Emerald Hell

Chapter 3

Waldridge had a little black hat and a pair of white gloves that he wore whenever he drove the early model Packard town car. Seriously early, maybe a 1936, but kept in excellent repair, glossily waxed, and fine-tuned. Hellboy figured he could understand the guy's feistiness if they made him dress up like this every time he went out to the market for a carton of milk or a pack of cigarettes. The chauffeur uniform somehow matched the Packard, which despite its age still had some real horsepower to it. Hellboy sat in the enormous back seat, which was large enough to fit all six silent sisters, side by side.

"You drive the Nail ladies around much?" Hellboy asked.

"They ain't left the house in years. They used to love piling in back, having picnics down by the waterfalls, chasing butterflies and moths in the honeysuckle fields. Even after they was struck by evil intentions, they enjoyed goin' visitin' around town. They had friends, still had a chance for beaus and maybe even happiness. But that's all gone now. Bad will and corrupt notions have worn away at them. Was a time when Mr. Bliss Nail would ask the gospel singers, travellin' ministries, and faith healers to stop on up at the house, but no one could do nuthin' for them girls."

Waldridge caught Hellboy's eyes in the rearview and asked, "You really think you can help them or Miss Sarah?"

"I'm going to try."

"Tha's all a man can do, I s'pose."

As they crossed the town of Enigma, Hellboy gazed out the window at the quaint stores bordering both sides of a one-stoplight main street. The post office shared space with a bait and tackle shop. A dilapidated set of railroad tracks ran along a pumpkin patch and faded into greater disrepair in the distance. Decades had passed since this line had been used.

Small homes littered the area, almost swallowed by the landscape. Ancient, knobbed trees contorted and writhed in the breeze, the brush alive with some kind of action. He saw eyes glimmering high in the branches and he shifted in his seat.

"Sloths," Waldridge said. "You know about them?"

"Just as a sin."

That got a laugh out of the houseman. "Plenty of that around these parts too. If the corn liquor don't get 'em then their worst ambitions might."

Hellboy saw several trucks and horse-drawn carriages filled with men riding through town, many of the men apparently drunk.

"What are they doing?"

"They comin' in from the day's work."

"Where?"

"Where their daddies and grandaddies toiled in tomfoolery."

Hellboy figured that was the choice way of saying the men were returning from making their moonshine. He watched police cruisers coast by. It was a different way of life down here than the rest of the world.

Farmland and barnyards rolled out into the distant darkness, Enigma itself blurring back into the swamplands. From here the town appeared to be nearly surrounded by the jungles of slough.

As they drove down a large dirt road, a huge house came into view, every window lit. More than a dozen young women sat in rockers and swinging love seats on a whitewashed wraparound porch, feeding and burping babies. A reedy voice backed by twanging guitars drifted from a radio.

"We're there," Waldridge said. "I ain't got no business in that home so I'll wait for you right here in the car." He settled into the seat, dipped his hat over his eyes, and was snoring lightly before Hellboy turned away.

There was a lot of activity going on around Mrs. Hoopkins's Home for Unwed Wayward Teenage Mothers & Peanut Farm.

With a large wooden cross bouncing on a length of twine around her neck, Mrs. Hoopkins trundled around the place chasing unwed wayward teenage girls through the house and scooping up babies left and right.

She was a middle-aged lady of bodily contradictions. Thin but somehow squat. Short but containing a large presence. Frail but with corded muscle, full of strength and vitality. Her face showed serious mileage but was still quite pretty, almost girlish in a way.

It was eight-thirty and Mrs. Hoopkins meant for all the babies to be fed, bathed, and changed within the next fifteen minutes, and everyone else to be in bed and asleep by nine.

Her pink-tinted hair, tied up with a scarf, looked something like a feather duster on top of her head. Wearing an apron, corrective sneakers, and with her stockings rolled down to her ankles, one might snicker at the way she was dressed, but she exuded a kind of hard-earned class and was due respect. She took care of business, Mrs. Hoopkins did.

The large living room was thick with naugahyde, braided throw rugs, doilies, crocheted blankets, and paint-by-numbers Jesus, Elvis, and Conway Twitty. Mrs. Hoopkins looked at Hellboy and asked, "For the love of the sweet baby Jesus in the manger, you ain't gonna bring me no more misfortune into my house, are you?"

"No, ma'am," he answered.

"Well, praise the Almighty for that anyway. We got us enough troubles."

"Anything to do with Sarah-?" He realized then that he didn't know what her last name might be. Not Nail. "Ahh-nineteen, both her parents died about a year ago?"

"Only iffun you count that she's gone. Her and two other girls, they licked out sometime before dawn. Had the sheriff in and out of here all mornin', him and his deputies been searchin' all over town, but I fear. I fear."

"Where'd she go? Do you have any idea?"

"She's been actin' fidgety lately all right, but she in her ninth month and that happens every so often. Them other girls, Becky Sue Cabbot and Hortense-"

Hellboy thought, Hortense, ah jeez.

"-Millford, they both ready to drop their bundles too."

"Sheriff's here 'gin, Mrs. Hoopkins!" one of the girls called.

Mrs. Hoopkins said, "Well, he's a man of true conviction, I'll give him that."

Hellboy drew back a frilly curtain and watched as a police cruiser pulled up in front of the house and parked next to the Packard. The sheriff climbed out of the passenger side. Guy was hefty, carrying a lot of extra weight around the middle. He took off his hat and drew the back of his hand across his brow, took out a handkerchief, and daubed around his neck. Behind the wheel, his deputy settled deeper into the seat, dipped his hat over his eyes, and went to sleep. Hellboy was starting to see a theme here.

The sheriff liked to enter a room so everybody knew he was there. He clopped in through the front door loudly. "Whee-ah, sure is hot out there!"

Mrs. Hoopkins said, "You say that every night."

"'Cause every night it's hot!"

A solid tactic. You went in noisy and tried to shake everybody up, see what fell out, determine who scurried for cover. It focused attention. Hellboy stood back, and the sheriff smiled broadly at him.

"Sheriff Jebediah Hark, son, pleased to meet you."

"Sheriff," said Hellboy.

"Bliss Nail gave me a call about you. Said he hired you to help him out."

"He didn't hire me, but I am trying to help. What do you think happened to these girls?"

Scratching at his jowls with one hand, Sheriff Hark boosted up his gun belt with the other. Crimson-faced and drenched with sweat, he looked like he was hurtling toward a massive coronary. "Might be they left for their own for reasons we don't know about. Or maybe, well-it ain't happened for a spell, but in times past we seen a share of children being taken by the deep swamp folk."

"Taken?"

"Sometimes they sell the babies to rich families in Savannah and Athens or raise them as their own to toil on their farms out in the morass of their village. And then mayhap there's times when,… well…"

Hellboy waited. "Well?"

"Children in these parts ain't always born, ah…"

"Ah?"

Mrs. Hoopkins said, "He means they're sometimes different. Got them some extra fingers or bodies covered with fur. Or no arms or too many arms, or they swim and crawl and slither but never walk."

"And the swamp folk take them in?" Hellboy asked.

"Tha's right."

"And the girls?"

"On occasion they come home again," the sheriff said, leaving the implication heavy in the air. "And sometimes they don't."

"So where is this village?"

"Ain't nobody rightly knows. We've had men who've gone out there lookin'. Some return ain't never seen it. A few, well, they says they seen it but most of them were outta their heads from fever and dehydration and maybe snakebite. Others, they've never been heard from again. Maybe gators got 'em, maybe sink holes. Maybe not."

He looked back at the sheriff and said, "Mrs. Hoopkins doesn't seem to think the girls were taken."

"That's what I say. They been having bad dreams and left on their own early this morning."

"They ain't anywhere in town," Sheriff Hark told her.

As an outsider, Hellboy found it especially difficult trying to dig through the layers of open secrets. Maybe the sheriff was just trying to be polite while talking about freaks face to face with Hellboy. He might be more worried about the swamp folk than he let on, or perhaps he wasn't worried at all and was trying to mislead Hellboy so they wouldn't trip over each other while investigating. No matter how fast you wanted to cut through the crap, it took some dancing around before you could do it.

Mrs. Hoopkins told the two men to sit and poured two glasses of milk. She handed them plates with slices of a dark purple pie on them. "Here, you boys have some briarberry."

It took Hellboy aback. He'd never heard of briarberry pie and the sound of it made his throat tighten.

Mrs. Hoopkins sat and said, "Them girls were havin' dreams, Jebediah."

"You keep saying, that, to no disregard," Hark said, his mouth full. "But you still cain't tell me what kinda dreams they were."

"That Sarah, she's tryin' to keep ahead of some kind of evil that's been chasin' her in her nightmares. Every night for more than two weeks she'd been wakin' up in a froze sweat, weepin' and callin'."

"Callin' on who?"

"On that John Lament."

"That boy? I always liked him when he show up." Hark sipped some more milk and had a final forkful of pie. "But he ain't been around in more than a year, has he?"

"Not that I know," Mrs. Hoopkins said. "But he's a drifter, comes and goes as he pleases, and now her dreamin's caught on with some of the other girls."

"Becky Sue and Hortense," Hellboy said.

"That's right. They dreamed their babies would be born… wrong."

"Ill children," the sheriff put in.

"Pumpkin-headed or pinheaded." She turned to Hellboy. "Now and then, well… sometimes the poison in the ground comes up and gets in the blood, or venom in the blood gets into the ground."

Mutants. Probably because of all the contaminated moonshine made out here over the last century, the outbreaks of yellow and scarlet fevers. And more recently due to the toxic waste dumped into the marshes by big corporations. Barrels of hazardous waste, perhaps even radioactive material, brought down in eighteen-wheeler caravans. Who the hell knew what might have been tossed out there to avoid federal regulations and health codes.

Mrs. Hoopkins said, "You ain't eatin', son. Why ain't you eatin' my pie?"

"Sorry, had a big dinner at Bliss Nail's house."

"Nobody in that house can cook the way I can."

"No, ma'am."

"Give it here," the sheriff said, pulling the plate to him and digging in.

Another toddler stepped into the kitchen and went for Hell-boy's tail. Mrs. Hoopkins came flying out of her seat and shouted, "Lolly Mae, ain't you got a boy needs some changin' and feedin'?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well then, get him off that big fella's posterior and get on with it. We all got to pull our weight, and tomorrow gonna be a big day on the farm."

"Yes, ma'am."

Lolly Mae picked up her son, did a little curtsey, and raced upstairs.

Flailing her arms, Mrs. Hoopkins said,"These girls got to get them some rest. Those who can got's to harvest peanuts on the morrow."

Hellboy had seen a lot across the world, but he'd never seen anybody work a peanut farm before. He wished he had time to watch such a thing. "I understand."

The sheriff finished his other slice of pie, stood, and followed Hellboy to the door. "You wanna wait until morning and I'll send some men with you."

"I can't wait," Hellboy said.

"Then you be safe, son."

Mrs. Hoopkins pressed a hand atop his own. "You think you can find them three girls out there in the slough 'fore any danger befalls them?"

"I'm going to try."

"I got me a bad feeling in these old bones."

Hellboy thought, Me too, but said nothing.

Tapping at the driver's window, Hellboy waited while Waldridge snorted awake from his nap. He told the houseman that he was going to go off and look for the bog village.

"You want I should go with ya?"

"No, that's okay. I was just hoping you could point me in the right direction."

"You just gonna set off walkin'?"

"Yeah." He knew that something would be along to shove and prod him on the way. Ever since he'd been let off in Enigma he'd felt he was being watched.

"Swamp that way," Waldridge said, angling his index finger south-east down a dirt track. "They say it's eight hundred square miles. Heard it on the radio once."

Only about 450,000 acres. "That's not so bad."

"You don't know your way 'round these black waters."

"Do you?"

Waldridge considered the question. "No man does fully, but it's better to have someone with ya. In case'a… well, snakebite… and to keep an eye out for gators."

A tough old feisty dude, all right. Hellboy said, "Thanks anyway. I appreciate the offer, but there's things I'm better off doing alone."

"I s'pect you're right about that. Hope to meet up with you again soon. If not, you'll always have my prayers."

Hellboy knew what they were worth, but it was nice to hear anyway.