HFTH - Episode 200 - Verdicts

Content warnings for this episode include: Animal death (Shank as usual), Violence, Death + Injury, Character Death, Blood, Transphobia and Homophobia, Birds (Omen as usual), Spiders (Mr. Spiderfingers as usual), Strangulation/suffocation, Emotional Manipulation, Drowning, Bugs, Body horror, Religious Violence, Child Sacrifice (Al as usual), Puppets, Autopsies, Cremation

Intro - Judge and Jury

When you called your court to order, you did not ask whether he deserved to die. You did not ask whether his creations had merit. You did not ask whether he would change his ways. You did not ask his friends if they loved him, and why. You gathered your flock of crows together to discuss a murder, and you only asked them how it should be done. And white-hot with fury, you rent open the heavens and descended, burning with so much wroth that it turned glaciers to oceans, and broke him. The light of a thousand suns fell upon him as your wolves tore him to pieces. You were the judge, and the jury, and his executioner.

You held no malice in your heart, no hate. Only indignance, that he had dared to apply his hands to a task that might someday damage your productivity. To you, to lose the smallest share of the power you have hoarded, that pours into your throat every second that the universe continues on, was as grievous a wound as a knife to your burning heart, poison in your all-consuming belly.

You did not care about the void in the cosmic order left behind by his absence. You did not care about his world, which would serve only as a mausoleum instead of a workshop for beautiful inventions. You did not care about me, who entombed him there. You did not care about his life, or the life that he left behind, life which will forever remember him every time it says Hello From the Hallowoods.

Theme.

Right now, dreamer, I am, as I always am, in a countless number of places at once. I am beneath your bed. I am in your closet. I am in a stone chamber with an apocalyptic cradle which functions as a library office. I am washing in the waves of coastal France; a great storm has just passed out onto the ocean. I am in the alleys of the upper boughs of Scout City at dawn. I am at its gates, and at a funeral pyre. I am at a broken window, and in a basket of crumpled typewriter paper. I am in a very old automobile; I flicker in an eye full of light. I am expansive in the realm of dream. I am in the belly of the Industry, and in its flaming jaws. I am at your left elbow, and I am waiting to see what you think, hoping that it will be what I need you to believe, to decide, in your heart of hearts. The theme of tonight’s episode is Verdicts.

Penny

After Misters Raven and Writingdesk introduced Penny to Mr. Spiderfingers, they were so cross with each other that they did not speak, and neither of them kept her company that night either, and so she was left to cry to herself as the lights of her enclosure dimmed. Her dislocated finger was bandaged with ice, and she held it close, and shuddered under her pillow until finally, at some point in the night, darkness took her.

“Penny,” a voice whispered in her pitch-black dreams. “Penny, we have more games to play together.”

There was a twitch of light in her dream, as if a match was struck, and she was sitting in a round concrete room with no doors or windows, and every surface was crawling with black shiny spiders, rushing up the sides, dropping from the top, chittering and clicking and biting at her toes, and she was so paralyzed with fear that she could not breathe—but when she opened her mouth to try, they came crawling inside, pushing with bristly legs into her lips and scuttling across her tongue, and she woke up screaming that morning, and many mornings that followed.

Penny found it interesting that she remembered this at all; it emerged, unbidden, in her mind as a bad painting might emerge from beneath the white dustcloth where it had been hidden so that no one could see it. She had dreamt of Mr. Spiderfingers for weeks, until they finally introduced more comprehensive traps and barriers around his enclosure and she stopped hearing his whispers, stopped seeing him in reflections. But all that had not come soon enough—she began to dream differently. Instead of fear, she accepted the spiders crawling, biting, becoming one with her. She felt nothing at all so that it would not hurt. And that was, she realized, the year she had stopped smiling or laughing. A child named Penny had lived in the enclosure, before Mister Spiderfingers, and after that it had only been CPE-13, just a living thing encased in glass, unable to live, unable to die, unable to feel strongly about it one way or the other.

But it had been years and years, and she had remembered, and she held a book and stared down from her podium at Mr. Spiderfingers as she locked him in the darkness forever, even if he did not quite know it yet.

Mr. Spiderfingers looked suddenly very small, and pale, and he was no longer vomiting an endless stream of juicy black spiders. His eyes were like spiders themselves, beady black abdomens, red hourglasses glittering instead of irises. Penny could tell that he understood some semblance of what had changed; could feel the wind where there had been no wind before. The collapse of the tunnel shaft to the surface, locking them below, had blanketed the room in dust, but Friday’s plan—to hold the compass that draws the bearer and a place closer together, and brace it in the immovable hand of the statue of the immortal king, had wrought much more damage to the enclosure of CPE-8, the book that always described the present. Right now the letters on its pages said “and that was how the Downing Hill Public Library came back.”

“What kind of game is this?” said Mr. Spiderfingers, quietly. He held a single small black spider in the long cage of his white fingers. “I don’t understand the rules.”

“The rules of this game are simple,” said Penny. “Downing Hill Public Library is a place full of forgotten things, just like you. I don’t think I can let everyone in this vault into the world above. I thought I could. I hoped I could. But you’re just too horrible. So you can live here, in the dark. You can explore the library. You can read if you like. But the way to the surface is broken, and you will never see the sunlight again, Mr. Spiderfingers. You will never hurt a child again. This is the last game you’ll ever play, and I won.”

“In for a penny, out for a pound!” croaked a shrill voice, and there was an orange light in the darkness of the hall, followed immediately by a burning black silhouette made of raven-shapes and a fiery heart, which came to land in the doorway. The Omen looked up to her, and to Mr. Spiderfingers. “Don’t even twitch, step away from the witch!”

“You can burn him,” said Penny, and Mr. Spiderfingers looked back to the Omen in horror as it obliged her; small pointed beaks opened across its amalgamate form and poured forth a dozen streams of flame. Mr. Spiderfingers scattered, his white tailcoats and suit, his black hair, his eyes all dissolving into scuttling, skittering forms that poured across the floor with a typhonic howl.

He was not gone, she knew; for that you’d have to really incinerate every last one, and probably take up the floorboards and get rid of the nests, but she wasn’t about that business. She folded the book beneath her arm, and took the Omen’s arm of burning raven-coals in the other, and went strolling down the crumpled halls of the vault to go find Friday. As she went, though, she found the vault quite changed. Passages of barren concrete connected at strange angles to expanses of familiar old floorboards and wallpapered walls with lit candelabras; some of the hallways were overlaid with courtyards and reading rooms and lecture halls at odd intersections. She could already hear the rising erup tions of CPE’s on levels below—those that could break free of their enclosures finding the power gone, their glass cages shattered. But she did not have any confidence that what they had done was right until she entered CPE-1’s enclosure, where the immobile stone king—she liked the carved face of the statue; it had lots of warm wrinkles in the crook of its eyes—was still standing, with the compass in its hand. She came up to a precipice, and looked out on the vast beyond.

Where there had been a shallow enclosure, with white and grey panels and fluorescent lights shining over the statue, the back half had been blown out, and it looked down into a dark crystalline pit. There were three people at the bottom of it, standing next to a stone altar or basin of sorts. Friday, standing with her arms crossed, looked up to her and smiled her grim smile. The remaining two people had faces that reminded Penny of the porcelain faces of the dolls she had been given in her enclosure, cracked with a gleaming white surface and all-black eyes. Masks, coming undone. One was younger, though, a doll of a lanky school student, and one was an older woman, with a wig of white hair and crescent-shaped glasses.

“Penny,” Friday called up, clearly trying not to sound too relieved. “You survived.”

“I seem to manage to,” Penny said, and stepped a few sliding steps down the embankment of rock. The Omen came flapping down behind her. Beyond the chamber, there was a great open space, full of gleaming purple lights, and hallways stretching off into the earth, a roofless labyrinth spreading out into the dark.

“Harrow, why don’t you tell my sister what you just told me,” said Friday.

“Hello,” said Harrow, and the porcelain student gulped. “I’m Harrow. Blackletter.”

“Penny Rescher,” she said. “Is it your library we set on fire?”

“My mother’s,” Harrow said, and here glanced to the older doll. “Who isn’t feeling terribly well. But I was telling Friday, first of all, that I thought you did something terrible when you set the library on fire. And something even worse when you brought it back. That is what you’ve done, isn’t it?”

“Don’t worry,” Penny said. “It will very much not be accessible to the public.”

“I had rather meant the other thing,” said Friday, tilting her head.

“Right,” said Harrow, and the doll’s hands went right into its pockets. “I make doors in space. It’s my specialty. And if you’d like to come with my mother and I when we leave, I can bring you.”

“That sounds ideal,” said Penny, glancing to Friday to be sure. “As we’ve rather sealed the only way up to the world above.”

“You’ve transformed my library into a zoo,” said Director Blackletter, looking around as if in a daze. “A prison.”

“It was already both of these things,” cried the Omen.

“A slightly more humane enclosure,” said Friday. But as she said it, Penny’s attention lay across the wide cavern of stone—on the far side of it, a building now stood where it had not moments before; the possessed farmhouse with its hanging corpse had come to sit. She could see the burned corpse twisting in the air inside, hanging from her rafter. She could see the corpse grinning. In front of it, within the farmhouse doors, there was a spirit that Penny had not seen; one that glowed white, and seemed to represent a boy with no skin. He looked up to the twisting corpse, and they chattered indistinctly to each other, whispers of ‘do you wanna play’ and ‘tag, you’re it’ before ghost and farmhouse both faded. Penny looked back to find Harrow staring, too.

“At least he’ll have friends, now,” Harrow said, and looked back to them all as the sound of shrieks and crashing echoed from the CPE vault beyond. And there they were, spilling over the edge into the far end of the cavern; a pair of chattering dentures, and the tooth fairies, and a boiling non-neutonian fluid, a black urn signifying her doom, a housefly, a 20-foot tall skeleton with trailing electric pylons in its ribcage, a clown with a lamprey living in its dislocated jaws, fifty tiny glowing squids jetting into the air one gush of space at a time, and the massive curling length of the unicorn.

“Lots of friends,” Penny said, and closed her eyes as Harrow blinked, and they were standing somewhere else entirely, and she was briefly blinded by the light, which she had not seen in over a week. The air smelled like smoke, and all around them were passing people, dragging wagons and carts full of belongings. The light of early morning beamed in from gaps in the walls around them; walls that seemed to be grown of tree bark. In fact the entire street seemed to be, also, and the storefronts on either side carved into the massive wooden surface. She was in Scout City, she realized; it was visible on the horizon from the Blackwood Coven, but she had never visited.

“Where are we?” said Friday, a hand on her shoulder.

“I loathe this putrid light,” said Director Blackletter.

“Who cares,” cried the Omen, flapping its arm-wings, which attracted the frightened gasps of the people on either side.

“Welcome to Scout City,” said Harrow, stretching. “I have friends here I’m sure are worried about me, and it’s high time I paid them a visit.”

Hope

“Better not leave yet,” said the Humble Boot. “It’s only half past three.”

“It’s definitely not,” said Hope. She was just beginning to dry out enough that the sand she was blanketed in came off in dusty puffs. She could feel it in her socks. She squinted at the storm outside; her eyes and throat burned. “It’s not even noon yet. You’d be able to tell by the sun.”

The Humble Boot waggled a finger in the air. He smelled like he had been hauled out of the ocean, and looked it too. Despite being burdened with a huge bag of wares from the capsized cargo liner, it appeared that he had dragged her up to his camp in the rocky caves of the shoreline. “There’s only one sun, and that’s the sun setting on mankind. Weak mankind. The night comes, and brings with it its footwear. The starry heel of the boot of night comes twisting down on sunny man, grinding him into the soil.”

“It’s rude to call people crazy,” said Hope. “But I think you might be.”

“Crazy is as enlightened does, at least until the truth is known,” said the Humble Boot, and turned around to go to the other side of the cave to fiddle with one of his bags, and began pulling out unlabeled cans. “These have precious vittles within, although I haven’t a clue as to which one is which. Some might be green beans, some might be peaches. Best you eat whatever you open so as not to waste any leather.”

“I bet I can figure it out,” Hope said, and turned while he was distracted to her backpack, and found that her jar was still there—a familiar black swirl of thick liquid washed within it, and a tiny skull bubbled up to the surface, green eyes glowing like two fireflies.

“Mort,” she whispered. “What happened? Do you want to help me find my parents?”

“Sure,” said Mort back to her quietly, from the jar. “Who are they?”

“Marco, the big one with the scars,” she said. “Brooklyn, my mom, has glasses and keeps her hair all bunched back. And Buck, who’s kind of shaky but very smart. Can you see them anywhere?”

Mort looked around the cavern from his jar; the Humble Boot was still pulling can after can out of his bag.

“No, not really,” said Mort. “Unless that guy is one.”

“Aren’t you huge and in the ocean?” said Hope. “Where are Yaretzi and the Countess?”

“I don’t know,” said Mort. “I can’t see what the rest of me sees until I go back. And it doesn’t know what I do, that you’re alive, until I go back either.”

“Ugh. Perfect,” said Hope, even though it was definitely not perfect. She would have to get them both out of there, but when she looked back, the Humble Boot was watching her steadily with two cold old eyes, and a large piece of pipe in his hands.

“Hold still, young lady,” said the Humble Boot. “There’s evil in that jar, and I’ll happily send it trickling into the gutter so you can use the jar for acorns or applesauce.”

“This is my friend,” Hope said. “If you touch him I’ll brain you.”

The Humble Boot held his pipe for a moment, consternating.

“I could be your friend, too,” said Mort. “My name is Mort. I’m part of Creep.”

“Creep is right,” the Humble Boot muttered, and went back to his cans. “This one could be tuna, I think. Or catfood. There would be no way of knowing.”

Hope sighed, and carrying Mort in his jar carefully, went over to kneel beside him, tried to get a good look at his face.

“Are you alright?” she said. “You seem stranger than usual, even.”

“Vampires,” he muttered. “I’ve had about enough of vampires, fowling up all my birds. From now on it’s no bats allowed.”

“I’m going to go now,” she said, and stood up, and took her seaweed-encrusted bag, and brushed a tiny crab from it, and went for the mouth of the cave. “The cans have tiny black letters on their ends? You might be able to get clues from those.”

“Mm,” said the Humble Boot, and examined the rusty can as she stepped quietly away. “Catfood after all. Perfect.”

She heard the pop of the tab as she stepped out into the light, and found that she looked over a wasteland; in the distance, the huge shape of the East Wind had come to poke from the waves like a dark reef, and the beach was strewn with a vast expanse of litter and debris. The storm still raged, although the blue lightning had faded; the rain pattered down thick across the cliff wall on either side of her, and light flashed in the sky, and yet on that distant hilltop she could see the black speck where the Abbey had stood, where something horrible had been unleashed.

“Well, let’s not waste good leather,” said the Humble Boot from beside her suddenly, and she jumped, sliding down the rainy bank of the cliff a little.

“What?” she said.

“Getting you back to your parents,” the Humble Boot said, stepping out into the storm, and glancing up to the sky, and the lightning reflected in his glassy old eyes. He had shouldered his backpack, and the leather boot he wore was still strapped firmly to his head. “Lovely day for a walk.”

Vincent

Vincent walked in the night, and Raj was at his side. It had taken nearly until dawn for the shakiness in him to fade; he felt as though he had crossed into the very threshold of death and back. Nevertheless, wrapped in long black coats, he and Raj had gone out from Raj’s mansion in the upper branches of Scout City. The air was thick with smoke, and distant lights told him that the very leaves of the upper boughs had begun to burn. The sound of shattering glass had drawn them to a home that Vincent recognized as Danielle O’hara’s; the dream therapist. And so Raj, with a sword concealed in his cane, followed Vincent down into the dark. They arrived just in time to see a masked figure, one Vincent recognized as the Drum who had come chasing after him in the forest, fall out of Danielle’s upper window and into the small yard of shrubs and moss that sat outside of her business storefront, and then scramble to his feet and come darting down, blindly, legs akimbo, in their direction. He froze immediately as he looked up to notice them standing. The skin of the drum was torn and flapping, and Vincent thought if he was lucky he might be able to get a glimpse of the face within. The surface of the drum was spattered thinly with beads of red blood, and his black cloak was sopping wet with blood that caused it to wrap around his legs and arm awkwardly. One of his hands was wrapped and bound in belts, and was bent and curled as if quite ruined.

“Hello,” said Vincent. “I hate to run into you again.”

“Allow me to run him through,” said Raj.

“Hold on a moment,” said Vincent.

“Or a duel. A duel to the death,” said Raj.

“A moment,” Vincent repeated, and pushed a few steps past him to stand in the middle of the alley. There was nowhere else to go; at least, not without eventually leaping off the end of the branch where it let out over Scout City. Drum stood, legs trembling, motionless in the middle of the street, and Vincent stood squarely in the center of the street, and reached a hand out in Drum’s direction.

“If you don’t mind my observation,” said Vincent, glancing down to the Drum’s bloodsoaked glove. “I wonder if you’re having second thoughts, young mister Kane. About whatever you’ve done. And I think you should hear at least once that there is still time to make something new of yourself. Believe me, I am no stranger to being a puppet. A knife in someone else’s hand. Are you killing because you want to? Or are they just using you as a weapon? You and I are not strangers. We have worked together, as the deputies and the morgue do. When did I become the sort of threat you must stop? Am I who you are sworn to kill?”

Drum merely stared back. There was, from somewhere distant, a rumble of thunder—a sound Vincent had been waiting to hear for the entire parched summer. It was followed by a flash of lightning that almost seemed blue past the shadows of the great leaves of Scout City, and when it passed and the rain began to fall, the Drum was gone.

“You allowed him to slip away,” said Raj, setting his cane back on the ground.

“Yes,” said Vincent, sighing. He was exhausted again, and the rain had begun to spill down through the leaves to pelt the street, and he and Raj with it. “I don’t want you knife fighting with murderous youths.”

“He wouldn’t know what stuck him,” said Raj, and then continued towards the house. “Shall we see what he’s left behind?”

In the minutes that followed, Vincent learned that Cole Kane, Second Drum of the Quartet, had left much behind indeed—and as Diggory Graves and the newly arrived old friend Olivier Song helped Mayor Valerie towards the Scout City Infirmary, and the rain that had begun to fall extinguished the towering flames from Scout City’s neighborhoods, Raj and Vincent took the body of Sheriff Virgil Kane and transported it gently on a rolling cart back to a familiar old building, one that Vincent had left behind for months, with faded police tape over its open Shank-sized hole in the wall. And in the darkness, by a single ray of dawn light trickling in through the skylight, Vincent conducted one more autopsy, as Raj documented, and in the firelit darkness prepared Virgil Kane to burn. Arranging a table, cleaning up bloodsoaked floors, and finding his scattered tools made the process take longer than usual, across the morning and into the afternoon, until finally the work was done, and he looked up to find Raj coming back from his break with a slip of paper in his hand.

“It’s strange,” Vincent said, scrubbing his hands in a basin of rainwater; the storm had continued all day, although he expected the forest floor had yet to drink its fill. “I did not expect to ever come back to this grim business. Yet I feel in some way as though my hands have missed it.”

“If you plan to continue undertaking, we will have a busy week indeed,” Raj said, and waved the paper slip. “But speaking of pastimes, your shipment has arrived.”

“Has it?” Vincent said, shaking his hands off and stepping across his ruined parlor to Raj. “Is it beautiful? Is it spectacular?”

“Hasn’t been opened yet,” said Raj, and shook out his cane—this one doubled as an umbrella. “Why don’t we leave Mister Kane the elder to rest, and go and see?”

“Let’s,” said Vincent, and took shelter under Raj’s umbrella as he shut the broken door of his mortuary, and walked with him into the thunderstruck street, and they spoke beneath the downpour as they made their way through streets bustling with those who had lost everything, and those who had lost nothing, and the children of both running together, mouths open, tasting the flavor of the sky. If his life was a movie, he thought, a piece of cinema, then he was glad he had not left it before its final act.

Riot

Riot, Russell and Shelby were all exhausted beyond belief, and not long after meeting the Chapmans—a family which seemed to consist of a froggy green man with frills, fins and fronds, a man who wasn’t there at all, and a young boy who did not resemble either of them but whose eyes sparkled with mirth like diamonds—and explaining their situation, the Chapmans had offered to contact a friend of theirs who had a vehicle to bring them back home. And while they waited for a ride, and watched the sideways house and the rippling black lake beyond it, it began to rain. Russell and Shelby looked up to the curling clouds and rejoiced without saying a word; let the rain wash the blood and soil from their hair and faces, run down their wounds and soak their bloodstained clothes. But they did not seem to see faces in the blue lightning the way that Riot did; and as she held Shelby’s remaining hand, she seemed to feel pulses of memory.

Of dark eyes, radiated with blue light from within. Of lips whose smile or pout she hung on. Of hair as blue as an evening sky.

Olivier Song had gone to the arctic with her. And neither of them had made it back.

Until now, she felt, and watched the sky light with glorious blue, again and again, as the storm raged down upon the forest, sweeping the trees in a massive embrace of wind. Had she changed, really, since Olivier had last seen her? Had Olivier?

“What are you thinking about?” said Shelby, eyes mostly closed, and squeezed her clammy hand, cold from the rain.

“Storms,” said Riot. “I love storms.”

“So do I,” Shelby said.

And then the ride arrived, and Riot slept the whole way home and remembered very little of it, and did not trust what she did remember. What she remembered was a corpse full of burgeoning fireflies, crawling in its eyes, its ribs, out of the thick furry sleeves of its coat, and it drove a rusty vintage 50’s automobile shell, complete with fins and bullet lights, which was affixed to the back of a twenty-foot-long crayfish, which scuttled and clicked its way across the massive roots of the Hallowoods underbrush. The rain pelted the rusted top of the automobile shell as Riot dozed off in hazy stretches.

“By the way, Riot,” said the corpse, whose name was Alice, at one point when Riot rustled awake on Shelby’s shoulder during a particularly bumpy root descent. “I found you something. It’s beneath the seat.”

Riot was surprised, as she had not given her name to the corpse, but she bent beneath the seat and retrieved an object—a garden shovel, weathered and ancient.

“Thank you?” said Riot. “I did lose my shovel somewhere tonight. What are you, a prophet?”

“Only a little,” said the corpse. And that was all that Riot remembered, until she found herself being shaken gently awake by Shelby, and the crayfish had come to a stop outside of the Stumps, and Shelby and Russell helped her down. They wished Alice a safe ride home, or to whatever lake bed she lived in, and then the corpse and the giant crayfish with its twitching tail of fins and clacking claws were gone, and they turned to face the devastation.

A quarter of the Stumps around Scout City were blackened, and street after street showed only huge black buildings, charred by the flame or burnt into dead embers. The storm washed soot down into the street, and turned the broken timbers damp and heavy, and throughout all of the city the inhabitants were beginning to sort through the wreckage, yellow jackets bright like new flowers as they stepped through the charred soil of their lives.

And she watched it as one dead, a little dazed by the enormity of the past day and desperate for sleep, until they were greeted at the base of the western gate to the Trunk by her mother, in a wheelchair, and Riot went running then, stumbling along the street, to wrap her arms around her, and Valerie’s hands clutched her back tight, and their mutual weeping washed together in the rain. And she looked up, to find someone standing a bit beyond, in dark coveralls, hair nearly black instead of blue, covered in stubble now instead of baby-faced, but nevertheless familiar. And Olivier’s arms were wrapped around her just as tightly, and lightning poured across the sky, and Riot could not help but wonder whether being alive in the skin of someone that they loved made her worthy of it. Shelby’s hand fell on her shoulder, and she thought then that she was born of Riot, and born of Clementine, and that who or what she was was really not as important as that there was burnt earth to restore, and a city to nurse back to life, and ground to keep.

Ignatius

Ignatius Thorpe had many reasons to be upset. There was that he had been forced to spend all night and day channeling the healing runes until his bones all set in their right places. There was that Shank had in fact been killed later that night, and it wasn’t by the hand of Scout City’s law but by a bizarre collection of vigilantes, Wickers, groundskeepers and dead things. There was that Oswin had to regrow limbs and it smelled absolutely putrid within about a mile when they did. There was that, by glancing up to the blue lightning in the sky, it was unmistakable that Olivier Song had come to Scout City. These were the things that circulated in his head, around and around like a whirlwind of flame, and burned between his eyes, simmered in his skull.

“It is alright to be sad,” said Oswin. His fellow deputy had donned a black veil and hat for today’s occasion, as they stared over where Virgil lay—the sheriff was dressed in his Scout City jacket, with a final badge for sacrifice in the line of duty sewn into one of the slim blank spaces. A covered roof had been erected so that he could be burned; Olivier’s storm had still not faded a day later. He had wondered if Director Blackletter’s pet project had survived that arctic trip north after all—you didn’t get to be the best of the best without learning how to stay alive. Beside Virgil, on a larger bed of wood, lay Heather McGowan, similarly adorned, and chest tastefully covered in a sheet so that the damage Shank had done could not be seen. Ignatius sniffed. There wasn’t much left of her beneath that, really.

“I’m not sad,” he said, through gritted teeth, and his eyes travelled to the people standing on the other side of the pyre. “I’m angry. I’m fucking furious.”

There were, of course, a crowd of red-haired McGowans. Mayor Valerie, in a dark funeral shawl, and Riot, Russell and Arnold in their groundskeeping uniforms. And Shelby Allen, despite everything. She glanced up to him, glaring. He glared back until she looked away.

“Fury is deserved, as well,” said Oswin quietly. “He might not have been your father, but…”

Ignatius was facing Oswin in a moment, a touch of light at the end of his finger, so close to Oswin’s veil that it smoldered and crisped where his finger hovered.

“Say one more word,” said Ignatius. “Go ahead. Diagnose me. What am I feeling?”

“We all loved Virgil,” said Oswin carefully, gloved hands raised. “And it follows that we are wounded by his loss.”

“You’re wounded,” said Ignatius, shaking out his hand, and the flame vanished. He glanced out to the crowd to make sure no eyes had been on him; they were fixed on the old lady, Bern, who was grousing something about the line of duty and fallen friends from her chair. As if the people who’d caused it weren’t standing around Virgil’s grave, scott-free. Who was going to hold them accountable now?

And then they were all looking to Ignatius, expectantly, as the rain poured around every side of the gazebo of death.

“Sherriff Ignatius?” said Bern. “You may do the honors.”

“Thank you,” Ignatius grunted, and handed Oswin Virgil’s wide-brimmed hat, and stepped forward, and raised his hands to Virgil and Heather’s cold dead corpses, and although he said nothing as he lit a fire in each of them that gushed up around their bodies, lit their mouths and the hollows of their bones, his eyes were wide as if he were screaming, and he wished as they blackened in the searing intensity of the fire, and the spectators backed away uncomfortably, that there were other bodies, bodies he liked less, feeding the flame.

Ratty

So like. The first thing was that nobody had seen Percy, which was like, crazy in the way that thirty-five dollars to get into a club on casual night is crazy. Because he was one of them, right? And like, when someone says ‘don’t worry, I got this, leave them to me’, you don’t actually let them try to fight all the bad guys on their own and then dip out, which actually like, legitimately sucked. Not even kidding. But like, barely after Riot and Russell and Shelby came back without him, Ratty was totally prepared to go right back to the creepy church and get him and eat everyone’s souls for late brunch when he showed up of his own accord.

Ratty was like, totally flipped, because on the one hand he was still the same level of alive but dead that he had been before, and hadn’t been eaten or torn up or something, but he was also seriously hurt—he’d gotten cut up kinda the same way she had, and also he’d burned a lot of soul, and she didn’t even talk to him about it right then because it would have been such a buzzkill but it would again later once they’d had time to kind of like, catch up and sit down and have a real soul-to-soul. But for now Ratty was like, just sort of happy that he was alive, or dead but alive still, and that was good. So good. For real.

He came with an older lady that he’d talked about a bit named Clara, who was like, some kind of spooky ooky forest witch lady. She could see Ratty all the time, which was actually kind of disorienting, because most of the time you kind of got used to not being able to be seen by people except when you wanted to be, so you could sneak up on them or jumpscare them and be like. Boo yeah.

But with Clara Ratty and Percy both had to be on their best behavior in a way, not that they were either ever on really good behavior. But Clara had a lot to say with Riot and Shelby and everybody and it was like, mostly about how the Church of the Hallowed whatever was super old and there was some uber history there and the dangerous organ and it was like. First off, dangerous organ? Try my dangerous organ. But also like, kind of already knew all that because they’re using ghosts like homing missiles which has gotta be some sort of international war crime.

Although, rights for ghostly people or the bodily unencumbered was not like, progressing at a huge pace, and the best kind of law is the law of smackdown, read to you by Ratty, so she was still like, totally stoked not to go home. Besides, Percy was feeling big emotions about his dad again, which happened like every month although she would never use that against him, so it was kind of like. Gonna be here anyway. Supporting Percy was never a question. That’s what you do for the people you are totally like, obsessed with in this weird pseudo-intellectual but also super metaphysical on a different level kinda way.

So yeah. Ratty was basically like, ready for anything. And the more that she heard like, all the horrible things that had happened to everyone that night, the more it was like. What are we waiting for? Let’s go. And Clara was all like, well yes, but hold on. Because they’re strong and we’ve got to do this together, so let’s like, wait until everybody’s wounds have healed up.

Which was ironic and also a little insensitive because for Ratty and Percy, their wounds were definitely not healing up, not ever. The stuff they’d been stabbed with, silver and the black stone, ripped permanent holes, and to not acknowledge that was a little rude. Like, yes, must be nice to have a body that heals back in a couple days or whatever. My skinned knees are forever.

“What are you thinking about?” Percy whispered. They sat together on the ceiling, watching Clara and Riot and Diggory and Olivier and Danielle talk as they swept broken glass out of Danielle’s apartment and cleaned the blood from the floorboards.

“Nothing much,” said Ratty.

“Not nothing,” said Percy, and elbowed her, although it clipped through her own elbow. “What is it?”

“Oh,” said Ratty, who couldn’t remember what she’d been thinking about anymore, and came up with something new and good. “Just how much I’m going to kick your ass next board game night.”

Victoria

Victoria Tepiani sat at her typewriter. The office buzzed with activity; there were a dozen news stories to report, working on the repair efforts, the fire, the evacuation and how it had been handled, eulogies and such. But the weighty front pager of what exactly had happened with Shank, and with the Quartet, and the Groundskeepers and Shelby Allen and Clementine and Diggory Graves had been left to her, and it seemed to weigh down her hands so heavily that she had only managed to fill half a wastepaper basket with false starts, and her paper with no words at all. She had several camocept photos which lay on her desk; their dark and dreary captures of black and white and grey on paper. Shank, hanging on chains in front of the Accordi house, with Russell McGowan beside him. Diggory Graves, steeped in the pigman’s blood. The shattered windows of Danielle’s house; the stained floorboards where Virgil Kane had died.

And she thought of Arnold, who had shown up in time to tell her what was going to happen, and where, and she thought briefly of flinging her typewriter across the room, and growing so large, so full of fury, that her teeth and nails would grow, and she could flee into the woods and never have to write a word again. But there was, again, the weight that kept her hands at the keyboard. All of Scout City was waiting to hear what she thought, and there was responsibility in that, too. She twisted her mustache, first the right, and then the left, and then pushed her hair back, and stretched, and let her hands fall on the keys like the raindrops on her office windows.

Marketing - To the Death

Lady Ethel Mallory:

Hello, America.

Did you miss me?

I am Lady Ethel Mallory, the C.E.O. of the Botulus Corporation, and I am extending an invitation to Dinah Dealey, Otis Moloch, Mandy Monroe, and any other contender for King of America. It’s time we settled this so that this country can have its rightful queen.

I am back. I am glorious. And you can either join my cabinet or face me in rightful duel in two weeks in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Be ready to fight for your crown—or more accurately, die trying.

Moth

“Well, that is spectacular,” said Moth, leaning out of the window. Moth had never seen trees like this, but especially none this size. It was as tall as a city building, and many times as wide; the windows and openings in its twisted bark told Moth that people lived in it, as high up as its very highest branches.

“What are you seeing?” Ray said. “You know my long-distance vision ain’t really worth remarking about.”

“It’s an exceptionally large tree,” said Lewis, still wearing the crimson sunglasses Moth had given him. The former king of America smiled sharply. “Crawling with idiots.”

“Hey now, be nice,” crackled Ray. “They’re probably only morons.”

“Friends,” Moth said, and popped open Ray’s door, and stepped out onto the black soil that comprised the street. A sign said ‘Welcome to the Stumps’, and the buildings directly beyond were just that; great tree stumps that had grown out of the ground, and while their timber must have been used elsewhere, the remains were full of homes and little shops. It was quite unlike anywhere Moth had ever seen.

“You’re sure you know people here?” said Lewis, following along briskly, although he kept the thumbs of his great batlike wings wrapped over his head to form a dark hood. “How long has it been since you saw them?”

“Feels like a lifetime,” said Moth, strolling briskly into the lane as Ray flashed his headlights, happy to stretch moth’s legs for what felt like the first time in weeks. “But I’m of the mind that you find friends anywhere you go.”

Shelby

Shelby had never seen Vincent so excited as he paced rapidly around the room, examining and fixing up things of seemingly no importance. They were all arranged in seats facing the same big blank wall—she stood in the back, leaning against the doorframe, unsure of where to sit, or what was happening, really. There were suspicious renovations around Raj’s magnificent manor; a glass booth of sorts out near the front gates, ropes acting to direct traffic. And ahead of her sat people she knew, and people she did not.

A number of Downing Hill students who had apparently returned from long journeys abroad—Friday and Penny Rescher, two middle-aged women who it seemed impossible could be twins, and Harrow Blackletter, who had nursed Arnold back to having a full body instead of just a clammy regrown hand, and they all sat in a cluster. Friday sat next to Olivier Song, another Downing Hill alumni who had brought the rains back, which pattered even now on the big roofs of Raj’s house, and they whispered discreetly to each other about library books overdue and old jokes.

Not far from them was Moth, a stranger who had apparently walked back into town from out of the blue, and brought with them a tall man named Lewis whose cape, Shelby was fairly sure, was attached to his back. His wings were bigger and more batlike than Puck’s. She was not sure what to make of his sharp, awkward smile yet. She had only recently been introduced. Her brother, Mulder, sat in the middle of an aisle, glancing back at her occasionally as if to ask her to sit down, but she hadn’t gone for it yet. Cannibal the dog had apparently returned to Mulder and Shelby’s house of her own accord, and ran now in laps around the perimeter of the room, as best as she could with her three legs.

Diggory Graves had carried Danielle in and deposited her in a front row seat—Milo, who was also in attendance, had not quite finished fashioning her a new and improved Rosenbrace. The curling vines of the Venus crowded the back edge of the living room. Two seats that were empty, as far as Shelby could tell, housed Ratty and Percy, although the popcorn in front of one of the chairs was definitely rising of its own accord and being launched at various other people in the rows of seats.

Russell McGowan sat along with several of his siblings, and looked back to her, and waved. There was a pain in his bright eyes that she had not quite observed before, and not just from the bullet they’d pulled from his arm, she suspected. Mayor Valerie was in attendance, in a chair wheeled in by her security entourage, who had not left her side since the killings on orders from Sheriff Ignatius. Victoria Tepiani was here, although in a capacity as a friend of Arnold and Harrow, or as a reporter for the Scout City Almanac, Shelby was not sure. Victoria caught strange looks from Clara Martin, who absolutely beyond a doubt travelled on a flying broom, and had ordered a large popcorn from the table at the back.

But in all of it, she could not see Riot, and she searched several times before she finally found Riot standing at her side, which surprised her.

“Hey,” said Riot, looking out over the expanse. “Some party.”

“I guess so,” said Shelby, squinting at the blank sheet that had been hung at the far end over the windows. “Seems silly when we’re not done yet, with the fight. Not by a long shot.”

“Sometimes a moment to breathe is okay,” Riot said, and Shelby felt a hand squeeze hers, and her face flushed. She grit her teeth. Wasn’t sure how to handle that yet, really. She was full of questions more than anything, and it was dawning on her a hundred new ways that she might get hurt even worse than slicing off her own hand.

This hand, however, she did not pull away, as Riot tugged her down the central aisle and into an empty seat beside her.

And then, finally, the lights dimmed, and Vincent strode out onto the makeshift stage at the far end of the living room.

“My friends, and fellow residents of Scout City,” he said. “I have been for my entire life a lover of a forgotten art called cinema. You may have been alive long enough to remember the theaters of a past age; you may have only heard of them. Perhaps a moving picture has never occurred to you at all. Regardless, it is my profound joy to present to you what I believe is the first motion picture to be screened in Scout City, and the first of many to come.”

Here he gestured, and walked off the stage, and from a balcony behind their rows of seats, Raj clicked and fiddled with a device. Glancing up, Shelby could see a bulky black form of metal; a shining white eye, two large reels of tape. Vincent had acquired a film projector. And then the auditorium was filled with light, and images began to flash out across the screen. She stared up, stunned, at the moving light; the pictures flickered into motion, and music began to play, and as its titles began to roll, Riot leaned over her bucket of popcorn to whisper.

“I’m getting a feeling—I think I’ve seen this one,” she said. “You’ll never guess who the bad guy turns out to be.”

“I’ll take that bet,” Shelby said, and settled into her chair. “I’m pretty good at figuring that out.”

Scout City

Hundreds of people in Scout City would wake, the morning after the fire, to the vague impression that they were supposed to do something. Hundreds more would remember what they had been told, person after person, dreamer after dreamer, painstakingly in the night before. And thousands would remember that Danielle O’Hara had been in their dreams that night, a dream they had shared, no matter how strange it seemed. In it, they dreamed that Danielle O’Hara had come right up to them, and grabbed them by the face, and said to them,

“The Quartet are real. The Quartet are Cole Kane, and Ben Alder, and Johannah Wicker, and Indrid Buckley, and a man who wears the mask of a fiddle. They have killed your friends. They have killed your family. They want you to believe that there is only good in people who are like you. They want you to be afraid of your neighbor. They want you to kill the monstrous, the different, the queer, the peculiar. They will not stop until they have made Scout City in their image. They are planning this at an old chapel where the Church of the Hallowed Name once stood. They are dangerous. They are coming for all of us.”

But if they had any doubt in their hearts, or fear that their dreams had been invaded, that they were being fed lies by a monster for a monster, it gave them pause when they woke—believing their dreams or not—to read, delivered to every door, the front page of the Scout City Almanac. And in an article by Victoria Tepiani, next to a camocept photograph of Diggory Graves standing over the fallen body of Shank, a headline in large black letters:

MASKED MURDERERS MUST BE STOPPED

SCOUT CITY GOES TO WAR

Apollyon

“And that, your honors, is how I met my gruesome end,” said Barb, and paused, and scratched his chin. “Actually, I think I left out the time back in Vegas that I had the entire cast of the Martini Show bet on which ones would make it to the next season. Heh. That was a night to remember. You don’t know the meaning of fun until you’ve seen thirty-five babes dressed like olives wres…”

“I do not wish to intrude on the seemingly infinite speaking time of the Devil Barbatos,” Lucifer protested, “but I ask the Auditors if they have heard enough to make their judgement.”

Polly had long been laying with his head in his hands at the table next to Barb, and looked up at this, shooting an outstretched finger towards the Auditors.

“My client will have his full speaking time,” he said.

“We have heard enough of the devil Barbatos,” said the Second Auditor, and then with a grinding sound of its metal mask, looked to both the first and third Auditors, and then back to the vast court of devils. “We will consult among ourselves and confer our judgement.”

“We thank you, your honors,” said Lucifer, with a bow, and Polly pulled in breath, and clapped Barb on the shoulder.

“It’s been a good run,” he said. “I would think about last words.”

“What? I totally swayed ‘em,” said Barb, shrugging. “That bit about Yaretzi and your whole little grubby family? Precious. Yanked right at their flaming heartstrings.”

“You spent half an hour describing what happened in hotel beds in your Fresno location,” Polly grunted.

“Hey,” Barb grinned. “Gotta capture the full range of human experience.”

“Two hours on types of alcohols and their merits,” Polly said, eyes hooded, arms crossed.

“Call that an incentive to visit the ol’ dirtball,” said Barb, and patted his suit jacket shoulder. “You’re one hell of a lawyer.”

“I barely got to talk,” Polly said, and went walking across the aisle as he noticed Lucifer, Typhon, Agarus and the rest of the circle of hell’s lawyers conferring. He knew suddenly what he must do, and it made him as filthy as Barb, filthier even.

“Excuse me!” Polly said, and went up behind Lucy, who turned around. On the Auditor’s podium, the three had withdrawn into a veil of shadow, and the courtroom buzzed with muttered conversations.

“Apollyon,” Lucifer said, studying him narrowly. “If you’ve come to apologize for the actions of your client in disgracing this fine court of Syrensyr’s power, I will graciously accept.”

“Nothing quite so dramatic,” said Polly, and stuck out a hand stiffly. “I just wanted to say, you’ve been a fine opponent. No matter what the Auditors decide, I appreciate that I had one more chance to show my face in the Industry. To see all of you. To see this place. It’s spectacular work we do here.”

Lucy frowned at his hand, but then extended his to meet it.

“Is this some polite form of begging for your life?” he said. “Because those pretty eyes of yours are going in Typhon’s jar, and your horns are going to be mounted on the wall above my desk. But yes, a pleasure to have you, hope you enjoyed one last look around the premises.”

Polly clapped a second hand around his, to shake it all the better.

“I can’t thank you enough,” he said, and then returned to his table quickly, just as the Auditors began to emerge again, and the court hushed.

“Floozy,” Barb said.

“Hush,” Polly said.

“We have reached our verdict,” said the first Auditor.

“The testimony from Barbatos and Apollyon presents a logical conclusion,” said the second Auditor. “It is clear from the word of Syrensyr that Devils, Demons, and Auditors are designed to serve the purposes that they were constructed for. However, no machine, no matter how resolute, can operate continually without rest or risk weakening, and in time wear down to an unsafe operating level. It is clear to us, after this inspection, that the devil Barbatos, the devil Apollyon, and many such instances predating them, are subject to this breakdown of constant stress and subsequent obsession over minor topics such as Earth culture. Therefore, let it be added to the handbook of the Law of Syrensyr, and in its appropriate heading and chapter be forever codified: Devils are to receive, once per thousand units of work, a unit of time in which to harbor one hobby, relationship, or personal project, unmonitored by the Industry.”

Polly looked over to Barbatos, who could not look back, and then on to the court beyond. There was, for a moment, absolute silence among the many legions of devils, and then Polly raised a hand.

“Request for clarification,” he said.

“Clarification granted,” said the Second Auditor.

“Is this one unit per thousand to be applied retroactively?” said Apollyon. “In order to ensure that Industry assets already near this breaking point are… able to maintain productivity.”

The auditors seemed to mutter among themselves, flames sputtering, and then the Second Auditor spoke again.

“It shall be so,” it said. And at that there was an uproar. Lucifer was shouting from the bench, and Industry employees were transforming in a way Apollyon had never seen them before. Briefcases of papers were thrown into the air by the most diabolical accountants; stoic business devils turned to each other and kissed until they fell off the benches. Even Typhon the Terrible, tremulous from the other side of the courtroom, had an expression on his face that Polly had never seen—the very smallest imaginable smile. Apollyon grinned. Some of them, he knew, had been working for nearly an eternity, and had earned a thousandth of an eternity in time off.

“Regarding the matter of Apollyon and Barbatos, they shall be executed by the Devil Lucifer in a manner which he deems appropriate for their crimes against the Industry,” said the Third Auditor, which Polly had completely suspected, but then as Lucifer looked up to him, and went rising over the chaos of the crowd, and manifested a flaming sword in his hand, Lucifer must have looked down to his wrist, because he seemed to lose his thoughts for a moment.

“Was nice knowing you, kid,” Barb said with gritted teeth, and looked up to the flaming blade.

“Hey Barb,” Polly said, and gripped his hand. “Let’s go home.”

In Polly’s other hand, he clicked the hilt of Lucifer’s watch, which he had stolen neatly during the handshake, and suddenly he was encompassed by the Earth, and he and Barb were shrinking away from the fires of the Industry, and they stood completely at peace in a grassy field. The distant coastline was washed by the ocean. Polly strapped the watch to his wrist, and admired its polished blue surface of earth’s clouds and continents twirling beneath.

“You dirty dog,” said Barb. “I really have ruined you.”

“We were always going to have to fight a little dirty,” Polly grinned, and then looked up to the distance, where already he could see a glint of gold in the distant hills, and feel the wind change as a faraway wolf began to run. “Hope you’re ready for a reunion.”

Ah. I am sorry, dreamers, I am being summoned…

Syrensyr's Sanctum

Nikignik

Greetings, sire. You called? It sounded urgent.

Syrensyr

Which one was it?

Nikignik

I am sorry?

Syrensyr

Which one of them was it? Someone has been busy.

Nikignik

I do not understand.

Syrensyr

Look at me, Nikignik. Look at me! I have been wounded. My economy of souls governs the existence of life across this universe; it also is a part of me. Productivity is dropping at a massive rate. A law has been written in my books which is preposterously against my governance. One of them has been tampering with my auditors, my devils, encouraging this defective streak to resist my will from the inside.

Nikignik

Did your creations not already have free will?

Syrensyr

Their will was MY WILL. MY WILL BE DONE. Now, I am not worried about the wound itself, I will simply reorganize the Industry until it functions correctly, that is no matter at all. But whoever in the Council is responsible for this… you will root them out. You will find them. And you will tell me who has tried to harm me this way.

Nikignik

You are sure it was one of the Council?

Syrensyr

There is no one else it could be. No one else who would want to see me gone. This is only the first step, you know; some underhanded attempt to weaken me. But it will not be the last. Whichever one of them it is, will make a move against me while they think I cannot defend myself. Search them, Nikignik. Find them. And when you have determined who, we will confront them together.

Nikignik

I shall redouble my efforts.

Syrensyr

See that you do. I want you entirely focused on this task. Put away any… distractions, that might keep you from the work.

Nikignik

…I understand. This task is important.

Syrensyr

The universe depends on it, my friend.

Nikignik

Then, for the universe, I shall keep watch.

Outro - Verdicts

For you, dreamers, I will keep watch. Until you dream once again of a forest where life and death meet, of the far north, of distant pines that grow high into the night sky. Until you dream again of the Hallowoods.

The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Pork Roast' 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, guilty or innocent? You decide. Commit some crimes, or not. You’re going to have a lot of time on your hands.