how Jayson Paras had found, packed up, and then transported the shield was a mystery, and one which would probably remain so for eternity. Now Paras was surely as dead as most of the people in the village; whatever procedures he had undertaken to keep the shield from being seen had failed and someone had discovered the crate and pried it open. The mystery, of course, was why that unfortunate adventurer and the next, and the next one after

  that

  hadn't simply become petrified until someone had gotten a clue about what was going on.

  And ... oh yeah. There were also those pesky living statues to think about.

  Well, Hellboy thought, this was just like an archaeology project. He'd never find the answers if he didn't dig around a bit.

  Hunkered down to keep out of sight as much as possible, Hellboy scuttled down the side of the cliff and slipped into the ocean-swept streets of the village.

  The village itself was a bewildering maze, a meandering trail of streets too narrow for conventional cars and which held an unspoiled beauty that made it the better for it. Most of the houses were whitewashed or painted in creams, pale yellows, and light gray to reflect the sun; window boxes held everything from sweetly scented flowers to pungent clumps of herbs ready to be plucked and tossed into the midday cooking pots.

  That, Hellboy realized, was the first indication that something was dreadfully wrong here: instead of the expected smells of olive oil and goat cheese, baking bread and smoking fish, there was a faint smell of dust and decay beneath the surface. Even the goats had fled from whatever had invaded this village. The smell of death was constantly washed aside by the sometimes strong winds off the sea, but it always built up again, like the scent embedded in the trunk of a car where a mummified corpse had remained undiscovered for months.

  The village was filled with stone bodies.

  It wasn't hard to follow the trail, and the dead ones themselves unwittingly gave Hellboy the clues he needed to begin piecing together this incredible mythological disaster. Many of them were clumped on the steps leading to the village's tiny Greek Orthodox church, but whatever protection they'd expected to find had either not lent itself to the existing threat or simply not felt benevolent that day.

  Hellboy stayed close to the buildings, still enjoying in spite of himself the high summer heat that reflected off the tile rooftops as he crept along. An hour of cautious exploring took him back to his starting point but revealed nothing. He began again, preparing himself for a slower, more thorough search, then his eyes narrowed and he paused just the other side of the church. Of all the frozen-stone bodies he'd seen in the village, those gathered here, at the bottom of the flight of stairs leading to the worn double doors, bothered him the most. It wasn't so much that they had sought help here and not found it that was bad enough

  but that there were so many. Why here and not, say, in front of the weathered constabulary four blocks over?

  Or maybe at the undersized but clean hospital at the other end of the village's main street?

  Could it be, perhaps, that there was something ... interesting inside?

  Time to find out.

  Hellboy wrapped his hand around the door handle and pulled, was surprised to feel solid resistance. Not an ordinary door lock

  that would have given under his heavy tug. No, this was as if something held it closed on the other side, something with a solid strength on line with Hellboy's own.

  Since when did a church want to keep people out!

  Hellboy scowled and yanked harder, putting his weight into it when he felt that same resistance, then getting aggravated enough to give it his full power. The force on the other side increased, then suddenly gave way; Hellboy grunted as his body lurched backward and he tumbled down the steps, staring stupidly at what remained of the door, a chunk of ragged wood surrounding the handle, still clutched in his thick fingers. He started to automatically look toward the now gaping doorway, then remembered the dangerous legend behind the Medusa

  if whatever waited for him in that doorway held the shield upon which her head had been imprisoned and Hellboy looked upon it, he could end up being made out of the same unyielding rock as had been the horse he'd destroyed on the cliffside.

  Damn, Hellboy thought. This was going to be harder than he'd guessed.

  He lifted one arm and slung it protectively across his eyes, then stood and lumbered back up the steps with the stone hand of his right arm held stiff in front of him like a football player, wondering how the hell he was supposed to fight something he couldn't even look at. He hit the entranceway at a dead run, then nearly fell flat when he encountered nothing to block his path. He flailed for balance then realized belatedly that in trying to stay upright he'd lowered his arm and gripped the worn wooden pews on either side of the narrow aisle. His tail swept the floor and hit something else, and when he glanced over his shoulder Hellboy saw the remains of what he assumed had been the statue trying to hold the door shut. When the wood had ripped away, the soldier figure had fallen against a stone basin containing holy water, and now its head and upper torso lay in pieces on the cold tiles of the floor. The rest of it twitched uselessly at Hellboy's feet.

  The interior of the building was filled
with shadows cast by the muted light bleeding through the gritty panes of the old windows. If there were electric lights, they weren't turned on; what few candles adorned the single, long room were unlit as well. Nothing moved, but Hellboy was not fooled.

  More, he thought. There have to be more.

  And indeed there were.

  At the opposite end of the room was a scarred, double-wide wooden pulpit. A few rose from behind it and the rest came from between the first three rows of pews, like a hideous gray army of more than three dozen.

  Obviously the oldest of what the village had to offer in adornments, and in the ten or so seconds before they attacked, Hellboy made the connection: this small island off the coast of Greece had kept its secrets well and held its own heritage apart from much of what had been pilfered and appropriated by the world's museums.

  The stone statues that moved before him

  depictions of nearly naked Greek gods and goddesses bearing

  everything from swords and shields to mythical serpents, were the original sculptures, the ones that dated back far enough, perhaps, to predate the village's solely human population when the Greek gods had walked the earth.

  Back to the time of Medusa.

  The village was full of stone, granite, limestone, and marble figures, but most of them remained just that.

  These, however

  "Medusa's victims," Hellboy said. His voice came out hoarse with amazement. "Every one of you was stupid enough to look her in the face." He shook his head in disgust. "And look what it got you."

  Dead or undead, apparently they didn't have vocal cords. Hellboy's comment brought no response, and certainly didn't slow the coming charge. He started to open his mouth and say something else when the first wave of Medusa's warriors hit him.

  Something drove a boulder-sized fist into his side and knocked the wind out of him, then another figure bonked him hard on the head. Hellboy sucked in air and managed to block the edge of a sword headed for the bridge of his nose

  it might be just rock, but it sure would've hurt had it found its target. "Hey!" he cried.