"You've lost me already. Carnacki who?"
Hellboy rapped his fingers on the table. "The few people who do know the name think he's fictional, the creation of a writer named William Hope Hodgson. The stories Hodgson wrote are a century old but worth reading. Carnacki was a real man, a ghost finder."
"The same way that Sherlock Holmes really lived but was turned into a fictional character by Conan Doyle?"
Hellboy gave a casual wave, no easy gesture with a right hand made of stone. "Yeah. There are a lot of examples. Jules Verne pretended that Phileas Fogg was fictional, H.G. Wells did the same thing with Dr. Moreau, M.P. Shiel with Prince Zaleski, Maurice Richardson with Engelbrecht, the list is endless.
"When he got old, Carnacki decided to create a society dedicated to ridding the natural world of paranormal threats. The same as what the Bureau does but on a smaller scale. The Carnacki Institute never had the resources we did and they were envious of us for a long time. The only advantage they had was that they were aware of our existence. We knew nothing about them."
"They don't seem much of an enemy, more like an alternative, albeit a poor one. We're doing the same job."
Hellboy shrugged. "You'd be surprised at how vicious people can get when they're working for identical goals. Professional jealousy, that kind of thing. The problem is that we do have the same objectives."
"I guess I understand that," I responded.
"And Carnacki's descendants aren't as noble as he was. His family had a bad reputation. He was the exception that proved the rule. The others have always been greedy scheming rogues, manipulators, and fraudsters."
"Nice bunch of people!"
"Yeah," nodded Hellboy. "Since it was founded the Carnacki Institute never got the chance to mount a real challenge against us. Not until now. Marvin Carnacki, the present director of the Institute, discovered a way to divert Nekrotzar onto a collision course with Earth. There was an old book in a locked attic. He had the good luck to find it. The book outlined the myth of Nekrotzar, gave instructions for a ritual that would change its direction through space."
"And the ritual was performed?" I asked.
Hellboy nodded. "Looks that way."
I finished my coffee. I like regular caffeine hits as much as the next guy but this one suddenly tasted disgusting.
"What the hell is Nekrotzar?"
Myths and legends are generally based on truth, that's common knowledge. Somewhere at the back of every folktale is an event involving real people. Theseus killed the Minotaur and probably there was a real beast for a real man to slay. Before he tackled the Minotaur he killed Sciron and once again that giant was surely an authentic creature. Descriptions are few and far between but Sciron was an ugly mother, that much is certain. And an even more hideous father. Lame joke.
I'll continue more seriously. Bald shiny head, flat round face with bushy eyebrows, thin lips, sagging jowls, lopsided ears, wide nose covered in tough black hairs, bulging belly, muscular frame, relatively short legs, eyes the color of a lake polluted by phosphates and uranium, in one hand a twisted club made of half a tree.
But what was his connection to Nekrotzar?
Nekrotzar was a planet in a distant galaxy, a galaxy not yet identified. The book found by Marvin Carnacki didn't seem too interested in speculating on such details as original locations, so I'll be just as blithe. It was an old planet circling a very old sun, a sun so ancient that it had burnt out. For a million years the planet kept going around anyway but the dead husk of the star was gradually eroded by streams of particles from nearby supernovae and its gravitational attraction became too weak to keep a family of planets in orbit.
Like the other worlds in that system Nekrotzar drifted away on its own, a rogue globe, but people still lived on the surface. The race of beings who always had dwelled there was excessively cruel. Their monarchs were among the most insane in the universe. And another mystery that needs to be solved: they were humanoid, similar in many ways to us.
I've listened to Bureau boffins discuss this enigma. One idea is that in the remote past, long before the Stone Age, humans were more advanced than now. They constructed spaceships and flew off around the universe, colonizing worlds and moving on. Then something happened here, a huge disaster, and the folk who stayed behind on Earth forgot what they knew about technology. So the cosmos is populated with humans and the variations that natural evolution has had time to create.
Plausible. But Nekrotzar is much older than our own planet. Indeed the sun of that world had gone out long before our precious Earth even condensed from Stardust. At least that's what Marvin Carnacki's book claimed. And who wrote that book? I don't have a clue. The Bureau is still examining it. Unlike every other book owned by the Carnacki Institute, that volume survived the terrific explosion that followed the ritual.
Whatever the biology of the matter, one thing remains clear: the rulers of Nekrotzar were complete loons. I'll skip over the more lurid accounts of what Kings Humper, Sepsis, and Nobbel got up to. Each was madder than his predecessor. The line ended with the maddest of all, King Sciron, who wanted a palace bigger than those his ancestors had ruled from. In fact he wanted the biggest palace in the history of creation.
Nekrotzar was a very old world and its core had cooled long ago, there was no liquid mantle under the crust, nothing but solid rock. King Sciron gave orders to start mining minerals, shaping blocks and piling those blocks higher and higher into walls.
Eventually he had the biggest palace of all time, the biggest possible palace. It didn't make him happy.
The Sciron killed by Theseus was clearly the same guy or else a mythical figure based on the real Sciron. But the question remains how the people on Earth who made up the myth, presumably the ancient Greeks, knew about Nekrotzar in the first place. I found this aspect of the case rather troubling. I thought about ordering a beer, maybe several, but I wasn't even in the mood to get drunk. Hellboy was ready to leave too.
"Time to get moving."
He held open the door of the coffee shop and I passed through and stood blinking in the sunlight. Then he lifted his stone hand to provide shade for both of us. Maybe he thought I needed a cooler head before I was ready to know the rest. If so, he was right.
King Sciron of Nekrotzar never gave the order to stop building. Blocks of stone were cut from the ground and added to other blocks continuously. The walls kept rising and rising. Towers were completed, turrets, domes, and chambers, only to serve as the foundations for more towers, turrets, domes, and chambers. The planet had no magma under its surface. The builders could dig it all up and shape it into blocks if necessary. That's what they did. Eventually the total mass of the planet was converted into the palace. One of the wonders of the universe!
A giant palace adrift in space. King Sciron had his personal chambers at the center. But he often liked to ascend the spiral staircase to the tallest turret. There was a balcony there without a rail that looked over the stars, comets, pulsars, other lost planets. Whenever he wanted to punish someone for an offense, he invited them onto the balcony of that turret and ordered them to kneel before him. Then he kicked them over the edge. The bodies are probably still falling, if they haven't already been burned up in younger suns.
Life is weird. I walk down the street with a big red demon and who's the one that attracts all the attention?
Yeah right. Car horns blared. A grinning fellow came up, tried to shake my hand and didn't look abashed when I refused. "Excuse me, but are you Foggy Dicks? Man, I love your flicks. Never seen anything like them before!"
Yeah, life is weird.
My minds a little disordered now. It's mostly the drugs, the painkillers they pumped into my veins after Hellboy knocked the crap out of me. I'm still flooded with that liquid junk. But I was strange before my beating. That's what the specialist doctors at the Bureau told me back in the days when they thought I might be team material.
Which reminded me: I still wanted to know where Liz and Abe were. Up north was too vague an answer to satisfy me. I can't say I ached to see them — I don't ache much emotionally — but they had been friends, to a small degree at least.
"Mount Snaefell," said Hellboy.