The Ice Wolves (2 page)

 
CHAPTER 1

—

After hours, the folklore department of New York University was a silent maze of dark corridors and tiny offices. Through the windows, the lights of Greenwich Village gleamed on a balmy, late summer night, but the displays in the glass cabinets lining Hellboy's route were a far cry from the modern world. Skulls and athames jostled for place with tribal idols, crystals, jewels, and amulets from every corner of the globe. They told of the truth: behind the sleek lines of the twenty-first century, the chaotic, fearful darkness of the primal unconsciousness still lurked.

It had been many years since Hellboy had last visited, but he hadn't forgotten the way. He moved quickly along the winding corridors until he located the familiar door that still bore the imprint of the long-since-removed brass nameplate and carried the aroma of lime and cardamom he recalled so well. He knocked once and entered.

Kate Corrigan sat on the floor in the middle of the room, surrounded by a jumble of cardboard boxes with papers spilling out. Her old office carried the air of absence; there was a desk and chair, but the bookcases were bare, and there were none of her personal items. One wall was filled with file boxes crudely stacked. So intent was she on an old yellow legal pad that she barely raised her head to greet him.

“Where do you get that great room freshener?”

“Hmm?” she replied, distracted. “It's not room freshener. It's a ritual paste from the Uxtli tribe. Fish entrails, guano, and human urine. And lime and cardamom, of course.”

“Forget I mentioned it.” He looked round. “I came.”

“So I see.” She tossed the pad back into one of the boxes and tipped the contents of another out before her. Notebooks, buff folders, envelopes, newspaper cuttings, and faded photocopies sprawled across the boards.

“I didn't have to,” he said.

“I know. But you'll be interested in what I have to tell you. And your help is needed.”

“By you or the Bureau?”

“By the world.” She batted a hand toward a wing-backed leather chair, but he propped himself against the empty desk.

“You know how to play on my sympathies,” he said.

“That's not hard. You're a sentimentalist, Hellboy. You always cry when George Bailey finds Zuzu's petals.”

“And sometimes you're too cynical for your own good. Why aren't you in Connecticut?”

“Because everything I need is here.” She indicated the haphazard spread of boxes.

“The university let you keep your old office?”

“One of the perks of being special liaison to the B.P.R.D.'s Enhanced Talent Task Force. Here!” Kate pulled a dog-eared notebook out of the heap of documents and scrambled to her feet. Eagerly, she flipped through the pages.

“What's all this stuff?”

“My research. Years and years of it. This particular load,” she kicked a muddle of boxes, “pertains to my first book.”

Hellboy looked blank.

“A study of werewolf trials in fifteenth-century France. I sent you a copy.”

“Ah.”

“You didn't read it.”

“I'm more of a thriller sort of guy. Don't get me wrong—it's on my to-be-read pile. Maybe I'll take it on my next vacation. Get into it on the beach.”

Shaking her head, Kate dumped the remaining contents of the box on the desk next to Hellboy. “Months of independent research in the archives in Paris and Chartres. Records that hadn't been read for hundreds of years, in the original medieval French. Accounts of peasants, administrators, aristocracy . . . hundreds and hundreds of people who'd had firsthand experience of the werewolf problem. By the end of it, I'd had more than enough of damp cellars and silverfish, but the material . . . !”

Hellboy picked up a notebook, which Kate had filled with scores of drawings of werewolves. Some could have been mistaken for regular wolves, loping on all fours or sitting among trees and staring out at the viewer. Others were unmistakably human shaped, covered in fur but with a wolf's head, incongruously wearing the clothes of their former lives. “Hang on,” he said. “Most of it was just peasants accusing their neighbors, right? Same as with the witch trials.”

“Some of it. The records suggest there was a highly localized epidemic of lycanthropy, which doesn't make sense. Between 1520 and 1630, thirty thousand people were branded as werewolves. They were interrogated, tortured, and whether they confessed or not, most of them died at the stake.”

“Sick.”

“But where did it all start? Why did it spread? Some of the cases are famous because they're so colorful. Jacques Rollet, the Werewolf of Caude. He was convicted of killing and eating a fifteen-year-old boy in 1598. More children were killed by Gilles Garnier in 1574, so many that the village of Dole in Franche-Comté put a price on the werewolf's head. There was even a boy werewolf, Jean Grenier of Aquitaine, who ran off into the woods after his father beat him, and spent the next few years eating other kids. He was caught in 1603. Because of his age and his limited mental capacity, he was imprisoned in a monastery in Bordeaux. A few years later, he'd grown long canines and claws, and was gaunt, lean, and lupine.”

Hellboy always loved it when Kate got caught up in the passion of her work. It reminded him of long conversations on cold nights, their friendship slowly taking shape. “Why have you dragged me out here for a history lesson? Stories of werewolves go back nearly four thousand years.”

“Exactly.”

Hellboy eyed Kate curiously. “You're saying we've got a wolf problem? Because after those fire wolves over in Amalfi recently and that business in Griart in the Balkans, I've had my fill for a while.”

“This is something new. You know there are all kinds of werewolves. Different origins, different causes.”

“Yeah, but they all smell the same.”

In the pile of documents, Kate located a particular sheet and fastened it to a board on the wall: a simple drawing of a black circle on a white background. “Have you seen that before?”

“Is this like one of those Rorschach tests? If you're just looking to find out my state of mind, I can save you some time—I'm pissed off that I'm sitting here when I could be having a beer in McSorley's.”

“The Black Sun. How about that? Ring any bells?”

Crossing the room, Hellboy saw the circle was surrounded by barely visible flames.

“I copied that from the account of a priest who gave evidence during a werewolf trial in 1525. He talked about a prophecy . . . the Time of the Black Sun.” Kate flicked through her notebook until she found the correct page. “It was mentioned again in 1541, in 1545, 1559, 1562, and . . . well, you get the picture. I didn't mention it in my book because I couldn't find any reference to what the prophecy actually was. But I always intended to come back to it.”

Through the office window that overlooked the campus, a movement caught Hellboy's eye, fast and low, darting in the shadows between the pools of light. He moved over to get a better look, but all appeared still in the deserted quad.

Engrossed in her research, Kate was oblivious. “Last year, a new collection of ancient occult texts came to light in the Czech Republic,” she continued. “My work at the Bureau stopped me from giving it any attention until two months ago, when I got a call from one of my old tutors here at the university, Daniel Pleasance. Daniel specializes in occult symbolism in medieval art—”

“I bet he was fun at parties.”

Kate ignored him. “And he'd flown over to Prague to examine some paintings and sketches that formed part of the collection. Naturally, he couldn't help having a look at the texts.”

“Yeah, who could?”

“In the codex, Daniel found a reference to the Time of the Black Sun, and it was linked to a separate account. During the Dark Ages, a plague of werewolves swept across northern Europe and disappeared into what we now know as Siberia. It was always my theory that the French werewolf trials were caused by a group of lycanthropes who got separated from that massive migration.”

“So the Time of the Black Sun has been and gone?”

“The codex Daniel found suggested it was an unfulfilled prophecy.”

“You're telling me this prophecy could be coming to pass, right? So what exactly is it?”

“Nobody knows, exactly. But the sense of threat around it cannot be underestimated.” Kate read from her notebook. “ ‘When the Black Sun rises, the world ends,' said Charles Benet at his trial in 1561. ‘In Benet's grin, the Devil lurked, and the blood of all present ran cold,' the priest who was observing the trial wrote.”

“Kate, why the sense of urgency about this?”

“Because I don't like coincidences,” she snapped. “The texts in Prague, hidden for centuries, coming to light now, and then earlier today these reports . . . ” Kate tossed Hellboy a file stamped with the B.P.R.D. logo.

He winced when the photos within were revealed. “Gruesome. Werewolf attack?”

“Attacks. Plural. From all over the world. Iceland. Greece. Russia. Norway. Bolivia. Malaysia. Australia. Same MO, same sickening brutality. People torn to pieces while going about their day-to-day business.”

“These all happened at the same time?”

“Yes, like someone had flicked a switch.”

“With all those different time zones, some must have happened in daylight. No full moon.” Hellboy turned the photos this way and that, trying to get a correct perspective on the jumbles of bodies.

“I wasn't joking when I talked about the switch being thrown. The suspects for the killings had shown no signs of lycanthropy. No moonlight flits. No mysterious bodies popping up here and there. All those close to them were convinced they were completely normal. And then, suddenly, that.” She motioned to the photos.

“You're sure it's werewolves? Maybe it's a bunch of terrorists? Sleepers getting the call to arms? Brainwashed Manchurian Candidates programmed to trigger at a certain time on a certain day?”

“We have several eyewitness reports from Japan. They described a beast, eight feet tall, wolf's head, red eyes, leaping from the bullet train and killing a guy and a woman on the platform before bounding away.”

Hellboy weighed this information for a moment, then asked, “How many incidents have you logged?”

“Two hundred and fifty so far. There's more coming in all the time. Some of the killings in more isolated areas are taking time to reach us.”

“So, a plague of werewolves. You want me to go on a world tour to wipe them out. Maybe I should get T-shirts printed.”

“No need. They're coming to you.”

“What?”

“Not you personally. America.” At the bleep of Kate's cell phone, she checked the message and said, “That's another one. Canada, two hundred miles from the previous Canadian killings. We're getting new reports all the time. If you plot them on a map, you can see they've turned toward America. They're coming here. All of them.”

“Why here? I know it's the land of opportunity, but you can kill and eat anywhere.”

Kate shook her head slowly. “Hellboy, what's going to happen when they get here?”

“Nothing more in your research?”

“I'll keep looking.” Sighing, Kate picked up a box on the edge of the jumble. “Last one. Maybe there's something in here.”

“What about your friend Daniel?”

Her face fell. “I can't get any reply from his cell, and he hasn't been back to his hotel. The collection, all the books, the paintings . . . gone. Taken out of the university basement overnight. No one saw anything.”

A shiver ran through Hellboy, and he realized the temperature in the room was plunging. Hugging her arms around her, Kate felt it too. Hellboy exhaled, watching his breath cloud. “Weird.” The window now sparkled with hoarfrost.

Kate stiffened. “Did you hear that? It sounded like someone calling my name.”

Rustling on the edge of his perception, Hellboy eventually picked up what sounded little more than a breath, dim and distant. Drawing his gun, he motioned for Kate to follow.

“Do you really need that?” she whispered.

“You've just shown me a bunch of photos that looked like an abattoir. I'm not taking any chances.”

At the door, the faint voice rose up again, barely more than a breeze blowing in through the keyhole. Hellboy grabbed the handle, than snatched his fingers away. “Yow! Freezing.”

Outside the office, the corridor glittered white with frost a quarter of an inch thick over all the surfaces. Hellboy slipped an arm around Kate's shoulders to give her some of his body warmth.

“Well, I'll be,” he said. “They didn't mention this on the weather report.”

Once again, the voice drifted toward them over the frozen surfaces, and this time Kate's name was clear. She clung to Hellboy tighter. “However many times I experience something like this, it never gets any easier,” she said.