Hellboy: An Assortment of Horrors
Author: Unknown
Date: 2017-08-11T07:00:00+00:00

Publisher Mike Richardson

Consulting Editor Scott Allie

Assistant Editor Katii O’Brien

Designer Anita Magaña

Digital Art Technician Christina McKenzie

HELLBOY™: An Assortment of Horrors

Text and Illustrations © 2017 Mike Mignola. All other material, unless otherwise specified, © 2017 Dark Horse Comics, Inc. Hellboy™, B.P.R.D.™, Abe Sapien™, Liz Sherman™, and all related characters are trademarks of Mike Mignola. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the express written permission of Dark Horse Comics, Inc. Names, characters, places, and incidents featured in this publication either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living, dead, or undead), events, institutions, or locales, without satiric intent, is entirely coincidental. Dark Horse Books® and the Dark Horse logo are registered trademarks of Dark Horse Comics, Inc. Dark Horse Comics® is a registered trademark of Dark Horse Comics, Inc., registered in various categories and countries. All rights reserved.

Neil Hankerson Executive Vice President • Tom Weddle Chief Financial Officer • Randy Stradley Vice President of Publishing • Matt Parkinson Vice President of Marketing • David Scroggy Vice President of Product Development • Dale LaFountain Vice President of Information Technology • Cara Niece Vice President of Production and Scheduling • Nick McWhorter Vice President of Media Licensing • Mark Bernardi Vice President of Book Trade and Digital Sales • Ken Lizzi General Counsel • Dave Marshall Editor in Chief • Davey Estrada Editorial Director • Scott Allie Executive Senior Editor • Chris Warner Senior Books Editor • Cary Grazzini Director of Specialty Projects • Lia Ribacchi Art Director • Vanessa Todd Director of Print Purchasing • Matt Dryer Director of Digital Art and Prepress • Sarah Robertson Director of Product Sales • Michael Gombos Director of International Publishing and Licensing

Published by Dark Horse Books

A division of Dark Horse Comics, Inc.

10956 SE Main Street

Milwaukie, OR 97222

DarkHorse.com

August 2017

First edition

ISBN 978-1-50670-343-5

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

Introduction

Christopher Golden

The title harkens back to the sorts of late 19th and early 20th century collections of supernatural tales, but I’ll tell you a secret—it also makes me think of Whitman’s samplers. Y’know, the little boxes of various chocolates, the ones you take out and poke to see which ones have something tasty inside and which ones are nasty? Yeah. Those.

The temptation is strong to do a riff on Forrest Gump’s famous “box of chocolates” line. Mignola would roll his eyes, but the truth is that editing an anthology really is sort of like that—you never know what you’re going to get. Even when you choose all of your contributors, inviting them to play in a particular sandbox, you never really know how it’s going to turn out until the stories start coming in. This is the fourth Hellboy prose anthology I’ve edited—the first one after a long break—and it’s never been truer than now.

Honestly, it’s the very best part of the job. An email arrives in your inbox with a brand-new story from an author whose fans would commit various crimes to get an early look, but you’re the only one who gets to read it. There’s something exciting about that. Even better when you read that story and you grin, thinking you’ve got something special and dark, maybe a bit funny or a little evil, or both. Both is nice. It’s such a pleasure to get those stories and know that soon you’ll be the one presenting them to readers.

This book is full of those stories.

Curious, isn’t it, that somehow the big red guy is the perfect vehicle for so many wonderful stories? Why is that? I have my thoughts on the subject, but I’m willing to bet that all of the authors who’ve written Hellboy stories over the years, in comics and prose, have their own. His mother was a witch and his father a demon. He’s supposed to grow up to be the Beast of the Apocalypse, but he’s a reluctant Beast of the Apocalypse at best. Hellboy came into the world as a little-boy-demon in the midst of a war that included Nazis, occultists, and Rasputin. His story is full of Hollow Earth theory and Lovecraftian cosmology. His best friends are a deeply moody pyrokinetic woman and a fish-man who was once a Victorian gentleman.

That’s all cool stuff, right? I mean, Hellboy drinks with skeletons. He meets mermaids and fights Mexican wrestlers. He’s a descendant of King Arthur and thus is the rightful King of England. He meets the ghost of the actual pulp hero who starred in his favorite childhood stories. He tosses off vague anecdotes about cases that would boggle the minds of any dozen other supernatural detectives/adventurers. Let’s not forget, he’s got horns and hooves and a tail.

None of that is what makes him such a great vehicle for stories. What does that—the brilliance of Mignola’s creation—is Hellboy’s humanity. It’s how much he loves his adoptive father, Professor Trevor Bruttenholm . . . how much he wants to make the old man proud, even after the professor is gone. It’s the ordinary-Joe-ness of him, the weariness of his soul as he gets older, and the joyful innocence we see in stories about his youth.

If you asked Hellboy fans for their favorite tale, many would point to “Pancakes.” It’s only two pages long. It’s funny, even adorable. Little-kid-Hellboy is being difficult. He doesn’t want to eat the breakfast that’s been prepared for him—like millions of other kids around the world, back through the mists of time. When he finally does take a bite, he declares his love of pancakes with little-kid love familiar to us all. The story cuts to a scene in Hell, where there is much wailing in horror, because the demons there know they have lost Hellboy to the human world forever.

There are a thousand examples of Hellboy’s humanity, but “Pancakes” is perhaps the purest distillation of the idea. He’s not one of them. He’s one of us. And so despite his origins and his outer appearance, he carries us through all of the horrors and sorrows of his story as if they are our horrors and sorrows.

Which makes it very easy to fill an anthology like this one. Writers familiar with Hellboy are more than eager to take the character—and the other characters in his circle—out for a spin.

When you go to the authors in this lineup, you’re tapping into the imaginations of some of the cleverest, most talented, and most creative purveyors of fantasy, horror, and crime fiction on the planet. You’re always going to get something great. But when you go to writers as skilled and as varied as these—and then you add in Hellboy—what you get is magic. I’m honored to have worked with each and every one of them.

If you’ve picked up this volume, it won’t surprise you to learn how easy it is to find prose writers who are not only already familiar with Hellboy, but who love the big lug. The attraction for many writers is immediate. The character and world Mike Mignola has created is full of monsters, magic, and mayhem, yes . . . but it’s also filled with sorrow and friendship and humanity. All the ingredients for my favorite stories.

They’ve done their job, crafting great stories, showcasing Hellboy, Liz, Kate, and other parts of the Mignolaverse. After keeping them to myself for so long, I’m delighted that the moment has finally come for me to share these tales with you.

Now it’s time to turn the page, taste them all, and choose your favorites.

Enjoy this Assortment of Horrors.

Christopher Golden

Bradford, MA

23rd March, 2017

THE PROMISED SMILE

Rio Youers

Even the waves try to keep us from Api Tua. They rise and strike the hull with anger, foaming and monstrous, although I have a feeling they are the least of the challenges we’ll face. Maybe it’s in the way the boatman lowers his eyes when he addresses me. Or maybe it’s Hellboy himself, sitting quietly with his head down, as if sensing that there is greater danger ahead than we were led to believe.

It’ll be a routine investigation, Malak had said, his face still wet with tears. You have my word. There’s nothing to be concerned about.

Cleveland Malak, heir to the Malak family fortune, named after the Ohio city where his father had built the first of his twenty-three North American hotels. Malak Jr. drips wealth and arrogance from every pore. I didn’t care for the spoiled brat from the moment I set eyes on him.

The waves boom and bully. I shield my face from the stinging spray and point at a gray knuckle of land some six miles southeast.

“Is that it?” I ask the boatman.

“Api Tua,” he says, nodding, but doesn’t look at me. He rudders the boat onward, occasionally grunting and urging us to hold on. We do. Me with both hands. Hellboy with just the one—his left. I think if he uses his other hand, he might tear most of the gunwale away.

The “boat” is a dilapidated sampan, thirty feet long and powered by a struggling outboard motor. Our boatman puts his entire body into working the tiller, trying to keep us from rolling. There are seven miles between the main island of Katamai and Api Tua, where Malak says his wife has been taken. In a more appropriate vessel we could make the crossing in minutes—twenty at the most. We have already been on the water half an hour and have gone little more than a mile. This is going to be a long trip.

Not that we can complain. This was the only boat that would take us to Api Tua. We asked around the docks on Katamai and were met with solemn stares and rejection. Finally, when I thought we might have to swim the entire way, we stumbled upon this rail-thin fisherman who said he’d take us as far as he could (which may yet not be all the way). He made a money-money gesture with his hands and his eyes were small, desperate lights. Hellboy agreed to pay the fee and we stepped aboard.

“Does this feel routine to you?” I asked Hellboy as he dropped into one of the narrow seats at the boat’s stern.

He grunted something in reply and looked across the water (blue and calm then; it only turned volatile after we started out). I took a seat nearer the prow and resolved to say as little as possible until we made land.

My father wanted me to be a lawyer, like him. I could imagine nothing worse. My mother wanted me to be an author, like her. She is a sweet, intelligent lady with a bounce of white curls and her right hand slightly hooked from holding a pen for so much of the day. What she can’t understand, though, is that I see no sense in making up stories when I get to live them out.

My name is Casper Morrow and this is my first assignment with the BPRD. I’m a graduate of Brown University with a master’s in paranormal studies. I have published several articles on such topics as the Yamata no Orochi, Quivira and Cíbola, and the Nukekubi of Kyoto. In addition, I hold a renshi 6-dan in kendo and a black belt in kung fu. Much to my parents’ chagrin, my life’s work has been dedicated to learning about—and defeating, by whatever means—monsters.

Needless to say, I’m equipped for this trip and whatever Api Tua has to throw at me, but Hellboy insists on treating me like the rookie that I am. I hate it when he calls me “kid” or talks over me, as if whatever I have to say holds no value. I remind myself that I’m here to learn, and that the only reason I am here is because Cleveland Malak assured us it would be a routine investigation.

It’s impossible to study the paranormal as passionately as I have without developing a tremendous respect for Hellboy. The fact that my first assignment is with him is both exhilarating and intimidating. But there’s little point in being here if I’m just a vague shape in the background. I hope that, before we head home, he sees enough in me to at the very least call me by my given name.

So why was I chosen for this particular assignment, and not a more experienced field agent? I put it down to a combination of clumsiness and good fortune: I was returning the Baron Konig case file to the archives (you can never do too much research) and was passing Dr. Katherine Corrigan’s office when I tripped and went stumbling through her doorway. The Konig file—some three hundred and eighty pages—flew out of my hands and scattered all over her floor.

“Oh, God. I’m sorry. What a klutz, I’ll just . . .”

I proceeded to pick the pages up as quickly as I could, scrabbling on my hands and knees, apologizing profusely. The last page was in Dr. Corrigan’s lap. She handed it to me with a smile.

“Sorry,” I said for about the twentieth time. I managed a timid smile of my own. “New shoes. The soles rub on the . . . Yes, I’ll just leave now.”

I turned around. Hellboy stood in the corner. Over eight feet of bright-red half demon and I hadn’t noticed him, such was my nervousness.

“Oh,” I said.

“New kid?”

I nodded. “It’s my second week.”

He smirked. Or maybe sneered. It was hard to tell. I lowered my eyes, started toward the door, but stopped when Dr. Corrigan said:

“Mr. Morrow . . . what can you tell me about the vamakan?”

I turned and looked at her, one eyebrow raised. As surprised as I was that she knew my name, I was mostly relieved that she’d asked me something I knew about. This was an opportunity to show her, and Hellboy, that there was hope for me yet.

“A vamakan is a creature of legend from the Katamai Islands. A bounty hunter, of sorts, usually summoned to track down errant demons and humans who owe a debt to the underworld. It’s over thirty feet tall, man shaped, but it walks on all fours. Its body is armored, like a rhino, and its face is made of bone. Oh, and it can only be summoned by a sorcerer or witch.”

“Good,” Dr. Corrigan said.

“Kichiimul,” I added, perhaps unnecessarily, but I felt I had a point to prove. “That’s what they call witches in the Katamais. There are, by all accounts, quite a lot of them.”

“Excellent.” Dr. Corrigan nodded. Her smile was a little wider. “Now tell me about the Katamai Islands.”

“It’s an unrecognized state in the South China Sea,” I replied without missing a beat. “Eight small islands, midway between the Philippines and Vietnam. Three of them—including Katamai, the capital island—are owned by Indonesian billionaire Afandra T. Malak. The population isn’t huge, maybe eighty thousand people, but he’s regarded as a king there, nonetheless.”

“How do you know all this?” Hellboy asked. His voice was just above a growl. I couldn’t determine if he was impressed or not. Probably not, I decided.

“My master’s thesis was on Asian mythology,” I replied.

“Very good, Casper,” Dr. Corrigan said, using my first name now. A promising sign. “You can go now. Oh, and make sure you put all those pages back in the correct order.”

I thanked her and left, and I did put the pages back in the correct order, after which I was invited—to my huge surprise—to join Hellboy and Dr. Corrigan for their meeting with Cleveland Malak. Two days later I found myself—to my even greater surprise—en route to the Katamai Islands.

The meeting with Malak proved tiresome, though, if only because he’s such an unlikable sap. He wept copiously, as if he were a child of four instead of a man of forty, bemoaning his beloved Aidra. No doubt he was grieving, but I found it all a little too theatrical.

According to Malak, his new wife was stolen from her home by a vamakan. He claimed to have seen the creature retreating across their expansive garden with the young woman slung across its shoulder like a knapsack.

“My parents are behind this,” he insisted, wringing his pudgy little hands into fists. “I know it. They never approved of our marriage and have had it in for Aidra since the day we met.”

“What’s their beef?” Hellboy asked. I could tell from his body language that he liked Malak about as much as I did.

“Aidra doesn’t come from money,” Malak replied. “She’s a peasant from the Yumi Fields, and it’s a huge embarrassment to my family that she now carries the Malak name, as if we’ve been tarnished somehow. They warned me that if we were to marry, there’d be consequences.”

I listened carefully, suspecting that he was lying—that he had in fact killed his wife and had invented this outlandish story to cover his tracks. But there appeared to be some truth to what he was saying, and asking the BPRD to investigate was hardly the action of a guilty man.

My instinct—such as it is at this raw place in my career—told me that something was awry, though.

“A vamakan can only be summoned,” Dr. Corrigan said. “Do your parents have access to witches and sorcerers?”

“We have money,” Malak said. “We have access to everything.”

“Then you don’t need us,” Hellboy said. “Find the witch your parents hired, then pay her even more money to tell you where the vamakan took your wife.”

“You make it sound so simple,” Malak said. “Unfortunately, there are dozens of kichiimul, so finding the right one would be a long and tormenting process. As least for the more refined among us.”

I heard Hellboy groan—or perhaps growl—from across the room.

“The kichiimul live on Api Tua—the smallest of the Katamai Islands.” Malak shrugged. “People like me don’t go there.”

“Why not?” Hellboy asked.

“Because it’s full of monsters,” I said. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Malak?”

“No, it is not.” Malak barked a dry laugh that had no humor in it at all. “You’ve been reading too many stories, my young friend. The monsters died out centuries ago. Only the kichiimul live there now.”

“And you want me to question them?” Hellboy said.

“You should start with my parents.” The resentment in Malak’s voice was genuine. He truly believed his mother and father played some part in this. “Interrogate them. Find out which kichiimul they employed. Then go to Api Tua and bring back my wife.”

“I’ll do it my way if I do it at all,” Hellboy said.

“I’ll pay you handsomely,” Malak said. “And I’ll make regular donations to the BPRD.” He looked at Hellboy, then at Dr. Corrigan, then at me. “It’ll be a routine investigation. You have my word. There’s nothing to be concerned about.”

“Yeah, I bet it’ll be a walk in the park,” Hellboy said. “As for your money, you can keep it. That’s not how we run things around here.”

“We’re a government agency, here as a courtesy,” Dr. Corrigan said. “You’re aware of that. You contacted us—”

“Because the BPRD are the best at what they do,” Malak interrupted. He then leaned forward in his seat and pointed a neatly manicured finger at Hellboy. “More importantly, you’re not human, so the things on that island might not perceive you as a threat. That gives you a huge edge over any investigator I could bring in.”

“An interesting theory,” Dr. Corrigan said.

“The kichiimul are unpredictable, and don’t always respond favorably to outsiders,” Malak added. “But they wouldn’t dare hex a demon.”

Hellboy narrowed his eyes. He didn’t seem so sure about that.

“They’ll smell the underworld in you.” Malak looked at Hellboy and curled his upper lip. If it was a smile, it was an ugly one. “Trust me, you’ll walk on and off that island unscathed.”

Two miles—maybe—into the journey and the waves increase their vigor. The boatman moans and makes a gesture to turn back. As he does so, a vehement swell strikes the hull port side and throws him to the deck. We pitch wildly for a moment. I hold on to the gunwale with both hands, fearing for my life, then Hellboy stands and takes the tiller. He holds it in his right hand and hunches his shoulders against the storm. The sampan shudders from prow to stern as the waves crash, but we keep going. The boatman huddles and cries. I look at Hellboy, his jacket rippling, his tail snapping in the wind, and in that moment I believe every story I have heard about him. If this assignment had been left to a red shirt like me—with my kendo and book smarts—I would be halfway to drowned by now.

At last the waves relent. Or perhaps they concede. Have it your way, they appear to say. Don’t say we didn’t try to warn you. The wind drops and the sampan’s motion becomes less violent. I’m wet through and as green in the face as I am in experience. Hellboy looks at me and the lowly boatman. He grunts, adjusts his jacket, and takes his seat.

“Plain sailing from here,” he says.

The boatman whimpers and takes the tiller. The sampan chugs onward and the island expands before us. I can make out sheer rock face, palm trees, banyans. The denser foliage is perhaps mangrove. I look for birds circling above the island but see none. Except for the dense vegetation, it appears dead.

The crossing is quicker. The boat picks up speed. Even the boatman has a lighter spirit about him. Overhead, the sun streams through a break in the cloud, offering a vista that might have been imagined.

“Nari po,” the boatman says. I have no idea what this means but he is almost smiling.

The sea remains calm, but the boatman’s good humor doesn’t last. We get to within half a mile of the island when he kills the motor and says, “No more, no more,” in perfect English.

“Closer,” Hellboy growls.

“No more,” the boatman insists. He folds his arms and stands his ground. He comes all the way up to Hellboy’s belt line.

“C’mon, old man. Crank that motor. Let’s go.”

“You swim. Here is good. Swim like big red fish.”

As they argue I look at the island and see the first sign of life. It almost knocks me off my feet: a vast, ropy thing rising above the treetops, bunched with muscle and slick. A green eye opens across its flank. I catch a flash of scissor-like teeth and then it’s gone. I have no idea what it is. For all my knowledge of Asian mythology, I have never come across anything like this.

“Umm . . .” I say.

“What is it?” Hellboy growls, looking at me through a narrowed eye.

This is the point where I can say to Hellboy that it might be wise to turn back—that there is absolutely nothing routine about this assignment.

And what then?

I lower my eyes. I know exactly what: I’d return to the BPRD without my wings, with my red shirt neatly buttoned, just another generic field agent who may never get another chance to step into the limelight. I recall my mother telling me that I should be an author, speaking so animatedly that her curls bounce and her hooked hand trembles against her chest, and I remember my response—that I would rather live the story than make it up.

“Nothing,” I say, and dive into the water.

Hellboy didn’t interrogate Malak’s parents, and he was right not to. Despite having enough money to solve world debt and forever feed the poor, and despite bringing an entitled asshole like Cleveland Malak into the world, they were generally sweet and helpful. The mother—small enough to nestle inside an ostrich’s egg, I thought—was quite charmed by Hellboy. The father said little but displayed the kind of smile that made me question that old adage about money not being able to buy happiness.

They know nothing about their daughter-in-law’s disappearance, and scoffed at the idea of hiring the services of a kichiimul. There’s clearly no love lost for the young bride, but I got the feeling their son isn’t exactly on their list of favorite people. If they were going to have a vamakan abduct anybody, it might have been him.

“Somebody’s not telling the truth,” I said as we left the Malak estate. Mrs. Malak insisted an aide sprinkle our route out with lotus blossoms. They swirled beautifully in our wake as Hellboy worked his tail.

“A vamakan is a bounty hunter, right?” Hellboy asked.

“Right.”

“So they only take people who owe some kind of debt.”

“I, umm. Well, I—”

“Maybe the lovely wife is hiding something from her peasant days.”

My mouth snapped closed. This was something I hadn’t considered. We left the ground in a cloud of pinkish blossoms. Hellboy tried hailing a ricksha but the diminutive riders took one look at him and kept cycling.

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“We go to the island,” Hellboy said.

Hellboy powers through the water, working his impressive body and ruddering with his tail. He overtakes me even though I had quite the head start on him. I’m exhausted after a quarter of a mile and doggy-paddle the rest of the way, letting the tide do most of the work. Hellboy is mostly dry by the time I stagger, spluttering and wheezing, onto the beach.

Api Tua is twenty-eight acres of granite and vegetation jutting from the South China Sea. Its sand is ash gray but glitters in a beguiling way—mica deposits, I assume, flushed into the North Pacific from some distant mountain. Boulders stand in jags and flash as brightly as glass. The flora is mostly banyan and mangrove, punctuated by regal palms that are rarely still. They bow and sway and always whisper. There are other trees I have no name for, almost skeletal in appearance. Obscurely, they flower with the most vivid, wild flowers, that almost seem to hum as you pass.

You can’t see the shacks and cabins from the beach. Indeed, you have to venture some distance onto the island proper before they become apparent, and even then they are hard to find, camouflaged as they are by the foliage. Some are built high into the treetops. The kichiimul who occupy these descend the trunks like spiders as we approach.

“Let me do the talking,” Hellboy says.

In moments we are surrounded. This breed of kichiimul is spindly and hideous. Their mouths are torn rags and their hair is clotted with moss and fungus. The same fungus grows on their throats. I can’t determine if they are threatening or curious. I spy a good-sized stick that I can use for a shinai at a push.

“We’re looking for a woman,” Hellboy says.

One of the witches creeps closer. Her long limbs move slowly, as if feeling the way. She knows a rudiment of English. It is broken, harsh, spoken around—or through—hacking, cough-like sounds. “A woman. Kah. Fleshy ripe. For eating? Whah.” She laughs and the others join her. The sound lifts my skin into tough little bumps.

“Not for eating,” Hellboy says. “The vamakan brought her here.”

“Kah.”

“Where is she?”

“Chomp her like a happle. Whugh.”

“She’s not for eating.”

“Jooooosy and—whah—sticky sweet.”

Hellboy groans. His body stiffens beneath his jacket, as if every muscle tenses at once. The witch—showing off in front of her spindly coven—has made the mistake of venturing too close. Perhaps she thinks she’s safe, but Hellboy’s wingspan is disproportionate to his body. He lunges with incalculable speed and seizes the crone by the throat.

“Bleeuuurgggh.” Her eyes brighten comically. Fungus oozes between Hellboy’s fingers. “Not gladsome. Whah. Hateful boy.”

“Where is she?”

“Kah.”

She twists and squeals. Her sisters, meanwhile, have scattered, spidering over the ground and up the trees, out of sight within moments. Leaves spiral around us, the color of burned pages.

“Where?”

The kichiimul screeches and points frantically at her throat. Hellboy loosens his grip. She draws in breath with a sound like an old gate opening, then flails a hand behind her, where the trees are broader and sometimes the darkness moves.

“Middlewise,” she blurts. “Kah. Look for the vainsome one.”

“Vainsome?” Hellboy regards her curiously.

“She of the newish smile.” One more screech, then she goes limp, hanging from Hellboy’s fist like a rag. “Whugh. She’s the one that called the taker.”

“The taker,” I say. “The vamakan.”

Hellboy opens his fist. The kichiimul hits the ground uncomfortably, all stiff limbs and wheeze, like a set of discarded bagpipes. Within moments, though, she is right side up, clawing her way up the nearest tree. She swears at her ugly sisters. They hiss like swans.

Hellboy looks to where the kichiimul flapped a desperate hand. His mouth is a firm line. I follow his gaze and see something coil through the gloom.

“Go back to the beach, rookie,” he says to me. “Wait for me there.”

“I’ll be safer with you.”

He glares at me, orange eyes shining, the muscles in his shoulders and neck stacked like bricks. I think he’s going to insist, but perhaps he sees the logic in my response.

“Fine.”

He lowers his head and walks middlewise.

I follow.

The light comes through the canopy in blades. The urge to step around them is strong. Hellboy is three or four paces ahead. He walks slightly crouched and alert. I can’t see his eyes but I imagine them switching from left to right, analyzing the environment for threat.

There’s constant movement; the foliage rattles with unseen things and what I believe to be a tree trunk lifts all at once, like the leg of some giant flamingo. At one point we pass through a haze of fist-sized pods that puff through the air like jellyfish and glow. Horned snakes drip from trees and regard us hatefully.

“Don’t make eye contact,” Hellboy says.

We pass a sprite-like kichiimul the size of Hellboy’s finger. She hops onto his shoulder and offers to make a light spell that he can scatter onto the pathway before him like hen feed.

“Izz darkawayz,” she warns.

“I can handle the dark,” he says. “Just point me toward the vainsome one.”

“Izz middlewize.”

“Which way?”

She points a tiny finger. “Thata. Go click-click and pazz the Nine Shy.”

We tromp on. The smell is deep and sweet and the darkness thickens. Narrow eyes flare throughout. Vines unfurl. The jungle chorus is mad and varied: hoots, howls, ticking, shrieking. I keep my eyes—as much as I can—on the point of Hellboy’s tail. I want to grab it, tie it to my belt so that we won’t be separated. The thought of being on this island alone (or rather, not at all alone) sends floodwater panic through my skull.

The Nine Shy are tall and pale, slender as reeds. Black hair hangs almost to their knees. It covers their faces. They turn away as we approach and whisper in their own language. It’s such an exotic, birdsong sound that I wonder what harm they can possibly do. It’s only when Hellboy grabs my arm that I realize I have been drawn toward them.

“Stay close.”

“But I . . . I . . .”

He points into the trees above the Nine Shy. Bodies hang from the branches like garlands. Some appear to be human. Many are animal. I see half a pig and several thick-tailed lizards and the remains of what might have been a horse. I imagine them all lured by the Nine Shy’s exotic whispering, then set upon, stripped for ingredients. It occurs to me then that I’m not ready for this, and may never be ready. Without Hellboy, I would be witch food by now. My bones would be used in spells that raise the dead and bring rain. My brain would be divided nine ways.

My imagination conjures a telephone call between me and my mother, in which I sheepishly tell her that I’m no longer a BPRD field agent, and that I have begun work on my first novel.

“C’mon,” Hellboy says.

He turns. He tromps. I follow. Closely.

“How many witches live here, do you think?” I ask a moment later.

“Too many,” Hellboy replies, and almost cracks a smile. “But I haven’t seen a chicken-leg house yet, so that’s a good thing.”

It isn’t a chicken-leg house, but we soon come across a curious shack built into the bole of a thick, sprawling tree with reddish bark and low-hanging branches. These enclose the entrance to the shack like many hands. The most curious thing is not that they appear to protect the shack, but that they are strung with mirrors. There must be a thousand of them, hanging from the branches, spinning and catching the light from a dozen flickering torches. Some mirrors are long, complete. Others are jags and shards.

As we approach, we see ourselves a thousand times. The effect is dazzling, disorienting.

“Vainsome,” I whisper.

We get to within ten steps of the door, then the branches shift protectively. Some curl into fists. Others are clawed. The mirrors tinkle like chimes.

Hellboy stops, takes a backward step, calls to her once.

“Kichiimul.”

She comes with her newish smile.

It has been stitched into the lower half of her face—a mouth graft, of sorts. And yes, newish: the stitches are raw and some of them bleed. The skin is pale and smooth and the lips full. A beautiful smile, no doubt.

The witch sashays toward us, pausing at every mirror, blowing kisses to the face reflected there. Her eyes and nose are covered by a shawl that she obviously has no problem seeing through.

She steps—almost dances—up to Hellboy. Her pretty mouth hovers close to his jaw.

“Kissy?”

“Not in the mood,” Hellboy snarls.

“You?” She turns to me. Her lips form a movie-star pout and in a moment she is pressed against me. I see her eyes glittering through the shawl and wonder what the rest of her face is like. I step away from her. Yes, her mouth is pretty but the smell inside it is dank and dead-like.

“I’ll pass.”

“You summoned a vamakan,” Hellboy says. “It brought a girl here. Aidra Malak. Where is she?”

“Hiding,” the kichiimul responds. “Rightly. An ugly little thing, but flashy eyes.”

“Hiding where?”

“Under moss. Under rock.” She shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. She’ll not go with you. A rotface now. A hag.”

“You took her smile,” I say.

“She owed it.” The kichiimul howls at me, spittle bursting from between those pretty lips. I feel a tiny drop on my face and it burns. “A deal’s a deal, you stringy whelp. She’s lucky I left her with any face at all.”

I back away, catching my reflection in the many mirrors. My face is pale and harried. This is how I look to Hellboy, I think. Like a child.

He isn’t looking at me, though. He looks at the kichiimul, eyes narrowed beneath his solid brow.

“She was younger,” the kichiimul continues, licking her lips. “Fourteen, maybe. A peasant girl—a dirthand—but comely, still. She watched her mother die of the scourge and her papi went soon after, him with a woebegone ticker. So she came to me, oh so brave, over water and through the woods, and begged I remove her from those fields. ‘You must have some witchery,’ she says, ‘that will grant me riches and romance and a bed that isn’t damp with horse piss.’ And I says to her, ‘Maybe, girlie . . . but what can you offer me?’ ”

“She offered her smile?” Hellboy asks.

“Not first away,” the kichiimul responds. “I put her to working—had her gather herbs and bleed out the critters, but to her it was worse than peasantry. So she offered money, which she didn’t have at that time. Nay, not a copper to scratch her peachy rump with. ‘When I have it,’ she says. But what good is money to me here? I’d sooner see a basket o’ beans.”

There is movement in the gloom to my left. I assume it’s another foul creature, or perhaps the damp breeze through the foliage. I look only briefly, see something pale shrink away, then turn my attention back to the kichiimul.

“I wanted her soul but she said she still had use for it. Bah! So I asked for her smile. Maybe she thought I meant her happiness, instead of her mouth, but she made the deal and went on her way. She likely figured that happiness and money don’t always go hand in hand.”

The kichiimul is distracted, for a moment, by one of the mirrors. She looks at herself and shapes her lips, giggling coquettishly, blowing kisses. It’s as if she’s forgotten we’re there. Hellboy makes an impatient sound from deep inside his chest and she drags her gaze away from the mirror. Her new mouth forms a wide sneer. She continues.

“The years go by. The girl’s hands get dirtier and I’d say her heart gets heavier, too. And then, on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, she meets the vilesome Cleveland Malak. The lives of two such people should ne’er cross but—wouldn’t you know it—Malak’s nag breaks a leg galloping through the Yumi Fields. He gets thrown and bumps his noggin, and when he wakes the girl is there with a cold cloth and a pretty smile. You can put the rest together yourselves.”

I notice her hands for the first time, withered and lined, with long fingers that appear to have too many knuckles. The front of her shawl has slipped a little, too. Her throat is a spider’s web of deep wrinkles. It looks to be about two hundred years older than the smile.

“It isn’t long before wedding bells ring out across the island. We can hear the cursed things from here.” She makes a vomiting sound and laughs. “Anyway, I’m owed a smile, so I trip-trap to Katamai—I even wear my prettiest dress—and find the girl on her wedding night.”

I notice that same movement to my left and look quickly, hoping to glimpse the creature before it disappears. The foliage rattles and I see the pale thing again, but only for a second.

“Something’s watching us,” I say.

“Lots of things are watching you,” the kichiimul responds.

“The wedding night . . .” Hellboy prompts her.

“Yes, and the girl has gone from dirthand to princess. She is garbed in silk and diamonds. How she shimmers. Riches and romance. Everything she wanted.”

“You made good on your deal,” Hellboy says. “But I’m guessing the lovely young bride didn’t see it that way.”

The kichiimul snorts, curling one lip. I see teeth as brown and textured as bark. “The bitchling. She stands there all glossy and clean and says I had nothing to do with her change of fortune. She says meeting Malak was fate, not witchery. I tell her she owes me her smile and that I mean to take it, then she calls for her guards to take me away. They’re like you, red man—all muscle and growl. So I leave the island peaceable, not a single hex thrown.”

“Until you got back here,” I say. “Then you summoned the bounty hunter.”

“A debt was due.” Blood leaks from the kichiimul’s stitches, onto her lips. She licks it away with a tongue as gray as ash. “It takes eight sunsets to summon a vamakan. Some mandrake and gull’s blood, a cracked monkey rib, a dash of pity, a pinch of rue. It came with its long bone face and knew its task at once. It set off under a snip of moon and was back before sunup with the girl over one shoulder. And how she screamed. A dozen lank cats couldn’t make that din.”

“I’m not surprised,” I say.

“We can guess what happened next,” Hellboy says, pointing at the witch’s delicate mouth. “I only hope you used a sharp knife.”

She shrugged. “It got the job done.”

I take deep scoops of air that taste like hell. I sense the movement to my left again but pay it no attention; I’m too concerned with getting the images of hack and sew out of my mind.

“I’ve heard enough,” Hellboy says. “Where is she?”

“You speak as if I’m holding her prisoner. Bah! She’s free to go any ol’ time.”

“Bring her to me.” Hellboy looms tall and red. “Now.”

“She hides.”

“Now!”

The kichiimul steps backward, scowls, her eyes piercing through the shawl. I think she’s about to hurl a spell and I ready myself—although I don’t know for what. Maybe it’ll rain poisonous toads, or I’ll sprout curved horns and throw myself at Hellboy. In that second anything seems possible.

Instead the kichiimul screeches, “Aidra . . . Aidra!” It’s a pretty name, but a terrible noise when it comes out of her mouth. She follows this with something in her own language, which, by contrast, is quite beautiful. It’s met by a weaker voice from the darkness—too soft to fully hear. I look toward the sound. There’s nothing at first, then I notice a ghost-like shimmer just beyond the mirrors and torches. It slowly materializes into a slender female form dressed in dirty white. Long dark hair covers her face like a mourning veil. She has shapely arms and her bare feet make no sound.

She stops at the witch’s side. Her hands are young but worked. They tremble.

“Aidra,” Hellboy says.

She looks in his direction. I wonder if she can see through the curtain of hair like the kichiimul can see through her shawl.

“We’re taking you home.”

A single shake of the head.

“Dalo en tolo,” the witch says.

“Nai.” Another shake.

“Aidra . . . dalo en.”

Her chest hitches and her narrow shoulders jerk up and down. The sound of her crying—sobbing—is both sweet and appalling. I want to cradle her. I want to cover my ears.

She reaches up with one hand and lifts the hair from her face.

I have no words.

Comely. That’s how the witch had described her. A dirthand, but comely, still. She’d been more than that, though. Looking into her perfect eyes, I can see how the “vilesome” Cleveland Malak, with all his fortune and finery, had fallen so resolutely in love with her.

Perfect eyes, yes. Deep and brown. Flashy, the witch had said, although the light inside them has dimmed. Her brow is smooth and shapely and her nose is a button. There are still diamonds in her earlobes.

“Don’t look at me,” she says. “Please.”

Below that button nose is the wretched maw of a two-hundred-year-old crone, with blistered lips and cracked, furrowed skin. It drools and snarls with a life of its own. An oval of bleeding, infected stitch work surrounds it.

The kichiimul claps her hands and howls, then throws off her shawl to fully reveal the inverse face: green eyes buried beneath the pitted shelf of her forehead, a gaping hole for a nose, open sores splashed across her cheeks.

But oh, such a pretty smile.

“Don’t we make a fine pair?” the kichiimul says. And then, unbelievably, she presses her mouth to Aidra’s—a long, terrible kiss. I see a flash of tongue, wet as an eel. “Like sisters,” she says, pulling away. “Sort of.”

“You’re a monster,” Hellboy says, pointing one stony finger at her.

I shake my head and look down at my feet, where the kichiimul’s discarded shawl has landed. I wonder—if I were to put it on—if I could slip from the forest unnoticed.

“We’re going,” Hellboy says, taking Aidra’s hand.

We don’t go anywhere.

Love? Revenge? Pride? I have no idea why Cleveland Malak has followed us to Api Tua. All I can think is that a man so distorted by wealth will trust only what he sees with his own eyes.

He appears out of the gloom to my left, where he’d been watching us for the past twenty minutes. After my initial jolt of wonder, it strikes me how unlikely he looks in this setting, in his silk shirt and expensive shoes, not a hair out of place. His expression is icy . . . determined.

Aidra drops to her knees and hides behind her hair.

“What are you doing here?” Hellboy growls.

“I am Cleveland Malak. I go wherever I please.”

“This is no place for a spoiled brat,” Hellboy says. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

“You’ll protect me.”

“Don’t count on it.”

Malak grins like a man who is used to getting his own way, even if he has to pay for it. He turns to the kichiimul. “So this is the horrible creature my parents hired to protect the family name, and make me look like a fool?”

“Horrible?” the kichiimul objects. “Don’t you recognize these lips? Kissy-kissy, loverboy.”

“Your parents had nothing to do with it,” I cut in quickly, although I wonder why he’s more concerned with his image than he is with his wife. “Aidra came here when she was younger. She made a deal.”

“She promised me her smile,” the kichiimul says, and drops a terrible wink. “Debt paid. You can take her home now.”

“That . . . that thing?” Malak points at Aidra, his lips twisted into a scowl. “I don’t want her. She can stay here with the rest of the monsters.”

“You’re some piece of work,” Hellboy groans.

“I came here to establish a precedent. Whether my parents had anything to do with this or not, I still need to show them—and the citizens of the Katamai Islands—that I will not be disrespected.”

And suddenly I understand. This is all about him.

“You never wanted us to find your wife,” I say. “You hired us so that we could lead you to the kichiimul.”

“Of course. This old hag took my property. The second part of my plan is to have you protect me while I kill her.” Malak looks at the kichiimul with cruel, dim eyes. “I’m going to cut off her head and mount it on a spike outside my mansion. I’d say that makes a pretty clear statement.”

The kichiimul thinks this is very funny. She howls and dances, shaking the branches of her tree so that the mirrors flash and chime. The other sound I hear—a deep rumbling to my right—is Hellboy fighting to keep his cool.

“Are you soulless?” I ask Malak. It’s a genuine question.

“My soul—or lack of—has nothing to do with it.” He smirks. His face is fat and clean and hateful. “This is all about commanding respect.”

Hellboy glares at him. From the way his jaw grinds, I expect to see smoke leaking from his mouth.

“I’m a very important man,” Malak says.

“Maybe on Mommy and Daddy’s island,” Hellboy retorts. “But not out here. Trust me, rich boy, the natives don’t give two hoots how fat your wallet is or how many cars you can park in your garage—”

“Twenty-six.”

“They’ll rip you limb from limb just for the hell of it. So let me give you some advice—free advice, because that’s just the kind of swell guy I am: Go home. Now. As fast as you can. And don’t come back.”

Malak makes a show of considering this. He even places one finger thoughtfully on his chin. Then he shakes his head and turns to the kichiimul.

“Kissy-kissy, bitch,” he says, and cuts her throat.

The blade springs from the inside of his sleeve. I register the sleight of hand—the way he flicks his wrist and catches something in his palm—but it happens too quickly for me to intervene. One moment the kichiimul is cackling and blowing kisses at the mirrors; the next she is holding the saggy folds of her throat, blood spraying from between her fingers.

“No,” I say. I lunge forward to help her. She shakes her head and makes a terrible cracked-pipe sound. Her blood paints the mirrors and branches in a wide circumference around her. So much blood. There’s nothing I can do.

Hellboy stomps toward Malak, both fists clenched, his tail lashing furiously. “Big mistake,” he says. I don’t know if he is about to snap Malak’s spine or carry him away like a naughty child. Whatever his course of action, it is interrupted by the kichiimul.

“Alo ma naka lai,” she blurts. Blood bubbles from between her pretty lips and the gaping crater of her nose. “Kato ma. Po ento pala mo.”

The trees around us begin to shiver. Even the darkness moves. Aidra gets to her feet and pulls the hair from her eyes.

“Oh no,” she says.

The kichiimul opens her arms, takes a couple of staggering steps, then fallsto her knees. She is red from the eyes down. Her throat wound is as wide as aman’s belt.

More movement—heavy movement—in the forest.

“Cho ka saso. Alo kin.”

“What’s she doing?” Hellboy asks.

“She’s summoning the darkness,” Aidra says.

The kichiimul uses her blood to paint a symbol on her forehead, then dips her fingers into her open throat and paints a second, larger symbol on the forest floor.

“Darkness? You mean a monster?” I shuffle closer to Hellboy. “Which one?”

Something screams through the branches. It’s followed by an earth-shattering thump. The trees crack and sway.

Whatever it is, it’s coming closer.

Aidra turns her eyes to the darkness. Her ancient mouth trembles.

“All of them,” she says.

It takes eight sunsets and a cracked monkey rib to summon a vamakan. Calling the monsters that are already on the island—and that don’t have to be drawn from the chambers of hell—is a decidedly quicker process.

The first of the creatures have appeared by the time the kichiimul drops dead on the forest floor. They emerge from the gloom with tough, glistening bodies and ready mouths. They snatch at the air and squeal.

Hellboy clenches his fists. His tail flicks.

“Give it everything you’ve got, kid,” he says to me. “We ain’t going down without a fight.”

I spring to my right and pick up a decent-sized stick. It has thickness and weight. I raise it above my head in the jōdan-no-kamae stance and set my feet.

“Okay,” I say.

The creatures attack. We defend. Hellboy swings his right fist to the music of exploding bones. I brandish my makeshift shinai—thrusting, parrying, swiping—and manage to keep the creatures at bay. I recall my earlier anxiety, that feeling of being out of my depth. It’s still with me, I realize, but now it fuels me.

I use it.

I steal a glance at Hellboy and wonder if it’s the same for him. The blood surging into his muscles, the sweat popping from his skin, the hammer-like action of his fist . . . Is it all fueled by fear? Has it always been this way, through every battle and victory, every fallen foe and comrade? I’d always assumed his grit came from a deeper, inhuman place, a realm of chaos and fire. But maybe Hellboy and I have this one thing in common: our fear and how we use it.

He drives one of the creatures into the ground, smashes two more together like cymbals, then grabs another by the throat and introduces it to that big right hand. The sound of its skull caving is like a footstep in gravel. More creatures drop from the branches. Scaly things. Winged things. The horned snakes we’d seen earlier uncoil from the darkness and spread hoods as wide as my rib cage. I lunge at them with my stick, making precise moves that confuse and anger them. They hiss and take venomous pops at me. I counter and break small bones.

Throughout this, Cleveland Malak stands in a daze of horror. He has dropped the knife and pissed his pants. For him, fear is not a driver. It cripples him. Laughs at him. If not for the constant noise—the howls, shrieks, the cracking of bones—I am sure I would hear his knees knocking.

He is pathetic.

A wolf-like creature approaches him from behind. It stands on its rear legs, mouth fully open—a mouth large enough to remove the top of Malak’s head in one bite. I could let it happen, I realize. It’s no less than he deserves, and no one would ever know. Do I hesitate? Do I teeter? Maybe, but then my conscience gets the better of me; I run at the wolf thing and drive the point of my stick into its wide mouth. It howls, pulls away, drops onto all fours. The stick dislodges with a sucking sound. I thrust again and puncture its left eye. It erupts in a hot spurt of gray jelly. The creature snaps, hackles raised, then turns and lopes half-blind into the gloom.

“Behind you, kid!” Hellboy cries.

I turn as a bird with thick, leathery wings swoops at me. I knock it out of the air and it falls broken. Hellboy, meanwhile, has three creatures on his back, another clinging to his leg. He claws them off, stamps on them, grinds his hoof into the dirt. Another beast lunges at him—all teeth—but I have company of my own: lean dogs with poisonous mouths, all of them snapping. I raise the stick and go at them.

And so it continues . . .

I tire. I ache. I fall and nearly don’t get back up. I hear Hellboy panting, groaning. I look at him. He is a map of blood and sludge.

“Don’t give up,” he gasps.

I don’t. My stick breaks. I’m left with two halves.

We fight.

There is a brief respite. No more creatures. The canopy above us falls silent, although the jungle beyond thumps and sways. Something is still out there. Something large. I’m on my knees and bleeding.

“Is it over?” I ask stupidly.

“It’s only just beginning,” Aidra says.

There’s a scream, a crash, a sound like trees being uprooted and tossed. Hellboy and I stand back to back with Aidra crouched below. She points and I see it—a part of it, anyway—snaking between the trees: a gray, ropy body, as broad as a freight train. This is the vast creature I had seen from the sampan, when Hellboy and the boatman were arguing. It had risen above the treetops and displayed long, scissor-like teeth. I’m close enough now to see its scales and thorns, and the thousands of snakes latched onto its back, like cleaner fish feeding on dead skin and nutrients. It growls and the island shakes. It circles us.

Malak has seen it, and it’s too much for him to handle. His mind snaps, I think, because he screams and makes a run for it. This time, there’s no saving him.

He is barely beyond the mirrors and torch light when the cleaner snakes attack. They detach from the vast body and slither toward him, too many to count, and too quick to avoid. They strike below the knees. Malak shrieks and falls. Then they hit his face and chest.

Aidra covers her eyes with both hands. “Nai,” she whispers through her ancient witch’s mouth. It’s the only part of her face I can see.

“He ain’t worth your pity,” Hellboy says.

The snakes leave Malak alive, screaming in agony. They return to their host with bloody mouths. The creature itself finishes the job. A long black tongue slinks between the trees, coils around Malak’s body, and drags him away. I see those scissor-like teeth once again. They cut and snip. Malak eventually stops screaming. The mouth feeds.

“Nai,” Aidra says again.

It’s not the only mouth. I count at least six of them along the creature’s immense body. Some are bigger.

It continues to circle us.

Other creatures chatter and howl. They fill the jungle, amassing for another assault. Dimly, I hear the Nine Shy, their deadly, bird-like song. If I can choose a way to die, it will be with them.

“Sorry, kid,” Hellboy says. It’s as if he’s read my mind. “This ain’t no way to earn your wings.”

I manage a paltry smile and ready my two small sticks. Hellboy’s fist is deadlier, but the arm bearing it is weary. He grinds his teeth and snorts. I look from him to the dead kichiimul, face down in the dirt. No more pretty smiles. No more blowing kisses at her thousands of mirrors. Then I look at Aidra, still covering her eyes.

I get an idea.

I pick up the dead kichiimul’s discarded shawl with the tip of one stick and flick it toward Aidra. It floats through the air and lands in her arms.

“Put that on,” I say.

“But—”

“Just do it.”

Hellboy gets it. His eyes brighten with tiny sparks of hope. “They’ll think you’re the kichiimul,” he says, lifting Aidra to her feet. “You’ve got her mouth, her shawl. They won’t attack the person who summoned them.”

“Let’s hope not,” I add. “At the very least, it might stall them for long enough for us to get off this damn island.”

“Do it,” Hellboy growls.

She does it.

The illusion isn’t perfect; Aidra is taller than the witch, narrower in the waist. She disguises this by stooping. The shawl does the rest. It covers her eyes and nose.

“Your throat,” Hellboy says.

Aidra nods and gathers the shawl close, as if she were trying to stay warm instead of trying to keep me and Hellboy alive.

“Your hands.”

She swaddles them. Only her cracked witch’s mouth is visible and her legs below the knees. They are not swollen with varicose veins, but they are dirty, at least.

Not perfect, no, but it will have to do.

The island trembles. The trees crawl and chatter with life. The vast snake monster glides through the darkness and its many mouths flash. Aidra starts walking and we follow. We take maybe twenty careful steps before the first creatures approach, but I sense their hesitation. Their eyes are dim and uncertain. Any flaw in Aidra’s appearance is made up for in her voice.

“Nai. Pomanka. En salo.”

Her imitation is perfect. Just the right amount of growl and spit. The creatures back away, but still regard us suspiciously.

“POMANKA!”

They jump—scatter. The trees bristle. Something calls out. One of the horned snakes slides close and pokes its tongue at Aidra. She leers at it—“Kalo en”—and it whips away in a blur.

We walk on. My heart feels like a door being slammed over and over again. I’m waiting for one of the creatures to expose our deception and attack. It would take only one of them and then the entire island would fold in on us. This does not happen. We take step after step. The evil shifts and lingers. It watches.

“En salo.”

Aidra speaks softly. Some of the creatures slip away but most hold their ground. We put the kichiimul’s shack behind us. Here are the Nine Shy, slender and pale. They turn away but whisper.

“Nai,” Aidra whispers back. “Moko om tala sei.”

They fall silent. We pass.

I see daylight ahead a moment later but I’m not certain we’ll make it. One wrong move, one slip, that’s all it will take. It doesn’t help my nerves that the vast creature is always close. It won’t let us stray from its sight. It doesn’t trust us.

This becomes obvious when it stops slithering, forming a thick, ropy wall that blocks our way out. Its cleaner snakes hiss and writhe. A mouth opens. It’s as wide as a truck’s grille and ringed with scissors. They clash and slide together. I see the tongue inside, flexing, poised to grab.

Aidra calmly says, “Pi ena mei wo.”

The mouth widens. The smell is blood and rot. I see a severed hand, adorned with an expensive gold ring, caught between two of the teeth. The rest of Cleveland Malak is somewhere inside.

“Om tanto el.”

It breathes on us.

“Pomanka.”

The huge tongue rolls out and slicks what passes for its lips. It’s still hungry. I look to my right and see one of its green eyes watching us warily. Its body pulses. It hesitates a moment longer, then its mouth slowly closes and it slithers on.

We wait for it to pass and walk toward the daylight.

We are almost out when a spindly hand reaches from the low branches and whips the shawl from Aidra’s head. She gasps and tries to cover herself but it’s too late.

“A woman,” a horribly familiar voice calls from above us. “Jooooosy and sweet. Whugh.”

I don’t need to look up to know who it is—what it is: the spider-like kichiimul that Hellboy grabbed by the throat when we first arrived on the island.

“Eat her,” she cries. She is clinging to a thick branch, waving the shawl like a flag. “Kah. Chomp her like a happle.”

Everything stops. It feels like the entire island takes a breath. I look at the vast creature. All of its mouths and eyes are open.

Aidra looks at me and Hellboy.

“Run,” she says.

We are fifty yards from the beach—I can actually see the water—but it may as well be fifty miles. I’m so tired. I can barely lift my arms and my legs are trembling. Hellboy looks equally beaten up and exhausted. We don’t let this stop us. Give it everything you’ve got, kid, he’d said to me, and I intend to.

Hellboy lifts Aidra onto his shoulder and breaks for daylight. I’m right behind him. We whip through the foliage, ducking between trees, leaping ditches and deadfall. The breaths pound from my chest and my heart booms furiously. Trees crash and splinter around me. I hear creatures snarl. Worst of all, I hear scissors. They snip and clash. The sound is terribly close.

Hellboy—twenty yards ahead of me—breaks from the tree line and pounds across the beach. I moan and gasp, drawing on my fear like a fire drawing on oxygen. I slide beneath a fallen log that stops three creatures in their tracks. I duck around a granite boulder a split second before the long black tongue slaps against it. The vast snake monster roars and scissors. I stagger, but manage—somehow—to keep my balance and push on. I can smell the meat on its breath.

Two creatures advance on my left and right, loping on odd limbs. They reach for me but I’m still holding the sticks. I impale their soft throats on the run, without breaking stride. They fall and slow the momentum of those directly behind.

I wonder if I will ever be this afraid—this strong—again.

I don’t stop running until I hit the water.

I go under. Everything is blue and cool and it feels heavenly. The current takes me and I let it. I might swim in a moment, break the surface, draw breath, but for now this cool blue feels wonderful.

I swirl. Seaweed brushes me. The waves pull and drag.

I sink.

A stone hand grabs the back of my shirt and lifts. The cool blue is replaced by open sky and Hellboy’s blurred red face. I draw a breath that comes all the way from the soles of my feet.

“Casper,” Hellboy says. “Hey, kid, you still with us?”

I nod and splutter, then look toward the island. I see a host of creatures hanging from the branches, clinging to the tree line. There are a few on the beach but not many.

“We’re safe here,” Aidra says. She is tucked into Hellboy’s other arm. “They don’t like the water.”

“Good,” I say.

“Can you swim?” Hellboy asks.

“Not yet.”

He holds me while I catch my breath, while the feeling returns to my body and my heartbeat dims in my chest. The sun dims, too, falling to the west in a blaze of peach light. I don’t want to be in the water when it’s dark, I know that.

We start swimming.

Malak’s boat is anchored nearby. It’s as gaudy and narcissistic as the man himself. We swim past—we don’t want any part of it. Our humble sampan waits half a mile offshore. We board gratefully. The boatman bickers with Hellboy about cost, then he rips the outboard motor into some kind of life and we are off.

I never look back. Not once.

Aidra has torn a strip of her dress away and wrapped it around the lower half of her face. She looks dangerous and beautiful. Hellboy sits in exactly the same position as he did on the outbound journey: at the boat’s stern, head down. He says nothing. His huge back rises and falls as he breathes.

I look at him for a long time, in awe of his power and tenacity. This is just one of many battles he has fought—the many stories he has lived through. Next week he could be in Peru, the week after that in the mountains of Romania. On and on . . . The pages of his incredible life are still being filled with color.

I’m just another red shirt, of course, and this—our story—will likely fade into the background for him. But for me, it’s something I’ll never forget.

He called me Casper, I think, and smile.

The sampan putters toward Katamai. I close my eyes and consider our story.

Maybe I’ll write it someday.

WHEN DOVES CRY

Delilah S. Dawson

The fact that some people come to New York City on vacation just flat out baffles me. You want to relax, you find your own personal mountain or stretch of beach. You pick up your binoculars and go bird watching or go stay at your uncle’s house in Orlando. You don’t elbow your way into the busiest place on earth at the hottest time of the year and expect to catch a nice breather.

But that’s not my business. My business is solving problems, especially weird ones. And this one is weirder than most. I’d usually have another agent with me, Abe or Liz, but it’s a busy time for us. Some scientist once said more murders happen when people are buying lots of ice cream, and there’s truth to it. Being this hot just makes folks—human ones and not-so-human ones—more prone to lash out. So I’m by myself, and I’m not on vacation, and I’m headed to what I hear is an impossible crime scene.

Like I said, it’s hot out, that New York kind of hot that only happens when summer should be giving way to fall but is sticking around like a bad penny instead. You can see the stink rising off the wet concrete, feel it cling to your skin. I’m the only person on this island wearing a coat, but that’s because I’m the only one who gets along better when they’re hiding most of what they are. New Yorkers might be oddballs, but I’m a gigantic red oddball with a tail, shorn horns, and cloven hooves, and that sticks out, especially once you get far away from the fashion districts.

Today’s job has got me riding the train way, way down south, so far down that you expect to end up in Florida, somehow. Stations flash by the subway windows, but the car doesn’t stop, just rattles on forever, full of dead air and crying toddlers and sweaty guys in suits loosening their ties. I check the map more than a few times, make sure I’m on the right track. Then I’m slogging up and up and up the stairwells. I try to help a granny with two big suitcases, but she smacks at my gigantic hand and mutters something rude.

“Jeez, lady. I’m just trying to help,” I say, hand open to show her I haven’t stolen anything.

She crosses herself and takes the suitcase back, lumping it up the stairs one worn step at a time. Some people, there’s just no helping.

When I get streetside, I have to shield my eyes from the brightness. Somebody’s opened up a fire hydrant, and kids splatter around in the tepid water under a rainbow in the spray. Pigeons watch, their weight making the phone lines droop. Old guys play chess on milk crates, teens whisper on stoops. Nice people, seems like, if not a nice place. Half the buildings are busy and alive, their windows open and laundry hanging in the total lack of a breeze. Jutting up here and there like rotten teeth are abandoned shops with burned timbers and boarded-up windows, the telltale signs of a place folks can go to squat or shoot up and forget living for a while. The place I’m headed for is like that, and it’s not rare.

I follow the directions from the Bureau and find a dank alley beribboned with yellow caution tape. The door I’m looking for is off the hinges, splintered across the ground. A streamer dislodges from the empty doorway as I duck under, and I mutter, “Sorry,” to anyone who might be listening.

This case—there’s something sad about it. Something that requires apologies.

You don’t need my better-than-perfect vision to see that something horrible has happened in this old brownstone. It starts here, in the kitchen, where streaks of blood reach out like someone tilted the world sideways. A barrel-bellied officer strides up to me, hand on his gun.

“This is a police investigation,” he barks.

“I’m Hellboy,” I say simply. “You guys asked for me.”

He looks momentarily confused and points at me. “Stay right here. We’ll see about that. Don’t touch nothing.”

I hold up both of my hands, the almost normal one and the impossibly made-of-stone one, both red as his alcohol-licked nose. “You got it, chief.”

We spend half an hour doing the Dance of Who’s in Charge before most of the local boys clear out. It’s always pretty funny, considering their biggest guy weighs about half what I do. The chief, an infinitely more competent woman than the guy who greeted me, motions me into the next room, which looks like a giant tried to paint a Jackson Pollock using somebody’s guts. Strips of meat—flesh, I guess—are contained by little chalk circles and number tents. A skeleton picked mostly clean gets the biggest outline, and I stare at it—him?—for a moment, trying to figure out how anything could clean a corpse that quick and not get caught, even by half-blind junkies. It’s enough to make me flinch, and that takes a lot.

“You already have the file?” Chief O’Rourke asks.

I nod. “Yeah. So this is happening a lot? Seems . . . hard to hide.”

She looks around the room and dabs sweat from where her tight bun strains back from a high forehead. “It happens at night, in places without a lot of light. Twice in alleys, a couple in crack houses like this one. Once on a closed subway platform. No witnesses, except guys so high they didn’t notice anything weird happening until they stumbled over the skeleton.”

“You think it’s drug related?”

She shakes her head. “There’s not a chemical substance in the world that could allow someone to do . . . this. All we know is that it happens quickly and with surgical precision. There are no leads. No motives. No connection between victims, except that they’re all men between the ages of eighteen and forty. Whoever’s doing it is managing to kill within moments and leave the scene of the crime without being seen and without leaving a trail, which seems impossible.”

She gestures to the ground, where my hooves and tail have managed to scrape a little ribbon of red. I wince. Oops.

“So where should I start?” I ask. She seems smart. Smart enough to know this job is beyond her squad but smart enough to know where she’d begin if she had to try anyway.

“I’d talk to the families of the vics. Latest guy, David Bernard, has an ex-wife in the neighborhood. It’s all in here.” She nods to a shiny new file, hands it to me. “Good luck. Everything about this case is messy and sad.” Shaking her head, she walks away.

With the local boys cleared out, I take some time to inspect the room, careful to hold my tail up out of the evidence, if you can call it that. There’s a stained, squashy couch along the wall, collapsing into a nest of needles and spoons and empty cans and chip bags. Candles drip along the floor, and everything smells of blood and smoke. The captain is right—it’s a sad place where sad people go to forget their sad lives. And one of them won’t need this pathetic escape any longer. He’s been filleted into millions of tiny pieces and splattered all over the walls, floor, and ceiling. I try not to look too hard at the chunks, try to stop myself from identifying how they might’ve once made up a man.

The poor bastard.

The ex-wife’s apartment is six floors up, no elevator, narrow stairs, suffocating hallways. Carrying groceries up here must be a living hell, and that’s coming from me. When I knock, I can feel everyone up and down the hall tense up, feel their eyes scanning me through peepholes. A few locks click shut. It’s a good thing my gun is hidden by my coat, or I’d hear shotguns racking, too. Whoever is behind my door isn’t making a move, but I can almost feel her ratcheting heart.

“Mrs. Lydia Bernard? I’d like to speak to you about your husband,” I say softly.

“Ex-husband.”

The power with which she hisses from the other side of the thin door makes me take a step back.

“Ex-husband, then,” I agree.

“It’s over. I told him last week to never contact me again. What does he want now?”

I bend over so I’m looking right into the peephole, so she can see my eyes and know that even if I’m weird and scary as hell, I’m not lying. “He doesn’t want anything. He’s dead. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

There’s a gasp, and then four locks rattle open and I’m staring at her through the open door. She looks like a dropped plum, her skin mottled with purple and blue and yellow, one black eye still fading. The baby on her hip stares at me, wide eyed.

I ignore the bruises and smile at the baby. “Coochy-coo, kid.”

When the baby laughs, she relaxes and steps back to let me in. I guess she knows that a big guy like me could easily get inside, either way.

It’s a small place but tidy, like she’s trying hard. A toddler plays with blocks, and she puts the baby into something that lets it jump up and down and scream without hurting anything. When she sits on the couch, I take the recliner across from her, sitting as lightly as possible, although it still screeches in protest under my weight.

“What happened?” she asks.

I lay it all out for her. Maybe I should be more gentle, but I can put the pieces together. This is a woman who’s seen things a guy like me never will, and it would be dishonest to lie to her, to hold back on letting her know what happened to the monster she once married.

She frowns, but more like she’s confused than sorry. “Who did it?”

I shrug. “That’s the thing. We don’t know. Did David have any enemies?”

Lydia’s laugh is a half-mad thing, and I don’t blame her. “He owed everyone money. He was a thief. Plenty of people wanted to hurt him. But none of them could do . . .” She glances down to the file in her lap. “This. Do you know if there was anything . . . if he left anything? Money, maybe?”

The desperation in her eyes is a killer.

“Not my area of expertise,” I say. I don’t mention that his pockets were just as shredded as his body. “Do you have someone who can help? Somewhere you can go?”

Her head drops, shakes. “The church at the end of the street helps, but not much. Too many single moms. He used to be a good man. I don’t know what happened.”

With my left hand, my lighter hand, I pat her shoulder. “Not your fault. Some guys get pretty good at hiding the monster inside. Hey, you want to order a pizza?”

She’s reluctant, but I end up using her phone to place the call. I slide two twenties under the phone book and she doesn’t offer me change. We both know she needs it more than I do.

“We’ll let you know if we find out anything,” I say as I slip out the door. “But keep all these locks up, anyway.”

Once I’m out in the hall, my shoulders hunched to fit between the narrow walls, I hear all four locks slide home. Eyes crawl over me as I head for the stairs, hungry and prying.

If I feel unsafe here, I can’t imagine what it must be like for her.

Thanks to the captain, I’ve got a whole page of ex-wives and ex-girlfriends and moms who wanted more for their murdered sons. They’re all within ten blocks or so, but I’m not ready to face another broken lady painted with bruises, her eyes shining with unshed tears. I’d buy pizzas for all of them, if I could, but I’m going to need an ATM first. Instead, I look for the church she mentioned, and it’s a pretty old thing of solid gray stone that doesn’t seem to fit the area around it. The stained glass is unspoiled, the gargoyles leering, the steeple tall and proud. Looks like the hand of God pried it out of some corner of London or Mexico and dropped it here among the falling-down walkups and boarded-up bodegas.

Before I go inside, I have to steel myself. Doesn’t seem like my kind of place, does it? But maybe the priest won’t notice my sawed-off horns and distinctly devilish color. Worst thing he can do is flick holy water in my face, which would be a blessing in this heat.

It’s cooler inside, pleasantly peaceful. A few quiet souls sit or sleep on the wooden pews, and I walk up the center and stare at the brilliant stained glass behind the pulpit, a Saint Francis surrounded by animals and birds. I hunt around a bit for the priest but can’t find him. Off to the side, there’s a bulletin board announcing various meetings: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Mom’s Morning Out, Weight Watchers, that sort of thing. There’s one for a group for battered women that catches my eye—that must be the one Mrs. Bernard mentioned. They all meet downstairs, so I head down the stone steps and finally find an office.

An elderly woman with cat-eye glasses and carefully curled white hair looks up at me, does a double take, and crosses herself with a little gasp before firming up her jaw. “Can I help you?” It comes out aggressive, like she’ll chase me with a pitchfork if I get rowdy, but I don’t mind.

She sits at a secondhand desk behind a name plaque reading Norma Gomez, guarding the closed door to the priest’s office. The rest of the room holds a long table and stacks of chairs, and I can imagine them settled in a circle as folks nervously drink off-brand cola and prepare to unload their broken souls to strangers.

“I’m investigating a local murder, and the victim’s ex-wife said she comes here for help,” I say, feeling awkward as hell. “The guy, his name is David Bernard.”

Norma’s mouth purses up and her eyes all but burn. “Poor Lydia. The things that man did to her. We help as best we can, but our flock is very large, and there’s so little we can do.”

“You have a group that meets here,” I prompt.

Her smile returns. “Ah, yes. The Enduring Doves. We try to get them back on their feet. Find apartments, fill their cupboards. It’s easier once they’re free.”

“Free . . . from their husbands?”

A chuckle. “From their monsters.” She nods to a statue in the corner, a Saint Francis matching the one upstairs. “He was a soldier once, our blessed Saint Francis. We pray to him, hoping his grace can help our girls take flight, much like the birds he once preached to.”

This much fervor makes me a little uncomfortable, so I try to change tactics. “What about the other victims? I’ve got a list of exes and mothers. Any of these names look familiar to you?”

I hold out the list, and she flicks her glasses down over her nose and trails a manicured finger over the lines of type. “Oh, yes. A couple of these ladies are church members.”

The four names she points out are the wives or exes of the deceased, which gets my gears turning. But she looks somewhere between suspicious and curious, so I nod and thank her and leave. The Enduring Doves meet here in a few days, which means I can kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.

Nobody dies until then, at least. I find a decently clean place to stay and enjoy the hot dog carts and bodega cafés con leche until it’s time for the meeting. The nights are slightly cooler, and the church shines like a beacon among the darker doorways. I creep down the stairs a few minutes after the meeting has begun, hoping to listen in. I know it’s kinda dishonest, but nothing’s going to make a group of abused women clam up fast more than a gigantic guy who always looks angry. I settle against the wall in the stone stairway and focus on their voices.

It starts off as the usual chitchat, a bevy of female voices ranging from light and conversational to angry and accusing to sad and punctuated with sniffles. Maybe a dozen people, I guess. Then the familiar voice of Norma Gomez pipes up, welcoming everyone and offering them coffee and snacks. The women pray together, say a chant about strength in numbers and God’s will, and begin the painful process of stepping up, one after one, to recount their stories. I swear I feel my heart break in my chest hearing how each person has suffered at the hands of her husband, her boyfriend, her father. When they recite, “We love you, Ashley,” and hug, sobs are the norm. I have to struggle to stay hidden and silent, feeling like a giant jerk for overhearing something so personal.

One story is especially painful as a lady named Jenny describes what her husband did last week, coming home drunk and smacking their kid and tossing Jenny into the table. “I called the cops, but they couldn’t do anything,” she says, voice low. “He said I fell down the stairs. There’s never any witnesses. He said if I call the cops again, he’ll get a gun. Dario was so sweet, but now that the baby’s here . . . it’s like he’s a different person.”

They pray for her, then, voices murmuring as one, begging Saint Francis for kindness, shelter, and understanding. At the end, someone mutters, “And revenge,” right before the Amen.

As they say their goodbyes, I scramble up the stairs and out into the street, feeling like I’ve been punched in the gut. I’m here to solve murders, but these battered women are what tug on my heart. I came here thinking maybe one of them did it, butthat seems impossible. This room—it’s full of sorrow, helplessness. For all my disadvantages, I’ve always had strength on my side. I’m pretty much indestructible and ageless and hard to hurt. But these women are small and soft and helpless, fragile as eggs. I can’t protect all of them. I can’t even protect one of them. But maybe I can try.

I know it’s Jenny because she’s the one with a black eye holding a baby, the one wearing sunglasses and a hat at night. She scurries down the street not like she’s being followed, as I’d expect, but like she doesn’t want to get where she’s going. It’s just a few blocks before she darts through a door—there’s not even a lock, not even a buzzer—and up rickety stairs. I eye the names beside the buzzer and note that Dario Marini is in 8B. After a few breaths that taste sour in my mouth, I tiptoe up stairs that feel like they can barely support my weight. On the eighth floor, I peek around the corner to make sure the hallway is empty, then edge over to 8B. Voices within are raised in argument, and I flinch at the sharp slap of flesh on flesh. Jenny screams, and I’m done. Maybe I should call the cops, notify a neighbor. But I’m enraged by what’s happening, by a world that allows it to happen. With one punch of my right hand, the flimsy door snaps inward.

The baby is crying on the ground in a wad of blankets, and Jenny kneels over it, her sunglasses gone and her face a mass of fresh bruises. I focus on the man standing over her, his fist upraised, a beer in his other hand as if this is totally normal. They turn and look at me, and his jaw drops, and that’s when it happens.

It starts with the sound of slashing blades, like a thousand pairs of scissors snickering. A mass of shiny metal flies in through the open window, forming and re-forming like a hurricane. Jenny ducks to cover the baby with her body, and Dario drops the gun he’s just pulled from the waistband of his jeans, and then they’re on him, and I see what they are. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of birds. Birds the size of crows, birds made of razor feathers and death, birds with bronze beaks like blenders. They don’t cry, they don’t caw, they don’t shriek. They simply tear the man to shreds. It’s like putting a steak through a grinder, and when the birds whoosh away from the column that was once Dario and swirl around the room like a tornado of knives, there’s nothing left but his skeleton and splatters of gore all over the walls and floor.

I hurry toward Jenny, but she’s unharmed, untouched by the birds, her hair and clothes splattered in red. The baby is crying, but I can’t hear it until the birds disappear back out the window that let them in.

The silence in their wake is deafening. I’m looming over this poor woman, and Jenny uncurls and looks up at me, only her bruised face free of her husband’s blood.

“Are you okay?” I ask. “What was that?”

She shakes her head in confusion, cradles the crying baby to her chest. She’s so freaked out that she doesn’t even register my strangeness. “I don’t know,” she says, again and again. “I don’t know.” I believe her.

She’s in shock, so I help her call her sister, walk her downstairs, and hold her overnight bag for her while she climbs into the running sedan. The whole time, she stares at me like I’ve done something amazing, which I haven’t. Whatever happened tonight? That wasn’t me.

When I go back upstairs, the only thing I find that can be called evidence is a single metal feather. When I pick it up with my left hand, it slices my thumb open. No point in calling the local cops. They’ll never believe this story. It’s up to me to figure out what the hell happened. And I’m starting back at the church.

The next morning, I bring Norma Gomez a box of donuts and a coffee. I’m at the front door when she comes to open up, and we make polite small talk while she unlocks various doors and lights candles and turns on lights. She seems just as unshakable and pleasant as she did when I first met her in the basement. Once we’re back down there, and I’m seated in one of the foldout chairs in front of her desk, I get down to business.

“Jenny’s husband Dario was killed last night,” I start.

“Oh?” She bites into a Boston cream, looking vaguely interested.

“You know. Jenny, who told the group last night that Dario hit the baby and threatened to bring a gun if she called the cops again?”

At that, her eyes narrow behind the cat glasses. “And how would you know that?”

I flick crumb-covered fingers in the air. “Let’s just say I know things. But I think you know things, too. Like I bet you know what was left of Dario after he pulled his gun and those metal birds showed up.”

Norma considers me, her mouth twitching. I lay the feather on the table between us, fiddling with it between the stone-hard fingers of my right hand.

“I followed her to help her,” I say, and that seems to tip the scales.

She stands and walks over to the statue of Saint Francis, stroking the dove in his palm softly. “When I started the Enduring Doves, I thought maybe I’d get one or two women, but there were so many. And we began to pray—for one another, for an end to sorrow. And then the birds came. The first one was John Ramos. He tried to shoot his wife and shot their little boy instead. So the birds claimed him. His wife was finally able to escape, go back home to live with her family, help their boy recover in peace. Then Elroy Fagan. He pushed his pregnant girlfriend down the stairs, made her lose the baby. We kept meeting and praying, and the birds kept coming to punish the men who deserved it. Afterward, the women can rebuild. It’s a blessing.”

“But why?” I ask. “I mean, I know why. But how does it work?”

Norma shakes her head. “There’s an old Greek myth about the Stymphalian birds. You heard of it?”

I shrug. “Maybe? I hear a lot of things.”

“They were man-eating birds with beaks of bronze and metal feathers who belonged to Artemis. And Artemis was known for protecting her own, for protecting the women who worshiped her. Our birds . . . Well, they seem a little like that, but they’re pigeons. Did you notice that? Almost like Saint Francis remembers his days as a soldier, remembers what it was to fight for what’s right before taking on the mantle of peace. A little of this legend, a little of that. Artemis, Saint Francis, an Old Testament bit of God. All I know is that I keep track of the girls left behind, and their lives are better off, after.” She grabs another donut and points at me, at my chest. “Who are you going to tell?”

I pick up the feather and consider it. See, my job is to stop problems. To save lives. To help people. Far as I can figure, these birds . . . Well, they’re doing that, too. I saw Dario last night, and what I would’ve done to him was pretty similar to what the birds did, only they’re better at leaving no evidence behind.

“Lady, I can fight gods and monsters and mad scientists and ghosts, but I don’t see how I can fight a flock of pigeons.”

She nods, her lips curling up.

“That’s true. You can’t fight pigeons. They’re like rats. Everywhere.”

She scoots the last donut toward me, and I eat it. We sit like that, with the feather between us, until the coffee is gone.

It’s a weird thing, leaving a case file open. Usually, it makes me feel like I failed somewhere. But the best I can figure, a closed file means the problem is gone. And as long as guys are beating up on women, this problem is far from gone. Call it nature evening out the odds. Call it supernatural revenge. Call it a simple accident of unruly supernatural wildlife. But when you point your finger at the bad guy, in this case, it’s not pointing to Artemis or Saint Francis or Norma or any of these bruised-up women gathering for bad coffee in a church basement. It’s pointing at the men who use their size and strength to intimidate, assault, or threaten the women they profess to love.

There’s nothing supernatural about this problem. It’s an asshole problem, and the solution is unusual.

It’s fair, is what I’m saying.

And maybe I’ll never be able to explain that to Chief O’Rourke and her boys. Maybe I’ll even take some heat for it back at the BPRD. But I’m okay with that.

I burn the file in a trash can. As I head down to the subway and out of the neighborhood forever, I toss the last of my hot dog behind for the pigeons. Never gonna be rude to one of those guys again. Just in case, I buy an extra pretzel and toss that down, too. Their feathers flash in the hot sun as they flutter from the telephone lines and peck and peck and peck.

I could use a vacation.

Somewhere cooler. Somewhere less busy. Somewhere less bloody.

But absolutely no bird watching.

THE OTHER SIDE OF SUMMER

Chris Roberson

Fairfield, Connecticut. July 1950.

Ginny was trying to think of a six-letter word for “mystery” when the phone in the hallway rang. The clatter of typewriter keys continued without interruption out on the veranda, which meant there was no hope of her mother answering, so Ginny left the Times on the kitchen table and went to pick up the handset.

“Payne residence.” She said it by force of habit, but it wasn’t really true. The real Payne residence was the brownstone back in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This was just the cottage where Ginny had been stuck all summer while her mother worked.

“Virginia, my dearest angel,” came the voice on the other end of the line, “it’s your uncle Rupert. Is your mother around?”

Ginny covered the phone with her hand and leaned over until she could see the front window, open to let in the morning breeze. “Mom. It’s for you.”

Her mother flounced through the front door with a pencil tucked behind her ear and a look on her face that suggested she was none too pleased with the interruption.

Ginny held out the phone. “Mom, do you think that later I could . . .”

Her mother silenced her with a glance, and held the phone to her ear. “Madeline Payne here. Who’s calling? Oh, Rupert darling, however are you?”

Rupert wasn’t really her uncle, just a friend of her mother’s since before Ginny was born. When Ginny’s father had died in the Battle of Anzio, she’d briefly entertained the fantasy that Rupert might move in with them and be her new dad. But that was only because Ginny had been a dopey nine-year-old at the time and didn’t understand how the world worked. By the time she was twelve, she’d figured out that Rupert was what was called a “confirmed bachelor” in polite circles, and referred to in far more vulgar terms by the uncouth. But as a producer on Broadway, Rupert was surrounded by other “confirmed bachelors,” and didn’t seem to care at all what other people thought about his lifestyle.

Ginny was back in the kitchen with the crossword puzzle. The New York Times was putting them in the paper every day now, which at least gave Ginny something to do when she ran out of things to read. There wasn’t much to do except go down to the shore and look at the water, and that had lost its appeal in the first hours they’d been here.

She could hear her mother talking in the hallway.

“Yes, the novel is coming along swimmingly. The research I’ve been able to dig up has been invaluable. Just a few more weeks and . . .”

Her mother broke off for a moment, and when she started talking again, there was a brittle edge to her voice.

“He didn’t. You’re joking. You didn’t tell him about . . . Oh, no.”

Ginny got up from the kitchen table and went to look down the hallway. Her mother’s expression had changed, and Ginny could see whatever Rupert was telling her, it was unwelcome news.

“All right,” her mother said with a ragged sigh. “I know, I know, we’ll figure something out. I will. Thanks for letting me know, Rupert. My best to Trevor.”

Her mother managed to contain herself as she returned the handset to its cradle, but it was like watching a volcano about to explode. Her hands were balled into tight, white-knuckled fists at her sides, and her jaw was clenched. Then . . . Vesuvius.

“That rat bastard!”

“Mom?” Ginny had seen her mother this upset before, of course, but not often. “Is everything okay?”

Her mother had her face buried in her hands. She took a deep breath, and as she lowered her hands, tried to regain some measure of composure.

“Oh, it’s nothing, really,” she said. “Just the fact that the time I’ve spent on this blasted novel is wasted.” She was pacing now, waving her arms. “Rupert ran into a literary-agent friend of his at a party, who told him that Arthur Miller has started work on a play. His next big show. And do you care to guess what it’s about?”

Ginny cringed. “Is it about . . .”

“It’s about the Salem witch trials,” her mother went on without waiting for Ginny to finish. “He’s using them as an allegory for the Red Scare, you see? Brilliant, isn’t it?”

“Oh.” Ginny glanced over at the mountain of books and papers piled on the sofa in the front room. Her mother had spent the whole summer traveling all over the southern part of the state, visiting libraries, personal collections, church archives . . . anything and everything to do with the Connecticut witch trials.

Ginny’s mother dropped into a chair, shoulders slumped, looking defeated. “He just won the Tony and the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman, for pity’s sake. It’s not as if his next project isn’t going to get attention . . .” She trailed off, and stared into the middle distance.

Ginny stood awkwardly in the doorway to the kitchen, shuffling her feet.

“Mom? I thought maybe I could head into town this morning. To the bookshop?”

Her mother continued to stare off into space.

“Mom?”

“Hmm?” She turned to look at Ginny, as if she’d forgotten for a moment that she was there.

“Can I go to the bookshop? I’ve run out of stuff to read.”

Her mother absently waved her hand toward the front door. “Sure, sure. That’s fine. Just be back by dinner.”

Ginny didn’t bother pointing out that they hadn’t even had lunch yet, but grabbed her coin purse and hustled out the door.

Normally her mother would have grilled her about what book she intended to buy, and probably would have insisted for the hundredth time that Ginny read something else by Virginia Woolf. But her mother was clearly far too preoccupied at the moment, which was fine with Ginny. She knew exactly what she waslooking for.

A few people stared at Hellboy as he strolled down the sidewalk, but not as many as before. It hadn’t really bothered him when they did, not much anyway, but still he was relieved to find that many residents of Fairfield seemed to have gotten over the shock of seeing him out walking his dog, and regarded him with no more interest than they would any other kid they passed on the sidewalk. Okay, maybe a little more interest, since he was the only kid in town with red skin and sawed-off horns on his forehead, but still.

He’d told the Professor that he was just going to walk Mac around the block and then he’d get back to his studies. But that wasn’t true. Or at least, not the whole truth. Yes, he was going to walk Mac around the block, and yes, when he returned to BPRD headquarters, he’d get back to his studies. But he’d crossed the fingers of his left hand behind his back when talking to the Professor, because he’d omitted the fact that he planned to make a stop along the way.

The first time Hellboy had walked into Finn’s Books on Old Post Road, it was like he’d found a hidden treasure trove. He’d been around books his whole life, of course, but the BPRD library was full of the kinds of boring stuff that the Professor was always reading—history, folklore, mythology. Who cared about any of that? Finn’s was stocked with the good stuff, including a rack of pulp magazines and comic books by the front door, shelves and shelves filled with science-fiction and mystery novels, and even cardboard boxes stuffed with old back issues and secondhand paperbacks in the rear of the shop.

Archie Muraro brought him to the store several times a month, to pick up the latest issues of Hellboy’s favorite pulp magazines or the mystery novels that Archie favored. And while technically Hellboy wasn’t supposed to wander this far away from BPRD headquarters on his own, Archie had been away for most of the summer, staking out a supposedly haunted sawmill in the Pacific Northwest, and Hellboy had gotten tired of waiting for him to return.

After tying Mac’s leash to the lamppost out front, Hellboy went inside, the bell above the door jangling as he entered. The proprietor glanced briefly in his direction from behind the counter, then turned his attention back to a girl standing beside the register.

“Just got it in last week, sweetheart,” Finn said, pointing at a row of shelves on the other side of the store. “Right over there between the Nancy Drews and the Trixie Beldens.”

“Thanks, mister.” The girl grinned, and bounced off in that direction.

Hellboy was scanning the magazine rack with mounting frustration when the bell over the door jangled, and for a split second he was sure it was someone from the Bureau come to drag him back to headquarters. But it was only the mailman, already heading over to the counter and pulling a bundle of mail out of his satchel.

After a few more moments fruitlessly scanning the rack, Hellboy walked over to the counter, where Finn and the mailman were shooting the breeze.

“Excuse me,” Hellboy said, hating the way that his voice cracked when he talked, “do you have the new issue of Weird Tales?”

Finn shook his head. “Afraid not, kid. The new shipment hasn’t come in yet. Probably have some older issues in the back, though.” He jerked a thumb toward the rear of the shop.

“Thanks,” Hellboy said with a sigh.

Finn turned his attention back to the mailman. “So what’s this about the Gilroys’ farm?”

“Mmm?” The mailman seemed to have trouble taking his eyes off Hellboy as he walked by. Hellboy tried not to mind. Finn had gotten over his appearance months before, and these days treated him like he would any other customer, but the mailman still had that startled look on his face that people usually got when they saw him for the first time.

“He says something’s been spooking his cattle?” Finn prodded again.

As he continued on to the back of the shop, Hellboy could almost feel the mailman’s gaze slide off his back. “Yeah,” he could hear the mailman say behind him. “And get this. He says it’s a real, live ghost.”

Hellboy spent a few minutes rummaging around in cardboard boxes arranged haphazardly on the floor, which were mostly filled with yellowing copies of Life magazine, National Geographic, and Hollywood tabloids. He failed to find any Weird Tales, but did manage to turn up a couple of issues of Lobster Comics that he hadn’t read before, so the trip wouldn’t be a total loss.

When he got back to the counter, the mailman was waiting for Finn to finish ringing up the girl’s purchase, clearly not done with their conversation. As the girl headed toward the door, Hellboy gave Finn a quarter for the comics and pocketed the nickel he got in change.

“If you ask me,” Finn said to the mailman as Hellboy turned away, “it’s probably just a cougar that spooked Gilroy’s herd.”

The girl was standing in the open doorway with a book tucked under her arm, looking back over her shoulder and listening with interest to the two men talking. As Hellboy approached, she grinned sheepishly and continued on through the door.

“Hogwash,” Hellboy could hear the mailman say as he followed the girl out the door. “Haven’t been any cougars in these parts since the end of the last century. And what about those screams Gilroy heard? Ain’t no cougar ever made a sound like that . . .”

Back out on the sidewalk, Hellboy found the girl kneeling down beside Mac and making cooing noises.

“Is this your dog?” she asked, looking up at Hellboy. When he nodded, she added, “Can I pet him?”

“Sure.” Hellboy shrugged.

“Hey, fella. Who’s a good boy?” The girl reached over and scratched Mac behind the ears, and his tail beat out a staccato rhythm on the pavement as it wagged in appreciation. “What’s his name?”

“M-Mac,” Hellboy stammered. “His name’s Mac.” He paused for a moment, shifting uneasily. “Um . . . My name is Hellboy, by the way.”

She looked up at him with a lopsided grin. “I knew that, silly. I read that issue of Life magazine with you on the cover.” She straightened up and stuck out her hand. “Ginny Payne.”

Hellboy took her hand, grateful she’d extended her left. It would have felt awkward trying to shake with his rock-like right hand. “Nice . . . uh . . . nice to meet you.”

Ginny dropped his hand, and gave him an appraising look. “It’s funny, though. I figured you’d be a lot younger, but it looks like you’re about the same age as me.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Hellboy managed an awkward chuckle. He didn’t really want to confess that even though he looked like he might be around fifteen, he hadn’t even celebrated his sixth birthday yet. But he couldn’t help noticing how casually she was talking to him. “You don’t . . . You don’t seem bothered talking to a kid with sawed-off horns and . . . well . . .” He held up his right hand.

Ginny rolled her eyes. “I was raised around artists and show people, Hellboy. Nothing much fazes me.”

The book tucked under her arm caught Hellboy’s eye.

“What?” Ginny said, following his gaze.

“Is that some kind of monster on the cover?”

Ginny grinned, and held the book up so he could get a better look. Sure enough, it showed a teenage girl fighting a monster, with a “Sarah Jewell Mysteries” banner above the title, The Thing in the Well. “It’s my absolute favorite series. Sarah Jewell is this girl who travels all over the world investigating mysteries, haunted houses, monsters, the works.” She gestured at the comics rolled up in Hellboy’s back pocket. “What’d you get?”

Hellboy pulled out the comics and unrolled them, a sheepish expression on his face. “It’s kinda kids’ stuff,” he said as Ginny looked them over. “I normally read the more grown-up stuff, like Weird Tales. My favorite is Jules de Grandin, the occult detective. In this one story—”

He broke off when the door to the bookshop opened, and the mailman stepped outside. They had to step to one side to let him pass, and the mailman stared openly at Hellboy as he went by.

Ginny glared at the mailman’s retreating back. When he was out of earshot, she turned back to Hellboy, who was tucking the rolled-up comics into his back pocket. “So what do you think about that story he was telling. About the ghost?”

Hellboy shrugged. “I dunno. Might be a cougar, I guess.”

Ginny shook her head, a sly grin tugging the corners of her mouth. “I think it’s the spirit of the witch.”

“Witch?” Hellboy cocked an eyebrow.

“Well, not really a witch, I guess.” Ginny chewed on her lower lip. “See, my mom’s a novelist—she’s had a couple of bestsellers, won some awards, stuff like that—and we came here this summer so she could research the Connecticut witch trials. Did you know that they happened, like, fifty years before the Salem ones?”

Hellboy shook his head.

“Well, anyway, my mom’s idea was that she could tell the story of this one witch trial in particular that happened here in Fairfield—Goodwife Knapp, who refused to name names even when she was falsely convicted of being a witch, and ended up being hanged to death—but the story would really be about McCarthy and the Un-American Activities Committee and all of that.”

“Huh.” Hellboy didn’t really keep up with politics, but wasn’t sure he wanted to admit that. “Sounds . . . interesting?”

“Anyway, what if her spirit has come back to haunt Fairfield, and that’s what the farmer saw?” Ginny’s eyes widened. “Hey, I just had an idea. We should investigate it. The thing at the farm, I mean. The mystery at the farm, just like Sarah Jewell would do.”

“Or Jules de Grandin,” Hellboy said, a little breathless. “We’d have to go at night though, after the grownups have gone to bed.”

“Exactly.” Ginny was so excited that she bounced a little in place. “So are you in?”

Hellboy knew that he would catch holy hell from the Professor if he got caught, but he had to admit that it was tempting.

“Okay,” he said, grinning. “Let’s do it.”

It had taken them the better part of an hour to find the Gilroy farm, but now they crouched in a copse of trees, hidden in the shadows. They had an unobstructed view of the farmhouse, the barn, and the fields, all tinged blue-gray in the light of the full moon that shone overhead in a cloudless, starry sky. They’d been sitting in silence for half an hour, but so far had seen no sign of any ghost, cougar, or anything else out of the ordinary. Hellboy was starting to get a little bored.

“Is it weird for you?” Ginny’s voice was barely above a whisper but still startled him after such a prolonged silence. When Hellboy turned in her direction, she was little more than a shadowy silhouette beside him. “Being the way you are, I mean. And the way people look at you? Like that mailman staring at you?”

“I don’t know.” Hellboy shrugged. “Is it weird for you, being the daughter of a famous novelist?”

Ginny laughed. “My mom isn’t all that famous. Not really.” The moonlight glinted faintly on her teeth as she smiled. “It’s not like she’s been on the cover of Life magazine, unlike some people . . .” She prodded Hellboy in the shoulder, then turned her attention back to the farm.

A silence stretched out between them, and in the distance the hooting of an owl could faintly be heard.

“It’s not so bad,” Hellboy said quietly. “I’ve got the Professor, and Archie and Margaret, and they’re all swell. It’s just . . .” He sighed. “I sometimes wish that I got to spend more time with other kids.”

“Well?” Ginny prodded him in the shoulder again. “I’m a kid, aren’t I?”

Hellboy grinned. “Yeah, I guess you are.”

“So quit bellyaching.” She chuckled. “Besides, we’ve got a mystery to solve!”

By the time the sun began to pink the sky in the east, Hellboy and Ginny had recounted to each other the plots of all of their favorite comics and novels, debated the relative merits of the various Universal Studios monster movies, and argued whether pancakes or waffles were the better breakfast food, but had still not seen anything that resembled the thing the farmer Gilroy had reported seeing.

“I should be getting back.” Hellboy stood up, rolling his shoulders, his legs a little stiff and numb from sitting still for so long.

“Yeah, me too.” Ginny brushed leaves off the seat of her pants. “Mom isn’t much of an early riser, but I don’t want to push my luck.”

They could see the farmer walking from the farmhouse to the barn with a milk pail in hand, and so they were careful to keep out of his line of sight as they made their way through the trees toward the road that led back into town.

“Well, I guess that was a bust.” Ginny glanced over at Hellboy as they walked along the road. “You sure you’re not going to get caught?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Hellboy shrugged, grinning. “But who cares? That was kind of fun.”

Ginny had trouble keeping her eyes open at breakfast. She’d managed to get maybe an hour’s worth of sleep before her mother came into her room to wake her up. Now she sat at the kitchen table staring listlessly into a bowl of cornflakes while her mother sat across from her with a cup of coffee, an unfiltered Chesterfield, and the morning papers.

“Yokels,” her mother snorted, shaking her head.

Ginny looked up. “Huh?”

“Get a load of this.” Her mother slid the paper across the table to Ginny. It was the morning edition of the Fairfield News, and beneath the fold on the front page was an article with a headline that read “Strange Sightings in the Night.” Ginny’s mother took a long drag on her cigarette. “Three hundred years after they killed poor Goody Knapp, and they’re still willing to believe any old superstitious twaddle.”

Ginny scanned the article. It seemed that late the previous night there had been a sighting reported, only a few miles away from where she and Hellboyhad been keeping watch on the Gilroy farm. And this time it hadn’t just beenone farmer in the middle of the night, but multiple witnesses, including a schoolteacher and a doctor, all of whom had been driving along a country road when they spotted something in a field. There was no clear consensus on just what it was they’d seen, but there was one element that was consistent in each of their accounts. All of the witnesses reported hearing bloodcurdling screams.

A few hours later Ginny sat with Hellboy at the soda counter at a pharmacy, neglecting their root beer floats while they huddled close and talked in low tones.

“. . . and when I asked the Professor about it, he said that there wasn’t enough evidence of anything paranormal for the Bureau to investigate.” Hellboy glanced over at a group of adults who were talking by the newsstand. “And since no one’s been hurt, not even any animals, the local police aren’t really doing much about it, either.”

“I heard some people talking on the street when I walked over here,” Ginny said. “They’re not happy about the official response, and some of them are planning on hunting for the thing themselves.”

“Hunting for it?” Hellboy raised an eyebrow. “For a ghost?”

“They think it’s some kind of monster.” Ginny tucked her hair behind her ear, a nervous gesture. “No offense.”

“Hmm?” Hellboy gave her a quizzical look, and then shook his head, frowning slightly. “Oh . . . Yeah, okay. Maybe it is.”

“Did you tell the grownups at the BPRD that we went out looking for it last night?”

Hellboy shook his head. “No. You tell your mom?”

“Me, neither. But there is really something out there, clearly.” Ginny chewed her lower lip for a moment. “Maybe we’ve been going about this all wrong.”

“Yeah?”

Ginny nodded. “Instead of staking out somewhere we know the thing has already been, maybe we need to look in places it hasn’t gone yet. Like in the Sarah Jewell novel The Mystery of the Sultan’s Crown, when Sarah is on the hunt for a manticore in a harem. If you’re looking for something that’s on the move, you can’t just stay in one place.”

Hellboy rubbed his chin with his left hand for a moment before answering. “So you want to give it another shot tonight?”

Ginny just grinned in reply.

Ginny and Hellboy had been traipsing through the woods for more than an hour, flashlights pointed at the ground, when he held his hand up, motioning her to stop. “Did you hear that?”

Ginny looked around, and shook her head. She could hear an owl in the distance, but that was about it.

“Quick,” Hellboy added, in a hushed whisper, “turn them off.” He switched off his flashlight, and Ginny quickly did the same.

A moment later they could see the beams of a half dozen flashlights lancing through the trees a few dozen yards away. Hellboy grabbed Ginny’s elbow and pulled her behind a tree, and the two watched as a group of farmers armed with flashlights and shotguns trooped past. They could hear the men talking in low voices about the “beast,” arguing over which of them would get to mount its head on his wall as a trophy.

When the farmers had passed by, moving on to search another part of the woods, Hellboy stepped out from behind the tree. “That was close.”

“You scared me for a second.” Ginny could feel her pulse still racing. “I thought you’d spotted the ghost.”

“Sorry.” Hellboy switched his flashlight back on. “I’ve got pretty good hearing, I guess. Didn’t realize you hadn’t heard them coming, too.”

“It’s okay.” Ginny shrugged, flicking her own flashlight on. “That was quick thinking, though.” She turned and studied Hellboy’s expression. “Have you done this kind of thing before? Like, go out on missions with the grownups at the BPRD?”

“Just one time,” he answered after a long pause. “Last September.”

Ginny’s eyes widened. “Really? What was it like?”

Hellboy shifted, uneasily, and took a deep breath. “There was this air force pilot. He’d done some necromancy stuff and was on the run from the law. We caught up with him and . . . and . . .”

He trailed off, a pained expression on his face.

“What happened?” Ginny asked.

Hellboy lowered his head. “I shot him.”

Ginny couldn’t prevent an audible gasp, hand held over her mouth.

“I killed him,” Hellboy continued. He looked up and met Ginny’s startled gaze. “I had to. The guy was about to kill the Professor and Archie. And Stegner, too.”

“Oh, Hellboy . . .” Ginny wasn’t sure what to say. Reading about danger and adventure in books was one thing. But to have experienced something like that firsthand . . . She couldn’t even imagine. “Do you want to talk about—”

Ginny’s next words were drowned out by the sound of a bloodcurdling scream directly behind them.

“The heck . . . ?” Hellboy said.

Ginny looked back, and could see a shadow moving out of the trees into the clearing where they stood. “Hellboy, over there!”

As their flashlight beams searched for the shape, Ginny could scarcely draw a breath. Was it the ghost of Goody Knapp, come back for revenge on the descendants of those who hung her as a witch? Was it a mountain lion wandered far from his normal habitat? Was it a monster?

“Huh.” Hellboy said. “I’ll be damned.”

The creature before them was about the size of a large dog, but with a face more like that of a cat, with jet-black fur and a long, bushy tail. And far from being imposing, the poor thing looked scared out of its wits.

“What the heck is that?” Hellboy took a step toward the creature.

Its mouth opened and another bloodcurdling scream bellowed out.

“Okay, okay,” Hellboy said, backing away. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

“Poor thing is terrified.” Ginny put a hand on Hellboy’s shoulder. “Do you think . . . ?”

“It came from over here!” a voice called from the near distance, and they could see the flashlights of the group of farmers approaching through the trees.

“Should we try to trap it?” Ginny asked.

Hellboy just stared at the creature, a sad expression on his face. “Those farmers’ll kill it. They won’t even think twice.”

Ginny turned to look back at the creature, which was crouched on the ground in the middle of the clearing, trembling. She thought about the monsters in the Sarah Jewell stories, which were always a threat to be overcome or a menace to be defeated, always inherently evil. But then, Hellboy was some kind of demon, right? That made him a monster, of a sort, and he wouldn’t likely be portrayed as a hero in a Sarah Jewell story, would he? He would have been assumed to be the enemy.

The group of farmers was getting closer.

“It’s not hurting anybody.” Hellboy glanced in the direction of the approaching farmers. “But that won’t matter to them.”

“What are we going to do?” Ginny felt helpless.

Hellboy took a few quick steps toward the creature, waving his arms. “Go on, get out of here. Shoo!”

With another bloodcurdling scream, the creature turned tail and scampered off into the darkness, away from the approaching farmers.

Hellboy switched off his flashlight, then took hold of Ginny’s hand. He turned to meet her eyes, a weary and forlorn expression on his face. “Come on, let’s get out of here before those farmers see us.”

Ginny switched off her flashlight, and followed Hellboy away from the clearing. She glanced in the direction where the creature had fled.

Things weren’t like they were in stories, Ginny realized. She should know better than most.

Hellboy was walking Mac down the sidewalk the following afternoon when he saw Ginny approaching from the opposite direction, a book tucked under her arm.

“Oh, good,” Ginny said as she approached. “I was hoping to run into you. Did you get home okay last night? Didn’t get caught or anything?”

Hellboy shook his head. “Nah, it was fine.” He looked around, conspiratorially. “But I talked to the Professor this morning. About that . . . thing?”

“You told him?” Ginny had a shocked expression on her face. “About seeing it?”

“Jeez, no. I didn’t say that I’d seen it, just that I’d talked to someone else that had. Anyway, turns out that it was probably something called a glawackus. It was first reported over in Glastonbury, Connecticut, back in the thirties, and people have been seeing it in different parts of the state ever since.”

“Huh.” Ginny nodded slowly. “I dug around in my mom’s research stuff, too. I think maybe it’s connected to the ‘familiar spirits’ that were mentioned a lot in the witch trials. There were all kinds of reports of strange-looking animals in the area, that were almost always attributed to devils serving the woman being tried, even if she had nothing to do with them.”

“Oh, sure, I’ve heard about those.”

“So what if this isn’t anything supernatural at all? What if it’s just some unknown species of animal that’s been creeping around here all of this time? But every time it gets spotted, people make all kinds of assumptions, and it gets mixed up with other stuff.”

“Could be.” Hellboy nodded, thoughtfully. “I was thinking maybe we could go out with some food for it. Maybe borrow a camera and take some photos? If we’re lucky, we might be able to get it to a zoo or something before somebody shoots it.”

Ginny shook her head, a frown tugging down the corners of her mouth. “My mom and I are headed back to New York tonight. School starts next week.”

“Oh.” Hellboy was crestfallen. “Will you . . . ?” He shuffled his feet. “Will you be back next summer?”

“I don’t know.” Ginny’s frown deepened. “No, probably not. My mom says she’s going to scrap the witch trial novel, now that Arthur Miller is going to use up all of the oxygen in the room.” She sighed. “Mom’ll probably end up doing something about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire next, or something else depressing like that.”

Hellboy managed a humorless chuckle, and struggled to think of what to say next. He felt completely out of his depth, unused to situations like this.

“Here.” Ginny took the book from under her arm and held it out to Hellboy. It was the Sarah Jewell Mysteries novel that she’d bought earlier in the week. “I finished reading it this morning, and thought that you might like it.”

“Hey, thanks!” Hellboy took the book from her, grinning. “You should check out Weird Tales if you can find a copy. I think maybe you’d get a kick out of it.”

Ginny smiled. “I definitely will. Look for a copy, I mean.”

An awkward pause stretched between them. Hellboy wasn’t used to making friends, but was even less used to losing them.

Finally, Ginny stuck out her left hand to shake. “I’m glad I met you, Hellboy. I didn’t think I was going to have any fun at all this summer, but I was wrong.”

“Yeah,” Hellboy said a little wistfully, shaking her hand. “It was great hanging out with you.” He let her hand drop and stepped back a pace. “Maybe I’ll see you again sometime.”

“I hope so.” Ginny smiled, then glanced around. “Well, I guess this is goodbye.”

“Bye.” Hellboy managed a weak smile in reply, then stepped to one side so Ginny could continue down the sidewalk in the other direction. He watched her go for a long moment, then tugged on Mac’s leash. “Come on, boy. Let’s go home.”

Hellboy headed back toward BPRD headquarters, with his dog’s leash in one hand and the book in the other, and if anyone stared at him as he passed by, he neither noticed nor cared.

THE HELLBOYNESS OF HELLBOY

Chris Priestley

The old woman looked up at the sound of the door creaking open and nodded at the skinny, bowlegged boy walking into the crepuscular church. Her caramel fingers, as cracked and weather worn as leather gloves, strengthened their grip on the broom handle. She smiled and a gold tooth twinkled in the twilight.

A diagonal shaft of light, swimming with dust motes, plummeted to the floor of the nave from a window way up in the domed ceiling above the altar. The skinny boy wiped his nose on his sleeve and walked through the light, glowing ecstatically for a moment.

He took a seat in a pew to one side of the altar and peered up at the side chapel in front of him. There was a coin-operated light so that tourists could illuminate the fresco, but there were few tourists at that time of year and he had no money to spare.

In any case, he preferred to let his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom. There were a few votive candles alight. That was enough. He liked to see the images form out of the darkness, as though they were his own thoughts.

Besides, the boy didn’t need to see what was there to know what was there. He knew every inch of that fresco by heart. Every single inch.

Hellboy grabbed hold of the back of a chair, almost snapping it in two, and blinked two or three times, taking a moment to fully realize where he was.

“Are we boring you, Hellboy?” asked Dr. Manning.

“A little,” he replied, rubbing his eyes against the harsh glare and piercing whiteness of the lab. “But don’t let that stop you.”

He blinked again. His vision was blurred at the edges, his mind fogged. It felt as though something was pulling at his eyes, gently but determinedly, from inside.

“As I was saying,” continued Dr. Manning, raising an eyebrow, his voice sounding distant, like he was speaking at the far end of an empty warehouse instead of two feet from Hellboy in BPRD HQ. “We have been aware of a series of seemingly connected, targeted thefts of ecclesiastical reliquaries around the world. We have been trying to work out why. Dr. Corrigan, if you could continue . . .”

“We believe,” said Kate Corrigan, stepping forward, “that all these reliquaries are being gathered by the same person or persons unknown.

“This piece was stolen last year,” she continued, showing them an exquisitely made silver spire set with jewels, about two feet high with a small, grimy glass container embedded near the base.

“We traced it to a known dealer and intercepted him as he was selling to a client in Toronto.”

“Why do we care again?” said Hellboy, rubbing his head. He was finding it hard to concentrate. His own voice sounded unfamiliar.

“Well, we believe that these reliquaries might contain the remains of a single being and that someone, for reasons unknown, is trying to reunite them.”

“You said ‘being’?” said Hellboy.

“The ones we’ve tested aren’t human.”

“What are they then?”

Dr. Manning shook his head. “We don’t know.”

“What is this, anyway?” asked Hellboy, looking at the reliquary.

“It’s a piece of Saint Cathoran’s stool,” said Kate. “Very rare.”

“Doesn’t look too valuable,” said Hellboy, leaning forward and squinting suspiciously at it. “How old is it anyway? It doesn’t even look like wood anymore.”

“Not that kind of stool, Hellboy,” said Kate.

Hellboy took another look.

“Holy crap . . .”

“Precisely.”

What little concentration Hellboy could muster was now targeted on the reliquary. He was dimly aware of Kate talking, but the only thing in sharp focus was the reliquary itself. He reached toward it.

The clean, bright world of the lab, of the Bureau, was gone in an instant. Hellboy found himself standing in a huge black void, soundless and formless. Or formless at first. Because slowly out of the darkness came shapes, oozing into sight as though floating up through black coffee. Or more properly, floating down . . .

Hellboy squinted up into the darkness, trying to make sense of the shapes in front of him. This wasn’t going to be good; he was pretty sure about that. When you didn’t know what something was, it was almost always bad, in his experience. Even when you did know . . .

Then, there it was: an angel hovering above him. Hellboy could see that he—or was it she or it—was an angel, because of the long, draping robes and the wings, of course, but the robes seemed to be made of some strange material that was almost flat and rigid like metal or masonry board, and the wings were of different sizes and looked like the fake ones attached to a child in a school play, although these were clearly part of the angel’s body, flapping stiffly, pale and moth-like.

Its movement did not look especially angelic. The angel jerked like a badly made GIF, twitching and convulsing. The crude features of its asymmetric face shifted almost independent of one another. Hellboy didn’t even notice the long trumpet until the angel raised it to its scissor-cut wound of a mouth and began to blow.

The sound was hideous—grindingly mechanical and animal at the same time, like something caught in the gears of a massive machine—painful to even Hellboy’s heard-it-all ears, and he snapped back to the Bureau with a start.

“You okay, big guy?” said Liz.

“Huh? Wh . . . Yeah, sure. I don’t know . . . I just . . .”

“Good story,” she said with a lopsided grin.

Hellboy rubbed his head. He was dazed, but not just with the disorientation of having been pulled back from whatever other world he’d been abducted to. That other place still clung to him, had seeped inside of him—still seemed to hold part of him hostage. This real world did not feel quite as real as it had. He did not feel quite as whole.

“And this thing here is part of some kind of being?” asked Abe.

“No,” said Dr. Manning with a sigh. “It turns out that really is a desiccated stool. Whether it’s Saint Cathoran’s, of course, is a different matter.”

“And if it had been?” said Liz. “An unknown being, I mean? Or the stool of an unknown being? What then?”

“Well,” said Dr. Manning. “We’ve developed this gizmo for measuring the . . .”

Dr. Manning struggled to find the word.

“Yes?” said Liz.

“It’s hard to explain.”

“To me, you mean?”

“To anyone,” said Dr. Manning. “It registers the essence of something.”

“Your gizmo says if something is alive?” asked Liz.

Dr. Manning shook his head. Hellboy was struggling to concentrate. He still had the after wail of the angel’s trumpet in his ears.

“No, no. Some lifeless things have a very strong essence, don’t they? They can have a kind of charisma—a building, a place, an object can have an unexplainable extra something. This device measures that. It measures the thingness of things.”

“The thingness of things?” said Abe.

“Exactly.”

“Of dead things?” said Liz

“No—it can read living things too,” said Dr. Manning. “As a matter of fact, I took a reading of Hellboy just as a test. Unsurprisingly, he scored very highly.”

“In thingness?” said Liz with a smile.

“In that he is packed with the essence of himself. It measured that. It measured the Hellboyness of Hellboy. Look, I’ll show you . . .”

Hellboy still felt like he was hung over. Dr. Manning returned with the machine—it was an anonymous-looking thing about the size of an old hi-fi amp. It looked a bit like one too, with a range of knobs and dials along the front. Dr. Manning adjusted a few of the dials and held it next to Hellboy. The machine made a bird-like twittering sound and a set of numbers appeared on a small screen.

“You see?” said Dr. Manning, as though this cleared everything up. But then he frowned and twiddled the dials some more.

“Well, that’s odd. The reading has gone down. Significantly.”

“You hear that, Hellboy?” said Liz with a grin. “You have less thingness than you did.”

“Well,” said Hellboy, feeling like the machine had a point. “None of us is getting any younger.”

“Are you sure you’re all right, Hellboy?” said Dr. Manning. “You look a little—”

“Me?” said Hellboy, a little more loudly than he’d intended. “I’m fine. I’m . . .”

The darkness flooded back in. He was being scooped out, hollowed—then filled with inky nothingness. He felt the cold, nauseous plummet of his guts, dropping like an elevator cut loose. Then nothing—nothing but impenetrable, pitiless darkness.

All except for the angel, who seeped in, as twitchy and convulsive as before. It blew the trumpet again, and again the sound skewered Hellboy’s ears before he could clamp his hands over them.

“Gahhh! If you’re gonna play, then play a tune, for crying out loud!”

At the trumpet’s third strangled wail, more misshapen angels began to seep into view. They shivered and slid and oozed like the distorted images of fish under rippled ice.

“I’ve never liked jazz,” he grumbled.

Hellboy peered into the murk and tried hard to concentrate on their shifting forms, but found he couldn’t. The sense of internal collapse recurred. The angels flapped arrhythmically—a series of arthritic spasms that juddered them this way and that, sometimes at an alarming speed, then with a dreamy, slow-motion languorousness.

“Hellboy? Hellboy?”

Dr. Manning’s voice sounded hollow, but all the same, Hellboy grabbed hold of its familiarity like a rope in a well and pulled himself back.

“What’s the matter with you?” said Dr. Manning.

“Nothing!” yelled Hellboy.

Everyone took half a step back and stared at him. He put up his hands. Everyone flinched.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m . . . Something weird is going on.”

“Like what?” said Liz. “You’ve been acting strange all morning.”

“It’s hard to explain,” he replied.

Dr. Manning smiled and put his hand on his arm.

“Why don’t we all go and grab a coffee. This can wait.”

Hellboy nodded and followed Dr. Manning and the others. They all sat down, the scraping of chairs dying away to silence as all eyes turned to Hellboy.

“So . . .” said Dr. Manning, seeing that nothing was forthcoming.

“Like I said—it’s hard to explain.”

“Try.”

Hellboy took a deep breath and let it out slowly, drumming his fingers on the melamine tabletop.

“I keep being taken away to somewhere,” he said eventually.

“Taken away?” asked Abe.

“Like in a dream—only it’s not a dream.”

“How do you know?” said Kate, taking a sip of coffee.

Hellboy sighed and shrugged.

“I’m kind of an expert on this sort of thing. I just know. Take my word for it. There’s dream weird and then there’s weird weird, and this is very much of the weird-weird variety.”

“Okay—then what does it look like, this weirdness you’re taken to?” asked Kate.

Hellboy took a deep breath.

“Well, for one thing, it’s got angels in it.”

“Angels?” said Liz, trying without complete success to stop herself from smiling.

“Yeah.”

“The ones with wings?”

“Yes, the ones with wings. What other kind is there?”

“So . . . You keep being taken to . . . heaven,” said Kate with a raised eyebrow.

Hellboy shook his head.

“No. More like the other place. But it’s not the other place either. And another thing,” said Hellboy. “The angels aren’t . . . right.”

“Aren’t right? How do you mean?” said Dr. Manning.

Hellboy tried to imagine the angels, but they were too slippery to hold on to. They slithered sideways like snakes, slipping into the darkness at the edge of his mind.

“They’re kinda distorted,” he said. “Lopsided. You know what I mean?”

“No, not really,” said Dr. Manning.

“It sounds like a hallucination,” said Abe. “Could you perhaps have—”

“It’s not a hallucination!” yelled Hellboy. “And I’m not crazy either, before anyone throws that in.”

Everyone looked down.

“Sorry,” muttered Hellboy. “Again.”

Hellboy stared at his coffee cup. The truth was, he wasn’t sure at all that he wasn’t crazy. How could you be sure?

“Do you have any idea what you think might be causing it?” said Dr. Manning after a moment.

Hellboy shook his head. Dr. Manning waited. Again nothing came.

“Has this been happening long?”

“No—it started today. While we were looking at that thing—the reliquary of Saint Whatshisname’s crap.”

“Could that be causing it?” said Abe.

“But we tested the reliquary,” said Dr. Manning. “It’s harmless. It really is just a—”

“Maybe we ran the wrong tests,” said Abe.

But even as Hellboy listened to them, he felt himself falling backward—inward—downward. He was back in the nonplace, staring into the infinite nothing. The angels suddenly began to flap their misshapen wings and point. Something was clearly bothering them.

At first Hellboy thought they were pointing at him, but then he realized they were actually looking at something behind him, and he turned to see what it was.

“Jeez,” he said. “I knew it was going to get worse. It always gets worse.”

Rising from the gloom behind him was a red shape that slowly consolidated into a vermilion mockery of Hellboy himself.

“What’s the big idea?” said Hellboy. “Is that supposed to be me? Because ifit is—”

The other Hellboy swung his enormous right hand with an awkward but surprising speed, smacking Hellboy in the jaw and knocking him into whatever passed for air in that place.

“Hey! That hurt!” said Hellboy, rubbing his mouth.

The other Hellboy’s lopsided face cracked into a lopsided grin and he lurched forward. Hellboy came to his senses and prepared to meet his double with the heaviest punch he could muster, but as the other Hellboy approached, he found he could not strike him.

His arm became so heavy he could barely stand upright. He tried to grab his gun, but he seemed to have lost control of his body. He felt like he had become a ghost of himself, vague and immaterial. The other Hellboy seemed solid by comparison.

His disjointed double juddered forward. His expression was impossible to read. It seemed frozen in a freakish, scowling grin. Hellboy wondered if he had ever looked like that as the other face got closer and closer until he was pressed up against a distorting fairground-mirror image. He felt as though he was falling into it—that all he had to do was let go and he would simply pass into that other him and be absorbed. It didn’t seem so bad . . .

Suddenly Hellboy lurched back to the light.

“What the hell?” he said, rubbing the back of his head.

“Sorry,” said Abe, holding some fizzing bare electrical wires.

“We had to zap you, Hellboy,” said Kate. “Your levels were dropping to almost nonexistent. What’s going on?”

Hellboy heard all this, but with a twenty-second delay, as if Kate’s words were being beamed via satellite. Something was wrong—really wrong. He could feel that. He just did not know how to process it, how to describe it. It was like a weakness, like an illness. But he didn’t get ill. Did he? That was for civilians. The reliquary. Abe was right. It had to be.

“The reliquary,” whispered Hellboy.

“Okay!” yelled Dr. Manning, pointing back to the lab. “I want it sealed off. I want it safe. Now, God damn it!”

Hellboy slumped to the floor, dimly aware of all the activity around him, of being carried outside to the parking lot, where, after a while, he began to feel more and more like his old self.

“You had us all worried there for a moment,” said Kate, sitting back on the hood of a car.

Hellboy nodded and told his face to smile, hoping he seemed more okay than he felt.

“What’s going on, Kate?” said Hellboy. “What’s with that thing, and why is it just me who feels like this?”

“We don’t know for sure,” she replied. “They’re running a load of tests on it. Seems like they’ve found something. Some kind of contamination. It seems like it’s not the reliquary itself, but that it’s been exposed to something else. The boss wants you to come and have a look. They think they’ve managed to isolate whatever’s coming from it and they are pretty sure they’ve managed to block it . . .”

“But they won’t know until I stand in front of it . . .” said Hellboy.

Kate managed a half smile. Hellboy shrugged.

“Let’s get on with it then.”

Hellboy followed Kate back into the building and down the corridors toward the lab, where they found Abe, Liz, and Dr. Manning standing with white-coated technicians in front of a domed chamber in which stood the silver reliquary.

“Well?” asked Hellboy as they joined the others. “Have you sorted that thing out?”

“You tell me,” said Dr. Manning.

Hellboy stood a while staring at the reliquary.

“Seems like you have,” he said.

“Okay, good. I’m not picking anything up from the reliquary except a kind of radiation. It’s been exposed to something—that’s our guess. Something bad. Something very powerful.”

“Where did it come from?” said Hellboy.

“From a small hilltop town in Umbria, Italy. Baldano,” said Abe.

He pointed to a map on a screen nearby and to a pulsing light a few miles east of Gubbio.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” said Hellboy.

“Not you, Hellboy,” said Dr. Manning.

“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that.”

“Look at what just the trace of whatever it is has done to you,” said Dr. Manning. “Who knows what will happen if you get near the source. It has no effect on us. Let Abe go.”

“Look,” said Hellboy. “I’m not just going to sit around here while other people go off and fight my fights. If there’s something after me, then I’ll face it. That’s just the way I am. The Hellboyness of me, remember?”

Dr. Manning sighed and nodded.

“Okay. Not that I was going to get far trying to stop you. But take Abe, Liz, and Kate with you. That’s an order.”

“Well—if it’s an order . . .”

They boarded the transport and Hellboy closed his eyes as they took off, wondering briefly what it was they were heading toward. What could that thing have come into contact with that had given it such power over him? And why was the effect felt only by him? He was aware of a strange sensation creeping over him: fear.

“This has really shaken you up, hasn’t it?” said Liz.

Hellboy opened his eyes. She was leaning toward him across the aisle. He smiled.

“I dunno,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of stuff, and it’s not like this is any worse, or even half as bad . . .”

“Why then?”

“Because it feels like it’s attacking me from inside.”

He tapped his head. She smiled.

“The Hellboyness of you?” suggested Liz.

“Yeah. I guess so.”

They landed at a military air base near Rome and were greeted by Fabio Rossi, a representative from the Rome office who had arranged transport to Baldano for them by helicopter.

He had offered to accompany them, but the team felt they should go on alone. Why risk more people than necessary? An hour later they were landing on a patch of ground near a river, the hill town above them.

“The town is pretty quiet,” said Hellboy as they walked up the main street of the new town, past shuttered apartment blocks.

“Siesta?” said Kate.

“Maybe,” Abe said. “But doubtful. When is it ever that simple for us?”

It was overcast and shadowless, the dusty lanes devoid even of the mangy cats that normally infested them. They followed the signs to the duomo—the cathedral—the lanes twisting upward and getting steeper, past balconies laden with wilting geraniums.

“It’s not just quiet, it’s empty,” said Hellboy. “Or almost empty, anyway.”

“Hellboy’s right,” said Liz. “It’s deserted.”

Abe looked down at the scanner Dr. Manning had given them.

“We’re close,” he said. “I suggest we all stay together.”

“You get no argument from me,” said Kate.

It was clear to them all now. The shops weren’t just closed for siesta; they were boarded up, the houses deserted, who knew for how long. Nothing moved. Not so much as a lizard.

They entered the small town square at the top of the hill. The church—the duomo—was on the opposite side of the square, some faded bunting from an old festival fluttering in the breeze.

“There,” said Abe, nodding toward the duomo. “There’s a signal coming from the church.”

Walking through the doors was like being doused in cold water. It was dark as a cave with only a long, diagonal shaft of light ripping through the gloom. Liz flicked a flame into life over her cupped palm, and the light seeped out across the tiled floor and the pews and columns. It was a couple of minutes before their eyes grew accustomed and they could add more detail.

They heard the patter of feet and Hellboy swung around, gun in hand, but all they saw was a skinny, bowlegged boy making a break for it toward a side door.

“It’s just a kid,” said Hellboy, lowering his gun. “Almost blasted the poor little son of a—”

“Hey,” said Liz. “Is that what you were seeing?”

Hellboy moved in for a closer look as Liz walked forward, illuminating walls covered in frescoes.

It was a grimy late-Renaissance depiction of the Day of Judgment, with angels sorting through the saved and the damned, the latter heading for the open jaws of hell.

“Kind of,” said Hellboy, squinting upward at an angel holding a long trumpet. “But this is way more vanilla than the one I was seeing. Mine was like Dalí and Picasso had been fighting for control of the pencil when they were drawing it out.”

“Look familiar?” said Liz, pointing to the bottom of the painting, where, shrouded in gloom, there was an ember-red demon. Some kind of damp had worked its way under the surface of the plaster, distorting it and giving the figure the appearance of having an outsized right hand.

“Well, I’ll be . . .” said Hellboy.

“We are not alone,” said Abe.

He pointed to an old woman sweeping by the chapel, seemingly ignoring them. They walked toward her and she slowly stopped, squinting up at them.

“Anyone speak Italian?” said Hellboy.

“Enough,” said Kate.

“Ask her where everyone’s gone.”

She uttered a few words of musical, fluttering speech. The old lady stopped sweeping but did not answer. Kate repeated the words. The old woman wheezed a long reply.

“She says that everyone has left. There has been a premonition. Something bad is going to happen.”

“Oh yeah?” said Hellboy. “Then how come she’s still here?”

Kate asked and the old woman grinned and wheezed out another reply.

“She says she was the one who had the premonition, and she’s too old to leave. If it is her time, she is content with that.”

The old woman looked at Hellboy and smiled.

“She doesn’t seem unduly concerned by my appearance—or yours—does she?” said Abe. “Don’t you find that rather odd?”

“Aww, jeez,” said Hellboy, cocking his head. “She’s a witch, isn’t she? I’m some kind of a witch magnet. And not in a good way.”

“There’s a good way?” said Liz.

The old woman took out a pair of glasses and carefully put them on. She leaned forward, peering at Hellboy, slowly taking in his imposing form, and then dropped to the floor in a faint.

“Okay then . . .” said Hellboy.

Kate crouched down and took her pulse.

“She’s fine. I’ll just put this cushion under her head. She just fainted. I guess she was shortsighted as well as second sighted.”

“The scanner is no longer saying the source of the disturbance is in this church,” said Abe.

“What? How can it have moved? We’d have seen it.”

“The kid!” said Hellboy. “The one who ran out when we arrived.”

They headed out of the church by the same small door they’d seen the boy leave by, the shock of the relative light of even that dull day as startling as the shift into the interior gloom had been earlier.

“This way,” said Abe.

They followed the scanner to a house not far away and cautiously entered. The house was empty but, walking out into a back courtyard, they saw a door ajar in a small outbuilding.

“He’s in there,” said Abe.

They crossed the yard and Hellboy opened the door. It was a fairly large barn-cum-storehouse, full of stacked firewood, tools, engine parts, and oil drums. It smelled damp and the only window was boarded up. Kate found a light switch and flicked it on.

The bulb was low wattage and flickered and hummed. But even by its low light they could see that the end wall was plastered over, and on that plastered section there was a painting. Pots of paint and a jar of brushes lay beneath it.

Hellboy felt like nails were flying around inside his head, careening off one another and hammering into the inside of his skull. The boy had used discarded tins of house paint to create his own version of part of the fresco in the church, complete with angels and the red demon with the outsized hand. But his childish imagination and limitations as a draftsman had rendered the demon with a distortion that gave it the curious impression of being a caricature of . . .

“Hellboy! That’s you!” said Kate.

“It does have a vague resemblance, I’ll give you that . . .”

“Are you kidding?” said Liz. “It’s the spitting image. The kid’s got talent.”

Again Hellboy winced as he felt pulled into the painting. A rustling noise made them all turn around. The boy’s head appeared over the top of an oil drum and he made a dash for the door. Hellboy was quicker and grabbed the boy, pulling him back. The boy stared, whimpering, wide eyes going from Hellboy to the wall and back again.

Hellboy lifted the boy off his feet and dangled him in front of his face. The boy yelled in panic, wriggling, squirming, desperate to break free, horrified to see his drawing come to life.

The ground began to shudder with a subterranean rumble.

“What’s he doing now?” growled Hellboy.

The boy carried on regardless, screeching now, spewing what Hellboy assumed was a volley of obscenities.

“It’s not him,” said Abe.

“Who then?” yelled Hellboy, as the walls shook and dust rained down.

“Earthquake,” he replied. “Natural.”

“Natural?” said Hellboy, squinting suspiciously into the falling dust.

“Yes—sometimes it’s just natural.”

The rafters began to come down and Hellboy shielded the boy, smashing his way through the wall and painting until they all stood coughing in the yard outside, listening to the settling of rubble all around them.

“I guess the earthquake was the bad thing the old lady predicted,” said Kate, dusting herself down.

“Or maybe just Hellboy,” said Liz.

The shuddering stopped completely after a moment or two.

“The boy must have ignored the old lady’s warning and come back to work on his painting,” said Abe, peering at the boy in fascination. “That’s how obsessed he was. His obsession became a power—a power independent of the boy and focused on you, Hellboy. It gave life to his work, but the painting wanted more. It wanted you.”

“But why obsess over me in the first place?”

“To be fair to the boy, we would need to know what possessed the painter of the original to place a version of you in his work.”

“Yeah,” said Liz. “Have you annoyed any Renaissance painters?”

“Not that I know of,” said Hellboy. “So what now? What do we do with him?”

“His power is gone,” said Abe. “That’s my guess, anyway.”

“Your guess?” said Hellboy. “What’s to stop him painting me all over again?”

“I think you have cured him of any desire to repaint that particular image. I wonder if he will ever paint anything again.”

With one last desperate effort, the boy squirmed loose of Hellboy’s grip. The kid was about to run when he noticed something on the ground and made a lunge for it.

“No you don’t,” said Hellboy, grabbing the boy’s arm.

The boy swore and winced in pain, opening his fingers and dropping a fragment of the collapsed wall to the ground. Hellboy let him go, and he ran off as fast as his legs would take him. Hellboy picked up the piece of cracked masonry the boy had dropped.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said.

It was the piece of the painting in which Hellboy’s face was depicted, albeit with the boy’s strange distortions. Hellboy growled and began to clench his mighty fingers around it.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” said Abe. “Until we know the exact—”

Hellboy crushed it to a fine dust.

“Yeah, well, you’re not me,” said Hellboy. “Nobody’s me, except me. Now let’s go home, huh? This place gives me the creeps.”

ONE MORE RADICAL STONE FOX

Chelsea Cain

The world was very, very bright to Liz Sherman. The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense was a sea of earth tones, everything the color of dirt and rocks, blood and pus and bile. Liz liked those colors. She liked the dark. She liked her home at the BPRD, even if it was several stories underground and full of monsters. But Liz was fourteen years old. She was complicated. She liked Joy Division, solitude, and Anne Rice, but she also wanted a rainbow puffy coat and a unicorn iron-on decal T-shirt. She wanted to watch Charlie’s Angels. She wanted to learn how to roller-skate.

She had planned her escape for weeks. She had waited for Hellboy to be away on a mission. Waited to hear the strains of the Professor’s gramophone, waited to hear the telltale skip, skip, skip of the needle that would indicate that the Professor had fallen asleep in his chair. Then she had packed enough medication to get her through a month on the road, and she had shinnied through the ductwork to freedom.

When you accidentally incinerate a city block’s worth of people, there are consequences. But it had been three years, and Liz was fourteen now, and she hadn’t had any more pyrokinetic incidents, if you didn’t count the forest fire or the cafeteria thing. She wasn’t a danger to anyone. As long as she took her pills.

She had been on the road for two weeks. Hitching hadn’t been a problem. It was the summer of 1976. Half the teenagers in America had run away from home. She was just one more radical stone fox keeping it real, thumbing her way to freedom. At least that’s what the first guy who’d given her a ride had said.

Nobody seemed to use the vocabulary she’d picked up reading the Professor’s books. If it hadn’t been for her subscription to Tiger Beat and the fact that Hellboy let her watch his TV once in a while, she’d have had no idea what anyone was saying at all. Culture was such a bummer.

Living with a big red paranormal investigator and a tweedy English academic had its perks. Liz knew a lot about Nazi occultists, the dewy decibel system, and demon pop psychology. But Liz wanted to know about other things, too. She had questions (about menstruation, about the Bee Gees). Once Liz had tried to ask Hellboy to explain French kissing to her. She didn’t know he could turn any redder.

She had to get out! See the world! Interact with regular people, people without hooves or horns. She had to see what she was missing.

What she was missing, apparently, was the American bicentennial. News of it had apparently not permeated the six-foot steel walls of the BPRD. But the rest of the country? They were bonkers for it. It was everywhere. Bumper stickers. Fast-food bags. Billboards. T-shirts. Mud flaps. Caps. Buttons. Mugs. Lunchboxes. Happy birthday, America!

Liz was already sick of it. And it was only June 17. Liz was in the back of an orange Chevette. The Chevette didn’t have air conditioning. A family of four! Plus one! In a subcompact! But she’d been on the on-ramp for almost two hours, and the Chevette was the first car that stopped. The family was called Rich. Literally, that was their name. They were returning from a trip to Disney World and they all had sunburns.

The car windows were down and hot wind tangled everyone’s hair.

Liz was in the middle, a Rich kid on either side of her.

The boy was maybe ten, the girl a few years younger. The car smelled like sweat and aloe and French fries and cigarette smoke.

Liz picked at a scab on her knee.

Mr. Rich smoked.

Mrs. Rich fought with a Motel 6 road map in the passenger seat. The Riches had worked their way down to Orlando on a bicentennial tour, stopping to look at an occasional historical plaque, and judging by the debris in the back seat, visiting every Burger King on the Eastern Seaboard.

Liz was crammed in the back, crushed between two sweaty, sunburned kids. The boy fanned himself with a Disney World fan—a square of paper stapled to a popsicle stick decorated with a picture of Mickey Mouse and his friends in Revolutionary garb, and the words America on Parade.

The girl was reading the same B.C. comic strip collection she’d had her nose in for the last hour.

Liz could feel the heat of their bodies next to hers. Her thighs felt sticky on the car seat.

When a human body ignites, the soft tissues contract. The flesh starts to tighten, burn, and vaporize from the heat, and the skin becomes waxy, discolored, blistered, and begins to split.

Mr. Rich tossed his cigarette out the window; a tiny firefly of a spark sailed past in the wind. Then he lit another cigarette.

“Are you a vampire?” the boy whispered to Liz.

She didn’t get a lot of sun at the Bureau, what with the whole underground secret nature of it. But at least her nose wasn’t peeling.

Liz leaned forward, gripping the side of Mrs. Rich’s seat. “I think I’m going to throw up,” she said. She had to get out of this car.

Mrs. Rich handed back an empty, crumpled Burger King bag. “Do it in here, dear,” she said. Then she bundled the map together and pressed Play on the eight-track player. Jefferson Starship started up again.

Even with the windows open, a layer of cigarette smoke hung over all their heads.

Mrs. Rich turned back around to Liz. She had frosted hair and plucked eyebrows and she was wearing a blouse covered in lilies, and belted shorts. “You feeling homesick?” she asked.

Now Liz had done it. She was going to get the runaway talk. The “call your family” talk. The “for the sake of God and Country go home” talk.

Liz made a mental note to no longer accept rides from parents.

“Our oldest is traveling,” Mrs. Rich said. “We think she joined a cult in—”

She shrieked then. A hollow, high-pitched yelp.

“Consarn it, Janet,” Mr. Rich said, hands tightening around the wheel.

Mrs. Rich was pointing out the window. “Take this exit,” she screamed.

“Consarn it, Janet,” Mr. Rich said again, steering the car across two lanes of interstate to follow her instructions.

Mrs. Rich beamed at the back seat. The Rich girl looked up from her book. Mrs. Rich’s cheeks were scarlet with excitement.

“Dairy Queen!” she announced triumphantly.

This was not the first time Liz had run away from the Bureau. The urge always struck her this time of year, as the anniversary approached, like a tickle at the back of her throat, like a cold coming on. She would feel especially uneasy in her skin. She had nervous energy to burn. Her legs itched. She had to move.

The Bureau was home, but it was dark and filled with old things and the Professor wouldn’t let her watch Laverne and Shirley. Sometimes she just wanted to be in the world. She wanted to run.

Liz dipped a green plastic spoon into her strawberry sundae. Vanilla soft serve, topped with the perfect twirl, covered in strawberry goop—the Professor never let her eat stuff like this. She ran the spoon around the inside rim of the Dennis the Menace cup, scooping up a circle of ice cream. Then she put it in her mouth. Sweet and cold and gooey. There is nothing better than that, than a strawberry sundae in June. June! It was Dairy Queen month! It said so right on the marquee.

She sat on a curb in the parking lot. The Rich girl and the Rich boy were in the bathroom. The adult Riches had the map open on the hood and were arguing about the next stop. A dragonfly zipped and swooped nearby. An American flag billowed from a high flagpole. The curb was warm under Liz’s shorts. She saw something glint on the pavement and reached for it. A coin! It was warm in her hand. A bicentennial quarter.

She glanced over at the Riches. They were folding the map. When she turned her head back, a boy was standing there. Not a boy, a guy. Older than she was by a few years. He had round, wire-rimmed glasses and was wearing American flag pants and an orange-and-red striped T-shirt.

“You better book,” he said. He brushed a lock of shoulder-length hair behind his ear and then pointed at her sundae. “Your ice cream’s melting.”

Liz looked down at her cup. It was already half soup. She stirred it with her spoon.

“That your family?” the guy asked, jutting his pimply chin at the Chevette.

Liz made a grossed-out face.

He seemed to understand. “You on the road?”

Liz shrugged.

“We’ve got a van. Room for one more. We can take you as far as Baltimore.”

Liz saw the van then, a VW microbus. Its side door was open and several other teenagers lounged around it. This was what she wanted. What she had beenwaiting for.

Liz set her shoulders back and searched her memory for the specifics of the Tiger Beat issue on contemporary slang. “Bitchin’,” she said.

The Riches took the news without much protest. They were too busy crumpling up their Dairy Queen detritus and finding room for it on the floor of the car.

“Thanks for the lift,” Liz told them, prying her backpack out of the back seat. She dug into her pocket for the coin and then held it out to Mrs. Rich. “I can pay for my ice cream.”

“You keep it,” Mrs. Rich said.

Liz stepped back from the Chevette, her backpack on one shoulder. Mr. Rich put the car in reverse and it rolled back a few yards and then stopped. Mrs. Rich leaned her head out the passenger window.

“Liz?” she called. Her glossed lips spread into a tentative smile. “Maybe use it to call home?”

The VW bus was just as smoky as the Chevette had been, but the smoke smelled different.

There were five teenagers. The bus belonged to two of them, a guy named Badger and his girlfriend, Big Girl. They were on their way to the Fourth of July celebration in New York with a duffle bag of illegal fireworks and another duffle bag of something called Acapulco Gold that Liz wasn’t supposed to touch.

They’d picked up the other three on the way.

The guy from the Dairy Queen was named Carl.

Then there were Daisy and Kevin. They were on their way to Canada to find a commune to live on, or if they couldn’t find one, start one themselves. Kevin had read a book about communes, but it seemed to Liz that he hadn’t absorbed many facts.

The van was dark and bumpy and just as hot as the Chevette. But Carl had promised to teach her how to play “Jive Talkin’ ” on the guitar. And Big Girl was super cool with her all-black clothes and bangs.

Liz sucked on her green Dairy Queen spoon, all that was left of her sundae.

The van stopped suddenly, or at least as suddenly as a VW bus can stop. It lurched to a halt, sending everyone in the back tumbling.

“What the hell?” Carl said.

Big Girl was in the passenger sheet, ashen. She pointed out the windshield. Liz scrambled to her feet and ducked between the front bucket seats. The air outside was full of black smoke. It smelled like burned ham.

Badger was already getting out of the driver’s side. Someone opened the side door and Liz followed everyone out. The highway stretched on either side of them. No cars in sight. Except one. It was off the road, on its roof, charred and smoking, its tires still spinning. Thick black tire tracks marked where it had skidded off the pavement.

It had left a trail of debris when it crashed.

So much trash. A Burger King bag skittered across the concrete like a tumbleweed.

Luggage lay open, contents spilled.

“We need to call the cops, man,” Carl said.

A heap of clothes lay in the road. Liz took a few steps toward it. Her stomach clenched and turned when she saw the clump of blond hair. Not clothes. The body of a girl. She was dead. How could she not be? Her face half-smashed like that. Bits of flesh peppered the pavement around her, scraped from her body as she’d slid. One arm was nearly detached, the other twisted under her body so that her hand seemed to reach from the wrong side.

Liz curled into herself.

“Over here!” Carl yelled.

He was standing next to another heap in the road. “It’s a kid,” he yelled. Dead. Even from where she stood, Liz could tell.

The others were making their way closer to the smoking car.

The Chevette’s orange paint job was blackened, but still visible in places.

Liz made herself move forward, made herself take steps. One, then another. Until Kevin used his body to block her. “Don’t look,” he said.

Human fat made a good fuel source. Charred bones coated in a greasy residue of burned flesh.

The kids had been thrown from the vehicle. Mr. and Mrs. Rich had been strapped in, their bodies taking the full brunt of the explosion when the car had hit the guardrail and flipped. Had Mr. Rich been reaching for a cigarette? Were they arguing over the map?

Liz could smell the charred flesh. She knew that smell. She had tasted it before.

An accident. A terrible accident. Yes. The tire tracks. You could see where Mr. Rich had slammed on the brakes. You could see the dented dirt and scorched grass marking the path as the car rolled. Yes.

Kevin was pulling her by the wrist toward the van.

Liz broke free and lunged at something on the pavement, snatching up a piece of the debris field. She didn’t know why. It could have been anything. It didn’t matter. It could have been the Disney World fan or the Motel 6 map or the girl’s comic strip book. A Styrofoam fast-food cup. But it wasn’t.

It was a pack of Marlboro cigarettes.

They all tumbled into the van, all six of them, no one talking, Badger driving like hell to the next exit with a gas station.

After the gas station attendant called the sheriff, after she’d said her goodbyes to Carl and Badger and Big Girl and the others, after the VW bus had disappeared up the road, Liz sat on the curb with her backpack for a long time. The sun was still high in the sky, glinting off the broken glass that littered the gas station parking lot like diamonds. Liz squinted up at it, and it hurt her eyes.

After a while she realized that she was still holding Mr. Rich’s cigarettes in her fist. She uncurled her stiff fingers and pushed the pack of Marlboros deep into her backpack. Some people thought cigarettes were dangerous. Some people didn’t.

One thing was for sure: this world wasn’t safe.

At least at the Bureau, Liz knew what to be afraid of.

She reached a finger into the pocket of her shorts, pulled out her bicentennial quarter, shrugged her backpack on, and walked across the lot to the phone booth. She dropped the quarter through the coin slot.

The number was long distance and it took forever to dial. Around and around, Liz’s finger went. Then finally, a familiar voice.

“Professor?” Liz said, trying to keep her voice from cracking. “It’s me. I want to come home.”

THE DUELIST

Jonathan Maberry

1

New Hope, Pennsylvania. July 1974.

“I expected a ghost town.”

Deputy Jim Sparrow looked across the desk at Hellboy. “Why’s that, exactly?”

Hellboy shrugged. “Read a bunch of tourist brochures,” he said. “All they talk about is the haunted history. I figured this was one of those towns that dried up and blew away except for the ghosts. And people who make a buck off of ghosts, like all those guys in Savannah and Gettysburg.”

The deputy was a small, thin man with tired little eyes and a sad mouth. The droopy mustache and hip sideburns attempted—and failed spectacularly—to make him look trendy and relevant. His office was too big and too empty and the radio didn’t seem to want to play anything that wasn’t at least fifteen years old. Connie Francis and Freddy Cannon. The current tune was Bobby Darin singing about his “Dream Lover.” No rock. No Grand Funk Railroad, no Eddie Kendricks. Hell, not even any Steely Dan, and that was just sad.

“We never quite dried up,” said Sparrow, “but we have our fair share of ghosts, I guess. Going all the way back to before the Revolutionary War. Lenni Lenape Indians were all over this place—”

“Before they got slaughtered?” suggested Hellboy.

The deputy took a beat before answering. “Before that, yes. And for the record, we didn’t kill all of them. Some got driven off to live in the Pine Barrens over in Jersey.”

“Yeah, that was a lucky break for ’em.”

Deputy Sparrow sighed. He’d been doing that a lot since he’d arrived at Doylestown Airport to meet the small private plane. People usually freaked out when they saw the big red-skinned, cloven-hoofed investigator for the first time. Black-and-white newspaper pictures never really prepared them. But Sparrow seemed to be more depressed than shocked. He sighed, his shoulders drooped even more than his mustache, and his eyes tended to meet Hellboy’s and fall away, meet and fall away.

“My point,” said Sparrow with strained patience, “is that there have always been ghost stories here in New Hope. It’s just that kind of town.”

“Okay,” said Hellboy, “maybe we should kind of cut right to it. Your office called my office and I’m here. Since I got here you’ve been dragging-ass around. I get that this isn’t the usual interjurisdictional thing, but—”

“It’s not that,” said Sparrow. “I mean, sure, you’re . . . who you are, and I’m a small-town cop and I don’t have any place in my head for this conversation to sit.”

“But . . . ?”

“But what’s really messing with me is that my wife is involved.”

Hellboy took his cigarette out of his mouth and leaned slightly forward. “I’m here to investigate five murders, deputy. I’m here because something is happening that needs me—specifically me—to be here. Not an FBI agent, not the military. Me. Which means it’s big and weird and wrong and nothing in the Good Deputy Handbook covers it. So, how ’bout you tell me how your wife is involved. Like . . . is she involved involved, or—”

“What? Oh, no,” said Sparrow quickly, his eyes flashing with alarm. “Not like that. Lilah wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not a gnat. No, no, that’s not what I’m saying.”

Hellboy reached across the desk and tapped ashes into a paper cup filled with cold coffee. He settled back, his bulk pulling groans from the visitor chair.

Deputy Sparrow cleared his throat. “Well . . . um . . . here’s the thing. My, ah, wife isn’t like most people. She’s different. She’s always been different.”

“Lot of that going around,” said Hellboy.

“No, I mean really different.” Sparrow touched his heart. “In here.” And his head. “Here, too.”

“Different how? She sick? She crazy?”

“No,” said Sparrow, “she has visions. Psychic stuff. Always has. People in town are scared of her, even the ones who like her. They think she’s touched—”

“By God, yeah, I know the phrase,” said Hellboy, unimpressed. “And . . . ?”

“And she thinks the murders are being committed by a ghost.”

Hellboy chewed his cigarette from one corner of his mouth to the other. “I guess I’d better talk to her.”

The intercom buzzed and Sparrow pressed a button.

“Doc’s here,” said the voice of the receptionist. Sparrow asked her to send him in. There was a brief, brisk tap on the door and then it was opened by a medium-sized man with burly shoulders and a wrestler’s handshake. His alert eyes snapped over to Hellboy, gave him a quick up and down, and brightened.

“Cool,” he said with a grin. “You’re bigger and redder than you are on TV.”

“Better looking, too,” said Hellboy.

Sparrow made introductions. The newcomer was Dr. David Weinstock, the Bucks County chief medical examiner, who was also a general practitioner in the small town. “Call me Doc,” suggested Weinstock. “And what do I call you? Mr. Boy? Mr. Hellboy?”

“Just Hellboy.”

“Solid,” said Doc. He wore bell-bottom jeans and a white lab coat over a shirt that swirled with colors. His hair was long but well groomed, and was full of life and energy. He took the other visitor chair and opened a battered briefcase from which he removed a thick folder and held it out. “Autopsy report,” he said. “You squeamish?”

“Not the fainting type,” said Hellboy, taking the offered folder.

“Figured as much,” said Doc. “Now here’s the thing—with victims one, three, and four, it’s clear that they died as a result of gunshot wounds. Possibly a handgun. Take a look at the photos and tell me what you see.”

Hellboy removed a sheaf of eight-by-ten color photos from the folder. The first few were actually crime-scene pictures and showed three men, all younger middle age, sprawled in ugly death. One in the corridor of what looked like a suite of law offices, another on the pavement in front of the county courthouse, and the third in a country lane. All of them had terrible red-black holes in their chests. Their clothes were soaked with blood, but there wasn’t much under them, suggesting they died quickly. Dead men don’t bleed unless the wound is under them. Sparrow and Doc watched him as he moved on to the thicker stack of photos of the postmortems. The nude corpses of the three victims had been photographed from every angle. Hellboy worked his way through the step-by-step of each autopsy, looking for the straight facts first, trying not to draw any conclusions, particularly based on what Sparrow had to say about his wife’s theory. Good investigation is based on the observation and analysis of facts. Bad investigators start with a theory and tend to look for easy ways in which the evidence supports it.

When he was done with the pictures, Hellboy glanced at the doctor. “Okay,” he said. “What can you tell me about the gun? The wounds are big. You said a handgun, but these are big entry wounds—.44 or .45?”

“I don’t think so.” Doc took back the photos, sorted through them, and placed three side by side on the edge of Sparrow’s desk. “These are cross sections of the paths of the bullets.”

Hellboy studied them and after almost a minute he saw what Doc wanted him to see. “That’s weird. The end of each path is round, kind of like it would be if the bullet didn’t flatten.”

“And?”

“Must have been something very hard. Some kind of special metal, but with a light load in the cartridge. Big hole but no exit wounds.”

“And . . . ?”

Hellboy looked again, then he frowned. “Wait . . . if these aren’t through-and-through wounds, you should have the bullets. Can I see them?”

“Ah,” said Doc. “That’s the thing. We were unable to recover the bullets.”

“Did they break up after all?”

“No.”

“Then you lost me, Doc.”

“Hellboy,” said Doc Weinstock, “we have definite bullet wounds, which we have verified by autopsy. There are, as you observed, no exit wounds, and yet there were no bullets in any of the victims.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Nor does this,” said Doc, handing over two sheets of paper. “We did microscopic studies of each of the slash and stab wounds on victims two and five. That the wounds were inflicted with a long, slightly curved blade is obvious. My guess is a light, thin-bladed sword. However, one of the abiding rules of forensics is that contact always leaves a trace. Even if the sword blade had been of ultradense steel, there would have to be microscopic traces of metal.”

Hellboy considered. “What about a plastic blade? There are some really tough polymers out there . . .”

Doc nodded, impressed. “I thought of that, too, but most polymers will also leave a residue, and a gas chromatograph would pick up chemical signatures even in the absence of particulate matter. There’s absolutely nothing here, though. No traces of lead or other metals in the bullet wounds, either.”

“That’s . . . weird.”

“That,” said Doc with a small smile, “is why, I suspect, you were asked to visit our quiet little town.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands on the desk. “Look . . . I’m deputy coroner for the entire county. At a conservative guess I’ve done maybe two thousand autopsies, and sat in on at least as many more. I keep up with the latest developments in forensic science. What we have here is weird. By anyone’s standards. Maybe even by yours.”

Hellboy said, “So if you had to make a guess about how these murders were committed, what do you think?”

“It is my considered opinion,” said Doc Weinstock, “that it beats the hell out of me.”

Deputy Sparrow, who had been silent the whole time, cleared his throat. “Guess we should go talk to my wife now. I asked her to meet us by the cemetery near the river.”

“Why?”

“I . . . Well, maybe it’s best if she tells you.”

2

They drove in the deputy’s car and parked within sight of the Delaware River, with New Jersey a long stone’s throw over the water. A thin woman stood by a low stone wall near the burned-out shell of an old church. Lilah Sparrow looked like a bird. Not a sparrow, as Hellboy saw it. More like a stork. No. Not that either. Something smaller, more delicate. A snowy egret? Yes, he decided. Just like that.

She was slender and pale, with white-blond hair, skin so fair that pale veins showed through on the upper curves of her breasts, and eyes of that peculiar shade of ice blue that made them look almost colorless. She offered a hand that was surprisingly strong.

“Thank you for coming,” she said, then cut a look at her husband. “You spoke with Doc Weinstock?”

“Just now,” agreed Sparrow.

Lilah’s eyes clicked back to Hellboy. “Then you know.”

“Not exactly,” said Hellboy. “The science tells me something weird’s going on. But here’s a news flash—there’s always something weird going on. Here, there, and everywhere. Nature of the world. What I need to know is what you know, Mrs. Sparrow. Or think. Or whatever.”

The woman flicked a quick glance at her husband, who looked down at his shoes.

“How much do you know about New Hope?” asked Lilah.

“Some,” said Hellboy. “Place is supposed to be haunted.”

“Yes.”

“Lots of places are,” he said.

“Not like here. By any way you want to calculate it, New Hope has more hauntings per capita than anywhere in America. We have a dark history here. Perhaps not as dark as Pine Deep, which is right up the road, but dark enough. Murders, suicides, battles, mass killings, unexplained deaths. People always want to file it all under ‘ghost stories,’ but it’s not just ghosts. Spirits come in all shapes and sizes.”

“You don’t say,” murmured Hellboy. He fished for a fresh cigarette from the pack in his pocket, lit it, and puffed smoke over the cemetery wall.

“I know you know,” said Lilah, nodding. “It’s why I asked my husband to contact your organization. Frankly, I get tired of trying to explain these things to people who assume that I’m either eccentric—if they’re trying to be generous—or crazy.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Jesus,” said Deputy Sparrow.

“Hey,” said Hellboy, “I had to ask. We get a lot of calls from people who think they’ve seen a ghost or who watched The Exorcist too many times and think their niece is possessed. Nine times out of ten they’re the ones who are nuts. Or paranoid. Or see something entirely different and don’t understand it so they cry ghost. Same with the UFO crowd. Most of that stuff probably is weather balloons, swamp gas, and ball lightning.”

“Except when it’s not,” said Lilah quietly.

“Yeah,” he said, “except then. Your husband tells me you think this is a ghost going around killing people.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She blinked. Lilah Sparrow didn’t do it the normal way. Instead her eyes closed and opened very slowly. It was odd and a little disconcerting. “Let me ask you this first . . . Have you ever taken any mind-expanding drugs?”

“Other than Jack Daniels?”

“I’m talking about LSD or magic mushrooms. Like that.”

“Not a fan,” he said.

“I’ve taken quite a few journeys,” she said. “I began experimenting back in 1965, while I was still in college. Peyote. Then later LSD. It was amazing. It isn’t just a warping of the perceptions. That’s what the establishment likes to say. That’s what small-minded people say.”

Deputy Sparrow sighed softly.

“The truth is that those drugs allow the inner potential of the human mind to expand, and to grow exponentially. Once the consciousness is free of the shackles of the flesh, it is also free of the natural biological limits on perception. New senses open up. Many of them. Senses we don’t have names for yet. Senses we can’t yet measure.”

“I’m familiar with the concept,” said Hellboy. “Where you going with all this?”

She said, “While I was journeying through other realms and perceiving with these extra senses I became aware of the beings that share our world—but not our specific plane of existence—with us.”

“Still with you, but still waiting for the punch line.”

“I moved to New Hope because I was drawn here. A lot of people are. There’s something about this town that attracts psychic energy. Can’t you feel it?”

He shrugged but made no comment.

“There are times when the energy here seems so bright, so pure and clean, that it is deeply healing. That’s why there are so many artists here. They tap into that light and positivity.” She paused and crossed her thin arms under her breasts as if a chilly draft had swept past. “And there are times when the energy is darker. It goes in cycles. In spring and autumn the energy is clean, which is different from Pine Deep, where it gets darker around Halloween. Very dark. Here, though, our darkness is strongest during the coldest months of winter and on the hottest days of July. And it’s strongest of all during the second week of July.”

“Always?”

“Always.”

The deputy said, “Violent crimes double in July. Always have.”

“It’s July 11,” said Hellboy. “The killings started around the beginning of the month?”

“On the second,” said Sparrow.

“It was the first really hot day of the year,” said Lilah. “July heat brings the evil. Stokes it, somehow.”

“Ah,” said Hellboy, getting it. “And you think the heat is what . . . ? Hellfire?”

She gave another slow blink. “Yes. I think this is some kind of demonic spirit. A ghost, but not a natural one. This one is malevolent.”

Hellboy scratched his chin with one finger of his huge right hand. “Is that what you know or what you think?”

“It’s what I believe.”

“Okay.”

“And I saw the monster who did this.”

Deputy Sparrow’s head whipped around toward his wife. “What?”

Soft roses of color blossomed on Lilah’s pale cheeks and she gave him a brief apologetic smile. “It was while I was out walking along this path. I saw him appear in the graveyard and he pointed a gun at me.”

“A gun?” demanded her husband.

“He looked at me and said, ‘You’re not the one,’ and then he seemed to sniff the air for a moment, and he suddenly looked angry, and maybe a little scared. He called me a witch and pointed his gun at me, but he didn’t fire. Even so, I ran away. I . . . I didn’t tell you because . . . because . . . God, you know why I didn’t tell you.”

A small jewel of a tear gathered in the corner of her right eye, broke, and rolled down her cheek.

Sparrow took her hands and pressed them to his chest over his heart. “Listen to me,” he said in a fierce whisper. “I keep telling you that you don’t have to worry. I’m never going to let them do that to you again. Not ever, honey.”

Sparrow kissed Lilah’s head very gently. Hellboy felt enormously awkward and out of place. And a bit annoyed.

“Yeah, I hate to kick the cat here, guys,” he said, “but if there’s something else you need to tell me, then now’s the time.”

It took Lilah Sparrow a long time before she raised her head and looked at him. Tear tracks glistened on her cheeks. “I took a lot of LSD when I was in college,” she said in a small voice. “Maybe too much. I . . . I mean . . . sometimes even when I wasn’t taking any—and I haven’t for years now—it’s like I just took a microdot and I . . . go away. Sometimes it’s hard to come back.”

“Flashbacks?” suggested Hellboy.

Sparrow nodded. “They got really bad for a while and her parents had her committed.”

Fresh tears fell.

Hellboy sighed. “Look, Mrs. Sparrow, I’m nobody’s idea of a therapist and I’m not a social philosopher. Mostly I creep around bad places and tussle with the things in the dark. So maybe I don’t know much, but I know people. I know what being different feels like. There are people who’d love to lock me away, or maybe put me in a cage so they can study me, and some who’d rather I just wasn’t, you know what I’m saying?”

She nodded.

“Fact is, though, that I’m here. I’m different. I think different. You’re different, too. Maybe it’s dropping acid. Maybe that only unlocked something that was already inside of you, whatever natural gifts you have. Psychic or spiritual, whatever. You following me on this?”

She nodded again and then reached out and touched his cheek with the cool tips of her fingers. “Thank you.”

He grinned. “Which isn’t to say you aren’t nuts, but you might be a useful kind of nuts, and that makes you more one of ‘my people’ than part of the regular crowd.”

She laughed, and even Deputy Sparrow managed a smile.

“Now,” said Hellboy, “where did you see this ghost?”

“Over there,” she said, pointing to a stand of peeling sycamores.

Hellboy and the Sparrows entered the cemetery through a rusted gate. The gray stones were covered with ivy and moss; some had fallen over and some leaned drunkenly. Hellboy wandered through them, reading the chiseled inscriptions. Many dated back to before the Revolution, and the most recent was from 1871. The whole place had a feeling of abandonment, of emptiness.

Lilah pointed. “He came out from behind those trees.”

“Time of day?”

“Around . . . um . . . three o’clock.”

“Sunny or cloudy?”

She smiled faintly. “Sunny. If you’re thinking he was a vampire, he wasn’t. The sun shone full on him.”

“Sunlight doesn’t hurt all vampires,” said Hellboy.

“Wait,” yelped Deputy Sparrow, “you’re saying there are vampires? Real vampires?”

Hellboy ignored him. To Lilah he said, “Describe what he looked like.”

She thought about it and opened her mouth and then paused and pointed. “God! He looked like that!”

Hellboy whirled as a figure stepped out from between the trees. He was a thin man wearing out-of-date clothes. Not from the wrong decade, but from the wrong century. Bottle-green breeches that ended at the knee, a faun-colored vest with large silver buttons, and a heavy coat of the same green as the pants and set with a double line of buttons. His shirt was snow white with a matching cravat tied with a frill at the throat, and upon his head was a cocked hat. He wore white stockings and shoes with polished buckles.

He slowly raised one hand to point at them.

At Lilah Sparrow.

“Witch!” he cried, and although he was no more than sixty feet away his voice sounded as if he were shouting from the bottom of a deep well, filled with odd echoes and distortions.

Deputy Sparrow gaped at him and said, “What the . . . ?”

It was all he could manage. His eyes were filled with strange lights as if his mind was exploding.

“Well, okay,” said Hellboy. “Ghost. We can go with that.”

The strange figure suddenly turned toward the big paranormal investigator and his eyes flared wide. “And the witch has brought her patron demon. God save my soul.”

He pulled open the skirts of his coat and drew a pistol. Not a .44 or .45, but a heavy Wogdon & Barton dueling pistol. He swung the barrel toward them and for a moment he wavered, shifting the barrel back and forth between Lilah and Hellboy. Then Sparrow hooked an arm around his wife and tackled her to the ground, down behind the protection of a tombstone. That left Hellboy as the only target.

“Back to the pit with you!” roared the man, and fired.

By then Hellboy was moving, too, diving for the cover of a granite monument. The heavy-caliber bullet punched a hole through the left pocket of his trench coat and burned a red-hot line along his thigh. Hellboy skidded chest first through summer grass, scrambled up to one knee behind the monument, and pulled his own gun. He took aim and . . .

Did not fire.

There was no man. No ghost. The stand of trees was empty and so was the graveyard.

Behind him he heard Lilah Sparrow weeping with fear and her husband trying, and failing, to comfort her.

3

Hellboy searched the cemetery but found nothing. Not a footprint, not a trace. When it was clear the ghost was gone, he allowed Lilah to bully him into letting Doc Weinstock see to his wound. It was a graze and only required a line of butterfly stitches, but it hurt like hell. What pissed Hellboy off, though, was the damage from the bullet’s passage through his coat. The hole could be mended, but the pocket had contained two very old and very potent talismans that he had gone to great lengths to acquire and attune to his own energies. Sure, he had other charms and protections in the remaining pockets, but he never liked to lose any of them. As he’d told the Sparrows, it was a big, weird old world and there were a lot of dangerous forces trying to do harm, gain a foothold, possess, invade, and pervert anything made of flesh. Even those made of demonic flesh, as he was.

They spent the rest of the day trying to make sense of the case. Now that he was convinced that this was indeed a ghost, it both helped and hindered.

The downside was that a ghost was tricky. It wasn’t like he could be apprehended and locked in Deputy Sparrow’s jail.

“There are all kinds of ghosts,” Hellboy explained. “Crisis apparitions, lingering phantoms, echo vibrations, fear phantasms . . . Jeez, I could go on and on. If we’re going to try to stop this guy we need to determine what kind of ghost he is. And what he wants.”

“He wants to kill people,” growled Sparrow.

Hellboy shook his head. “Believe me, it’s never as simple as that. There’s always a cause and effect, even in the spirit world. We need to start at the beginning and sort it all out. So here’s what I need.”

Within an hour they were gathered at the county hall of records, which was housed in the same building as the post office, the jail, the mayor’s office, the courthouse, and the library. It was a very small town. They spread out a map of the whole town and stuck colored pins into the sites of each murder.

“Ghosts dig rituals,” said Hellboy. “They don’t do random thrill kills. There’s usually a connection and . . . aha!”

“Aha, what?” asked Sparrow, but then he grunted and nodded. The five murders formed a geometric shape.

“A pentacle!” cried Lilah, tracing it on the map.

“Or a circle,” said Hellboy. He used a ruler and then nodded. “If you add the cemetery, then each killing is on the rim of a big circle. A pentacle only works if the killings stopped at five, but our boy looked ready to up his body count. The question is, what’s here?”

He rapped a thick red finger on the exact center of the circle.

Sparrow bent forward. “West Bridge Street near Chestnut.”

“Is that another cemetery?” asked Hellboy.

“No.”

“What’s there, then?”

“It’s an old, abandoned place,” said Lilah. “I heard they were going to tear it down and build something else.”

Hellboy grunted. “You know anything about the house?”

“It’s borderline famous,” said Sparrow. “Or was. Aaron Burr stayed there after he killed Alexander Hamilton.”

Hellboy frowned. “That’s not the ghost of Hamilton. His face is on the ten-dollar bill, and that ain’t him. I forget, did Aaron Burr die there?”

“No,” said Sparrow. “After the duel he fled and hid out there with family friends. He died a long time later.”

“Here in New Hope?”

“I don’t think so,” said the deputy, “but get this—the duel with Hamilton took place on July 11.”

When they looked it up they found that Burr had died on Staten Island in 1836 after suffering a stroke.

“So it’s not the ghost of Aaron Burr?” asked Sparrow.

“Never said that,” Hellboy told him. “Ghosts aren’t always tied to where they died. Sometimes they return to a place of real importance in their lives. Let’s see if we can find a picture of him.”

Lilah found one in a history book. They all bent and peered at it and then glanced at each other.

“It’s him,” whispered Lilah.

“Jesus Christ,” breathed Sparrow.

“Yeah,” said Hellboy. “Aaron freaking Burr.”

“But . . . but . . .” began Sparrow, then collected himself. “If Burr didn’t die here, then . . . why is he here?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?” said Hellboy. “Maybe the answer’s in the people he killed.”

Sparrow went through each one. Victim number one was Bradley Harris, a director at the First Bank of New Hope. Victim number two was Michael Clinton, a politician who’d been on the fast track to run for mayor. Number three was Thomas Cheetham, a city councilman. Number four was the editor for a conservative political newspaper called The New American Citizen. And number five was a history teacher and frequent contributor to that paper.

They all knew each other because it was a small town and they were prominent men. They each had some ties to local politics and were often outspoken about national politics. Each of them had spoken out against school integration, and they were clearly not supporters of equal rights between races or sexes.

“Kind of losing my interest in stopping this killing spree,” joked Hellboy. “These guys are jerks.”

“The ghost is committing wholesale murder,” snapped Sparrow.

“Oh, calm down. I was just talking out loud.” Hellboy rested a hand on the stacks of books Lilah had brought to the table. He sighed. He had a deep well of knowledge, but it had been mostly acquired through fieldwork rather than sitting hunched over old books, and he itched to go hunting for the murderous ghost.

Lilah must have caught—or perhaps intuited—his anxiety because she gave him a small, encouraging smile. “The answers are in here,” she said, touching the books. “The more we know . . .”

“I get it,” he grumped and sat down across from her. They dug into the life and history of Aaron Burr, reading about his troubled marriage, his political machinations, his moments of heroism, and his flashes of violence. Lilah and Hellboy, working together, roughed out a set of possible motives. They outlined it all for Sparrow.

“Burr loved to duel,” said Hellboy, “and he clearly took offense pretty easily. So, pistols and swords . . . ? That fits.”

“Why these men, though?” asked the deputy.

“I figured that part out,” said Lilah. “I looked up the histories of the men to see if any of their families were here during the time Burr was here. They all were. They’re all from old families.”

“The kicker,” added Hellboy, “is Cheetham. He’s a direct descendant of one of the men who accused Burr of election tampering.”

“And Burr had all sorts of problems with powerful politicians, and after a while the press turned on him. He also clashed with bankers at times.”

“So this is revenge on the descendants of the men he hated?” asked Sparrow.

Hellboy frowned. “That would be nice and tidy, but on the whole the supernatural-vengeance gig can get pretty random and messy. I think Burr is on the hunt for types. Bankers, politicians, newsmen—maybe with a bias toward anyone who didn’t share his views. Even though he killed Alexander Hamilton, a lot of Burr’s views weren’t too bad. He was for women’s rights and respected them. And he was against slavery. Got to give him points for that.”

“But . . . we are going to stop him,” asked Sparrow. “Right?”

Hellboy smiled. “Kind of have to.”

4

They checked the cemetery, but after waiting all day Lilah suggested they go to the house where Aaron Burr had hidden out. It wasn’t much of a house anymore. The old place had begun collapsing under its own weight. The windows had all lost their shape and the board nailed over the door was askew. Weeds had long since conquered the yard and there was a feeling of emptiness and abandonment.

Except . . .

Hellboy stood on the cracked flagstone walkway in front of the house and stared into the black eyes of the empty windows. The fist of his big right hand was propped on his hip; his left was in his pocket, the hardwood grips of the .357 snugged against his palm. He had a chain with the Seal of Solomon wrapped around his wrist. It wasn’t the strongest protection against ghosts, but it was the best he had with him. The packet of blessed salt he’d had in his other pocket would have been better, but the ghost’s bullet had done for that.

He stared at the house and for a long time nothing happened. And then he felt the exact moment when the house began staring back.

Those dark eyes did not change in appearance, but Hellboy felt that now something was behind them. A darkness that was suddenly alive, vital. Damaged. Ugly and old.

“Stay back,” he murmured. “This could get weird.”

It got weird.

Aaron Burr opened the door and stepped out. It was not the sheet of plywood that swung out, but a vapor-thin ghost of an ornate red-painted door. For a moment there was a second version of the house superimposed over the first. Straight lines, clean bricks, tidy shutters, polished windows, baskets of flowers, fresh paint. The ghost of a man stepped out of the ghost of a house.

Burr no longer wore the coat but was instead in breeches and white shirt, and he held his pistols with the barrel up. Dressed for dueling, thought Hellboy. Swell.

“I see the witch hiding there,” said Burr. “She wears the face of someone I knew and loved. Is that Eliza’s ghost, or another demon come to plague me?”

Hellboy recognized the name. Burr had been briefly married to a rich widow, Eliza Jumel. The history books suggested that it was a marriage of financial convenience for him and one of social climbing for her. In either case it fell apart after only two months. However, the look in Burr’s eyes was one of intense longing and sadness.

Behind him, Hellboy heard Lilah speak. “Eliza’s maiden name was Bowen. I’m a Bowen, too. My great-grandmother moved from Rhode Island to New Hope. I’m not Eliza . . .”

“You have her face,” said Burr. “And her eyes.”

“I thought you married her for her money,” said Hellboy.

Burr’s eyes flashed with sudden anger. “Lies. One of the many lies they tell about me. I loved Eliza. I will always love her.”

“Hate to break it to you, man, but Eliza Bowen Jumel Burr died a long time ago. This woman isn’t her. And none of the men you’ve murdered are the same men who messed with you when you were alive.”

“Maybe not,” countered Burr, “but they are cut from the same rotten cloth.”

“Can’t really argue with that,” said Hellboy, “but the fact is they weren’t guilty of anything worth being murdered over. You need to chill out.”

Burr looked blank. “Your words are meaningless.”

“People tell me that a lot. Let me put it in simple terms, okay? You’re dead. You’ve become a vengeance ghost, but you’re getting it wrong. Maybe it’s because you were a hothead of epic proportions. Maybe your judgment is screwed up. I kind of think so. It stops now.”

“Be damned to you!” bellowed Burr. “How dare a demon of the pit tell a good Christian gentleman what to—”

“Let me stop you right there, Sparky,” said Hellboy, holding up his right hand. “First, let’s lose the ‘demon of the pit’ crap. I’m tired of hearing it. Second, bite me. I’m not giving you a choice here.”

Aaron Burr made the sign of the cross in the air between them.

Hellboy sighed. “You weren’t Catholic, man, and I’m not a Hollywood vampire. That stuff doesn’t work. You’re going to stop shooting people. I’m serious. I get the moral-indignation bit. Got a little of it myself, but you don’t actually have the right. Trust me that I know more about this stuff than you do. You’re done with the killings.”

“Bah! I challenged each of them to fair and honest duels. It is not on my conscience if they could not best me.”

“Duels with . . . what? Pretty sure they weren’t packing iron or wearing swords.”

Burr sneered. “I provided them with weapons every bit the equal to my own.”

“You were a soldier, man. A damn good one. And you were an experienced duelist. They had no chance.”

The ghost shrugged. “That was their misfortune and is not counted against whatever sins are of my own making.”

“Don’t make me get nasty about this.”

The ghost looked taken aback. “I am of the grave. You cannot force me to do anything. I will vanish into the air and challenge whom I want and when I want. There is nothing you can do to—”

“I challenge you to a duel,” growled Hellboy, cutting him off. He heard both Lilah and Sparrow gasp, but he ignored them.

“What—?” said Burr.

“You heard me. A duel. Pistols seem to be your favorite, so let’s go with that.”

“You are a demon and impervious to mortal weapons.”

“You’re a ghost, dumbass, so your bullets aren’t mortal. I got a line of stitches on my leg from earlier, so, yeah, you can hurt me.”

Burr studied him. “If you are lying to me, I will kill the people behind you, and then I will kill everyone of their blood.”

“Talk’s cheap.”

Burr considered for a long, long moment. “Very well.”

He took a few steps forward and suddenly a second pistol appeared in his other hand. He reversed it and offered it butt first to Hellboy.

“No thanks.”

“As the challenged it is my right to choose the weapons.”

“Yep, but since I don’t trust your weapons, I’ll use my own.” He produced his .357, showed it, cracked open the cylinder, and removed all but a single round. “Just to make it fair.”

“A strange weapon,” muttered Burr.

“Sure, and nothing else about this is strange,” said Hellboy, snapping the cylinder into place.

Burr cut a look at Deputy Sparrow. “You, there. You’re a man of the law, yes? Then on your honor you will be the judge of the duel. You will call the count and tell us when to turn and fire.”

“I . . .”

“Do it,” said Hellboy quickly. “It’s okay.”

Shaking with fear and sweating heavily, Deputy Sparrow stepped into the overgrown yard. Lilah stood by the fence and watched, eyes wide, hands over her mouth as if to stifle a scream she knew was inevitable.

Hellboy and Burr walked backward from each other, their weapons pointed up to the sky. Thick gray clouds had begun closing around the town like a fist. Hellboy could hear birds in the trees. Most of them were crows, which was somehow appropriate. They chattered like spectators at the Roman games.

“Are . . . um . . . are you ready?” asked Sparrow, tripping over it a bit.

“I am,” said Burr with supreme confidence.

“Sure,” said Hellboy. He licked his lips and felt the cool touch of the Seal of Solomon against his wrist. It was a ward against ghosts, but he was pretty sure that it wasn’t going to stop a ghost bullet.

“Okay then,” said Sparrow. He cleared his throat. “I’ll count to three and then, um, you know . . . tell you to turn.”

“Get on with it, man,” growled Burr as he turned his back to Hellboy, who also turned.

“Yeah. Sure. Right. Okay. Um . . . One.”

Hellboy took a step, leaves crunching beneath his hooves.

“Two.”

He could feel the hammering of his heart. This is a stupid way to die, he thought.

“Three.”

Sweat gathered beneath his eyes and stung him.

“Turn and fire!”

Hellboy whirled and brought up his pistol, squeezing off a single shot as his opponent came into view.

The ghost of Aaron Burr fired first. Hellboy knew it. In a fractured splinter of a moment he saw the barrel of the ghostly pistol flash with fire. Then he felt the heavy impact as Burr’s bullet struck him.

Then he was falling.

Falling . . .

Fell.

He crashed down into the tall weeds, his breath punched out of him, fireworks exploding in his eyes. He saw the terrified face of Deputy Sparrow looking down at him. And then Lilah. Both of them wearing the expressions people have when they are certain they are looking into the eyes of death.

He said, “I . . .”

And then all the lights in the world went out.

5

Hellboy sat on the top step of the dead house.

It was truly dead now.

He held a plastic bag filled with crushed ice to his chest. The muscles and bones hurt. His heart hurt. Breathing was an exercise in self-abuse.

His hand, though, did not hurt at all. The right hand never did.

He looked down at it and could not even find the mark of where the bullet had struck it. Nothing. Not a scratch.

Lilah and her husband stood a few yards apart, looking down at where Aaron Burr had fallen. There was nothing there, of course. Nothing except a place where all of the weeds had suddenly withered and died.

When he’d turned, Hellboy had brought his unbreakable right hand up to cover his heart. He was a decent shot, but he was not a duelist. Not like Burr. No way. If this had been a punching contest, then he’d have gone into it with more optimism. He knew he’d lose the draw. Burr’s pistol, according to the history books, had been set with a hair trigger, and the man killed everything he aimed at.

He should have killed Hellboy.

“You cheated,” Burr had said after he’d dropped to his knees, translucent blood flowing from a heart wound.

“The rules never said anything about putting your hand over your heart,” Hellboy had managed to gasp before he passed out.

“Be damned!” groaned Burr as he fell and faded and died. Again.

Be damned.

Hellboy held the ice against the deep bruises caused by the bullet driving his hand into his sternum.

“Kind of late for that,” he mused.

The crows in the trees laughed at him.

Five hours later he was on a plane back home.

A Quiet Night in the Library

E. Lily Yu

The floss-haired figure at the podium bent with the stiffness of a corn doll and gestured with open palms at his audience.

“To summarize, then: Even while Samuel Parris railed against his congregation for their lack of financial support, his daughter, Betty, emptied an egg white into a glass to look for her sweetheart and saw only a coffin. The most convenient explanation for that undaughterly disobedience and meddling with the occult (that is, the one that would not leave him questioning himself and his family, who were hungry in that cold winter of 1691) was witches. Is it any surprise the girl feigned fits?”

“He’s right about one thing,” Hellboy said, pitching his whisper so that Roger, Kate, and Liz could hear. “They never caught the real witches. The executed were innocent. But he’s dead wrong that no magic was involved.”

“You took me out there, I think,” Roger said.

“Salem? Yeah.”

“On a—vacation.”

“You needed it, let me tell you. After all the zapping. You were wound up like a terra cotta soldier.”

“I carried a clicking box for you.”

“Geiger counter?” Liz said.

“Some vacation,” Kate said.

“I enjoyed it,” Roger said.

Here and there a silvered head turned to glare at them.

“Modified Geiger counter. Look, he said he enjoyed it. The BPRD shoved it in my hands as we were about to board the plane. ‘Do us a favor, won’t you, ol’ buddy, ol’ pal.’ Their hunch was right, too. Not the graveyards, those were dull as dirt. But the woods around town—the readings were wild. Your professor friend won’t find any of that in his books.”

Polite applause pattered through the hall. A handful of academics began to line up along the stage to shake Professor Vanderveldt’s hand. The four of them rose with relief—the wooden seats had not been kind—and shuffled towardthe exit.

“That’s still classified data, Hellboy,” Kate Corrigan said. “And he’s a historian, not a mythologist. They have some—blinders.”

“I’ll say. He was dry as a mummy. Even if he’s a genius.” Liz had a lit cigarette in her mouth the moment they stepped outside. Berkeley students and faculty streamed around them, laughing and chattering.

“I took a class from him in undergrad,” Kate said. “He was livelier then.”

“I half expected Professor Whatshisface—”

“Vanderveldt.”

“—to keel over in the middle of his talk. He’s eighty if he’s a day. Besides”—Liz cocked an eyebrow at Hellboy—“bad things happen to professors around you. When they should be living quiet lives in their libraries, like mice.”

Kate said, “Libraries aren’t always peaceful.”

“What do you mean?” Liz said. “It’s just books. Flammable, but not exactly exciting.”

They followed the path to the edge of campus, then turned down College Avenue.

“When I was doing my dissertation in Bucharest—did you want to get a taxi? It’s a bit of a walk.”

“I could use a walk,” Hellboy said, leaning back to crack his vertebrae. “That lecture was an hour too long.”

“It was only an hour,” Roger said.

“Exactly.”

Liz said, “I’ve never been to Bucharest.”

“I wasn’t in the city too much, to be honest. I spent most of my time taping oral narratives in the field. Lots of mud, and hot showers were rare, but my hosts were always gracious. They’d feed me whatever they had, even when they didn’t have enough themselves. I was a clueless foreigner, living off a Fulbright and the kindness of strangers. Asked them endless questions about strigoi and pricolici. I thought I could be the hotshot researcher who published photos that proved the peasants weren’t as superstitious as the government thought—not that I said anything about that.

“I went on some wild-goose chases. Closest I ever got was glimpsing a big, bushy tail disappearing into the woods, right as I was packing up my stakeout. I was luckier with the stories. Some of them mentioned strigoi who were good neighbors—never in the village I was in, always one over—who died and went back home the day after the funeral, to take care of the crops and the wife and the kids. Absolutely harmless, if a little unsettling.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with libraries,” Liz said.

“I’m getting to it. So, between months of fieldwork, I’d go back to Bucharest and hole up in the Central Library with my transcripts and books. Only I wasn’t paying attention to the calendar, and on this one night, November 29—”

“Saint Andrew’s Eve,” Hellboy said.

“If I’d been in the countryside, no one would have let me go out alone after dark. But in Bucharest they laugh at folk traditions. So I went to the library, which was quiet but not empty, and the first thing I did was check my requests. Would you believe it, they had this rare book I’d been chasing for weeks. A book that the librarians insisted was lost. It was this thick—this wide—I had to carry it with both arms.”

Liz yawned. “When do we get to the exciting part?”

“I could see why the librarians didn’t want a foreigner looking at this book. It was bound in human skin and stitched with human hair. Brown, if you’re wondering.”

“Ugh.”

“I had my cotton gloves, of course. And I wasn’t about to let a little squeamishness get in the way of a good footnote. This title was only cited once, in an obscure but important volume, and I figured I’d struck gold.

“So I opened it.

“Someone had shut three spirits in there, and the inked letters that bound them were too faded to hold. They burst out, going for my eyes. Screaming, claws out. The smell of decay and rot was enough to make me gag. Still, I got the first one with my fountain pen.”

Hellboy said, “Your fountain pen.”

“Silver nib, blessed by priests of every Catholic and Orthodox denomination. Nothing as fancy as the BPRD’s kit, but you learn a thing or two as a graduate student of folklore with a practical concentration. The Rare Manuscripts librarian had gone for a smoke, thank God.

“The other two spirits saw the first one writhing and smoking on the end of my nib and streamed away through the stacks, shrieking about revenge and freedom.”

“So you went after them,” Roger said.

“Eventually. First I skimmed and took notes.” She looked at the others. “What? It was an informative book, and I only had a three-hour hold.”

“Sometimes you terrify me, Kate,” Hellboy said.

“After some time the screaming was too loud to ignore.”

Cars swept by, headlights glaring. The trees along the road cut lace-like shadows in the moonlight.

“I followed the screams, wishing I had kept some garlic on me. Or holy water. I was still learning, that year. I didn’t make that mistake again.

“As I turned the corner, the nearest screams stopped. Cut short. There had been students in the library when I settled in, but I didn’t see them now. Ran, I guess. Or most of them did. I found a pair of bloody glasses, a shoe, a ripped coat between bookshelves . . . There was very little blood. A handprint here, a light spray there. No—no bones.”

“And the spirits?”

“The first one I saw perched on a table, chewing a scarf to bits. It gnashed its needle teeth at me.

“ ‘What were you doing in that book?’ I said.

“ ‘Collected,’ it hissed through its lipless mouth. ‘By some smug magician at this university, may he be eaten by pigs and vomited up again.’

“ ‘What were you before you became a spirit?’

“ ‘Hungry!’ it wailed, and the walls trembled with the word. ‘Orphaned, burnt in the fire, afraid, in pain, and—hungry! I will eat you. I will eat all in this place. I curse it with fire. I curse it by blood.’

“I said, ‘Well, you can’t eat me. Not while I have this pen. I’ll cut you open if you try.’

“ ‘You think hunger dies so easy? You think rage is so quickly conquered? You think you can kill fear?’

“ ‘I do. I did, just now.’

“ ‘You can’t. You haven’t. Even now the tatters of my friend, the one you killed, you murderer, they wind around you, they cling like ash to your hair and skin—you will never be free of them—you will carry them wherever you go. You will carry them home, Kate Corrigan. They will put down roots and grow, when you’re not looking. And then you and all you love will be eaten, oh yes, even if we must wait. We are used to waiting.’ ”

“What did that mean?” Hellboy said.

“Stonewall, maybe? Or Reagan. Or the Gulf War. Or it was lying to get under my skin. I don’t know.”

“Probably lying,” Liz said. “Ghosts often lie.”

“I could hear more screaming, further off. I lunged, aiming for the spirit’s throat, or rather, where its throat should have been—its body was all one rotten fog. But it moved faster than me. It snatched the pen from my hand, threw it over its shoulder, and laughed.

“I ducked its swiping claws and tripped over a bag of books—I think they belonged to the girl whose scarf was now a mouthful of threads. I hope she made it. I didn’t see blood.

“On the floor was a crude glass icon of Saint George. It must have fallen out of her coat or bag. I snatched it up. As I got to my feet, I caught the spirit with the corner of a textbook on statistics, right under the jaw, and with my other hand I stuffed the icon down its throat—”

Roger said, “I’m having trouble modeling this situation.”

“Its teeth tore my sleeve clean off. It gurgled, trying to wail, but it couldn’t. And it swelled up and split down the middle, leaving nothing but a handful of gray dust that settled over everything.

“That left one spirit in the library.”

“And you found it, killed it, and that was that,” Liz said. “The end.”

“Well, not exactly.”

“This retirement party we’re going to,” Hellboy said. “Will there be those little hot dogs in pastry? I like those.”

“I didn’t kill it. As far as I know, it’s still out there.”

“Or the cheese quiches, the ones that come in big slices, not the cough-drop-sized—wait, what?”

“When I found it, it had one of the librarians cornered. The nice one, who always grabbed my holds for me as soon as he saw me coming. I had a bit of a crush on him, to be honest, and I think maybe he felt the same. But I couldn’t come out and say it. He would have been in trouble—he would have beenquestioned—I was American, see.

“Anyway. He was crying from fear, his eyes wide open. I’m not sure he saw me. The spirit turned around and hissed at me. Its teeth were smeared with blood.

“ ‘I see them on you, Kate Corrigan. I see my friends, the ones I spent my long captivity with, the ones you think you destroyed.’

“ ‘Then you should be afraid of me,’ I said.

“ ‘I am not afraid of any living thing, Kate Corrigan,’ it said. ‘But I do not hunt you tonight. Open the door. Open the door, and I will go out, and this man shall live.’

“I opened the library’s doors, which were as heavy as tombstones. They might as well have been tombstones, that night. The spirit rushed past me and disappeared with wild laughter into the dark. I don’t know where it went after that. The librarian was all right—there was no scratch on him, I mean. He stopped talking after that. And he would never look me in the eye again. I don’t know what happened to him after I left the country. I hope he’s forgotten that night. I hope he’s well.”

“The students, though,” Liz said. “The ones who were eaten. How did you explain that? How did you explain the blood?”

Kate shook her head. “Many people disappeared under Ceausescu. The secret police were everywhere, those days. Even your priest could be an informer. It wasn’t unusual.”

“Sounds like one hell of a PhD program,” Liz said.

“Someday I’ll tell you what it took to get tenure.”

They turned left on Pleasant Valley Avenue, and left again on Howe. The strip malls and bars and bookstores gave way to neat houses.

“The thing is,” Kate said, “I never could shake what the second spirit said. The Central Library burned down in the revolution of 1989.”

“This is the end of the street,” Hellboy said, frowning. “Which house is it?”

Kate said, “Keep going. Through the gate.”

“The gate says Saint Mary’s Cemetery.”

“We’re almost there.”

“Is this a joke, Kate?”

“If you’ll recall, one of the stories I collected in Romania—one of the stories that everyone wanted to tell me, although I couldn’t confirm its reality—is that some strigoi wanted nothing more than to work on their farm and provide for their family. None of your castle-haunting, bloodsucking Bram Stoker nonsense. Just your neighbor being your neighbor, looking a little the worse for wear. I think that might be why no one ever pointed those strigoi out to me. They knew, but they protected them.”

She leaned against a new gravestone, its polished surface catching the moonlight.

Roger squatted in front of the stone and ran his fingers over the deep, sharp letters. “Walter Vanderveldt. Professor, loving husband, devoted son. 1921 to 1994.”

Liz said, “Not funny, Kate.”

“You better have a good explanation for this,” Hellboy said.

Kate patted his shoulder. “Everyone knows how tireless an investigator you are.”

“And?”

“And I want you to promise me you’ll refrain from investigating any reports you receive from this area.”

“Like hell I will. What’s going on?”

Kate glanced at her watch. “Ten minutes and you’ll get your explanation.”

A light wind stirred the grass, and clouds veiled and unveiled the moon, but nothing else in the cemetery moved. Liz fumbled another cigarette and lit it. Hellboy crossed his arms.

A slim, bent figure trudged up the hill, moving stiffly but with admirable speed.

“Good evening, Kate. Are these the friends you mentioned?”

“That was a fine talk, Professor Vanderveldt. This is Hellboy. Roger. Liz.”

“Charmed.”

“He wasn’t ready to lie down,” Kate said. “He has projects to finish.”

“Two papers,” the professor said. “On witch cakes and egg divination in colonial America, and the evolution of supernatural excuses for mob violence, respectively.”

“Don’t his colleagues know he’s dead?” Liz said.

“I’m emeritus; that’s as good as dead to most of them. And I’m not blocking the appointment of any bright young things.”

“But the funeral—”

“Private. And apart from a flattering eulogy or two, quite boring.”

“Or obituaries—”

“A humble and brief announcement, easy to miss. I wrote it. And if anyone read it—who will they believe? An ephemeral, imperfect print artifact? Or me, in the flesh?”

“I need whiskey,” Liz muttered.

“That reminds me,” Kate said, producing an amber bottle from her bag. “Congratulations on your retirement. It was hard earned.” She knelt, uncapped the bottle, and poured a generous splash over the grave.

“Much appreciated,” the professor said, smacking his lips. “I always said you would do great things, Kate, and I’m glad you proved me right. A pleasure meeting you all. If you’ll excuse me.”

He took off his wool jacket, shirt, trousers, and shoes, revealing a bony frame and flannel underwear, folded and tied everything into a plastic bag, and set it under his headstone.

With a quick nod to the four of them, the professor sank through the whiskey-soaked soil in three sharp jerks: up to his knees, then his chest, then his eyes. Then, as if tucking himself into bed, he swept an armful of earth over his face and disappeared from view.

“I didn’t know humans could do that,” Roger said.

“Generally we can’t,” Liz said. “And I’m not sure he qualifies as human. Pass that whiskey, Kate.”

“You’re just full of surprises tonight, Kate, aren’t you?” Hellboy glared down at his feet, as if he could see through the soil to Professor Vanderveldt.

“I’m sorry about the deception, Hellboy,” Kate said. “I needed you to observe him without prejudice.”

“I’m not prejudiced. Who says I’m prejudiced?”

“It’s true,” Liz said. “Hellboy sees a vampire, he stakes him.”

“Now that you have, I’m sure you understand why I need you to close all investigations opened in a five-mile radius for the next year—mark them as unsubstantiated—and say nothing about Professor Vanderveldt to the BPRD.”

“That a request or a demand?”

“He wants to finish two papers, Hellboy. You heard him. He’s harmless.”

“He finishes those papers—what then? Rampaging, Kate. I never met a vampire that didn’t rampage. And this is Berkeley—he could hide here forever. Invisible. Everyone’s eccentric, half the teenagers claim to be vampires—next thing you know, we’re up to here in blood and corpses.”

“I’ve known him for twenty-five years. He’s too obsessed with obscure historical trends to stalk the midnight hour.”

“He almost bored me to death with that lecture,” Liz said. “That’s pretty dangerous.”

Hellboy said, “He’s too obsessed with his research to die.”

“Oh, he’s dead. He knows he’s dead. We talked about it on the phone. He’ll be ready to go once he puts the last touches on these papers. A colleague at Dartmouth’s been staying alive on blood transfusions and spite, waiting for Walter to kick the bucket—he organized a festschrift, but won’t publish it until Walter’s done.”

“I don’t know what that is and I don’t want to know.” Hellboy rubbed his forehead. “I’ll take that whiskey if you’re done with it, Liz.”

“Here. Can you believe she poured out single malt?”

“Peat to peat,” Kate said. “It was appropriate.”

Hellboy gulped from the bottle and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Right, that’s it. I’m going home and pretending this never happened.”

“Congrats on your retirement,” Roger said, patting the headstone. “I liked your talk.”

And from the loose, clotted earth, a muffled voice said: Thanks.

FIRE IS THE DEVIL’S ONLY FRIEND

Michael Rowe

The little girl’s voice wove itself through Hellboy’s dream like a silver thread. The words themselves seemed to glitter, as though lit from within by phosphorescence that lifted them up and away from the dream itself. He felt them rather than heard them, and yet they imprinted themselves on his mind like they were spelled out on a marquee.

My name is Hazel Marie Haase. I’m eight years old. And I’m going to die tomorrow night. Please come. If you can hear me, please come. Please come. Help me. Help me. Please help me. If you can hear me, please find me. Please.

Even asleep Hellboy felt himself inclining toward the familiarity—indeed, the purity and beauty—of the nonvoice. His body shifted, his head lifting slightly from his pillow as if to better listen.

Then the thread unraveled, releasing a bundle of images that tumbled across the screen of his sleeping mind with clarity they’d never had in any of his other dreams of her and of this place. In the dark he could make out the contours of a little girl’s bedroom: A small white dresser. A wooden chair with painted flowers along the top rail. A half-empty bookcase with a handful of oversized children’s books haphazardly stacked in piles. A narrow closet, open just a crack. Tracking along the bare linoleum floor with his mind’s dream eye, he made out a naked doll lying face down on a small hooked rug beside the bed. The doll’s head was twisted around and its left arm was broken, angling away from the body like a bracket.

Hellboy knew, with the insight peculiar to dreams, that he was seeing what she was seeing, whoever she was. Long accustomed to viewing the world from his own prodigious height, he was aware that he could not be seeing what he was seeing. He looked down. All around him, a tangle of stale pink sheets, a shinyduvet.

Even dreaming, he felt ridiculously out of place in all that pink.

In his sleep, Hellboy muttered, “This bed’s too damn small, kid. How’d you fit me in here? I’m gonna break it to pieces if we sit up. Don’t move.”

Again, with more urgency this time, the voice came: My name is Hazel Marie Haase. I’m eight years old. And I’m going to die tomorrow night. Please come. If you can hear me, please come. Please find me. Help. Help. Help. Help.

Across the room the bedroom door slowly swung inward, opening darkness upon darkness from the dim hallway beyond. A faceless, hulking shape stood motionless in the doorway.

The dream turned hot and red. Hellboy smelled smoke and felt heat.

Please come. Please come. Please find me. Please. Please. Please. Terror now made the beautiful voice raw and no longer beautiful. Help me. Help me. Please. Please. PLEASE!

When the shape began to move slowly, deliberately, inexorably toward the bed, the voice in Hellboy’s head became a scream so loud that it woke him.

He looked out the window of the room in the Victorian mansion in which he had been quartered by the BPRD during his stay in this city and saw the first fingers of gray light beckoning dawn across the waning night sky. He heard the rain explode against the windows in a steady, insectile tapping.

Hellboy lay back and closed his eyes, but he knew sleep was over. He rubbed the stubs of his freshly filed horns. His head throbbed. He reached back into his dream, searching for a connection to the familiarity of the girl’s voice, the knowing that had followed him into the waking world, if only to understand the urgency he still felt, which was something quite apart from any normal reaction to the random mosaic of images that formed the component parts of dreams.

No, Hellboy thought. This was something more than a dream.

He looked around the room, half expecting to see the frail, slumped shape of a little girl standing in the corner by the window, staring at him, arms outstretched like a plaintive ghost imploring his protection. But in the dawn-lightening shadows, he saw that the room was still empty. The only ghosts were the remnants of the dream that shivered and eddied in Hellboy’s mind.

Fifty miles away, at the moment Hellboy had woken from his dream of the screaming child, Katrina Haase opened her eyes and sat up in her bed, unsure of what had disturbed her.

The digital clock on the bedside table blurred green as she rubbed her eyes. It was a little after six a.m., too early for noise inside the apartment.

Holding her breath, Katrina listened. The apartment was silent. She looked down and frowned. The bed beside her was empty. She laid her hand against Jake’s side of the mattress; it was cool to the touch, with no imprint of his body’swarmth on it.

She called out his name, but there was only silence in reply. In the way of mothers of vulnerable children, mothers who never fell completely asleep, she knew every sound in the apartment, even the nonsounds and silences, and what they might portend. Jake was a man who made noise. He snored every night and, between the snoring and his farting under the covers, she was used to the noise and even welcomed it. Even on those nights when she didn’t feel his love, or what he called, and she accepted, as his love, it was still better than sleeping alone. The nonsound that answered her told her Jake wasn’t in the apartment.

And yet, something had woken her.

Katrina heard something fall over down the hallway in Hazel’s room. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and crossed the bedroom floor. She walked quickly down the short hallway, glancing reflexively into the tiny living room as she passed. It was empty, as she knew it would be. The computer was off.

Where the hell did Jake go at this hour of the morning, and why didn’t I hear him leave?

She pushed open her daughter’s bedroom door. Hazel was kneeling on her bed, facing the wall. Her arms were gripped tightly across her chest in a gesture Katrina recognized as signaling terror.

Two years before, Hazel had aggressively tried to pet a Rottweiler in a nearby park. Katrina had repeatedly told Hazel that she always had to ask permission, but Hazel loved the softness of the fur atop dogs’ heads and sometimes couldn’t help herself.

When Hazel had touched the dog, it had recoiled as though her hand was a live wire. The Rottweiler had begun to bark, then howl. For her part, Hazel had begun to scream.

The well-dressed woman at the other end of the leash had been furious. “What the hell is wrong with you? Don’t you teach your kid park etiquette? You don’t let her touch dogs without permission!”

“I’m so, so sorry. She didn’t mean anything by it. She can’t help herself; she just loves dogs, and sometimes I can’t stop her before she reaches them.”

Katrina had been about to explain about Hazel when the woman with the Rottweiler angrily wheeled on her screaming daughter.

“Stop that noise, for Christ’s sake! Can’t you see you’re making it worse? You’re upsetting him! Be quiet! Behave yourself, you stupid little girl.”

In the whiplash of the woman’s voice, all of the pain of the public humiliations came back—the meltdowns in supermarkets when Hazel wanted everything on the shelf, resulting in cans everywhere and gathered crowds, the cruel stares, the oily pity from people who’d just seen something about autism on television and wanted to tell Katrina how brave she was, the mothers at the public pool who pulled their children to the side as soon as they realized there was something “different” about the little girl in the red swimsuit with the beautiful, curiously vacant face and the jerky movements. All the nights of weeping alone in the darkness, before she’d met Jake, back when no one wanted to date a single mother with two jobs and a “problem child.”

All the nights she’d slept next to Hazel, feeling a protective love for her daughter so vast that it seemed to lift her up and crush her at the same time.

White faced, Katrina had walked up to the woman with the Rottweiler and leaned in close. “You shut your mouth, you bitch. Don’t you ever raise your voice to my daughter. You don’t know her, you don’t know me. You don’t have the first clue.”

The woman went pale. “How dare you speak to me like that? I’m calling the police.”

“You’d better hope they get here before I beat the living shit out of you for shouting at my daughter. And see what happens to your damn dog when I tell the cops it attacked her. And it’ll be my word against yours. Want to take a bet on who they believe?”

The woman drew back. “You’re crazy. Keep your kid under control.” She jerked on the leash and began to drag the howling dog away. “Come on, Ivy, let’s get out of here.” Over her shoulder she had shouted to Katrina, “I’m going to report you.”

“Go to hell,” Katrina had shouted at the woman’s back, but by then she was already exhausted and angry with herself for letting the woman get under her skin.

Hazel had stopped screaming, but she was trembling. Tears had streamed silently from her eyes. Once they had gotten back to the apartment, Hazel had started to rock, arms crossed in front of her. She rocked for three hours until she fell asleep from the sheer exhaustion of it.

Now, in the predawn dimness of her bedroom, Hazel rocked back and forth, nodding her head rhythmically in time with the movement of her body. From her mouth came a soft whistling sound. When Katrina reached for Hazel, to gather her in her arms, the girl flinched and drew back, but not before Katrina registered that Hazel’s nightgown was soaking wet.

Katrina spoke softly. “Hazel? Sweetheart? Did you have a nightmare? Baby? Are you okay? Mommy’s here, sweetheart. It’s okay.”

Hazel continued to rock.

She looked around her daughter’s bedroom for what had woken her. Hazel’s wooden chair—the one Katrina had found on a sidewalk near the apartment the summer she’d been pregnant with Hazel and painted with flowers in an attempt to make something fundamentally cheap and ugly into something beautiful for the baby growing in her belly—had been flung across the room. From where she was sitting next to Hazel on the bed, she saw that the chair had been broken into two pieces as though ripped down the middle. Like it was made of cardboard instead of hardwood.

Katrina shivered. It’s solid pine. I stripped it and refinished it myself. There’s no way she could have broken it even if she’d had an episode. And if she’d thrown it hard enough to break it, there’d be a four-foot hole in the wall and we’d be in so much trouble with the landlord.

For a brief second she wondered if Jake had done it, but she dismissed the question out of hand. Aside from the fact that he was slight and wiry, Jake was a taciturn man, given to brooding silences, never fits of rage.

So, what happened? And again, where the hell is Jake?

Katrina stroked Hazel’s hair. “Sweetie, what happened to your chair? How did your chair break? Did you do it? Did you throw it?”

But Hazel just kept rocking. Even when Katrina removed her soaked pajamas and dressed her in dry ones, she rocked and rocked.

Sitting in the booth at the all-night diner on Melton Street, Jake Smith knew his coffee was cold. The creamer coated the brown surface like a miniature oil slick. When the waitress looked across at him, raising the coffeepot to inquire if he wanted a top-up, he’d shaken his head no. He’d had three cups already, not counting the untouched one in front of him, and his stomach felt corroded by it.

After the night of rain, the early morning sun, sharp as knives through the plate glass window, hurt his eyes, which felt raw in their sockets. He was almost surprised not to find blood on his fingers when he rubbed them.

Jake had slipped out around four a.m. without even waking Katrina, whose most recent second job—cleaning an office building in midtown—usually got her home just after midnight. He’d thought she looked exhausted lying there.

Before he’d left, he’d pushed open Hazel’s bedroom door and stood there for what seemed to him to be an eternity, watching her body contort in the throes of what looked like the mother of all nightmares. He noted that she was sweating. Idly, he wondered if she’d pissed herself too, making a mental note to make sure he wasn’t back at the apartment until Katrina had dressed her, lest he be asked to help clean up the urine.

Jake had checked himself for any emotion, anything—sympathy, pity, compassion—anything a normal man might feel for the disabled young daughter of a woman he was supposed to be in love with, but there was nothing. Nor did he think himself odd for it. Although what he felt was probably not what people thought of as love, he believed he loved Katrina.

He didn’t love Hazel. He certainly didn’t hate her either. Truth be told, he was entirely indifferent to her existence, except for what it was costing him in terms of not only Katrina’s time, but also his own peace of mind.

To him, Hazel looked like a sleeping animal—a noisy, messy, expensive animal that caused trouble for everyone when it was awake, an animal that refused to acknowledge his existence in any normal human way. He was embarrassed to be seen in public with her, and he was tired of being embarrassed.

Also, he was tired of not getting his fair share of Katrina’s attention.

Most of all, Jake was tired of being dead broke and living in a shitty apartment in a shitty part of town. He was made for better things than this.

When he caught the reflection of his own mirthless smile in the mirror over the counter, he rearranged his face into a more pleasing—more normal—expression. He winked at the waitress, who blushed, then he paid for the coffee with the money Katrina kept in the Maxwell House tin behind the cookbooks on the highest shelf in the kitchen, a new hiding place she thought he hadn’t discovered yet.

This is the last dawn I’m ever going to see as a normal person. Tomorrow morning at this time, people will call me a monster if they learn what I will have just done. And if there’s a hell after I die, tomorrow will be the first sunrise of my journeyto damnation.

But Jake didn’t believe in hell, or demons, or the devil.

What he believed in were solutions to problems, and getting difficult problems out of the way as painlessly and quickly as possible for everyone involved—especially for Jake himself. And if there were people crazy enough to believe in demons and devils that could help him solve his problems, then that was fine with him.

As Hellboy went through the motions of starting his day he found himself only half present, even to himself. The dream of the little girl’s voice, and the images that accompanied it this morning, seemed like something that had actually happened to him in the night rather than something he’d merely dreamed. Curiously, while the words themselves were fading from his memory, the images were growing more vivid. The smell of smoke, for instance, was still in his nostrils and it was strong enough—and real enough—to cause him to step into the hallway to make sure there wasn’t a fire. Naturally, there wasn’t, but he’d already known there wouldn’t be. Feeling like a bit of a fool, he went back into the room and closed the door. He sat down heavily on the bed and sniffed the air again. There was another smell now, under the smoke. Something rotten, sour, like a turned refrigerator. It smelled like . . . cheese? No, not cheese. Milk. Sour milk.

“Damn, kid,” he said aloud, speaking to the little ghost girl from his smoky dream, the little girl who wasn’t even real and felt more like a pain in the ass this morning than anything else. “Milk, now? I’m smelling milk? You’re messing with my head. Go outside and play with someone your own age, real or not. I ain’t in the mood.”

Hellboy and Liz had been in the city for three days, investigating persistent rumors of a coven of some sort in an exclusive gated community on the outskirts of town. It had been a weak-enough assignment, one that Hellboy had considered a waste of time, roughly on par with the “Satanic panic” hysteriaof the 1980s—investigating a number of fairly lurid third-party reports of fires in the woods and figures in dark red robes allegedly sighted by teenagers out late at night.

What had brought these stories to the attention of the BPRD, even in the absence of overt magic or any clearly supernatural footprint, were the missing children. Six children in fact, four girls and two boys, all from low-income or single-parent families, all of whom had lived in a one-hundred-odd-mile radius of each other, all over the course of a decade.

Their disappearances had roughly coincided with the evolution of the rumors of a cult, but the local police, even the FBI, had been unable to make a connection. The gaudy stories couldn’t be substantiated beyond rumor and conjecture. There had been alcohol involved on several of the occasions of the alleged sightings. Even when sober people had made the reports, the specific details had been inconclusive. On the face of it, even if there was some sort of hippie cult performing rituals under the full moon in the woods, without evidence of some sort of crime, the worst thing they could be charged with was trespassing.

As for the children, in the absence of blood, bones, or a body, they were officially listed as missing. For all intents and purposes, they had simply vanished into various black nights, over the course of a number of years, leaving no trace.

Hellboy heard the sharp rap on the door of his room at the same time it swung open. Liz was dressed for the road and he could see her suitcase in the hallway. She looked at her watch.

“Are you packed? You look like you just woke up. The car is picking us up in twenty minutes.” She stood on her tiptoes and peered into his face. Obligingly, Hellboy leaned down, bringing his face close to hers. Liz’s scowl melted into concern. “Did you even sleep last night? You look like crap. Are you feeling all right?”

“Bad night,” he said gruffly. “Bad dreams. I don’t know if I slept or not, to be honest. I think I did, but I dunno.”

Liz sat down on the bed. “I can’t wait to get out of here and back home. I had a feeling this investigation was going to turn out to be a bust. It’s a sad situation with the missing kids and all, but I don’t know what the Bureau was thinking sending us out here without something solid.”

Hellboy was silent for a moment, staring out the window. Then he spoke, not looking at her. The crystalline white sunlight from the window framed his head and shoulders like a halo.

“Liz?”

“Hmmm?”

“You think there’s a chance we missed something? Anything?”

“What do you mean?” She sighed. “There wasn’t anything to find. We checked out the site where the so-called witches were allegedly seen. We read the reports from all the so-called witnesses. Nothing. Nada. We tried to make a connection between two separate things that weren’t connected, and didn’t have any sort of supernatural component. And I can’t wait to get out of here. This house is damp.” Liz paused. “Why do you ask? I’d have thought you were as happy to be out of here as I’m going to be. That bed can’t have been very comfortable for you. Look,” she said, pointing to the lower sideboard, now cracked and sagging dramatically. “You broke it. You broke the bed, you ox.”

When Hellboy turned slowly around to face her, he wasn’t smiling, nor did he look at the broken bed and make some joke about his size. “I need you to go on ahead. Make some excuse for me. I’ll join you in a couple of days.”

“What?”

He sighed. “I’m going to stick around for a couple of days and check some things out on my own. I’m not sure we covered everything.”

“Covered everything?”

He sighed. “I had a dream last night. There was a little girl. She was in some kind of trouble.”

“So you had a dream,” Liz said. “We just spent three days looking at pictures of missing kids, watching video interviews with their heartbroken parents, and realizing there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. At least not any more than the local cops and state police who are already investigating. I’m not surprised you dreamed about kids.”

“This wasn’t like any dream I’ve ever had. It was too real. It felt like I was actually there . . .”

Liz cut him off. “Hellboy, it was a dream. You’re not clairvoyant. You’re not a telepath or a psychometric. You don’t get visions. We have people who do that, but you’re not one of them. Come on. Pack up, because the car will be here in a minute, and I, for one, would like to get out of this mausoleum.”

From the wounded expression on his face, Liz realized that she’d spoken more sharply than she intended. Jesus, I can be a bitch before I’ve had my morning coffee. And he really does look like he didn’t sleep all night.

More gently this time, she said, “If you really think there’s something going on here that needs a Bureau investigation, we can send someone else, someone with the abilities necessary to check it out. Maybe that’s what they should have done in the first place.”

Hellboy closed his eyes, then shook his head. “No, Liz. There’s something going on here. I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but I’m staying. Just another day or two. Maybe I’ll head back into the woods. Maybe I’ll just stay here in this room and try to sleep. Maybe that’s what you should tell Manning—that I needed some sleep. That’ll keep you out of it.”

“Out of what? Seriously, you’re freaking me out now.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Hellboy said. “Just go, Liz. I’ll be fine.” He sniffed the air again. “Do you smell anything? Anything like smoke? Or . . . milk?”

“No, I don’t smell milk, or smoke. I smell bullshit, and I know just where it’s coming from, too.”

Hellboy inclined his head toward the window, where the sound of tires on the gravel of the circular driveway could be heard, getting louder. “Your car’s here. I’ll be home soon, I promise.”

“You promise. I must be insane letting you get away with this. Manning hates it when you pull this stuff.”

Hellboy laughed. “He’s used to it by now.”

Outside, the sound of a car horn came twice, sharply. Hellboy leaned out the window and shouted, “She’s coming! Hold your water!” And to Liz, “Go on, get out of here. I’ll be home soon.”

The morning had started badly for Katrina and seemed only to be getting worse by the minute. This filled her with dread because a bad day with Hazel could be a very bad day, even with Jake’s help, and Jake hadn’t been particularly helpful so far today.

After bathing her—with Hazel rocking the entire time, flooding the bathroom in the process—and dressing her in a clean nightgown, Katrina had tried to put her back in bed, but Hazel was having none of it. Instead, she paced around the room, occasionally slapping the wall.

Once, just once, she slapped herself in the face, which she hadn’t done for years now. Please God, not again, Katrina thought. We can’t go through this again.

Softly she said, “No, Hazel. Please don’t, honey,” and reached for Hazel’s hand, pressing it close to her daughter’s side. To Katrina’s relief, Hazel didn’t slap herself again, but she did continue to pace.

Later, when Katrina had tried to prepare Hazel’s breakfast, Hazel had slapped the carton of milk off the table, splattering its contents all over the table, the floor, and the wall behind her.

The stench that rose from the spilled container filled the kitchen, making Katrina gag. The milk on the floor was thin, rancid, yellow, and full of foul-smelling chunks of rotten curd.

It’s sour! Damn him. I asked him to pick up milk yesterday while I was at work! Do I have to do everything? Her eyes filled with tears of the purest and most utter frustration. Not for the first time—indeed, far from it—Katrina wondered what in God’s name she was doing with Jake when lately she felt more alone than she ever had when Hazel was a small child. Back then, Katrina had been single, lonely, and on welfare.

Now she worked two jobs and barely slept. She lived with a man who had been unemployed for more than a year and a half and showed little inclination to find a job, a man whose primary saving grace was the fact that he helped out with Hazel, took her to the special program run by the nuns at Saint Aloysius Charitable Outreach—which was basically babysitting with arts and crafts, but with visiting therapy students fulfilling internship quotas—and then picked her up again at four thirty p.m. He watched Hazel while Katrina was at work.

In Jake’s defense he also filled the house with adult noise, slept beside her, and occasionally even made love to her, though less frequently of late. He was a reasonably handsome man and good with the neighbors. Hazel didn’t seem to care for him very much, but Katrina was used to Hazel’s behavior patterns and worked around them, and Jake didn’t seem to be bothered by her one way or another.

Last December she’d asked Jake delicately when he thought he might have a job, even something seasonal like working for one of the parking lot Christmas tree vendors in the city.

He’d answered flatly that no one was hiring, then asked her if she’d come into some money he didn’t know about, because how was she going to afford the childcare his schedule allowed him to provide her?

Feeling as though she’d just been slapped, Katrina had quickly glanced up into Jake’s face, searching for cruelty. The impression she’d had was of a shadow flitting and vanishing, as though if she’d looked up a nanosecond earlier, there might have been something there other than his bland smile and his bright, unblinking blue eyes.

This morning, he’d sauntered in just before eight, acting as if leaving the apartment in the middle of the night to wander around the streets of the city was something normal. Dimly, Katrina was aware that she should probably wonder if Jake had been with another woman, but she was too tired and too worried about Hazel to think about anything else. And now, here he was slouched in the kitchen doorway like nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

“Sheesh, what a stink!” Jake waved his hands in front of his face. “What is that, milk? Jeez. Did you do that, Hazel, sweetie? What a mess.”

“Jake, where have you been? I’ve been worried sick! She’s been upset since six a.m. And why didn’t you get milk yesterday? You know she needs her breakfast before school and I need to get ready for work. I’m going to be late as it is. Where were you?”

Jake grinned at her. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went out for a walk. I had some coffee. She was fine when I left the house, and I didn’t want to wake you. You looked exhausted. What’s the problem? Don’t be so hysterical. You’re making it worse. Look at how freaked out Hazel is. Calm down.”

“She’s been like this since I woke up, Jake. And I’ve had to handle it all by myself. Do you think you could help me out here? You know, unless you have something else to do that’s more important?” As soon as the words had left her mouth, Katrina regretted them. She needed Jake’s help right now and antagonizing him, however justified her anger was, wasn’t going to get him to cooperate. “I’m sorry,” Katrina said. “I’m tired and cranky. Do you think you could clean up the milk? I’ll get her dressed for school. Would you mind?”

Jake was still grinning. “Sure, Kat,” he said. “I’ll clean up the milk. Leave it to me. You get her dressed and then I’ll take her to school, just like always. And I’ll do some shopping on the way back and get everything we need. Sound good? I’m sorry I freaked you out. I just didn’t want to wake you—you looked so tired lying there.”

Katrina, who had expected a fight, was taken aback by both the apology and his unexpected conciliation. “Thanks, Jake,” she said. “I appreciate it.” And to Hazel, who had been staring at Jake since he returned home but had abruptly reached for Katrina’s hand and was now gripping it tightly, “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s get you ready for school so that Mommy can get dressed for work.”

“Don’t worry about her breakfast,” Jake called, as Katrina led Hazel into the bedroom. “I’ll buy her a bagel on the way to school. Do you have any money?”

From the bedroom, Katrina’s voice sounded utterly threadbare. “There should be some in the Maxwell House can on the top shelf, by the cookbooks.”

“I’ll find it,” Jake said, knowing he’d already spent everything in the can on his own breakfast at the diner, and that even if Hazel had any way of telling anyone that Jake hadn’t bought her anything to eat on the way to school this morning, after tonight she’d be dead and it wouldn’t matter anyway.

It had taken Hellboy just under two hours to reach the edge of the city on foot along back roads until the countryside gave way to the woody exurbs that finally opened up along the side of the freeway. The expressions on the faces of the handful of midmorning commuters who’d caught sight of his swiftly moving crimson bulk had been priceless and had made him smile. Idly he wondered if they’d tell their coworkers at the office when they got to work that they’d seen an enormous red demon trudging along the side of the highway, and he decided that if he’d been able to make their gray-flannel lives a little bit interesting, just this once, he was good with that.

The closer Hellboy got to the city, the sharper his memories of his dream became. New images came to him as well, nothing with the cinematic clarity of the night before, but no less insistent and unsolicited: a sudden flash of a sandwich board going by with some letters stenciled on it spelling out Fresh hot bagels! accompanied by the scent of freshly baked dough and a flash of hunger he knew wasn’t his. A little girl’s extended arm, in the hand of a man who was dragging her along a sidewalk. A sudden jolt of pain in his shoulder socket, as though someone had given his arm a particularly vicious tug. He knew it was a sidewalk because he could feel the unforgiving concrete under his own hooves even though he himself was walking on grass, and he knew he was taking one step for the little girl’s four.

And then suddenly Hellboy saw her face.

It was more than a flash this time. He closed his eyes, swaying on his feet, suddenly dizzy, and concentrated on the image. He was looking at a plate glass window that reflected the sidewalk and the passing pedestrians.

Standing in front of the window was a girl no older than nine, a girl with staring blue eyes and wild, uncombed blond hair. She was dressed in pale blue jeans and a washed-out pink Hello Kitty sweatshirt that had clearly seen better days. Her eyes were intently focused on her reflection, almost as though she were not merely staring at it, but seeing herself for the first time.

A man was holding her hand tightly, trying to pull her away from the window and along the sidewalk, but she stubbornly refused to move, setting her heels at an angle that made her difficult for the man to dislodge.

My name is Hazel Marie Haase. I’m eight years old. Please help me. I can see you. I know you can see me. I can see you seeing me. I know your name.

Aloud, he said, “What’s my name?”

Your name is Hellboy. He’s going to hurt me. Please find me.

“How are you doing this, kid? Are you real? How did you get into my head? I can’t read minds. Are you reading mine?”

Find me. Help me! HELP ME!

There was a sudden sense of blurring and violent movement. Hellboy felt, rather than saw, the little girl brutally pulled away from the window. There was one more ghost pain in his shoulder. In his mind, he heard the echo of a rough, cold male voice saying, Come on, you little brat, I haven’t got all day, move your ass.

Then the vision was severed as effectively as if someone had pulled the plug on a television set. He half expected to hear a whumph! sound and see sparks.

Hellboy opened his eyes. He felt cold all over in spite of the unseasonably hot sun, which had now risen to its noontime zenith. His shoulders no longer ached and he felt the grass beneath him instead of concrete. Whoever the little girl was, however she’d managed to possess him, or project her mind into his, she had left him. He was entirely himself again.

But he knew three things now, for sure: She was real. She was possessed of some form of telepathy he’d never encountered before, a form of telepathy that didn’t require her receivers to be telepathic themselves.

Most prominently, he knew that she was in fear for her life.

Hellboy thought of the photographs of the missing children he and Liz had pored over during what had at first appeared to be a fool’s errand of an attempt to tie together six missing children and a garden-variety suburban legend about some sort of cult. Their faces had haunted him, as had the faces of their parents in the police videotapes he’d watched, the mothers in particular. He’d never known his own mother and everything he’d learned about maternal relationships he’d learned from watching other people, but his human side was strong and he was not lacking in empathy. The pain in these women’s faces, and their raw tears, had rendered them jagged with loss and their anguish caused him pain, albeit in the abstract.

Maybe this is why I stayed. Easy, right? Find a girl I’ve only seen in my head, in a city I’ve never been in before, and save her from . . . something. No idea what, but something. Simple, right?

Hellboy sighed deeply and turned toward the city, picking up his pace. Whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen soon, and if he was going to ride in like the cavalry, his little friend was going to have to give him a few more clues to work with. He opened his mind as wide as he could, emptying it of as many thoughts as he could, so the screen would be blank when she switched her projector back on, which she damn well better do, and soon.

At four fifteen, Jake was sitting on a bench in the park across the street from Saint Aloysius, waiting for the nuns to bring Hazel out to him.

It had been impressed upon him by his new friends that the single most important element of the transaction into which he was about to enter was that there be witnesses to him picking Hazel up, preferably the nuns. There had to be a visual record of him leaving Saint Aloysius with Hazel, or the deal was off. The van would meet them in the alleyway three blocks south, at which time his new friends would take over, and that would be that: his problems, financial and otherwise, would be permanently over.

It would be a little painful, of course.

Jake would have to be able to make a convincing case that he’d been jumped by Hazel’s kidnappers and that he’d bravely fought them off, but he’d been assured that there were professionals among the group, men who were skilled at doing maximum, believable damage to the human body, stopping just short of permanent injury, let alone death.

Bones heal, Jake thought. Two million dollars, more money than he ever in his life dreamed would be his, would last a long, long time.

It would get him out of this dirty city and Kat’s crappy apartment, for one. If he still wanted Kat when this was over, he could take her away with him. If he didn’t, he could leave her. She’d eventually get over losing Hazel. She’d meet another guy, maybe get knocked up again. Maybe this time she’d have a kid that wasn’t messed up. Everybody would win. It was like Jake was doing everyonea favor.

Jake had met the man he knew only as the Professor the previous summer when he was out at the park with Hazel.

Kat had been at work and Hazel had been at her absolute worst, refusing to obey him, ignoring him, screaming, and carrying on. Eventually Hazel had gone off to the empty sandbox to dig with a stick or some other God damn messy thing.

Jake had never been more ready to leave Katrina than he was at that moment, contemplating the scratch marks on his hands where Hazel had dug her nails into his flesh. Jake had hated her at that moment. He had almost slapped her. He’d wanted to, but there had been too many people around and he’d known it would just make her scream louder and embarrass him even more. It wasn’t worth the warm bed and the free apartment to put up with that shit, no sir.

A well-dressed man with receding gray hair had sat down on the bench next to him. They had made small talk about the weather and how nice the park was at this time of year. The man had seemed to sense Jake’s discomfiture and his eyes had followed Jake’s to where Hazel was sitting in the sandbox.

“Your daughter?” he’d asked.

“Hell no,” Jake had replied. “My girlfriend’s kid.”

“She’s very pretty,” the man had said, but Jake noted that he hadn’t said it in a creepy way, more like the way a grandfather would have commented on how attractive his granddaughter was. “What’s her name?”

“Hazel. My girlfriend Katrina says that God made her that pretty so we wouldn’t kill her. She was kidding, obviously,” Jake added. “But today, I think she might be on to something.”

“Quite right!” The older man had laughed appreciatively, as though Jake had made a witticism.

Jake, who’d grown up in the system, had never known a father or grandfather, was absurdly flattered that a refined, clearly educated older man thought he was funny. Jake wondered briefly if the old man was queer, but he wasn’t getting that vibe either. He was just a nice old man in a camelhair overcoat and a navy silk scarf with white polka dots who spoke to Jake as an equal, not as some unemployed bum to be looked down on or pitied.

They’d begun to meet on a regular basis, first in the park with Hazel, the old man, apparently some sort of retired professor of anthropology, always solicitous and welcoming of Jake’s company.

A couple of months later the old man had invited him out for drinks and listened to the story of his life. Drinks had turned into dinner at the sort of restaurant Jake had only ever seen pictures of in magazines. Jake had gotten very, very drunk on wine that had gone down like the best sex he’d ever had and left him feeling like a king.

That’s when the Professor had asked Jake if he’d ever consider selling Hazel, for an enormous amount of money.

Jake, utterly drunk, thought he’d misheard. He laughed, and told the Professor what he thought he’d heard him say, expecting the Professor to laugh too.

But the Professor hadn’t laughed, nor had he smiled.

Instead, he had repeated the question and cited a figure so astronomical that Jake felt himself sobering by the second.

“No one would ever know what happened,” the Professor said. “We’d see to that. The money would be in an overseas account and it would be yours, but untraceable back to you. You could live anywhere, be anything, do anything. Or, you could do nothing at all. But you could do it in restaurants like this, with wine like this, and with any women you chose. You’d be rich.”

“You’re crazy,” Jake had said. “I’m leaving.”

“Here, take my card. The number is on the bottom.”

“How do you know I won’t call the police?”

Now the Professor was smiling broadly. “You won’t call the police,” he’d said. “Because you know, deep down, you’re a winner, and that what I’m offering you is what you really want, but never dreamed you could ever get—complete, utter freedom. Luxury beyond your wildest dreams. The respect of everyone who has ever looked down on you and called you shiftless white trash. The things that are holding you down, the things that are keeping you from my gift, are things you don’t even love. Think about that when you’re sober.” He’d tucked his card into Jake’s shirt pocket and patted it genially. Jake hadn’t reached for the card, but he hadn’t pulled it out of his shirt pocket, torn it up, and thrown it in the Professor’s face, either.

After Jake got home, after he’d vomited up all that expensive red wine and passed out in the bed beside Katrina, who screamed at him the next morning, during the worst hangover of his life, the sound of her voice like a paring knife in his brain, he’d fished the business card out of his pants pocket and tucked it carefully in his wallet where he wouldn’t lose it.

He didn’t see the Professor in the park again all winter, nor did he seek him out. The ecru business card was tucked away inside his wallet, wedged between the lucky condom he’d received from his best friend on his sixteenth birthday and his Virgin Megastore discount card. Sometimes when the apartment was dark and quiet, he’d take the Professor’s card out and run his fingers along the raised letters. Then he’d shiver and put it back into his wallet as carefully as if it were alive.

One night that early spring, Jake and Katrina had the biggest, worst fight they’d ever had, a roof-raising, dish-breaking donnybrook of the very loudest order.

It had started, naturally, over something Hazel had done that he’d reacted badly to and had gone from there. The neighbors had banged on the wall and threatened to call the police. The fight ended with Katrina throwing Jake out.

By the time he came back two days later, and they’d made up, Jake had already called the Professor—who’d been delighted to hear from him—and told him he’d be interested in meeting to discuss that particular matter they’d talked about that night in the restaurant.

In the ensuing months, there had been many meetings, both with the Professor and with the other members of what he called his “group of friends.”

The talk of old religions and Canaanite gods bored Jake, who’d had religion shoved down his throat in a couple of the foster homes, and didn’t believe in the real God anyway, let alone imaginary gods. He didn’t particularly care what these rich weirdoes did with Hazel, but he supposed he was relieved when they told him she wouldn’t feel anything when the time came. It would be like putting a cat to sleep, the Professor had told him, and that was language Jake understood. As long as his two million dollars was in that bank account—and they’d shown him the papers from the bank in Andorra proving that it was—it was all good.

Now, six months later, here he was, sitting on a bench across from Saint Aloysius waiting for the nuns to bring Hazel to him one last time before the life he’d always known he was born to live began.

Hellboy roamed the neon-lit underbelly of the premidnight city, following the invisible beacon that swept the streets in front of him, lighting the darkness of a pathway he could fully see only when his eyes were closed.

In the hours since the sun had set across the tops of the skyscrapers, Hazel’s communication had gone from the weak, fitful stream of earlier that morning to a dazzling pyrotechnic display of vivid telepathic imaging unlike anything Hellboy could have dreamed. While there was nothing on these streets and in these alleyways that could hurt him, Hellboy felt Hazel’s terror to the point that it nearly overpowered him, almost crucifying him with its sharpness.

Just before five p.m. there was a vision of a van of some sort, with blacked-out windows. He smelled what she smelled—cold greasy metal, a dirty blanket on the floor that stank as though unwashed dogs slept on it. There was an awareness of vibrational movement, as though an unseen road was rushing by beneath him. There had been the sudden sharp pungency of some sort of chemical—chloroform, perhaps—followed by sudden blackness and hours of no communication at all.

Then the images had started up again, weak and fuzzy at first, then swiftly clarifying. Hellboy had trudged through the darkest parts of the city barely looking up, allowing himself to be guided by Hazel’s mental signal fire.

He was standing on the edge of a quadrangle of abandoned warehouses near the docks, at the very furthest outer edge of the city, the lights of which he could see in the distance. He had no idea how many miles he’d traveled since this morning, nor really even where he was. The air was cold and foul, and carried a lick of dirty salt from the brackish river he could hear lapping in the distance, where the blackness of unlit docks met the blackness of the water beyond.

He closed his eyes very tight and opened his mind as wide as he could.

The light was suddenly red and shaky and Hellboy realized what he was seeing was the light of hundreds of candles against a concrete wall. Then he smelled the smoke and felt the familiar heat and knew he’d found her.

This was what I was dreaming about last night. She knew what was going to happen to her. This is what she was showing me. This is what we should have been investigating all along. The six missing children were connected to a cult, but it wasn’t in the suburbs. It was here, right in the middle of the city where nobody thought to look, the one place where it’s easiest for children, or anyone, to get lost.

Hellboy raised his eyes to the row of boarded-up windows on the top floor of the warehouse. All were dark, but even through the boards he could see a faint red glow flickering behind the glass of the third window facing the courtyard.

They had beaten Jake so badly that he could barely see through his swollen eyes, but he was aware of a sudden, terrible commotion in the room nonetheless.

His mouth tasted of blood and smoke. He lay on the floor of the warehouse in a splintered heap of broken bones, his entire world reduced to a one-note song of the purest possible all-consuming agony. If he’d had enough imagination, he’d have known he was about to die. But then again, if he’d had enough imagination, he’d have known six months ago that no one—least of all a retired professor of anthropology from a famous university whom he’d met in the park—was going to pay Jake two million dollars to deliver a child to him for a ritual sacrifice.

Speaking in a tone of voice that reminded Jake of being back at school, in the principal’s office, the Professor said, “No, not when there are so many greedy, venal, stupid little men who can be tricked into betraying a mother’s trust in exchange for outlandish promises of wealth.” The Professor gestured to what appeared to be a crudely constructed bronze coffin, or miniature incinerator. It was child sized. Welded to the top was the intricately sculpted head of a bull, also cast in bronze, with two upraised bronze arms with upturned hands protruding from the sides. From the unlocked open lid came a stink like barbecued pork, and Jake saw that the metal interior had been burned black. “But thank you for Hazel, Jake. She’ll make a very pleasing sacrifice to the god, like the other six before her. As for you, we’ll just dump your carcass into the river when we’re through with her. Or maybe we’ll just leave you here for the rats.”

Jake had passed out then from the pain. He’d awoken to shrieks and bedlam.

The locked metal door to the warehouse was battered with a series of blows that made the floor shake. Then the metal gave way to whatever monstrous force had ripped it off its hinges in a cloud of dust and a hail of splintered wood from the door frame.

Then, Jake, who didn’t even believe in God, saw the devil stride into the room on cloven feet, swinging a huge stone arm like a battle mace, smashing everything in his path.

A load-bearing pillar splintered like balsa wood, bringing a section of the ceiling crashing down and knocking over a brazier full of coals, igniting the robes of several cultists who crisscrossed the room in confusion, suddenly transformed into human fireballs. The walls went up in sheets of flame and the air was full of the smell of burning meat and the sound of screaming and Jake understood that no one would ever know what had happened to him, or care. He was also dimly aware that the Professor was going to die too, and that gave him some small, distant comfort. He hoped being burned alive hurt terribly.

The last thing Jake heard before one of the warehouse’s beams fell from the ceiling and crushed his skull, ending his pain, was the devil’s voice—speaking not to him, but near him. Jake had expected to hear judgment, or even a welcome to eternal damnation. But the devil’s voice was gruff and soft, even tender, as he reached over with an enormous arm and plucked a tiny bundle out of the corner where it had been tied and stored like an animal in a slaughterhouse, and cradled it to his massive chest.

“Found you, Hazel,” the devil said. “Let’s get you home, kid. Nothing to see here.”

Guided by the open window from Hazel’s mind to his, Hellboy took a serpentine path of dark back alleys and lamp-lit side streets across the city, with Hazel riding piggyback, her face white against the ruby of his skin as she broadcast the way home. He thought her hair smelled faintly of cinnamon and cloves, but it could have been anything. The little girl felt warm and fragile against his bulk, and he was reminded again of how fragile ordinary people were, especially children.

They reached Katrina’s apartment building just before two a.m.

Hellboy looked up to the seventh-floor window. It was dark. He knew the apartment was empty in the same way he knew that Katrina was at the police station frantically trying to convince the desk sergeant that the fact that her boyfriend and her daughter were away at the same time really was an occasion for alarm. The same way he knew that Katrina would be home in exactly forty-three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, and that the sight of Hellboy would be one brick too many after the day she’d had.

Hellboy laughed. “Don’t you ever use words?”

Hazel looked down at the apartment building’s door. She squinted her eyes and grimaced. The lock clicked and the door swung open of its own volition.

Hellboy took the stairs four at a time till he reached the seventh floor. Once again, Hazel opened the apartment door without touching it and he carried her inside. He deposited her gently on the floor and stepped away.

“Are you going to be okay till your mom gets home, kid? Are we good?”

Hazel reached up and stroked his hand. She looked up into Hellboy’s face again. Thank you, came the light-filled nonword words in the beautiful nonvoice that he felt rather than heard. Thank you for coming to help me. Thank you for saving me. I will never forget you. Then she turned and walked down the hallway to her bedroom.

On a table by the door was a faded color photograph in a cheap brass frame. Hellboy picked it up gently and stared. It looked as though it had been taken three or four years before at a shopping mall photography studio. The young woman holding the beautiful little girl with the curiously vacant eyes looked tired under her makeup. Tired, but proud, and radiant with love.

An image shimmered in his mind, stunning him with its sudden clarity. An image of a priest and a nun standing vigil over a chained coffin containing something precious, someone he never knew and never would know.

Hellboy laid the photograph of Katrina and Hazel gently down on the table. Then he closed the door of the apartment gently behind him, and was gone.

A HUGE DAMN VAMPIRE

Richard Kadrey

They’d closed the vampire case just in time for him to join the fight tournament. Good thing, too. The prize was something they could really use.

“Mr. Boy,” said the Minotaur. “You’re in the next bout.”

“Excuse me, pal. It’s not Mr. Boy. It’s just Hellboy. All one word. And you can drop the mister part,” he said.

“Of course. Thank you. You’re next, Mr. Boy.”

Hellboy sighed. Why try explaining anything to a Minotaur? They never listened.

“It’s like they think a head full of horns means they run the world,” said Babkaa. He stood next to Hellboy. “They never listen.”

“That’s what I was just thinking. You know, I wasn’t so sure before, but you’re a good little guy to have around, Babkaa.”

“Right back at you, Big H,” said Babkaa, throwing him a goofy little salute.

Babkaa was about four feet tall. He had a short snout, catlike whiskers, and long, pointed ears that drooped down at the ends. Hellboy thought that you could even mistake him for a cuddly plush toy—if it wasn’t for his mouthful of sharp teeth.

Babkaa hopped around with his fists in the air. “You ready for the next fight?”

Hellboy looked around the arena. It was in a deep, rocky bowl with mountains on all sides. Fires in tall urns lit the place with a jumpy, flickering light. If he looked at it too long, it made his head hurt.

Hellboy turned to Babkaa. “Next fight? I already had a fight?”

“Yeah. With a manticore. You turned him into taco salad in about six seconds.”

Hellboy scratched his chin. “Huh. Funny. I don’t remember.”

“He whomped you good on the side of your head. But don’t worry,” Babkaa said. “It’s a telegram from Grandma.”

“It’s a what?”

“It’s old news.”

Hellboy laughed. “That’s a good one. Old news. I’ll have to remember that.”

Babkaa pointed across the arena to a wide gray mass that looked like a wall with a hide flag draped around it like a big pair of shorts. Some kind of butt-ugly statue, Hellboy thought.

“You’re going up against Timur the Dead. He isn’t the strongest guy in the world or the fastest or the prettiest, but he makes up for it by smelling like the dirty socks the devil stuffed up a dinosaur’s butt.”

Hellboy wanted to laugh again, but it hurt too much.

Babkaa half closed his eyes at him. “You okay, Big H? You’re not looking too good.”

Hellboy shook his head to clear it. He looked around the arena wondering where his BPRD team was. They were new recruits. He hadn’t worked with any of them before, but they were an okay bunch. Hellboy caught sight of them all the way on the other side of the arena. What were they doing all the way over there, he wondered. Probably talking about the vampire case. He kind of wished he was over with them, because for the life of him, he couldn’t remember how they’d wrapped it up. He glanced at Babkaa. The little guy was right. He must have gotten clocked pretty hard in that last fight.

“It ain’t going to happen again,” he said.

“What ain’t?”

Hellboy looked around the fighting floor. “Where is this Timur character already? Catching up on his beauty sleep?”

“Timur would need about a hundred years tucked in with his jammies to get an inch out of Ugly Town,” said Babkaa. He pointed into the distance. “That’s him over there.”

Hellboy looked hard. “Where? By the big wall with pants?”

“Big H, he is the big wall with pants.”

Hellboy watched as the wall began to move. Big blocks shifted to the sides to form blunt arms. The gray mass beneath the shorts unfolded into legs. Timur’s head was squat and wide, with black slit eyes. He was at least ten feet tall.

“Crap.”

“He’s not so big if you compare him to, you know, a planet. You’ve got this.”

“Remind me again why I’m doing this when I could be somewhere warm, smoking a cigarette and drinking too much?”

“The idol,” said Babkaa.

“Oh right.” He remembered now. That’s why he’d joined the tournament. First prize was an idol that told the future. You just looked through its eyes and thought about what you wanted to see and it would appear right in front of you.

“The BPRD could sure use something like that,” Hellboy said.

“Me too. I’d head straight to the roulette table and bet the bank on red. Get a convertible about twenty feet long, fill the trunk with the rest of my money, and disappear into the sunset.”

“Dream big, little man,” said Hellboy.

“I always do, Big H. What would you do with all that cash?”

“Pretty much what I do now, only with better whiskey.”

“Tell you what. When I win it big, I’ll buy you a whole case of the world’s best single malt.”

Hellboy smiled—until he saw the Minotaur walking over. He knew what was coming.

“Mr. Boy,” said the Minotaur. “Please come with me.”

Hellboy tried not to flinch hearing his name screwed up like that, but he kept his mouth shut and followed the Minotaur onto the fight floor.

Timur stood, silent and massive, at the hot end of the arena, which suited Hellboy just fine. On one side of the fight floor was a bottomless frozen ice lake. On the other was a lava pit. Standing next to the pit, Hellboy felt his muscles unknot and relax. He saw his team in the stands and waved to them. They waved and clapped. Hellboy raised his big fist and smiled.

“The rules are as before, gentlemen,” said the Minotaur. “There are no rules. The fight is to the death . . .”

“Wait. What?” said Hellboy.

The Minotaur cleared its throat. “The fight, Mr. Boy, is to the death. I thought you would have understood that as you’ve already dispatched one opponent.”

Hellboy’s stomach churned. How could I forget something like that? He didn’t like killing things that didn’t need to be killed. That manticore must have been some mean son of a gun for him to have to do that. Hellboy looked up at Timur.

Hellboy said, “Can’t I just make him say uncle or something?”

The Minotaur solemnly shook his head. “It’s to the death. Starting now.”

Hellboy was about to say something else, but a fist that felt like a freight train knocked him halfway across the arena. He landed hard on his back. By the time he’d rolled onto his feet, Timur was already towering over him, his massive fist in the air.

“You don’t get two for free,” said Hellboy. He leapt out of the way as Timur’s fist crashed into the floor.

Hellboy spun and got behind Timur’s leg. A guy this size, he thought, once you tip him over, he isn’t going anywhere. Before Timur could round on him, Hellboy grabbed the gray hulk’s right ankle and pulled, waiting for the bigger man to fall. Only he didn’t. What he did do was laugh so low and deep that to Hellboy it sounded like a whale singing the blues.

He tried to jump back while he figured out what was so damned funny, but he couldn’t. His hands were stuck in Timur’s ankle, like he was up to his elbows in rock-hard taffy. Timur reached down and pulled Hellboy free and tossed him at the lake. Hellboy got his feet down and skidded to a halt right at the edge.

He stabbed a big finger at Timur. “Hey. Nobody tosses me around like their dirty laundry. It’s not dignified.”

If Timur understood him, he didn’t show it. He charged Hellboy with both fists in the air, ready to crush him or drown him in concrete taffy.

“Get him, Hellboy,” yelled Gifford from the stands. He pointed to her and winked, jumping out of the way just as Timur’s fists crashed into the arena floor, shattering the stone. When the giant was low, Hellboy swung a haymaker at his jaw, hoping to knock him out. But his head seemed to be made of the same sticky, gummy stuff as the rest of him. When Timur stood, Hellboy dangled from the side of his head.

So much for dignity, he thought.

Gifford and Avramson whooped and called from the stands, along with Aleksandar, the team’s local contact in Moldova. Hellboy and the others had come to Savanovic looking for a bloodsucker. And not an ordinary one. A huge damn vampire. He left fang holes in people a good two feet apart. They tracked him through the high, freezing mountains, where Hellboy finally cornered him on an ice bridge over a thousand-foot waterfall. They fought hard, but in the end Hellboy had to smash the bridge, dropping them both into the chasm. Only Hellboysurvived.

Timur shook his granite-gray head back and forth like a terrier with a rat until Hellboy went flying from the side of his head and came to a stop with his feet in the lake. Hellboy thought about tumbling through the waterfall after he destroyed the ice bridge. He never wanted to be that cold again. The funny thing was that when he tried to picture it, he couldn’t. The bridge. The fall. The water. The memory was vague and fuzzy.

He looked at the stands and saw Aleksandar on his feet. Maybe he was the one who got the vampire. With a garlic grenade maybe? Wait. Did garlic grenades even exist?

While he was pondering the question, Timur tried to crush him under his enormous, smelly foot. Hellboy rolled out of the way and got to his feet.

I’ve got it, he thought. Gifford caught the vampire. She tricked him into a glass cage and they all waited until sunrise together, smoking and passing a bottle of lousy local wine. How could he forget that?

As Timur closed on him again, Hellboy tapped his head and said, “Got to get my noggin looked at when I get home. Something got shook loose, but not by you, ugly.”

When Timur tried to grab him, Hellboy leapt over him. As he came down by the edge of the lake, he slammed his big fist into the ground. With a crack that sounded like a clap of thunder, the ice under Timur’s feet splintered and fell apart. The gray giant scrambled away from the frigid maw opening under his feet. He grabbed chunks of ice, but they broke apart in his hands. Hellboy scrambled back. He sure didn’t want to get sucked down into the cold too. After a few minutes, Timur stopped moving.

Hellboy walked over to him, feeling bad that he had to hurt the big dummy so much. At the edge of the lake he turned to the Minotaur. “Do I have to let him freeze to death? I mean, he’s as beat as beat can get . . .” He didn’t say anything else because his feet were yanked out from under him and he was being dragged toward the lake.

Hellboy looked down and saw that with his last ounce of strength, Timur had grabbed him and was dragging him into the water so that they could die together.

“No way,” Hellboy yelled. “I’m not going out freezing my tail off.”

Timur let out with his deep basso laugh just as Hellboy reached the edge of the lake. The gray monster was crusted with ice and his joints were rigid and hard.

When he was even with Timur’s head, Hellboy swung on him like he had last time—with a knockout punch to the jaw. This time, Timur’s frozen gummy head and body shattered into a thousand pieces, raining down cement-hard chunks into the frigid water as he slowly sank beneath the ice. Hellboy got up and strolled to the other side of the arena, warming himself at the lava pit. His teeth chattered from the cold, but he kept his head down so that no one could see.

The Minotaur tapped his hands together in the least convincing applause Hellboy had ever seen. He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the winner is Mr. Boy.”

Hellboy sighed and dragged his aching body over to the bench where Babkaa was hopping around and clapping.

“I knew you could do it, Big H!”

Hellboy dropped onto the bench and Babkaa began massaging his shoulders. Considering their difference in size, Babkaa’s hands felt like baby chicks walking on his back, but Hellboy didn’t say anything. He knew the little guy was just trying to help.

“Thanks, pal,” said Hellboy. “You think my friends over there could come hang around with us?”

Babkaa stopped massaging for a minute. “Sorry. No can do. Just fighters, their seconds—like yours truly—and that jerk Minotaur.”

“Yeah. What’s his problem? I mean, my name isn’t that hard to pronounce, is it?”

Babkaa went back to rubbing Hellboy’s shoulders. “It’s nothing like that. I think he’s just jealous.”

“Of what? My Cary Grant good looks?”

Babkaa tapped the stump of one of Hellboy’s horns. “It’s this. What we have here is an antler situation.”

“I don’t exactly have antlers, Babkaa.”

“That’s my point. Minotaurs are such macho lunkheads. See how shiny his horns are? I bet he polishes them every day. You, on the other hand . . .”

“I saw mine off.”

“Exactly. You don’t need ’em. It’s obvious he’s jealous.”

“If he is, he’s the first guy ever jealous of my looks. I once unhaunted a graveyard just by doing the flashlight-under-the-chin trick. You know, you hold it so the light shines up on your face all spooky? Cleared the ghosts right out.”

Babkaa came around and gave him a friendly punch in the arm. “Don’t talk like that, Big H. You’re a runway model compared to some of the twisted mugs around here.”

Hellboy couldn’t argue with that. The viewing stands were filled with more homely monsters, wraiths, and tentacled and multieyed creeps than he’d ever seen in one place. The all-too-human BPRD team stood out like chickens in a wolf pack.

“It’s time, Mr. Boy,” said the Minotaur.

Hellboy looked at him, a little confused. “Time for what?”

“Your next bout. There are only two of you left.”

“Wait. There was already another fight?”

“Of course.”

“And I missed it?”

“Apparently.”

Hellboy rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t suppose one of you big shots has an aspirin on you?”

The Minotaur looked away for a moment. “Possibly, but I don’t like you, so no.”

“What did I tell you?” whispered Babkaa. “Antler envy.”

Hellboy stood up slowly and looked at the Minotaur. “Fine. I’m sick of being here. I’m sick of you. I’m worried about my friends. And my head hurts. Point me to this jerk and I’ll finish him quick.”

The Minotaur pointed across the arena to a bat with a wingspan of at least twenty feet.

Hellboy shook his head. “Is everything around here giant? Big vampires. Big bats. Can’t you have one thing normal sized?”

The Minotaur sniffed. “I’d ask, but . . .”

“I know. You don’t like me. Let’s get this over with.”

“Don’t forget a weapon this time, Big H!” called Babkaa.

Hellboy glanced around and saw a rack on the far edge of the floor. It was full of swords, axes, morning stars, and a dozen other deadly instruments. How had he missed that before? “I’ve really got to get my head examined when I get back,” he mumbled.

“The rules are as before, gentlemen,” said the Minotaur.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hellboy cut in. “There are no rules. We get it.” He looked at the enormous bat and hooked a thumb at the Minotaur. “Do you believe this guy? All he does is run his mouth.”

The bat didn’t say anything. It just licked its lips.

Hellboy wagged a finger at him. “The silent type, huh? I get it. Psychological warfare. Nice, but not my style.”

“Fight!” shouted the Minotaur.

Hellboy sprang forward and swung his big fist at the bat’s head. But it wasn’t there anymore. The bat hovered above him, beating its wings and letting out high-pitched chirps. They felt like ice picks in his ears.

Hellboy put his hands to his head. “That is not helping my headache one bit, you flying dust ball. Now come on down here and let’s fight.”

The bat dove. Hellboy swung at it, but it was too fast. He missed and the bat picked him up by the leg. It carried him high into the air, until the arena was just a speck below. Then it opened its claws and let Hellboy fall.

“Dang.”

They were so high that it took a few seconds for the arena to come back into focus. When it did, Hellboy smiled. High above the arena floor, he grabbed the edge of a huge fight banner that covered the side of one mountain. Holding onto the edge of the heavy banner, he swung down on it, landing just a few yards from the weapons rack.

Guess my luck’s changing. Finally.

Someone screamed at him from across the fight floor. It was Babkaa. The little creature hopped up and down, pointing behind Hellboy. He turned and immediately saw what the commotion was about.

A millipede the size of a grizzly bear loomed over the BPRD team in the stands, its mandibles wide and hungry looking.

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” he said. “Everything is too damned big around here.”

He hopped a low wall and plowed his way through the fight crowd until he came to the millipede.

“That’s an awful lot of feet,” said Hellboy. “Let’s see if you can tap-dance.”

He punched the colossal insect in what he hoped was its stomach and tossed it onto the fighting floor just as the bat landed. It watched the bug hit the ground and instead of attacking Hellboy, it jumped on the millipede and began to feed. Hellboy casually strolled to the weapons rack and picked up a sword as long as he was tall.

The noise from the crowd was deafening as they roared, screeched, howled, and barked. It was so loud that Hellboy whistled as he carried the sword over to the bat.

Hellboy cleared his throat. “Excuse me, monsieur. How ’bout some dessert with dinner?”

The bat screeched and Hellboy swung the sword. The bat’s head went careening through the air and landed near the fight officials, splashing blood onto the Minotaur’s robe.

Hellboy rubbed the back of his neck. “At least one thing went right today.”

He tossed the sword and went straight to the judges. Babkaa was waiting when he got there.

“You did it, Big H. You won!”

“It looks that way, little pal,” he said. When the Minotaur came over, Hellboy lit a cigarette and said, “For the record, pal, I don’t like you either. Now, make with the idol.” Hellboy held out his hands.

The Minotaur’s lips turned up in a curdled smile. “I’m afraid I don’t have it. You have to go and get it.”

Hellboy puffed his cigarette. He said, “As long as it’s away from you, that’s fine by me. Where is it?”

The Minotaur pointed. “Up there.”

Hellboy looked up at a snow-covered mountain towering over the arena. Black storm clouds swirled around the peak. He looked back at the Minotaur.

“I’ll give you a dollar to go up there and get it for me.”

“Sorry. That would be against the rules.”

“I thought there weren’t any rules.”

The Minotaur shrugged. “I lied.”

Hellboy looked back up at the mountain, then shouted to Gifford, Avramson, and Aleksandar. “I’m going for the Kewpie doll. You go back down to the village. I’ll meet you there.”

Gifford shouted something to him, but he couldn’t make it out. Hellboy waved her off. “I’m fine. I’ll meet you later.” She waved back and the BPRD crew filed out of the arena with the others.

“Don’t worry, Big H. We’re a team. I’ll be with you every step of the way,” said Babkaa.

Hellboy picked him up and put him on his back. “You bet. Come on. Let’s get you that convertible.”

They walked to the base of the mountain and Hellboy began to climb. The peak was tall, but once he started up, Hellboy saw that it wasn’t nearly as steep as it had looked from the ground. However, it was rocky and he slipped several times.

“Easy there,” said Babkaa. “Slow and steady wins the race.”

“Is that what wins the race? I thought it was the guy with the biggest feet.”

Babkaa waved his size-fourteen paws in Hellboy’s face. “If that was right, I’d shave and join the Olympics. I hear those guys get some sweet endorsement deals.”

“Too bad they don’t have Olympics for guys like you and me.”

“You’d look good on a box of Wheaties. Me? I’m holding out for a beer deal. I hear you get free suds forever.”

“Yeah? I might have to fight you for that beer thing,” said Hellboy.

“Never, Big H. We can do it together.”

“It’s a deal.”

They reached the summit in less than two hours. To Hellboy’s relief the climb hadn’t been nearly as bad as he’d thought it would be. Yeah, his head hurt, there were a couple of minor landslides, and the ice at the top made the rocks slippery and treacherous, but all in all, Hellboy thought, it wasn’t nearly as awful as it could have been. Everything was good except for Babkaa. He weighed a lot more than a guy his size had any right to. Hellboy hoped the idol wasn’t too big. He wasn’t sure he could carry both of them down the mountain.

“There it is!” shouted Babkaa.

Hellboy followed Babkaa’s gaze. There, in a small niche near the very top of the peak sat a spindly idol with a large, flat head and holes where its eyes should be.

“Well, I’ll be. I’m glad you spotted it. I would have gone right by.”

“No problem. You want me to carry it on the way down?” said Babkaa. “It looks kind of heavy.”

Hellboy picked up the idol and weighed it in his hand. “Nah. It’s not too bad. I’ll carry it, thanks.”

“Right-o,” said Babkaa.

The climb down the mountain was more difficult than the one up. The storm was closing in fast and seemed to follow them all the way down. Twice Hellboy lost his footing and they slid down the icy slope, and were only saved when Hellboy plunged his big fist into the mountainside to stop them. The idol, which didn’t seem to weigh much at the top of the mountain, got heavier with each step down. And having Babkaa on his back didn’t help the situation. By the time they got back onto level ground, Hellboy was sweaty and exhausted.

“Great job, Big H,” said Babkaa.

Hellboy panted. “Thanks, little buddy. But you need to go on a diet.”

“Maybe not today. I’m looking forward to a big dinner.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s on me, pal.”

“I know,” said Babkaa as his face began to melt. His ears retracted into his body and his fur morphed into translucent scales. Big ones. Which made sense, Hellboy thought, because the snake he was wrapped in was huge. As it began to squeeze the breath out of him, he finally understood everything—his headache, his scrambled memories, and even Babkaa.

He said, “You big jerk. There wasn’t any big damn vampire. It was you biting people. That venom of yours, it hypnotizes people, doesn’t it?”

Hellboy looked into the snake’s glassy, dinner-plate-size eyes.

“You bit all those poor slobs because you couldn’t climb the mountain, only they all died. But I’m just big enough and dumb enough to live. Man, you are not my little buddy anymore.”

The snake hissed and tightened its coils. Hellboy groaned. With his free arm, Hellboy threw the idol against the side of the mountain. It shattered and fell to the ground in little shards.

The snake’s head darted toward where the idol had fallen, which gave Hellboy a look at what else was in the snake’s coils: the bodies of Gifford, Avramson, and Aleksandar. Gifford and Avramson were unconscious, but seemed to be breathing. Aleksandar, however, wasn’t. His face was blue and swollen with poison.

“Oh no.”

The snake whipped its head back to Hellboy. In fury, its glassy eyes went from black to red.

Hellboy pointed to his friends. “That was the wrong move, moron.”

The snake’s head shot down at him, its footlong fangs dripping with venom. Hellboy didn’t move. He stared the snake in the eye, waiting. Right until the moment when the snake’s jaws were closing on him.

Hellboy twisted around and threw a single uppercut hard enough that it snapped the snake’s head back. The sound of breaking bone echoed off the mountain and down into the valley.

The snake shivered and shook. Feeling the snake’s grip loosen, Hellboy pulled his other arm free. The snake flailed for a minute. Finally, its head dropped to the ground with a massive thud.

Hellboy climbed out of the coils and carried each of his friends a good distance from the snake and laid them on the ground. He found some smelling salts in Gifford’s first-aid kit and revived her and Avramson.

“Where’s Aleksandar?” Gifford said. Hellboy showed them his body and told them the whole story—however, he left out the parts with Babkaa. The whole situation was strange enough without explaining how he’d been buddies with a monstrous, homicidal snake.

Before they started the long walk back to the village, Hellboy scooped up as many pieces of the idol as he could find and put them in his pocket. He hoped that maybe someone back at the BPRD could put it back together.

Gifford and Avramson leaned on each other for support and talked quietly as they walked slowly down the mountain. Hellboy carried Aleksandar’s body. He didn’t join the conversation, but went over the day again in his mind.

We completed the mission and killed the “vampire.” Big deal. We lost Aleksandar and didn’t even get the idol out of the deal. A lousy mission. A lousy day. A lousy place. And I sure didn’t make it any better.

Hellboy’s head hurt less as the venom faded from his system. He didn’t look forward to explaining what had happened back at headquarters. As he walked, Hellboy decided to never tell anyone about Babkaa. As much as he hated to admit it, whatever Babkaa was, the cheery imp kind of got to him. Really, aside from the part where Babkaa tried to kill everyone, he was going to kind of miss the little guy.

THE OTHER GOVERNMENT GUYS

Weston Ochse

Hellboy just pegged thirty-five on the ten-point grumpy meter. Not only did he hate flying; he hated airplanes. There wasn’t an airline on the planet that had seats big enough for his eight-foot frame, unless you included United States military. The back of a C130 was little more than a parking garage for small vehicles and supply pallets, which gave him ample room to spread out. The C130 he was currently in was empty except for a crew chief, four other members of the rescue team strapped into comfy basket seats, and himself. No first-class seating. No peanuts. No early morning mimosas. No flight attendants. Just a sleepy crew chief and four serious men in parachutes who kept giving him the hairy eyeball as he sat in the middle of the floor strapped to a larger cargo parachute like he was a military vehicle or a heaping stack of United Nations supplies about to be dropped onto a third-world refugee camp. The straps affixing the diabolical mechanism to his body ran between his legs and were binding in places straps should never bind. To top it off, his next move was to hurl himself out of a perfectly good aircraft so he could land in the Asscrackistan part of Afghanistan.

But he shouldn’t complain. He’d volunteered for this mission. Correction: he’d volunteered after Kate had asked him to find her nephew. Truth be told, he would have done it even if she hadn’t asked. Family was important.

In this case, his assignment was to find Staff Sergeant Carl Billings, who’d gone missing four days ago in the northeast corner of Afghanistan during a mission to take out a Taliban high-value target. Billings was with the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment and had been detailed to Afghanistan six months ago. With two bronze stars and his deployment half over, he was destined for promotion. That was until this last op. Four dead, one missing. The survivors reported being attacked by strange lights in the sky.

Turns out they weren’t the first in the area to see strange lights in the sky. Kate had provided a briefing about the appearance of things called vimanas going back almost three thousand years. From Sophocles to Alexander the Great, travelers had reported lights in the sky. They were the original UFOs and had been attributed to gods older than the Zoroastrian religion.

Hellboy had seen enough in his day to give him little reason to doubt these vimanas were real, and he wondered idly what they were. Not gods, obviously. Something that could be killed, he hoped. Whatever the answer, he was itching to find out. But first, the jump.

“You ever jumped out of a plane before?” asked one of the men, a Ranger captain named Han.

They’d had brief introductions at the Kandahar air base an hour ago. All four of the men were dressed in sterile combat uniforms. Two of the men were Army Rangers. The other two had given him ridiculous code names and hadn’t even bothered shaking his hand. They wouldn’t say who they worked for, but Hellboy guessed the Agency. They were along as experts. Frankly, he’d rather have had Kate come along, but CENTCOM headquarters wouldn’t approve a female this far forward of the operating bases, and this mission was by the book.

“I asked if you’ve ever jumped out of a plane before?”

“Once or twice,” Hellboy said.

“Have you had any problems?”

Hellboy remembered how his chute had ripped on his second jump. He’d fallen eight hundred feet into a bog. Every bone and muscle in his body had hurt for days. He hated jumping out of airplanes.

“No problems,” Hellboy said. “Why is it we can’t land this thing?”

“Too many hostiles in the area. The Taliban has been surging. It’s why we have such a small rescue force. We do have some helos on standby to pick us up, though.”

“That’s a comfort,” Hellboy said.

The Ranger gave him a look, then turned back and shook his head.

Five minutes later the crew chief gave them the warning. Then he dropped the ramp. The hurricane sound of air filled the inside of the C130 and made hand signals necessary for the rest of the preparation. They were at an altitude of ten thousand feet. His chutes were programmed to open at two thousand feet, which gave him a glorious eight thousand feet of free fall. When the green light ticked on, the Rangers jumped out, then the two Agency men shuffled off the end of the ramp, then, reluctantly, Hellboy stepped off and let gravity rip him down.

He hurled curses at planet Earth for seven of the eight thousand feet of free fall, but the words were torn away by the descent. For a brief moment, he was worried that his chute wouldn’t open, then it deployed with a jerk, virtually halting his descent before slowing him to a manageable speed. He might have shouted for joy, had the straps between his legs not found the place they shouldn’t go.

Slamming into the earth alleviated the pain in his legs by replacing it with pain in his face and chest. The chute dragged him for several dozen yards before he was able to disengage it, letting the cloth flutter to the ground like an immense dead butterfly.

He got up, looked around, and saw where the others had landed. He dusted himself off, adjusted his belt, made sure his gun was in its holster, then headed in their direction. They were in a wide valley deep in the Hindu Kush. There was nothing as far as the eye could see other than scrub, dirt, and rock. They might as well have been on the moon.

The two Rangers carried HK416s and vests filled with other military goodies.

The two civilians carried small packs with 9 mm pistols in chest rigs.

“I’ve read your file,” one of the civilians said smugly. The short, wide one.

“Glad to hear it,” Hellboy said.

“Is it true that you actually fought the Nazis?”

“Autographs can wait till later,” Hellboy said.

“I don’t want an autograph. I just wanted you to know I read your file.”

Hellboy turned to the smaller of the two men. He wore a smile but Hellboy couldn’t tell if it was sincere.

“Don’t let my friend get to you. We don’t let him out often,” the other man said.

He was tall for a regular guy, but thin to the point of looking sickly. Still, he had a warm, confident smile and intelligent eyes. Except for the height difference, they reminded him of the old comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.

“What is it you two do exactly?” Hellboy asked. “And what’s with your ridiculous cover names?”

“Hooker and Blow?” The man grinned. “I know, I know. They sound more like things to do on a Saturday night. You can blame our mainframe back at the office. We don’t really know. What we do know is that right before we had our code names assigned, our AI had just finished analyzing all the 1970s blaxploitation movies for hidden subversive code words meant to incite violence.”

“Why not ask for new cover names?”

“That’s not how it works at our office.”

“And where exactly is your office?”

He grinned again. Eyes bright. “We’re an OGA. Other government agency.”

Hellboy rolled his eyes. “You guys and your secrets.”

Hooker shrugged. “If it’s all you have, then . . .” He let the sentence die.

The Rangers organized them and they headed northeast toward a towering mountain range. Captain Han was in front. Captain Franks was in back. Hellboy strode in the middle with Hooker and Blow.

An hour later, they were at the edge of the village of Madud. Hellboy and the two civvies stayed behind while the two Rangers went into the village. It wasn’t much more than a collection of mud huts and one-story cement buildings. Hellboy was protected from view behind a low rise and was able to observe that many of the villagers had light hair and blue eyes.

“Russians,” Hooker said. “Russians and Alexander the Great. Whenever an army comes into Afghanistan, they do what they can to embrace the local culture . . . and I do mean embrace. There are entire towns higher in the mountains where everyone has blond hair and blue eyes. It’s as if you were in Norway.”

“Are they friendly?” Hellboy asked.

“The more different they are from the Pashtun majority, the more they are discriminated against. They see us as being like them. So yeah, they’re friendly.”

“Is that what you’re here for?” Hellboy asked. “Are you a regional expert?”

Hooker grinned. “Among other things.”

The Rangers returned.

“Taliban haven’t been in the village in two days so we’re good there,” Han said. “But there’ve been increased sightings of lights in the sky. The villagers won’t go near our target area. They say this mountain is where the devil lives and they don’t ever venture up there. We don’t have any information regarding them and are uncertain of the threat, which is why having you along is a big bonus,” he said, turning to Hellboy.

“While I appreciate the confidence, I’m not indestructible.”

“Yes, you are,” Blow said.

“It’s not an idea I want to put to the test,” Hellboy said.

Franks pulled out a map and pointed to a spot. “We’re here near the village of Madud. OGA believes that Billings is holed up in a cave complex right here. The caves used to be mines. Evidently, the locals have been pulling copper and cobalt from the mountain for over two thousand years.” He pointed to a spot higher up in the hills. “That is, until the Soviets invaded. Since then, the lights in the sky have increased in number. No one has mined there for threegenerations.”

Blow took the map and held it to his head like Karnak about to read a fortune. “I’ve seen him inside the cave. He’s wounded and starving. He had water, but it ran out.” After a moment, he added, “He’s still there, but unconscious.”

Hellboy’s eyes narrowed. “Is that supposed to be funny?” The last thing he needed was these two civilian buffoons making light of the mission to rescue Kate’s nephew. Playing at fortunetelling was an insult.

Blow opened his eyes and looked at Hellboy. “No, sir. This is what I do.”

Hellboy took a moment to let that sink through his skein of anger. “You mean you see him right now?”

Blow nodded.

“It’s what he does,” Hooker said. “He’s like a remote viewer except he doesn’t only see places. He sees certain people in places.”

“I prefer the label ‘long-distance bloodhound.’ ”

Hellboy nodded slowly. Maybe these two were useful after all. He knew what Blow was good for. Now to figure out Hooker’s skill set.

They began moving up into the mountains. While Hellboy had no trouble keeping up with the two Rangers, the two OGA civilians were having a hell of a time climbing over the goat track they were following. Hellboy could tell the Rangers were anxious to move faster to save their comrade, so he did what he could to help them achieve that goal.

The day passed quickly, especially in the shadows of the immense Hindu Kush range. Parts of the mountains were shrouded in darkness with deeper pockets of blackness marking hollows.

All eyes kept going to the sky, searching for the lights that had been reported by the surviving Rangers and the villagers.

They were nearly to the summit when Hooker whispered, “Everyone down. Something is coming.”

Hellboy and the others did as they were told, but he couldn’t help but wonder how Hooker could know. Hellboy hadn’t heard, seen, or smelled anything.

The two Rangers flattened to the side of the hill, weapons on their chests but ready to be used.

The civvies were lying on the ground with their hands over their heads.

Hellboy didn’t like hiding, but he got down as much as he could. Still, it felt awkward. He was normally running toward danger instead of hiding from it. Then he heard it. A very low vibration, barely detectable. The sound was present for a full minute, then retreated until he once again heard nothing.

Hellboy watched Hooker.

The other man lay with his eyes closed. Then after about thirty more seconds, he opened them, got to his feet, and began dusting off his pants and shirt where he had lain on the ground.

“All clear,” he said.

“So that’s what you do. You’re an early warning system,” Hellboy said.

“That’s basically it.”

“Does it work on everything?”

“I have to be thinking about it. For instance, had I not been thinking about the vimanas, I would have missed it.”

“So a sniper could have taken you out, but you would have been safe from the UFO.”

“No, I was thinking about snipers. In fact, I was thinking about Taliban,al-Qaeda, snipers, IEDs, vimanas, and Afghan soldiers. If any of those were to pose a threat, I’d know.”

“Genius,” Hellboy said. “Hooker is an early warning system and Blow is a remote viewer. What other tricks do you have at your OGA?”

Blow looked at him coldly and said, “That’s classified information.” Then he turned and began moving up the path.

Hooker shrugged and patted Hellboy on the shoulder. He ignored Hellboy’s glare at the offending hand and said, “Like I said. He doesn’t get out much.” Then he followed Blow up the path.

About thirty minutes later, Hooker informed them of the presence of another vimana. The day was almost gone.

“Get down!” Captain Han commanded.

“We’re wasting time.”

“It’s going to see you,” Franks hissed.

“We’re going to have to deal with them sooner or later.” He pointed up the trail. “Might as well be now.”

Then the vimana came around the corner. It appeared to be little more than a localized ripple effect in the shape of a twenty-foot ball of mirage. Hellboy’s keen eyesight could see a form sitting on what appeared to be a throne inside the ball. It was only shadow, but Hellboy was sure of what he saw.

Before Hellboy could move, a bolt of energy shot from the vimana, striking him in the chest. The force sent him slamming into the side of the mountain, rocks and dirt cascading on top of him in a mini avalanche.

He started to move, but another bolt of energy shot free and hit him in the face, pushing him against the mountain. It felt as if he were being slapped in the nose by a Mack truck and all he could do was flail his arms. What the heck were these things?

He heard the sound of automatic weapons firing as both Franks and Han unloaded their HK magazines into the hovering object to little effect.

Another bolt shot free, slamming Franks into the side of the mountain. Where Hellboy had felt as if he’d been hit by a truck, but was recovering, Franks’s face flattened, blood and brain matter exploding from his ears.

Hellboy roared as he took three steps and launched himself into the air. He hit the vimana and grabbed hold with his huge right hand. He felt queasy as it pushed through the power bubble surrounding the flying throne, but he forced it forward, even as some of the contents of his stomach released and spun downward. The proximity to the vimana made him sick, but he concentrated and grabbed hold of the first thing he could. For one instant, he was with the vimana, then he found himself falling back to the ground.

But he didn’t fall alone.

The vimana was just a vehicle of some sort. He’d managed to grab the creature that drove it by the throat, and it screamed as they both tumbled down the mountain.

Meanwhile, without a driver, the vimana first slammed into the mountain, then ricocheted and hit the path, careening down the side and nearly squashing Hellboy and his captive as it passed over them.

Hellboy switched his grip and began to slam his right hand into the ground, slowing their transit.

The vimana hit the bottom of the draw and exploded. A wave of heat scoured Hellboy, but it had little effect. The creature he held, however, didn’t fare as well. By the time they skidded to a stop, the creature was broken, bruised, and burned, with only a spark of life remaining.

Hellboy let go as he stood. He shook his head to stop it from rattling and dust and rocks flew free. His tail whipped back and forth, showing his barely concealed irritation.

Whatever he’d grabbed was as tall as he was, but didn’t have even a quarter of his bulk. Its skin was a somnolent gray and smoking, probably from the heat of the explosion. It was angular and thin to the point of being malnourished, and its sole distinguishing feature was its head. Elongated and narrow, the face held a long, toothless lower jaw. Slits formed a nose above an almost imperceptible upper lip. The eyes were extra wide, pulsing with a golden hue. Then he saw its hands. Twice as long as a human’s, each of the six fingers of each hand were tipped with a four-inch talon. He knelt and grabbed one for a closer look. Definitely not a fingernail—more like an enlarged talon from a bird of prey. Overall, the creature looked like a combination of an Area 51 gray alien and a barrow wight.

“I don’t suppose you speak English,” he mumbled at the figure.

The creature blinked slowly and opened its mouth. It tried to pull free from Hellboy’s grasp, but didn’t have the strength. It spoke a few words, its voice a gravelly bass.

Hellboy didn’t recognize the language, but the words had the sound of the Old Lemurian Professor Bruttenholm used to try to teach him as a kid. It had been their secret language and the Professor had used it often when he didn’t want anyone else to understand what he and Hellboy were saying.

Struggling to remember the Lemurian, he asked, “What are you?”

The creature spoke again. If he had it right, it was telling Hellboy to do something unholy with a goat.

“Been there. Got the T-shirt. So why was it that you attacked?”

The creature looked as if it were about to speak, then its mouth fluttered and the gold hue left the eyes, leaving them a cold, dead gray.

Hellboy let go of its wrist and stood. “I guess that’s that,” he said, then began to trudge back up the mountainside.

When he got to the others, it was clear that Franks wouldn’t be going on any more missions. Han laid him to the side, then stood, saying that they’d retrieve the body on the way out.

Hellboy explained what little he’d learned about the demon-angel below.

Blow asked, “Do you really think that could be an angel?”

“One man’s angel is another man’s devil,” Hellboy said. Then he turned to go. “Han, lead the way.”

Han took one last glance at his dead partner, then continued up the path.

Only this time, they were able to get somewhere.

Hellboy was still trying to work through the time bubble the demon-angel had put them through, but didn’t have the smarts to suss out a solution. Damn, but he wished Kate were here. She’d have figured it out in a snap.

After about twenty minutes, Blow said, “There, up ahead.”

The shadow of a cave opening took shape before them. The sun winked out over the mountainous horizon. They were at the end of what the military called nautical twilight and soon it would be pitch black in the Hindu Kush.

“We need to hurry,” Hooker shouted. “They’re coming.”

Hellboy turned and saw a dozen or more circular mirages heading their way. For some reason they were more visible in the darkness, the golden hues leaking out from behind the rippling mirages. They probably didn’t like it that they’d lost one of their eight-thousand-year-old pals and were eager to stress the point. He grabbed Blow around the waist and sprinted toward the cave opening. He managed to pass Han at the last moment. What he wasn’t able to see was that the cave floor dropped twenty feet about four steps into the cave. For a moment, he was doing the cartoon running-in-midair dance, then he fell hard to the cave floor below. Blow fell on top of him, then rolled off.

They both lay there a moment catching their breath, until Hooker slid over the lip of the floor, landing squarely on Hellboy, then bouncing off.

Hellboy growled and surged to his feet. He wasn’t about to let Han fall on him as well.

But he shouldn’t have worried. Han was the only one dexterous enough to keep from falling, and was picking his way down. When he got to them, he snapped on a light, then checked on the two civilians. Both of them were winded and a bit stunned, but otherwise okay. He passed out headlamps on flexible elastic bands to both of them. Then finding the sole avenue of egress from the lower chamber, he headed into it.

Hellboy followed with the other two behind.

In a matter of minutes, picking their way through well-hewn ancient tunnels, they came to an immense domed room. Relics of mines past dotted the floor—iron-and-wood carts, picks, shovels, rotting timber, and metal staves. And in the very center, near a glowing fire, lay a single man.

Han ran to him, slamming himself to his knees. He held out a canteen, dribbling water on the rough, dry lips of Staff Sergeant Carl Billings, who was just barely alive.

When Hooker and Blow caught up, it was Blow who said, “I knew he was alive. I said he was, didn’t I?”

Hooker patted his colleague on the shoulder. “That you did, Blow. Excellent work.” When he noticed Hellboy glancing at him, he added, “It’s his first time in the field.”

Hellboy glanced at the wide man with close-set eyes and nodded. Then he returned his attention to Kate’s nephew.

Han had his med kit out and was working on a nasty wound on Billings’s right side.

“How is he, Han?” Hellboy asked.

“Broken ribs. Looks like he had some internal bleeding, but it stopped. One benefit of being dehydrated, I suppose. We’ll have to get him to a hospital ASAP. Hold him, will you?”

Hellboy placed his hand behind Billings’s upper back while Han wound a bandage around the man’s torso.

Billings’s eyes fluttered open. “He-He-Hellboy?” he managed to say through a sandpapered throat.

Hellboy grinned. “That’s me, kid. Your aunt said to say hello.”

Hooker suddenly spun around. “Be ready! They’re coming!”

Hellboy went on alert and gently laid Billings back to the ground. What danger? He wasn’t about to travel halfway around the world to save the boy only to have him killed.

“What is it?”

“The vimana. They landed and something came out of them. They’re coming this way.”

“Through the tunnel?” Hellboy asked.

“Yes. There.”

Hellboy pulled his gun. He was ready to see how well these beings stood up to some fifty-caliber action. He searched around and found a twelve-foot metal stave that might once have been used to pry rocks. He held that in his right hand.

“Han, we have company,” he said.

Han was still working on Billings. He didn’t raise his head and look as he asked, “Who and how many?”

“Dunno and dunno. Just be ready.” Then he took off running toward the tunnel. He wanted to get them in a place where the creatures could only attack one at a time. If they managed to get into the chamber and surround them, the things would have the upper hand.

Hellboy left the nimbus of light behind him because he didn’t really need it. He was just approaching the tunnel entrance when he spied a tall, angular being making its way toward him in jerking steps, as if it wasn’t used to the pedestrian form of transit. Its hands were down at its sides, each tipped with six talons. The vimana driver—whatever it was. Like Hooker had said, they’d landed and were now coming after them. Glowing yellow eyes stared at him from the blackness of the tunnel.

Hellboy barked in his best Lemurian, “Come closer and I’ll kill you.”

The creature stopped in midstep, crouching a little. Hellboy missed a few words but he thought it said, “You speak us?” Its voice had the same low, haunting quality of the other.

“Yeah, I speak with you. Now get lost.”

“Your destruction noted.”

“My destruction . . . Oh, you mean your pal? He came at us first. Newton’s law. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.”

“You kill. Protect.”

Hellboy didn’t care to be talking to the thing, but as long as it gave Han time to save Billings, he’d give the Gettysburg Address if he had to.

The Old Lemurian was coming back to him. “So what are you? Angel or demon?”

“We are who we are,” it said, then launched itself.

Instead of firing, Hellboy thrust his right hand forward and skewered the creature, punching the stave through its torso.

It gave out a multioctave shriek that made Hellboy want to cover his ears. Then it did something unexpected—it grabbed the stave and pulled itself closer to Hellboy. He was so stunned by the move that he let the creature do it again. Now close enough to reach out and touch Hellboy, the creature did just that and the moment was electric.

Hellboy saw in his mind’s eye a thousand things, from bursting suns to struggling armies to a view of the Earth from something high and speeding. He also felt power leaving him. Where the thing touched him, its hand glowed gold, as if it was leeching something from him. He brought his gun to bear and fired point blank into its head.

It died on the spot, the gold of its hand fading like the gold in its eyes.

Hellboy pulled the metal rod free. Another stood behind this one, waiting its turn. Hellboy felt weaker. Whatever it had taken, he needed to get it back, if he could get it back.

Suddenly, Hooker was at his side, illuminating him with his headlamp. “There are too many. We need to go,” he said urgently.

“Where can we go? They’re blocking our exit.”

“Blow thinks there’s another way out.”

Hellboy spared a glance at Hooker, then gave the next creature two rounds from his gun. It fell, only to be replaced by another.

Hooker peered into the tunnel to get a look.

When the light hit the eight-foot-tall, narrow-taloned creature, it backed away, skin sizzling.

Hellboy remembered that the first one’s skin had been smoking and he’d thought it had come from the explosion. But what if these were light sensitive, like the vampires from movies, or in this case, eight-thousand-year-old, strength-sucking Zoroastrian vampires. Is that what they were? Some sort of barrow-wight vampire demon?

“They don’t like the light,” Hellboy said. “We need more of that.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Hooker said, then ran off.

Hellboy rolled his eyes. I thought it was a good idea at the time was too common a line for those who ended up magnificently failing. A failure here would mean that the men under his protection would die. He might even die. But worse, Kate’s nephew would die, and he couldn’t have that. He hoped whatever idea Hooker had was going to work—whatever it was.

“You angry spirit, why kill us? We are brothers,” the next victim said.

“You’re no brother of mine,” Hellboy said, shoving the metal rod in its direction.

It shrunk back just out of reach. “I can smell it on you. You are not human. You lack their stench of fear.”

“When you’ve seen what I’ve seen, not much scares you. So, why don’t we make a deal. You and your friends take off and leave us alone and we can end this here. No more killing.” He accentuated it with a couple jerks of the rod. “Do we have a deal?”

The creature scraped its talon against the rock wall of the tunnel as if it were considering his proposition. The sound was like fingers on a chalkboard and Hellboy winced as it continued, echoing through the tunnel. Then it leaped, catching him unawares. It got past the rod and knocked it away with one monstrous sweep of its left hand. Before Hellboy could bring his gun to bear, it was on him, pushing him down.

He fell hard to the ground, the creature on his chest. Another came behind. Hellboy shoved the creature off his chest and grabbed the rod. He shoved it in the direction of the second creature, impaling it, and still it came. The first creature climbed back onto Hellboy’s chest and firmly planted both hands there, glowing gold as his life force left him. The other had pulled itself along the rod like the first one he’d encountered in the tunnel and had a golden, glowing hand wrapped around Hellboy’s ankle. Simultaneously, visions flashed through his mind, confusing him. He wanted to concentrate on them, discover what they meant, but the images were flashing past too fast.

Hooker came back with a blazing torch. He waved it at the creature on Hellboy’s chest and it backed away. As soon as the creature was off, Hellboy got to his feet and shot both it and the one still grasping for his legs.

“Thanks for that.” He took the torch and held it forward. He did a quick ammo count and realized that he didn’t have enough bullets if there were going to be a lot more of those creatures.

“Han said this might be useful,” Hooker said, holding out his hand and revealing a grenade.

“Did he now? If we blow the tunnel, we may be trapped. Did he think of that too?”

“He did, and said to use your best judgment.”

“He said that?”

Hooker nodded, making the beam of light rake up and down, revealing more sets of glowing eyes down the tunnel.

“Do you still think there’s too many?”

Again came the nodding rakes of light.

“Well, hell.”

He holstered his gun. Took the hand grenade. Pulled the pin and threw the grenade down the tunnel. Now he’d see how these eighth-century BCE creatures would do against twentieth-century CE explosives. He and Hooker stepped to the side of the tunnel just in time.

The explosion came suddenly.

A gout of light, flame, and rocks blasted into their area. Rocks from the roof of the dome rattled free and fell as well. Something he hadn’t anticipated. The whole rock dome might come down on top of them.

“Let’s move,” said Hooker.

They crossed the room amid a hail of debris and then propelled themselves into a side tunnel where Blow waited for them. Han and Billings had gone ahead.

Blow guided them, knowing perfectly where Han was because of his ability to remotely view.

Hooker was on his six, making sure that he wouldn’t be attacked.

The tall man and the wide man, two OGA guys he’d completely taken for granted, were now his eyes and ears and more a force of protection than he’d ever be. These two guys had either developed or been born with truly stunning abilities. In truth, Hellboy sometimes wondered if he was a tool not unlike that hand grenade, and nothing more. These guys weren’t helping his self-image.

They soon caught up with Han. Hellboy picked up Billings, who was still weak from dehydration. Blow led the way.

They traveled for what seemed like hours, only occasionally going down the wrong tunnel before Blow realized it and led them back onto the right track.

Eventually they came to a dead end.

“Now what?” Han asked.

Blow turned back. “Hey, Hooker, we still have enemies?”

Hooker shrugged. “I get vague impressions from back behind us, but nothing more. What about you?”

“I’m fairly certain that this is the way out, but we’ve hit a wall.”

“Maybe it’s just a cave-in,” Han offered.

“How are you finding the path?” Hellboy asked.

“You’re going to laugh,” Blow said.

“Try me.”

“I’m remotely viewing my girlfriend in Queens and the path we’re on is the nearest way to her.”

Hellboy laughed. “But she’s ten thousand miles away.”

Blow shrugged. “It works, doesn’t it?”

“Does it?” He set Billings down and approached the rock wall. It did look like it could be a possible cave-in. “Stand back.”

He began to pull rocks away. Some of them the size of his head, some as small as his left hand. He felt the draft first. A tickle of air at cheek level.

“I think there’s something.”

The others looked at each other and grinned.

Hellboy continued pulling rocks until the first hint of light shone through. Now convinced it was a cave-in, he began working faster, both hands and his tail removing rocks and stacking them alongside the tunnel walls. He soon had a space large enough for a human to get through.

Han climbed over.

Then Hooker.

Hellboy helped Billings up and over, then Blow.

Now, without the two OGA guys behind him to worry about, he threw himself into widening the spot so that he could get back outside, and he let the rocks fly.

Soon, they were all standing on the lip of a ledge on the opposite side of the mountain. After breathing in the fresh air, they stumbled down a goat trail to the valley floor. Han pulled out a pair of poncho liners and made a sunshade, then he called in to the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment for an evac. Once he was assured that rescue was coming, he got up and made to take off.

“Where are you going?” Hellboy asked.

“To get Franks,” Han said simply.

Hellboy paused, then said, “Hold up, I’m going with you.”

Han shook his head. “That’s not your job. Your job was to rescue Billings. He’s not rescued yet, so your mission isn’t done.”

“I thought that was your job, too,” Hellboy said.

“Nuh-uh. My job was to get you and the OGA guys there.” He clasped Hellboy’s shoulder. “We’re all pieces of a puzzle. We all have a job, equally as important as the other.”

And then he was off.

Hellboy watched him go until he was too far away to see. Then he sat with Billings, Hooker, and Blow in the shade of the poncho liners, appreciating the strangely named pair and knowing that Han was right. They were all pieces of the same puzzle.

HER RED RIGHT HAND

Paul Tremblay

The house in which they now lived was quite small, a one-level cabin with two bedrooms separated by a thin hallway adjacent to a teacup kitchen. The one bathroom was a dot to an i. The walls were wooden and despite the surprising number of windows, it was always dark inside.

The house in which they now lived was quite far away from where they’d used to live, and far away from Gemma’s friends. It was far away from new neighbors and from Gemma’s new school. In the fall, she would have a twenty-five-minute walk to the bus stop and a twenty-minute ride to school. In the winter, when the ground sulked beneath a layer of snow and ice, the walk and ride would be longer.

The house in which they now lived had a large yard of lazy yellow grass and weeds. The property was surrounded by acres of woods. The woods had tired trees that were always bent and gave up their leaves, needles, and secrets too easily. The trees could not be trusted.

Gemma’s father found the cabin, this place, because at the edge of the property, at the wooded line, was the Trundell Well.

The well was hundreds of years old. Its wall was a ring of stone and crumbling mortar, jutting three feet above the ground with an opening that had a circumference wide enough to fit Daniel Webster and the devil. The wooden canopy was the well’s crooked hat with shingles as loose and wiggly as baby teeth. There was no pump for water, only a windlass and a wooden bucket on a rope that had gone black.

A priest named Reginald Trundell, founder of, so he claimed, the northernmost English-speaking Catholic parish in New Hampshire, blessed the well one hundred and thirty years ago. He was a squirrelly-looking man. Short and curved, he had large, round brown eyes, a tight mouth, and big teeth that were browner than his eyes. He consumed rashers of bacon, whiskey, and British folklore in equally gluttonous quantities. The proud Anglophile became obsessed with tales of sacred springs and holy wells that dotted the British countryside. Alarmingly to Father Trundell, the wells that had not been christened remained pagan and subject to goblin or demon infestation. The English called the well devil puck, and the Welsh pwka. Father Trundell believed that denying the existence of the devil was to deny the existence of God. He would help protect the souls of his parishioners by blessing all the local New Hampshire wells he could find. He managed to bless one. In 1887, he died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-seven after a heroic two-day, two-night bender celebrating the completion of his three-hour-long ritual christening of, as it has been since dubbed, the Trundell Well.

If we’re being honest, despite an impressive and fiercely protected local reputation as a healing well, the Trundell Well hasn’t had a successful historical run in terms of numbers of locals healed, either physically or spiritually. In actuality, the Trundell Well has been a blight to all.

Gemma’s mother suffered from cystic fibrosis. Her chronic lung infections had progressed to a stage beyond conventional medical help. Instead of moving Mom into hospice care, they all moved to the cabin at the beginning of summer. Gemma was ten years old.

In the mornings, Gemma went to swimming lessons at a local pond. She didn’t want to go but her father insisted, saying she would make new friends, which didn’t happen, as most of the other kids in her class were at least two years younger than she. Gemma liked to swim, but she didn’t like the pond, as its mucky bottom oozed between her toes and the dark water was cold and had a coppery smell.

Upon returning home from the lessons, she followed her dad through their yard and to the edge of the woods and the Trundell Well. The windlass squealed rhythmically as the bucket descended into the darkness, but was silent upon the bucket’s return. Her dad wasn’t an old man, but had begun to pass into some unidentifiable age defined by hardening eyes, pallid skin, downturned mouth, and receding hairline. Normally a kind, warm man, he used to fill recycled mustard squeeze bottles with pancake batter and then create all manner of letters and shapes on the skillet. He’d ask, “Ever eat a Q, Gemma? It’s exquisite, of course. Ever wanted to nosh on a monkey’s paw? Well, give it a go anyway.” He used to sing songs with the lyrics perfectly inverted. He used to perform sock puppet shows, give endless piggyback rides, and brag about the utterly fabulous dust bunny collection he kept under his bed. He was never a particularly religious man, but he’d become a desperate one. In the year plus since Mom’s health had deteriorated, Dad descended into the fortress of himself, and like a bucket dropped without its tether into the deepest well, he had become unreachable.

Dad filled a single glass with water directly from the well bucket. The water was cold, but not clear, and like the pond, smelled coppery. There was a mineral tint, and unidentifiable bits floated like dust in a sunbeam. Her father soon tired of Gemma’s complaints about the look of the water (it wasn’t for her to drink, now was it?) and stopped using a clear glass. Gemma dutifully brought the well water to Mom, who sometimes drank without complaint, and sometimes she didn’t drink any of it and had Gemma pour it out the bedroom window.

Gemma spent the warm afternoon hours before dinner camped out on the floor of her parents’ bedroom. Her sketchpad was half her size. She drew pictures of Mom with a charcoal pencil, rubbing and blending shadows with a paper towel or sometimes her finger and thumb. The lines were rough and thick. The shapes she created bordered on abstract, but her mother was undeniably there in the drawings. Gemma’s fingers, palms, the sides of her wrists and forearms were black with stubborn charcoal dust that did not remain on the paper.

As that terrible summer leaked away as all summers must, her sketchpad filled with pictures of her mother lying in bed as encroaching late-afternoon shadows clouded up the room. Within the progression of drawings, her mother deteriorated and shrank away into a valley between the mountainous bedcovers. Gemma showed her mother each drawing when finished, even waking her when it was necessary.

Her mother coughed, and sometimes the coughing lasted until the walls and floorboards shook. Even in the depths of illness, her mother looked just like Gemma: dark, almost black hair, forehead as wide as a wheat field, pale skin that passed into shades of red and pink at the slightest temperature or mood change.

Mom said, “It’s lovely. My daughter is so talented.” She said that every time until she couldn’t say anything at all.

In the last picture Gemma drew of her mother, she had a red right hand.

When Mom had been healthier (never fully healthy, at least not in Gemma’s memory), they played games of Monopoly that would last months because they gave each other breaks on rent, and she took Gemma to the movies on weekday afternoons so they were the only ones in the theater, and she brought her to the library and told her she could bring home a book if it fit her theme of the day (the cover was blue; either the word grass or time had to be in the title; length between 136 and 147 pages; an author with initials ML or LM; and so on), and she would play ineffectual soccer goalie in the backyard and always let the winning shot in, and she taught Gemma to braid her own hair and how to make pizza and most importantly to Gemma, how to draw, or, as Mom described it, how to build with lines, shapes, and shadows.

After the wake and the funeral, impossible days of constant despair and tears, Gemma became angry. Her anger was a decision, one she spoke out loud: “Today and all day, I will be mad.” She had in her mind, like a grasshopper cupped in her hands, that destroying the well was a solution to the inexplicable set of problems life without Mom would become.

Relatives and assorted family friends were long gone. Dad was alone in his bedroom with a bottle of whiskey, the door shut and latched. Gemma snuck out of the house and to the small, dilapidated tool shed, which was as gray and bent as a mushroom. She plucked a rusty-headed hammer from its cobwebbed spot on the wall and stormed across the almost knee-high grass toward the Trundell Well. She would smash the canopy first, splintering the wood, until it collapsed, sending the bucket tumbling to the water and never to return. She would chip away at the mortar and force stones down the well’s gullet until there were no more splashes, until it was choked dry.

The sun already had begun its descent behind the trees and the well was an outline in shadow. It occurred to Gemma that she could put the hammer back in the shed, retrieve her sketchpad, and draw the well like it was now because it looked like she felt. However, she was determined to hold on to her anger. As she got closer, there appeared to be the silhouette of a small child sitting on the stone wall. The child hugged its knees to its chest and rocked side to side, bumping the well bucket with an elbow and a hip, which made the windlass squeak and complain.

Gemma was afraid; the child might lose its balance and fall into the well, or maybe it wasn’t a child at all. She thought that it not being a child was somehow more likely. The more watching she did, the more the figure became a not-child. She tightened her grip on the hammer and called out, “Hello?”

The figure clucked its tongue and leaned away from the well, tottering and then falling toward Gemma. As it fell it speedily unraveled, spooling over the well’s side. Its body elongated and thin, whip-like arms and legs shot out to secure hand- and footholds in the mortar cracks. It curled and scrabbled along the exterior, tracing the wall, ringing it twice. It laughed, high pitched, and a fraction of an octave below a bird’s call. It laughed with such abandon and glee, Gemma wanted to laugh too, and the edges of her mouth quivered and the corners of her eyes stung with tears.

Without warning, it left the well and scrambled through the dry grass. The familiar coppery and fetid smell of well water was heavy in the humid air. Gemma raised the hammer with a shaking hand and she did not run. She held her ground.

Once it was within arm’s reach, it stood, slowly straightening its spine, like it wasn’t used to or didn’t enjoy standing upright. At its full height it was as tall as her father. Its skin was the color of dried, dead moss, the darkest of greens, and then even darker. Arms and legs were knobby tree roots. Its face and features were an amphibian blur, with glimpses of the wide, bottomless lakes of its eyes.

It opened its terrible mouth, expelled warm, swampy breath, and shouted, “Gemma!” in her father’s voice. It was not an imitation; it was Dad’s voice, his angry voice, deep and throaty. Dad didn’t use that voice very often but when he did, it would flip her power button and shut her down.

The well goblin continued to talk in Dad’s angry voice, and said, “Things are going to have to change around here.”

Gemma looked to see if Dad was standing behind her, and if so, was he angry about her taking the hammer without asking? He wasn’t there.

The goblin said that Gemma was so lazy, wasting time drawing her stupid pictures, so fucking lazy she didn’t get the glasses of well water to Mom quick enough, or so clumsy she’d spill half of it, and then she was always waking and bothering Mom, so God damn whiny and needy and not letting Mom get the rest she needed.

The goblin still sounded like angry Dad, but it wasn’t angry. That laugh was there, an ocean beneath the waves. Gemma heard the goblin smiling when it said that it was Gemma’s fault Mom died when she did. Mom could still be alive. Gemma could’ve saved her, but she didn’t.

Gemma was in bed, tented under her bedcover with a flashlight, her charcoal pencil, a rubber-banded clutch of tired crayons, and her sketchpad. Her door was locked and she’d moved the spidery wooden chair in front of it. Her drunk father had banged on her door earlier, tripping through her name and slurred threats. He was still out there, raging through the cabin, and was now in the kitchen, throwing dishes into the sink. He yelled, “Things are going to have to change around here!” And then he yelled some more.

Gemma tried to ignore him. She stared at the last picture in her sketchpad, the one of Mom in bed and holding up the palm of her red right hand. Gemma touched the hand and felt the wax of red crayon on the tips of her fingers.

She closed the sketchpad and flipped it over so when she reopened it, the glorious blank back sides of her old drawings faced up. She furiously sketched the well and the goblin with jagged lines and chaotic, crooked angles. She wrote down all the things the goblin said to her, the letters made of slashes and trapped in a large, billowing dialogue bubble. Then, above the well and the goblin she drew a disembodied red right hand.

It started out as Mom’s hand, but she added to it. Mom’s hand became the kernel, the soul and seed, to a larger hand. That hand became a large fist, made of brick, the knuckles thick and round, the size of dinner plates. This hand hovered over the goblin. It was a promise.

Gemma returned to the well the next day and every day after. She brought the hammer with her each time. If the goblin wasn’t there she would smash and seal up the well for good. But the goblin was always there, sitting on the wall, a cruel impostor Humpty Dumpty.

It continued to speak with her father’s voice, and how extra cruel it sounded echoing from that great and horrible mouth. It continued to blame her for Mom’s death. The goblin said it was her fault so often she began to believe it was true. Maybe if she’d gotten the well water to Mom quicker, maybe if she’d let her rest more, maybe the charcoal dust from all those drawings got into her lungs and had taken root and further poisoned her, maybe if she’d gotten her father to come to the room, maybe, maybe, maybe . . .

In the evenings, when her father was drunk and threatening to make her late for school in the morning, he said terrible things too, and it was almost impossible to not believe him.

The children at her new school whispered that she was the girl without a mom. They were not actively cruel, but they kept their distance, safe and cold. They only spoke to Gemma when she spoke to them. Soon she didn’t do any speaking and her classmates’ indifference was as vast and complete as a desert.

Gemma’s bedroom, door locked, hidden under the bedcovers with her sketchpad on her folded legs, was her only safe space and the only time it was safe to return to herself, as though returning from a long, arduous voyage. On the back side of another drawing of her mother, she again sketched the well and the goblin in one of its fits of mocking laughter, and she transcribed what it had said to her. She added the talisman of her mother’s hand, which again became this other hand, a red right hand of doom.

Each night, on the back side of another sketch of Mom, she redrew the well, the goblin, and the red right hand. One night she attached the great fist to a similarly proportioned, cylindrical forearm, and in the next drawing, the fist and forearm were connected to an elbow and a boulder-sized bicep. In each successive sketch, she added more. She affixed the arm to a wide chest. The chest was then stanchioned on sinewy legs, and curling out from behind the legs, a tail. The tail made her giggle. His normal-sized left hand and arm made her stop giggling, and she wondered if he would be strong enough. He had to be. Then came the curious overcoat. The drabness of color and material made Gemma smirk; she was either proud of herself, of her artistic invention, her discovery, or pleased with the hero on the page because he chose that coat, because the coat told her who he was and who he would be, and she couldn’t help but think the coat was proof that he was strong, funny, mischievous, and he would lend her Monopoly rent money if Gemma needed it.

On the night she drew his head, she spent hours getting the oblong, slightly bent rectangle right, and the square chin that jutted off the page, and the bushy sideburns (her father wore the same sideburns in photos from before Gemma was born), and his yellow eyes, those piercing spotlights shining out from all that red, and the round bases of broken horns that looked like goggles resting on his forehead. She wondered if the broken horns hurt, if they ever healed.

The next day was Saturday. It was a gray, cold day, the kind typical to northern New Hampshire once the calendar turned traitor, the kind made for sweaters, blankets, and shutters on drafty windows.

Dad made a surly appearance at breakfast, which was more like lunch if the kitchen clock could be believed. He muttered to himself, slammed drawers and shelves, content with inanimate enemies and combatants, and made himself two slices of burnt toast. He stood at the sink, bent and slumped, and he nibbled on the dry toast, his back turned to Gemma.

Gemma had already eaten a bowl of instant oatmeal. She wasn’t hungry, but asked, “Dad, can you make me pancakes?”

He slowly straightened his spine, like he wasn’t used to or no longer enjoyed standing upright anymore. Or maybe it was too painful to unbend, to unslump. He turned and faced Gemma. She expected a furrow and snarl. His eyes were wide and his mouth formed an O. She expected words sharpened into razors but there were none. Gemma couldn’t tell if he was surprised that she was there or surprised at her question, or surprised at himself, or at something else entirely.

The cloud of some memory passed over his face and he said in a smaller voice, “Not now, sorry.” He grabbed a bottle half-filled with amber liquid off the counter and disappeared into his bedroom. She imagined the bottle filled with the ineffectual and coppery-smelling well water.

Gemma spent the day tweaking her most recent drawing, and also thinking about what her hero would say to the goblin. She left space on the page for him to say something, something important.

She waited until dusk to go out to the well.

Instead of the hammer, she brought her sketchpad and her pencil. She felt stronger this way. Not necessarily safer, or more protected, but stronger. The pencil was in her front shirt pocket and she held the sketchpad behind her back.

The goblin was there muttering to himself and idly swiping at the bucket, and for a moment, she pitied the creature. Upon seeing her arrival, the goblin swelled with horribleness and did not hesitate to laugh at her. He bounded off the well, prancing like a dog excited that his family had returned home. Gemma and the goblin went through their now ritualized meet and greet. They stood face to face. The coppery smell made her gag; she would never be used to it and she would never forget it.

The goblin started in with what a lazy good-for-nothing girl she was and her mother would be so disappointed in her, in who she was becoming, and of course her mother wasn’t around anymore, was she, and whose fault was that?

Gemma had planned on—she didn’t remember what she’d planned. Why would bringing her sketchpad do anything? How could she have believed that it would’ve made any difference? This was her new life now. Instead of growing stronger, bigger, older, Gemma would instead be chipped away, eventually eroded into nothingness by an unrelenting tide of terrible words.

He said, “What’s behind your back? Come on. You brought it out. Show me.”

Gemma showed him. She held out the sketchpad in front of her chest like a shield. But it wasn’t a shield. It deflected nothing.

He laughed and said, “What a waste of time. You wasted all those hours in that room with her drawing when you could’ve talked to her, helped her, stopped her—”

Gemma flipped the unadorned cardboard back cover over the sketchpad’s spiral wire spine and revealed the last drawing of her mother, the one with her red right hand extended out.

The goblin stopped talking. He blinked hard twice, and a third time. His mouth turned to an O.

Gemma carefully turned the page over to reveal the most recent picture, the one she had drawn last night and had worked on all day: the goblin and the completed hero. She stepped forward, held it out closer to the goblin so he could see it and know he should be afraid.

The goblin woke from a fugue, returned to his miserable self, and cackled and snorted and guffawed and made all manner of noises and subnoises.

Gemma fought the urge to collapse to the ground and melt into the grass and dirt. With a shaking hand she pulled the charcoal pencil from her shirt pocket. She drew a large dialogue bubble coming from the hero’s mouth in angry, righteous arcs. But she didn’t know what he would say, what he must say, until he said it.

What the hero said was, “Hey, kid, that’s pretty damn good.”

The goblin laughed harder, drunkenly swaying on his feet, stumbling, zigging and zagging aimlessly.

Gemma said, “Thanks.”

The hero stood behind her, looking over her shoulder at the picture. “Yeah, I mean, my legs are kind of too skinny.”

“But they are a little skinny. Not like that hand.”

“Jeez, not that skinny. But, fine, yeah. Hey, great job with my right hand.” He flexed it somewhere behind her. She heard it. “It’s perfect.”

Gemma said, “I know.”

“How’d you know I was coming?”

Gemma said, “I didn’t. How did you know to come here?”

“I don’t know. I just did.”

Gemma looked down and the charcoal pencil was in her hand, her fingertips black, and the words they’d said to each other were there on the paper.

The hero pushed the sleeves of his overcoat over both of his elbows. He said, “Excuse me, kid. He and I need to get acquainted,” and walked toward the goblin.

Gemma sat cross-legged in the cold, damp grass. The sketchpad was out of blank paper. She sectioned off the inside of the cardboard back cover into nine rectangles. And she drew and drew and drew.

The goblin leapt onto Hellboy’s back, wrapped its boa-like arms around his head, covering his eyes, and then it bit his shoulder.

“Son of a . . .”

Blood ran hot down his chest and back. Hellboy reached behind him but the goblin was too high up and too slippery.

“Screw it.”

Hellboy ran blindly away from the house and Gemma. He planned to smash himself into a tree, hopefully goblin side first.

The goblin clung and chomped and chattered terrible nothings into Hellboy’s ear, telling him how Gemma hadn’t done anything to help her own mother when she did it, and instead of getting her dad or calling 911 she sat there and did nothing until later when she drew a God damn picture—and then the goblin bit off the tip of Hellboy’s ear.

“Ow! You little . . .”

Hellboy punched the goblin and, by proxy, the side of his own head.

The goblin slacked its grip enough for Hellboy to pull its arms away from his eyes.

Hellboy expected to see a tree, but instead there was the Trundell Well wall about to take him out at the knees.

“Oh, right.”

Hellboy busted through the well wall and canopy, but was slowed down enough by the collision that he pitched forward, sending him and the goblin tumbling down into the mouth of the well.

They grappled and bounced off the walls, falling in the dark, falling into the dark.

Hellboy’s yellow eyes glowed.

He finally got a grip on the goblin with his left hand, which was strong enough after all, and he hit the goblin repeatedly with his Right Hand of Doom.

And they fell.

And they fell in silence, and they fell for a really long time, passing into more darkness, passing into the greatest depths of darkness.

And they fell until they were unreachable.

And they fell until they splashed into water so cold it must’ve leaked into the well from a hole in the bottom of the deepest sea.

Gemma filled eight of the gridded rectangles so there was only one blank rectangle left on the cardboard cover. Gemma wasn’t sure what to draw.

Her father had come outside into the backyard. He started yelling, asking what she was doing out there by herself in the dark. He had yet to see the smashed well, or if he did, he didn’t comment on it.

Gemma said, “Nothing. Just out here drawing. Dad, can I show them to you? Please? You don’t have to look at the old ones of Mom, just the new ones.”

He was a silhouette, a ghost, a shape, a hole; maybe he wasn’t really there. Then he tilted his head and he said, “I will. But come inside with me first.”

Gemma squinted in the harsh light of the living room. Dad sat down on the couch, blinking and wiping his eyes. He wiped his hands on his jeans, and then folded his hands together, fingers entwined, and he unfolded them, turned them to rock-like fists and put them in his pockets. He said in his smallest voice, “Okay, show me.”

Gemma was careful to only show him the progression of pictures of the well and the goblin and eventually the hero, and not the portraits of Mom on her deathbed.

On the first viewing of the goblin drawings Dad sobbed into the back of his hand, and he said he was sorry over and over, and he asked if she could ever forgive him.

On the second viewing, he said the drawings were amazing and she was so talented and gifted.

On the third viewing, Dad flipped through the pages, and flipped them so quickly the emergence of the red right hand and then the hero, piece by piece until he was whole, appeared as if animated, as if alive.

Hellboy, soaked to the bone, sat atop the ruins and rubble of the collapsed Trundell Well.

The night sky had cleared and the half-moon emitted enough light so that he could study a drawing that featured a red right hand. A hand that wasn’t his.

“Jeez . . .”

Like the other drawings, it was good. No, it was great.

His heart broke because it was so great.

It was great because the whole story was there.

It was always there.

Gemma walked into Mom’s bedroom with another cup of water from the well. This cup was the biggest yet. The doctor who’d come to the cabin the day before had advised them that Mom only had weeks, maybe days left. Dad had refused to listen and had promised Gemma and Mom that the well water was helping and would continue to help. Mom was half-propped up on her stack of pillows and in the midst of a coughing fit. The wet, choking sounds were impossibly loud and coarse. Gemma waited for it to pass, thinking it might not pass this time. Gemma shakily held out the cup of water. Mom held up her right hand, like a stop sign. The red was so bright and shocking and wet. It dripped and ran and stained. Had she coughed up that much blood, that much of her insides? Gemma dropped the cup of water and it spilled everywhere and that damn coppery smell filled the room. She started yelling for Dad, and Mom interrupted her. Mom stopped her. She said, “Gemma, don’t. Please.” Her hand was still held up, a red setting sun. There was a deep gash parting the skin and muscle of Mom’s wrist, a pond of blood in the bedcovers, and a paring knife from the kitchen clutched in her left hand. Mom said, “Don’t, please.” Her eyes were clear, full of sadness and pain and love. She said, “Stay with me. Just stay with me until I fall asleep. And hold my hand.” Mom let go of the knife. Gemma did as Mom asked.

Hellboy looked at the moon.

It was the same color as his eyes.

He gently pressed that fearsome Hand of Doom over the drawing of her red right hand.

He felt the wax of red crayon under his fingers.

Gemma is in her bedroom, tented under the covers and with a flashlight. She has two sketchpads with her, her old one and a brand-new one in which the blank pages glow deliciously clean and white.

Her bedroom door is open. Dad is in the kitchen cooking. Earlier, the two of them decided to have breakfast for dinner. Butter hisses on the skillet and Gemma smells the pancake batter even from under her bedcovers.

Gemma swaps old sketchpad for new on her lap. She turns the old one over to look at the inside of the back cardboard cover. The last rectangle, the one in the lower right corner, is the last panel of the story.

The hero is perched atop the rubble of the destroyed well. He has a sketchpad on his lap. His head is turned up to the moon. His right hand covers the drawing.

Gemma writes a capital G, her signature, there on that last panel, hiding it down by the grass and on a fallen stone.

TO BELL THE CAT

Angela Slatter

“Well, that’s something you don’t see every day.” The big red guy lit a cigarette. The scent was incredibly strong, a welcome relief from the miasma of the sewers. “Giant subterranean gator. Who’d have thought?”

“Not a gator, Hellboy. A crocodile. A Nile croc, by the size of it.” I took in deep breaths, still a little puffed from the climb up the access ladder to the street.

Hellboy kicked the manhole cover back into place; it made a solid grating clank as it settled. “There’s a difference?”

“Well, both will eat anything that moves and both make nice handbags, shoes, belts. But the crocs aren’t native to the US, and certainly not to Manhattan. I wonder how it got there?”

“Flushed as a baby?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It looked . . . I don’t know, it looked weird. I would have liked to examine it more closely.”

“No offense, Kate, but any closer and you’d have been croc crap.”

I couldn’t fault him on that. I was going to have a bruise on my left thigh where the end of the creature’s tail caught me a glancing blow. I was grateful Hellboy had managed to punch a hole in the croc’s enormous head, knocked through the skull. The whole animal then turned to dust that dissolved in the waters of the city’s waste. It was churlish to complain about not being able to autopsy the thing.

“You’re right. Well, I’ll write up the report in the morning. See you, Hellboy.” I sketched a wave and turned to set off across Central Park.

“You’re not coming back to the field office?”

“No. I don’t really feel like sleeping in the dorms tonight. I’ve got my place here, need to check on it anyway. I’ll see you tomorrow for the trip back to Fairfield.”

“Okay, Kate. Stay safe.”

It wouldn’t take him long to return to the field office. I’d inherited a rent-controlled apartment from my grandmother when I’d taught at New York University as a professor in folklore, and never given it up. Truth be told, I was looking forward to sleeping in a room that didn’t look like part of an institution. The sun was low in the sky, but I’d make it with some rays of light to spare.

There were three cats in my sitting room when I got home—one white, one tortoiseshell, and the other a tawny gold—which was weird because I don’t own any. Despite the complete lack of opposable thumbs, not a one between them, somehow they’d jimmied open the window I knew I’d closed and latched the last time I was here. I could feel my allergies revving their engines, the beginnings of an itch that would turn into a sneeze in about sixty seconds flat. It would have been bad enough with a month’s worth of dust, but with furballs? Twenty minutes in these close quarters and there’d be watery eyes, wheezing, coughing—the whole nine yards.

I sighed. I wasn’t interested in anything paranormal this evening. Wasn’t it enough that I’d spent the morning and a good part of the afternoon in the tunnels beneath the Met and Central Park? I was interested in a whiskey, a TV dinner, and a good book. Also a shower because I was certain I could still smell eau de sewer.

Not interested in these cats, though.

Not these cats with their fancy jeweled collars; certainly not the tortoiseshell one with a mouse’s tail hanging from the corner of its mouth.

Not any cats at all.

“Good evening,” I said. “Can I help you?”

There were no answers, unless you count a round of purring as an answer, which I guess you probably should because, well, cats. The sound got louder and louder, the collars glowed, and the felines all began to change. Their outlines blurred and vibrated as if a great hand was shaking them really fast, and the hearty thrumming continued, got even louder. I was about to cover my ears when the noise finally stopped.

Now three women were perched around my sitting room. All had smooth olive skin, astonishing Nefertiti faces, ankle-length white pleated robes, long black hair in many braids with beads and gold threads woven through, and those glorious jeweled chokers with facets of ruby and garnet, turquoise and agate still around their slender throats. She who had been white curled her legs under her and nestled against the couch cushions, a sistrum in her lap. The one who’d previously been tortoiseshell was perched on the back of the sofa, a short staff in one hand, like an emblem of office; her tongue flicked out and hooked the mouse tail up into her mouth. The once-tawny one held no talisman, but her collar bore the ancient Egyptian sun disk, its golden arrows radiating across her chest. This last one’s face wasn’t entirely human; between the widely spaced tilted eyes, the slightly flattened nose, and the sharp white teeth she couldn’t quite close her lips over, she appeared to be still mighty feline. Leonine, actually.

You know when a domestic cat gives you that look? The one that says, If I were a bit bigger you’d be my lunch? That’s what I was being given right at that moment. I wondered if stepping back out the door was an option, but that thought didn’t last any longer than I would have if I’d tried to retreat.

Leonine.

Wonderful.

Just wonderful.

“So,” I said. “Is anyone going to talk?”

Still nothing. I sighed and stepped around the bench into the small kitchen, swiped the bottle of Seagram’s whiskey from the top of the cupboard, and poured myself a hefty dram. I carried the tumbler back to the sitting room and chose the brown leather armchair farthest away from my uninvited guests and sank into it. I sipped at the peaty malt, peering over the rim of the glass, waiting for some kind of explanation to make itself known, and all the while desperately dredging up what I knew of Egyptian cat goddesses, because that was undoubtedly what they were.

Some had protective aspects, watching over women in childbirth and families, rulers and holy places; some were associated with dance and music (that might explain the sistrum); yet others were linked with war and plague. So my chances of distracting them with a ball of wool seemed very small indeed.

I took another sip, felt the warmth traveling down my chest, and set the glass aside. Just enough to take the edge off, not enough to make me slow and stupid. I hoped. I crossed my legs and noticed there was still something nasty and unidentifiable on the side and sole of my boot. The least of my worries, really.

“Well, ladies, it was lovely to meet you, but I’m going to have to insist you leave. It’s been a long day.”

“We want the one called Hellboy,” said the woman with the staff.

Aha. “Well, he doesn’t live here.”

“You were easier to follow,” purred another, and began to pluck out a tune on the sistrum. It might have been soothing under different circumstances. Followed. That’s what I got for wanting some solitude and a little fresh air to remove the stink of the underworld from me.

“Bring him here,” demanded the one like a lion. She didn’t look like she was going to take no for an answer.

“Okay, well—” I began, only to be interrupted by a growl, a hiss, and some judicious spitting from all three. Tough crowd. The one with the sistrum shimmered and shifted back to a white cat, the collar flaring once again. “I was just going to ask why. I mean, I need a good reason.”

“Because today he committed murder.”

“Lady, I was with him all day and—oh.”

We’d been chasing the giant croc in the tunnels beneath the Met, and I remembered seeing the posters advertising a Gods of Egypt exhibition with estates of the gods and authentic grave goods, etc.—apparently so authentic that it also had real gods. At that early stage we’d thought we were dealing with an urban legend made flesh (kind of our stock in trade): the sewer gator, flushed down someone’s john and grown all big and strong and making his presence known above and below the streets of New York. It hadn’t occurred to me that exhibition and croc were connected.

“Our brother Sobek had merely slipped out to explore.”

“Ah, he ate four people, injured eight, and the reports of disappearing dogs are still being tallied.”

“He was starving! We are gods brought here against our will!” The lioness shouted so loudly my ears rang; her face distorted, furred over for a moment, and the sun disk in her collar glowed.

“We saw!” said one.

“We felt his death!” chimed the other, back in human form again.

I held up my hands. “I can see how that would be confusing.”

“We are not confused! We are angry and we demand justice!” The one with the staff shook it at me.

“Okay, okay.” My chances of survival were getting slimmer by the second. I thought fast. “Obviously, you’re not going to want Hellboy to know you’re here?”

“Obviously,” sang the one with the sistrum.

“And if I get him here, you’ll forget my part in today’s little debacle?”

They narrowed their eyes, gave slow smiles, and I could tell they thought they understood me—that they thought they understood traitorous human behavior and had my number. The one with the sistrum began to lick the back of her hand, then stroked the side of her face, over one ear, then down the other cheek.

“Agreed,” the three intoned, and I thought, Like hell.

With the phone located in the tiny open-plan kitchen, I couldn’t whisper. After dialing the number, I glanced over my shoulder to see the goddesses leaning to one side so they could watch—so I’d know they were watching. I hoped that Hellboy had gone straight back to the field office, that he hadn’t decided to stop in at the haunted bar over by Grand Central Station for some company and booze. I played with the twisted cord, then ran my fingers over the tiny indoor herb garden my mother had given me last time she visited; she still thought I was going to learn to cook. I hadn’t the heart to tell her most of what she’d planted were weeds, and that the mint wasn’t actually mint at all. That was probably why I always made sure I gave it a good watering every time I left the apartment. I crushed a bunch of leaves and was happy to discover a fair bit of sap still in them despite my black thumb of death. I let it coat my fingers, then smiled with relief as there was a pickup at the other end.

“Hellboy? How are you?”

“Kate? What’s up? Everything okay?” Hellboy’s dark, raw voice was loud enough to be heard in the sitting room. It was a wonder the guy could creep up on anything.

“Couldn’t be better, all the fun of the fair. Say, can you come over? I need to write up our report from today and turns out Manning wants it ASAP. There’s some stuff I need your help with.”

“Sure, Kate, no problem.”

“Don’t be long. I don’t want to be up all night,” I said, but was cut off by a click that echoed across the apartment. I went back to my chair, stared at my visitors. “So, goddesses, huh?”

They stared.

“Which ones?” I asked. “There’s so many of you it’s hard to tell . . .”

That got a reaction. Wounded pride, steamed arrogance—no one wants to be seen as a cookie-cutter goddess.

“I am Bastet, protector of family and hearth, mother of all cats, the singer of joy, the greatest of musicians”—I noticed the other two roll their eyes at that—“bringer of the dance, and the goddess of love.” Her last words were kind of swallowed as she shone and transformed again, becoming sleek and snowy, the sistrum absorbed into her body. I wondered how Hathor, official goddess of love, might feel about that last claim, but kept the thought to myself. The one with the staff was talking now.

“I am Mafdet. I defend the sacred places and the kings’ chambers. I am the spirit of justice.”

“Well, you’ll be all over this Hellboy situation, then.” She ignored me and rightly so.

The last one’s head was getting more lionish by the second, and she gave a full-bodied roar to let me know I wasn’t taking things—or them—seriously enough. “I am Sekhmet, I am war and fire, I am plague and the hunt, I breathed and the desert was born, I am guardian to the pharaohs, and I have never failed them.”

“Not a lot of them around now. Must have some time on your hands.” I was obviously spending far too much time with Hellboy; pretty sure I was never this mouthy before the BPRD. Or maybe it was just the usual level of nervous behavior you’d expect when confronted by cat goddesses—whatever usual was in these circumstances.

As I watched, Bastet meandered onto the arm of the sofa, then leapt to the low bookshelf that stood beneath the open window. She sat, tail hanging down, curling and curving from one side to the other, and then she began to yowl as if to call all of her kind in the city and beyond. I had visions of the apartment filled with wall-to-wall cats, and groaned. From outside, from the floor above, a yell tumbled down the fire escape, an unhappy voice that I never missed when I was away, but was weirdly happy to hear at that very moment. The building’s super—a woman so bitter she made a lemon seem sweet—couldn’t hear rattling pipes, a creaking elevator, or a shuddering furnace, but she’d caught the cry of one rotten feline.

“Dr. Corrigan? Have you got a damned cat in there? You know you’re not supposed to have any damned cats!”

I went over and stuck my head out the window. Bastet rubbed her head against my shoulder as I yelled back, “Nothing to worry about, Mrs. Buddenbaum, just a stray. I’ll take care of it.” Then I pulled the sash window closed, and grabbed up Bastet, tucking the goddess under my arm. As I stared out at the cityscape and wondered when Hellboy might turn up, I ran a hand over the cat’s fine head and neck. The collar was, I found, fairly loose; I slid two fingers beneath it. “Greatest of musicians, my ass. How about you keep the songs of your people for your people?”

Bastet stiffened and I thought I was going to get shredded for my trouble, but then her nose twitched and she began licking at the fingers of my other hand, her rough tongue seeking out the sap from the kitchen herb. I wondered how much would be enough, and soon her eyes started to roll and she was a very dozy kitty indeed. I slid the collar off and dropped it into the pocket of my combat pants. Bastet didn’t notice; she was still lethargically trying to remove the last traces of plant juice from my skin. I put her on a chair next to the bookshelf, tried to curl her on the round cushion, but she seemed to have no bones at all; in the end I just draped her over the seat.

I looked at her sisters; they hadn’t noticed anything amiss. I could only assume they were used to this behavior from Bastet, the frivolous switching from two legs to four. In fact, the more I thought about the whole situation, the more I was struck by how unconcerned they were about me. They were goddesses from an old world; they’d never been threatened or challenged. They figured me for a traitor, and Hellboy for a pushover. They were used to being worshiped, to people being in awe of them. Wow. If their hubris was my only weapon, I’d happily use it.

I shook my head and tried to figure out how much time I had. Catmint doesn’t affect all cats, but if Bastet was anything to go by, my main problem was how to get it into them. Mafdet was flicking through the wall-to-ceiling bookshelves near the door, no doubt looking for something with hieroglyphics. Sekhmet was standing in roughly the same place, but was moving her feet back and forth, scratching at the carpet in a horribly familiar motion.

“Oh no, you don’t! Not in here, not on the carpet, I don’t care if you’re a goddess or not!” I marched down the short hallway to the bathroom door and flung it wide. “Sekhmet, meet modern plumbing. Whatever you do, make sure you press the button on the top of that there litterbox, and wash your hands when you’re done.”

She snarled but went in, padding softly as if expecting a trap. I closed the door gently behind her and thought. I pulled one of the high-backed kitchen chairs away from the small dining table and propped it up under the door handle. It wouldn’t hold her for long; I could only pray for number twos. What was taking Hellboy so long? Once again, Mafdet hadn’t noticed anything; I supposed they’d got so used to each other they didn’t bother to pay attention anymore.

In the kitchen I opened the refrigerator. Nothing. In the pantry I had a little luck: a carton of UHT milk. I resisted the temptation to pour it into a saucer, and used a tall glass instead, then shredded leaves of catmint in like garnish. I didn’t know what I was going to do about the goddess of war, but one problem at a time: I’d get Mafdet down for the count, then think of something.

“Your Goddessness?” I said, approaching Mafdet. She turned a haughty glare on me and I raised the offering.

“A little something to drink?” I wondered how long they remained as statues, how long they went without sustenance. I wondered if she’d have any interest in the white stuff. I wondered just how long I had, and if they were planning on eating me as soon as they had Hellboy out of the way. Mafdet reached a long-fingered, sharp-nailed hand toward me and took the glass. She sniffed at the contents, her eyes widened, and she drank. She drank fast, until there was only her really long, really red tongue flapping around the bottom of the vessel to slurp up every last drop. When she finally gave up, she pushed the glass at me, eyes staring, and demanded, “More!” all Oliver Twist–like except without the cute or the polite. “Don’t tell my sisters.”

I nodded, keeping an ear out for the sound of the bathroom door handle turning, but all was quiet on that front. I was back in the kitchen, about to pour once more when I heard a thud—not from the bathroom, but the sitting room. Mafdet had flopped over the back of the sofa, pretty much passed out.

I stood behind her, gingerly lifted away the thick braids, and found the catch on her collar. Once it was gone, and she was back to being furry, manageable, and tortoiseshell, I put her in a corner of the couch.

Then at the end of a suddenly all-too-short corridor, the handle of the bathroom door started to rattle, and I knew I was in trouble.

“Hang on, sometimes that sticks!” I shouted, trying to get back around the kitchen bench to grab a knife. “Did you flush?”

By that time it was too late: the bathroom door exploded before I’d taken two steps—bright light, tongues of flame, the whole deal. There was enough of a blast to knock me on my backside; I managed to cover my face, but still felt splinters embed themselves in any exposed flesh.

No longer a tawny cat, Sekhmet leapt down the corridor as a fully grown lioness. I scrambled away, fetched up against the bench, and wasn’t fast enough to avoid the swiping paw that caught my left wrist, taking a chunk of skin and flesh as it went. I watched it gather itself to spring, and felt an unfamiliar thing—a prayer—start in my mind. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in anything, just that I’d seen so much I wasn’t precisely sure what to believe in at any one time.

Sekhmet was in midair when the front door—not a good day for doors at my place—was kicked open. I saw the lock mechanism fly across the room and hit the wall, where it rattled my graduation photo from UC Berkeley. It was soon followed by one goddess of war, propelled by a big red hand. Taking in deep breaths and trying to get my heartbeat under control, I pulled myself up and stood, wobbly as a newborn, to stumble over to where Sekhmet lay. I undid her collar and dropped it in my pocket, where it clinked against the others. It took long seconds before she started to transform—I wondered if Hellboy had knocked the kitty-cat out of her—then the fur came through and she was a tawny little fur bag again, breathing hard.

“What the hell?” Hellboy stood in the doorway in all his crimson glory.

“We should get her checked by a vet,” I said as I lifted Sekhmet. She seemed okay—she was an Egyptian goddess, for crying out loud. Nine lives, goddess of fire and war and plague, and all that.

I went into the kitchen and found a clean tea towel to wrap around my torn wrist, trying to ignore the aching throb.

“Hey, Kate, that looks bad.”

“And it feels worse than it looks, believe me.” Painkillers were going to be my friend for the next few days.

In the bottom of the pantry I found an empty cardboard box with a fold-over lid. I lined it with old towels, then punched some holes in the top and sides for air—big enough for oxygen to get in and out, but not to allow any escape attempts. Then I laid Sekhmet inside and lined Mafdet up beside her.

“Aww, ain’t they cute?” crooned Hellboy, and ran his left hand over the furry beasties. He probably wouldn’t have been saying that if they’d got their way, and I didn’t think the goddesses would like being manhandled, but they should have thought about that before they broke into my place with malice aforethought. My allergies were starting to hit, and I began to sneeze.

“This what you wanted me to clear up? Looks like you got it, Kate,” the big guy said.

I nodded. “But now I need you to drive me to the hospital.”

“What about the kitties?” he said.

“We’ll take them to HQ, but they’ve got to stay out of my office. Maybe a couple of months—or twelve, or a lifetime—in the labs will teach them some lessons.” Might make them rethink their actions. I worried for a moment they might get pissed about having cat food, then remembered one had eaten a mouse in front of me.

“What exactly happened here, Kate?”

I put my hand in my pocket, touched the cool metal of the collars. The BPRD was going to have a field day testing those babies; maybe the goddesses would get them back one day. Maybe not. I limped over to the seat by the window and picked up a sleepy Bastet, then curled her beside her sisters. I found the duct tape in a drawer in the kitchen and sealed the box, which I handed to Hellboy.

“Merry Whatevermas. Let’s talk on the way to the hospital.”

“Better not be any damned cats in there,” came a familiar voice from the corridor. It was a sign of Mrs. Buddenbaum’s obsession that she hadn’t mentioned the state of the door.

We pushed past her. She didn’t even give Hellboy a second look.

“No damned cats, Mrs. B. No damned cats.”

VERSTECKDT

Kealan Patrick Burke

1

The moon was a bloodshot eye. To Hellboy, it seemed that of all the people moving beneath its lurid gaze in the city tonight, he was its focus. If he leaned closer and tuned out all the ambient sound, he thought he might hear its whisper, learn its secrets. And while he could never be sure to whom it might be speaking, or even if it was speaking at all, he did not doubt that it had things to tell him. He had, after all, encountered too many cultists and creatures over the years who’d been driven by lunar (and often, if he was honest, loony) fealty to that pockmarked satellite to believe it was merely a hunk of space rock acting as a spotlight and decider of tides. No, like so many things, it had a purpose beyond the obvious, significance beyond the astronomical, and he knew in time, whether by accident or design, such mysteries would be revealed to him.

“Pretty night,” someone said behind him, and he smiled but did not turn around.

“A view to die for,” he said.

“Especially if you fell.” Dressed in a windbreaker to stave off the chill, Kate sat beside him, her back to the moon and the view of the city, her warm but forever studious gaze fixed upon him. She’d been invited to speak at a symposium at Columbia University and asked Hellboy along for company. He’d agreed because he hadn’t been to the Big Apple in a while, and because Kate had been bugging him to get out in the “real world” more. He’d been either cooped up at BPRD HQ in Fairfield or on field assignment for what seemed like months, and she’d thought he needed a moment to exhale, and maybe a hot dog from a street vendor. She’d been right on both counts.

Beneath Hellboy’s dangling feet, tiny cars chased their own lights, ant-sized people chased their dreams. From up here, the world looked too small to be relevant. He raised his face to the moon and figured, to that great big shining orb, it probably wasn’t.

“Feeling wistful?”

He gave her a sidelong glance. Her blond hair danced around her face as she folded her arms against the chill. “Feeling bored.”

“Well then, you’re in luck. We don’t know a whole lot right now, but Dr. Manning asked me to tell you that you have an assignment. Apparently you’ll be flying solo on this one, as per the contact’s request.”

He nodded, lowered his gaze to the city and the exhalations of the smokestacks breathing toward the moon.

“You want to know where you’re going?”

He summoned an exaggerated smile. “Somewhere tropical? Maui? The Maldives? Hawaii?”

“Austria.”

“Oh.”

“Isolated, dreary, fogbound mountain town.”

“Rats.”

“Probably.”

“I need to fire my travel agent.”

Kate nudged him affectionately with her shoulder. “Hey.”

He looked at her, forced a petulant scowl because he knew it was expected of him. In truth, it didn’t matter much where he was being sent. Even paradise lost its luster when populated by monsters.

“Kaiserschmarrn,” she said.

“Is that the town?”

She stood and brushed the dust of the ledge from the backs of her legs. “Austrian pancakes.”

“That’s dirty pool.”

“I hear they’re amazing.”

“They have syrup in Austria?”

“I can only assume they do, yes. Cars and music and furniture too. They’ve come a long way since the war.”

“Fine. I’m sold.”

She squeezed his shoulder, a gesture he always liked despite the fact that it must have felt to Kate akin to squeezing the edge of a building. “I left the folder in your room. We can talk once you’ve had a chance to read it.”

He raised his left hand and patted hers reassuringly. “You got it, sister.”

Only when he heard the access door slam shut behind her did Hellboy raise his face to the moon once more.

“So tell me,” he said. “What am I in for this time?”

2

In the deep shadow of the mountain, the old man shuddered against the chill. Despite his heavy overcoat and the wool sweater beneath, the cold infected his bones, made them rattle. The sun was not yet up, but a thick, greenish mist had risen from the sphagnum to cloak the ground and mute the sound of his footfalls.

Gregor kept his head lowered, glad of the poor light as he passed in sight of the statues, all of them facing away toward the cobblestone entrance to the village. Their visitor would find those stone figures curious, he knew, and he would sate that curiosity though the villagers had taken an oath never to speak of them. This was not a time for reticence. While Gregor did not intend to be completely forthright with his guest, there would be much he would need to know. It might also be the last chance for salvation, because lately the fever dreams had changed, waking him with the imprint of unspeakable things still lingering behind his eyes. Beetles pouring forth from enormous locks built into the earth, mewling not like insects at all, but infants. Awaking from one dream into another in which he, in which all the villagers, had been turned to stone like those who’d tried to flee.

Breath shuddering into the air in transient clouds, he angled toward the ramshackle tavern, which had never been named, because the buildings in a village of twenty-six people did not need christening or claiming. The building was low slung and fashioned from limestone provided by the very mountain in whose shadow they now lived. A roof of tightly packed mud and straw provided insulation at the cost of ventilation, so the blocky building was perforated with windows on all four sides, the thick glass smoked to reduce the glare from the sun off the snowy slopes of the mountain. In the predawn gloom, the lanterns lit within the tavern made animal eyes of those dark windows.

With difficulty, Gregor forced the door open. Countless hard winters and warm summers had confused the wood of the door, forcing it to swell into the frame for safety and shriek in protest when freed.

Inside, the lamps cast nervous shadows around the room, made huddled men seem taller, and deepened the darkness around their watchful, wary eyes. Cigarette smoke meandered, pushing away from the glowing bowls of briar pipes to seek out the rafters, only to return and curdle around the gathering like some curious, ethereal serpent.

Ordinarily these meetings took a familiar shape: some of the men clustered dispiritedly around a long ash table; others propped up against the bar, already in their cups; while still others counted on the absence of light in the farthest corners to hide them. Today, however, all of the men were crowded around the table, some jostling for position, all heads turned in the direction of the figure seated at the head of the table, where Gregor normally sat. Had it been anyone else who had usurped his position of authority, the old man might have felt moved to chastise them, but as the curse upon this village had continued unabated for nearly two decades, it seemed appropriate that the first time he conceded his position should be to someone who represented their best chance to end it.

“You must be the boss,” Hellboy said.

The men, some of whom bore a twinkle in their eyes that Gregor had not seen in many years, looked at him with the beginnings of smiles on their tired, haggard faces. Though Gregor dared not entertain the same degree of hope that enlivened his neighbors, he was nevertheless glad that it was there. Even partial sunshine was a break from the rain.

“I am.” The men made way for him as he approached the table. Benedikt Lieber, the butcher, vacated his seat and gestured for Gregor to take his place at Hellboy’s right, which the old man did. As he lowered himself down, the arthritis in his knees forced a pained breath from his lungs. “My name is Gregor Yoter. I summoned you here. You are much earlier than we expected.”

Hellboy, who in the dim light looked as if he had been carved from a sandstone cliff, nodded. “I had nothing else going on.”

“Well, you are quite welcome among us.”

“Thanks. I was told there’d be pancakes.”

It took a chuckle from some of the other men for Gregor to realize it was a joke. Only then did he smile and nod, though he hardly found it an appropriate time for levity.

“Ah,” he said, rather clumsily, “I suppose that was what you would call an ‘icebreaker.’ ”

“Still waiting for the thaw.”

“Pardon?”

Hellboy smiled, revealing teeth like headstones. “Never mind. I’m here, you’re here, that’s all that matters. Some of your friends have briefed me on the problem, but I’d appreciate hearing the details from you.”

Gregor nodded, but he found the words slow to come, not because he didn’t know where to start but because it was difficult for him not to marvel at the contradiction seated before him. Clearly his guest was not a man, though he displayed the most obvious traits of one. His name was Hellboy, which suggested a being demonic in nature, and yet everything—with the possible exception of his appearance—suggested benevolence. He looked like something mankind would hunt rather than employ as a hunter. He found his eyes straying to the creature’s brow, to the sawed-down circular stubs where once there had been horns. Nothing less than a devil sat in his parlor, and Gregor had hired him as an angel.

“It might take me a few days,” Hellboy said suddenly, startling him, “but I have character references if you need them.” His eyes twinkled with amusement.

Embarrassed, Gregor cleared his throat. “I apologize. I fear isolation has atrophied my social skills.”

“I get it.”

From the shadows under the table, Hellboy produced his right hand, an enormous appendage that made his left look positively palsied by comparison. A series of interconnected stone-like slabs, it looked less physiological than architectural. Eyes still locked on the old man’s face, Hellboy lowered his arm, and though it had been a gentle motion, the weight of the appendage caused the far side of the old wooden table to rise, forcing the men seated there to lean forward to push it back down.

“It’s a real pain trying to get this through customs. Luckily, it doubles as a carry-on,” Hellboy said, noting the attention the hand had drawn. He smiled, his tail whipping up behind his shoulder as if peeved to have its view of the proceedings occluded. “Now, you were about to tell me what’s going on.”

The old man cleared his throat a second time, and forced his gaze from the red stone hand on the table to the chiseled red face, and then to Hugo at the bar. Gregor raised a finger. Only when the glass of whiskey had been delivered to him did he finally begin to speak.

3

Hidden from the world in the shadow of Todesberg Mountain, our village used to be a haven, a sanctuary, especially during the war. It was too remote and inaccessible to be of much use to either ally or enemy. Somewhat of a nomad on a forced sabbatical from my post as adjunct professor of history and English at the University of Vienna, I stumbled upon this place almost by accident. I say almost because the welcome I received and how well I fit in made it seem more like fate or destiny.

“Back then, we counted ninety people who called Versteckdt home. We had wells, crops, farm animals, and the forest at our backs, everything we needed to sustain ourselves. Hardy people lived here so the brutal winters were not seen as a challenge. We knew how to weather them, and simply battened down the hatches and kept ourselves well fed and warm until the spring. And though we sometimes feared that the conflict tearing the world asunder would one day find us, it was ultimately something worse that would prove our undoing, for while the world’s war ended, ours had not yet begun.

“Twenty years tomorrow marks the first time she appeared. There had been signs leading up to it, omens that something was amiss. Great flocks of ravens, the likes of which we had never seen, blotted out the sun as they fled from the mountain. The clouds above the peak began to churn like curdled milk. Our livestock grew panicked; some broke free and caused great injury, sometimes even death, either to themselves or those who tried to apprehend them. The ice on our windows began to form patterns, letters in a language in which we weren’t versed, symbols that looked as if they had been culled from ancient texts. Then the ground began to shake, as if something might be shifting deep inside the mountain. And always, on the night before she came, there were the dreams instructing us of her intent, and of the rules by which we would be forced to abide in order to avoid annihilation.

“Her name is Adaggah. This we know. She is ancient, cruel, and quite mad. At some point in an era that preceded us, she was imprisoned inside the mountain for some betrayal against her creator. About him, we know only that she claims he was vanquished by other gods and his death freed her. Adaggah has either designed another world for herself inside the mountain or its core serves as a gateway to that other world. Whatever has sustained her for centuries has either run out or is no longer sustenance enough—or perhaps her tastes have simply changed. Whatever the case, on that dark day two decades ago she turned her attention to our village, to what she considers a convenient food source, and that is what she demands of us, one day of every year: a sacrifice. We have become cattle.

“At first, we thought our collective dream just that—a dream—and so, though troubled, we did not adhere to her wishes, did not follow her instructions. We did not banish the women and children to the cellars and string garlands of garlic and thorns and copper upon the doors, and we did not draw straws to see which man would be forced to walk to the foot of the mountain. We simply went to bed as always despite the dark stirring in our souls and the primal whisper of instinct that told us we were making a mistake.

“And we awoke to the same terrible sound that would punctuate the night of November thirtieth every year thereafter: the sound of a scream. And every year we have tried to think of a way to bargain or reason with her, and yes, on occasion we have even tried to trick her. All of our efforts have ended in horror, until at last we were forced to accept that our only choice was to acquiesce.”

4

And yet, here I am,” said Hellboy. “Vive la résistance.”

Gregor nodded grimly. “Yes.”

In Hellboy’s ear, a tinny voice said, “That alone speaks volumes.”

He agreed, but did not acknowledge Kate’s input. It wouldn’t do to let the villagers know that the BPRD had accompanied him, even remotely. Gregor’s brief had made it clear that the entity he called Adaggah demanded there be no outsiders, no attempts at intervention, or the villagers would pay for it in blood. He figured—and Gregor’s continued appraisal of him supported this—that they were gambling on him being less than human, an anomaly that might float under the witch’s radar or prove an acceptable exception to the rule. Maybe they figured he was also dumb and hadn’t already concluded, as Kate just had, that for Gregor and his people, no matter which way this turned out, they couldn’t lose. Either Hellboy won and freed them from the witch, or he lost and became the sacrifice, buying them another year to formulate a better plan.

Luckily for them, he decided not to hold their deception against them. Desperate times, etc., etc. Also, he had no intention of losing.

“Okay,” Hellboy said aloud. “Meeting adjourned. I suggest everyone get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

Only a handful of the men, perhaps worn down to nothing by the anticipation of Hellboy’s arrival and the terror of the inevitable, agreed and went home. Most stayed and bombarded him with questions. It made him feel like a celebrity, a status with which he was not at all, and never had been, comfortable. What did make him feel good was the gratitude on the faces of the gathering. No matter the duplicity at play here, these were good people, their only ulterior motive to buy themselves some time in the event that he couldn’t deliver the salvation they were hoping for, and he didn’t blame them. They had done nothing to deserve the fate and the horrific choices being forced upon them, and thus, any meager feeling of ill will evaporated and he gave them an audience. Their questions ranged from the intelligent to the bizarre, and by the end, with the clock on the wall by the front door inching toward noon, he felt more like a carnival attraction than their savior. They took turns looking at his hand, his weapons, the trinkets and charms on his belt, and—with curiosity tempered by fear—the nubs of his horns.

At length, he found himself alone with Gregor.

“Why not move?” Hellboy asked. “No disrespect to your picturesque little hamlet here, but there are far more appealing and witchless places to live.”

“That was the first thing we tried to do. You saw what happened.”

Hellboy nodded his understanding. “Those statues on the way into town.” They had reminded him of images he’d seen of Pompeii in the wake of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in which people had been encased in ash, their bodies forever frozen in the act of running away, or hiding. “All men.”

“For whatever reason, she has no interest in the women.”

“Then why hide them in the cellars? Why not send them away?”

“We hide them to spare them the horror of what must happen, and to protect them in case Adaggah changes her mind. She has, in the past, proven somewhat fickle. The only thing that is clear is that, per her rules, no one is allowed to leave, and after what she did to those men, nobody has tried. Fear keeps us prisoner.”

Kate’s voice in Hellboy’s ear. “We need to talk.”

With visible difficulty, Gregor rose from his seat. He braced his gnarled hands on the table and looked squarely into Hellboy’s face for the first time since his arrival.

“Thank you for coming to our assistance. These are goodhearted, hard-working people. I’ll never rest in my grave if I have to die knowing I left them to this hell.”

“You’re welcome,” Hellboy said, and watched as the old man walked to the door and opened it. Sunlight blazed through the gap and Gregor raised a hand to shield it from his eyes. He stepped out, but stopped and turned slightly in the doorway. He looked back over his shoulder.

“And tell the BPRD I thank them also.”

His small smile matched Hellboy’s perfectly.

5

Three hours shy of midnight and Hellboy expected to find the villagers milling about the town, perhaps gathered in groups to continue the discussions they’d fostered in the tavern earlier. Instead, he found it deserted. Even Gregor was nowhere to be seen. Hellboy was alone in the moonlight on the cobblestone street, the houses dark and quiet, all the shades drawn. It was an eerie feeling, as if he’d just walked out of a packed theater to find himself in an abandoned city.

Theater. The word lodged in his mind.

“You alone?” Kate asked.

Scanning the windows for signs of life—a curious face, a shifting curtain, a passing shadow—and finding none, Hellboy nodded. “Creepily so.”

“Can you talk?”

“One of my many gifts.”

“Okay, so the practical part first. Abe and I have set down about seventeen miles east of your position. Small town called Wilhelm Station. It was as close as we could get without risking giving the game away.”

“I think the game was given away the minute we arrived. The old guy knew I had an earpiece. But for now, he seems fine with you just being a voice in my ear.”

In the absence of anyone to whom he could pose further questions, Hellboy stepped off the street into the loamy grass and headed toward the statues. There were eight of them, all pointed toward the arched wrought iron gate bearing the name of the village in tall, Gothic letters. On either side of the gate stood rows of leafless black oak trees, their twisted limbs raised in supplication to the season that had torn their color away.

“Well, if anything goes south, we’ll be more than just voices in your ear. Say the word and we’ll be there in minutes.”

“Good to know, Kate. Thanks.”

“I can’t be the only one thinking there’s something really off about this whole thing, right?”

“Right.”

“And it’s more than the obvious notion that you’re their de facto sacrifice here. I mean, I know the situation is a dire one, but to casually offer you up in someone else’s place speaks to a kind of callousness better reserved for the monster they called us in to deal with.”

Hellboy reached the phalanx of statues and inspected them closely. Eight men of varying ages, and in various modes of flight, the oldest one lagging behind the others, arms spread wide for balance as his foot caught on nothing but incompatible gravity. Panic had been petrified onto their faces, mouths open in breathless terror showing cobalt-colored teeth and tongues, eyes forever fixed on salvation they would never reach.

“And I think you’d agree we’ve amassed a considerable database of the diabolical, cryptozoological, paranormal, and mystical over the years, but Gregor’s story doesn’t ring even the tiniest of bells. The nature of what he’s described is completely alien, and that rubs me the wrong way.”

“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .’ ”

“Right, but Abe has been analyzing this up and down and inside out and we have nothing. Even sticking within the realm of the natural for a minute: Gregor said Adaggah’s coming was always signified by seismic ripples. Rumbling. That should register on a seismograph somewhere, particularly if it’s an annual event. But there’s no evidence of something like that happening anywhere near here.”

He reached out and ran a hand over the shoulder of the nearest man, a young, sinewy figure wearing work pants: a farmer. The texture was as he’d expected, rough, like granite. In places, moss had grown over the stone, and dark strands of ivy had threaded their way up the legs of five of the eight statues.

“And speaking of records . . .”

“Tell me.”

Kate took a breath. “Gregor had to be unusually specific with his coordinates. We didn’t give it much thought at the time. Older villages in the mountains can be like that. Some of them don’t show up on newer maps.”

Hellboy backed away from the statues and looked toward the mountain. The moon was creeping behind it.

“Problem is,” Kate said, “Versteckdt doesn’t show up on any of the old ones either.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time we found ourselves in a place that wasn’t on a map.”

“True, but I don’t have fond memories of those places, Hellboy. I doubt you do either.”

She was right. Everything about this was off. He’d known that even before she’d fed him the information they’d uncovered, or not uncovered. He could feel it in his blood, the wrongness of it.

“Well, I’m here,” he said. “And I figure it bears investigating one way or another.”

A sigh in his ear. “Just be careful, okay?”

He nodded, took in the cold stillness of the village. “Always.”

“Call us if you need us.”

A click and he knew she was gone.

Like a swimmer about to dive into a dark lake, he took a breath, stepped into the shadow, and began to walk toward the mountain.

6

There was a tall vertical crack in the foot of the mountain, the size and shape of it making it appear to be a reduced silhouette of the mountain itself. Even if Hellboy hadn’t seen it, the slight vibration from the horseshoe on his belt told him that there was something of interest within a few feet of his position. It was a relief, because even though traversing the slope wouldn’t have taxed him as much as it might a regular guy, it would still have been a chore. And just because he didn’t feel cold as keenly as other people, that didn’t mean he enjoyed it either. Being able to get in at lobby level was the much more palatable option.

The jagged fissure was not quite big enough to allow Hellboy access, but an hour spent pummeling it with his fist changed that. The echoes of his labors on the inside of the mountain told him there was a hollow, and after another hour he exposed it enough to be able to squeeze inside. After a brief moment of irritation in which his right hand snagged in the entrance, he found himself in a small natural anteroom with unlit candles on the walls, cradled in old iron sconces that had been nailed into the rock. The rough floor of the room was carpeted by an impossible number of animal skeletons as if they had convened here en masse just to die. Hellboy crunched through them to a rough opening in the far wall. Beyond it, a slope led down and away to the left, but a faint flicker of light told him that was where he needed to go.

As he ducked down and entered the tunnel, the air grew colder. The many vents and cracks and hollows in the mountain acted as an echo chamber for a perpetual song of mourning as the breeze swept around Hellboy, making his coat flutter. He followed the tunnel down, down, down, until it seemed as if he might end up at the center of the earth.

At last the light grew brighter, but only for a moment. Whatever awaited him inside the cavernous room up ahead cast an enormous shadow on the opposite wall of the tunnel.

The horseshoe began to hum, sending vibrations through his legs.

The smell of rotten flesh wafted out from the room into the corridor, making Hellboy wince as he braced his back against the wall to the left of the entrance.

“Okay, baby, let’s get this done,” he muttered.

Teeth clenched, he stepped around the corner, weapon raised.

“At last, you’ve come,” Adaggah said.

7

Hellboy stared at the wretched monstrosity before him.

“Whoa.”

He estimated the cavern to be roughly forty feet high and just as wide. Other than the deer skeletons scattered around her and the thick, sputtering candles ringing the walls, the witch filled the space completely. She was enormous, and sat crammed into the hollow with her bony knees drawn up to her elongated chin like a massive fetus in a stone womb. Stringy black hair, what little still grew from her scabrous skull, reached to the floor where it pooled like oil around her flaccid buttocks. Withered arms the size of dead trees were looped across her knees and ended in impossibly large hands. Her fingernails were withered and obscenely long. They looped and curled in on themselves, making it appear as if snakes had grown from her fingers. Her skin was a mottled blue color better suited to corpses, which was appropriate given her noxious perfume. Eyes like blood blisters swiveled wildly in a face that called to mind an Inca mask overlaid with bleached cowhide. Every inch of her had been tattooed with black symbols that were as unfamiliar to Hellboy as Gregor had claimed the frost missives on the village windows had been to him.

“Do come in,” she gurgled, her voice like a sink draining. “I’ve been waiting ever so long to meet you.”

“Uh . . .”

“And it’s not as if you can leave.”

Perplexed, Hellboy scratched his head with the muzzle of his gun. “Why not? I mean, it doesn’t look as if there’s room for the two of us.”

Her lips, like a pair of moray eels tethered together at both ends, parted in amusement. “Those bones upon which you trod so carelessly on your way in? Even now they are alive and shoring up the crack through which you entered my prison.” She waved her fingers, and Hellboy averted his eyes because the motion had exposed one long, thin, sagging breast with a blackened teat the size of his arm. He looked back in time to see the deer skeletons in the room standing upright, re-formed and animated, grazing at food that wasn’t there.

“Neat. So now what?” he asked.

She sighed contentedly, the expulsion of air filling the room with a renewed gust of corpse stench. Hellboy coughed and waved a hand before his face.

“Now,” Adaggah said, blood-blister eyes widening above her hawk-like nose, “you will set me free. It is the only reason you are here.”

“And why would I do that?”

“What good is your strength if you don’t use it? Are we not of a single nature? Are we not familiars? No matter the kind of friends you surround yourself with, you’ll forever be alone. Think of all that might be accomplished with me at your side. It would be nothing less than dominion.” One twisted fingernail twitched in his direction. “Your hand. Use it now. Smash the bonds only we can see and set me free. Oh, it’s been so long. Be a dear, won’t you, and see a lady home?”

Hellboy rolled his eyes. “Ugh. Sorry, honey. Pretty sure the village folk didn’t hire me to shack up with an old crone.”

Her laugh was like someone had flushed a toilet through a loudspeaker. He winced. The reanimated skeleton animals collapsed in piles of bone.

“The village folk? You mean . . . my dolls?”

From his earpiece, a crackle, and the faintest snatch of a voice. Kate. He knew she’d never be able to reach him. Not here, not this far underground.

“There are no village folk,” Adaggah continued. “Not anymore. What you saw out there, dear heart, are dead things. My toys.” She brought her fingernails up to scratch at the stone wall before her. Chunks of the rock fell in a cloud of dust. With a grin, she dipped her nails into the debris and began to stir. Bright blue sparks sizzled upward, and a moment later, a stone man with a hat stood there looking at Hellboy, his mouth wide open in frozen terror. “The original villagers served me once upon a time, sacrificed themselves to me. Now the village is only a memory, though I think I deserve credit for making my toys seem so alive that even they aren’t aware they’re dead. I have always been something of an artist.”

“And the women? What did you do with them?”

“I have a special place in my heart for women. I let them go to rule their own worlds, which is how it should be. Without them, all our worlds would be doomed.” She sighed. “You came to find me earlier than I’d anticipated, though, which is why you found the stone dolls on the way in. You caught me napping, caught them napping, and I didn’t have time to wake them up like I did the others. I apologize for the incomplete set. I imagine it must have been like attending a play and seeing the stagehands.”

“So Gregor . . .”

“The professor? Another toy, drawn here to free me. Even with his knowledge, he failed, and so I put him to use. He became an extension of my voice, a puppet I used to bring you here to me.”

The witch leaned forward, her knuckled spine dislodging a row of stalactites that tumbled down her back. “Now, come, we’ve bantered enough and it’s been so very long since I got to walk out in the world.”

In a flash, her hands moved, her fingers exploding toward him, nails curling and crackling around his body, forming an instant prison as she hoisted him off the ground.

“How very small you are,” Adaggah cackled in delight.

“Size isn’t everything,” Hellboy said. He reared back his right fist and smashed it against the cage walls. The bars shattered instantly, and he found himself in free fall. Her hands separated, nails swishing above his head, scratching at the floor, scrabbling for the prize.

“Oh come now, don’t fight me, Hellboy. This is supposed to be fun.”

He hit the ground with the force of a boulder, dust scattering away from him in waves, and brought the gun up just as those twisted fingernails swept toward him again.

“There is no reason we can’t be friends,” Adaggah said. “We have so many things in common.”

“I have enough friends.” He pulled the trigger and the gun bucked in his hand. The witch shrieked as the bullet punched through one of her cheeks, splashing grue onto her chest. Hellboy didn’t hesitate. He ran toward her, already reloading, gun in left hand, right fist raised. And now all pretense of civility fled and the witch’s face darkened, became a portrait of corruption, her lips drawn back over teeth the same size and shape as javelins. Hellboy took aim, but just as he pulled the trigger and the gun roared, something plowed into him, knocking him off his feet.

“Damn it.”

Abruptly, he found himself on his back on the chamber floor, his ears filled with the witch’s bubbling laughter and a thwocking sound as a herd of skeletal deer trounced him with their hooves and raked him with their antlers. Their empty eye sockets were filled with dumb venom.

“Okay, enough of this,” Hellboy said and lashed his right hand out in a vicious arc, pulverizing the rank of deer skulls. As he rose, mouth full of bone dust, their headless bodies clattered to the floor in heaps.

“Now, where were w—?”

He turned and jolted in surprise. Adaggah’s giant face was somehow at floor level, filling his vision, filling the world, her body a contorted bluish mess behind her. Her mouth was wide open, revealing a dark red light somewhere down in her gullet. As she laughed, her jaw scraped across the floor like a bulldozer blade toward him, the skin peeling away in layers like discarded coats. He aimed the gun down her throat and she clamped her teeth on his hand. The giggling in her throat traveled in vibrations up his arm, the gore from her ruined cheek oozing down onto his wrist. Hellboy shuddered. “Gross.” Adaggah raised her face from the floor, her distended neck bones crackling, and suddenly he was in the air, dangling from her mouth, his fist still snared in her teeth. Her eyes were like twin suns on the verge of burning out, and this close he could see that they too were tattooed with symbols. Whoever had imprisoned her hadn’t taken any chances.

He punched her hard in the ruined side of her face and she shuddered but did not release her grip on his hand. She began to shake her head like a dog. “I will gobble you up.”

Again, he socked her hard, and this time she growled at him. And though his hand was trapped between her teeth, he could still move his fingers . . .

“Gobble you up and then gobble up your world.”

. . . which he now used to regain his grip on the gun, still resting on the undulating surface of her cold, wet tongue.

Aware of what he was doing, she paused, a look of uncertainty crossing her hideous face. Her eyes rolled and found him.

“Yep,” he said, and pulled the trigger. She jerked backward with a screech and he was free. Whatever that red light in her throat was, it apparently didn’t care much for bullets. He landed on the floor hard, and knew he’d be feeling it in the morning when he woke up, assuming he made it out of here. Quickly, he got to his feet, pumped the remaining rounds into the witch’s face and neck, watched black holes appear in the flesh. The hieroglyphic tattoos began to move like ants away from the wounds. Enraged, she turned and roared like a lion at him and as she came in for the kill, he leapt right up into her face and drove his red right hand deep into her left eye.

Her cry of pain was deafening as she contorted, the involuntary motion forcing her skull upward into the stalactites. Some of them snapped off; others penetrated her scalp. The sound of her rage became a keening, but Hellboy didn’t wait to see whether or not this was just a reprieve from the assault, because that sound, rising higher in pitch the longer he stood there, made the ground shake and the walls tremble. Cracks began to open in the stone, a fissure zigzagged across the floor toward him. Deep below, something enormous shifted, more like the turning of some colossal engine than anything that belonged inside the earth.

“No, no, you can still set me free. Don’t let him swallow me . . . Don’t let him . . .”

As Hellboy turned to run, he felt a massive concussive wave at his back. The floor caved in and all of the air was sucked down into whatever waited below before being expelled again in a massive blast. Hellboy was blown into the hallway as the witch’s agonized cry reached a crescendo and the mountain began to tear itself asunder.

Hellboy rolled, scrambled, fled as around him huge slabs of stone rained down and the floor buckled. His flight seemed to take a short eternity of dodging, weaving, and rolling, before he found himself at the exit. The wall of bones collapsed in the absence of the witch’s will, and then he was out and still running, the cold night air filling his lungs as the mountain fell.

8

Kate, Abe, and Hellboy stood together in the smoke-shrouded remains of what had once been a conjured village. Now, it was just an overgrown field full of stone statues, dozens upon dozens of them. Among the frozen crowd, Hellboy saw Gregor, an old man with a stick, a pained expression on his face, and felt an inexplicable pang of loss. Yes, these had all been “dolls” animated for the sole purpose of delivering him to Adaggah, but once upon a time they had been real people with real lives and loves. It reminded him that all battles cost lives, and no victory came without ruin.

“You okay?” Abe put a hand on his shoulder.

Hellboy shrugged. “Sure.”

Kate nodded toward the crater of the mountain, which was still roiling, still tumbling, still roaring like some enraged beast. Smoke billowed into the night sky, blanching the face of the moon. “I feel like I should give some speech about collateral damage, but . . .” She shrugged and started to walk toward the plane. “Let’s go home. Dr. Manning is going to love fielding calls from the Austrian government.”

Abe followed. “We can claim it was a natural disaster,” he said cheerfully.

Hellboy looked at the mountain, and knew he’d be wondering about that machinery he’d heard down in the guts of the earth for quite some time. It had, like the moon, struck some chord deep within him. But for now, as with so many things he had encountered, he was content to let the mystery stay buried with the bones.

9

There came an old traveler to the ruins of what had once been a majestic old mountain, led to the crater by cobalt dreams of keys turning in mouth-like locks. He had educated himself over the years on the ways of mystics and magic, and for a time believed he had found ways in which to exploit other realms. Alas, despite his commitment and fervor, none of his experiments had borne fruit. Now, he found himself possessed of a certainty that down there in the aching hollow of the mountain, something awaited him. The answer. The validation.

It took him a full day to reach the center, where to his abject dismay, he found nothing. The realization that he had wasted a life on intransient and amorphous pursuits, wasted his immense talent and faith chasing the fog, finally broke him. Exhausted and ashamed, he decided he would never leave, and so he sat and began to whisper desperate questions to the cold black stone that was the heart of the mountain.

And in time, it answered.

OF BOYS AND TWO-HEADED DOGS

Laird Barron

Maynard Richter awoke from a fever dream of fire and bloody smoke. His dearly departed mother smiled at him as flags blazoned with death’s heads and swastikas burned around her. She beckoned as the flames rose and an air raid klaxon blared.

Modo licked Maynard’s face and rescued him from the recurring nightmare. The puppy cried, his lumpy features exaggerated with fear. A buzzer sounded in the community hall. Perimeter sensors alerted the Richter clan of impending trouble. Men shouted to one another; Dad’s voice was, as ever, loudest.

Maynard left his bunk and limped to the commons. Had the FBI finally decided to raid the compound, as Dad and Grandfather always predicted would happen one dark day? The truth proved stranger. Surveillance cameras revealed an enormous crimson man in a duster. He seemed to be alone with nary a supporting government commando in evidence. Apparently, the red man didn’t need backup—he tore a hole through the electrified fence that hemmed the southern edge of the mountain approach. White-hot sparks sizzled and the generator in shack two sputtered and failed.

Dad said, “Well, guess I owe the old man a dollar. Satan’s right hand is here.” He passed Maynard a rifle. “Loaded some special rounds in there. Now get your boots on.”

Twenty men snatched up weapons (shotguns, AK-47s, M-14s, and hunting rifles of all calibers) and fanned out along the heavily wooded ridge. Uncle Ralph and his helpers brought their German shepherds. Meanwhile, the women hunkered in prayer.

From their catbird’s seat, Dad’s crew watched the enemy blunder forward. How had the man simply walked through a fence crackling with enough voltage to fry flesh from bone? It wasn’t natural. Maynard studied his scripture and knew something of angels and devils. What if Dad was right? What if this huge red figure was Satan’s minion? Or Satan himself?

The big guy in the duster stepped on one of the many bear traps hidden across the southern edge of the property. He roared and kept coming. An uprooted stump and chain dragged in his wake.

Dad, observing through a Redfield scope, said, “Sweet Jesus. Son, take the shot.”

That’s Satan. I’m shooting the devil. Ice filled Maynard’s chest. His teeth chattered. I can’t shoot the devil—

“Boy, do it!”

Hundreds of hours of target practice with Dad barking in his ear did the trick. Maynard pulled the trigger from pure Pavlovian reflex. He’d gotten so feeble, the recoil almost knocked him down. One hundred yards downhill, the big guy staggered. Then Dad and Uncle Ralph fired their own rifles and the trespasser dropped in his tracks. They sent the dogs in to make sure, but the dogs circled the corpse and whined and wouldn’t go any closer. These were man eaters. Uncle Ralph kept them hungry and mean. “Wall dogs,” he called them, in honor of the brutes tethered along the Berlin Wall all those years ago.

Dad cussed as he reloaded. He and Ralph eventually crept down and surveyed their work firsthand. Maynard knew what a Winchester Model 70 did—a man could stick his head in the exit hole. He didn’t have the stomach for it. The boy didn’t have the stomach for much of anything, lately. His guts stabbed with pain and wouldn’t tolerate food half the time. The Richter clan didn’t place a lick of faith in hospitals—anything short of a severed limb, a man was expected to grit it out. Drained and reeling, he leaned against a tree and closed his eyes.

Red smoke, red hellfire. His mother turned her back.

Two dozen families inhabited the compound; nonetheless, they collectively referred to themselves as the Richter family. A select group of staunch Richter men settled on the Mountain (Granddad’s name for their bolthole paradise) during the 1960s. Granddad and his brothers bought land for miles at the end of a defunct logging road. They built cabins and dug a bunker. Ran moonshine and guns. Later, somebody got the bright idea to grow weed, although Granddad drew the line in the dirt there—no way would the Richters get so low as to cook meth like the Sonders up to Tadson Creek, or the Willingham boys over the Mountain. The old man reckoned moonshine, weed, guns, and dogfights would keep body and soul together. Law enforcement categorized them as a white separatist militia. That suited the Richter clan. As the years rolled by, like-minded souls flocked from around the country and gathered beneath the Richter banner.

Dad brought his wife and son to the Mountain shortly after Maynard’s sixth birthday. Mom hated the compound and what its culture represented. Her family believed in love, peace, and progress. Gentle folk. Dad sneered the phrase like a curse. Gentle folk. Mom swallowed her antipathy and tried to honor the Richter traditions; she dutifully listened to Granddad’s lectures about the evils of big government, illegal aliens swarming God’s country, the filth of miscegenation, and how a day of reckoning would fall upon the faithless and the corrupt like a hard rain.

She helped the other women cook meals and mend clothes and tend the children. Prior to the Mountain, she’d taught third grade at an elementary school near New York City. Grandfather didn’t permit government textbooks within the compound. He acquired proper Christian materials from an obscure source. Under Granddad’s stony supervision, Mom instructed the children in letters, numbers, and the Word of Almighty God. Rather than a convert, she considered herself a missionary or a fifth columnist working to effect change from the inside.

Mom lasted two years before she said goodbye to Dad and departed with Maynard back to New York. Dad called her a faithless whore, a dyed-in-the-wool Jezebel. He didn’t stand in her way, though. He just laughed and said to mail him the divorce decree—he could always use kindling paper. Let her flee to New York. Let her flee to China, if she wanted; in the eyes of the Lord, she’d belong to Dad forever.

Two summers ago, Mom died in a car wreck. Back to the compound for a hero’s welcome Maynard went. Dad crushed him in a hug that smelled of gun oil, sweat, and dog piss. Now you’re free, son!

The boy didn’t know how to react, so he accepted the situation. Mom had called him a people pleaser, and that’s exactly what he did. It wasn’t easy, despite his best efforts. Granddad and Dad were taskmasters and held Maynard in contempt for a soft upbringing. They were extra hard on him, for his own good, naturally. The boys his age took their cues from the adults, and a few of the bigger, stronger ones kept his eye blacked and his nose bloodied. Lately, he’d become so perpetually ill, his foes showed scornful pity and avoided him entirely.

Maynard found solace in his only friend, a castoff puppy.

Modo was barely four months old. Nobody knew who’d sired him. Occasionally Uncle Ralph’s prized dogs escaped the kennel and ran off on an adventure. Stray mongrels prowled the hills, feral as wolves, and the wandering female shepherds like as not slunk home pregnant. Modo’s markings were of a mutt.

The pup (sole survivor of the litter and rejected by his mother at birth) suffered from a defect—his scrawny neck barely supported an enormous skull and he listed like a drunken sailor. Richter family tradition dictated imperfect animals must be culled without mercy. Maynard, in a rare moment of defiance, claimed the pup as his personal responsibility. He’d recently turned fourteen and gained his majority, so choosing to adopt Modo was his right. Dad had lowered the killing hammer in bemusement. He finally chuckled and said the boy would learn a valuable lesson from his foolishness. This one wanted to be a Siamese twin. Almost had yourself a two-headed dog. You can see where he absorbed his brother. He’s a freak of nature. Don’t come crying to me when he gets sick and dies. Dad went on to suggest Quasimodo as a righteously appropriate name. Maynard, afraid to press his luck any further, shortened it to Modo.

Poor Modo, with his misshapen skull, hunched spine, and a mug only a lonely, desperate boy could love, might not have been worth a tinker’s damn, but Maynard cherished him unreservedly—and the pup felt the same, inseparable as a shadow.

Maynard was slumped in a chair, holding his dog, when Dad came and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Not a bad shot, boy. You look like spoiled milk. Is your liver really that tender?” Dad didn’t accept that Maynard might be ill. Despite the fact this had gone on for several months, he put his son’s pallid flesh and stomach pains down to an affliction of the spirit. The ghosts of his mother and her love of city life gripped his very soul. More fresh air and more meditation upon the Bible would lead to Maynard’s salvation. Until he let go of his old life, he’d suffer, sure as God caused the sun to rise and set.

“My stomach hurts.” Maynard bit back the pain. He didn’t want to sound as if he were whining.

“On your feet. Grandfather wants a word.”

The dread of an encounter with Granddad momentarily banished Maynard’s exhaustion and the spikes of agony in his middle. He and Modo trudged along after Dad to Bunker C, a fair hike from the main compound. Bunker C served mainly as storage. Today, a pair of Granddad’s bully boys stood sentry. Neither appeared too pleased. Dad glared and the men squared their shoulders and stared straight ahead into the woods.

A string of electric bulbs lighted the way into deep murk. Granddad awaited them at the rear of the bunker near a sealed vault. He resembled a leather sack stuffed with bones. Most inhabitants of the Mountain loved and feared him in equal measure. While literature beyond the Bible and a handful of how-to manuals was forbidden, his own reading habits encompassed a variety of texts, philosophical and occult alike. He frequently spoke to his confidants (Dad, Uncle Ralph, and a couple other old-timers) on the subject of witchcraft, demonology, and occultism as practiced during the heyday of the Third Reich. He’d told Dad that the reason the Richters chose this territory had less to do with remoteness and defensibility and more with the fact it bordered on a nexus of otherworldly forces.

Among Granddad’s favorite screeds: A Christian crusader should not fear to dwell in the shadow of Damnation. The End Times are nigh, brothers and sisters! We shall summon light from the darkness to smite our enemies, to destroy the unmakers, and purge our glorious homeland of corruption!

“Lo! The worm turns!” Granddad pinched Maynard’s cheek and grinned at the irony. “A headshot, no less.”

“He’s racked with guilt,” Dad said. “His mother’s heart in that pigeon chest.”

“Ah, the demon isn’t dead. Satan’s kin aren’t so easily dispatched, enchanted bullets notwithstanding. Show him.”

Dad swung open the heavy steel door. Inside, the big red man dangled from a snake’s nest of logging chains bolted into the ceiling. The man wore nothing except pants. Bloodied and bruised, his barrel chest rose and fell. Occasionally, he muttered groggily and twitched against his bonds. His black hooves grazed the floor.

Modo whined and pressed against the boy’s leg. Maynard stared at the prisoner’s sawed-off horns, sinuous tail, and huge stony right hand. “Is he . . . the devil?”

“Nay, it’s merely hell spawn,” Granddad said. “I’ve seen Lucifer.”

“What are we going to do with him . . . it?” Maynard couldn’t shake the notion they were pondering the fate of a man, regardless of his own misgivings and Granddad’s assertions to the contrary.

“Taking an interest, eh? We’ll bleed the fiend dry. Demon blood is potent, oh, yes. Grind its bones to powder. First though, it will tell me the secrets of the pylon on Gallant’s Peak.”

Gallant’s Peak lay along a deer track several miles north of the compound. Maynard had seen the pylon twice. Once up close—fifteen feet tall, gray as a dead tooth, and covered in caveman writing partly washed away by the elements. It reared from a shelf of rock overlooking a gorge. Second time he saw it was at a healthy distance by the dark of the moon. Granddad lighted a small campfire and prayed to the pylon while glimmering orange light made his shadow a monstrous thing. Maynard hadn’t been able to hear his exact words, only snatches of Latin carried on the quickening breeze. The tone frightened him anyhow. Echoes never sounded quite human.

“Think it came down from the peak?” Dad said.

Granddad glanced toward an array of Caterpillar D9 batteries, an acetylene tank, a torch, and jumper cables. Ye olde Richter “articles of persuasion.” Holdovers from an era when the lesser races knew their place or could be put back in it right smartly. “If you’re hinting that I summoned this creature, no. We’ll put it to the question. Cut and burn zealously enough, Satan Hisownself will answer true.”

“Amen,” Dad said.

“Ya got it wrong, Herr Richter. I’m no mere creature—I’m Hellboy.” The red man spoke in a rumble. His eyes opened to slits, hot as furnace glass. “You’re the one who’s going to answer a few questions.” The chains groaned as he tested them by flexing his torso. He fixed his gaze on Maynard. “Kid, ya better scram. This ain’t gonna be pretty.”

Dad drew his pistol and swiped it across the prisoner’s jaw. “Silence, demon!”

Hellboy yanked his left arm down and that chain sheared free of its mooring and smashed Dad flat. The horrible gonging reverberated through the steel floor. Granddad shrieked curses in Latin and German. He gestured like a magician incanting a spell.

Maynard made a split-second calculation. Either this red demon guy would destroy Granddad as he promised, or Granddad and the militia would rally to defeat the brute. Death or another day in purgatory? Neither appealed. He scooped up his puppy and ran for the hills.

World War III (or, at least, the Civil War Part II) erupted below as the boy climbed, Modo clutched tight against his chest. He’d chosen his ascent instinctively—downhill lay militia guards and a long swath of electrified fence. Eventually the thunder of gunfire became sporadic thumps and booms and then faded. Night came and, with it, heavy rain and utter darkness. Maynard lurched through the woods. Rain and mud soaked his clothes and chilled him. He pushed onward. His head swam with feverish delusions and his lungs burned. He pushed onward. He tripped countless times and rose again, and pushed onward. Onward until pain and weakness overcame his determination.

When his legs folded for the final time, he dragged himself and Modo beneath the lee of a rotten log and instantly lost consciousness. Boy and dog shivered uncontrollably, each pursued into the depths of their nightmares by red demons and cackling old men.

Dawn light seeped through the misty undergrowth. Maynard tried to move, but his limbs were made of lead. He groaned and submerged again into delirium. Before succumbing to oblivion, he slid the puppy under his shirt. “I’m sorry, dog,” he muttered. The puppy burrowed in and fell asleep.

You’re coming home, Mother said. She stood silhouetted in a spectral doorway, her hand extended, beckoning. Crimson light pulsed around her figure.

I’m dying. Maynard realized this had been true for many weeks. I’m dying of cancer. Mom had explained the disease to him—it had felled her own mother and an older brother.

At last, in the realm of a fever dream, he’d gained the courage to name his affliction and accept his fate. Soon, he’d pass through the doorway to where his mother awaited, whatever that portended for his everlasting soul.

Aw, damn it, kid,” Hellboy said upon finding them after thirty-six hours of hunting through the underbrush. He wrapped the ashen and unresponsive boy in his coat and dribbled water from a canteen between the child’s lips. The puppy licked Hellboy’s fingers. The next order of business was to build a fire.

After a while, the warmth caused Maynard to stir. He stared, clear eyed and fatalistically calm. “Were you sent to punish us?”

“Nah, kid. I came to stop Richter and his cronies. They were messing around with powers not meant for mortals. Especially not meant for neo-Nazi bastards.” Hellboy read the expression on the boy’s face. “Don’t worry, I didn’t massacre the joint. The rest of your friends scattered to the winds.”

“I apologize for shooting you.” It obviously took great effort for the boy to speak and his words were scarcely more than a whisper.

“It’s okay. Whatever Richter did to those bullets, they stung.”

“Take care . . . of my dog. His name is Modo.”

“Actually, I’ve been looking for the dog,” Hellboy said. “He’s special.”

Maynard didn’t answer. He was gone.

Hellboy grimly piled stones into a makeshift cairn. He hated to leave the boy, even temporarily, but this would keep the animals away until he finished his business on the mountain. The BPRD would be on scene at the compound, cleaning up the mess. In a few hours, he’d rendezvous with the team and turn the boy over for a proper burial. First, however, he had an urgent mission to accomplish.

Modo cowered next to the cairn. He howled miserably as Hellboy tucked him under his arm and strode into the woods. “Don’t worry, pup. I won’t abandon either one of you out here.”

A certain deer trail wound ever higher, until the trees grew small and sparse. The pylon of Gallant’s Peak awaited on its promontory above a gulf of misty old-growth canopy. Mortal reality thinned here and the ancient altar acted as a kind of gateway. Otherworldly entities could easily slip through this fault, even when the gate lay inactive. Should an amateur sorcerer, such as the late Ernst Richter, devise a key to activating its power . . . Well, such concerns would soon be moot.

Hellboy pressed the Right Hand of Doom against the pylon. He concentrated until a nearby cliff face cracked open and tunneled toward what seemed to be a fiery cavern at the heart of the mountain. He patted Modo and set the pup down at the threshold.

“This world ain’t for you,” Hellboy said as the pup hesitated. “Go say hi to your pop.” In the distance, an enormous silhouette formed among lava and geysers of flame. Perhaps a giant wolf, or an ur-canine—the conflagration made it impossible to know. A welcoming howl boomed along the tunnel, and multiplied.

Modo’s ears pricked. He stumbled forward, enraptured by the call of a sovereign. As the pup went, his back straightened with an audible crack and his stringy frame grew dense with muscle. Black and red fur shone with unearthly luster. His neck thickened and his skull split bloodlessly as a second head emerged. He glanced over his shoulder, majestic and terrible, two sets of eyes aglow with the fires of hell, tongues lolling across fangs as long and sharp as knives. His shambling gait smoothed. He trotted into the furnace and its flames closed behind him like a curtain. The portal closed and left a slab of soot-smeared rock.

All had been set right, for the moment.

Hellboy destroyed the pylon with several crushing blows from the Hand of Doom and cast the larger chunks into the gorge. Then he lit a cigarette and smoked with melancholy satisfaction. It seldom paid to dwell on misery. He shook himself to dispel the glumness. He whistled “Two-Headed Dog,” and started down the mountain toward whatever sorrows and calamities the world had in store.

BURNING GIRLS

Seanan McGuire

Fire has two states: either it’s burning, or it’s not. There’s room for interpretation—for smolder, for char, for smoke that curls in the air like the ghost of a burn—but either fire is burning, or it’s not. Either fire is alive, or it’s not. Either fire is here, or it’s gone.

Liz Sherman is gone.

A hole, begging to be filled; a fluid heat, begging to be put to use; a heart, begging to be free. Of such combinations are disasters made. But Liz is not thinking of disaster, of cost or consequence, is not thinking of anything but the freedom she desires and deserves. She steps closer. She slips her finger into the hole, and she uncorks her hostage heart, and the world the world the world burns, as it was always and ever meant to do.

Why would the world be so flammable, if not to prepare it for the burning?

Souls have two states: living, and dead. Ghosts, specters, the risen, they’re all shades of gray along a simple binary spectrum. Liz Sherman opens her eyes, and everything is white, and everything is black, and the two colors exist side by side and simultaneous, competing without contradicting.

She stands on nothing. When she looks up, seeking a ceiling or a source of the white light that bathes everything (a source of the black light that illuminates when it should obliterate), she sees nothing. She is the only concrete object in a place entirely founded on nothingness.

“What,” she says, and her voice seems to carry forever, buoyed up by the perfect acoustics of infinity, “is happening here.”

There is no echo. Even she can’t answer her own question. Which is sort of par for the God damn course, since she’s been asking questions that she couldn’t get an answer for since the first time she set one of her favorite toys on fire. God doesn’t make mistakes, that’s what the priests always said, but how can giving a little girl matchsticks for hands and kindling for a family be anything but an accident? It’s hard to have faith, so hard to have faith, in a world where anything can burn.

She wasn’t here before, she’s sure of that much: she was . . . somewhere else. Then she opened her eyes, and she was here. The logical question is whether closing her eyes will make this all go away again. She closes her eyes. She counts to ten, slow and careful as lighting a cigarette. She opens her eyes.

The white-black world remains, flickering like a dying light bulb. The nothingness under her feet remains as well, and makes her oddly grateful for the featureless plain. If she could see anything apart from herself, the part of her mind responsible for the little, automatic acts of logic—for distinguishing up from down, for understanding an eternal plunge into an infinite nothingness—would probably start screaming and never stop.

As if summoned by the thought of its absence, something appears in the far distance. It stands at what she would think of as the horizon, if there were anything here to justify the existence of a horizon, a small dark speck against the white and a small light speck against the black, no bigger than a mustard seed, casting everything around it into new doubt. If it stands on something, shouldn’t she be standing on something? Shouldn’t they both be falling, dragged down by the impossible gravity of an impossible place? There is gravity here, she knows that. As long as she doesn’t look down, she can feel that she’s standing on something.

“I burn because I breathe,” she says, to herself, although with the way this place carries sound, she may as well be shouting it to the nonhorizon. “My best friends are an amphibian and a guy with horns growing out of his head. Impossible is not a problem. Impossible is just fine.”

She doesn’t believe herself. She never does, when she puts things in such plain terms. But she feels a little better about the situation. Enough to start walking toward the speck on the nonhorizon, her eyes fixed on it, the one stable thing in a world that might as well not exist.

She’ll walk forever, if that’s what it takes to find out what the fuck is going on.

She doesn’t remember this: this is one of the moments the mind locks away, whether out of mercy or malice or simple bad judgment, because she might have understood herself a little better if she had remembered. But she doesn’t remember.

Elizabeth Sherman, age five, sitting in her room, a cardboard box for a table and half a broken tea set handed down by a neighbor, arrayed on a pillowcase tablecloth like she was planning to serve the queen of England. She’s chattering nonstop to the empty air in front of her, pausing to let the air reply. Her mother, amused, watches from the doorway, until it becomes clear that Elizabeth isn’t going to stop.

“Sweetheart,” she says, “who are you talking to?”

“My sister, Mama,” says Elizabeth, and her smile is the fire on Christmas morning, bright and beautiful and guileless. “She likes your dress. She says it’s pretty.”

“You don’t have a sister, sweetheart,” says her mother carefully.

“But Mama, she’s right there.” Elizabeth points, with all the fierceness of her tiny child’s heart. “Can’t you see her?”

“No.”

“She looks just like me, only different.”

“What’s her name?”

“Elizabeth.”

“You can’t both be Elizabeth.”

“Oh.” Elizabeth turns to look at the empty air, head cocked, like she’s listening. Then she nods, and turns back to her mother, and says, “She’ll be Beth. I’ll be Lizzy. There. Now we both have names.”

Her mother, feeling suddenly cold for reasons she can’t name, takes a step backward. Only later, in the sanctity of the confessional, will she let herself remember that for a moment—just a moment—she thought she’d seen two children where only one belonged. Elizabeth, her perfect princess, and a second little girl, paler, wreathed in flames that both came from and comprised her tiny body. A child made entirely of fire.

She didn’t say anything to the priest. It would only have caused trouble, and children were allowed to have imaginary friends, weren’t they?

Weren’t they?

Liz’s mother died not remembering that day. Liz doesn’t remember it still. But she’s always felt a strange repulsion for the name “Beth,” even though it should be hers. Half of the name she was born with, and yet. Somewhere, deep down, she knows that she gave it away. She knows it belongs to the sister she, and everyone around her, refuses to see. The sister who was never even born.

She’s been walking for a long time, and she’s about as sick of it as she’s ever been of anything. She’d stop, but since there’s nothing else to do here—nowhere to sit down, nothing to look at, nothing—she might as well keep going.

The speck on the horizon has turned, inch by inch, step by step, into another person walking toward her with the same implacable resignation that she feels in her own bones. Whoever it is, they’re stranded here too. All she’d do by stopping is make them come to her, and that’s not fair.

This place. This place, whatever it is—heaven or hell or purgatory or the space behind her eyelids when she closes them and tries to let sleep take her (although she suspects it’s not that, because she can’t feel her heartbeat, and she remembers what a struggle it was to breathe)—goes on forever, and it doesn’t give anything away. It doesn’t seem to take anything but time, either. She’s been walking for . . . She’s been walking for a while now, and her legs aren’t tired, and her feet don’t hurt. Everything simply extends.

The figure is getting closer. Close enough to pick out features, now, to see the hospital gown and the bare feet and the blank expression. For a moment—only a moment—it feels like she’s looking into a fun house mirror, something distorting and unforgiving. She looks down at herself, and is relieved to find her T-shirt, her jeans, all the pieces of her visual identity still in place. Clothes are armor worn before the world. They’re the asbestos wrapped around an eternally burning heart.

This woman, though, walking toward her . . . This woman has no asbestos, no armor. She has a hospital gown tied behind her neck, with the sort of small, unidentifiable stains on the hem that seem to appear almost as soon as one of those shapeless garments is donned. They look a little bit like ash. She has no color in her skin, and her hair is less dark than it is charred, like a fire pit that’s been allowed to burn too hot and too long, until everything worth burning has been consumed.

Their faces are similar. That’s all. That’s all, Liz tells herself firmly, and maybe she believes it, and maybe she doesn’t, because looking at this stranger is like looking at a broken mirror, and that’s the problem. If she’s looking at her own ghost here, in this featureless plain, it’s because she’s dead, and if she’s dead and here, not dead and in heaven or hell, then she’s been right all along. Her power, her fire, it didn’t come from God. He doesn’t want her anymore. She didn’t repent fast enough.

They’re so close to each other now. Maybe ten feet away. Liz stops. So does the stranger. That’s something. She doesn’t have to do this if she doesn’t want to.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“Who are you?” replies the stranger.

The voice isn’t quite hers. She takes comfort in that, and shunts aside thoughts of bone conduction and the way we always sound wrong to our own ears. “My name is Liz Sherman. BPRD.” She wants her badge like she’s never wanted anything in her life. She could prove that she doesn’t belong here, in this horror movie getting ready to start, staring at this stranger she refuses to recognize.

“Liz Sherman,” says the stranger, and it’s not an echo, although it’s echolalia: it’s a thoughtful statement, a rolling over of the words to look at what might be clinging to their bellies. It’s terrible. It’s ideal. “What a funny name.”

There: something new. Something Liz knows she didn’t say. “My parents gave it to me.”

“My name’s Beth. My sister gave it to me.” The room is black and white at the same time, and the word sister is truth and lie at the same time. Born of the same blood, yes, but one is flame and the other kindling; one the match and one the hand that holds it.

Truth and lie and neither can exist without the other.

Liz does not flinch. Flinching would give too much away. “Where are we?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. The place where the dead things go before they’ve decided whether or not they’re going to stay dead.” The stranger—Beth—cocks her head. “Dead things don’t always.”

“Stay dead?”

“Decide.”

Silence stretches between them like a silken thread, binding and tangling and refusing to let either of them be free without the other’s consent. Liz is the first to look away. Sometimes it feels like she’s always the first to look away, like she lives in an endless cycle of inferno fading into ash.

Sometimes there’s another girl in the mirror.

Liz doesn’t know how to describe those moments, the times when she looks at her reflection and sees someone else looking back at her, and so she doesn’t; she locks them away at the bottom of her mind, in a steel chest labeled “Beth” and surrounded with the best defenses her subconscious can provide. Here there be monsters, and she is a monster, and the monsters of a monster must be the most terrible of all. So when she looks at her reflection and sees someone else where she ought to be, she looks away as quickly as she can.

It’s never quickly enough. It could never be quickly enough, because over and over again, that girl’s still there, that girl made of ash and char and burning, burning, always burning, and her hands still get hot in the night, leaving char on her sheets and blisters on her thighs. She must be a monster. She must be one of God’s mistakes. She must deserve what she gets.

Liz learns how to brush her hair without the aid of a mirror, and wonders if the monster will ever leave her alone.

“Why did you give me away?”

Liz looks back, a sudden lump in her throat, choking her, making it difficult to breathe. “What?”

“You gave me away.” Beth looks at her with reproachful eyes. Her skin seems to be growing paler, the shadows under her eyes deeper. “I made myself look like you, so we could talk, so we could be together. You stopped talking to me, and then you stopped wanting me, and then you stopped listening to me, and then you gave me away.”

“I’ve never seen you before in my life.” It’s a lie, it’s a lie, but it’s a lie with the weight of long repetition, of denial in waking and in dreams, of hands clenched tight against the flames that threaten to break forth at the slightest provocation. It’s a lie with the weight of cigarettes and whiskey and self-loathing to pin it down, like a burning butterfly under glass.

It’s also the truth, because they’ve never been face to face like this, incarnate in the same place, facing one another down. One of them has flesh and one of them doesn’t, conjoined twins fighting against the rules of reality to stay together, until one of them started fighting twice as hard to keep herself apart. Liz has been bleeding for years from self-inflicted wounds intended to weaken her, to lessen the danger she presented, but she could never cut deeply enough to touch the girl she sometimes saw in the mirror, the one who was more fire than flesh.

“You gave me away.”

“I never asked for you in the first place!” It is a repudiation, a shout, a scream: if things could echo here, this one would. She claps her hand over her mouth, eyes gone wide, staring like she could somehow take it back.

Beth nods, satisfied. “Good,” she says. “Now we can talk.”

The room is small, and clean, and charred around the edges, no matter how often they clean it: they say that there is nothing here for her to burn, but Liz knows better, Liz always knows better, because as long as she is in the room, there’s something she can burn. She is her own match and her own tinder, and when she stands at the heart of the fire, unburned and ever burning, she can consume worlds.

“Knock, knock. Mind if I come in?”

An unfamiliar voice is a novelty here, enough that she looks up, squinting against the light. For a moment, she thinks she must be dreaming. How else to explain a man who looks more like a mountain, with skin the red of a boiled lobster? He must be a ghost, the spirit of everyone who ever burned at her hand, come to punish her at last for her crimes and her sins, to carry her away to where girls like her belong—if there are any other girls like her, if she isn’t singular in all the world. She doesn’t know whether she wants to be or not. It would be nice not to be alone. It’s probably a sin to wish for anyone else to live with what she lives with, and she’s not sure her soul can handle any more sin. Not with everything she already carries.

He’s holding a lollipop. That, more than anything, proves that this can’t be happening.

“You can’t . . .” Her voice dies, a fire unkindled. She tries again. “You . . . you talked to me?”

“Shouldn’t I?” The figure takes a cautious step into the room. He has the stubs of horns, she sees, snapped off and as red as the rest of him. They must be covered in skin, to be that color, or else everything about him is that red, all the way down to the bone.

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll burn you?” The words are small, bloodless, pale. It’s been so long since she’s heard her own voice when she wasn’t answering clinical questions about her condition that she had forgotten what it sounds like when she’s choosing her own words. She stays where she is, seated on the bed, trying not to think about how easily the mattress could burn. How easily he could burn.

He grins. “Nope,” he says, and offers her the lollipop.

Liz may not have a mother anymore, but she still has the manners that her mother gave her. She takes it. The candy is a sweet shock in her mouth, and she’s never tasted anything better, and she doesn’t deserve this. She doesn’t deserve anything.

“Not sure I can burn,” he says. Waving one big red hand at the viewing window, he adds, “The scientist guys out there sort of work for my dad, if you tilt your head and squint at the mad science and weird crap organizational chart hard enough, so they let me come for a visit without testing my flammability. You’re Liz, right?”

“ . . . Right,” she says, after a long pause to remember what that means. She’s Liz. She’s Elizabeth Sherman. That’s her. Right? She came here voluntarily, after they told her she didn’t have a choice, because voluntary was better than the alternative, and she’s going to stay here until she’s dead, and they’ll need a name to put on the drawer they shove her body into after they dissect it.

“I’m Hellboy.”

She laughs. She can’t help it.

From the look on his—on Hellboy’s—face, he’s as surprised by the sound as she is. Then he grins.

“I know, right? Pretty ridiculous. I guess it makes sense, though. What else could you call a mug like this? ‘Dave’?” He pulls a face. “I don’t look much like a Dave.”

“Carl, maybe.”

“Did you just make a joke? Because it feels to me like maybe you just made a joke, and if you’re making jokes, maybe you’re not as far gone as they”—he hooks his thumb toward the window, and this time there’s a sharpness in the gesture that wasn’t there before, an underpinning anger that speaks of being poked and prodded by men like the ones who poke and prod at her, by people with their own agendas, as yet unexplored—“seem to think you are. And maybe you’d be willing to listen if I told you about something else you could be doing.”

“What?” she asks warily.

“See, I work with—I guess you’d call it an organization. We try to keep the things the world doesn’t really want to think about from destroying the world as we know it. Because I don’t know about you, but I’d be pretty pissed if the world ended tomorrow. I mean, you could never eat pizza again—”

He talks, and Liz listens, and while the walls of the room she had resigned herself to dying in don’t exactly fall away, they lighten, getting less important, until some small, near-forgotten part of her heart remembers what it’s like to see the sky.

They have words for girls like her. Monster; freak; pyrokinetic. Accident of nature, sign of the apocalypse, mistake, mistake, mistake. She’s heard them all, some spoken out in the open, others whispered behind cupped hands or spoken in observation rooms by scientists who forgot that the microphone was hot. Most of them stopped hurting years ago, when they didn’t change anything, no matter how many times she heard them.

Liz Sherman is a human girl who sets things on fire when she wants them to burn, who once lost control and burned her entire family to death, who can never afford to lose control again. Here and now, standing on this featureless plain, it’s hard not to wonder if that’s even an option.

“Am I dead?” she blurts.

The stranger . . . Beth . . . God, what do you call a twin you never knew you had? A twin made of fire and potential, who shouldn’t even be here? . . . Beth nods.

“About five minutes ago,” she says. “Your heart stopped. Your cells forgot how to burn.”

“They didn’t forget. I gave it away.”

“You gave me away,” says Beth, and Liz doesn’t contradict her. “Everything burns, all the time, forever. Oxygen burns when we breathe. Our cells burn from the inside when they fight to keep us alive. Everything burns.”

“So?” asks Liz. “Not everything can burn the world. I was too dangerous. I needed to be free.”

“You can’t live if you can’t burn.”

“I can’t hurt anyone if I’m here.”

“You can’t help anyone, either.”

Liz doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything to say.

“You used to talk to me. When we were little girls, you talked to me.” Beth—who was never a little girl, not really, not in the sense of blood and bone and breath—looks at her solemnly. “You said I was your sister.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You decided to forget.”

“I don’t remember doing that, either.”

“All the burning we both should have done, all the fire we both should have had, it all went into you. I was the flint, but you were always the steel. Knock us against each other and watch the world go up in flames.”

“So maybe I forgot you for a reason.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have killed them.”

Liz goes very still.

People have learned, over the years, not to mention what happened to her family. Not because it makes her angry: because it makes her quiet. Because there are things that can’t be forgiven, not in the self and not in anyone else. Because blame is hard to lay at the feet of a natural disaster, and that’s precisely what Liz Sherman had been on the day she burned her entire family alive. She had been startled, she had been scared, and she had lost control. None of those are things that should define a life, and yet here she is, alone with her smoke sister on a white plain that is neither heaven nor hell, but whatever comes before either.

She’s always thought what she did was a sin. She’s always known she didn’t mean it. Maybe when God splits the difference, this is the result: nothing but her and the incarnate ghost of the fire that burned everything she ever loved, forever.

Even now, it’s no more than she deserves.

“You can’t control what you won’t talk to,” says Beth. “Even a good dog bites if you leave it in a cage long enough. You walled me off. You wouldn’t let me out enough to breathe, much less burn, unless I broke the walls down. Once I was out, when I was out, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to go. You were supposed to be telling me that, and you didn’t even want to remember that I existed.”

“Are . . .” Liz hesitates. “Are you really a person?”

“Only here. Ideas can be people here. Flames can be people here. And I used to be a person to you, when you were still trying to understand me, instead of pushing me away.” Beth looks at her, a challenge in her borrowed eyes. “We were sisters.”

“I guess we were.”

“You threw me away.”

I didn’t know you existed, Liz thinks, and I couldn’t control you, Liz thinks, and I just wanted to be normal, to do normal things, to love and dance and live and see the world, I wanted to see the world, I wanted everything to be glitter and rainbows, I wanted to be real, and I couldn’t do that with you holding my hand, Liz thinks, and “I’m sorry,” Liz says.

Beth—the ghost, the shadow, the fire given flesh in this liminal space where nothing is real and nothing is a lie—smiles a little. “I didn’t think you’d say that.”

Liz shrugs.

Beth takes a half step toward her. “I’m sorry I hurt people.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t listen.” Because the fire had tried to communicate. The fire had screamed frustration in her fingers, itched in her veins, told her again and again that it was alive, and all living things need to run. All living things need to be free, at least some of the time. Liz was the one who had refused to open the door, over and over again, who had locked the fire inside and then pretended to be shocked when it found a way to break loose.

She likes it when the fire breaks loose. That’s the part she could never admit to anybody, not before this featureless place, not before Beth, still looking at her with shy, earnest hope in her face. She likes it when the world burns. No one would understand. Not even Hellboy, who works so hard to keep his own fire—his own monstrosity—locked away inside.

He’s a better person than she is, and he’s not even human. What does that make her?

“So now what?” she asks.

“That depends on you,” says Beth, and holds out her hand. “Can I come home?”

Liz Sherman is not dying: Liz Sherman is dead, a shell of a woman, scraped clean and laid out on the table like an offering to an unknown god. There is a hole in her heart where the fire used to be. There is a man made of clay with a fire in his gut that does not belong to him. There is a lock and there is a key, and when the two are combined, anything is possible. Only possible: not guaranteed.

“Yeah,” says Liz, after a moment’s thought. “I guess so.”

She takes her sister’s hand, the sister she never had, the fire that walks like a woman, and the world burns from white into black, from black into white, and everything hurts, and everything heals, and everything is going to be okay.

Fire has two states: either it’s burning, or it’s not. The spark catches. Liz Sherman’s heart beats; her eyes open; her lungs inhale. The burning girl breathes, complete once more, and the fire rages on.

TALES OF THE WORM LORD

Hellboy held his candle aloft, turning about, making a quick survey of the tomb’s interior. Splintered coffins littered the cold stone. The stakes he’d used were each half-buried in vampire dust. Two had broken on impact, but the rest looked salvageable. Rotten tapestries and sheets of cobweb as big as sails stirred in the breeze flowing down the stairs behind him. His breathing slowed, the adrenaline settling in his blood. He counted: six of them. A whole nest. In a month they would have laid waste to the countryside.

Something scraped against stone behind him, and he turned to see one more: weakened and scared, crawling up the stone steps to the tomb’s entrance, a rectangle of molten light. The vampire’s skin was already beginning to smoke.

“Son of a—” Hellboy retrieved a stake from the ground and climbed the stairs without haste. Arriving at the vampire’s side, he rolled him over with one hoof, holding the stake in his right hand, the candle in his left. “Where do you think you’re going?”

The vampire was old, its skin desiccated and its eyes red cauldrons. It bared its fangs at him and hissed, but the dying sunlight was already doing its work. Oily smoke spilled rapidly, like an engine overheating. If the creature had gotten away, it might have been able to hide somewhere until the sun had completely set, and the whole thing would have started all over again.

“Good night, you horrible thing,” Hellboy said, and raised the stake for the killing blow.

“Wait! Tell the Worm Lord I’ll go! We didn’t know this was his territory.”

Hellboy paused. “What?”

The vampire rolled onto its belly again and continued its faltering climb. “No one told us. I’ll even help! Listen. Once upon a time, The Worm Lord Came to Potter’s Lane . . .”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“He was a great man trapped in a benighted village,” it said, and then its tongue caught fire. Its next words spat from its mouth in red cinders.

“Oh, shut up.” Hellboy jammed the stake into its heart from behind. There wasn’t enough left of its face for it to cry out, and it collapsed into dusty silence.

Hellboy finished climbing the stairs and stepped into the cemetery just as the sun dipped below the tree line, casting a dark red light through the branches. The wind had kicked up, carrying traces of snow. He looked at the ranks of headstones, the squat tombs interspersed among them.

Worm Lord?

Just how bad was this infestation?

There’d been precious little information about Potter’s Lane in the BPRD report. It was a modest town in coastal Massachusetts, its roots extending well back before statehood. Its population was small, insular, and aging. It boasted little to attract tourists, and as the fishing industry continued to shrink, its young people decamped to more robust cities as soon as they were old enough. The folks who lived here were protective of their traditions and suspicious of out-of-towners. Vampires tended to do well in these kinds of communities, preying on hidden vulnerabilities and taking advantage of the population’s reluctance to seek outside help.

Hellboy left the cemetery and walked into town. Even this early, it seemed to be putting itself to bed: shutters drawn, lights doused. So it was with relief that he saw the pale glow coming from the window of a tavern near the docks. The shingle bearing its name—Crabby Jack’s—swung in the wind. Hellboy pushed through the door, brushing the snow from his shoulders.

The place had a pretty good crowd for a weeknight: maybe a dozen or so people gathered around tables, more hunched at the bar. The talk went dead upon his entrance—a phenomenon Hellboy was accustomed to. The villagers’ eyes lingered on him, firelight reflecting from their ruddy faces. He wended his way through the tables, slowly and carefully so as not to alarm anyone unduly, and settled into a free stool at the bar. He wound his tail around one of the legs, trying to give them less to latch their fears upon. To his relief, the old-timer next to him kept his seat.

He looked at the bartender, a heavyset woman with hair dyed as red as his own skin. “Got any coffee?”

“This is a bar, hon. We got booze and we got beer.”

“Fine, give me a whiskey. I need to warm up.”

The bartender poured him a glass of something brown and pushed it across to him. “You’re new to these parts,” she said.

“What gave me away?”

Nobody laughed. The sign squeaked in the wind outside, and a loose shutter banged against the window.

“Okay, you got me. It’s my first time here. Nice place. Shame about the vampires, though.” He knocked back the drink and pushed the glass forward, watching her carefully as she refilled it.

She didn’t even blink. “Don’t sound familiar.”

“Seriously?” He turned to the old-timer roosting beside him. He held a cigarette, smoke unspooling above him. His beer glass was near empty, and by the look of him it was a long road from his first one. “What about you? You know of anyone having vampire trouble lately?”

The old man lifted his lip, exposing one crooked yellow tooth. “Vampires don’t bother us here.”

“Really, now.” Hellboy turned back to his drink. “That’s kind of weird, because I just killed six of them not two miles down the road.”

“That’s the Meadows lot,” the bartender said. “Hell, that’s unincorporated land.”

“What interests me here is we got a call to take care of them, but it came from the neighboring town, which is ten miles away. Nobody from Potter’s Lane thought to call it in.”

“Like the man said, big fella, vampires don’t bother us here. Neither do devils . . . usually.”

Hellboy decided to let that one slide. “Does that have something to do with the Worm Lord?”

Nobody had anything to say to that. The bartender turned her back to him, and the old man concentrated on the lit end of his cigarette, staring into the orange ember. Hellboy could feel the attention of the others in the bar. When he turned on his stool to face them, their eyes slipped sideways. No one met his gaze.

“Who told you about the Worm Lord?” the old man said at last.

“One of those vampires brought him up. He didn’t have time to get into details.”

The old man looked at the bartender. “Even the vampires have taken to talking about him! I’ll be damned.” He shook his head and chuckled.

“Look, I can help you. My name’s Hellboy. I’m from the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.”

“We know who you are. We’re not yokels.”

“I didn’t mean it like—”

“Never mind Atticus,” said the bartender. “He’s the sensitive type. I’m Tessa.” She extended her right hand. Hellboy’s own right hand was a massive stone instrument; he took hers gingerly between his fingertips—conscious as always of the frailty of human bones—and they shook. She said, “You ain’t no help to us. Go home, honey.”

Hellboy sighed. He’d seen this kind of thing before. Some supernatural thug scaring a populace into submission, convincing them they had no choice but to bend the knee. He liked breaking guys like that. It was a treat. He stood up to his full height—eight and a half feet of corded red muscle—and inflated his chest a little, letting them all get a good idea of his massive bulk. “I know you’re scared. But I can help you. Trust me: this Worm Lord, whoever or whatever he is, never met anything like me before.”

“Well, I suppose that’s true,” said Atticus.

Tessa sized him up a moment, and came to a decision. “All right, Mr. Hellboy, you want to know about the Worm Lord? I’ll tell you. But you’re going to want another drink.”

Hellboy finished what was in his glass and presented it for a refill. “Give it to me,” he said.

This all happened a couple hundred years ago, before America became a country. We don’t know who he was Before He Became the Worm Lord, but we do know he was some fancy gentleman come over from England. Some folks say he was close to King George. Others say he was in cahoots with the king’s enemies, and was helping to plot a regicide. One thing is for sure: he was practiced in the dark arts.”

“Maisie says he was a student of John Dee, the sorcerer of the court!” said Atticus.

“Well, that would be a hell of a trick, seeing as how John Dee lived a whole two hundred years earlier!”

Atticus looked chastened. “It’s just what Maisie said.”

Hellboy was impressed. “You guys know a thing or two,” he said.

Tessa paid neither of them any further mind. “In any case, something went wrong for him over there, and he found himself on a ship bound for the colonies. When he got here he decided not to enter Boston’s high society, such as it was, since his experience with the upper classes went so bad for him back in England. Instead he traveled to Potter’s Lane, where it is said his arrival was heralded by three hundred crows descending upon the town like a black cloak, crying out his name. He came to the village and bought a home some distance from the town square, where he pursued his studies in isolation.

“The people in the village were curious, and made many attempts to integrate him into their community. He resisted all of them. He was proud, and considered himself better than they were. A breed apart, you could say.”

“Sounds like a real charmer.”

“Well, eventually he showed he was right.”

After a moment, Hellboy realized she was waiting for him to ask her how, so he obliged. “And how did he do that?”

She leaned over close, and spoke with a half smile. “By not dying.”

Hellboy passed a hand over his face. These folks were clearly loving their story, but it was pretty old hat. “I think I know where this is going.”

Tessa pulled back a little, looking skeptical. “You do?”

“He was a sorcerer studying black magic, right? A lot of these black-magic types are just small, scared little people when you get right down to it. You say he prolonged his life, right? So let me guess: he worked his experiments in his home. Strange lights shone through the windows. There were mysterious disappearances in town. Eventually, people noticed he wasn’t aging. People died of old age but he kept right on going. I bet he’s even still living in town.”

Tessa looked offended. She turned her back to him and gave her attention to someone further down the bar.

The old man, Atticus, poked Hellboy’s arm. “You stole her thunder.” He chuckled.

“This isn’t exactly my first day on the job. I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings, though.”

“She likes to tell her stories. I guess we all do. You got most of it right.”

“Where did I miss?”

“The aging part. He wasn’t able to keep his youthful vigor.”

“Yeah . . . I guess it must not have worked out exactly the way he planned, if you’re calling him Worm Lord.”

Atticus laughed. “And how often does anything work out how we planned, son? You’re still young, so maybe you don’t know. You’ll see.”

“Anyway,” said Hellboy, “this guy is what they call a lich. A sorcerer who becomes immortal through black magic. They’re intimidating, but they all have the same weakness. I can get rid of him for you.”

“What’s their weakness?”

“They have to put their soul in a receptacle, which they store in a safe place. It’s called a phylactery. You break that, and you’re done. All I have to do is find it. I’m pretty sure it’ll be in his house, or buried somewhere on his property.”

Atticus seemed to consider this for a moment. He fished another cigarette from inside his coat and lit it up. Outside the snow had started to come down more heavily, and a few people left the bar, hoping to get home while the roads were still passable. “I might have an idea where he keeps it,” he said.

Hellboy turned to face him. “Oh yeah?”

“Sure. You’re not the first one to come through here, talking about a phylactery. Another Sorcerer Came to Town, once. Drove up in the middle of the night, rented a room, and stayed hidden for days. Nobody would have known he was there at all except for Millie worked the desk that night, and she can’t help herself from talking.”

A pea in a pod, Hellboy thought, but he kept quiet.

“The Worm Lord knew, though. And he knew what he was here for. While the professor was gathering his strength in that hotel room, searching through his books and getting his trinkets in order, the Worm Lord was preparing to receive him. None of us knew it at the time, of course, but it became obvious soon enough.”

“Tell about the corpse giant,” said Tessa, who had recovered from her disappointment and rejoined them.

“I’m getting there, damn it. Whyn’t you get us another round instead of stepping on my story.”

Hellboy, predicting an imminent battle with this Worm Lord, put his hand over his glass, closing it off. He wanted a clear head.

“So anyhow, they meet in the middle of the road one moonless midnight, the professor on one side of the street, his collection of books spinning in orbits around him like little moons, little tracers of green fire slithering up and down and around his body like snakes. Standing down the way a little bit was the Worm Lord, his preservational abilities working to keep him alive, but his body rotted away anyway, looking like something made out of wet mud or melted clay, the worms shivering in his body so that he seemed to vibrate in the air, seemed to shed his own kind of weak light.

“Well, they got to trading insults at each other, the college fella in his elevated way, using a lot of four-dollar words, the Worm Lord speaking his own peculiar language, which made more sense to the grubs living in his skin than it did to any of the folks who heard it. I suppose it was like a Frenchie and a Chinaman shouting at each other, without a whole lot of understanding passing between them.”

“I think they probably understood each other well enough,” said Hellboy.

“You might be right. Because it was then that their spells filled up the night. Big blasts of color, spectral bodies materializing from thin air to disgorge glowing glyphs from their open mouths, the earth beneath their feet groaning in a kind of slow language that trembled the buildings and shook the trees, sending all the nesting birds clamoring into the night sky. I tell you, it was like nothing Potter’s Lane had ever seen.

“It looked for a time like the professor was going to come out on top. He was younger and I guess he had more vinegar, because the Worm Lord dropped to one knee, and as he did so one of the professor’s spinning books dropped flat on the ground and opened a little pocket in the air above it, from which sailed an inkwell, landing in the professor’s open palm just like he’d called it to him. And I guess that’s exactly what he did. When the Worm Lord saw it, he reached for it, desperately, but he was unable to get to his feet.”

“The phylactery,” said Hellboy. “Gotta be.”

“All he had to do was break it, you say?”

“That’s it. Problem solved.”

“Tell about the corpse giant now!” said Tessa.

“Okay, woman, okay. Well, sir, he never got a chance to break it on account of what happened next. Remember how I said the Worm Lord was preparing for him, too? He finally played his trump card. Just as the professor raised his fist to hurl that ink pot to the pavement, the world shook beneath his feet, and he lost his footing. The ink pot rolled out of his grip and settled on the grassy curb. A deep sound filled the air: the regular, metronomic thump of a great weight against the earth, and a soft, fleshy sound interrupted from time to time with sharp snaps, like tree limbs breaking. And pushing ahead of it, this wretched, godawful stink, like spoiled meat.

“Around the bend, behind the resurgent Worm Lord, came what looked like a huge person, standing almost ten feet tall. You had to look at it for a minute before you could figure out it wasn’t any single person at all, but dozens of them, all wrapped together with corded rope and fashioned into a human shape, limbs sticking out here and there, bones broken in service to the thing’s overall design. It left gruesome footprints in its wake: the slurried remains of long-wasted corpses. And that’s what these things were: corpses raised from the cemetery and lashed together to make this one unholy freak, this putrescent soldier in thrall to the Worm King.”

“Jeez,” said Hellboy. He glanced at Tessa, whose face seemed to radiate a joyful light, her patience at last rewarded.

“It was as this thing walked past that those present to witness this confrontation detected voices rising from somewhere within this mass. Thinking she recognized one of those voices, one of the onlookers crept after it until she could get close, and she saw that there were living bodies broken and woven into the mass of corpses. She looked into the staring eyes of one of them, eyes surrendered to pain and madness, eyes she claimed belonged to her oldest son, whom she had not seen in days.

“In any case, the creature raised one of its peopled arms and smashed the professor to death in two or three quick blows. The Worm Lord fetched the inkwell from the grass and tucked it into his ragged robes as easy as you please, like it was nothing more than loose change. The air went quiet, and the corpse giant disassembled itself in a great splash of bones and gore. Those who had been alive and part of it made broken noises—cries for mercy—as they twitched and shivered on the empty street. They didn’t last long.”

Atticus took a deep breath and drained his mug of beer. Others in the bar watched him quietly, and Tessa refilled his mug yet again with a sense of quiet approval. Outside, the snow fell more heavily.

When no one spoke, Hellboy said, “Is that it? What happened next?”

Atticus shrugged. “The old fellow went on home, and folks cleaned up the road. Everybody just got on with things.”

“Man.” Hellboy was quiet for a moment. “And the Worm Lord still lives here.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Can you tell me where?”

Atticus exchanged a glance with Tessa. “What are you gonna do that this other fella couldn’t do, and others like him couldn’t?”

Hellboy rested his huge stone fist on the bar top. “I’m gonna beat him into the earth.”

After a silent moment, Tessa said, “Well, now. That would be something to see. Sure, we can tell you where he lives.”

Potter’s Lane wasn’t a big town, so it was a relatively short walk from Crabby Jack’s to the house of the lich, as mapped out on the back of a bar napkin. The snow had begun to accumulate on the road and to collect in drifts beside it; that would have been enough to slow a normal person, but Hellboy pushed through it with ease, carving a path like a plow horse. Tessa and Atticus hovered by the bar’s entrance, a warm yellow light spilling out into the frigid air. It seemed small and cozy, and he looked forward to returning there with good news.

The lich’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was a modest two-story structure, its driveway empty and the neighboring houses apparently unoccupied. Old paint peeled from the wood siding. The grass was long enough here that green shoots still peeked out of the fresh snow bed. The house was dark. He wondered, briefly, if they were playing a trick on him, until he stepped closer and saw the little warding sigils carved into the bottom stair leading up to the porch.

The sigils were made to keep out other sorcerers. Hellboy stepped over, mounting the stairs quickly. His enormous right hand was clenched into a fist, ready to swing like a wrecking ball into whatever threat might lurch from the shadows. The wood creaked loudly beneath his vast weight; he knew he wouldn’t be surprising anybody.

Heavy curtains were hung over the windows, affording him no glimpses inside. A quick survey of the porch yielded no new insights. There was nothing out here to indicate habitation of any kind. Not that he expected a lich to spend a lot of time drinking tea on a porch swing, especially if it looked the way they said it did. Still, the barren nature of the place made him uneasy.

And what was it doing here, anyway? Surely there were more interesting places for an immortal to spend the years. Why hadn’t he returned home? Were there no derelict castles where he’d come from? No haunted mansions?

Might as well get to it. Hellboy pounded his left hand on the door. “Hey! Open up!”

He listened. Nothing from inside. Only the hiss of snowfall behind him.

This time he knocked with his right hand. The door smashed easily, collapsing into planks and splinters at his hooves. The dark foyer gaped. A thick cloud of dust swirled from where the door had fallen in, tickling his throat as he stepped tentatively inside. The air had the heavy, settled quality of a place that had been empty for a long time.

Dust covered everything: the coat rack by the door; the little table where one might deposit car keys or, in this case, a favorite evil relic; the carpet, which unfurled like a red tongue from the black throat of this wicked house. Hellboy continued on, peering into the living room to his right. The furniture was broken: chairs around the dining table had snapped legs, the couch was shredded, even the grand piano was cracked in two like an animal whose spine had been snapped.

“What the . . .”

He crept up the stairway, wishing he’d brought a flashlight. The darkness had a weight to it, and even though he knew the Worm Lord wasn’t here, he felt a growing apprehension. Something was wrong here—not just in the house, but here in Potter’s Lane—and he didn’t know what it was.

Why had the vampires been trying to tell him a story, too?

Hellboy entered the master bedroom. The bed looked like the site of an ancient atrocity. Black blood stiffened the sheets, and the center sagged, as though something had been resting there for a long time. Whoever or whatever it had been, it was long ago. There were no flies lapping this bounty; there was no smell choking the air.

A desk sat next to the bed, its single drawer yanked out and lolling like a tongue. Old papers littered the carpet by its feet. Atop the desk was a book bound in stained leather, the symbol for a low-level demonic functionary charred onto its face. Hellboy recognized its provenance, if not its purpose. It held real black magic, and it meant that the lich probably did live here. Once.

Something on the ground caught his eye as he turned to leave, and he knelt to examine it. An inkwell, its bottom smashed out. Black ink stained the carpet beneath it.

The phylactery. Long broken.

“You gotta be kidding me.”

A small sound floated up from downstairs, subtle yet unmistakable: the weight of a foot upon the floor. Hellboy rushed to the bedroom door and peered down the stairwell, barely in time to catch a glimpse of a figure in black rags passing out of sight, toward the foyer. A blistering stench rolled up the stairs.

“Hey!” Hellboy bounded down the stairs, heedless of caution, and was half- consumed as the old wood gave way beneath his bulk and he crashed through to his armpits. He smashed his way free, stumbling over the wreckage, charging down the hallway, and stopping at last at the broken front door.

The dark figure was gliding out over the snow, leaving no trail in its wake. Standing in its path farther up the road were the bundled occupants of Crabby Jack’s, gathered at the entrance to the cul-de-sac, watching him with flashlights and even a few raised lanterns. They didn’t move as the figure drewnearer.

Hellboy strode out into the snow. He wrenched a mailbox from its post and hurled it overhand at the lich, desperate to distract it from the crowd. “Hey! Worm Lord!”

The mailbox passed through its body and landed in the snow.

“A ghost . . . ?”

The Worm Lord stopped about a dozen feet in front of the gathered townsfolk and turned, at last, to face him. It looked like something turning to sludge, a deliquesced mass of sliding flesh and rotten meat. Worms writhed in its hair, and when it opened its jaw to speak he saw that they lived there too, wriggling in the bowl of his mouth like a living confection. The black robes it wore fluttered in the cold wind. When it spoke its voice did not come from its own seeping lungs but bled from the air itself, something distinct.

Hellboy marched at him, cocking his great fist. “That’ll be enough of that!” he said, punctuating his sentence with a devastating blow.

His fist passed completely through the lich, and he landed face first in the snow. The creature did not move, its ghostly feet planted in Hellboy’s back, and he rolled to the side, feeling angry and embarrassed.

Some of the people gathered to watch started to laugh.

Ignoring the Worm Lord for the moment, Hellboy climbed to his feet and faced them. “What the hell is wrong with you? Get out of here!”

Tessa pushed her way forward. She pointed an accusing finger at Hellboy, and the wrathful joy on her face took him aback. “We didn’t finish telling you our stories!” she cried, shouting over a rising wind.

“You’re crazy! Can’t you see what’s going on here?” He looked over her shoulder, addressing all of them. “Can’t any of you see?” The lich kept speaking its strange language, its voice cleaving through the wind.

Atticus pushed Tessa forward another step. “Tell the story, Tessa! It’s yours now!”

She seemed pleased by this, and took a few more steps of her own. “The Worm Lord isn’t the fool you think he is! He’s not keeping his soul in some stupid jar so any fool can come along and smash it! Too many people tried! He Wrought a New Art. He studied the art of naming; he studied the narrative chain songs of a secret cabal of monks who spend their whole lives in absolute darkness, and travel from shadow to shadow in the world of men. He doesn’t need a phylactery anymore!”

Behind her, some of the townsfolk started to bunch together while she spoke. At first he thought it was because they were cold, but they kept pressing. They looped arms around each other, intertwined their legs—it looked like they were grappling. He started to lose track of what Tessa was saying. Then he heard the first sharp crack of bone, followed by several more, and he realized what they were up to.

“No!”

He pressed into the crowd, but someone swung a flashlight and split his lip, and someone else jabbed him with a pocketknife. They were forming a perimeter around the cluster of people, who were slowly breaking themselves to make a new shape.

Others joined in the attack against him. When he pushed one down, two more jumped into place. He was careful with his right hand, conscious, as always, of the frailty of the human frame. These were just people.

Judging by the sounds coming from the mass, it was too late to save them. He turned in fury at the Worm Lord, forgetting in his rage that there was nothing to hit, and he drove his fist through its incorporeal body into the ground. The shock of the blow sent tremors through the earth; glass shattered nearby.

He finally understood. The broken inkwell, the modest little town. The lich itself was long dead. What was left of it lived in the stories. Each tale they told about it was a spell to keep it alive. They’d been nursing it along the whole time they were talking to him, summoning it into shape. Even the vampires, the poor bastards, had mistaken Hellboy for one of them, and tried to buy his forgiveness by keeping the spell going.

Hellboy turned to Tessa, who was doubled over in laughter. “Why? Why would you do this? Why would you allow this?”

Atticus answered for her. “How can you ask that? You saw yourself how those vampires run off. You think they’re the only ones respect the Worm Lord? Everything living or dead around here respects the Worm Lord, son. This is his town, and we’re his people.”

“But you don’t need him! You have other options! Look what you’re doing to yourselves!”

“We want him.”

Tessa spat in the snow. “And here you are, just like the rest, thinking you can take what we have away from us.” The corpse giant—except they weren’t all corpses, not yet, not judging by the sounds coming from the wretched mass—took a faltering step in his direction. It raised a contorted fist, and stumbled to one knee—someone’s face, buckled with rage—leaving a bloody mark in the snow. It pushed itself to its feet again, advancing on him. But worse, so were the rest. They came at him with their small fists, their flashlights wielded like clubs; some brandished kitchen knives or meat cleavers. One had a little gun, something that looked more like a toy than a deadly instrument. They could not hurt him with these little trinkets, not in any real way. But he was powerless against them.

They were people. Still alive. Everything here—the lich, the construct—all just people. There was nothing for him to hit. No trinket to break, no incantation to pronounce. There was no beast here but the beast in the heart. There was only the grotesque will of the people.

There was no one here to save.

He did the only thing that made sense. He turned and he ran. The townsfolk chased him to the city limit, some in cars now, slaloming across the icy roads. When he passed out of the town and into the woods, they stopped, shouting after him. Calling for his blood. Celebrating the fear, riding the hate. The people in the corpse giant screamed too, but whether it was pain or some kind of ecstatic, doom-hungry joy, he could not tell.

He ran until he arrived at the neighboring town, ten long miles away.

By the end of the next day, Hellboy rested on a couch in the library at BPRD headquarters, a few hundred miles away in Fairfield, Connecticut. The snow continued to fall outside, but inside it was warm and well lit. An open book rested in his lap, but his attention was on the window, and the blowing darkness beyond it.

Kate Corrigan, the resident folklorist, came in. She carried a tray with a pot of tea and two little teacups. “Mind if I join you?”

Hellboy blinked, just noticing her. “Oh, hey, Kate. Sure. Is that tea?”

“It is tea,” she said, settling in beside him. “And some of it is for you.”

“I’m not really a tea guy.”

She arched an eyebrow at him, and he gave her half a smile. “Sorry,” he said. “What I meant to say is, thank you, Kate.”

“You’re welcome.”

She poured for both of them, and he waited while she tended to hers, adding sugar and a little cream. When she was finished, they took their first sips, and he had to admit that the heat felt good going down. It felt like it was doing important work.

“What are you reading?” she said, gesturing to the book.

He lifted it up so she could see the cover. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt.

“Ah, so something light. Me, I like to read a little Crime and Punishment or A Clockwork Orange when I’m trying to unwind.”

Hellboy shrugged. He couldn’t find the energy to give her the laugh she wanted. “I don’t know. I’m just trying to figure things out.”

“I read your report,” Kate said. “Sounds like you had a bad one last night.”

“It wasn’t my best moment.”

“Why do you say that? Do you think you did something wrong?”

He sighed, making a helpless gesture. “I don’t know.”

“You didn’t.”

“Are you sure? I’m not. What are you supposed to do, Kate? What do you do when they actually choose the monster?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t.” She placed her hand—small, frail, human—over his. Hellboy felt the warmth of it even through the heavy stone, and it galvanized him. She was his friend. He felt suddenly moved by this knowledge. It seemed important in a way he couldn’t articulate. “But I know that the fight matters, Hellboy. No one knows that better than you. So we keep fighting. And we save the ones we can. It won’t be everybody. It never is.”

He nodded. “Yeah. ‘The fight matters.’ Here’s to that.”

They clinked a toast.

Outside, the wind surged, the night grew long, and monsters stirred across the world.

Author Bios

Nathan Ballingrud is the author of North American Lake Monsters: Stories and the novella The Visible Filth. He’s won two Shirley Jackson Awards and has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards. The Atlas of Hell, a second collection of short stories, is forthcoming. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.

Laird Barron is the author of several books, including The Imago Sequence, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, and Swift to Chase. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. Laird currently resides in the Rondout Valley, writing stories about the evil that men do.

Kealan Patrick Burke is the Bram Stoker Award–winning author of, among others, The Turtle Boy, Kin, and Sour Candy. A number of his stories have recently been optioned for film. Visit him on the web at KealanPatrickBurke.com or on Twitter: @kealanburke.

Chelsea Cain is the author of the New York Times best-selling Archie Sheridan/Gretchen Lowell thriller series (including Heartsick, Sweetheart, and Let Me Go), and the Kick Lannigan series (One Kick). One Kick is currently in production for television under the name Gone, starring Chris Noth and Leven Rambin. Chelsea’s novels have been published in over thirty languages. Stephen King included two of her books in his top ten favorite books of the year, and NPR named Heartsick one of the 100 best thrillers ever written. Chelsea has also written comic books, including Marvel’s Mockingbird, a Liz Sherman story for Hellboy Winter Special, and a Jessica Jones story for Civil War II: Choosing Sides.

Delilah S. Dawson writes the Ladycastle comic series for Boom! Studios. As a novelist, she is the author of the Blud series, the Hit series, Servants of the Storm, the Star Wars stories “The Perfect Weapon” and “Scorched,” Shadowman: Follow Me Boy, and Wake of Vultures and the Shadow series (writing as Lila Bowen). Find her online at WhimsyDark.com.

Richard Kadrey is the New York Times best-selling author of fifteen novels, including the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime list and is in development as a feature film. Some of his other novels include The Kill Society, The Wrong Dead Guy, Metrophage, and Butcher Bird. He also writes Lucifer for DC/Vertigo.

Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times best-selling suspense novelist, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. His books include the Joe Ledger thrillers, The Nightsiders, Dead of Night, and X-Files Origins: Devil’s Advocate, as well as standalone novels in multiple genres. His YA space-travel novel, Mars One, is in development for film, and his Monk Addison short stories and V-Wars shared-world vampire apocalypse series are being developed for TV. He is the editor of many anthologies, including The X-Files, Aliens: Bug Hunt, and Nights of the Living Dead (coedited with zombie-genre creator George A. Romero). His comics include Captain America, Black Panther, Marvel Zombies Return, and more. His Rot & Ruin novels were included in Booklist’s Ten Best Horror Novels for Young Adults. He is one third of the very popular and mildly weird Three Guys with Beards podcast. Jonathan lives in Del Mar, California, with his wife, Sara Jo. JonathanMaberry.com.

Seanan McGuire lives and works in the Pacific Northwest, and writes a genuinely horrifying number of books annually. We’re pretty sure she doesn’t sleep. When not writing, she enjoys touring the haunted attractions of North America, with a special fondness for anything involving chainsaws, corn, or both. Her work has been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and she won the Alex Award in 2017 for her novella Every Heart a Doorway. Keep up with her at SeananMcGuire.com.

Weston Ochse (pronounced “oaks”) is a former intelligence officer and special operations soldier. He has written more than twenty-eight books in multiple genres, and his fiction and nonfiction have been praised by USA Today, the Atlantic, the New York Post, and Publishers Weekly. The American Library Association labeled him one of the Major Horror Authors of the Twenty-First Century. His work has also won the Bram Stoker Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and won multiple New Mexico–Arizona Book Awards. His military supernatural series SEAL Team 666 has been optioned for a movie starring Dwayne Johnson. His military sci-fi series, which starts with Grunt Life, has been praised for its PTSD-positive depiction of soldiers at peace and at war.

Chris Priestley is a writer and illustrator living and working in Cambridge in the UK. He has worked as an illustrator and cartoonist on the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and many English newspapers. He has written several strip cartoons, stories for radio, and over twenty short story collections and novels for children and young adults. “Death and the Arrow” was nominated for an Edgar Award in 2004. Tales of Terror from the Tunnel’s Mouth won the Dracula Society’s annual Children of the Night Award in 2009. He is currently writing and illustrating a new funny gothic middle-grade series for children called Maudlin Towers.

Chris Roberson is the cocreator with artist Michael Allred of iZombie, the basis of the hit CW television series now in its third season, and the writer of several New York Times best-selling Cinderella miniseries set in the world of Bill Willingham’s Fables. He is also the cocreator of Edison Rex with artist Dennis Culver and the cowriter of Hellboy and the B.P.R.D., Witchfinder, Rise of the Black Flame, and other titles set in the world of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. In addition to his numerous comics projects, Chris has written more than a dozen novels and three dozen short stories.

Michael Rowe is the Shirley Jackson Award–nominated author of two novels, Wild Fell and Enter, Night, as well as an award-winning essayist and former journalist. He welcomes readers at MichaelRowe.com.

Angela Slatter’s debut novel, Vigil, was released by Jo Fletcher Books in 2016, and the sequels Corpselight and Restoration will follow in 2017 and 2018, respectively. She is the author of eight short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales, and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories. Her work has been adapted for the screen and translated into Japanese, Russian, and Bulgarian. Angela has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar Award, and five Aurealis Awards.

Paul Tremblay is the award-winning author of six novels, including Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and The Little Sleep. His short fiction and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and numerous year’s-best anthologies. Paul is currently on the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards, lives in Massachusetts, hates pickles, and has no uvula. PaulTremblay.net.

Rio Youers is the British Fantasy Award–nominated author of Westlake Soul and Point Hollow. His new novel, The Forgotten Girl, was recently published by St. Martin’s Press. Rio lives in Canada with his wife, Emily, and their children, Lily and Charlie. Follow him on Twitter: @Rio_Youers.

E. Lily Yu received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2012. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, from McSweeney’s and Boston Review to Clarkesworld, Tor.com, F&SF, and Uncanny, as well as multiple best-of-the-year anthologies, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. She holds an MA from Cornell.

Table of Contents

- Introduction

- Christopher Golden

- THE PROMISED SMILE

- Rio Youers

- WHEN DOVES CRY

- Delilah S. Dawson

- THE OTHER SIDE OF SUMMER

- Chris Roberson

- THE HELLBOYNESS OF HELLBOY

- Chris Priestley

- ONE MORE RADICAL STONE FOX

- Chelsea Cain

- THE DUELIST

- Jonathan Maberry

- A QUIET NIGHT IN THE LIBRARY

- E. Lily Yu

- FIRE IS THE DEVIL’S ONLY FRIEND

- Michael Rowe

- A HUGE DAMN VAMPIRE

- Richard Kadrey

- THE OTHER GOVERNMENT GUYS

- Weston Ochse

- HER RED RIGHT HAND

- Paul Tremblay

- TO BELL THE CAT

- Angela Slatter

- VERSTECKDT

- Kealan Patrick Burke

- OF BOYS AND TWO-HEADED DOGS

- Laird Barron

- BURNING GIRLS

- Seanan McGuire

- TALES OF THE WORM LORD

- AUTHOR BIOS