Tom Piccirilli - Emerald Hell

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.

Cries of children drew him awake.

Shadows passed over and through him, his memories stirred and his green dreams tinged with prophecy, forcing him back to the world. Children. Inhuman, horrific in nature. Calling to God and those who aid God's will.

A woman's tongue probed his neck. Hellboy threw his head back and made an effort to open his eyes. Everything stayed dark. Perhaps it was night, or maybe he'd been blinded. This kind of blackness, it somehow felt eternal. Then he realized he still hadn't opened his eyes and he tried again.

Sunlight filtered through the soaked cypress. Girlies moved jerkily before him, in a slithery, sexual fashion. Arms and legs moving in perfect concert with the dead and dying men coiled in the waters. So incredibly beautiful, these women. Plump and rounded, with thin calves but heavy wide hips, breasts heaving in the cutting golden rays. Their nails weren't painted but dripped blood and tissue torn in thick strips from men's backs.

"I bet this is bad," he muttered.

His voice sounded strange to him. Weak, doped up. He looked around and found that he was kneeling in the water with the bull grass surrounding him, tendrils tangled around his legs, arms, and throat. He made a feeble attempt at breaking free and the tendrils tightened, choking him until he nearly passed out again.

Women- dozens of the same woman- -wove all about him, lissomely dancing and wafting, biting him and drawing blood, There wasn't much pain but it did sting, and he held onto the small aches and tried to concentrate and center himself.

He said, "Hey, hey… lay off."

They tittered, and it wasn't a human sound. More like wind blowing through boles in a tree, the scratchy noise of leaves brushing together.

"I don't suppose… you ladies… can talk…"

Several turned to face him and he got his first good look at those eyes-those awful catfish eyes. Jesus Christ, back to the catfish, always with the catfish. He didn't like them any better now than he had on his dinner plate. The girlies tickled him under the chin and kept making small wounds to sip from. They rubbed the flowers, wreathing them over his nose. They opened their mouths and he saw shards of yellowed, brown, and black teeth in there-mercury and gold fillings, bent bridge work.

One of the women pressed the side of her face to his stone hand, trying to bite into it. He pinched his fingers closed and grabbed her upper lip. She pulled away with a soft ripping sound and half of her face lifted easily and flapped free. The rest hung from a fractured skull that had been cracked decades ago.

Their flesh wasn't flesh at all, but a plant-life designed to appear as skin, grown over the skeletons of men who'd died out here in the swamps maybe a hundred years ago. The black hair was some kind of stringy, grass-like fiber.

Hellboy shrugged at the vines again, tightening the muscles in his throat to hopefully keep from strangling himself. They pulled taut as the women cavorted, lifting and leaping through the air, flying. At last he saw that the tendrils were actually attached to the girlies.

The vines moved the women about like marionettes. The girlies, they weren't separate creatures. They were all part of the same being …

A plant posing as dozens of beautiful human women, to bait and entrap men.

So they were all Mama-another living part of the bog, a single life-form that made use of the rotted dead on hand. Surviving and reproducing on living blood, always hungry and feeding on others.

One woman touched his mouth and crammed a finger down on his tongue. Then she did the same to herself, moving her lips to mimic speech as the air was driven through the… the what?… stalk?… stem of a blooming flower? The bellowed air produced a harsh whistling noise almost like laughter.

The noise was weird but lulling. Flower petals kept falling from above. Hellboy strained against the tendrils, pulling harder and harder, grunting and hauling forward. The women flinched and heaved around him, hoisted from the water. He kept tugging even though he couldn't breathe, a small surge of adrenaline limping through his veins.

There were a lot of unacceptable ways to die, but going out as plant food had to be damn near the top of the list.

His lungs began to burn and so did his mind, red and black flares rising at the edges of his vision. He opened his mouth to cry out but he didn't have enough air. Still he continued straining, pushing himself, the scream rising inside along with the fire until finally there was a deafening whip-crack blast, followed by another and another. Like tree bark being sheared by lightning strikes. The vines snapped away and the pressure eased.

It took him a while to catch his breath. Half a dozen of the girlies appeared to be dead in the water around him, floating face down and carried into the bull grass by the rippling waves his struggles had caused.

He reached for his gun but his holster was empty. He searched the rows of dying men until he spotted Lament, who was also weakly grappling with a girlie, his mouth twisted into a melancholy smile. She had scraped a particularly deep gouge along his ribs, and her palms and chin were covered with his blood.

Hellboy shrugged forward and moved to them. He stretched his arm down into the bog, got his stone hand on the creature's ankle, and pulled hard. The suck of sediment and slime resisted for a moment, and then with a great bubbling sputter she came loose. Free, her legs whipped against Hellboy with extraordinary force and he was nearly batted aside. One foot caught him solidly in the jaw as she slithered loose.

Lament groaned and reached into the air where she dangled with one long fleshy tendril snaking back down into the slough, connected to the center of her back. She smiled, still crooning, suspended in midair as the vine lifted higher and vaulted her across the area. Her left leg had snapped at the knee, bent backward at an awful angle. On display was all the long-dead bone, root, tubers, and moss that comprised her.

The woman lifted again and darted toward Hellboy, the tendril swinging her into flight. He caught her face in his right hand and crushed her head, the ancient skull beneath bursting into fragments.

Mama finally realized the threat.

A reflection caught his eye. He looked and it was gone. He set off for the spot in the grass where he'd seen it.