The Mouth on Charming Hill:
Chapter Three
--
Hallisburg, VA
5:31 AM
Few things had ever been proven to really, truly startle Agent Tiffany Sand; by nature she was emotionally solid, difficult to surprise, and what Hellboy had, with some annoyance, dubbed "a cocky smartass," which was, in a way, something of a compliment coming from him. He had his share of cocky and smartass moments as well, though he tended to be more serious about rather dangerous matters – comes with old age, he thought with a snort – than was Sand.
She was not terribly impressed by the jagged sticks of wood driven into the general landscape, lit haphazardly by a five-thirty-two dawn. "What exactly were you guys talkin' about to make the poor tree explode?" she asked flippantly, nudging a slender piece and watching as it shifted in the gravel. "Or are my ears too tender?"
"I'll tell you when you're older," Hellboy replied pleasantly. The small, intimidating smile and the casual tap of a red finger on the cigar stub he held served to complete the warning message. "Deal?" His tail lashed, once, all but hidden in the underbrush he stood near as a precaution.
Sand managed to not make a childish face, and settled for a generally lofty expression as she stepped carefully around a splintered branch sprawled across the gravel. Rocks twisted and rasped lightly underfoot, giving just enough under her weight that she held herself with a certain careful wariness. "Well, jeez," she said, leaning to peer at the relatively hollow stump left, poking once at the jagged lip. "The damn thing really did explode, huh? Bet that was a mood-killer."
Liz turned to grant the other woman a particularly withering look, pausing her self-appointed chore of studying the photocopy of a hand-drawn, and local, map provided by the same Sasha Harper of the bed-n-breakfast. "Yes," she replied dryly, "the tree really did explode. Nearly killed me while it was at it." She touched a hand absently to her mouth, and briefly started, having forgotten her earlier discarding of the cigarette.
She ran the hand quickly through her black hair, strands lightly tangled after the fruitless search of the evening before. Hellboy looked away, stepping from the undergrowth to join Sand by the stump.
"Look," Sand pointed, tapping a finger against an odd wet swell within the stump. "Started to suck the roots up out of the ground through the nicely gutted tree. You've got to admit, that's kind of unique. Stupid, maybe, but unique." It was almost a grudging admiration the way she said it, apparently fascinated with the awkward lump in the shell left of the tree.
"Try annoyed as hell," Hellboy corrected offhand, exhaling a small, obscuring puff of acrid smoke as he picked the cigar from his mouth. "It stuck around long enough to basically flip us off before running." He paused, breathing out another small cloud of cigar smoke. "Coward."
A characteristically blunt, and randomly apt, statement; Liz smiled in spite of the quiet seriousness of the dawning morning, shook her head gently with a slight amusement.
"Whatever it was," added Sand in a perfunctory fashion. She allowed herself one final poke, prodding the swollen, exposed inside of the twisted root, and wiped her hand over her dark slacks.
"I'd like to say it was a poltergeist," Liz responded, heels scrapping over the gravel as she came to stand to Hellboy's left, his larger red frame towering over hers. "That is, with all the problems everywhere else, it wouldn't be too shocking." She glanced at the map in her hand as if to verify her statement, merely blinked as she registered it was in fact the Hallisburg map and not the set of Virginia maps locked in the black-painted milk-truck. With a soft sigh, she pinched the bridge of her nose, passed a hand over the worn tenseness of her face drawn tight with sleeplessness.
"Doesn't seem to fit, though," Hellboy said, idly twisting the cigar between his fingers. "Needs a source – some teen thinks her parents're out to get her, kid with repressed emotions; you name it. We don't have a name 'til we've got a source." Studying the cigar frankly, he fit it back to his mouth.
Liz made a murmuring noise in agreement. "Right," she said. "Don't jump to conclusions." An elegant black eyebrow twitched up sardonically as she looked to her taller, brightly colored companion. "Hellboy's motto. Isn't that right, H.B.?" she teased, lightly.
To his credit, he maintained his solid, coolly professional expression, taking a slow – and pointedly thoughtful – drag on the cigar. "Yeah," he replied. "That sounds about right. You know me to the letter, Liz." He grinned widely, sarcastic, before she smiled – little more than a dry twitch of her mouth – and motioned to him. "What?" Hellboy asked, glinting red in the sunlight.
"I need your right arm," she answered, unfolding the small, if unwieldy, photocopied map. "A breeze is picking up and I don't really want to try flattening it against a tree."
Needlessly adjusting the shortened sleeve on his right arm, Hellboy offered the giant stone forearm, trying momentarily to peer at the map as Liz carefully began smoothing it across the patterned rock. She leaned forward, hiding the lines and symbols as her dark hair tumbled forward over her shoulder, and Hellboy turned his head away, focusing intently on a large slab of shattered wood needled into another tree.
Sand cleared her throat, in as amused a way as possible. Damn it, he thought, straightening his back and fighting to not turn around and glower at her; she was beginning to get really annoying.
"They won't bite," he said casually, instead, to Liz. She started, glancing up and giving him that mixed look of exasperation and mild amusement she had. "The trees," he explained just as casually.
He was rewarded with a flickering smile and Liz slowly tracing the trail's winding direction. "Here," she said, looking to him and then Sand, motioning for the woman to come closer with a quick flip of her hand. "There's an abandoned house on Charming Hill; this trail cuts through the back-yard – for lack of a better word, at least."
"Always an abandoned house," Hellboy muttered around the cigar. "Always a hill. Jeez."
Liz gave him a sharp look, and returned to the map with a soft sigh, moving her attention from the trail to the hedging lines of the streets in town. "While you visit the house on Charming Hill, H.B., Sand and I'll be checking out a bookstore – where the little girl vanished from." She pinpointed the small square of A CHARMING READ at the base of Charming Hill, leaned back to let Sand see it.
"Alrighty," Sand grinned. "But you mind if we eat first, hon? I'm starving."
Liz stepped away from Hellboy, re-folding the map as she looked upwards, to the early morning sky. "That'll be fine." She turned back to the bed-n-breakfast, nearly obscured by the trees, and stepped around a jagged piece of wood lodged in the ground at her feet.
-
Charming Manor
Hallisburg, VA
The actual 'yard' area behind the decrepit blue manor on Charming Hill was as unpleasantly filthy and overrun with decay as the house itself; dark blue paint had been bleached with years of sunlight, chipped and peeling like faded navy snow to sprinkle over weeds and wildly placed flowers – roses, marigolds, tulips, all equally faded like the paint, and uniformly sickly-sweet in their aroma. It was a quiet, motionless decadence, dead or dying in spite off the muddy sponginess of the earth, sliding in oozing wrinkles beneath his boots.
Walking to the manor had been relatively uneventful; but for one false scare with a particularly inquisitive – or confused – doe, Hellboy had seen nothing moving along the trail after waving the girls off. The house seemed as uninhabited and dead as the trail, and as he dropped the withered cigar stub, grinding it into the mud with a heavy heel, no deer – curious or lost – presented themselves to break this silence. Fitting, he thought. What would a haunted house be if anyone really lived in or around it?
Stepping onto the sagging, damp porch carefully and wincing, barely, at the dangerous groaning of the rotten wood, he still moved to knock on the dark, flaking door. He partly expected the door to swing open, bleak and inviting, of its own volition, but was not disappointed when it did not. Nor, when he tried to jiggle the grimy doorknob, did the door prove unlocked.
He shrugged, leaned back, taking care that his weight did not punch through the weakened porch, and slammed his right fist through the soft wood, drawing back again as the door splintered and whined. The hinges – rusted with age and rain – groaned and gave, sending the door twisting back into the musty interior of the manor.
He placed his left hand on the door frame, gingerly eased himself into the firmly lit, sickeningly sweet-smelling ruins of an old kitchen. Yellowed tablecloths lay torn on an older style stove, one remembered faintly from what had passed as his childhood – shining white in places, but mostly tarnished and blackened with dust and soot and flaked paint.
Hellboy straightened his neck, having stooped to fit through the now empty, though dusty, doorway. Broken plates, stains from old foods and drinks, cobwebs, and that disgustingly pervasive smell of the flowers – the kitchen was unwelcome, seeming removed from the cheerful dawn lighting the Virginia sky outside.
Glass and porcelain cracked, or shattered, as he stepped forward, eyes adjusted now to the yellowed dark. The ceiling was hung low; or, rather, low enough to nearly scrape the shaven knobs lefts of his horns, and the wood – once polished – floorboards soft, small and somewhat dry creaking sound accompanying each step. He waved his hand before his face twice, attempting to brush away the unpleasantly sweet scent, and casually reached for the polished handle of the Samaritan where it was slung at his hip. If, in fact, the focal point for Hallisburg's years of mild oddness was a poltergeist, or group of poltergeists, he doubted it would do any good to actually use the Samaritan, but if was something more tangible, at least he would have it in hand.
First, though, he figured he'd break its nose after the frenetic suddenness of last night.
"Hey," Hellboy all but drawled, hunching to slip through the kitchen doorway, elbowing a broken and loose door out of his path. "Spooky: you in here? It's not nice to keep a guest waiting." He drew the Samaritan, holding it in a loose and almost congenial – were it not for the gun's size and nature – manner.
This room, a long and presumably once-elegant banquet hall, was darker than the kitchen, a blackened sort of mahogany leeched out by dust from rotted paneling and wet, unraveled cloth that may have been tapestries, or drapes. No windows existed to dispel the faded darkness, the only light being the peek of angled sunlight from further in the house, and the sickly yellow shades of the kitchen.
He glanced, briefly, at the deep red of the elongated table cracked and crumbling from age and the persistent decay, muttered an unimpressed, "Right," under his breath.
Taking another ginger step into the banquet hall, he coolly checked the state of the Samaritan's ammunition, not entirely feigning his un-spirited disinterest in the decant atmosphere of Charming Manor. "Look," he said, pacifying. "I'll allow that the bit with the tree was unexpected. I'm not going to lie and say I get exploding trees every day on the job; it was a little creative on your part. But this?" He motioned with his left hand, encompassing the shady length of the banquet hall with the down-turned barrel of the Samaritan. "Who the hell're you trying to impress, Spooky? A bunch of dumb-ass teenagers out for a midnight horror run and some underage drinking?"
A slight wind billowed lightly through the banquet hall, stirring gently at the lapels of his overcoat and twisting the crumbling felt and cloth of the tapestries, or draperies, along the walls. He waited, patiently and stoically, with the Samaritan heavy against his shoulder; Hellboy remained as endlessly unimpressed by the soft, showy breeze as he had been by the equally showy decaying atmosphere of the manor itself – so much of it as he had seen so far. He could think of no reason, at that, to believe anything else in this dark manor would be any more inspired, much less inspiring.
"Yeah," he said. "That's what I thought."
The wind suddenly magnified, pounding at his back with a horrible fury. Decidedly against his will the current ripped the Samaritan from his shoulder and hand, managing to propel the heavy weapon literally into the opposite wall.
"Aw, crap," he had time to ground out, before planting his large feet – booted hooves, rather – firmly on the floorboards. As the wind quickly eased into the normal, stock-creepy stillness, the molded wood underfoot moaned and snapped, jolting him as he dropped two inches. He looked to his feet, glanced aside in annoyance, and began picking himself out of the floor with the intent of reclaiming the Samaritan.
"Hello," a small voice said, interrupting him. "I don't think you're supposed to be here."
Hellboy looked up, sharply, to see a slender girl – eight years, at the oldest – with stringy red hair and a curiously flat sort of expression. "What're you doing here?" he asked in response.
The girl did not flinch, just as she had not when she first spoke though it was the general reaction people seemed to have after seeing him.
"I am," she answered detachedly. She gave a miniscule, bland shrug, more a routine reflex than an actual reaction. "That's all to say."
He grunted, resettling his weight carefully on the floor away from the twin holes. "Great," he said, rotating his right shoulder absently. "You have a name, at least?"
The girl looked to him, blank and emotionless as she seemed to consider the question. "My name was Jeannie," she replied, distant. "And then I died."
The floor moaned again, and burst, caving in and then sending spokes of dead wood into the air like rotted needles.
-
A Charming Read
Hallisburg, VA
A CHARMING READ was anything but: though the glass from the shattered window display had been swept from the sidewalk, jagged shards remained in the actual casing. A rich and nasty smell – like rotting weeds, or flowers – stuck in the air directly around it, and when Liz stepped through the empty, door-less doorway into the store, it was into a comparatively dark and frenetically disorganized one. What light-bulbs were in place in the ceiling fixtures were broken, pointed and ragged; books and papers were strewn across a glass-covered, carpeted floor, crunching and rustling as Sand followed.
"Huh," Sand whistled. "Damn."
Liz crouched to the floor, sifting a hand gently through uneven glass and unmarked, torn papers to pick a dented book up by the creased corner. "Streets of Laredo," she read, and just as gently set it back down amidst the glass and scattered paper. "Sounds like something Abe might read." Propping her hands on her knees, she straightened on her feet, shifting with a string of brittle crunches through the mess.
For no discernable reason, she touched her hip briefly, feeling the metal weight of her gun beneath the black cloth of the loose-fitted jacket she wore. Heavy, foreign, comfortable normal – a weapon she did not have to fear. She clenched her hand into a fist.
"Humid," she heard Sand mutter, "and hot, and would you look at that: not only do they actually have tourist books, they're charging six-fifty for 'em. Hallisburg," she murmured, lifting the booklet to what dim light gleamed in the store, "you're just not that interesting."
Liz smiled, humorlessly, and turned to the empty display case as a uniformed man stepped across the room from the back.
"I'm going to have to ask you two to leave," he announced by way of greeting, drawing Sand's attention from the booklet and Liz's from the occasional glitter of glass shards in the window casing. "I don't know why you're in here, exactly – store's not open to customers anymore – but you'll have to get out. Plenty of other places in town for tourists like yourselves." An unseen sneer twisted the officer's words, and Liz stiffened her back, black hair falling straight around her pale face.
"Thank you," she responded, flatly. He nodded, brusque, touched the brim of his hat with two fingers in a curt salute of sorts, and vanished into the storage area once more. Shifting to face Sand, she suggested lowly, "We might as well check on H.B. now."
"Sounds great," Sand agreed, slipping the booklet into her pocket and looking innocent under Liz's sharp gaze. "What? I left a twenty on the counter."
Liz said nothing, and picking her way through the frantic chaos of the floor, stepped into the sunlight.
--