Purple mushrooms don’t grow on streetlights… It’s the yellow mushrooms. Them’s the kind that like to grow their spindly little tendrils up the side of the glowing street lights; the warm bulbs of heaven’s glow. I mean, how else is the lobsters with bat wings s’posed to live if they can’t eat the yellow mushrooms that grow next to the heaven bulbs?
Walking, walking, walking. I need some more of my Tonic. I wonder where Fallon is right now, with my tonic? I bet he’s singing the blues to a pigeon in the park. A gray little pigeon that appreciates old Jazz and buttered pop-corn. Yes… That’s the way Fallon is. Him and his birds… and the bees?
Birds and bees?
The birds and the bees fly up and hide in trees,
  Special berries they pick and chew, grown’ on the leaves,
    Candy corn and apple blossoms, Turkish delights… hidden in my sleeves.

Where am I going, and why is a man without his horns, as red as cherries in the sun, and as tall as the giants of Manhattan looking at me so strange? “Sir, you’re standing in my light. I’m expected to write poetry, sir, and I can’t if you’re standing in my light.”
The giant man’s deep yellow eyes look into my soul. “What the hell are you talking about?” He says it and I hear it. I hear it from far away. From the meadows of Earlsberry, where golden pixies dance and play…
“Sir! You’re standing in my light!” I shout the words at him, and they all come quivering out of my mouth, little bullets from my mind that are lethal and furious.
“We’re in an alley, it’s midnight, and it’s as dark in here as it is in a vampire’s coffin. What the hell are you on, little man?” His mouth won’t hold still when he talks. It keeps moving around, like it doesn’t like being on his big, hairy red face.
“Would you like some of my Tonic, sir? It tastes delightful. Like lemon pie and cinnamon. Or like Earl Gray tea and strawberry syrup.” Such treats I dream up, and I can’t bear to have them linger in my mind without accompaniment. Only the Tonic goes better with my thoughts than my dreams.
Inside my jacket is a thunderstorm, and lightening flares and flashes while I dig through the ogre caves I keep sewn into my leather jacket. Tonic is hiding today… It’s playing its little game with me again… Furious… Furious!!
FURIOUS!!!!!

“WHERE THE FUCK IS MY FUCKING TONIC!!??” I kick at the street, at the walls, at the garbage cans, at the little dancing midgets, at the red man’s hooves, and I bash my head against a pale blue window that shatters into icicles and sprays the ground with merriment and joy, and I slam my body into the demon statue that grew on the red man’s right arm.
The boy from hell, the red demon man of Manhattan is laughing hysterically at me, and my Tonic finding dance. He must think it funny that my Tonic is playing its hiding game again. It is funny. My rascally little Tonic and its games… I laugh to tears thinking about how funny my little Tonic is!
“You’re too much, little man!” He laughs at me again, and I laugh with him; with his barrel chest, pumping the alley full of joy. “You’re the best junkie I’ve met! I oughta come down here more often…”
I stare up at his boisterous face and his yellow eyes, and the stumps where he should have horns—horns like a goat—and I stare at him like a child in a candy store. “Sir! You strike me with fits of laughter! You must visit me again, right here, in this very corridor where the midgets dance! What is your name? I will mark it down in my next poem.”
“Name’s Hellboy, but don’t tell anybody, a’right?” His grin spans the many counties of England…
“You may know me as Sir Fredrick S Killkenny, of the East Borough of Canterbury. Visit me again and soon, my friend! Now I must be off to find my Tonic! A dear friend of mine, a Mr. Fallon of Foxworthy, is keeping it for me, locked in his chest beneath the park bench where the pigeons sing.”

There are no pigeons in the park where Fallon should be. Only a man of eternal slumber, resting his weary woes and dreary droll on the very bench where I was to get my Tonic. I beat the sleeper until the crimson gushes out—the crimson that makes moonberries and cocoa palms grow—spattering the earth so that my Tonic will have a pleasant place to lay when it returns…