The Ice Wolves

by Mark Chadbourn

  The drawing room smelled of beeswax polish, and in the sitting room all of the furniture broken during Hellboy’s battle with the spider was now as new. The occult artifacts were in their original places, but they too had a new life. They appeared to shine with an inner light, and when Hellboy approached any of them he felt a rustling in the back of his head, as if they were calling out to him.

  Touch me. Use my power.

  “Keep away from everything you see here,” Hellboy stressed.

  “How many of these things have you tried to use, Dad?” Brad asked.

  “I’m not interested in any of them.”

  “Just the Kiss of Winter. The big one. No point wasting time with the small fish.”

  William’s modulated voice grew sharper. “Abraham didn’t bring them here for power. He was after knowledge.”

  Hellboy glanced at him askance. “You sure about that?”

  “Over the year I’ve lived here, I’ve started to know Abraham’s mind. He was searching for something always just beyond his reach. These artifacts were part of that quest. I’m sure he felt the Kiss of Winter was the final and most valuable part of the puzzle he was trying to solve, which is why he hid it so well.”

  “And the wolves want it, because with the Kiss and the Heart they can bring about the Time of the Black Sun and the Rise of the Wolves,” Hellboy said thoughtfully.

  “The Rise of the Wolves,” Lisa repeated with a shiver. “Imagine if that army out there took control. We’d be the prey.”

  “Okay, knowing Abraham’s mind is a good thing. We established that,” Hellboy said. “If you’re getting inside his head, where would he hide the Kiss of Winter?”

  William thought for a moment, then shook his head.

  They ventured out into the hall and were surprised to see gas lamps alight on opposite walls. The warm light was comforting, but it only made the rest of the house appear darker.

  In the far reaches below them, they heard a sound like a ball bouncing along the bare boards of a corridor. A dim creak, and, after a long silence, a cough.

  “They like their games,” Hellboy said. “Let’s go.”

  Holding the lamp aloft, he led the way down the stairs. The first floor was no longer bare. Pictures hung on the walls, and there was a new carpet running down the center of the landing. Here and there an incidental table stood with ornaments, strongly scented flowers, or silver-framed cameos.

  “Looks like they’ve been doing some remodeling,” Hellboy noted. “I like their style.”

  “I can hear something.” Brad summoned them over to a bedroom door. Pressing his ear to the door, he silenced them. “Voices. Lots of them.”

  The others could just about hear it too. “Horses?” Lisa said. “Is . . . is that a cart rolling by?”

  “A whistle,” William said confidently.

  “Let me.” Hellboy opened the door.

  Instead of a bedroom, they were shocked to be looking out on a busy city street from a hundred or more years in the past. Horses and carriages rolled by, and men with hats and handlebar moustaches darted among them across the road or strolled on the sidewalk. An old woman in a threadbare shawl sold flowers to another in an elegant summer-blue dress. They could smell the horse manure, the heat of the sun on the sidewalk, the scent of the flowers and the trees that lined the avenue.

  “Whoa,” Hellboy gaped.

  The old flower seller looked directly at them, and through them.

  “They can’t see us,” Lisa noted. She grabbed the handle from Hellboy and slammed the door shut. “Too weird,” she added.

  Brad gaped. “That . . . that . . . ”

  “Was another time,” William finished. His eyes glowed with excitement. “The door opened on another time, and another place.”

  “A vision,” Hellboy stressed. “A glimpse into the past, that’s all.”

  “But with sound, and smell,” Lisa added, puzzled.

  William stepped by the others and eased the door open cautiously, but this time there was only a bedroom, smelling of lavender, with a mahogany wardrobe and an iron-framed bed covered in a floral quilt. William’s face fell.

  “This is the work of the Kiss and Heart of Winter, right?” Lisa asked.

  “It’s warping everything,” Hellboy said. He glanced at the line of doors along the landing. “I wonder.”

  Moving to the nearest door, he rested a hand on the wood. “Hmm. Hot.”

  “Don’t,” Brad said, his expression troubled. There was an odd note to his voice as if he knew what was to come.

  “Go on,” William said, eagerly. “We have to see.”

  Hellboy opened the door and was instantly assailed by a baking heat, a billowing cloud of acrid smoke, and a cacophony of shrieks and cries. The doorway opened onto a souk in a whitewashed but badly degraded Middle Eastern city; buildings were pockmarked with bullet and shrapnel holes. A bomb had just exploded somewhere in the heart of the market, and flames rushed through the jumble of stalls beneath a pall of greasy smoke. Locals ran in terror, their faces charred, their clothes bloodstained. The remnants of bodies were just visible among the wreckage.

  “Close the door!” Brad yelled.

  Comforting Brad, Lisa silently motioned for Hellboy to shut the door. “That was Iraq,” she said.

  “It was more than that. It was something I lived through. Something awful.” The posttraumatic stress brought a convulsive shudder through Brad, but with Lisa’s help he managed to contain the attack.

  “You want to go back upstairs?” Hellboy asked.

  “No. I’ll deal with it. I always have. With Lisa’s help.”

  Taken aback by his son’s extreme reaction, William eyed Brad curiously.

  Hellboy was intrigued by the vision and how it underscored his initial impressions back in old Beacon Hill. “Interesting,” Hellboy said. “Maybe the doors don’t open to random times. That one was linked to Brad. Somehow he was connecting with whatever’s going on here.”

  William grew even more excited. “Yes! Earlier this evening I’d been researching through some books about occult investigations in New York at the end of the nineteenth century.”

  “That’s what we saw through the last door,” Lisa said. “So . . . do you think we can go through these doors to wherever we want?”

  “Let’s try.” Going to another door, Hellboy concentrated for a moment, then opened it. A blast of icy wind tore across desolate, frozen wastes at sunset. Hellboy closed the door.

  “Was that what you wanted?” Lisa asked.

  “I was after December 1944, East Bromwich, England.”

  “Maybe the Kiss connects with unconscious desires,” William mused. “If so, that makes it hard to control.”

  “So who was thinking about that cold hell?” Hellboy asked.

  Brad shrugged. “I was planning a trip to Antarctica. To take some photos for a climate-change piece.”

  From the floor below came a low, rumbling sound like a note of disapproval formed deep in the throat.

  Lisa took a step closer to Hellboy. “What was that?”

  Raising the lamp, Hellboy illuminated the path toward the stairs. A footstep, heavy and dragging, rose up from the landing below.

  “Something’s coming.” As Hellboy took a step toward the stairs, Lisa caught his arm.

  “I think I know what it is. You remember the pig? With the missing eyes—”

  She was interrupted by a wheezing breath sounding uncannily close in the stillness. Something heavy lumbered against the banister. A foot on the first step.

  “Let’s go back,” she pleaded. “At least till this has passed.”

  “No,” William snapped. “We need to explore where these doors lead.”

  Brad confronted him. “If Lisa wants to go back, that’s what we do.”

  The lamp flame wavered, although there was no breeze. “Uh-oh,” Hellboy said.

  A second later, the light went out, and the entire landing was plunged into darkness. Instantly,
Hellboy grabbed hold of Brad and Lisa before whatever was coming could get to them. “William,” he called, but there was no response.

  Pressing them back against the wall, Hellboy located the nearest door and barged into the room with Brad and Lisa, hoping to go back for William. The shock of finding himself in daylight on a grassy hill gave him pause, and when he looked back, the door was gone.

  “Okay, this is not good,” he said.

  Brad and Lisa sprawled in the long grass where they had fallen from Hellboy’s thrust. Scrambling to her feet, Lisa looked round at a landscape that bore none of the scars of the twenty-first century—no roads, pylons, or train tracks. The air was fresh and clear without the hint of pollution. Instead, there was the scent of deep, cool forests, and wildflowers, and of the warm sun on the swaying grass.

  “Okay, question,” she said. “How do we get back?”

  “Doesn’t look like we’ll be hitchin’ a ride,” Hellboy replied. “This is a vision, but it feels real. Where are we?”

  “No landmarks round here. Could be anywhere.” Brad brushed himself down. “Could be anywhen. Maybe over the hill?”

  “When you found yourself back in old Beacon Hill with Abe Grant, you popped right back to the present,” Lisa said to Hellboy. “Maybe that’s how it works.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  “If we’re just visiting, we might as well enjoy the scenery . . . and work out exactly why this place is important.” Lisa saw Brad looked troubled. “What’s wrong?”

  “Dad. He’s left there with . . . that thing.”

  “We got out. Your father could too,” Hellboy said.

  As they crested the hill, a plain revealed itself to them, with a river meandering across it, and next to it a village with medieval architecture. A jumble of houses with red-tiled roofs lay amid a maze of winding, narrow, cobbled streets. The largest building was a stone monastery with an adjoining church, and a tall bell tower. Just inside the walls, pigs and chickens roamed in a sea of mud. Behind the village, on the far side of the river plain, densely forested hills rose up to the blue sky.

  “Pretty,” Lisa said. “Any clues?”

  “I’m going to say . . . Eastern Europe?” Hellboy replied. “Looks like some of the places I’ve come across in my travels. Maybe Bulgaria? The Kapinovo Monastery just outside Veliko Tarnovo, maybe? I saw drawings of the old monastery and it looked just like that.”

  “So if every door in the house opened onto somewhere relevant to us, why here?” Brad asked.

  “I don’t know about relevant to us, but relevant, yeah,” Hellboy said.

  “If this is a vision, how can we feel sensations?” Lisa asked, holding a hand up to shield her eyes from the sun.

  “Who knows?” Hellboy replied. “But it makes it more real. Come on.”

  They stumbled down the hillside, enjoying the warmth after the bitter chill of Boston. But by the time they had reached the foot, tremors began to run through the ground.

  “What’s that?” Brad asked. “Stampede?”

  “They wouldn’t have that much cattle at this time. A village this size . . . probably twenty cows at most.” Hellboy looked along the sparkling river toward the horizon for the source of the vibrations. After a moment, a blur of movement rounded one of the foothills, a wave of figures which he estimated was almost half a mile across. Their peculiar loping motion sent him flashing back to Mount Vernon Street when the army of werewolves had swept across Boston, but this time there were far more. The wolves moved into the plain and headed straight for the village.

  “How many are there?” Brad said incredulously. “Looks like . . . I don’t know . . . a thousand?”

  The monastery’s bell began to toll furiously, drawing men out from the houses and the surrounding fields to clamber onto the walls to view the approaching army.

  “Looks to me like the villagers were expecting them,” Hellboy noted. “Let’s get inside there—see what happens.”

  They broke into a run as the howls and snarls reached them on the breeze. A narrow stone bridge took them across the river, and then they were at the walls just as the villagers were dragging the sturdy gates shut. As they slipped through the gap, the gates slammed behind them and a large oak beam slid into place.

  “For the sake of these people, let’s hope the wolves give this place a wide berth, because that isn’t going to keep out squat,” Hellboy said.

  In the middle of the muddy square beyond the gate, where the squawking chickens ran and the women frantically gathered together the playing children, stood a priest, his face grave, his hands clasped on the front of his black robe. A man of about thirty, in dusty clothes, ran up to him and begged in English to know what was happening.

  “Why are you here?” the priest replied in heavily accented English.

  “You can speak English, Father?”

  “A little. For a time I attended the French court before traveling east to build this monastery. I ask again, why are you here?”

  “I am traveling to the east,” he said in a scared voice. “I came here looking for food. What is happening?”

  Along the walls, the men called to each other as they lit burning torches and passed out farm weapons to defend themselves.

  “The wolves are coming,” the priest said.

  As the priest led the visitor up worn stone steps to the shaky wooden walkway around the walls, Hellboy, Lisa, and Brad followed, feeling odd to be in the middle of life, yet be unnoticed. At the top they could clearly see the wave of fang and claw rushing toward them. All around the men blanched, but attempted to put on brave faces.

  “This is the third wave,” the priest said to the visitor. “The first passed a mile to the north. The second slaughtered our cattle and took the lives of three men working in the fields. This time we prepare for the worst.”

  “The third wave?” Lisa said incredulously. “Look at how many there are. There’s not been any sign of them in modern times, so where did they all go?”

  “I don’t know,” Hellboy replied.

  The ground shook with the thunder of more than a thousand feet.

  “We’re right in their path,” Brad noted. “They’re not going to miss the village this time.”

  Hellboy rested his hands on the wall and peered at the advancing army. “Three waves of werewolves, all of them passing this way. Where are they going?”

  “They travel east,” the priest said to the visitor, but it was almost as if he were answering Hellboy. “Toward the frozen lands, or so say the stories that have reached us from the path of slaughter they have carved across the land. For generation upon generation, the wolves have haunted the west, but now they are leaving it behind. Why? I do not know. But I thank the Lord, and pray the Devil is at their heels.”

  “This is why we’re here, isn’t it?” Lisa whispered in awe to Hellboy.

  The priest grew pale. “There is a prophecy in the Church: the Time of the Black Sun.”

  “What is that?” the visitor asked.

  “The Time of the Black Sun is the end for all humankind. The wolves will rise up in their multitude and feed upon us, like the solitary wolf feeds on the lambs in the field. They have hidden among us since we left the Garden. They carry the mark of Cain upon them, and his essence in their black hearts. All humankind will be torn apart, and feasted upon, and when the blood has finally soaked into the soil, there will only be the wolves and the never-ending forest and the moon, and our time will be done.”

  “Just like we thought,” Lisa said breathlessly. “So if the wolves get the Kiss of Winter in our time, that’s what’s going to happen? It’s the end of everything. We’ll just be food.”

  The wolves were less than a mile away now, and the sound they made was loud and sickening. The men grasped their paltry weapons, the recognition of the futility of their stand clear in all their faces.

  The priest closed his eyes. “I pray the wolves will pass us by. Let the Lord watch over us.”

  Brad mapp
ed their path, then looked to Hellboy and shook his head. “Why are they leaving?” he asked. “Where are they going?”

  “Somethin’ big’s going on.”

  Hellboy, Brad, and Lisa watched until the wolves were close enough to see their black eyes glittering in the sunlight, their vast number so terrifying it was difficult to look at them. They appeared like one beast, one mind, ferocious, brutal, with no hint of compassion.

  “Father, these men on the walls cannot defend against those things,” the visitor said fearfully.

  “They want to protect their families, their homes, their livelihoods.”

  “Would you have them standing here trying to ward off a storm?”

  The priest considered the visitor’s words and then raced along the walls yelling at the villagers in their dialect. Reluctantly, they threw down their weapons, but the relief in their faces was palpable.

  Quickly, the men barricaded themselves in their homes, though even then Hellboy wondered what chance they would have. It all depended on if the wolves stopped to feed.

  Hellboy, Brad, and Lisa followed the priest and the visitor to the monastery, where a small band of monks knelt and prayed in Latin. Looking out of the window at the village’s paltry defenses, Hellboy felt a wave of queasiness.

  “This isn’t going to be good,” he muttered.

  The wolves hit the village like the storm the visitor had predicted. The gates splintered and burst in, and within seconds the livestock were dead and devoured. The wolves continued directly on their path, many of them leaping onto the walls from the ground and continuing over the roofs of the tiny houses, shattering tiles and knocking off chimney pots as they ran.

  Some, though, were consumed by a hunger, and they sought to break into the homes along their route. From the window, Hellboy watched the carnage, feeling sick that he couldn’t help. He slammed his fist against the wall in angry frustration, but it didn’t help. As the terrible screams carried across the village, Lisa covered her ears and Brad sat, head in hands.

  The village was a sea of fury. Whenever Hellboy thought no more wolves could enter, a new rank crashed through the gate and surged over the walls. Every square inch was alive with sinuous lupine bodies filled with a tremendous muscular power and athleticism; humans did look like sheep alongside their unstoppable killing prowess. After a while, all Hellboy could see were those snapping jaws and glittering black eyes, and in its intensity, it really did resemble the end of the world.