Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell (7 page)

"Dare I ask how?" Burke and his tight smile again. "Speaking informally, of course."

Earlier, his colleagues had made it clear that they hadn't wanted to know much about how the scroll would be making the trek from the Vatican to Connecticut. Ignorance could be more than bliss. Sometimes there was security in it, too, and this was one of those occasions.

"By sea," Hellboy said, and left it at that. "But if you really thought about it, you probably could've figured that out for yourself."

"I suspected as much. What better protection against fire than all that water?" Burke took a long, smoldering pull on his cigarette. "You seemed in a hurry to reach me. Maybe you have something on your mind too?"

"Some unfinished business from this morning. I just didn't think I'd get very far pressing the matter down in the hidey-hole."

"That matter being...?"

"Whoever it is you guys suspect of calling down the attack dogs," Hellboy said. "Father Laurenti, wasn't he the one looked like he'd dug his suit out of the charity bin? He seemed set on keeping the information close to the vest, and everybody else seemed content enough to follow his lead."

"And you have a problem with that?"

"It felt like it was getting treated as a need-to-know item, except we had two different opinions on who might need to know. If I have people putting their lives on the line because of this conflict you've got brewing under the surface here, then I'd say I've got a need to know."

"So why come to me, if we presented a unified front earlier?"

"Because you seem like more of a pragmatist than the other five put together."

Burke's grin was looser now. "I believe if you wanted to, you wouldn't have to strain yourself at all to make that sound like an insult."

"I just have that kind of face."

"And you may have just come to the right pragmatist, too. As fate would have it, you and I are on the same wavelength. Do you have an hour or two to spare before you take off?"

Hellboy thought of Abe in the tower, babysitting the scroll and bluffing out the possibility of Armageddon, and Bertrand up there, babysitting them both. He hoped Abe was in a forgiving mood.

"Because if you do," Burke said, "there's something you need to see."

T
hey took a taxi--easily the most harrowing experience of this trip so far, careening along streets tight as clogged arteries, mere inches from brown brick walls, and engaging in swerving showdowns with candy-colored motorscooters whose riders, if not suicidal, gave a heart-stopping impression of it.

The ride ended in east Rome, in a neighborhood where the buildings started to thin out, a place of abandonment and obsolescence. As the light of day began to seep from the sky to leave behind a firmament of rose-stained clouds, Burke pointed out to their driver where he should stop. It was a rounded, ramshackle turret of a place, three floors tall, and looked as though it might have begun life as some wealthy Renaissance scholar's idea of an observatory...and had then been left to deteriorate at some point in the past century or two.

Burke paid the driver for the fare, plus a bonus for him to return in forty-five minutes. They watched his taillights shoot down the street. Only when he was gone did Burke turn to a nearby building, half a block away and in marginally better repair, and lift his hand in a subtle greeting to someone unseen. It wasn't a simple wave, but rather some quick gesture that may have been an all-clear signal that he was in no trouble.

"We're being watched?" Hellboy asked.

"Not us so much as the
osservatorio."

"By other priests?"

Burke gave him the tight smile. "How about we just call them believers."

Hellboy got the general drift. Over the centuries, even priests sometimes needed things done that required a harsher set of skills.

They paced up the walkway, past a small garden that had run riot, then died in a choked heap. Now the breeze rustled through brittle veins of dead ivy, and the husks of fallen leaves swirled at their feet.

Though bristling with splinters, the building's door, broadly curved at the top, still looked durable. The face-level slit, ringed with iron plating and sealed with a small door, seemed to be a later addition. Burke produced a key and let them inside.

It took a moment for Hellboy's eyes to adjust to the gloom, but when they did, what he could see of the place was what anyone might expect from the outside: peeling walls and unswept floors, old frescos cancerous with mildew. More rooms remained to be seen, but there was no reason to expect them to look any better. Near one wall was a hulking wooden staircase, twisting upward not in a smooth spiral, but in cruder, squared-off segments.

"Don't worry," said Burke. "It's sturdier than it looks."

They took it up past the second floor, where a glance around showed only more dirt and emptiness, then on to the third floor. It was brighter up here, the last of the day straining through tall windows, then Burke let in more light by turning an old iron crank. This forced a set of gears into groaning motion as they pulled toward opposite sides the overlapping series of panels that comprised the roof. These, at least, must have been scrupulously maintained over the years. When closed, they looked to fit together as snugly as the hull planks of a Viking long-ship.

One slow 360-degree look around at the top floor, now open to the sky, and there was only one thing to ask: "What
is
this place?"

"As of the past few days? Abandoned, I think," Burke said. "Men like Father Laurenti, who made it clear he didn't want you sticking your nose in these matters...? It's been forever that his kind has been trying to root out the group that used this place. But, whoever they are, they seem to have been warned off just in time. Spies, remember."

Up here, it was all one capacious circular room perched upon the living quarters underneath. Hellboy had no trouble imagining the man of money and learning who might have built it centuries ago...losing himself up here, a stranger to his family, having meals sent up as he spent his days poring over charts and Copernicus, and his nights studying the stars.

The cupola was braced inside by a network of rough-hewn beams, although to Hellboy's eye, part of it had been ripped out some time in the past to keep the central floor space open and unobstructed. In the rafters were the remnants of a pulley system, although there was no longer any sign of the observation platform it must have hoisted from the floor up to the apex of the roof.

No, this place had long since been converted to other purposes.

He'd felt it even before he had seen it clearly...the accumulated weight of ritual and intent. Such things left echoes when repeated over time. Just as any old building might absorb the essences of the goings-on inside it, so this place had soaked up a resonance of mystery and dread.

It was more than just the things that hung on the walls and from the beams, although certainly they were part of it: archaic tools of torture and punishment, of recantation and forced conversions. Countless sets of manacles dangled from their chains. From pegs and hooks hung leg-irons and larger frame-like restraints designed to freeze the body into unnatural positions that would cause agonizing muscle cramps. From one overhead beam hung a mobile made of more than a dozen sets of thumbscrews. Elsewhere, high-tensile iron collars--some smooth for use as garrotes, others lined with spikes that would bite into the neck or skull--had been looped together into a giant chain. Fitted along one rounded vertical beam was a display of iron mutes, each with a band that clamped around the back of the head and a jawplate that filled the mouth with a gag. On the walls were innumerable scourges and flails, pokers and brands, pincers and tongs. Tools that poked and tools that ripped. An oak framework threaded with bolt-shafts and lined with sharp spikes for crushing knees and elbows.

They didn't appear to have been used for generations, the metal dull and often corroded, the stains left by long-ago victims faded to shadows, unrejuvenated by fresher blood. Instead, they hung as though displayed like museum pieces.

Or objects of power.

Hellboy stepped over to one of the smaller devices and snatched it off the wall, turned it in his hand: a thick leather strap with a primitive buckle for fitting around someone's neck and, in the middle, a short metal bar tipped at both ends with a pair of points. One end to jam under the chin, the other to bite into the hollow above the breast-bone. A heretic's fork, it was called, and this one was engraved with the word its users wanted most to hear:
Abiuro.

I recant.

He hurled the fork at the ceiling, where it stuck into a rafter. "Seems clear enough who these used to belong to."

"Yes," Burke said. "They're exactly what they appear to be. Their
history
is exactly what it appears to be."

"But that doesn't explain the rest."

Because over decades, maybe centuries, a bewilderingly complex array of symbols had been chalked and painted on the floor and walls and beams. Many of them he was already familiar with. The heart of it all was the circle in the middle of the floor, large enough to hold over a dozen men without crowding, and its edges inscribed with such meticulous patience it seemed inhuman. Some sections held Hebraic words; others were rimmed with lettering from other alphabets...Theban, whose letters curled like scimitars, and the simpler Malachim, like twigs tipped with dots. The great circle was made even more intricate with an internal arrangement of seals and talismans, which had come from such sources as the
Clavicula Salomonis
--the Key of Solomon.

Underfoot and overhead were pictograms and sigils of ancient origin, plus refinements and inventions both medieval and Elizabethan, as well as things he'd
never
seen. The place was like an archaeological dig, cross-sectioned with layer upon layer from various eras and schools of ceremonial magic.

"What you see here," Burke said, "is a classic case of fanatics becoming the very thing they were trying to stamp out."

"The Inquisition," said Hellboy. "We're talking about the Inquisition here."

"Speaking bureaucratically--not in practice, thank God--the Inquisition never actually went away. It just got renamed. You knew this, right?"

Hellboy said he did. The department in the Papal Curia that, for the past thirty or so years, had worn the benign name of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had been born in the 1200s as the Holy Inquisition. Three centuries later, it became the Holy Office, although it had taken more than the name change to abolish its more barbaric practices.

"How does a thing like this
happen,
Burke?"

The monsignor seemed amused that he would ask. "Proximity...exposure...those are as good an explanation as any. On an entirely different level, the same thing happened during the Crusades when the armies of Western Europe encountered a level of civilization they hadn't expected: 'These Saracens may be infidels, but they're way ahead of us in science and medicine.' "

Hellboy finished for him: " 'So even though we're here to kill them, let's not let all that go to waste.' "

"And thus the exchange of ideas and technologies proceeds. There was a time when war was good for promoting that kind of cross-pollination." Burke waved at the grim relics on the walls. "Now, most of the poor unfortunates these things were used on hundreds of years ago truly were innocents. They simply had different beliefs, or had basically the right beliefs but expressed them in the wrong way...or, as it sometimes happened, they did everything right but had the misfortune to run afoul of a neighbor in a secular matter...and the good neighbor decided that Inquisitors were more likely than impartial judges to bring about the preferred outcome. A lot of land got stolen that way."

But sometimes, according to Burke, in their prosecution of those who deviated from acceptable beliefs, these long-ago defenders of the faith encountered practices that existed on an entirely different plane from folk remedies and other pagan traditions. Trafficking in spirits of the dead and entities that had never been cloaked in flesh at all...these, along with denial of the faith, deserved the most savage punishments of the body and cleansings of the soul. Yet, over time, the lesson was too stark to have been lost on even the most fiercely intolerant men: Here were techniques and methodologies that were
working
. Perhaps not enough to save the heretics from an agonizing fate at sanctified hands, but working nonetheless.

The dead could be interrogated, demons forced to reveal their secrets...

For a certain mindset, the temptations must have been insidiously subtle at first, and ultimately overpowering. After all, what did sorcerers desire that such zealous churchmen did not? Knowledge, power, the carrying out of their will...

"So they thought they could justify its use on their own terms," Hellboy said. "Adopting the enemy's ways to stamp him out, except in their own hands, it becomes something pure, right?"

"Right. The ends justify the means. It's not like we have signed confessions and records of their meetings, but from the bits and pieces we've put together, a picture emerges. They'd interrogate the dead for some of the same reasons the Inquisition would interrogate the living...to get them to incriminate other people. Or just reveal things they could use as leverage one way or another. And if they came upon a genuine adept of sorcery, or just an unconventional healer who understood herbs, they might summon demons and turn them loose on the person and his family. Their version of poetic justice, and probably an object lesson to the victim's neighbors on the perils of straying from the true path. They saw themselves as fighting a war against the forces of darkness, and I imagine they regarded what they did as no different than a soldier picking up an enemy's weapon on the battlefield and killing him with it. And God be praised." For a prelate, Burke could do snide awfully well. "Remember, though, we're talking about only a select few, who banded together into their own society that could
never
have gained sanction by the Church."

"If they turned into heretics themselves," Hellboy said, "why didn't they ever get stamped out along with the rest?"

"Two theories, and the reality was probably a combination of both." Burke fumbled in his pockets; seemed to have gone without a cigarette long enough. "One holds that even though the Inquisition had no reservations about going after rank-and-file priests thought to be bewitching nuns and female parishioners, they were less eager to purge their own ranks. Because to do that, they'd have to admit they were susceptible to corruption."

"You believe that?"

"I suppose it would depend on the individual Inquisitors. For the true believers, it probably wouldn't have made any difference. But we have to assume that their line of work also attracted men who may have preached a good game, but were first and foremost sadists...deeply disturbed men who found an accepted outlet for their worst perversions. Naturally they're going to focus their attentions on the most helpless."

"And what's the other theory?"

"That they were extremely effective at maintaining their status as a secret society. They wouldn't have been the kind of group you could infiltrate, while having another agenda, or gain information about from outsiders. Supposedly their initiation rites contained activities that someone uncommitted to this unorthodox path would never have been able to bring himself to commit. Not that
they
regarded it as devil worship, by any means...but that's the only way it could've been regarded by someone who didn't share their views."