Medusa's Revenge

Yvonne Navarro

Because of the danger involved, Hellboy had thought it would be best to work by himself on this case. Now he regretted it.

He didn't need help or research or someone else with supernatural powers — at least not yet. What he wanted was someone to share what was spread out before him.

He wanted Anastasia.

Because below was a vista of paradise.

Hellboy had been a lot of places, seen more things and countries and beauty than he could probably ever appreciate, but nothing had ever compared to this. He stood on the highest point in the area, and lush hills covered in knee-length grasses spotted with limestone boulders fell away both in front of and behind him. Directly below was a cliff that led to the Aegean Sea and water that sparkled like a blanket of diamonds stretched to an impossible horizon edged with barely visible mountains, the farthest end of the universe and beyond where surely the gods of former Grecian glory had stepped off this earth and left behind the puny mortals. More water lapped at the opposite side of the narrow cliff point, while to his right, hundreds of feet below, the tiny, whitewashed houses of fishermen — too many to count — crowded among the rocky nooks and crannies that eventually led to the boat docks and the sea. A warm, fresh breeze swirled around him, bringing with it the scents of saltwater and sunshine.

But the beauty of this tiny, unnamed island to the east of Tghira was deceptive, and the water that should have carried sound, should have bounced it up to him like a child skipping rocks across the surface of a quiet pond, brought only silence. No one fished on the short coast below, or cooked, or swept the neat sidewalks in front of the shacks crowded together; no dogs barked and chased hissing cats among the stalls of the deserted marketplace. Even the seagulls seemed to have fled, left the village to the ruin of whatever heavy hand of evil had descended upon it. It was just as well that Anastasia was several thousand miles away and tending to the intricacies of her own life. Here, he was certain, she would find only danger.

Hellboy shifted, trying to find a more comfortable spot to stand, one where the tiny pebbles and shells washed up here in the ocean storms didn't embed themselves into the bottoms of his hooves. He scratched at the stubble on his head, enjoying the heat of the sun as he peered down the hillside and tried unsuccessfully to spot movement. He had no doubt that there were still people down there somewhere, but they weren't stupid. Hiding probably, sequestered in their houses with heavy wooden bars thrown across the doors and the windows tightly shuttered, and be damned to the high summer temperatures or the desire for the cooling ocean wind. But wait —

There.

Hellboy stood up straighter, straining to see. At first it was only a speck, but the moving object closed the distance rapidly along the upper outskirts of the village, picking its way nimbly among the boulders and grasses. It took Hellboy a minute or so to realize that the thing seemed to have a purpose, and when he figured it out, he was anything but pleased: it was obviously angling toward him, following a path up the side of the cliff that would bring it right to his feet. Of course; he must be like a big, red beacon standing up here. He might as well have beat on his chest and shouted, Here I am! at the top of his lungs.

Another thirty or forty seconds — the object was moving fast — and Hellboy could finally recognize it for what it was: a horse.

A stone horse.

Hellboy felt no fear, only a sharp and detached sense of interest. Horse lovers worldwide would despise him for it, but he really didn't care about saving the oddity headed toward him with such single-minded purpose. It was surely beyond redemption, its flesh and heart petrified for all time, its thoughts, were he to believe what Dr. Manning had told him in his briefing at the Bureau's Fairfield, Connecticut office, turned solely to destruction.

Another twenty seconds and he could see it in full detail, watch the weird play of muscles moving along the rocky surface of its hide. This was no fire-breathing anomaly — it wasn't breathing at all, just moving with a sort of dead animation that reminded Hellboy of the earliest and crudest of the ancient stop-motion Willis O'Brien movies. The creature's eyes were as lifeless as the ground on which Hellboy stood and about as friendly; only the wide-open mouth portrayed its true intentions, the lips drawn back to reveal the horse's long, square teeth, a full set clearly aiming for a taste of Hellboy flesh.

"Not today," Hellboy rumbled, and planted himself more firmly.

The stone horse closed the last few feet and reared, pawing the air between them with hooves bigger and quite a bit sharper than Hellboy's own. Until he'd met it face to face, Hellboy hadn't registered how huge the horse was; raised on its hind legs, he wasn't thrilled to discover that his head came only to mid-ribcage level at the front of the moving statue.

Great, Hellboy thought. Created by a sculptor who'd liked working big.

He dodged the swipe of one hoof and backskipped as the front of the horse came down, landing heavily right where Hellboy had been standing only a second before. He swung at it and was surprised when he missed — made of rock or not, the statue was considerably faster than he expected and it danced out of range with ease. It circled to the left and came back for another try, this time at an eerily soundless charge that put its full body weight into it.

"You call this strategy?" Hellboy asked dryly, just before he threw himself sideways and out of the way. The world turned upside down as he slid and bumped his way a full twenty feet down the hillside before a rocky outcropping stopped his descent with a not-too-pleasant thud. There was a tremendous crash and Hellboy craned his neck to see back up the hill as he felt a vibration run through the ground. The horse statue was on its way, and any sense of surefootedness had disappeared: its own weight had gotten the better of it and the thing was rolling end over end —

Straight for him.

Hellboy yelped and clawed at the ground, found his balance at the last second, and scrambled sideways across the grass like a clumsy spider. He felt the breeze as the rock creature rumbled past and a shower of stinging, sharp-edged pebbles hit him, more gifts from the unlikely animal assassin. Trying to watch almost cost him his hold and he cussed and found it again, finally steadying himself as he saw the horse somersault a final time and crash against the boulders where the base of the cliff met the shoreline. Rock against rocks and it was all over; the thing's head shattered and the rest of it broke into four or five large pieces. Fascinated, Hellboy saw the pieces quiver for a few seconds, as though they were trying to work themselves back together before they realized a vital part was now forever missing. They stopped as Hellboy stared; from where he lay amid the rocks and grasses, the dust settling around the remains of the horse statue looked like a burial shroud, a final layer of gravel that should have remained undisturbed.

"Great," Hellboy muttered to himself as he found his footing and dusted himself off. "Chased by stone horses in the first quarter hour — what's next?"

And what was next? He turned back toward the village and studied it, this time crouching so he wasn't such a target to more of the reanimated objects he knew were prowling the narrow streets and alleyways. He could see movement down there now, but thankfully nothing else, man, beast, or stone, seemed to be headed up the hill toward him; for a nervous few moments he'd wondered if these statues had some kind of telepathic link to one another. For now, though, it looked like he'd be okay on that count.

Too bad Jayson Paras hadn't had the same luck.

Dr. Manning had shown Hellboy a photograph of the amateur archaeologist and pre-doctorate student of ancient mythology. Tall, strong, and young — no more than twenty-eight — with the sort of dark hair and eyes that women craved set in a rugged face tanned golden brown by the Grecian sun. Hellboy had accepted what he was in this world a long time ago, but sometimes, when he saw a man like that, he couldn't help but wonder what his existence would have been like had he been born under more human circumstances.

Be that as it may, Paras had come back from the Isle of Karpathos, and friends, family, and colleagues had listened with skepticism to his account of this latest in a series of summer trips. He had, he claimed, found a tomb buried deep in a cave on the coast of the Sea of Crete, the entrance to which had previously been only a fable, as mythical as the secret of the gods it was meant to conceal. It was in this cave that Paras discovered — or so he insisted — the Shield of Athena, the same one on which the Greek legends declared was imprisoned the deadly head of Medusa.

If the ancient story of how the sight of Medusa would turn a person to stone was true, how Jayson Paras had found, packed up, and then transported the shield was a mystery, and one which would probably remain so for eternity. Now Paras was surely as dead as most of the people in the village; whatever procedures he had undertaken to keep the shield from being seen had failed and someone had discovered the crate and pried it open. The mystery, of course, was why that unfortunate adventurer — and the next, and the next one after that — hadn't simply become petrified until someone had gotten a clue about what was going on.

And ... oh yeah. There were also those pesky living statues to think about.

Well, Hellboy thought, this was just like an archaeology project. He'd never find the answers if he didn't dig around a bit.

Hunkered down to keep out of sight as much as possible, Hellboy scuttled down the side of the cliff and slipped into the ocean-swept streets of the village.

The village itself was a bewildering maze, a meandering trail of streets too narrow for conventional cars and which held an unspoiled beauty that made it the better for it. Most of the houses were whitewashed or painted in creams, pale yellows, and light gray to reflect the sun; window boxes held everything from sweetly scented flowers to pungent clumps of herbs ready to be plucked and tossed into the midday cooking pots. That, Hellboy realized, was the first indication that something was dreadfully wrong here: instead of the expected smells of olive oil and goat cheese, baking bread and smoking fish, there was a faint smell of dust and decay beneath the surface. Even the goats had fled from whatever had invaded this village. The smell of death was constantly washed aside by the sometimes strong winds off the sea, but it always built up again, like the scent embedded in the trunk of a car where a mummified corpse had remained undiscovered for months.

The village was filled with stone bodies.

It wasn't hard to follow the trail, and the dead ones themselves unwittingly gave Hellboy the clues he needed to begin piecing together this incredible mythological disaster. Many of them were clumped on the steps leading to the village's tiny Greek Orthodox church, but whatever protection they'd expected to find had either not lent itself to the existing threat or simply not felt benevolent that day.

Hellboy stayed close to the buildings, still enjoying in spite of himself the high summer heat that reflected off the tile rooftops as he crept along. An hour of cautious exploring took him back to his starting point but revealed nothing. He began again, preparing himself for a slower, more thorough search, then his eyes narrowed and he paused just the other side of the church. Of all the frozen-stone bodies he'd seen in the village, those gathered here, at the bottom of the flight of stairs leading to the worn double doors, bothered him the most. It wasn't so much that they had sought help here and not found it — that was bad enough — but that there were so many. Why here and not, say, in front of the weathered constabulary four blocks over? Or maybe at the undersized but clean hospital at the other end of the village's main street?

Could it be, perhaps, that there was something ... interesting inside?

Time to find out.

Hellboy wrapped his hand around the door handle and pulled, was surprised to feel solid resistance. Not an ordinary door lock — that would have given under his heavy tug. No, this was as if something held it closed on the other side, something with a solid strength on line with Hellboy's own.

Since when did a church want to keep people out!

Hellboy scowled and yanked harder, putting his weight into it when he felt that same resistance, then getting aggravated enough to give it his full power. The force on the other side increased, then suddenly gave way; Hellboy grunted as his body lurched backward and he tumbled down the steps, staring stupidly at what remained of the door, a chunk of ragged wood surrounding the handle, still clutched in his thick fingers. He started to automatically look toward the now gaping doorway, then remembered the dangerous legend behind the Medusa — if whatever waited for him in that doorway held the shield upon which her head had been imprisoned and Hellboy looked upon it, he could end up being made out of the same unyielding rock as had been the horse he'd destroyed on the cliffside.

Damn, Hellboy thought. This was going to be harder than he'd guessed.

He lifted one arm and slung it protectively across his eyes, then stood and lumbered back up the steps with the stone hand of his right arm held stiff in front of him like a football player, wondering how the hell he was supposed to fight something he couldn't even look at. He hit the entranceway at a dead run, then nearly fell flat when he encountered nothing to block his path. He flailed for balance then realized belatedly that in trying to stay upright he'd lowered his arm and gripped the worn wooden pews on either side of the narrow aisle. His tail swept the floor and hit something else, and when he glanced over his shoulder Hellboy saw the remains of what he assumed had been the statue trying to hold the door shut. When the wood had ripped away, the soldier figure had fallen against a stone basin containing holy water, and now its head and upper torso lay in pieces on the cold tiles of the floor. The rest of it twitched uselessly at Hellboy's feet.

The interior of the building was filled with shadows cast by the muted light bleeding through the gritty panes of the old windows. If there were electric lights, they weren't turned on; what few candles adorned the single, long room were unlit as well. Nothing moved, but Hellboy was not fooled.

More, he thought. There have to be more.

And indeed there were.

At the opposite end of the room was a scarred, double-wide wooden pulpit. A few rose from behind it and the rest came from between the first three rows of pews, like a hideous gray army of more than three dozen. Obviously the oldest of what the village had to offer in adornments, and in the ten or so seconds before they attacked, Hellboy made the connection: this small island off the coast of Greece had kept its secrets well and held its own heritage apart from much of what had been pilfered and appropriated by the world's museums. The stone statues that moved before him — depictions of nearly naked Greek gods and goddesses bearing everything from swords and shields to mythical serpents, were the original sculptures, the ones that dated back far enough, perhaps, to predate the village's solely human population when the Greek gods had walked the earth.

Back to the time of Medusa.

The village was full of stone, granite, limestone, and marble figures, but most of them remained just that. These, however —

"Medusa's victims," Hellboy said. His voice came out hoarse with amazement. "Every one of you was stupid enough to look her in the face." He shook his head in disgust. "And look what it got you."

Dead or undead, apparently they didn't have vocal cords. Hellboy's comment brought no response, and certainly didn't slow the coming charge. He started to open his mouth and say something else when the first wave of Medusa's warriors hit him.

Something drove a boulder-sized fist into his side and knocked the wind out of him, then another figure bonked him hard on the head. Hellboy sucked in air and managed to block the edge of a sword headed for the bridge of his nose — it might be just rock, but it sure would've hurt had it found its target. "Hey!" he cried. "Cut it out!"

Like they were listening.

"Well, this just sucks," Hellboy snarled as he took another teeth-rattling blow, this one on his left shoulder and nearly hard enough to make his arm go numb. "Time to rock and roll!"

He began to fight in earnest.

His left fist was useless against stone but his right was a fine weapon, manufactured for just this type of situation. He swung and spun, then swung again, over and over as he braced himself with his tail so the impact of his blows wouldn't knock him off his feet — the last thing he needed was to get buried under God-knows-how-much weight if these things fell on him.

Everything in a circle around him seemed to disintegrate as he battled, rocks and pebbles whizzing through the air and pelting his face and chest. He struck out again, connecting with whatever was in his way, and something exploded before he could see what it was. With a grunt he brought his stone hand up and smacked at another figure; the shoulders of a toga-draped woman crumbled beneath the blow. Hellboy was getting tired of this and angrier by the second; in about a half a minute, he was going to lose his temper and dig something out of his belt that would lay waste to the entire building.

"Enough."

A single word, uttered by a voice that sounded like it had come from a throat lined with sandpaper and ground glass, and it all simply ...

Stopped.

Hellboy blinked stupidly at the suddenly empty spaces around him, then watched what was left of the stone soldiers back off in that same, eerie silence. The remainder of the mini-army wasn't much; three or four male statues unremarkable except for their extraordinarily handsome physiques, an equal number of female, a few more figures that could have gone either way and which bore attachments that represented creatures from Grecian mythology, including the thick, delicately sculpted body of a headless serpent.

"Come closer ... Hellboy."

"Damn," Hellboy grumbled to himself. "I really hate it when they know my name."

Hellboy obeyed not because the voice commanded it but because he wanted to; keeping his eyes safely focused on the floor was easy because it was a necessity. The place was littered with rocks and stones from the fight — if he didn't watch where he was walking, he'd likely end up with something stuck in one of his hooves like the lion with the pebble between his paws in that stupid fairy tale. "This is as far as I'm going to go," Hellboy said flatly and stopped at the third pew from the front. "You want to tell me what's going on here?"

"Isn't it obvious?" the voice hissed. "I've finally been releassssed."

The last word was long and drawn out, like the sound the tongue of a snake — a very big snake — might make when it flicks out to taste the air.

"Pardon me for pointing this out," Hellboy retorted. "But last I heard you were missing the bottom part of your mobility."

"But I am still powerful."

There was an almost amiable tone to the voice that made Hellboy's eyes narrow with suspicion. He wasn't about to say so, but it only took a quick look around to realize that he had to agree with the power part. "Must be hard when you have to depend on someone else for a ride all the time," he said blandly.

"Perhaps. But there are always those willing to serve."

Hellboy glanced around, but the faces of the stone statues were just that, cold rock, totally unreadable. Were they watching him — could they tell he was considering a blind rush on the podium? Through all this, there had been no movement behind it, and Hellboy thought it was a pretty good bet that the shield with Medusas head on it had been stashed back there before the rest of her stone cronies had surged forward to fight him. If he could leap to the podium and bring his stone hand down and over, give it one good blow, the shield — and presumably the biggest problem this picturesque Grecian village had — might be obliterated.

"What about you, Hellboy? Would you serve?" The voice of Medusa paused, as if contemplating. "The other gods have long gone, and they no longer concern themselves with the puny distresses of mortals. With your special ... talents ... we could rule this pathetic world."

Hellboy looked again at the figures around him, but he was just as clueless about what was going on in their 'minds' as he had been before.

"Me rule something?" He shook his head nonchalantly, hoping that whatever attention span existed in these rock-headed warriors would be drawn by that movement and away from the minute tensing of his massive leg muscles. "Nah, I never was the management type. The only thing I want to do in that respect is —

"Rule you out!"

Hellboy sprang.

He rolled into the wooden podium like a bowling ball and it shattered. Too late he realized how distorted sound had been in this closed-up building with its high, peaked roof. His stone fist swiped downward at empty air and then he fell, landing face-first on the floor hard enough to make his eyes water, tiles cool against the always over-warm red skin of his face. Something moved just out of view on his right side and Hellboy rolled and came to his feet in an instinctive fighting stance, leaning forward with his shoulders hunched and his fists up, hooves planted firmly a shoulder's width apart. But the only thing in front of him was the smooth backside of another statue, this one with most of her upper body, including the right half of her head, missing.

Damn. Where had Medusa's voice been coming from?

"An unfortunate choice, Hellboy," she said, and then the fragmented statue spun, much faster than Hellboy would have ever expected —

— and he was facing the head of Medusa straight on.

His eyes met hers involuntarily and everything in him locked up and went numb. Out of his peripheral vision he saw the headless snake — boy, Medusa seemed to like her subjects without that upper appendage, didn't she? — slide heavily across the floor until it was out of sight somewhere below. The only comforting thing he could come up with was that at least with no head or mouth the damned thing couldn't eat him.

Whether his body was turning into stone or not, Hellboy could still see, and boy that Medusa woman was one ugly mother. Jutting cheekbones, a bulbous nose and a mouthful of tiny, pointed teeth surrounded by stretched, cracked lips were just a few of her many attributes — not a babe Hellboy would want to kiss on a dare, especially with the bristly tongue that jutted obscenely from between those deadly looking teeth. Her skin was as gray as the one-armed figure that held up her shield, and below a high, misshapen forehead her eyes were the only thing with any color in them: they were a deep red and shot through with flecks of black and yellow, like the gaze of some over-hungry, hellish cat.

And then, of course, there was her fabled hair.

Snakes all right, hundreds of them, and all complete with fangs and nasty little triangular heads that writhed and hissed and snapped at everything, including each other. Too bad they didn't just bite the witch that had commandeered them to be her eternal headdress.

"You could have ruled at my side," Medusa said almost mournfully. Her snakes twisted and hissed louder as she talked, as though competing with their mistress' voice. "But now ... "

If she'd had a body, Hellboy thought the Medusa would have shaken her head at him in disappointment, as if judging the behavior of a bad little boy. Instead, she stared at him, her eyes filled with malice. "What do you think of my subjects, Hellboy?" she asked, as though he could actually answer. "Not what I would have chosen for myself, but certainly convenient. My original prey, I gazed upon them eons ago and after all this time, they still await my bidding. Too bad they're so damaged."

The head smiled at him then, and if Hellboy had thought it was ghastly looking before, it was nothing compared to the way that hideous mouth now twisted up in happiness. "But still they serve their purpose, as that fool Paras found out." Medusa laughed, the sound screaming into Hellboy's ears and making him want to cringe. God, he thought, have these other statues been like this for all these thousands of years — able to hear and see and think, able to know, but helpless to do anything about it?

Would the same thing happen to him now?

"You see," Medusa continued, "Paras thought he was being so intelligent, the way he uncrated me and so diligently kept the packing material between himself and my shield. But when he lifted me from the wooden box, it was in a place where many of my subjects were also stored — I believe you call it a museum." Medusa chuckled. "He was quite surprised when the stone woman across the room came to life and rushed him. He's still there, you know, waiting for my bidding. He makes a fine statue."

Wait a minute, Hellboy thought. His gaze cut experimentally to the right, then to the left.

I can still move my eyes.

"My body still exists, Hellboy, hidden deep in a cavern on Mt. Idhi in Crete. And you, with your perfect physical body and unstoppable strength, will take me there for my reunion. I need only wait a small measure of time and then reanimate you as I have done with my more ancient subjects. You will find yourself as obedient as they, although, unfortunately, you will lack the more ... interesting ... aspects of your personality."

Hellboy barely heard her. He was concentrating on his eyes, rolling them around and around enough to make himself dizzy inside whatever weird stone covering had encased him. Made of stone? He wasn't afraid of that — he'd always had a part of him that was stone and it still functioned just fine.

Why shouldn't the rest of him do the same thing?

The Medusa's voice had taken on a dreamy, singsong quality that did nothing to make it more pleasant, but Hellboy was focusing on himself, on making the tingle he felt when he rolled his eyes spread throughout his face and neck, then on to the rest of his muscles. "Once my head and body are rejoined, I will take my rightful place as the new owner of this world, the only god left who walks among mortals and has the power to rule them. There will be no force on earth that can stop me. I have waited thousands of years for this moment, for retribution against — "

Hellboy flexed his arms.

Whatever Medusa had been about to say died in mid-sentence as her terrible eyes widened. Hellboy grinned, pleased to feel the stretch of his mouth, the warm air in the church as it rushed into his lungs, the movement of his own tongue against the back of his teeth when he spoke.

"Hi, honey. I'm home!"

He heard her hiss at him just before he leapt, then the statue that was holding her turned its back to him, protecting the shield and taking the blow that Hellboy had meant for that ancient, ugly face. The entire back of it shattered and it went down, the face and whatever power of mobility it had possessed going with it; out of the corner of one eye Hellboy saw the shield roll awkwardly away and bump against the back wall, then fall face up. He started to go after it and tripped, unused to the quadrupled weight of his new stone body. He was cumbersome and slow, but at least he wasn't as fragile as the rest of Medusa's soldiers; the only thing that seemed to be truly paralyzed — as petrified as the legends claimed — was his stone hand.

Fine. It might be inconvenient, but if it wouldn't move then he'd use it as a battering ram or something.

Hellboy hauled himself upright, then promptly hit the floor again as something twined around his feet — that damned, headless snake. He started to bat it aside then realized it was a more formidable foe than he'd assumed; it quickly coiled itself around his tail and both legs, and he found himself fighting to keep it from winding its way up his chest. He might not be lunch for the thing, but Hellboy knew the big snakes — the boas and pythons — killed by asphyxiating their prey, squeezing and holding until the trapped creature simply couldn't breathe anymore.

But he couldn't get his fingers underneath it, couldn't find a hole between the snake and his own stony skin big enough to snag a grip. The other hand was next to useless — his fingers wouldn't move at all. He scrambled around for a few more seconds, then absurdly a line from an old folk song popped into his head —

"If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning ... "

Hellboy hunched over and began to pound on the snake with jackhammer speed using his stone-dead hand.

He felt each blow all the way down to his teeth as it vibrated through the beast thrashing around him — he had to acknowledge that he might not like being all made of stone, but it had certainly increased his power. After five more seconds the hold loosened enough for him to think he might be able to continue breathing after all, and the next quarter minute made pieces of the snake fly in all directions, a mini-explosion of crushed stone and gravel.

He came upright and threw his arms wide, roaring like an oversized gorilla as he met the fresh onslaught of stone-faced warriors that were pouring into the church, drawn, no doubt, by some sort of telepathic command from Medusa. But it was a useless effort for them — where Medusas power had turned them into a mini-army of fighters, it had unwittingly turned Hellboy into an undefeatable one-man machine of destruction. Again and again his double-stoned fist flashed out, dwindling their already reduced numbers.

Until, finally, it was only him and Medusa's head.

Certain that more statues were likely to come pouring into the church at any moment, Hellboy bounded over to it, then yanked back instinctively when the hair-snakes contorted wildly and bit at him. For the first time he realized how wrong he'd been in assuming that the shield was also made of stone. It wasn't; instead, he found himself looking at a living head attached to a hand-hammered disc, flesh melded onto a metal circle into which had been carved a thousand glyphs — no doubt they were ancient Grecian spells geared to destroying or continuing to imprison the head. Hellboy could never hope to decipher these markings in time to help himself, and it only took a second to realize he would never be able to break the shield ...

So he was back to that hammer thing again.

Ignoring the repulsive knots of snakes, Hellboy bent and hefted the shield. The creatures in Medusas hair attacked him viciously, but their long fangs couldn't penetrate the stone skin in which their mistress's own gaze had sheathed him. In his hands, the metal felt uncomfortably warm, even for Hellboy, and he had to fight the urge to toss it away before his job was done. Instead, he literally began to fight with it, punching and pounding and twisting, turning then trying to tear — anything that would do some measure of damage to this seemingly indestructible piece of godly armor.

Nothing.

"Damn it!" Hellboy roared. The head and hair still flailed at him, and this time the snakes had changed their tactics and were going for his eyes, the only part of him that was likely to still be vulnerable. In frustration he flung the shield back to the floor; this time it landed face down and Hellboy let his anger take control. He began to jump on it, up and down and all over again, each time bringing the stone-fortified weight of his not-inconsiderable body down fully in the center like a child stomping on a hated toy.

Beneath him, Medusa's enraged screams reached a crescendo that made his eardrums ache, but ... did he detect a change in that awful voice, a weakening? And was that a dent he saw growing in the middle of the shield?

Another mighty pounce, and another, and more still. Somewhere inside his head Hellboy heard a brain-splitting shriek, then the shield gave way beneath him. He dropped to floor level with a grunt and stopped, staring fixedly down at a spiderweb of cracks that began to run along the backside of the armor, threading their way in a spiral pattern until they reached the outside edge. Something dark, wet, and viscous spread from beneath the shield — gods' blood perhaps, something which ordinary man was never meant to see. As Hellboy gawked, the shield suddenly trembled and the battered, uneven surface of the metal crumbled, morphing before his eyes until it became stone, Medusa's revenge turned upon herself. Even the black puddle beneath the shield hardened and began to change, lightening until all that remained was a fine powder of stone dust.

And finally, Medusa's head was silent.

Hellboy reached tentatively for one edge and flipped it rightside up. It landed against the tiled floor with a clang so out of place inside the quiet church that it made Hellboy look around guiltily to see if he'd disturbed someone. On the floor at his feet, the shield still held the face and head of Medusa, but now it was deadened and veined with chips and holes.

Still, Hellboy didn't trust it.

Against the wall was a tall, marble cross. Hellboy bounded over and picked it up, pleased at its substantial weight, then returned to stand over the shield. It was the same as it had been a moment before —

Maybe.

Or maybe not. Did he see something malevolent in the dead Medusas eyes as she glared unseeingly up at him?

Again, maybe.

But he could take care of that.

As though he were staking some kind of perverted vampire, Hellboy upended the cross and drove it point-down into the center of Medusa's forehead.

And the shield shattered into a thousand pieces, and was no more.

It took nearly three days for the stone skin covering his own to finally slough away.

During that time, the flesh beneath it itched unmercifully and Hellboy found himself clawing at his body countless times while he waited for the process to complete itself. Each time he started to rant or feel his temper start to go, he would look around at this once-picturesque village in the Greek isles and remind himself that what he endured could, indeed, be worse.

Much, much worse.

Because with the destruction of Medusa's head had come the release — and resurrection — of her victims.

All those reanimated statues were also sloughing away their stone prisons, changing back to flesh bodies which had, either in battle with Hellboy or with the passage of time, lost all or a part of themselves. Returning to life with missing limbs, heads, or huge chunks knocked from parts of their bodies, the ancient figures were incomplete abominations; if they had mouths they screamed in terror and pain but they — and the strange, mythical creatures that came back to life bonded with them — would not die on their own.

And so the townsfolk — those who finally came out of hiding now that the worst was over — moved in to complete the slaughter.

The more recent victims of Medusa were returning to flesh as well, but most of them were dead or in the same shape as the ancient ones. Nothing could be done for them, and their fate was the same: faces grim with mourning, the inhabitants of the village exercised their hands at killing, then spread the bodies of old and new side by side.

The village's menfolk found Jayson Paras, resurrected from stone but still locked and wandering aimlessly in the lower level of the tiny, local museum. Ironically unscathed, the amateur archaeologist insisted he'd been sleeping and that he'd had some kind of nightmare. Everyone thought he was quite mad.

And all Paras ever talked about, from that day forward, was an image from the dream that he couldn't get out of his head.

Snakes.