The Mouth on Charming Hill Chapter Four, a hellboy fanfic

The Mouth on Charming Hill:

Chapter Four

Charming Manor

Hallisburg, VA.

"Okay," Hellboy muttered, propping himself up with his right hand and plucking a large, bent splinter from his pant leg. "Evil undead eight-year old. Got to remember that." Settling his weight on that propped hand, he shifted, sending a shower of dust from wood and mold out; he levered carefully up from the dampened dirt now bared by the gutted floorboards. Except for the few toothpicks of wood that had lodged in the edges of his coat, easily brushed aside when he stood gingerly, the actual tearing up of the floor had done little damage to him. The banquet hall itself was a different matter. The long, soft table had splintered and torn apart with diseased simplicity, legs snapped and jutting fiercely out from the dining table tossed against the far wall, crumpled in half.

Brushing down the worn, dusted folds of his coat with his flesh hand, he swung the other lightly through the stale air, trying to sweep away the disturbed dust from his face. With the lack of any decent lighting and the thick layer of irritating dust obscuring what little light there was, walking over fallen mounds of cloth and an uneven earthen foundation would be difficult. Probably stupid, too, he snorted, and did so anyway.

Still sweeping his right hand slowly through the air, he stepped forward, boot landing firmly on a splintered floorboard and easily crumbling the weak wood. He paused, sliding it aside with the side of his foot, and moved to step again only to stop and exhale with an annoyed restraint.

"Y'know," he muttered conversationally, digging his left hand into a coat pocket, "what the hell'm I doing?" From the various wards and small religious tokens he drew out a small flashlight, flipping it over in his palm and casually flicking it on. The dust obscured the thin beam, blurring slightly though it was nonetheless much clearer; at least now he could see the frequent scattering of aged wood snapped from the floorboards and old rock pulled up from the spongy earth, before stepping on it.

Absently swiping at the dust a last time with his right hand, as the dry cloud began to resettle, he twitched the flashlight to the side, trying to pick out the gleam of metal beneath dirt, or wood. "Damn," Hellboy grumbled, annoyed with Charming Manor. "What do you say you give me back my gun, huh?"

On a whim, he glanced up, flicking the flashlight's slender, battery-operated light up as well; a bizarre, coiled pattern of a serpent wrapped, mouth gaping, around an exaggeratedly large fly was painted on the sagging wooden ceiling, chipped and faded paint pierced by the occasional floorboard.

"Nice," he said, dryly, and swept the flashlight back down to continue searching the frenetic mess. Kicking aside several sharply angled slats, soft splinters jabbing out from each broken angle, he did the same to a half-ripped tapestry haphazardly strewn across the dirt. "This place isn't going to last, Spooky: didn't you read the story? One man builds a house on sand," he flicked the flashlight to scan the clutter along the wall before him, and was rewarded with a faint metal glint. "And another man, he's a smart guy – he builds on a rock foundation."

Hellboy stooped, crouching, to pick up the Samaritan, half buried under a ragged tapestry made a pincushion with splinters and a broken floorboard or two jabbed deep into it. "So what've you got, Spooky?" he asked absently, lifting the Samaritan with his left hand and turning it to check for dents or stains. "A big hill of dirt? That's not much better than sand. One more big storm with you sucking all the water up, and bye-bye Charming Manor."

Somewhere in the chaotically devastated banquet hall came the distinct (and quickly becoming familiar) sound of wood snapping suddenly in two. His eyes flickered up from glancing over the Samaritan to stare briefly at the wall beside him. He waited, still crouched casually in the light wreckage as the gun gleamed, the flashlight's beam catching it from where he carefully held the slender cylinder with his stone hand.

"Spooky," he said patiently, "you've got to learn how to take criticism." Smoothly tucking the Samaritan into its worn leather holster with all the suave grace of a Western vigilante, he stood, drawing himself up with a meaningfully bored shrug of his coat. He glanced to the fading mural overhead and gave one mock-pitying shake of his head before turning to face the banquet hall as a whole.

He held his hands out in a sarcastic pantomime of congeniality, held to the side as the flashlight cast its beam through the remaining hazy dust. "That okay with you?"

The small and unpleasant wind murmured around his boots, sifting through rubble and flapping the edges of shredded cloth draped in asymmetrical discord in the dark expanse of wood and broken chairs. It still stank of a heavy, sweet rot, stronger than before as the wind wafted it through, from mold, velvet, and aged, weakened wood – flowers, too, somewhere in the corners or outside the hall, putrid and hidden.

"Hey, Spooky," Hellboy drawled, twitching the flashlight so it flickered along the far, blackened wall, diffracted by the hazy lack of lighting. "Is this the best you can do? Throwin' a little tantrum?" He made a brief, amused noise in the back of his throat, half-smirking in a condescending manner as he glanced, unimpressed, across the room.

"Go away," came the child's voice, abruptly sharp and hateful as it rang through the shadows and dust. "This is not your place. Go away!"

The table, tossed some distance away, groaned and with a shuddering cracking collapsed entirely in an awkward mess of wood and dirt. Dust roiled up from it, curling around what remained of the torn and crumpled chairs. The light from the small flashlight glinted, piercingly, through the momentarily disturbed cloud of dust.

"Yeah," he said. "Whatever."

Walking with as uncaring an air of indifference as was possible, he bent his head forward to carefully fit through one of the empty doorways into an even larger room. The ceiling vaulted, sharply, allowing him to straighten his neck as he lifted his boots to step gently on the floorboards. The wood settled with only a few puffs of old dust leaving the thin space between slats; this room with two once-elegant staircases leading up on the walls, to his left and to his right, was darker and far cleaner – though spiderwebs still clung stubbornly to the staircases.

Through the dark of the wide room he could see an arching doorway several feet in front of him, behind which – he turned the tiny flashlight to illuminate the carved wood – was what he thought was the front door. There were other doorways, of course, in the room, one (servants' quarters?) at the base of each staircase, but only the entranceway had some remaining semblance of worn and delicate décor.

"Really letting this place go, Spooky," Hellboy noted, and he took a few cautious, creaking steps forward. With the odd cleanliness of this particular room, the floor and walls gleaming distantly and the air not dusty, the flashlight was brighter, shining with a stricter clarity.

Movement, then, outside the narrow illumination of the flashlight, a dark shift in the shadows balanced at the foot of the staircase to his right. He twisted the flashlight over in reaction, an attempt to catch the movement, and was rewarded with the brief glimpse of something darting beyond the edge of the door by the last step; one trace of black pulling into the room behind that door, leaving it gaping slightly, a narrow strip only shaded more by his flashlight's direction. He began moving to the door, pausing to study the tube still pinched gingerly between rocky fingers and then looking to his empty left hand, flesh fingers idly flexing. With something of a lopsided shrug, he drew the Samaritan out a second time, balancing it with practiced ease in his palm.

The faint harsh sound of static burst from the small channel-radio at his belt as he went to follow the unknown thing, and he stopped, again, with an irritated expression. He re-holstered the Samaritan, feeling a sense of annoyed timing, and depressed the comm.-button on top of the small square with his thumb. "Sand," he acknowledged, loudly enough so his voice would carry through, as would the unspoken threat. "What the hell do you want?"

"Hey, hey, now, big fella," Sand replied in good-natured defense, her voice tinny. "You're only going to push everyone away, you know. Alienate yourself. Wind up a lonely old man surrounded by an exponentially growing number of cats."

Hellboy kept his thumb in place, looking appraisingly at the front door. "Hey, Sand," he said, sharply. "Leave my cats alone. And who are you calling an old man, anyway?" He turned the flashlight up, glanced critically at the undecorated and gloomy ceiling and the railings where the second floor grew back from the stairs.

"Yeah, well, witty comeback inserted here," Sand muttered, her voice drawn thin by static and obstructions. "Anyway: Liz and I got kicked out of the bookstore. Local police force might be tight-lipped as all get-out, but at least they're efficient. You know – or something." She coughed, once, either naturally or from some bored anxiety.

Probably just bored, he thought dryly, and keeping his eyes and the flashlight's clear beam on the side door, asked, "So where'd you run off to now, Sand? Try not to piss off any of the locals." He glanced back to the decadent banquet hall, and added, "Living or undead."

Sand took a moment to respond, as though she were listening to another speaking on her end, before making an amused snorting sound. "Liz says we'll leave the pissing off of locals, be they living or be they dead – sorry, undead – to you. Don't kill the messenger, now!"

She was, he thought with a trace of his own unpleasant humor, too damn gleeful about it – as, he was sure, was Liz.

"But to answer your question," Sand continued, that tinny voice barely carrying through the air, "we're kind of right outside the front of Charming Manor. Trust me; we'd love to barge in and kick some intangible ass right alongside you, but there's a really, really big tree laying here instead of, y'know, half the front veranda. It sort of fell across the door some time last night, near as I can figure. Can't move it!" she ended, bizarrely cheery.

Hellboy turned to face the front door again, as if to judge the strength of the wood both of and around it. At the edge of his vision he caught another vague and shadowy movement, this one also darting swiftly beyond that side door, sliding through the gap left open. "Damn," he muttered. Louder, he spoke to Sand, "Is Liz next to you?" Waiting, he returned his attention to that side door, carefully watching it for more movement.

"Where else would she be?" Sand answered rhetorically, quickly – before, in an entirely too 'knowing' tone, she added, slyly, "Oh-ho-ho. Yeah, she's here. I'll get off the line." She paused, and finished, unable to resist, "Nudge-nudge."

"Sand," said Hellboy. "Shut up."

The static resumed temporarily, rasping and easily louder than their voices were on the line; it was distracting and too loud of a noise, actually, one that would probably drawn even more attention to them than he already had by himself. Perfect, he thought.

"H.B.?" asked Liz, her voice, too, thinned by the line as the static vanished; still, this particular reedy voice was unmistakably Liz's. "You wanted to talk with me?" She sounded faintly, but no less distinctly, humored, and he felt a wry sort of smile pulling at his own mouth with the thought.

"Yeah," he answered, wanting to clear his throat but not taking the time to do it. "Look, I'm worried about you, sorta – you doing okay after the thing with the tree?"

It was as unclear and fumbling a question as he could have hoped.

She was obviously amused when she responded, a wistfully sarcastic humor in her voice – he could nearly see her smiling. "You're worrying about me? I think you've got it mixed around a little: aren't you the one who takes all the hits here? Besides, it's not like it really matters anyway – I'm fine."

A brief and faint murmur ensued, as – he assumed – she turned to speak to or with Agent Sand, and with something of an obscured, parting affirmation, Liz shifted back to the radio-line. "H.B.," she said, almost able to hide the tired tone in her voice, "this tree's not going to be moving any time soon – it's taken half the veranda and the veranda's roof with it. I'm surprised we've gotten as close to the door as we have with all the broken wood around it. Never mind the actual tree." Her voice thinned again, wavering and fading.

Hellboy, too, was silent for a moment, feeling as though he should offer some form of gruff encouragement and knowing if he hadn't already lost whatever those things had been, he sure as hell was going to if he didn't wind up this conversation. Damn, he thought, with no small irritation at life and the world in general.

"Liz, you and Sand head 'round the house," he said, instead, moving toward the side door as the flashlight bobbed and gleamed. "Back door's open; cut through the kitchen and the dining room." He paused, eyeing and mentally judging the stability of the staircase near the side door, doubting it would hold his weight, but thinking it could probably support the two women. "Stay quiet," he added with a lazy glance to the banquet hall," and get to the foyer or whatever it is. Check the second floor."

Liz, as always, followed his words quickly, committing instructions easily to memory in preparation. "Where'll you be?" she asked, impersonal and expectant.

"Checking out a side room," he said in clarification, absently casting the flashlight's beam up the stairs. "Thought I saw something move. Safer for me to follow after it than letting you and Sand." He looked to the door now only a foot away, ducking his head in consideration as she spoke again in reply.

""We'll turn on locators if we come across anything dangerous," Liz sighed, the noise small and dwarfed by the room. "One of us will radio in if it's an emergency."

"Same here," he said, and grinned humorlessly for a moment. "Don't know what it'd take to get me in a bind, kid."

She laughed, brief and faded into a reedy ghost of a noise, and with a wry familiarity said, "Don't get cocky – it'll only make it more embarrassing." The smile, or the tone of one, was still in her voice, and it vanished smoothly into a last remark: "Radio silence until someone's in danger, then?"

"Radio silence," he agreed, and lightened the press of his thumb on the comm.-button. "Stay safe, Liz."

"Same to you, H.B.," she said, and an abrupt burst of static took the place of her voice, disrupting the air for several seconds until he lifted his thumb entirely. Reaching for and drawing the Samaritan from the stamped holster, he hoisted it effortlessly to his broad shoulder and gently knocked the side door open.

Liz stepped through the doorway into yellowed light, hazed by a layer of dust and made musty as it drifted aimlessly in the kitchen. She waved her hand absently before her face in a reflexive attempt to brush away the thick, rotted stink of some shriveled and dead plant life. "H.B.," she said with a faint smile, looking at a widely spaced path of dents in the wood, weak slats bent where his booted hooves had stepped.

She turned to look for Sand, hearing the other agent poking curiously about in the backyard, and started slightly, half-turned, at seeing a small child with greasy red hair and a look of undefined fury. "Oh," said Liz, instinctively moving for her gun and stopping, feeling foolish but still wary. "Hello. Do you live here?"

The girl's face twisted into an ugly expression, and she bunched her soggy, dirtied skirt in her hands. "You do not belong here!" she screamed, and blue-white flame burst from Liz's fingertips, as uncontrollable as the sudden heat that exploded in her mind.