Hellboy: Odd Jobs (19 page)

"Nothing much. I thought I might have spotted our target, but it turned out just to be a garden-variety pedophile."

"
That's
a cheery thought."

"Do you think the newspaper coverage might have scared it off?"

Hellboy shrugged, even though she was not there to see it. "That's assuming it has the brains necessary to read the papers, much less the pocket change to buy them. You know the drill, Liz. We stay put until Bruttenholm says otherwise. There's too much at stake here."

"You're right, Hellboy. Still, I can't help feeling we're spinning our wheels here."

"We'll see. The day's not through yet. Over and out." After another hour, however, Hellboy was beginning to agree with Liz about the stakeout being a total bust.

There was a sudden throbbing just above his brow. Hellboy sat up straight, every sense razor sharp. He always got phantom pain from his horns when there was a paranormal being in the area.

At first he mistook it for one of the parents, but there was something about the way it moved that caught his attention. It walked with a swift dedication to purpose, like an underwater welder who knows he only has a certain amount of time before his air runs out, stranding him in a hostile environment. It was dressed in loose-fitting, flowing garments, with a scarf over its head, obscuring its features from the casual observer. It was too willowy to be a man, but too tall to be a woman. It ignored the other children crawling over the playground equipment like ants on a piece of candy and headed towards a pair of tow-headed children who were off by themselves, playing with a toy ball.

The stranger called out to the children, who stopped what they were doing to look up at its hidden face. The little boy, the older of the two, immediately smiled and dropped the ball.

Hellboy spoke hurriedly into the transmitter as he got to his feet, his left hand going instinctively to where he kept his gun.

"Professor! Liz! Come in! I see it! It's here!
"

"Hellboy!
" Bruttenholm's ancient voice crackled in his ear. "What is it?!? What are we dealing with?"

"Tell Cartier he wins the office pool," Hellboy growled back. "We got ourselves a fairy."

"What sub-species?"

"I can't tell from here. It's zeroed in on a couple of kids."

"Can you shoot it?"

His dislike of supernatural creatures was so strong, he was tempted to go ahead and fire, but at the last minute his Bureau training took over. "I can't

there are too many civilians in the area

mostly kids."

The mother of one, if not both, of the children, left her seat on a nearby bench and hurried forward, grabbing the stranger's sleeve. The creature turned towards the woman, removing its veil to momentarily reveal an androgynous face with high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, and smooth skin. Its radiant, sexless beauty was so pure it transfixed and disarmed instantly, like the face of a saint. However, the feral hunger burning in its golden eyes was far from beatific.

The woman's face went blank and her hand fell away from the stranger's sleeve and hung at her side as if dead. Without saying a word, she turned around and resumed her seat on the bench, staring off into space, caught deep within the same glamour that had once ensnared Merlin, long centuries before.

As the creature moved to replace its veil, Hellboy glimpsed gossamer-fine hair the color of a robin's egg. His eyes widened. The fairy turned its hypnotic gaze back on the kids and took their tiny hands in its own and

began to walk from the playground, back in the direction of Columbus Circle. The children obediently followed their abductor without a cry or whimper.

"Crap," he groaned.

"What? What's going on?" Bruttenholm demanded testily. "Hellboy talk to me!"

"It's a Cailleach Bheur."

"That's what I was afraid of," the old man replied. "Try to keep it there. We're on our way."

"Too late, Prof. It's made the grab and it's impossible for me to engage it not under these circumstances.

I'm going to try and follow it."

"Follow it

?!?" Bruttenholm blustered.

"It's going to ground, Prof

if I track it, maybe I can find the others."

There was a moment of silence on the Professor's end, then the old man's voice came back over the receiver, sounding far older than even Hellboy knew him to be. "Very well, son go ahead and follow it. Don't forget

to turn on your homing beacon."

"Thanks for the reminder, Prof," he replied. "I'm already halfway across Columbus Circle."

Hellboy's big worry was that the fairy would hail a cab and disappear into the city. That concern disappeared when the creature led its prey down into the subway, only to be replaced by a new fear of losing them on the crush of the platform. Hellboy clattered after it, cursing under his breath as he wedged his sizable bulk through the turnstiles. He spotted his quarry standing on the downtown side and was secretly relieved to see that the little boy and girl, outside of being extremely quiet and docile, seemed otherwise unharmed.

Hellboy carefully jockeyed himself in the crowd so the creature would not accidentally catch his scent. The last thing he needed was it getting wind of him and hurting the kids. However, the fairy seemed to be too preoccupied with keeping both children under its control while maintaining its own semblance of humanity to pay much attention to anything else.

As Hellboy surreptitiously followed the fairy onto the train, he couldn't help but marvel at how well its race had adapted to the modern world. He wondered how many of the faces on milk cartons were the direct responsibility of creatures like the one he was following. After all, fairies had been abducting mortal children for centuries

long before the gray UFOnauts ever thought of making the scene. Why should they stop now?

The problem with fairy infestations was that modern humans didn't believe in them anymore, which gave the more vicious variants room to run wild. As far as the average human was concerned, fairies were thumb-sized little girls in tutus with butterfly wings, quaint little figments of the imagination best suited for children's books and animated films and nothing else.

Of course, 'fairy' was something of a misnomer. There were numerous species and subspecies, just as there were with such catch-all descriptions as 'bird', 'primate', and 'fish'. All were, at best, tricky and unpredictable, and many were genuinely baleful creatures. They came in various shapes and sizes, and had apparently existed alongside mankind since the most ancient of days, thanks largely to their gift of 'hiding in plain sight'

via a supernatural ability to cloud the minds of humans.

The fairy race ranged from such creatures as the strikingly beautiful Seelies to the gnarled Kobolds, to the shapeless horror of the Brollachan. In this case, he was faced with a Cailleach Bheur, one of the most dangerous and unpleasant members of the whole damned family.

In ancient Scotland, before the Christian religion took hold, they were one of the most feared breeds of fairy folk. Back then, they had been known as Blue Hags, infamous for their cruelty and their rapaciousness. They were especially dangerous to travelers and children sent to collect firewood or fetch water from the highland streams. As time passed, and civilization grew, it became harder and harder for them to rely on such direct methods of predation. They were forced to become more daring and inventive if they wished to remain fed.

So they used their power to cloud the minds of men

to cast glamours, or spells

to make themselves

more attractive to their prey. And so the fearsome Blue Hags were replaced, in time, by the beautiful Blue Fairies.

And humans, being what they are, romanticized this history of systematic predation by writing ballads and lays and all manner of fanciful crap about fairylands and fairy brides and changelings. All of which was complete and utter bullshit.
Tarn Lin, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Le Morte d'Arthur, The Faerie Queene,
Peter Pan, The Pied Piper of Hamlin
... all of it a total crock. Those lured away by the fairies didn't go to a world under the hill where it was always summer and no one aged and they danced and fiddled all night long.

They went directly into the fairy's belly, if they were lucky. If they were unlucky, they were used as incubators. Hellboy hated dealing with fairies. They were invariably tricky bastards, and deceptively hard to kill, given their build.

The Cailleach got off the train at the last stop before Brooklyn. Hellboy wasn't surprised it had chosen to make its lair in the East Village. Walking amongst the sullen, black-garbed, heavily pierced and tattooed denizens of Avenue A, the Cailleach and its victims were the picture of normalcy. Even Hellboy didn't rate a raised eyebrow past Avenue B.

The fairy was headed toward the deepest reaches of Alphabet City, where the real-estate developers had yet to lay claim to the dilapidated tenements and chase the remaining crack-heads and junkies from the shadows.

In this blighted neighborhood, isolated from the financial rejuvenation that brought sushi bars and trendy boutiques to the northern end of Houston Avenue, there were still shooting galleries and rats the size of small dogs brazenly feeding from overflowing garbage pails. Here, the streets were still mean, the shadows still dark. It was a perfect location for the likes of the Cailleach Bheur to tend to its grisly business unmolested.

Hellboy hung back by a half block, watching the Cailleach as it entered a dilapidated tenement with boarded-over windows and a crumbling facade heavily marked with graffiti tags and human urine. He increased his pace, hooves clattering loudly on the pavement. He couldn't wait for the others to join him. He had to move in now, or it would have all been for nothing.

The interior of the building was gutted, resembling a squalid four-story atrium, with criss-crossing wooden beams overhead. What was left of the first floor groaned under his weight as Hellboy tested it with his hooves. Even with his keen, dark-adapted eyesight, the gloom inside the abandoned building was too heavy for him to see what might be lurking in its shadows.

Grumbling under his breath, he removed his Bureau-issue flashlight from one of his duster's inner pockets and played the beam along one of the rafters directly overhead. They were swaddled in some kind of blue-white webbing, below which was a pendulous nest, similar to those created by weaver birds, made from the same substance. Hellboy cast the beam farther and was rewarded by the sight of a large cluster of silken sacs plastered to the far wall. He didn't have to count to know there were twelve of them.

A movement caught the corner of his eye. Instinctively, he moved the beam towards it. There was a man splayed across the wall, his arms and legs spread akimbo, as if making snow angels in mid-air, his wrists and ankles held in place by the webbing that composed the Cailleach's nest and pantry sacs. Judging from the tattered remains of the suit hanging from his wasted frame, he was some hapless commuter the Cailleach had seduced from the trodden path

a modern-day Tarn Lin lured into Never-Never Land by la Belle Dame Sans Merci.

The man twitched convulsively a second time. Hellboy moved closer.

"Hey, buddy

hold on

the cavalry's arrived," he whispered gruffly.

The commuter's head rolled back on his shoulders. His flesh was gray and covered in sores, his eyes sunken into their orbits. Save for a grotesquely distended belly, he looked more like a scarecrow than a human being.

A pained, gargling sound was all that came from the dying man's throat. Whatever had turned him from commuter to incubator had taken his tongue.

With a roar of anger and disgust, Hellboy reached into his coat and withdrew one of the flares he kept for emergencies and struck it against the crumbling brick wall. A flame as red and baleful as those of the lakes of his birthplace leapt forth, giving light to the darkness, while at the same time creating contorted shadows.

"That's it! I'm through pussyfooting around, you bargain-basement maleficent!" he bellowed, his throat sacs bulging like those of a bull ape. "
I
know you're here and
you
know I'm here! So show yourself!"