MONDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2410 1729 CAMPANELLA STREET NEW AVALON, ZETA CYGNI The uniformed cops working crowd control around the crime scene were accustomed to seeing official vehicles turning up, from ambulances to the big black sport utes the IPO crime lab people drove. Indeed, when a large vehicle detached itself from the sparse flow of traffic on Campanella and pulled to the curb with a blue light flashing behind its grille, they at first assumed it was another CSI arriving on the scene, until they took another look and realized it wasn't anything like one of those rides. It was a big black car, long, low, and somehow sleek and burly at the same time, and it had a lot more chrome than a modern vehicle would sport. Despite its station-wagon-like body, it had -tail fins-, big ones. In another life it had been a 1959 Cadillac ambulance, and for these young cops, seeing it pull up to the curb now was a bit like watching a three-decker warship from the great age of sail heave to. Then they saw the gold symbol on the door - an upraised fist holding the grip of a sword, above the block letters "B.P.R.D." - and understood. Nothing was ever quite normal when the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense got involved. After that realization, seeing the people who got out of the converted ambulance was almost not a shock. Great big red guy with filed-down horns, a tail, and a right forearm that looked like it had been borrowed from a statue twice his size? Blue-grey fish guy who didn't conform to any known aquatic sentient species? Sure, why not? This was New Avalon, after all. "Fellas," said the big red guy with a cordial nod as he ducked under the yellow tape. Eyrie Productions, Unlimited and Bacon Comics Group present BPRD: BUREAU OF PARANORMAL RESEARCH AND DEFENSE Vol. 1 No. 27 "The Curse of the Big Train" Devised, plotted, and scripted by Benjamin D. Hutchins Bacon Comics chief: Derek Bacon (c) 2005 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited Detective Sergeant Barbara Gordon of the New Avalon Police Department's Special Crimes Squad fared better than the uniforms; after all, she was expecting the BPRD contingent, and she'd met them before. "Hellboy. Abe," she said. "Glad you could make it." "No problem," Hellboy replied. "What've we got?" "We're not sure," said a ginger-haired man in a suit as he emerged from an alley between two red-brick warehouses. "That's why we called you guys." "Oh, uh - Hellboy, Abe, I don't think you've met Horatio Caine? He's the day shift supervisor for the IPO crime lab. H, meet Hellboy, and this is Abraham Sapien. They're from the BPRD." Caine nodded and shook hands with the two paranormal investigators. "Actually, we -have- met," he said. "Oh?" Gordon asked. Hellboy grinned. "Abe and I made the mistake of trying to take a vacation last year. Didn't know you'd left Alderaan," he added, nodding to Caine. "You get tired of the constant sunshine after a while," said Caine sardonically, adjusting his wool overcoat. Fall was sliding crisply toward winter in New Avalon, where the climate had been tailored to reflect a more northerly latitude than Caine had been accustomed to as a member of the Aldera police. "What we know," Caine went on as he turned and led the other investigators into an alley between two warehouses, "is that we have human remains... but I've never seen anything like this before." Hellboy stood and looked down at what had once been a person. The body was sprawled up against the brick wall of one of the warehouses (the Puckett's Landing district was a sort of waterfront extension of the Millrace, and shared its more famous neighbor's faux-Victorian industrial brickwork architecture), contorted into an unnatural position, arms drawn up, legs straight. Hellboy could see just from the way it lay that it was as stiff as a board. What was surprising about it, though, was that it was -mummified-. The skin was blackened and pulled tight against the bones, with basically no flesh intervening. It was dressed in rags that looked like they'd once been sportswear - a warmup suit, maybe, of the sort people would wear to go jogging in this kind of weather. "Looks like this guy's been dead for quite a while," Hellboy remarked. "Nobody noticed him before now?" "That's the part that makes it so strange. He -hasn't- been dead for quite a while," Caine said. "The first thing we did after photographing the scene was genetype him, just in case, and it turns out he's a city employee - works for the New Avalon Water Company." "What's so strange about that?" Abe asked. "City employees get murdered too." "He was a -current- city employee," Caine said. "He clocked out of his regular shift yesterday afternoon at 5, just like always. Last seen by the manager of his apartment building over on Williams at about 7:30, going out for an after-dinner jog. This man was -alive- less than twenty hours ago." Hellboy hunkered down next to the body and looked it over. "Well, he sure doesn't look it," he said. "What could do this kind of thing to a person in less than a day?" Gordon wondered. "Quite a lot of things, actually," said Abe. "Abe's right," Hellboy said, straightening up. "We'll have to take this back to the Bureau with us and see if our lab guys can narrow it down. No offense, H, but your crew hasn't got the training or the equipment to handle a case like this. Depending on what killed this guy, he could come back to life at nightfall and start eating your lab techs or something." Caine nodded. "Well," he said, "that's why we -have- your department, right?" Abe Sapien smiled thinly. "The last person to have your job didn't agree with that viewpoint," he said. Caine chuckled. "I like to keep an open mind," he said. Although the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense was part of the International Police Organization - in fact, part of the IPO's Criminal Investigations Division - it was not housed at IPO Headquarters downtown. There were several reasons for this, but the main and most important one was that the stuff the BPRD worked with on a daily basis was best kept out of the center of the city. Instead, the Bureau had its own separate headquarters, tucked away in green, wooded hills a few miles northeast of Crescent Heights. Two hours after being led to the desiccated corpse by Horatio Caine, Abraham Sapien was in one of the Bureau's labs, carrying out a careful and detailed examination of said corpse. As he finished up, the door opened and Hellboy entered, carrying a fat file folder in his left hand. "That's quite a file," Abe observed. Hellboy nodded. "Police reports. Lots of 'em. Did you know people have been disappearing in Puckett's Landing for years?" Abe's fishy face looked unruffled. "People disappear all over the city all the time," he said. "That happens in any big city, unfortunately." Hellboy shook his head. "This is different. Every year, from about the end of September until the first snowfall, the disappearance rate in Puckett's Landing -spikes-. Look." He propped the folder in his stone right hand, rummaged in it with his left, and took out a graph. "It never gets high enough to tip the cops off, but if you plot it over time it's obvious. Something -screwy- is going on down there." Abe would've raised an eyebrow if he'd had them. "Is that a technical term?" he asked. Hellboy put the chart away. "'Lise has the computer pulling all the stats from the NAPD right now. We'll have a better plot in an hour or so. You find anything?" he asked. "A few things. Take a look at this." Abe pointed to the side of the body. Hellboy looked, then shook his head. "I don't see anything." Abe reached to a small control panel at the side of the examination table and flicked a switch. The overhead light switched to an alternate mode, bathing the body in a purplish light rich in ultraviolet - and suddenly what he'd been pointing at became obvious. The body's torso had several rows of regular round marks impressed in it, wrapping around its trunk in a spiral pattern. "Huh," Hellboy said. "Sucker marks. Some kind of tentaculid?" Abe nodded. "I believe so. All the signs are here - massive dehydration, sucker marks and crushing damage to the bones of the torso, this very regular laceration to the back of the skull, and a severe disruption of brain tissue. This man was killed by a cthonic being of some sort." "A brain sucker? Ugh. I -hate- brain suckers." "Well, there's more to it than that," Abe said. "I suspect the damage to the body was just a side effect. From what little is left of the brain tissue, I took some psychometric readings, and they were almost completely flat." Hellboy's face fell further. "You think there's a soul eater loose in New Avalon?" "Maybe not loose," Abe said. "If your theory about the disappearances is correct, it may be confined to a specific area." Hellboy blinked. "Puckett's Landing," he said. As he and Hellboy entered the basement office, Abraham Sapien felt a brief sense of trepidation. It wasn't that Abe was a coward, or even that the basement was all that scary; it was just that he believed a wise man should always feel a little bit of fear when entering the domain of an oracle. As always, the feeling passed quickly, because Annalise Fleming wasn't particularly oracular. When they entered her office, the BPRD's resident computer expert was sitting with her combat-booted feet up on her desk, listening to antique electronic trance music at an imprudent volume while an audio-to-video conversion program converted it to psychedelic patterns on her console's 60-inch semi-projective holographic display panel. A little more than five feet tall and a hundred pounds soaking wet - odd turn of phrase, that, Abe had always thought - Annalise wouldn't be intimidating much of anybody anytime soon. With her hair (black streaked with neon green this week) in a pair of Viking-style plaits and her wide-eyed, pug-nosed face, she was constantly being mistaken for a high school student. In truth, she'd been out of high school since she was 12 anyway, and now was rather more than twice that age. Annalise was what the occult experts of the Bureau called a technomancer. She had a natural rapport with electronic equipment that went beyond simple technical aptitude. One of the BPRD's screeners described it in her pre-recruiting report by writing, "Miss Fleming loves computers, and they love her right back." Though the statement was an obvious oversimplification, it did often seem true. Computers had a way of... well, doing -favors- for Annalise. The data center wasn't her life, though, nor were computers her only area of expertise. She was also an authority on the extra- sensory and occult uses of various mind-altering substances, as well as their more mundane applications. She had connections in the black and grey markets of a half-dozen civilizations and could acquire almost any substance for almost any purpose, which was a talent that came in handy on a surprising number of occasions for the Bureau. Today, Hellboy and Abe needed her -primary- talents, though, and it was obvious from what she was doing now that her work on their behalf was already done. Annalise wasn't one to goof off when there was work waiting. "Wondered when you guys were going to show up," she said after pausing the music and switching back to the statistical system she'd been using. "Hey, HB, I got some prime mi-go in the chillbox for this weekend. You in?" Hellboy looked tempted, but hesitant. "Uh... we'll see. 'Yana might not be down with that." Annalise snorted dismissively, then made a whipcrack noise. "Just show us the stats," Hellboy said, sounding mildly aggrieved. "Sure, sure. How about you, Abe? Expand your consciousness?" "Thank you, no," Abe replied. "I make it a rule never to eat or smoke anything that once used language." Annalise shrugged equably. "Suit yourself, man," she said, then pulled up a graph. "Well, here's the chart of disappearances by time. You were right about the way it trends, HB. The rate is about the same in the Landing as it is in the rest of the metro area for most of the year, but every October it spikes, stays that way for about a month, then tapers off just as winter's really starting to set in." "Strange," Abe mused. "What's stranger is this." She punched a couple of keys and pulled up a map of the Puckett's Landing district. With another key she plotted the homes (in red) and workplaces (in blue) of the disappearance victims. "We don't know where most of the victims disappeared from, since in all but the latest cases the bodies were never found," she said. "But we do know where they lived and where they worked." "Scattered all over the Landing and the north end of Docklands," Hellboy said. "That's not much help." "That's what I thought," Annalise said. "Then I had a thought. The police reports must have some information about these people's favorite haunts, right? I mean, if I disappeared, I would hope the cops would ask my friends where I liked to hang out and check to see when was the last time anybody saw me there." Abe nodded. "That makes sense." "So I dug around in the reports and plotted any of those I could find as well." She punched a couple of keys and dropped a third set of dots, these in green, onto the map. Like the others, these were spread out all over the map, though there weren't as many of them; a lot of people's hangouts in any given neighborhood, Hellboy supposed, would overlap. "Not real helpful, yeah? Well, then I ran a statistical interpolation on the whole mess to try and find some kind of center point. I asked myself the question: Is there a place in the Landing that these people's lives revolved around, so to speak, and if so, what is it?" She entered a couple more commands. The red, blue, and green markers vanished, replaced by a sort of grey haze that settled over the holographic map. Geometric lines appeared, bisecting the "cloud" from various angles. All the lines converged on a single point, then shrank, drawing the cloud with them, until all that remained on the map was a single pulsing point of white light. Annalise turned around in her chair. "Now you tell me that's a coincidence," she said. Hellboy leaned closer to the map, his yellow eyes narrowing. "Well, I'll be damned," he muttered, then straightened up and turned to Abe. "Knights Field." Abe slowly blinked his big black eyes. "The Curse of the Knights?" he said. "That's crazy," Hellboy said. "Not really," Annalise told him. "Remember the Hebron Tigers?" "They built their stadium on an ancient Ytherian burial mound!" Hellboy replied. "I'm pretty sure the same isn't true of the New Avalon Knights." "Yeah, but there's too much circumstantial evidence here to ignore," Annalise persisted. "The victims' lives centered, whether they knew it or not, on Knights Field. The disappearances always start just after the end of baseball season - when the Knights would be in the playoffs if they were ever any good. And this pattern started in 2385 - the year the team came to town." Hellboy stared hard at the map for a couple of seconds, then nodded reluctantly. "I guess it makes sense. Jeez! I just hate sports curses." He turned to Abe. "Better get a sweep team together and start checking out the neighborhood around the ballpark." By evening, the reports were in, and they were unanimous: Metaphysically speaking, there was something very strange going on in the vicinity of Knights Field. "Holy cow," Hellboy said as Abe entered his office. "Check out these PK readings. Why haven't we noticed this before?" "We haven't been looking for it," Abe replied mildly. "I have more bad news." "Great," Hellboy grumbled. "Lay it on me." Abe unrolled a sheaf of charts on Hellboy's desk. After taking a moment to orient himself with the top one, Hellboy realized it was an architectural drawing of a building - and not just any building. "Hey, this is Knights Field," he said. "Where'd you get this?" "From the city planning office," Abe replied. "Well, what about it?" "The architect's name is Wladislaw Shandor," Abe said. "Sound familiar?" Hellboy's brow furrowed between his horns. "Shandor. Shandor," he murmured; then his face fell. "Aww, -hell- no," he said. "-Ivo- Shandor. The designer of the Great Manhattan Spirit Antenna?" Abe nodded. "That's the one. Wladislaw is apparently a descendent of his. He designed quite a number of buildings around the city, and in Coronet on Corellia before he moved here in '82. They all seem to be quite ordinary - but I can't say the same about Knights Field." He peeled back the general arrangement drawing on the top of the sheaf, revealing a structural diagram beneath. Hellboy looked it over. "Some very interesting geometry in this structural steelwork," he observed. "Interesting materials, too," Abe said. "Lemme guess. Cold-riveted steel girders with selenium cores." "Mm-hmm. And orichalcum rivet caps along the main axes. In addition, the stadium happens to be sited at the intersection of two of the pseudocontinent's lesser ley lines. It seems Mr. Shandor is also a fair predictive geomancer, since those lines hadn't even formed yet when the building was erected." Hellboy looked at the structural diagram for a few more moments, then paged through the drawings below, his practiced eye catching details here and there that deepened his dread. Then he flopped the sheaf back to the general arrangement, plunked his stone hand down flat on top of it, and said, "The whole thing's a great big cage." Abe nodded again. "The question is, a cage for what?" Hellboy looked thoughtful for a moment, then asked, "This Shandor guy, is he still alive?" Abe shrugged. "No one knows. He disappeared in 2402." "In October?" The fish-man shook his head. "He was reported missing by his housekeeper on April 17." "Huh. Well, either way, we can't ask him what's going on. Let's get 'Lise running some simulations to see what kind of entities this thing could hold in," Hellboy said. "We can cross-reference what she comes up with against the body we found and see if anything matches." "And when it does?" "Then we'll have to pay a little visit to Knights Field." Why, Hellboy wondered rhetorically, do we always do these things at midnight? The question he asked out loud was perhaps no less rhetorical, but it was somewhat more to the point: "Are you sure this is gonna work?" "No," Abe Sapien replied casually. He finished calibrating the verteron inhibitor unit, thumbed it into standby mode, and then stepped back so that Hellboy could wrangle the heavy device on its massive iron tripod into position on the pitcher's mound. "Great," Hellboy grunted as he set himself to that task. The stadium was eerie in the middle of the night - almost as eerie as some graveyards he'd been in during his career, which he wouldn't have expected. It was a smallish ballpark as these things went, only seating about 40,000 people. Its old-fashioned design put the seats right up close to the field, giving it an intimate, even chummy atmosphere during the day, or in the early evening with the lights turned on and the stands packed with cheering fans. And they generally were, too. The Knights weren't very good - they rarely had a winning season, and had never once made it to the post-season - but they had a large and loyal following. They were by far the more popular of the two major-league baseball teams in New Avalon, despite the fact that the Monarchs had a much bigger, slicker stadium, massive corporate backing, and two World Series trophies. Knights Field prided itself on being one of the friendliest parks in the majors. Right now, though, it felt hard and forbidding, the empty stands and massive mechanical scoreboard looming over the field and its nocturnal visitors like disapproving sentinels. Hellboy would be just as glad to get this job over with and get out. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye and whirled, his hand automatically dropping toward the big handgun hanging from his belt. He stopped himself from drawing it with an effort of will as he saw that the moving figure was the jumpsuited shape of a maintenance man, emerging into the watery evening light from the shadowy depths of the home team's dugout. "Jeez," Hellboy said, removing his hand from the gun. "What're you doing here?" The skinny maintenance man said nothing for a moment. Then he raised his head and looked Hellboy in the eye - and his eyes flashed with an eerie blue-white fire. "Oh, sh - " Hellboy said. "SHAKKATH!" the maintenance man roared in a voice like a kettledrum. Lightning shot from his outstretched hand and hit Hellboy full in the chest, hurling him away from the inhibitor and sending him sprawling painfully on the frozen grass near third base. Abe lunged for the inhibitor's controls, but the maintenance man zapped him as well. "Abe?" Hellboy called. "You OK?" "Can't move," Abe replied from somewhere near second base. "Yeah, me neither. Just hang tight, it'll wear off in a minute." Hellboy slowly raised his head - about the only part of his body that wasn't as numb as granite just then - to look at the man in the coverall, who was walking with a slow, even step out to the middle of the field. "Wladislaw Shandor, I presume," he said. The man paused, then turned his glittering eyes toward Hellboy. In the gloom, the investigator could just make out a smile spreading onto his face. "Very clever," he said. "Not really," Hellboy replied. "What other warlock creep is going to show up to stop us from whacking whatever monster you trapped under Knights Field?" Shandor inclined his head, conceding the point. "Fine," he said, "you are not clever after all. In fact, now that I look at the situation more closely, I'm forced to agree. You two shouldn't have come here alone." "'Swhat we do," Hellboy replied chattily. "So listen, Wlad, I'm curious. Why summon a Harbinger of Chaos and trap it under a baseball stadium?" Shandor chuckled. "Why does a mortal man ever have truck with such creatures?" he replied. "Revenge, my friend." "Revenge? On the -Knights-?" "Yes! Revenge!" Shandor said. "Not for myself, though. For Walter." Hellboy blinked. "Walter? Who's Walter?" he asked. "Walter -Johnson-," Shandor said in the voice of one who is patiently explaining something obvious to a very stupid person. It didn't help Hellboy. "Who the hell is Walter Johnson?" he demanded. "Don't toy with me, demon," Shandor snarled. "I hold your life in my hands." "That happens to me a lot," Hellboy replied, unconcerned. "Are you gonna tell me who Walter Johnson is or not?" "He was a baseball pitcher," Abe put in, making Shandor jump slightly - he'd forgotten that the other investigator was there. "He was the GREATEST baseball pitcher!" he roared. "The greatest who ever lived! He gave this miserable team his -life-! Gave them the only World Series win they ever -had-! And how did they repay him? They cast him aside like a worn-out shoe. Noooo, this cannot stand. It -cannot- stand." "Uh... the Knights never won the World Series, and they sure as hell never had a great pitcher," Hellboy said. "Walter Johnson didn't play for the Knights," Abe explained. "He pitched for the Washington Senators... in the early 1900s." "The -1900s-?!" Hellboy blurted. Slowly, he hitched himself up on his elbows so that he could give Shandor the incredulous stare he deserved. "You cursed the Knights because of some 20th-century ballplayer?!" "He -came- to me," Shandor said, a mad light gleaming in his eyes. "He came to me and begged me to balance the scales! He cannot rest unless he knows the team that cast him out will never win again without him!" "But this isn't the same team!" Hellboy said. "Actually," Abe interjected quietly, "it is." "What?" "Yes, yes, your fishy friend knows," Shandor said. "The Knights were once the Minnesota Twins - and before that, they were the Senators." "But so were the Neo-Texas Rangers," Abe pointed out. "Bah! An -expansion- franchise," Shandor spat. "Not the true Senators. Not Walter's Senators. No, -this- is the team that had to be punished in order for the Big Train to rest easy in the next world." "Look, buddy," Hellboy said. "If all you were doing was screwing up a baseball team's win-loss ratio with this little escapade, that'd be one thing - but your little pal under the field here has been killing people for more than 20 years!" "An unexpected side effect," Shandor mused, nodding. "Great Bhuud-Tze'lhig sleeps during the cold months, and the Knights' own energies sustain him during the season, but there's a... gap." "Yeah, well, that 'gap' has killed -dozens- of innocent people, people who had nothing to -do- with your little grudge against the Senators," Hellboy said. "Yes, he has," Shandor acknowledged. "And now he will claim two more. BHUUD-TZE'LHIG! AMAL DAK SHUGGOR KABATH AKAL! HOROG SHUG LAMATH!" "OK, I definitely don't like the sound of that," Hellboy said, doubling his efforts to get his body back under control. He'd actually recovered faster than he expected, but he'd drawn it out in hopes of keeping Shandor talking. Now he gritted his teeth and made himself get up. Glancing across the way, he saw Abe still flat on his back. The amphibian investigator was tough, damn tough, but he didn't have Hellboy's infernal constitution. The field shook, then split open. The verteron inhibitor tipped over and crashed to the frozen ground on its side as the pitcher's mount parted, making way for a huge, fleshy, sucker-lined tentacle. "-Not- good," Hellboy muttered. The tentacle, which looked about as big around as Hellboy's own body, flailed blindly in the air for a moment, then lashed downward - straight toward Abe. Hellboy tensed to leap into its path, not knowing if he could get his still-shocky body to make the move in time. The tentacle smacked down onto a dome of hard black light that suddenly appeared over Abe's sprawled form. "Wha - ?!" Shandor blurted. The tentacle recoiled from the dome of dark as if burned by it. An aggrieved, hideous, muffled roar sounded from under the field. The light dissipated, revealing a petite figure in a dark-blue cloak standing over Abe, her hands crossed in front of her face. "Raven!" Hellboy blurted. "Would you guys keep the noise down?" Raven asked dryly in a soft, sardonic voice. "People are trying to sleep." "Witch!" Shandor snarled. "You won't stop me!" He hurled lightning at her, the same spell that had felled Abe and Hellboy, but she blocked it with more of that black light, then counterstruck with her own power, forcing Shandor onto the defensive. "I'll handle this guy," Raven said. "You see what you can do about Bhuud-Tze'lhig." Three more fat tentacles burst from the ground around the now-demolished pitcher's mound, flailing wildly at the air as the horrible roaring from beneath the ground increased in intensity. "Sure," Hellboy said. "Great." Shandor hissed with fury and doubled his efforts, but Raven seemed to be his equal in the sorcerous arts. The two stood deadlocked, their powers sizzling and slashing at each other in the space between, as Shandor's cthonic ally went berserk. Hellboy drew his weapon, a massive revolver of Ignatine manufacture - the monks called it "the Samaritan" - and blasted the nearest tentacle. Blue-grey ichor splattered from a wound the size of a watermelon as the hand-cannon's huge bullet struck home; it made a sound like a side of beef falling from a rooftop to the sidewalk. The monstrous creature shrieked - part of its main body was starting to emerge from the field now, complete with a beaked maw like that of some nightmarishly huge squid - and slammed him to the ground with a second tentacle. Hellboy cursed and tried to roll over, but before he could scramble to his feet, the tentacle wrapped around him and heaved him into the air. "OOOOOOH - CRAAAAAP!" Hellboy yelled as Bhuud-Tze'lhig flourished him high in the air, then slammed him to the ground in the general vicinity of first base. "That's good. Keep him distracted," Raven said dryly as she focused her efforts on neutralizing Shandor. "VERRRY - FUNNYYYYYY!" Hellboy bellowed as the monster smashed him down again, not far from Abe. "BHUUD-TZE'LHIG MAKATH HABAG SLABA!" Shandor screeched, his eyes and neck veins bulging. "SHAKKOR HAD SHELBAGH NAKOYA - " The incantation was interrupted by another terrible roar from the monster, one that even took its summoner by surprise. The creature thumped Hellboy to the ground near where he'd fallen when Shandor had zapped him, but as it lifted him again, he drove the fingers of his stone hand into the flesh of its tentacle. Ichor spouted out around them as he wrenched the hand downward with all his strength, tearing a gash in the flabby, glistening surface. Bhuud-Tze'lhig released him, rearing back to howl and lash at the sky with all four tentacles, two maimed now. Hellboy hit home plate hard, bleeding from angry red-black sucker marks around his body, and sagged for a half-second before rising and blasting the main mass of the monster's body with the Samaritan. The creature jerked, keening, as the slugs tore into its hideous flesh, and Shandor's body jerked with it. Sweat popped out on the sorcerer's forehead as he fought to retain control and keep fending off Raven. "You'll never stop him that way!" Shandor yelled. "I don't intend to," Hellboy replied, smirking slightly. "Just keep it busy." As the monstrous being slashed at the air with its tentacles, trying and failing to get a new grip on Hellboy, Abe - who had at last shaken off the shock of Shandor's blast just in time to roll out of the hurtling Hellboy's path a few moments before - darted in from its flank. Quick as lightning, he seized the verteron inhibitor, wrenched it free from its mangled tripod, and then hurled it with all the strength in his long aquatic muscles at Hellboy. A moment later, one of Bhuud-Tze'lhig's undamaged tentacles hit him broadside, flinging him clean across right field and into the bleachers. Hellboy holstered his pistol and dove for the inhibitor, catching it just before it hit the ground and rolling out of the way of Bhuud-Tze'lhig's pounding tentacles. Rolling to his feet, he caught the tapering end of the nearest one with his stone hand. "Ah-ah," he said. "Not twice." Then he whirled and smashed the tentacle he held into another one, knocking both away from him, before turning and charging straight for the monster's main body. Within seconds he was inside the creature's reach, his booted hooves churning up chunks of frozen turf. Bhuud-Tze'lhig snapped at him, its beak extending on a fleshy protuberance like a stunted tentacle of its own. Hellboy interposed his stone hand, propping the beak open with its indestructible length, and then shoved the inhibitor inside with the other and thumbed the activator. The device emitted a hair-raising near-ultrasonic whine, like the sound of a million strobe flashes all charging at once, and then pulsed. Bhuud-Tze'lhig convulsed, its very structure rippling, as the inhibitor's charged energy pulse tore at the bonds that held its animated-matter structure to the mystic energy field that was the creature's true self. It shrieked in inhuman agony, its tentacles whipping and twitching - but when the pulse passed it was clearly still very much alive. "Oh, crap," Hellboy muttered a half-second before it figured out how to spiral a tentacle into the center to snag him, did so, and then hurled him up into the press box. Wladislaw Shandor gave a triumphant laugh. "YES! NOW, IMMORTAL BHUUD-TZE'LHIG! CRUSH MY FOE WITH YOUR - " As he extracted himself painfully from the right-field bleachers, Abe Sapien smiled very slightly. Unlike Hellboy, who never bothered to read the technical briefings on new pieces of equipment, he knew that the inhibitor was supposed to do that. The first pulse was just to take the beast's measure, figure out the resonance rates of its verteron flux. Now came the real thing. The beast didn't even have time to howl as the verteron pulse tore through it, stripping away the bonds that held together the crude matter of its earthly form. It simply twitched, rippled, and then dissolved into a brilliant column of light that rushed skyward and vanished. "NO!" Shandor cried. "BHUUD-TZE'LHIG ZAKASH ABOR! SHUG'NATH SLAKAAD ABADA - " "Enough of this," Raven growled, her eyes going white. "Azarath - Metrion - ZINTHOS!" The glowing blackness surrounding her and the dark blue of her garments both changed to white as the eye-shaped amulet at her throat popped open, pouring out the purest light Shandor had ever seen. It tore at him, ripping his defenses to shreds. He reeled, screaming. "NO!" he yelled, wild-eyed. "WALTER! HELP ME! HELP YOUR MOST HUMBLE SERVANT! WALTER JOHNSON ZAKASH ABOR! SHUG'NATH SLAKAAD ABADA TAL-JAKAR!" Hellboy heaved himself out of the wreckage of the press box and jumped down to the field just in time to be blown over by the shockwave as a bolt of lightning streaked out of the sky and struck Shandor dead-on. Abe, still in the bleachers, ducked behind the right field wall. Raven cried out and shielded her eyes, her white cloak blowing all around her. High above, the glass in the stadium's lights shattered, raining down all around the field. Hellboy sat up, shook his head, and then carefully rose to his feet, brushing bits of glass from his tattered coat and bloodied chest. Then he drew the Samaritan and climbed warily out of the Knights dugout. His eyes had been dazzled by the light show, so it took him a moment to make out shapes. Raven's cloak had gone back to dark blue when her amulet closed after the blast, so she was almost invisible anyway. The pale grey-green shape of Abe was visible off to the side as he made his way in from right field. There was nothing left of Bhuud-Tze'lhig but a smoking hole in the ground where the pitcher's mound belonged. And the man standing halfway between first and home... was not Wladislaw Shandor. He was much taller, his shoulders much broader, and he was dressed not in the dark jumpsuit of a maintenance man, but in the white flannels of an old-time baseball player. "Would somebody like to tell me what in the hell is going on around here?" asked Walter Johnson. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2410 BPRD HEADQUARTERS Hellboy stood by the window of BPRD director Tom Manning's office, looking down at the courtyard behind the main BPRD building. It was a cold, blustery day in the rest of greater New Avalon, but in the courtyard, the weather was springlike and balmy, thanks to an adept down in Research who had a way with that kind of thing. Annalise Fleming was taking advantage of the opportunity to play a little catch with one of the greatest baseball pitchers who ever lived. "How's he taking it?" Hellboy asked. Manning turned from the report he was perusing. "Johnson? He'll be fine. We've got him in the standard orientation program. He's a little taken aback... " Hellboy reached into his inside pocket, took out a cigar, stuck it in the corner of his mouth, fished out a box of wooden matches, struck one on his stone hand, lit the cigar with it, then shook it out and tossed it in Manning's ashtray. He chuckled. "Well, it's not every day you get resurrected in the 25th century by some wacko who thought he was calling on your infernal power." He turned to Manning. "He didn't have anything to do with the monster, you know." Manning nodded. "'Lise told me," he said. "She spent most of yesterday, while you were lying around in the infirmary, guiding him through a spirit revelation. Whatever Shandor was communicating with that told him to trap that thing under Knights Field, it wasn't Walter Johnson." He plopped the report down on his desk and sighed. "So, we'll get him oriented, make sure he's going to be OK, and then release him into society." He lit a cigar of his own. "How's Abe doing?" "He's fine," Hellboy said. "Broken arm - same one he broke on the Giurescu job, but in a different place. The docs say it'll bond so he won't know the difference in a few days." "And you?" Manning asked, gesturing with his stogie to the bandages crossing Hellboy's barrel chest. "Ah, I'm OK," Hellboy said dismissively. "I get banged up worse'n this every Walpurgisnacht." He puffed his cigar, then walked around Manning's desk and headed for the door. "Take it easy, Tom. I'm taking the day off. You need me for anything, I'm gonna be hangin' down at Strangefate Books." "You do that," Manning called after him, then got started on the next report. ... ON NOVEMBER 12, 2410, A BPRD ESPER TEAM REPORTED THE KNIGHTS FIELD AREA OF PUCKETT'S LANDING FREE OF ANY SUPERNATURAL ACTIVITY. WALTER JOHNSON COMPLETED REORIENTATION IN DECEMBER. IN JANUARY 2411 HE SIGNED A FIVE-YEAR, cr15,000,000 CONTRACT WITH THE NEW AVALON KNIGHTS AS PLAYER-MANAGER. UNDER HIS LEADERSHIP, THE KNIGHTS WON THE 2411 WORLD SERIES, DEFEATING THE NEW AVALON MONARCHS OF THE GALACTIC LEAGUE IN FIVE GAMES. DURING THE SERIES, JOHNSON PITCHED TWO COMPLETE GAMES AND GAVE UP ONLY ONE EARNED RUN. THE DISTURBANCES AROUND KNIGHTS FIELD HAVE NEVER RECURRED... Eyrie Productions, Unlimited and Bacon Comics Group presented BPRD: BUREAU OF PARANORMAL RESEARCH AND DEFENSE "The Curse of the Big Train" by Benjamin D. Hutchins with help from The Bacon Comics Bullpen Hellboy, Abe Sapien, and the BPRD created by Mike Mignola except Annalise Fleming created by Benjamin D. Hutchins with other creative debts as noted elsewhere BPRD Vol. 1 No. 27 BACON COMICS GROUP 2410 E P U (colour) 2005