Hellboy: On Earth as It Is in Hell by Brian Hodge

resonance of mystery and dread.
    It was more than just the things that hung on the walls and from the beams, although certainly they were part of it: archaic tools of torture and punishment, of recantation and forced conversions. Countless sets of manacles dangled from their chains. From pegs and hooks hung leg-irons and larger frame-like restraints designed to freeze the body into unnatural positions that would cause agonizing muscle cramps. From one overhead beam hung a mobile made of more than a dozen sets of thumbscrews. Elsewhere, high-tensile iron collars--some smooth for use as garrotes, others lined with spikes that would bite into the neck or skull--had been looped together into a giant chain. Fitted along one rounded vertical beam was a display of iron mutes, each with a band that clamped around the back of the head and a jawplate that filled the mouth with a gag. On the walls were innumerable scourges and flails, pokers and brands, pincers and tongs. Tools that poked and tools that ripped. An oak framework threaded with bolt-shafts and lined with sharp spikes for crushing knees and elbows.
    They didn't appear to have been used for generations, the metal dull and often corroded, the stains left by long-ago victims faded to shadows, unrejuvenated by fresher blood. Instead, they hung as though displayed like museum pieces.
    Or objects of power.
    Hellboy stepped over to one of the smaller devices and snatched it off the wall, turned it in his hand: a thick leather strap with a primitive buckle for fitting around someone's neck and, in the middle, a short metal bar tipped at both ends with a pair of points. One end to jam under the chin, the other to bite into the hollow above the breast-bone. A heretic's fork, it was called, and this one was engraved with the word its users wanted most to hear: Abiuro.
    I recant.
    He hurled the fork at the ceiling, where it stuck into a rafter. "Seems clear enough who these used to belong to."
    "Yes," Burke said. "They're exactly what they appear to be. Their history is exactly what it appears to be."
    "But that doesn't explain the rest."
    Because over decades, maybe centuries, a bewilderingly complex array of symbols had been chalked and painted on the floor and walls and beams. Many of them he was already familiar with. The heart of it all was the circle in the middle of the floor, large enough to hold over a dozen men without crowding, and its edges inscribed with such meticulous patience it seemed inhuman. Some sections held Hebraic words; others were rimmed with lettering from other alphabets...Theban, whose letters curled like scimitars, and the simpler Malachim, like twigs tipped with dots. The great circle was made even more intricate with an internal arrangement of seals and talismans, which had come from such sources as the Clavicula Salomonis --the Key of Solomon.
    Underfoot and overhead were pictograms and sigils of ancient origin, plus refinements and inventions both medieval and Elizabethan, as well as things he'd never seen. The place was like an archaeological dig, cross-sectioned with layer upon layer from various eras and schools of ceremonial magic.
    "What you see here," Burke said, "is a classic case of fanatics becoming the very thing they were trying to stamp out."
    "The Inquisition," said Hellboy. "We're talking about the Inquisition here."
    "Speaking bureaucratically--not in practice, thank God--the Inquisition never actually went away. It just got renamed. You knew this, right?"
    Hellboy said he did. The department in the Papal Curia that, for the past thirty or so years, had worn the benign name of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had been born in the 1200s as the Holy Inquisition. Three centuries later, it became the Holy Office, although it had taken more than the name change to abolish its more barbaric practices.
    "How does a thing like this happen, Burke?"
    The monsignor seemed amused that he would ask. "Proximity...exposure...those are as