HFTH - Episode 198 - Escapes

Content warnings for this episode include: Animal death (Shank’s head as usual), Suicide (letting go of a tree branch before you get stabbed), Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Transphobia and Homophobia (Church of the Hallowed Name as usual), Gun Mention, Strangulation/suffocation, Static (including sfx), Emotional Manipulation, Drowning, Body horror, Puppets, Home Invasion, Fires, Decapitation, Stabbing, Choking

Intro - Would You Have Walked

It would have been such a lovely escape. When the world was cast in flame, and governments and systems of government crumbled, to go north. To live by no one’s rule but your own, to forge a life for yourself in the wild expanses of forest north of any city. To follow in the footsteps of the Sleepers who began to walk in the night when the Black Rains first fell, and see where the tolling of the age that only they could hear had called them. To be alone, surrounded only by the people you had chosen. To feel the quiet rush of the wind and river, and heed no one’s command.

It would have been, if in the North had not been the heart of all your woes. If the black waters did not seep in from the arctic and fill the forests and lakes with the worst of the maker’s touch. If each raindrop, each drop of the stream, each snowflake was not infused with the fundamental power of creation, a creation that works against the very nature of your blood, takes the simple cells of your body and sculpts them into new and elaborate shapes, turns the fire of your immortal soul green. Would you have walked, if you had known that in the north there is a forest that is unbound by space, where all directions lead North? Would you have walked if you knew that the gates of the heart are guarded by a faceless king? Would you have walked if you knew that you went only into a ruin as treacherous as it is beautiful, and to a chorus that eternal sings Hello from the Hallowoods?

Theme.

Right now I am perched on a pitchfork. It has been raised to valiantly defend Scout City from the monsters that have been haunting its streets and killing its citizens. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, it also became pointed at Diggory Graves, who was recently thrown into the air by a man masked with the face of a pig. They fall through the air, as the embers from the torches of the crowd travel up around them, and towards the gleaming spears and garden implements held by Scout City’s denizens. The theme of tonight’s episode is Escapes.

Story 1 - Bones From A Trough

Diggory Graves was falling, but at least it granted them a view as they twisted through the air. Of Shank, standing in a clearing in the crowd, hands soaked with the blood of two of Scout City’s residents. Of the Coda, their symbol pinned to their Scout City jackets, stretching out around and beneath them as they fell, carrying a wide variety of invented weapons. Of the Scout City reporter, with her camocept’s eye raised to capture photographs of the crowd even as her eyes studied Russell, who was stumbling away from the crowd and towards Scout City’s trunk. Of Shelby, clambering back out of the woods in the distance, bloodstained and swollen. Of the small clan of Wickers, pointing guns at Shank and pulling their triggers, gunshots ringing out in the night, bullets twisting through the crowd. Of the two ghosts drifting over the heads of the crowd—Ratty, her real silver piercings in her ghost body glinting like orange javelins in the firelight, and of Percy, whose hair curled in the air as beautifully as it had the night they danced on a lake floor in the first few weeks after their meeting, and whose eyes were as wide as the yawning void of heaven, and whose scream echoed out over the scene. This distracted Diggory from the spearheads beneath them, inching closer as they descended through the air—Percy’s light grew brighter and brighter as he combusted, and white flame was in his hands and his hair, pouring from his silhouette to peal over the crowd like chain lightning, and if Diggory had any words left, they lost them.

The fire changed everything, as fire was prone to.

The flame seared Diggory’s embroidered jacket and their stitched skin, crisped the ends of their thick black hair, and turned their vision an agonizing white—for all the rampant life that had been infused in them by touching the Heart, their remaining eye was still as sensitive to light as it had ever been. But Diggory was enveloped by the waves of flame pouring off of Percy, and thrown further, just as the outstretched weapons of the crowd were pushed back; the Coda tried to shield their eyes and faces from the scorching, crackling light of Percy’s spirit, and Diggory felt their body strike the earth and roll across the soil violently as they were buffeted by the blast.

They stood, for a moment, on a beach of bones that seemed to stretch as wide as eternity itself. The waters were not tranquil, but raging waves that curled up in great arcs and threw themselves against the shore; where they withdrew, moss and curling ivies sprining up to curl in the eye sockets and nostrils of the skulls that littered the shore, left damp afterprints of green. It was green fire that burned in the far horizon, beneath the surface of the black sea. Rain pattered against their face, and against the shoreline, and they were pitch black teardrops. As they watched the waves, they caught brief glimpses of Irene Mend, tumbling in the surf like a shark, unable to free herself from the tides, screaming beneath the water as she suffocated on rampant life. They looked to their shoulder, where she was still standing—Rizwana Mirza, one-time Prime Minister of Canada. One-time person of her own, before she was the mind and lips of Diggory Graves. All was not well with Rizwana, who stood like a pillar of black salt on the beach, lips cracked, eyes blackened and sprouting with moss.

“I cannot forgive you,” she said, although her lips did not move.

Diggory leaned down, and kissed her forehead, and flowers began to bloom in a crown where their lips touched her calcified skin.

“I do not ask for your forgiveness,” they said. “Neither have I given you mine.”

“Hey scarecrow,” she said. “You got any fight left in you?”

Except her voice was Shank’s, and Diggory registered that their chest crunched as it was kicked, and their body went rolling another twenty feet across the earth and wrapped around a tree. When the white light of the beach faded, they were blinking awake in a firelit night. In the distance, the crowd of the Coda were recovering from Percy’s fire, screaming or stumbling to their feet, skin scalded and smoking. But much closer was Shank, skin charred like a pig roast, and who was stomping towards them, the black eyeless sockets of his pig mask fixed on them, face frozen in a tusky grin.

“Ragdoll,” he said. “Ain’t got no meat on your bones.”

Diggory rose to their feet, and placed a hand against their side—he had cracked many of their ribs. They frowned. It would be difficult to glue them back together, and it would have to be done soon, lest the Heart do something peculiar with them first.

“Shank,” they said, exhausted.

“You ever been strung up?” said the pig-man, stomping ever closer towards them. One or two of the Coda’s meathooks were still lodged in his back. “Left to die, chokin’ on your best friend’s blood?”

“Shank,” they said again, standing up straighter, even as pieces became dislodged in their middle. They took off their smoking leather jacket and dropped it to the ground—their arm was still written over with tattooed images. A flaming heart, a bloody butcher’s knife, a raised fist clenched so tight that blood trickled from the cuts in the palm. If they knew how to fight, it was the remains of Evelyn Fry in them that instilled them with the rhythm. Left, right. Bob, weave. Duck, uppercut.

“You got a thing or two to learn,” Shank said, and lunged out toward them with a heavy hand. They slid to the side, fast as an eel, and Shank’s hand collided with the tree behind them; sent an explosion of bark flying out of the massive trunk. Shank twisted again, leering down, but this fist Diggory caught, wrapping both of their claws around it. They found that the twisted black nail was downwards in his palm, driving down towards their eye, a rusty bloody point.

“You are young,” Diggory said, sewn lungs rasping. “This violence will not solve anything.”

“No,” Shank hissed, and the clouds of his breath made Diggory hunger, although they had never hungered before. They hungered for meat, raw and bloody, juice running, fat tearing. They strained under the incredible strength of Shank’s fist, which was driving down on them. Their seams stretched; their bones shook, and the black nail Shank wielded inched closer to the surface of their remaining eye. “Sure feels good though.”

“It does,” Diggory agreed, and twisted out from beneath Shank’s fist, and as his massive body came hammering down, they drove their handful of knifelike fingertips up, knuckle-deep into his chest, and wrapped their hand around his heart, and squeezed, five knives cutting into Shank’s blackened arteries.

“They’ll burn you,” Shank hissed, burned flesh sloughing from his face, inches from Diggory’s. They thought, somewhere inside the deep black sockets of the pig mask, they could see real eyes glinting, peering from deep knots of muscle and tendon. “They’ll rip you apart and eat your bones from a trough.”

“I know,” said Diggory, and lunged upward with their free hand, and hacked into the side of Shank’s neck with five knifelike fingertips. Blood spat from Shank’s skin like a geyser, a corpse long bloated in the sun. Diggory’s frown remained as they pulled their hand free, and thrashed again, cut deeper into the pig this time. Shank stopped breathing, stopped sputtering blood through his ruined airways; they felt his heart stop beating in their hand. And yet Diggory continued, swinging their handful of knives again, again, until with one last sickening crunch they had severed the thick bony chain of his spine, and his pig head went rolling across the parched soil of the cabin road, watering the forest with long rivers of black blood. They shoved his body off from above them with their remaining hand, withdrew their fingers from his heart, and his body shook the ground as it collapsed.

They stood, for a moment, staring down at Shank’s head, dripping in his blood from head to toe, running in rivulets through their hair, down their face, along the long knifetips of their fingers. And then they looked up to find themselves ringed by several dozen scorched members of the Coda, watching silently, and then there was a bright light from the Scout City Almanac reporter’s camocept as it blinked and captured their likeness as sound ruptured the silence.

“You bastard,” called one of the Wickers. “We had first rights!”

Two of his sisters ran out to kick Shank’s head, much to the protest of the Coda, who immediately were surging forward to gather the remains of all who had died, and chaos enveloped them.

“Diggory Graves,” called the mustached reporter, pushing past the screaming Wickers to shove a pencil and paper under their chin. “Are you open to taking some questions for the Scout City Almanac?”

“Perhaps later,” Diggory said, and stepped beside her, and began to push through the crowd, and to search for Percy, Ratty, Shelby, Russell, Riot. “I am afraid I have to go and save my friend’s life from the Quartet.”

Interlude 1 - Ways To Get Away

Would you like to just get away? How much would you like to get away? You could get away from your job by stepping outside. It is a shame that you still need a job, really, collecting junk from abandoned homes in the forest and selling them or harvesting valuables from bog bodies or breeding strange varieties of goats. Even after the end of your era, you still have to get by somehow. You could get away from the stress of your relationships by walking into the woods, alone, until you encountered the peculiar gravity of the Northmost woods and were drawn by it into an impenetrable labyrinth of trees, and all those bothersome loved ones who express love and cruelty in equal measure would have to refer to you in the past tense. You could get away from yourself by drinking black water until you forget the names of the stars, until you forget your own name, until you become a living mass of forest loam or grow lampreys that nestle where your eyes used to be or your teeth turn to tree bark.

We go now to one who gets away the way I do.

Story 2 - A Rude Awakening

Danielle hovered in the expanse of black that was the realm of dream, at least as she perceived it, and the constellations of dreaming minds that remained in the night. Dreaming out here was much different than it had been in the Prime Dream; in the Prime Dream, image was everything, and she had spent a lot of time sculpting how she appeared to others. In this realm, things were shapeless, cast in a fractal light, and she felt like an immortal god each time she walked in this nowhere-place.

Few minds in Scout City were left dreaming now, but she kept a close eye out for any sudden arrivals. There was a brief flash that she was sure was Diggory, but she couldn’t get close enough to tune in to it before it vanished again, fast as she was. She stayed a moment there, in the dark obsidian outlines of the trees at the forest at the edge of Scout City’s farthest neighborhoods, until another spark appeared, low on the ground, hopping a little from place to place, which was curious. She came closer, and knelt to reach out a hand to the wavering ember, and found herself standing suddenly within its dream.

The building was clearly abandoned, and stood in a golden field at the edge of a green pine forest. It was a building of haphazard red brick, covered in places by white plaster, with dark and empty windows, and several buildings in similar states of repair stretched to the left and right. The door that led into it was wide open, and above it was a rusty sign with its image of a cartoon mascot; a cartoon smiling pig dressed as a clown. The letters over the pig’s head said ‘Shank’s Deli Cuts’.

In the doorway was a small boy, who was kneeling down to scratch the head of a large pink pig, which snorted and sniffled up at his face. It was almost as large as he was. Both the boy and the pig looked up to her, and she thought for a moment that she had been clocked as being an outsider in their dream, which almost never happened quickly. But there were voices from behind her, and she realized that was the source of the trouble—trouble, she thought, because the boy immediately darted inside the abandoned building, pulling the stubborn pig inside after him. She began to drift in his direction, but then she heard voices that she did not much like at all, and they were saying “Good. She’s asleep.”

She withdrew from the dream immediately, peeling back from the dreamscape first and then from the realm of dream, seeping back most of a mile so that her consciousness nested again in the cradle of her skull, and she gasped awake, and sat up.

Her room was lit with an orange glow shining in from the windows beyond, and casting long black shadows from her dresser and coatrack. She could hear the sound of broken glass on her floorboards, the wind whistling in her living room beyond. Her bedroom door was more open than she had left it when she went to sleep, and in the gap was a figure wrapped in black—black hood, black gloves, black boots—except for the mask, which resembled a drum stretched tight around the face. A hole was ripped in its skin, and through it she could see a glimpse of Cole Kane’s face.

“Hey,” she said. “Sorry to disappoint but I’m off the clock. Wanna come back for therapy later this week?”

“Not why I’m here,” Cole said.

“Are you doing a scary voice?” Danielle said. “I can see your face. I can see your face doing it.”

“Do you ever shut the fuck up?” hissed a voice by her side, and Danielle found that there was another black shadow on either side of her bed, and she clutched her neck as she found a wire wrapped around it suddenly; it pulled taut, threaded behind the posts of her magnificent queen bed, and she was pinned against the headboard. The masks leering on either side of her were the broken keys of a piano and the polished wood of a fiddle.

“Tattletale, tattletale, hang your britches on a nail,” said Piano.

“Snitches get stitches,” said Fiddle.

“Cole,” grunted Danielle, and felt the cable grow tight enough that it cut her skin; she dug her fingers under it, and slipped in her own blood. Damn. Taking that out of the bedsheets would be a pain. “You think murdering me is going to change anything?”

“Drum,” said Fiddle, looking back. He and Piano were each holding an end of the wire, Danielle noticed, the cable wrapped around the wrists of their thick black gloves. “Beyond knowing who you are, she’s a freak who can crawl around in other people’s minds. She will kill our movement before it begins. She’s been harboring monsters in her own home. It’s time for you to prove that you have what it takes to save this city. To really make a difference.”

There was a knife, long and curved, in Cole’s hand. So that was the game, she thought. And Cole nodded, and came stepping into her room, to stand at the foot of her bed.

“Your death will help save this city,” Cole said. “You should know that.”

“Imagine how much more I could help save this city if I wasn’t dead, though,” said Danielle.

“How are you still talking,” said Piano, and yanked harder; Danielle choked as the wire bit deeper, and that was it for the air that she had; she felt like her fingers were getting cut to the bone. She matched Cole’s gaze, and did not look away, and wondered whether he really had the mettle. Her vision began to go into black and white spots as he came walking around the bedside, knife gleaming, and it wasn’t the expanse of dream either.

And then, as his knife drifted toward her chin, and her throat, and the silk robe that covered her chest, a white glow lit the back of the room, and cast long shadows of all three of the Quartet members standing over her.

Ratty stood in the door, hands on her hips, eyes angry black voids, glowing bright, licking her sharp grin with a forked tongue.

“Boo, bitches,” said the poltergeist, and then it flew into motion. Ratty surged off the ground, hands trailing down through the air, over Cole’s head, and its hands of flame only hardened to grasp his helmet, yanking it down over his eyes, and drawing him forward to slam into Piano’s body. As both members of the Quartet collided, the wire wrapped around Piano’s gloves slipped, and Danielle sucked in air as she tore the wire away for a moment of slack. As Piano stood again, she noticed immediately that Danielle was free, and yanked the wire again; Danielle slid down beneath the covers, pulling her head out from the wire just in time before it thwacked against the headboard.

“Use your knives, idiots,” said Fiddle, and Danielle twisted through her sheets as what she presumed were Fiddle’s boots pelted her bedspread—he must have been leaping up to fight Ratty in the air. Danielle pushed herself with her arms—her legs were like wooden logs lately—through the side of the comforter and then finally fell free of the bed entirely, collapsing to the floor on her back. It was the perfect view to watch as Ratty twisted through the air like a corkscrew to deliver a blow to the middle of Fiddle’s chest that sent him sailing over her and out her bedroom window; glass and windowframe shattered outward into the air a few hundred feet over Scout City. Ratty recoiled for a moment, and it raised a hand to its neck; Fiddle had grazed it with his curved knife, and a black void like space opened up like a tear in fabric.

“Shit,” said Ratty. “That stings.”

The poltergeist ducked just in time to avoid Piano’s knife, but by then Danielle had snatched up the Rosenbrace from its bed of soil by the foot of her bed, and was out of the window and onto the flaming branches of Scout City, where the leaves had begun to light and burn.

Marketing - Inside Box Atlas

Lady Ethel Mallory

Oh hello Oswald.

Did you really think you’d shot down my ship? How adorable. I’m disappointed of course that you haven’t even sent a broadcast to gloat. Am I worth nothing to you?

As we speak, I’m already inside Box Atlas. I was never in the air; while you were busy blasting away my empty drone carriers, I was able to get across your grounds and work my way inside. I’m crawling in you, Oswald, crawling in your blood. You may have noticed your office doors have lost power. Your windows, of course, are designed to resist impacts as significant as a plane crash, so good luck getting out of there.

Your clever little trapdoors and escape passages? I’ve choked them up, Oswald. I know this place like the back of your hand. There’s no escape. I’m here. I’m coming for you. And you are finally going to goddamn talk face to face with me. I know what you’ve become. But you have no idea what I have. I am your reckoning. I am the Queen of America. And I am going to sit in your chair and eat you alive.

Story 2, Continued - A Rude Awakening

Sometimes, when a door closes, a window opens. And sometimes, if you really can’t take the hint, you’ll crawl back through that window. We return now to Danielle O’Hara.

The Rosenbrace had originally been marketed to Danielle as the ultimate bio-engineered mobility aid, but the truth was it was the choosiest houseplant she had ever owned. It required constant care, and feeding, and nutritional soil supplements, and a nightly bath in moist dirt. When it was attached, though, the lengths of leafy vine dug its thorns into her skin and felt the numb impulses of her degenerated nerves, and kept her from toppling over as she walked out in her silk robe onto the huge tree of Scout City that her house sat on; forming rooty claws to anchor her against the bark. Fire was cascading upwards in all directions, as glowing embers rose from the burning neighborhoods far below—it had spread so far while she slept—and touched on bushels of the paper-like dry leaves, igniting them in great bursts that consumed the canopy around her. As the titanic branches blackened, she could still hear the fight between Ratty and the Quartet in her room behind her, the poltergeist dancing like a violent spiky whirlwind of light, throwing around furniture and trinkets that Danielle winced to see used as projectiles.

But then there was a shadow, stepping out onto the branch behind her. She looked back to find that Fiddle had not fallen to his death, but to cling to the side of Scout City’s trunk; he stepped out now, with a curved hook attached to a length of wire in one hand, and his knife in the other, and came pacing towards her. She was out far enough down the branch now that she was running out of places to go; it forked into several narrower paths that all led towards flaming handfuls of leaves.

“There’s a U and I in Quitting, you know,” she called back. “That’s my ghost friend. It’s going to eat your soul probably.”

“Souls are interesting,” said Fiddle. He was still walking toward her, delicate bootsteps, like a catburglar. Twenty feet. Fifteen feet. Ten. Danielle considered hurling herself from the branches, except that she couldn’t fly and would plummet to her death. She reconsidered that. “Yours is going to be a part of something big. A tool for good. Rejoice. The day of your redemption is at hand. If only we could all be so lucky.”

“Didn’t you see the sign on my front door?” said Danielle. “It says no soliciting.”

Fiddle stopped, ten feet from her, and lowered his hook and knife to his sides, and tilted his mask as he studied her.

“For what it’s worth,” he said. “We wouldn’t have been able to do this without you.”

“Aw shucks,” she said, holding her robe closed with one hand, the other extended for balance. She felt her Rosenbrace wilting in the heat; one length of vines along her thigh buckled, and she nearly slipped off the side of the branch as she shifted her weight. “Dare I ask what you’re monologuing about?”

“Clementine came to you with a dog,” he said. “You helped them find Shank. Setting him up to be our killer in the dark, our monster in the shadows, would have been much harder otherwise.”

“Tell Cole he’s a pussy,” said Danielle. “The least he could do is kill me himself. But he’s getting his ass kicked in there.”

“Does it help?” said the Fiddle. The other side of her Rosenbrace snapped at the ankle, leaves blackening and curling in the heat, and she fell backwards then, caught herself in a fork in the branch before she fell completely, legs dangling uselessly out over the burning expanse. The roots district was getting quite the view. She clutched the bark, and Fiddle came to kneel imperiously in front of her, fire glinting in his mask. “To make a joke out of everything? You’re about to die.”

Danielle smiled.

“Yeah,” she said. “Kind of does.”

His knife flashed out, although it didn’t go for her face as she’d expected, but rather for her hair; he came away with a fistful of it.

“Hey,” she shrieked. “It took forever to grow that out.”

“Now you can die,” he said, and went flashing out with the knife again, but she let go first, and slipped out of the flaming branch. It was not so different, she thought, as she began to fall, as falling into dream. The same rush of vertigo, the same feeling of excitement in the base of your belly, the same way the world became a blur of light and dark.

Interlude 2 - More Ways To Get Away

To really get away, and I mean really, you’d have to start thinking outside the confines of your mortal body. You’d have to project your mind into the expanse of dream, where the dreaming minds of all things that sleep are linked by the plane of Zazzlezazz’s governance. Or walk into the crystalline dimensions that stretch infinitely up and down in fractal shapes beyond your own.

You could go to sit on the Heavenly Line and let it transport you further and further away from your own planet; you could go as far as the Dream-City of Distant Kazanth, if you were a cat lover. You could walk out of your universe entirely and into one of the dedicated realms of the Indescribables, where space is contorted and held by their own power—the Industry in Syrensyr’s belly, for example, or Marolmar’s World, which still is fueled by the slow-burning radiation of his magnificent power even after his life has ended. And if I ever deigned to open one, I suppose you would be welcome. I have not forgotten about that garden party.

But as tempted as I am to get away, and I suppose I do in a way, dreaming about Earth and places far away from my new occupation in the Council of Heavens, each time I look back to your world I am reminded a little why I must stay.

We go now to one who is looking for a way out.

Story 3 - Into Death

Riot stared at the glowing, gaping wound in the chest of the Fifth String; the founder of the Church of the Hallowed Name eyed her back from the other side, keeping the flesh of the Fifth String open with his hands, as if she were a bag he might pry open to escape. The Fifth String’s mask of metal trumpet sunflowers was bent back in agony or ecstasy, and her hands clawed against the stone steps. The church organ towered over them all, dark and doomy.

“Mom always said not to talk to strangers inside strange ladies,” said Riot. Her hands were still bound with cable, but she came to sit up on her knees in front of the stone steps of the chapel.

“Did she?” said the prophet Tiberius Laevinus, who looked and sounded prehistoric. “She sounds a wise woman, then. Is she respectful of the wise men of your city?”

“No, not particularly,” said Riot. “Respect has never really been her thing. Especially not for creepoids like you.”

“Creepoids,” said Tiberius. “I am not familiar. What is the meaning of this word?”

Riot blinked. Tiberius continued to stare from inside his flesh peephole, and the Brass member of the Quartet, who still reeked of the griffocaugh urine she’d bombed him with, wasn’t saying anything either.

“Sorry. When are you from?” said Riot.

“I was alive during the time of Christ,” said Tiberius.

“Oh yeah. I think I saw that movie,” said Riot. “So you are old old.”

Tiberius’ wizened eye narrowed, inside of the Fifth String’s ribcage.

“I am brought back from death to provide the word of eternity in the age when it is needed most,” he said. “It is as I said. Comply, and explain your path back from death. Or do not, and we shall gain it from your corpse anyway and ensure that your mother and anyone else who holds you dear is stripped away from the very memory of this city. Looking at you, I find the light of the devil. Have you made a deal with him? Have you bandied for your soul? What matter of witchcraft was it? Or rather, by whose dark hand were you returned?”

“Ugh. This guy’s not born yet and I’m already sick of him,” Riot said, looking back to Brass, and catching another glimpse of the green light that shone from the keyhole—the carved wooden mural in the back of the chapel, over the doors, seemed to have doors of its own that could be opened.

Tiberius sighed, and she looked back.

“Okay,” she said. “So let’s say…”

But the look of the ancient prophet pierced her, and in it she found that his decision had already been made. Damn, she thought. Talking usually buys more time.

He reached up, and she lost the view of his face as his skeletal silver hand, protruding from the wounded chest of the Fifth String, twisted up to find its way, feeling clackily, to the keys of the church organ laid out behind her. Riot watched in disbelief as the ancient prophet pressed down, and the Fifth String’s body arched upwards, almost on her palms and heels, and Tiberius Laevinus played a chord.

Riot stumbled back, rising to her bound feet, but then was tripped by Brass, and fell back to roll among the wooden pews. She looked up—she had never been particularly gifted when it came to seeing ghosts, but she could see the bright-burning faces peeling away from the weighty organ as it breathed out a titanic breath, one that must have echoed for a mile across the forest beyond.

Brass was moving behind her, but surprisingly not toward her—she found instead that he was going for a narrow wooden stair that rose over the chapel doors, towards a thin platform on the cabinetry doors. When she glanced back to the bent Fifth String, the skeleton arm, the church organ, she found that the ghosts were rising like a flood from the organ, from the floor, clawing their way through the pews like marionettes on ghostly strings. She was familiar with each of their faces; she had done that much, learning just who the Quartet had killed. And yet, as she watched the late Mr. Greenstreet with his bald old head and Abraham Walker with his flaming face and the four tortured angels and a dozen more that she could barely identify surging towards her, she felt more than fear overcome her as she wormed her way backward.

They had died on her watch.

This was what she was here to stop. What Clementine had given her life to end. What Shelby kept her vigil against. The Instrumentalist was truly back, if not in the flesh of Solomon Reed, in the music. And she had been running from his orchestra ever since she was young, when she was stepping into the fresh air of the world above for the first time, the night she had stolen a key and lost Clara. As they clawed their way toward her, tumbling over the old pews, she grit her teeth. It had to end, once and for all.

The doors of the chapel burst open, and she heard a grunt behind her as Brass looked down from the doors of the mural he was fiddling with the key for. Standing in the doorway were three figures, one with a face swollen like a gnarled tree stump, one with stained groundskeeper’s clothes, and one who floated and glowed white-hot in the air, dark eyes glaring.

“I was worried you forgot about me,” Riot called, and tried not to mean it too much. Shelby and Russell were immediately running towards her, and Percy floated into the chapel room over the horde of ghosts. She was not able to call out anything more useful though, because Brass leaped from the top of his platform to pounce on Russell, and the ocean of angry ghosts were clawing at Riot’s feet, tearing at her boots with blazing-hot claws, and the skeletal hand of the Founder played one lonely chord after the next, some monastic tune she could not identify.

“We would never,” said Percy, crackling with light. “Get out of here—I’m going to burn this place to the ground.”

He was immediately tackled by a ghost shaped like a twisted angel, and they were two candle flames fighting, barely visible in Riot’s vision.

But then Shelby was kneeling beside her, and her cleaver fell between Riot’s ankles, severing several bands of the wire which spooled apart.

“You okay?” Shelby grunted, although she was so beat up the words barely left her mouth intact. Riot was so happy to see her that she could cry, and as Shelby bent over her to try and sever the wires wrapped around her arms and chest, Riot bent upward to plant a fast kiss against her bruised mouth. Shelby recoiled, looking down at her in shock, her remaining hand touching her chin where the kiss had landed.

“No time,” said Riot, suddenly red, and rolled to her feet, arms still bound, just in time to avoid a sweeping crunch of ghostly arms which flattened half a church pew behind her into splinters. She went dashing up to kick Brass off of Russell where he had pinned the groundskeeper; Russell’s clothes were stained with blood.

“Workplace hazards,” Riot said, and went for the door, but then a sweeping wave of ghosts rose up from the ground to occupy the chapel door, reaching out for her with razor fingers; she stumbled backward into Shelby, who caught her and restored her to her feet. Percy was flying to try and rip apart the church organ, but he seemed to be caught again and again by ghosts soaring out of the crowd to tumble through the air with him; his screams were a whisper to Riot, but he burned so bright she could see him clearly.

“I’ve got a bad idea,” said Riot, and it was true. She glanced up the flimsy wooden staircase to the green glow of the open cabinet doors; they creaked open, unlocked, as a green light began to flood the chapel.

“In the light of the Dawn, your souls are malleable,” screamed the wiry voice of Tiberius from the Fifth String’s midriff. “Join the tools of the lord your god!”

“Back in a minute,” Riot called, and as the wave of ghosts in the door and the second wave crashing down the pews went to catch the three of them in the middle, she jaunted past where Brass lay, giving his helmet one more kick for good measure, and then up the stairs.

“Where does this lead?” Shelby called behind her, helping Russell up the steps; the sea of ghosts crashed and curled around the base of the wooden steps and then began to rise upwards, clawing fingers and gnashing teeth.

“Nowhere good,” Riot said, standing in the open green door. The carved wooden panels of apostles had spread open, and only the bright green glowing square of light shone out upon her; offered a blurred view of a landscape beyond. “Maybe death. You can stay behind if you want.”

“Not this time,” Shelby said, and pushed her forward, bearing Russell along with her, and then they were through the doors, and Riot yanked them shut behind; they were different on the other side, heavy and black, and then with a final boom the doors were shut, and the crash and shrieks of the ghosts and the music of the organ and the whining drone of Tiberius was all gone.

The wind whistled in rocky stones, and she was temporarily blinded by a brighter light than the dim chapel, brighter even than the sea of ghosts or Percy’s flame. The light was green. She looked up, as her vision adjusted, to find that she was in a landscape of black stones, stretching out into distant dunes, which were dotted with young saplings. Clouds of green mist sailed slowly over a deep black sky, lit with emerald stars.

On two wooden folding chairs, sitting in front of the door they had just come through, were people whose faces swam through her murky memory. Both were bearded—one in thick fluffy grey, which surrounded his face like a cloud and was tied back in a respectable old man ponytail, and he wore a yellow Scoutpost jacket and yellow boots, and smoked a pipe. A crown of green flame hovered over his head. Beside him, in the other chair, was a smaller man but more muscular, dark of beard and hair and with a stony wrinkled face, and one of his arms was formed of living tree bark that resembled the wood of the folding chairs as well as the saplings far beyond, and was sprouted with tiny branches and leaves.

“Hey Jonah,” she said. “Hey Hector. Quick question—are we dead? Because everyone in Scout City thinks you died.”

She found herself quickly swept off her feet in a hug—Jonah moved quickly for his size and age—and heard his voice from through the muffled blanket of his beard.

“You know,” he said. “Hector and I were just arguing about that ourselves.”

“My answer is absolutely,” said Hector. “Welcome to purgatory.”

Outro - Escapes

Escapes. The life that you have been given is not long, dreamer. Whether it ends a few days or years or decades early hardly seems, at a glance, to make a difference. Your planet will continue to rotate. Your sun will continue its slow burning out like a candle. You may be mourned, or not. But perhaps, in the lack of consequence, there is solace. You are unbound by matters of importance. You have no obligation except to see all that you wish to of this life, to visit places you have never visited and ingest substances previously unknown. To meet people and leave them behind; to form loves and friendships tomorrow you could not imagine today. What limitless potential there is in what is left of your incredibly infinitesimal existence.

At times, I halfway wish I could have been born so small, and to have nothing to do except what I wished—while Earth is quarantined by the Industry, it is not even as though your soul will go to be anything useful. Unfortunately, now I have a job at the Council of Heavens to uphold. Ugh. Responsibility is a heavy burden to bear.

Until you have gotten every good thing out of this life, and meet your end suddenly and unexpectedly and are snuffed out like a candleflame, perhaps midway through laughing at a joke told by someone you do not yet know, I am your loyal host Nikignik, waiting escapalogistically for your return to the Hallowoods.

The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Attention Span' 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, dreamers, in the event of a fire or other emergency, please do your emergency equations in chalk until the corners of your room are intersected into dimensional doors that allow for immediate exit from your chamber. Do not forget the emergency equations.