William’s voice was flat and dead: “I did have something to do with your mother’s disappearance.”
Hellboy saw Brad flinch, his eyes narrowing. He was ready to act if Brad lost control.
“I’m as bad as you always said I was, Brad,” he replied. “A bad husband as well as a bad father. I drove your mother away.” He saw the anger flare in Brad’s eyes and added hastily, “Not that. I never laid a hand on her. I would never hurt her. Sometimes the less dramatic things are the most damaging. I was . . . cold. Insular. I never learned how to give your mother the emotion she wanted. I never tried, if truth be told. And we argued, and fought, and I think after a while she came to hate me. At least . . . she didn’t love me anymore. And one day she’d had enough.”
“Mom left me,” Brad said, devastated.
William covered his face, suddenly looking very old. “That’s the only explanation I can find, Brad. God knows, I’ve thought about it enough. We argued that day, and then she walked out, and she never came back.”
“I don’t believe it. Mom wouldn’t have left me like that.”
“I don’t know, and that’s the thing—we’re never going to know,” he said wearily. “We’re not so different, you and I. We’ve both wasted our lives waiting for a truth that will never come. Waiting for some moment of blinding revelation. Waiting for the door to open, the bell to ring. Picking up the newspaper every morning, fearing an answer, hoping for one too. In the end, it defined every aspect of my life. The bitter, cold, not-knowing consumed everything. Somewhere deep inside was the person I used to be, but there was no way of reaching him. Finding out what happened to your mother, discovering if she was alive or dead, and escaping that torment was the only thing that mattered to me.”
Hellboy watched a connection grow between Brad and William, common ground that neither of them realized existed.
“I thought . . . I hoped . . . you’d just get on with your life if I let you be.” William’s eyes were luminous in the lamplight. “I didn’t want you poisoned by my misery.”
Brad shook his head, his own eyes gleaming. “You heard about the Kiss of Winter . . . what it could do. Breaking the barriers between life and death. You think Mom’s dead, and you thought you could get back to her.”
“That was the only hope I have of redeeming myself. Without that, there’s nothing. No point.”
“And even if you couldn’t cross that barrier, there’s always the past,” Brad continued. “You could go back to when she was alive. Maybe even follow her on that day that she disappeared.”
“And I’d find out the truth, for good or bad. And finally I’d have peace.”
“Then we can do it together!”
William shook his head forcefully. “My life is over, Brad. I’ve wasted it. You’ve still got a chance. Don’t let yourself be consumed by the past anymore. It’s like a drug, always pulling you in, always promising you answers, but disappointing at each turn while offering something else to keep striving for. Some things we’ll never know. We just have to deal with it and move on.”
“How can I do that?”
William nodded toward Lisa. “You’ve got someone who can help you now.”
Brad sighed. “I just want to know what happened to her.”
“No. You don’t. The details of what happened aren’t important. Whatever the truth, it’s not going to be good. But just knowing the question’s been answered, that’s the important thing. It’s about putting to rest the things that haunt us, and moving on.”
Hellboy felt uncomfortable amid the raw emotions, but both Brad and William were oblivious to him.
“The past always tries to sink its claws into you, dragging you back, always back,” William said. “We both have to find a way to shake it off once and for all, and look to the future.”
“So it doesn’t matter what happened, just that we know there is an answer?”
William nodded.
“I don’t know if I could live with that.”
William stared deep into Brad’s face for a moment, and then surprised him with a forceful hug. “I’m going to find a way to put things right for you,” he whispered.
Hellboy saw Lisa had come to a sudden halt at the top of the final flight of stairs down to the attic room. “Do you hear that?” she said.
At first, there was only the ringing silence, but as his ears grew accustomed to what lay behind it, he heard faint whispers echoing behind the walls. Though it didn’t appear to be a foreign language, the words were incomprehensible.
“They’re waking,” William said.
Hellboy started down the stairs. “We all know where this is ending up. We’re nearly there now.”
By the time they reached the door to the attic room at the bottom of the house, the whispers were punctuated by occasional bursts of laughter that sounded like steam escaping from a pipe.
“I don’t like the noises they’re making.” Lisa kept looking over her shoulder up the dark stairs. “It sounds like they’re happy. That can’t be good.”
“Keep moving,” Hellboy urged. “We’re too close to go back. Not that we have a choice.”
He swung the door open and marched in. The room was as empty as always, with only the four paintings hanging on the wall, illuminated in turn by Hellboy’s lamp.
“Nothing’s changed?” Lisa said.
“You’re not seeing what I’m seeing.” Hellboy adjusted the opera glasses as he followed the blue trail up the wall. It became a rectangle on the wall in the space left by the missing painting.
“What are you seeing?” Brad asked.
“A door. Or a mark where a door could be.”
“You were right, then,” Lisa said. “Know my mind. Sarah was always the key. Here, the absence of Sarah is the path to the Kiss of Winter, and, in Abraham’s head, the path back to Sarah herself.”
“Does it open?” Brad asked.
“Careful,” William cautioned. “There may be another layer of protection. That’s been the pattern for this place.”
“I can’t see a handle,” Hellboy said. “What am I supposed to do? Say, open sesame?” He paused. “Open sesame.” Nothing happened. “Okay, worth a try. Scratch that.”
“How about knocking?” Lisa said.
“When you do that, something usually answers,” Hellboy noted. “So maybe you ought to stand back.”
As he raised his right hand to hammer on the wall, a distorted face thrust its way out of the plaster.
“Whoa!” Hellboy took a step back. “Nearly hammered you on the nose.”
Appearing to be a part of the wall itself, the face resembled a Notre Dame gargoyle, with a hooked nose, pointed ears, lowering brow over shadowed eyes, and an elongated chin. “What is the word?” it said in a rasping voice.
“What . . . It wants a password?” Lisa queried.
“Could be.” Hellboy rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “What do you figure?”
“Come on—what important word would Abraham use to get to the thing he valued most?” Brad pressed. “Has to be.”
“Okay. Let’s give it a shot.” Hellboy leaned in so his nose was a few inches away from the gargoyle. “Sarah,” he intoned clearly.
“ROOOAAARGH!” The gargoyle tore open its mouth and released a furious blast that flung them back head over heels to crash against the window wall.
His head ringing, Hellboy lurched to his feet. “Got any more great ideas, Brad?”
“Uh . . . no.” Brad helped Lisa up, and then, after a second’s hesitation, offered his hand to his father.
“If that was the first refusal, I’m not sure I want to experience the next,” Lisa said.
Hellboy nodded. “If the password isn’t something obvious, we could be here all day.”
“Frankly, I’m not sure I could survive one more of those, never mind a whole day’s worth,” William said, rubbing his arms.
“Eliza Grant led us here,” Hellboy noted. “She wouldn’t have done that if it was hopeless. Th
is is just part of the puzzle. The password’s got to be hidden somewhere else. Let’s go back to the hall and follow the second trail.”
“Thank you,” Lisa stressed with relief. “One less minute spent down here makes me happy.”
But once they had stepped through the attic-room door, Hellboy realized everything had changed. The whispering behind the walls had reached a crescendo of insane shrieking, so loud they had to clutch their ears, and behind it all there was the deep, heavy rhythm they had heard before, like the slow pound of distant machinery. Hellboy thought instantly that it sounded like a heartbeat.
LUB. DUB. LUB. DUB.
“Let’s get out of here!” he shouted.
Hellboy could sense the mood growing more intense.
Something’s coming, he thought.
He saw the others felt it too. Lisa’s hand went to her mouth as she felt the rising threat mutate into the feeling of dread she had experienced before.
“Something’s coming,” she said.
“Yep,” Hellboy replied. “Probably best not to think about that either.”
When they rounded onto the next landing, they were brought up sharp by the sight of the walls along the length of the corridor bowing out, like an inflating balloon. Specks of moisture glistened along the surface as though it were bleeding.
Hellboy scraped his fingers along the wall. “Hmm? Oily.”
The heartbeat grew louder, and the walls began to pulse in time.
Hellboy glanced back down the stairs they had just climbed, unsure if the threat lay at their backs or ahead. The shadows behind swelled with a life of their own, but as he looked up the next flight of stairs he saw the same effect, as if something were taking shape within the dark.
“Run!” he shouted.
The next landing passed in a blur of distortion and deafening noise; the heartbeat now sounded like they were in the middle of an enormous factory, with machines pounding all around.
As they raced up the final flight toward the hall, Hellboy felt something invisible sweep by and catch Brad square on. Flying backward, he crashed on the landing below, dazed.
“Brad!” Lisa scrambled back down the stairs to him. William hesitated for only a second and then followed.
“Dammit!” Hellboy snapped.
As Brad struggled to his feet, his head snapped back suddenly as though he had been struck, and then he was thrown roughly against the wall. He slumped down half conscious.
The lamplight began to dim. The flame flickered, grew smaller.
“Aww, no! Not again!” Hellboy said.
All around the dark pulsed and began to draw its arms tightly around them until it felt like some terrible presence was standing only inches away. The pounding continued; the shrieks behind the wall rose even louder.
“What’s wrong with him?” Lisa cried desperately. Blood trickled from Brad’s nose, then his ears and eyes. Involuntarily, Lisa’s hand went to her own nose and came back slick and dark. William pivoted at the waist. Blood spattered on the floorboards. “What’s happening?”
“We need to get out of here!” Hellboy searched for the threat, but it felt like it was everywhere, and nowhere. Hauling Brad onto his shoulders, he attempted to bound up the stairs, but a tremendous force swatted him back down. He crashed on the floor next to Lisa.
“That bastard doesn’t want us to get past him,” he said. “Now I’m angry.”
Climbing to his feet, he used the opera glasses to try to see what was in the dark. But as he swept round, he was surprised to see the figure of a woman along the landing, beckoning to him frantically.
Hellboy saw Brad shake his head as he started to come to his senses. Blood streamed across his lips.
“Brad! Brad!” he called. “Eliza Grant. Long black hair, pale skin, sad eyes?”
“Ye . . . yeah,” Brad muttered.
“Come on.” Hellboy herded Brad, Lisa, and William toward the shimmering apparition only he could see. Terror contorted Eliza’s face; Hellboy understood that even the ghosts were scared of what hunted them. He was sure he could hear its rasping breath at his back, even above the cacophony, and feel the awful gravity of its presence. He didn’t like to run, but his first priority was to keep the others safe.
Close now, he thought. Too damn close!
Eliza tore at her hair, her mouth in the O of a silent scream. She indicated a door next to her.
Hellboy didn’t think twice. He tore open the door and thrust the others through it. As he stumbled after them, the door slammed behind him as if the thing at their backs had wrenched it shut in a monstrous rage.
The house was gone. They were somewhere else.
CHAPTER 20
—
A freezing wind blew across a desolate landscape of jumbled, protruding rocks and thick snow falling away down a slope toward a dense, dark forest which stretched out toward the horizon, where the treetops were covered in a thin silver mist. Behind them, the mountain soared up to a row of peaks disappearing into the distance beneath a sky streaked pink and yellow, slowly turning to powder blue as the sun rose. The air was crisp, clean, and fresh, unpolluted. A new day, a new world.
Lisa, Brad, and William were wracked with shivers from the cold, the blood drying quickly on their faces. Hellboy examined them in turn, but whatever had afflicted them in the house had passed.
“What was that?” Brad asked, his teeth clattering.
“I don’t know,” Hellboy admitted. “Some kind of demon. Powerful. I’m guessing that’s the big cheese in the house, trapped there by the Kiss. Whatever it is, it’s going to be waiting for us when we get back.” He looked around at the unspoiled landscape. “Another vision. As real as the last time.”
“What’s the importance of this time and place?” Lisa asked.
“It looked to me like Eliza was guiding us through this door,” Hellboy said. “She wanted us to be here for some reason. I’m wondering if the help we’ve been getting has come from her and Sarah, the good spirits trapped in the house.”
“But do you trust Eliza?” William asked.
“I do,” Brad said.
“Pretty place. But cold. I’ve really had enough of cold. Let’s go.” Hellboy set out down the slope with big strides, the others struggling to keep up.
By the time they reached the trees the temperature had warmed enough to make their progress bearable. Rabbits scattered through the undergrowth ahead of them, and here and there deer grazed. The forest was ancient, trunks too thick for three men to encircle, gnarled and twisted, branches reaching out high over their heads. Glittering streams ran down from the mountainside along channels lined with bracken and lichen-encrusted rock. Every now and then they came to peaceful pools of dark water where silver fish swam among shafts of sunlight breaking through the leaf cover.
“Seems deserted,” Hellboy noted. “Gotta be something worth seein’ round here.”
Eventually they broke through the trees into an area of grassland broken by granite outcroppings. Beyond, the downs fell into a deep, heavily wooded valley system where the mist still drifted.
“Look at this.” William indicated low piles of rocks almost hidden among the yellow grass. They were scattered all around the area.
“Cairns,” Hellboy said. “So there are people here somewhere.”
“What are they?” Brad asked.
“Burial mounds. Prehistoric.” Hellboy considered the evidence. “So, what? Neolithic? Paleolithic?”
“A long, long time ago,” Lisa said dreamily. “Should we look for the people who built these? Maybe they’re the reason we’re here. Wouldn’t that be a rush!”
Hellboy motioned to a gray wolf loping out of the tree line towards them.
Brad flinched. “Is that—?”
“Just the regular variety,” Hellboy said. He watched it carefully, wondering if there was any relevance to its appearance.
As the wolf passed one of the cairns, a moss-covered rock rolled off it and bounced across the grass. The
wolf watched it until it came to a halt.
“They need to build these things better,” Brad said.
“Yeah,” Hellboy said thoughtfully. Looking around, he tried to estimate how many cairns there were in the vicinity. Something had set his nerves jangling.
More rocks rolled off the cairn. A second later, a bony hand raked out of the hole left by the falling rocks and snapped around the wolf’s rear leg. It fought furiously to free itself.
The cairn burst open, showering rocks all around as the occupant climbed to his feet. Looming over the wolf was little more than a skeleton, tatters of flesh hanging from the yellowing bones amid the remnants of rotted leather clothing.
“Damn!” Hellboy exclaimed. “You can’t even go for a walk in the countryside without stumblin’ across something that shoulda stayed dead.”
Glancing round, Hellboy saw all the other cairns start to stir, rocks falling off as the occupants dragged themselves from their resting places, in various stages of decay. The air became heavy with the sour apple stink of decomposition.
Within seconds, the wolf was torn apart, and the dead slowly returned to their homes.
“They were still until the wolf passed the first cairn,” William noted. “So, what? The skeletons stop wolves, or all trespassers?”
“The question is: why?” Hellboy mused over the scattered remains of the wolf.
“Maybe we can get some clues from them.” Lisa pointed to the tree line beyond the rolling grassland, where figures watched before moving quickly back into the shadows.
Hellboy led the way into the forest. Sprinting, he dodged low-hanging branches and ducked around trees, trying to keep sight of the attackers, who flitted like ghosts among the shadows and the shafts of sunlight.
Hellboy skidded to a halt as the forest came to an end on a ridge. Some of the ground had fallen away and snaking roots protruded above a steep, grassy incline toward another area of dense forest. Just disappearing into the trees were the attackers, dark-haired men with suntanned skin, dressed in animal hides and carrying spears and bows.
“Why did you stop?” Brad said breathlessly, skidding to a halt beside Hellboy. Lisa and William caught up a moment later.
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