Hellboy: Odd Jobs (5 page)

"Pardon!"
Guy laughed, "Never again!"

It was rumored that Thomas was the last surviving fossil of the
Union des Gueles Cassees,
World War I veterans who had lost limbs and faces in the trenches, but Guy had never bothered to ask Thomas. It seemed possible; surely, teenagers had fought there, too, and the hospice bedded many veterans of later wars.

Thomas never spoke of the war, any war, or the cause of his mutilation, so Guy never inquired. It seemed unimportant.

Thomas was his own man, and Guy felt a great affinity with him.

Thomas's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper.

"How is the new job going at the
Faculté de Médecine
?" he asked.

Guy pulled his chair closer to Thomas's bedside and leaned in to speak softly. Fraternizing so with the patients was discouraged, of course, as death was a frequent visitor to the home. Francine and Guy had been repeatedly warned not to grow too close to any of their wards. They acknowledged the cold logic of the rules, given the high mortality rate, but neither could maintain the aloof stoicism of the older nurses or the callous disregard of their more cynical workmates.

"Fine, I think," Guy whispered. "I can't tell yet if they're giving me all the shit details as an initiation, or if that's what they hired me for."

"What did you find last week sweeping up the bibliothèque?" Thomas asked, his finger crooked to urge Guy closer with his reply. "Anything of interest?"

"Nothing much," Guy whispered back. "A cloth bookmark for Francine. No one will ever miss it. Very ornate, she loves it. But you could hide anything in some of the nooks and crannies of that library."

Thomas grunted and nodded, though he couldn't hide his disappointment. Guy leaned in closer with the promise of treasure yet to be found.

"They've got me assigned to the medical archives for the rest of the season. Some rooms haven't been touched in decades, I'm told."

"Ah!" Thomas grunted with satisfaction. "If you find my arm there, bring it back for me, will you?"

There was much to despise about the hospice job

long hours, low pay; bedpans, bedsores, and constant

illness; accusations and abuse from suspicious relatives or uncaring visitors vainly asserting their regard for discarded lives; the thieving of greedy siblings, adult children, and untrustworthy caregivers; the tenants'

bottomless sorrow, depression, and despair; the merciless dimming of eyes, hearts, and lives. All there was to love in it were the people like Thomas who somehow retained their dignity and heart amid the remnants of so many dwindling sparks.

"Go on with you," Thomas croaked. "Steal some dinner with your
belle
before you head off to your new job.

Long, long night ahead of you,
mon frère."

Guy squeezed Thomas's lone hand, and bid him
adieu.
There were others to attend to within the remaining hour, and the long Metro ride to the
Faculté
ahead of him.

But between the two, there was a fleeting meal with Francine at the cafe on the corner, right by the Metro
Richard'lenoir
entrance. He had enough to cover their dinner and his round trip on the Metro.

Tomorrow, he would have something for Thomas.

To Abraham, the soft green of the hotel phone looked like a bar of soap perched on the expanse of Hellboy's blazing-red palm.

When Abe held the phone, it disappeared against his skin, as if he were made of the same wet-looking plastic the same color and contours of the bathroom tub, sink, commode, and the bidet. Having memorized the visage of every Notre Dame gargoyle facing their windows, and unable to leave the room without wrapping himself up like the Invisible Man, Abe had taken to finding small pleasures in the textures of the room itself.

It was a meditative art lost on his travel partner.

"Like a fish in a fish bowl," Hellboy had chuckled when Abe had tried to share his observations earlier that morning. "We're gonna kill each other if we stay cooped up in this shoe box much longer."

Hellboy's flat, stony hand was cupped around the phone like a monstrous soap dish, enhancing the illusion.

His normal hand held the phone to his ear, jade within fire, as Elizabeth Sherman drove the final nail into her arguments for them to stay put in Paris another week.

"Listen, HB, Kate's on her way over to you in a day or two," Liz concluded. "That drawing from your most recent dream kicked up some dust for her, and she believes you're onto something."

"Pah," he scoffed. Abe recognized the slow sagging of Hellboy's shoulders: they would be staying longer, floundering in the fish bowl.

"All right. If the Bureau can justify the expense, there must be something to all this. When's Katie arriving?"

Abe savored the shifting of green on red, emerald plastic on flame-baked skin, as Hellboy shifted the phone to the crook of his neck and struggled with pen and pad to take down Liz's instructions.

"Yes, I'll have her call you," he growled. "No, we're not far at all from the
Palais de Justice,
and the
prefecture de police
is right down the boulevard. Later, Liz."

He hung up, returning the receiver to its cradle.

There was an inexplicably delicious completion in the coupling of smooth green on green between the sinewy

scarlet left and the hammered red right hand. Abe's gaze drifted up to Hellboy's brooding brow.

"What the hell are you grinning at, fish face?"

Weary from the day at the hospice and the Metro ride, Guy shuffled his way through the halls of the
Faculté
de Médecine.
He'd already lost his way twice this evening, and hoped he was finally cleaning the right room.

It was a storage room, of that there could be no doubt. He just hoped it was the correct one. He double-checked the number on the
Directeur's
note against the faded numbers on the door, and went to work.

It had perhaps once been used for classes, but the desks and chairs were stacked against the far wall, shrouded in cobwebs and dust. The other two walls were nothing but shelves, piled high with books, boxes, files, dirt-opaqued jars and instruments, and all manner of paraphernalia.

The high windows were blocked with crusty curtains, and partially obscured by expansive shelving that stretched from floor to ceiling. Nevertheless, the moonlight filtered through here and there, back-lighting the various beakers, scales, and specimen jars. Moonlit, the contents of some of the jars gleamed through the decades of dust that buried them, casting pale shadows and reflecting the odd glimmer of long-dead eyes, wings, teeth, fins, and embryos.

Guy fumbled for the lights, finding the switch just as the distant ringing of a church bell deepened the gloom.

Even with the lights on, the room seemed dark. Nevertheless, he had to start somewhere. The ceiling lights illuminated the topmost shelves best; besides, the scattered dirt and dust would settle onto everything. It just made sense to start with the uppermost levels and work his way down. Two step-ladders were braced together at the bottom of the window shelving. He separated them and propped the sturdiest of the pair alongside the shelving, and climbed as far up as he felt safe.

In time, he had cleared two shelves. Their contents were strewn across the floor in roughly defined categories: paper, files, cardboard, instruments, and specimen jars. The latter were of some interest, though the glass was too filthy to clearly see what they contained. That would take some time, which he could indulge during another shift, after the sorting and disposal detail was further underway.

As Guy dragged the step-ladder to a new location, he tipped it to avoid a clutch of specimen jars he'd just placed at the foot of the shelves. The top step clipped a box of files on the third shelf down and sent it tumbling. Guy steadied the ladder, preventing it from falling, but it was too late. Everything to the right of the toppled box of files went with it. Guy winced as something bulky hit the tiles, and glass shattered, scattering into the settling papers and files.

Something that looked like oversized escargot and black purses slid over the floor, pooling in formaldehyde that soaked into one stack of papers. Hopefully, the documents weren't too important.

Grumbling to himself, he set the ladder aside and hunkered down to pick up the mess.

A half hour later, he had the spill in order, save for the spilled specimen jar that had shattered and scattered a potpourri of shark embryos and skate egg cases in one corner, and an odd collection of gray, desiccated pieces of what appeared to be metal, rock, or some painted substance he simply couldn't identify. They were unusually lightweight, despite their appearance. Their edges were irregular, though they seemed to have been precision cut, not broken, into their odd variety of shapes.

Guy gathered the gray blocks and shards into a single corner of the floor and began to toy with them. There were well over two dozen in all, .some as big as his fist, others small and smooth as marbles. Only their color was uniform, indicating their relation to one another.

Holding them up to each other to compare their contours, he found two of them seemed to fit together. With a flex of his wrist, he snapped them into place as they seemed designed to do. To his surprise, the fit was snug. He sorted through the rest and found a third which fit into place, too.

And a fourth ...

A fifth ...

By the tenth piece

a large marble which slipped smoothly into a rounded socket

Guy became uneasy as

he began to recognize the pattern of the puzzle.

He held one of the unassembled pieces in one hand, the partially assembled mass in the other, and felt a cold shiver ripple up his neck.

The piece in his hand was a nose.

He dropped it as if it were a spider that had just landed on his palm.

He nervously gazed at the mass he held in his other hand, and let the wave of recognition wash over him: the odd, disarticulated object was a human head, somehow mummified, preserved, and jig-sawed into pieces.

As his realization reeled into revulsion, he impulsively snapped his fingers open, dropping the object.

It hit the floor. One of the assembled pieces broke free, but the impact was felt in another way.

The rounded marble

an eye

opened in the dusty relic, suddenly warm with color.

It was alive.

Guy scrambled to his feet as if stung by a bee. He stood frozen at an odd angle, legs akimbo, arms outstretched, as if to flee or fight. As the minutes ticked by, though, and the object simply lay still, Guy began to relax.

A head. A human head, preserved and jig-sawed into pieces.

As revulsion gave way to reason, he decided it was safe to sit back down next to the object. Surely, it was some kind of teaching tool, designed to instruct anatomy students. Why else would a medical university have such an obscenity in storage?

Perhaps it was a game, a puzzle. A three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. But the detail, the sculpting no, it

seemed to be a genuine human head. No artist could craft such an object complete with bristling brows, whiskers, and hair stubble.

Mesmerized, Guy returned to the puzzle. He fondled the strangely weightless pieces and convinced himself it was just a trick of the light that the eye seemed to glower from within.

Under the watchful gaze of the single, open orb, Guy continued to fit the metallic pieces together, solving the puzzle until the jaw and a portion of the tongue snapped into place.

There was an impossible stirring beneath his hand, and then the head began to speak to him in a soft, barely audible whisper.

"I will make of you a king ... "

His hands spasmed open, dropping the gray mass to the floor. His every instinct was to flee, or to bring his foot down upon the dust ball and stomp it into oblivion.

Still, it whispered, with a voice dry as wasp paper.

"Restore me," it beckoned, "and I will make of you a king."

Guy closed his eyes and threw the cleaning rag over the damned thing. He sat still, praying under his breath, finally daring to take a peek once more.