"They been starved and drained," Lament told him.
"It wasn't just that," Hellboy said. A wave of guilt swept through him. The same way it had in Calcutta, Istanbul, and Beirut when the corpses lay scattered at his hooves. "I think it was the shock too. After the women left them they went into seizures, like addicts going cold turkey. I should've thought it through and been more careful."
"Not your fault, son. They were already too far gone. Even if any of them had survived this long, they woulda been as insane as that old man we run into, and destined to kill themselves anyways. Don't take on a burden that ain't yours to carry."
Hellboy wasn't salved, but he appreciated the words. "You know any of these guys?"
"No, but I suspect that Megan Dodd's husband Jorry is among them. The rest must be gator hunters, fur trappers, moonshiners, maybe some marijuana farmers. The mother plant must've started pluckin' at 'em one at a time at first, and then gathered more and more to it in recent days."
The brush rippled with breeze and Hellboy's shoulders tightened. Hot as it was, he was getting waterlogged and a chill worked through him. He snorted. "You got some really weird grannies around here if that's what they're growing back here. I always thought little old ladies liked chrysanthemums and tulips."
"I like to think she was fightin' it, tryin' to tame it. Granny witches are strong, nurturing women, they try to live in harmony with nature. It's what gives them their power."
"This isn't natural," Hellboy said.
Lament managed a chuckle. "It's a big odd world, son, or ain't you noticed?"
"All right, forget that. We've got to get the hell out of here. Where's the skiff?"
"Beached on gator ground or sunk most likely. We might have to slog our way out."
After all those miles traveled on the water through this emerald hell, the idea of trying to crawl out that same way made his tail twitch. "Is that even possible?"
"We'll know soon enough, I reckon. Unless we're lucky enough to run into Sarah out here, which is our whole purpose."
Hellboy thought it would be pretty damn humiliating to come this far to save three pregnant girls only to have to rely on them to walk him back home again.
"Come on now, let's get on our way," Lament said, and as he took a step away from the bodies and bones, the girlies burst from the tupelo scrub and catclaw brambles again and came hurtling forward. They swept down, diving and dancing.
"We've got to take this fight to them!" Hellboy shouted, preparing to club the women aside.
"No, that ain't the way," Lament told him. The women whirled and reached to hug him. "Do like I do, son. They ain't gonna stop until they woo us, so let them woo."
"Let them woo?"
"Yes. Have faith."
Instead of battling the beautiful feminine husks, Lament moved along with them across the shallows, easing himself one step at a time toward the deep wet scrub, The girls cooed and sighed and watched with black eyes, and Lament resisted while appearing to give in. He laughed with them. It was a sickening sound but it appeased the girlies. Hellboy marched along too, the women hanging onto him, their lips at his neck. He let them woo and they began to bleed him.
They tried to make Hellboy dance but he wouldn't dance. They tried to make him lie down at their knees but he wouldn't do that either. Lament seemed to be having fun, allowing them to literally sweep him off his feet. They lifted him to the trees and he glided around in the air, entwined by the soft pink arms of moss cultivated over gator-mauled skeletons.
Hellboy had to give it to him, he was a sharp little hillbilly, playing along like that. The girlies sipped at Laments numerous small wounds but he didn't show any sign of pain. Instead he laughed like a gigolo and twirled among the fat tupelo leaves. The ladies responded with their tittering breaths from the boles.
The bizarre procession moved steadily through the jungle getting closer to the lair of the mother beast, whatever it might be. The vines grew taut and drew them in faster like a fisherman reeling in his lines.
Normally, walking into a head-on confrontation like this would only make Hellboy feel like an idiot, but he just didn't see any other way of getting on with his day.
Holding one of the women in his arms, hovering a few inches off the ground, Lament looked back over her shoulder at Hellboy and said, "Be on your toes, son. I mean your tippy-hooves. You feel it?"
"No."
"We're there."
And as they came up out of the scrub and weeds, they were. In a great wet tussock of bramble, chokeberry, lichen-covered oak, and mountainous logjam grew a mammoth tree that wasn't a tree. You could feel its antagonistic presence the way you could sense a furious man staring at the back of your head.
There was only a hint of a figure hidden among the reams of bark, branches, and seedling flora. You could just make out the shape of a colossal human being hunkered down in the mud, its limbs folded, hugging its knees to an immense torso. Its eyes were closed but the mouth was partially open and stuffed with flowers.
It looked to Hellboy like a sleeping woman.
Mama.
Why? he wondered. Why were the slumbering giants always the ones who caused such a goddamn ruckus?
Like waving hair on that massive being's head, the vines rose from the top of the Mother Tree and writhed in the air, some of the girlies suspended above while others lay in wait inside the enormous being's crevices and wrinkles. They laid out on the great wooden face sunning themselves, preparing to bloom. Dozens of the marionettes wafted about their mother, who had birthed them and raised them, and was them.
"Sweet Jesus at his loneliest hour…" breathed Lament. The ladies that held him, with their mouths red from the taste of his flesh, dropped him gently into the mud and floated off to join the others.
Hellboy shrugged off the husks still attached to his arms and chest and watched them flit away. "Guess that's Big Mama."
"I reckon so. Can you make out the web around her?"
Hellboy squinted and thought he saw, thanks to Granny Lewt's eyes, some kind of burning white filament about the Mother Tree. "That's a web? What kind of web?"
"A net of spells, set there by Granny Dodd,l s'pect. She knew enough to try to contain it and keep it from growing too wild. But when she died, the charms floundered. I still wonder if this was an entity she found here a'growin' or if she nurtured it for her own reasons."
"Does it matter?"
"I suppose not."
"I'm going to hit it."
Lament turned and looked at him. "Mayhap that's not the best course."
"And mayhap it is," Hellboy said. "That's what I do. I hit things and I hit them hard. If they get up I hit them some more. There's not much finesse, but it usually works." He tightened his hand into a fist, but that ethereal web glimmered again. "Unless you think you can strengthen the spells? Might give us an edge."
Palming away some blood on his neck, Lament shook his head. "Me? I done told you already, I don't know any magics."
"Right, I forgot. The magics know you."
"Say it with mistrust if you must, but it's the truth."
"I believe you," Hellboy said. "I don't understand it, but I believe you."
"Well, son, you're the one got yourself splinters of saints and all manners of inscribed silver trinkets. Can't you wield no enchantments?"
"No." Hellboy sighed and tried to figure out what the best way to go clobber a big sleeping tree woman might be.
The wind shifted and Lament covered his nose with his forearm, trying not to gag. Hellboy smelled it too, the narcotic perfume coming on strong. He turned away and got the smelling salts out again. He jammed them tightly to his nostrils and sniffed until tears squirted from his eyes.
When he spun back, Lament had gone down to one knee and was muttering to himself. "That fragrance again-urging free my dreams-I have dreams, you know, wonderful and plain, my wife on the porch, my child learning to sing-"