Hellboy: Odd Jobs by Christopher Golden, Mike Mignola Read Free Book Online Page A

been turned to stone or something. Last night it opened its eyes and spoke to me.
    German."
    "Did it speak of your father again?" Abe asked.
    Hellboy nodded, and poured a fresh glass of wine.
    The morning after Thomas's death, Guy quit the invalid's hospice. He made his apologies, and fled the building. For Francine, it was a loss upon a loss, with no time to catch her breath.
    Francine flinched when the Monsieur le Directeur used Guy as an example to all at the monthly staff

    meeting. He had grown too attached to one of the patients, the Directeur explained, an intimacy ill-advised in the medical and nursing profession. The Directeur gazed meaningfully at Francine, no doubt misinterpreting the tears she brushed away from her cheek.
    She missed Thomas, too
    but she missed Guy's attachment to the hospice even more. It created a sudden, irreparable vacuum that frightened her. For the first time, there were fissures in their life together.
    Days later, he still would not speak of what had happened in the medical lab the evening that Thomas had died. He never explained the odd smell, or what had already shaken him so, before he'd learned of Thomas's passing. She had laundered the uneasy stink of that night from the bedclothes, but Guy's sleep was still restless and punctuated with inexplicable shivers.
    That she planned to clock extra hours at the hospice only aggravated the unspoken rift. As if goaded to match her distance, Guy secured extra evenings at the Faculté de Médecine, claiming he needed to make up for the loss of once-dependable income and had to cover the additional Metro fees necessary to the longer commute.
    She didn't like it; the Faculté was a mystery to her. She'd never laid eyes on its doors, much less its expansive halls and cluttered rooms. He'd made no friends there as yet to speak of, and rarely had any anecdotes to share. He hardly ever spoke about the university, really, dismissing it to ask instead after her favorite patients at the hospice.
    It was as if her job meant more to him than his own, and she enjoyed the attention, though that attention quickly waned in the days after Thomas's death.
    Through it all, a week
    just a week!
    passed without their sharing a waking moment together.
    Ah, but Sunday remained their own. She still had him that Sunday morning. She roused him, and they made love, and he finally cried and spoke of Thomas, and she eased him back into the slumber where he was hers and hers alone, if only for a few hours.
    Come Monday, they returned to work again, and the gulf between them widened.
    Guy had avoided the room all week, despite the notes from the Faculté Directeur urging him to at least start with the cleanup of the archives.
    He had dreamt of the thing in the corner all week; horrible, unspeakable dreams, in which it was his own head being cut into sections, while birds and babies cried around him. He had never dreamed of blood before in his short life. Never. Ever.
    Playing the radio wherever he worked in the Faculté, Guy braced himself to go back.
    He would go there, as soon as he was finished in the offices.
    Once the bibliothèque was clean.
    After he had swept the hall, he would do it.
    He would open the door.
    He would go in.
    He would switch on the light.
    Moving stiffly, carefully keeping his back to the wall stacked with the desks and chairs, Guy slid the more dependable looking of the two ladders over to the shelves. He was about to lift it up to brace it against the shelving supports when he heard the willowy rasping from the far corner.
    Paper thin, dry as dust, a breath.
    A half hour later, he re-entered the room. Soaked in sweat, he stared balefully at the flats of cardboard he had stacked over the hollow beneath the desks, where he had hidden the damned object.
    Again, the breath, unmistakable.
    Guy began to tremble. He rubbed his face and eyes, then steeled himself for the worst. Hesitantly, he shuffled to the cardboard and carefully set it aside. He bent