Hellboy, Vol. 2: The All-Seeing Eye (37 page)

Hellboy supposed that the peak — the lodestone — must jut out at an oblique angle, otherwise when he had fallen he would surely have bounced off the sides of the mountain as it widened further down. He knew that the source of the energy was down here, that the true Eye from which all things flowed was somewhere in this vicinity. He had gleaned this from the energy itself, when it had tried, and almost succeeded, in subjugating him. When it had touched his mind — or rather, when it had torn into his mind, trying to strip his thoughts away — it had been unable to avoid unwittingly revealing a little of itself, a tantalizing glimpse of its origins, its nature, its unceasing and voracious hunger.

He closed his eyes and placed his stone hand on the rock face once more, trying to tap back into the burning memory of the moment when the energy had touched his mind and briefly revealed itself to him. Abe would have approved, he thought wryly. His friend was always encouraging him to get more in touch with his spiritual side.

Deep in his mind, lodged there like stubborn shreds of meat jammed between his back teeth, Hellboy was aware of a confusing jumble of images. He went deeper, down to where the pain was. He saw something blue — an egg, a crystal ...
an eye
! And he had the sense of a journey, of being released from the eye, of soaring up through the empty darkness and into a world full of busy thoughts, raw emotions, the juicy and delicious pulse of life ...

When he came to, his head spinning, he was walking around the base of the mountain. It was slightly disconcerting at first. He felt like a puppet, in thrall to thoughts that were not his own.

But then he realized he was simply following the energy to its heart, that he was being drawn to the source of the entity that had tried to possess him. It was an instinctive thing, his body merely obeying the instructions of his subconscious mind. And so he kept going, through the silence, and the heavy, dank darkness, his torch beam lighting the way.

He had been walking for maybe fifteen minutes when he came across the door. It was simply carved into the side of the mountain, an arch whose apex was twice the height that he was. The now-familiar sign of the eye had been gouged into the rock. There was no handle, no bell push, nothing. Hellboy gave the door an experimental shove. It seemed immovable, almost as if it had been drawn onto the rock rather than cut from it. He put his shoulder to it and pushed harder. It didn’t budge.

“Open sesame?” he muttered hopefully, then he banged on the door, the clash of rock on rock spiralling up through the blackness. Finally he growled, “Aw, to hell with this,” and drawing back his stone fist once again he slammed it directly into the center of the eye.

Most of the symbol imploded in a powdery mass of rubble. Cracks zigzagged out from it in all directions. Hellboy clenched his jaw and kept on punching, and although the muscles at the top of his right arm and across his shoulders hurt like hell, he didn’t stop until he had punched out a hole large enough for him to step through.

Dust sifted down through the beam of his torch as he looked around. He was in a tunnel, high and wide enough to drive a tank through. The walls of the tunnel were not smooth, and the ceiling was jagged, uneven. He shone his torch ahead, but darkness swallowed the beam with no end of the tunnel in sight.

He began to walk. His surroundings didn’t change much. He tramped confidently, unerringly, through a whole maze of tunnels, sometimes turning right, sometimes left, sometimes taking the tunnel that sloped downwards, and sometimes the one that required him to climb a slight incline before it leveled out.

Some of the tunnels had water dripping from the ceiling or trickling down the walls, but most were dry. Occasionally the tunnels would widen out before narrowing again, but never did they become any narrower or lower than the one he had started out from.

After about half an hour the batteries in Hellboy’s torch started to fade, so he replaced them. It always bugged him in movies when FBI agents were plunged into darkness because their torch batteries had died on them. In real life, properly trained agents always carried spares; stuff like this was never left to chance.

By the time he came across the second door he knew he had traveled deep into the heart of the mountain. He knew too that if the energy had not touched his mind just for that split second he would never have found this place.

The second door was similar to the first — maybe not quite as high and wide, but pretty much the same shape, and once again bearing the telltale eye symbol. Switching the torch from his right hand to his left, Hellboy didn’t even bother with the preliminaries this time. Ignoring the stiffening pain in his joints and muscles, he began to punch with just as much gusto and intent as ever. As before, the door cracked and crumbled and eventually caved in beneath his assault. Wafting stone dust out of his way, Hellboy stepped through the gap.

He found himself in a vast space, a natural cathedral. Stalactites and stalagmites, both hundreds of feet in length, had stretched to join in the middle, forming colossal pillars. The walls glittered with phosphorescence, illuminating the chamber to such an extent that Hellboy was able to put his torch away. Somewhere ahead of him, in the gloom and the shadows, something was glowing with a soft blue light.

He moved forward, the clack of his hooves echoing around him. As he neared the blue glow, the shadows seemed to recede, like a series of tattered veils drawing back to reveal the scene ahead.

The blue glow was coming from a huge crystal that was set into the forehead of a black statue standing in the center of the cavern. The statue was maybe thirty feet tall, and looked like a mummified corpse made massive and twisted by layer upon accumulated layer of glistening, coal-colored rock. The thing’s face was skeletal, its mouth, full of jutting black teeth, yawning open in an endless, silent scream. Its third, glowing eye
(the Devil’s Eye
, he remembered Abe saying over lunch at the Three Cups) was in marked contrast to the two beneath it, which were shriveled in deep sockets. Bulging growths of rock on the statue’s limbs and torso made it seem malformed, elephantine. Corkscrewing stalagmites of rock stuck up from its misshapen head like a pair of strange, crooked horns.

Hellboy approached the statue slowly, wary of traps. “Well, aren’t you a handsome devil?” he murmured softly.

It was only then he noticed the figures that were flanking the statue. Like their leader, they were black and misshapen, and the reason he had not noticed them immediately was because each was in a crouching position, and at first glance had resembled nothing but a massed formation of glittering black rocks. Now, Hellboy realized he had seen one of these creatures before. A few days ago, in the tunnels of the London Underground. And that one had been very much alive!

When the B.P.R.D. team had gone down into the tunnels to talk to the creature after Hellboy’s initial contact with it, they had not been able to find it. The assumption had been that it had returned to whatever realm it had appeared from. Hellboy now recalled what the creature had said to him, though. It had said that it had been human once. It had said that “they” had looked into the Eye and slept. Hellboy looked around at the ranks of glittering black statues and could only wonder what decades-long dreams the original members of the All-Seeing Eye had had.

He turned his attention back to the leader, to the vast creature bearing the Devil’s Eye itself. He remembered what Abe had told him about the founder of the All-Seeing Eye, Maximus Leith — about how he had mysteriously disappeared one day, leaving all his worldly possessions behind.

“Well, I guess the cops can finally call off the search, huh, Maximus?” he said softly.

He stepped forward, clenching his stone fist ... but suddenly he remembered something else Abe had said during that interrupted lunch in the Three Cups. He had said, “If you fall into the Devil’s Eye, you become his forever.” Well, Hellboy
had
fallen, but he doubted whether the words had been meant so literally. Leith and his followers had fallen too, but they had fallen in a different way — by looking
into
the Eye, by opening themselves up to it mentally and physically.

Hellboy scowled. He was itching to smash the Eye, to drive his fist right into the center of the damn thing, but all at once it occurred to him that maybe that was exactly what it
wanted
him to do. And that maybe it wouldn’t therefore be such a good idea to bring the Eye and the so-called Hand of Doom together.

With a reluctant sigh, he looked around for a suitable rock with which to do the job. He spotted one behind him, a few meters away, and clomped over to pick it up. It was about the size of his head, and although it wasn’t particularly heavy, it was an awkward-enough shape that he had to use both hands. He bent down with a groan, his muscles aching, lifted the rock, straightened, turned.

“Oh, crap,” he said wearily.

The black stone figures were slowly unfurling. They made a sound as they did so, their joints squeaking and clicking, as if they hadn’t been used in a long time. Their mostly empty eye sockets were now lambent with the same iridescent light that had almost overwhelmed Hellboy. Dropping the rock, Hellboy spread his hands.

“Come on, guys, I’m sure we can talk about this,” he said.

They came for him, grinding and creaking, slowly at first but moving more easily with each step. Knowing he had no choice, Hellboy stomped forward to meet them. He had fought big guys before, and knew that he could punch a lot harder than most of them. Problem here, though, was sheer weight of numbers. Lumbering brutes though they were, there was no way of dodging all the sledgehammer blows that he felt sure Leith’s followers would throw in his direction.

As soon as the stone giants came within range, Hellboy started swinging. He took a few of them out — he drove his fist right through the chest of one, shattering the creature’s ossified heart, and smashed the jaw clean off another — but the rest surrounded him like a gang in a schoolyard and methodically began to pummel his already tenderized body.

He fought bravely, but little by little the guardians bore him down. He took blow after blow, and eventually his legs buckled under the incessant barrage and he hit the deck. Even then, however, he continued to fight. As the guardians crowded round him, he struck out at the forest of legs, attempting to break kneecaps, splinter shin bones. But as the blows continued to rain down on his head and shoulders, his thoughts began to swim. He tried to concentrate on what mattered — avenging Cassie, saving the world — but at last a particularly savage blow caught him behind the ear and he slumped forward onto his hands and knees. He roared his defiance, but it was not enough to prevent his arms giving way, his face hitting the rock floor.

He thought again of Liz, of Abe, of Cassie. He thought of all the people he was letting down. He couldn’t lose now. He
couldn’t
. But even as that thought burned fiercely inside him, he was aware of consciousness slipping away, of everything going black ...

And then suddenly he realized that the blows
had
stopped. He blinked as consciousness slowly returned. Yes, it was true. The blows really had stopped. And yet somewhere he could still hear the fight continuing, could still hear the clash of blows, the sharp crunch of rock on rock.

With an enormous effort he raised his head. It felt massive and misshapen, and far too heavy for his neck muscles. He looked around, but at first he could see nothing except a confused shimmer; the vague impression of massive black shapes moving in front of him; a wavering light, like a blue ghost in the darkness.

He focused on the ghost, and little by little the glow from it seemed to expand, to illuminate and clarify its surroundings. He realized that the “ghost” was in fact the Devil’s Eye, which blazed in the center of Leith’s forehead. But what was astonishing was not that Leith had creaked into life like his followers, but that he was currently caroming his way through them, shattering heads and crushing limbs, sending huge black bodies careering and collapsing this way and that.

He had help too. Another of the rock creatures was standing shoulder to shoulder with Leith, battling his fellow guardians. Hell-boy peered hard at the creature. Was it the same one he had spoken to in the tube tunnel, the one that had first told him about the All-Seeing Eye? He wasn’t absolutely certain, but he thought that perhaps it was.

Through sheer force of will, his teeth clenched against the pain, Hellboy pushed himself first into a sitting position, and then into a standing one. He swayed a moment, his vision blurring. He might hurt more than he could remember hurting before, but as long as he could stand and move and punch, he would do whatever he could to carry out his mission. And so he let out a battle cry that seemed — temporarily, at least — to make the pain and stiffness flow out of his limbs, and he plunged into the fray once more, his stone fist pistoning forward, smashing into black rock that had once been sinew and flesh.

Side by side, Hellboy, Leith, and the tube creature battered their opponents to defeat. They made a good team, Leith and his acolyte providing the brawn, Hellboy moving in to finish off combatants that were already reeling from his unlikely partners’ demolition-ball blows. Though Hellboy was quick and lithe compared to his opponents, he was aware that he was operating purely on adrenaline. Tough as he was, if he came out of this one alive he doubted he’d be able to move for at least a week afterwards.

What quickly became apparent was that the stone figures were reluctant to fight their leader with the same relentless force that they had defended the Eye against Hellboy. Evidently they were torn between defending themselves against an outright aggressor and protecting the very artifact that had imprisoned them. As a consequence, Hellboy, Leith, and the tube creature were able to press home their advantage, to cut a swathe through the guardians. Hellboy might almost have felt sorry for his opponents if they hadn’t already inflicted so much pain on him, and if there hadn’t been so much at stake.