Emerald Hell

by Tom Piccirilli

  “A dead man.”

  Should’ve seen that one coming, Hellboy thought. “And who might he be?”

  “The husband. The man who killed Sarah’s mama. He was a preacher, a travelin’ minister, famous in these parts and all across the swamps and the deep South. He once had the power of the Word, and anyone who heard him speak could feel it. Some called him a healer though I don’t know if he ever made such a claim. But he performed wonders and knew great secrets. They said they saw him with angels. A blessed gospel singer and a staunch man of God.”

  “Until you fooled around with his wife.”

  It made Bliss Nail raise his chin, straighten in his seat, and let loose with an agonized warble as if he’d just been punched in the kidneys. He reared like he was going to leave his chair, maybe take a poke at Hellboy. His face went through three shades of purple and finally settled on grape.

  Hellboy waited. He heard the girls roaming up the corridor, all rustling of silk and lace. Finally Bliss Nail let out a groan and sank in on himself, visibly deflating. “Like I said, my sins ought to be my hardship alone. He once had another name but the one they all spoke together, though I’d never heard it before, was Brother Jester. Still I knew it was him.”

  Brother Jester. The name was repeated six times out in the hallway, where the silent bewitched daughters were forced to speak. They wafted past the open doorway like wraiths, too lovely, too thin, and too pale. For a moment he wondered what their letters might be like to read, and imagined bundles of scented pages tied with bows, never mailed and never opened. He fought to contain himself, but his great stone-like hand clenched into a fist at his side. His journey had made him a little maudlin and edgy. He wanted to beat the crap out of something.

  “He been gone from Enigma for years,” Bliss Nail said. “There was rumors, for a time, that he’d gone insane and was now using his voice to kill. He knew secrets that set brother against brother, that made husbands rise up against their wives and children. But then the rumors stopped and I thought we’d never hear from him again. I reckoned he was dead. But if Brother jester is back in Enigma, I fear for Sarah’s safety. He’ll extend his curse or cut her down like a field of ripe cane.”

  Waldridge entered and began to clear the plates. When he got to the untouched catfish in front of Hellboy he made a face. Hellboy didn’t mind, he was just glad to have the damn thing stop looking at him.

  “There’s war in my family’s veins,” Bliss Nail said. “We all been soldiers right down the line. If I thought it would help, I’d take a Bowie and a Colt .45 and go after him myself. But—”

  “But you’re smart enough to know that you’re the one who somehow gave him his power,” Hellboy finished. “You made him what he is.”

  Bliss Nail’s hard features had softened considerably during their talk, and the fierceness had gone out of the man. His steel-gray eyes were no longer steeped with strength, but accommodated only loss and fear. It happened like that when you caught a full jolt of memories that showed you exactly what you were and what you’d once done.

  “So where is Sarah? I’ll go look after her.”

  “She’s with Mrs. Hoopkins. Out at Mrs. Hoopkins’s Home for Unwed Wayward Teenage Mothers & Peanut Farm.”

  Hellboy wanted to say, You people. You people, Christ.

  “When is she due?”

  “A matter of days.”

  “What about the third name your daughters spoke?”

  “Sarah’s beau, my grandchild’s father, I believe. He’s a backwoods traveler who wanders the Appalachians the same way Jester did and maybe still does. There’s bountiful rumors about him too. They say he’s got a touch of magic to him. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I take note of such talk. I hear tell he’s back in town. His name is John Lament. That’s what they said. Lament.”

  At Lament’s name the six nameless daughters spoke and drifted past the door once again, as if this was a ballet that they had rehearsed many times before. Lovely and ethereal, like wisps of white smoke. He found himself wanting to hear their voices through their written words.

  “Name your price,” Bliss Nail said. “What you want for this aid in my needful hour?You only stumbled upon my ills.”

  “I did. But that’s how these things happen.”

  “You help and I’m in your debt. You fix the cost and I’ll pay it.”

  “How about the price of a bus ticket to Connecticut?”

  Bliss Nail frowned. “That all?”

  “I don’t much like hitchhiking.”

  “You have my word.”

  Hellboy guessed that before this was all over, he’d find out exactly how much that was worth.

  “Okay, so how do I get to this peanut farm anyway?”

  “Waldridge will drive you,” Bliss Nail said, and his silent daughters continued staring, waiting for their otherworldly sentence to be lifted. Their voices to return, the house to be filled with the sound of children. As Hellboy stood and walked from the room, they each came to him, lithe and pallid, eyes ashen and lovely faces stern with pain. They floated past with their silk dresses trailing, and one of the silent daughters, perhaps the one who’d waved to him on the stairway before, who looked too similar to her sisters for him to tell her from the others, pressed a soft hand to his cheek before gliding away with the rest.

  Chapter 2

  Brother Jester, slave to God’s pettiest whims, returned to the town of Enigma, that place of his former life, his eventual undoing, and his own death.

  The hunger visited again. He found a crushed possum in the road and began to remove what few guts remained in it. He only ate what the Lord provided and only what he found offered to him in the road. It was both a measure of penance and an act of defiance. Daring Heaven to whittle him down farther, if that was his fate. When there was no food, he ate his rage.

  While Brother Jester could starve, he couldn’t die.

  The moon shone down in a burnished silver rippling. He had no shadow when he walked, but he had many in his mind. As he’d preached his way back and forth across thousands of miles of the American South, occasionally retracing his steps from church to church, through a ghost town or swamp village, he’d send the shadows out among the crowds and they’d return with hidden truths. It was the way of the Lord.

  Sometimes he spoke these secrets aloud in his devastated voice, letting a cuckold know which men his wife had slept with. Periodically he held back words that might ease decades of bad blood among families or carry an afflicted soul up from the void. He could only do so much, and took pleasure in doing no more for others than was ever done for him. We all have our blood to let.

  He worked his will among the people as God did, treating them no better or worse than Heaven ever had. Some died at ease, others did not. He reveled in their faithlessness as much as he did in their courage. On their deathbeds, he murmured their corruptions and trickery to them and watched the turmoil and terror bloom in their eyes just as the light of life faded from them.

  It was, in its own way, quite glorious.

  As Jester continued walking, taking his first bite of raw possum, he heard the woman whimpering out in the morass.

  He moved off the road and pressed through the palm fronds and scrub oak. He eased into darkness and his shadows awakened. The ground grew muddier and the glowing cypress grew thicker, the hanging moss stretched out above. He heard laughter and hunkered down behind a stand of sprouting sassafras.

  Two handsome, golden-haired men stood at the shore of a hillock of slough watching a middle-aged woman slowly sink into the mire. Her arms flailed once and she let out a sob, but could do no more than that. All the fight had already gone out of her, blood in her eyes as she cried out a name that sounded like “Henry.”

  Two scut-backed bull gators swam through the slime toward her, their powerful tails slashing deep black wakes behind them.

  The men crouched and pawed through clothes and the contents of the woman’s luggage and purse, letting ou
t whoops of joy when they found fifty dollars in cash.

  “I gonna get me a new shirt and go out dancin’ Friday night,” one said.

  “You can’t dance worth a lick, but you can use you some new clothes, ‘specially some undergarments, whether you two-step in ‘em or not.”

  Brother Jester sent his own darkness among the two killers and the dying woman, watching the shadows flap free as their feathery touch brushed the raised, knotted flesh of his scarred throat. They returned momentarily with knowledge of love and crimes that had been, and would be, completely buried in these swamps. It added to his anguished heart.

  The woman’s name was Marcie Andrews, a saleswoman on her way down to Jacksonville for a Mary Kay Cosmetics convention. She was a top earner in Raleigh and wanted to win a pink Cadillac for selling more product than anyone else in the region. She had stopped several times during her trip to hold impromptu sales pitches with various waitresses at truck stop diners and five-and-dime cashiers.

  Sixteen cases of lipstick, eye shadow, rouge, pancake powder, and other necessities for a woman’s morning ritual of beautifying were packed in the back of her Ford. Her husband Henry had told her not to push the Ford past sixty for fear of throwing a rod, but the more she stopped the further behind in her schedule she got, and the faster she drove to make up for lost time.

  Already she’d sold another $227.48 worth of cosmetics, which she just knew was going to earn her that Caddy. Then Henry would surely be happy and might even take her on a second honeymoon like he’d been promising for the last twenty-eight years of marriage. The first honeymoon had been three days at the Whispering Pines Motel outside of Rosestock, South Carolina where he’d mostly gone fishing with the motel manager and another newly wedded husband, and Marcie and the other newly wedded wife mostly browsed at the little souvenir shop and read recipe magazines together.

  She threw a rod two miles outside Enigma and sat behind the wheel flustered and cussing, wondering where in the hell she was going to find someone to help her in this swamp burg. Her tears cut quarter-inch-deep twin channels down her heavily made-up face and, gesticulating helplessly to the sky, she began to walk the road.

  In their Dodge Charger, the Ferris boys found her that way, alone and about a half mile from her truck. They offered to haul the Ford to the nearest repair station, and Marcie, so taken with their chiseled, winsome features, didn’t start to get worried until they were already deep in the river bottoms and bog land.

  The boys didn’t have to do anything more than toss her out the door into the morass. Marcie’s penchant for fried foods and bonbons hadn’t done her figure much good, and after five minutes of trying to dog paddle out in the muck, she was breathless and ready to go under. If she was lucky, she might drown before the gators dragged her off to gator ground and rolled her down in the mud, letting her ripen wedged and broken between logs. It might take days to die that way.

  Brother Jester parted the high-standing sassafras and stepped into view. Showing mercy, as the Lord sometimes did, he was filled with prophecy and said to the woman in his ruined voice, “Henry will soon be with you before the eternal divine presence, Marcie. When he hears of your death he’ll shoot himself in the head with his father’s Army .45. You’ll be together come Judgment Day in the light of Christ’s peace and beauty.”

  Marcie tipped to one side, dying but still worried that her hair was getting dirty and the nice French curls that had cost her eighteen dollars down at Iris Connifer’s House of Beauteous Bouffants were getting bugs in them.

  But before the dark waters filled her mouth she whimpered, “Help me ... oh no Henry ... no ... don’t ...”

  The bull gator took her by the legs and yanked her under right then. Jester saw it would be hours before she would pass, as the gators jammed her beneath a hill of brambles to rot and tenderize. She wouldn’t be eaten until Tuesday.

  Jester bowed his head and said a prayer.

  The Ferris boys stared at him and saw what the rest of the world saw. A seasoned, weathered, gaunt man with parchment-white skin, wearing a dusty frock coat, string-tie, and flat black hat of the old-time traveling ministers.

  “Son, you done messed with us now,” Deeter Ferris said. “Better to fling yourself in the mud your own self than cross paths with us.”

  His brother Duffy pointed to the water. “Go on and get in there. Don’t you make me dirty my snakeskin boots none.”

  “That wouldn’t be right at’all.”

  “Not’all.”

  “I know who you are,” Brother Jester said. “Duffy and Deeter Ferris, who killed your own parents when you were but ten-year- and eleven-year-old bucks. And you haven’t stopped your backwoods murdering since. You’ve masked your evil with your charm and comeliness, so no one dares accuse you.”

  The Ferris boys didn’t act surprised to hear their ugliest and most intimate truth spoken aloud. Enigma was a town of many open secrets.

  Deeter stroked the golden stubble on his chin and said, “This preacher sound like he been garglin’ hot asphalt.”

  “Good that he ain’t bein’ loud, my ears is still ringin’ from that woman’s yodelin’. Why you sound like that, preacher?”

  “I was hanged,”Jester said.

  The Ferris brothers burst out laughing. Duffy asked, “Well, son, who done hanged you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Reckon you might recollect a thing like that.”

  Deeter moved forward. “Reverend, you made the worst mistake in your whole dang life, not haulin’ ass while you had the chance.” He drew a Bowie knife that glinted with shreds of moonlight. “Lord almighty, now ain’t you one sad sight, boy. Been a while since you had yourself some biscuits and gravy, ain’t it. You won’t hardly make a decent dessert for them bulls.”

  A six-inch skinning blade appeared in Duffy’s hand. “You is surely one ugly sumbitch, Reverend. We doin’ you a favor sendin’ you off to Heaven ‘fore you ain’t nothin’ but a walkin’ skin-bag’a corruption and bones.”

  How true, Jester thought. Such luminous gospel cannot be hidden even from ignorant degenerates as this.

  They approached easily with their weapons drawn, the violence and butchery in them large and majestic, which Brother Jester found refreshing.

  He held up a hand and a faint crackle of black energy played between his fingers, dancing across his debased flesh, before he stretched out his palm and the power moved from him toward the killers.

  Here was the capricious will of God. As often distant and oblivious as it was pure and obliging. Here was the strength of ten thousand prayers spoken in hope and belief, and ten thousand more from, the heart of his loss and hatred.

  “Hellfire, son,” Duffy called. “What you got there?”

  Jester afforded himself a grin. “Heaven-fire.”

  He clenched his hand and the cords of mystic power tightened around their bodies while they screamed. It was an ugly passionate sound, perhaps loud enough for Marcie Andrews to hear down where she moaned trapped and broken in the catclaw briars and tussocks of weeds. The black energy wove about the Ferris boys and stung at them like wasps. It tore and delved and slithered through their ears to heat their brains. It dug at their tongues and knew all their words. It skittered against their knives and the blades turned red-hot in the emerald darkness. Both cried out,”God—”

  We all call for God before our deaths, Jester thought, all except himself, of course. Which is perhaps why he was so blessed and so damned.

  His shadows found all their secrets and weaknesses and raked their excruciating places. The brothers, like all righteous penitents, went to their knees, bleeding and sobbing and begging.

  “I may have use for you two,” Jester said.

  ———

  Once he had been a man like other men, but perhaps with a greater will to serve Heaven than most. He preached the holy word and sought to save lives that had gone to shambles. The road whispered for him to follow and he traveled the land giving
witness and testament: He had a lush, compelling voice and would sing at tent revivals. His words, a gift from on high, brought peace and joy, and then, by turns, prophecy and tongues.

  Eventually, through another boon, he began to heal the sick. The crippled, diseased, and maimed came to him in long processions, winding through the marshes and villages and towns, hobbling in along the dirt tracks, the blind following his voice.

  He had the love of a good woman at home and he always returned to her, in time. When he returned they would picnic down by the bottoms and make love in the juniper. When the Lord called for him to move on again, she understood.

  His last few years as a mortal man had been busy ones. He was away from home more than ever. Building churches, improving schools, inviting doctors to create clinics. Mending those he could and consoling those he could not. The flocks gathered to him. No matter how often they saw the miracle of each new day, and were blessed with life and family, they needed to be reminded of the Word.

  There were more ill children to attend and souls to save. So many that when he spotted the orphan boy in the swamp revival during an all-night sing, and heard the child sing and preach with a golden voice even more commanding than his own, he knew he would mentor and cultivate the boy’s skills.

  After those long months traveling the hills and the swamps, growing to love the boy as a son, he returned to Enigma strong and tan and full of conviction to find his wife holding a newborn baby girl.

  He remembered that moment as one of overwhelming elation, so much so that he rushed to her and threw his arms around her. It wasn’t until he noticed his wife’s terrified expression that he realized he couldn’t be the father. He’d been away for more than a year.

  Brother Jester could no longer recall his wife’s name, or his own at that time, because for so long it made him suffer and groan to even think of them. But he spoke her name then, whatever it had been, and, with the pieces of his heart twisting inside him, he looked at the baby and wanted to kill it.

  His wife spoke his name, whatever it was, and said, “You love God more than you do me.”