Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(45)

Yes, terrible, it said, and then it laughed for real.

Abby fled, but as she drew herself back out of Memory and into reality again, the thing she had touched gave her something. Whether intentional or accidental, she fell back into her own body with an image, and a sense of place, and an idea in her mind that showed patterns and designs where there had previously been nothing.

Abby cried out and sat up in the old church. It was fully dark now — the street lamps around the ruin had gone off — and rain pattered down through the open roof. For a few seconds the terrible weight of that thing was all around, pressing down on her body and squeezing breath from her lungs, blood from her veins. She felt the fire of her soul deep inside lessened by the presence, and she screamed against being snuffed out. But then she was alone in the church again, eyes blinking back Memory even as it faded away like an old dream, so complete and solid upon waking and little more than an echo once life and time took over once again.

She was alone, and all that watched her now were the eyes of a ruined Christ.



* * *



She hurried from the church. The streets of Baltimore were all but deserted now, occupied only by shuffling nighttime people. A bum pushed a loaded cart down one street, pausing here and there to snatch up something from the gutter and stuff it into one of his already bulging bags. A police cruiser drifted by, wheel hissing along the wet concrete road. It slowed as it passed Abby, but she walked with purpose and confidence, and the cruiser moved on. Three women passed her going in the opposite direction, none of them looking at her or saying anything. They were well dressed and seemed intent on keeping themselves dry with oversized umbrellas. Abby paused and turned to watch them go, wiping rain from her eyes as though that would make her vision clearer.

She was trying to make sense of what she had seen in the Memory. As she tumbled back out of that place, the huge presence had given her something, an image or a smell, a location or a direction. She was struggling to get hold of it and translate it before it faded away, a dream gone to shreds. Blake was somewhere in there, she was sure. If she could make sense of what she had been given, she was certain that it would tell her either where he had been or where he was now.

She ducked into a doorway and pulled a small notebook from her pocket. There was the nub of a pencil in there too, and she bent forward, shielding the paper from the rain as she started jotting, doodling, letting her mind run off at whatever tangents it chose.

The moon tugged at her. She glanced up and saw its pale image behind the rain clouds. If only clouds would hide her from the moon in a couple of nights' time. She worried about that — what she would do and to whom — but it was also a fascinating prospect. Back at Bureau HQ it had been deer, and before that on the New Ark there was nothing she could remember, and she was happy keeping it that way. But now she was faced with true freedom for the first time, and though she was terrified of what she would do, she was fascinated as well. Will I be a murderer? she thought. She hoped not. But if that was her destiny, then she would embrace it, become who she really was, be herself for the very first time — free of Blake, free of the Bureau, liberated and unbound.

Abe had tried to help her create a history, when in reality she was the only one with the power to do that.

She glanced down at the paper and saw that while she had been thinking, her hands had been doing their own thing. There were words and phrases jotted there, smudged lines that could have been something else. She turned the page and carried on, trying to make sense of what that huge presence had left her.

She thought of Blake and her time in the New Ark and what might have come before. She had little memory of being birthed, though there was a sense of time beginning, a point at which life had started. Blake had created her from the Memory, and it had been a pure creation, not a resurrection. Abby was not a werewolf that had lived before but rather a creature constructed from the faded memories of all of humanity. She was born of old superstitions, given life where before there had been only potential. She was like a never-ending dream brought into reality. And instead of fading away as time took hold, she had taken on true form.

Blake was the nearest thing she had to a father, but she had no love for him. She had seen his mind and known its madness, understood what he was capable of. She had always known that this day would come. She should have told Abe ...

"No!" she said. "Dammit, no!" Her dilemma was growing, because she was aware of what would be happening around the world by now. She knew what was aboard the New Ark, and her brief visit to the Memory had shown her how much had been taken from there, how empty that place of myth and legend now seemed. The world was full of monsters tonight, and she had spent her life swearing that she would not be one of them. She could tell Abe and Hellboy what she knew, but that would draw them in deep and fast. They would die. She had no doubts about that. She would not consider other possibilities. Betray them, yes, but she would not kill her friends.