Far Flew the Boast of Him

Brian Hodge

Grown men, they may have been — and now, post-mortem — but they reminded him of children. All the slaughter in the world, and here they'd gone out for a weekend's lark to pretend to wreak more. Like young boys playing at war games. All the barrels of blood that had seeped into England's soil, and here they'd gone out for a day of make-believe, pretending to shed it all over again.

Well, that blood was certainly real enough now, wasn't it? And there would be no pretending otherwise, not with nearly three dozen new widows left scattered from London to Newcastle.

At least all were now assumed to be widows by anyone who could afford to be brutally realistic. Only just over half the bodies had so far been found, and as long as there's no corpse then there's always hope ... but Hellboy could not imagine anyone who wasn't nervously fingering a wedding ring, or awaiting news of a missing father, son, brother, lover, was expecting a single one of those poor dumb bastards to come walking in from the border country here near Scotland.

Divine intervention, it seemed, was always in much shorter supply than diabolic. "The Battle of Lindisfarne," this fellow was saying. Survivor on account of absenteeism. Trevor Copplestone, his name, or something close to that. "June eighth, 793. That's what we ... they ... had come up here last weekend to re-enact."

" 'Battle' of Lindisfarne? How do you figure that?" said Hellboy. "There wasn't any 'battle' to it. There's no battle when the other side's unarmed."

"Ah — so you know Lindisfarne, do you?"

"I may look dumb," Hellboy said, "but that's just a disguise."

"Well, then ... battle of ideologies, call it," Copplestone said. Working hard at keeping his stiff upper, but the strain was showing. "The sword of the monks' Lord and savior, matched up against the swords of boatloads of raiders whose sole idea of a guarantee into the afterlife was a good death. Wasn't much of a contest, was it?"

"No. It wasn't. And whatever it was that your friends ran into up here last weekend ... ? That wasn't much of any contest, either."

You had to imagine that by now Trevor Copplestone was feeling like the luckiest man on either side of Hadrian's Wall. A bad sausage in last Friday evenings helping of bangers and mash at a pub near his Northumberland hotel flattens him for the next twenty-four hours, knocks him off his pins and into bed every moment he's not crouched over his toilet. Certainly in no condition to troop out and play Viking with his friends.

Maybe Copplestone looked more imposing when he had his period gear on, his chain-mail or jerkin or helmet or whatever he decked himself out in for these weekend outings, but here and now he did not look the part. A big enough frame, and a well-trimmed beard and a shock of hair that the sea breezes stirred, but inside his jacket he was a soft-looking man. Doughy in the middle, and the beard grown to hide his burgeoning jowls. A man shackled to a desk forty or fifty hours each week who looks out his window, if his office even has one, and dreams of living in an age when the cloud-thickened welkin would've been the only roof that mattered.

And he had not been alone. A historical re-enactment society, they called themselves. Study up on their favorite blood-baths, choose up sides, then pick a weekend to go out and pretend they'd been there. Grand fun, but evidently they'd always come back alive before. Full of beans as they invade the nearest pub, and the worst argument they've got to settle is who buys first round.

All history now.

Hellboy had the feeling that it would be a good long while before Trevor Copplestone felt any urge to pick up his sword again. Some new look of haunt and harrowing in his eyes that wouldn't have been there eight days ago ... survivor's guilt, or just the fact of everything that had once been academic and safely within the realm of pretense hitting him full in the face, to leave its indelible mark: This was what it was like to lose friends and comrades by the score. This was what it felt like to walk home dragging their memories like heavy chains. This was what it was like when there wasn't even enough left of some of them to bury.

This was history, the genuine article. They'd learned it, and still they'd been doomed to repeat its most enduring lesson.

"This one meant something more to you guys," Hellboy said. "It had to. Otherwise, where's the fun?"

"I'm not sure I follow you."

"Yeah you do. Re-enact Lindisfarne, and half of you don't even get to fight. All you get to do is wear a cowled robe and fall down and pretend to die. I don't get that. It's over too quick. And they wouldn't even grant you guys permission to stage it where it really happened, because they found the idea too tasteless. So you stayed here on the mainland and settled for a plot of ground just barely in sight of the real thing. That's an awful lot of trouble to go to for something over so quick."

"So why Lindisfarne," Copplestone said, "when there must be hundreds of other battles better suited to keeping us all busy, and for a longer stretch of the day — that's what you're asking?"

"It might help get to the bottom of what happened."

"I sincerely doubt that. It ... it was the work of a madman, obviously."

Hellboy simply stared; wouldn't even encourage that one with an answer. How badly Copplestone must've wanted to believe this. The handiest explanation that would restore his world back to order. A madman, yes. Just the sort of thing they do. Brute strength and no restraint and even less idea what he's doing ... you can take comfort in that. Because you can medicate him for it and lock him in a cell. And if he was able to go tooth-and-nail through twenty or thirty chaps with swords, well then, perhaps he was some form of new, improved madman, and yet, for all that, still no match for the right pharmaceutical company.

Hellboy stared at Copplestone until it unnerved him. Reminding him by sheer presence that there were more peculiar things afoot than lunatics. Skin like red armor and an oversized hand that could crush cinder-blocks — what did Copplestone think was standing right in front of him? Just another cop like the pair who'd driven him out to the meadow for this meeting?

"Some of us," Copplestone admitted, finally, "not all, mind, but some ... we'd got to feeling that more than our interests belonged to the remote past. That maybe the claim reached as deep as our hearts, too."

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that this land, it wasn't always Christ's. There's plenty who'd be happy to tell you otherwise, but all that goes to show you is how thoroughly they've forgotten who their forefathers really were."

"Which forefathers would those be, again?"

"The Angles and the Saxons, of course."

"So whose land would that make it?" Hellboy thinking he knew already what Copplestone was driving at; wanting to hear him say it, regardless.

"Britain was Odin's too, once. Every bit as much as Norway and Sweden and so on. We woke up to that."

"So this Lindisfarne business," Hellboy said. "You thought you'd come up here on its anniversary, commemorate the occasion, celebrate this awakening?"

"Something like that, yes."

"What'd you think you were doing? Giving the whole place back?"

"To Odin?" Copplestone lowered his gaze, stared down at his shoes. Or the earth beneath them. "Nah. Not really. It's his just about any old time he wants it."

"News flash, Trevor. Odin's dead. And if he was ever out there, he isn't any more. You and me, and those cops in that car over there ... ? All of us might believe there was a Michelangelo, but that doesn't mean he's coming back to carve another statue of David."

Copplestone's eyebrows peaked. "Ancient faiths, old beliefs? Dried-up riverbeds, is what they're like. All they need's a fresh torrent to bring them back to life, and they run as true as they ever did."

"Dehydrated gods? Just add water? That could catch on."

Copplestone looked wounded. "Are we finished here?" he asked. "Because ... because you've a madman to catch."

Finished. Yes, they were. There was nothing more he could learn from Trevor Copplestone, and if there was, it was nothing Hellboy couldn't guess and have it serve just as well. We woke up to that, Copplestone had said, and if he wanted to believe in aberrant men with the strength of twenty, let him. It felt far more likely, however, that something else had awakened alongside them.

As he stood alone on the meadow overlooking the sea, the salt air gusts snapped the length of his coat about his cloven feet and tail, and he watched Copplestone's back as the man trudged away in a defeat that neither of them could name. The two officers who'd driven him here let him into the car, then gave Hellboy a nervous glance that said everything he would ever need to know about why they'd kept their distance, all three of them now looking relieved to be driving back toward what they believed to be the normal world.

Because as much as they feared the darkness they didn't understand, they feared as well what stood against it, because they didn't really understand that either.

All right. Lay it out, all of it. The known, the unknown, and the conjecture that bridged them together. It was the only way he knew how to start.

Indisputable facts:

Even by British standards, the Holy Island of Lindisfarne was old. Old. Three miles off the coast of Northumbria, it had in the early six hundreds proven to be a prime site for the raising of a monastery. Safe, ruggedly beautiful, protected by land and sea, it was ideal for monks who wanted no more of the world than what they required for survival and contemplation. Like most monasteries of their day, they stored Church treasure, compiled Church history. They buried saints. Late that century from their scriptorum came one of western civilization's most highly cherished illuminated manuscripts, the Lindisfarne Gospels.

And a century later it all came crashing down upon their tonsured heads. New technology: the Viking longship, perfectly suited for ocean travel. What had once been thought impregnable was just an easy few days' sail from Norway. The Norsemen looted the monastery, put the monks to the sword, sent shock waves throughout the horrified whole of Europe: the world has just changed.

Getting to Lindisfarne today was no more bother than driving the causeway that spanned the tidal inlet, just as long as one didn't try driving it at high tide. Big draw for tourists, for modern-day pilgrimages. The monastery was long gone, but the red sandstone ruins of an eleventh-century Norman priory and those of a Tudor-era castle served equally well for seekers of the picturesque. And for modern creature comforts: hotels, cafes, even a meadery. Difficult to imagine the more tweedy buffs and conservators of Brit history entertaining even for one moment the notion of a rough-and-tumble re-enactment celebrating that twelve-hundred-year-old slaughter.

Hard facts:

Trevor Copplestone and his group had no choice but to remain confined to the mainland, where they went about their faux pillage and plunder on a pastoral meadow rise from which, if the day was clear enough, they could in the distance see the island where it had happened.

All signs indicated they'd made a good long day of it: scraps of food, spilt bottles of ale, whiskey, mead. Lounging about a pair of evening cookfires, no doubt reminiscing over days they could only pretend they'd lived, they had been caught off guard, under cover of dusk. Something coming out of the night and, turnabout being fair play, massacring them.

No quarter had been given, and no deference shown for the roles they had played. Monk and marauder, all had died the same, protected by neither sword nor cross. When found the next morning, this eerie tableau like a Dark Age charnel field that had slipped forward in time, blood making a muck of the earth where the various and sundry parts of them had tumbled, the first natural conclusion drawn was that these silly bastards had really gotten carried away.

It hadn't taken long to rule that out. Grievous though they'd been, their wounds had not been made by swords, by spears. They were much too ragged for that. Whatever had violated these men, it had come from no forge.

Nor did it appear that all of them had fallen where they'd died. Far and wide, they were strewn, on a meandering path inland, as much as twelve miles between one of the stray legs and the hip socket from which it had been torn. And this was only accounting for what had been recovered — nearly half the bodies had yet to turn up. Early on it had been assumed that hounds would be the simplest solution, quickly sniffing out the remains still lying somewhere, awaiting discovery.

But the dogs would have no part of it, Hellboy had heard. They'd tucked their tails between their legs and lowered their ears and slunk away from the fresh scent trail with fearful whines, as though whatever they might find at its end would be worse than the most loathsome excuse for a man they'd ever tracked.

Dogs, in Hellboy's estimation, often showed more common sense than the ones holding the leash. Their reaction, as much as anything, was why he'd been summoned here in the first place.

And so much for the known.

There had been, of course, no witnesses, or if there were, they'd been snatched too, their bodies vanished with the rest. No reports of any missing locals, but you'd figure a tourist or two could disappear for a while without attracting attention.

If there was anywhere in England you could lose someone, this was the place. Northumberland was her most sparsely populated county. Five times as many sheep as human beings, although the sheep's numbers had dwindled a bit of late, too. Farmers rising with the dawn to be greeted by the sight of animals reduced to tatters and mutton. This Hellboy had checked into upon learning that the dead men's wounds looked as though they could only have been left by tooth and claw.

Theories from the civilian population? No shortage of those. Dead farm animals always meant someone, somewhere, would be pointing at the sky and seeing lights. Even now contingents were trying to link the massacre to crop circles, hunting for obscure parallels between the latest patterns in the wheat-fields and the haphazard arrangement of the corpses.

And cats. Big cats — it was actually one of the more sensible theories. Hellboy considered its merits as he traversed meadow and field and moor, following the trail of last weekend's strewn carnage — long since shuttled off to the morgue, but something lingered in the air, a miasma of slaughter that the wuthering winds had been unfit to disperse.

The U.K. had big cats, all right, from Cornwall to the most remote reaches of Scotland. Leopards, panthers ... whatever they were, where they'd come from was a mystery: the Exmoor Beast, and others who'd been bestowed no names. It was no longer a vast and untamed wilderness, this island Britannia, not a place you'd expect big cats to do anything other than get themselves hunted to extinction, yet they were out there, canny black stalkers seen at a distance, even filmed, but it was a rare day indeed when anything but their kills were encountered close-up.

Of course, one alone couldn't wipe out more than thirty men. But suppose, it had been suggested, they were now roaming in packs.

Hellboy'd seen weirder.

Strange place, England, as though by its very antiquity it had been granted license to bend the rules of reality that held more firmly elsewhere. Consider its soil alone, a sponge soaked in the blood of thousands of years of war and conquest and sacrifice; drowned in the psyches of wave after wave of invaders, butchers, tyrants, holy men, madmen. Dig deeper, in the proper places, and you might find crusts of earth stamped with the footprints of giants, while strata deeper still had yielded up fossils seen by fewer than twenty pairs of living eyes, and guarded now with the kind of security usually reserved for national treasuries.

Oh, a place like this, every once in a while you had to expect it to give rise to something that ran roughshod over the laws of nature.

After all, he'd been born here himself, hadn't he? If born was even the proper word. Meaning that whatever aberration this land spawned might conceivably be construed as his brother.

But brothers could be polar opposites.

Been that way at least since Cain and Abel.

Breathe them, smell them, taste them ... those drafts of otherness that blow through the land in arbitrary gusts. Hear them, watch them, walk them ... those subterranean currents of other worlds enfolded into this one. These highways and byways known only to the dead.

He fell back on a basic constabulary strategy of searching afield for what had vanished: begin with a nexus of its last-known locale — in this case, the farthest-traveled casualty found thus far — and spiral outward from there. Sure it was time-consuming. But time he had. And he did not tire easily. The arcs of sun and moon overhead did not much weigh on him.

Even in the most desolate meadows and groves he was rarely alone for any span of hours. The land was full of ghosts. Most were bereft of anything resembling soul or mind; they were echoes of what they'd been, sensible enough only to sense how incomplete they were, and to feel the agony of it. They wept vaporous tears; they put their fists through their cheeks while trying in vain to claw at them.

Others, though ... somehow they had retained themselves. They looked, saw, recognized, knew.

Hellboy came across one such casualty of the past suspended by his neck from a lower bow of an immense oak. A hanging tree, a perversion of Yuletide cheer festooned with its bygone era's accumulation of decayed ornaments, rotted fruits. The fellow was but one of many, and the most aware amongst them all — men, women, children, they spun in slow half-circles, toes reaching for a ground they would never touch. Animals, even. A pony dangled motionless, truly dead, slumping in halves from a thick cable bound around its middle. In contrast, a large wolf whipped its muscled body about and scrabbled its paws at the air, ceaselessly snapping at the cord cinched around its throat.

"You ... see ... me," said the hanging man. From behind a ragged veil of hair, his voice was like a creaking door.

"I see a lot more than you, friend."

"Have you come to claim me?" he asked.

"Why do you ask that?"

"Have you seen yourself, sir? There can be only one place whence came the likes of you. 'Tis a realm I always feared to go. So I went nowhere. Am I then to be claimed at last?"

Criminal, victim, suicide ... Hellboy didn't care what the man had been in life, and certainly didn't care where he chose to spend eternity. Didn't mean he had to tell the truth about it. Death, life — no matter. Fear was still the best inducement to prompt the sharing of secrets.

Hellboy drew his pistol and took a bead on the frayed rope just above the man's head.

"Unless you know of something that'll be more of a challenge for me, looks like you and I have some traveling ahead of us."

And how was it that long-dead eyes could brighten so? Could know hope?

"Such a shabby little prize would I make for the likes of you," he said. "But if it's larger quarry you're after ... "

Hellboy lowered the gun halfway. "I'm listening."

"I know not what it was, but I believe that I heard its birth. A most monstrous bellowing in the night."

"When?"

The man spread empty palms. "Time ... is not the same from this vantage. But not long."

"Which direction?"

An arm, trailing shreds of muslin, unfurled from the man's side and pointed to the west.

"Abominable cries, they were, that could belong only to suchlike fiend as passed by thereafter. I could see naught but shadow or silhouette ... a most dreadful apparition. The likes of it I had never seen before ... yet it felt in some wise familiar to me ... as though I should know its form, and had but forgot."

"Have you seen it any more since then?"

"I would not want to. But there have been occasions when I believe I have heard it. It weeps. In the night, it weeps." The hanging man raised his head from the collar of his noose. "Have I fulfilled our contract, sir? You will tell them nothing of me?"

"Go back to sleep. Dream yourself some better company than what you've got now."

"Ah, but they make such willing listeners to my stories. I have so many, you know. So many ... "

"You and every other dead man," said Hellboy, and pushed onward.

He found it within a couple of hours — if not the end of his search, at least a telling stop along the way. Not like anything he'd ever seen before, but there was no such thing as a finished education, not where matters like this were concerned.

It belonged here, in the mists and vapors of the moors. The calendar may have said early summer, but this parcel of land seemed to resist, to cling to starkness and decay. The trees grew more fungus than leaves, and the sun was thwarted in its attempts to brighten.

And then there was the earth itself. The pustule, at first glance, looked like a crater left by a small detonation: a grenade, a mortar shell. On closer inspection it resembled an open wound, as well. A distended heap of earth and membrane that were not separate but somehow intermingled — smooth here, grainy there; in one place a resilient sheet, while in another it clotted and crumbled and smeared.

I know not what it was, the hanging man had said, but I believe that I heard its birth.

And right here was the canal.

He hunkered down beside the rim, rolled up his sleeve, thrust his hand into the muddy stew. Fished around until he felt something brush his wrist, and grabbed it, as big around as a boa constrictor. Hellboy stood, put the power of his armored hand into it, and tugged.

It came, and came, and came. There seemed no end to it, as tough and fibrous as a vine, as slick as wet cartilage: an umbilical worthy of a nightmare. Its one end looked raggedly sheared through, bitten; tug as Hellboy might, though, its other end was still anchored somewhere down in the depths of Britannia's earth.

He stopped pulling only when the cord snagged on something near the surface, then brought it up. When the object broke through the soil, Hellboy slung the coils aside and stooped again to inspect the piece and to rub it clean.

It was a helmet, corroded but intact save for the dome, punctured with several elliptical arrangements of holes. They'd not been made in some remote age, however; these holes were fresh, the scarred metal of their edges raw and shiny bright. They looked for all the world as though they'd been left by teeth, gnawing in idleness, out of boredom or frustration or, like human babies with rubber rings, simply to coax the teeth into appearing.

Forget the holes for a moment. He inspected the helmet itself, its form, its design. The flanges around the bottom, the guard that dipped down like a mummer's mask to shield the wearer's eyes.

Hellboy plunged his arm deeper into the hole, a blind search but coming out with piece after piece, find after find: a dagger, a scabbard, a jeweled shoulder-clasp inset with garnets, gold, and glass. He began to suspect that there might be an entire treasure trove here waiting to be discovered, perhaps the greatest find in England since the excavation of Sutton Hoo. The bones of Saxon kings or heroes down there, whose deeds poets had labored to recount in all their rightful glory.

Abruptly he decided to let the rest be. He was no archaeologist, and for the moment had found enough to sate his curiosity, to ignite speculation. The known, the unknown, and the conjecture that bridged them together. He stood at the edge of the hole, staring into it, daring it to deny what must have happened here.

The world was younger then, and wilder, governed by the horizon. They came from the cold forests of Northern Europe, astride the icy timbers of their ships. They came, and they never left, fathering a lineage that still dominated England today, even unto giving the country her name. They came, and buried this Dark Age cache of artifacts, steeped in their blood and sweat and fury and honor.

And somehow the place had become a womb. Seeded by ... what ... ?

Belief? Fear?

No such beast as coincidence.

A few days ago he wouldn't have expected it to be so literal, what Copplestone had said about the ancient ways, about old gods awakening to believers who have in turn awakened to them. Dried-up old riverbeds, he'd compared them to, lying in wait for a fresh infusion to come roaring back to life.

Copplestone and his mates, they believed, all right. Said they weren't alone, either, not by a long-shot.

And if they'd begun to bring their ancestral gods back home, well, who was to say one or two of the ancestral devils hadn't hitched a ride in the bargain. For aren't those things that mean you harm so much easier to believe in, in the long run, than those which mean you well?

Now that Hellboy had a good idea who he was looking for, it considerably narrowed where he'd have to look.

Spiralling.

Fractal repetition, echoed in scale from infinitesimal to infinite. Twined helix of DNA and spinning sickle starfish-arms of galaxies. Spirals carved in megalithic rock at Newgrange, drawn by shamans in Ugandan dirt. Spiraldance of pagans at revel, round and round and round we go. And somewhere in between, blueprint for the search for the lost ... this our hub, this our axis.

Involution, evolution. The rise from the swirling waters of birth, the slow drift down into the waters of death. The path deciding all, while the pattern remains the same.

Hellboy couldn't have not found this place. The centuries had conspired to spin him to it.

A small lake deep in the moors, its stagnant waters slopped quietly against the muck of its shoreline. With bark leprous and branches gnarled, the surrounding trees looked poisoned, not by substance so much as spirit, as though the soil from which they grew no longer remembered the specifics of some terrible event that had happened here, only the essence of it.

Imagine, then, the heart of the being that would choose to call such a place home.

Imagine having no other choice.

Hellboy found it at dusk, this black oasis, and knew he was in the right place when within a mossy cluster of trees he spotted a great depression in the spongy green, along with a calcium-white heap. Something had rested here, had taken bones of the dead and passed a few idle hours by reducing them to chips and flakes. Grinding them, perhaps. It was said that, in some antiquated Germanic tongue, this was what had given Hellboy's quarry his name.

Even then they had called him a roamer of the night, and it appeared that nothing had changed. Gone for this one already, Hellboy suspected, so he settled onto the cushion of moss to wait. When the moon rose high and the surface of the lake remained undisturbed, that confirmed it: this vigil would last until dawn.

And a lonely vigil it was, the silence here so deep it was unnatural. No frogs, no crickets, no splash of fish from the ebony waters, and when the first soft blush of pink tinged the eastern sky he heard no birds around to greet it. The sole signs of life were those approaching footsteps that had been inevitable, and when their maker at last shambled into view through the trees and the dewy morning haze, Hellboy viewed him over the barrel of his gun.

Grendel stopped, and though he came from an age ruled by another form of steel, seemed to understand precisely what it was.

"Men I know. I do not know what manner of thing you are," said Grendel, "but I see you have learned their lessons well."

"And you know what surprises me?" Hellboy said. "I wasn't expecting you to have the power of speech."

"Why should you have expectations of my ways at all?"

"The man who killed you. Beowulf. Someone wrote about his life. Big, long, epic poem. It's stood the test of time."

"But the poet had no words to give me?" Grendel asked. "Words only for the hero? It is no surprise. Poets save their best words for what they long to be or desire to possess ... and cannot. And like all men, what they do not understand they fear, and what they fear they find convenient to kill."

"You mean like the way you handled those poor thirty-odd bastards a few days ago?"

"They hungered for a life they never knew. I gave them a brief taste of it. They wanted dragons to fight. I gave them one. It was their yearning that drew me to them. The next morning may have been abhorrent to you, but the night before ... ? They lived as they had never lived before. They died as few are privileged."

Hellboy hadn't been there, but he had his doubts. Had seen few die with the kind of savage exaltation with which heroes died in the sagas and epics of old. Had they ever, really? They begged, they bargained, they shrieked and wept and bled, and he could not think of a single shame in it.

He imagined that the sight of Grendel would have been more than enough to send them running. Long, muscled, spidery limbs, sharp-tipped and coarse with gray bristles; primal simian face with the shearing teeth of a carnivore, and eyes cunning as a cannibal's. Would bankers stand and fight him; would architects and crossing guards? Never.

Although he was not nearly so large that it would have required four men to carry his head back to Hrothgar's mead-hall. Even then the tales of heroes' exploits had needed help from their tellers, so that their boasts might be better winged to fly down through the ages.

Grendel's speed, though — by any standards it would be legendary.

One arm lashed out, quick as a whip, and Hellboy would not have thought he could reach so far. A slashing blow, and the gun was ripped from his grip, knocked a dozen yards away, where it struck a tree, chipping away loose bark and lichens. And Grendel overhead then, his own limbs merging with those of the oak into which he'd hoisted himself, death from above as he bore down with gristle-flecked jaws. Hellboy reacted out of instinct, dodging and swiping an arc with his huge stone-like hand, and its grip found purchase, and wrenched, and the damage was done before he even realized it: Hellboy, standing there with Grendel's arm dangling from his grasp.

Again, the old wound.

And rain, red rain from emptied socket.

Grendel bellowed into the rising day, launched himself from the branches and into the waters of the lake — a tremendous splash, and then a rapid, rippling calm. For a moment Hellboy watched the wavelets, then retrieved his gun and waded in to follow.

Awash in greenish murk, he swam slowly and, as any good hunter would, followed the threads of blood that swirled and eddied before him. Down and down and down, as the lake was gray-lit by the first spears of sunlight to pierce its surface, the thinning blood-trail leading to a horizontal channel dug out of rock and clay. The breath ached against his lungs and an inky darkness enfolded him, total now, and still he kicked onward until a faint flickering orange beckoned overhead.

Grendel's lair. Another land, another eon, but his habits persevered.

Hellboy broke surface, found himself treading water in a small pool ringed by stream-smoothed stones. They had been chosen and placed with obvious care. As if their simple arrangement had been something that had mattered.

He dredged himself from the water, stood dripping in a small cavern far below the surface of the daylight world. Its earthen walls crawled with roots; the light from half a dozen torches shimmered on the moist sheen of its rocks and strobed a dance of shadows. In one corner, a heaped jumble of tooth-marked bones.

And upon the walls, suspended from brackets of sticks, hung their swords.

He plucked a torch from its seat of earth and back, back along a corridor where the light was loath to reach, followed the spatters of blood upon the floor. Their size shrunk every step or two, until he could clearly see what they'd led him to.

By all the gods that ever were, he had never seen anything like this.

At first Hellboy thought it was a body sitting propped against the cavern wall, an enormous corpse somehow half-preserved from an epoch when its kind had walked above ground. But no, it had never lived ... only its parts had.

Bones made from branches — the trunks of saplings for its arms and legs and spine, stout curved branches for ribs. The wool of sheep wound like muscle mass around the makeshift limbs. For a head, a bale of hay stuffed into a large grain-sack, with hair of plastered weeds and algae. And skin quilted together from the hides of at least a dozen men, fashioning from them this colossal hag's pendulous breasts, matronly belly, her atrocious face.

It weeps, the hanging man had said. In the night, it weeps.

Hellboy understood now whom those tears were for.

His mother. From the only tools at hand, Grendel had remade his mother.

The telling of his slayer's tale had come as news to Grendel. That much was apparent. Could he even know, then, that she too had fallen to Beowulf? Did he wonder, did he suspect? Or did he weep only because he had been spawned once more into a world where she no longer existed?

Hellboy squeezed shut his eyes, able to understand that feeling, his own mother never anything more to him than an echo, a phantom glimpsed in the desecrated ruins of a church in East Bromwich. Old deluded woman at the end of a lifetime shaped by devil's lies.

Or had he only hallucinated her to compensate for what he'd never known, making her outright from the fabric of his need?

At his feet, there issued a turbid flow of blood from the juncture of the hag's splayed and outstretched legs. Hellboy reached forward and, as if opening the flap of a tent, peeled back a drape of leathery skin on the sagging kettledrum of her belly. Behind it, Grendel sat curled double within the hollow, remaining hand clamped over the ragged socket of his shoulder.

The fight now bled from him, Grendel stared back at Hellboy over the muzzle of his gun.

"So plain it is in your eyes ... " said Grendel. "You do not think I belong in this world or any other."

"I'm hardly alone in that," Hellboy told him.

"Others may look upon you and judge you the same."

"Not if they know enough to judge me by my actions."

"Ah, those," whispered Grendel. "Protecting the very ones who would find you a fearful thing to look upon? Defending them from the rawheads and the bloodybones of a darkness that could not exist if they did not feed it ... crave it in spite of their piety? Because even a hellspawn is better than their fears that there may be nothing for them beyond this life."

Life-blood oozed over and between those trembling, spindly fingers. Surely there could not be much more left for his heart to pump. And it was said, Hellboy recalled, that the blood of Cain flowed in him, and this was why Grendel had turned against mankind. He was every man that killed his brother, no matter how loosely one defined the term.

"Answer me one thing," Grendel said. "Will Paradise welcome you any more than it would welcome me? Your heart may be a good one, but will the guardians of the Gate forgive you the birth you must have had?"

He did not know how to answer this. Knew only what he hoped.

"I thought as much," said Grendel. "This, too, is so plain in your eyes." And then he shut his own, and murmured, "Mercy."

Hellboy shook his head. "Even if I was inclined to give it, there's no time and nothing I could do for you."

"You do not understand." Slowly, slowly, Grendel craned his neck forward to bring his skull within a hair's breadth of the gun. "I would not die the same ignoble death twice. So I ask you ... "

And some part of him — the same part which days ago, this mystery still unfolding as he walked in spirals, wondered if what the land had birthed might not in some way be his brother — didn't want to do this.

" ... all I ask you ... "

Oh, but they all wore the mark of Cain, didn't they?

" ... mercy."

He obliged, and pulled the trigger.

Hellboy waited awhile before leaving the lair. Spent some time sorting amidst the bones for any trinkets that might be recovered for a grieving widow or child, to bring them the tiniest comfort — a necklace, a medallion — but there were none to be found. So he waited until the torches burned themselves out, one by one, and stared at the ruin of this son, this surrogate mother.

Pondering, too, his own fate, his legacy. Wondering if after long centuries anyone, anywhere, might know of him, know the least thing about him, care.

And when the last torch remained, he touched it to those flammable parts of the mother's vast body, the kindling wood and the hay, and when at last they caught, he hoped that it would burn the rest, as any funeral pyre should. And that some of the smoke, at least, would sift its way through the soil, up, up, to be sighed by the earth into the air, spirals of breath and vapor that would rise into the sky to meet the clouds, and linger there, and someday fall back with the rain.