Hellboy: Odd Jobs (34 page)

When the last police car is gone and the street is dark and silent, Liz goes to a pay phone on the corner and dials the number of the BPRD. It only rings twice before being answered by a doctor Liz knows.

"Come and get me," she says, and begins to cry. She hasn't cried since she was eleven. The tears burn worse than fire. And when the long black car that comes to fetch her finally turns into the Bureau's winding driveway, Liz knows that this time she really is home.

Far Flew the Boast of Him

Brian Hodge

Grown men, they may have been

and now, post-mortem

but they reminded him of children. All the

slaughter in the world, and here they'd gone out for a weekend's lark to pretend to wreak more. Like young boys playing at war games. All the barrels of blood that had seeped into England's soil, and here they'd gone out for a day of make-believe, pretending to shed it all over again.

Well, that blood was certainly real enough now, wasn't it? And there would be no pretending otherwise, not with nearly three dozen new widows left scattered from London to Newcastle.

At least all were now assumed to be widows by anyone who could afford to be brutally realistic. Only just over half the bodies had so far been found, and as long as there's no corpse then there's always hope ... but Hellboy could not imagine anyone who wasn't nervously fingering a wedding ring, or awaiting news of a missing father, son, brother, lover, was expecting a single one of those poor dumb bastards to come walking in from the border country here near Scotland.

Divine intervention, it seemed, was always in much shorter supply than diabolic. "The Battle of Lindisfarne,"

this fellow was saying. Survivor on account of absenteeism. Trevor Copplestone, his name, or something close to that. "June eighth, 793. That's what we ... they ... had come up here last weekend to re-enact."

" 'Battle' of Lindisfarne? How do you figure that?" said Hellboy. "There wasn't any 'battle' to it. There's no battle when the other side's unarmed."

"Ah

so you know Lindisfarne, do you?"

"I may look dumb," Hellboy said, "but that's just a disguise."

"Well, then ... battle of ideologies, call it," Copplestone said. Working hard at keeping his stiff upper, but the strain was showing. "The sword of the monks' Lord and savior, matched up against the swords of boatloads of raiders whose sole idea of a guarantee into the afterlife was a good death. Wasn't much of a contest, was it?"

"No. It wasn't. And whatever it was that your friends ran into up here last weekend ... ? That wasn't much of any contest, either."

You had to imagine that by now Trevor Copplestone was feeling like the luckiest man on either side of Hadrian's Wall. A bad sausage in last Friday evenings helping of bangers and mash at a pub near his Northumberland hotel flattens him for the next twenty-four hours, knocks him off his pins and into bed every moment he's not crouched over his toilet. Certainly in no condition to troop out and play Viking with his friends.

Maybe Copplestone looked more imposing when he had his period gear on, his chain-mail or jerkin or helmet or whatever he decked himself out in for these weekend outings, but here and now he did not look the part. A big enough frame, and a well-trimmed beard and a shock of hair that the sea breezes stirred, but inside his jacket he was a soft-looking man. Doughy in the middle, and the beard grown to hide his burgeoning jowls. A man shackled to a desk forty or fifty hours each week who looks out his window, if his office even has one, and dreams of living in an age when the cloud-thickened welkin would've been the only roof that mattered.

And he had not been alone. A historical re-enactment society, they called themselves. Study up on their favorite blood-baths, choose up sides, then pick a weekend to go out and pretend they'd been there. Grand fun, but evidently they'd always come back alive before. Full of beans as they invade the nearest pub, and the worst argument they've got to settle is who buys first round.

All history now.

Hellboy had the feeling that it would be a good long while before Trevor Copplestone felt any urge to pick up his sword again. Some new look of haunt and harrowing in his eyes that wouldn't have been there eight days ago ... survivor's guilt, or just the fact of everything that had once been academic and safely within the realm of pretense hitting him full in the face, to leave its indelible mark:
This
was what it was like to lose friends and comrades by the score.
This
was what it felt like to walk home dragging their memories like heavy chains.
This was
what it was like when there wasn't even enough left of some of them to bury.

This
was history, the genuine article. They'd learned it, and still they'd been doomed to repeat its most enduring lesson.

"This one meant something more to you guys," Hellboy said. "It had to. Otherwise, where's the fun?"

"I'm not sure I follow you."

"Yeah you do. Re-enact Lindisfarne, and half of you don't even get to fight. All you get to do is wear a cowled robe and fall down and pretend to die. I don't get that. It's over too quick. And they wouldn't even grant you guys permission to stage it where it really happened, because they found the idea too tasteless. So you stayed here on the mainland and settled for a plot of ground just barely in sight of the real thing. That's an awful lot of trouble to go to for something over so quick."

"So why Lindisfarne," Copplestone said, "when there must be hundreds of other battles better suited to keeping us all busy, and for a longer stretch of the day

that's what you're asking?"

"It might help get to the bottom of what happened."

"I sincerely doubt that. It ... it was the work of a madman, obviously."

Hellboy simply stared; wouldn't even encourage that one with an answer. How badly Copplestone must've wanted to believe this. The handiest explanation that would restore his world back to order. A madman, yes.

Just the sort of thing they do. Brute strength and no restraint and even less idea what he's doing ... you can take comfort in that. Because you can medicate him for it and lock him in a cell. And if he was able to go tooth-and-nail through twenty or thirty chaps with swords, well then, perhaps he was some form of new, improved madman, and yet, for all that, still no match for the right pharmaceutical company.

Hellboy stared at Copplestone until it unnerved him. Reminding him by sheer presence that there were more peculiar things afoot than lunatics. Skin like red armor and an oversized hand that could crush cinder-blocks what did Copplestone think was standing right in front of him? Just another cop like the pair who'd driven him out to the meadow for this meeting?

"Some of us," Copplestone admitted, finally, "not all, mind, but some ... we'd got to feeling that more than our interests belonged to the remote past. That maybe the claim reached as deep as our hearts, too."

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that this land, it wasn't always Christ's. There's plenty who'd be happy to tell you otherwise, but all that goes to show you is how thoroughly they've forgotten who their forefathers really were."

"Which forefathers would those be, again?"

"The Angles and the Saxons, of course."

"So whose land would that make it?" Hellboy thinking he knew already what Copplestone was driving at; wanting to hear him say it, regardless.

"Britain was Odin's too, once. Every bit as much as Norway and Sweden and so on. We woke up to that."

"So this Lindisfarne business," Hellboy said. "You thought you'd come up here on its anniversary, commemorate the occasion, celebrate this awakening?"

"Something like that, yes."

"What'd you think you were doing? Giving the whole place back?"

"To Odin?" Copplestone lowered his gaze, stared down at his shoes. Or the earth beneath them. "Nah. Not really. It's his just about any old time he wants it."

"News flash, Trevor. Odin's dead. And if he was ever out there, he isn't any more. You and me, and those cops in that car over there ... ? All of us might believe there was a Michelangelo, but that doesn't mean he's coming back to carve another statue of David."

Copplestone's eyebrows peaked. "Ancient faiths, old beliefs? Dried-up riverbeds, is what they're like. All they need's a fresh torrent to bring them back to life, and they run as true as they ever did."

"Dehydrated gods? Just add water? That could catch on."

Copplestone looked wounded. "Are we finished here?" he asked. "Because ... because you've a madman to catch."

Finished. Yes, they were. There was nothing more he could learn from Trevor Copplestone, and if there was, it was nothing Hellboy couldn't guess and have it serve just as well. We woke up to that, Copplestone had said, and if he wanted to believe in aberrant men with the strength of twenty, let him. It felt far more likely, however, that something else had awakened alongside them.

As he stood alone on the meadow overlooking the sea, the salt air gusts snapped the length of his coat about his cloven feet and tail, and he watched Copplestone's back as the man trudged away in a defeat that neither of them could name. The two officers who'd driven him here let him into the car, then gave Hellboy a nervous glance that said everything he would ever need to know about why they'd kept their distance, all three of them now looking relieved to be driving back toward what they believed to be the normal world.

Because as much as they feared the darkness they didn't understand, they feared as well what stood against it, because they didn't really understand that either.

All right. Lay it out, all of it. The known, the unknown, and the conjecture that bridged them together. It was the only way he knew how to start.

Indisputable facts:

Even by British standards, the Holy Island of Lindisfarne was old.
Old.
Three miles off the coast of Northumbria, it had in the early six hundreds proven to be a prime site for the raising of a monastery. Safe, ruggedly beautiful, protected by land and sea, it was ideal for monks who wanted no more of the world than what they required for survival and contemplation. Like most monasteries of their day, they stored Church treasure, compiled Church history. They buried saints. Late that century from their scriptorum came one of western civilization's most highly cherished illuminated manuscripts, the
Lindisfarne Gospels.

And a century later it all came crashing down upon their tonsured heads. New technology: the Viking longship, perfectly suited for ocean travel. What had once been thought impregnable was just an easy few days' sail from Norway. The Norsemen looted the monastery, put the monks to the sword, sent shock waves throughout the horrified whole of Europe: the world has just changed.

Getting to Lindisfarne today was no more bother than driving the causeway that spanned the tidal inlet, just as long as one didn't try driving it at high tide. Big draw for tourists, for modern-day pilgrimages. The monastery was long gone, but the red sandstone ruins of an eleventh-century Norman priory and those of a Tudor-era castle served equally well for seekers of the picturesque. And for modern creature comforts: hotels, cafes, even a meadery. Difficult to imagine the more tweedy buffs and conservators of Brit history entertaining even for one moment the notion of a rough-and-tumble re-enactment celebrating that twelve-hundred-year-old slaughter.

Hard facts:

Trevor Copplestone and his group had no choice but to remain confined to the mainland, where they went about their faux pillage and plunder on a pastoral meadow rise from which, if the day was clear enough, they could in the distance see the island where it had happened.

All signs indicated they'd made a good long day of it: scraps of food, spilt bottles of ale, whiskey, mead.

Lounging about a pair of evening cookfires, no doubt reminiscing over days they could only pretend they'd lived, they had been caught off guard, under cover of dusk. Something coming out of the night and, turnabout being fair play, massacring them.

No quarter had been given, and no deference shown for the roles they had played. Monk and marauder, all had died the same, protected by neither sword nor cross. When found the next morning, this eerie tableau like a Dark Age charnel field that had slipped forward in time, blood making a muck of the earth where the various and sundry parts of them had tumbled, the first natural conclusion drawn was that these silly bastards had really gotten carried away.

It hadn't taken long to rule that out. Grievous though they'd been, their wounds had not been made by swords, by spears. They were much too ragged for that. Whatever had violated these men, it had come from no forge.

Nor did it appear that all of them had fallen where they'd died. Far and wide, they were strewn, on a meandering path inland, as much as twelve miles between one of the stray legs and the hip socket from which it had been torn. And this was only accounting for what had been recovered nearly half the bodies had yet

to turn up. Early on it had been assumed that hounds would be the simplest solution, quickly sniffing out the remains still lying somewhere, awaiting discovery.

But the dogs would have no part of it, Hellboy had heard. They'd tucked their tails between their legs and lowered their ears and slunk away from the fresh scent trail with fearful whines, as though whatever they might find at its end would be worse than the most loathsome excuse for a man they'd ever tracked.

Dogs, in Hellboy's estimation, often showed more common sense than the ones holding the leash. Their reaction, as much as anything, was why he'd been summoned here in the first place.

And so much for the known.

There had been, of course, no witnesses, or if there were, they'd been snatched too, their bodies vanished with the rest. No reports of any missing locals, but you'd figure a tourist or two could disappear for a while without attracting attention.

If there was anywhere in England you could lose someone, this was the place. Northumberland was her most sparsely populated county. Five times as many sheep as human beings, although the sheep's numbers had dwindled a bit of late, too. Farmers rising with the dawn to be greeted by the sight of animals reduced to tatters and mutton. This Hellboy had checked into upon learning that the dead men's wounds looked as though they could only have been left by tooth and claw.