The agents were all incapacitated, crawling away themselves, dragging their comrades with them. Hellboy resumed his slow all-fours shuffle. In his path lay one prone figure. Manning, still unconscious. Hellboy delicately crawled over his body, continued his penitent's circumnavigation of the room.
"... No good," a voice gasped from Kates walkie-talkie. "Jesus he's strong! Can't even get near him. 'Got to help her!' he keeps saying. Asked us if we were there to make the room nicer, then he went for us ..."
"Why does he think Liz is in there?" Abe said. Liz did not look up from the papers.
"It's like the story," Kate said. "She talks about 'the woman' a long time before she talks about herself. I guess it's not easy to admit that you're the one who's being ... who's ..."
"How long do we have? Until he starts ripping the walls?" Abe said.
"And why is that a problem again?" Liz said.
"If he goes by the story, not long," Kate said. "Liz, maybe you're right. Maybe he'll rip it all off, stand up, sniff, take off the dress and walk out. But what if he doesn't? What if the wallpaper wins? You want to risk it?"
"If we enter and try to incapacitate him," Abe said, "we might seriously hurt him. If we don't incapacitate him he might seriously hurt us. And if we leave him he might go seriously mad."
They watched. Not wanting to risk another incursion, Manning's agents managed to snare him with a makeshift lasso, and drag him out at last into the corridor.
"What is that?" Abe said. He pointed at the screen. "I thought it was a flaw in the electronics, but..."
In the corner of the room, something hovered. A figure, barely, hazily, just. It stuttered in and out of focus, and presence. A shadow. They stared. No one breathed. There was nothing, then nothing, then as Hellboy continued his slow crawl, it appeared again, behind him. Watching him. Moving.
"It's a woman," said Abe.
"You think?" said Kate. "I thought it looked like ... I thought it looked like Hellboy." They both squinted. The shuddering shadow watched Hellboy's terrible slow progress. It guttered like a candle, a woman-shade, then nothing, then a horn-stubbed thing, gone again, then a thinner remnant, something else again, shadowed with — what was that? — a ghost beard. Gone, and only Hellboy remained, crawling.
"It was a woman. The trapped woman. And the trapped Hellboy too," Liz said. "And that other thing was ... the other part of the presence haunting that room." She waved the papers. "The one with the cure for uppity women. Doctor Silas Weir Mitchell.
"'You must morally alter as well as physically amend,'" she read from Fat and Blood. "You need to control the woman 'with a firm and steady will ... with no regard to her complaints ...' He's there to make sure the rest cure goes the distance. He's the bars in the wallpaper."
"Oh my god," breathed Kate. "What are we going to do ... ? It's trapping him." On the screen that baleful presence was there again, close up to the camera suddenly, leering, behind Hellboy.
"Listen," Liz said. "Hellboy keeps asking if we'll improve the room. That's the wallpaper asserting itself." She read again. "'If circumstances oblige us to treat such a person in her own home, let us at least change her room, and also have it well understood how far we are to control her surroundings.' That kind of improvements okay because its all about power. Which is what that damn wallpaper wants."
"So?" Kate said. "Even if Hellboy or the room or the wallpaper lets us in, it'll only be to throw in some cushions or something."
"Even when Hellboy, and the woman, fight him to try to get out, they're stuck in that room," Liz said. "They're secluding themselves, just like the wallpaper wants. There's a whole chapter on seclusion in this." She waved the papers. "That wallpaper wants them in there alone. The last thing it wants is another presence."
"Well its not going to get it." Kate said, "Hellboy wont let us in there ..."
She stopped. She and Liz stared at each other.
Kate dialed Sirbilex. "Where," she said, "is your grandfather's folder? How fast can you run up a design?"
Fast, it turned out. A quick block printing, some speedy sewing. Under this kind of pressure, Ellie produced a pair of curtains within a few hours.
"He's started picking at the walls," Abe said urgently when Kate returned. They pushed very gently at the unlocked door, looked into the room where Hellboy knelt in his ragged dress, a strip of the strange wallpaper in his hand, an end still anchored like skin to the wall. Behind him, the shadow stained the air. They felt an onrush of malevolent attention as the spirit of the wallpaper regarded them across the oppressive yellow atmosphere.
"Hellboy." Liz said, quickly. Hellboy hesitated in his crawl, and looked up at her.
"You here to help you ... her ... out, Liz?" Hellboy said. His voice was heartbreaking.
"No, Hellboy," she said. "You can do that. I trust you. I'm here to make the room nicer. Can I? You were right. Those curtains are terrible." She dangled the cloth she held for him to see.
"What's going on?" Approaching from the end of the corridor was Manning, his head bandaged. Kate clapped her hand over his mouth.
"Hush," she whispered. He stared at her. "Liz has got this."
"Yeah," they heard Hellboy mutter. "Those curtains are kind of ugly. C'mon in."
Liz stepped carefully past him. The something, the whatever, the ugliness in the room parted for her. She stepped past the remaining furniture. Hellboy's constant circling had worn a smear across the wallpaper, in the lower half of the wall.
"She's trying to get out," he whispered. "I'll have her out in a moment."
Liz bit her lip. "Don't rush," she said. She could feel the wallpaper watching her, with its little bud-pattern-ugly-nub yellow eyes. She stood on a chair by the window. "This'll make it nicer in here," she said. "This'll go better."
She fiddled with the runners, threading the curtains onto them, replacing the violently multicolored ones she had so recently put in place. Their replacements were strange and old fashioned. Their pattern was of rippling vertical stripes like tresses, interspersed with coils of ribbon. The bands joined together in clutches at the top of the curtains. Liz stepped back.
"There you go," she said. "Much more appropriate." The odd pattern was not much more attractive, but was at least more subdued in color, more antique in design. "Good luck, Hellboy," Liz said as she left.
"You're giving him new curtains?" Manning muttered.
Liz closed the door. They crept to where they had brought the monitor, in sight of the door.
Hellboy tugged at the rip of wallpaper. He tore it slowly from the wall. They watched him on the screen and heard his sigh, a moan, of relief or sadness or something, through the door.
"Come on," Kate whispered. Hellboy reached with his great right hand, and with strange delicacy snagged another piece of the wallpaper, and began to tear it. There was a whispering in the room, of women, men, somethings. Behind the kneeling Hellboy, the shadow appeared again, the woman, Hellboy, the controlling doctor, insinuations in wallpaper spirit, overseeing another mind tearing itself apart to freedom. "We're too late," whispered Kate.
Wordlessly, Liz pointed at a further corner of the screen. At the curtains. They billowed. Though the window was closed, and there was no draft. Something was moving behind them. The viewers froze.
Hellboy tore another strip from the wall. The wallpaper-presence stuttered out of sight for several seconds as Hellboy paused.
Behind him, crawling low out of the shadows below the curtains, something was coming toward him. Something like a cadaverous human figure, reaching out with bony arms, it and all its limbs all covered with reams of unnatural long hair. The thing crept, spidery, toward the frozen Hellboy.
"What the hell... ?" Manning whispered.
"You," said Abe, "could perhaps benefit from reading more ghost stories."
"The curtains," Kate said. "From 'The Diary of Mr. Poynter.' Ghost story by M.R. James."
"What is it?"
"According to James's story," Kate said, urgently, as the hair-thing advanced, "probably the ghost of Everard Charlett, notoriously dissolute seventeenth-century rake. Kind of his ghost. Or at least the ghost of his hair."
"Fictional rake, yes?" Manning said. "Wait, his hair?"
"Yeah. It's invoked by the pattern on those curtains, which are based on his hair. Whatever, it's hair related."
"And vain," Abe added. "I've read the story."
"And predatory," said Liz. "Damn it, it's coming for him!" The hair-thing stalked, ungainly and vile, toward where Hellboy sat.
Hellboy did not move. He still held a strip of wallpaper. In his hand, and around the room, it was growing agitated. The patterns on it were flexing. There were women visible behind its bars, and faint, faint reproductions of Hellboy, crawling. The shade-thing that emanated from it flickered around the room, agitated, stopped, suddenly, darker than before, between the approaching curtain-thing and Hellboy.
"Neither of them wants competition," Liz said. "They both want him."
The two pattern-spirits stared at each other. The newcomer rose, tottering, in baleful inhuman motion. It stood, a humanoid shape in flamboyant locks, facing the rest-cure-and-seclusion-enforcing spirit, a twisting figure-coagulum of wallpaper pattern, a constantly plaiting twist of yellow skeins.
"Look," said Kate. The women were clearer on the walls now, the vague Hellboy-shapes with them, as the intricate curling patterns that trapped them faded, and the wallpaper-spirit grew more tangible, more yellow, so yellow the slippery color seemed visible like urine even on the black-and-white screen.
"They're getting out," said Liz. The crawling woman-shapes, the vague, crawling Hellboy-shapes, escaping from the bar-free walls, their hidden coloration and contours moving swiftly and disappearing, as the spirit of the yellow wallpaper, outraged at the intrusion of another predator decoration, took its attention away from its prisoners and turned to the curtain-monster of hair.
The wallpaper-spirit reached up with a limb made of pattern and shoved the curtain-apparition in its hairy chest.
The curtain-thing staggered, regained its footing, and shoved the wallpaper back.
The two aspects of evil interior design circled each other warily, as the last of the shadows in the wall slipped away. Finally, the two presences began to punch each other. Somewhat ineffectually.
Hellboy shook his head, dropped the little trail of wallpaper he held and turned. He saw the shoving match between monstrous invocations of patterns, pushing each other like thirteen-year-olds in a playground. Still sitting down, scootching along backward on his haunches, Hellboy retreated slowly to the door, as the curtain-spirit kicked the wallpaper-spirit in the crotch.
"Oooh!" Everyone gathered around the monitor winced as the curlicue-thing doubled over, and the hair-creature swaggered closer, only for the enraged yellow manifestation to grab it in an incompetent wrestling hold and trip it up. All without a sound.
Hellboy opened the door, slipped out, and closed it again. A few feet from him, Abe, Liz, Kate, and Manning stared at a screen. He cleared his throat. They looked up, and gestured him over.
"Hey, big guy!"
"You got out!"
"Come check this!"
Hellboy steepled his fingers as best he could given the differences between his two hands.
"I have three questions," he said. "One. What was I doing in Liz's room? Two, why was something that looks like evil wallpaper squabbling with something that looks like evil curtains? And three." He looked slowly down at himself. At the extraordinarily filthy, yellow-smeared, ripped-up dress still hanging off his shoulders. "Three ..." he said, and fingered the material. "Whatever the answer to three," he said, "it never happened. Clear? We never speak of it."
"They're squabbling over you," Kate said. "Well, they were at first. Hellboy, come and watch. We can explain. Which do you thinks stronger: male dominance and social control, or cruel and sadistic vanity? I've got five bucks on misogyny. Abe's backing narcissism. At the moment they're pretty evenly matched — ouch!" One of the decor-things scored some painful hit.
"Winner can buy me a pizza," Hellboy said. "I'm going back to the oxblood palace. Liz, you want your dress back?"
