Later they stood together looking up at the statue of Christ the Redeemer. The waning moon hung just over his left shoulder. Strange, Hellboy thought. It all started here for me, and finished with Leh, and Leh was supposedly put down by Christ, Sometimes the turning wheels are just too damn oiled.
"What now?" Amelia asked.
"Well, Britain's got a lot of new creatures roaming its countryside, and there are those that Blake released around the world as diversions. They'll spread, maybe mate. We've had reports of something huge in the Indian Ocean, bigger than anything ever seen before. So I guess BPRD is going to be busy. In some ways Blake's new world might just come about, only nothing like he imagined. And who knows, maybe people can learn to live with dragons and banshees."
"Hmm," Amelia said. "OK, but ... I sort of meant, what now?'"
Hellboy looked down and returned her smile. "Oh," he said. "I see. Well ... is there a place around here we can get a good meal?"
"Plenty."
"Good. It's on me."
* * *
Amalfi, Italy — 2005
RICHARD VISITED HIS brother's grave every month for those first couple of years. As time went by the visits grew less frequent, partly because the grief had lessened and partly because Richard had found a new life. He was living in a leaky old house with a beautiful Italian woman, someone who loved him for what she said he would be rather than what he had been. He adored that idea of falling in love with the future. In a way he supposed his father and brother had done just that, but in very different ways. They had been mad.
He liked to think that through time he had discovered sanity.
But still he sometimes went back to that little graveyard, sat by his brother's unmarked grave, and thought of everything that might have been. Occasionally he read of sightings of strange creatures around the globe, leviathans in the deep, and now and then he would see photographs or grainy footage on TV. As time moved on, he was able to disassociate himself from these things. In a way, he supposed, there was wonder in the world again.
And he thought of that most of all. Not all the people who had died, or those who had been maimed or orphaned. The wonder. That's what kept him going.
That and the knowledge that if he ever needed it again, the Book of Ways was safe and sound in his dead brother's folded arms.
About the Author
Tim Lebbon lives in South Wales with his wife and two children. His books include Dusk, Face, The Nature of Balance, Changing of Faces, Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark), Dead Man's Hand, Pieces of Hate, Fears Unnamed, White and Other Tales of Ruin, Desolation, and Berserk. Future publications include Dawn from Bantam Spectra and more books with Cemetery Dance, Night Shade Books, and Necessary Evil Press, among others. He has won two British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Tombstone Award; and he has been a finalist for International Horror Guild and World Fantasy Awards. Several of his novels and novellas are currently under option in the United States and the United Kingdom. Find out more about Tim at his websites: www.timlebbon.net and www.noreela.com.