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 Savannah 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.
Mrs. Hoopkins sat and said, "Them girls were havin' dreams, Jebediah."
"You keep saying, that, to no disregard," Hark said, his mouth full. "But you still cain't tell me what kinda dreams they were."
"That Sarah, she's tryin' to keep ahead of some kind of evil that's been chasin' her in her nightmares. Every night for more than two weeks she'd been wakin' up in a froze sweat, weepin' and callin'."
"Callin' on who?"
"On that John Lament."
"That boy? I always liked him when he show up." Hark sipped some more milk and had a final forkful of pie. "But he ain't been around in more than a year, has he?"
"Not that I know," Mrs. Hoopkins said. "But he's a drifter, comes and goes as he pleases, and now her dreamin's caught on with some of the other girls."
"Becky Sue and Hortense," Hellboy said.
"That's right. They dreamed their babies would be born… wrong."
"Ill children," the sheriff put in.
"Pumpkin-headed or pinheaded." She turned to Hellboy. "Now and then, well… sometimes the poison in the ground comes up and gets in the blood, or venom in the blood gets into the ground."
Mutants. Probably because of all the contaminated moonshine made out here over the last century, the outbreaks of yellow and scarlet fevers. And more recently due to the toxic waste dumped into the marshes by big corporations. Barrels of hazardous waste, perhaps even radioactive material, brought down in eighteen-wheeler caravans. Who the hell knew what might have been tossed out there to avoid federal regulations and health codes.
Mrs. Hoopkins said, "You ain't eatin', son. Why ain't you eatin' my pie?"
"Sorry, had a big dinner at Bliss Nail's house."
"Nobody in that house can cook the way I can."
"No, ma'am."
"Give it here," the sheriff said, pulling the plate to him and digging in.
Another toddler stepped into the kitchen and went for Hell-boy's tail. Mrs. Hoopkins came flying out of her seat and shouted, "Lolly Mae, ain't you got a boy needs some changin' and feedin'?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Well then, get him off that big fella's posterior and get on with it. We all got to pull our weight, and tomorrow gonna be a big day on the farm."
"Yes, ma'am."