Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell

by Brian Hodge

  "Cam, what about this man?"

  "I think...he's your guy. He's the one."

  Now Rogier was shaking his head. "This can't be. I would believe anyone before Gino Laurenti. Myself before Gino Laurenti."

  "It's just that..." Cam was stammering now, as though reading an inscription from fragments of stone he was still piecing together. "He...he doesn't know it. About himself."

  "How is this possible?" Rogier asked.

  Cam's hand started to twitch, as though he were developing a tic. "More than one mind here. There's...there are three..."

  Liz leaned in cheek-to-cheek, let him know she was there. "Cam, does he have something inside him?"

  Shaking his head slowly, as if only gradually verifying the truth, or the truth as he perceived it. "No...that's not it...but...ummm...I'm getting some threads here I don't really want to follow--"

  Liz forced her nails past his clenched fingers and yanked the crucifix from his hand. "Okay, that's enough of that, this is over."

  She sat beside him as his eyes opened and he looked around the room as if to reacquaint himself with it, to remember what was most real, and she stroked his forehead back toward the clipped hairline, poor guy, halfway to a monk's existence already when you knew that without this awful gift he'd be happy with his hair in his eyes and both hands attached and playing guitar in some awful band and contending with hangovers left by cheap beer instead of tainted souls.

  "You kicked ass," she told him.

  She helped him up from the chair and steered him toward the hallway, led him back toward the other rooms and put him to bed, fully clothed except for his shoes, old flat-soled Keds. She worked them off and by the time the second one hit the floor, he was already asleep. She pulled a quilt over him and left him in peace.

  "It takes a lot out of him, does it?" Rogier said, fumbling the question out in an awkward way that told her he'd wanted to help and wasn't sure how, because he was so far out of his element.

  "When it's like that, it does," Liz said. "I don't know about you, but whenever I have these dragged-out, super-emotional confrontations, it's so draining, it saps me so bad all I want to do is go to sleep. He's the same way, I guess. He told me that when it's like that, really ugly or just really challenging, he said, 'Imagine the worst, most heart-breaking fight you ever had in your life, then multiply by ten.' "

  He looked her in the eye, then shyly away, then back again with a contemplative smile that suggested to her he considered himself largely exempt from such things, and that he wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not.

  "What does all this mean?" he asked. "I know what I heard him say but I don't know what it means."

  She had to tell him she didn't know, either, she just lived here. This world where less and less made sense to her, and very little seemed fair.

  After Artaud left, with the bag of stolen items slung over his shoulder--all but the crucifix--and the task of clandestinely returning them still ahead, Liz returned to her chair by the window and watched him pedal away. And since Hellboy was not here, she decided she would be the one to watch the sky, on guard against avenging angels, but ready to extend welcome if any benevolent ones felt like winging by.

  But there were only clouds, until the sky went black.

  Chapter 21

  On the way in, the old prophecies drifted through his mind, although he couldn't say why. The seven hills of Rome equating with the seven heads of the beast that would rule over the end times, trampling upon the righteous for a few years before the host of Heaven got riled enough to get down to some serious smiting. One long-ago man's view of the end of the world, and certainly open to interpretation. Live long enough on a rocky, sun-blasted Greek island, and he supposed you'd say a lot of things that were open to interpretation.

  Didn't look so menacing from the air, Rome didn't.

  Didn't look so menacing on the ground, either, on the ride from the airport.

  Under the surface, though...that's where things always boiled the hottest, in the hidden places, the places that people could never see and were just as happy to forget existed at all...even when the portents bubbled menacing and violent.

  He thought of Pompeii, hours south of here, and the day it disappeared from the face of the earth, buried in tons of ash that baked thousands in their homes and in the streets. Yet they had chosen to live in the steaming shadow of Vesuvius all the same.

  It possesses craters of fire that only go out when they lack fuel, a Greek geographer had written decades earlier.

  There were times when he found it too easy to imagine a Vesuvius that would cover not just a city, but the world...and the people who would stand by and watch it happen.

  It was after dark when he and Abe reached the apartment in the Borgo. Liz told him that her protege's readings of the nicked items had gone well, and he assured her they'd get to that soon. For now he just wanted to meet the kid she'd been working with all these weeks, whose input had so quickly become so crucial.

  He'd felt bad ever since that exchange on the boat when he'd called Campbell Holt her project, as if he were sticks she was putting together with glue. He never used to do that--ignore that there was a human being, usually in pain, behind the labels that the bureaucrats slapped onto them: Pyrokinetic. Psychometric. Suicidal.

  "How are you doing?" he said in greeting. "I'm Hellboy."

  "No--really?" Campbell said. "I was expecting somebody...redder."

  Okay...bit of a smartass. It went with his age, probably. Probably a stupidly obvious introduction, too.

  They'd gotten here at dinnertime--Campbell's, at least. Liz was content to have a smoke by the window as the kid wolfed down a plateful of pasta that appeared to have been dumped from a large take-out carton. Four-cheese ravioli, on inquiry. Hellboy grabbed a fork from the kitchen and speared four in one go, slurped them off the tines one at a time.

  "You don't mind, do you?" Because there was no way he was going to be able to stop at four, not with these gooey babies.

  "Oh. I get it. Hazing the new guy, right?" Campbell said. "I finally meet the BPRD's star agent and he steals my dinner? Pardon my disillusion."

  "Just keep your hand at least two feet away from his mouth at all times," Abe said from a chair near Liz. "You'd hate to end your bureau career before it really gets off the ground."

  "Did you ever think of changing your name?" Campbell asked, this time in all seriousness. "You seem to have kind of...outgrown it. I know, Hell man is already taken by the mayonnaise, but still..."

  "I think by now I'm stuck with it," he said. "What are they gonna call me--Steve?"

  Liz blew a plume of smoke out the window. "It was the only thing Professor Bruttenholm would ever admit failing to plan ahead for."

  They talked awhile longer--he filched only ten ravioli total, an exercise in moderation--then he got down to business, asked Campbell for a quick overview of how this wild talent of his worked.

  "It's all in my dossier. Have you read that?"

  "Humor me. I'm a little behind on my reading."

  "Which is like saying a little water goes over Niagara Falls," Abe had to add.

  Campbell was mopping up the last of some sauce with a crust of bread but set it aside and held up his hand, palm up and fingers spread. "An object goes in here, and I can read into the life of who owns it. Usually the stuff that's been uppermost on their minds lately. Or if they're dead, the important stuff at the end of their life. But if I hang with something long enough, I'm learning how to root around and dig deeper."

  "What about something with multiple owners?"

  Campbell nodded. "If the thing's changed hands along the line, I can usually pick up on the previous owner, or owners. They may be weaker, but they're there. It's sort of like deciding which channel to leave the TV on...

  "The main thing is that someone's really lived with it. I hardly ever get a hit off public property, or something that's passed around all the time. Like coins. It happens, but not very often.
So just in case"--he tapped his fork, his plate--"I try to always use the same silverware and table service. But most of the time, the object has to have been in someone's possession to build that strong of an association. They really have to have made it theirs."

  Hellboy dug into one of his topcoat's big pockets and drew out the rag-wrapped bundle. Peeled away the cloth and dropped onto the table the dark gnarled horn he'd ripped from the Scotsman's skull that morning.

  "You think you can tell me about what used to possess that?"

  He was on the roof almost before he knew it.

  The horn had barely hit the table when Liz came vaulting out of her chair, snatching it up and handing it off to Abe and demanding--not asking, demanding--that he hang onto it and not let it anywhere near Campbell. She'd grabbed his sleeve next and yanked him toward the door, up two flights of stairs and out onto a small walkway surrounded by gently sloping red clay tiles.

  "Are you out of your mind?" she asked. "Because if you expose him to that, there's a good chance it'll drive Cam out of his."

  This, he felt pretty sure, was called the riot act, and she was reading it to him loud and clear.

  "We can't do this downstairs, like a team?" he asked.

  "There's a rule of thumb in all the better families," she said. "The parents don't let the kids see them fight."

  "He's not our kid, Liz."

  "In our world he is. In our world he's a wet-assed babe in the woods."

  She stamped off a frustrated six paces away, as far as she could get before the flat roof ran out, then turned around and stamped back. They may have been few, but there were occasions when he wondered how it was that a woman who probably didn't weigh even a third of what he did could make him feel so small.

  "I read Kate's briefing on what you came across in Glasgow this morning," she said. "If that ugly thing you dropped on the table has even a residue of the malevolence I know has to be behind it, then, psychologically speaking, you might as well be strapping Cam into an electric chair, because I don't have any doubt that it would fry his mind."

  "You don't know that. And we still don't know what's going on around us. I just know we better figure it out soon. This would be the quickest way. We can always take the horn away from him if it's too much."

  "What 'if'? There's no 'if'--trust me, it will be."

  "You didn't want to bring him to Rome in the first place, either, but he looks like he's handling it fine."

  "You weren't here this afternoon when he tapped into one of the priests. He got through it, but it put him down the rest of the afternoon. If that happens to him with one of the good guys--supposedly good--what do you think'll happen if he starts sniffing around your--"

  Abruptly, Liz clamped down on whatever she'd been about to say. But she didn't have to say it. He could finish for her, or near enough. Your family tree. Your relatives. Your hometown. Something like that. Not exactly a cheap shot, and nothing he would hold against her, but it was something that wasn't ever going away. Despite their similarities, and no matter how much history they shared, their births--and all that their births implied--were poles apart.

  "Look, H.B.," she said. "You call the shots and there's nobody I'd rather have do that. But this is the one where you and I..."

  She didn't want to say it. They weren't used to this, opposite sides of a divide. So he said it for her: "Lock horns?"

  One corner of her mouth ticked. "We have to find another way. We may have already. But this one's non-negotiable. Promise me you'll lock that thing up in the wall safe downstairs until we can get it back home."

  She was probably right. There were plenty of men and women who had, across the centuries, divined various secrets of Hell and lived to tell the tale. He'd hoped that Campbell Holt might have their kind of fortitude, their inner strengths. But there was a difference, too. The Hell that most dark mystics had encountered had been sought. Campbell's insights would come from a Hell that would be forced on him. So maybe it wasn't the way.

  "Supposedly good guy, you said a minute ago. What did you mean by that?"

  "So now you're ready to hear about that. About time," she said. "Father Laurenti's unwitting donation to this afternoon's roundup. A crucifix. Cam got this weird hit off it."

  As Liz told him what had happened in front of her and Father Artaud, she had his ears but St. Peter's had his eyes, as he gazed toward the colossal dome that still seemed to see all, dominate all, even though it was many blocks away, with a small town's worth of rooftops in between. He wondered if he would live to see a day when it too had sunk into a state of wreck and ruin, like so many of Rome's monuments to its own past--once lustrous forums and temples, the pride of empire and republic, today just a few crumbling blocks in the weeds and clusters of chipped columns.

  A house divided against itself cannot stand, a president had once said about the land Hellboy now called home, but the lesson was universal.

  "Okay," he said when Liz had finished. "You're right, we should check that out right away."

  "Do you even know where to find Father Laurenti?" she asked.

  "Matter of fact, I think I do."

  Chapter 22

  He'd had an address to go on, and a general description of the grounds. After a few passes up and down a secluded stretch on the northern fringes of Rome, the driver of their panel truck determined that the place was an unmarked estate barely visible behind rusty gates and stone walls draped with vines. Easier to have identified it by daylight, maybe, but Hellboy hadn't felt like waiting until morning.

  Monsignor Burke had given him this address at the end of their trip to the observatory...the place where rogue churchmen had sought to punish the wicked by summoning down angels and, according to legend, calling up devils. Burke had pointed him here immediately after revealing that he and his compatriots had finally accomplished what opponents of the Opus Angelorum hadn't managed in centuries:

  A close encounter of the third kind, Burke had said. We caught one of them.

  "They're holding a priest by the name of Domenico Verdi," Hellboy told them. "True or not, I don't know, but Burke said they caught the guy coming back to get one of the old torture devices hanging all over the place. A piety belt. Fits around your gut like a weightlifter's belt, except it's got two or three hundred barbs poking inward."

  Liz looked appalled as only she could. "I'm afraid to ask, because there's just no good answer to this, is there, but...?"

  "Himself," Hellboy said. "He wanted it for himself. And, according to Burke, Father Laurenti practically moved in here where they've been holding him."

  Abe's eyes narrowed. "Why should Burke tell you where to find either one of them? Especially after Laurenti told us to stay out of their fight?"

  "Same reason he showed me the observatory. He thinks this Opus Angelorum group is a plague that needs to be taken out in a way he doesn't think his own people have the stomach for. This Verdi guy...I figure he gave him to me either as a place to start, or a loose end to tie up."

  "He does know you're not a hired killer, doesn't he?"

  "Maybe he has faith in my powers of persuasion."

  The four of them slipped from the panel truck and had it continue onward, find someplace to wait out the duration, out of sight but no more than a couple minutes away at the other end of the radio. In the moonlight, they moved along the wall until they came to a round-topped doorway inset into the stone, the door a heavy iron frame full of byzantine designs and sealed by a wrapped chain and padlock.

  No more problem than pulling a loose thread off a shirt, really. The chain and its broken links hit the ground like a handful of coins.

  Trees loomed large on the other side of the wall, and breezes rustled through a low-lying jungle of vines and creepers turned brittle by autumn. They carried the scents of water and contamination. The Tiber. They must be near one of the many bends of the Tiber.

  Hellboy glanced over his shoulder at Campbell. "You doing okay back there, rookie?"

 
"Sure," he whispered back. "Hey...you're not going to hurt this guy, are you? This priest, Laurenti--whatever's up with him, Liz told you I said it's not his fault, right?"

  "I got the message, yeah."

  A few yards closer and the house began to take form in the night. With staggered tiers of tiled roof, and haphazard arrangements of columns here and archways there, it had the rambling look of a country villa, and may well have started out that way, built long before the spreading city eventually caught up with it.

  "How are we going in?" the kid whispered. "Should I have a gun? Nobody ever issued me a gun."

  "Anybody ever train you how to use a gun?"

  "No."

  "Then I'll bet you can figure out the connection there."

  "Relax, Cam," Liz told him. "These people are on our side."

  "Uh huh." He didn't sound convinced. "Do they know that?"

  "Anyway," Hellboy said, "I figured we'd do the polite thing for a change and knock."

  As expected, Laurenti wasn't the least bit happy to see them. He spent the first couple of minutes fretting over how they'd learned of this place, whose gilded edges may have been dulled by dust, but whose past splendor wasn't entirely hidden under renovations and repairs. As near as Hellboy could tell, three guards were on duty, armed with handguns and, by the looks of them, certainly not priests. Probably the outside help that Burke had alluded to.

  At first Hellboy refused to name the tipster who'd sent him here, until it became clear to him that the only way they were going to get anywhere with Laurenti was full disclosure: Monsignor Burke, who'd had different ideas on what the BPRD should and shouldn't be privy to. And, while they were at it, the bureau was aware of the observatory, too, and who had used it, and for what.

  "These things...you should not know them," Laurenti said. "He should never have told you."