Hellboy: Odd Jobs

by Christopher Golden

  It hadn't taken long to rule that out. Grievous though they'd been, their wounds had not been made by swords, by spears. They were much too ragged for that. Whatever had violated these men, it had come from no forge.

  Nor did it appear that all of them had fallen where they'd died. Far and wide, they were strewn, on a meandering path inland, as much as twelve miles between one of the stray legs and the hip socket from which it had been torn. And this was only accounting for what had been recovered nearly half the bodies had yet

  to turn up. Early on it had been assumed that hounds would be the simplest solution, quickly sniffing out the remains still lying somewhere, awaiting discovery.

  But the dogs would have no part of it, Hellboy had heard. They'd tucked their tails between their legs and lowered their ears and slunk away from the fresh scent trail with fearful whines, as though whatever they might find at its end would be worse than the most loathsome excuse for a man they'd ever tracked.

  Dogs, in Hellboy's estimation, often showed more common sense than the ones holding the leash. Their reaction, as much as anything, was why he'd been summoned here in the first place.

  And so much for the known.

  There had been, of course, no witnesses, or if there were, they'd been snatched too, their bodies vanished with the rest. No reports of any missing locals, but you'd figure a tourist or two could disappear for a while without attracting attention.

  If there was anywhere in England you could lose someone, this was the place. Northumberland was her most sparsely populated county. Five times as many sheep as human beings, although the sheep's numbers had dwindled a bit of late, too. Farmers rising with the dawn to be greeted by the sight of animals reduced to tatters and mutton. This Hellboy had checked into upon learning that the dead men's wounds looked as though they could only have been left by tooth and claw.

  Theories from the civilian population? No shortage of those. Dead farm animals always meant someone, somewhere, would be pointing at the sky and seeing lights. Even now contingents were trying to link the massacre to crop circles, hunting for obscure parallels between the latest patterns in the wheat-fields and the haphazard arrangement of the corpses.

  And cats. Big cats

  it was actually one of the more sensible theories. Hellboy considered its merits as he traversed meadow and field and moor, following the trail of last weekend's strewn carnage long since

  shuttled off to the morgue, but something lingered in the air, a miasma of slaughter that the wuthering winds had been unfit to disperse.

  The U.K. had big cats, all right, from Cornwall to the most remote reaches of Scotland. Leopards, panthers ...

  whatever they were, where they'd come from was a mystery: the Exmoor Beast, and others who'd been bestowed no names. It was no longer a vast and untamed wilderness, this island Britannia, not a place you'd expect big cats to do anything other than get themselves hunted to extinction, yet they were out there, canny black stalkers seen at a distance, even filmed, but it was a rare day indeed when anything but their kills were encountered close-up.

  Of course, one alone couldn't wipe out more than thirty men. But suppose, it had been suggested, they were now roaming in packs.

  Hellboy'd seen weirder.

  Strange place, England, as though by its very antiquity it had been granted license to bend the rules of reality that held more firmly elsewhere. Consider its soil alone, a sponge soaked in the blood of thousands of years of war and conquest and sacrifice; drowned in the psyches of wave after wave of invaders, butchers, tyrants, holy men, madmen. Dig deeper, in the proper places, and you might find crusts of earth stamped with the footprints of giants, while strata deeper still had yielded up fossils seen by fewer than twenty pairs of living eyes, and guarded now with the kind of security usually reserved for national treasuries.

  Oh, a place like this, every once in a while you had to expect it to give rise to something that ran roughshod over the laws of nature.

  After all, he'd been born here himself, hadn't he? If born was even the proper word. Meaning that whatever aberration this land spawned might conceivably be construed as his brother.

  But brothers could be polar opposites.

  Been that way at least since Cain and Abel.

  Breathe them, smell them, taste them ... those drafts of otherness that blow through the land in arbitrary gusts. Hear them, watch them, walk them ... those subterranean currents of other worlds enfolded into this one. These highways and byways known only to the dead.

  He fell back on a basic constabulary strategy of searching afield for what had vanished: begin with a nexus of its last-known locale

  in this case, the farthest-traveled casualty found thus far

  and spiral outward from

  there. Sure it was time-consuming. But time he had. And he did not tire easily. The arcs of sun and moon overhead did not much weigh on him.

  Even in the most desolate meadows and groves he was rarely alone for any span of hours. The land was full of ghosts. Most were bereft of anything resembling soul or mind; they were echoes of what they'd been, sensible enough only to sense how incomplete they were, and to feel the agony of it. They wept vaporous tears; they put their fists through their cheeks while trying in vain to claw at them.

  Others, though ... somehow they had retained themselves. They looked, saw, recognized, knew.

  Hellboy came across one such casualty of the past suspended by his neck from a lower bow of an immense oak. A hanging tree, a perversion of Yuletide cheer festooned with its bygone era's accumulation of decayed ornaments, rotted fruits. The fellow was but one of many, and the most aware amongst them all men,

  women, children, they spun in slow half-circles, toes reaching for a ground they would never touch. Animals, even. A pony dangled motionless, truly dead, slumping in halves from a thick cable bound around its middle.

  In contrast, a large wolf whipped its muscled body about and scrabbled its paws at the air, ceaselessly snapping at the cord cinched around its throat.

  "You ... see ... me," said the hanging man. From behind a ragged veil of hair, his voice was like a creaking door.

  "I see a lot more than you, friend."

  "Have you come to claim me?" he asked.

  "Why do you ask that?"

  "Have you seen yourself, sir? There can be only one place whence came the likes of you. 'Tis a realm I always feared to go. So I went nowhere. Am I then to be claimed at last?"

  Criminal, victim, suicide ... Hellboy didn't care what the man had been in life, and certainly didn't care where he chose to spend eternity. Didn't mean he had to tell the truth about it. Death, life no matter. Fear was

  still the best inducement to prompt the sharing of secrets.

  Hellboy drew his pistol and took a bead on the frayed rope just above the man's head.

  "Unless you know of something that'll be more of a challenge for me, looks like you and I have some traveling ahead of us."

  And how was it that long-dead eyes could brighten so? Could know hope?

  "Such a shabby little prize would I make for the likes of you," he said. "But if it's larger quarry you're after ...

  "

  Hellboy lowered the gun halfway. "I'm listening."

  "I know not what it was, but I believe that I heard its birth. A most monstrous bellowing in the night."

  "When?"

  The man spread empty palms. "Time ... is not the same from this vantage. But not long."

  "Which direction?"

  An arm, trailing shreds of muslin, unfurled from the man's side and pointed to the west.

  "Abominable cries, they were, that could belong only to suchlike fiend as passed by thereafter. I could see naught but shadow or silhouette ... a most dreadful apparition. The likes of it I had never seen before ... yet it felt in some wise familiar to me ... as though I should know its form, and had but forgot."

  "Have you seen it any more since then?"

  "I would not want to. But there have
been occasions when I believe I have heard it. It weeps. In the night, it weeps." The hanging man raised his head from the collar of his noose. "Have I fulfilled our contract, sir? You will tell them nothing of me?"

  "Go back to sleep. Dream yourself some better company than what you've got now."

  "Ah, but they make such willing listeners to my stories. I have so many, you know. So many ... "

  "You and every other dead man," said Hellboy, and pushed onward.

  He found it within a couple of hours

  if not the end of his search, at least a telling stop along the way. Not like anything he'd ever seen before, but there was no such thing as a finished education, not where matters like this were concerned.

  It belonged here, in the mists and vapors of the moors. The calendar may have said early summer, but this parcel of land seemed to resist, to cling to starkness and decay. The trees grew more fungus than leaves, and the sun was thwarted in its attempts to brighten.

  And then there was the earth itself. The pustule, at first glance, looked like a crater left by a small detonation: a grenade, a mortar shell. On closer inspection it resembled an open wound, as well. A distended heap of earth and membrane that were not separate but somehow intermingled smooth here, grainy there; in one

  place a resilient sheet, while in another it clotted and crumbled and smeared.

  I know not what it was, the hanging man had said, but I believe that I heard its birth.

  And right here was the canal.

  He hunkered down beside the rim, rolled up his sleeve, thrust his hand into the muddy stew. Fished around until he felt something brush his wrist, and grabbed it, as big around as a boa constrictor. Hellboy stood, put the power of his armored hand into it, and tugged.

  It came, and came, and came. There seemed no end to it, as tough and fibrous as a vine, as slick as wet cartilage: an umbilical worthy of a nightmare. Its one end looked raggedly sheared through, bitten; tug as Hellboy might, though, its other end was still anchored somewhere down in the depths of Britannia's earth.

  He stopped pulling only when the cord snagged on something near the surface, then brought it up. When the object broke through the soil, Hellboy slung the coils aside and stooped again to inspect the piece and to rub it clean.

  It was a helmet, corroded but intact save for the dome, punctured with several elliptical arrangements of holes. They'd not been made in some remote age, however; these holes were fresh, the scarred metal of their edges raw and shiny bright. They looked for all the world as though they'd been left by teeth, gnawing in idleness, out of boredom or frustration or, like human babies with rubber rings, simply to coax the teeth into appearing.

  Forget the holes for a moment. He inspected the helmet itself, its form, its design. The flanges around the bottom, the guard that dipped down like a mummer's mask to shield the wearer's eyes.

  Hellboy plunged his arm deeper into the hole, a blind search but coming out with piece after piece, find after find: a dagger, a scabbard, a jeweled shoulder-clasp inset with garnets, gold, and glass. He began to suspect that there might be an entire treasure trove here waiting to be discovered, perhaps the greatest find in England since the excavation of Sutton Hoo. The bones of Saxon kings or heroes down there, whose deeds poets had labored to recount in all their rightful glory.

  Abruptly he decided to let the rest be. He was no archaeologist, and for the moment had found enough to sate his curiosity, to ignite speculation. The known, the unknown, and the conjecture that bridged them together.

  He stood at the edge of the hole, staring into it, daring it to deny what must have happened here.

  The world was younger then, and wilder, governed by the horizon. They came from the cold forests of Northern Europe, astride the icy timbers of their ships. They came, and they never left, fathering a lineage that still dominated England today, even unto giving the country her name. They came, and buried this Dark Age cache of artifacts, steeped in their blood and sweat and fury and honor.

  And somehow the place had become a womb. Seeded by ... what ... ?

  Belief? Fear?

  No such beast as coincidence.

  A few days ago he wouldn't have expected it to be so literal, what Copplestone had said about the ancient ways, about old gods awakening to believers who have in turn awakened to them. Dried-up old riverbeds, he'd compared them to, lying in wait for a fresh infusion to come roaring back to life.

  Copplestone and his mates, they believed, all right. Said they weren't alone, either, not by a long-shot.

  And if they'd begun to bring their ancestral gods back home, well, who was to say one or two of the ancestral devils hadn't hitched a ride in the bargain. For aren't those things that mean you harm so much easier to believe in, in the long run, than those which mean you well?

  Now that Hellboy had a good idea who he was looking for, it considerably narrowed where he'd have to look.

  Spiralling.

  Fractal repetition, echoed in scale from infinitesimal to infinite. Twined helix of DNA and spinning sickle starfish-arms of galaxies. Spirals carved in megalithic rock at Newgrange, drawn by shamans in Ugandan dirt.

  Spiraldance of pagans at revel, round and round and round we go. And somewhere in between, blueprint for the search for the lost ... this our hub, this our axis.

  Involution, evolution. The rise from the swirling waters of birth, the slow drift down into the waters of death.

  The path deciding all, while the pattern remains the same.

  Hellboy couldn't have not found this place. The centuries had conspired to spin him to it.

  A small lake deep in the moors, its stagnant waters slopped quietly against the muck of its shoreline. With bark leprous and branches gnarled, the surrounding trees looked poisoned, not by substance so much as spirit, as though the soil from which they grew no longer remembered the specifics of some terrible event that had happened here, only the essence of it.

  Imagine, then, the heart of the being that would choose to call such a place home.

  Imagine having no other choice.

  Hellboy found it at dusk, this black oasis, and knew he was in the right place when within a mossy cluster of trees he spotted a great depression in the spongy green, along with a calcium-white heap. Something had rested here, had taken bones of the dead and passed a few idle hours by reducing them to chips and flakes.

  Grinding them, perhaps. It was said that, in some antiquated Germanic tongue, this was what had given Hellboy's quarry his name.

  Even then they had called him a roamer of the night, and it appeared that nothing had changed. Gone for this one already, Hellboy suspected, so he settled onto the cushion of moss to wait. When the moon rose high and the surface of the lake remained undisturbed, that confirmed it: this vigil would last until dawn.

  And a lonely vigil it was, the silence here so deep it was unnatural. No frogs, no crickets, no splash of fish from the ebony waters, and when the first soft blush of pink tinged the eastern sky he heard no birds around to greet it. The sole signs of life were those approaching footsteps that had been inevitable, and when their maker at last shambled into view through the trees and the dewy morning haze, Hellboy viewed him over the barrel of his gun.

  Grendel stopped, and though he came from an age ruled by another form of steel, seemed to understand precisely what it was.

  "Men I know. I do not know what manner of thing you are," said Grendel, "but I see you have learned their lessons well."

  "And you know what surprises me?" Hellboy said. "I wasn't expecting you to have the power of speech."

  "Why should you have expectations of my ways at all?"

  "The man who killed you. Beowulf. Someone wrote about his life. Big, long, epic poem. It's stood the test of time."

  "But the poet had no words to give me?" Grendel asked. "Words only for the hero? It is no surprise. Poets save their best words for what they long to be or desire to possess ... and cannot. And like all men, what they do not understand they f
ear, and what they fear they find convenient to kill."

  "You mean like the way you handled those poor thirty-odd bastards a few days ago?"

  "They hungered for a life they never knew. I gave them a brief taste of it. They wanted dragons to fight. I gave them one. It was their yearning that drew me to them. The next morning may have been abhorrent to you, but the night before ... ? They lived as they had never lived before. They died as few are privileged."

  Hellboy hadn't been there, but he had his doubts. Had seen few die with the kind of savage exaltation with which heroes died in the sagas and epics of old. Had they ever, really? They begged, they bargained, they shrieked and wept and bled, and he could not think of a single shame in it.

  He imagined that the sight of Grendel would have been more than enough to send them running. Long, muscled, spidery limbs, sharp-tipped and coarse with gray bristles; primal simian face with the shearing teeth of a carnivore, and eyes cunning as a cannibal's. Would bankers stand and fight him; would architects and crossing guards? Never.

  Although he was not nearly so large that it would have required four men to carry his head back to Hrothgar's mead-hall. Even then the tales of heroes' exploits had needed help from their tellers, so that their boasts might be better winged to fly down through the ages.

  Grendel's speed, though

  by any standards it would be legendary.

  One arm lashed out, quick as a whip, and Hellboy would not have thought he could reach so far. A slashing blow, and the gun was ripped from his grip, knocked a dozen yards away, where it struck a tree, chipping away loose bark and lichens. And Grendel overhead then, his own limbs merging with those of the oak into which he'd hoisted himself, death from above as he bore down with gristle-flecked jaws. Hellboy reacted out of instinct, dodging and swiping an arc with his huge stone-like hand, and its grip found purchase, and wrenched, and the damage was done before he even realized it: Hellboy, standing there with Grendel's arm dangling from his grasp.