Emerald Hell

by Tom Piccirilli

  It wasn’t a question. It needed no answer. But he felt compelled to say, “Yes.” As if there could be any other response from him. As if there should be.

  “He’s a selfish god, is what He is,” she continued, “and I’m a selfish woman. I need a man wants me more than anything else. Who comes home to be a husband.”

  Jester began crying, smiling sickly, unable to stop. “But we were bound before—”

  “You haven’t spent more than a week at home in the five years we’ve been married. How bound does that make you to me?”

  He didn’t know what to say or what to do. The full sweeping call of his rage had not struck yet. His tears fell and he staggered about the room, occasionally lurching toward the baby as if to take her, and then moving off again. He stumbled into furniture. He hugged the boy and then shoved him aside. There were pictures of Jesus on the wall staring.

  Brother Jester asked who the father was.

  His wife wouldn’t answer.

  But even then, as his path to destruction widened before him, with no possibility of avoidance, his power was rising. He went to his knees before his wife, chewing his lips, blood filling his mouth.

  Shadows drifted. Angels moved through the air and knew him—Azrael, Adonai, Ariel, Anafiel—their wings unfurling and the light brush of black feathers touching his cheek, their shadows crossing his racked body like scourges.

  The knowledge became his because it was nothing but a greater torture. And from such pain came purification. His mind filled with white light and the answers to his questions.

  Bliss Nail, the rotten rich man who already had six daughters. They were always laughing and gabbing about town, driven about in a huge town car, with a chauffeur who tipped his cap to everyone he passed.

  The baby girl merely stared at Jester, smiling toothlessly, and then reached for him and grabbed hold of his finger.

  Jester scowled at his wife’s child, wanting it dead.

  The boy, standing behind him and holding a handful of roses to present to the woman, said with true understanding, “The Lord’s work sometimes ain’t easy on His servants. We do our best but it ain’t always good enough.”

  In his heartbreak, and in the awakening of his true nature,Jester had almost forgotten about the boy. His protege, his almost-son.

  Brother Jester said, “Quiet, boy, you don’t know anything about what this means.”

  “I reckon I do, and it’s you who’s done lost your way. I see it in your eyes. They’re brimmin’ with hate. It’s not too late. Ask forgiveness.”

  “Like hell!”

  And then, like the striking of a hammer, Jester’s skull nearly burst with his black grief and righteous wrath, his need to die and his need to kill. He screamed and the baby began to cry, and the wife backed out of the room, and the boy dropped the roses.

  Jester remembered running for the shed and finding the hatchet there. The shadows of lost archangels lashing him along like a whipped animal.

  The boy had tried to stop him. The child’s faith was fearsome and forceful, even the angels drew back from the boy, confused and uncertain. But the boy was only eight years old and Jester struck out with the hatchet and left the child crumpled in the dust, his forehead cracked and bleeding.

  Returning to his wife, who was on the phone pleading for her lover to aid her, Jester casually twirled the hatchet, the blade dark with a splash of the boy’s blood. Bliss Nail’s voice came through the line loudly, and in the background there was the sound of girls squabbling and yakking. He grabbed up the phone and said, “Bliss Nail, you’ll have a silent home now.”

  Then he proceeded to murder his wife.

  She didn’t struggle, her hands raised as if to scratch at his eyes. But she never did claw at him, as if too disgusted to touch him now, even if it might save her life. He left the infant in its cradle, willing it to die but unable to reach out and break its neck or use the hatchet. And how he had tried. He’d stared at his hands for minutes, until they turned black and began to spark. But for some reason, despite his rage, he couldn’t place his fists in the cradle and do the deed.

  After that, his memory became a haze. He remembered awakening once at the end of a noose, his body swaying, laughing to himself because he wasn’t dead. Then he felt small hands on him. His next recollection was three days later. He was bent in the road chewing on the headless body of an egret. There were feathers in his mouth, and a group of children stood across from him, whimpering, too frightened to even run.

  His once-strong voice, which had brought peace and joy to others, was now filled with ash. It had turned into an awful croak.

  For almost twenty years now he’d walked the hollows and ridges and marsh prairies, speaking at church tent revivals, spreading truths, no matter how ugly, as he saw fit. Saving some, damning others, and forcing a great many to their most destructive sin and vice. He felt no remorse because he was only a vessel for God and God’s madness.

  And now the angels told him to come home again, because his daughter—his very own daughter, for he was the father who had set her course, because he could not kill her in the cradle—was about to give birth. Hallelujah.

  ———

  These were to be his acolytes and aides: two moonshine-running, gator-skinning, local backwood murderers, as beautiful as Lucifer and just as evil.

  They had been pawns of their father, Farrell Ferris, who thirty years ago would beat Jester in the schoolyard every afternoon because Jester would eat lunch alone while reading the Bible. Farrell Ferris, his tormentor, had grown worse with age and moonshine.

  The blood on his hands became thicker and redder until he was stained to the elbows. These boys had been fed that malevolence and had flourished on it.

  He drew back the rage into himself and released the Ferris boys, who rolled in the mud and wept across the ripped clothes and makeup cases of Marcie Andrews. When they could move again, wincing in pain, they both stood and trembled in the heat, without any idea of what to do next.

  “I knew your father,” Jester said. “When I was a boy.”

  “He was the meanest critter this swamp hollow ever done seen,” Duffy said.

  “‘Sides us, a’course,” Deeter added.

  “You made it last. The killing of him.”

  Duffy nodded, his mane of golden curls sprawling to his shoulders. “Took a while ‘fore him and Mama finally done give up their ghosts. We wasn’t very strong then, but we could still wield ax handles. Wouldn’t have been much fun watchin’ him die quick, now would it?”

  “Hell no, where’s the joy in that?” Deeter turned to Jester and said,”Last time he made to strike us we got out his own shotgun and blew off the big toe on his foot, then broke his arms some with the ax handles and chased him through the briar till he was so torn up that he looked like... like ...” Deeter’s hands moved in useless gestures. Try as he might, he could think of nothing that looked as raw as that.

  “Like us after one’a his early-morning-to-mid-after noon whippings.”

  “That’s right, like us. And he was hung up in the brambles, caught on a thousand thistles, and we sat down before him with a jug of moon and watched him struggle and bleed to death from the scratches. Was a mighty jubilant sight, it was.”

  “It was,” Duffy said, “a rapturous sight. Yes, it was.”

  Breathing in their hate and enjoying the heady scent of it, Brother Jester said, “After twenty years of preaching in the mountains and the valleys, I’ve come home again for a reason. God has set me on this path and finally allowed me to return to its beginning. I have need of you two. God is the master, I am merely the servant. And you are now servants to the servant.”

  Duffy and Deeter exchanged a panicky glance and nodded, biding their time.

  “I lost my skinnin’ knife,” Duffy’ said. “Somewhere in the mud. I feel nekkid without it.”

  “You want, Reverend, we’ll get you full up on some grits and gator meat.”

  “I don’t share f
ood with anyone.”

  “That much is plenty evident, Preacher!”

  Jester smiled in the night,his teeth burning.”! eat only what is provided for me dead in the road. And I’m not a preacher anymore. Call me Brother Jester.”

  “What you come back here to Enigma for? What you gonna do? Why you among us again?”

  “I’ve come for my daughter,” Brother Jester said. “Sarah.”

  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 Savann
ah 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.