Hellboy: Unnatural Selection (24 page)

Abby turned and looked out the small window at her side. She had a view of the wing and the green landscape down below, fluffy clouds passing by here and there, roads and rivers meandering across the surface of this country she was coming to for the very first time.
I'm not that far from Paris,
she thought.
Maybe that's where Abe will think I'm going.
The thought of her friend was depressing, because she was betraying all the faith and hope he had developed in her over the years. But at the same time there were reasons, there was rhyme. When the time eventually came for him to discover the truth, she hoped he would understand. "Understand," she said. Her breath misted the window and then faded away.

A dream came back to her, sudden and hard. She was alone in the dark, except that the darkness itself was not barren and neutral as it should have been. But neither was it alive. It watched her without eyes, listened without ears, and spoke without breath, and though she could not recall the words that had been whispered to her, she knew that they were all bad.

Awake now, an unbearable sense of unease had settled over her. She looked out at the aircraft's wing and hoped it would not break off. She looked down to the ground a mile below and hoped the landing gear would lock down correctly. Her dreams had always affected her intensely, and mostly she put it down to having been born of a memory herself. She supposed dreaming was her way of thinking back to the time before Blake had brought her into this world, her own memory of the Memory. Her recent brief foray back there had revealed that great, conscious darkness to her once more.

But this dream was different. It had felt intentional, not random, as if something had come into her mind to present it, instead of her mind presenting itself. She shivered and closed her eyes.

Full moon tonight,
she thought.
I've set myself free to murder.
She hated thinking about what would happen when she changed. She had all but ignored it since fleeing Baltimore, dismissed the thought with some vague idea of locking herself away or being able to hunt animals, not people. But she could sense the blood flowing around her, smell the meat, and even through the staleness of the confined atmosphere, the smells were good. Her mouth watered. She hated that, but she could not control it.

"Stupid bitch," the man next to her said, staring after the flight attendant. He flipped out his phone again and switched it on.

"That can interfere with communications," Abby said.

The man looked at her, smiled, and pressed the phone to his ear.

Abby narrowed her eyes. She saw a vein pulsing at the man's throat, a tic in his left eye, and she could smell his wet flesh beneath his rank body odor. She thought he would probably taste tough and insipid — a lifetime of discontent would do that to a person — but still she grinned, and growled, and the man turned away and slipped his phone back into his pocket.

Abby closed her eyes. Her bones and muscles were beginning to ache.
Just let me find him before I change,
she thought.
After that ... I don't care. Blake needed stopping years ago, and I failed in that. This time I'll do the right thing.

The plane touched down and eventually disgorged its disgruntled passengers. Abby immediately noticed the way the ground crew kept looking away from the passengers, out the tunnel windows, and up at the sky. They were nervous. No, they were terrified. They were trying to hide it, but everything about the way they stood, silent and twitchy, told her that they really did not wish to be here. At the junction of the tunnel and the arrivals terminal she paused and looked out the window. The sky was clear, the afternoon sun shining down on the busy airport ... and there were army vehicles flitting between buildings, disgorging soldiers who carried heavy machine guns and rocket launchers.

Abby walked into the arrivals terminal. It was silent. Hundreds of people stood clumped around TV monitors, and those who had just arrived soon joined the silent throng. It spooked her seeing so many people doing nothing, saying nothing, simply watching the screen. But even from a distance she could see flames smeared yellow and orange across one of the screens, and immediately she thought,
Heathrow.

"What is it?" she asked a young man, his eyes wide, face slack with disbelief.

"Dragons just destroyed Heathrow," he said without stopping. He was walking from TV to TV, as if viewing different channels could alter the truth.

Abby did not stay long. She had seen one of the dragons in the
New Ark
, and she had no wish to watch them raining fire and destruction down on innocent people. "You bastard," she muttered as she left the terminal.
Whatever cause Blake claims as his own, there's no justification for this.

She had to get there. Hire a car, drive to London, because the hints she had received from that awful, ancient entity in the infinity of the Memory had seemed to be right. London was where things were beginning to happen, and she knew that Blake would be there soon.

She would meet him. Father and daughter reunited. But this child had nothing but hate in her heart for her father. Hate and fear and a growing desire to kill him and eat of his flesh.

Abby breathed a sigh of relief as she pulled out from the Avis parking lot and found her way onto England's motorways. She supposed the world had far greater problems to contend with right now, but she had still been expecting the BPRD to put out information about her, telling airport authorities that she was ... what? A monster? A runaway werewolf? A danger to herself and everyone around her, come full moon?

She smiled, shook her head, turned on the radio. "Bad Moon Rising." Great.

"G
AL, THIS IS MADNESS.
Father would never want us to do what you re talking about doing. It could destroy everything we've done over the past fifteen years!"

"Zahid de Lainree doesn't agree, you said that yourself."

"Yes, but he was obviously mad."

"Mad," Gal said, and he smiled. His cigarette lit his face in the darkness of the sultry night, a pale yellow glow that set his skin aflame. "One man's mad is another man's sad."

"You know how things are, Gal." Richard loved his brother so much, and yet lately he had grown to fear him as well. He was afraid that Gal was dying — the sending weakened him more every time, and his recovery periods between instances were starting to overlap — but he was more afraid that his brother was going slowly, comprehensively mad. Whether madness or death would take Gal first, Richard was terrified at the thought of either.

"Yes, I know. I know I'm more than just a son to our father. I'm a way for him to better his plans."

"He told us what to get, and we've been getting just that."

"And is there no room in that plan for betterment?" Gal said. He leaned forward in the chair and stared at Richard, his face illuminated by vague light from a balcony farther along the side of the hotel. "Do you run through your life simply doing what you're told, instead of trying to find better ways to do the same thing?"

"This is not a better way, it's a different way," Richard said. Gal's eyes were deep black pits, and he could not look straight at them. So he looked out over the city instead, amazed as ever by the lack of light reflecting from the low clouds. "We have no idea what may happen if we find this thing. What if it speaks to us? What if it's never been asleep and gone, just lying there dormant, waiting for someone to come and speak the right words to give it life again?"

"That's just what we are going to do. You'll lead us to it from de Lainree's book, we'll find it together, then I'll send whatever I can to Father, wherever the
Ark
is right now. And after that ... the choice is his."

"No," Richard said. "If we do this tomorrow and find something, we're taking all choice away from Father and putting it in the hands of something else."

"We're giving him power."

"He has that already. Can you imagine the
New Ark
now, Gal? Can you picture what he has on there and what he has yet to bring through? If only we could see ... if only we could go to him."

Gal sighed and lit another cigarette. His face was gaunt and weak, skin yellow and saggy in the match's flare. He drew in the smoke and leaned back in his chair. "It's a beautiful night," he said. "So warm, peaceful. So filled with potential."

Is he really thinking this?
Richard thought.
Can he really believe we'd be doing any good?
"Potential for chaos," he said.

"And isn't that what we've been working toward for years? Chaos?"

"No," Richard said, and he was certain of that. He'd asked himself the same question every time they went in search of something else from de Lainree's book, and each time he watched Gal perform the sending spell, his answer was the same. "No, not chaos. Order. We're helping Father bring order back into the world. We're saving the planet."

Gal laughed, loud and surprisingly bitter. "Richard, for someone so old you still hang on to your cute childish conceits."

"I'm not embittered by what we're doing," Richard said, regretting it instantly. The sending was killing Gal, and they both knew it.

Gal sighed again. "Well, it's your choice come sunup."

But it was not Richard's choice, and it never had been. They both knew that, both acknowledged it, and yet they had these conversations and pretended that their outcome could make a difference. Gal — in pain, weak, feeble, and quite probably mad — was the stronger of the two by far. His will steered their lives. Richard, protesting and hesitant, followed along every time.

Next morning Richard woke early and found Gal poring over the book. He was sitting in the same chair out on the balcony of their hotel room, and Richard wondered whether his brother had even gone to bed. He often seemed not to sleep at all.

The streets around their hotel had come to life with the dawn, and Richard was relieved that the silence of the previous night was no more. People talked and shouted, cars growled and hooted, motorbikes roared, traders called, and children chattered in the street two stories below their balcony, and the mouthwatering aromas of street cooking wafted up to them on pale smoke. He liked the feeling of the world around them being alive, yet at the same time Richard knew that he and Gal were apart from this world. They had removed themselves the day they fled their burning home with their father. Ever since, they had been hiding beneath the skin of reality, digging deeper into the petrified flesh of history. Anyone who happened to look up would see two middle-aged men on a hotel balcony, one staring intently at a big old book, the other standing at the rear of the balcony, looking out over Jerusalem with an expression of confusion that would be familiar to the observer. Many foreign tourists came here, but few ever truly understood the city.

Richard looked down into the crowd below. None of them could have any idea of what he and Gal were considering doing this day.

"How can you read this?" Gal said. His voice was croaky from too many cigarettes and too long sitting on his own, not talking, just thinking. "There's no sense here at all, no meaning. It's all distortion."

"That's because it's what you perceived the very first day Father showed us the book."

"And you saw clearly what it said?"

"No, I saw what it meant. I knew page one, and every page since has been open to me, with a little concentration."

Gal shook his head, closed the book, and smoothed its time-worn leather cover. "I'm glad I have you with me, Rich," he said. "I truly am."

Richard's heart missed a beat at the unaccustomed softness of his brothers voice. The brash man of last night had gone, burned away perhaps by the morning sun, and in his place there was his brother. Vulnerable, wasted, tortured by many things from many times, yet still his brother. They were from the same father and mother. However different their personalities, Richard liked to remember that.

"Are you ready to go?" Gal said quietly.

"I suppose so. But I think I need something to eat first."

Gal stood, twisted his body this way and that, easing out the stiffness. "We can pick something up on the way." As he passed Richard on his way back into the room, Gal put a hand on his brother's shoulder. "You know this is the right thing, don't you? Its in de Lainree's book, it's part of the Memory, and Father will only thank us." Gal went inside to get ready.

I hope so,
Richard thought.

It took them most of the day to find the entrance to the tomb.

They walked through the streets of Jerusalem, ignoring street traders, avoiding police and army patrols, pausing every half hour at a street café, drinking strong coffee while Richard strengthened his spell of course and tried to make sense of that most esoteric chapter of the
Book of Ways.
He was doing his best. Whatever doubts he felt about what they were doing, never did he feign confusion. The words and text and strange drawings merged in his mind, steering him this way and that, until late in the afternoon, as they sat in bright white plastic chairs outside a building a thousand years old, two symbols bled into each other and showed Richard the way.

He sighed, slumped in the chair, picked up his coffee, and downed it in one gulp. "I have it," he said.

"Good." Gal leaned across and touched Richards shoulder. "I knew you would."

They remained in the café for a while and ate, Richard to regain the strength he had lost through that long day of spell casting and concentration, Gal to fortify himself against the sending yet to come. The sun dipped toward the western hills, and they both decided at the same time that they should not remain above-ground to watch the sunset. Much better to be on their way by then. They had flashlights, folded digging tools, and a crowbar packed into their rucksacks. They were used to breaking and entering, finding buried history. Richard sometimes felt that all the relevant moments of their lives had been spent underground.

He led them to a deep drainage ditch beside a park, filled now with discarded bicycles, clothing, cardboard boxes, and other refuse.