Hellboy, Vol. 2: The All-Seeing Eye (7 page)

Uh-oh
, he thought,
time to go
. All the same, he couldn’t resist rapidly squeezing off a few more shots before scrambling to his feet.

The soldier was speaking into a radio. And then there were armed, uniformed men running across the airfield towards him. Although Proctor wasn’t scared for his safety (he was confident that the worst that would happen would be that he’d be questioned and his equipment confiscated), he was terrified of losing the story. Heart whacking in his chest, he burst through the bushes bordering the side of the dirt track and began to run.

The ground was slippery with mud, and he felt horribly exposed out in the open. He ran for perhaps thirty meters, slithering and almost falling a couple of times, before realizing that if he was going to have any chance of escaping his pursuers an alternative strategy was needed. Jumping from puddle to puddle to cover his tracks, he veered towards the dry stone wall on the other side of the road. He glanced behind him to satisfy himself that he was still screened by the bushes and trees opposite, and then he clambered awkwardly over the wall.

The drop on the other side surprised him a little. The field was at a lower level than the road, and he fell a good six feet into springy, boggy grass. Muddy water instantly oozed over his feet and ankles, waterlogging his shoes. Unable to keep his balance, Proctor fell to his knees. He grimaced, but forced himself to remain silent and motionless, pressing his back against the stone wall.

After a few minutes he heard shouts, and then the thump of approaching footsteps. He pressed himself even further back against the wall as the splat of booted feet seemed to sound directly above his head. He was certain that at any moment someone would peer over the wall and see him crouching in the mud. He heard shouted orders, and then the rapid-fire thud of soldiers running off up the road in both directions. There then followed a muted conversation — of which Proctor could catch only the occasional word — between what he assumed were a couple of officers. Eventually the conversation stopped, and he heard the sound of receding footsteps. He left it another five minutes and then he tentatively began to move.

He edged along the length of the wall in a semi-crouch towards the corner of the field. Here the wall was bisected by a wooden fence, which seemed to be holding back a surging mass of woodland. Proctor peered over his shoulder, then bolted for the cover of the trees. He was filthy, cold, and wet, and his breath was rasping in his chest, but it would be worth it if he could reach his car and get back to London with his story.

Chapter 3

“So what are these theories of yours, Mr. Varley?” Abe asked.

Varley, sitting between Liz and Abe, smiled self-consciously. “Well, it’s
Dr
. Varley actually. But please, call me Richard.”

From the front of the Daimler, Hellboy groaned. “Don’t you
ever
get tired of the info-dumping, Abe?”

Liz smiled an apology at Richard. “HB, that’s rude,” she said.

“Sorry,” said Hellboy, and glanced at Richard in the rear-view mirror. “No offence, Dr... er, Richard, I mean.”

“None taken,” Richard said, and laughed. Liz liked the fact that there was no hint of nervousness or uncertainty in his reaction. Too often people meeting Hellboy for the first time were too eager to please, as if afraid he would tear them limb from limb if they incurred his wrath.

“You mentioned muti murders,” Abe said, “but as I understand it,
muti
is simply the Zulu term for medicine — or am I wrong?”

Richard raised his eyebrows. “I’m impressed.”

“He reads a lot,” Liz said dryly.

Smiling, Richard said, “You’re right, of course, Abe. Muti is a catch-all term for African herbal medicine. However, there is a darker, more clandestine aspect to it. Certain sangomas, or witch doctors, have been known to mix body parts with other ingredients to increase the effect of the medicine’s power. Brain matter mixed in with the muti, for example, is said to bestow knowledge or to increase intelligence, whereas breasts and genitals are thought to endow a client with greater virility.”

“And how widespread are these darker practices?” asked Liz.

Richard shrugged. “No one really knows. There are reports of muti murders right across northern and southern Africa, but muti encompasses so many different rituals and beliefs that often murders which could be attributed to it are simply swept up within the general melee of lawlessness. Even in South Africa, which has a more centralized system of policing, there are no solid statistics. Muti murder estimates vary from one a month to several hundred a year. There was, however, a recent high-profile case in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape Provinces. Nine men belonging to a Yoruban cult were convicted of a woman’s murder, in which the victim had her facial skin removed with a scalpel, following which her genitalia, breasts, hands, and feet were hacked off while she was still alive. The reason they didn’t kill her first is because the screams of the butchered victim are said to enhance the power of the medicine. In this case the woman’s body parts were used as the ingredients for a get-rich-quick spell called
ukutwalela ubutyebi
. The men apparently smeared the woman’s blood over themselves and then ate the parts they had hacked off.”

“What a sweet little bedtime story,” Hellboy said from the front of the car.

Grim faced, Liz asked, “And now you think one of these Yoruban cults has come to London?”

Again, Richard shrugged. “I think they’ve been here a long time, perhaps even years. I think they’ve established a whole subculture which operates beneath the law.”

“Is that possible?” asked Abe. Liz and Hellboy looked at him as if they couldn’t believe his naivete. “In such a small and highly civilized country, I mean, where almost every murder becomes a national headline?”

“I think the Yoruba, if that’s who they are, have become experts at covering their tracks,” Richard said. “Many of their victims are illegal immigrants, children who are bought in African cities like Kinshasa for as little as five or ten pounds and then smuggled into the country. A police inspector recently told me that out of three hundred black children from ethnic backgrounds reported missing from London schools in the first three months of this year, only two have been traced. And these are just the children who are
enrolled
in British schools. Many more slip through the net and have no official existence in this country.”

In her line of work, Liz had encountered hundreds of demonic entities, had frequently come face to face with evil, and had witnessed death on a grand scale ... and yet she had still never quite come to terms with the appalling depravity of man’s inhumanity to man.

“It’s what makes you strong,” Hellboy had told her once when she had been weeping in his arms after a particularly harrowing mission. “Lose that and you stop being human.”

“That’s sickening,” she said now, quietly, looking at Richard.

He nodded slowly. “It’s certainly that.”

“I don’t know, Richard,” said Abe. “These current killings don’t really follow the MO I’ve seen in previous muti activities.”

“You’re right, of course,” said Richard, “and that’s what makes these deaths so ... well,
intriguing
. Firstly all the victims are adults, secondly all the victims are white, and thirdly the placing of the remains has meant that the killings have become extremely high profile.”

“Plus there’s the occult element to consider,” Abe said.

Richard looked quizzical. “I don’t follow.”

Abe quickly filled Richard in on the occult significance of each of the murder sites.

“Interesting,” the lecturer said quietly.

“I still think we could be dealing with nothing more than a psycho here,” Hellboy chipped in. “These guys, they read this stuff and think they’re on Earth to do the devil’s work or some such crap.”

“You could be right,” said Richard.

The talk turned to more general matters. As Abe questioned Richard further about his particular field of expertise, Hellboy closed his eyes and phased out the conversation. Although he was a quick healer, he was tired from the still-throbbing wounds inflicted by the fire-worm the day before, not to mention the poison his antibodies had been fighting. He rested his stone hand in his lap and decided to catch a few more
z
‘s while Abe and Richard discussed the intricacies of African tribal customs. Richard seemed like a good guy, and Hellboy had known Liz for long enough to recognize — just from the secretive little looks she had cast in the lecturer’s direction and the way she had been eager for him to accompany them to London — that she thought so too. Her interest was kinda cute, and he couldn’t blame her for it — Richard was good looking and intelligent, after all — but he couldn’t help worrying about her all the same. Despite the tough-girl exterior, Hellboy knew that Liz was a vulnerable soul and he hated seeing her get hurt.

You better treat her right, Varley
, he thought,
or you’ll have me to deal with
.

Lulled by the murmur of the Daimler’s engine and the drone of conversation from the back seat, he drifted into sleep ...

———

Now that it appeared he’d gotten away with it, Proctor’s mind was whirring again. He was no longer merely thinking about getting back to London and delivering his story before his nine p.m. deadline, he was now starting to wonder how he might make the story
even better
.

An interview, he thought. An interview with Hellboy at his hotel. How amazing would that be? First, though, he had to find out
which
hotel Hellboy and his chums were staying at. And to get that information he needed to do a certain amount of reckless driving, and trust to an even greater amount of luck.

From his vantage point at the perimeter of the airfield, Proctor had observed the various officials arrive. Some time later he had seen a chauffeur-driven Daimler with tinted windows pull in to the small car park beside the aircraft hangar. No one had emerged from that vehicle, not even the chauffeur, which had led Proctor to assume that this was the car which would take Hellboy and his colleagues to London.

Even as he was making his bedraggled and desperate escape across the fields and through the woods to the layby where he had parked his car, a plan had been churning away in the back of the journalist’s mind. Almost subconsciously he sifted through the pros and cons of his scheme, and by the time he reached his scratched and battered little Astra — 85k on the clock, dodgy clutch and even dodgier brakes — and sank, mud spattered and exhausted, into the driver’s seat, he had pretty much decided to go for it. After all, he had thought, what had he got to lose?

His thinking was that there was no reason the Daimler wouldn’t take the most obvious route to the capital. That included going up the A229, on to the M20 and from there on to the M25. All Proctor had to do, therefore, was drive like crazy and follow the same route. Eventually, if the Daimler was sticking to the speed limit, as he suspected it might, he would catch up with it. Then it was simply a case of tucking himself in behind the vehicle — though not
too
close, of course — and trailing it into London.

The main drawback of the plan was not the Astra itself- — it might be a battered old wreck, whose engine rattled like dry peas in a tin, but it could really
move
— but the possibility of being pulled over by the police. However, on this particular score God turned out to be shining on him. The only cops Proctor saw were already parked behind a yellow Ferrari on the hard shoulder, gleefully giving the Ray-Ban-wearing driver a hard time. Proctor slowed down a little to cruise past them, but they didn’t even look up from their notebooks.

Just over half an hour later, he struck lucky.

There it was! The Daimler! Cruising along in the slow lane at a modest sixty-five. Proctor eased off on his accelerator, then indicated left, and tucked himself nicely in, a couple of cars behind.

As the heater slowly dried his wet, filthy clothes, he smiled in satisfaction. The warm air circulating in the car might stink of the cow dung he had waded through earlier, but that no longer mattered one bit. As far as he was concerned, everything was coming up roses.

———

Hellboy had been to London many times, but it never failed to give him that now-familiar rush. He could almost hear the vibrant echoes of its terrible, exhilarating history reverberating through the centuries, each year merely adding another skin, another layer, to an ever-expanding past. Like a kid in a sweet shop, he pressed his face to the Daimler’s tinted window, the sawn-off stumps of his horns clunking gently against the glass each time the car bumped over a patch of uneven road. In many ways the city was a mess — dirty, sprawling, congested, patched-up, a mishmash of styles and cultures — but that was also kind of what made it beautiful. It was like some impossibly old man, whose unbelievable, event-filled existence was etched into every deep groove on his gnarled and wrinkled face.

Hellboy had woken the instant they left the M25, the ever-busy motorway that encircled central London like a noose. It was as if he had a built-in sensor that informed him when the journey was about to get interesting. They approached central London from the east, bypassing Canning Town and Limehouse — once a center for shipbuilding, notorious in Victorian times for its gambling and drug dens, and a frequent haunt of Charles Dickens — and cruising through the much-renovated Isle of Dogs. Abe pointed out the glittering, rocket-like splendor of Canary Wharf, the tallest building in the UK, as it drifted by on the right, and then they were driving through Whitechapel, Jack the Ripper’s old haunt, and on from there into the city.