Chapter One

Trevor Bruttenholm - The Adoptive Father: His Past

Author’s notes: Even though much of this is my own, some of it is based on backstory information from Del Toro’s film and was mostly worked up from memory.

When Trevor ‘Broom’ Bruttenholm was young he was afraid of the dark and thunderstorms. He often suffered terribly from nightmares where he thought that he could hear dark, evil voices crying out words that he could not understand. His mother, a gentle, kind woman, would come to him when this would happen and comfort him.

Unfortunately, Trevor’s mother was not always emotionally stable and the deaths of his two young sisters due to illness drove her into a nervous breakdown. As his mother became more and more unstable his father became emotionally distant, eventually deciding to separate from his increasingly eccentric wife. His father, a strict Protestant, especially objected to his wife’s attempts to contact their lost daughters through seances and other paranormal means.

Trevor’s main emotional relationship eventually became his paternal grandfather, the man who he had been named for. Captain Trevor Bruttenholm loved his grandson dearly, often finding this relationship a more emotionally satisfying one than his relationship with his own son, Trevor’s father. When Trevor’s parents established separate residences and his mother showed herself unable to deal with raising him alone, he went to live with his grandfather and they often travelled the world together.

Captain Bruttenholm, recognizing the essential soberness and stability of his grandson, did not interfere with the young Trevor’s growing interest in the paranormal and Catholic spirituality and mysticism. In fact, he encouraged his Grandson’s interest in legends, folklore, and the supernatural; often they visited interesting people and places, both in their home country of England and abroad.

One thing that Trevor was reluctant to share with his grandfather was the continuing dark dreams and nightmares that plagued his sleep. However, as Trevor entered his early adolescence the nature of these dreams began to change. At around age twelve the nightmares began to be less frequent, but oddly started to cluster around particular times of the year, especially late October to early November. After a while the dreams faded completely; or so Trevor thought.

Trevor Broom was still shaken by the devastating vision granted to him by Rasputin.

He pulled away from Rasputin’s hand in disgust, not so much in disgust at the role planned for the unwitting Hellboy as in disgust at himself for being helpless to prevent this. Rasputin made it clear that one of the ways he was going to use to get at Hellboy was the murder of Trevor Broom himself.

Broom no longer paid any attention to what Rasputin was pontificating on; his mind raced for ways he could use to warn Hellboy that appearances would not be all they seemed. He came to realize that Rasputin was asking him a question.

“My Master has revealed to me his true name. Would you like to know it?"

Speaking very quietly to disguise from Rasputin his essential revulsion, fear, and sorrow Broom replied “I know what to call him. I call him Son.”

Hoping that Rasputin would not understand what he was doing, Trevor Broom removed from his wrist the rosary he always wore there, the rosary that had been a gift to him from Hellboy many decades before, and carefully left it on top of the encyclopaedia entry on Rasputin he had just been consulting. He kept his hand on the rosary - almost as a kind of benediction for the demon he loved as a son and knew he would never see again in this life.

“I’m ready,” Trevor Broom said quietly, without fear. He never moved as he felt Rasputin’s Nazi assassin, Kroenen, step up behind him. Any fear he did feel was solely for Hellboy, the demon he loved as his own son.

His last thought as he was stabbed from behind was, “God, protect my son; allow me to always be with him.”

The fifteen-year-old Trevor swam up from under a deep sleep realizing that someone was shaking his shoulder.

“Trevor,” he heard his grandfather’s voice, “are you all right, Son? This is the third time this week that you have cried out in your sleep. I really do not want to pry, but I am becoming concerned. Is there something that is bothering you?”

Trevor sat up totally disoriented.

“Grandfather, I don’t remember crying out; have I really been doing this? I don’t even remember that I have been dreaming anything this past week. I used to have nightmares, but I thought they had stopped a few years ago.”

Captain Bruttenholm sat down on the edge of his grandson’s bed.

“Son, I know that you used to have nightmares, but since you never wanted to discuss them I left it go. I always assumed that they were related to anxiety about your parents. I was reassured as they became less and less frequent. But these dreams you have been having this past week seem very different from these earlier nightmares.”

Trevor shook his head; half in disbelief at what his grandfather was saying, half in trying to shake the sleep out of his head.

“No wonder I have been feeling so tired lately; my sleep was being disturbed and I didn’t even realize it. I am certainly sorry that I have been disturbing yours, Grandfather.”

Trevor got up from the bed and stumbled into his bathroom. He switched on the electric light and peered short-sightedly at his reflection in the mirror over the sink; at first, for a few seconds, another, much older, face looked out at him and then settled down into a slightly blurry reflection of his own youthful face.

He groped for a pair of spectacles from a nearby shelf, pulled them on, and peered again at his reflection. He shook his head, took a long drink of water from the sink, and returned back to his grandfather.

“I am heartily sorry for interrupting your rest like this, Grandfather,” he said as he walked back into his bedroom, “I know that you have not been feeling well lately. Let’s go back to sleep and speak further on this at breakfast.”

Trevor was annoyed that the nightmares he thought finally banished from his life had returned in this new, stranger form and were still clustering around late October to early November. He was especially annoyed that now he didn’t even know he was having these dreams. In the past, even though he never recalled many details of the nightmares he was having, at least he was aware he was having them.

After speaking further with his grandfather on this matter the next morning, it was decided that he would visit with a Catholic acquaintance who was a professor of folklore and the paranormal at a famous university. Professor Mark Peters was also an expert on dreams and often used hypnosis to help people delve into dreams and nightmares.

It was decided that Trevor would visit with him on December 23, the other day of the year when he sometimes had strange dreams. Professor Peters hoped that if he put Trevor into a trance on that day he would be able to converse with him about what his subconscious was inflicting him with.

Trevor had never been hypnotized before and was both anxious and curious about what might be revealed. He went under rather quickly and when Professor Peters brought him out from the trance several hours later he remembered nothing of what had happened. He hadn’t even noticed the passage of time.

As Trevor awoke from this trance he felt a lot of the same disorientation he had felt that earlier evening when his grandfather had awakened him from the dream he didn’t know he was having. He sat up from the reclining position he had been in and pulled on the spectacles Professor Peters handed back to him.

“Mark, did you find out anything?” Trevor inquired after standing and stretching his arms and legs. He sat back down.

“Yes, Trevor,” Professor Peters replied, “I found out plenty, but I’m not sure how much of it I should reveal to you. I can tell you this much - regardless of the nature of your very early nightmares these dreams you have been having more recently are really visitations of future events. These dreams, if we may still call them dreams, seem to be taking you out of the realm of ordinary, linear time and revealing something of your own future. They appear to be clustering around what will be dates of significant events in your future life. To tell you any more of what I have found out could disturb the delicate balance between fate and free will. And even though you consciously recall nothing, or next to nothing, after these dreams, your subconscious seems to be preparing you to someday make the choices and decisions you must make to fulfill your life’s work.”

Trevor stared at the older man who was speaking to him.

“You know, Mark,” he said after a while, “When I first started having these dreams around age twelve, I had a feeling that they were always about the same man, sometimes older, sometimes younger, but he seemed vaguely familiar to me. That was the only thing about these dreams that I could recall. What you are telling me is both more confusing and more intriguing.”

“Trevor,” Dr. Peters said, after a few moments of consideration of all that just passed, “I think that you should allow me to hypnotize you again. It may be worthwhile to plant a suggestion that whatever is going on right now is not threatening to you. This may stop whatever is going on deep in your subconscious from creeping into your conscious mind as nightmares.”

He walked over to Trevor and placed a hand on his shoulder, “I am afraid that I will never live long enough to see the resolution of what was revealed to me when I hypnotized you earlier. I always realized that there was something really special about you and you must believe that I now feel extremely privileged to have met you.”

Trevor just stood in an amazed silence wondering what his older friend could have seen revealed about his future that so moved him.

After this session with Dr. Peters, Trevor was never again disturbed by these nocturnal visitations; or at least not in a way that he was consciously aware.

At age 17, on one of his travels with his grandfather, he attended an exorcism and the old woman who was the subject of this revealed to Trevor Bruttenholm that he would always transit a line between Heaven and Hell. This revelation caused him to recall the strange conversation he had had at age 15 with Dr. Peters and Trevor Bruttenholm wondered what exactly fate had in store for him.

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