Hellboy: Odd Jobs (28 page)

"Fucker!"

Apparently Bigfoot spoke English.

He lunged at me. I threw an overhand punch with my stone right hand that hit him full in the chest and dropped him in his tracks. I was about to press my advantage when the mechanical sound came again and dust and leaves rose all around me. In the cup-sized clearing on the far side of the hill, a helicopter sat down quietly. Three men sprinted out of the woods, unloaded some crates, and melted back into the blackness of the woods as the chopper lifted, hovered a moment, then disappeared into the night as well.

I turned back to the fake Bigfoot as he rose to his feet. I took a step toward him and froze when I heard a shell get racked into a shotgun. Turning, I found myself face to face with Ranger Holliman and his twelve gauge. I kicked myself for not noticing the aroma of his cheap cologne.

"You damn freak. I knew you'd screw up this deal."

I tried to appear nonchalant. "What's in the crates, Ranger? Your monthly Brut delivery?"

Holliman grinned. "No harm tellin' you since you'll be dead in a minute. It's chemicals. Me and some of the local farmers found out that there was a lot more money in Ice than there is in corn."

Ice, I knew, was the newest of the designer drugs. It behaved like Ecstasy but kicked like a mule. In short, it made crack look like Mountain Dew. "So," I said, "you talked them into going into the recreational-drug business."

Holliman shrugged. "Gotta keep the wolf from the door. Even a red-skinned freak like you oughtta understand that."

He was beginning to piss me off again.

Bigfoot lifted my pistol and stepped over by Holliman. I had no chance to jump both of them, and if I went for one, the other would get me. This felt a lot like trouble. I was just figuring out which one of them I was going to take with me when I noticed a small movement in the bushes behind them.

Stephanie

shit!

She hadn't had sense enough to stay in the hole and get enough pictures to convict these assholes, and now she was probably going to die with me.

I took a deep breath, probably my last one, and prepared to jump. Then the bushes parted and a dark shape half a foot taller than the ersatz Bigfoot stepped into view. I gulped and leapt toward Holliman as the shape grabbed Bigfoot by the neck.

The ranger's gun exploded, the bright light nearly blinding me as the buckshot whizzed past my ear. I grabbed the barrel in my stone hand and yanked it from Holliman's grasp. In the next instant it became the club I used to pummel him to the ground.

I heard the fake Bigfoot scream as the shape lifted him and threw him like a toy. He crashed into the trunk of a tree with a sickening crunch, and then all was quiet. I looked up, and under the moonlight, I found myself face to face with a real Bigfoot. A nearly eight-foot-tall beast whose face was far more animal than human.

Yet the eyes held something I couldn't quite put my finger on. His gaze held me in an understanding that I've seen on the faces of only a scant few humans.

For a moment there, we understood the beast in each of us.

We both turned when we heard a noise and found Stephanie struggling up the hill.

"I got it all on film," she said. "We're gonna be rich. This is the scoop of a lifetime."

"I'd rather you didn't do that," a female voice behind me said.

I whirled around to see a strong-boned woman of around thirty, dressed in animal skins, holding a baby. Her dark hair shone in the moonlight.

Stephanie turned too, her mouth agape.

"You're Pam Cervantes, aren't you?" I asked. She looked so much like Anastasia Bransfield that I had to will myself not to embrace her.

She nodded.

Stephanie stepped forward and peeked at the baby, part Bigfoot, part human.

"It's a boy," Pam said.

Grinning, Stephanie said, "He's beautiful."

Pam looked hard at the reporter. "He won't be if you show the pictures of his father to the world."

"Pam!" Stephanie said. "Do you realize what a story like this could mean?"

"Sure

'I Had Bigfoot's Baby!' Just another
Inquisitor
story."

"Not this time," Stephanie said, holding up her camera. "Not with real proof!"

I took the camera from her. Stephanie watched wide eyed as I smashed it with my stone hand. "You don't have to worry about us, Pam

your family is safe."

Bigfoot, the real one, stepped forward and wrapped me in an awkward embrace. Then he released me, held out a hand to his wife, and the family disappeared into the woods.

"Shit," Stephanie said. "There goes my Pulitzer."

I grinned. "You've still got a good story about the drug-running park ranger."

"Yeah, but no art."

The camera lay in pieces at my feet. "Sorry."

She shrugged. "Still a good story, I guess."

"Look at the bright side," I said. "You can go tell Walker he's not nuts."

Stephanie laughed. "Just because there really is a Bigfoot doesn't mean Walker's not nuts."

Though his meeting with the tree had taken the fight out of him, the fake Bigfoot seemed to be all right.

Holliman already had a nasty lump on his face from the shotgun stock, but he too would live. I handcuffed them together and marched them to our waiting car.

I returned to the BPRD office with a copy of the latest
National Inquisitor.
The headline read, "Bigfoot Deals Dope, Busted by Inquisitor Reporter." Turned out Stephanie had used more than one of Walker's cameras and had some pictures of the fake Bigfoot both with his suit and without. There were no pictures of the real thing, and she went out of her way to say that Bigfoot was a hoax, and that most scientists doubted the existence of such a creature.

Though I didn't much like the story, I knew she had a job to do too, and that she had done her best to protect the family that still lives somewhere deep within Palisades State Park.

Abe saw me looking at the
Inquisitor.
"You reading that trash again?"

I shrugged.

"Didn't you learn anything on your wild-goose chase to Iowa?"

I thought about that a moment and tossed the paper into the garbage. "I learned," I said, "that there are lots more things in life more important than Bigfoot."

Abe stroked his chin. "Like what?"

I didn't bat an eye. "Pizza. And it's your turn to buy."

I wish to acknowledge Matthew Clemens for his contribution to this story.

The Nuckelavee

Christopher Golden & Mike Mignola

The old man had a shuddery way about him, a fidgety, near-to-tears aspect to every glance and gesture that said he'd jump at every shadow, if only he had the strength. If only he weren't so damned old. But his eyes weren't old. His eyes were wild with terror.

It was a cold, clear evening in the north of Scotland, and the sky was striped with colors, from a bruised blue on one horizon to the pink of sorrow or humiliation on the other. The rolling hills that surrounded the crumbling stone estate had no name save for that of the family which had resided there for more than five hundred years: MacCrimmon.

"That's it, then. Just as I said. It's dry as kindling, now, and ne'er will run again," said the old man, whose name was Andrew MacCrimmon.

He was the last of them.

MacCrimmon's wild eyes darted about like those of a skittish horse, as though he waited for some shade to steal upon him. Night had not quite fallen, and already, it seemed the man might die of fright, heart stilled in his chest so as not to be heard by whatever he feared might be hunting him.

Whatever it was, it had to be horrible, for the old man stood on the slope of the hill beside a creature whose countenance would give a hardened killer a week of restless nights and ugly dreams. Hellboy carried himself like a man, but his hooves and tail, his sawed-off horn-stumps, and his sheer size spoke another truth.

There were those who thought him a devil. But Andrew MacCrimmon would have sought help of the devil himself if he thought it would have done him any good.

"You'll stay, then, won't you?" the old man asked. "You must."

Hellboy grunted. He stared at the dry river bed, gazing along its path in both directions. It didn't make any sense at all to him, but he hadn't been there more than fifteen minutes. Just a short way up the bank of the dry river was a small stone building. When the water had still run through there, it would have stood half in, half out of the river.

"What's that?" Hellboy started off toward the stone structure.

"Ye don't understand," the old man whimpered. "Ye've got to help me. I was given to understand that ye do that sort of thing."

As he approached the small building, Hellboy narrowed his eyes. The thing was ancient. Older, even, than the MacCrimmon place, which stood on the hill behind them. The place couldn't be called a castle. Too small for that. But it was too big to be just a house, and too dilapidated to be called a mansion.

But this other thing ...

"What is this?" he asked again.

"It's as old as the family," the old man told him. "Been there from the start. My grandfather told me he thought it was the reason the MacCrimmons settled here."

Hellboy studied the structure. The ancient stone was plain, but overgrown with ivy save for where the water would have washed across it before the river had gone dry. Centuries of water erosion had smoothed the stone, but Hellboy could still make out the faintest impression of carving. Once upon a time, there had been something drawn or written on that stone surface, but it was gone now.

Curiously, he clumped down into the dry river bed and around the other side of the edifice. His hooves sank in the still damp soil. There was something else on the river side of the building. Set into the stone, there was what appeared to be a door.

"How do you get in there?" he asked.

The old man whimpered.

There were no handles of any kind, nor any edges upon which he might get a significant grip. Still, Hellboy tried to open the door, to no avail.

"Please, sir, ye must listen to me," MacCrimmon begged.

Hellboy paused to regard him. The man's long hair and thick, bristly beard were white, and his face was deeply lined. He might have been a hermit, a squatter on this land, rather than its lord. Of course, 'lord' was a dubious title when it referred to the crumbling family home, and a clan which no longer existed.

"Go on."

"The river was here before us, but the legend around the doom of Clan MacCrimmon was born right here on this hill. When the river goes dry, the legend says, it'll mean the end of Clan MacCrimmon. I've no children, ye see. I'm the last of the clan. Now that the river is dry, death will be coming for me.

"I knew it right off," the old man said, becoming more and more agitated. "Took three days for the river to run dry. Three days, you understand?"

Hellboy grunted. "Not really."

It was then that he noticed that the river wasn't completely dry. A tiny trickle of water ran past the door, past the building. It wasn't more than three inches wide, and barely deep enough to dampen the earth, but it was there. Hellboy reached down to put his finger into the water, and MacCrimmon cried out as if in pain.

"No, you mustn't! It's the doom of the MacCrimmons, don't you see? When the water stops running, the doom of my clan will be released."

"That's ... interesting." With a shrug, Hellboy stepped up onto the slope again. "So what do you expect me to do?" he asked, massively confused by the old man's babbling. "Some legend says you're gonna die, I don't know how I'm supposed to deal with that."

The old man clutched at Hellboy's arm with both hands, eyes flicking back and forth in that disturbing, desperate twitch.

"You'll stay for dinner," he said, but it wasn't really a question. "You'll stay, and you'll see."

It was a very long drive back to anywhere Hellboy might stay that he wouldn't be shot at by local farmers or constabulary, so when Andrew MacCrimmon urged him on, he trekked up the hill to the crumbling manse alongside the old man. It was a gloomy place, a testament to entropy, with barely a whisper of the grandeur it must once have had.

Once they had entered, Hellboy saw that he had not been entirely correct about its origins based on his initial observations. While the manse itself was no more than three hundred years old, it was built around an older structure, a cruder, more fundamental tower or battlement, that must once have served as home and fortress for whomever had built it.

MacCrimmon Keep, someone at the BPRD had called it. Hellboy hadn't understood before, but now he saw it. This was the keep, and the rest of the place had been built up around it.

When they had settled inside, the old man brought out cold pork roast and slightly stale bread. There was haggis as well, but it looked like it might have gone over somewhat. Not that Hellboy was the world's greatest expert on haggis, but there was a greenish tint to it that made him even less likely to eat it than if he'd been trapped for a week on Everest with nothing to gnaw on but coffee grounds and it was a choice between haggis or his fellow climbers

which was pretty much the only way he would've eaten haggis even if it were fresh.

"Sorry I don't have more to offer," MacCrimmon muttered, a mouthful of questionable haggis visible between what was left of his teeth as he spoke. "The cook and t'other servants left three days ago, when the river started to slow. They
know,
y'see. They know."

When the meal was done, MacCrimmon seemed twitchier than ever. The manse was filled with sounds, as every old building is

a sign of age like the rings in a tree stump. The old man must have been familiar with most of those sounds, but now they frightened him, each and every one. He seemed to draw into himself, collapsing down upon his own body, becoming smaller. Decaying already, perhaps, at the thought of death's imminent arrival. Or imagined arrival.

"Cigar?" he asked suddenly, as if it were an accusation.

Hellboy flinched, startled. "Sure."

MacCrimmon led him to the library, which was larger than the enormous dining room they'd just left. Two walls were lined floor to ceiling with old, desiccated books, but Hellboy's eyes were drawn immediately to the other walls. To the paintings there, above and around the fireplace where the old man now built a roaring