HFTH - Episode 195 - Kindlings

Content warnings for this episode include: Animal death (Shank as usual), Violence, Wanting to Die, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Homophobia & Transphobia (Quartet as usual), Birds, Strangulation/suffocation, Emotional Manipulation, Bugs, Body horror, Religious Violence

Intro - Four in Masks

When you were small, you used to hold hands with a boy in a secret fort you had constructed in the woods. You had the faintest inkling, even then, that what you were doing was wrong, for why else would you keep it a secret? But then he was drowned for it, and your young rage was implacable. When he returned, winters later, giant and changed by the water, you sent him against your persecutors with all your fury, and after that you drifted, and did not find community until the great tree of Scout City began to loom over your neck of the woods. They did not regard you as an outcast, but it was difficult to ever see yourself differently; you lived on the edge of their society. In time, though, you became a neighbor, a friend, someone who plays games, makes friends of groundskeepers.

And then four people in masks were waiting for you, one day, when you returned home, and they asked you to renounce your love of sin by killing your old love, and your old self with him. And when you refused, they tore you apart, and carved a warning sign in your skull, and put your head in the fireplace. Yet it was not the end for you; a long sliver of your bone is even now set into the keys of a church organ, and you have been bound by the green light of death’s own realm, and you are one of a growing host who dwell voiceless in the pipes of the old chapel, and the music that compels you begins with a litany against a Hello from the Hallowoods.

Theme.

Right now, I am crouching adjacent to a fireplace. It is full of ashes, and yet empty of flame; the burdens of its past work have suffocated its fire completely. It sits, quietly, as fireplaces are prone to, and wonders whether it still has the possibility of one last spark, and if it does, what will have to burn to set it alight. The theme of tonight’s episode is kindlings.

Story 1 - Ice Cream

When Shelby Allen woke, it was to a dead fireplace. It was well up on ashes, and the embers had long darkened, and sunlight beamed over her shoulder and the side of the sofa in lazy rays. She squinted at the light; noted the shifting of the shadows as footsteps crossed the room, and then a face leaned down over the sofa to kiss her on the cheek.

“Good morning,” whispered Clementine, and she hovered there for a moment. “Sleep good?”

“Like the dead,” Shelby grunted, reaching up, and she got a fistful of Clementine’s shirt to try and pull her down onto the sofa, but Clementine took her hand and held it to the side of her face.

“Let’s go out,” said Clem. “It’s hot in here.”

Shelby groaned, and rolled to hide her face in the cushions.

“Do we have to?”

Clem circled over to her side of the sofa, and knelt, and Shelby rolled back to meet her face to face; her grey-blue eyes, the fluff of her wolf cut, her eyelashes transparent in the sunlight. Clem gave her a kiss on the nose.

“We can get ice cream,” she said.

It was enough for Shelby to sigh, and roll off the sofa entirely; follow Clementine out of her office—the expanse of red string on the walls told her that Clem had not slept that night.

They walked through the hazy streets of late spring in Scout City; the breeze was cool, and the smaller groves of trees nestled within the titanic trunk-buildings of the stumps rustled, green leaves fluttering off to tumble in the wind.

They got their ice cream from Mr. Nice Cream; although while she stood in line, looking up to the carved mascot perched on top of the building’s roof, Shelby had the briefest impression that it was blackened and charred, cast in the light of a garish red flame, but when she blinked it was the same white-painted, slightly frightening ice cream cone with a smile that it always had been.

And then they went to sit at Milliner’s Creek; it was a bridge that had been carved from one great root that crossed a small trickling stream that wound through the outer Stumps—she could not fathom why she had thought it was all dried up. The water flowed beneath their swinging feet, and she savored the taste of walnut and cream on the thin wooden spoon.

“You ever have the feeling that you’re missing something important?” said Shelby, looking over to Clem, whose waffle cone was dripping faster in the bold sunlight than Clem could lick.

“Oh, all the time,” Clem said, giving up to let beads of marshmallow run down her hand. She stuck a cigarette in her teeth and lit it, and took a drag before she returned her attention to the cone.

“But there isn’t,” Shelby said, shaking her head. “There’s nowhere to be except here, with you.”

Clem gave her an odd look, and Shelby noted it, and her brow furrowed.

“Is there?”

“I’m disappointed in you,” Clem said placidly, and the taste of walnut turned sour in Shelby’s mouth.

“Can I ask you to explain why?” said Shelby, quietly. “What did I do?”

“This,” Clem said, and gestured widely to the river, and then pitched her half-finished cone off into the creek. It splashed into the water and was gone.

“I don’t understand,” said Shelby, setting her cup down. “What’s wrong?”

There was a swirl of chocolate syrup melting in her cup that did not belong on walnut ice cream; it sent a shudder through her, and she envisioned a bead of black running down the forehead and snout of a dead-eyed pig’s head.

“I’m not upset that you’re acting like I’m dead,” said Clementine, and Shelby looked up to her again, but Clem’s gaze was fixed down the creek. “I understand. Because I loved you and I’m gone and what survived of me isn’t the same. I get that.”

Shelby gulped, and took Clem’s other hand in her own; it was missing a thumbnail.

“I’m upset that you’re ignoring everything I gave up my life for,” she said, and finally Clem turned back to her, and was one eye short. “I’m still half of her. And I’m always with you.”

“You’re not,” said Shelby, and she put her head in her hands. “I’m so, so alone, Clem.”

“You’re not,” said Clem, and Shelby felt Clem’s hand on her arm. “I’m still here, even if I don’t remember. Please, take care of me. Don’t let me die doing something stupid, even if I’m not the same person I was. We were loners together, but Riot—who is me too—isn't. She has friends. Friends who are there for you, too. You’re going to need to let other people in. Let them know you. Let them love you. You’re going to have to fill the emptiness in you with something other than the memory of me.”

“I’m so tired,” Shelby whispered, and kept her eyes closed, and took Clem’s hand in hers, and kissed her knuckles; she wasn’t sure she wanted to remember Clem as she had appeared in her last hours. “I want to rest so bad. Can’t I just stay here? With you? This day was perfect.”

“You can,” Clem said, and Shelby felt Clem’s head rest against her shoulder. “That’s your choice. But if you do, you’re going to let everything slip away. And I never lost without a fight.”

Shelby sighed, and sat a long last moment, and took in the birdsong, the trickle of the stream.

And then she picked her birch-bark cup up and pitched it into the creek, half-finished. There had been a centipede in the bottom of it, anyway, swimming in the melted cream, and it went whirling down with the cup into Milliner’s Creek. Globules of ice cream in the air glinted with memory; a hand severed by razors, blood and leather, wire and night, and carrying someone that you loved who was broken and pulling a crossbow trigger and cutting through flesh with an electric saw and a human skull in the head of a pig and all of the raging heat of the hate that she felt and all of the chill cold hate that she carried. And it all hit the water, shortly followed by the spoon.

Interlude 1 - Dry Season

Although the Hallowoods are located in the former Hudson Bay Lowlands, the increasing magnitude of the Northmost Woods and a rainless summer have made this typically damp environment unusually parched and fragile. Leaves that have died on the branch flutter like parchment paper. Twigs reach out for the sky like the fingertips of a desiccated desert traveler. The birdsong is low and mournful; the sky is hostile, cloudless. The burn warnings were in place for long months, admonishing that the pine needles will burn like handfuls of matches, should any spark light upon them.

And for the Stumps neighborhood of Scout City, the remains of the larger trees that were felled surrounding the burgeoning great tree of the city form most of the shops and residences. The gigantic stumps of those trees, impossible to remove from the ground, have been hollowed and used as houses or as the foundations for larger buildings. The lumber that was gathered from their trunks has been fashioned into cabins and fences, windowpanes and rafters. They have dried in the summer heat. Scout City, like the hearts of its people, was ready to burn a long time ago.

We go now to a dying flame.

Story 2 - Nail

Russell McGowan had been shot, and it was not something he had anticipated on ever being. But his Scoutpost training had instilled in him a deep belief that when holes were ripped in your body, you had to find a way to tie something tightly over the wound, and so he worked off the belt from beneath his coveralls, and half-screamed as he drew it tight around his upper arm where Johannah’s bullet had struck him, and grit his teeth until the white nettles behind his eyes went away. The pain was a roar that went up and down his arm like fire, and jolted every time he moved, so he held as still as he could while he thought about what to do next. Several things were true of his situation.

There was a jagged hole in the ceiling of the cellar twelve feet above him, and a stair leading up to a cellar door the Quartet had dragged something heavy in front of. He was neither very tall or feeling very strong, but something was going to have to budge either way.

His sister Heather had been killed that night by Shank, who sat next to him in the cabin’s basement among heaps of shattered wooden timber.

Shank had a large black nail jammed into his head, and seemed quite dead.

Heather had belonged to the Quartet, who had killed Shank. But they had also killed lots of other people, good people, people who didn’t deserve it. People like Abe, people like Raoul Greenstreet.

His friend Johannah was also a part of all that. And of course, she had shot him.

Something was wrong with Shelby, and she was unconscious beside him. And between the two of them publicly preventing Shank from getting arrested by Scout City deputies—however those idiots thought that would have gone—would earn him no love with the Coda, whose voices and feet he could hear somewhere above. That was them, no doubt, with the screaming voices, the stampede of boots. His friends and neighbors, people who had been wronged by the Instrumentalist and his memory. People who should have been on his side, keepers together of the same city, and yet in the wake of the Quartet’s departure a question coursed in him like poison through blood: what if they were not his friends after all?

Shank and Shelby were both unmoving, and despite the arm, despite the blood finding its way out the side, he still had to pull things together. He was about to pull himself up from where he lay against Shelby’s sleeping side when he noticed movement that he had not before.

Looming above him was Shank, sitting against the basement wall. The gigantic pig-man’s legs and arms lay still, which was much different from their usual head-crushing, spine-breaking speed. The ragged pig head which he wore was unchanged; one chunk of jaw was grown of knitted black tendon where it was healing from the night’s earlier shotgun shell. A twisted square iron nail stuck in the center of his forehead, as a corkscrew through a soft fruit.

The nail turned. Nearly imperceptibly. Russell blinked, but a few moments later, sure enough, it twisted a little more, backing out of Shank’s head one millimeter at a time. And, although at the same glacial pace, moment by moment the hole in Shank’s jaw was retracting as pigskin flesh crawled back over the gaping black wound.

It was not hope that stirred in Russell, because Shank when awake was difficult to reason with and impossibly violent, and he was not sure that Shank waking up was good. But if Shank was healing, his flesh slowly rejecting the nail, then it seemed likely Shank was alive. Whatever he had been stabbed with seemed to have a tranquilizing property, then; whether by virtue of being stabbed through Shank’s brain or some other quality. Pulling it free might be all it would take to wake him.

But then, by the same nature, if Shank was unconscious, or at least immobile, it was perhaps the only chance he would ever have to kill Shank. If he wanted to. Did he want to? It would be a reasonable thing, he supposed, to want to, given that Shank had crushed his sister’s ribcage and hung Joshua Wicker on a tree to die and nearly squeezed his skull to a pulp.

The muffled voices of the Coda above had nearly reached the door, he would guess, and boots were tromping up the front porch. And they would burst in as their search for the Pig-man continued, and look down through the hole, and see him and Shelby and Shank all together, shot and sleeping and helpless, and what would the Coda do then? It was either that, or he pulled the nail, and they would see a Shank stepping through the basement door like it was paper, and they would come with torches and Shank would turn someone into paste, and then they’d really be fighting for their lives, but at least they’d be fighting. Fighting their friends. Fighting their neighbors.

And he looked back to the slowly-twisting nail as the doors burst in upstairs. Shank was an animal, and all people when afraid, and what was he?

And that—

sound of Syrensyr’s summons

Not now.

Not now of all times.

Dreamers, I am being summoned for my meeting with Syrensyr. It will not take long… I hope.

Just the preliminary meeting, to be introduced formally and discuss a few things about the obligation of my new position, and then I am sure I will be free to return to this.

And really I must, because the number of factors that are moving in these few brief hours in Scout City—Riot bargains for her life in the Old Chapel, and Russell contemplates whether to wake a beast; Victoria Tepiani makes her way across the flaming neighborhoods of the stumps in search of the cabin where the truth can be found, and the Coda are gathered outside of the Accordi house a hundred strong, and Diggory Graves and Ratty and Percy descend the outside of Scout City’s trunk to arrive all too late to a fight, and three of the Quartet take aim for a new victim, and it is crucial that they do not reach her…

Just a moment.

The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'To The Rescue' 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!