Hellboy: Unnatural Selection (15 page)

There was treachery, and lying, and in the end she supposed she had always known that there would be betrayal. But that did not make it any easier.

She sat in the ruined church and felt the lure of the full moon closing in on her. Deep inside her burned a small fire, one of desire and animalistic freedom, and it was slowly growing. The side of her she could not control was coming to take charge, and in two days she would no longer be herself. Or, she supposed, she would be more herself than ever before. She would be pure Abby Paris, not the restrained, recreated Abby Paris she had lived her life as since escaping Blake.

She looked down at her hands and clenched them. Her fingers were long and fine, graceful, and her nails were short and functional. There were no hairs sprouting from her tattooed knuckles yet. No stretching of the nail beds, no thickening of the nail, no bulking out of her hand and palms to create the pads of feet. She closed her eyes and felt that fire inside simmering, but she knew there was still time. Her betrayal of her friends was cutting deep, but at least she would have a chance to lessen its impact. She would visit the deep blackness of the Memory, do her best to discover where Blake was now, and then she would kill him. Simple to say ... but she did not wish to dwell on the practicalities.

Then she would return to Abe and the Bureau, and her future would be her choice. They could accept her back into the fold — the werewolf they knew about, the liar they did not — or they could let her go out into the world. Any other possibilities did not bear thinking about.

She closed her eyes and tried to calm her mind. It was too busy and too stretched, so she started breathing deeply, concentrating on one point of light, filling herself with its source, and letting it out with each breath. She let her mind wander where it would to begin with, knowing that to rein it in too soon would be detrimental to her efforts. Soon her slowed breathing became more natural, her heartbeat dropped, and the point of light in her mind's eye suffused her bones, flesh, and muscles. She felt illuminated, and her mind drew back and wallowed in the sensation. Such freedom gave her confidence, and that confidence gave her peace of mind, for now at least. The future was always a dark place, so she did not look that way. The past was mostly pain, so did she not look that way either. The present, the here and now, was where she could truly find salvation. Every second of every minute of the next few hours could provide her with an opportunity to validate her life, and she guessed that was all anyone could ever really hope for. Some could merely exist, and some could
live,
and she wanted so much to live.

Something touched her leg, but Abby ignored it. A cat or a rat, it would move on, finding nothing of interest here. Water dripped on her head from the broken church roof, but she reveled in it, an anointment from history. She became separate from the outside world, existing deeper inside her own mind than ever before.

Then, when she felt the time was right, she went further.

As a true creature of the Memory, her way back was relatively easy to find. Abby moved forward into the light, pressed deeper, and when she emerged from the other side, darkness prevailed. This was the primal darkness, the place that was the everywhere and nowhere before creation had come to build upon it, and its vastness terrified her. She hung back for a while, sheltering in her own mind and aware of the light behind her. It no longer shone, but it was there, as much a presence as her own mind. It comforted her, and in this place comfort was hard to find.

This was the landscape of Memory. A great blankness, deep and endless, to which forgotten things had been relegated, imprisoned. They existed here as conceits, not physical presences, and though they had minds, there was no past and future, no now and later. Abby's time here had been long, but she could remember nothing of it, other than a sense of being known by no one but herself. That strange solipsistic existence had not been painful, as such, because it had allowed consideration of no other. But its memory was still there, painted on the black backdrop for her to draw upon, and now that she knew so much more of life, its implication was horrendous: she could have stayed here, a mind festering forever. Blake had pulled her through from the other side, and for that she wanted to feel grateful. But his reasons for doing so ... they had been all his own. There was only selfishness in his mind. Freeing the creatures of Memory he might be, but for his own ends, not theirs.

Abby moved on, leaving the light behind. She knew that it was there for her should she need it, and she had a very definite sense of being attached to her sleeping body, back in that ruined church in Baltimore. That was her physical side, and it was very important to her, a link to the world that she would never willingly break She might have been re-created for someone else's gain, but she was all herself once more. If ever a time came when she would be relegated back to the Memory ... then she would rather die. That way at least she would be remembered, rather than being sent back here so that everyone could forget.

Out in the darkness little stirred. She felt intimations of presences around her, but none made themselves apparent, and she was surprised at how reduced this place felt, how empty. She drifted through the Memory, questioning the dark but receiving only blankness as an answer. Perhaps anything out there was keeping to itself, shy of her intrusion and unsure of how to respond to this presence, one of them and yet linked to a place beyond. She tried to project kinship, but in truth she felt none. This had once been her place, but that was no longer the case. She had a new home now.

Help me,
she thought, and the idea echoed in the dark.
I was once here and always will be.
The echo to this was smaller, as if the darkness itself could see the lie of her statement.
A man took me out, and now I seek him.

The man!
something shouted. Its voice was loud and broken.

The scientist,
Abby thought.
The magician.

He pulled he hurt he tore!

And did he not take you?

He pulled he tried he broke he shouted he left me all alone!

Where are you?
Abby thought. She looked through the blackness but saw nothing, sensed nothing other than the vague outlines of things that once were. Echoes of presences, that was all. Most were the ghosts of memories made whole again by Blake, but some drifted, so faint as to be almost invisible even to her. Some were lost forever.

I'm here, I'm lost,
the echo said.
I'm here forever.

Why didn't Blake take you through?

He tried, it hurt, he failed and moved on. Left me here with them.

Them?

The old ones, the oldest ones. The ones even he could not try to touch. And now that so many others have gone, their shapes become more apparent. Cant you see, stranger? Cant you taste them, invader?

I'm no invader,
Abby thought, but she knew that was not the case. She looked further, deeper, but saw only taints on the empty blackness.
What were you?

A god and a demon, and now barely a memory.

And if I promise to remember? Will you help me then, will you tell me where the man is?

I'm here hurting I'm here nowhere, and you want me to give you a place?

An idea at least,
Abby said.
You'll become my memory, I promise.

If there could be laughter in Memory, the thing uttered it now. It was a hollow sound, dry and empty and devoid of character.
Don't offer what you can't deliver,
it said.
I'm way beyond Memory now. Too old, too faded
...
too terrible.

But you can tell me, cant you?

The thing was quiet for a time, and at last Abby sensed something starting to drift closer.
I could hold you here,
it said.
The pain would go, the hurt would go, because you would be my own memory ... my own waning dream ...

I exist,
Abby thought, and she suddenly had no fear.
I'm a part of the world, no longer just faded history. I have friends.

And I can never be a friend,
the thing said.

Darkness grew out of darkness, a bulk formed from void, and it was growing closer. Abby began to feel its weight, its gravity, and it was tremendous. She sensed age, eons of time, and an endless stretch of experience and knowledge.
A god and a demon,
the thing had called itself, and she shrank back at its approach. It was not only size and weight but import and presence. She began to think she had been fooled. If this were only an echo, the true source of this Memory must be terrible indeed.

Yes, terrible,
it said, and then it laughed for real.

Abby fled, but as she drew herself back out of Memory and into reality again, the thing she had touched gave her something. Whether intentional or accidental, she fell back into her own body with an image, and a sense of place, and an idea in her mind that showed patterns and designs where there had previously been nothing.

Abby cried out and sat up in the old church. It was fully dark now — the street lamps around the ruin had gone off — and rain pattered down through the open roof. For a few seconds the terrible weight of that thing was all around, pressing down on her body and squeezing breath from her lungs, blood from her veins. She felt the fire of her soul deep inside lessened by the presence, and she screamed against being snuffed out. But then she was alone in the church again, eyes blinking back Memory even as it faded away like an old dream, so complete and solid upon waking and little more than an echo once life and time took over once again.

She was alone, and all that watched her now were the eyes of a ruined Christ.

She hurried from the church. The streets of Baltimore were all but deserted now, occupied only by shuffling nighttime people. A bum pushed a loaded cart down one street, pausing here and there to snatch up something from the gutter and stuff it into one of his already bulging bags. A police cruiser drifted by, wheel hissing along the wet concrete road. It slowed as it passed Abby, but she walked with purpose and confidence, and the cruiser moved on. Three women passed her going in the opposite direction, none of them looking at her or saying anything. They were well dressed and seemed intent on keeping themselves dry with oversized umbrellas. Abby paused and turned to watch them go, wiping rain from her eyes as though that would make her vision clearer.

She was trying to make sense of what she had seen in the Memory. As she tumbled back out of that place, the huge presence had given her something, an image or a smell, a location or a direction. She was struggling to get hold of it and translate it before it faded away, a dream gone to shreds. Blake was somewhere in there, she was sure. If she could make sense of what she had been given, she was certain that it would tell her either where he had been or where he was now.

She ducked into a doorway and pulled a small notebook from her pocket. There was the nub of a pencil in there too, and she bent forward, shielding the paper from the rain as she started jotting, doodling, letting her mind run off at whatever tangents it chose.

The moon tugged at her. She glanced up and saw its pale image behind the rain clouds. If only clouds would hide her from the moon in a couple of nights' time. She worried about that — what she would do and to whom — but it was also a fascinating prospect. Back at Bureau HQ it had been deer, and before that on the
New Ark
there was nothing she could remember, and she was happy keeping it that way. But now she was faced with true freedom for the first time, and though she was terrified of what she would do, she was fascinated as well.
Will I be a murderer?
she thought. She hoped not. But if that was her destiny, then she would embrace it, become who she really was, be herself for the very first time — free of Blake, free of the Bureau, liberated and unbound.

Abe had tried to help her create a history, when in reality she was the only one with the power to do that.

She glanced down at the paper and saw that while she had been thinking, her hands had been doing their own thing. There were words and phrases jotted there, smudged lines that could have been something else. She turned the page and carried on, trying to make sense of what that huge presence had left her.

She thought of Blake and her time in the
New Ark
and what might have come before. She had little memory of being birthed, though there was a sense of time beginning, a point at which life had started. Blake had created her from the Memory, and it had been a pure creation, not a resurrection. Abby was not a werewolf that had lived before but rather a creature constructed from the faded memories of all of humanity. She was born of old superstitions, given life where before there had been only potential. She was like a never-ending dream brought into reality. And instead of fading away as time took hold, she had taken on true form.

Blake was the nearest thing she had to a father, but she had no love for him. She had seen his mind and known its madness, understood what he was capable of. She had always known that this day would come. She should have told Abe ...

"No!" she said. "Dammit, no!" Her dilemma was growing, because she was aware of what would be happening around the world by now. She knew what was aboard the
New Ark
, and her brief visit to the Memory had shown her how much had been taken from there, how
empty
that place of myth and legend now seemed. The world was full of monsters tonight, and she had spent her life swearing that she would not be one of them. She could tell Abe and Hellboy what she knew, but that would draw them in deep and fast. They would die. She had no doubts about that. She would not consider other possibilities. Betray them, yes, but she would not kill her friends.

She looked back at the paper, and whatever the Memory presence had given her had been channeled through her hand. While she was distracted by her own deep thoughts, information had risen from the depths. She had written of intent, though she had an idea of that already. She had sketched ideas of vengeance and intervention, an image of the world gathered under a pair of spread wings, Blake taking the world under his own control. That, too, she had suspected. What she had never known was how and where, and here was a rough map, drawn in her own hand, of a place she could not yet recognize.