Glass began shattering nearby, the sound echoing along the streets of the tiny village. The interior of the hall was striped in shadows, and pools of sunlight and dust swirled in the light. Hellboy had wondered how Garm was getting in and out of the building, particularly dragging corpses with him. Now he knew, for at the rear of the long building, its inside vaulted and cavernous as a church, there was a section of wall that had been broken away and the sun streamed in there as well.
Where the shafts of sunlight penetrated the shadows, blood streaked the wooden floor. But in the direct light of day which shone through that twelve-foot section of shattered wall, Hellboy could see the bodies. He slowed as he ran into the hall, nearly slipping on blood that was not quite dry. Abe and Pernilla came up on either side of him, as transfixed as he was by the sight before them.
It was a small mountain of the dead, a pile of corpses that spilled all around the floor at the rear of the building. Benches had been thrown aside and rubble was strewn about as well, but the real debris there was that of the dead. Some had been killed brutally, ripped to shreds, their bones gnawed on and flesh torn off. Others were husks, shells, little more than scarecrows of people, as if they had been long dead and buried and then only recently unearthed. Hellboy might have thought exactly that if not for the fact that their condition reminded him of what Professor Aickman had looked like at the time of his death.
Drained. Those were the ones Thrym had sucked dry of life before moving on. It was not enough that he was king of the Frost Giants, that he was savage and cunning and incredibly strong. He was also a sorcerer and had used that power to drain these people of their lives. It was a hideous sight, among the most gruesome Hellboy had ever encountered.
The enormous beast that lay atop the mountain of shattered bone and torn flesh was worse. Its fur was matted with blood and when it shifted, the entire pile of human remains moved beneath it with a skeletal clacking. Though their entrance had certainly been noisy enough to give them away, Garm seemed oblivious at first. The great wolf-hound held a dead thing between its paws, a human corpse whose lower torso and legs were still intact, but whose upper body seemed to have been stripped of flesh, bone scarred by the monster’s teeth.
The Nidavellim stalked toward the pile of bones, moving warily, on guard for a sudden attack by the beast, but Garm continued to ignore them. It gnawed on the skull of the dead man in its grasp, only to have the spine shatter and the head come off. It splintered in Garm’s maw and the beast spat it out.
Hellboy felt the serpentine pendant grow cold against his chest again and Mjollnir seemed lighter than ever, as if rather than burdening him, it were pulling him on. Abe and Pernilla hung back a step or two behind him as the three of them started toward the mound, approaching cautiously, completing the circular enclosure the Nidavellim had begun.
As if only now aware of their presence, Garm dropped its massive snout over the corpse in its clutches and glared at Hellboy out of the corner of its eye as though he might want to steal its dinner. Then the massive beast took one of the dead man’s arms in its mouth and began to chew, not ripping it off but gnawing on it with a pop and crunch of bone and the tearing of ligaments.
“That is really gross,” Hellboy muttered.
Garm pricked up its ears and lifted its head, turning sharply to snarl at him. Its black lips curled back from gleaming, blood-stained fangs. Its growl was low and deep, a rumble that shook the pile of corpses under it and echoed across the cavernous hall.
“Somebody needs a Milk Bone,” Hellboy said.
The beast began to rise from its perch, hackles going up. Brokk let out with some unintelligible roar that Hellboy figured was some sort of ancient challenge. Eitri banged his daggers together as if to draw attention to the blades, and the others shouted as well, trying to confuse or disorient the beast. Garm glanced around quickly and moved one step back as it took their measure.
It wasn’t a giant thing, not like Thrym. But a wolf-hound the size of an elephant was just damn creepy to look at, particularly with the dark intelligence that was sparking in its eyes.
“Abe.”
“Yeah?”
“Shoot it.”
“Gladly.”
Hellboy heard the revulsion in his friend’s voice, but did not look away from Garm. The creature’s eyes were locked with his own in a kind of stalemate and he wanted to draw its attention as long as possible. But in his peripheral vision, Hellboy saw the motion on either side of him. Abe had come up on one side, his sidearm leveled. He was a good shot; Hellboy had always envied him that.
On his left, Pernilla used both hands to lift and aim Hellboy’s gun.
Garm grunted and sniffed at the air. The Nidavellim had moved to the bottom of the death mound but no further, and the creature ignored them. “Fire,” Hellboy said.
Abe and Pernilla shot at Garm almost simultaneously. Hellboy’s gun was louder and harder to manage, and Pernilla got off two shots in the time it took Abe to fire almost an entire clip at the monster. Bullets punched through Garm’s fur, adding its own blood to that of its victims, trickling through its filthy fur. But the creature barely flinched with each bullet, eyes never moving from Hellboy.
“Crap,” Hellboy whispered. He turned to Pernilla. “Leave.”
“But—,” she began.
“Go!” he snapped. He spun to glance at Abe. “Take her and get out of here.” Then they were moving, and Hellboy felt a kind of release go through them. It had been an experiment, and the big ugly dog had been cooperative enough to sit still for it. Guns weren’t going to do a damn thing against it. Now they knew. No reason for Abe and Pernilla to be there at all. Garm began to growl again. “Play dead?” Hellboy suggested.
The monster stood up, massive paws sliding through bones that shifted and tumbled in miniature avalanches of the dead. It snarled, a red-tinged drool sliding from its lower jaw, and then it leaped from the tower of corpses and landed on the wooden floor, its body striped with shadow and slashes of sunlight from the windows.
“Didn’t think so,” Hellboy muttered.
Brokk shouted in his guttural ancient tongue for the other Nidavellim to attack. They let out a bloodthirsty war cry and ran at Garm, even as it began to lope toward Hellboy. Garm was too fast for them, but those who were closest caught up to the beast. Eitri punched both daggers into Garm’s side and began to use them as pitons, slashing into the wolf-hound’s body and climbing up its side as it ran. The Nidavellim’s body shape was deceptive; they were much faster than they looked.
Another of the dwarves hacked into one of Garm’s haunches with a double-edged battle axe. The weapon was torn from his hand as the monster continued to lunge for Hellboy, who stood his ground, hooves clacking on the wood. His tail swung in the air, curling with the anticipation of Garm’s attack.
Brokk leaped into Garm’s path, raised his war hammer. The creature stopped, claws scratching wood. With a shout of triumph, Brokk swung his hammer at Garm’s chest, almost beneath him now.
Garm dipped his snout down and bit Brokk in two; threw back his head and gulped down the top of the dwarf’s body, hammer and all, while the bottom half struck the ground, pumping blood onto the floor. Eitri saw this and shrieked in fury. He was atop the monster now, and he wept openly, screaming and driving his blades into Garm’s flesh again and again.
The remaining Nidavellim attacked anew, swords and axes falling, hacking at Garm, gashing its skin.
The great beast shook them off as though they were insects. Its growl rumbled across the floor and dust fell from the ceiling, swirling in the sunshine. Garm stared at Hellboy and started for him again.
Mjollnir felt as though it was burning him. Which was impossible, of course. Hellboy’s huge right fist could not be burned. Still, the hammer seared his palm and fingers, and he held it even tighter as he let loose a bellow of rage that echoed the war cry of the Nidavellim. He barely understood the words, but in his heart and his gut he knew the meaning of it. To the de
ath.
Garm had killed Tyr.
Whoever Tyr was.
And the beast had killed Brokk.
Hellboy ran at it, tail curled up behind him. He cocked back his arm and swung the hammer. Despite its momentum, the great beast stopped short. The wolf-hound chuffled as though in amusement when Mjollnir cut through the air only inches from its snout. Then Garm was on top of Hellboy, shoving him down, pinning him to the floor the way he had the stripped corpse at the top of the pile of the dead.
Its drool slipped out and soaked into his long jacket, and where it touched his skin, it burned.
“Son of a bitch!” Hellboy shouted in pain.
Garm’s yellow eyes seemed almost to glow as it glared down at him. “The hammer. It isn’t yours.” Its voice was a low rasping growl, as though the words came from deep beneath the earth and had risen with the inexorable power of an earthquake.
“You can talk,” Hellboy said, surprised.
“Where did you get that?“ it snarled, the stench of death on its breath.
“That makes it worse.”
Hellboy curled his left hand into a fist and struck Garm in the side of the head. The wolf-hound was thrown off balance and he took advantage of the moment, bucked against the beast and rolled away from it. Mjollnir slowed him down, however, and as he turned to attack, Garm was nearly upon him again.
Hellboy swung the hammer but the beast opened its maw, and its jaws closed around his forearm and the weapon clutched in his fist. Its teeth scraped the wrist of his right arm, of that mysterious appendage, but did not cut him. “You want something to chew on?” Hellboy demanded. He yanked his hand back and Mjollnir shattered Garm’s teeth from the inside. The wolf-hound howled in pain and staggered back, staring at him warily now. Hellboy ran at it, raised Mjollnir, and leaped. “Chew on this!”
Garm tried to dodge out of the way, but the hammer struck its back, shattering its spine, and the great beast went down on the floor, crashing into some of the benches that had still been arranged for people to sit on in the public meeting hall. The irony did not escape Hellboy, that the people of this village had had their last meeting.
The thing was still alive, though barely. Hellboy felt satisfaction at the echo in his mind of the hammer striking the monster’s back, of shattering its teeth. That reaction depressed and disgusted him, and he turned and began to walk from the building, leaving the Nidavellim to finish Garm, to have their revenge for the death of Brokk.
If it was true that all of this was some kind of bizarre chain reaction from Thrym’s resurrection, he wanted it stopped sooner rather than later. Not just because of the massacre in this village, and not just because he feared what could happen if more monsters like Garm started showing up—things that were supposed to have been dead eons ago.
He was doing his best to push the urges away, but he felt angry almost all the time, now. Enraged at nothing but the world around him, and wanting to lash out with Mjollnir, to have something more to fight, to destroy, monsters whose bones he could shatter.
It felt good, despite the burning of the hammer and the chill of the pendant against his chest. The craving for combat and destruction was delicious.
The sooner this was over, the better. But in the back of his mind, he wondered how long it would be before the presence within him, the essence of the hammer’s previous owner, influenced him so much that he decided he did not want it to be over. That the more dead things that rose from the earth, the more ancient monsters somehow recalled to this world, the happier he’d be. That scared him.
Abe stared at the open front doors of the assembly hall. He had reloaded his sidearm, and the texture of the grip was almost too rough on his skin now. He figured it was what people called an itchy trigger finger, but he’d never felt the sensation before. He wanted another crack at Garm, with or without the gun. Not because he felt particularly inclined to throw himself into the gnashing jaws of a wolf the size of their stolen delivery truck, but because of the remains inside that building.
People. Those were the people of this village. Not just remains. They had lived and worked here, gotten by with a kind of old-fashioned self-sufficiency that most of the world thought was extinct. Then this thing had just come along and eaten them.
That wasn’t exactly right, though. Garm had not been here first. Thrym had been first, had killed most of the villagers, and left Garm to feast on what he left behind.
“We should go back in,” Pernilla said anxiously.
Abe glanced over at her, saw the pensive look on her face, and reached out to lay a gentle hand on her shoulder. Together they stared back at the front of the building.
“No,” Abe replied. “He was right. If guns weren’t going to work, we were just in the way. There was this thing with a djinn and a bull one time in Calcutta when…” His words trailed off and he glanced at her. “Let’s just say I learned the hard way that sometimes the only backup I can give him is to get out and be there to pick up the pieces if things go wrong.”
There was a moment of silence between them that became awkward, and Abe removed his hand from her shoulder. Pernilla watched him and, though Abe kept his gaze on the front of the building, he felt her eyes on him.
“That must be hard,” she said quietly.
“It is.”
Shouts and roars came from within the building, but they moved no closer, only stood together, connected by the electric tension of the moment.
“This is so unreal,” Pernilla said at last. “I mean… Garm is a myth. So is Thrym. Every time I think I’ve accepted this, I slip back into the insanity of it all. I feel as though my whole mind is out of focus, and the only thing keeping me from losing it entirely is the one certainty I can hold onto.”
“What’s that?”
“My father’s dead,” Pernilla replied, a hitch in her voice. “My father’s dead and a myth killed him. That’s the only focus I need. But it’s still hard to accept that myths are real.”
At last Abe turned away from the building. He felt almost silly with his gun in his hand, and so he holstered it as he gazed at her, hoping she could feel his sympathy, because expressing it would only embarrass them both.
“Some are. Some aren’t,” he said. “Even the myths that are true aren’t completely true. But none of them are completely made up, either. I’ve had an inkling about that for a long time, but this solidifies it. Every myth started somewhere.”
A loud thump interrupted them, and they spun to see Hellboy and the Nidavellim walking across the street toward the truck. The sound had come from the half of the door that was still attached to its frame. Hellboy had put it back in place, as if he could shut the horror of what had happened in there away.
The expression on Hellboy’s face was grave, but the Nidavellim were even more grim. They were dirty and disheveled, their clothes and hair stained with blood. But there were only four of them. Abe scanned the faces and realized who was missing.
“Brokk?” he asked, as Hellboy passed him, headed for their vehicle.
Hellboy paused and glanced at him, eyes unreadable.
“He’s dead. Drive the truck.”
Chapter Thirteen
It was shortly before 7:30 A.M. when Tom Manning pulled into the underground garage beneath the unremarkable building that was headquarters for the BPRD. It was nestled on a gently rolling hillside in Fairfield, Connecticut, surrounded by trees and shrubbery so that it seemed almost part of the landscape, heavily influenced by certain Asian architectural styles. The BPRD offices were fairly remote—not a single restaurant that didn’t require a car to get to—but that was a decent trade off for the view from the top floors.
The weather was spectacular, and Dr. Manning had driven with the windows down, turning the radio up loud enough that when he stopped at a red light, he was embarrassed enough to turn it down again, thinking himself too old for such indulgences.
Still, he was smiling as he stepped out of the car and locked the door. He ha
d gone for a short jog that morning in the neighborhood around his home and he felt invigorated. It was still summer, but several days of sweltering heat and crushing humidity had given way to a kind of harbinger of autumn, a hint of what was to come.
The second he got inside, he planned to open his windows wide, and then tackle the mountain of paperwork on his desk. If he played his cards right, he’d skip lunch, keep his beeper on, and then tell Kate Corrigan, his Assistant Director of Field Operations, that she could ring him if anything urgent came up.
Tom had a couple of Corona beers in the fridge at home, and a fresh lime to go with it. It was that kind of day, and at his age, they didn’t come around too often.
He was whistling as he rode the elevator up from the garage, briefcase dangling in his hand. Dr. Manning used his key card to let himself into the corridor where all of the upper-echelon offices were. Several people greeted him in the hallway, and he smiled amiably. When he reached his own office, he slid the key card in again. The tiny light on the mechanism turned green, and he pushed inside.
Penelope, the young woman who had been acting as his receptionist while his assistant was out on maternity leave, was nowhere to be seen. Her desk had been abandoned, save for the open can of Pepsi that seemed omnipresent ever since the woman had been moved upstairs from communications. He glanced around, but saw no note, nor any pile of mail and phone messages that she would usually have waiting for him.
Must have gone to the ladies’ room, he thought.
Without any further hesitation, he opened the inner door that led into his interior office, but he left it open behind him so that Penelope would know he had arrived. Tom strode across the office, dropped his briefcase on the chair behind his desk, and went to the nearest window. He unlocked it, and began to crank it open.
The door clicked shut behind him.
The Bones of Giants Page 16