Content warnings for this episode include: Animal death (Shank as usual, Dreaming Box environmental effects), Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Needles, Birds, Frostbite, Strangulation/suffocation, Body horror
Intro - Adopt a House
You feel it watching each time you pass—the house that lies beyond the dark iron gates. You would think that surely, someone else would have scaled them by now, but not a pane of glass is broken in the windows. One day you clamber up the bars, boots slipping against the iron, and haul yourself over the spiked top to land in the garden. You draw near to the house as if trying not to spook it, although you are spooked yourself as you draw slowly up the front path, choked by creeping vines, and reach out your hand for the front door so that it can examine your scent.
Finally, it allows you to touch it, and you step into a foyer of old pine floors and crumbling plaster walls. There are things that need doing, of course. A drip in the ceiling, moth-eaten carpets. But summers and winters pass, and you tend to its peeling paint, feed its hearths with tinder. The house inhales in the winter, and exhales in the spring, boards creaking and shuddering as it stretches after a long slumber, as if it is groaning Hello From The Hallowoods.
Theme.
Right now, I am sitting on a bench outside of a tree stump the size of a house. The front of it has been built up into a facade of doors, glass windows and a cheerful painted wooden sculpture that depicts an ice cream cone with eyes and a mouth. A threadbare striped canopy flaps in the night wind above, and the unseeing eyes of the carved mascot stare down from above a door of broken glass. Only darkness dwells within. The theme of tonight’s episode is forebodings.
Story 1 - Best of Three
“There he is,” said Shelby, and stopped across the street from Mr. Nicecream, which sat along a lane of ramshackle buildings in the Stumps outside of Scout City. Under normal circumstances, she was sure news of a break-in out here would have alerted Scout City deputies, but it would take them time to recover from their loss in a way that Shelby could not afford to. Riot stood beside her, in the shadows at the far side of the street. Diggory was just a single white eye in the darkness of the alley.
“How did you know he’d be here?” said Riot, and Shelby turned to look at her. That face was so much like Clem’s, despite the buzz cut and the stitches, the curiosity and intensity of her gaze. But the thoughts were not the same, and Clementine would have known implicitly. She supposed she had told Riot far less about Shank than Clementine had heard through her broken recollections of her childhood, the fear of the pig-man’s shadow that had loomed over her and Mulder ever since.
“There’s only two doors out of the warehouse where he fought the deputies, and he didn’t come back through the front,” Shelby said. “This is the general direction it would have pointed him. But from there, he likes cold. Dark confined spaces where he can hide. This came to mind, and sure enough.”
“How should we approach him?” said Diggory, perfectly still.
“You don’t,” said Shelby, glancing to them both. “I will. He knows me. If strangers go in there I don’t know what he’d do—but it would be fast and incredibly violent. Which is probably what happened to Heather.”
“You said you two were working together,” said Riot, arms crossed, black threadmarks twisting around her biceps and down her forearms. “You have any idea why he did this?”
“Not yet,” said Shelby. “He was supposed to stay put. To wait for me. He didn’t. I’ll be back.”
She crossed the street, under the watchful gaze of the wood-carved statue of Mr. Nicecream that surveyed the street from above the door. The mascot and the words were painted on the marbled sheet of glass that served as a front window. In heat like this summer’s, the line had been long enough at all hours that it stretched across the street. But in past summers, she had been through with Clementine, and waited under a gentler sun, and received a delicious taste of Scout City’s dairy.
Her favorite had been walnut, in a birch bark cup with a spoon. Clementine’s had been marshmallow swirl, waffle cone.
She walked through the shattered doorframe, broken glass shards brushing past her trenchcoat sleeves as she ducked inside. She cradled the saw attached to her arm, just in case. She made her way to the back, where behind a stone countertop that had been lifted free of the floor and shoved across the room, there was the back end of an old ice cream truck. Metal double doors, round and rusted through their white enamel paint, protruded from the back of the shop. Dark boot marks encrusted the tile, and streams of something black and sticky had been spattered across the floor from the front door to the cooler. She reached up to one of the freezer handles, and pulled. The vehicle’s metal box had been hollowed, packed with insulation, and was kept frigid at all times by a glowing blue triangle artifact that emanated frost. In a large heap of metal tins of ice cream on the far side of the room sat Shank, grimy boots staining the frosted floor. He was utterly still, the eyeless mask of his pig head staring down at the floor, white gloves torn to reveal his raw meatlike skin beneath. He dripped with an oozing black blood, and it pooled at his chin, his fingertips, down the ice cream throne. His clown jumpsuit and skin alike had been opened all over with long black cuts, and his chest and back were full of sharp slits from, as much as Shelby could guess, repeated stabbing. There were still several black knife handles buried in his back, and what rose immediately from his hands was a curled furry form; Cannibal came limping towards her gingerly on three paws. She did not kneel to meet the dog, but nodded her respects, and Cannibal passed by her feet and hopped down out of the freezer into the warm summer air behind her. Thanks, Shelby thought. I’ll take it from here.
“You alive?” she said.
Shank did not answer.
She stepped in, and the freezer door nearly swung shut behind her; she stopped to drop a crossbow bolt in the gap of the door, stop it from closing completely. She’d been trapped enough times in her life. And then she took a couple slow steps across the freezer, and came to crouch a few paces away from the pig-man, peering up at the slashed skin of his face. There was an exhale from Shank, a hot cloud of foul air, that turned to particles in the freezer’s cold.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “Killed Heather. We didn’t get a chance to talk to her. I know she was in with the Quartet. But I wanted to know why. It doesn’t make any goddamn sense.”
“The big girl?” said Shank, although his mouth did not move so much as a slight shake of his head. “We had ourselves a little game. Guess I won.”
“We had a deal, you and I,” Shelby said.
“Deal shmeal. You think that’s how you’re gonna get ‘em?” said Shank, tilting his head up. “Runnin’ around collectin’ buttons and askin’ questions? I went out and I found ‘em. All four of ‘em. Now there’s only three. Soon theren’t won’t be any but none and I can go back to the witch and get better.”
“They were luring you out,” said Shelby. “They wanted you to find them. That’s how they’re going to get us, you understand? By getting us alone.”
The pig hissed, and Shelby stood up, and stepped over to him. Shank tensed, ready to snap, but she stood among the slipping ice cream tins to yank the knives free of his back. She tossed them to the floor by his feet.
“How hurt are you,” she said.
“Barely nicked me,” said Shank.
Shelby squinted; she could swear that the cuts along his arms were not quite as defined as they had been when she walked in. The burns he had suffered in the northern logfall had faded into the patchy texture of his forearms. Shelby shivered in her coat, and sank down to sit against the frigid wall. Her breath formed far smaller clouds than Shank’s.
“Did she say why,” said Shelby. “Why she was doing this. Who the others are. Anything we can use to pin them down.”
“I don’t ask their names,” said Shank. “After I crushed the big girl they ran. I didn’t see their faces none. I don’t like their masks.”
“Ironic, coming from you,” she said.
“With a mask, you can’t watch the light drain from the eyes,” said Shank. “Makes it less fun.”
“Maybe they’d like if you took your mask off, for the same reason,” said Shelby.
“Wish I could,” Shank hissed, and leaned back against the pile of storage tins and broken shelves. “Wish they could see my face. They’d know how much I liked it. A big old smile on me.”
“What happens when it comes off someday?” said Shelby. “It can’t be long now that Clara’s big project is done.”
Shank looked over at her, with a tilt of his huge head, and she could not find any light reflecting beneath his empty dark sockets.
“What’s’it matter to ya? Ya gonna come visit? We gonna be pals?”
“Just asking,” said Shelby, and looked around the freezer. “Why cold? Every time I find you you’re somewhere cold.”
“Gets hot in this thing,” said Shank, and pointed a finger up to his ragged neck, the loose flap where the pig face ended and the dried red skin began. “I’m dyin’ under here. I can always feel it. Itchin. Sweatin’, squirmin’ on my skin. Some days it makes me wanna pull my own head off.”
“I feel the same way lately,” said Shelby, shifting her stump against the leather bindings that held it to the electric saw. “Listen. Shank. The Scout City deputies are after us. They think we’re behind all these murders. They’re going to be coming for us. And they’re strong. Even without Heather. I don’t know how Oswin’s powers interact with you, but they could kill me by touching me. Ignatius lights fires, and I know you don’t like those.”
“Let ‘em come,” said Shank. “I’ll kill ‘em one by one.”
“That is not the way we’re doing this,” said Shelby. “They’ve done nothing wrong. Yet. Although I don’t know—if Heather was part of the deputy’s department, I don’t know how many of them are in on it. We’ve begun tearing up a long stitch, Shank, and it goes deep beneath the skin of this city.”
“It’d be easy,” Shank continued. “Send ‘em in one at a time. I’ll tear each of ‘em in half. Dead folks won’t trouble ya no more.”
“I know you could,” Shelby said, and rose to stand again, looking down at him. “I’m asking you not to. The deal was you wouldn’t kill until we agreed. Until we could do it together.”
“Well,” said Shank, and although his rigid tusky teeth did not move, she felt him grinning. “There’s still more of ‘em left. Wanna play a game? Best of three.”
There was a knock on the door of the freezer, and Shelby turned.
“Who’s there?”
“It’s me,” said Riot, and the door swung open. Shelby glanced quickly to Shank, back to Riot, who stood momentarily speechless in the freezer door. Shank was a brutal sight to behold, even in his Sunday best.
“Shank, this is… this is my friend. Riot. She’s a groundskeeper here. You know what those are? They try to keep things peaceful. She’s helping me fight the Quartet.”
“Hey,” said Riot. “Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Shank, I’m sure. Uh, Shelby? They’re coming. Diggory’s prepared to hold them off but if we can get moving that would be great.”
“Shank, can you walk?” said Shelby.
Shank grunted, and rolled his neck, and then with a groan rose slowly out of his ice cream throne, leaving only the stain of his blood behind, and stood half bent over against the freezer ceiling.
“Never been better,” he said.
“Jesus, Shelby,” said Riot, and backed away from the door. Shelby nodded, and stepped down into the heat of the ice cream parlor, and they stood together in the clouds of evaporating moisture as Shank lumbered out of the freezer.
“Well,” he said, and Shelby looked up to see lights sweeping across the outside of the ice cream parlor. “Time to play.”
Interlude 1 - Do Not Enter
Behind every Do Not Enter sign is an adventure waiting to happen. And in this age of fallen guardians, who is to stop you? By and large, a Do Not Enter sign on a former grocery or an abandoned construction site is as significant to you now as a welcome mat. There are select locations where it is still wise, even at this time, to heed the warnings.
Most Dreaming Boxes retain their laser defense systems and their brutal radiation output which can be clearly identified by the feet-deep trench of decades of rotted animal matter that surrounds each one in a ring. If you find yourself wading into a trench that can only be described as festering, turn back before a red glow lights the trees and then irradiates the skin from your bones.
Although they are not clearly marked, it is unwise to tamper with a CPE Foundation complex, as they are filled with countless dangers both built by the company and imprisoned below. According to the laws of particle physics, merely observing the inside of one of these places might set irreversible reactions in motion.
And of course, heed a do not enter sign anywhere that you suspect might be a tabernacle of the black eternity. No matter how much it calls to you.
We go now to one who likes to ignore such safety signage.
Story 2 - Old Chapel Doors
Hope sat at a dark wooden table in the guest room of the old stone abbey, and fiddled with the peas on her plate, which did not gracefully attune themselves to a fork tine. Her mom sat beside her, and then Marco and Buck, and on the other side of the table, the tall and creepy Countess, who sat with her back perfectly rigid, and Yaretzi, who had shifted her chair to lean back in it and put her feet in the Countesses’ lap. Dashiell had finished his meal and gone to smoke a cigar over by the dull flickering fireplace. At the end of the table sat their new friend Olivier, who wasn’t quite as old as everyone else, but still old by Hope’s standards. Everyone seemed very enthralled to listen to Olivier talk about world politics and drink wine that she wasn’t allowed to have. Dark fog rolled across the courtyard of the abbey outside, illuminated occasionally by a sweep of the watchtower light.
“So I went to school at an institution called Downing Hill Public Library,” said Olivier. “It… it was a magic school. But what we think of as magic, is really tied to forces that are bigger than us. Ones we can’t understand or control. The Black Rains, everything that we’re seeing in the world, are a part of that. But Buck would remember that I used to make storms and lightning and weather. And that was something I learned how to do at Downing Hill.”
“Gods,” said Yaretzi, eyes glinting with flecks of gold. She reached up a hand, and as she did, ripples of fur ran across it, flickering across her skin, nails growing and retracting. “They touch us. Change us. But what they offer comes with a cost. And a purpose.”
“Lucky you,” said the Countess. “Having a purpose. Mine’s quite forgotten about me, I think. Or she’ll check in on me in a thousand years to see how the experiment is going.”
“At Scout City we are familiar with Downing Hill,” said Buck, nodding, eyes half-closed, although Hope knew his brain was not at all sleepy. “When the library vanished, we ended up absorbing everyone who had escaped. There are a number of former students employed at Scout City.”
“Do you remember if one of them was named Friday?” said Olivier. His dark eyes moved to Hope, and he smiled briefly. Hope frowned and stabbed a pea.
Buck frowned. “Brooklyn?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Brooklyn. “A name I’ve heard mentioned, once or twice. There was a Harrow Blackletter, an Arnold Eggers, a Victoria Tepiani, Ignatius Thorpe, a few dozen others.”
“I do remember those people,” said Olivier, and smiled. “It’s funny, I’d even be happy to see Ignatius. Even though I hated him in school.”
Olivier’s attention turned down to the table, and his smile faded.
“I thought that Downing Hill was alone. That it was all Director Blackletter’s big plan. But there are several organizations tied together. Downing Hill was responsible for teaching people like me, taking the power that was in us, forcing us to push it further and further. Making us into weapons, that Downing Hill and the others could use. The Daedalus, that airship, is one of the others. The people who run it are called the… what would it be in English. Aristocracy? And for years they’ve acted like gods in Europe. When there’s drought, they make it rain. When the soil is contaminated, they make it bloom. They can end wars overnight. Turn warlords to ash. What they demand is tribute.”
“Let me guess, a lifetime subscription?” said Marco.
“How long did you spend among this ruling class in the sky?” said Dashiell, from beside the hearth, breathing out smoke as he paced.
“Sounds like you were a prisoner there, of sorts,” said Buck.
“More or less,” said Olivier. “After my third or fourth time trying to escape, they dropped me off in the middle of nowhere. I made it all the way to the coast, but I have not heard of one ship making it back to North America. I didn’t know if anyone I cared about was still alive on the other side. And while I was thinking about all that, I found this place. And, kind of a new calling.”
“It’s a lovely abbey. Good old stone,” said the Countess. “I’m partial to the towers myself.”
“You mentioned the Daedalus has disappeared,” said Dashiell. “I’m going to need everything you know about its routine. Trajectory. Where it was bound. Anything that you told Belladonna about where to find it.”
“Sure,” said Olivier. “But it’s going to be a long list.”
“I’ve got all night,” said Dashiell.
“Can I be done?” said Hope, and Brooklyn glanced over to her plate.
“You finished that fast,” Brooklyn said, eyes narrowed. Hope said nothing, just looked down.
“Sure, kiddo,” said Marco. “Just, don’t stay up too late, okay?”
Hope nodded, and rose from the table, and went clambering up the stairs to the floor above. There was a balcony that overlooked the dining room, and several doors in the hall behind. She made her way to the room with the bunks where her family had put down all of their bags, and went to her backpack, where Nighty the Night-Gaunt waited. He was not the only one; she unzipped it to pull free a big glass jar, still sandy from the beach. A thick black ooze swirled inside of it, and she dropped a fistful of peas into it, which immediately were absorbed by the plasm.
“Thanks,” said Mort.
“Hey Mort,” she whispered. “Wanna go take a look around?”
Marketing - Frostbite
Lady Ethel Mallory
I don’t know much about frostbite. But what I do know is that when the cold has gnawed and gnawed at you, seeped into your skin and killed the life in it, turned it bubbling and black, you are so numb to it that you don’t feel it at all. You watch it happening, unable to stop it, too frigid to try and create warmth. The life leaves and leaves until you’re an empty husk, and then. Crack. Off goes a toe. A finger. A nose, an ear. Everything around it was already dead.
I am frost, Oswald, and I am creeping along each of your veins as we speak. Turning your blood to ice. Freezing your joints, icing over your bones. What I break off from you and what I take you don’t even know. It’s already begun. Can you guess where I am? What I’ve taken next? What I’m taking now? By the time I get to you, you’ll have nothing to fight back with.
I hate to be so cold to you, Oswald. But I’m told that’s the best way to serve vengeance.
Story 2, Continued - Old Chapel Doors
Vengeance. Vengeance for what? You were fully salaried with benefits a decade after your position became irrelevant. You were fired for staging a sabotage that turned into a company-destroying disaster. I do not think you can claim vengeance if all that happened to you was a product of your own choices. We return now to Hope Torres-Williams.
Hope had managed to escape through the window, and then slip from the ledge down a vine-encrusted gable to the ground without making much of a sound, and pulled the jar from her backpack and went walking down the small gravel paths that lined the intricate gardens within the abbey. The fog was dense, and she could not see more than thirty feet ahead, although it was a natural product of the oceanside and not the obscuring shadows mustered by the Countess. Even so, the fear of being swept up into the night by some vast threatening creature was not entirely gone, so she kept a low profile as she wandered through aisles of curling vegetation and gnarled fruit trees that filled the center of the abbey. High buildings ringed the courtyard, rising into stone towers, although the beam of light that shone from the highest tower like a lighthouse largely pointed outwards across the landscape beyond, or across the ocean that she could hear but not see. She could hear the crash of waves, and the bustle of several late night conversations and dinners coming to a close, the cry of seagulls, and a child, singing.
“Do you hear that?” she whispered.
“Hear what?” said Mort, in the jar. There was a single skull adrift in it, the skull of a gull perhaps, and its matchstick-flame eyes were tiny and green. “I don’t hear anything. But I also don’t have ears.”
“There’s another girl here,” said Hope, and she carried the jar more hastily through the fog, following the direction of the song. It grew faintly louder as she tread down a winding path, up again, as the abbey stretched between two hillsides. She didn’t understand the language, but the high pitch and tone must have required a lot of practice. She wondered who Maria was.
She finally came to a stop in front of a tall stone house with two big doors; it had appeared suddenly in the fog, and seemed as dark as the night sky. She could not make out what the stained glass windows were supposed to represent, on account of the thick cracks that ran through each pane of glass. Several wooden planks had been nailed across the doors, but there must have been another door, because the voice of the girl resounded from somewhere far within, bouncing off what must have been a high stone ceiling in the most angelic way.
She crept closer, reaching the front stone step, and noted that strange signs were painted on the boards, across the stones, that they almost seemed to glow as she reached for the brass handle between the bars.
“Hey! Can we not touch that?” said a voice, and she looked up to find Olivier standing in his dark coveralls, black curls shrouding his face in the fog. She pulled her hand back immediately, and hid the jar behind her back.
“I was just taking a look around,” Hope said, and looked up to the doors, and back to Olivier. “Cool house.”
“Do you know what this is?” said Olivier, stepping up within a few paces of her, hands in his pockets. He looked up to the doors too. Hope searched for an answer that would make her seem smart, but faltered.
“Not really,” she said.
“It’s called a chapel,” said Olivier, and knelt down to her level. “People used to use these to worship gods. They’d go inside, and sing songs. Is it singing to you?”
“The chapel?” said Hope. “I hear a girl in there. Who is she?”
“She’s not real,” said Olivier, and looked back to the glass. “This chapel has something very scary living in it. It’s been trapped in there a long time, and it eats people. So it’s singing to try and lure you in there. Into a trap.”
“Oh,” said Hope. Her hands slipped a bit on the heavy jar behind her back. Her shame at almost having waltzed in through the front doors was replaced by confusion. “Why do you still keep it in here then?”
“Sometimes scary things are better kept close and locked up safe, than far away, out in the world,” said Olivier, and gestured to the glowing symbols on the wooden bars, and she could see them glow with each wave of Olivier’s hand. “You see these? I made these. They’re runes of protection. They invoke the name of a very old god, whose fire keeps this thing inside from ever leaving. I can show you how to make them sometime, they’re very useful. It’s important that you don’t let this thing out, okay? Don’t mess with the runes, don’t open the doors. Or it will cause a real disaster in here and probably everyone will die.”
“I get it,” said Hope. “Runes sound cool. I didn’t know that was a thing.”
“Well, you’d only learn them in a very special school,” said Olivier.
“Olivier?” said Mort, and Hope almost shushed him, but Olivier looked up and noticed the object she was concealing. She brought it out into the open.
“You know him?” said Hope.
“Oh yeah,” said the gull-skulled Mort, from his jar. “We’re old friends!
Seems like everybody is, she thought.
“Mort!” Olivier said, and Hope stepped a little closer with the jar, and Olivier took it gently. “You’re… smaller.”
“Actually I’m much bigger,” said Mort proudly, swirling against the glass. “But most of me is out in the ocean.”
“I see,” Olivier said, blinking out at the wall that stood between them and the water. “Do you know what happened to any of the others? Buck and everyone don’t seem to know.”
Mort bubbled remorsefully. “There was a storm. We all got split up. Cindy blew herself up. It was just me and Diggory at the end. And I… got ate too. By Creep. Now Creep and I are friends. But Diggory went down, in my suit. And I never saw them again.”
“That’s… rough,” said Olivier, and hugged the jar. “Well. Glad you made it, buddy.”
But there was a clamor of bells, then, ringing much like they had when they came to stand on the abbey’s doorstep.
“Weird,” said Olivier, standing up. “Getting you all in was unusual enough, for guests. Wanna go see who’s at the door?”
“Sure,” said Hope, and gave a last glance to the chapel; the singing had stopped, although she swore she saw for a moment a face through the stained glass window, one that was like her own, but made of white glass like a doll. It was gone when she blinked, and she followed Olivier quickly through the maze of gardens in time to find the old gate-keeper, Guillaume, with his bent back and sloped hat, opening a small grate in the large doors that separated the abbey from the rest of the world. And Hope recognized immediately the hood and owl-like eyes of Sir Fen of the Knights of Saint Loris, and dozens of knights behind her, and she looked up to recognize Hope.
Interlude 2 - Omnipresently
I am in all places, dreamer. Omnipresence does that to you. I am at your left elbow. I am in the attic, and the floor. I am in the tree outside your window. I am far away, in the night sky, and I am flowing down the river. I stand on mars and pluto. I am on worlds thousands of light years away that you cannot even begin to comprehend. I am at the gates of the Council of Heavens and I am waiting outside the council chamber wondering where I am supposed to be visiting next, and I am out there, impossibly far and stretched across the surface of me, disappearing across the edge of all that is into the vast nothingness that hungers on the other side. I would go there, dreamer. I wonder what I would see if I went to confront Urnundurn. If it would bandy words with me. If he bandies words at all. Whether I, my consciousness, would be immediately consumed. Or, were I to do that and then to look back, whether life on Earth would have fully run its course, or blossomed into something entirely unexpected and new.
Best that I stay close. The affairs of cosmic gods are time-consuming indeed.
We go now to one who has been given time.
Story 3 - Peaceable Like
Riot felt intensely nauseous; the pig-man smelled like death, like rotting meat, and his breath made her dizzy on her feet. She had thought perhaps upon opening the freezer door that she’d found some horrible murder victim of the Quartet, although she supposed he wasn’t far off. The massive menace left boot-shaped dents in the metal floor of the freezer as he walked, and the floor of the shop shook with his steps. She cast a worried look to Shelby, and raised her hand in front of her eyes and squinted; out there she could see two Scout City deputies flashing lights at the parlor.
“Come out with your hands up,” called a voice. “This is the Scout City sheriff’s office. We do not wish to harm…”
The voices outside were interrupted, and the beams of light turned around.
“Whoah whoah whoah, hold it!” the voice continued, and although Riot was blinking away discs in her vision, she could see Diggory emerging from the alley behind the deputies. Ignatius wore a leather jacket with Downing Hill alumni patches over his uniform, and Oswin wore a beekeeper’s shroud draped from the brim of their deputy’s hat. Oswin’s gloved hands twitched, and a pinpoint light illuminated each of Ignatius’ hands.
Riot watched, and in that moment a sense of clarity came rushing through her fingertips, her face. She had spent long weeks wondering why she had returned, what kind of life was to be forged out of the two broken pieces of her. Seeking a new purpose, a calling to breathe meaning into her third act. She had none of that, but in the moment she also was not thinking about it as she grabbed a broom from the back of the shop, snapped it in half and went out ahead of Shelby and Shank, screaming.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” she called, and that drew looks from Ignatius and Oswin, tilting back from facing Diggory. But she realized, after saying it, that she had also drawn attention to a Shelby and a Shank just behind her. The deputies moved to face her in the street. She knew there was no avoiding public attention; faces peered from windows, doors opened further down the street. Cannibal was in the street, barking at Oswin.
“Everybody just play it cool,” said Ignatius, the burning orange centers of his eyes turning to Riot as flame appeared, dancing over his palms. “Shelby Allen, Pig-man, you are both under arrest for heinous murders committed here in Scout City. Riot Maidstone, Diggory Graves, we’re going to have to take you in also. Everyone stay peaceable here and this can be an easy night.”
Six people stood uncertain in the roadside, and Riot sensed that others had much more to hold in the standoff than a broom handle.
“We’ve got information,” called Riot. “That you need to know. About Heather.”
“Do not talk to me about Heather,” said Ignatius, stomping a boot, and fire lit his eyes. “She’s dead because of this monster here. She gave her life tonight to try and bring this bastard in.”
“You gotta temper on you,” rumbled a voice behind her; she realized that the pig spoke, although his mouth barely moved. He was walking slowly past her into the center of the circle, Shelby pulling at his arm. “Maybe a joke would cheer you up. You wanna hear something funny? She hunted me like an animal, but she’s the one who died like an animal.”
Riot was about to reach past him, and noticed Shelby’s crossbow was loaded and concealed behind Shank, and Diggory was trying to interject with something diplomatic and Cannibal was howling in the street, but then she had no more time, because Ignatius raised his hands and a fire began that would never truly be extinguished in Scout City.
Outro - Forebodings
Forebodings. Often there is the feeling that a certain doom is coming. It may have a tangible form, it may not. It may be possible to track its movements and sense its constriction of all that is, or it may only exist in the imagination. It looms so large and dark ahead that one cannot look away from the enormity, nor shift one’s feet from the drawing shadow that is already knee-high and growing deeper each moment. And yet, when it swallows you completely, what is to be done?
There are two possibilities. If the doom is false, then there is no reason to cower. Make yourself large, and hold light against it, reveal it to be empty, a shadow and nothing more, and one that flees from the rising of the light. Or the doom may be true. In which case, I would say to do all the same. If only so that when it arrives, it must put up a fight, and it will remember you because you did not curl and make yourself easy to swallow, but you buried a knife in its tongue and dragged all the way down its throat. We cannot control what is coming, or how deadly or dark it will be. Only that for better or worse, we shall not go quietly. Until the doom arrives, dreamer, I am your loyal host Nikignik, waiting and always watching for your return to the Hallowoods.
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Front Door' and is available on the Hello From The Hallowoods Patreon. Consider joining for access to all the show's bonus stories, behind-the-scenes and more! Until next time, dreamer, why didn’t the huntsman get directions from the watching tree?
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