Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (22 page)

Hellboy trusted Artaud in a way that he wasn't now prepared to trust the others who'd been instrumental in arranging for the scroll's departure from Rome. Not that they were all corrupt, but because it appeared that one among them was not what he appeared to be. One of them was in league with forces that, rather than see the scroll destroyed, would steal it for their own purposes.

So who was it?

For Hellboy, the quickest way to the heart of this mystery was Campbell Holt. And for someone on the inside they trusted to surreptitiously round up a few personal items from the rest of the inner circle.

"However you want to do this, it's your call," she told Cam. "We're not in the blue room anymore."

"Can't spend my whole life in the blue room, can I?" He puffed out a tense sigh and stepped from behind the kitchen counter.

Liz pointed at the scattering of purloined items. "You want to take them into one of the other rooms? Or do you want the two of us to leave you alone, or..."

He gave the main room a once-over and decided he wanted to stay out here. Made sense. This was where they'd spent the bulk of their time, around the fireplace and the old plush furniture, most of which had seen better days but had a homey feel. He'd grown comfortable here. His only request was to pull the windows' shutters to, and the glass down, to minimize distractions from outside.

With that done, Cam settled into the biggest chair. "Just bring them to me one at a time, and I'd rather you not tell me anything about who they belong to."

"The privacy, the intrusion..." Rogier still seemed queasy about moral issues. "Does this process of yours reveal...intimate details? Things that deserve to remain personal?"

"What, you mean like how many times a day a guy might beat off?" Cam said, and she wanted to smack him. "Sorry, what's there is there."

He must have noticed the look on her face, because Cam immediately looked as though he realized this was no time to cop an attitude.

"Umm, look...if it makes you feel any better," he told Rogier, trying for a hasty salvage, "what I'm looking for, if it's here at all, if the guy has this whole other side to his life that none of the rest of you knows about, it should give off a pretty big hit. Whatever else is there...if it doesn't look and feel like the big sharp needle, I throw it back in the haystack, because it doesn't matter."

Well done,
she told him with a discreet smile and tip of her head.
Nice save.
Then a reversion to stern mentor:
Now don't ever ever ever do that again.

She brought him the ring first, silver-banded with a black stone in the middle--onyx, maybe--that was engraved with a red cross. He curled his fingers around it and let his head drift toward his chest, the usual pose he went into when it was time to work. She'd never been able to discern whether it came from concentration, or was an unconscious defensive posture he'd evolved, but didn't want to ask. It didn't seem worth calling attention to. When it came to psychics, in her experience, the least little thing that made someone self-conscious could contaminate the reading, throw it off.

"This guy could stand to lose some weight. I'm not kidding..." Campbell said.

Liz gave Rogier a sideways glance.

"Archbishop Bellini," he whispered with a grin. "True, he could."

"...but he's clean." Campbell opened his eyes and returned the ring directly to Rogier. "Seriously. Have a word, dude. This guy's having chest pains and thinking he can ignore them forever, and they're probably not going to stay minor much longer."

Next she gave Campbell a white glove; it looked like the kind of dress glove a drum major might wear. She leaned in close to Rogier.

"You didn't," she whispered. "One of the, what are they called...?"

"The Swiss Guard?" he said. "Yes."

"Oh, you
are
good."

Campbell held the glove crumpled in his hand for a moment longer, then gave it back with a shake of his head and a snicker, as if to ask how anyone could ever have suspected
this
guy? "He's so conscientious about duty he probably does marching drills in his sleep."

He went through a couple more, and on the fourth got something that gave his face a pained twist as he was taking it in, but he waved them off, no problem, nothing that had any bearing on their business here, and then said he wanted to give it a rest for a few minutes.

Throughout this process, Rogier had gone from mild skepticism to interest to rapt fascination. He was clearly grateful for the break, because it gave him a chance to pose the question he seemed increasingly anxious to ask, without interrupting:

"How do you
do
this?" Rogier wanted to know. "How does this
work?"

Campbell studied the floor a moment, then looked up with an apologetic smile. "I'm not really sure. A few days ago, I learned a couple of theories from some people, but I can't say which one feels more right to me. I don't guess one has to be totally wrong for the other to be right."

"Not that either of them has to be right," Liz added.

"In one theory, the objects we own, that have a real presence in our lives and aren't just forgotten in the back of a closet somewhere," he said, "it's like they're psychic sponges. We imprint them with what happens to us, and our strongest memories, and our feelings about whatever we love and hate, the stuff that really makes an impression...and for some reason, I can pull all that out of them.

"The other theory," he said, then backed up a moment. "Have you ever heard of the Akashic Records?"

Rogier said he hadn't.

"Don't feel bad, it was a new one on me, too. But if you think of everything we do as expending some kind of energy...our actions and thoughts and emotions...that energy's got to go somewhere, because you can't destroy energy, it can only change form. Well, supposedly, a part of it touches this higher plane of existence and makes a permanent impression. And that's what the Akashic Records are, if you believe in it: this master record of everything that's ever happened, no matter how small. And those personal objects I was talking about? They're nothing by themselves. But they're like"--he stopped, clawing for a comparison--"links on a web page. And for someone like me, what they do is point me to their owner's record."

Rogier seemed quietly enthralled, with an obvious preference for this theory. Beneath his wide brow and balding pate, he had the look of a boy hearing about dinosaurs for the first time.

Yeah,
Liz thought,
that's the one that would appeal to a librarian.

"Except I don't have the skill to read it the way I would a book yet," Cam said. "I mostly have to take what jumps out at me. And it's usually not subtle."

After pondering this for a few moments, Rogier asked where the lavatory was. She'd really been pushing the bottled water on him. A warmish afternoon, pedaling his bike around in Rome traffic...go on, go on, rehydrate. Liz pointed down a hallway and told him which door, and he excused himself. She followed the progress of his footsteps, the clunk of the closing door.

Hurriedly now, she grabbed his shoulder bag off the kitchen counter and dropped it into Cam's lap. He looked up at her from the chair as though she'd given him a dead fish.

"Yeah. Him too. Don't look so surprised," she whispered.

Wide-eyed: "I thought you all
trusted
him..."

"And we want to keep trusting him, so do it."

With a flash of bitterness across his face, Campbell snatched the bag in his hand, opened himself to the ebb and flow...then tossed it back at her.

"Nothing wrong with him, either," Cam said, and wouldn't take his eyes from hers, a glare that bordered on accusation. "You want to know what his big secret is? He likes you. I mean
likes
you. And that's really eating at him because he knows he can't do a thing about it. So he's trying hard to fight it. It's filling him up with guilt that, personally, I don't think he should feel, but he does, and now I can feel it too."

They heard the toilet flush.

"Please don't ask me to blindside somebody again when they leave the room," Cam said. "It really makes me feel like an asshole."

She nodded, and this time felt like not only was she the one chastened, but deserving of it. Not that the subterfuge wasn't necessary, but she should have warned him in advance that it was the only way to be sure.

They were both winging it here, weren't they? And Campbell knew it.

Rogier was back after a few moments, and she started getting the cleared items out of the way before they moved on to finish the rest. Putting them back in his bag and marking them off on her list, dictated from Hellboy, and checking them against Artaud's list of who owned what.

"Hey," she said. "We're missing somebody. There's one name not on your list."

"Yes, Monsignor Burke. He's since gone back to theU.S., many days ago."

Liz scowled at the paper in her hand. "I know you can't help it, but Hellboy's not going to like that. If we don't find what we're looking for in the rest of these things, the suspicion's naturally going to fall on Burke's head. Except we'll have to figure out another way of verifying it, and that's going to take time, and be that much trickier to pull off."

Nothing they could do about it now, though, and Cam still had three items to go...

The walnut pen, explored and returned...and another was cleared. She next gave him a crucifix, on the understated side rather than garish, carved from ivory and small enough to fit in the palm of the hand. A moment after it went into Cam's, he jolted, as though he'd been physically shoved back into the chair, and she was at his side in a heartbeat, her hand cool and soothing and pressed against his forehead--

I'll catch you if you fall

--because they had already rehearsed for moments like this, like breaking the emergency glass: Feel the cool of her palm, the temperature of blue, and he would be back in the blue room with its cerulean walls, his sanctuary, where he had control and nothing could reach him...

"Cam?" she said. "You okay?" Her other hand was poised to grab. "You want me to take it from you?"

He thrashed his head back and forth. "No...no, I'm on top of this...I've got this by the short hairs..." Sucking down a few deep breaths to calm himself and stabilize, and in his mind he would be cranking valves, adding filters, regulating the flow. "It's just that...this guy's seen and been through some
heavy
stuff."

Liz glanced back at Rogier. "Whose crucifix is that?"

"Father Laurenti. Do you know of him?"

"Anecdotally," Liz said--Kate's new friend, or at least newfound fascination. She was still talking about the man when Liz had met up with her again at the Cornwall safehouse, nearly three days after the wreck of the
Calista
. A priest who looked like a pauper and had given Kate an insight or two into spirit possession that she'd never encountered.

Campbell was easing back to a more relaxed state and hadn't once seemed willing to break the connection. She was proud of him, proud of herself for having brought him this far in just a few weeks.

"Except..." he said, and his brow began to furrow. "Maybe it's not such a big deal now that you didn't get anything from that Burke guy you mentioned." Eyes still closed, head still down, he had a look of bewilderment. "Oh, this is weird..."

"Cam, what about this man?"

"I think...he's your guy. He's the one."

Now Rogier was shaking his head. "This can't be. I would believe anyone before Gino Laurenti.
Myself
before Gino Laurenti."

"It's just that..." Cam was stammering now, as though reading an inscription from fragments of stone he was still piecing together. "He...he doesn't
know
it. About himself."

"How is this possible?" Rogier asked.

Cam's hand started to twitch, as though he were developing a tic. "More than one mind here. There's...there are three..."

Liz leaned in cheek-to-cheek, let him know she was there. "Cam, does he have something inside him?"

Shaking his head slowly, as if only gradually verifying the truth, or the truth as he perceived it. "No...that's not it...but...ummm...I'm getting some threads here I don't really want to follow--"

Liz forced her nails past his clenched fingers and yanked the crucifix from his hand. "Okay, that's enough of that, this is over."

She sat beside him as his eyes opened and he looked around the room as if to reacquaint himself with it, to remember what was most real, and she stroked his forehead back toward the clipped hairline, poor guy, halfway to a monk's existence already when you knew that without this awful gift he'd be happy with his hair in his eyes and both hands attached and playing guitar in some awful band and contending with hangovers left by cheap beer instead of tainted souls.

"You kicked ass," she told him.

She helped him up from the chair and steered him toward the hallway, led him back toward the other rooms and put him to bed, fully clothed except for his shoes, old flat-soled Keds. She worked them off and by the time the second one hit the floor, he was already asleep. She pulled a quilt over him and left him in peace.