Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(72)

She smiled, shook her head, turned on the radio. "Bad Moon Rising." Great.



* * *





Jerusalem — 1990



"GAL, THIS IS MADNESS. Father would never want us to do what you re talking about doing. It could destroy everything we've done over the past fifteen years!"

"Zahid de Lainree doesn't agree, you said that yourself."

"Yes, but he was obviously mad."

"Mad," Gal said, and he smiled. His cigarette lit his face in the darkness of the sultry night, a pale yellow glow that set his skin aflame. "One man's mad is another man's sad."

"You know how things are, Gal." Richard loved his brother so much, and yet lately he had grown to fear him as well. He was afraid that Gal was dying — the sending weakened him more every time, and his recovery periods between instances were starting to overlap — but he was more afraid that his brother was going slowly, comprehensively mad. Whether madness or death would take Gal first, Richard was terrified at the thought of either.

"Yes, I know. I know I'm more than just a son to our father. I'm a way for him to better his plans."

"He told us what to get, and we've been getting just that."

"And is there no room in that plan for betterment?" Gal said. He leaned forward in the chair and stared at Richard, his face illuminated by vague light from a balcony farther along the side of the hotel. "Do you run through your life simply doing what you're told, instead of trying to find better ways to do the same thing?"

"This is not a better way, it's a different way," Richard said. Gal's eyes were deep black pits, and he could not look straight at them. So he looked out over the city instead, amazed as ever by the lack of light reflecting from the low clouds. "We have no idea what may happen if we find this thing. What if it speaks to us? What if it's never been asleep and gone, just lying there dormant, waiting for someone to come and speak the right words to give it life again?"

"That's just what we are going to do. You'll lead us to it from de Lainree's book, we'll find it together, then I'll send whatever I can to Father, wherever the Ark is right now. And after that ... the choice is his."

"No," Richard said. "If we do this tomorrow and find something, we're taking all choice away from Father and putting it in the hands of something else."

"We're giving him power."

"He has that already. Can you imagine the New Ark now, Gal? Can you picture what he has on there and what he has yet to bring through? If only we could see ... if only we could go to him."

Gal sighed and lit another cigarette. His face was gaunt and weak, skin yellow and saggy in the match's flare. He drew in the smoke and leaned back in his chair. "It's a beautiful night," he said. "So warm, peaceful. So filled with potential."

Is he really thinking this? Richard thought. Can he really believe we'd be doing any good? "Potential for chaos," he said.

"And isn't that what we've been working toward for years? Chaos?"

"No," Richard said, and he was certain of that. He'd asked himself the same question every time they went in search of something else from de Lainree's book, and each time he watched Gal perform the sending spell, his answer was the same. "No, not chaos. Order. We're helping Father bring order back into the world. We're saving the planet."

Gal laughed, loud and surprisingly bitter. "Richard, for someone so old you still hang on to your cute childish conceits."

"I'm not embittered by what we're doing," Richard said, regretting it instantly. The sending was killing Gal, and they both knew it.

Gal sighed again. "Well, it's your choice come sunup."

But it was not Richard's choice, and it never had been. They both knew that, both acknowledged it, and yet they had these conversations and pretended that their outcome could make a difference. Gal — in pain, weak, feeble, and quite probably mad — was the stronger of the two by far. His will steered their lives. Richard, protesting and hesitant, followed along every time.



* * *



Next morning Richard woke early and found Gal poring over the book. He was sitting in the same chair out on the balcony of their hotel room, and Richard wondered whether his brother had even gone to bed. He often seemed not to sleep at all.