by Brian Hodge
Hellboy had never given much thought to retirement, not seriously. For someone like him, or Abe Sapien, life with the BPRD had always seemed like life in the Mafia--something you just didn't retire from. You either got whacked in the normal course of business, or you hung on until you were doddering and senile and only thought you were still useful while waiting for natural causes to catch up. Neither option seemed likely to happen to him anytime soon, so even after half a century, retirement was still something that others got to look forward to.
But if he did retire, if such a thing were possible, he supposed he would want to retire to Winograd Heath. It was tucked amid the forests and fields along the sloping western edge of the Cotswolds, and like all the drowsy little villages of Gloucestershire, preserved every storybook image of pastoral Old England that still survived, from the sheep grazing its hills to its overgrown cottages built of limestone the colors of honey and ash.
It was, in his heart, everything that East Bromwich wasn't.
And they knew him here.
Today he had come down from the Midlands, through Worcestershire, and bypassed the usual benevolent haunts that never failed to put his mind right during one of his English sojourns--streamside at the old mill, fireside at the Badger's Claw Pub--and headed straight for the vicarage.
For twelve years they'd known him here. But Father Simon knew him best of all.
"Well...! By the pricking of my thumbs," he first said upon opening the vicarage door, "something clumsy this way comes."
"Nice to see you too," Hellboy said. "Been working on that one long?"
It had been work--what else?--that first brought him here: the last appearance of Springheel Jack, the preternaturally acrobatic assailant who always seemed to arrive out of nowhere to terrorize some local populace. He'd been at it since early Victorian times, mostly in London, and eventually elsewhere toward the end of Jack's first fifty years, after which his sprees became more rare, sometimes with decades in between. Always to return, though...modern times, but still the same old Springheel Jack, ugly as sin with breath like blue flame, and bounding between streets and rooftops, and roof to roof, with the ease of children playing hopscotch. He never killed, just liked to claw and scratch, rip and tear--women and their clothes, mostly--before bounding off again.
Bad for the tourist trade, though, by the time he turned up in the Cotswolds during the summer of 1984, and Hellboy figured he'd probably come to the region for the same reasons anyone did: felt like old times here. When Jack sprang into Winograd Heath, Hellboy was already waiting...the first time in nearly 150 years of assaults and getaways that Jack had had to contend with a foe that could keep up with him. After an energetic chase that lasted less than half an hour, Hellboy had him bagged.
Once caught, Jack lapsed into a kind of coma from which he'd never awakened. They still had him back in Fairfield, warehoused in the sub-basements along with the talking mummies and other peculiarities. As near as anyone could tell, he was the malformed offspring of a female imp and an incubus.
Although the job had been done to near-universal gratitude, it had nonetheless earned Hellboy, if not enemies, at least a handful of grumbling critics loath to forgive his tactics. While Springheel Jack was lightfooted enough on the rooftops, Hellboy carried four times the mass. His landings had played havoc with a row of picturesque thatched roofs during the rainiest summer in a decade. And good thatchers were booked months, even years, in advance, even for the rich who settled here and paid handsomely to preserve the illusion of the past.
Something clumsy this way comes...
The Reverend Simon Finch had always gotten a perversely good chuckle out of the collateral damage; seemed unlikely to ever let him live it down.
Then he got serious, putting a hand to his chin as he stared from the doorway.
"You look to either be on your way to East Bromwich again, or you've just come from there," he said. "Shall I get my jacket, or do you want to come in?"
"I was there early this afternoon...and yeah, let's go for a walk."
Easier on Mrs. Finch, he figured. Lovely woman, but he always got the idea she worried he was going to demolish her furniture.
The vicarage was in the shadow of St. Mark's, the Anglican parish church, a gray monolith with a tall squared-faced Norman bell tower made friendlier by the carpet of green ivy growing from bottom to top. They automatically steered down the lane toward it as the daylight seeped from the sky.
Small talk for awhile--Father Simon was always a good one to expound upon various single malts from around the isles, and while Hellboy wasn't as particular when he felt like downing a shot, he found it easy enough to warm to the enthusiasms of a whisky connoisseur.
Then, as they stood on the road and he watched the last of the sun send a final flare through St. Mark's stained glass and suffuse the air with a butterscotch light, he got into it. Told Father Simon everything, from the attack on the Vatican to the business with the armored car, from the sinking of the Calista to his unexpected return to Dreich Midden. Told him about the Masada Scroll at the center of it all.
Father Simon didn't interrupt, didn't question. He had the patience of a man who'd been around long enough to earn it the only way you can: by letting life unfold at its own pace. He was just past sixty, Hellboy thought, or maybe just shy of it, a slender man with thick white hair and a jawline that was only now starting to soften.
"I'm having some real problems with this one," Hellboy finally said. "Most of the time I go into a situation and it's so black and white. Like twelve years ago. Springheel Jack comes to town, doing what he always does. You can't let a thing like that go on. End of debate. It's simple, it's clear, it's..."
"A no-brainer, I believe, is the term you're looking for."
"Exactly."
"And this one isn't."
They started to walk again--the stained glass light show was over--strolling further down the lane as glass-walled cages in the row of lampposts began to wink on.
"First thing that's been bothering me is the scroll itself," Hellboy said. "When I went into this, I went in knowing that even the Vatican couldn't say if it's genuine or not. If it's not genuine, though, why am I still caught between Heaven and Hell over it? It's drawn the attention of both sides. One side wants to destroy it. The other side kept trying to take it until they got it. Doesn't seem to me like either side would be this interested in it if it wasn't authentic."
Simon nodded. "A reasonable conclusion."
"But if it is genuine," Hellboy went on, "that's even worse. Because what are they still fighting for? What's the point of all this if...if the entire basis for the Church has been repudiated by the man it's based on."
Simon's eyebrows creaked upward and he eased out a sigh. "That's a tough one. Are you sure you shouldn't be talking to one of your Vatican pals instead of a bloke like me out here in the sticks?"
"My Vatican pals have their own agenda. You, you've got no dog in this fight."
"Well, I do wear the dog collar on Sundays and random occasions the rest of the week."
But they both knew what he meant. Hellboy was quite certain that the whole creed, Anglican and Roman and Protestant alike, could collapse tomorrow and it wouldn't make a bit of difference to Father Simon. He would go on as though nothing had changed. He'd put on his collar when appropriate, he'd say Mass for whoever straggled into the pews, he'd sit for hours at a deathbed. He'd sing--rarely on key--and he would pray. Like always. It was who and what he was. My religion is kindness, the Dalai Lama had said, and Father Simon probably could've said it too.
"I don't believe it matters to the world and the forces it's caught between," he finally said, "whether the scroll is genuine or not."
"You're kidding, right?"
"No. As long as it's not an outright fraud or hoax...and if I heard you right, that's not an issue, is it?"
"It's first century, all right. There's no question about that."
"Then I would say it's immaterial
whether or not it's genuine or simply a work of...early creative allegory, let's call it. As long as there's room for doubt, then there's room to exploit that. So its power doesn't reside in whose hand really put the ink to it. Its true power lies in what human beings--and other beings--choose to make of it. Things like this, they call them bombshells? Well, it all depends on where the bomb is dropped, doesn't it?"
Moloch as bombardier--not a prospect he liked to consider.
Father Simon clapped him on the shoulder. "The first thing bothering you, you said. What else?"
"The seraphim. They're supposed to be the good guys, aren't they? On the side of ultimate good? Not from what I've seen, they're not. Priceless pieces of history, innocent lives...they incinerated everything with no more thought"--he sniffed the air, the autumn scent that came wafting in from one of the nearby homes--"no more thought than you'd give to burning a pile of leaves. Their tactics don't seem any different from the other side. Their body count's about even so far. Which doesn't say much for their boss, does it?"
"Got the toughie out of the way first, good for you." Simon pointed straight at him. "You're your own best answer to that one."
"How's that?"
"You're the greatest illustration of free will that I've ever seen, or ever expect to. Even if you don't know everything about yourself, or what you were intended to be...still, you were, by every indication, conceived in evil, then delivered in evil, by evil men with evil intents...and yet you've chosen the side of good."
Hellboy shrugged. "Hey, I was raised by the good guys."
"True enough. But when you got old enough to look inside, like any adolescent, and ask some hard questions, you still had to have made a conscious choice to defy the obvious about yourself and instead live in accordance with the way you were raised. Really, now, what could you have been afraid of if you hadn't--a spanking? They'd take your allowance away? Not snatch it back out of that hand, they wouldn't."
Hellboy knew exactly what he'd been afraid of: disappointing those who'd taken him in, who'd come to mean something to him over the years. Who he'd come to love, and who'd found something in him worth loving. Which pretty much proved Father Simon's point, even if he hadn't said it outright: that there was a human conscience underneath that red hide.
"So if you were able to make that kind of choice, and be right," Simon went on, "is it any less possible that angels could exercise free will and be wrong?"
"Stands to reason that they could, yeah. But..." And this just kept going, didn't it? The vicious circle at the heart of an imperfect world. "That puts God in an awfully remote position."
"Aww, and just look what you've done now. You've put us back over into the tough ones again, haven't you?"
They'd come to a curve in the lane, where a pair of yew trees flanked the road, their huge runneled trunks purple in the twilight, their branches meeting overhead to form a green archway. Father Simon stared at the left one, and when Hellboy took a closer look, he thought he saw the ghost of an old scar in the dense bark.
"Two lads hop in a car with a sackful of lagers and a few packets of crisps, and a couple of hours later, that's where the ride ends." Simon pointed at the mar on the tree. "Both mothers together at the hospital, and we're all of us waiting for the news. Then it comes, and what am I supposed to do then? Tell them 'God saved your son, but not yours'? How do you comfort anyone with words like that when His intercession seems so random? There's always the old fallback of God working in mysterious ways, but there are so many times when that's no more help than a slap in the face." Simon shook his head. "The hardest thing I have to do is decide when to give God credit for something and when not to. Because if you credit Him for making the oaks and ivy in all their beauty, and that sunset we were just now privileged to witness, then you have to give Him equal acclaim for the bubonic plague."
"You think too much for a priest, you know that?"
"Curse of my race, us tweedy Anglos," Simon confessed. "So the best I've been able to sort it all out to my satisfaction is that because chaos and destruction seem to be such an intrinsic part of the system, then God must have an unshakable faith that renewal will always follow in their wake. That's the good news, that we're worthy of that kind of faith. The bad news is that it punts the challenge down to us to minimize the destruction, and keep it from feeding on itself. To be there when it's time to build again."
Until the next violent rampage? Hellboy wondered. Until the next crashing wave, the next upheaval of the earth, or madman with a war machine?
Yeah. Until then.
And the next one, and the one after that.
It was the only way to beat Heaven at its unfathomable games.
Father Simon turned and looked him in the eye. "I don't know if God made you. I suspect not. But you still seem to fit right into His plan...and in such a way as to leave me feeling awfully hopeful for the way it all ends."
And again, Hellboy remembered why he always liked coming to England to clear his head.
Chapter 19
From the sun-dappled Cotswolds to a rain-soaked Glasgow slum...
What a difference a weekend could make.
With no trace of dawn in the sky yet, Hellboy and Abe bailed from the car that had delivered them from the airport, sprinted half a block along a row of battened-down shopfronts, and clambered into the back of the unmarked van. Quick hellos all around with the three-agent team pulling surveillance duty--two Scots and a British medium from just over the border in Northumberland, with scarcely a decipherable accent among them.
"Anything happen since I talked to you from the plane?" Hellboy asked.
"No' a move in the four hours we been here," one of the two Scots answered, the male of the pair. Muir, his name, and he kept watch on a pair of monitors. One screen showed the feed from a small roof-mounted camera aimed at the target's front door, the other a remote signal from a camera that appeared to be secured in an alley and trained on the exit.
"But there's something in there...?" Hellboy said. "Not just some cranked-up loser with an antisocial attitude."
"Oh, aye." Ormston, the Brit, gave a disgusted nod and wrapped both hands tight around a mug of coffee poured fresh from one of several thermos bottles. "And the foulest thing it is that I've ever sensed from a block away."
"You got a photo on the guy yet?"
Kirsten, the other Scot on the team, said they did. She slid it from an envelope and handed it over while trying to tame her reddish hair, turned by the humidity into a bumper crop that exploded from beneath her watch cap.
Hellboy gave it a look, saw a dark-haired man in his mid-thirties with a broad, open face that might've been called friendly if not for his eyes, as cold and narrow as archers' slits in a stone tower. He handed it to Abe.
"Could that be the main guy you saw on the island the other night?"
Abe held it for a long study while rain hammered the van's roof like hailstones. Actually, they could all stare at the photo. The back of the van would have been close quarters for three, and with five now--particularly with someone of Hellboy's size--it was claustrophobic, everybody bumping knees and feeling the cloying wet air of rising body heat.
Ormston gave a suspicious sniff. "Swear I can smell roast monkey-nuts."
Hellboy grimaced. "That'd be me."
"You should've smelled him a few nights ago," Abe said, then gave the photo back to Kirsten. "Could be, yes. But 'could be' and 'was' are two different things. Sixty paces in rain and lightning...that was the closest look I ever had."
The man's name was Calum Gilmour, and he'd surfaced during the BPRD's last few days of database frenzy--cross-referencing names, known occult registries, odd police reports...anything that could be triangulated into a plausible pattern that would give them someplace to begin.
They'd already been checking leads since Friday night, around the time that he would've been having his impromptu consultation with Father Simon. But this one was made up of component bits that, when reviewed
together, sent up a red flare.
Gilmour had, in the past few months, entertained at least two visits from the police following up on neighbors' complaints about a smoky smell and emanation from his apartment. Nothing came of either visit; the officers had given the place a look-see and could find nothing that would cause whatever his neighbors were blaming on him. A total non-event on the surface, but in context, and the way Hellboy's own eyes had been fooled on Dreich Midden, plus Kate's theory about a glamour being used against the armored car crew, Hellboy had to wonder if the police hadn't missed something right under their noses because they honestly couldn't see it.
Worse, the area in a three-mile radius around his home had, in that same period, experienced a slight increase in the number of children reported missing. Maybe a statistical blip, but...look at the big picture.
Calum Gilmour was already on the BPRD's watch-list, albeit at the lowest, most plebian classification. He had, four years ago, served a jail term of several months for a failed attempt at burglarizing a rare books dealer in Edinburgh. Just one volume, that's all he was after: Ernst Schweiger's Things Better Forgotten.
Word went north out of Cornwall, and in the follow-up drive-by, Ormston, the medium, had gotten such a hit off Gilmour's place that he'd doubled over in nausea that still hadn't entirely passed.
Something seriously wrong was going on behind that door.
"What's the layout like, anybody know?" Hellboy asked.
"A basemen' fla', but iss a big'n, doon the whole lef' side o' the buildin'," Kirsten said. "No way o' seein' in. I coun' three skinny wee garden windows, but I tried to hae a keek inside earlier and couldnae. He's go' 'em all blocked o'er."
Hellboy blinked. "I'll take that as a no."
"Everything that pointed us here, it could still be coincidence," Abe said. "I'd feel better if we had one totally solid thing to go on before we start kicking down doors."
"Like his membership card from Campus Crusade for Moloch?" Hellboy said. "It's hardly ever that clear when we're talking about citizens."