"Well, you're not gonna be the only person staying with us. My momma and I sort of help people out, other kids who need a place to go. There's a girl there whose folks threw her out 'cause she's pregnant, and two boys who like each other ... you know?"
Liz just says, "That's cool," but she could cry with relief, except that she never cries. When they finally come to the house, a solid old two-story deal with bright red trim and a pointy roof covered in multicolored shingles, she almost feels as if she is home.
Just inside the front door, mouth-watering fragrances envelop them: basil, garlic, fresh bread. "Momma!"
Mahogany calls. "I've got somebody with me!"
A woman stands at the stove stirring spaghetti sauce. As she turns, Liz sees that she looks old enough to be Mahogany's grandmother instead of her mother.
"Momma, this is my friend Liz. Liz, meet my mother, Zora."
"Welcome, sweetheart. We're pleased to have you here. You hungry?"
"I am now," Liz says.
Zora laughs, and Liz notices that her careworn face is beautiful. "Good. Mahogany, see if you can find David and Patrick. Caroline's feeling poorly; I'll take a tray up to her later. Liz, will you keep me company?"
Mahogany leaves the kitchen. Still stirring the sauce, Zora gazes levelly at Liz. "We don't have too many rules around here, but there are a couple you should know. One, you don't judge anybody in this house. Only God is fit to judge, though I don't believe he does. Two, you're safe here and welcome to stay as long as you want, but if you're in some kind of trouble, I need to know about it."
"I'm not in any trouble," Liz says. "Just on my own and tired." Technically it's true; though the Bureau is probably looking for her, she didn't break any laws by leaving. Her custody is a hazy, difficult matter, and the Bureau is hesitant to stir already troubled waters by hunting her down and dragging her back to Connecticut every time she gets antsy and takes off.
"Good. You don't lie to me, I won't lie to you." Zora turns back to the stove. "Can you lay out those plates for me? Five of em."
They eat at a wooden table polished to a golden brown patina, with old-fashioned white lace placemats that remind Liz of a set her mother had. That brings a lump to her throat, but the chatter of David and Patrick, the two boys who like each other, soon distracts her. They are about fifteen, long haired, handsome, and fragile looking. Liz wonders how they ever survived in the real world. By their wits, she supposes; both are as talkative and charming as Siamese cats. They tease Mahogany with great affection, and she gives back as good as she gets.
After washing up, the five of them sit in the living room and talk for hours. At one point Caroline comes downstairs to say hello. The bulge of her pregnancy looks impossible on her tiny frame, but she carries herself with a brittle, formal dignity. No one asks Liz any prying questions, nothing about where she came from or why.
Everything is fine until she goes to bed.
She shares Mahogany's room, which has twin beds on either side of an antique vanity table. The sheets are deliciously soft and cool, especially since she's been sleeping in bus stations and behind mini-marts lately. The two girls talk a little longer about nothing in particular, just sleepy scattered conversation like the kind that comes toward the end of a slumber party. Then it's dark, and Liz is dreaming.
She's back in Kansas City, in the front yard of her house. Her Matchbox cars are scattered on the ground before her and the purple ponytail holders are in her hair. The ginger kid is nowhere in sight. She turns and goes up the front walk toward the house. The door to the foyer is partly open, but Liz can't see inside. She has almost made it to the porch when her mother half-staggers, half-falls through the door.
Her mother is in flames. Her face is barely recognizable, her eyes seared shut, her hair burned away. Her mouth stretches open and emits a soundless scream. Her charcoal-claw hands reach out to Liz.
"Mommy!" Liz screams. She rushes to the burning woman, trying to smother the fire with her own body, but it is too late. The flames don't burn Liz, but her embrace crumbles her mother's body and the charred pieces fall away.
She wakes to the sound of screaming, but it is not her own.
The bed is on fire. She sees Mahogany through the curtain of smoke and flames, reaching frantically for her, shouting her name. The covers are destroyed, the mattress beginning to smolder, but Liz feels nothing. She scrambles out of the bed and rushes to Mahogany, who grabs her. "Are you hurt?" Mahogany asks, and it twists Liz's heart a little that this should be her first question.
"I'm fine! Help me put this out!" Liz spins wildly, searching for clothes, covers, anything that might smother the flames.
"We can't, Liz! Look
" The fire is halfway up the wall, exposing joists and wires. Blue sparks fly as it spreads into the electrical system. The girls run from the room, down the hall, yelling and banging on doors.
Everyone gets out alive. That is her only consolation, the only reason she doesn't just throw herself in front of a fire truck. The house and everything in it are completely destroyed.
When the firemen have gone, leaving only a pile of black and stinking rubble where a home once stood, Zora and the two boys come over to Liz. Zora's arms are wrapped around the boys' thin shoulders; all three faces are streaked with soot and tears. Liz sees Mahogany comforting Caroline on the other side of the street. "The officer knows a shelter we can stay in tonight," Zora tells Liz. "I don't know what we'll do after that, but we'll find something."
Liz can hardly meet the woman's eyes. "That's okay, Zora. You guys have enough to deal with. I think I'm just gonna take off."
"In the middle of the night? Why, Liz, I can't let you
"
"I've got someone I can call to pick me up," Liz tells her.
She sits on the curb and watches them ride away in two police cars. Before they'd parted, Mahogany hugged Liz and gave her the address of some aunt or cousin, asking her to write and let them know she was all right.
Liz knows she never will. These people don't need her in their lives, don't deserve what she has already given them in exchange for their kindness.
When the last police car is gone and the street is dark and silent, Liz goes to a pay phone on the corner and dials the number of the BPRD. It only rings twice before being answered by a doctor Liz knows.
"Come and get me," she says, and begins to cry. She hasn't cried since she was eleven. The tears burn worse than fire. And when the long black car that comes to fetch her finally turns into the Bureau's winding driveway, Liz knows that this time she really is home.
Far Flew the Boast of Him
Brian Hodge
Grown men, they may have been
and now, post-mortem
but they reminded him of children. All the
slaughter in the world, and here they'd gone out for a weekend's lark to pretend to wreak more. Like young boys playing at war games. All the barrels of blood that had seeped into England's soil, and here they'd gone out for a day of make-believe, pretending to shed it all over again.
Well, that blood was certainly real enough now, wasn't it? And there would be no pretending otherwise, not with nearly three dozen new widows left scattered from London to Newcastle.
At least all were now assumed to be widows by anyone who could afford to be brutally realistic. Only just over half the bodies had so far been found, and as long as there's no corpse then there's always hope ... but Hellboy could not imagine anyone who wasn't nervously fingering a wedding ring, or awaiting news of a missing father, son, brother, lover, was expecting a single one of those poor dumb bastards to come walking in from the border country here near Scotland.
Divine intervention, it seemed, was always in much shorter supply than diabolic. "The Battle of Lindisfarne,"
this fellow was saying. Survivor on account of absenteeism. Trevor Copplestone, his name, or something close to that. "June eighth, 793. That's what we ... they ... had come up here last weekend to re-enact."
"Ah
so you know Lindisfarne, do you?"
"I may look dumb," Hellboy said, "but that's just a disguise."
"Well, then ... battle of ideologies, call it," Copplestone said. Working hard at keeping his stiff upper, but the strain was showing. "The sword of the monks' Lord and savior, matched up against the swords of boatloads of raiders whose sole idea of a guarantee into the afterlife was a good death. Wasn't much of a contest, was it?"
"No. It wasn't. And whatever it was that your friends ran into up here last weekend ... ? That wasn't much of any contest, either."
You had to imagine that by now Trevor Copplestone was feeling like the luckiest man on either side of Hadrian's Wall. A bad sausage in last Friday evenings helping of bangers and mash at a pub near his Northumberland hotel flattens him for the next twenty-four hours, knocks him off his pins and into bed every moment he's not crouched over his toilet. Certainly in no condition to troop out and play Viking with his friends.
Maybe Copplestone looked more imposing when he had his period gear on, his chain-mail or jerkin or helmet or whatever he decked himself out in for these weekend outings, but here and now he did not look the part. A big enough frame, and a well-trimmed beard and a shock of hair that the sea breezes stirred, but inside his jacket he was a soft-looking man. Doughy in the middle, and the beard grown to hide his burgeoning jowls. A man shackled to a desk forty or fifty hours each week who looks out his window, if his office even has one, and dreams of living in an age when the cloud-thickened welkin would've been the only roof that mattered.
And he had not been alone. A historical re-enactment society, they called themselves. Study up on their favorite blood-baths, choose up sides, then pick a weekend to go out and pretend they'd been there. Grand fun, but evidently they'd always come back alive before. Full of beans as they invade the nearest pub, and the worst argument they've got to settle is who buys first round.
All history now.
Hellboy had the feeling that it would be a good long while before Trevor Copplestone felt any urge to pick up his sword again. Some new look of haunt and harrowing in his eyes that wouldn't have been there eight days ago ... survivor's guilt, or just the fact of everything that had once been academic and safely within the realm of pretense hitting him full in the face, to leave its indelible mark: This was what it was like to lose friends and comrades by the score. This was what it felt like to walk home dragging their memories like heavy chains. This was what it was like when there wasn't even enough left of some of them to bury.
This was history, the genuine article. They'd learned it, and still they'd been doomed to repeat its most enduring lesson.
"This one meant something more to you guys," Hellboy said. "It had to. Otherwise, where's the fun?"
"I'm not sure I follow you."
"Yeah you do. Re-enact Lindisfarne, and half of you don't even get to fight. All you get to do is wear a cowled robe and fall down and pretend to die. I don't get that. It's over too quick. And they wouldn't even grant you guys permission to stage it where it really happened, because they found the idea too tasteless. So you stayed here on the mainland and settled for a plot of ground just barely in sight of the real thing. That's an awful lot of trouble to go to for something over so quick."
"So why Lindisfarne," Copplestone said, "when there must be hundreds of other battles better suited to keeping us all busy, and for a longer stretch of the day
that's what you're asking?"
"It might help get to the bottom of what happened."
"I sincerely doubt that. It ... it was the work of a madman, obviously."
Hellboy simply stared; wouldn't even encourage that one with an answer. How badly Copplestone must've wanted to believe this. The handiest explanation that would restore his world back to order. A madman, yes.
Just the sort of thing they do. Brute strength and no restraint and even less idea what he's doing ... you can take comfort in that. Because you can medicate him for it and lock him in a cell. And if he was able to go tooth-and-nail through twenty or thirty chaps with swords, well then, perhaps he was some form of new, improved madman, and yet, for all that, still no match for the right pharmaceutical company.
Hellboy stared at Copplestone until it unnerved him. Reminding him by sheer presence that there were more peculiar things afoot than lunatics. Skin like red armor and an oversized hand that could crush cinder-blocks what did Copplestone think was standing right in front of him? Just another cop like the pair who'd driven him out to the meadow for this meeting?
"Some of us," Copplestone admitted, finally, "not all, mind, but some ... we'd got to feeling that more than our interests belonged to the remote past. That maybe the claim reached as deep as our hearts, too."
"And what's that supposed to mean?"
"It means that this land, it wasn't always Christ's. There's plenty who'd be happy to tell you otherwise, but all that goes to show you is how thoroughly they've forgotten who their forefathers really were."
"Which forefathers would those be, again?"
"The Angles and the Saxons, of course."
"So whose land would that make it?" Hellboy thinking he knew already what Copplestone was driving at; wanting to hear him say it, regardless.
"Britain was Odin's too, once. Every bit as much as Norway and Sweden and so on. We woke up to that."
"So this Lindisfarne business," Hellboy said. "You thought you'd come up here on its anniversary, commemorate the occasion, celebrate this awakening?"
"Something like that, yes."
"What'd you think you were doing? Giving the whole place back?"
"To Odin?" Copplestone lowered his gaze, stared down at his shoes. Or the earth beneath them. "Nah. Not really. It's his just about any old time he wants it."
"News flash, Trevor. Odin's dead. And if he was ever out there, he isn't any more. You and me, and those cops in that car over there ... ? All of us might believe there was a Michelangelo, but that doesn't mean he's coming back to carve another statue of David."
Copplestone's eyebrows peaked. "Ancient faiths, old beliefs? Dried-up riverbeds, is what they're like. All they need's a fresh torrent to bring them back to life, and they run as true as they ever did."
"Dehydrated gods? Just add water? That could catch on."
Copplestone looked wounded. "Are we finished here?" he asked. "Because ... because you've a madman to catch."
Finished. Yes, they were. There was nothing more he could learn from Trevor Copplestone, and if there was, it was nothing Hellboy couldn't guess and have it serve just as well. We woke up to that, Copplestone had said, and if he wanted to believe in aberrant men with the strength of twenty, let him. It felt far more likely, however, that something else had awakened alongside them.
As he stood alone on the meadow overlooking the sea, the salt air gusts snapped the length of his coat about his cloven feet and tail, and he watched Copplestone's back as the man trudged away in a defeat that neither of them could name. The two officers who'd driven him here let him into the car, then gave Hellboy a nervous glance that said everything he would ever need to know about why they'd kept their distance, all three of them now looking relieved to be driving back toward what they believed to be the normal world.
Because as much as they feared the darkness they didn't understand, they feared as well what stood against it, because they didn't really understand that either.
All right. Lay it out, all of it. The known, the unknown, and the conjecture that bridged them together. It was the only way he knew how to start.
Indisputable facts:
Even by British standards, the Holy Island of Lindisfarne was old. Old. Three miles off the coast of Northumbria, it had in the early six hundreds proven to be a prime site for the raising of a monastery. Safe, ruggedly beautiful, protected by land and sea,
it was ideal for monks who wanted no more of the world than what they required for survival and contemplation. Like most monasteries of their day, they stored Church treasure, compiled Church history. They buried saints. Late that century from their scriptorum came one of western civilization's most highly cherished illuminated manuscripts, the Lindisfarne Gospels.
And a century later it all came crashing down upon their tonsured heads. New technology: the Viking longship, perfectly suited for ocean travel. What had once been thought impregnable was just an easy few days' sail from Norway. The Norsemen looted the monastery, put the monks to the sword, sent shock waves throughout the horrified whole of Europe: the world has just changed.
Getting to Lindisfarne today was no more bother than driving the causeway that spanned the tidal inlet, just as long as one didn't try driving it at high tide. Big draw for tourists, for modern-day pilgrimages. The monastery was long gone, but the red sandstone ruins of an eleventh-century Norman priory and those of a Tudor-era castle served equally well for seekers of the picturesque. And for modern creature comforts: hotels, cafes, even a meadery. Difficult to imagine the more tweedy buffs and conservators of Brit history entertaining even for one moment the notion of a rough-and-tumble re-enactment celebrating that twelve-hundred-year-old slaughter.
Hard facts:
Trevor Copplestone and his group had no choice but to remain confined to the mainland, where they went about their faux pillage and plunder on a pastoral meadow rise from which, if the day was clear enough, they could in the distance see the island where it had happened.
All signs indicated they'd made a good long day of it: scraps of food, spilt bottles of ale, whiskey, mead.
Lounging about a pair of evening cookfires, no doubt reminiscing over days they could only pretend they'd lived, they had been caught off guard, under cover of dusk. Something coming out of the night and, turnabout being fair play, massacring them.
No quarter had been given, and no deference shown for the roles they had played. Monk and marauder, all had died the same, protected by neither sword nor cross. When found the next morning, this eerie tableau like a Dark Age charnel field that had slipped forward in time, blood making a muck of the earth where the various and sundry parts of them had tumbled, the first natural conclusion drawn was that these silly bastards had really gotten carried away.
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