She brought my hand up, pressed it to the side of her face. "You are a demon. If I am shot, you can carry me through, to do what I must do. And my human flesh will protect you from the runes."

"No." The alabaster jar had broken, but I knew there were others, including the one he'd prepared for Big Mama. And that strange coldness still flooded me, the shuddering sense that any minute soul and body were going to peel apart ...

Death? Could I die? I'd always thought so, but now I wasn't so sure.

And what would happen to me then?

"You must." She leaned over me, forced me to look into her eyes. "If the Guardian Zar destroys ibn-Ghaalib we will all of us be killed. Azuzar and all the others will be taken into her forever, to who knows what end, now that she has been freed? And if ibn-Ghaalib destroys her ..."

Metal scraped on the stairway above. Carmichael whispered, "You ever shot one of these things, honey?" By the smell of the blood he'd lost a lot of it, but he was hanging on.

She said again, "You must."

Maybe I could have let her die a" though I doubt it. But not all three of them.

And either way, I was toast.

I closed my eyes. Felt her bend down, her mouth pressing mine.

My breath went into her. My spirit, into the place where Azuzar had dwelled for so many years.

It was ...

... It was nothing I ever, ever want to do again.

Pain. Hate. Human memories of a life enslaved and oppressed. Thermonuclear rage ignited in me and I staggered to my feet, swaying like a drunken thing, barely even conscious of the great crimson carcass lying on the stone at my feet. Barely conscious of Harik staring up at me a" at us a" with naked horror and shock. I scooped up Carmichael's pistol and charged across the line of demon signs and yes, her human flesh protected me, though I felt as if I'd run through barbed wire, and yes, Fuad shot her and I/we didn't care. I broke his neck before he got off a second shot, before I even turned to see what was happening in the center of the cistern. Ibn-Ghaalib swung to face me a" us a" with his eyes red with hellfire and that demon smile on his mouth, his hands gripping the pale half-visible limbs of the Guardian Zar. It a" she a" writhed, snapping at him with her snake mouth as he drew her toward the silver-sealed skull. I strode toward them, knowing he would devour her in the next moment and have the strength of both, undefeatable. He'd devour us both before we were out of the room. I shot at him as I strode a" almost point-blank range a" and saw the bullets tear through his flesh, and he began to laugh; light poured out of the holes instead of blood. I stretched out my hand a" Raisha's long, delicate fingers a" and felt her scream inside, wrench at me, make me stumble. I reeled against her dragging strength, pulling me aside, away, across the square stone room. I yelled at her, You crazy bitch a" ! as she flipped Carmichael's gun around in her hand, and the next second she flung herself down on her knees in the circle of demon jars, gun butt raised like a hammer.

Ibn-Ghaalib shrieked something, let go of the Guardian and threw himself at us like a tsunami of fire as Raisha brought the gun butt down on the first of the jars.

I convulsed, gasped, and nearly broke the back of my skull on the stone steps beside which I lay. Harik grabbed my flailing hand a" my own hand, my more or less human left hand a" and shouted, "Hellboy!" at me, in the same second a blast of searing, oily heat pounded over us from the cistern. I don't know who screamed louder in there, Raisha or ibn-Ghaalib. The sound was nothing human, anyway. With the dust and the fire and the whirlwind of demon energies as all the entities ibn-Ghaalib had absorbed into his body ripped out of him again as the jars were smashed, it was pretty hard to tell what was going on.

When I got to my feet a few minutes later a" feeling strange in my own body again and shaking like a leaf a" and shined the flashlight into the cistern chamber, the result was not pretty.

Raisha lay in the middle of the room, covered with a" well, let's just call it mess. Ibn-Ghaalib wasn't the first person I'd seen torn apart from the inside by demons, but he sure was the most comprehensive.

I don't think Professor Harik saw the Guardian whipping and flickering around the chamber through the slow-settling dust, but she wasn't pretty, either. I held him back as he started to go in. There was someone else in there, too. A shining shape, like a man in a white galibeya, knelt beside Raisha's head. "You owe her a debt," he said, and the Guardian bared her fangs at him a" several mouthfuls of them. "In the name of the woman that once you were," he said.

She didn't look a whole lot like a woman these days, that's for sure, but she withdrew, coiling herself just outside the hole in the wall that led to the inner chamber. I thought I saw an iron chest in there, with a simple gourd bottle sitting on top of it, but I wasn't going to get any closer. All the things that a woman can have done to her a" all the things I'd learned, from those few minutes within Raisha's brain and Raisha's memory a" looked out at me, unanswerably, from those unspeakable eyes. Azuzar turned for a moment toward me, dark eyes in a face green as a corpses, and beckoned with a long-fingered green hand. As I stepped across the dead line of demon runes, he turned Raisha over gently, bent down, and kissed her mouth, pouring into her like a breath-drawn mist.

I kept a wary eye on the Guardian Zar as I picked Raisha up a" careful not to even think about getting near that iron box and I don't care whose notes were in it a" and said, "All right with you if we lock up when we leave?"

She bared her teeth again. There was ibn-Ghaalib's blood on them, and little chunks of other stuff. She didn't look like she'd mind.

While Thomas was talking Harik through flight prep and the jarhead bandaged Carmichael and Raisha, I took a couple of grenades from a box at the back of the plane and tossed 'em down the shaft to the old cistern. When we took off, I could see the subsidence in the ground where the stairway had fallen in. So far as I know, nobody's ever been back there.

On the bench in the back of the plane, Raisha rested easily, her breath gentle, her face the face of a woman wrapped in the sweetest of dreams. I went to the other side of the cabin and lit a cigarette. Looked out the window at the red towers of Timbuktu shrinking behind us in the hot noon light. I knew everything that was in Raisha bint-Tahayet's heart; everything that was in her mind, in her dreams, in her past. Her sweetest hopes and her vilest hatreds: love poisoned, betrayal endured smiling for years. Everything that had happened to her in her life, had happened to me.

And I knew she knew that about me.

I knew a" and I was right a" that I'd be dreaming her dreams for years, waking in the morning feeling stained and shaken and hating myself and her, for what we both knew. You should never know someone that intimately. I knew a" and I was right a" that I'd have a bad night, when years down the road she finally came to die. She was a strong, wise, likable woman who'd had a hard life and had gotten through it gracefully, and under other circumstances I'd probably have liked her.

But I knew I didn't ever want to look on her face again.

And God help her, I knew she wouldn't ever want to look on mine.

In Cupboards and Bookshelves.

Gary A. Braunbeck.

We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

a" Graham Greene.

The Power and the Glory.

During those times when Hellboy found his thoughts wandering down paths he knew from experience were best avoided, Trevor Bruttenholm would take him aside and say precisely the right thing to soothe the disquiet and discomfort that were Hellboy's constant companions. Neither Bruttenholm nor Hellboy ever used the word loneliness when they spoke of such things, although, sometimes, Hellboy would acknowledge a certain aloneness at the core of his existence, and Bruttenholm would smile and laugh and say something like, "Well, it does have that impenetrable Kierkegaard ring to it that I so often in my thoughts associate with you."

"Are you laughing at me, sir?"

"No, dear boy, I am laughing near you. You ought to try joining in sometime."

"Only if there will be pancakes later."

"Dear boy, there will always be pancakes."

But Trevor Bruttenholm a" the closest thing Hellboy had known to a father a" was no longer here, yet that aloneness remained, a constant aide-memoire that he wasn't merely the last of his kind, he was alone of his kind, with no heritage, no real sense of purpose or meaning, and no promise of ever finding the answers to and behind his existence. Sometimes Hellboy felt as if he were one breath away from being cast afloat into the darker corners of the universe, unbound, unfocused, but never un-made (something that would be a mercy, especially at times like this). Sure, he had friends, good friends like Abe, like Kate Corrigan, like Liz and a small handful of others at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, but they hadn't come along this time, so if he were feeling a bit, well ... anxious, he had no one to blame but himself.

"How many children do you have here?" asked Hellboy, craning his neck to try and take in the enormity of this place. The walls of the cave a" or whatever the hell it was a" soared upward at either end like the sides of a ravine. Looking up, it seemed to Hellboy they could never meet in the darkness overhead.

He stood at the crossroad of several different paths, all strewn with random stones and loose piles of scree. Illuminated by the light from the dozens, possibly hundreds, of torches, he saw that these paths became narrow and steep, the rocks growing fewer but larger, stacked one on top of the other. In the distance he could make out something that looked like a chaotic staircase of massive, wedge-shaped boulders. This was evidently the anteroom of some vast, silent, ancient chamber.

Ahead, he could see a bluish radiance, haloing some kind of rock formation. On a small plateau, under an overhang of white calcite that curved gracefully upward like a snowdrift hollowed by the wind, stood a cluster of meticulously carved stones, each roughly the size and shape of a woman, arms outstretched, holding something whose shape he could not quite discern. Their bodies were complete but all of them lacked faces.

Hellboy turned slowly around, looking upward, and felt his breath catch in his throat.

"Holy crap," he whispered.

Crisscrossing above his head like strands of a web was an intricate network of handmade bridges, some constructed from disparate sections of metal, others made from rope and planks of wood. Below these bridges was a catwalk, also made from wood, that seemed to encircle the entire chamber. Lighted torches and battery-operated lanterns hung from the surrounding walls, and every ten or fifteen feet there would be a rope ladder, some leading down, some leading up.

And everywhere above there were hollowed spaces that looked like small tombs, each of them lit from within and tenanted by children. Hellboy could hear music coming from some of the chambers, laughter from others. Other chambers were cut off by means of curtains that had been nailed into place somehow. The more he scared, awestruck, the more apparent the ingenuity that had gone into constructing this place. The curtains were not nailed into position as he'd first thought; expandable shower curtain rods had been used in each doorway, so that if the tenant desired privacy, they had only to slide their particular curtain closed. Some used quilts, others blankets.

"How ... how many of you are there?" he asked again.

"I quit counting almost fifty years ago," replied a voice near Hellboy's side. "These catacombs go on for miles, and where one series of chambers ends, there are passageways to others just like this. There's an underground spring not too far from here a" the cleanest water you've ever tasted. I'd offer to give you a tour but you don't look to me like you're up for much sightseeing at the moment. In fact, you kind of look like a sick walrus trying to climb over a rock, so I'd have a seat if I were you."

A moment later, the children erupted from their rooms with squeals of laughter and anticipation, scurrying down the ladders, running across the catwalk, dashing over the bridges. Hellboy thought for a moment that this cavern perhaps opened somewhere near the top because he was again seeing stars a" some so far away they were mere pinpoints of light a" but as he watched, he became aware that these distant stars too were moving, circling around other catwalks, traversing higher bridges, descending other ladders, or being lowered in their wheelchairs on wood-and-steel elevator platforms that were operated through a massive and ingeniously constructed system of chains, pulleys, winches, and counterweights, all coming toward him, not stars at all but yet more torches and lanterns being carried by children whose rooms were hundreds of feet above those he had first seen.

It was incredible. He'd thought there might be only a few dozen children living here, maybe a hundred, but now saw that their numbers were legion; there had to be at least two thousand children, maybe even more. He tried again to pull all the shadow-children into his vision but was overwhelmed with dizziness and vertigo. There were just too many of them.

"Are you all right?" asked another voice, this one a child's.

Hellboy nodded, then took a deep breath, and then shook his head. "I am feeling a bit dizzy, now that you mention it."

The children continued to descend from above until the chamber was packed; never before had Hellboy seen so many in one place. He tried to regain his balance before the dizziness got the better of him but managed only to drop onto his ass, his tail getting entangled with his oilskin coat and sending a sharp lance of pain up through his back. He looked around at the sea of surrounding faces and realized he couldn't see where the crowd ended.

"I'll be passing out now, if that's all right."

"I'm surprised you remained conscious for this long," someone said.

"I'll expect pancakes later ..."

"Beg pardon?"

"... was told ... there would always be pancakes ..."

And, as he'd always suspected would one day happen, Hellboy was cast afloat into a dark corner of the universe.

He'd known something was up before he'd even entered Tom Mannings office. The director of the B.P.R.D. had this air about him any time his authority was overridden by someone, or something, higher up. Manning had been named director while Trevor Bruttenholm was still alive a" the professor had wanted to use his time for research and field work a" but Hellboy knew that many in the B.P.R.D. viewed him as a simple bureaucrat, a poor replacement for the accomplished Bruttenholm. In the wake of the professor's death, Tom Manning, Hellboy suspected, needed no one to remind him that he was the consolation prize. For a while, Hellboy himself had felt this way, but as Manning proved time and again just how well qualified he was for the directorship, what had first been an outright resentment on Hellboy's part became a gruff form of respect and, sometimes, even admiration.

Still, sometimes it was easy to see that Manning, for all of his stiff-backed demeanor and even steely manner, felt as if he were sometimes reduced to the role of errand boy a" especially when it came to honoring requests made by Trevor Bruttenholm prior to his death. Who would dare argue with Hellboy's dead father, after all?

So when Hellboy saw the way in which Manning did not so much walk to his office as plow through the hallway, eyes not making contact with anyone along the way, he knew something wasn't right. That suspicion doubled when he received the call not one minute later to come to the director's office immediately. If any doubts were still lingering, they vanished as soon as Hellboy closed Manning's office door and saw the look on the director's face; Tom Manning looked humiliated beyond words; helpless, ineffectual, inept.

"Hellboy," said Manning, gesturing for him to take a seat.

"Sir," replied Hellboy, hoping that the tone of his voice was as neutral as he tried making it sound.

Manning met Hellboy's gaze for only a moment before returning it to the telegram on his desk. Reading it over once more, he pushed it across the desk, then sat back and rubbed his eyes. "That arrived less than an hour ago."

Hellboy nodded, then picked up the telegram: HB.

I hope this doesn't get you into trouble. I need your help. Please get here as soon as you can. Urgent.

The Reverend.

"I promised Professor Bruttenholm a lot of things before his death," said Manning. "Not the least of which was that I'd respect certain matters the two of you wished to be kept private. Your friend the Reverend was near the very top of that privacy list. I never pressed Trevor and I've never pressed you about who or what he is. I know he's helped the Bureau on several occasions and has never asked for anything in return. Hell, even in the telegram, he doesn't demand your help, he asks for it. That tells me the man's got integrity and knows how to show respect."

"That he does, sir."

Manning tried to smile, didn't quite make it. Hellboy felt kind of bad for the guy.

"One of the other things I promised Trevor," said Manning, "was that anytime the Reverend requested your help or that of the Bureau, it would be given immediately and without question. Care to guess which part of this I'm having trouble with right now?"

Hellboy placed the telegram back on the desk. "Sorry, Tom, but I promised the professor that I'd keep the Reverend a private matter, as well."

Manning stared at him for a few moments, and Hellboy could sense the director trying to search for just the right words, or some small gesture that would say, I know I'm not Professor Bruttenholm, but I could be your friend, I'm just no damn good at making the first move. A little help, maybe?

"He's never used the word urgent before," said Hellboy. "Trust me ... Tom, this is a guy who doesn't scare easy. He's not in the habit of overreacting. If the Reverend says its urgent, then its probably something that would make most people here crap their pants just to think about it, let alone deal with it."

Manning nodded. "So you have no reason to doubt that it's serious, whatever it is he needs you for?"

"I don't doubt it at all."

"You trust him that much?"

"Yeah, Tom, I do. So would you. I, um ... I could introduce you sometime." The change in Manning's expression was subtle, but it was all Hellboy needed to know that he'd put the director at ease on several unasked questions.

"I would appreciate that," said Manning. "So ... what do you need from the Bureau?"

"Just a ride to Ohio. I can make do with the chopper."

Manning tried to smile, actually made it this time. "Is there no end to the sacrifices you make?"

"Is kind of inspiring, isn't it?"

Ninety minutes later, just before one a.m., the B.P.R.D. chopper lifted off from a field one mile east of the Heath airport. Hellboy stood in the field, waited until the chopper was high enough, and then waved at the pilot. He never understood why he liked doing that so much, but he did, and what did it hurt? So he waved again, and then turned toward the direction of Cedar Hill and took off running.

He liked his infrequent visits to Cedar Hill because they allowed him the time and distance to really run, flat out, for miles at a time, across empty fields, through abandoned buildings, across construction sites, through countless alleyways ... he often wondered if the people living in Cedar Hill knew what an amazing, confounding maze their city was. And if they thought it was bad on the surface...

He ran until he reached downtown, just off the square, and ducked into the alley beside Riley's Bakery. Was it just him, or could you still smell the pastries from this morning? Have to pop in sometime and ask. Maybe his celebrity would be good for a free box of glazed, or a bagful of crullers.

He reached the end of the alley and took the five short cement steps that led down and to the right. The door was locked, but that was to be expected. The Reverend had long ago provided Hellboy with the key to this door a" not that it was exactly state-of-the-art security; a strong-enough breeze would probably snap the padlock one day, but Hellboy used the key out of courtesy to the Reverend. It wasn't everyone who knew that this old door at the bottom of those five ill-kept steps opened into a series of underground maintenance tunnels that spread out underneath a full sixty percent of the city.

Hellboy went down the short flight of steps on the inside until he came to another, unlocked, door. Opening that door, he reached in and around to the side, turning on the emergency lights that were strung through every foot of the tunnels.

There was a golf cart waiting for him, a note on its windshield: Never say I don't let my friends travel in style. R.

Laughing, Hellboy climbed into the cart a" impressed that the Reverend had found one that would support his weight a" fired up the engine, and drove the route that he could travel in his sleep. Despite knowing that the Reverend's message was urgent, Hellboy couldn't resist the temptation to take a couple of side corridors and pull a few wheelies. Then it was back to business.