Hellboy: Odd Jobs (6 page)

The filthy rag completely covered the head. He was afraid to hold his gaze; if the rag should stir, drawn in by a breath, he would surely break down.

Holding his breath, Guy scrambled towards it on his hands and knees and looked away as he tightened the wrap. Mercifully, it made no further sound. If he heard it speak again, he knew he would scream.

Streaming with sweat, he frantically gathered up the various unassembled pieces and stuffed them into an unlabeled manila envelope among the paper debris he had thrown to the floor from the top shelf. He began to feel lightheaded, then remembered to take a breath.

He shuddered when his nervous breathing was echoed from within the rag.

Driven by fear

of staying, of discovery, of the damned thing beneath the wrap

Guy scrambled to his

feet and grabbed the largest broom propped against the door.

The urge to jab at the object or just smash it swept over him again, but he instead used the broom to keep the thing as far from reach as possible as he jammed it and the unlabeled manila envelope into the far corner beneath the towers of desks and chairs.

Once it was out of sight, Guy began to calm down. He broke down the cardboard and stacked the flats against the corner where the damned thing was now hidden, as if to blot it out. Regaining some clarity of mind, he swept up the broken glass and the shark embryos, consigned them to the trash bag, and then proceeded to mop the floor.

The pungent aroma of the spilled formaldehyde should have overwhelmed everything, but all he could smell was the head, a dry odor ripe with age, mold, and spores. He coughed and gagged, shook his head, and finished the mopping.

Whenever possible, he averted his gaze from the end of the room dominated by the stacked desks and chairs.

He jumped at the occasional echoes of his own breathing, couldn't put out the light or slam the door quickly enough.

He had somehow finished the cleanup, though he couldn't remember the final minutes. He continued to sweat as he left the
Faculté,
entered the Metro, and started the long ride home. As he got off at
Richard'lenoir,
he still felt anxious and afraid.

What would he say to Francine? What would he tell himself?

His heart sank as their
appartement
window came into view. The light was on inside Francine had waited

up for him. He could not simply slip into the bed and close his eyes. She would see something was wrong.

He'd never kept any secrets from her. How, where would he begin?

For the first time, he noticed how badly he smelled. The stench of his sweat and the cleaning fluids was bad enough, but he could smell something else. He sniffed his hands, and shivered: He could still smell the thing.

He was rubbing his hands against his pant legs when he staggered into the
appartement,
afraid of what he might say.

Francine looked up at him from her perch at the edge of the bed, her eyes red and swollen.

"Guy," she whispered, "Thomas is dead."

"Welcome to
La Table D'or.
And your friend would be

?"

"Abraham Sapien," Hellboy responded to the maître d'. "Dr. Kate Corrigan is expecting us. Private salon."

"Bonjour,"
Abe managed between the coils of his scarf. The flustered maître d' gazed for only a moment, as if to penetrate the opaque shielding of Abe's mirror shades; he had no way of knowing the opacity of the lidless eyes beneath the lenses. If anything, the starched guardian of the restaurant's sanctuary seemed more disturbed by Abraham's guise in such muggy weather than he had been by Hellboy's trench-coated stature.

They cut a mean rug, he and Abe, no doubt about it.

"Yes, of course," the maître d' chirped, regaining his composure. "Your private salon is right this way we

wouldn't want to disrupt the clientele. Dr. Corrigan had requested special attention be given, and I apologize we weren't quicker to recognize your arrival."

"Lead on," Hellboy gestured, sorry he couldn't milk their entrance for a little more juice.

Abe kept his gloved hand to his face as they were led into a separate dining chamber. Kate stood to greet them, brow cocked at the maître d'.

"What's the
soup de jour
?" Hellboy asked.

"I've ordered for us," Kate replied. "The food and wine is already here."

"Thank you, madam. If I could be of any more service

"

The evident relief on his face coaxed a smile from Hellboy, who turned to close the salon door behind the efficient clicking of the maître d's polished shoes. Abe gasped as he slung the scarf away from his neck, quick to exchange greetings with Corrigan as he finished stripping away his disguise. Hellboy claimed his seat and managed a sip of wine before Abe was ready to join them.

"You're looking good, Kate," Hellboy cooed. He rarely saw Corrigan dressed up for dinner, every dirty-blond hair brushed into place.

Kate smiled at Hellboy and turned to Abraham. "Room comfortable at the
Hotel de la Cathédrale
?"

Abe nodded. "Your choice? Very nice. Like the big bathtub. Good color, too."

"Matches his eyes," Hellboy snorted. "Thanks for getting us out of there tonight."

"Let's get to it, shall we?" Kate began. "Was this the symbol you saw in your dream?"

"Yeah, huh," Hellboy grunted, cradling his wine goblet in his left hand. "Told you I wasn't much of an artist."

"On the contrary," Kate whispered, "I found it with nary a blind alley."

The rough arc, within a square, split by a single sword, point down: but the arc was, in the old woodcut reproductions, a serpent, split by the curving blade.

"I've traced this back to a group of alchemists who made their mark in Southern France during the late sixteenth, early seventeenth century. I need more to go on, but it's a start, and you seem to be suffering more vivid dreams the closer you've come to the source: vague memories in Connecticut, more vivid dreams en route to the U.K. and in London, a narrative pattern to the dreams and increasing specifics now that you're in Paris."

Hellboy shifted his glare to Abe. "Tattle-tale."

Abe shrugged, sipping his bottled water. Kate leaned across the table toward Hellboy, gingerly placing her pale hand on his rough stone fingers.

"You've had more nightmares since you've been here, haven't you?"

Abe looked away as Hellboy cleared his throat, turning his slitted eyes from the amphibian's averted gaze to Kate's open, imploring look. He swished his wine thoughtfully and then swallowed it down in a single gulp.

Bad form. No matter.

"You both know how I hate this psychic stuff," he muttered. "It's worse when it's scrambling your own noggin."

Kate closed her other hand over his massive paw.

"Tell her about the head," Abe insisted.

"I thought it was happening to you

"

"Yeah," he managed. "I've been completely sliced and diced and brazed. But now there's more. I can hear rug-rats wailing, men chanting. Latin, French, Spanish, Italian. I see babies cut from throat to crotch. I smell blood."

Kate pulled a notebook from her bag and began writing.

"I can see something else," Hellboy concluded. "A head, not mine, but jig-sawed, like what they've done to me there in the dream. It's been turned to stone or something. Last night it opened its eyes and spoke to me.

German."

"Did it speak of your father again?" Abe asked.

Hellboy nodded, and poured a fresh glass of wine.

The morning after Thomas's death, Guy quit the invalid's hospice. He made his apologies, and fled the building. For Francine, it was a loss upon a loss, with no time to catch her breath.

Francine flinched when the
Monsieur le Directeur
used Guy as an example to all at the monthly staff

meeting. He had grown too attached to one of the patients, the
Directeur
explained, an intimacy ill-advised in the medical and nursing profession. The
Directeur
gazed meaningfully at Francine, no doubt misinterpreting the tears she brushed away from her cheek.

She missed Thomas, too

but she missed Guy's attachment to the hospice even more. It created a sudden, irreparable vacuum that frightened her. For the first time, there were fissures in their life together.

Days later, he still would not speak of what had happened in the medical lab the evening that Thomas had died. He never explained the odd smell, or what had already shaken him so, before he'd learned of Thomas's passing. She had laundered the uneasy stink of that night from the bedclothes, but Guy's sleep was still restless and punctuated with inexplicable shivers.

That she planned to clock extra hours at the hospice only aggravated the unspoken rift. As if goaded to match her distance, Guy secured extra evenings at the
Faculté de Médecine,
claiming he needed to make up for the loss of once-dependable income and had to cover the additional Metro fees necessary to the longer commute.

She didn't like it; the
Faculté
was a mystery to her. She'd never laid eyes on its doors, much less its expansive halls and cluttered rooms. He'd made no friends there as yet to speak of, and rarely had any anecdotes to share. He hardly ever spoke about the university, really, dismissing it to ask instead after her favorite patients at the hospice.

It was as if her job meant more to him than his own, and she enjoyed the attention, though that attention quickly waned in the days after Thomas's death.

Through it all, a week

just a week!

passed without their sharing a waking moment together.

Ah, but Sunday remained their own. She still had him that Sunday morning. She roused him, and they made love, and he finally cried and spoke of Thomas, and she eased him back into the slumber where he was hers and hers alone, if only for a few hours.

Come Monday, they returned to work again, and the gulf between them widened.

Guy had avoided the room all week, despite the notes from the
Faculté Directeur
urging him to at least start with the cleanup of the archives.

He had dreamt of the thing in the corner all week; horrible, unspeakable dreams, in which it was his own head being cut into sections, while birds and babies cried around him. He had never dreamed of blood before in his short life. Never. Ever.

Playing the radio wherever he worked in the
Faculté,
Guy braced himself to go back.

He would go there, as soon as he was finished in the offices.

Once the
bibliothèque
was clean.

After he had swept the hall, he would do it.

He would open the door.

He would go in.

He would switch on the light.

Moving stiffly, carefully keeping his back to the wall stacked with the desks and chairs, Guy slid the more dependable looking of the two ladders over to the shelves. He was about to lift it up to brace it against the shelving supports when he heard the willowy rasping from the far corner.

Paper thin, dry as dust, a breath.

A half hour later, he re-entered the room. Soaked in sweat, he stared balefully at the flats of cardboard he had stacked over the hollow beneath the desks, where he had hidden the damned object.