by Brian Hodge
"Maybe it doesn't matter," Liz said, "as long as there are ninety-eight."
"Gut instinct? It matters," he said. "Magic's not open-ended. There are balances. Cause, effect. You've got a definite destination? You've got to have a definite origin."
Behind him, Abe tapped his flashlight against the edge of one of the cubicula closer to the floor, on the left side of the corridor.
"This gets my vote," he said.
Hellboy and Liz squatted down for a look. The human bones had been disturbed more here than inside the other recesses they'd checked. The skull had been shattered against its bed of stone, and in its place sat the skull of a bull. However long ago, it looked to have been put in place when fresh, scraps of leathery hide shriveled back from the muzzle and over the broad ivory dome, and the rock beneath it stained with blood and decay.
"I'll go first," Hellboy said. "We don't know one thing about what's on the other end of this. Neither of you have to follow."
"You know better than that, H.B.," Liz told him.
For better or for worse, he did.
Diagram in hand, he began, one two, counting under his breath as he measured each pace along the way, eighteen nineteen, doing his best to follow the path set down by Campbell's hand. The broad curves, the tighter zigzags, thirty-four, the double-backs before continuing ahead. Would anyone walk this way by accident? They might, and probably had somewhere, sixty-six, but if intent were a part of it too, as Kate had suggested, he had this covered as well, eighty-three, his will focused on making the crossing and nothing else, making the turn, pacing down the branching gallery and toward the side chamber, ninety-six
ninety-seven
ninety...
...eight.
Considering the totality of the displacement, the moment was remarkably calm, but he supposed it helped that he'd been walking in near-darkness, confined to a small battery-thrown pool of light. He didn't find the transition itself any more disorienting than he might have if he'd kept his head down while indoors, then lifted his gaze once he was outside.
Then his eyes truly registered the scale of the place.
Before he took another step, he grabbed a fat stub of chalk he'd stuffed into a pocket back in the apartment, stooped, and thickly marked the point of his entrance on the rocky floor. Pulled out a handful of chemical lights and snapped them into glowing life, scattered them into a soft blue circle, then moved out of the way.
Staring, impossible to take it all in at once, and he had to admit: Nothing could have prepared him to find this.
Footsteps behind him. Friendly, he assumed.
"Oh my god," Liz said. "This can't be real."
"It may not be real," Abe said, "but it's here."
Chapter 29
This would always be the greatest power of the unknown, the unknowable, Liz thought: to root your feet to the ground so thoroughly that the mere idea of movement seems impossible.
With a single step she'd crossed a threshold from one realm into another, from claustrophobia to agoraphobia, but that was the least of it. There were things the mind resisted, could barely begin to process...and this was one of them. Hubris and cruelty and decadence on a magnitude that defied imagination.
A few moments in and the panic started to hit, Liz whirling to look behind and realizing there was no doorway there anymore, no corridor either, no stone walls cut into file cabinets for the dead--How do I get back? How will I ever GET BACK?--and she imagined being trapped here forever. Abe must have sensed her sudden alarm and grabbed her wrist.
"If we walked into this place," he told her, fixing her with his aqua eyes as calm as a summer lake, "then we can walk out again...and will."
If you had to call it anything, you could call it a cavern, its distant rock walls gleaming with a black sheen like coal or wet obsidian...but no cavern this size could have existed near the undetected catacombs outside of Rome. This could have swallowed the catacombs, and maybe Rome too, if not for one thing: This place was not of the earth, nor in it, but alongside it, a few steps away in places where the borders between worlds had been rubbed thin. You couldn't fly to Heaven, you couldn't dig to Hell, and, as with Kate's oft-referred-to Faerie, the only way to get here was knowing where and how to walk.
But right now, her impulse was to run the other way.
She supposed it was large enough to contain its own weather. The roof was far enough above that it dissolved into a murky haze--not quite clouds, nor mists either--a veil over a weak source of light that cast this world into perpetual gloom.
So maybe it was a mercy that she couldn't see the Moloch any clearer.
It rose before them, above them, something a colossus could only aspire to be. It looked cut from the rock, and where rock was not enough, cast from ores that gleamed cold in the meager light. Its head was an eclipsing shadow, and the statue squatted upon the cavern floor as if poised to spring upright, so the horns might rip bleeding gashes between worlds.
And the arms. Dear god, the arms...
Passing between its knees and either side of the cauldron of its belly, its arms stretched down toward them, each hand resting palm-up on the cavern floor. Its right hand held a network of temples that intimidated with spikes and spires, battlements and buttresses. Its left hand...she couldn't tell. Whatever it held was smaller, lower, and from this distance all she knew was that they could only be a greater or lesser degree of terrible.
And so far, it all looked deserted.
"That's the best they could do?" Hellboy said, and whether he knew it or not, it was just the thing she needed to hear, that could pry her feet from the cavern floor.
He decided they should check out the structures built upon the left hand, since it wasn't as obvious what they were. They hadn't yet gotten there--hadn't even reached the terraced stairs at the tips of the spread fingers--when they started to find the first bodies.
Eight of them lay scattered on the cavern floor, and immediately reminded him of the armored car's hijackers, all bones and sinew, but in worse condition, much worse, as if most of the flesh and fat had been sucked out of them, to leave behind skeletal shells in a shrink-wrap of skin.
Except they still weren't dead.
They'd been on the verge of it for a very long time, and he wondered if it would ever truly arrive, even after their bodies started to fall apart, their term of servitude to the devils they'd courted never considered complete.
He knelt beside one of them, drawn by the clothing: filthy, ragged, blue-and-white remains of an old sailor shirt...fetish wear among certain young men in Weimar Berlin, Hellboy had learned. This one--aged hideously, unnaturally--must have been here since the very beginning.
Hellboy hauled him up by the shoulder, looked him in the face, could smell the stale dust of his breath. He looked at the hands and forearms, worn raw and callused so many times that they looked as though they'd been dipped in a yellow, cracking glaze. He looked into the eyes, red and runny and still trying to find what was right in front of them.
"Hey," Hellboy said. "Was it everything you hoped for?"
No answer. Hellboy laid him back onto the stone with more care than he probably deserved.
"I bet we're gonna find hundreds of these before we're through here," he said. "Maybe thousands."
"Even with tens of thousands--this?" Abe said, and pointed at everything that towered overhead. "They could do this?"
"They're slaves, Abe. They just had the whips put to them on the inside."
He thought of the Egyptians who had built the pyramids, so many of them that today their graves were like a city in the desert. Frightening to speculate on what they might have built had they been hosts to devils.
"But watch yourselves," he warned. "There must be some left around here in better shape than the rest. Newer ones, maybe, haven't been used up like the oldest. Those are the ones they must've thrown at us on the outside."
They pushed on, ascending the steps to the plateau of the left hand, walking the length
of one finger until the structures here began to gel into context. Machinery, it all turned out to be, dark and oiled, still gleaming with the kind of newness that can only be preserved with a lack of use, and the greatest hope he could extend toward it was that it never would be. It was an open-air slaughterhouse, an abattoir turned inside-out and rebuilt in a ring around the outer edges of the palm. An elaborate network of drains and gutters had been built to channel the runoff toward the center, where it would spill over the sides and...
Disappear.
There was no center of the palm. Just a hole. No, not even that. A hole implied edges, inner walls, and this, after a certain depth, had none. Bottomless? Probably not, but who could tell? It was a well as big around as a stadium, descending into a vortex that churned and swirled with infinite shades of darkness. He could think of nothing worse than what might one day be drawn from it.
You belong to two worlds, Moloch had told him through a borrowed throat. You exist to open the doorway between them.
Holding onto the housing of a contraption built for a crosscut saw the length of a telephone pole, he stared out into it, like a lake of blackest storm clouds.
That doorway has never been closer...
He wondered if it was just his imagination...
There are other ways of opening the door. And it will open.
...or if Abe and Liz heard it whispering too.
What you must do, and do soon, is decide how you will be greeted by what comes through.
"With fear, I hope," he whispered back. "That'll do just fine."
He became aware of a closer voice, and turned to find Abe and Liz wearing expressions edging toward concern, as if they'd had to call him a few times to get his attention. He gave it now, full and undivided.
"What exactly have they done here?" Liz asked.
"I doubt we'll ever know it all," he said, "but my take? This whole place is an antechamber to Hell. A way to connect Hell and Earth, even though they're never supposed to be connected." He gestured toward the cavern. "This space and time here...I think it already existed. Parallel world, whatever--possible to get to from our side. They just reworked it to what it is now....
"That group from Berlin wanted Hell on Earth?" He shook his head. "Hell has its own timetable, and doesn't tolerate rivals. But it wasn't above using those people to put Hell one step closer." He pointed at the vortex, surrounded by its engine of suffering. "Once they're able to put this all the way through, the rest would probably be easy. It's the back door into our world."
Not just through the catacombs that had led them here, either, Hellboy thought. He had a feeling that another passage dumped out somewhere in the heart of Rome, if only because of how quickly the hijackers had ended up at the armored car.
In fact, it wouldn't have surprised him to learn that there were several portals to and from this realm, in the hidden places beneath the surface of the earth. The sewers of Berlin and Moscow, maybe; the subways of London and New York. And if there were, it seemed reasonable to believe that they'd been swallowing the innocent, as well as those who came willingly to serve.
They found the proof of this a little later, along another section of the abattoir, where a body hung by the neck from a framework of pipes surrounding gears and grinders. An obviously new arrival, she wore jeans and a bright pullover top, and had fashioned her noose from the straps of a nylon backpack that lay near the dangling tips of her shoes.
If you'd come to surrender your soul, would you bring it in a backpack?
They took her down, even though there was no soil here to bury her. They took her down because it seemed the only thing to do, unknotting the strap from around her bruised and purple throat. With a careful fingertip, Liz pulled free the strands of hair, dyed a cheerfully unnatural red, that had caught in the corners of her mouth. She looked dead only a day or two, but that might have been an illusion, because in this place, this new Tartarus, decay seemed to come in its own interminable time.
In her backpack they found a university ID and three books, plus notebooks and pens, a portable CD player and discs and headphones, lipstick and more. Liz folded it up, pack and all, and put it in her own backpack.
And in one pocket of the girl's jeans was the last thing she must have written:
Si je suis deja en enfer, est-ce encore un suicide?
Hellboy handed the note to Liz. "You know French, don't you? A little?"
She took it, even though she looked as if he were handing her a bouquet of thorns. She gave it a long perusal.
So much for needing intent to walk the path into this place.
" 'If I'm already in Hell, is it still suicide?' " she read aloud, and her eyes never moved, and her expression didn't change, as her hand flickered blue and orange, the paper slowly curling to brown and black, then sifting into fine gray ash.
They made the crossing from left hand to right, one ebony mesa to the other. To Hellboy it felt like they'd done it in less than two hours, but he allowed that time passed strangely here. At their right, the Moloch statue was a constant presence, an eternal threat. He wondered if its pendulous belly was hollow, a furnace that could burn entire forests and send flames roaring up a throat and out the mouth so far above.
More bodies? Those too, in ones and twos and by the dozen, and at their worst it became like walking through the site of a mass suicide, another Jonestown Massacre, except these sometimes twitched or tried to crawl, to reach, to bite. It was worse than if they'd been able to attack--he could deal with that, had been dealing with things trying to kill him all his life. Not this, though, these fields of bodies wallowing in the rags of clothing last in style before the Nazi Party came to power. Whenever he and Liz and Abe left them behind, in the unearthly quiet on echoing stone, they continued to hear the clicking of nails and teeth for a long time after, and the wheezing of desiccated lungs.
If these people, and the things that wore their skins, had succeeded in obtaining the scroll from the armored car, he had no doubts that they would have brought it back here. He couldn't think of any reason why they still wouldn't. And if he didn't yet understand what the scroll meant to them, why they wanted it so fiercely, he had a feeling he was getting closer to it with every step.
Now that they were here, the right hand held what looked to him like a city center of cathedrals run amok, architectural cancers meant to petrify instead of uplift. They wandered its streets, the bodies even more abundant here, a hellish Calcutta where they were all dying, eternally, sprawled in streets and propped against walls like beggars too weak to lift their hands.
It was noisier here, too. Now and again they would hear a shriek--maybe rage, maybe pain, maybe madness--and the walls and cavern kept the echoes alive forever.
Soon a new sound whispered around the corners, then rapidly began to build with a fearsome energy: footsteps, a multitude of them, on the run.
"Guns out," Hellboy said. "I've got a feeling these might be the ones that were supposed to intercept us the other night."
They stood back-to-back and triangulated, Liz at his left shoulder and Abe at his right. The way things echoed here, it was hard to tell exactly where the stampede was coming from.
"And remember," he added, in case anyone had forgotten how the armored car's crew had fallen, "don't let these things get close enough to bite."
Moments later a group of bottom-dwellers--there had to be at least thirty of them--poured out of the passageway between two of the baroque black walls ahead of him. They may have been lean and leathery, but there was nothing feeble about them. They looked able-bodied enough to do damage--latter-day disciples who'd arrived long after the Berliners littering the caverns and streets, or maybe those that Tartarus had ensnared and then converted.
"We've got more back here, too," Abe said.
Hellboy cursed and started to aim. Flanked from two sides, they couldn't handle this simply by stepping back and letting Liz broil them as they came head-on. This was happening too fast, and she needed ti
me to get control, and Abe was too close to risk it if she didn't. No, they'd have to do this the messy way.
At his shoulders, they started shooting at the attackers coming up from behind.
Abe and Liz carried nine-millimeter automatics with high-capacity magazines. In one sense Hellboy was at a disadvantage, stuck with a six-shooter after all, but then, what it lacked in capacity it made up for in firepower. It could put rounds through a cinderblock wall as though it were cardboard. Flesh and bone were no barriers at all.
He chose his shots carefully as they came, didn't fire until he could take them lined up one after another, five and six deep, then he would squeeze the trigger and drop them by the handful, blasting through the chest of the first one, the huge round tearing out his back and into the next one, and so on, like watching them fall to a reaper's scythe.
Behind him, Abe and Liz were firing more quickly, brass casings bouncing underfoot across the stone. Men, women, and dear god even children...without the advantages of night and surprise they had no chance, yet they kept coming no matter how many fell around them, hurled into harm's way by masters to whom they were expendable.
The gunfire rolled through the darkened canyons in overlapping echoes, and Hellboy was already feeling sick with revulsion by the time he dug into his pocket for a speedloader to feed the revolver's cylinder another six rounds. His bullets, Abe's bullets, Liz's...they were only finishing the work begun years ago, decades ago. Bodies crumpled and disintegrated, they came apart and splashed the streets with blood and bile. He cursed at the senselessness of it. This was Hell's idea of sport, idle amusement. Like throwing water balloons at them.
Ahead of him, the last survivors were starting to fan out--one bullet, one kill now. With his gun reloaded for the third time, he moved forward, saving his shots for the ones that looked like they might be trying to slip around and come at them from the side. The ones directly in front he let get close enough to punch or backhand, swatting them to the ground and grimacing at the feel of breaking bones.