by Brian Hodge
Something like that, stuck to the wall, you don't do it just because you have to.
You don't do it out of a sense of duty.
You do it because a part of you likes it, the sport of it.
"Hellboy...?" said Abe. "What can do this?"
"There's Liz, for starters. But she's on the other side of the ocean right now, and it's not her style anyway, so we can rule her out," he said. "Other than that, plus what my nose tells me? My guess is seraphim."
Abe had one of those faces that could be hard to read a lot of the time. Not his fault. He didn't have the full set of features that helped with all the nonverbal cues. Like eyebrows. Or a brow ridge, for that matter. Still, he sometimes had this way of looking at you, and you just knew how much he hated what he was hearing.
"Seraphim," Abe said flatly. "And here I thought that, of all places, this one was on the side of the angels."
"If there's any truth to the old stories, seraphim are a breed apart. I've heard them called Heaven's stormtroopers. Never saw one, but I've always gotten the idea they do what they're told without a lot of questions. Not that it's going to make you feel any better, but the last I'm aware of them unleashing this kind of firepower was in Sodom and Gomorrah."
And the question hung in the air unasked, because neither of them had to: What could possibly have come along, after upwards of 3500 years, to pose enough of a threat that would warrant this level of response?
"Dresden." Kate's voice, behind them. He hadn't seen her rejoin them. "You forgot Dresden, Germany. Near the end of World War Two."
"That's just a rumor. Not even a convincing one," Hellboy said. "One Allied phosphorous bomb for every two people? You don't need seraphim with that kind of payload raining down."
"You're looking at it wrong. If it's true, Dresden wasn't cause-and-effect. It was opportunity seized," Kate said. "Where better to blend in and cover their tracks?"
On this one, at least, they could agree to disagree. Kate Corrigan definitely knew her business...and if it was weird, well, then it was her business. A fortyish woman with a tousled bob of sandy hair, she'd been consulting for the bureau for the past dozen years, when she wasn't teaching history classes at N.Y.U. Or hunched over a keyboard. The woman wrote books almost as fast as Abe could read them--sixteen at last count, her own ever-growing shelf in the folklore and occult section.
She'd beaten him and Abe here by a full day. Had been on some unspecified sabbatical at the Paulve Institute in Avignon, France, when the summons came in that the Vatican, of all places, was asking for a discreet outside opinion.
"It's taken awhile, but I'm finally getting somewhere with these guys," she said. "You know, I'd hoped that maybe, just maybe, this place would've been different...but no, you show up and it's the same as any other bureaucracy. They beg for your help, they tell you how glad they are you're here...and then it practically takes a case of whiskey and a pound of laxatives to get the relevant truth out of them."
"A lovely image," Abe said.
And Kate was beaming. She didn't do that often. She frowned, she scowled, she had a whole closetful of thoughtful looks, but she hardly ever beamed. Especially in places like this, where death was still so fresh.
"What's going on here, Kate?" he asked.
"The confirmation of a legend," she said. "They just gave up what that hit squad must have been after: the Masada Scroll."
BUREAU FOR PARANORMAL RESEARCH AND DEFENSE
Field Report Supplement EU-000394-59supA
Date: October 16, 1996
Compiled by: Dr. Kate Corrigan
Classification: Restricted Access--Need To Know Subject: Vatican Secret Archives Document s/00183/1966
Although the Masada Scroll has for the past thirty years been a quiet but persistent rumor, impossible to substantiate, its existence has finally been verified by a physical artifact. At this early stage the BPRD cannot take a position one way or another on its authenticity, only cite the claims made about it.
Background: According to the only known contemporaneous first-century source (The Jewish War, by Josephus Flavius), Herod the Great, King of Judea, built the fortress known as Masada in the fourth decade B.C.E. Installed as a puppet ruler by the Romans, Herod was reviled by the Jewish populace, and thus intended Masada to be a personal refuge in the event of an uprising.
For strategic purposes, the location was well chosen. Herod utilized the natural features of a remote mesa and cliff structure located at the western end of the Judean Desert. The eastern side plunges hundreds of meters straight into the Dead Sea. At the western side, the plateau is still roughly a hundred meters above the desert floor. The pathways up were few, openly exposed, precarious to navigate, and thus could be easily defended by a relatively small group.
Nevertheless, in the year 66 C.E., during the Jewish Revolt, a group of rebels defeated the Roman garrison at Masada and took control of the site. After another four years of conflict, following the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, Masada became a final stronghold for hundreds of militant Zealots who left Jerusalem with their families. For two years they used Masada as a base from which to launch incursions against the Romans.
All that came to an end in 73 C.E., when Roman governor Flavius Silva besieged Masada with the Tenth Legion and additional units. After establishing camps and closing off the immediate area with a wall, they began a mind-boggling feat of engineering: using thousands of tons of stone and packed earth to build an enormous ramp from the desert floor up to Masada's western side. After it was completed in the spring of 74 C.E., they wheeled a battering ram up the ramp and broke through the fortress wall.
However, the Roman victory was Pyrrhic at best. They were met not with further resistance, but by the corpses of 900 to 1000 men, women, and children. Rather than be taken alive, Masada's defenders opted for death at the hands of their family members and compatriots, until the last man alive committed suicide. They also burned everything but the food supplies, to make certain the Romans knew that they hadn't been driven to their deaths by starvation. Josephus Flavius' account of Masada's last hours was allegedly based on testimony taken by him from the only known survivors: two women who hid to escape the carnage.
While Masada's location was verified in the modern era as far back as 1842, it wasn't until the mid-1960s that international teams of archaeologists undertook a serious excavation of the site. It was during one of these digs that the purported Masada Scroll was unearthed by a joint British-Israeli team, although it has never been a part of any official inventory of artifacts from the site, much less offered up for public study, like the Shroud of Turin. It has, for all intents and purposes, been a phantom find, the archaeological equivalent of an urban legend...spoken of by various sources, but its existence uncorroborated by any scholar connected with the Masada excavations.
[Note: Fr. Rogier Artaud's informal checks into the background of the scroll, as detailed in the Vatican Archives documentation (see attachment Field Report Supplement EU-000394-59supB), have without exception led to dead ends, all traces of the personages involved seeming to end by no later than 1968. Because Artaud's resources are limited, I recommend that the BPRD conduct a more thorough follow-up, although it's difficult to avoid drawing conclusions from Artaud's lack of results, however informal his efforts.]
The Masada Scroll: According to the aforementioned copy of Vatican Archives documentation, the scroll was found in the floor under the remains of a structure that has come to be known as the Administrative Building, from its Herodian origins. It had been secured inside two clay jars, one nested inside the other and cushioned by an inner layer of soil, with the opening of the larger jar sealed over with pitch. These jars had in turn been buried .8 meter down in a natural hollow of rock, the remainder of the space filled in with additional earth that had been tamped into sufficient compactness to blend it with the natural floor. Thus protected, it survived the conflagration that burned directly above it, and the 1890 years th
at followed. Both of the jars and the outer seal remained intact until after their discovery.
The scroll itself consists of five inconsistently sized sheets of parchment, which had been rolled and bound with a leather thong. The state of preservation of all materials was regarded as remarkable--although the same could be said of many finds at Masada--due to two primary factors: the site's remoteness and inaccessibility, and the dry climate.
The text's authorship is, in the salutation, attributed to Yeshua (Jesus) the Nazarene. Its intended audience, also established in the salutation, is a group in Ephesus, on the western coast of what is now Turkey. A full translation of the text will follow, pending approval by Fr. Vittorio Ranzi, Artaud's immediate superior, but according to Fr. Artaud, it is not an earlier document brought to Masada, but was written at the site, with clear references to the Roman siege. It appears to have been begun relatively early in the siege, with hopes expressed that the Romans would fail in their endeavor. A current of pessimism enters later and the letter remains unfinished, as its author appears resigned to the fact that it will never be delivered or read by its intended audience...although the author, or someone else, obviously had optimism that it might be discovered later.
The majority of the text, according to Fr. Artaud, portrays the bittersweet reflections of a Jesus knowing he is at the end of a long and painful life...not specifically denying his divinity, but coming to the understanding that he is just "one of many sons of God." He also hopes to refute what he clearly considers distorted and divisive interpretations of his original message by Paul (ne Saul of Tarsus), and reconcile the schisms that were, even in his lifetime, starting to violently oppose one another.
That Jesus could have survived crucifixion and lived into old age is considered possible by medical science, with various theoretical scenarios citing biblical as well as forensic details. And, while most often condemned as heresy, the premise that Jesus lived into old age appears in different forms, including one legend that he and Mary Magdalene and other followers fled Palestine and eventually settled in the British Isles, with his descendants alive today in Western Europe. However, the "Masada theory" is thus far the only one that comes with potential physical proof.
The Vatican takes no official position on the scroll's authenticity--or even a consistent unofficial position, for that matter--preferring to instead quietly relegate it to permanent exile in archival storage like any other historical artifact. However, they have, in strict secrecy, subjected it to analysis by various scientific tests that have emerged since its discovery (after, it bears noting, the as-yet unknown and undocumented means by which the document came under Vatican control).
Paleography, spore analysis, and radio carbon dating of the leather binding have all indicated that the document does indeed date to the first century, and thus is unlikely to have been buried at Masada at some later date. However, its authorship--certainly a deeper and more vital authenticity--cannot be proved, only disproved...and thus, with the scroll certified as a first century relic, its custodians have arrived at a stalemate.
Chapter 3
Hellboy and Abe kept to the trees while they waited. Behind the scenes, some sort of mid- to high-level meeting was going on, archivists and a few Church officials haggling over what to do next.
Hellboy hoped they weren't too high level. He'd met plenty of priests over the years and felt only fondness for most of them...but then, they'd nearly always been the grunts, never the glorified, the guys who dutifully put on their collars and took care of their parishes without much of anybody to take care of them. Start giving them pageantry, power, and positions to protect, though, and the distinctions between holy men and politicians started to become a lot less clear.
As dawn came, Vatican City started to awaken around them, lights winking on in buildings near and far...although nothing was truly far away here. Enclosed by a wall like a medieval city, all but the opening to St. Peter's Square, this was the world's smallest sovereign state--the beating heart of Rome, yet a world unto itself. Most of its buildings were clustered along the eastern side, and much of the interior was like a park, full of trees and gardens and green lawns. Here Hellboy and Abe lingered, facing the long, castle-like western wall of the museum complex that housed the Archives, the Apostolic Library, and art beyond price and artifacts beyond numbers. As the sky lightened, he could see the blackened scorch marks on the stone above several windows in the middle. To the south loomed the enormous gray dome of St. Peter's. No getting away from that one. It rose over all and saw everything.
A discreet fifteen paces away stood the member of the Swiss Guard that had been assigned to them. Invited into Vatican City or not, you didn't just stroll around the grounds like a tourist. An escort was mandatory, so whenever they weren't in the company of priests, a corporal by the name of Bertrand took over, stoic enough about this all-night duty but still seeming embarrassed about the formality. The Swiss Guard was a token unit, the last remainder of the papal armies of centuries past. Even in this day and age, they carried halberds.
Hellboy nudged Abe and kept his voice low. "Is this guy freaking you out a little?"
"Me? No," Abe said. "Maybe it's the uniform."
Strangest uniform Hellboy had ever seen. No camouflage here. You could see these guys coming a mile away. Their uniforms had big, bold, vertical stripes of saffron and maroon, with puffy sleeves and legs, and were topped off with a dark beret. The effect was like a cross between a soldier and a harlequin.
"He makes me nervous," Hellboy said. "He's like the guy that follows you around in the store because he's afraid you're gonna break something."
Abe just looked at him. "When was the last time you were shopping, anyway?"
Footsteps along a nearby path--as a man in a black cassock drew closer, Hellboy saw that it was Father Artaud, the Palestinian antiquities specialist who'd saved the scroll. He was Belgian, Kate had said earlier, and looked to be in his late thirties, early forties, and all that bike-pedaling must have paid off. A less athletic man may not have cleared the attack area in time.
"Come with me," the priest said. "Hurry."
They followed as he led them back into the museum complex...down palatial hallways, through further doors, up a flight of stairs. Then, along a deserted second floor corridor he stopped before what appeared to be just one more muraled panel in the wall, until he stooped and his fingers found pressure points in the lower corners. The panel ground open to reveal the rough stone blocks of an inner corridor.
"Not you guys too," Hellboy said.
Artaud motioned them inside. "The Vatican is honeycombed with them. These places were built in a more dangerous time. Who knew when these passages might be needed? And today...?" He almost smiled. "To waste them would be a sin."
Down again, as the panel ground closed after them, and Artaud led the way with a penlight.
By the time they stopped, they must have been well below ground level, in a plain stone-block chamber the size of a small chapel, lit with nothing more modern than a dozen candles. A hole bored into the floor of one corner might once have served as a crude toilet, mercifully unused in a very long time. Too inconvenient for storage, too dry for a dungeon, too unadorned for a ritual space, the place would once have been good only for hiding away from an invading army. Or, today, making sure that something spoken in secret remained that way.
At their arrival, all heads turned, and Artaud closed a thick wooden door that fit as tightly as a cork in a bottle.
"Why, Kate Corrigan," said Hellboy. "Tell me you're not down here corrupting an entire roomful of priests."
"If anything's getting corrupted, it's my lungs," she said quietly, and flicked her gaze toward a pair who stood along one wall conversing over cigarettes, taking rapid pulls off them as if in an agitated race to see who could finish first. If there was any means of circulation, Hellboy couldn't spot it, and the air was turning hazy.
Artaud included, there were six men in black down here--four
in cassocks and two in suits. None of them appeared to have enjoyed a restful night, with bleary eyes and stubbled faces all around. A rotund fellow sat repeatedly nodding off in his chair; his heavy jowls would squash outward with every sharp droop of his head, then he'd bob upright again and blink. A thin man with a balding skull and the prize for the room's darkest shadow of whiskers was pouring himself coffee, black as oil, from a silver thermos. Artaud introduced him as Vittorio Ranzi, his superior in the Archives.
"I'm not much for ceremony, so it doesn't bother me," Hellboy said, "but if this is the best conference room you can come up with, it leads me to believe that whatever comes out of here won't have an official stamp of approval."
"Official can mean many things," Ranzi told him. "Whatever comes of this will have the support of many hundreds more than you see here. For now, it is best if that support is quiet. Away from eyes and ears that would be better off blind and deaf to it."
"Spoken like a true conspirator," Hellboy said. "Let me tell you something, just so we're clear on it: I hate doing other peoples' dirty work. And I hate it when people twist the truth to try and get me to do their dirty work."
Kate put her hand on his arm. "Hey. You're getting a little ahead of yourself. Hear them out."
The plump man in the chair, introduced as Archbishop Bellini, had jolted awake for good and struggled upright. "This place, this Church--if you know anything about her, then you know that no matter how tranquil she seems on the outside, underneath she always has some unrest. Always some struggle going on beneath her surface." He shook his head. "Dirty work? No, no, no. Where the Church is concerned, we here speak of evolution."