Emerald Hell

Chapter 12

Lament scanned the trees. "I don't see nothin'."

"I'm telling you, she was there," Hellboy said. "She waved to me."

"I ain't doubtin' you, son. If you say it's so, then I believe it."

"You don't sound like you believe it."

"Now don't you go gettin' all defensive on me."

"Christ, I'm not getting defensive!"

Tupelo, laurel, and titi shook in the breeze, and the swamp went silent except for distant murmurs that sounded like a man whispering sweet-talk to a loved one. Granny Lewt's ears didn't tell him it was any kind of a bird or rodent or reptile that only sounded like a man, so maybe it was Megan Dodd's husband Jorry or somebody else lost out there. He swung the skiff in that direction and came up against a thicket with dead hollowed-out trees jutting everywhere.

Lament froze and sucked air through his teeth.

"What is it?" Hellboy asked.

"Thought I felt somethin' for a second. Hold on."

Cocking an ear, Lament seemed to be listening intently to the wind, his curly hair wafting about his face. Hellboy saw that beneath the white streak was a large, old scar twisting across Lament's scalp. He thought about what that wound must've looked like on an eight-year-old boy and was shocked that Lament had managed to live through Jester's attack with a hatchet.

As if speaking quietly to someone nowhere in sight, Lament said into the breeze, "Plume Wallace, that you? This your silver thread?"

Then he made as if he heard some unheard voice. He frowned, nodded and grunted assent. "Uh yuh, yuh." Rubbed his beard stubble and listened a bit more."I'm sorry to hear that, you was a pretty good ole boy, way I remember it. You done all that you could, don't fret none about that. You got my prayers to help ease your burden. No man should die crawlin' in the mud. And they stole your shotgun too? Sonsabitches."

Hellboy said, "Hey, I'm right here, why don't you tell me what's going on?"

Lament held a hand up and gestured for him to wait. After another minute the hillbilly's face reddened and he tightened his fists. "Goddamn them Ferris brothers. They such handsome boys they got near everybody beguiled. I shoulda killed them when I had the chance. You tell Mrs. Hoopkins she gonna rest easy, I'll see to her girls. Bliss Nail owes us all a little somethin' for settin' us on this damn course, he got the money to keep her home and peanut farm runnin'. Maybe he can get his own six daughters out helpin' folks, leadin' their lives again. I'll make sure he finds the good Samaritan in himself and becomes a fine and charitable person, you got my word."

He faced Hellboy and said, "Jester's onto us. Got hisself a couple of bad ole boys, too, name'a the Ferris brothers. Killers born and bred, though they're golden-haired and beautiful to gaze on. They cut down Mrs. Hoopkins a short time after you left last night."

"Damn it."

"And this morning they stole the skiff from a fella name'a Plume Wallace. Worse than that, Jester's put his soul in service to learn what he can about us. He ain't seen Sarah or the girl you spotted in the trees a'drape in flowers, but the dead are sensitive and he knows we comin' up to a bad area of the blackwater."

"Seems that's all we've been doing. Is there a good area in this swamp? I don't like being chased. I'm the one who does the chasing."

But Lament turned away to dialogue with the ghost again. Hellboy checked the cypress and the sycamore and pine trees once more. A naked girl with flowers wreathed around her body wouldn't have been nearly as unsettling if she hadn't been forty feet in the air and had eyes black and empty as a shark's.

"Let me see if there's anything I can do," Lament said to the dead.

With the poise and fluidity of performing a well-practiced ritual, Lament moved his hands into the proper positioning for casting a spell. Interlaced, with the tips of index fingers together in a this-is-the-steeple fashion, his thumbs pointed over his heart. Hellboy could feel the straining effort of Lament's will in his perfectly conducted actions.

Bursts of blue and black sparks crackled in his hands. The hillbilly drew hexagons in the air, followed by a seal of Solomon, pentacles, representations of the Sephiroth and Sephirah angels, and Kabbalistic symbols.

Hellboy recognized the Rite of Release, which set free bewildered souls that still thought they were alive. But he'd studied for decades reading ancient grimoires and tomes in the finest paranormal libraries of the world. Where could an Appalachian-wandering, mouth-harp-plucking, former-child evangelist, backwoods drifter learn all this?

Visibly weakened and shaken, Lament wavered and sat heavily in the skiff. "I'm sorry, Plume Wallace. His whipcord is too tight upon your soul. He's a long row of bad, but liar ain't among his evils. Iffun he said he'd let you go, he will. I promise to tend your grave least once a year, no man deserves less than that."

The breeze rose and shook leaves down on them, and then it fell away and the swamp was silent and still again. For an instant Hellboy thought he saw a reflection of silver in Lament's eyes like a trail of mercury floating by, and then it was gone.

He didn't mind following his instincts and going along blindly with a situation when there was no other way to approach it. But he didn't like being in the dark when someone else knew a hell of a lot more about things than he did.

"I've had it with you," he said."Who taught you that Rite of Release and those other magic practices? Where did you learn them?"

"I ain't never learned no such thing," Lament told him. He pulled the small jug of moonshine from his rucksack and took a sip, screwing his face up at the taste. "They learned me."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"Mayhap not, but it's still the truth."

Hellboy took up the pole and pointed it at Lament's chest. "I want some answers from you, pal."

"If I had 'em to share, then share 'em I would."

"That sounds pretty, but I'm not buying it. I've seen a lot of strange things in my time, but you're starting to make me really antsy."

"Well, boy, I done told you that none of this is your burden, and iffun you wanted out, I'd point you the way any time you like." Lament replaced the jug and took hold of the stobpole with one hand, pointed into the jungle with the other. "That's how you leave, 'cept you'll have to swim and crawl and walk to get out, 'cause I still have need of this boat. But you'll make it, I'm sure of that. You ready to be on your way?"

"I'll see this thing through to the end," Hellboy said.

"Well, you follow your heart as you see fit, son."

Hellboy drew in a deep breath, ready to launch into a lecture about the times he'd been betrayed by those he thought were his friends. He jutted his chin and took a step forward when he saw several beautiful naked women wearing flowers draped about their bodies and in their hair, coyly flitting about in the brush.

"Oh crap."

"That about says it." Lament snatched the pole out of Hellboy's hand and started stobbing the skiff along fiercely. "Those must be Mania's girlies, whoever or whatever they be. We need to get on away from here."

"Well, yeah," Hellboy replied, "sure, but-wow, they're pretty-" And that's when the boat got caught on the edge of a tussock of briar and bull grass, where a naked old guy lay in the shallow muddy water, giggling insanely to himself.

Okay, Hellboy thought, so this place had weird people just everywhere you looked. You couldn't walk on a road or climb into a boat or get lost in a swamp without tripping over them. Given a choice, he'd rather be glancing around at the nudie cutie-pie girlies than looking at this guy's wrinkled pale patootie.

Hellboy leaned over but couldn't quite reach the geezer. "Ease us in a little closer. You know who he is?"

Lament shook his head."No, never met him, 'leastways not that I recall."

The deranged coot crawled through the slough, dragging himself by his arms over the matted roots and silt teeming with white egrets and other life. His legs were thin and twisted, and he was apparently crippled. That would explain the crutch they found. His laughter came from deep in his bony chest. From all about in the brush, girlish titters seemed to echo it.

Lament worked them around the tussock toward the old man, who was trying to scrabble across the bank of branches on his useless legs.

"Ma girlie," he said. "Smellin' so pretty and so fine. She was here, jest for me, singin' the way I like. Leave me alone, I say! Go way now, you go on away!"

"Come on, old-timer," Hellboy said, lifting the guy into the skiff, "let's get you out of the water." The geezer weighed hardly anything. He was undernourished, dehydrated, and exhausted, as if he'd been lying out there doing nothing but smiling obscenely for days. "What's your name?"

"Ain't got one!"

"You don't have a name?"

"Not no more. Please, I never done you no harm. Put me back. Put me back!"

"We're going to take you home."

"No, I say, no!" the coot cried. His beard was tangled with thorns and he was covered in the jetsam of the bayou. His skin was raw from sunburn and insect bites. Hellboy wrapped him in a blanket and tried to get some of the corn griddle cakes down his throat, but the old man refused to eat.

Turning away, Hellboy caught a powerful musky perfume on the air.

"Smell that?" he asked.

Lament nodded. "Same odor that was in Megan Dodd's shack."

"Cain't go back no more," the old man whimpered. "Hep me get on. I needs to get on with my answering."

Something bumped against the bottom of the boat, and Hellboy almost lost his footing. Lament tried poling free and said, "We're stuck on water vine."

Staring into the marsh prairies, Hellboy knew a fight was coming with whatever was down there. The waters were thick with silt, snaking roots, and rotting clumps of plant matter. Although the cypress reached astounding heights here, sunlight broke through and lit the black waters, the green mire glowing, alive and hungry and eternally patient. He tightened his hands into fists waiting to slug something.

Then he saw it. A hand waving from beneath the slime, as if gesturing for him to follow. Red fingernails wrapped with a thin, veil-like film.

"There's somebody down there," he said.

"No one we want to cotton with. You're much stronger than me, come pole us out of this patch."

"My girlie!" the geezer cried.

A mass of ebony fibrous hair now wove about in the waters, and the giggling of the girls continued to waft among the trees.

Calling to the skiff and calling to one another. The perfume grew stronger. Hellboy turned and spotted the flash of limbs among the tupelo. An arm, a breast, a well-muscled leg here and there. A smile, a glimpse of dimpled thigh.

Eyes without pupils, staring: black, lethal, empty.

"Take the stobpole!" Lament shouted.

Hellboy grabbed it and shoved the skiff off the tussock with a groan of snapping branches. He watched as the hands beneath the water still came reaching for them. Those ladies were holding the boat in place. Laurels and flower petals shook from the trees and heaved from the swamp bottom.

Below, the girlies stared up at him. Beckoning, hauntingly beautiful and lush as the jungle itself. As he stobbed he brushed their bodies, and could hear vines tightening in the water, like a snare netting them. "We're getting tied up."

Lament looked left and right, trying to find a way out of the trap. "Old man," he said, "this call a'yours. What are you answering?"

"You hear it, don't ya? If not, you will. You gonna hear and see and smell and feel the girlies in the grasses."

"Who are they? What are they now?"

"All I love and ever wanted to love and care for," the coot cried, laughing, his crooked legs bouncing wildly as the skiff jounced.

"You're already a week or so starved. Another few days and you'll be dead."

"Don't matter none to me! Let me go on with the rest!"

Lament's face hardened. "The rest? Where are they?"

"We all happy, damn you. Why'n't you just let us be?"

The blackwater churned, faces appearing in the mire around the keel. The women rose and dove, almost invisible as they swam and played. Hellboy stobbed harder and the tendrils below tightened around the pole and tried to yank him in.

"This is getting ridiculous," he said.

"Gator on the left," Lament said. "He ain't lookin' edgy or angry at all. Guess he's used to these curious inlets."

The scut-backed bull came out of the swirling from the morass, and hands broke the surface of the water, fingers pointing. With a wild cry of desire, the crippled old man threw himself overboard and went under, rising instantly to let out a single scream-perhaps joy or maybe terror now-and Hellboy was too slow getting a hand out to him.

The geezer flapped his spindly arms trying to stay afloat, glaring and shouting in surrender."My girl… she's here…!"

"Old fool, swim back to us!" Lament called. "You got a bull sidling up behind you!"

"… She's here…! My girl…"

The gator accelerated and snapped its jaws firmly on both the coot's feet. He didn't appear to feel anything and hardly made a face as his blood bubbled and seethed around him. He continued grinning, trying to move to the beautiful forms ahead.

The gator took him below, rolling and thrashing. Vines snapped taut and hummed like the strings of a guitar. More women broke from the brush, boughs and tree limbs cracking as they moved into sight and instantly out again.

"Jesus Christ," Hellboy said. "What is it with these broads?"

"I just don't know. Maybe Granny Dodd did somethin' to them, or mayhap she was fightin' them, tryin' to control them."

Blood thickened in the water and the girls swam about in the crimson froth.

"Can you get us free, son?"

"This whole area is choked with weeds, grass, and vines… and people…" He had to be careful not to snap the pole. He leaned over the bow and reached down, grabbed a handful of the water vines and tore them loose. The skiff loosened and swung aside. Lament took hold of the stobpole and pushed off. They skimmed more roots and drifted another dozen yards.

Then Hellboy saw them, laid out in vague rows like rice paddies.

They lay in the mud shallows, the swamp men who'd answered this call and followed the scent.

Some had drowned and others had been bled while entwined with their girlies. Like the geezer, those men died with smiles, their eyes rolled back in their heads, tangled in the mire. Crowding into thickets and acres of morass. Those still alive didn't notice the skiff entering their patch of bayou grassland.

The women looked up from their prey, leering, their red nails bright in the sun. Hair floated like tasseled black dresses, eddying in the green fen. Innocent faces too empty of sin to be human glanced over at them from every direction now. They were all the same woman, with identical faces and bodies.

"Lord a'mighty… wait… the smell, its…" Lament said in a daze.

He reached for his shirt pocket but never made it. His eyes rolled up in his head and his lips twisted into a crazed smile. Moaning, he collapsed and fell over backward into the water.

Hellboy moved but it felt like he was buried in mud. He watched the swamp men in the muck shuddering and mewling, reaching for their girlies. He looked for Lament but couldn't finish turning his head to the side.

The heavy stench became overwhelming and sickening, enrapturing and engulfing his thoughts. Swooning, he realized too late what was happening.

The musk, it was some kind of narcotic -

This was a nest.

A farm.

Where the girlies fed on men.

Two gorgeous women swam up and climbed from the shallows, white and pink flower petals falling and filling the boat. They each took hold of one of Hellboy's arms and gently tugged. He closed his eyes and dropped into the emerald hell.