by Mike Mignola
Before Hellboy had to ask, Louis was reaching into the breast pocket of his padded jacket and taking out the map they had been given at the outset of their mission. They pored over it, Louis holding one side, Hellboy pinching the other delicately between the stubby stone fingers of his right hand. Louis traced their route with a black-gloved finger.
“We’re . . . here,” he said. “We’ve covered about . . . what? Four miles?” He glanced at Hellboy. “So which way now, boss?”
Hellboy glowered at the map. If he was being honest, he didn’t have a clue. This plan had seemed so simple at the outset: Come down here, find the monster, batter some answers out of it. It hadn’t occurred to him that the Underground system encompassed some two hundred and fifty-odd miles of track. As if reading his thoughts, Sean said, “Ye reckon we’ll find this beastie, Hellboy?”
Hellboy scowled. “We’ll find it.”
“Ye got special powers, is that it? Monster-detecting glands or something?”
Hellboy glanced at the young officer and raised one eyebrow. “You poking fun at me, kid?”
“No way!” Sean exclaimed, then gave a slight smile. “Well, a wee bit, mebbe. I just . . . I don’t see how we’re goan find this thing, that’s all.”
“We know where it was last spotted,” Hellboy said. “And we can guess that most of the time it sticks to unused tunnels, out-of-the-way places, otherwise . . .”
“A damn train woulda hit it,” said Louis.
“Yeah,” said Hellboy. He glanced from left to right. “My guess is that it emerged or appeared somewhere around here, and has made its lair close by. I doubt it’ll have strayed far from its place of origin.”
“What makes ye think that?” Sean asked.
“Monsters are creatures of habit. Most of ’em stick to particular places—haunted lakes, blasted heaths, that kinda stuff—and terrorize the crap out of the local population.”
“Until you turn up to pulverize ’em,” said Sean.
“That’s usually the way it goes, yeah.”
“So . . .” Louis said. “Which way do you wanna go, boss?”
“Which way takes us away from the trains?”
“Left.”
“Then we go left,” Hellboy said.
Louis folded up the map and they trudged on. The dark areas set into the wall ahead were tunnels. The first ended in a rusty mesh grille, stretching floor to ceiling, but the second was more promising. When Louis shone his flashlight into the opening, the light revealed a passage stretching back into darkness that was both high and wide enough to accommodate even Hellboy’s bulk.
“I’ll go first,” Hellboy said. “Stick close behind, and try to light the way ahead as much as possible. I don’t want the bastard jumping out of the dark at me.”
“Why? You scared?” Sean asked cheekily.
“Behave,” Hellboy said.
They moved forward cautiously, alert for the slightest sound or movement. The walls glistened with damp, the water having trickled along the same cracks in the brickwork for so long that white veins of deposit had formed along the channels. The ground was thick with sludge, which caked Hellboy’s hooves. As requested, Louis and Sean tried to give Hellboy as much light as possible by shining their gun-mounted flashlights through the gaps between his body and the tunnel walls on either side.
They had been moving for less than five minutes when the criss-crossing beams picked out what appeared to be a thick white worm on the ground ahead. Immediately Hellboy came to a halt, holding up his stone hand. He had seen many strange sights in his time—flying vampiric heads, giant bees with the faces of jackals, a demon that disguised itself as a camper van—and so a potential attack by giant killer worms was pretty much par for the course. He peered at the worm. It was inert, half covered in sludge, though he knew better than to assume that inactive meant harmless.
“Keep your lights trained on that thing,” he murmured. “I’m gonna check it out. We don’t know what it is, how fast it can move, or what it can do, so keep alert—and expect the unexpected.”
He stalked forward, unconsciously bunching his fists. He fully expected the thing to rise out of the sludge and fly at him any moment. He was only a couple of meters away when he realized it wasn’t a killer worm at all. The realization didn’t make him any happier.
“Crap,” he said.
“What is it, boss?” called Louis.
“Evidence that we’re on the right track,” said Hellboy. “Come take a look.”
The two armed officers squelched forward, their light beams converging on the object.
“Nasty,” said Sean quietly.
What Hellboy had thought was a worm was in fact a human arm. Up close they could see that the flesh was marbling as the blood coagulated inside it. The fingers, rigid and clawlike, were half buried in the mud.
Louis bent over to take a closer look at the severed limb. “Look at the way the bone’s splintered at the shoulder,” he said. “Looks like the poor guy’s arm was twisted right out of its socket.”
“Hmm,” Hellboy said. He liked the way the guys were keeping it together here. Okay, so Sean was a little pale, but neither of them were freaking out, or asking dumb questions, or standing and goggling in disbelief at what their prey could do.
Louis glanced at Hellboy. “Proceed with caution?” he suggested.
Hellboy gave an abrupt nod. “You got it.”
They bypassed the severed arm and moved on, a little more slowly than before. Louis and Sean tried to illuminate every meter of the tunnel as they progressed, their light beams slithering across the floor, skittering up the walls and across the ceiling. Hellboy was poised for action, his jaw set and muscles bunched, his breathing slow and regular. His tail swished from side to side and his yellow eyes were unblinking as he stalked like a gunslinger towards his own personal high noon.
Three minutes later, Louis said almost conversationally, “Whoa, guys.”
Hellboy, a meter or so in front of him, said, “I see it.”
“What?” Sean asked.
Louis’s light beam was trained on the ground ahead—black with mud, with more blackness beyond. He shifted the beam slowly from side to side, using the light to paint in a little more definition. They saw the edge of a ragged opening, a chasm stretching from one side of the tunnel to the other.
“Jesus,” breathed Sean. “Is it doon there, d’ye think?”
“Most likely place we’ve found so far,” muttered Hellboy.
They edged forward until they were standing at the edge of the chasm. Louis and Sean pointed their beams directly into the pit, but all they could see beyond the reach of the light was blackness.
“How far down does it go, I wonder?” mused Louis.
Hellboy glanced at him. “Could be all the way into hell for all I know.” He pondered a moment, then said, “I’m going in.”
“Ye’re goan climb doon there?” said Sean, eyes wide.
“Nah,” said Hellboy. “That’d take too long. I’m gonna jump.”
Louis half reached out as though to put a restraining hand on his arm, then thought better of it. Calmly, he said, “But you don’t know how far down it goes.”
“That’s part of the fun,” Hellboy said, grinning.
Still calm, Louis asked, “How far can you fall and still survive?”
Hellboy shrugged nonchalantly. “I’ve fallen out of airplanes in my time. Can’t say it doesn’t smart, but you can’t do this job without picking up a few bruises.”
Louis glanced at Sean, then he straightened up, planting his feet more firmly apart, adopting a combat stance. “Okay, boss,” he said. “What do you want us to do?”
“Wait for me here,” Hellboy said. “If I’m not back in an hour, head for the surface. If something starts to come out of the pit and it isn’t me, open fire. If you give it all you’ve got and it keeps on coming, then run like hell. You got that?”
“We’ve got it,” said Sean.
“Good luck, boss,” said Louis.
Hellboy nodded and stepped forward, planting his hooves firmly on the edge of the pit. Peering down, he murmured, “Arrivederci, boys.” Then he leaped into the dark.
CHAPTER 5
—
As Abe had theorized—or at least hoped—the culvert widened out after a dozen meters or so. He had been only mildly concerned as he had wriggled through the tight brick tube surrounded by nothing but blackness and the rush of water, but he still felt relieved when he suddenly found himself with room to spread his arms, raise his head, and kick his feet. He hovered a moment in the suddenly much deeper water, blinking his eyes and getting his bearings. Behind him, through the murk, he saw a solid wall, in the center of which was the black circular hole from which he had emerged.
Upon immersion in water, Abe’s body immediately and automatically began to act as a biological filtration system. Far more efficiently than most amphibians, he was able to take what he needed from the water and discard its harmful elements. Additionally he was able to assess and mostly identify the presence and volume of foreign bodies in his immediate environment. He knew that the water he was currently swimming in was from a natural source, but that it had been tainted by a degree of human and chemical effluent as it had flowed down from higher ground and found egress through the channels and conduits—some natural, some man-made—which snaked beneath the streets of London like a vast rabbit warren. Swimming in the stuff was not entirely pleasant, but neither was it unbearable, or, more importantly, hazardous to Abe’s health. It was nothing, in fact, that a warm shower and a change of clothes wouldn’t fix once he was done.
He allowed the water to caress his skin and ripple through his gills for a few moments, and then he kicked his feet and began to swim. For the most part he allowed the flow to carry him along; he always adored the sensation of giving himself up to the convoluted flux of streams and rivers and seas, of becoming one with the sinewy and remorseless purpose of the tides.
Abe being Abe, however, he did not allow himself to become distracted. Mindful of his mission, he was assiduous in his exploration of this new and hidden world. Meticulously he investigated each passage, each avenue, each side tunnel he came across. Sometimes a detour would lead to further detours, whereas at other times they would simply peter out, forcing him to double back. Wherever his meanderings took him, however, Abe would always—partly through instinct and partly through calculation—eventually find his way back to his main route through the city. As he swam, absorbed in his task, time became meaningless; an hour passed, then two, and still he ploughed on, searching for clues, for answers. He had an excellent sense of direction and a highly attuned ability to calculate distance, but by the time he found the sack he had only the vaguest idea where he was. Somewhere southwest of his starting point . . . he tried to picture in his mind’s eye the map of central London he had studied earlier. Hammersmith, he thought, or Fulham—somewhere around that vicinity. His senses told him that he had started close to the river, then had moved away from it as he had headed west, and was now quite close to it again.
During his search he had found several black bin liners full of rubbish, one battered suitcase packed with sludge and what appeared to be reams of paper so saturated they had turned to thick pulpy blocks, and various other containers, all of which he had cursorily examined. The sack he saw now, however, set his heart beating a little faster, not least because it reminded him of the classic means of body disposal he had seen in a thousand and one gangster movies.
Sitting on the muddy bed of a particularly deep body of water within what looked as though it had once been a natural cave, the lip of the sack, secured with twine or wire, appeared to mouth at him as it shifted back and forth in the currents. Abe’s limbs were aching now, but he immediately realigned his body, kicked his legs, and swam sinuously down towards it.
He grabbed the sack and tried to lift it, but could shift it no more than a few inches along the riverbed. He blinked as a black cloud of silt, disturbed by the movement of the sack, puffed up and enveloped him.
It’s weighted down with something, he thought. Rocks maybe. He allowed the silt to settle, then began to pick at the twine securing the lip of the sack with his webbed fingers.
His hands were nimble, dextrous, and in less than a minute he had unpicked the mass of knots cinching the sack tight. Discarding the twine, he tugged the sack open . . .
. . . and reared back as a white face with staring eyes rose up out of the dark depths, mouth half open as if for a kiss.
Recovering his wits quickly, Abe pushed the bobbing head back down with the tip of one finger and tugged the sides of the sack closed over the staring face. His heart was thumping with reaction, his gills rippling agitatedly. Although he had found the evidence he had been searching for, he couldn’t deny it was still a shock. He breathed deeply, allowing the cooling flow of water to calm him, and thought about what he should do.
Clearly he had to get this lot up to the surface—which meant that he had to remove whatever was weighing the sack down. If he opened the sack fully, though, he would doubtless have to cope with the grimly humorous spectacle of various body parts breaking free from inside and drifting languidly around him. In which case there was only one possible course of action. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but Abe knew he was going to have to bite the bullet and get on with it. Not allowing himself to hesitate, he relaxed his grip on the top of the sack a fraction, leaving just enough room to ease his hand inside. Then, bracing himself, he delved deeper, exploring the contents of the sack.
It was like a macabre game of lucky dip. His searching fingers closed on a face, and then a smooth tube that might have been an arm or a leg, and then what was undoubtedly a foot. The jumble of limbs and heads as his hand eased its way between them rose and fell, and even seemed to squirm sluggishly, as if they still possessed a kind of feeble half-life. Abe clenched his teeth and tried to blank out his mind as he pushed his hand deeper, wincing only slightly as a probing finger found something soft and yielding. Eventually, his arm now buried in dismembered body parts up to the elbow, his fingers bumped against a rough, hard surface.
The rock was about the size of a bowling ball, and just as heavy. With a little more groping around, Abe ascertained that there were at least four of them in the sack, their combined weight effectively anchoring it beneath the water.
Tensing his muscles, he got as good a grip as he could on the rough, jagged surface of the first boulder and hauled it up and out of the sack. Body parts spun and swirled as the rock nudged them out of the way. Abe clamped his lips together as an arm somehow managed to wrap itself around his wrist like a sleepy eel. He shuddered, shaking his hand back and forth while taking care not to let go of the rock, and eventually the arm slid almost apathetically away.
He hauled the rock from the sack and dropped it on the ground, causing a slow-motion cloud of black silt to puff up around it. Now that his arm was out of the sack, Abe really didn’t want to plunge it back in again. However, after only a moment’s hesitation, he slid his hand back inside. The process of locating the next rock, grabbing it and yanking it through the obstacle course of heads and limbs was no easier a second time, or a third, or a fourth. At last, however, the task was done, and Abe was able to find the twine he had previously discarded and tie the sack up again. He hunkered down for a moment on the soft, silty ground, all at once feeling weak and sick. Then, hauling the sack behind him, he rose to his feet and kicked up towards the surface.
The water was a good six to eight meters deep here, and cloudy with sediment. Abe’s sleek head broke the surface with barely a ripple, and immediately he was looking around, taking in his surroundings. He appeared to be in a natural cave, the rocky ceiling three meters above his head. What struck him immediately was that, although the cavern was not manmade, there was evidence that men had not only been here but that they used this place frequently.
First, there was a light source—a feeble one, admittedly, but more than enou
gh for Abe, with his excellent eyesight, to see by. The light came from a chunky, wall-mounted lamp, not unlike a car’s sidelight, that had been screwed into the rock a meter or so below the ceiling. A gray cable, affixed to the rock at intervals with U-clips, snaked out from the light and disappeared into a jagged hole in the ceiling. Also disappearing into the hole was a rusty iron ladder which was bolted to the wall. And at the bottom of the ladder, bobbing on the water, was a small green rowboat.
The yellowish light sent ripples and reflections dancing up the rocky walls in shimmering threads. Abe looked at the boat and wondered whether it was possible to use it to negotiate a subterranean course all the way from here to the murder sites. Possibly not, but the sites were certainly accessible from here for a strong swimmer; he himself was proof of that. Of course, Abe was a far stronger swimmer than any ordinary man could ever be, but in his opinion the swim was not beyond the capabilities of a fit man, providing that he wore the right equipment and stopped to rest a few times along the way.
He swam across to the iron ladder and reached up to grab the bottom rung. Looking up, he saw that the ladder ascended through the hole and into what appeared to be a circular brick-lined shaft, like a well or the flue of a chimney. He lifted the sack out of the water and dumped it in the rowboat. Even without the rocks to weigh it down, it was too heavy to drag around, not least because the coarse cloth was saturated. Abe decided that he would check out whatever was at the top of the shaft and come back for the sack later.
Hauling himself up with his right arm, he reached out with his left hand and grabbed the second rung. He pulled himself out of the water, his gills making the instant switch from water to air. As his body emerged, water streamed from his skin, leaving him dry within seconds.
Although weary, Abe had far greater stamina than a normal man. He took a couple of deep breaths, then began to climb. He felt cool air wisping down from above, and saw that at the top of the shaft was what appeared to be a metal manhole cover. He climbed the ladder to the top, then anchored his feet tightly in its rungs so that he could use both hands to push the cover upwards. Not knowing what was on the other side, his aim was to raise the metal disc as slowly and carefully as possible, so as to draw the minimum amount of attention to himself.