Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(12)

And then the fire, and the murder and accusations, and for the first time in their lives, their father had looked after them. They had run, and while on the run, he told them what he wanted to do. How he wanted to seek vengeance. And he gave them both something very special before sending them on their way, something that, in retrospect, did not surprise them one little bit.

He gave them magic.



* * *



The site was not especially well protected. There was a security fence, but something had burrowed beneath one section of it long ago — a fox or a dog — and Gal and Richard managed to squirm their way underneath. They paused while Richard cast a spell of haze at a couple of security cameras, waiting for a few minutes for the enchantment to take effect. When the lenses of the cameras whitened with cataracts, the brothers hurried across the open ground, coming to a standstill up against the closest hangar. They looked around, waiting for the shout or whistle that would signify their being sighted, but all was silent.

The air was still, as if nature held its breath. Perhaps soon it would. When they had collected everything their father needed, maybe then the whole world would hold its breath. And when Benedict Blake had finished with it, the planet would start to breathe itself clean once again. That's how Richard and Gal thought of it; they were helping the earth to clear its lungs. Humanity was the bad habit, and the planet needed to give it up.

The hangar was huge. They had to scamper around its perimeter for a while until they found an open door, but once inside, the scale of the enclosure became apparent. It was at least the size of a football field, the ceiling maybe a hundred feet high, and the open space it created was unhindered by columns or supports. At its center sat the charred remains of a passenger jet. The aircraft had plunged into the Alps a week before, killing more than a hundred people. If only the investigators could reassemble those lives so easily ... but they did what they thought was the next best thing. Found out what went wrong, and why.

"If only they knew," Richard muttered.

"Even if they did, they'd never believe. That's their problem. They pay no homage to their Memory." Gal was haunted by Memory, that place, that emptiness where so much existed that should not. Every time he went there, he wished he were the weaker one, the translator his brother had become. He wished he did not have the strength it took to dip into the Memory, because he hated that place and what it represented, and as each year passed, his rage at the ignorance that had created it grew.

"Let's go," Richard said. "No one here. Maybe they're out to lunch?"

The men darted across the floor of the hangar and hid amid the separated and labeled wreckage of the airliner. They could still smell the fire that had consumed the fuselage, and though much of it had been reconstructed on a framework of steel supports, the floor was still strewn with unidentified parts. Like body parts, Richard thought. Bits they can see, many more pieces they cant identify. The plane came apart like the bodies inside, and people only have themselves to blame. If they d opened their minds — if they'd given the little spirits credit for their talents — the gremlins would have never turned on humanity.

"Over here," Gal said. Richard followed him to the tangled mess of one of the massive engines. It had been gutted by an explosion, and its mechanical guts hung out as if seeking escape. Gal traced his finger across the blackened surface of the metal, sniffed the soot, shook his head, and moved on. "Closer," he said. "Getting closer." He repeated the process here and there, and Richard joined in, touching and sniffing, looking for that trace of something that was not mechanical or electrical, something that had once had life and thought and emotion.

They found it on the outside of a smashed door.

The door was so twisted by fire that it had not yet been reaffixed to the body of the plane. Molded around its exposed handle, cauterized hard by the conflagration, was a layer of greenish material. Neither brother even had to touch it to know what it was. Flesh, the fat of a spirit, the trace of a gremlin.

"There it is," Richard said, and, as ever, he was filled with wonder at what they had found. Every search started with belief and little more. And every search ended with discovery. They were doing something right, and not for the first time he wondered who, or what, might be steering them.

"You take it, I'll send it," Gal said.

Richard used a penknife to take a slice of the material. When he cut it, it bled.

Gal sketched a sigil in the soot on the hangar floor. He knelt, closed his eyes, started to mutter the invocation that would open the Memory to him, and he dropped the gremlin flesh onto the sigil. The world around him receded to little more than an echo. The sigil grew warm, as if flaring with the flame of the crash once again, and the gremlin flesh sizzled and popped as it faded out of this world and into another. It passed into Memory and, as always, Gal had an instant to watch it go. He felt the depth of that place and the emptiness, the loss and the rage, and he fell back crying into the arms of his brother.