Emerald Hell (8 page)

She rushed across the wooden floor and hung back against the far wall. “Get away from me, O Lucifer, Son of the Morning!”

Lament moved, grabbed the shotgun out of her hand, and said, “He only looks like Lucifer. But he's a man of principle and his heart is righteous.”

“You sure about that?”

“I'm certain. And look close—”

She peered at Hellboy for a moment and said, “Oh, those is Granny Lewt's eyes!”

Again with the eyes. He wondered when the eyes were going to wear off, or if when he got back to the rest of the world everybody would be commenting on his old lady eyes.

Megan came to some decision. “If she trusts him, I suppose I will too.”

“What's going on here?” Lament asked. “Tell me what happened.” An emerald wash of light ignited the side of her ashen face as she passed a window. The caramel-colored freckles flecking her cheeks stood out as if etched, until she fairly glowed in the interior of the shack. She pressed close to Lament. Slowly, she brought her mouth to his ear. “You been gone a long while, John Lament, but I remember your all-night sings in the church tents when you was a child. You had the most beautiful voice. That still the truth?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I ain't sung much in recent times.”

Hellboy almost mentioned the little song he'd sung in the rowboat on the way over, which in its own way had been beautiful and captivating.

“Are you still a friend to the folks of Enigma?”

“You know I am.”

“And the swamp folk too?”

“Yes. I'm your friend, Megan. Now you take a breath and calm down some and tell me what's going on.”

“You shoulda been gone, you shoulda gone, John.” A bark of frustration broke from her.

“Who are these girlies you keep mentionin'?”

Her face darkened with futility. “I can't rightly say. Granny Dodd never let me go out too far in the lowland meadows. I used to watch her throw her potions in the water and do those rituals out 'neath the moon, and afterward she'd sleep for two days straight so tired from makin' her spells'a protection. She done warned me and my man Jorry, but he never did listen to her much. Always used to say she wasn't right in her head. But Granny tole us that Mama's girlies had a special need for men 'cause they could be easily called away.”

“Called away how?”

“I ain't got no idea, but called they were. After she died some of the menfolk from 'round these parts went missin' and then my Jorry got to thinkin' maybe somethin' was wrong after all. He never drifted too far to get the gator meat. But three days ago Jorry went out into the watergrass prairie and never come back. I spent all night and the next mornin' lookin' for him, but I failed. The girlies musta got him, and they gonna get you too iffun you stay here too long.”

Dejection crowded Lament's face. He'd been hoping for more information about Sarah. He glanced at Hellboy and Hellboy told him, “Don't worry, we'll find her.”

“I fear I done lost her trail already, and now the storm's gonna blow away any other sign. We'll stay until it passes and then be off.”

“Back to Enigma,” Megan said.

“No, I got to find her.”

“She's likely dead as my Jorry.”

“You done despair too easy, Megan Dodd, didn't your granny teach you no better than that? I gotta keep lookin' for my Sarah, and if I come across your Jorry, I'll send him back home quick-like.”

Rain came on stronger, and the walls shimmied.

Hellboy warily took a sniff, and went into a fit gagging on the musk. When it finally ended, his throat was raw. “Christ, what is that?”

“I dunno,” Megan said. “It started a week or so back, and gets stronger with the storms.”

Taking up post at the window, Hellboy alternately stared out at the wet emerald hell and glanced down at his right hand, wondering what it was that he'd been holding onto in his nightmares. He kept getting the feeling that someone knew things about him that they shouldn't know, perhaps things he didn't even know himself or couldn't remember, and it pissed him off. He didn't like the idea of a rogue preacher out there spreading harm but still being blessed by Heaven. He realized then he very much wanted to meet this Brother Jester.

Lament and the girl talked about the swamp village. She'd never been there but she had an idea of where it was and which backwaters and inlets to take in order to get there. They had a different way of talking about water and mud and jungle than he'd ever heard. Sort of like how the Eskimos supposedly have a hundred different ways to describe ice and snow. Maybe it was true. He couldn't differentiate, but Lament seemed to understand the girl's ambiguous directions.

When the storm calmed some Hellboy looked over his shoulder and Lament was already saying goodbye to Megan Dodd.

She walked up to Hellboy and told him, “You jest watch out for Mama's girlies. You a man, like any other, least when it comes to that.”

“Lady, give me a break, huh?”

Lament led him from the shack and the two slogged through the gurgling mud and mire back to the skiff.

“We'll find them,” Hellboy said. “Take your own advice and don't despair.”

“I'm doin' my best. But I fear.”

The rain had cooled the swamp down, and the terrain had shifted dramatically with the deluge. The blackwater had risen enough that they didn't need to row the skiff anymore. The tangled roots and islands of matted branches were mostly underwater now, and as they pushed off they each reached for the stobpole.

“You done your part with the oars in the shallows,” Lament said. “I'll take a turn.”

“I don't like to just sit. I like to keep busy.”

They each held the stobpole tightly. There was a moment when it could've gone either way. Hellboy could imagine the two of them slugging it out over which one got to shove the tiny boat around in the slimy inlets. They both needed action and wanted to let off a little steam. Hellboy just couldn't sit there staring at
the glowing green any longer, trapped between boredom and serious tension.

Finally Lament released the stobpole. “Iffun you say, son. I'll guide us. Keep to the left here past the prairie grasses. I s'pect it's not the way Sarah and the girls came, but we'll hopefully meet up on the other side of this strait. The swamp village should be out thataway.”

“You think we'll run into this Mama she was talking about?”

“Your guess is right as mine. Granny Dodd had her some real power to her, like her sisters. I reckon we'll find out what she was makin' or what she was fightin' soon enough.”

Hellboy stobbed the skiff past the Spanish moss and along the inlets. Lament pointed and told him when to turn and how to avoid the jetsam. They worked well together like that for fifteen minutes. The skies cleared and the sun shone powerfully down. Lament signaled for Hellboy to stop.

“What's the matter?”

Drifting slowly in an eddy leading to a tussock of bull grass, low out on a sand bank, rested a crutch.

Poling more quickly as the skiff bumped up against the knolls and mounds of morass, Hellboy saw an overturned rowboat further along the bank.

Lament searched the waters. “Nothing else here I can spot. No bodies.”

Hellboy nodded and saw a blur of black motion at the corner of his eye. He raised his chin and looked up.

“Hey!” Hellboy said.

“What is it?”

“I saw something.”

“What?”

He pointed with his stone hand. “A girl.”

Lament shielded his eyes from the sun and said, “Where? What girl?”

“A naked girl,” Hellboy told him. “She was covered in flowers, way up in the trees, waving to me. Her eyes entirely black. As midnight.”

 
CHAPTER 11

—

Deeter Ferris stobpoled Plume Wallace's skiff through the morass with great efficiency and poise. His drunken, brutal father hadn't been good for too damn much, but the man had certainly taught his sons all there was to know about living on the bog.

“I still don't see why we had to bring this old boy along,” Duffy said. “He startin' to stink somethin' awful. Passed a perfectly good sinkhole back aways where he'd'a been gone forever and not ruinin' our day. 'Stead we got a half a gallon'a blood sloshing in the bottom of the boat and evidence a'plenty if we run afoul of the sheriff or anybody else.”

Brother Jester, seated in the back of the boat, held the corpse up beside him, his arm around Plume Wallace like he was hugging a drunken friend. The dead man's mouth was parted slightly, an inch of tongue jutting between the rotted stumps of teeth, with its ashen face still showing the frozen leer of a painful death on it, turned to Jester's ear.

Shadows twined around the corpse's lips and urged the secrets up from his undeparted soul. They slowly tore free like the deep roots of an old maple.

“Someone camped right there, at the edge of the basin last night,” Deeter said.

“It was our enemies,” Jester said. “We're growing nearer.”

The long rumbling cry of a bull gator resounded like thunder across the weeds and hummocks, the gator's musk filling the air. Duffy drew his cutting blade, still crusted with Mrs. Hoopkins's blood, and cleaned it in the waters of the lake before replacing it in his sheathe. He saw the bull gator's rutted forehead skimming through the mire in the distance and watched his brother easily divert the skiff to avoid the beast. Duffy checked both the pump shotgun and the double-barrel ten-gauge they'd stolen from Plume Wallace's cold hand.

“'Sides that there weird-lookin' big red fella, who we aim to fight?”

Jester said, “An honest young man graced and blessed the way I was once graced and blessed.”

Duffy waited for more and when no more was forthcoming asked, “That it? That all you gonna tell us?”

“That's all there is to tell the likes of you.”

“Well, I figure a couple'a shell blasts in their gizzards are likely to stop them just fine no matter how weird or God blessed or graceful they be. What you say to that, Preacher?”

“I'm not a preacher anymore,” Brother Jester told him, his ruined voice sounding even uglier as it snapped and echoed across the basin, imposing itself upon the natural sounds of the swamp. He turned his full attention to the corpse beside him.

Jester patted Plume Wallace's back—still wet with blood—running his hand back and forth and gripping a shoulder adamantly, the way a best friend offers condolences to someone lost in bereavement. Even after being shot twice by Deeter, it had taken Plume Wallace almost five minutes to die while crawling in the dirt behind his shack, drawing himself around and around in agonized circles.

He'd refused to plead or beg or beseech. He'd left the world cursing and reaching for Deeter's ankle. A man of pride and courage, Jester respected him deeply. Patting the body even harder, Jester felt a profound love for Plume Wallace.

All the dead had reasons to live, even if they didn't know those reasons while they were alive. Plume Wallace had a sister he hadn't seen in over thirteen years because of some fool argument they'd had over an old car radiator. Plume wanted to use the one in their daddy's junked Ford for his still, and she fought him on it because even a drop of radiator fluid would poison the moon and make him go blind. By God, but he knew how to flush a damn radiator he told her, what'd she think, that he was an eedjit? But she didn't want him to take the chance. She loved him too much and she worried. So he booted her in the ass and sent her packin' to go live with their lame Aunt Etta in Waynescross.

Only the recently dead understood real regret.

Now more than anything the spirit of Plume Wallace wished he could speak to his sister and beg forgiveness. She was right to have worried—he'd flushed that radiator plenty but when it was time to take the first sip of moon he gave it to his neighbor Earl Groell. Earl Groell was already mostly blind so it didn't matter much, but it didn't stop Plume Wallace from throwing the rest of the batch in the swamp and flushing that radiator again.

Now he sought to send his soul sixty-two miles northwest to the door of his Aunt Etta's home and pledge his love for his sister, even if she couldn't hear him. It was a need that consumed him, and the first step toward his shrugging free of his mortal self and finding peace at his entry into the beyond.

Jester's shadows held firmly to Plume Wallace's soul while it struggled to leave the rotting bag of flesh. The tortured expression on the dead face seemed to become even more despairing. “Not yet. Not yet. I have need of you, friend.”

“What's he goin' on about?” Deeter whispered to his brother, and Duffy, the blood in the bottom of the boat rising halfway over his shoes, said, “Just you get us the hell out of these black waters, all right?”

Speaking quietly into Plume Wallace's cold ear, Jester told him, “Go on ahead of us. Visit with my true enemy. My shadows can see deeply in most things, but they cannot see him.”

“I ain't your huntin' dog,” the dead man told him. “Do your own damn villainous work, and let me alone. Sweet Jesus is waitin' on his throne to greet me comin' up the golden stairway. Ain't you done enough bad will on me?”

“You won't rest a wink in the afterlife until I release you, friend—”

“Ain't very friendly-like at'all . . .”

“And I won't do that until you aid me in my undertaking.”

The dead were extremely sensitive. The ghost of Plume Wallace, already agitated because it hadn't found the peace of oblivion yet, grew angry and struggled harder to be free of its body. “That supposed to be funny? That what tickle your ribs, you skinny sumbitch? Mentionin' undertakin' to a murdered ole boy never done you no harm?”

“A poor choice of words,” Jester admitted. “In my crusade to find my daughter and unborn grandchild in these dark waters I seem to have forgotten my manners.”

Butting a log, the skiff jolted and shook, and the corpse flopped sideways away from Jester as if scrambling toward freedom. “I remember you now,” said Plume Wallace's spirit. “I sat in on one of your gospel sings when I was no more than twelve, thirteen. You had a voice come straight from on high. You done good for folks, healed my mama's bunions, cured Daddy of a cyst in his eye. How'd you come to this?”

Smiling, his sorrow and madness entwined, Jester said, “I loved and I trusted.”

Feathered shadows tugged at Plume Wallace's soul and Jester's hand ignited with his fury. He pressed his palm on the corpse's chest, shoving out the ghost but binding it to him. A thin silver strand no mortal could see connected them, and would until Jester decided to sever it and let Plume leave this world.

“Go on ahead and seek out my enemy. Find my daughter if you can, and return to me again with whatever you glean.”

“I ain't got no choice, so I'll be back, and hope when I do I find you burnin' from your own malicious deeds.”

“I already am,” Jester said.