Hellboy: Odd Jobs (36 page)

"But the poet had no words to give me?" Grendel asked. "Words only for the hero? It is no surprise. Poets save their best words for what they long to be or desire to possess ... and cannot. And like all men, what they do not understand they fear, and what they fear they find convenient to kill."

"You mean like the way you handled those poor thirty-odd bastards a few days ago?"

"They hungered for a life they never knew. I gave them a brief taste of it. They wanted dragons to fight. I gave them one. It was their yearning that drew me to them. The next morning may have been abhorrent to you, but the night before ... ? They lived as they had never lived before. They died as few are privileged."

Hellboy hadn't been there, but he had his doubts. Had seen few die with the kind of savage exaltation with which heroes died in the sagas and epics of old. Had they ever, really? They begged, they bargained, they shrieked and wept and bled, and he could not think of a single shame in it.

He imagined that the sight of Grendel would have been more than enough to send them running. Long, muscled, spidery limbs, sharp-tipped and coarse with gray bristles; primal simian face with the shearing teeth of a carnivore, and eyes cunning as a cannibal's. Would bankers stand and fight him; would architects and crossing guards? Never.

Although he was not nearly so large that it would have required four men to carry his head back to Hrothgar's mead-hall. Even then the tales of heroes' exploits had needed help from their tellers, so that their boasts might be better winged to fly down through the ages.

Grendel's speed, though

by any standards it would be legendary.

One arm lashed out, quick as a whip, and Hellboy would not have thought he could reach so far. A slashing blow, and the gun was ripped from his grip, knocked a dozen yards away, where it struck a tree, chipping away loose bark and lichens. And Grendel overhead then, his own limbs merging with those of the oak into which he'd hoisted himself, death from above as he bore down with gristle-flecked jaws. Hellboy reacted out of instinct, dodging and swiping an arc with his huge stone-like hand, and its grip found purchase, and wrenched, and the damage was done before he even realized it: Hellboy, standing there with Grendel's arm dangling from his grasp.

Again, the old wound.

And rain, red rain from emptied socket.

Grendel bellowed into the rising day, launched himself from the branches and into the waters of the lake a

tremendous splash, and then a rapid, rippling calm. For a moment Hellboy watched the wavelets, then retrieved his gun and waded in to follow.

Awash in greenish murk, he swam slowly and, as any good hunter would, followed the threads of blood that swirled and eddied before him. Down and down and down, as the lake was gray-lit by the first spears of sunlight to pierce its surface, the thinning blood-trail leading to a horizontal channel dug out of rock and clay.

The breath ached against his lungs and an inky darkness enfolded him, total now, and still he kicked onward until a faint flickering orange beckoned overhead.

Grendel's lair. Another land, another eon, but his habits persevered.

Hellboy broke surface, found himself treading water in a small pool ringed by stream-smoothed stones. They had been chosen and placed with obvious care. As if their simple arrangement had been something that had
mattered.

He dredged himself from the water, stood dripping in a small cavern far below the surface of the daylight world. Its earthen walls crawled with roots; the light from half a dozen torches shimmered on the moist sheen of its rocks and strobed a dance of shadows. In one corner, a heaped jumble of tooth-marked bones.

And upon the walls, suspended from brackets of sticks, hung their swords.

He plucked a torch from its seat of earth and back, back along a corridor where the light was loath to reach, followed the spatters of blood upon the floor. Their size shrunk every step or two, until he could clearly see what they'd led him to.

By all the gods that ever were, he had never seen anything like this.

At first Hellboy thought it was a body sitting propped against the cavern wall, an enormous corpse somehow half-preserved from an epoch when its kind had walked above ground. But no, it had never lived ... only its parts had.

Bones made from branches

the trunks of saplings for its arms and legs and spine, stout curved branches for ribs. The wool of sheep wound like muscle mass around the makeshift limbs. For a head, a bale of hay stuffed into a large grain-sack, with hair of plastered weeds and algae. And skin quilted together from the hides of at least a dozen men, fashioning from them this colossal hag's pendulous breasts, matronly belly, her atrocious face.

It weeps
, the hanging man had said.
In the night, it weeps.

Hellboy understood now whom those tears were for.

His mother. From the only tools at hand, Grendel had remade his mother.

The telling of his slayer's tale had come as news to Grendel. That much was apparent. Could he even know, then, that she too had fallen to Beowulf? Did he wonder, did he suspect? Or did he weep only because he had been spawned once more into a world where she no longer existed?

Hellboy squeezed shut his eyes, able to understand that feeling, his own mother never anything more to him than an echo, a phantom glimpsed in the desecrated ruins of a church in East Bromwich. Old deluded woman at the end of a lifetime shaped by devil's lies.

Or had he only hallucinated her to compensate for what he'd never known, making her outright from the fabric of his need?

At his feet, there issued a turbid flow of blood from the juncture of the hag's splayed and outstretched legs.

Hellboy reached forward and, as if opening the flap of a tent, peeled back a drape of leathery skin on the sagging kettledrum of her belly. Behind it, Grendel sat curled double within the hollow, remaining hand clamped over the ragged socket of his shoulder.

The fight now bled from him, Grendel stared back at Hellboy over the muzzle of his gun.

"So plain it is in your eyes ... " said Grendel. "You do not think I belong in this world or any other."

"I'm hardly alone in that," Hellboy told him.

"Others may look upon you and judge you the same."

"Not if they know enough to judge me by my actions."

"Ah, those," whispered Grendel. "Protecting the very ones who would find you a fearful thing to look upon?

Defending them from the rawheads and the bloodybones of a darkness that could not exist if they did not feed it ... crave it in spite of their piety? Because even a hellspawn is better than their fears that there may be nothing for them beyond this life."

Life-blood oozed over and between those trembling, spindly fingers. Surely there could not be much more left for his heart to pump. And it was said, Hellboy recalled, that the blood of Cain flowed in him, and this was why Grendel had turned against mankind. He was every man that killed his brother, no matter how loosely one defined the term.

"Answer me one thing," Grendel said. "Will Paradise welcome you any more than it would welcome me?

Your heart may be a good one, but will the guardians of the Gate forgive you the birth you must have had?"

He did not know how to answer this. Knew only what he hoped.

"I thought as much," said Grendel. "This, too, is so plain in your eyes." And then he shut his own, and murmured, "Mercy."

Hellboy shook his head. "Even if I was inclined to give it, there's no time and nothing I could do for you."

"You do not understand." Slowly, slowly, Grendel craned his neck forward to bring his skull within a hair's breadth of the gun. "I would not die the same ignoble death twice. So I ask you ... "

And some part of him

the same part which days ago, this mystery still unfolding as he walked in spirals, wondered if what the land had birthed might not in some way be his brother didn't want to do this.

" ... all I ask you ... "

Oh, but they all wore the mark of Cain, didn't they?

" ... mercy."

He obliged, and pulled the trigger.

Hellboy waited awhile before leaving the lair. Spent some time sorting amidst the bones for any trinkets that might be recovered for a grieving widow or child, to bring them the tiniest comfort a necklace, a medallion

but there were none to be found. So he waited until the torches burned themselves out, one by one, and stared at the ruin of this son, this surrogate mother.

Pondering, too, his own fate, his legacy. Wondering if after long centuries anyone, anywhere, might know of him, know the least thing about him, care.

And when the last torch remained, he touched it to those flammable parts of the mother's vast body, the kindling wood and the hay, and when at last they caught, he hoped that it would burn the rest, as any funeral pyre should. And that some of the smoke, at least, would sift its way through the soil, up, up, to be sighed by the earth into the air, spirals of breath and vapor that would rise into the sky to meet the clouds, and linger there, and someday fall back with the rain.

Contributors

STEPHEN R. BISSETTE
has been in the comics industry for over twenty years, and writing professionally for over a decade. Along with his award-winning work as a cartoonist and illustrator, Bissette has scripted, edited, published, and co-published a variety of projects.

Bissette is perhaps best known for the award-winning
Saga of the Swamp Thing,
a milestone in comics publishing. Shortly thereafter, he published the Eisner Award-winning horror comics anthology,
Taboo,
which was the birthplace of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbells
From Hell.
As an illustrator, he has worked on projects by such writers as Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, and Douglas E. Winter. As a writer, Bissette's hundreds of interviews and articles have appeared in dozens of magazines. His original novella.
Aliens:
Tribes,
won the Bram Stoker Award in 1992, and he has scripted numerous comics. Through his imprint, Spiderbaby Grafix, Bissette self-published
S. R. Bissette's Tyrant,
a rigorously researched portrait of the birth, life, and death of a
Tyrannosaurus rex
in late Cretaceous North America.

He lives in southern Vermont with his teenage children, Maia and Daniel, who also write and draw their own comics and stories.

*

POPPY Z. BRITE
is the author of four novels,
Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, Exquisite Corpse,
and
The
Lazarus Heart,
two short-story collections,
Wormwood
(a.k.a.
Swamp Foetus)
and
Are You Loathsome
Tonight?
and a biography of rock diva Courtney Love. She has edited two anthologies,
Love In Vein
and
Love in Vein 2.
Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines.

Brite's interests include Victorian hairwork and mourning jewelry, traveling, gardening, animal rescue, and gourmet dinner with her husband Christopher, a chef. She lives in New Orleans.

*

MAX ALLAN COLLINS
is the Shamus Award-winning author of the Nathan Heller detective novels. He is a leading author of movie and TV tie-ins, including the
NYPD Blue
novels and such best sellers as
In the Line
of Fire, Air Force One, The Mummy,
and
Saving Private Ryan.
With artist Terry Beatty, he co-created
Ms.

Tree, Wild Dog,
and the mini-series
Johnny Dynamite: Underworld,
co-created
Mike Danger
with Mickey Spillane; and wrote the 'Dick Tracy' comic strip for fifteen years. An independent filmmaker in his native Iowa, Collins wrote and directed the cult-fave thrillers
Mommy and Mommy's Day,
and recently completed a documentary,
Mike Hammers Mickey Spillane.

*

NANCY A. COLLINS
is the author of several novels, including the award-winning
Sunglasses After Dark,
Walking Wolf,
and
Angels on Fire.
She has written more than fifty short stories. Her comics credentials include a two-year stint as writer on DCs
Swamp Thing,
and the mini-series
Predator: Hell Come A' Walkin',
for Dark Horse Comics. She also wrote a comics series based on her fan-favorite character, Sonja Blue.

Several of her novels have been optioned for film.

*

MATTHEW J. COSTELLO
is the author of sixteen novels and numerous non-fiction articles and books.

He wrote the script for
The 7th Guest,
the best-selling CD-ROM interactive drama of all time. His latest novel,
Masque
(Warner Books, 1998), has been optioned by Tom Cruises production company. His upcoming
Poltergeist
novel,
Maelstrom
(PenguinPutnam), will appear in February 2000. His novels have been published worldwide in over a dozen countries.

For The Sci-Fi Channel, Costello co-created and scripted
FTL News.
He is the creator/writer for the Disney Channel's ZOOG-DISNEY, launched in August 1998, and renewed for 1999. Costello is currently writing episodes for the BBC/Disney series,
Microsoap,
and developing a new series for the BBC, with Douglas Adams, called
The Glitch.

*

CRAIG SHAW GARDNER
has spent far too much of his life around comic books. This has resulted in his management of a comic-book store (the fabulous Million Year Picnic in Cambridge, MA) and his work on a number of media tie-in projects, like the novelization
Batman
(a
New York Times
Best Seller), and
Spider-Man: Wanted Dead or Alive.
Craig has written a whole bunch of other books, from his first,
A
Malady of Magicks,
to his most recent,
The Magic Dead
(written under another name that also starts with G).