Emerald Hell Read online

  “I’m not your brother,” Hellboy told him. He raised his great stone fist that had shattered mountains and abolished behemoths. And, knowing it would do no good if he tried to crush, smash, slug, or bash the rail-thin dead man with it now, he opened his fist and laid his hand against Jester’s chest, and felt the childish angels and human weakness within. “And I don’t want to hurt you.”

  ———

  After sprinting a couple hundred yards after Duffy Ferris, with his wounds seeping and broken ribs grating together, Lament dove and tackled him in some laurels. They rolled through a patch of wet scrub oak and came up together knee-deep in mire, facing one another in the night that had brightened with star shine.

  Duffy held out a cutting blade and said,”I’m’a gonna skin you like a gator.”

  “You’re gonna take the beatin’ of your life, is what you’re about to do.”

  “I reckon I’ll bleed you some first, boy.”

  “You’ll bleed, all right.”

  Duffy Ferris had wrestled gators, killed them, and stripped their heavy skins away. His muscles bulged and he was fast as a striking cottonmouth. He stabbed forward with the knife fully expecting to feel it sliding through flesh.

  But there was only empty space. He didn’t anticipate Lament being so quick on his feet. Duffy tried again, slashing now and hoping to open up Lament’s belly, watch him seep and try to hold his goods in with his hands.

  But again, Lament moved too swiftly for him, and Duffy overextended himself and lost his footing.

  He slid in the muck and felt a subtle pressure on his wrist just before hearing a loud snap like a rotted branch breaking. He turned, watched a bright piece of metal fly by, and only hazily noted that it was Mrs. Hoopkins’s knife. It landed with a splash in the swamp water while he wondered how the hell he’d dropped it.

  Lament stood before him, arms crossed against his chest. Duffy went to throw a fist but an oddly shaped child’s arm moved before his eyes. A regular limb bent about halfway in the middle, with the fingers gnarled and wriggling about a bit.

  The pain hit a moment later and he realized it was his own arm, busted near in two.

  Duffy screamed and howled and thrashed about in the mud. Lament bent to him and said, “We’re on gator ground, son, you might want to curb your convulsin’ a touch.”

  Drawing his busted limb as close to his belly as he could, and holding it there tenderly with his other hand, already going into shock, Duffy quietly, almost with a friendly air, said, “Please, don’t kill me, John.”

  Lament said, “Duffy Ferris, I stood over you and your brother on many a night while you snored in your moonshine drunks. I watched you sleep while I slapped an ax-handle in my hand, prepared to cave in your skulls. Many a night it was over the years. The world woulda been a better place, all right. But the Lord let me know it wasn’t the right path. I don’t aim to understand why He let you go on as long as you did, causin’ the evil that you have, murderin’ and begettin’ your other atrocities, but I held true to my faith even when I wanted to scream. I did my best to see that you had your role to play for the greater good. You hear me, son?”

  “I hear ya. But what’s all this talk for?” Duffy almost started to grin, but thought better of it. “The Lord God Hisself done already told you to let me be.”

  “Whatever it was you needed to do, you already done it, ‘cause the Almighty ... well... let’s just say He ain’t so worried about your well-bein’ no more.”

  “But you cain’t just kill me!” Duffy cried.

  Lament told him, “You deserve it more than anyone I ever met, more so even than Jester. Blessed by God with them fine features and you never done a lick of good in the world.”

  “Gimme a chance to redeem myself, preacher!”

  “I’m not a preacher,” Lament said, “and I don’t kill. But you got a call to make amends. Like I said, we on gator ground. You’ve poached these swamps for years, you and your brother and your daddy before you. You’ve worked for the people that tried to ruin this land. You got a lot to make up for, iffun you’re sincere.”

  “Oh, I am, I am!”

  Duffy started to beg again, but as he perched himself in the muck he felt the cutting blade right under his flank. He snaked his hand down and grabbed the handle with his good hand. “I am, I am!” he repeated, and couldn’t contain his snicker as he brought the knife up, preparing to jam it into Lament’s throat.

  Duffy felt a subtle pressure on his wrist just before hearing another loud snap like another rotted branch breaking. He turned and watched Mrs. Hoopkins’s knife fly by.

  This time the pain hit quicker. Shrieking, Duffy went down and spun under the water, the agony in his two busted arms driving him nearly out of his head. He came up sputtering and coughing and grunting, but couldn’t clear the muck from his throat. He began to croak like a gator.

  Lament backed away until he was up on grassland, where he squatted and got out his mouth-harp and twanged a tune. Duffy roared and croaked some more.

  His own cries called three bulls out from the bog, and one after the other they crawled through the laurels and titi and came down after him. Lament stood his ground and when the gators strayed too close to him, he waved them on toward Duffy, who tried to scramble through the watergrasses and swim away with his two shattered limbs.

  Try as he might though, he didn’t manage to get very far before the gators set upon him.

  They didn’t kill him fast. They did what they like to do with their food, dragging it around and pounding it against logs, softening it, taking it down to their mud holes and stuffing it in tussocks of root and bramble, letting it ripen.

  When the few straggler bulls came by to raise their heads from the water and stare inland, Lament said, “It’s been a rough couple’a days, boys, now don’t go makin’ it no rougher. You got your supper, so you move on now.”

  They did, slipping away in one direction while Lament went another.

  ———

  Hellboy faced Jester, thinking about being the destroyed and the destroyer. He wavered on his feet and saw that Jester was doing the same.

  The angels swarmed him, plucking out pieces of him, stinging like wasps. He didn’t know if it was going to help. All these years with Jester and they still didn’t know anything much about what it meant to stand up and fall down. To love and to hate, to seek out answers in the earthquake and the silence. He was remote and He was not. He was vast and He was not. He was here within both of them and He was. We are. I am. The distance between man and God seemed as wide as ever. Archangels wouldn’t be able to close the gap. It was up to man and God to get there on their own. Hellboy figured they’d make it eventually.

  Dripping and mud-soaked, Lament appeared at Hellboy’s side and tugged at his elbow. Hellboy tried to refocus.

  “You all right, son?”

  “What?”

  “Them shadows been wearin’ upon you.”

  “They have their work to do, same as the rest of us, I guess.”

  “You got some more fire, son?”

  “I’ve always got fire.” Hellboy got out the Zippo and snapped it off his hip again..In the glow, Hellboy saw that Lament held a throbbing black piece of... something.

  “What do you have there?” Jester asked, roused from his own thoughts. “What is that?”

  “This here?” Lament said. “Recognize it? This is apiece of shadow taken from a dead man. He chopped it off himself.” Lament held the coursing piece of darkness in his hand. “Murdered his wife with a hatchet. Then threw it down and cut oft part of his own shadow.”

  “My ... ?”

  “Makes me wonder ... if I give it back, what’s gonna happen?”

  Jester knew it contained too much of the man he’d once been—the weak and faltering man, the one driven mad, the one denied by Heaven. He backed away a step and moaned because he felt something he had not felt in twenty years. The honest, true, and pure grip of fear.

  “You know what
I been doing with this portion of shadow right here?” Lament asked. “I been talkin’ to it since I was a child. I been tryin’ to teach it to follow God’s path.” He held the piece of darkness out to Hellboy and said, “I can’t put it back to him. You gonna have to do it.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re stronger than me, and you got more understanding.”

  The shadow, like a frail animal, made a scrabbling effort to leap from Lament’s hand into Hellboy’s and failed. It tried again and landed upon him.

  I am many things, the man said—the man Brother Jester had been before he’d broken faith. Weak and willful. In need of great love and consumed by fear that the Almighty has turned His back. The power to sing and heal proves me only a vessel, and my faith is in decline. My wife is too often alone. I miss her dearly. I am a man. I merit my own life, one free from God’s constant demands. The distance between us grows greater. I love. I need love. I am a son but I wish to be a father. I want a child. My wife and I deserve a child. God forgive me, I stray from His path and seek my own. The man wailed because it was what lonely, distressed men do. The man was lost, in need of a family.

  Hellboy leaned forward and spoke to the lost soul with as much conviction as he could muster.

  He whispered, “Do your best to go and sin no more.” Then drove the shadow against the man’s chest as if nailing it to him.

  ———

  Leaning forward as if listening to a soft voice, Jester cast his own shadow beneath the moon and said, “I’m weak and willful, in need of great love and consumed by fear. God forgive me. Oh God, forgive me what I’ve done. All that I’ve done.” He let out a keening sob.

  The archangels rose and moved from him, from within and without him, their feathered wings unfurled and ready for flight.

  Lament put out his hand and closed his eyes, dropped his head back and spoke. He said, “I hear you, children. Your ambition’s been honest, and for that we thank you. But the gates of Eden need to stay closed for a little while longer. We’ll find our way back to God and Him to us. You done your duty. You get on now.”

  Black wings, they flew into the night toward the rim of the heavens.

  ———

  Brother Jester, slave to God’s noblest efforts, who had returned to the town of Enigma but found his destiny in a nameless swamp village, who had lived and died, now lived again as an ailing, lonely man. He was thankful for the chance. On his knees, he rocked back and forth and hid his face in shame. “Lord, the things I done, the things I done—”

  Lament had nearly passed out on his feet, and Hellboy helped him to stand. “You need to rest.”

  “These damn ribs.”

  Sarah and her child moved out of the shanty doorway to join them, and the swamp folk stepped from their homes and watched the proceedings, close by but afraid there was still a reckoning due among these powerful few.

  Fishboy Lenny swam up and circled Deeter’s corpse.

  “Okay,” Hellboy said, “so what do we do with Jester now?”

  Lament said, “Grounds soaked in miracles. Swamp’s full of flung-aside crutches. The lame walked here. The deaf heard the word. The blind saw a vision of God. That has meaning. Worth.”

  “Despite all the trouble he’s caused?” Hellboy asked. He wasn’t being dissident, he was simply stating a point. “He murdered his own wife. He almost killed you when you were a kid.”

  “Not in spite of, just sayin’ it’s the case. He has his role to play for the greater good.”

  “How do you know?”

  Eyes wide, Lament seemed surprised Hellboy would ask such a question. “Because we all do.”

  “Oh. So what should be done with him now?”

  “I don’t reckon I know for sure. What’s your feelings?”

  A dark preacher, once a good man and then a half-demon, burdened with a knowledge he shouldn’t have had, fighting himself and trying to forgive himself, and always failing before the faces of angels. Hellboy—who knew a little about what it was like to be burdened with a dual life—didn’t know how this situation should play out.

  “Let him find his way back to salvation,” Sarah said, pressing her face to the bundle in her arms.

  Most of the time when Hellboy was done fighting something, that something lay in a pile of rubble or oozing in the sunlight. He wasn’t sure what to do with an enemy who was still walking around at the end.

  “Okay, so we let him go.”

  Lament asked, “You sure about that, son?”

  “No. But he’s not a dead man anymore. Now he’s as full of confusion and regret as anybody. It won’t be hard to beat him again, if we have to.”

  “I s’pect you’re right about that.”

  Hellboy walked over and bent down to Brother Jester, and helped the feeble, starved old man to his feet. He said, “Just remember what I said about sinning, or I’ll come back and do more than just knock your hat off next time.”

  “Thank you,” Jester said. He kissed Hellboy’s right hand, turned, walked into the merciful gloom of the emerald hell, and was gone except for one last quivering word.

  “Brother.”

  Chapter 26

  Hellboy came to the crossroads.

  It was mid-afternoon, but the day had been a little rainy, and now as it warmed the mist drifted in off the deep acreage of sugarcane.

  He and Lament had spent almost a week in the swamp village, recuperating, enjoying each other’s company, and building houses that wouldn’t get pushed over in a strong wind.

  He’d first played baseball in 1947, but he pretended he didn’t know the rules so that the village kids could show him how it was done. They found a flat dry meadow and the pumpkin-headed kid pitched, the insectoid kid was umpire, and Fishboy Lenny played shortstop. Lenny could really smother the ball.

  Ma’am McCulver prepared huge meals, and the night before they left they had another genuine hootenanny that wasn’t fouled by any uninvited guests or troubles. Leaving Hortense and Becky Sue behind in the village, where the girls wanted to stay for a while longer with their newborns, Hellboy, Lament, and Sarah said their goodbyes to the swamp folk at dawn and decided, without saying so aloud, to leave together.

  They walked to the creek where the Ferris boys’ stolen skiff had been beached on the shore and climbed in.

  Hellboy was getting used to stobbing and rowing, and followed Sarah’s easy directions through the blackwater. Every so often the sound of a loon or an egret would draw his attention to the slough.

  On occasion the baby would cough or cry, a vast and lovely sound that filled the stillness.

  They picnicked on a bramble island and ate a fine meal of griddle cakes and bacon that Lament cooked. Afterward, Lament played his mouth-harp and Sarah sang along, and with the morning moving away rapidly they were soon back in Enigma.

  They were mostly quiet as they hiked the backroads of town, the hush broken only occasionally by a pickup rumbling by. No one offered to give them a ride, and Hellboy didn’t think they’d take one anyway. He’d been worried about Sarah being on her feet for so long, but she seemed to enjoy the exercise as the day grew hotter.

  “You come up with a name for the little one yet?” Hellboy asked.

  “We’re thinking of Lila,” Sarah said. “After my mother.”

  He thought on it for a moment, wagged a finger under the infant’s chin, and said, “I like it.”

  Without acknowledgment, but with a deeper understanding of what had to happen next, they walked until the Nail mansion came into view.

  This time, the moment Hellboy stepped onto Nail land, he noticed a lifting of the atmosphere. He glanced up at the row of large windows above and saw that none of the six lovely pale women were staring down at him.

  Lament turned to Hellboy and told him,”Bliss Nails her daddy, and she deserves a family, now that the folks who raised her are gone. A family besides me and the baby, a’course. She’s got six sisters to gab with now. And ole Bliss Nail gonna have to cough
up some of his coffers and quit livin’ in the blood of the past. Someone’s gotta help pay the bills at Mrs. Hoopkins’s peanut farm and take care of the girls.”

  Hellboy nodded at that and stayed back a bit on the front walkway while Sarah and Lament continued up to the door. Lament spun and said, “What’s this?”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “You ain’t comin’ in?”

  “It’s not my place, John.”

  “You’re wrong about that. You’re a friend, and a friend is always welcome.”

  “Thanks, but you’re all a family now, and need time to work things out yourselves.”

  Sarah moved to him, hugged him, and said,”It’s only thanks to you we ever come away from that place intact. We owe you our hearts.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  “I reckon we’ll run into one another somewhere down the line, son.”

  Lament held his hand out and Hellboy shook it. “Mayhap we will,” Hellboy said, and that got both of them grinning.

  He watched them step inside, the man, woman, and child, and after a moment heard a swelling of voices and laughter. He didn’t even want to bother Bliss Nail and ask for the bus ticket to New York.

  As he listened to them, the family meeting in celebration, Waldridge the houseman silently appeared at his elbow.

  “Shouldn’t you be in there tending to things?” Hellboy asked. Still in his cap and white gloves, Waldridge said, “I’m dead this time. Don’t be concerned with me none though, I’ll be leaving this earth presently. I just wanted to hear the ladies speak for a while first, and see the new miss come home.”

  “Well,” Hellboy said, “thanks for telling me.”

  “I knowed you was worried about it.”

  “Did you at least go peacefully?”

  “Happened on the way back from droppin’ you off at Mrs. Hoopkins’s peanut farm. Heart just stopped workin’ at the wheel.”

  “Did you crack up the Packard?”

  “Bite off your tongue, son,” Waldridge said. “I eased that car to a slow, full stop with my very last breath.”

  Hellboy stepped up to the house and peered through a window. The six silent daughters were no longer silent. They were chatty and giddy and fanciful, and Bliss Nail actually had tears in his shining eyes. They all took turns reaching for Lila and making faces. It wouldn’t be long before the other six had husbands and families of their own.