Tom Piccirilli - Emerald Hell

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.