Red Herring

Psycho Llama

Summary: About a girl from the 30s, the 1930s to be exact--and by exact I mean give or take a couple of Nazis, undead spiders and living, breathing skeletons. This is the life of Emily as reported by Aviary Gardener to whichever newspaper takes this seriously enough to print. Written for the Hellboy world but mostly concerning original characters, though Rasputin, Kroenen and the Thule Society feature heavily in later chapters.

Disclaimer: I don't own Hellboy or any of the associated. I do own an Abe Sapiens action figure, though.


Janus trudged through the thickly black forest, elbowing trees to map a path in his mind. He tried to be quiet, but the snares of roots and footholds and the uneven ground soon gave up to cursing and muttering in the dense bush. The red herring was nearby. He was not the only soldier on the hunt, but… he could hear no other noise than the heavy fall of his own boots. Had she killed them all?

No, he shouldn't think of that. It was just a legend. How did a rebel get to be a legend? Janus stopped that train of thought. It was dangerous to question the Empire. His jackboot slipped and the soldier stumbled into a shallow trickle of water. Janus stilled, thinking he saw something dart across his vision. He saw shimmers leading down to a pool of water. The surface of the water quivered.

Janus aimed his rifle at the water, skidding over the slimy stream. The man fumbled for his torch, aiming at the water and jamming it on. He almost slipped in at the sight of the girl's body that lay face down, submerged in the water. Copper ringlets drifted placidly in the still pool, arms floating uselessly and pale as ice. Janus found himself gasping, though the man had shot countless little girls himself, the dead body in the water had still frightened him.

Maybe a rock slipped. The water seemed to be draining out of the little pool. Janus stopped himself; rather, the girl's head seemed to be rising out of it. She didn't move, but rose steadily, her hair forming a wet curtain around her head as the crown of curls rose above the water. Glistening black eyes locked with his and she went flying out of the water, one hand squeezing Janus' neck as if it would pop. The soldier fell to his knees, not able to gasp for air. The redhead looked dispassionately at the swastika on Janus' arm, and ripped it off.


The night sky was brighter out in the open country. And yet, all the promise of the word country was stripped bare as the wastelands opened up around the trio and engulfed their little black car. Three men glanced imperviously at the dried mud and rubble, the desert that forms after war has spread.

There were no roads to follow, nor any reasonable suspension in the wheels to save them from the undulating earth. The driver's white moustache bristled as he fought the motorcar for complete control; broken husks of wooden wheels flickering white in the headlights. The younger man in the back seat leaned closer to his window, looking up at the stars. Beside him sat the man with the silver pocket-watch.

"We're here," pocket-watch announced. The younger man caught a glimpse of the watch face. There was a strange myriad of flickering numbers and symbols but a distinct lack of hands to tell the time. The driver pulled over to the nearest distinct landmark, more ruins of man.

The three stepped out and walked back slowly to where pocket-watch had indicated. The younger man pulled out a pen while idly flipping over pages of his notepad.

"Reporter?" pocket-watch chuckled, watching the younger man with sharp eyes.

The man shrugged, "Anything to make a buck now-a days."

"Hrumph. I expected someone of better reputation for this discovery… which I am about to make."

"Don't get me wrong old chap. We're both looking towards this big break you keep talking about. It'll make my career as much as it'll make yours. If it exists."

"I guarantee you Mr Gardener, this place of mine exists." Pocket-watch assured grimly, "If not in the books of geography, at least in the memoirs my mind."

The driver turned on his torch, a weak beam of light, and skimmed the rough ground surface, "I think that could be that one, sir." Illuminated ahead of them was a dark basin of earth dipping into obscurity.

"After the Maginot Line, a tunnel underground in the wastelands of Britain won't exactly blow up too many skirts, my friend," the young reporter mused, already scribing away.

Pocket-watch smiled to himself. "We're definitely here. This is the entrance. I'd recognise it instantly."

The entrance to the tunnel lay at an oddly horizontal angle, as if to appear engineered by nature. Tight rivulets wound their way into and out of the gaping hole. Rainwater ducts or well-worn tracks of sorts. Aviary Gardener whistled, "That'll be a tight squeeze."

"This way, sirs," the driver announced in his wheezy voice, stalking towards the open mouth calmly.

"The three of us will fit down there?" Aviary asked, pocketing his worn notebook.

"Precisely. That is why our Mister Translator had to remain behind. Poor old chap would never fit into a gap this thin," pocket-watch chuckled darkly, "And you might want to leave your hat behind, young man."

"For some poor beggar to steal?"

The driver approached the hole and manoeuvred to slide himself inwards and then, suddenly… down.

Aviary again whipped out the notebook and sketched a brief hypothesis of the tunnel that their driver had so suddenly vanished into. The pocket-watch man was next, crouching to reach in his arm and throw down the torch. Before Aviary knew it, he himself was climbing from one loose handhold to the lower. The earthen chute halted abruptly and the reporter dropped down.

"This, gentlemen, is the true scale of our mystery tunnel," pocket-watch declared mightily. He waved with his black cane at the vast stretch of underground railway that fading into cold blackness.

"Jove-! Where do these rail tracks come from?" Aviary asked into the dim silence.

"Ah, yes, a very big clue. Who knows? I have yet to traverse the length of this underground. That, Mr Gardener, will our task for to-night."

"Watch your heads, sirs," the driver interrupted, "The ceiling is quite low."

The journalist hurried to keep up, slipping his hat back on. "I see why you kicked up all that fuss at the lecture, then. This is quite incredible Ron… but listen to me. You shouldn't expect to break world headlines with this. I know, it's a fantastic discovery but-"

"There's no need to patronize, my boy!" Pocket-watch frowned and pulled a photo from his blazer. Aviary took it and motioned for the torchlight. It was a black-and-white of a young lady standing alone in the desert above them, looking skywards. She was short and wide-shouldered with spidery arms and distinctly curly hair.

"Who's this, then?" the reporter asked, squinting at the figure's sharp expression.

"A vigilante, if I recall. She was referenced as an assassin, but she's not working for us, or the Germans."

"She sounds scary, let's kill her." The torchlight jerked in the direction of the sound and a pale figure standing inches from the pocket-watch man moved out of the flashing light; two of the men shouted. Aviary realised his left hand was clutching his hat to his head.

The driver shone the torch around the narrow tunnel way, the pocket-watch man holding his cane as if to strike out with it. Aviary couldn't see the redhead girl, but felt a rustle behind him and turned to face the barrel of a very old gun.

"Evening, gentlemen," the girl mocked icily. Her eyes locked onto pocket-watch and glinted, "Ronald; I seems the giant tarantula didn't eat you after all."

"My Goodness, child, you actually live in this cave?"

She cleared her throat and removed the gun from Aviary's temple, "No, I've just been sent here to investigate. This tunnel is the only thing getting me to point B and you… three… seem to have stumbled down here quite accidentally."

"By accident-via the one and only entranceway?"

"Yes. Short-sighted to have only one path and one door, in my belief."

Aviary was reaching for his notebook, "Are you the one that made this tunnel?"

"Make a tunnel by myself? What, are you thick?"

"No, no, no, I mean; are you responsible for this tunnel?"

"No. I found it this way."

"Oh really? Railroad included?" Aviary questioned sceptically.

The teen looked down at the train tracks, as if to see them for the first time and rocked on her heels, "I think the railroad came later."

"Child, where does this road lead to, exactly? One cannot strive to build a tunnel that has no ending in this modern day and age."

"…There's a house," she admitted.

"And the house that it leads to? Did this house come as a later development?" Aviary added dryly.

"Oh. Much later. But I think the house was built first."

Aviary slapped his notebook closed; "Now you're just being contradictory."

"On the contrary. It… no, just follow me," she walked between pocket-watch and the driver, following the tunnel onwards, "and it's just faster if you see for yourself."

The pocket-watch man, Ronald as the girl had called him, looked back to his travelling companions, "Right. Well, men-I seem to be feeling in the mood for an adventure."

"Very good, sir," the driver sighed wearily. Aviary nodded with pursed interest.

They all stumbled in the dim half-light. The driver's torch did not much more than shine a dull yellow gauze upon the muddy rail tracks. The redhead gave a rather nasty cuss when she fell foot-first into a fissure and tripped t. She caught onto something, and appeared to hover mid-air as she unstuck herself in tricky twists.

"The clay down here is rather damp."

Pocket-watch snatched the torch and pointed it straight down the wide crack, "By Jove! Something down there moved," the gentleman hissed sharply.

"Ignore it. No…" the young lady held up an arm. A disturbed silence settled about them. In the distance, they heard scratching. Pebbles being moved and dropped.

"A-a wind surge, perhaps, sir?" the driver whispered.

The redhead ran back to Aviary and the other two, "Turn your torch off!" she yelled, grabbing the driver's coat. Then Aviary felt the most wretched sensation across his face, and arms and legs and anything else not covered by his trenchcoat. The light vanished. Hairy feelers flowed like water through a floodgate, tickling as they rushed over him and marched on in the millions. They were legs, thousands of feeling and flowing legs that rolled over the four as if they were of stone. For the most part, Aviary tried to be.

The sudden onslaught surged and tapered to a drizzle of crawlers. The reporter flinched as the last crawled past his ear and down his spine. It was a long time before anybody said anything. Aviary could still feel the coarse hairs brushing his mouth and shut it tightly.

"Pick up the pace. We need to get to the house before those things come back."

"What, uh, what were were those?" Aviary stuttered, checking his hat curiously for stragglers.

"Spiders."

"Spiders?"

"I don't know. They felt like tarantulas. Didn't like me very much, wee bastards recognised me," she sniffed disdainfully.

Ronald re-examined his pocket-watch in the new light, "A little odd for tarantulas to be moving en masse, is it not?"

"En yes."

"Do they come from 'the house' at all?"

"Good thinking but no, I don't think they do. They keep going along the tunnel past it," she stopped in her tracks, "But we… turn off here." The light shone upwards into a hole on the ceiling, identical to the sheer drop that they had entered through. The underground tunnel, however, kept on going. Seemingly infinite.

"How far does it go?"

"Haven't checked. It catacombs after a while, but then the spiders got angry with me so I left."

Pocket-watch made a face, "To what extent are you meaning angry?"

"There was some… swarming. A couple of bites. Would you mind giving me a boost?" she looked to pocket-watch, the tallest, "If it's not too much for you." Fifteen minutes of hefting and scrambling up an unstable, earthy hole and the girl had vanished upwards. Aviary took a moment to jot shorthand scribbles into his notebook, frowning thoughtfully.

"Glad I brought you?" Pocket-watch smiled, "To witness the Red herring? That's what the Germans call her. Oh yes. In German, of course; 'roter Hering', I think." he turned his head upwards, tapping his foot, "Yes, she's caused them a lot of trouble, over the years…"

"How the hell are we going to get up there?" Aviary muttered, "I mean, we don't all have the same girlish figure."

A face poked over the top of the vertical tunnel, "I plan on sliding down some of the floorboards from up here. They're a bit old and… oldish. But I'm at a loss to find you all a rope ladder to your liking."

"Boards will do fine, lass," the older gentleman beamed.

Balancing on a ramp made of two parallel floorboards was a very dangerous acrobatic feat, especially worm-eaten wood with odd bits of nail poking out. The driver was the last one up, needing both men to hoist his short stature the rest of the way in.

They arrived inside of a very old and very dank-looking barn. Or, what had once been a barn. Aviary turned his nose up at the litter of old books, crumbs of chalk and shards of broken glass. Two perfect circles drawn with chalk on the wooden floor held skeletons. They were kept exactly inside the circle by iron chains and very, very old by the look of the rotten clothes.

"What is this?" the gentleman exclaimed in a whisper.

"Something bad," said the Red herring, "This… this all looks wrong. And it stinks of black magick."

Aviary was in a flurry of documentation, getting as much detail as possible. The driver examined an old staircase. It led to a balcony that wound around the inside of the barn. "The windows are covered in dirt."

"Yeah. Yeah, the whole house I think. Underground. I've walked on top of where we are now. There's nothing but more wasteland," Emily murmured.

"Not so," the gentleman held up his pocket-watch, "We are at the exact same distance above ground as before we entered the tunnel. The existence of this structure is, and I hate to admit this, utterly contradictory," he looked up at the girl again with a long and intelligent expression.

The young lady looked all over the three walls, turning her head this way and that. There was a myriad of chalk scribbles higher up on the wood. Stars within circles and zodiacal diagrams, "Damn," she cursed.

"What? You believe in all this pottery and black magic?" Aviary joked. He did not, however, copy the symbols.

"There's no such thing as magic," the teen waved dismissively, "This is just a space-time… thing." She crouched down before one of the chalk circles, tracing the line with her fingers, "Yes, yes, definitely time."

"Time-travel? Well I suppose going to sleep for a thousand years doesn't exactly work as well in practice as it does in H. G. Wells' world."

"Oh you'd be surprised, ye of little to no imagination."

The driver was standing before the fourth wall, the only wall not entirely visible. Most of it was draped with a long, grey velvet curtain. "Sir," the driver called, "If you will... this fabric is not worn nor faded."

"The curtains seem to be new," The pocket-watch holder agreed to the room of explorers.

"How new?" Red herring called.

"Within a month. The dust hasn't even settled here…" his wrinkled hand fumbled along to the edge of the wall-length curtain and found two ropes. He secured the right one and pulled with both hands. Behind the curtain the fourth wall was a two-storey complex of glass display cages, revealing the purpose of the indoor balcony close to the fourth wall. The glass cages were all empty bar the large one in the centre. Inside hung a dead tarantula the size of a cougar, covered in tattered web. All four stepped back. It was an interesting display, the carcass strung up from within.

Aviary breathed, "If we can get that through those holes, that would make the front cover of Time and the National Geographic! Mister Roger, by Jove we have our break at last."

The driver and the pocket-watch gentleman hurried up the stairs to the observation level, looking into more of the dirty-glass cages. The one above the large tarantula was open to give the operator access to how the trophy hanged. Perhaps, Aviary considered, they could pull it out from there.

"Ronald, be careful," the Red-herring girl cautioned, walking about the other oddities around the mystery barn.

"I will!"

The girl growled at his indifference and made to follow up the stairs. Aviary followed, scribing pages of shorthand by the second. The reporter managed to get a good look at the girl for the first time. He sketched her profile deftly, "Miss? You-you mentioned time earlier. Do you really mean it? Time travel?"

The teen stole a glance at the other gents, "Time travel is entirely real. You, me, this house… we're all travelling through time. Didn't you notice?"

"What? Right now?"

"Well, yes. If you couldn't travel through time you wouldn't get very far past your first birthday now, would you?" she smirked and then nodded, "Changing the constant of our travel through time is possible. It's just a damn mess as those two poor bastards over there found out. Experiments with time travel. Very early ones… but they were successful; you've got to remember that. They had to break physics to do it," she sighed irritably, "But they did it."

"…Break physics?"

"We're inside a time-space anomaly as your friend so… assuredly pointed out. This place does not travel through time. It is invisible. It does not exist. And since we're here, neither do we. That's physics right there broken in two. Einstein would be ashamed if he knew. The way that we entered the building and the chalk… they've all got something to do with it. Cultists call this black magick. I for one call this mess a-"

"Pre-proven, scientific fact of… future discoveries?"

"Well, 'Unknown', usually. It's more mathematically sound." The two examined the empty glass shells in the wake of the gentleman and his driver.

Pocket-watch leaned over to stare down at the tarantula on display, "A trinket from the future, do you think? We could be a billionaires, Tom."

The driver walked up behind him and leaned too, "Wouldn't have the foggiest, sir." The driver shoved the pocket-watch gentleman forwards into the glass cage and the older man fell into the display of the spider. Like a trap the legs snapped around him, as the once thought dead monster injected its venom.

The redhead shouted and started up the stairs towards the opening but the driver gripped her by the shoulder and brought his gun up to her waist, shooting her midsection thrice. The girl's eyes bulged and words caught dead in her throat. With a thrust behind him the driver felled the assassin and moved onto Aviary.


A/N: Yes, it is mostly original characters so far. I promise there will be a little involvement in chapter three at least with Ilsa and Kroenen, but the major characters are, sorry, original in this fic. If you think that this fic really shouldn't be here because it is just too original, tell me in a review. Otherwise, sit back and enjoy! Suggestions are very, very much welcome, as is any feedback. And thank you very much for reading :)