Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

“I sincerely doubt that. It … it was the work of a madman, obviously.”

  Hellboy simply stared; wouldn’t even encourage that one with a response. 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 they’re doing … you can take comfort in that. Because you can medicate 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 the man. Reminding him by sheer presence that there were more peculiar things afoot than lunatics. Skin like red armor and an oversize hand that could crush cinderblocks — 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 Hellboy 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 600s 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 scriptorium 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, and 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 British history entertaining even for one moment the notion of a rough-and-tumble reenactment celebrating that 1200-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 had lived — they’d 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’d 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.

  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 wheatfields 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 UK had big cats, all right, from Cornwall to the most remote reaches of Scotland. Leopards, panthers, the Exmoor Beast, and others who’d been bestowed no names … whatever they were, where they’d come from was a mystery. 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.

  He’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.

  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 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 by-ways 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 didn’t 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 spectral 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-brooch 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.