Emerald Hell

Chapter 15

Sometimes you just had to prove to some giant monstrosity or another that survival of the fittest didn't have anything to do with size.

For some reason they all got it into their enormous heads or manifold forebrains or multifarious cranial casings that they could just mow over folks because they were bigger or faster or a little nastier than most everybody else.

That's why, when you got right down to it, Hellboy's function was knocking over the biggest creeps on the block and showing them there was something even worse around.

He reached underwater and filled his stone hand with several of the mother vines, secured his grip, and tugged hard, holding the women back from Lament.

This whole trip was starting to get on his nerves. Hellboy muttered, "That's enough of this crap," and with a powerful wrenching motion that made him bite into his tongue, he jerked until the tendrils connected to a half-dozen women started to rip loose.

Their limbs flailed, those luscious mouths opened as if to scream, but all they emitted was that same noise of the wind through the woods. He grimaced and pulled harder. Those catfish eyes gazed at him, incapable of sadness or any kind of honest pleading for mercy. That was something to be thankful for. He swallowed the taste of blood and roared, and with one powerful final twisting yank he separated the bodies from the vines and the rest of Mama.

The no longer animate husks fell into the muck and immediately began to sink, Lament came sputtering up from the mire.

Suddenly the remaining girlies hovering over the dying men were snapped back through the brush. They flew high into the trees and thickets and vanished.

A hush fell over the area broken only by the soft, lonely whimpers of the few emaciated men who hadn't yet perished. Soon even that stopped. Hellboy stood ready, checked behind himself, and watched the water.

Yeah, sure, like he was going to believe it was all over and drop his guard now.

He made his way to Lament, who floundered in the shallows choking and spitting out weeds and blooms. Hellboy got his arms around him, pulled him to his feet, and held him securely while Lament vomited.

It took him a while to clear his guts. When Lament was through he pressed himself to Hellboy's chest and stood there wide-eyed and shuddering.

"You all right?" Hellboy asked.

Okay, so it was a stupid question. Lament drew back and stared at him with little recognition, his gaze clouded. He rasped, "Asleep… feels like I'm still… dreamin'…"

"It's the flowers," Hellboy told him. "They're some kind of narcotic." He checked his belt, came up with a small first aid kit, and drew out some smelling salts. He shoved them under Lament's nostrils. "Here, this should help."

"What's that you say?"

"Come on, sniff these."

Lament did so and instantly revived. "Whew, lordy!"

As an afterthought Hellboy waved them under his own nose and was startled at how the acrid odor sobered him. He'd been a lot more out of it than he'd realized.

The atmosphere became palpable. They could both feel it, the afternoon darkening again with storm clouds moving in once more.

Every tap of branch against branch caused Hellboy to wheel, the wet mossbeards of cypress dripping and drawing his attention. The stink of death and rot flooded the area now that the women's alluring fragrance began to thin. He and Lament stood side by side, shoulder to shoulder, covering all directions.

"Feeling better?" he asked.

Nodding slowly, Lament said, "Greatly improved, thanks to your ministrations. My gratitude is stacking up to near chin-high right about now." He scanned the morass. "Watch yourself, there's still gators about."

"That's not the worst of our problems."

"Hardly ever is."

Lament stood with his arms out, hands open as if to make mystical gestures, in a stance Hellboy had seen sorcerers take many times before. He expected the hillbilly to start speaking in some unknowable language or hurl hexes from his fingertips.

But instead Lament simply shrugged out of his shirt and tore strips from the tail. He bound the deepest gash along his ribs, wincing as he knotted the rags around his chest. Hellboy still didn't understand what the guy was all about, but he had to let it slide. You could only cover so many things at once.

After tightening his bandage, Lament buttoned the remainder of his shirt back up, got his suspenders back on, and moved toward the paddies where the backwoods men lay in the watergrass.

"Them nasty critter-girls still nearby? Lord almighty, when they were on top of me I thought Sarah was among them. Saw her, even felt her… I could hear her voice deep inside me." The memory disturbed him and he shook his head to break free of it. "No wonder that crazy crippled ole coot didn't want us messin' with his dyin' comforts. I can understand it now."

"They're plants, grown over the remains of the dead," Hellboy explained, pointing to the remnants of the girlie whose head he'd crushed. "No, not plants, really… a single flora life-form that just appears to be many."

Lament kneeled and inspected the skeleton beneath the fibrous material. "Gator scratches and chew marks on the bone." He held the shredded tendril and examined the sap, which was pink from drawing blood from the men. Searching out Hellboy's eyes he said, "This whole area is a bad spot of swamp, but it's just as natural as any other. After the girlies have their supper, the gators come and clean the meat from the bones. Then, the plant life comes back and grows over the frame. A natural cycle. One hand washin' the other. It's beautiful in its own way."

"I'd call it a lot of things but 'beautiful' isn't one of them."

"You ain't from here," Lament said, moving to the men again. "People from here don't seem to last long," Hellboy said. "Granny Lewt near a hundred and sixteen." Lament stepped over some of the battered female husks. "Iffun these are just the buds… the leaves… the sweet meant to lure the prey… then where's the trunk of the thing?"

"Good question." Hellboy looked at the broken vines and followed them with his eyes as far as he could. Some had risen high over tree limbs and others went under the water, but they all ran into the deep scrub. He pointed. "That's where they went off, flying and dancing and floating." He cocked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing in the opposite direction. "So I guess we should go that way."

"'Ceptin' that's where we already come from."

"I was hoping you weren't going to tell me that." Lament continued climbing through the knee-high water and finally reached the nest where the captured men from town lay. One after the other he found them in their rows, dead but grinning, propped up in their little patches of mud.

"I wonder if their loved ones would he thankful these boys all died so happy."

"I'm guessing not," Hellboy said. "A few of them were still alive a couple minutes ago."

They searched among the aisles, checking throats for pulses, turning over bodies mostly face-down in the shallows, but all the men were now lifeless.

"They been starved and drained," Lament told him.

"It wasn't just that," Hellboy said. A wave of guilt swept through him. The same way it had in Calcutta, Istanbul, and Beirut when the corpses lay scattered at his hooves. "I think it was the shock too. After the women left them they went into seizures, like addicts going cold turkey. I should've thought it through and been more careful."

"Not your fault, son. They were already too far gone. Even if any of them had survived this long, they woulda been as insane as that old man we run into, and destined to kill themselves anyways. Don't take on a burden that ain't yours to carry."

Hellboy wasn't salved, but he appreciated the words. "You know any of these guys?"

"No, but I suspect that Megan Dodd's husband Jorry is among them. The rest must be gator hunters, fur trappers, moonshiners, maybe some marijuana farmers. The mother plant must've started pluckin' at 'em one at a time at first, and then gathered more and more to it in recent days."

The brush rippled with breeze and Hellboy's shoulders tightened. Hot as it was, he was getting waterlogged and a chill worked through him. He snorted. "You got some really weird grannies around here if that's what they're growing back here. I always thought little old ladies liked chrysanthemums and tulips."

"I like to think she was fightin' it, tryin' to tame it. Granny witches are strong, nurturing women, they try to live in harmony with nature. It's what gives them their power."

"This isn't natural," Hellboy said.

Lament managed a chuckle. "It's a big odd world, son, or ain't you noticed?"

"All right, forget that. We've got to get the hell out of here. Where's the skiff?"

"Beached on gator ground or sunk most likely. We might have to slog our way out."

After all those miles traveled on the water through this emerald hell, the idea of trying to crawl out that same way made his tail twitch. "Is that even possible?"

"We'll know soon enough, I reckon. Unless we're lucky enough to run into Sarah out here, which is our whole purpose."

Hellboy thought it would be pretty damn humiliating to come this far to save three pregnant girls only to have to rely on them to walk him back home again.

"Come on now, let's get on our way," Lament said, and as he took a step away from the bodies and bones, the girlies burst from the tupelo scrub and catclaw brambles again and came hurtling forward. They swept down, diving and dancing.

"We've got to take this fight to them!" Hellboy shouted, preparing to club the women aside.

"No, that ain't the way," Lament told him. The women whirled and reached to hug him. "Do like I do, son. They ain't gonna stop until they woo us, so let them woo."

"Let them woo?"

"Yes. Have faith."

Instead of battling the beautiful feminine husks, Lament moved along with them across the shallows, easing himself one step at a time toward the deep wet scrub, The girls cooed and sighed and watched with black eyes, and Lament resisted while appearing to give in. He laughed with them. It was a sickening sound but it appeased the girlies. Hellboy marched along too, the women hanging onto him, their lips at his neck. He let them woo and they began to bleed him.

They tried to make Hellboy dance but he wouldn't dance. They tried to make him lie down at their knees but he wouldn't do that either. Lament seemed to be having fun, allowing them to literally sweep him off his feet. They lifted him to the trees and he glided around in the air, entwined by the soft pink arms of moss cultivated over gator-mauled skeletons.

Hellboy had to give it to him, he was a sharp little hillbilly, playing along like that. The girlies sipped at Laments numerous small wounds but he didn't show any sign of pain. Instead he laughed like a gigolo and twirled among the fat tupelo leaves. The ladies responded with their tittering breaths from the boles.

The bizarre procession moved steadily through the jungle getting closer to the lair of the mother beast, whatever it might be. The vines grew taut and drew them in faster like a fisherman reeling in his lines.

Normally, walking into a head-on confrontation like this would only make Hellboy feel like an idiot, but he just didn't see any other way of getting on with his day.

Holding one of the women in his arms, hovering a few inches off the ground, Lament looked back over her shoulder at Hellboy and said, "Be on your toes, son. I mean your tippy-hooves. You feel it?"

"No."

"We're there."

And as they came up out of the scrub and weeds, they were. In a great wet tussock of bramble, chokeberry, lichen-covered oak, and mountainous logjam grew a mammoth tree that wasn't a tree. You could feel its antagonistic presence the way you could sense a furious man staring at the back of your head.

There was only a hint of a figure hidden among the reams of bark, branches, and seedling flora. You could just make out the shape of a colossal human being hunkered down in the mud, its limbs folded, hugging its knees to an immense torso. Its eyes were closed but the mouth was partially open and stuffed with flowers.

It looked to Hellboy like a sleeping woman.

Mama.

Why? he wondered. Why were the slumbering giants always the ones who caused such a goddamn ruckus?

Like waving hair on that massive being's head, the vines rose from the top of the Mother Tree and writhed in the air, some of the girlies suspended above while others lay in wait inside the enormous being's crevices and wrinkles. They laid out on the great wooden face sunning themselves, preparing to bloom. Dozens of the marionettes wafted about their mother, who had birthed them and raised them, and was them.

"Sweet Jesus at his loneliest hour…" breathed Lament. The ladies that held him, with their mouths red from the taste of his flesh, dropped him gently into the mud and floated off to join the others.

Hellboy shrugged off the husks still attached to his arms and chest and watched them flit away. "Guess that's Big Mama."

"I reckon so. Can you make out the web around her?"

Hellboy squinted and thought he saw, thanks to Granny Lewt's eyes, some kind of burning white filament about the Mother Tree. "That's a web? What kind of web?"

"A net of spells, set there by Granny Dodd,l s'pect. She knew enough to try to contain it and keep it from growing too wild. But when she died, the charms floundered. I still wonder if this was an entity she found here a'growin' or if she nurtured it for her own reasons."

"Does it matter?"

"I suppose not."

"I'm going to hit it."

Lament turned and looked at him. "Mayhap that's not the best course."

"And mayhap it is," Hellboy said. "That's what I do. I hit things and I hit them hard. If they get up I hit them some more. There's not much finesse, but it usually works." He tightened his hand into a fist, but that ethereal web glimmered again. "Unless you think you can strengthen the spells? Might give us an edge."

Palming away some blood on his neck, Lament shook his head. "Me? I done told you already, I don't know any magics."

"Right, I forgot. The magics know you."

"Say it with mistrust if you must, but it's the truth."

"I believe you," Hellboy said. "I don't understand it, but I believe you."

"Well, son, you're the one got yourself splinters of saints and all manners of inscribed silver trinkets. Can't you wield no enchantments?"

"No." Hellboy sighed and tried to figure out what the best way to go clobber a big sleeping tree woman might be.

The wind shifted and Lament covered his nose with his forearm, trying not to gag. Hellboy smelled it too, the narcotic perfume coming on strong. He turned away and got the smelling salts out again. He jammed them tightly to his nostrils and sniffed until tears squirted from his eyes.

When he spun back, Lament had gone down to one knee and was muttering to himself. "That fragrance again-urging free my dreams-I have dreams, you know, wonderful and plain, my wife on the porch, my child learning to sing-"

"Here, take the…"

"Wondrous, the places Mother takes you-"

"… smelling salts. Sniff them!"

Shaking his head to clear it, gritting his teeth and groaning, Lament managed to climb to his feet. "You keep them. I have something else."

From his pocket he drew out what looked like dried flowers. Again with the flowers, everywhere down here with the flowers.

All things being equal he'd rather be at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Enough with the flowers. And the damn catfish.

Hellboy remembered Lament reaching for his pocket when they'd first come upon the nest. Lament placed the petals in his mouth and started to chew.

"What're those?"

"Roses. Held out to a woman who died a minute later, then placed on her grave in the sunrise."

"How are they supposed to help?"

"They've got power." He swept back his dirty wet hair, that scar on his scalp even more noticeable than before. It appeared to be much redder now, like a recent branding. "They were strewn on the floor and stained with her blood, so they're mighty bitter. They'll keep me focused."

Hellboy was going to ask more questions but figured it wasn't worth it. He just let the guy chow down. Besides, he couldn't argue with results. Lament's voice had lost that vacuous quality.

"So," Hellboy asked. "Where should I hit it? How do you kill a weed?"

"You scorch the earth," Lament said, and right then Mama opened her eyes.