Hellboy, Vol. 2: The All-Seeing Eye (2 page)

BMA House was an impressive building, beautiful even. It was neoclassical Palladian in style (its designer, Sir Edwin Lutyens, had described it as “Wrenaissance” in deference to Sir Christopher), and in the sunlight the Portland stone and red-brick facade gleamed like new.

Not only was the sun shining on this October day, but it was also unseasonably warm. Sporting large brown sunglasses, a cream cotton suit and pale-green blouse, Kirsty felt elegant, sophisticated, as she stepped from the car. All she needed was a wide-brimmed sun hat and she fancied she’d resemble one of those willowy diplomats’ wives from back in the day when Britain had an empire. She could see herself surveying the Serengeti plains with a cocktail in her right hand, or strolling through the markets of New Delhi.

“Morning, Miss Reece,” said Adam, the doorman, after buzzing her in. She always liked the way he tipped the brim of his cap with his forefinger — ironic but playful, as if he was acknowledging that he looked like a performing monkey but was happy to share the joke. He was a beautiful, angular man with a smoothly shaven head and a tuft of dark hair, too slight to be termed a goatee, beneath his bottom lip. At weekends he attended fetish clubs with his statuesque girlfriend, Helda.

Kirsty’s feet clacked on the marble floor as she approached the Great Hall. Her first task was to collect the agenda and handouts for that morning’s meeting, which she had left carefully stacked on the chairman of the Medical Ethics Committee’s desk before heading off for the weekend.

The Great Hall was a magnificent room. One hundred and thirty feet in length, it had been converted into the main library in the mid-1980s. The high ceiling was supported by rows of peacock-blue marble columns, and the various committee rooms occupying the roof space were accessed by a number of elegant spiral staircases. Redolent with the delicious musk of old books, the vast room was nevertheless bright and airy. Kirsty loved it, particularly at this hour of the morning, when it was still and empty, the air languid and somehow expectant.

Halfway up the central aisle she turned left, between bookshelves so high that each was equipped with its own set of ladders and browsing platforms. She climbed the staircase at the end of the row, her feet clanging softly on the iron steps. A door at the top led into a long, plushly carpeted corridor with paneled doors on both sides. The room Kirsty wanted was just over halfway up on the right. She strolled towards it unhurriedly, unsnapping her black leather shoulder bag and delving for her keys.

There was no indication that anyone had been here before her, nothing to alert her to the foul discovery she was about to make. When she unlocked the door and entered the office, she did so with no sense of foreboding whatsoever.

For several seconds after clapping her eyes on the thing propped in the chair behind the wide oaken expanse of the chairman’s desk — the desk on which were still stacked the papers she had come to collect — she could only stare in disbelief, her mind momentarily blanked by the sheer impossible awfulness of what she was seeing.

It was a naked human body. Or rather, a naked human
torso
, from which the head and limbs had been removed. Surprisingly there was no blood. The exposed meat of the ragged stumps was a dark salami-pink and relatively dry.

Before her legs gave way and she started to scream, Kirsty registered two additional details. One was that the torso was male, albeit almost hairless aside from a few wiry tufts around the blue-gray nipples, and the other was that it bore a fuzzy blue tattoo of a hovering hummingbird just above its left breast.

———

John Saxilby Funeral Services, Shoreditch High Street,
London, England
Monday, October 22nd, 10:41 a.m.

That nice Mr. Saxilby had made a lovely job of Arthur. Lying in his coffin in his best suit, Flo couldn’t remember when she had last seen him looking so well. There was a bloom to his cheeks, and a serene expression on his face. He even looked as though he’d put on a bit of weight.

In the back of her mind, however, Flo knew that none of it was real. It was all the result of carefully applied makeup and morticians’ putty. But it made her feel a bit better nonetheless. It leavened the memory of her beloved Arthur’s final days in the hospital. And when it came right down to it, surely that was all that mattered.

Fifty-three years she and Arthur had been married. Sitting on a chair next to her husband’s coffin in the Chapel of Rest, Flo recalled her wedding as if it were yesterday. It had been a bright day, but windy. Her veil had flapped around her head as if it had a life of its own. Her dear old dad, a chubby giant of a man, had clutched her little hand in his great paw and had sobbed in the car all the way to the church.

Dad had been the local butcher, and the neighborhood kids had been scared of him with his bald head and his bloodstained apron, but he’d been as soft as a brush. Flo and her mother had always had the ability to twist him round their little fingers. And perhaps best of all, he’d adored Arthur. To Flo’s delight, the two most important men in her life had got on like a house on fire.

A solitary tear wormed its way down Flo’s wrinkled cheek as she pictured Arthur on that late-spring day fifty-three years before. He had half turned towards her as she’d walked down the aisle, and he had looked so proud and happy and handsome, tall and lean in his best demob suit, his black hair gleaming with oil. He had smiled at her and winked, and his apparent confidence had stilled the butterflies in her stomach. Later he had confessed, in the privacy of their hotel’s honeymoon suite, that he had spent the day feeling like a rabbit in the headlights. How they had laughed as they had munched on a plate of chicken sandwiches, glad after the emotional whirlwind of the day to finally have some time alone together.

They had had their ups and downs like everyone else, but overall theirs had been a happy life. They had never been rich or famous, never done half the things they had said they were going to do, or been to half the places they had said they were going to go. But they had had a lovely home, and two children they could truly be proud of, and every night they had had food on the table. And they had laughed, and they had loved, and they had never run out of things to say to each other.

And now it was over. Arthur was gone. It was the end of a life extraordinary to no one but himself — and of course to those who had loved him.

Flo was almost surprised to find that the tears were flowing freely now. As her vision blurred she reached for the handkerchief that she’d tucked up the sleeve of her cardigan. She dried her eyes and blew her nose, hoping Mr. Saxilby wouldn’t choose that moment to poke his head round the door. No doubt he had witnessed grief in every shape and form over the years, but none of that meant a jot to Flo. She had always hated people seeing her upset. It made her feel weak, naked. That came from her mother. Although he had been the breadwinner, her dad had always been the blubbering baby of the family.

“We women are the strong ones, Flo,” her mother used to tell her. “Stiff upper lip of the empire we are. The real power behind the throne.” Then she would tap the side of her nose and wink. “But don’t go telling the fellers. Best-kept secret in England.”

Flo wasn’t quite the matriarch her mother had been, but she had inherited a little of her steel. Eyes dry, tears under control, she stood up and leaned forward over the coffin to give Arthur a final kiss.

Her lips were less than an inch from his unnaturally rosy cheek when he opened his eyes.

With a cry of alarm, Flo reared back, the sudden movement making her momentarily dizzy. Her first thought was that this was some involuntary reaction. Poor Arthur’s muscles must be slackening as he ... as time passed, and the slight movement as she rested her weight on the side of the coffin must have been enough to cause his eyelids to spring apart like faulty shutters.

But even as she was thinking this he slowly raised his hands and gripped both sides of the coffin. Flo watched in astonishment as Arthur, his face slack and expressionless, struggled to sit up.

He’s still alive, after all
! That was her first joyous response. Almost immediately, however, reality kicked in. Although Flo didn’t know the full procedure for preserving a body after death, she did know enough to realize that Arthur’s resurrection was an impossibility.

They drained the body of blood, didn’t they? They drained it of blood and filled the veins with formaldehyde. And hadn’t she read somewhere that they took out the brain and packed the skull cavity with newspaper? That might have been a myth, but one thing she
was
certain of was that Arthur had had a postmortem, and she had never heard of anyone surviving one of those!

She watched in fascination as her late husband slowly sat up. She wasn’t scared, not yet anyway. What was happening was so unreal that she felt slightly detached from it. Besides, her Arthur had never given her cause to be afraid of him, and she saw no reason why he should start to do so now. She stepped forward, reaching out as if to help him from the coffin (he had become awfully unsteady on his pins over the past year or so) when the door behind her burst open.

Flo turned. Nigel, who at twenty-one was the youngest of the Saxilbys, was standing there, all of a fluster. His ears were red, his eyes were wide and his lips were quivering, as if he were about to cry. He looked at Arthur in abject horror, which Flo found a bit insulting. As if she weren’t even in the room, he turned back to the open door behind him and shouted in a shrill and chalky voice, “Here too, Dad!”

Arthur had now succeeded in swinging one leg clear of the coffin and was probing uncertainly at the floor with the toe of his gleaming right shoe. Instinctively Flo moved forward again, worried that her dead husband was about to fall flat on his face.

“
What are you doing?
“ Nigel Saxilby all but screamed, making a grab for her.

Flo snapped a look at him. “I’m going to help my husband.”

Nigel’s neck, swelling out of the collar of his crisp white shirt, was as ruddy as his ears. “But he’s dead!”

“I’m perfectly aware of that, thank you,” Flo said tightly, “but I really don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.”

Nigel goggled at her. His mouth opened and closed soundlessly. Finally he spluttered, “They’ve all come alive, Mrs. Jackson. The dead are walking.”

Flo was not entirely sure how to respond. To be honest, she was a bit out of her depth — although, looking at Nigel, she could see she wasn’t the only one.

Faced with something she didn’t understand, she did what she had always done over the years — she pushed it aside. The bigger picture was not her concern, after all. Shaking her head, she said, “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that my Arthur needs me.”

She half stepped towards her husband again, who had now managed to plant one foot on the floor and was attempting to lift his other leg clear of the high-sided box. Nigel, however, grabbed her wrist tightly enough to make her wince.

“How dare you! Let go of me!” she ordered.

“Sorry, Mrs. Jackson,” Nigel said, looking as though he truly meant it, “but ... he might be dangerous.”

“
Dangerous?
“ echoed Flo. “My Arthur?”

Nigel cast a look that was both wary and anguished towards the dead man. “Well... yes,” he said. “I know this is all a bit mad, but... haven’t you seen any zombie movies?”

Unable to trust herself to utter a civil reply, Flo stayed silent for a few moments. She took a deep breath and finally said primly, “I can’t say I have. It’s not really my sort of thing.”

“They eat brains, Mrs. Jackson,” Nigel said miserably.

“Who do?”

“The zombies. The dead. When they come back.”

“I see,” she said. “And that’s what you think my Arthur’s going to do, is it?”

“Well... he might.”

She stared at him. In a quiet but imperious voice, she said, “What utter piffle. Now will you kindly let go of me.”

Nigel looked down at his hand encircling her bony wrist almost with surprise. His fingers sprang apart.

“Thank you,” she said, resisting the urge to rub the aching bones, then turned her back, dismissing him. She walked across to Arthur and took his flailing arm. He was still balancing on one leg, trying to drag his other from the silk-lined box in which he had been expected to remain until his cremation.

Arthur did not acknowledge Flo, but neither did he attack her, as Nigel had warned her he might. Instead the dead man simply ignored her. He seemed completely unaware of his wife’s presence, of her hand on his arm. If he had some sinister motive for climbing out of his coffin, he gave no indication of what it might be. He appeared to be moving simply because, suddenly and inexplicably, he could.

Indeed, Flo couldn’t help but think that her husband’s actions were instinctive, almost mindless. Certainly when she looked into his glazed and slightly shriveled eyes she saw no spark of intelligence or recognition or awareness there. Arthur now appeared to be nothing more than animated meat, and the realization of this saddened her so much that she felt like weeping. There was no miracle to be found here, no dignity. On the contrary, it was awful and degrading and pointless.

Even so, she talked to her husband, coaxed him, encouraged him. “Come on, dear,” she murmured. “That’s it, best foot forward.”

Under Nigel Saxilby’s silent but horrified scrutiny, she helped Arthur clamber from his coffin and totter about the room. He did not lean on her, but she was conscious of his dead weight nonetheless, of the puppetlike heftiness of him, of his stale, slightly chemical odor.

After wandering aimlessly around the room for several minutes, Arthur — whether by accident or design — blundered out of the door and into the corridor. Flo escorted her husband as he ambled like a sleepy drunk towards the front of the building. In front of them, sunlight angled through the stained-glass windows framing the oak front door, filling the wide hallway with pools and beams of rainbow light.

“Where are we going now?” Flo said in hushed, bright tones, as though to a timid child. “Are you showing me the pretty colors?”