Hellboy: Odd Jobs (11 page)

I nodded.

I remembered him well. A spry Scottish-American research scientist, MacDougal and Trevor Bruttenholm had spent many an evening playing chess during the year we lived at Roswell. As I had come to look upon Bruttenholm as my father, at that time Jamie MacDougal had been like an uncle.

"He's here, stationed at Los Alamos. Very hush-hush. Now I'm considered a liability, I can't have any contact with him. But somehow he managed to get a note to me, requesting I contact you to see if you'd come."

Robert puffed slowly, savoring the rich aroma.

"I'm here. So what's the problem?"

"His son's disappeared."

A half-crescent moon rode high in the sky like a severed quarter as I walked the arroyo running parallel to the road where young Malcolm MacDougal had last been spotted. I was five lonely miles outside of Los Alamos, heading southwest into the foot hills of the Jemez Mountains. I was searching for a stream, for there I hoped to find a woman who would lead me to the boy.

"They believe he's dead," Jamie MacDougal had said earlier that evening. "He's been gone a week. They called off the search on Monday

said it was a waste of manpower

that he must have perished because

no seven year old could survive the night temperatures.

"But I know," he said, pouring himself a generous glass of single malt. "I'm his father, and I know in my bones he's still alive."

I hadn't seen Jamie in nearly eight years, and the river of human time had eroded his once-full head of red hair, and reshaped his features like a rain-washed statue. He looked closer to sixty than his fast-approaching forty-seven. It was his birthday next week. I had remembered en route to Los Alamos from Roswell. Robert had stopped the car outside Santo Domingo Pueblo so I could buy a gift. The Anasazi pot sat on Jamie's dining table, ground zero between the two of us.

"Go slow, old friend," I said. "Start at the beginning."

Jamie took a hearty swig of his malt, and sighed.

"Lucy

his mother

died a year ago. Car crash. Almost a month to the day," he added, wistfully staring into his drink. "So the base provided us with a housekeeper, a nanny of sorts who could take care of him.

Dona's her name. Local woman of Zuni extraction. But of course he took it hard. We both did. And a seven year old wants his mother, not a stranger."

He was right. All boys need a mother. Even a Hellboy. I, however, had no recollection of a mother, or a father. Or of anything before I appeared in the ruins of an old church in East Bromwich, England nearly ten years ago.

"Yes," I said, "go on."

"Dona's a good sort. Takes excellent care of him

or did until she let him wander off.

"The last couple of months have been very hard, what with the anniversary coming up, and I've been working long, long hours in the lab.

"I should have been there for him," he suddenly exclaimed, slamming a hand on the table top, almost spilling his drink and knocking over my pot.

It took a while, and another drink, to calm him.

Malcolm, I learned, had taken to wandering away from the base over the last few months. There was nothing unusual in that. Boys will be boys, and with so many ruins to explore, the summer-kissed landscape surrounding the cold, uninviting barracks-style housing could be a place of endless wonders to the over-active imagination of a seven year old. Summer was gone now though, swept aside by an early, harsh fall, and the nights came cold and hard at this elevation. But Los Alamos was a safe town, perhaps the safest in the United States due to the secret nature of its inhabitants' work, and Dona had thought nothing wrong in letting the boy play outside after sunset. But that all changed when he met the woman.

There was a good reason why New Mexico was called The Land of Enchantment, for there are arcane energies here, powers present which defy rational explanation. Was it a coincidence Los Alamos became the Secret City, birthplace of the atom bomb, of that Fat Man's explosion happened at Trinity Site? Why not Nevada, or some other desert state with even more wide-open spaces? Why did a supposed extraterrestrial craft crash at Roswell? Trevor Bruttenholm believes this state forms a nexus of paranormal energies, and when the US military insisted on relocating me from England so I could be studied at Roswell, he was only too happy to accompany me. During the time we lived here, he immersed himself in the myths and legends of New Mexico and took me along on frequent investigatory trips.

One of my first memories was of our visit to the Santuario de Chimayo which was nestled in a secluded valley in the Sangre de Christo foothills. Like the pilgrims who had trekked there over the centuries, predominantly the sick and enfeebled, we went to experience the mysterious healing powers of its magical soil. Bruttenholm was convinced it cured his arthritis. All it did to me was make me itch.

I had so many other stories and experiences during that early period in my life perhaps it was no surprise I decided to follow my adoptive father's line of work. We spent nights in the ancient mission of Isleta Pueblo, hoping to see the restless corpse of Father Padilla and his cottonwood coffin rise from beneath the altar, as he had done so on numerous occasions over the past two hundred years (he didn't). We spent days camping on low mountain slopes, sitting up through the night in case a fireball-riding bruja passed by overhead (we never saw a witch, but I saw my first shooting star).

New Mexico was like the Navajo rug Bruttenholm bought as a gift for me before we left Roswell for the East coast and the BPRD headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. It was a simple rug, just two rows of white, rectangular clouds outlined in black against a light blue background. But the rug had a deliberate line woven through its lower border, a 'spirit line' worked into the weave in case a soul became trapped during the weaving and needed a way out. New Mexico itself seemed like a spirit line, a gateway between realms, and some of what sought freedom here was of a malevolent stripe. Then there are those forces which are a reflection of the soul of the beholder, neither good nor evil, merely a mirror to our needs. She was one of them. The one known as La Llorona, The Weeping Woman.

A particular manifestation of New Mexico and its Hispanic heritage, La Llorona's story had many variations concerning her origins and nature, but I knew she was more than a myth. I knew because I met her.

Back in early '47, a few months before the Roswell crash and our departure for the lush New England green of Connecticut, Bruttenholm had taken me to Santa Fe where he was visiting Fray Angelico Chavez, the renowned historian and restorer of ancient churches. Fray Angelico had been researching the recorded appearances of Fray Padilla, and he invited Trevor to read the first draft of the paper he was preparing.

Although I had only been on the earthly plane for a couple of years, I had already reached adolescence and was suffering the restlessness of youth. So, as the day waned and the magical spring twilight bathed the Sangre de Christo range ruby red, and as Bruttenholm and Fray Chavez continued their impassioned discussion, I walked out into the streets of Santa Fe.

Since I was still wary of the reactions of others to my unusual appearance, I walked away from the bustling plazas, sticking to narrow side streets lined with sleepy adobe homes squatting behind hand-carved wooden gates, half-hidden by gnarled cottonwoods or softly hued hollyhocks, and made my way down to the banks of the Santa Fe River. It was peaceful there and calmed my troubled thoughts as I followed the water eastwards.

Maybe it was the onset of adolescence and the need to understand who and what I was. Or perhaps it was the natural questioning of an orphan concerning his parentage, but for weeks I had lain awake at night tossing and turning, wondering and wanting answers to an enigma. The enigma of myself. Seeing the other children who lived on the Roswell base play ball with their fathers, go shopping with their mothers, made my heart heavy. Trevor Bruttenholm was a kind, compassionate, and thoughtful mentor, as fine a father figure as a Hellboy could have. Yet when sleep would not come, I would lie in my room wondering what it must feel like to lose one's self in a mother's embrace or rage at my inability to remember where I came from before a magical rite summoned me to this world.

Did I have a mother? Did she mourn for the loss of her son?

These thoughts vexed me daily, but that evening as I walked the river bank the preternatural calm of Santa Fe soothed my soul and my mind turned towards more intellectual ideas. Albert Einstein had visited Roswell with Oppenheimer the week before and spent hours with me explaining his theory of relativity. Trevor was intent on providing me with the best educational opportunities, and who better to help explain physics than Einstein? I savored the time we spent together, even though the deluge of knowledge he unleashed threatened to sweep me away. So it was with a head full of equations and formulae, I wandered into the dark, barely aware of the distance I had traveled or the fact that night had almost completely descended in its diamond-studded velvet glory.

At first I thought the sound was that of an animal. But as I listened more carefully I realized it was a human sound, a sorrow-filled lament. Then, maybe two hundred yards ahead, I saw a figure standing on the bank where the river curved. It was a woman clad in a long gray dress, her head and shoulders cocooned in a black woolen shawl.

The wail ripped from her lips with a terrible strength, a power born of great emotional pain, and I realized she was about to fling herself into the water.

Again she cried out:
"Ayyyy, mis hijoooosss!!"

I didn't understand what she was screaming, but her intentions were clear.

I started to run as she threw herself into the river, shedding my long coat like a second skin as I dove after her. The chilly waters made me gasp, shocking me like an unexpected slap to the face, but I doubled my efforts as I saw her head disappear beneath the surface. It was instinct, pure and simple. I had no time to think, only moments to act. The undercurrent was surprisingly strong considering the seemingly slow momentum of the surface, and at the bend I saw sudden turbulence as the now speeding water rushed over jagged rocks. If I couldn't reach her in time, she'd surely be smashed to a pulp against their sharp peaks.

An Air Force sergeant at Roswell had taught me how to swim, and I put every ounce of strength into a fast crawl which would have made him proud. And not a moment too soon: I grabbed her hand as she went under a third time, trying to halt my forward momentum in the midst of frothy whitecaps a dozen feet or so from the bend. Somehow I managed to pull her now-limp body towards mine, but I couldn't fight the flow. Turning, cradling her against my chest, I managed to spin around so my broad back hit the first partially submerged boulder. The impact felt like a mule kick. And then we were moving again, leaves in a hurricane, tossed from one boulder to the next.

I don't remember seeing the low-lying branch or grabbing it. Suddenly we were in stasis, surrounded, pummelled by the river's wild waters, but not moving, not at its mercy. Not completely, at least. The fact the branch didn't break, and, amazingly, that I was able to pull us out and up the bank one-handed well, I

guess those Charles Atlas exercises Trevor encouraged me to do on a daily basis paid off. I saved us through dynamic tension.

Chest heaving, lungs aching, I lay on my back on the muddy bank beneath our benefactor, the tree. She lay beside me, conscious now, sobbing softly. In English this time.

"My children. My children ... "

Placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder, I stood, swaying slightly with adrenaline-driven vertigo, my equilibrium still spinning like a gyroscope after the dervish dance of the rushing waters.

"It's okay," I mumbled. "It's going to be all right.

"I'll get my coat. Need to keep you warm."

Stumbling through the scrub, my mind still a tilt-a-whirl, I don't remember hearing the sudden silence as her sobbing stopped. Scooping up my full-length tan duster, I turned towards her and She was gone.

Vanished.

Into thin air.

Later, seated around a roaring open fire in the rectory of Loretto Chapel, Fray Angelico explained I had been blessed by encountering La Llorona, and that my selfless act would bring good fortune.

"La Llorona is ancient; her true origins go back, way back before the time we have recorded. She was a part of this landscape long before the Spanish came. She even predates the indigenous Anasazi peoples."

"I've heard tell

"

Fray Angelico waved a hand to silence Trevor. "Listen. And learn. If not for your own sake, then for Hellboy's

for this special child has been blessed.

"She is not always so forgiving. Nor is she so vulnerable to the eyes of others. One might hear her sorrow.

One might see her struggle with her pain. But to see her in such naked despair ... That is highly unusual."

Felicia, Fray Angelico's housekeeper, brought me a mug of steaming hot chocolate. Its warmth revived my shivering senses, and I listened intently to the legend of La Llorona.

"There once was a girl," the priest began, "who was said to be very beautiful. Because of her looks, people didn't treat her like others. And the more beautiful she became as she blossomed into womanhood, the more people shunned her. Even her own family felt ashamed for not being able to provide for such a beauty.

"One day a stranger came to the pueblo. He was well dressed, obviously a man of wealth. Generous, too. And his largess made him very popular with the locals.

"The stranger soon grew tired of the pueblo and was preparing to move on when he laid eyes on the beautiful woman, and he was entranced. How did such a woman come to be here in a poor pueblo surrounded by nothing more than cacti and dust? He had never seen such fine elegance and decided to stay, to court this ravishing woman. When he proposed marriage, her family encouraged her to say
yes,
for this fine man could provide for her, give her the future they believed their beautiful daughter deserved.