Hellboy, Vol. 2: The All-Seeing Eye (12 page)

He allowed the water to caress his skin and ripple through his gills for a few moments, and then he kicked his feet and began to swim. For the most part he allowed the flow to carry him along; he always adored the sensation of giving himself up to the convoluted flux of streams and rivers and seas, of becoming one with the sinewy and remorseless purpose of the tides.

Abe being Abe, however, he did not allow himself to become distracted. Mindful of his mission, he was assiduous in his exploration of this new and hidden world. Meticulously he investigated each passage, each avenue, each side tunnel he came across. Sometimes a detour would lead to further detours, whereas at other times they would simply peter out, forcing him to double back. Wherever his meanderings took him, however, Abe would always — partly through instinct and partly through calculation — eventually find his way back to his main route through the city. As he swam, absorbed in his task, time became meaningless; an hour passed, then two, and still he ploughed on, searching for clues, for answers. He had an excellent sense of direction and a highly attuned ability to calculate distance, but by the time he found the sack he had only the vaguest idea where he was. Somewhere southwest of his starting point... he tried to picture in his mind’s eye the map of central London he had studied earlier. Hammersmith, he thought, or Fulham — somewhere around that vicinity. His senses told him that he had started close to the river, then had moved away from it as he had headed west, and was now quite close to it again.

During his search he had found several black bin liners full of rubbish, one battered suitcase packed with sludge and what appeared to be reams of paper so saturated they had turned to thick pulpy blocks, and various other containers, all of which he had cursorily examined. The sack he saw now, however, set his heart beating a little faster, not least because it reminded him of the classic means of body disposal he had seen in a thousand and one gangster movies. Sitting on the muddy bed of a particularly deep body of water within what looked as though it had once been a natural cave, the lip of the sack, secured with twine or wire, appeared to mouth at him as it shifted back and forth in the currents. Abe’s limbs were aching now, but he immediately realigned his body, kicked his legs, and swam sinuously down towards it.

He grabbed the sack and tried to lift it, but could shift it no more than a few inches along the riverbed. He blinked as a black cloud of silt, disturbed by the movement of the sack, puffed up and enveloped him.

It’s weighted down with something
, he thought.
Rocks maybe
. He allowed the silt to settle, then began to pick at the twine securing the lip of the sack with his webbed fingers.

His hands were nimble, dextrous, and in less than a minute he had unpicked the mass of knots cinching the sack tight. Discarding the twine, he tugged the sack open ...

... and reared back as a white face with staring eyes rose up out of the dark depths, mouth half open as if for a kiss.

Recovering his wits quickly, Abe pushed the bobbing head back down with the tip of one finger and tugged the sides of the sack closed over the staring face. His heart was thumping with reaction, his gills rippling agitatedly. Although he had found the evidence he had been searching for, he couldn’t deny it was still a shock. He breathed deeply, allowing the cooling flow of water to calm him, and thought about what he should do.

Clearly he had to get this lot up to the surface — which meant that he had to remove whatever was weighing the sack down. If he opened the sack fully, though, he would doubtless have to cope with the grimly humorous spectacle of various body parts breaking free from inside and drifting languidly around him. In which case there was only one possible course of action. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but Abe knew he was going to have to bite the bullet and get on with it. Not allowing himself to hesitate, he relaxed his grip on the top of the sack a fraction, leaving just enough room to ease his hand inside. Then, bracing himself, he delved deeper, exploring the contents of the sack.

It was like a macabre game of lucky dip. His searching fingers closed on a face, and then a smooth tube that might have been an arm or a leg, and then what was undoubtedly a foot. The jumble of limbs and heads as his hand eased its way between them rose and fell, and even seemed to squirm sluggishly, as if they still possessed a kind of feeble half-life. Abe clenched his teeth and tried to blank out his mind as he pushed his hand deeper, wincing only slightly as a probing finger found something soft and yielding. Eventually, his arm now buried in dismembered body parts up to the elbow, his fingers bumped against a rough, hard surface.

The rock was about the size of a bowling ball, and just as heavy. With a little more groping around, Abe ascertained that there were at least four of them in the sack, their combined weight effectively anchoring it beneath the water.

Tensing his muscles, he got as good a grip as he could on the rough, jagged surface of the first boulder and hauled it up and out of the sack. Body parts spun and swirled as the rock nudged them out of the way. Abe clamped his lips together as an arm somehow managed to wrap itself around his wrist like a sleepy eel. He shuddered, shaking his hand back and forth while taking care not to let go of the rock, and eventually the arm slid almost apathetically away.

He hauled the rock from the sack and dropped it on the ground, causing a slow-motion cloud of black silt to puff up around it. Now that his arm was out of the sack, Abe really didn’t want to plunge it back in again. However, after only a moment’s hesitation, he slid his hand back inside. The process of locating the next rock, grabbing it and yanking it through the obstacle course of heads and limbs was no easier a second time, or a third, or a fourth. At last, however, the task was done, and Abe was able to find the twine he had previously discarded and tie the sack up again. He hunkered down for a moment on the soft, silty ground, all at once feeling weak and sick. Then, hauling the sack behind him, he rose to his feet and kicked up towards the surface.

The water was a good six to eight meters deep here, and cloudy with sediment. Abe’s sleek head broke the surface with barely a ripple, and immediately he was looking around, taking in his surroundings. He appeared to be in a natural cave, the rocky ceiling three meters above his head. What struck him immediately was that, although the cavern was not manmade, there was evidence that men had not only been here but that they used this place frequently.

First, there was a light source — a feeble one, admittedly, but more than enough for Abe, with his excellent eyesight, to see by. The light came from a chunky, wall-mounted lamp, not unlike a car’s sidelight, that had been screwed into the rock a meter or so below the ceiling. A gray cable, affixed to the rock at intervals with U-clips, snaked out from the light and disappeared into a jagged hole in the ceiling. Also disappearing into the hole was a rusty iron ladder which was bolted to the wall. And at the bottom of the ladder, bobbing on the water, was a small green rowboat.

The yellowish light sent ripples and reflections dancing up the rocky walls in shimmering threads. Abe looked at the boat and wondered whether it was possible to use it to negotiate a subterranean course all the way from here to the murder sites. Possibly not, but the sites were certainly accessible from here for a strong swimmer; he himself was proof of that. Of course, Abe was a far stronger swimmer than any ordinary man could ever be, but in his opinion the swim was not beyond the capabilities of a fit man, providing that he wore the right equipment and stopped to rest a few times along the way.

He swam across to the iron ladder and reached up to grab the bottom rung. Looking up, he saw that the ladder ascended through the hole and into what appeared to be a circular brick-lined shaft, like a well or the flue of a chimney. He lifted the sack out of the water and dumped it in the rowboat. Even without the rocks to weigh it down, it was too heavy to drag around, not least because the coarse cloth was saturated. Abe decided that he would check out whatever was at the top of the shaft and come back for the sack later.

Hauling himself up with his right arm, he reached out with his left hand and grabbed the second rung. He pulled himself out of the water, his gills making the instant switch from water to air. As his body emerged, water streamed from his skin, leaving him dry within seconds.

Although weary, Abe had far greater stamina than a normal man. He took a couple of deep breaths, then began to climb. He felt cool air wisping down from above, and saw that at the top of the shaft was what appeared to be a metal manhole cover. He climbed the ladder to the top, then anchored his feet tightly in its rungs so that he could use both hands to push the cover upwards. Not knowing what was on the other side, his aim was to raise the metal disc as slowly and carefully as possible, so as to draw the minimum amount of attention to himself.

He positioned his hands on the underside of the cover, but before attempting to lift it he glanced back down at what was now only a tiny dark circle of water below. If the worst came to the worst, he would simply let the cover drop back into place, step off the ladder, and plunge back down the shaft.

Bracing himself, he took a deep breath and then pushed upwards. He was pleased to discover that the manhole cover was not particularly heavy, though from this angle it was still awkward to lift. He grimaced as the cover grated free of its housing, wobbling a little as it did so. As the cover rose, so did Abe’s head, his keen eyes peering through the widening gap, scanning left and right to absorb as many details as possible of the unknown world above him.

He saw an empty room with gray stone walls and a low ceiling. The only light, diffuse and mustard colored, seeped in through a row of high, narrow windows, cataracted with so much grime they were almost opaque. Immediately Abe realized that he had emerged in yet another cellar. The angle of the light, trickling down from above, informed him that the ceiling of the room was at pavement level.

Satisfied there was no one down here with him, Abe lifted the manhole cover aside. He climbed out and stretched, his tired muscles cracking and popping. Looking around he saw that the room was vast yet featureless, stretching off into shadows behind him. Aside from racks of old shelving units with nothing on them, the cellar was empty.

In the far corner, adjacent to the row of windows, was a set of stone steps leading upwards. It was only when the angle of light shifted as Abe walked towards them that he realized a symbol of some kind had been daubed on the wall. It did not take a genius to ascertain that the black, crusty substance used to create the symbol was dried blood. Abe stood in front of it and weaved his head from side to side, so that the insipid light slid along its full length.

It was an eye, and a fairly simple representation of one, albeit with a small squiggle linked to the center of the bottom rim. It struck Abe that the squiggle was like a Chinese character — although it also resembled letters found in both Egyptian and Persian alphabets. Then again it might have been an obscure form of Sanskrit. Abe was reasonably knowledgeable about many of the ancient languages, and this symbol looked like and yet unlike any number of them.

It was only after noticing the first symbol that Abe glanced to his left and realized that, in fact, the wall was covered with them. Further scrutiny revealed that not only was
this
wall covered, but all four walls, the floor, and the ceiling were similarly daubed.

A thousand eyes
, he thought, noting that this solved the mystery of what the drained blood of the victims had been used for. He wondered what purpose the symbols served. Perhaps they were focusing prisms for psychic power, or a pictorial form of invocation, or they might even constitute some mystical kind of surveillance system. Abe had certainly come across stranger things in his time, and if his latter theory was correct, then perhaps his arrival
hadn’t
gone undetected. He would have to remain vigilant — not that he wouldn’t have been anyway.

Silent as a shadow, he slipped across the room and ascended the stone steps. At the top was a door, the wood so warped that it barely fit its frame. It had either swollen or been forced into place, but by putting his shoulder against it, Abe was able to shove it open. He winced at the squealing scrape of wood, but no one came running to investigate his intrusion.

He quickly worked out that the building he had entered was an abandoned mill or factory. The rooms were vast, high ceilinged, and deserted, and the corridors and staircases had the functional angularity Abe associated with institutional edifices such as schools, hospitals, and office blocks. The worn wooden floors of the largest rooms were marked with lighter patches where machinery had once stood. The walls of these rooms were lined with rows of long windows, each of which was divided into smaller panes. The windows had evidently let in plenty of light at one time, but now they were caked with soot and grease. Many were boarded up.

Abe walked through the place with an increasing certainty that it was deserted. Even so he remained on his guard, not least because the symbol of the eye was everywhere. There was not a door, wall, floor, or ceiling that had been left untouched. The artist (or artists) was either very dedicated, or crazy, or both.

Despite the silence, Abe found it unnerving to be stared at by so many eyes. He was being foolish, he knew, but he couldn’t shake off the notion that he was constantly under surveillance. As he slipped from room to room, his own eyes darted everywhere. He moved as he always did when expecting trouble — with a balletic poise, so light-footed that not even the old floorboards creaked beneath him.

On the fifth floor he found signs of occupation. In what might once have been a boardroom, beyond a row of offices which resembled a linked series of boxes constructed mostly of smoked glass, were three rolled-up sleeping bags and an equal number of grubby pillows. Beside each of the sleeping bags was a sports bag or duffel stuffed with clothes and other belongings. Half-melted candles mounted in wax-caked bottles were perched on window sills or simply stood on the floor. In one corner of the room was a camping stove, next to which stood a box full of food. Most of the food was canned, but there was also a half-finished loaf of bread and, on a shelf above, a quarter-full pint of milk, ajar of coffee, and a bag of sugar.