weighed hardly anything. He was undernourished, dehydrated, and exhausted, as if he'd been lying out there doing nothing but smiling obscenely for days. 'What's your name?'
'Ain't got one!'
'You don't have a name?'
'Not no more. Please, I never done you no harm. Put me back. Put me back!'
'We're going to take you home.'
'No, I say, no!' the coot cried. His beard was tangled with thorns and he was covered in the jetsam of the bayou. His skin was raw from sunburn and insect bites. Hellboy wrapped him in a blanket and tried to get some of the corn griddle cakes down his throat, but the old man refused to eat.
Turning away, Hellboy caught a powerful musky perfume on the air.
'Smell that?' he asked.
Lament nodded. 'Same odor that was in Megan Dodd's shack.'
'Cain't go back no more,' the old man whimpered. 'Hep me get on. I needs to get on with my answering.'
Something bumped against the bottom of the boat, and Hellboy almost lost his footing. Lament tried poling free and said, 'We're stuck on water vine.'
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
'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
