Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (14 page)

He'd been hit before, hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. Hit by things whose blows could demolish walls. But never quite like this. He imagined this was what it must be like for someone caught by a cyclone, that final instant of agony and awareness when struck full-on by the house that the winds have thrown.

And yet he lived.

It catapulted him from the water, and he saw stars and the moon, and the water again, and when he slapped against it its surface felt as hard as steel, and he lay floating for a moment, but only just, and then the great toothed mouth closed over him, gulping him down with the tide.

I
t had been years since she'd been in a morgue, and if it was years before she set foot in another, that would suit her fine. Kate Corrigan was no stranger to death--a part of her had always longed to know the secrets people took with them to their graves--but death knew many forms, many faces.

She had been one of those peculiar children who didn't fear graveyards. Instead, they were the most peaceful places she knew. She would read the names of the dead, the too-brief engravings that memorialized their lives or crystallized the anguish over their loss; she would do the math to work out how long they'd lived, and how long ago; she would sit for hours and stare at their stones.
I'll be here too one day,
she would tell herself, but the thought held no terrors for her, only the possibility of getting answers to so many questions. At the time, she'd believed she might get to meet them all, down to the last infant. From the clues and tidbits of their inscriptions, they had seemed so much more interesting than the living.

Even as a girl she'd been fascinated by history...and who made history if not the dead?

As she had grown older, and her life and career had taken their odd turns, she sometimes thought of herself--in jest usually, but not always--as a haunter of the dead. Ruined buildings, lifeless villages, forgotten customs, and, yes, the dearly and not-so-dearly departed...although she now understood that death and tranquility did not always go hand-in-hand. She'd explored too many places where too many terrible things had happened to believe in a truly peaceful death anywhere outside of a feather bed. But she still envied them their secrets, and probably always would. Every grave held a piece of history, a bookful of stories that deserved to be heard.

She just wasn't used to seeing the dead quite so...fresh.

And as she looked--not
too
closely--at the volcanic crater of meat and bone that had been the face of a stranger, Kate couldn't help but think he'd damn well better have secrets worth knowing.

He and four others, all of them lined up on rickety gurneys in a chilly room whose air hung heavy with preservatives and disinfectants--this was all that remained of the men who'd been involved in the other night's episode with the armored car. From the alleyway, as well as from the car itself. Victims, perpetrators, or something in between--they were all in the same position now, weren't they? Horizontal, and draped in dingy sheets.

Nice to have connections, at any rate. It had taken a couple of days to arrange for approval, but if she hadn't been working with people who could pull a few strings, this little trip might never have taken place at all. Now, if they could just get a fix on how all this carnage had happened.

"Are you not feeling well?"

The priest's voice slapped off tiles, metal doors and drawers, sounding even more like an accusation than it was already.

She turned back to Father Laurenti, her impromptu partner in this foray into...what would you call it, really? Spiritual forensics? That was as fitting as anything. She'd have to remember that one.

"Why do you ask?" she said.

"Because I have seen bad cheese that had a more healthy color than you have now."

"Careful, Gino," she told him. "Even if your side does get its way...? If you don't learn to talk to women any smoother than that, you're going to be one of the guys who stays celibate."

Not that she could see him caring. It just felt good to say.

Over the years Kate had met priests who, though they'd been gentlemen who hadn't uttered one risque word or given any indication of having broken their vows, had nonetheless come across as intensely sexual beings. They touched things--food and books, rosaries and piano keys--as if they wanted to consume them, be consumed by them. Their eyes shone with a healthy hunger for experience, even when they knew they couldn't have it.

Father Laurenti was not one of them.

Just before coming here, she had met him at a nearby cafe, where he'd been content with water. And on the short walk together, they had passed no less than half a dozen women so gorgeous they left Kate feeling frumpy even in the new thigh-length Piero Tucci leather jacket she'd bought while here. Had Laurenti noticed? Not a one of them, she was sure of it. He seemed to have little use for women, although it was not misogyny. He seemed to have little use for most men, either, and few creature comforts, for that matter. His insistence that she call him Gino appeared less an attempt toward familiarity than a simple distaste for standing on irrelevant ceremony.

But put him in a roomful of corpses where violent death was the rule, and just watch him come alive. He hunkered down with each of them, getting so up close and personal you might think he believed a few lives could still be saved. She suspected it wasn't the first time, either. After the morgue's pair of attendants had lined up the last of the five gurneys, they had slipped quietly away, as if they'd been through the same routine with Laurenti before.

"This one," he said, standing over a thickset man whose heavy dark stubble made his blood-drained face look that much more pallid. "How did he die?"

"It's kind of obvious, isn't it?"

Seriously. He was talking about a man with five or six entry wounds in his torso.

"Please," he said. "What is obvious does not always explain all there is to know."

He had a point. Kate double-checked the name on the toe tag and consulted her notes.

"This was the driver," she said. "Hellboy insists that his cooperation during the takeover was due to coercion. That he feared for his life, or maybe there had been some threats earlier--that's impossible to know. As for his death, there was a moment in the struggle when there were some ricochets inside the cab. Hellboy didn't witness it, but thinks that's when he was hit."

Laurenti moved to the next in the lineup, the guard who'd been the first to die. "And this one?"

"What you see is what you get. Shot through the eye, stripped of his uniform, and covered up with his topcoat against the alley wall," she said. "According to the ballistics report, the bullet exited the back of his head and was further damaged by the same wall, but they think it was a nine-millimeter Parabellum. Hellboy recovered an antique Luger from this one"--she pointed to the gurney bearing the unidentified corpse whose face had turned into an exit wound--"and that's the type of bullet it fires. We don't have any way of verifying it right now, but it seems a reasonable conclusion that he was the one who shot the guard."

"And stole his clothes to take his place."

She wished that Hellboy had left the Luger behind to at least resolve this much of the puzzle, but he could be like that sometimes, wanting to remain in control of things even when control might be better shared. But enough misgivings for now. It felt uncomfortably close to criticizing the dead.

Stop that,
she ordered herself.
He is
not
dead.

But it didn't look good. She'd gotten word late this morning. Liz and two surviving crewmen from the wreck of the
Calista
had, after floating in a raft for close to thirty hours, been picked up by another pleasure craft and taken to the nearest port: the city of Palma, on Majorca.

It was beyond doubt that Hellboy had been swallowed by some deep-sea beast far larger than even a blue whale. All three survivors had seen it happen. Although Hellboy had gone up against things that dwarfed him before, and prevailed, hope was a little harder to cling to this time--Abe was not among the witnesses. He'd neither made it to the life raft, nor been found among the wreckage. Of course, Abe had no need of the life raft, but his failure to resurface after going into the water...not good.

If any two friends of hers were to go missing in the middle of the sea, she would have to say that Hellboy and Abe Sapien were the ones best equipped to survive it. But that didn't make their sudden absence any easier to bear. She could hear it in Liz's wrung-out voice as she'd relayed the news--the losing struggle against grief, the guilt that could so easily take hold of a survivor's heart.

He's not dead.
They're
not dead,
Kate told herself again.
It's just like Gino said. There's what's obvious, and then there's the rest of the story. So do your job...

Right. The morgue. Body by body, down to the last two...

The other nameless mystery man, found in the alley with the guard who'd been shot through the eye, had died without a mark on him. Although if you ignored their wounds and considered their overall physical condition, he looked by far the worst of the lot. He appeared to be American or Western European, and she guessed him to be a young man, perhaps a few years past college age, despite the fact that his fair hair was so lank and stringy his scalp was visible, and he'd evidently been eating so poorly that his muscle tone had wasted to the point that his skin had begun to tighten over his bones.

Heart failure? Malnutrition could cause that. They should know soon. He was due for an autopsy later today.

Laurenti seemed to find him of particular interest. After two or three minutes of visual inspection, he snapped on a pair of latex gloves and pried open the corpse's jaw, peeled back the upper and lower lips. Probed around the leathery flap of tongue, then pushed the mouth shut again without a word of explanation.

Then he moved on to the last of the five.

"His name was Tokunbo Ogundana," she said. "He was a Nigerian immigrant, although that was over fifteen years ago, when he was a student. According to his employers, his work record was exemplary. Which, on the surface at least, makes his betrayal of his co-workers and attempt to kill my team members even more puzzling."

Except for the man missing his face--a single devastating wound--Ogundana had been the most grievously injured, having caught several ricochets too, then being done in when his damaged weapon had exploded in his hands.

She went on, assuming that Laurenti was still listening, just doing a spectacular job of pretending to ignore her. "Hellboy's assessment was that Ogundana wasn't in complete control of his actions. That he was being controlled by someone else."

Laurenti nodded, otherwise engrossed in the man's corpse, the dark brown skin now a mottled gray peppered with ugly wounds.

"Or some
thing
else," Laurenti said, then scowled at the body. "This would be not so difficult if he were not so much of a mess."

"I'm sure he'd apologize if he could."

One corner of Laurenti's mouth ticked. What do you know, looked like he was finally warming up to her. Then he got busy again probing a particularly nasty wound, as ragged as it was deep, that had mangled Ogundana's left shoulder.

"Gino, I have a question that may sound a little naive. Or maybe a little insulting, so please don't take it the wrong way," she said. "But...what
are
you?"

Hunched over the gurney, he appeared to give the question some thought before answering. Coming up with a lie? If that were what he was doing, she wouldn't expect him to be quite so obvious about it.

She'd been wondering about him all along. The other morning, during the hastily convened meeting in the room beneath the museum complex, Father Laurenti had appeared to be the sore thumb of the group, the one who stood out among his fellow priests as...well, as a biker might stand out against businessmen.

"I am--" He seemed to be clawing for the right word, something he probably knew perfectly well in Italian but not in English. "--an embarrassment."

"A newer suit of clothes, a barber who can see out of both eyes, I'm sure you'd clean up nicely."

Of course she hadn't really thought that was what he meant. And, personally, she'd found his disheveled motif rather charming. The old, worn clothes, the unruly hair...he'd reminded her of Albert Einstein, of all people, letting the outer man go while his mind was occupied with higher things.

But it took her a few moments to catch onto what he was
really
telling her about himself, and then she had it:
My god...he's one of us. In his own way, he's one of us.
She remembered something she'd said to Hellboy about the Church the other day, shortly after he and Abe had linked up with her at the Archives:
For all their legacy of mysticism, they don't seem particularly experienced with it, overall...not anymore. You can barely get them to admit they still have exorcists.

"You're...an exorcist?" she asked. Somehow it suited him...near-pariah status as a throwback to an earlier age; maybe a living reminder of the sins the Church had committed once upon a more superstitious time.

"If I need to be, I am." He swept his arm along the row of corpses with a dismayed and resigned expression that this was how things always had been, were now, and always would be. "I look at things like this, and yes, most of the time they are the work of men. But they sometimes are crimes
against
men,
all
men, and women, and against God too. If this is what they are, I sometimes can see things most priests cannot. Or will not. But most of the time," he said, "I would prefer to read."