Sarah?'
'I'm going to try.'
'Tha's all a man can do, I s'pose.'
As they crossed the town of Enigma, Hellboy gazed out the window at the quaint stores bordering both sides of a one-stoplight main street. The post office shared space with a bait and tackle shop. A dilapidated set of railroad tracks ran along a pumpkin patch and faded into greater disrepair in the distance. Decades had passed since this line had been used.
Small homes littered the area, almost swallowed by the landscape. Ancient, knobbed trees contorted and writhed in the breeze, the brush alive with some kind of action. He saw eyes glimmering high in the branches and he shifted in his seat.
'Sloths,' Waldridge said. 'You know about them?'
'Just as a sin.'
That got a laugh out of the houseman. 'Plenty of that around these parts too. If the corn liquor don't get 'em then their worst ambitions might.'
Hellboy saw several trucks and horse-drawn carriages filled with men riding through town, many of the men apparently drunk.
'What are they doing?'
'They comin' in from the day's work.'
'Where?'
'Where their daddies and grandaddies toiled in tomfoolery.'
Hellboy figured that was the choice way of saying the men were returning from making their moonshine. He watched police cruisers coast by. It was a different way of life down here than the rest of the world.
Farmland and barnyards rolled out into the distant darkness, Enigma itself blurring back into the swamplands. From here the town appeared to be nearly surrounded by the jungles of slough.
As they drove down a large dirt road, a huge house came into view, every window lit. More than a dozen young women sat in rockers and swinging love seats on a whitewashed wraparound porch, feeding and burping babies. A reedy voice backed by twanging guitars drifted from a radio.
'We're there,' Waldridge said. 'I ain't got no business in that home so I'll wait for you right here in the car.' He settled into the seat, dipped his hat over his eyes, and was snoring lightly before Hellboy turned away.
There was a lot of activity going on around Mrs. Hoopkins's Home for Unwed Wayward Teenage Mothers & Peanut Farm.
With a large wooden cross bouncing on a length of twine around her neck, Mrs. Hoopkins trundled around the place chasing unwed wayward teenage girls through the house and scooping up babies left and right.
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.
'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.
