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.
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.
Chapter 13
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.
Another woman fell atop him and clung to Hellboy’s back. She dug her fingernails in, and he realized they were actually thistles and barbs for easily rending flesh. She dug them in deeply, and he let out a cry, trying to tear her free. After whirling about, he managed to get a hand on her wrist and tug her arm loose from the shoulder.
She writhed in the cypress overhead, beckoning with her remaining fingers, and moved to him again.
Hellboy thought, What I wouldn’t give for some industrial strength weed-killer.
There was still a loving expression on that lovely face, the catfish eyes empty of any humanity. He hit it again, and again, and once more until the woman’s body tore free from the tendril. She dropped motionless beside one of the dying men laid out in his aisle. The guy lethargically propped himself in the mud and started wailing as his girlie sank into the slime.
The tittering grew louder until it was more like a scream in the underbrush. The cypress shook and rattled, more women gliding in and rising from the waters, joining the fray. He couldn’t keep this up much longer the way he was feeling. His thoughts were still sluggish, his head stuffed with cotton and razors.
Hellboy called, “Lament! John Lament! Get your hillbilly butt up, I need some help here! All you other guys, if you want to live then come on, fight! Fight it!”
He slogged ahead and spotted the flash of metal again, near his feet. He stormed forward and found his pistol half-buried in weeds, caked with mud and slough. He quickly tried to clean it on his coat but nothing was helping much.
“Son of a—”
Another marionette dropped on him and he drew back his fist to pummel it, but its jaws cracked wide and its neck distended like a snake’s to fit his stone hand down its throat.
He tried to pull free but the girlie tightened her hold and began gnawing her way up his arm.
Terrific.
He was already trying to figure out what he was going to put in his report and what he’d leave out. Some of this stuff was pretty embarrassing.
The girlie began moaning with hideously false noises. He pressed the gun to her forehead and saw the barrel ease into the flesh-like fibrous growth. He pulled the trigger and the barrel exploded.
Agony lanced through his left hand and he cried out. The force threw him backward into the shallows and the human skull in the girlie’s head came along with him in a splash of bayou silt.
How do you kill a weed? You have to tear it out by the root.
Ml the girlies started rushing forward in unison, trying to drink the blood from his wounded hand. Lament raised his head and began to fight with the creatures too, like some kind of celebrity being mobbed by fans, sinking beneath their numbers. They dragged him away deeper into the ooze.
Chapter 14
After wetting a bandana and wrapping it around his neck, Duffy Ferris pointed to the inlet at the base of the dark lake and said, “I see they broke camp over that’a’way this mornin’. There’s still a faint trail of smoke risin’ from the last of their embers.”
“I see it too,”Deeter said. “That’s gator ground.”
“Crossed over to the other side and goin’ deeper into the morass. Notice where they tore up the twigs passin’ through? All the mud they raked up and log litter they broke past? We comin’ up to the marsh prairies. We’re only two, three hours behind ‘em.”
“I spot two cold camps,” Deeter said, shielding his eyes from the sun.”One a bit aways from the other. Them teenage girls come through this way too, mayhap the night before. None’a them are gator bait yet.”
“Which ain’t to say there ain’t still a chance for it.”
“No, which ain’t to say that at all. Gotta admire them girls’ pluck though. All of ‘em with child
. Ain’t a one of ‘em that’s what you might call weak-willed.”
Duffy grabbed the pole and began stobbing again, his muscles corded and the thick veins twisting along his arms. “You think Dorrie Mae Wilkes is among ‘em?”
Deeter furrowed his brow. “Which one’s that?”
“Pretty young thing, blonde hair halfway down her back, fine shapely figure on her. She won Miss Peach Pit over in Waynescross last summer, rode up front on the float during the Peach Pit Parade. You don’t recall?”
“Wilkes’s got four girls, so I’m havin’ some trouble decipherin’ which particular one she might be.”
“Don’t matter none.” With nostrils flaring, Duffy sniffed the air. “You smell it?”
“Can’t smell me nothin’ but that ole boy gettin’ riper in the back of the damn boat.”
“Corn griddle cakes. And fried turtle eggs. No breeze here to carry the aroma off.”
“Yeah?” Deeter put a hand on his belly as it emitted an audible growl. “Them boys are livin’ the honeyed life out here, for certain. Wish we could stop for some food. It’s gettin’ on lunchtime.”
Duffy whispered, “That Jester don’t eat but what he finds flattened dead on a broken white line, so I guess he expects the same of us. How I do wish we never run into that hell preacher.”
“No more so than me,” Deeter said. “Bless my ears, I hear him still conversin’ with that deceased codger.”
“Naw, he done quit that a while back. Guess ole Plume Wallace wasn’t reciprocatin’ enough. Now preacher’s just prayin’, except they ain’t like no prayers I done heard any man mutter before.”
The Ferris boys turned together to check on Brother Jester, who sat in the stern of the skiff with the corpse, doing little besides mumbling and staring. The flies were so heavy back there that a dark cloud hovered and wreathed about Jester, who didn’t seem to notice.
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