Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(40)

"Why isn't someone doing anything about this?" Liz shouted.

"We are," Hellboy said. "Someone in the know at the NYPD called the Bureau a day ago, and I guess we just put them on hold for a while."

They walked into the park. Hellboy turned his head left and right to try to make out where the banshee shriek emanated from, but echoes confounded him. Liz held on to his arm, cringing toward the ground as they walked. Darkness nestled beneath the trees and strove to reach out against the streetlights, and it felt as though they were leaving the whole city behind them. Hellboy had been in Central Park once before, and it had felt like a whole new world within a world, a place totally separate from Manhattan. Now, as the darkness was split by the wails and the lights of the city receded behind them, he was more nervous than ever about what they would find.

They passed a fenced baseball area, and more fencing enclosing a basketball court and a kids' play area. The pale concrete path curved away from them, catching some of the sparse starlight and showing them the way.

The wail died down into a moan. She's giving birth to pain, a woman in Ireland had told Hellboy the last time he'd heard a banshee. She's pregnant with agony, and it births itself, so it's never ending for that poor spirit.

"This way," he said. Liz let go of his arm and walked beside him, slightly more relaxed now that the screaming had died down. They still heard groans and sobs, and at every corner Hellboy expected to come across the banshee. The sounds were so intimate, so close, that he thought perhaps it was following them, drifting through the shadows beneath the trees, and teasing them for sport. It was crying from the left, sobbing from the right, and all the time its weeping abraded his ears.

"Damn, it sounds pissed," Liz said.

"It's not a happy bunny, that's for sure."

They walked on, passing the shadows of rocks hunched down like cowering beasts. When the angle was right they could make out splashes of graffiti on the stone, exhorting love and hate and the wonder of drugs. They kept to the path, steering deeper into the park. The sobs of the banshee surrounded them, neither drawing them in nor pushing them away, and Hellboy wondered whether it even knew that they were there. It would soon. He planned on tracking it, holding it down — he had charms and trinkets in his belt pouches that would aid him in that — and quizzing it about why it was here, where it had come from. It would not be easy. And it would not be nice, putting this wretched spirit through more pain and uncertainty. But the banshee's was a small part in a much larger play. Hellboy needed to see the whole act.

Something flitted past them in the dark. Both Hellboy and Liz spun around and looked the way they had come, but there were only motionless shadows behind them. The wailing continued, though it had not seemed to grow any closer.

"What was that?" Liz said.

"Dunno ... saw it from the corner of my eye."

"Bat?"

"Bigger."

They walked on, glancing nervously behind them in case whatever it was came in for a second run.

It did, but not from behind.

A shadow emerged from the darkness before them and wrapped itself around Liz's head. She screamed, but her voice was muffled and then drowned out completely as the banshee screeched. Its sound was thunderous and desolate, and it drove Hellboy to his knees. Liz thrashed around, desperate to keep her footing, waving at her head and pummeling at the hazy shape that enveloped her. It coalesced into the image of a woman, and as Liz stumbled out from a tree's shadow, moonlight illuminated the spirits face. It was an old woman, face gray and heavily lined, mouth open wide, and lips pulled down into an image of abject misery. It looked directly at Hellboy and cried, its voice vibrating through his bones and setting his right hand shaking. He screamed, clasped his fingers tight, fisted his hand, and punched at the ground. He did not hear the impact. The banshee's voice was everything.

"Liz!" Hellboy shouted. "Down onto your knees!" But even his booming voice was drowned out by the spirit's wail, and he forced himself to stand and stumble into Liz. She sprawled to the concrete path, hands still flapping at the ghost wrapped around her head, legs kicking, and Hellboy began to wonder whether she was able to breathe in there. Slow suffocation, he thought.

Something shimmered around Liz's hands and feet, and it was not starlight.

"Oh, lady, now you've pissed her off," Hellboy said.

The banshee seemed to grab on tighter, and then it rose slowly from the ground, Liz still wrapped in its arms and legs. Hellboy leaped and grabbed its wrinkled gray cloak. Still the banshee and Liz rose, their ascent slowed but not halted by Hellboy's grasp. They were above his head now, his arm pointing straight up, the spirits cloak wrapped in his big hand.