Philip Nutman - Cities of Night

“They believe he’s dead,” Jamie MacDougal had said earlier that evening. “He’s been gone a week. They called off the search on Monday — said it was a waste of manpower — that he must have perished because no seven-year-old could survive the night temperatures.

“But I know,” he said, pouring himself a generous glass of single malt. “I’m his father, and I know in my bones he’s still alive.”

I hadn’t seen Jamie in nearly eight years, and the river of human time had eroded his once-full head of red hair and reshaped his features like a rain-washed statue. He looked closer to sixty than his fast-approaching forty-seven. It was his birthday next week. I had remembered en route to Los Alamos from Roswell. Robert had stopped the car outside Santo Domingo so I could buy a gift. The Anasazi pot sat on Jamie’s dining table, ground zero between the two of us.

“Go slow, old friend,” I said. “Start at the beginning.”

Jamie took a hearty swig of his malt, and sighed.

“Lucy — his mother — died a year ago. Car crash. Almost a month to the day,” he added, wistfully staring into his drink. “So the base provided us with a housekeeper, a nanny of sorts who could take care of him. Dona’s her name. Local woman of Zuni extraction. But of course he took it hard. We both did. And a seven-year-old wants his mother, not a stranger.”

He was right. All boys need a mother. Even a Hellboy. I, however, had no recollection of a mother, or a father. Or of anything before I appeared in the ruins of an old church in East Bromwhich, England nearly ten years ago.

“Yes,” I said, “go on.”

“Dona’s a good sort. Takes excellent care of him — or did until she let him wander off.

“The last couple of months have been very hard, what with the anniversary coming up, and I’ve been working long, long hours in the lab.

“I should have been there for him,” he suddenly exclaimed, slamming a hand on the table top, almost spilling his drink and knocking over my pot.

It took a while, and another drink, to calm him.

Malcolm, I learned, had taken to wandering away from the base over the last few months. There was nothing unusual in that. Boys will be boys, and with so many ruins to explore, the summer-kissed landscape surrounding the cold, uninviting barracks-style housing could be a place of endless wonders to the over-active imagination of a seven-year-old. Summer was gone now though, swept aside by an early, harsh fall, and the nights came cold and hard at this elevation. Still Los Alamos was a safe town, perhaps the safest in the United States due to the secret nature of its inhabitants’ work, and Dona had thought nothing wrong in letting the boy play outside after sunset. But that all changed when he met the woman.

There was a good reason why New Mexico was called The Land of Enchantment, for there are arcane energies here, powers present which defy national explanation. Was it coincidence Los Alamos became the Secret City, birthplace of the atom bomb, or that Fat Man’s explosion happened at Trinity Site? Why not Nevada, or some other desert state with even more wide-open spaces? Why did a supposed extra-terrestrial craft crash at Roswell? Trevor Bruttenholm believed this state forms a nexus of paranormal energies, and when the US military insisted on relocating me from England so I could be studied at Roswell, he was only too happy to accompany me. During the time we lived here, he immersed himself in the myths and legends of New Mexico and took me along on frequent investigatory trips. One of my first memories was of our visit to the Santuario de Chimayo which was nestled in a secluded valley in the Sangre de Christo foothills. Like the pilgrims who had trekked there over the centuries, predominantly the sick and enfeebled, we went to experience the mysterious healing powers of its magical soil. Bruttenholm was convinced it cured his arthritis. All it did was make me itch.

I had so many other stories and experiences during that early period in my life that perhaps it was no surprise I decided to follow my adoptive father’s line of work. We spent nights in the ancient mission of Isleta Pueblo, hoping to see the restless corpse of Father Padilla and his cottonwood coffin rise from beneath the altar, as he had done so on numerous occasions over the past two hundred years (he didn’t). We spent days camping on low mountain slopes, sitting up through the night in case a fireball-riding bruja passed by overhead (we never saw a witch, but I saw my first shooting star).

New Mexico was like the Navajo rug Bruttenholm bought as a gift for me before we left Roswell for the East Coast and the BPRD headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut. It was a simple rug, just two rows of white, rectangular clouds outlined in black against a light blue background. But the rug had a deliberate line woven through its lower border, a “spirit line” worked into the weave in case a soul became trapped during the weaving and needed a way out. New Mexico itself seemed like a spirit line, a gateway between realms, and some of what sought freedom here was of a malevolent stripe. Then there are those forces which are a reflection of the souls of the beholder, neither good nor evil, merely a mirror to our needs. She was one of them — the one known as La Llorona, The Weeping Woman.

A particular manifestation of New Mexico and its Hispanic heritage, La Llorona’s story had many variations concerning her origins and nature, but I knew she was more than a myth. I knew because I met her.

Back in early ’47, a few months before the Roswell crash and our departure for the lush New England green of Connecticut, Bruttenholm had taken me to Santa Fe where he was visiting Fray Angelico Chavez, the renowned historian and restorer of ancient churches. Fray Angelico had been researching the recorded appearances of Fray Padilla, and he invited Trevor to read the first draft of the paper he was preparing. Although I had only been on the earthly plane for a couple of years, I had already reached adolescence and was suffering restlessness as a youth. So, as the day waned and the magical spring twilight bathed the Sangre de Christo range ruby red, and as Bruttenholm and Fray Chaves continued their impassioned discussion, I walked out into the streets of Santa Fe.

Since I was still wary of the reactions of others to my unusual appearance, I walked away from the bustling plazas, sticking to narrow side streets lined with sleepy adobe homes squatting behind hand-carved wooden gates, half-hidden by gnarled cottonwoods or softly hued hollyhocks, and made my way down to the banks of the Santa Fe River. It was peaceful there, and it calmed my troubled thoughts as I followed the water eastwards.

Maybe it was the onset of adolescence and the need to understand who and what I was. Or perhaps it was the natural questioning of an orphan concerning his parentage, but for weeks I had lain awake at night tossing and turning, wondering and wanting answers to an enigma — the enigma of myself. Seeing the other children who lived on the Roswell base play ball with their fathers, go shopping with their mothers, made my heart heavy. Trevor Bruttenholm was a kind, compassionate, and thoughtful mentor, as fine a father figure as a Hellboy could have. Yet when sleep would not come, I would lie in my room wondering what it must feel like to lose one’s self in a mother’s embrace or to rage at my inability to remember where I came from before a magical rite summoned me to this world.

Did I have a mother? Did she mourn for the loss of her son?

The thoughts vexed me daily, but that evening as I walked the river bank, the preternatural calm of Santa Fe soothed my soul, and my mind turned towards more intellectual ideas. Albert Einstein had visited Roswell with Oppenheimer the week before and spent hours with me explaining his theory of relativity. Trevor was intent on providing me with the best educational opportunities, and who better to explain physics than Einstein? I savoured the time we spent together, even though the deluge of knowledge he unleashed threatened to sweep me away. So it was with a head full of equations and formulae that I wandered into the dark, barely aware of the distance I had traveled or the fact that night had almost completely descended in its diamond-studded velvet glory.