Red Herring - Chapter 3. "Gull able"

Disclaimer: I don't own Mike Mignola's evil villains. ...I'd like to.

Emily grappled with the train as the tremors threatened to toss her off. Its wheels were crumbling over on the rocky ground. The tracks had vanished into the dirt a while back. Steam shot out of the chimney, cutting into Emily's revere and jolting her alert with a string of profanities. She turned her head and saw the reporter making sure his hat wouldn't fly away, "Aviary?" He looked up and waved. Emily glared, "Aviary! The train is disintegrating!"

"What?"

"The train is breaking up!"

"Damn. I've got Maria here," Aviary yelled.

"Good! We'll need her."

Maria's head popped over the bell "But I hate trains!" The train juddered violently and the wheels shrieked. They were driving on rails again. Emily's hands clutched at the yellow light.

Aviary held on with white knuckles as the tracks swerved sharply around a corner. A large knobbly hill rocked into view with a dark, tight tunnel running through it. "We are going to crash!"

"Aviary, don't leave Maria behind! We're going to run."

Maria locked her grip onto Aviary's arm and tried to imagine how she could possibly jump off the back of the train. Her mind predicted failure and an avalanche of pain, "Aviaryyy…"

Emily was the first to jump. She swung her arms as high as she could to catch the brush above the tunnel. Aviary hooked his arm around Maria's waist and launched them off the back of the train alongside the redhead. Something invisible hit Emily square in the back and hurtled her up the hill. Leaves and dirt crunched into the girl's face and arms, tumbling her over and over. Maria and Aviary felt the kick-forwards a moment later, so powerful the abrasive ground spun Aviary until he could no longer determine which way the gravity pulled, leaves flapping in his face. He landed in the sky and something sharp stabbed his arm.

"Aviary!" Marie squealed as she fell past him. Aviary wrapped his injured arm around a bush and grabbed at the tumbling girl. His fingers brushed hers but missed and she kept skidding down. The foliage went silent. The reporter unwound himself from the short tree. Emily came crashing down through the thick branches.

She looked about in a panic, "Where's Maria?"

"She fell. Down there. I tried to grab her."

Emily didn't hesitate any longer, thrusting herself feet-fist into the green hillside. "Emily!" Aviary scrambled after her with the desire to, if anything, not to be left behind. "Emily!" He put all of his weight on one leg and the ground sagged beneath him. Aviary grabbed wildly but his foot fell through a tangle of weeds and the reporter helplessly fell with it. Small twigs broke beneath him as he skated down the hill on his behind. Aviary landed on something hard and had the wind knocked out of him. He had reached ground level.

Maria was crouched on the ground tending to a pair of bright red grazes on her knees.

"I think we got out of the way without being followed," Emily sighed.

"Yeah, but you cheated by stopping time," Maria objected.

"I didn't stop time, I just…" Emily threw her hands up in emphasis of her point, "Ran a train through the middle of it."

Aviary frowned, "So… were is the train?"

"Somewhere. It's somebody else's problem. What we have to do is walk all the way to that tiny speck of a town on the horizon. Before lunchtime. Still up for walking?"

"I haven't yet found my car," Aviary lamented.

"Fine, then we're walking."

"Wait! Why do we have to get there before lunchtime?" Maria looked out towards the distant town they were heading towards, soaked red in the rebirth of the sun, "No. Why are we going there? I can't go to that town! My father, Pa, he told me not to go there. It isn't safe there. He said so."

"I know what your Pa told you, Maria," Emily murmured.

"Then why are we going?"

"Think it'll be the last place they expect us to go?" Aviary asked, "Because if I were a villain it would be the second place on my mind. I vote we go to Singapore. They'd never look there."

Maria walked faster to keep step with Emily, "I want to go to Singapore."

"I know you do. Aviary, you aren't helping," the redhead scolded.

The reporter was taken aback with the genuine irritation. He tilted his hat respectfully and brought out his notebook. He followed behind the two females, foraging through the small inky scribbles for anything he had not written down. Mr Moray. Aviary studied the sketch intently, bringing the memory back to the surface. He traced over the sketchy outline, filling in more details on the walk. There was an outline, broad and rumpled. He hadn't seen the man's eyes. Aviary slipped on a patch of mud and almost lost his balance.

"What are you writing?" Emily asked, turning her head back to glance.

"Notes. For my paper. They'd kill for this story," Aviary grumbled.

Emily smirked. Maria walked at the head of the trio, "I know someone who lives in the town we're going to. Pa said it wasn't a good place to visit, though. He said we should not talk about it."

"Why not?"

"Safety. Pa said so. Pa said if we didn't use names the danger wouldn't get to us," Maria looked around them, "It was a friend of my Pa's; she used to work with Pa on his experiments and things…"

"Left," the red herring directed. The trio cut through a particularly dense section of trees, the conversation boiling down to a murmur.

Aviary returned to his notebook but found little inspiration, "...Emily,"

"God, I hate that name," the young lady muttered.

"Really?"

"What?"

"Oh, sorry. Who is Mister Moray?"

"Mister Moray?" Emily closed her eyes; "He's a man in his late 50's who is a member of the Teutonic Order. Teutonic, that's like the Thule Occult. As in… 'Accept this sacrifice, oh mighty lord of darkness'."

Aviary's eyebrows arched, "Sacrifices?"

"Mister Moray has killed at least three people, the ones that I know of. Ellyn, Russell and Jerome. Don't get yourself added to that list, alright?"

"I'll try."

The morning opened slowly. Maria stumbled along half-asleep with her arms gripping the crook of Aviary's elbow. The reporter had not slept since the afternoon beforehand, but was impressed at how far they had travelled on foot. It was late in the morning when Aviary suddenly noticed the number of houses passing them by.

"If someone looks at you strangely, tell me," Emily murmured. Aviary's head bobbed upwards to the broken silence. The girl's eyes flickered, "I don't know who else has arrived in town since we left that underground place."

"You know, strangely doesn't give much to work with."

"I think the difference between, say, curious and a death threat would be obvious to even you, Aviary."

Closer to the docks, the population of houses became denser. Emily took them through a series of winding back-roads and narrow streets until they came outside a rather ordinary house. Maria groaned and rubbed her eyes, "Why are there so many seagulls?" The small brick bungalow was covered in birds.

"Shoo!" Emily barked, sending a few of the feathered rats into the sky.

Aviary looked at the neighbouring houses… "Not a seagull in sight. They seem to be only perching on this one house in particular. Did you have something to do with this?"

"I hope I didn't. We need to go inside." Aviary guided the drowsy Maria towards the front door, following the adamant Red Herring. She tried the door; "Locked." The teen pressed her hand to the lock and waited. Scowling, she pulled out her ornamental gun and-

"You can't fire a gun in a neighbourhood like this!" Aviary hissed, "You'll get strange looks and death threats from everyone!"

"Calm down!" Emily whispered sharply. She flipped the handle over and used it to bludgeon the hinges off the door, albeit noisily. She took a step back and rammed her shoulder into the wood and bounced off.

"No, no. You use your foot. Kick the door in!"

"Why don't you kick it in? Wait…" Emily pulled at the door and it opened with a sickening crack, "Ah. Should have known. Very weird front door, though. Smart."

Maria's eyes opened and went round, "You broke in?"

"Come on, you go in first. Stay downstairs. We need to check out the kitchen."

"Check for what?" the reporter questioned.

"Clues. The detective kind." Emily swooped in through the doorway following the little Maria. The brick enclave was packed with scientific instruments and old paper thick upon the desks. It could have been a laboratory. The kitchen was wholly dedicated to polished tin cans filled with what was definitely not food.

Maria picked up something wooden from a shelf, "This is Helena's house, isn't it?"

"Who's Helena?"

Emily leaned against a desk, "Helena worked with your father, didn't she?"

Maria nodded, "She helped him with his experiments. She was really smart."

"Can you remember any… projects that they were working on before the time-machine?"

"Oh, I know!" Maria ran into the kitchen and peered into some of the tin cans, sorting through the stacks along the bookcases and tabletops. "Here," she showed Emily the contents of the can. A clear, yellow jelly. Maria looked up at her, "It stops fire burning. You can put fire in this jelly and if you take the jelly away it will start burning again," she grinned toothily.

"Ooh," Aviary murmured.

"Now we're on to it! Did your father make anything with fire in it?"

Maria shrugged, "I don't know."

"Darn it…"

Aviary scratched his head with a pencil and looked skywards, "What kind of clues are we looking for, anyway, Emily? ...Notes? Death threats?"

"What have you found?" Emily asked impulsively.

The reporter pointed up at the wooden rafters. Maria and Emily had to walk into the hallway to see what he was staring at. Carved into the ceiling was a short sentence in German. Aviary frowned, "I can't even read that out loud."

" 'You have made a mistake'.' " Emily recited, "Does that scare you?"

Maria's face whitened, "Someone wants to kill Helena?"

Emily poked Aviary's chest, "You need to go down to the post office. Write a letter. Tell your newspaper friends what's going on. And you need to find out some gossip. The person who did this? They would have attracted some attention," the redhead turned to look back at the violent inscription, "I should have noticed that myself."

She inclined her head closer to him; "There is also someone else in this town that can help us. We need to find them. Don't write that in your article but… look out for people playing with fire," the youth smiled wryly.

"Your wish," Aviary tilted his hat with notebook in hand.

"Aviary. Don't get yourself killed. I'm not joking."

"Not on purpose. Is that the way to the post office?"

"It's by the docks. Near the pub, just follow the noise."

The reporter nodded and took off at a brisk pace. Emily turned back to her young charge. Maria was playing with some knick-knacks she had collected, fitting smooth pieces of wood together like a jigsaw.

The youth pulled over a chair and sat down, "Maria, did you know anyone that wanted to hurt Helena?"

"Nobody would want to hurt Helena. Everyone thought she was just his assistant, but she was smart. She made me a lot of things when she was in Pa's workshop, like toys." The wooden pieces clicked together as effortlessly as joints, "She tried to stay out of the way of the people Pa worked with, because she was a woman. You know how men think women aren't smart."

Emily smiled, "Or brave."

The little girl nodded, "Helena wanted to help people. She sometimes got into fights with Pa, but no one ever wanted to hurt her."

"Helena told me where to find you," the redhead told her grimly. Her hand slipped into a pocket and pulled out a shred of folded notepaper, "Directions. They led me to you. I think she wanted you to have something that belonged to your father. Come on, we need to look around."

Maria snapped the wooden pieces into a broken ring and left it on the table. The pieces started moving like a Newton's cradle in a loop, one piece of wood jumping across the gap to the next in rhythmic succession.

Aviary jogged into the main street by the wharf. A blonde lady was milling about in front of the post office while another couple was strolling along the pier. The reporter eased the glass door of the post office open, ringing a brass doorbell which crackled in the silence.

The young man flicked open the notebook to the very beginning. Ronald explaining the strange discovery he had made; the half-sketch of the Red Herring pointing her strange-looking gun. "I'm really sorry, Ronald." He sat down at a desk and started his article.

Halfway through the blonde cast the door open and clicked in on high heels, ringing the bell again. The shrivelled man behind the counter looked up only momentarily. Aviary pulled out a new sheet of paper and started a different letter to the post, anonymously informing them that an English banker by the name of 'Mister Moray' was responsible for a murder in the outskirts of London.

"Damn white rats," the blonde muttered, watching the seagulls swarm across the wharf from the other side of the glass.

"The seagulls?" Aviary asked.

"Mmm. All over my house this morning, I haven't a clue as to why," she spoke with a foreign lilt that Aviary just couldn't place.

"So that was your house… in the, um, east... of here."

The blonde sized him up, "You saw it, did you?"

"Are you… Helena? By any chance?" Aviary tried to sound casual. Perhaps one octave too high.

She gave him a severe look but nodded, "I am."

Emily grabbed an armful of books and slammed them on the floor. No luck. "Maria?" the redhead called through the house. Helena had left the clues for a reason. She had left something behind for Maria, but what was it? Important, but had the Thule Society found it already? Kroenen had scratched that warning into the ceiling-she should have seen that earlier. Helena didn't know German, so whom had he left it for after all? The girl shook off a shiver, "Maria?"

Emily felt like kicking something. Maria had gone upstairs. "Maria, wait!" she darted up the staircase, hooking her arms into the above handrail and swinging herself up and over a flight. Maria was backed up against a wall, deathly afraid at the sight of the person across the room from her.

"Maria, it's okay," the redhead told her calmly, "Just come over here."

A shadowy figure was sitting propped up on the neatly made bed. The dark, empty eyes were void of life. Helena was dead; parts of her throat hanging in bloodless tatters. Emily shook her head, "I found her that way. I don't think anybody from around here knows she's dead. She left clues, Maria. She wants to help you. The people that got to her, though… they might have taken the thing we're looking for."

Maria jumped over to Emily, gripping her arm tightly. The little girl faced away from Helena's body. She tried to control her face, "Who did that?"

"The same person that carved the warning into the ceiling downstairs, I think, and that's not good. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't dead scared of him."

Maria wiped her face clear with her palm, "Is he trying to kill me?"

"I don't know. We need more clues," Emily pulled out her gun and dialled the power down.

The redhead walked past her small charge and began firing her gun at random objects in the room. Blue arcs stuck to books, papers and knick-knacks, crackling and dissipating with a blue glow. An arc hit something resembling a dead frog, causing it to twitch and jiggle right off the desk. Another shot hit a piece of paper and sparked. Emily frowned and shot it again. "That is what we are looking for."

The paper was blank apart from the scattering of sparks. Emily picked it up and sniffed it, "Ye Gods! That smells terrible. Want to?" she offered it to Maria.

Maria contorted her face, "Stinks like rotten jelly."

"Clever," Emily grinned. She rustled through the dead woman's belongings until she found something to scrape with. A butter knife proved to be sufficient as Emily worked away at scraping the rotten jelly off the paper. She hissed when a flame came to life beneath her hand and scorched a mark on the paper.

Aviary fidgeted with his pen, "I was just investigating a lead that an old colleague of mine brought up. I wasn't sure whether to write it as an actual article or a piece of fiction. It was all quite odd. W-We never did catch up with Roger. I think he made it out alive, though."

The blonde traced a nail down the half-written article, looking interested, "You make an invasion of seagulls seem trivial with this. It is good writing."

"Thank you," Aviary nodded.

"Though, it ends very suddenly. How did you get into town?"

"We walked. Um, Briskly."

Helena gave him an unimpressed glance and skimmed the letter again, "So, these… companions of yours… I suppose they are investigating my house as we speak. Perhaps I should go over there and say hello."

"That might make looking for clues a bit easier," Aviary offered nervously.

The blonde smirked, "That it would. Finish your letter, I will tell them that you are doing well."

"It was nice to meet you Helena," the reporter inclined his head. The woman merely waved a hand in recognition as she strode out of the post office. She was heading off in the direction of her home at a swift pace.

A/N: Yay, readers! Finally, some actual characters from Hellboy, eh?