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.
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."