Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(99)

But chased by whom?

"Who's chasing?" she asked, but her yoke crackled from the phlegm suddenly flooding her throat. Saliva dripped from her lips, pink from the blood of her wounded gums.

"Oh, I think you'll know them when you see them," Leh said.

Abe, Abby thought. Oh, Abe, I never wanted you to see me like this.

"Not Abe," the demon said. "But close enough."

Abby changed. The world retreated from her for a while, and despite the intense physical pain, this was the one moment when she found true mental peace. She was nowhere for a while, a place without dream or nightmare, with no Memory or reality. Simply a blank.

When she woke up, the world was a very different place.



* * *



"I can smell him," Hellboy said. "An old man. A fading man. He's almost passed into Memory, but we can't let him get away. Come on, Liz, run!" They pelted headlong along corridors, passing through huge rooms that had once held creatures of untold size and power. Maybe we've come up against some of them already, Hellboy thought. Maybe some we have yet to meet. But if we catch Blake soon, instead of letting him escape into this maze of rooms and corridors, we can hope we'll never have to meet them at all.

"Stop!" Liz said. Hellboy paused, glanced back at Liz. She was holding up her finger. "Hear that? Footsteps." Hellboy heard them, racing off way ahead. "Our echoes?" Liz shook her head. "Only one set. Come on." The deeper they went, the more amazed Hellboy became. "Has Blake really been here for so long?" he said. "What about fuel, food, repairs?"

"There are a hundred ports where he'd get help with no questions asked," Liz said. "We can worry about the past later, after we've sorted out the present."

"Right," Hellboy said. But as ever, it was the future that worried him the most.

So they followed the echoing footsteps, and soon, far too quickly for Hellboy to think it was luck, they saw the shape of a shuffling man ahead of them. He looked back, eyes going wide, and skirted sideways into a narrower gap between walls. Liz followed him first, Hellboy squeezing in after her.

"Nearly there," Liz said. "Blake! Stop!"

"Yeah, like he'll listen," Hellboy said. "Stop, police!" he shouted, then laughed.

"Sarcasm doesn't suit you, HB," she said.

"I'm just trying it on for size." The smile suddenly slipped from his face, and he was glad that Liz was hurrying on ahead, unable to see his expression. That's cold, Hellboy thought. That's so cold, so empty, so wrong. That's not Blake. He's mad, he has magic, but he isn't ... evil. I smell evil. Black as pitch and stinking a hundred times worse.

They emerged into a huge chamber, a place that reeked of old oil and something else, something much more distant and unearthly. "Liz," Hellboy said, "get behind me."

"Don't you start with all that macho — "

"I mean it." The fact that Liz moved quickly behind Hellboy assured him that she had seen the look on his face. "This is so much more than Blake."

At the center of the chamber, suspended from the ceiling, hung a huge vat. Gray stuff had congealed around its rim and dripped down its sides like melted wax. Whatever this thing was, it hadn't been used for a while. It made Hellboy uneasy. He didn't like the smell coming from the thing, or the sight of it, and it felt so out of place in this world. This is where he brought them through, he thought. Then he heard the old man scream, and everything began to move very quickly.



* * *



"Hellboy!" a voice said. "Long time."

"I've never met you, demon."

Leh shrugged. "Have it your own way." It was standing on the rim of the huge vat, twenty feet above the deck, and it held Benedict Blake in one hand. Hellboy could see the demons fingers clasped inside the man's throat, as if Blake were becoming transparent.

Hellboy and Liz had rounded the vat just in time to see the demon grab Blake and leap, landing on the vats rim with uncanny balance. Hellboy had seen a shape slink back into the shadows at the corner of the room, but he wasn't sure Liz had seen, and he did not want to make Abby the center of this. Not yet. Not unless he had to.

"I came here for him, not you," Hellboy said.

"Him?" The demon went to drop Blake into the vat. "He'd make a fine brew, I'm sure."