HFTH - Episode 199 - Vassals

Content warnings for this episode include: Abuse (Percy’s childhood), Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Transphobia, Homophobia, Gun Mention, Strangulation/suffocation, Misgendering, Static (including sfx), Emotional Manipulation, Stabbing, Drowning, Body horror, Bugs, Consumption of Inedible Materials (Oswald Biggs Botulus), Religious Violence, Child Sacrifice, Sounds of Chewing, Character Death

Intro - Nothing in the Sky

Your fellow disciples once looked to the night sky and found it alive with stars. For you, though, it was not the light that fascinated you, but the darkness. The cosmos nearly empty, a vast nothingness punctuated by the smallest spattering of suns, and you as a traveler on a dead stone, one of thousands cast by the wayward hand of fate. And beyond the brief cusp of light, there is darkness, infinite darkness—not emptiness, for emptiness implies the possibility of fullness, but the nothing that lurks just beyond the confines of the light.

You found beauty in nothing.

Nothing is infallible. It expresses nothing; is on no mission, and is moved by the prayers of no man. What it envelopes goes dark, and is no more. It is stronger than all that is not nothing, and surrounds it, infinitely larger than a nearly infinite universe. It is the ultimate. It will be the last and only god. And so it is the cornerstone of your faith; the darkness. There shall be no false gods before the nothing. And the triune face of the ultimate god is prepared to cradle humanity, to make it new, and to one day bring about a final revelation. A revelation that begins now, as you reach once more into the air of a living earth, and light your silver fingers upon the keys of a church organ, and play an ode to the Black Eternity which will soon swallow up every Hello from the Hallowoods.

Theme.

Right now, I am sitting in a skull, and peering through a thin veil of black fabric that covers it. Through the shimmering silk, I can see the light of spirits fighting in the lofty rafters of an old chapel. The music that hangs in the air is a melody that has not been played in this iteration in seven hundred years. It is to this dreary ode that the ghost of Percy Reed tangles with the spirits of the murdered residents of Scout City, while those who have pulled his father’s history up from the ground and given it new life strive for his downfall. The theme of tonight’s episode is Vassals.

Story 1 - Malleable

“Where do you think you are going in that?” said Percy’s father. Percy froze; he had almost made it across the deadly crossing from the stairway banister down the hall to the back door. He had gambled on his father having dozed off during his afternoon sit in the living room chairs. He felt like a prisoner sometimes in this house, watched by jailors at every corner. Jailors with no sense of style.

“It’s just pants and a shirt,” Percy said, teeth gritted. Which was true, albeit layered with chains, a metal band logo and tatters that somehow made him look like the devil to his parents. He imagined if the devil were real, he would be dressed in a fancy suit like a pastor.

“It’s unladylike,” said his father, who leaned forward to make eye contact with Percy from through the living room door. A grey bushy brow was raised high over the round lens of his spectacles; an eye like an eagle’s was fixed on him, and it had the usual mouselike paralyzing effect on him, which he hated. He had learned that submission was better than discipline.

“This is how all my friends dress,” Percy said, although he knew immediately what sort of response that invited.

“You could use ladylike friends, too,” echoed his mother’s voice from the kitchen. “Good girls. Christian girls.”

“Agreed,” said his father, sitting back out of view. “A girl your age should be careful. Your spirit is malleable, you know, to worldly influences.”

Percy had never heard the word malleable before, but took it to mean, vulnerable, weak, easily changed. He had heard lots of other long words, like panopticon for instance, just not that one. Percy had not been allowed to go out, after that, although he had hoped perhaps a lecture would be token enough. He had been made to change into a skirt and stay the rest of the day inside, texting friends that he would have to cancel plans to hang out behind the dying stripmall with the cheap haircut salon where he maintained the lordly discipline of having a job.

Years and years later, Percy was quite dead and had lost any connection to his bones or various grand pianos or harps or licorice tins, and he had buried his father, and watched his mother rot, and burned his childhood home to the ground, staircase and all, and then gone to live in Toronto where there were hundreds of ghosts who did not think being dead was quite so bad after all. And he only thought of that afternoon in Alabama now because he thought of it every time he heard the word malleable, which he had never heard pronounced mall-ible, as the face peering out of the half-naked woman’s chest had pronounced it.

Ratty had taught Percy to fight, and it had not been easy on him during those sparring sessions. Some of the principles were simple: emotion makes you powerful, makes you substantial. The more solid you are, the more visible, the more space you take up in the world, the faster it burns the finite fire of your soul. He hadn’t truly appreciated until later what his father’s work entailed… a spirit that was anchored to an object wouldn’t burn out. And the binding of the spirit and object together required a bit of the corpse, and the green otherworldly light of a cabinet Solomon Reed had once been entrusted by the Church of the Hallowed Name—one that was of the same make as the altarpiece that his friends were now vanishing through, pulling the doors shut behind them. Musical instruments were his father’s choice, because in playing them, he could make their ghosts to dance, and they had danced to his command.

All of this too, he thought of, because there were dozens of ghosts in this chapel, tied to this organ, and they were anchored to a single fixture, a single instrument: a church organ that dominated the chapel wall, spilled over in long pipes across the stained glass panels. With each note that the silver arm played—it was still jutting from the crabwalking body of the Fifth String—the spirits rose and fell, crescendoed and went still. And with his friends safely through the cabinet and out of harm’s way, it was to him to still the part of Ratty’s voice in his head that was telling him he’d already burned record amounts of his soul tonight scalding Scout City residents and fighting with Ben Alder, and how much more of himself could he really afford to set on fire? How many years of his afterlife had he already spent tonight?

Whatever it takes, was the answer raging in his head, and he grinned with a bitter fury as a corpse with a flaming head and a charred, drooping face within the white blaze came sweeping towards him. Despite the best puppeteering that the prophet below could manage, brand-new ghosts did not know how to fight, and he had picked up a trick or two. Where two hands went flying for his neck, he flipped suddenly in the air, kicking the hands away from him and shoving the spirit overhead, sending it careening past him and towards the back wall of the chapel, where it faded out before it struck the stone. A second, a mutilated corpse arranged like an angel, was draped in lengthy cables that trailed back through the air to the church organ. When it came surging through the air towards him, he dropped suddenly, then grabbed ahold of its cables and yanked, propelled himself with holy fire, and sent it sailing down into the pews below, where it nearly struck Ben Alder, whose melted brass mask still had Percy’s handprints in it. Ben looked up to Percy, and Percy stared down imperiously.

“I warned you, Ben,” he said. “This all comes crashing down tonight.”

A third ghost flew by him; Percy twisted away in time to miss his raking path. But then when he looked back down to Ben, it was to find a black knife pulled back in his hand, and then Ben threw it, twirling a jagged path through the air. On instinct, Percy went to go quiet, invisible, let it pass through him, and looked down and found it caught in his ghostly sweater; a stabbing black pain that spread out like a wound from where it had entered, and when he yanked the handle away, it was a sort of emptiness that was eating away at the threads of his middle. The knife dropped twenty feet to the church floor, but by then the throng of spirits, unsuccessful at trapping his friends, had risen up from behind him, and there were fingers—clumsy, but even so—digging at his ghostly skin, pulling at his clothes, his hair, dragging him down towards the chapel floor, holding him down beneath their murmuring tangle of weight. And then there was a silver wire around his neck, and it burned where it stung him, and he hissed. He thought briefly about doing what Ratty had done; about eating the spirits that held him down. He somehow couldn’t bring himself to do it; even now. They were as young and angry and tortured as he had been, at first.

“You think your father’s legacy is something that can simply burn?”

He was surprised to find the question did not come from the voice of the prophet Tiberius Laevinus, but from the weak voice of the Fifth String. The skeletal arm in her wound had withdrawn; her chest was covered again by the black layers of her cloak, and her mask of metal sunflowers leered down from where she knelt beside him. He wrestled against the throng of spirits pinning him, but they neither would budge nor claw at him further.

She withdrew a few steps, and his eyes followed her as she moved towards the altar. There was a black cloth set over several objects on the top of it, he noticed; he had written it off as perhaps a covering for those tasteless wafers in their fancy can before.

“Your father was a remarkable man, Persephone,” she said, as she came to kneel in front of the altar, and her frail gloved hands reached up for the cloth. “He was marked as lacking in conviction by the Vicar of this church, did you know that? Because he loved all children the way he loved you.”

She could not seem to pull herself up far enough to reach the cloth, exhausted from her ordeal, and she looked back to him, straining against the spirits holding him in check.

“You people never knew him,” Percy spat. “You don’t know who he really was. All you have is lies and some false history you’ve told yourself enough until you started to believe it.”

“No,” she said, and she reached up to grasp the mask of metal sunflowers, and pulled it free of her head, and in the glow of the horde of ghosts she turned back to look at him. He did not recognize her; she was gaunt, with dark rings below her hollow eyes, and flat wisps of hair that clung to her sweat-encrusted face. She looked for all the world like the sort of pained woman who looks to heaven in Renaissance paintings.

“I knew your father,” she said. “When my boy, Al, was chosen as the spring sacrifice, it didn’t sit right with him, even if it was right with god. That was why he saved my boy’s skin. He knew he could call a spirit back that way. So that he could know a true and godly life. The same way he saved you.”

Al. Percy did know Al. The skinless ghost of a boy who had been kept in Solomon’s basement. Who liked to play games. Who hadn’t quite gotten the hang of becoming solid yet. Percy opened his mouth to speak, but she grabbed a hold of the dark cloth on the altar then, and pulled it; and gleaming in the ghostlight was a polished skull, set on a display of ribs twisted up into the air. A cracked, twisted, and charred set of spectacles. Percy knew immediately whose they were, and the tears that fell from him were drops of molten light.

“And we remember him for that,” she said, looking to the empty sockets of the skull. “As a saint. It took us years to understand the vision that he had for Scout City, not just as a city, but as a bastion for the Church. That its impurities must be rooted out and made clean, so that it can be a light that shines for the whole world.”

“You people are monsters,” Percy grunted, and then felt a sharp sting from his neck as the silver cable, which Ben Alder held taut, jerked even tighter.

“How did she do it?” said the Fifth String, looking back down as she slid, one stumbling foot at a time, a few steps back down the stone steps to lay, stretched out and exhausted. “Your friend, the girl with the stitches. Riot Maidstone was dead. Clementine Maidstone was dead.”

Percy grunted; the wire was burning-hot against his neck, and yet the crushing throng of arms and ribs and skeletal teeth pressing down against him held him in place. And yet, he had already given up the secrets to life and death once, to Oswald Biggs Botulus, and he had still never forgiven himself for it. It was part of a long long list of things Old Percy had done that he was sure New Percy would never. And he began to glow brighter, although the silver cut him more with each mote of light he gained.

“Shut up,” he said. “Shut up shut up shut up! I am going to burn all of you!”

“Just like old times,” Ben Alder grunted, and dragged hard on the choke.

“I did it,” a voice said from the chapel doors, and the Fifth String, Percy, Ben Alder in his mask of melted brass, several dozen ghosts, and the unseeing sockets of Solomon Reed’s empty skull looked up to find a figure standing in the archway.

It was one Percy was familiar with; even so, it took a moment for him to recognize Clara Martin. When she was frittering around her decrepit cabin, going on long academic ramblings about how to bring the corpse of Riot Maidstone back to her feet, her hair had been wild, her clothes ramshackle, her demeanor a little sleep-deprived. But she stood now, hair in managed braids, a tall double breasted black coat that billowed out from her waist like a skirt. Beside her floated a broomstick carved with dozens of birds in flight, and it drifted alongside her as she walked slowly into the chapel, poking in the direction of the Fifth String and Ben Alder as an attack dog on a leash might.

Immediately Ben Alder had let go of the wire around Percy’s neck, and Percy’s form was under less stress, although still bound by the heavy throng crushing him. He was able to twist to see Clara and the door a little better, as hard as it was to tear his gaze away from his father’s bones.

Ironic, he thought. I was bones to you, once. Now look at you. Both of us being used for something we couldn’t dream of after we died. Who’s the tool of the lord now?

“Brass,” said the Fifth String, and she sighed. Ben looked back to her.

“She’s seen your face,” he said. “She has to die.”

“I wouldn’t try anything,” said Clara, from the door, pausing at the first shattered pew, and her floating broom held up beside her. “I’m classically trained.”

At this, Clara opened the black folds of her coat, and let an object on her belt shine bright.

A golden handle of a curved blade, sheathed in black leather. A handle with a resplendent ruby set in the pommel. And in that ruby, dreamer, an eye, an eye of such tremendous power and beauty that it could scarcely be trapped in an earthly stone, except that it was granted willingly. Some gifts, I think, it is acceptable to want returned in time.

“That blade belonged to an apostate of the church,” the Fifth String said with a frown; it was surprising how imperious someone so sick could seem. “It carries the semblance of a false god.”

“Yes. And she didn’t have very nice things to say about you either,” said Clara, dark eyes narrow and magnified in her glasses. “Let go of my friend Percy.”

“Or what?” said Ben, brass mask gleaming. He had gotten his knife back, even if it was held slack at his side.

“Or you don’t get this,” Clara said, tilting her head; she withdrew from the folds of her coat a book. It was a heavy-looking book, marked in red glyphs that looked wet and glinted in the light. Percy recognized it immediately from the night of Clementine’s death and Riot’s rebirth.

“I tried burning it,” she continued. “But it just kept coming back. So I’d love to get rid of it some other way.”

“Don’t you dare,” he breathed, sparking with rage, but Clara shot him a glance that told him to be still, and his anger curdled. How much could he trust her? How had she spent her decade and a half, again?

“You dare raise one of the devil’s manuscripts in a house of god,” said Ben Alder, but the Fifth String held up her hand.

“The devil has no power except which god grants him,” said the Fifth String, and tilted her head, looking down to Percy. “You would trade this for the boy’s freedom? He is the son of our saint. We had such plans for him.”

“Everyone gets what they want,” said Clara, and her broom poked up at Ben, who had been slowly circling around to her side. He froze and was still. “Our fights aren’t over by any means. But is tonight the night you want to face your destruction, before you’ve gotten your precious saint back?”

Percy wondered how she knew any of this. I, of course, knew exactly how. I suppose I was there.

The Fifth String nodded, and then pulled herself up from the stone, past the altar, to the keys of the church organ, and played a few notes—a soothing melody; not a dirge but a few cheery notes of ‘I Would Not Be Denied’. And the throng of ghosts, frowning with regret and eyes hollow and weeping, went slithering back to nest in the various tubes of the church organ as eels might in a coral reef.

Percy rose, trembling with rage, fire burning from his silhouette. He looked to the organ, and to his father’s skull, staring back.

“Percy, don’t do this alone,” Clara breathed from the door.

Old Percy, the one Ben Alder knew and loathed, would have flown right for the fifth string, and burned her head to a crisp, and then set the tubes of the organ on fire, burned away the hair and bone that was inlaid on each key. And he wondered for a moment if he was not still Old Percy after all. If being a monster would not have been to be his true self. And he felt despicable as he floated back from the open floor of the chapel, retreated in the air towards Clara. The doors of the altarpiece over the doors had closed, to reveal only a green keyhole of light again.

“Before I go,” he said, looking back to the woman on the altar. “I want to know. Is he here? Is his ghost somewhere in that organ? Is that why you pulled his bones out from where I buried them?”

“We tried,” said the Fifth String, candidly, maskless. She studied him as if she wished to offer him her condolences for the death in the family. “But wherever Solomon’s soul has gone, it is beyond our ability to pull back. We can only benefit now from what he wrote, and what he taught us, and what he left behind.”

Clara flung the heavy tome of the Compact across the ground, and it flipped end over end before it slapped heavily on the stones of the chapel floor. Percy hated her in that moment, but came to hover beside her as she turned.

“We’ll be back,” said Clara, as she began to walk out of the chapel, beneath the closed doors of the cabinet, and into the dim orange light of the firelit night. “And when we come again, it will be to destroy you.”

“We will meet all your blades and arrows with the infinite embrace of our faith,” said the Fifth String. She had begun crawling across the stones to the book, and looked up from her knees. There was a glint of silver fingertips from within the fold of her robe. “And the words of our true prophet.”

Percy slammed the doors on his way out, so that the very rafters shook with dust, and came to soar in front of Clara, burning hot and shedding furious tears.

“Why would you do that?” he said. “You don’t know who they are. You don’t understand. Why would you give them what they want?”

“Oh,” said Clara, and there was a look in her eye he had not seen before. She was older inside than she looked, and he knew what that meant. After all, he was pushing fifty on paper, even if he was barely out of high school when he’d kicked the mortal coil. “That old thing? It’s no good to anyone.”

“It seemed to help you pull Riot back to life,” Percy said, not backing down. “It seemed good for that.”

“Yes,” Clara said, and pushed up her glasses. “But it took me a lifetime to read, and it’s full of traps and razor blades, and a very unhelpful fish. That book is a labyrinth designed by devils. And by the time they’ve managed the prologue, we will be transmuting the stones of that cursed building into ash.”

Percy was silent for a moment, hovering, and glanced back to the closed chapel doors, and then to his reflection in her thick glasses, and her unblinking dark eyes fixed on him.

“You’ve changed,” he said. “With time.”

“For better or worse, do you think?” she said, tilting her head.

“For the deadlier,” he said.

“Well,” she said, and swept a leg over her broomstick, and sat upon it like a motorcycle, and traded her glasses for a pair of aviator’s goggles. “Deadly is what we need. Now, I’d like you to come with me. I’ve done a lot of work to put Riot back in the world of the living, and I’d like to keep her that way.”

Interlude 1 - What Will You Serve

What will you serve? It is a decision, often unspoken, that will change the outcome of your life, dreamer. And although you may think, I am an independent being, free of thought and speech, who serves no one, you will go on to do things in your life of some level of significance. You might, for instance, reject the notion of any grand organisms that float in the inky heavens, and focus all your years of toil upon running a small convenience store in a northerly borough of the Stumps district of your rooty city. And you might sell your blankets and firewood and compasses and shovels completely of the conviction that you are unfettered by any master except yourself.

But this would be far from the truth. You serve the children who admire you, who you regale with stories each time they stop in to peruse whichever sweets have been eked from the forest’s saps this year. You serve the hardened survivors who stop in and exchange gruff but thankful words with you as they replace their tools or buy their winter firewood, already chopped by your calloused hands. You serve the community you have become a fixture of. And even now, you serve the Scout City volunteer firefighter’s department, as buckets that you sold them become the vessels by which water travels from Lurch Lake all the way to the block where your store lies in cinders, and you fight to control the blaze, to stop it from spreading to the residential stumps across the street, because everything in your store you can make again, but the homes of the families that are going up into embers moment by moment can never be regrown.

We go now to one who serves her city.

Story 2 - Do Something

Valerie Maidstone walked through the wide lane of Scout City’s street, a tough leather jacket around her shoulders, frizzy blonde hair floating on her shoulders, and her hands gripped tightly the dented aluminum bat. She scouted down one long alley after the next—there were not so many of them up here in the utmost neighborhood, where the lanes extended onto the widest branches of Scout City, and the buildings hung out on supports among the smaller branches jutting away from those. She still could not shake the image of Diggory Graves, standing in her hallway, looking back at her. Judging her. For not doing enough. That was what they were, in a way: her constant reminder that she was a failure of a human being, of a mother, of a friend. In some other world where she’d gone north with Evie and Riz and the rest, she and maybe even the unborn Riot were a part of Diggory Graves too, and they could all be one big spiky grim reaper together. But as it stood, she had lived, and the rest had not, and she had to live in the shadow they cast from beyond the grave, and that shadow wore an embroidered leather jacket and had a judgy eye.

And so she walked, alone, down the empty streets.

“I know you’re here,” she screamed, turning in the intersection, bat raised, eyes glancing from one two-story townhouse to the next, storefronts and residences with dead doors and windows. The ceiling here was mostly the leaves of Scout City’s upper canopy, and beyond their dark shapes she could see the orange sky glowing over Scout City as the flames rose higher. “I know you’re coming for me. Because I’m in charge, right? Because this is my city? Because I’ve done it all wrong?”

She thought she caught a glimpse of movement in an alley, and twisted, pointed her bat towards the shadows.

“Well try me on for size,” she said. “You took my daughter. And she told me to fight you. To keep you at bay. God help me, I'll die trying.”

“Valerie?” said the dark figure, rearing up—the cowboy hat and yellow jacket told her it was Virgil Kane, as he stepped out of the shadows. The thickly mustached sheriff of Scout City had a javelin in one hand, and something which he went to conceal quickly in the other, but she recognized it immediately as a shotgun.

“Virgil,” she said, lowering her bat, and she stepped over to him quickly, tried to hide a deathly embarrassment behind a true exhaustion. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask the same of you,” he said, coming up beside her, his beady old eyes searching the streets and windows around them. “Where is your security entourage? You’re supposed to be safe at home.”

“Safety doesn’t agree with me,” Valerie said, and wished it were true. “Virgil, why are you carrying a gun?”

“Things are dire, Val,” he grunted, looking down to the gun and back, perhaps with an embarrassment similar to hers. “Ignatius is putting his bones back together. Oswin is regrowing their hand. Cole stormed off earlier tonight after Heather died. I’m down every one of my deputies—and I could raise that a deputy per sector was never going to be enough for situations exactly like this, and all the non-violent volunteer forces in the world can’t help us right now, but that’s for another time. I got reports from evacuators that there were three people in black cloaks coming up the city streets, and I thought for sure they were coming to kill you, and that I was the only one left on the force who can stand to protect you. But if you’re here…”

At this, there was the sound of breaking glass, and Valerie looked up just in time to see the edge of a black robe hoist itself up into a window far down at the end of the dark lane of the upper trunk; it was a house she recognized immediately.

“That’s Danielle’s house,” she said, and felt the blood drain. God she wished they’d come for her. How much of a fucking relief it would be to bleed out for Scout City, just so they’d finally know that she cared, that she would lay down her life for them in a heartbeat. Being alive, powerless, the one to blame, while they butchered her children and the friends of her children, was worse than death—it was humiliation. “Not on my watch,” she said, and went dashing down the lane.

“Valerie,” Virgil called after her, but she did not slow down until she had reached Danielle’s ground floor door, and tried it, found it locked. She looked up to the second floor; a wire trailed down from the broken window, but it was thin, sharp to the touch, and she had no gloves. Virgil caught up to her, gasping, and pushed past her.

“Valerie,” he began.

“Virgil, I’m not going home,” she said. “Danielle came out of Botco with me. She’s like a daughter to me.”

“Move,” Virgil breathed, and as she moved aside, he unloaded his shotgun into the door handle. The door flipped open in shattered chunks, and then they were both inside, darting down the hall of Danielle’s dim office, climbing up the stairs for her private quarters. They ascended up the creaking boards to her apartment door; there was the sound of crashing inside. Valerie tried the handle and found it open, and gave the door a mighty kick.

She was not sure what she expected to see, but it could be summarized briefly.

A mosaic of broken glass spread across Danielle’s living room floor.

A figure in the living room, in a black cloak, masked in bits of a musical instrument. One of the Quartet, from Clementine’s case files. The one Clem had described as Drum, although she’d described Drum as quite large and tall, and the silhouette she saw before her was not either of those things. In fact, Drum was sitting with his back against the wall beside Danielle’s bedroom door, from which more crashing came, and then a sudden stillness. And Virgil was right there beside her, gun cocked, trained on the cloaked figure.

“Freeze,” he said. “You are under arrest by the jurisdiction of the Scout City Sheriff's department.”

The drum-masked figure looked up to them suddenly, as if waking from a deep thought, and the broken skin of his dented mask flapped, and she caught a glimpse of a jaw, an eye, a hard cheekbone. Virgil’s raspy breath hitched in this throat.

“No,” Virgil whispered.

“It’s not…” said Drum, rising to his feet, knees shaking. There was a knife in his hand, and Virgil pointed the gun higher. There were voices from the bedroom, and then quiet.

“Keep an eye on him, Virgil,” said Valerie, and she hurried across the living room, towards Danielle’s bedroom door. She bashed it open with her shoulder, swinging her bat into the room, to find it empty; the windowframe was broken, and the ledge showered with glass and splintered wood. Everything in the room had been upturned, shattered, or reduced to splinters, but there was no one to be seen, and seemingly no cause for the crashing she had heard. Her gaze fell upon the closed closet doors near the bed, and she went stepping closer to them, bat in hand. But a word from the living room caught her off guard.

“Dad,” said Drum.

“Cole,” said Virgil. “What the hell are you doing, boy?”

And Valerie glanced back, to catch a glimpse of a knife falling as Cole dropped it to the living room floor, and her eyes left the closet doors.

But then there was a hot flash across the backs of her ankles, and she screamed, and fell suddenly and hard against the wooden planks of the floor. She twisted back to find that beneath the bed there was another black cloak, another knife, another mask—this one made of broken piano keys.

“Hello, mommy,” said Piano, and Valerie screamed, and swung her bat for under the bed; Piano jammed her knife into the boards so that the bat bounded back, rung in Valerie’s grip, and then Piano rolled away from her and out from under the bed on the far side. Piano’s voice echoed, although she could only see the edge of the mask as Piano hopped up onto the bed, leering down at her. “Why’d you let me die, mommy? Why’d you let me die?”

Valerie gave out a wail; her blood was hot, and red, and it seemed suddenly less noble to give it all for Scout City when it was pouring out across Danielle’s floorboards and she could not get to her feet. Virgil looked up through the bedroom door towards her, and came dashing over towards her, past where Drum, where Cole, was still sitting.

“Virgil,” Valerie warned, but Virgil came to stand in the door, and there was a bright flash as his shotgun rang out; it spattered the back wall and ceiling of Danielle’s bedroom. Whether it struck Piano directly, Valerie could not tell, but it was true that there was a whirl of her cloak as Piano instead threw herself away from Valerie, towards the windows, and vanished from Valerie’s field of view as she pulled herself across the ground. She looked up to Virgil, who had a strange look on his face.

“Virgil,” she said. “Are you alright?”

Her eyes were blurred with tears, and white-hot spots fled in her vision like wildfire ash, but she came to notice the glint of silver poking from within his jacket, and that it was not his badge or buttons or bandoliers.

“Virgil,” she breathed.

A knife was withdrawn, and Virgil Kane crumpled to his knees, and then facedown beside her, long ragged breaths whistling out of his dying lungs. And standing in the doorway was Drum, staring down. She could catch a glimpse of an eye, a mouth.

“How could you,” she said, although it was becoming difficult to see. She crawled against the ground, but could not seem to get her feet under her.

“I’m doing something,” said the Drum, through gritted teeth. “At least I’m doing something.”

And Valerie opened her mouth to say, you killed my best friend, but someone else spoke first.

“If I find that you have hurt Danielle,” said Diggory Graves, stepping into Danielle’s apartment somewhere behind Drum, in the far shadows at the end of her living room. “I will end your life, and quickly.”

It was a blur to Valerie, then—infuriatingly. She pulled herself closer to Virgil, enough to see his wrinkled face, his eyes gleaming, his wheezing breaths staining his mustache red.

“My boy,” he said. “My boy.”

There was a flurry of action from beyond; the sound of boots leaping free of the living room window and scaling down into the yard, and Diggory’s nearly silent bootsteps crossing past her, kneeling down.

“You are injured,” said Diggory Graves.

“Virgil’s dying,” Valerie managed; it escaped her all in one burning breath.

A hand of black knifelike fingertips—she was still not sure if they were flesh or bone or something else entirely—passed over the face of her friend.

“No. He is dead,” Diggory Graves said, and stood, matter-of-factly.

“Don’t you care?” Valerie said, and screamed a little as she twisted, sat up; the wounds on the backs of her ankles were so deep and cherry red she could not stand to look at them. “Don’t you care that he’s dead? Don’t you care that any of them are dead?”

A single pale eye looked down to her, and she hated the mote of pity that gleamed in it. Or at least, she thought it was pity. She was never really able to tell what Diggory Graves felt.

“My regrets lie with the dead,” said Diggory Graves. “But I must go fight for the living.”

And they turned, and hopped easily, like a great big bird, out of the broken bedroom window, and Valerie pulled herself over to the daybed sprinkled with broken glass, commanded her vision to focus, and her eyes widened as she took in the sight ahead of her:

Scout City’s branches were on fire. The upper boughs were burning, and the fire leapt from the bushels of dry leaves in a flaming flood, creeping towards their homes minute by minute. The city was going to burn from the top and bottom alike.

And, Diggory Graves, standing on the tree bough, facing a masked figure who wore the face of a fiddle, as the flames carried around them.

Marketing - Hello Oswald

Lady Ethel Mallory

The day you’ve been waiting for is here, my happy dreaming family and also my loyal American subjects. You’ve been asking for it for decades, whether you knew it or not. The day of reckoning for our loyal founder, Oswald Biggs Botulus. As I speak I am outside of his office doors. He’s trapped, like a fly in paper.

Do you hear me, Oswald? I’m here. I’m here, and I’ve come for you! To talk to you! That’s what old friends do, isn’t it?

Rupert, open the doors. Slowly about it now. Give him time to take in… all of me. Understand what’s coming to him.

Oh yes, Oswald. Here I am, in the flesh. You thought you’d seen the last of Lady Ethel Mallory? You thought you could banish an American icon? You thought you could make me nothing after you promised me the world forever and ever?

Behold, what you have made me into…

Oswald?

Oh, really. You’re going to sit there at your chair, at the head of your nice big conference table, all silent. You really have nothing to say to me?

You have…

You…

Oswald?

No.

Rupert, no, it’s all wrong. He’s…

He’s not moving, Rupert. Take us off the air.

He’s… just look through camera two… he’s just in his chair. All fifteen feet of his blackwater-crusty skin. He was as addicted as I was… I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like he’s dried. A crispy husk.

No, it’s not a shedded skin situation, Rupert. There’s tissue here, it’s just he’s… been here a while.

A long while.

Oswalldddddd.

Oswalddddd.

Oswald.

You smug bastard. Stop grinning at me. You haven’t won anything. You’re dead. You understand? You’re dead. You can’t do anything. You can’t manage a company. There’s…

There’s… nothing.

I…

Ugh.

He smells delicious, Rupert.

And… hah. A whiff of his old cologne. That shell, like the crust of a gas station pizza. Fragrant. How long has he been here, I wonder? Even the greats can’t live forever I suppose. And… I…

sound of a crunch

sound of extended crunching

Story 2, Continued - Do Something

Ughhughguhghgh.

We return now to Valerie Maidstone.

Valerie had been through her Scout training, and although it was not the best solution, a pair of Danielle’s tights went toward applying pressure to the wound, and as she did, she kept an eye both on the apartment doors, in case anyone else were to come creeping in, and on Virgil’s still body, pooling red across the floorboards, and on Diggory Graves, who was stalking down the bough.

“You have brought nothing but sorrow to this city,” Diggory Graves said evenly, and their long black claws were outstretched on each side of them as they walked. “Where is Danielle? Where is my friend?”

The Fiddle, standing at the far end of the branch that extended from beneath Danielle’s apartment out over the city, only tilted his mask to indicate a distinct downward direction. Diggory seemed to take this in, looking down, and then their gaze remained fixed down there long enough that Valerie followed, and noticed a point of light.

A ghost glowed brightly; one that reminded Valerie of the punks she had once biked with, in days when she was full of less misery. And in her arms was suspended Danielle, a silk robe billowing around her. They were a hundred feet down from the branch, perhaps, and sinking lower at a fast rate.

Fiddle seemed to notice this, seconds later, and looked back up to Diggory, and spread two knives out in a mock of Diggory’s own gesture—one made of silver, and one of obsidian stone. But as Diggory went pacing towards them, there was a second silhouette rising, moving.

“Diggory,” she screamed. “Look out!”

And Diggory twisted in time to catch Piano, who had come creeping up across the branch, and a silver knife twisted out of Piano’s wrist, which was caught in Diggory’s gloves, and the knife went tumbling out into the raging fires below. Piano scrabbled for momentum, for balance, and Diggory simply released her, and then she was falling backwards off the branch.

Piano was in freefall, for a moment, before a silver wire went darting out from her, and a hook caught further on in the branch; Piano caught herself, went on a wide swinging arc towards Scout City’s trunk, and cascaded away, one wire hook at a time. When Valerie looked back up, Fiddle had similarly begun to descend, sliding down on a long cable.

Piano was on the trunk of the city now, and disappeared from Valerie’s view, but Fiddle was still dropping down, unreeling one spool of cable after the next, and she watched as Diggory walked up to the hook from which Fiddle rappelled, and quite simply, reached down to touch the wire, and the cable snapped, and then Fiddle was falling fast towards the fires below, tumbling end over end, and there was no ghost to catch him.

Diggory stood for a moment, surrounded by the flaming branches, and turned back to look at her, and she nodded to them, teeth gritted. And then there was a sound that Valerie had not heard for months—one that echoed in the orange sky over Scout City.

And then there was a flash of blue light, so close and so quickly followed by booming thunder again that she was certain the storm was directly overhead, and the orange sky over Scout City turned black, and there was a hiss as the smallest, sharpest raindrops began to cascade down, falling against her blood-smeared face, and to pelt the flaming branches of Scout City with steam, and then rising mist roared up from below as the raindrops turned fat and heavy, and the sky reverberated with crackling blue light again, and for the first time that summer, it rained in Scout City.

And as Diggory walked back, thick black blood washing down their body and dripping free of their hair, a second shape descended in a twist of the wind, wearing blue coveralls and a jacket instead of a blue cloak, although she recognized him in an instant nonetheless, and in his dark eyes there were patterns of light that matched the sky.

“Hello Missus Maidstone,” said Olivier Song. “Can I ask where Riot is?”

Interlude 2 - Serving Myself

If you were to ask who I serve, I would tell you that I serve myself. That I am One Hundred Eyes In The Dark, and I bow my head to no one, and will never be collared or sealed away or made to heel again by anyone. But then I look at myself, dreamer. And I serve, in some way, the memory of Marolmar, as his forest, his final work, is closely linked to mine. And I serve you, in that I am documenting the end of days for your species. I am less interested in Lolgmololg’s pet project of froglinkind, who are rising on your heels, although I suppose there is some crossing of your paths that must be told regardless.

And recently, I have taken it upon myself to serve Syrensyr and his Council of Heavens. As their eyes and ears. As his… well. Informant, I suppose. Auditor of thoughts, of eyes, of secrets, of whispers. If there could be one without the other, dreamer. And yet all of these I must serve, if I am to serve any at all. And my service is not yet done.

We go now to one who is learning what service means.

Story 3 - Visit Anytime

Riot walked under strange stars. The world of stone, with its exposed view of space, its green mists and emerald stars, filled her with strange feelings—the sort that, if she listened, might compel her to walk until she found the edge of the realm, or lay down and sleep among the stones for an eternity, or to learn how to read the hieroglyphics that blanketed the titanic stone buildings in the distance. But the way that Shelby, who it was incredible that she was still on her feet, and Russell, who seemed shellshocked and distant and clutched his arm to his side as he walked, looked at her told her that she did not have the luxury of doing any of those things. That if she did not walk, they did not either. And so she walked, and tried to make it seem as though this was something she did everyday, and they were all going home safely.

“So that’s kind of how I became both a new Riot and a new dead clone sister of myself,” she said. “Anything new with you?”

“Not really,” said Jonah, who walked ahead of her slowly, with Hector keeping pace. The crown of green flame that hovered over his head stoked memories in her brain, except it conjured images of a big pile of rats in a truck stop, which seemed so bizarre to her that she logged it away to ask about later with people who remembered her history a little better. He reminded her of sort of an eternal cursed king Santa Claus. “Hector’s been able to plant saplings, so we’ve been growing forests here.”

“And that’s… kept you away from everyone?” said Riot, prodding them along for information. Shelby gave her a thankful look for mining for information when her own inquisitive batteries were burnt. “I mean, again, I was kind of dead for most of that time, halfway, so I’m not judging. My clone was a detective.”

Hector, the shorter, stockier, and more sapling-armed man of the two, gave a negative grunt, but Jonah seemed to plunge ahead anyways.

“It’s mostly on account of Hector,” Jonah said, looking to him lovingly. “He was doing real bad when he came here, and here… life and death are sort of fixed. Under control. If he goes back I don’t know if he’d live. Or even survive for a minute. So I don’t want to risk it, and obviously I’m not leaving him here by himself. So we’ve got a nice little cabin up on the hill. I’d invite you to visit if we had a little more time.”

“I’m sure it’s lovely,” said Riot, and began to take in the mountain that lay ahead of them; the stones that formed the landscape rose up in a precarious peak, as if they had all been poured in one titanic pile there. “By the way, the tree you turned the Scoutpost into? It grew into a massive tree. Like, as big as that mountain. It’s a whole city now.”

“Really?” Jonah paused, and beamed, and showed more wrinkles on either side of his bushy smile than Riot thought were possible to have. “That’s incredible. I’ve grown quite a love for trees.”

“Trees. Sure,” grunted Hector, and glanced down at his tree arm. The bark, Riot noticed, was elaborately carved with a heart, with a J and H inscribed inside, and detailed cuts of two German Shepherds.

“Before you go,” Jonah said, looking up towards the mountain. “How is ma?”

“Zelda?” said Riot, blinking. “Uh. That’s a good question. I don’t exactly know, since again, I’ve been really alive for like a few months… but I’ve heard a few things. I think she stole a truck and left.”

“Ah,” said Jonah, and smiled. “Sounds like her.”

“No guarantees about what you’ll find at the top,” said Hector, looking up. “I recall it was underwater. Be prepared for a swim.”

“A swim,” repeated Shelby, blinking.

“Now that you mention it,” said Riot, “where exactly is it you’re expecting us to go where you won’t follow?”

“Just at the top of the hill there,” Jonah said, pointing up to the spindly peak of the mountain. “I built this mountain myself, one stone at a time, over an eternity or so. There’s a door up there, at the top. It’s one of three doors in this place. The key should be in the lock. I figure you don’t want to go right back into the church you just left—it’s a different way out of this place. Hector and I have been trying to decide whether we’ve been having intruders again—so we’ll go back to our stakeout, and when the doors open again, it’s time to give them a piece of our mind.”

“Be careful,” Shelby said. “They’re dangerous.”

“So are we,” said Hector.

Jonah chuckled, and then nodded sagely.

“Even if we don’t look it,” he said.

“Note taken,” said Riot, and then went to hug Jonah again, selfishly, because it was warm and soft. Shelby nodded in his direction.

“I don’t want to be rude in any way,” Jonah paused, as the bruised detective began to turn away from him. “But if you wanted a hand of bark or moss or something, I could arrange it.”

Shelby stared at him, grimly.

“It wouldn’t be very sanitary,” she said, and then began pacing up the mountain, stones rattling down behind her with each bootstep.

“Thank you, sir,” said Russell, and seemed to reach out for a handshake to Jonah, and then winced and went back to holding his blood-spattered arm. “And sir.”

“We’ll try and make it back for a longer visit,” said Riot. “There’s half a lifetime of news to share.”

“You know where to find us,” Jonah said, and the two waved as Riot began to clamber after Shelby, Russell following at her side.

“This is the worst day of my life,” Russell breathed, as he began to climb after her. “And the weirdest. Am I dying? Am I dreaming?”

“I’ve done a lot of both,” said Riot, and looked back to him, and grinned. “Just stick with me and you’ll be fine.”

It gave him cause for half a grin, which was more than he’d managed all night, and he hurried after her.

They had aspirations of stepping on it, on account of the rest of the Quartet going to kill Danielle in Scout City, but ultimately Riot had to trust that Ratty and Diggory, who had been assigned to take care of it, would be able to handle it, because the mountain was much taller than it appeared, and receded into the green mists of the sky, and it was hours before they reached the peak. And there it was—a door, perfectly formed of wooden timbers, with a key in its brass keyhole, hovering at the top of a small wooden staircase that had been erected where the rocks ran out. From this high up, the entire realm was almost one smooth globe of stones, stretching out, bent in on itself, swallowing up every horizon. She tried not to look down, and instead stepped up to the door, and look to Russell and Shelby a last time—Shelby’s swelling had mostly gone down by now, much to both their reliefs—and then she reached out and opened the door, and the three of them were caught in a torrent of water that poured out and around them and filled her world as she pushed herself through the doorframe.

And then they were paddling upwards in cold, frigid darkness—losing boots and coats as they struggled for air, and the water was a choking mire, and then she burst upwards into the air.

Or, into a living room, of sorts.

It was a rustic cabin house, with decrepit remains of flowery wallpaper. And it sat, perfectly sideways, on the surface of the water. Shelves had been bolted to the floor and ceiling, which were now the walls, and as she and Shelby and Russell rose, they seemed to have made their way into the middle of a breakfast. On a higher ledge that had once been a kitchen, there was a dining table, and seated at it were a green-finned man with sharp little teeth and wide yellow eyes, and a teapot that seemed to be hovering in the air by itself, or held by an unseen hand, pouring into a teacup in shock until the cup overflowed, and a perfectly normal brown-haired child.

“Oh dear,” said the invisible man. “I did not prepare at all for guests.”

“Don’t worry,” Riot said, waving from the water’s surface. “We were just going.”

Outro - Vassals

Vassals. At times I remember songs from my earliest years, and I think of their words with new meaning. For whom were they written? And why? And by who? Words I once took without thought into my mind, now I scrutinize. Because I have carried them for several billion years now, and sometimes only just in the present realize that they were made to teach me something, twist the way I perceive all the universe for better or worse. Songs have power. Words have power. And it is a power I lay my hands and eyes upon. You should fear me, dreamer. You will never begin to comprehend me, beyond what I choose to show you. The story I tell you is curated and cut. For every perspective you are given, there are a hundred you do not receive. Can you trust me? Should you? What good will come of all these nightmares?

After all, I cannot even say now that I am my own master.

Until servants and masters alike fall into eternity, I am your loyal host Nikignik, waiting feudally for your return to the Hallowoods.

The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Local Guide' 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, the next time you reach for your knife and fork, ask yourself. Is that what the meatworm nestled between your jaws wants? Or do you want to reach in and snap up your steak whole, reaching out your meatworm’s mandibles to savor the juicy red spatter? What need has the meatworm for cutlery?