Hellboy: Odd Jobs (30 page)

He could hear Andrew MacCrimmon screaming, down the hill, where the riverbed was now completely dry.

Hooves pounding the grass, Hellboy gave chase. Where the river had run, he saw hoof prints from the beast in the soft, damp earth. As he passed the structure that stood on the river's edge, he saw that the stone door he had found impossible to open now hung wide. Seconds after he crossed the dry riverbed, he heard a kind of explosion, and turned to see that even that stone structure had been part of the chain reaction. It was nothing but rubble now.

The doom of the MacCrimmons had come, all right.

There came another scream. Hellboy glanced up the opposite hill and saw the beast disappearing over its crest, looking like nothing more than a large horse bearing two riders. But the way its raw, skinless form glistened wetly in the moonlight ... it was no horse.

When he reached the top of the hill, however, neither beast nor man were anywhere in sight. Hellboy crouched in the spot he had last seen them, and found a trail. It was relatively easy to track; the beast was so heavy that its hooves left prints in the hardest, driest ground.

Hellboy followed.

Hours passed, and he made his way across farms and estates, through groves and over hills, and finally he came to a town on the north coast, the tang of the ocean in the air, the sound of the tides carrying through the streets. It was after midnight, and most of the residents had long since retired for the evening. In the midst of the town, on a paved road, he lost the trail. Hopelessly, he looked around for someone who might have seen something. After a minute or two, he spotted a portly man slumped in a heavy, old chair on the porch of what appeared to be some kind of mercantile.

"Hey, wake up," Hellboy said, nudging the portly man with the weight of his stone hand.

The man snorted, blinked his eyes open, and let out a yell of surprise and fear. The odor of whiskey came off him in waves.

"Quiet," Hellboy snapped. "I'm just passing through."

"Thank the Lord for that," the man said in a frightened whisper.

"You see anything strange go through here?"

The man stared at him as if he were insane.

"Anything
worse
?" Hellboy elaborated.

"Depends on your definition of strange, I suppose," the man said. "Two men came through, not long ago. Two men riding the same horse. Only one of them wasn't riding. He was the horse. That's pretty strange."

"You see where it went?" Hellboy demanded.

"Down to the rocks," the man replied. "Down to the sea. And that old one screaming all the way. Weren't a surprise, though. I'd scream too, that horse, and the whole thing smelling like a fisherman's toilet."

His voice trailed off and he moaned a bit, and fell back to sleep, or into unconsciousness. The whiskey had claimed him again.

Hellboy scratched his chin and looked along the paved road to the rocks and the ocean beyond. He could heard the waves crashing, and he started to walk toward them. At the end of the road, he stopped where the rocks began. There was a cough off to his left, and he turned to see an old woman standing on the front stoop of her home in a robe that was insufficient for the chill ocean breeze.

"It was a Nuckelavee," she told him.

Hellboy looked at her oddly, but she didn't even turn her face to him. She just stared out at the ocean.

"When I was but a wee girl in the Hebrides, my father told me a story. He were coming home late one night, and a Nuckelavee come up out of the ocean and chased him. He only escaped by jumping over a little stream of fresh water. The monster roared and spit and with one long arm snatched off me father's hat, but he got away clean save for a pair of claw marks to show off to prove the truth of it."

Now she looked straight at Hellboy for the first time.

"He was luckier than that old man tonight. That's certain."

Hellboy nodded and looked out across the waves again. He could see a dark hump in the distance, out on the ocean.

"What's that?"

The old woman hesitated. At length, she spoke, her voice low and haunted. " 'Tis the Isle of Malleen. But don't ye think about goin' out there. It's not a place fit for man, nor e'en a thing such as yourself. There's only evil out there, dark and cruel. If that's where the Nuckelavee was headed, no wonder the old man were screaming so."

Hellboy considered her words, staring at the island in the distance.

"I guess maybe he deserved it," he said after a bit. "I'm starting to wonder if maybe all it did was take that old man home. And I think there'll be hell to pay when he gets there."

The wind shifted, then, and for a moment, it seemed as though he could hear a distant scream, high and shrill and inhuman. But then the waves crashed down again on the rocks, and it was gone.

A Night at the Beach

Matthew J. Costello

I had been to Coney Island twice

and I thought I'd never have to visit it again. The first time? 1952.

Golden years in the good old USA, and Coney was America's beach. Miles and miles of relatively pristine beach front, an endless boardwalk, and the post-war boomers all baking into lobsters. Not that red isn't a nice color ... Kinda made me feel okay.

And why was I there? Oh, nothing too dramatic. One person on the board of the Bureau had a house in nearby Brighton. I probably didn't know it at the time, but I was still in the process of being checked out.

Everyone searching for an answer to the big question ... who was I?

Not that we ever answered the question. We have just all agreed to move ... past it.

And my second visit? 1975. And Coney was no longer anyone's playground. The big amusement parks like Steeplechase were long gone. Now the empty, haunted rides sat dark while the Atlantic slurped at the nearby coast. When I went, Coney looked like Berlin circa 1946. I actually had to step over a dead dog on the sidewalk wondering ... how long before someone comes and removes it? Or maybe they wouldn't? Maybe the dog would just lie there until it withered away, until it was just a pile of canine bones on the cracked pavement.

That time I had gone to Coney to talk to someone who had links to a Santeria cult in Manhattan that had turned, as Darth might say, toward the dark side. Alphabet City was turning into death world, and there was a former member in Coney who might help.

Or could have. I found him ... on his wall, pinned like one of the stuffed prizes from the boardwalk. I'm pretty sure he wasn't completely dead by the time the last giant four-inch nails had been hammered through him and onto the cracked plaster wall.

But he sure was dead by the time I got there.

Made stopping the cult that much harder.

But stop it I did. It's in the Bureau's files. Under 'Ritual Murder' ... or maybe 'Demon-Directed Serial Killing'.

Not sure ... they've changed filing methods so often. Not my job, as they say.

And I thought I'd never revisit Coney Island again. Place left a multiple of bad tastes in my mouth.

But I was wrong.

I was due at least one more ride on the big Coney coaster.

It started with a grim-faced Abraham Sapien calling me into a small meeting room at the bureau. Now 'grim faced' is nothing new for Abe. But even for him, he looked unusually
concerned.

"Sit down," he told me.

"I'm fine standing," I said. I've broken enough chairs in the joint to opt to stand unless I was mighty sure of my perch.

But Abe sat and opened up a manila folder ... from which all these clippings slid out.

"Know about these?" he said.

I looked at the clippings, most from the
Daily News.
A few disappearances, kids, a teenage girl, a postal worker who didn't come home. But then there were two stories of ... drownings. People found with their clothes on who drowned. I checked the locations ... Manhattan Beach, Brighton Beach, Sheepshead Bay, Coney Island.

The Brooklyn Riviera.

"Yeah, so ... ?" I said.

"That's not all, Hellboy. These are what the paper's got. Here's the other stuff ... "

And then he dumped ... the other stuff. Police reports, photos, audio tapes ... I only had to skim the material to see what was missing from the
Daily News'
recounting.

The drowning victims had strange lacerations all over their bodies as though they had been in the cage with a pack of starving wolves. The pictures

even for me

were hard to look at.

The police reports on the missing people had eyewitnesses saying how they heard sounds by the shore, people running, screaming, the sound of splashing water.

In five minutes I could see two things: That all the stories were probably linked. That was a no-brainer. But another element also emerged. Something mighty strange had happened to these people. Strange and

horrible.

"The drownings," I said looking at the pictures, " ... they're people who tried to ... escape from ... whatever?"

"Yes. Except we don't know anything about the 'whatever'."

I looked at the photos again. One of the bodies was found within sight of the Cyclone roller-coaster. The police photographer went for an art shot. Here's the lacerated body, and here's the decayed amusement park.

I put the evidence down.

"You have your work cut out for you, Abe." He looked up. His eyes narrowed. "I mean, it's obvious that you should take the lead on this. With the water tie-in and everything. Your show all the way. I'll be there for back-up, of course. But

"

He held up a hand.

"No. I knew you'd think that. Maybe there's a water connection. Seems obvious, I know. But

"

Abe hesitated. There was something going on here that he didn't tell me.

He looked back up at me. "I don't know how to tell you this, Hellboy. It's not easy to admit."

The air in the room felt close, claustrophobic

as if we were underwater.

"Partly it's intuition. Partly it's making a few conceptual leaps from these photos. But this has something to do with the sea, something in the ocean that's growing in power, feeding off these people. If I go ... I'll meet them in their world. Which is precisely what they want. You

on the other hand

"

I laughed. If there's one thing I knew about Abraham it was that he didn't scare easily. So I believed what he was saying ... that this possible water-related investigation might be better done by me.

"Coney Island," I said.

Abe nodded. "I'll do back-up, and I have a few leads for you to follow. And I've asked Kate to help."

I nodded. I wondered if Dr. Kate Corrigan was still annoyed with me. When we were in the Appalachians my over-eagerness triggered a whole room full of folk texts to explode into flames. That the books were bound in skin didn't deter her academic's interest in their documentation of three centuries of rural cannibalism.

"She's up for it?"

"Yes, as long as you think a nanosecond before blowing anything up."

"Deal. And the lead?"

"Just this one ... "

Abe handed me a slip of paper.

I rolled my eyes. "You gotta be kidding me ... "

But he wasn't.

Kate Corrigan had an office on the campus of New York University though I had never seen it.

"You'd create quite a scene," she said.

"In the Village?" I said. "Give me a break."

There were days I traveled below Eighth Street and I felt as though I fit in just fine. In New York City you could be anything ... even a Hellboy. The village could be mighty tolerant. Still, she met me at the Used Book Cafe. I didn't exactly disappear, but this meeting of old books and fresh coffee had enough of a bizarre charm that I felt okay.

"So what's up?"

"What?" I said. "No 'Hello, Hellboy

how are you doing'? Hows life in the fast lane?"

She smiled. "I have thirty minutes before my urban-legends seminar. If I could only tell them half of what I know ... "

"And scare the hell out of them? Not a good idea."

She looked right at me. "So

"

I told her what Abe had been talking about, the murders, the disappearances. She sipped her latte.