Hellboy: Darkness Calls

Plot

In  Darkness Calls  , several plotlines and characters from earlier stories converge.

Chapter One

In a tomb near Lucca , Italy , Igor Bromhead (last seen in  Hellboy: Box Full of Evil  ) summons the witch-goddess Hecate to a catacomb using runes written in blood. She demands to see the lizard body with qui the devil Astaroth HAD _him_ cursed and he obliged. Before she can destroy him by her invoking her secret name, which, ever since her resurrection in  Hellboy: Wake the Devil  , has been that of Ilsa Haupstein, her luckless human host. Bromhead reveals the bones of Haupstein’s lover, and Hecate’s son, the vampire Vladimir Giurescu, from whom Bromhead has magically wrung the information which gives him full power over the horrified goddess.

Back in England, three witches meet among standing stones; Hellboy broke out of his skull during  Hellboy: Wake the Devil  and get away from it. Harry Middleton, an old friend of his and adoptive father Trevor Bruttenholm . Under the witches’ (and the carved horn’s) influence, Hellboy decides to go for a walk, but not before accepting a vintage pistol and holster from Middleton as a gift. It is followed by a clop of cats and spawned by a haggard specter with copper coins for eyes. Hellboy encounters two odd men and a woman who see him and cut short their rendition of the evocative “Mister Stormalong”sea ​​shanty, whose monster-hunting folk hero they identify with Hellboy, and whose verses we have been hearing over several pages of captions. They inform Hellboy that they have reached the spot where corrupt 17th-century witchfinder Henry Hood hung three witches, “their ladies”, who cursed him with torture and undeath (he is the corner-eyed specter we have seen). After hearing the hanging scene reenacted, the trio of the three hanged witches, whose doting animal familiars Hellboy finds itself in the process of becoming a member of the community, but they are not familiar with the subject. Hellboy: Hellboy: “They gather for you !!”

Chapter Two

The three witches with the carved horn for the night and its associated powers for binding Hellboy and for resurrecting their three dead sister witches, executed by Henry Hood but now flying on a shocked Hellboy. The three greet their mistresses happily happily Henry Hood bursts upon them transfixing two of them with the blue unearthly fire of his cutlass. It aussi wounds the half-demon Hellboy, Who he attacks For His hellish parenting, leaving Hellboy reluctantly to be rescued by the third witch and her familiar raven Who Hellboy carry off amid a flock of undead witches “to the Sabbath at LeedsHarry Middleton’s pistol, dropped, plummets from the sky. He has not escaped, however, he has not yet escaped. him using his carved horn.

For a cautious, inquisitive Hellboy, they recount the scene between Bromhead and Hecate, filling in rising history of  Hellboy: Wake the Devil  and showing a triumphant Bromhead removing Ilsa Haupstein’s wailing corpse from the Iron Maiden in which she had become Hecate, and bricking it into an alcove with Giurescu’s still-amorous skeleton, there to wait “till Doomsday.” Bromhead had then tried to become more powerful and more powerful. They tell Hellboy that the sound of a witch and the demon ruling the witches of Lancashire and Abbotsbury (and East Bromwich , Faversham and Berkswell), they have selected him as their king. Hellboy angrily refuses them, declares himself at war with them, and begins to make his way out of the church. The carved horn shatters. Panic-stricken, the witches cast about a plan, when Koku, a diminutive serving of Hellboy’s old enemy Baba Yaga , appears and conveys his mistress’ offer to take Hellboy off their hands if they (who unlike the Baba Yaga still live in the real world) “offer” him to her. The witches agree, and Hellboy steps out of the church in the middle of a vast and empty wintry expanse through which an army of armed and fur-clad skeletons approach. Amidst the thicket of impaled lantern skulls in which she keeps her power, we see the Baba Yaga promising to take Hellboy’s eye (in return for the one of hers he ‘”The Baba Yaga “) and Hellboy) also his life.

Chapter Three

Hecate or Hellboy Back in the church, the witches debate The Gruagach of Loch Leane , Hellboy’s vengeful fairy nemesis, arrives offering to go fetch a witch they poisoned and cut in pieces, one that they are still fearing, who should be their queen, and could rescue them from dwindling into nothing, and also “make the daytime world weep with fear. ” Meanwhile, in the snowy plain “beyond the thrice-nine lands in the thrice-tenth kingdom” the Baba Yaga’s army attacks Hellboy, who fights for a while and then runs into a wood. Giant wolves rush from the wood to attack the Baba Yaga’s soldiers, and a giant white wolf guides Hellboy in the woods to the campfire of his master, the Leshii. Hellboy bores the Leshii who is happy to save Hellboy in order to spite the Baba Yaga. Before leaving in the form of a giant horned bear, the Hellboy Leshii warns to stay in the woods only for one night. He asks Perun , the Russian storm-god, to destroy the army, which is buried in snow, as Hellboy finds them when, just before daybreak, he is chased by the woods by the Leshii’s wolves. Thwarted, the Baba Yaga flies in her death and pestle to the castle of Koschei the Deathless, who broods, cobwebbed on his throne, what if he helps her, she must give him the gift of death. Hellboy’s head. Meanwhile, Hellboy finds his way through a winter storm to a small house where he resists a brief attack from, and then makes friends with, the house’s guardian spirit or Domovoi. The Domovoi tells him that Perun is hiding him from the Baba Yaga and from Koschei using the storm weather, but that he can not be killed as he is inside an egg inside a rabbit inside a goat which the Baba Yaga has hidden. Meanwhile, the Baba Yaga finds Perun (who we have just seen a spear-armed horseman riding above stormclouds) drawing lightning branches with a stick in the mud of a riverbank, a mud-caked and naked old man. Her soldiers dispatch him with arrows as she says she will tolerate no other Russian gods than herself.

Chapter Four

A bird grieves over Perun’s body, meanwhile somewhere in England, the blood of a hilltop church, flowing from two murdered monks. A hole in the floor before the altar leads to an ancient cavern where the Gruagach and two elfin servants approached a giant iron lid. When Gruagach rings on the lid with his hammer, a giant appears who puts on shows to read the letter Gruagach hands him – from the giant masters, the witches of Britain – and then begins to weep at what he must do. He raises the lid and climbs down to get his prisoner for the Gruagach. With Perun dead, meanwhile, the storm Hellboy’s cottage has failed, and Koschei kicks in the door. The two fight as Koschei explains his intentions and motives, and the Domovoi wails over his broken furniture. Hellboy impales Koschei and beheads him but Koschei only reattaches his head. At that momentVasilisa , appearing at the cottage’s door, subdues Koschei with light from the skull she received from Baba Yaga in her legend. Hellboy pins Koschei to the floor with his own sword and they run. Kosschei ignores the Domovoi’s goading, extricates himself, and takes out an arrow from his pack. Vasilisa explains to Hellboy the story of his magic doll and her time with the Baba Yaga, and shows Hellboy the tunnel back to the real world, before falling to the first of Koschei’s arrows, which also pepper Hellboy as Koschei wrinkles on them. Dying, Vasilisa gives Hellboy the wooden comb and blue handkerchief her doll had given her (“When I was old and gray and dying in my bed,” she says) and becomes her doll, still pierced by Koschei’s arrow. Hellboy confronts the now-arrived Koschei.

Chapter Five

At Yggdrasil , the world tree, a squirrel, (never to be known as Ratatosk ) worries aloud that Ragnarok has come with the death of Vasilisa, but one of the Baba Yaga’s soldiers shoots him and he dies. The Baba Yaga, Koku, and a figure that seems to be Deathwatch from their place at the tree’s roots. In the distance, Hellboy tosses Vasilisa ‘s comb at Koschei, who tosses it over his shoulder. Where it hits the earth in a small forest springs up, its branches face lift in the sky and growing agonizingly through its chest and limbs. The Baba Yaga insists that there is no longer a place in the world to which he can run, and the back to the hilltop church, the giant climbs out of his hands carrying a small wooden box containing the dismembered and segmented body of his prisoner . He then climbs to the bottom of the hole, pulling the lid down to him, in order to escape the world. Tugging the box out of the church, and his companions Gruagach tell a small bird (who will next APPEAR in the opening scene of  Hellboy: ) that it was better to say that Elsewhere, the lead fairy from  Hellboy: The Corpse  asks the Dagda, fairy king, how bad it will be and the Dagda answers “We will not survive it.” In the Thrice-Tenth Kingdom, Hellboy begins to climb toward the tunnel back to reality; but the Baba Yaga calls for Koschei’s soul and begins to breathe her power into its mouth. Up in the branches, Koschei screams as his body bursts with light and fire burning free of the branches. He goes down blazing upon Hellboy as the Baba Yaga anticipates using Hellboy’s eye to look into Hell and into secret places to learn “the secret workings of all things.” As Hellboy crushes Koschei beneath a boulder, the Baba Yaga repeats that Hellboy has gone to hell with the world, and through the tunnel we see England’s witches flying over their cobwebbed church celebrating the approach of their new queen.

Chapter Six

The Baba Yaga’s ten thousand skull lanterns are going out, all their power being breathed into Koschei. Meanwhile, two of Baba Yaga’s soldiers reminisce about serving under Koschei when alive, and pity his servitude to the witch. Koschei begs Hellboy to accept death, and regret that he is cursed to keep killing Vasilisa. The Baba Yaga breathes her last spark of life into Koschei who still can not defeat Hellboy. She considers using the spirit of Rasputin which she had stored in an acorn since the epilogue of  Hellboy: Conqueror Worm , but Koku knocks it from her hand so it falls through the roots of the World Tree into Hell. Defeated, Koschei hurls his sword at a start to Hellboy’s back, so that he drops Vasilisa’s blue handkerchief, which becomes a flood to carry Koshchei’s body away. Death explains to the Baba Yaga that “Hellboy is as deadless as Koschei” and his eye must be given freely, for which Hellboy is not yet ready. Hellboy wanders through the tunnel into the cobwebbed church (now empty), where he silently passes the ghostly figure of Vasilisa, lighting a cigar and reaching back to Koschei’s sword. Henry Hood greets him in the churchyard repeating “Finish it” before dissolving into dust and two copper coins. Scratched in the rust of Hood’s cutlass is the name: IGOR BROMHEAD. Forty-two hours later in Italy, near Lucca, two villagers show Hellboy where Bromhead has been hiding – he has been eating their sheep. Having swallowed the moon, he has bloated into a monstrous giant human worm. He begs Hellboy to kill him, while two witches, flying as birds, urge that he be left to his fate. Hellboy asks if he’s ready and then stabs him with Hood’s cutlass. Dying, and once again with a fully human body, Bromhead tells Hellboy that he will see him in Hell, and that he sees him there already, seated on a dragon at the head of his army. Meanwhile, the Dagda meets the Gruagach and his friends, who have been dragging their new queen’s box to the top of a hill. He begs the gruagach to see reason and one of the gruagach’s two bodies stabbed him in the back, before stabbing his own heart in tow.

Epilogues

At the Colorado headquarters of the BPRD , Kate Corrigan is reading to Liz Sherman and Abe Sapien from a Hellboy teammate. Kate is alarmed when Abe points out that Harry Middleton has been dead for over twenty years.

Meanwhile, back at the Italian catacombs, the imprisoned Hecate receives a visit from the spirit of Sir Edward Gray. She tells Gray that she is his queen and that he has walked in his shadow for a long time. Thér, king of the Hyperborean city of Gorinium, who kept the knowledge of three captive Watchers mostly to himself. After Thoth fell asleep, Hecate entered the garden where she killed the Watchers, drinking up their blood so she could write all of their knowledge on the walls of Gorinium’s temple so everyone would read it. This event caused the downfall of the Hyperborean civilization as Hecate, revered by some as a goddess, is cursed into the lamia-like form by Thoth. Regardless, Hecate tells Gray she is still unrepentant at her mission to enlighten and free mankind: insisting that she is beyond human knowledge. Before entering a deep sleep until the last day when Hellboy calls her,upcoming war and That Gray will find and assist Helboy. Hecate concludes her prophecy before entering her rest by telling Gray: “You will learn to do evil to accomplish good.”

Collected editions

It was collected as the eighth  Hellboy  trade paperback with two new epilogues:

• Darkness Calls  (6-issue mini-series, Dark Horse Comics , tpb, 192 pages, 2008, ISBN  978-1-59307-896-6 )  ^[1]

See also

• List of Hellboy comics

Notes

References