his head to break free of it. 'No wonder that crazy crippled ole coot didn't want us messin' with his dyin' comforts. I can understand it now.'
'They're plants, grown over the remains of the dead,' Hellboy explained, pointing to the remnants of the girlie whose head he'd crushed. 'No, not plants, really… a single flora life-form that just appears to be many.'
Lament kneeled and inspected the skeleton beneath the fibrous material. 'Gator scratches and chew marks on the bone.' He held the shredded tendril and examined the sap, which was pink from drawing blood from the men. Searching out Hellboy's eyes he said, 'This whole area is a bad spot of swamp, but it's just as natural as any other. After the girlies have their supper, the gators come and clean the meat from the bones. Then, the plant life comes back and grows over the frame. A natural cycle. One hand washin' the other. It's beautiful in its own way.'
'I'd call it a lot of things but 'beautiful' isn't one of them.'
'You ain't from here,' Lament said, moving to the men again. 'People from here don't seem to last long,' Hellboy said. 'Granny Lewt near a hundred and sixteen.' Lament stepped over some of the battered female husks. 'Iffun these are just the buds… the leaves… the sweet meant to lure the prey… then where's the trunk of the thing?'
'Good question.' Hellboy looked at the broken vines and followed them with his eyes as far as he could. Some had risen high over tree limbs and others went under the water, but they all ran into the deep scrub. He pointed. 'That's where they went off, flying and dancing and floating.' He cocked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing in the opposite direction. 'So I guess we should go that way.'
''Ceptin' that's where we already come from.'
'I was hoping you weren't going to tell me that.' Lament continued climbing through the knee-high water and finally reached the nest where the captured men from town lay. One after the other he found them in their rows, dead but grinning, propped up in their little patches of mud.
'I wonder if their loved ones would he thankful these boys all died so happy.'
'I'm guessing not,' Hellboy said. 'A few of them were still alive a couple minutes ago.'
They searched among the aisles, checking throats for pulses, turning over bodies mostly face-down in the shallows, but all the men were now lifeless.
'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.
