HFTH - Episode 204 - Remains

Content warnings for this episode include: Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Gore description, Blood, Static (including sfx), Religious Violence, Emotional Manipulation, Body horror, Burning to Death

Intro - The Huntsman

You were once a hunter. Of men, of beasts, of devils. All that you needed to survive, you took. The strength of your hands and your willingness to shove those who were weak beneath your heels allowed you to survive when few others could. You roared at the dark age opening up before you, and fired bullets into it, and drove your all-terrain vehicle with reckless abandon, flag flying proudly. And those who disrespected you, who stole from you, had to be met with the utmost vengeance, lest you begin to look weak. Weakness was a slow death indeed.

And yet, when the devil wronged you, made you weak, you chased him, and you found your slow death. Cast out. Broken. You became a thing among dead things, with a root growing in your side that you could neither control nor stem. And the years have passed, and you are a huntsman now. When you wake, it is to grind your axe and walk into the woods to free them of its pests. Your only friend is a warden who stewards the growth of the forest. How strange, you think, that weakness used to mean the world to you. The worry alone robbed you of all your strength. And you watch a dark smoke rising, and know that this place you once feared and hated, you have become it, and a hello from you is a Hello from the Hallowoods.

Theme.

Right now, I am a long time removed. The trees are young. When you remember, dreamer, you close your eyes and see only a dark reflection of your imagination. When I remember, I am there. I was there. I was everywhere. I was there to see a boy crouching in the forest, looking at the lady in the bushes. The theme of tonight’s episode is Remains.

Story 1 - Made New

Ben Alder crouched on the forest floor. One of his knees was skinned, and he had his knapsack half-full of useful items. It was best to keep it half-full; you never knew what you might find to fill it. In this case, though, he’d hoped that he’d find maybe a nice abandoned rifle or a bear trap or something useful like that, something his father could sell at the market. Something to make him proud.

It wasn’t this. The lady in the bush reminded him lots of the lady that he’d found in the tent, with the broken teeth. They’d buried that one, to lay her to rest properly. As if she’d be the only one, the last. But here was another. Her head was shaved, and ten thin, deep red cuts ran across it and down her neck to the rest of her. The blood looked sticky, the way it ran down her skin. She must have been put here recently; maybe even hours ago, maybe even minutes. Her body was all twisted up; head half around, one arm crumpled beneath her, the other caught on a branch in the bush. She was missing every other finger. He knew the way she was cut, and the odd markings that interrupted the lines.

Someone had cut sheet music into her.

Ben wondered what the song was. Whether she had known the tune. Whether she had listened to it when the music man did this to her.

Oh, he knew about the music man. Ever since finding Broken Teeth he’d heard the sound of music deep in the forest, moving fast. His father never heard, but then again, his father snored loud and slept deeply, and by the time Ben got him to come listen, the music was always gone.

“What are you staring at, boy?” a voice said, and Ben jolted back. There was a stranger in the forest, twenty feet away from him. The stranger had long white hair that hung on either side of his face, a white beard and round glasses, and wore a long red coat like a band conductor. His sleeves were rolled up, and he was carrying an instrument case in his hand and several more strapped to his back. He looked like he might be selling instruments, really, if Ben did not already know that he had a different occupation.

“You’re the music man,” Ben stated, looking around. His heart should be pounding, but he was calm. Perfectly calm. Was he dreaming? “You did this to her.”

The old man’s eyes darted down to the bush, and he frowned.

“I did.”

Ben watched him. Neither of them moved, but if the man did, Ben was going to fish in his backpack for his slingshot.

“Why did you do it?” he said, brows furrowed. “Why do you do this to them? Why do you kill them?”

“A good question, my boy,” said the old man, and his gaze turned down to the bush. “I do it because they’re not really dead. I do it because I’m saving them this way. Because I have the power and the capability to do it. If I had the power to save them and I didn’t, that would truly be a sin.”

“What are you saving them from?” Ben said. He waited for the fear to come, but instead there was just fascination. He’d known there had to be a reason. They were killed too carefully, carved in particular ways. Their bodies were riddled with purpose.

“Themselves,” said the music man, and here he knelt to lower his instrument case to the ground. “Has anyone taught you about hell, boy? About good and evil?”

“I know a little,” said Ben.

“Then you know that people who do bad things go to hell, don’t they?” said the music man. “A horrible fate. Their soul destroyed, taken apart, disintegrated for a devil’s amusement. No. No one should suffer that. This woman was a harlot. She fornicated. She used her body not as the god-given temple that it is, but as a playground for strangers. A violation of God’s plan for her life. Had she died by any other means, the weight of her sin would have dragged her straight into Satan’s furnace. But with my intervention…”

Here he removed the instrument from its case; it was a large golden instrument, beautiful, called a Saxophone, with small white accents in its keys that Ben knew immediately had been the bones of the lady’s fingers. And the music man played a long, swelling note, eyes closed, cheeks full of air. Ben thought about running, right then, and things might have been different if he had.

But she was there, then. Hovering in the wood, a few feet off the ground. Her head was covered with the sheet music lines, and the lines wound over her body. She glowed with white light. She was beautiful, like an angel. Her eyes were dark voids. She stared straight ahead, over Ben. There was not fear or sadness on her face. Nothing at all. She was not like the thing that screamed, that thrashed in their home, that played the piano in the night. She was different, somehow. Pure.

“She is alive,” said the music man, lowering the brass instrument to stare at her. “Her soul is alive. And now that she cannot hurt herself anymore, she is finally a tool for god’s plan. For a holy life. If I say go left, she goes left. If I say right, she goes right. She will further the missions of the lord with every action that she takes, now. I have saved her soul from damnation, boy. Would you rather I had left her as she was?”

Ben stared up at her, and then at the body in the bush, and shook his head.

“Quite right,” said the music man, and set his instrument down again, and she vanished. He closed the lid of the case and locked its latches.

“My dad says the church is all full of liars,” Ben said at last. “That they’ll say anything to get your money that you worked hard for. That none of it’s true.”

“And right he is,” said the music man, looking up; his eyes were like glass behind his spectacles. “Most churches of the modern day are full of rampant heathens, who have no moral scruples nor mission. They will say whatever makes them feel comfortable in order to ignore scripture and pretend that they love God while they ignore his teachings. There is only one church that preaches true gospel, and your father does not go there. If he did, I would know you already. It is called the Church of the Hallowed Name. Seek it out, when you are ready. It will be there waiting for you.”

Ben watched the music man turn, and walk away into the woods, singing a song quietly to himself—a humming refrain that went ‘I would not be denied’. And Ben looked to the woman in the bush, and smiled.

She wasn’t there anymore, in that poor bleeding body. She was beautiful now. Only the music man had the power to make her that way. Maybe someday, he’d have the power to fix people too. What did it take, he wondered? Where did you begin?

Interlude 1 - The Unquiet

What do you do with the dead when the dead refuse to stay silent? Many different funeral practices have been attempted since the Black Rains fell. Those who are buried in a casket, though, have a tendency to wake eventually, as the moisture finds its way down through the soil and worms its seeking tendrils through the wood. Some took to burying them in iron boxes, but this did not last long, as iron boxes are rare and heavy, and far fewer in quantity than the dead. For a while, instead, they were burned, which is effective in that there is little for the rains to remember by the time the pyre is done. A funeral pyre is a nice thing, done once a month or so. However, as the centers of population grow, so does the disdain for a constant stream of bodies burning on the outskirts of town.

In places like Scout City, creative solutions have been devised. Large, fast-moving fungi that can strip the flesh from bones in a matter of days, quietly, discreetly, have become the popular method of body disposal. Its Mortal Grove is home to the remains of hundreds of its citizens. Some receive grand funerals there in the garden, where the fungus takes in a new corpse and sets it alight in beautiful teals and oranges as it decomposes. Some receive funerals as small as a single undertaker, delivering last rites in silence.

We go now to a corpse.

Story 2 - Breakfast Table Autopsy

“This is highly irregular!” Vincent said as he trotted quickly down the halls of Raj Greenstreet’s house. Shelby lugged one end of the black bundle of fabric, while Moth and Lewis struggled to lift the back half. The smell of it was a sickly sweet charbroil. “And a terrible imposition. We’re in the middle of brunch. It’s not even my table. It’s not even my house!”

“You don’t mind, do you Raj?” said Shelby, looking over to Raj Greenstreet. Scout City’s wealthy patron was wearing a yellow suit with a purple satin robe over top; his skin was dark and ruddy, and he had a thin and elegant mustache. He raised a dark eyebrow; his eyebrows, like his hair, were streaked with silver.

“Not at all,” he said, and gestured down the hall in the direction they were carrying, towards the brunch table. “Be my guest.”

“Raj,” Vincent said, but Shelby left them to their debate. The body she had pulled up from the fire debris at the base of Scout City was heavy. Lewis darted ahead, to scoop plates and pitchers and sugar bowls away, just in time for Shelby and Moth’s strength to give out—she only had one hand to offer, after all; the Graspentwine was not supposed to lift more than twenty or thirty pounds before its little plant tendons would tear. Useless sprout. As Moth and Lewis backed away a little, she threw open the black folds of the fabric to reveal the body concealed inside.

Moth covered moth’s mouth with moth’s cloak and tried to still a gasp. Lewis smirked, a dark humor playing across his lips. Raj Greenstreet’s temples seemed to pulse, and his jaw twitched. And Vincent was momentarily stilled, mouth open in surprise before he cleared his throat.

“Ah,” he said, at last. “This isn’t just any body you’ve brought me.”

“It’s somebody,” said Shelby, looking over to him. The body that she had brought had been cooked in the fire; skin was blackened and barely clung to the bone in most places, limbs twisted and melted together with the body. The burnt and broken fiddle mask concealed the figure’s face. “And I need you to find out who.”

Vincent looked up not to her, but to Raj, glaring.

“I told you I was done with dead people,” said Vincent.

“This is a rather particular exception, my dear,” said Raj, frowning as he studied the twisted form on the tarp on the breakfast table. “I think I can forgive you for performing one more examination.”

“If you will forgive me, then,” said Vincent, and the wizened old man turned to set his own robe aside, and rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt underneath. “And if I must.”

Marketing - Speechless

Lady Ethel Mallory

I… Surely you don’t… Well. My happy dreaming family, despite what my competition would say, I am…

I’m not…

Cut it, Rupert. Something is wrong. I can’t…

Static

Story 2, Continued - Breakfast Table Autopsy

I have seen in my years of observation many Lady Ethel Mallories.

I have seen her as a self-made woman, taking on the business tycoons of Los Angeles for the advertising deal of a lifetime.

I have seen her growing more bloated and more self-important by the year as she speaks relentlessly to an audience that cannot speak back.

I have seen her swell into a gigantic parasite, the size of a building, that is landing currently in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. And as the crate-like container that holds her is deposited on the ground, and the great rotor vehicle that bore her here ascends once again into the sky, she throws off her dreaming visor and opens the doors, and one giant spidery leg after another peels out of the crate like a tunnel spider. She rises, suspended on her lower legs, to look up at the blazing sky through her heart-shaped sunglasses. And I have seen her again and again, dreamer, but I have never seen her speechless.

We return now to Shelby Allen.

Shelby sat on one of the slightly moth-eaten sofas that lined the large living and dining room of the Greenstreet manor. It was not that Raj, and likely Raoul when he had been alive, chose moth-eaten sofas specifically for their tremendous home, but more that for the exquisitely velvet and plush style of sofa that they liked, with the curling wooden ar ms and accents, it was moth-eaten or none at all. It must have cost a killing to ship these home from the Wet Market alone. She sat with her elbows on her knees, head down, studying her entwined hands—real and fake. Raj Greenstreet sat across the coffee table from her. Occasionally she glanced up to Vincent, who was slowly circling around the breakfast table, with his eye unfolded into long silken tendrils that wavered in the air, examining the corpse’s burnt tissue on a nearly microscopic level. Moth and Lewis were exploring the house somewhere, poking over the collections of artifacts and old world memorabilia that lined the walls and curiosity cabinets.

Shelby studied Raj. He was always whimsically cheerful and matter-of-fact, despite the direst situations that she had seen him face. Currently he stared over the back of the sofa, watching Vincent work with a wistful admiration. She was reminded that Vincent had performed the autopsy on Raj’s own husband after he was murdered by the Quartet.

“What’s your story, Raj?” she said. “You’ve been around Scout City a long time, but I don’t know anything about you.”

“I typically try to keep it that way,” said Raj, looking away from the autopsy in progress and over to her—a challenge, as Vincent was reaching for a scalpel which Raj seemed to particularly enjoy. “My late husband did enough talking for the both of us where the town was concerned.”

“I have reason to believe it was Brass who killed Raoul. Ben Alder,” Shelby said. “Obviously not without help, but he started it. Ben had a therapy session with Raoul shortly before his death. Was able to go digging through his books. The secretary he hired was lousy with security.”

“Clearly,” said Raj, and looked down at the coffee table. “Raoul saw the worst in people every day and chose to believe the best about them. I could never quite find the root of his optimism.”

“You’re dodging my question,” Shelby observed. There was a sound like cracking stale bread as Vincent’s blade cut into the body across the room. She kept her gaze focused on Raj, however. “Was Raoul your first husband?”

Raj tilted his head, as if scrutinizing her, and finally sighed. “No, not remotely. I had rather hoped he would be the last, however.”

“What were the others like?” Shelby said, laying back, arms crossed. “Any of them before the black rains?”

Raj sighed. “I’m not a corpse, Shelby Allen. You can’t put needles into me until you get what you’re looking for.”

Shelby looked up to him plainly. “It’s in my nature to be curious, I guess. You’ve been a good friend to us. And to Vincent, after everything that’s happened.”

“What would you say,” Raj said, “if I told you that I had had thirty-seven husbands?”

Shelby blinked.

“I would say that’s more than most,” she said.

Raj stared at her, and squinted, and then looked over to the decorated walls that surrounded them, the railing and the second level balcony where Moth and Lewis were talking in low tones about a collection of silver pistols in a glass case.

“My life story is too impossible to tell you and expect you to believe it,” he said. He looked back up at Shelby, and smiled, and there was a tightness to his smile, but also the slightest welling of water in his eyes. “It is best, I think, that you know me as a mystery. And know that I am very intent on finding the people who killed my husband and doing whatever it takes to bring them to justice. I was willing to set the forest on fire to do it, once. There’s nothing I would stop at, when it comes to that. You can rely on me for that.”

“I’ve heard a lot of unbelievable things in my time,” said Shelby. She made a mental note to solve the mystery that was Raj Greenstreet at some point, when she was ready for a case that was a little less murderous.

“I’ve heard even more, believe me,” said Raj, looking back to the autopsy. Vincent worked delicately with his scalpel to separate the fiddle mask from the face, until it finally came off in a mostly intact piece of wood. His tendril-eye raced over the dark and mangled mass that lay beneath, until finally the white threads retracted to form his usual cynical eye, and he sniffed and went to the bowl of water to scrub at his hands.

“What do you have for me, Vincent?” Shelby said.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” said Vincent, sighing. “I don’t know who he is. No one that I’ve seen before, as far as I can remember. Appears to be male, probably twenty-five. Muscle and build would indicate a life spent outdoors for the most part, hard labor. All signs point to that he burned to death, as you might have guessed.”

“That’s all you’ve got?” said Lewis, leaning over the upstairs railing. “He burned to death? Oh, a shocking surprise.”

“Be nice to the creepy man,” said Moth. “He did his very best job.”

“And it’s what we needed,” Shelby said, rising from the sofa. She made her way over to the fiddle mask, burned as it was, and picked up the fragile wooden shell before tucking it into her bag and making for the door. “Moth, Lewis, let’s go.”

“Wait,” Vincent said. “Where are you going? What do you want me to do with the body?”

“Bring it to the Scout City infirmary,” said Shelby, glancing back as Moth and Lewis made their way down the stairs. “They can see if anyone recognizes who it is, make sure a nice funeral happens.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to take a second look?” said Moth, arriving next to Shelby in the entry hall. “Maybe there’s some clue that could tell us who the Fiddle was.”

“That’s not him,” Shelby said, pointing to the corpse, and then she went to open the door. “The real Fiddle is out there, and they want us off their trail for tonight. We need to treat today as if we could come under attack at any time, from any direction. Fiddle is out there. We need to warn the Groundskeepers.”

“How can you tell?” Vincent said, pausing. “What makes you so sure?”

“It wasn’t the fire that should have killed him,” Shelby said, looking back from the door. “It was the fall.”

Interlude 2 - Dead Worlds

You think your world is dying, dreamer.

You have not seen dead yet.

I have.

There are worlds that drift in this cosmos that once bloomed with life in a thousand colors and varieties, just as yours does. Creatures grew there that would be incomprehensible to you. They began very small, but they grew, and came to shape the wildness of their landscape, turn thorny vegetables into crops, harness the acid in their rain to create power and industry. They loved, and loved life deeply, and looked to the stars and dreamed that they might not be alone. But, like you, they were early in this universe, and by the time you first glimpsed their star, their world had already gone dark.

Endings and beginnings come and go, dreamer. Empires and superspecies collapse and new ones rise. A cycle continues. But for that dark world, dreamer, it will be a long time, if ever, before anything begins there again. The surface of it is a blackened ash, and the only life that dwells there is devoid of life at all—only a semblance, a mockery, a void wrapped in deadly silver and thin porcelain. A monolith has been erected there which is a tall dark stone, and it hovers over the earth, and the masked apostles of the darkness stand immortal and unmoving in worship. It is the only standing structure on the otherwise smooth and lightless world, where nothing grows.

The only thing that stands in the way of the cycle, dreamer, of growth and change, the only thing that may stop it completely, is obliteration. And you cannot obliterate some things. You cannot obliterate dreams, or hopes, or beliefs. But you can obliterate a people. And although their memory may live on to inspire in poetic and meaningful senses, there is no way to get them back. They are gone, lost to the void, forever.

Your world is not ending yet.

We go now to one who wishes to change this.

Story 3 - A Pine-Shaped Shadow

“My disciples, I thank you,” said Tiberius Laevinus, Hand of the Black Eternity. He wore a toga and tunic that, he supposed, had been resurrected much like himself, through strange means. He found the fashion of the age, its tweed and turtlenecks, restraining and distasteful. There was simplicity in the loose clothes that his age had possessed. But there were many things that he had come to understand while living in the body of the archivist Lawrence Abbot. When his soul had first been pulled back from its hibernation by the Church of the Hallowed Name and forced to inhabit the body of that pale-haired child, he had not even spoken the English tongue. But he found himself watching through Lawrence’s eyes for much after that.

Being placed at Downing Hill Public Library. Growing amongst the faculty. Reading through his eyes academic texts based on the foundations of his own beliefs filtered through two thousand years of watering down and philosophical deconstruction. But living in Lawrence, as much as it was a painful existence, confined and barely an existence at all, had given him the opportunity to spend years in study of his own. How to communicate with the natives of this part of the world. Reading, writing. Playing instruments. Using a tape recorder. And more than anything, directing Lawrence on a thousand small tasks to gather the information that he needed.

His transformation, finally breaking free of Lawrence’s body to restore his own, had gone awry, however. He had been siphoned out, sealed away in a prison in the shape of a painting of a field of sunflowers. He had spent time there with the memory of a girl, memories that had been carved away. He had found her quite tiresome, eventually, once he came to understand his new predicament.

But then there had been Indrid, blessed Indrid, to pluck the painting from the wall and carry it away, out of Downing Hill, before the flames took it. And he instructed her, as best as he could, on how to recreate the beetle tattoo, the binding ritual that would give him a gestation, a new life, bursting forth from her own. But no matter how much her spirit was willing, her art was weak, and she had mismanaged the process somehow. Left them fused, him in a prison within her chest halfway between existing and eternity. Left him once again trapped in someone else, waiting for a way out.

He had not expected the path forward to be simply handed to him, though. And now, here he stood—breathing in the acrid sweet scent of the forest, looking up to the morning sun shining down in long beams through the great canopy of dark boughs, and to three of his masked disciples, standing to either side of him.

“Indrid Buckley, the Fifth String, gave her life for the most noble and honorable of purposes: to usher in the age of eternity. I know that she was close to you all, and that she was the primary reason that we have seen the survival of the Church, the return of the lord’s purpose to this forest,” Tiberius said, and looked to Johannah in her mask of piano teeth. “For some of you, she was… a personal relationship of great importance. Your mother in the faith. I tell you this: her sacrifice will not have been in vain. She died a martyr for your beliefs. And I say this: do not disappoint her memory, nor waste all that she died for, by having a crisis of faith now. Scout City has declared a war against your beliefs, against your faith. This kind of persecution will not stand in the eyes of our God. For raising their voices against the truth, for raising their weapons against the bringers of knowledge and righteousness, he shall envelope them in his eternal darkness. Behold!”

Tiberius raised his hand to the tree in front of him: a gigantic pine, gnarled bark and great black bristling bows holding thousands of pine cones. The summer breeze carried through it, and the hint of a cold and fast-coming autumn.

Tiberius felt good. Pleasure coursed through each muscle of his body. HIS body. He had not had one to himself in so many thousands of years! There was strength within him swelling as if he was a young man again, and the blessings of the Black Eternity were deeper, stronger, than he had ever known them. He held up his hand of silver bones, and watched a dark wind seize the tree; shadow swirled around it just as it spilled and smoked from the rifts between his bones.

And then he squeezed his fist, and the shadows that wreathed his arm constricted tighter.

And then it was not a tree; only a shadow in a tree’s shape. It hung in the air, a single black color that absorbed all light; you could not tell one branch from another save by their silhouettes. The breeze did not shift its branches, anymore; it was a dark memory of what had stood there before.

“Holy shit,” breathed Piano. Drum stood with his arms crossed—the skin of his mask had been repaired since the conflict two weeks ago. And Brass walked towards it slowly, a hand outstretched in awe. Tiberius reached out to touch his arm, stopping him from walking further.

“Be careful, my friend,” he said. “Once eternity touches you, you are eternity. And there is still much for you to do on this earth to bring about its revelation.”

Brass nodded, and took a step back.

“The city is coming for us tonight,” he said. “We should leave the chapel. Find someplace more discreet.”

“On the contrary,” Tiberius said, looking from the three of them back to the lowly stone chapel, overgrown in the forest. “It shall be our fortress, and it houses our greatest weapon.”

Outro - Remains

Remains. One day, dreamer, your body might be reduced to ash and carbon, or dissolved in a large vat of acid, or digested by a large creature for sustenance until it is only bones. But there will be something left, nonetheless. Your bones, left on the forest floor, will feed small creatures until eventually they crumble to leave the roots with nourishment. Your spirit may go to the nest of a grackle, or be taken to fuel a great forge, or simply wander in a universe you are now detached from. The memory of you might live the longest, and will be carried always by someone, until finally they too meet their end. But that memory, dreamer, I will also hold, long after the rest is gone. And who knows? Someday, when it is pressing, when the time is right, I may tell your story.

Until nothing remains, dreamers, I am your loyal host, Nikignik, waiting crematorially for your return to the Hallowoods.

The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Centennial Man' 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, please do not put spring-powered snakes into your own intestines as a fun surprise for the morticians. We have already lost three morticians to your pranks.