"As a train?"

"The train, the dragons, and most likely a ton of things we haven't even seen yet."

"But why would he take it out on the townspeople? Surely they haven't all done something to him?"

"He's been someone powerless, and in his dreams he has power, but because of a number of quirks in his makeup, in his experience, the intensity of his anger, his thoughts have become solid. And like some murderers, he kills near someplace he is familiar with. Perhaps in real life he would never do these things, but in his dreams ... well, it's different."

"Just someone going to sleep at night and they are able to do this? That is some kind of power."

"They may not be doing this when they sleep. Not a normal sleep anyway. It may have to do with some kind of suspended state. It's not about sleeping. It's about dreaming. And for him, his dreams are about jiving with shadows and dragons and long, black trains."

"Like being under medication?" the Reverend said, sipping his coffee. "Something drug induced?"

"Something like that," I said.

"So, this probably isn't an end-of-the-world situation?"

"Probably not. Disappointed?"

"Evil is evil."

"Now you're talking."

"You know, Hellboy, you're a lot smarter than you look."

"And you really do have a big nose," I said.

Down in the coma, the king of his domain Sometimes he felt himself float up, and when he did he would glimpse the whiteness, the light, and he knew he had come too far, and he would feel pain, and he didn't like it there.

Sometimes he knew he was in a hospital, and that he hurt, and that there was morphine pumping through him, and there were moments when it was stronger and moments when it was weaker, and in those weak moments he almost surfaced. That was when he could feel himself bobbing below the light like a fish in a dark pond, looking up at movement just above his metaphorical waters.

But it was cool dark when he swam down into the darkness, and he felt that he had considerable abilities there. He lived in a very nice boxcar with all his magazines and toy trains, and the dragon necklace was magical. All he had to do was think about the necklace and the dragon would jump out of the little shape around his neck and it would grow and move about his dark boxcar with its black walls and black curtains and a light that was no light at all, but an ability to see in the blackness without brightening it. Sometimes the dragon divided. Sometimes it was smoke. It could leak out from under the boxcar doors, and it could fade through the boxcar walls and make its way toward the engine where no engineer resided. It could go into the big hot box of coals that Wilbur continued to imagine in the furnace, and the dragon could become smoke, go right up the stack and out into the night. The dragon was his eyes. What it saw, he saw. What the light of the train saw, he saw. And the very walls of the train were shadows of rats and bats, and what they saw he saw.

He had powers down there in the depths of the coma, and down there in those depths he stewed and felt mad and thought of Naomi and his horrible witch of a mother who he had seen licked clean of flesh by a wave of explosive flame; a big old orange and yellow tongue that with but a flick changed the nature of all it touched; it had robbed him of skin, he knew that upon surfacing a few times, going up there into the light. But he wasn't going back. Never again. He was staying down here in the cool dark where he could do magic.

He thought of his old paper route, and when he did, he thought of Naomi, and then he remembered she had been in Cold Shepherd, and that he had gone and got her and that she was down here with him. They were part of the very fabric of the darkness he lived inside of, and when he thought that way he could see Cold Shepherd, and it was an empty place because his train had come to town, and he could see the other empty towns beyond it, one, two, three. He had done it. He had made it happen. But he was in the hospital. How did that work? Where exactly was he? Was it all in his head? Was Cold Shepherd still thriving? Was he no more powerful than before?

He must have been moved to Phoenix, to a bigger city, a burn unit. Yeah, that was it. Had to be it. He was operating inside the coma while his body lay scalded and peeled and fat and destroyed in the light of a Phoenix hospital.

Down here in the dark his blood was morphine, his soul was shadow, and he began to move through Cold Shepherd in his big black train, and when the train moved the darkness gathered around it and his mind hung a big old bright yellow moon in the sky. It was the way the moon looked when he first went out with Naomi, and they had sat in the park in Cold Shepherd, not really saying much, but liking each other's company.

And now, she was down here with him. He turned his head, and there she was, lying in the bed, her skin dark in the shadow and her hair gone black as a raven's wing, her lips full and thick and black with dried blood. He sat up in bed and the black sheet fell away from them, and he saw that he was not fat at all, but slim, and muscular, and Naomi, whom he loved, had grown beautiful, if forever draped in the colors of night, the darkness of narrow corners and deep wells and empty pockets. He felt hungry, and he called to the dragon. And the door at the far end of the boxcar flew open, and there was no more light in the car beyond than in the one where they rode along, gently rocking. Behind the dragon in the dark were the people of Cold Shepherd, and the other little towns, and they hung by their feet on ebony hooks poked through their ankles. They had been split open by the dragon and cooked by the dark flame that came from inside its gut and spewed from its long, knotty snout like a flame thrower.

The dragon stood in the doorway and looked at them. Wilbur nodded. The dragon turned, whipping his long dark tail along the floor. With his sharp talons and sharp teeth, he tore loose the already burned flesh of a large woman, and dragged the flesh along the floor, and into the lair (and Wilbur so dearly loved to think of it as his lair), where he dropped it on the bed between Wilbur and Naomi. Wilbur patted the dragon, said, "Have your fill." The dragon nodded happily and moved quickly into the other car, found a corpse of his liking, tore the testicles from it with his fangs, and ate them as an appetizer. And then the dragon really turned hungry and began to rip savagely at the corpse, and he moved so violently that all the other corpses on their hooks swung back and forth, stirring the shadows and causing them to spin.

Wilbur closed the door with his mind, leaving the dragon to his meal. He and Naomi ate like lions.

When they were satiated, Naomi said, "You brought me here."

"That's right," Wilbur said. "What do you think?"

"I love it. I feel different. But what about your mother?"

"We need not worry about her anymore. Would you like me to read aloud from an issue of Weird Tales?"

"Oh, yes. That would be grand. Please do, Wilbur."

"Very well," he said, and he flowed over the floor as softly as a windblown ball of cotton. He reached up into his rows of magazines in nice plastic bags and took down an issue, and read to her. He began by reading the title. " 'The Graveyard Rats.'"

And so Wilbur's train moved through the towns he had already devastated and turned them dark again and hung the moon again in each. He came to the border of Sand Rock, and the daylight there began to fade. What the train saw he saw. And what it was looking at was Hellboy, and a lean guy in a trench coat with fists full of pistols.

Further excerpts from the journal of Hellboy.

(Actually signed as Honorary Human a" Gee, thanks).

So it showed up, the train. And it was a big ole dark baby coughing out some really nasty-smelling smoke. It wasn't running on tracks. Right over the highway, and there we stood in the middle of aforementioned highway, watching, me and Reverend Jim Jeff, our nice blue rental off to the side.

The night came with the train. It was like some kind of window dresser from the heart of Halloween showed up, started tossing black confetti, 'cause pretty soon the day sky was night and the real moon waded up and went away. Up there, pinned to the sky, was a perfectly round moon as big as a platter and shiny as a freshly waxed plastic melon.

The train came on fast, and I can't tell you exactly what got into me, but I said, "Reverend, step aside or you'll be run over."

And he stepped aside, and me, I stepped forward and swung the Big Right Hand with all my might. Hit that train so hard it rattled the minerals right beneath it. Hit it so hard the big cow catcher on the front of the train came loose and tumbled over the ground and turned to smoke, and then the engine started to slide, and it caught me broadside as it turned. It knocked me about a hundred feet through the air, causing my tail to whip around and clip me one on the lip, and then I was rolling, and through glimpses I saw the train's boxcars jack-knife and overturn and one of the boxcars exploded, and bodies, burned and cut up and chewed up, came sliding out of them and into the dirt. The rest of the boxcars went twisting off to the side and remained upright.

I got to my feet, gathered my thoughts, which were mostly ouch, and looked at the train more carefully. The engine had broken loose from the boxcars. The engine turned quickly, as if on a swivel; it moved as easily as a cartoon train. And then it blew a burp of black smoke out of its stack, and screamed its whistle, and came for me.

I had kind of lost track of the Reverend, but now I heard those big guns of his bark, cling-clang, and ping-ding on the side of the train. He might as well have been spitting jelly beans at it; whatever mojo was in his bullets wasn't enough to stop the train.

I glanced at the Reverend, saw him walking and firing, looking so strange in that long black overcoat flowing in the wind, sunglasses covering his eyes, bright orange bursts jumping out of the barrels of his guns.

Pushing back my overcoat, and trying to be stylish about it, I pulled out my really Big Gun and shot a really Big Bullet at the train as it pumped and thundered toward me.

Now, let me tell you. I'm not a squeamish kind of guy, and I've been known to take some serious blows, and just moments before I had actually hit a train with my fist, knocking it and the boxcars spinning, but this whole business, that train not running on tracks and all that horrid meat, the bodies of those humans sliding along the ground, had given me a bit of acid reflux. When my Big Bullet from my Big Gun hit the train engine, the bullet was sucked into it like a cashew dropped into chocolate pudding. The train just sort of slurped it in, and the great light at the front of the engine glowed brighter, and something moved behind the light.

When it hit me, that's when I lost my meal, which was not nearly so good coming up as it had been going down. The waitress flashed before my eyes, and I thought, damn it, I had that one sewed up, and now I'm going to be dead. The impact of the engine was worse this time, like it had gathered its forces, and as I spewed my meal, I clung to the front of it and it pushed me across the street and off the street, across an abandoned lot, and through a little ice-cream shop (I got a whiff of vanilla gone sour; glimpsed a flying waffle cone), and it slammed me into the side of a general store and knocked one of my teeth loose.

So there I was, pinned between engine and store wall, and I could feel the wall giving way behind me, and I tried to move, but was stuck there too tight, and I looked up, and what did I see, but the Reverend, climbing up the side of the engine. He had removed his trench coat and had it wrapped around his hands, which, considering steam was coming off the engine in a hiss of black smoke, was not a bad bit of thinking.

He was climbing on it as it pushed forward, trying to kill our hero (that would be me, if you re wondering), and it heaved steam off its surface in big, hot waves. The heat didn't bother me. Heat I can do. I'm not crazy about cold, but heat, that's my element, baby.

Anyway, I was pinned at a high point on the engine, and I could see the Reverend scrambling up there, using that trench coat, and he got up close to the stack, and out came his bag of tricks, which was mostly a large bottle of something that I figured was Holy Water, and with a deft flick of the wrist, he tossed it inside the stack.

Nothing happened.

At least not at first.

And then there was a sound from inside the engine like a hungry stomach rumbling, and then another sound, like someone demure passing a fart in attempted secrecy, and then the engine exploded in a blur of shadows and steam. It was such an explosion that it knocked down the wall my back was pressed against. It sent me ass over hooves through the general store and through the far wall and into a boutique store and rolled me right over the ladies' section. When I stood up from all that, I was wearing women's panties on my head, and my arm, the Big One, was draped with a nice pink teddy.

I charged through the ruins, the teddy and the panties flying free, crunched over the glass and the charred lumber. I found particles of the engine. They appeared to be flesh and bone, bleeding blood the color of rerun thirty-weight oil. Its ribs were sticking up here and there and the front of the engine, the great light, had burst open, and there was a big eye on tendons inside, and it was dangling out in the dirt, squirming. It was about the size of a grapefruit, but less appetizing.

I stomped it and it squirted like a water balloon. It was kind of nauseating, not to mention creepy, but you know how fun it is to stomp things that squirt. I looked around for the Reverend, didn't see him.

I heard a creak, and I looked. It was one of the boxcars. The door came open. And something came out of it, so quick at first I couldn't recognize what it was, but between breaths it moved again, and this time I saw it real good, because it was right up in my face, and it definitely needed a breath mint. It was a dragon, a kind of wavery dragon, all black with wet black eyes that somehow seemed blacker than the rest of it. It breathed black flames.

I wrinkled my nose. The breath stank, but as you know, the fire didn't bother me. I felt like I was in a comfortable sauna. I punched the dragon and my hand went right through it. It wasn't like the train. It wasn't solid.

Except when it hit me with a swipe of one of its talons. When it did that I can attest to the Amen Corner (testify, brother), that the dragon was as solid as a wall of politician lies. It knocked me winding. Swatted me so hard that I hit the ground with enough impact to crack the highway and send up twirls of dust that filled my nose and pissed me off.

I pushed up, and there came the dragon, beating its great wings and skimming low over the earth. I thought about my Big Gun with the Big Bullets, and realized when the engine had hit me, it had been knocked out of my grasp. I tried to duck, but the dragon hit me. It wasn't any worse than being clipped by a 747. I went flying and twisting along the ground (hey, got a glimpse of the Reverend, lying over in the dirt, taking a nap while I'm doing the hard work). I had no sooner stopped than I felt myself being lifted. The dragon had me, was flying up toward the moon.

We went up and up and I tried to twist free, then I decided maybe that wasn't what I wanted. And then a very odd thing happened. The dragon bumped into the moon. The moon shook and rattled like a dinner platter, and I realized that this fake moon was not so high up and neither was the sky, and neither were we.

I twisted and got hold of my personal bag of tricks, and jerked out a lucky horseshoe (blessed by a holy man whose horse had died), and managed to bend a little so that I was in front of the dragons face, tight in its talons. The dragon gave me another fire bath, but that was nothing. I cocked back my arm (not the Big One) and threw the horseshoe into the mouth of the black-fire-breathing dragon. The horseshoe melted a little, but it went in, and the dragon gulped, and then it did a thing with its throat, like it was about to bleat like a sheep, but no sound came out. No fire came out. There was a small sound that I can't think of any neat simile or metaphor to describe, and then the dragon let me go.

It was actually higher up than I thought. I hit the ground pretty darn hard. I made an impact that left a small crater. I crawled out of the crater and looked up. The dragon was twisting and turning all over the sky. You know how you blow up a balloon and you pinch off the bottom of it with your thumb and your forefinger, and then you let go, and the air starts coming out of the balloon, shooting it up and all over? It was like that.

The dragon collided with the moon. The moon shook, swung down a little, then came loose of its fixings, clattered to the ground. I looked where it had been. There was a little hook up there, like the sort of thing you'd hang a picture on. Whoever had created this universe within the real one was doing it in a very methodical and cheap manner. Anyway, about that dragon. He spewed this way and that, finally hit the ground and broke apart in a burst of shadows.

Without the moon up there it was really dark, but I see well in the dark. I started walking back toward the overturned boxcars, and the couple that were still upright. One of which had been the source for the dragon.

I stopped and thought things over. Maybe I didn't want to do that just yet. I went back to the wreckage of the building and looked around and found my Big Gun with the Big Bullets, went back to the boxcars.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," I said, "because you don't want me to come in there after you."

Pulp Inside the train, Wilbur, an ebony body with shiny ridge-like muscles, a skull like a huge, bumpy turnip, arose from his bed. When he did, the black satin sheet fell away, and he saw his darling, Naomi, exposed. Naked and beautiful as a Frazetta heroine, dark as sin, shiny as fresh-licked licorice. He was everything here he wasn't back there, in the world. He was strong and virile as Tarzan and Conan, crafty as Elak of Atlantis. He was all the heroes of his memory and his imagination. But he was a lot more pissed off.

He tried to will his train back together, but he couldn't. Someone out there was messing with his thoughts by messing with his train, and they had to be stopped. He could sense his dragon was dead. The one he had once worn around his neck. It was dead. But there were others, and he called out to them, and they came out of the shadows in a clutch of beating wings and spurts of dark flame and hisses of chocolate-colored steam.

"Take him," said he who was master of all he surveyed.

Further excerpts from Hellboy's report I'm creeping up, you see, quiet as a mouse in sneakers, some of those gel cushions on the shoe soles, that's how quiet I am, and the side door of the boxcar flies open, and out comes a whole batch of shadow dragons. They aren't as big as the guy I dealt with before, and their eyes are red, like burning coals, as we like to say when referencing hell. They're smaller boogers than the one I dealt with before. They are whipping about like huge dragonflies. They do not look happy, and they do not hesitate to take in the sights, speculate on the nature of the universe. They come right at me, moving like jets.

I have my Big Gun with the Big Bullets pointed, but before I can fire, a shot comes from off to my right. I glance, and there's the Reverend Jim Jeff, walking toward the dragons with his head turned slightly to the side like a curious dog, walking like he has one foot in a ditch, the other on a stump, and he's firing fast, with his big gun, which is not really all that big, and he's not hitting every shot, because I think inside his head he's still spinning from that explosion, probably can't hear a thing, got a humming in his head like a sea-shell pressed to the ear. Didn't bother me a bit, that explosion, except it made some holes in my nifty trench coat, but I been around regular people (I am, after all, an honorary human) enough to know how it could affect him. He also looks a little scalded; one side of his face is as bright as a baboons ass and a bit of it is peeling off like old wallpaper. The other side of his face has grown hair and teeth that stick out of one corner of his lips; the werewolf has jumped out of him after a long time being dormant, or at least a little of it has. That funny walk, he's probably got one wolf leg, and a long tail crammed up under his pants. That can't be comfortable.

He has a gun in either hand and they are barking like a cage full of dogs. Dragons are taking a dive; stuff in his bullets is enough for these guys. I get off some shots, drop two, and then one has me. I can't get a good shot at him. We wrestle all over the ground, me dropping the Big Gun again, him holding onto my trench coat with one talon, trying to scratch my eyes out with the other, succeeding primarily in making my face look like a tic-tac-toe board.

I roll up on top of him, try to get him in some kind of hold, but a stepover toehold doesn't work so good on a dragon. Finally, I grab him by the snout, the top one, in such a way I'm pinching his nose holes together, and then I raise the Big Right Hand and I hit him so hard he spurts into a splatter of shadows, hit him so hard the blow smacks through him and knocks a hole in the ground big enough to fill up and make a nice wading pool.

I get up and rush toward the boxcar, forgetting my Big Gun with the Big Bullets, lying back there somewhere on the ground. I go at the boxcar, whacking at dragons with my Big Right Hand. One of the Reverend's bullets clips me on the shoulder, sends a spray of blood upward, causing it to make an umbrella of red drops.

"Hey," I yell back at him. "Watch it."

"Sorry," the Reverend says, and then he falls down. Doesn't melt, just goes down straight and flat as a dropped two-by-four, shakes a little when he hits. Nose forward, right in the dirt. His wolf tail rips up out of his pants and waves in the wind, then droops.

No time to consider his condition further.

I rush inside the open boxcar door.

Inside the air was cool and it was dark and there was a stench so strong it could wear an overcoat and boots and take a walk. I moved through the boxcar. There were bodies hanging on hooks. There was blood on the walls. My feet were tromping through entrails. There was a black shadow flowing between the corpses and moving about me, and it was ectoplasmic, sticky as a wad of Kleenex beside a teenage boy's bed.

I went on through and came to a door that was closed, pulsing like it was breathing. I could see all this clearly, thanks to those nifty see-in-the-dark eyes of mine. It goes with my ability to see long distances. I'm a walking, talking, night-vision, telescopic kind of guy. (I know you know this, but I like to remind you of my skills because it makes me feel good and ... well, that's mostly it. It makes me feel good.) The door was dark, but it had veins and arteries and they were pumping with the rhythm of a heartbeat. I kicked out at it, and that really hurt my foot. I did then what I should have done all along. I hit it with my right hand and it came apart and fled away in a flow of black rats and flapping bats.

The next room stank only a little less than the first, and the walls were the same, breathing, lined with veins and arteries. As I looked, the veins and arteries became less obvious and I could see rats and bats crawling all over the wall, or rather, they were the wall. The place smelled of not only dead bodies, but of rodent shit.

I went along the floor and the floor swayed. It too was made of bats and rats, and they nipped at my hooves, not causing me any damage (I have pretty tough hooves, as you know), and I came to a black (of course) curtain, and pushed it aside with my very fine and dexterous left hand. In there, on the bed, which was as black as all night, was a man, big and muscular and nude, his head propped against black pillows. His forehead pulsed like a knotted water hose, and beside him on the bed was a woman's corpse, split down the middle, the innards gone, the face gnawed on. She appeared to have on some kind of see-through negligee, stretched over her rotting meat, the blood from her wounds sticking to it like a bandage.

I thought, wow, now that is different a" and, as you know, I've seen a few things.

He got out of the bed as if he might be merely thinking of putting on his pants and checking his mail. He was tall, taller than me, and he came for me at a run.

I ran at him, hard as I could. When we collided in the middle of the dark room, we made a noise like a" pardon this a" but it was a noise like two trains running together. We hit so hard we were both knocked backward.

I wobbled to an upright position. He climbed to his feet.

"I am a living hell," he said. "I am fire and brimstone and shadow and hate. I'm the whole package. I am all the pulp horror that can be in a world."

"No argument," I said.

And then he came for me again.

Hellboy comic panel.

Splash page.

Pulp cover style.

Dynamic. We're talking so beautifully pulp it makes trees in the forest tremble for fear of more like it. You got this big, big, now we're talking big, obsidian guy coming at Hellboy with his fist drawn back. The right one. And its a big fist. Almost looks as if the clenched fingers are an anvil. The body is like a black ice sculpture. Perfect. The head however, not so nice. Big and bulbous as if something inside is about to explode at any moment. Rising out of one ear, pushing to get free, is a bat. It's snarling, showing some real ugly bat teeth.

Hellboy, he looks impressive as well. He and Wilbur (a.k.a. the Obsidian.

Giant) are about the same size, and Hellboy, he has a look on his face that looks very far away from pleasant, and his Big Right Hand (a.k.a. the Right Hand of Doom) is drawn back so far it looks like this punch (lacking economy of motion all the way) is being drawn all the way from hell, and when it hits it will knock its target all the way to the heavens.

And for those paying close attention to detail, in this splash panel we can see on the bed the horrible slab of meat that is Naomi. It is boiling with maggots. Her hair is coming off on the bed in patches.

Another note: The walls are literally made of wing-flapping bats and squirming rats that look half the size of an armadillo.

Darkness swells around the feet of Hellboy and the Obsidian Giant, like a splashing pool of sewage. This is drawn and inked and painted so carefully, so perfectly, we can almost hear the wind from their fists.

Freeze on this panel. Hold this panel. Now a".