Hellboy: Odd Jobs Read online

  With every blow, Guy dashed his own skull against the wall.

  Something gave inside, and he felt his face go utterly numb. He slammed his head against the mirror Francine's mirror

  until it, too, shattered.

  His cries stopped after he'd broken his own jaw and his bleeding tongue had nearly swollen the back of his throat closed. He mewed like a kitten instead.

  Still, the hoof pounded down.

  When he could stand no longer, Guy slammed his face against the iron posts of the bed, the edge of the dresser, until he was on his knees grinding his ruined face against the chair, the bed frame, the floor. He crawled to the scattered remnants of the head and kissed them, though they were now glowering like coals.

  As Hellboy's hoof dealt the decisive blow, all that remained of Moro burst into flames.

  Groveling amid the shards, stuffing them in his mouth, Guy's hair and skin caught fire. Blind, he couldn't see the red demon as it turned from the detritus on the floor to seize a cistern of water and rush to Guy.

  Having rammed his ears against the knob of the bedpost, he couldn't hear the demon as it implored him to stop, though he felt the cooling splash of water.

  Softly banging his head against the floor still, he felt strong hands and arms slide beneath him. He felt the weight of his nights lift and drift off as he was cradled and carried by his savior, and for a moment, just a moment, he thought he heard the Sunday morning stirring of the Boulevard Richard'lenoir outside his window.

  He imagined he heard Francine's voice, felt her touch on his lips, his eyelashes, his brow.

  Francine came to call twice a week at the most unusual hours. She looked like an angel, but many feared her nonetheless.

  Her nursing credentials were impeccable, so it was said, and the hospice authorities never questioned her presence, whatever the time of night or day. There seemed to be some long-standing attachment between them, and the Monsieur le Directeur demonstrated an uncharacteristic reverence in her company. In fact, it seemed she had her own key, given the ease of her comings and goings in the pre- and post-dawn hours, usually calculated to coincide with the shift change.

  No surprise, then, that none of those who worked at the home seemed to know anything about her. One shift saw her coming, another saw her going, and she never lingered long enough for either to engage her attention, though she clearly galvanized theirs, like a phantom. She was unfailingly courteous, but she never fraternized with the staff, nor answered even the most tentative queries about herself or the center of her attention.

  The rumors circled but never clung. She was a pauper, it was whispered, pouring all she earned into her loved one's care. She was wealthy, it was said, through a recent marriage, and her husband tolerated her eccentricities linked with the invalid home visitations out of Christian regard for her prior affections for one long gone.

  No, no, she was widowed, others said, and she came to visit her only surviving family member (who might be either her father or brother, depending on who spoke of the matter).

  He was a patient here at the home, the old man they called 'Puzzle'.

  Puzzle's identity remained equally cloaked in mystery. His records were sealed and kept under lock and key, as more than one curious staff member had discovered. He never spoke clearly or loudly enough to ascertain any accent or origin, and bore no mark to provide any clue as to who he might have once been.

  Old, withered, and emaciated, his scarred visage ruined beyond repair, he steadfastly avoided eye contact, and indeed seemed to harbor a dread of seeing anyone's face or of being seen.

  Those who tended him did so reluctantly, respecting his silence and distance while unable to avoid stolen glances at his single eye, his ravaged scalp and tattered brow, his crater of a nose. He screamed at whispers overheard, and sobbed uncontrollably at times for no apparent reason. His bed was bolted to the floor without any clearance beneath, and his terror of what might lurk beneath other beds, tables, chairs, or cabinets was self-evident. He shunned books and shelves, and could not be forced to even pass the door to the hospice's meager bibliothèque.

  Puzzle stared out at the trees in the spring as their buds swelled into leaves, enchanted by the spectacle. He was at his calmest and most childlike behavior throughout the summers, counting on his fingers as he blissfully gazed up at the leaves shimmering in all manner of weather; his daytime attendants vigilantly moved his wheelchair throughout the afternoons so he would never be looking up into the sun, a reasonable concern given the constant intensity of his lone eye's upward gaze.

  He was at his absolute worst in the autumn weeks, fretting over the fall colors and weeping pitifully as the leaves that fell outside were raked into piles and burned. He sobbed as he frantically counted his fingers, as if calculating some eternal, unfathomable loss.

  Rumors that he was thus because of the Great War and perhaps the last surviving member of le Union des Gueules Cassees seemed unlikely, though he looked nearly a century old. This lent some credence to the belief that Puzzle was father to the mystery woman, though the tale of his barely audible reply to a nurse who had once pressed him on the matter

  "I had her as often as I wished, my chérie."

  sparked gossip of

  incest, prompting many to give Puzzle and his female visitor an even wider berth.

  So, too, did the persistent asides about her arriving with a strange man bundled up like a burn victim and wearing sunglasses in the dead of night, and an unnaturally tall, bearded 'red man' who accompanied them an Indian, perhaps? They had never seen an Indian from America, except in the movies. Could they grow to such size in America? The red giant supposedly had called him 'Jigsaw', and had words with Puzzle that seemed to bring him some comfort.

  Francine clearly brought him comfort, too.

  His fear of faces and being looked upon evaporated only in her thrall. Like an infant, he gazed upon her as if she alone were his world

  the world

  and nothing else had or would ever matter.

  She tended to him faithfully, and at times her singing could be heard lilting, ever so softly, from his cramped chamber.

  "Guy," she whispered, so softly that none but he could hear, "chéri."

  And, oh, she loved to touch him, especially when he was asleep in the very early morning, and the dawn light played upon his face.

  This one is to Marj. Special thanks to two excellent friends: Jean-Marc Lofficier, for considerable assistance and inspiration, and John Totleben, for sweeping up and finding the original head. I owe a great debt to the work of David Kunzle, comics' greatest historian, from which I drew all the material on Jean Leger and the Piemont atrocities. Last, but never least: merci, Mike, Chris, and Scott.

  A Mother Cries at Midnight

  Philip Nutman

  He stared at me sadly over his steaming cup of coffee and I saw then how the terrible weight of his responsibility had crushed his spirit. Instead of fathering hope and life, instead of saving lives, he had given birth to the most destructive force known to mankind. There had been no irony when, as Fat Man exploded, he had said, "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." For eight years he had had to deal with that terrible knowledge.

  "How are things at the Bureau?" my friend J. Robert Oppenheimer asked, pulling his pipe from his pocket.

  "How's Trevor?"

  "Quite well. He asked me to send his best," I replied, watching him pack the pipe bowl with a pungent tumble-weed of Balkan Sobrane tobacco.

  The waitress suspiciously eyed the back booth in which we sat. Not because of the cloud of thick, sweet smoke now pluming above Robert's head, but I sensed it was my presence that made her uncomfortable.

  Even though we were only a few miles outside of Roswell, New Mexico, and since 1947, shortly after I moved away, the locals had grown used to strange sights, and even stranger goings-on, having a large, red creature seated in your diner was certainly unusual. Beneath my duster, I tightened my curled tail lest it slip below t
he hem. Some women, I had discovered, frequently found the tail to be more than they could handle.

  "They've taken away my clearance. I'm persona non grata," he said into his cup. "But I can't be a party to it anymore. They're not going to stop. It's all about bigger and better bombs. And they don't want me as a conscience. My opinions are uncalled for."

  His angular features were pinched. You didn't need to be a rocket scientist to see he was in pain.

  "But that's not why I asked you to come ... I'm acting as middle man. Do you remember Jamie MacDougal?"

  I nodded.

  I remembered him well. A spry Scottish-American research scientist, MacDougal and Trevor Bruttenholm had spent many an evening playing chess during the year we lived at Roswell. As I had come to look upon Bruttenholm as my father, at that time Jamie MacDougal had been like an uncle.

  "He's here, stationed at Los Alamos. Very hush-hush. Now I'm considered a liability, I can't have any contact with him. But somehow he managed to get a note to me, requesting I contact you to see if you'd come."

  Robert puffed slowly, savoring the rich aroma.

  "I'm here. So what's the problem?"

  "His son's disappeared."

  A half-crescent moon rode high in the sky like a severed quarter as I walked the arroyo running parallel to the road where young Malcolm MacDougal had last been spotted. I was five lonely miles outside of Los Alamos, heading southwest into the foot hills of the Jemez Mountains. I was searching for a stream, for there I hoped to find a woman who would lead me to the boy.

  "They believe he's dead," Jamie MacDougal had said earlier that evening. "He's been gone a week. They called off the search on Monday

  said it was a waste of manpower

  that he must have perished because

  no seven year old could survive the night temperatures.

  "But I know," he said, pouring himself a generous glass of single malt. "I'm his father, and I know in my bones he's still alive."

  I hadn't seen Jamie in nearly eight years, and the river of human time had eroded his once-full head of red hair, and reshaped his features like a rain-washed statue. He looked closer to sixty than his fast-approaching forty-seven. It was his birthday next week. I had remembered en route to Los Alamos from Roswell. Robert had stopped the car outside Santo Domingo Pueblo so I could buy a gift. The Anasazi pot sat on Jamie's dining table, ground zero between the two of us.

  "Go slow, old friend," I said. "Start at the beginning."

  Jamie took a hearty swig of his malt, and sighed.

  "Lucy

  his mother

  died a year ago. Car crash. Almost a month to the day," he added, wistfully staring into his drink. "So the base provided us with a housekeeper, a nanny of sorts who could take care of him.

  Dona's her name. Local woman of Zuni extraction. But of course he took it hard. We both did. And a seven year old wants his mother, not a stranger."

  He was right. All boys need a mother. Even a Hellboy. I, however, had no recollection of a mother, or a father. Or of anything before I appeared in the ruins of an old church in East Bromwich, England nearly ten years ago.

  "Yes," I said, "go on."

  "Dona's a good sort. Takes excellent care of him

  or did until she let him wander off.

  "The last couple of months have been very hard, what with the anniversary coming up, and I've been working long, long hours in the lab.

  "I should have been there for him," he suddenly exclaimed, slamming a hand on the table top, almost spilling his drink and knocking over my pot.

  It took a while, and another drink, to calm him.

  Malcolm, I learned, had taken to wandering away from the base over the last few months. There was nothing unusual in that. Boys will be boys, and with so many ruins to explore, the summer-kissed landscape surrounding the cold, uninviting barracks-style housing could be a place of endless wonders to the over-active imagination of a seven year old. Summer was gone now though, swept aside by an early, harsh fall, and the nights came cold and hard at this elevation. But Los Alamos was a safe town, perhaps the safest in the United States due to the secret nature of its inhabitants' work, and Dona had thought nothing wrong in letting the boy play outside after sunset. But that all changed when he met the woman.

  There was a good reason why New Mexico was called The Land of Enchantment, for there are arcane energies here, powers present which defy rational explanation. Was it a coincidence Los Alamos became the Secret City, birthplace of the atom bomb, of that Fat Man's explosion happened at Trinity Site? Why not Nevada, or some other desert state with even more wide-open spaces? Why did a supposed extraterrestrial craft crash at Roswell? Trevor Bruttenholm believes this state forms a nexus of paranormal energies, and when the US military insisted on relocating me from England so I could be studied at Roswell, he was only too happy to accompany me. During the time we lived here, he immersed himself in the myths and legends of New Mexico and took me along on frequent investigatory trips.

  One of my first memories was of our visit to the Santuario de Chimayo which was nestled in a secluded valley in the Sangre de Christo foothills. Like the pilgrims who had trekked there over the centuries, predominantly the sick and enfeebled, we went to experience the mysterious healing powers of its magical soil. Bruttenholm was convinced it cured his arthritis. All it did to me was make me itch.

  I had so many other stories and experiences during that early period in my life perhaps it was no surprise I decided to follow my adoptive father's line of work. We spent nights in the ancient mission of Isleta Pueblo, hoping to see the restless corpse of Father Padilla and his cottonwood coffin rise from beneath the altar, as he had done so on numerous occasions over the past two hundred years (he didn't). We spent days camping on low mountain slopes, sitting up through the night in case a fireball-riding bruja passed by overhead (we never saw a witch, but I saw my first shooting star).

  New Mexico was like the Navajo rug Bruttenholm bought as a gift for me before we left Roswell for the East coast and the BPRD headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. It was a simple rug, just two rows of white, rectangular clouds outlined in black against a light blue background. But the rug had a deliberate line woven through its lower border, a 'spirit line' worked into the weave in case a soul became trapped during the weaving and needed a way out. New Mexico itself seemed like a spirit line, a gateway between realms, and some of what sought freedom here was of a malevolent stripe. Then there are those forces which are a reflection of the soul of the beholder, neither good nor evil, merely a mirror to our needs. She was one of them. The one known as La Llorona, The Weeping Woman.

  A particular manifestation of New Mexico and its Hispanic heritage, La Llorona's story had many variations concerning her origins and nature, but I knew she was more than a myth. I knew because I met her.

  Back in early '47, a few months before the Roswell crash and our departure for the lush New England green of Connecticut, Bruttenholm had taken me to Santa Fe where he was visiting Fray Angelico Chavez, the renowned historian and restorer of ancient churches. Fray Angelico had been researching the recorded appearances of Fray Padilla, and he invited Trevor to read the first draft of the paper he was preparing.

  Although I had only been on the earthly plane for a couple of years, I had already reached adolescence and was suffering the restlessness of youth. So, as the day waned and the magical spring twilight bathed the Sangre de Christo range ruby red, and as Bruttenholm and Fray Chavez continued their impassioned discussion, I walked out into the streets of Santa Fe.

  Since I was still wary of the reactions of others to my unusual appearance, I walked away from the bustling plazas, sticking to narrow side streets lined with sleepy adobe homes squatting behind hand-carved wooden gates, half-hidden by gnarled cottonwoods or softly hued hollyhocks, and made my way down to the banks of the Santa Fe River. It was peaceful there and calmed my troubled thoughts as I followed the water eastwards.

  Maybe it was the o
nset of adolescence and the need to understand who and what I was. Or perhaps it was the natural questioning of an orphan concerning his parentage, but for weeks I had lain awake at night tossing and turning, wondering and wanting answers to an enigma. The enigma of myself. Seeing the other children who lived on the Roswell base play ball with their fathers, go shopping with their mothers, made my heart heavy. Trevor Bruttenholm was a kind, compassionate, and thoughtful mentor, as fine a father figure as a Hellboy could have. Yet when sleep would not come, I would lie in my room wondering what it must feel like to lose one's self in a mother's embrace or rage at my inability to remember where I came from before a magical rite summoned me to this world.

  Did I have a mother? Did she mourn for the loss of her son?

  These thoughts vexed me daily, but that evening as I walked the river bank the preternatural calm of Santa Fe soothed my soul and my mind turned towards more intellectual ideas. Albert Einstein had visited Roswell with Oppenheimer the week before and spent hours with me explaining his theory of relativity. Trevor was intent on providing me with the best educational opportunities, and who better to help explain physics than Einstein? I savored the time we spent together, even though the deluge of knowledge he unleashed threatened to sweep me away. So it was with a head full of equations and formulae, I wandered into the dark, barely aware of the distance I had traveled or the fact that night had almost completely descended in its diamond-studded velvet glory.

  At first I thought the sound was that of an animal. But as I listened more carefully I realized it was a human sound, a sorrow-filled lament. Then, maybe two hundred yards ahead, I saw a figure standing on the bank where the river curved. It was a woman clad in a long gray dress, her head and shoulders cocooned in a black woolen shawl.

  The wail ripped from her lips with a terrible strength, a power born of great emotional pain, and I realized she was about to fling herself into the water.

  Again she cried out: "Ayyyy, mis hijoooosss!!"

  I didn't understand what she was screaming, but her intentions were clear.