Hellboy, Vol. 2: The All-Seeing Eye (33 page)

“Why should they? As far as they’re concerned, we were waiting outside the building for them. There’s nothing to make them suspect any of us were inside.”

“Even so, they might consider it a possibility that we were — or even that we went back there after we’d lost the ambulance and made the Hipkisses tell us where the HQ is.”

“Liz is right,” said Hellboy. “If they’ve got any sense they’ll vamoose and set up elsewhere, just to be on the safe side.”

Abe was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Maybe ... but what choice do we have? It’s not as if we’ve got a whole bunch of leads we could be following up. And besides, we’re only ten minutes behind the ambulance. They might not have
time
to go anywhere else.”

“Plus there’s a chance they’ve already put everything in place for the ceremony,” mused Liz. “Charms and stuff, I mean. Stuff they can’t redo easily.”

“And the house itself might be significant,” Abe pointed out. “This campaign has been characterized by occult placement, remember, so locations are important to them.”

“In which case, they’ll be on their guard,” said Hellboy.”Which means that we should be too.”

“When are we not?”

Ranskill Gardens was situated in the very heart of Crouch End, in a poorly lit, tree-lined street of what must once have been rather grand Victorian homes. Now the street looked a little shabby, a little bedraggled. A number of the expansive front gardens were overgrown, or uncared for, or strewn with litter, or had simply been concreted over to provide extra parking spaces. Around half the houses had evidently been purchased by landlords or housing corporations and converted into flats. Many of the buildings were in dire need of repair. Looking around as they cruised almost silently into the street, Hellboy saw paint peeling from doors and window-sills, roofs missing slates, drainpipes sagging from walls, stonework blotched with mold. Dotted here and there were houses which were just as grand and well maintained as they must have been in their heyday, but these buildings were few and far between, and stood out like occasional healthy teeth in a mouthful of rotted and broken ones.

Number 44 was even darker than most of its neighbors. Not a single light burned behind its tall, curtained windows. In fact, if the house had not been one of a row, a casual observer might not have known it was there at all. The building lurked behind a pair of huge, twisted trees, which flanked the central gravel path that led to the front door. The hooded streetlamps lining the pavement cast a limp, foglike sheen, which masked the building rather than illuminating it, seeming to drive it even further back into the blackness that enshrouded it.

Liz brought the car to a halt a little way up the road and turned off the engine. Instantly the silence rushed in. If Liz hadn’t been so pragmatic she might have described it as an expectant silence, a silence that was waiting for something to happen.

“There’s no sign of the ambulance,” Hellboy observed.

Abe shrugged. “I’d have been surprised if there had been. They’re not going to advertise their whereabouts, are they?”

“I guess,” Hellboy said.

“Okay, so how do we approach this?” Liz asked. “Split up or stick together? Go in with all guns blazing or adopt the cautious approach?”

“We stay together and keep it low-key for now,” Hellboy said. “Let’s find out what’s happening in there before we start busting heads.”

Abe and Liz nodded. “Around the back?” queried Abe.

“Around the back,” Hellboy confirmed.

“Right, then. Let’s go and save the world,” said Liz.

Chapter 14

The worst thing was the sense of helplessness, of vulnerability. Being trussed and gagged and blindfolded, and knowing that if her captors decided to torture or kill her she would be unable to do a thing about it, had sent Cassie into a cold, shaking panic on several occasions. Each time it had happened her imagination had gone into overdrive, and her craving to move — to run and scream and whirl her arms about — had been so overwhelming that she had begun to hyperventilate; had even, a couple of times, almost passed out.

Whenever the panic came, she had felt her mind dividing into two distinct parts. One part — the part that threatened to overwhelm her — was like a hysterical child, almost insensible with escalating terror. The other part, the part which desperately attempted to rein the child in, was the adult side — calm, rational, practical. It was this part which clung to the hope that even now people were missing her and looking for her, and which told the child that it had to remain calm and patient, and eventually — inevitably — release or rescue would come.

But where would it come
from?
Who even
knew
she was missing?

Hellboy, she thought. Hellboy knew. And Hellboy would come.

She tried to cling to this thought as the hours passed. Tried to cling to it even as the voice of the child grew louder, insisting that Hellboy didn’t know or care where she was, that he had far more important things to do than run around looking for her.

She wondered how long she had been here. It seemed like hours since she had regained consciousness. And how long had she been unconscious before that? Twenty minutes? Ten hours? Three days?

And where was she? Still in London? Still in
England?

All she knew of her surroundings was that they were quiet and cold. And pitch black, of course, because of the blindfold.

What else? She knew that it smelled musty, dank, which might mean that she was belowground, in a cellar perhaps. And she knew that she had woken up tied to a hard wooden chair, and that she was dreadfully thirsty.

And was she hungry too? She supposed she was, in a way. Well, maybe not
hungry
exactly — she was too scared to be hungry — but her stomach was certainly growling through lack of food.

What else? As time went on it was becoming increasingly hard to think beyond her fear and her physical discomfort. Because she had been sitting in the same position for so long — her arms pinioned and trussed behind her, her ankles tied to the legs of the chair — her back was aching, her hands were numb, and her muscles were bunching and cramping. The pain, in fact, was becoming so intolerable that Cassie kept having to fight down bouts of panic caused purely by her inability to stand and stretch, to relieve the grinding throb in her back, the persistent clenching spasms in her arms and legs.

Oh God, how long would this go on for? How long would it be before something
happened?
Although Cassie was dreading what her captors might be planning to do to her, there was a part of her that thought the worst thing of all would simply be to be left here to die slowly in a dark agony of cramped limbs and gnawing hunger.

When it finally came, however, the sound of footsteps somewhere above her head offered her no relief at all. Her head jerked up as a new fear gripped her, and she started to shake once again, her guts turning to water.

The footsteps were muffled, measured, ominous. They moved in a diagonal across the ceiling. And then, shockingly close, a door somewhere to her left clunked and creaked, making her jump.

And suddenly Cassie could hear breathing, the rustle of fabric, the faint sounds of movement.
There was someone in the room with her
! She whimpered, shook with terror, tried vainly to shrink into herself, as the footsteps came slowly across the room towards her.

———

Getting in was easy. At the back of the house was a conservatory, its glass panels speckled with green mold. The door leading in to it was flimsy. Hellboy simply leaned on it until the lock gave way with a soft crunch.

He went in first, and the others followed. All three had their weapons drawn. The conservatory was full of squashy, lived-in furniture. Well-thumbed magazines about gardening and home improvement were stacked on a small side table. There was a bookcase; a selection of pottery frogs on one windowsill; a cushion in the shape of a cat. It all seemed very ordinary, homely even. Liz hoped they hadn’t been sent on a wild goose chase, hoped Jess Hipkiss’s fear, which Liz would have sworn was genuine, hadn’t been an act, after all.

The door from the conservatory into the kitchen was unlocked. Again, Hellboy went in first. The kitchen was spacious, but unremarkable. There were a couple of rinsed-out milk bottles on the draining board, an up-to-date calendar on the wall with nothing marked on it. A red zero on the display panel of the dishwasher showed that the machine had been switched on earlier and had now completed its cycle. Liz opened a cupboard and saw breakfast cereal — Special K,Weetabix, Cheerios.

Abe glided across to Hellboy, silent as a fish through water, and pointed at a solid-looking door tucked into an alcove in the far right-hand corner of the room.

“I see it,” Hellboy whispered. He too could be remarkably quiet when required.

“Should we check it out?” whispered Liz, moving across to join them.

Hellboy considered for a moment. “Let’s cover the rest of this floor first, then come back.”

They moved into the long, tiled hallway, where a Victorian grandfather clock sonorously ticked away the seconds. There were framed batiks on the walls, original stained glass in the front door through which the insipid light from outside glowed dimly. The tasseled shades around the ceiling lights looked as though they might have been purchased in a Turkish bazaar. A long, high bookcase was stuffed full of paperbacks.

There was nothing to suggest that the house was the center of operations for a group of murderous occultists. On the contrary, it seemed like a friendly house; it possessed an aura of Bohemian academe. Liz could imagine a middle-aged university professor and his wife living here. She could imagine such a couple bringing up a family within these walls, children who had now grown up and moved on, perhaps to university, perhaps to start families for themselves.

Again she wondered whether they had been outwitted, out-maneuvered. She would almost have welcomed an attack by Eye acolytes, because then at least they would have known they were in the right place.

The next room they entered was the sitting room. More big, squashy furniture — the sofa had some sort of throw with an ethnicky print draped over it. In the far corner was a tall wooden sideboard bearing a music system and a shelf of CDs, with another shelf of ornaments above it. In the alcove beside the fireplace was a Victorian wash-stand with a black marble top. Candles and decorative glassware were arranged on the mantelpiece. The bay windows were curtained floor to ceiling by red velvet drapes.

Hellboy produced his torch from his belt and shone it around. Even the extra light failed to reveal anything untoward. Liz was looking at one of the paintings on the walls — a smeary abstract of reds and blues — when, as if he’d been reading her thoughts, Abe said, “There is
something
unusual.”

Liz turned to him. “Oh?”

“There are no photographs. In a house like this there are usually photographs. Children. Grandchildren. Weddings. Graduation ceremonies.” He shrugged. “It’s just an observation.”

Hellboy nodded, his tail weaving lazily behind him like a snake. “Don’t think it’s a convictable offense, but yeah, you’re right, buddy. It is a little odd.”

He wandered over to the sideboard, the beam of the torch shrinking to a bright circle of light. He peered at the CDs, not quite sure what he was looking for. Demonic chanting perhaps? The Lord’s Prayer read backwards? But all he saw was Dvorak and Mendelssohn and Strauss. Nothing unusual; nothing sinister.

He turned, about to suggest they try the door in the corner of the kitchen. But as his torch beam swept round, Liz gasped.

Before Hellboy could ask her what was wrong, she had collapsed. For no discernible reason her legs simply buckled beneath her and she dropped to her knees, throwing up her hands as if to defend herself against a swarm of stinging insects. She grunted and cried out as she twisted and turned, uttering short, sharp sounds of pain and distress.

“What the hell — “ Hellboy said, and took a step towards her. Then, on the far side of the room, he saw the same thing happen to Abe.

Elementals
, he thought, as the amphibian crumpled, writhing, to the ground. He had seen this kind of thing a couple of times before. It was a psychic bombardment, usually laid as a trap, and it apparently felt as though you were being mercilessly pummelled by invisible assailants. There was no way to defend yourself and no way to fight against it. All you could do, if possible, was vacate the area, put yourself out of attack range.

Hellboy moved forward, with the intention of scooping up his friends and carrying them from the room. But he had taken no more than a step when he felt the first blow on his shoulder. It was hard and sharp, like being whacked with a steel cudgel. Almost immediately it was followed by a second blow, to the back of his head, and then a third, in the small of his back.

Within seconds the bludgeoning assault escalated, and suddenly what felt like vicious blows were raining on Hellboy from all angles, smashing into his ribs and shins, battering down on his head and shoulders. He grunted, instinctively sweeping his arms from side to side, even clenching his fists and punching at thin air. But there was nothing to fight against. And meanwhile the stinging blows continued, seeking out every vulnerable, exposed spot on his body, never letting up for an instant.