by Mike Mignola
“See that then? Already you better off than a whole slew of ignorant dullards.”
“That makes me feel a lot better.”
“Good. Always glad to help a friend.”
It began to rain lightly and the kids all let out whoops of joy. Hellboy didn’t quite get it, but he liked that they were so full of energy and elation. He hoped they stayed here in their little corner of the planet, where they might count on one another and their people to get them through. The rest of the world would try to steal that laughter from them.
Passing beneath a sharp palmetto frond he felt something cold brush against his cheek. He looked up and a huge snake was hanging uncoiled from the leaves, its mouth open.
Hellboy shoved Lament aside. “Watch it . . . a snake!” He brought his stone hand up and caught the snake just as it was prepared to leap.
Lament said, “It’s only a timber rattler.”
“Only a rattler?”
“At least it ain’t a cottonwood mocassin. Just don’t let it bite you. Go on and let it get about on its way.”
“Oh.” Hellboy opened his fist. The rattler wasn’t about to ever get about on its way again.
“I don’t think you needed to squeeze it quite so hard, son,” Lament told him.
“Guess I overreacted a bit.”
The kid with the insectoid eyes came running over and asked Hellboy in perfectly nuanced English, “Are you plannin’ to keep it?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“May I have it, please?”
“You want a crushed dead snake, kid?”
The boy nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, please.”
Shrugging, Hellboy figured, All right, whatever. He handed the timber rattler to the kid, who grinned, and the snake was reflected and refracted about a billion times in his eyes. The boy ran off to rejoin the others ahead.
A few years back Hellboy had run into a cult of Nyarlothepian sorcerers down in Paraguay who used boiling baths of serpent venom to call up long-slumbering demi-gods. Now he couldn’t even go to the reptile cages at the Bronx zoo without thinking about bad juju.
“What’s he want with the snake?” Hellboy asked, wiping his hand clean on a thatch of fronds.
Lament said, “Well, it ain’t for no damn genetic purposes, if you still got that on your mind. Why else would he want it? It’s ’cause he’s hungry.”
“He’s going to eat it?”
“Probably bringin’ it back to his ma so she can fricassee it and feed it to the whole family. They make for good eatin’, especially with fried rice.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Can’t exactly order in prime rib and chicken cacciatore out this far in the bogland. Can’t order it in town neither, but that’s another matter altogether. Folks here live on snake and lizard, gator meat, wild goat, hog, duck, squirrel, and fish, mostly.”
For years Hellboy had been so busy fighting the infernal orders, the angry dead, the towering trolls, ogres, and dragons that he sometimes forgot there were simpler issues abounding. Like sick kids without bread. He had to stay hooked in to the world. It was easy to get too caught up in paranormal events and forget about the orphans.
Hellboy heard music in the distance. The children grew excited and rushed along faster toward the sound. Hellboy reached down and lifted Fishboy Lenny, hoping to put the kid up on his shoulder the way Lament had carried the girl, but the little fishy guy just slipped out of Hellboy’s grasp and squirmed away.
So much for that.
Lament said, “Well, I think we’re nearly there. Lord help us if Sarah and the girls ain’t. I’m not sure where to search next.”
“We’ll find them, don’t worry. You’ve been to this village before. What’s it like?”
“They were glorious times. I was a young’n and still sang the gospel. Used to have all-night sings out this way. People’d come in from as far as three hundred miles to listen and bear witness.”
“Listen to you and Jester.”
His eyes clouding, Lament nodded. “Wasn’t much of a town at the time, nor populated by so many people with special consideration under the Lord. But it was here.” He watched the girl with no bones in her legs slither along in the cabbage leaves. “I seen my share of one-of-a-kind peoples in my travels, same as you have. Some good, some not so good. The more different we are from one another, the more the same I discover us to be. Sharing problems and fears and endeavors. Not any one of us is so strange as to not have the same hopes and heartaches, not even
you, I reckon.”
“How about Jester?”
“He’s not all that different from the rest of us neither,” Lament said, brushing his wet hair from his face. “Except he’s dead and won’t lay down.”
“That could be considered a pretty big difference.”
“I’m not so sure.”
The pumpkin-headed kid let out a holler. Fishboy Lenny returned to Hellboy and went, “Fweep,” and then scurried off again.
Breaking clear of the brush now Hellboy saw clusters of paintless cabins and crescent rows of dark shanties lining the slopes of slough, vine-draped and overgrown with hanging orchids. The music grew louder. Fiddles, banjos, washboards, and squeezeboxes wheezed and rattled and twanged out.
It was a hell of a racket, and yet just as with Lament’s tunes, Hellboy felt himself willing to go with it. A couple of screen doors clattered in the hot breeze. He thought they must’ve been having one of their swamp weddings or revivals out in the bog, despite the rain. Or maybe not. Maybe they were just enjoying life.
CHAPTER 19
—
People walked up and greeted them, making a fuss, calling for a doctor, and offering skins of clean water, wine, and whiskey.
Hellboy gulped down two bags of water, hardly taking a breath between them. Weird to think this place with so much marsh and quagmire and rain would make him as dry as if he’d crossed the Kara Kum desert. It wasn’t an exaggeration. He’d crossed the Kara Kum desert once, and this was worse.
He was surprised at the size of the town. Someone mentions a swamp village you think maybe seven or eight shacks, a handful of folks carving out some kind of hardscrabble life. But as he looked about he saw more and more buildings in the distance, larger homes, a kind of main street with stores on it. The hum of gas-run generators thrummed beneath all the other noise.
The channels of swamp water ran between houses, and small bridges had been built to span them. There were stables, chicken coops, and barns. He saw goats and pigs in small corrals. Several skiffs sat at the sycamore-lined bank of a large creek that led back into the deeper bog.
Teens fished beside their fathers. He saw tots pushed along in babycarts. This was a true community, as real as any other town he’d been in, and he knew without asking that it had no name.
When he was sated he turned and saw people still scuttling around Lament, who was lying on a cushioned bench on a nearby veranda. An old white-haired man with a bushy silver mustache and thick glasses, who actually looked like a small-town doctor, turned out to be a small-town doctor. He even carried a black bag. His shirt was buttoned to the collar and he wore a string tie and walked through the crowd with an air of controlled annoyance. When he reached Lament the doc immediately began to examine him.
“Quit makin’ such a bother over me,” Lament said, “I tell you I’m all right.”
“Hush now, we all got our chores to attend and jobs to do. So let me do mine.”
“Forget that. Is Sarah here? Tell me she’s here.”
“She is, and she’s fine, so now you just settle yourself.”
“I need to see her!”
The old man cleaned his glasses with the ends of his tie. “If you want to see Sarah again you’ll hold still. You’ve got a broken rib poised to enter your lung, and you must’ve dropped two or three pints of blood already.”
“Oh, that ain’t so much.”
“It ain’t much when you’re drinking moonshine, but
it’s plenty to lose from your pulmonary system. You’re a mass of lacerations, abrasions, contusions, acute edema, hairline fractures, and exhaustion.”
“You just like haulin’ out fancy words.”
“Hush and lie back or I’m a’gonna conk you with a rock.”
Lament lay down and allowed the doc to do his work. Hellboy wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting the old man to pull from his bag, maybe leeches and mud packs, eyes of newt and a jar labeled Doc’s Gallbladder, but he was impressed when he saw the doc filling a needle with antibiotics. Afterward, he used a staple gun to close Lament’s gator scratches and other wounds, and bandaged the busted ribs.
The doc washed his hands in a metal bowl and pointed at Hellboy. “You next, friend.”
“I’m okay.”
Doc sighed, threw back his head, and stared at the heavens. “Lord save me from such hardheaded, steely roughnecks.” He glowered at Hellboy. “Son, my name’s Doc Wayburn. I’m seventy-one years old and I can measure out with a yardstick the distance I’ve got left before I reach the Elysian Fields. You gonna make me waste my precious remaining days arguing with you too?”
Hellboy was more afraid of the old guy conking him with a rock. “Okay, I’ll settle in and try to be a good patient.”
He sat beside Lament on the bench and Doc Wayburn inspected his wounds, gingerly removing the torn strips of his coat and prodding here and there.
“You a veteran, son?” the doc asked.
“What makes you say that?”
“These are field dressings. Nicely done too. You been on the battleground.”
“I’ve seen my share of scrapes.”
“Of that I’m sure, son.”
Doc Wayburn continued his ministrations, taking care of the wounds, dressing and suturing a few injuries Hellboy hadn’t even been aware of, considering how battered he was. His left hoof had cracked at the edge, and the doc ran off to a nearby home and returned with a petroleum-based sealant. He said, “It’ll take a few months for the split to grow out. Until then, you might consider shoeing it to keep the crack from getting worse. We got a good old boy blacksmith can fix that right up.”
“Thanks for your help, I’ll be fine.”
“As you say, then. I got some more rounds to make.” And with that he smoothed down his thick mustache and marched off through town.
The children brought plates of food and Lament and Hellboy sat side by side on the veranda, tired and neatly bandaged, eating and drinking wine. Hellboy didn’t know what was on his plate and he was glad nobody told him. He wasn’t about to ask.
“Doc Wayburn told me Sarah’s fine,” Lament said.
“I heard. That’s good. Where is she?”
“I don’t know, but if she don’t show up in the next few minutes I’m a’gonna go lookin’.”
A couple more people came up and said hello to Lament, treating him with some reverence, even celebrity. When they’d gone Hellboy said, “I thought you hadn’t been here since you were a boy.”
“I haven’t.”
“Then how do they all know you?”
“Some know your name too. You gonna ask them about that as well?”
Hellboy figured that he’d made the papers at least a couple of times even down here. “That’s different.”
“Mayhap.”
“Enough with the mayhaps already.”
“I know a good many of these folk from Enigma. Some of ’em have, ah, retired from town life and come out here to live. Others come because of their children. Some you might say commute between Enigma and the village. And some, well, you know—”
“I know? What do I know?”
Lament said, “Some I know from my dreams.”
The children began to dance again, and the folk returned to their food and their music. Who knew a washboard and an empty jug and three strings drawn up a broom handle could create such complete and rich songs? More clapboard doors clattered in the wind. The air was full of laughter. Fishboy Lenny just hung in the background, waving his flippers. Hellboy waved back and the kid spun in happy circles.
Hellboy looked closely at the people, seeing the slight mutations in many of them. He saw webbed hands and vestigial gills in several people. Others who had animal-like, reptilian, or insectoid features. Maybe their mutations were just a leap in genetic adaptation to their swampy surroundings.
Pointing up the main street, he said to Lament, “I’m going to take a look around this way.”
“I think I’ll head in the other direction. Give a shout if you run into any more mischief. It’ll be getting dark soon.”
With that they stood and began to move off, Hellboy thinking maybe Fishboy Lenny could lead him around the town, show him the sights, the corn crib and the place where they shucked oysters or caught crawfish, or whatever it was that they did, but before he took two steps Lament gripped his elbow. “Hold on, son. Town elder is a’comin’.”
“Who would that be?”
“This here would be Granny McCulver.”
Hellboy thought, Well sure, of course, another granny. What else had he been expecting?
This granny was a hell of a lot different from Granny Lewt, that was for certain. She was young and a stone knockout. She had all her limbs and features. As she moved among her people, the crowd parted to let her by. The music rose and the song grew in strength. He felt the pleasant pressure of her power exerting itself. The great force of her character.
He didn’t know where the granny part came into it at all—she looked about thirty on the outside. A very fine and well-endowed thirty. He couldn’t figure out exactly how she’d made it to granny status, but decided to put off the question as he stared.
“Son, your tongue is danglin’,” Lament said.
“Oh boy.”
Her glossy, lustrous black hair fell about her shoulders and swirled in the breeze. Eyes like burnished black diamonds were emphasized even more by her pale, heart-shaped face. She grinned with slightly parted rose-petal lips, her perfect white teeth
shining through.
The pumpkin-headed kid stood nearby and smiled so widely, with his head tipped to one side, that he nearly fell over. She patted the little tuft of hair at the top of his dome and the kid swooned. Hellboy didn’t blame him.
He breathed, “Wow.”
She strode up and said, “John Lament, we welcome you to our village once more, and your friend as well. It’s been some time since you’ve visited, and quite a changed sight this must be for you.”
With a little nod of deference, Lament said, “Ma’am McCulver, nice to see you again.”
Hellboy figured he’d just follow the routine. He nodded too, as in, yep, yep, well all righty then, and said, “Ma’am McCulver, how’s it going?”
Lament stood there like he might be poised for anything, the hinges of his jaw tight and pulsing, and she said, “Ease your mind, John, Sarah and her two companions are at my home, resting.”
Lament actually slumped and Hellboy had to reach out to keep him from falling. “Thank the Lord.”
“They arrived last night, in the dark without hardly any moon. She found her way here because she was meant to. Becky Sue Cabbot was with her, ready to burst, and round about sunup she gave birth to a lovely baby girl. But Sarah and young Hortense—”
Hellboy thought, Hortense, ah jeez . . .
“—Millford, they’re still holding on, though it won’t be long now.”
But Hellboy realized girls named Hortense, they were made of stern stuff. For her to have come through that slough, all this way, heavy with child, it brought his chin up in respect.
The rain began again, a slight drizzle that no one acknowledged, not even Hellboy who was getting used to it. Ma’am McCulver brushed a hand across her forehead and drew her hair to the side, and her force and beauty radiated even more strongly. He wondered if it was a bewitching, if he was really staring at some century-old hag trying to pull a fast one. He had charms that might break the illusio
n if there was one, but he decided, Why make life even tougher?
“Tell me what happened out there,” she said. “I know the blackwater has been restless and a’grieved, the land agitated lately. I heard screaming and terrible crying at the rim of my ear, and a voice begging to burn away the children. Tell me, which children are in danger?”
Lament related the story of the Mother Tree and Mama’s girlies. “It wasn’t what I wanted, but we had no choice. There are fields of dead men out there in the wet grasses.”
“Lord, if only I’d known about it sooner, but I’ve been distracted with events here. Since my sister’s passing, I’ve struggled with new responsibilities. The town’s growing faster than we can handle. Our numbers have become so inflated, even though so many of our kin have gone missing these last few weeks.”
“A good many of them won’t be returnin’.”
“If only I’d been paying greater attention,” she said, her lovely face folding into grimness. “But village concerns draw me from my leanings, the ways of my mothers and sisters. We’re having
this celebration to remind us of all we have, and to fight our growing despair.”
“And to protect yourselves. The music has charms.”
“Yes. The walking darkness approaches. I sense it. And times have grown rougher these past few years. The chemical dumping is becoming worse all the time. Too much time is spent in Enigma barring roads and keeping a lookout for the trucks. The soil and river fights us more and more. There’s less fish. The gator poachers kill off whole strains.”
Hellboy said, “I might be able to help.”
“How?”
“I can make a call.”
Ma’am McCulver didn’t seem to understand. “Call? Call whom?”
“I work for some people who have pull. We’ll track it down. I’ll do my best make it stop.”
“They won’t stop, they’ll simply go elsewhere. Another corner of a different swamp.”
He shrugged. “You’re probably right,” he admitted, “but we do what we can, right?”
Still, she smiled and said, “I hear the deep truth in your voice. Thank you for your willingness to aid us.”