Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(22)

Two drones scamper up steps set into the side of the vat and swing on a metal wheel. It squeals and then opens, letting a spray of fluid down into the vat. The smoke and vibration lessen, and the drones close the wheel and drop back to the deck.

"Bring it through too soon, and it'll never coalesce," Blake says. He reaches the bottom of the stairs and stands with hands on hips, staring up at the vat even though he cannot see what it contains. The drones fuss around him, but he ignores them. The vat shakes again, as if whatever it contains senses Blake's presence, and Abby realizes that he is the center of the New Ark, its heart, its tainted soul. There is nothing grand or even intimidating about his appearance — he is an old man — but he seems to exude a power that keeps the vat turning. "Not long now," he whispers, and his voice fills the chamber. "Not long now, and the next of my children will be through."

What this time? she thinks. Hidden away behind the crates, she thinks of all the strange creatures this ship is home to, and she tries her best to imagine what could be forming in the vat even now. Does it have wings or horns? Does it breathe air or water? Can it make fire or ice? Her hackles rise as a noise erupts from the vat — boiling liquid, or the growl of something already there — and she feels her own hidden strangeness aching to break out.

Blake hurries to a control panel set in the side of the vat. He taps some dials, shades a display from the flickering light, and moves in close so that he can read it. He seems happy with what he can see. "Coming along fine!" he shouts, and Abby wonders whom he is talking to. The drones? Unlikely.

Me?

She shifts uncomfortably. She's still certain that Blake does not know of her presence; he must be talking to himself. After so long out here, he must crave company. She wonders for the thousandth time why he has never spoken to her since her birthing, though she is one of the few 'children' of his possessing intelligence enough for the gift of speech. The potential answer — that he does not truly care — hurts her as much as ever.

"Crazy," she whispers. "He's a crazy old bastard." Even on the verge of escape, she almost goes to talk to him.

But then something rises from the vat, something black and huge and monstrous, and Blake steps back, arms wide, face split by a maniacal smile, and he cries out in joy. "Black dog! My black dog!"

The dog — five times the size of Abby, coated with slime and still spitting weird green ectoplasm at the shady air of the vat chamber — opens its mouth and barks for the first time in living memory.



* * *



Later, rushing through the ship, everything she sees crushing in on her, Abby at last realizes the importance of everything she has seen and known. It is as if leaving has given her sight, allowed her truly to perceive the very wrongness of all this. These creatures are terribly real and yet awfully redundant, their purposes on this world having long since faded away. They have had their time. Evolved out of humankind's collective mind, these things have been relegated to something darker and more distant than simple memory, a place where even legends no longer live and the memories of legends are less than sighs in a hurricane.

Abby is one of those legends, and rushing through the ship, she feels that more keenly than ever. The knowledge cuts her, stabs her to the quick. It almost carves out her heart. But Abby has a mind, and she has a soul, and being here, though not of her own devices, is something she cannot deny. She is here, and she wants to continue being here. Life is precious. Perhaps, she thinks, even legends can find their own places in the world once more.

Later, when she realizes that she has been fooling herself all along, the memory of her last contact with Blake will seem like the last time she has ever been alive.



* * *



Abby runs the entire length of the ship, from compartment to compartment, hold to hold. She rushes past the compounds and cages and cells, hearing their occupants screeching at her passing and growling at her meaty presence. She shoulders by things milling in corridors, creatures with dripping maws and the blistering stares of memories given a second chance. She even speaks to some of the things in the ship — a man who lives by drinking blood, some women with the tails offish bobbing in a huge water tank — but she is nothing like them. They are blanks upon which Blake has cast his anger and rage. However smart they may seem — and in one room there is something like an angel, singing songs of deliverance and growling the threat of vengeance falling from above — Abby is running with her own mind, not standing around waiting in tune with the mind of another.