HFTH - Episode 210 - Cocoons

Content warnings for this episode include: Body horror, religious violence

Cocoons

Somewhere out there, two things are happening at the same time.

Four things are happening at the same time.

Eight things are happening at the same time.

One hundred thousand things are happening at the same time.

One trillion things, to a power that you could not comprehend, are happening at the same time.

Exactly as many things are happening as I have eyes. I am watching it all, like an infinite number of your human cameras, eyes of red fire peeled wide open, watching helplessly as a universe that demands my attention in so many places moves on so fast. Second by second, lives are lived. People are born on planets whose light you will never see. They live, and die just as quickly. Cities become memorials and mausoleums. Lights are lit and then extinguished. Sometimes it is not until after, when I remember what I have seen, that I realize that I watched the rise and fall of an entire civilization. It is all committed to my memory.

And yet, when my attention wanders, far from the cold, impenetrable halls of the Council of Heavens, it wanders back to you.

Back to your earth, small and blue, hanging on a thread of sunlight.

Back to your ocean, where the blood of my beloved is slowly transforming you from the creature you were into something new.

Back to the sky, whose clouds inhale the poisoned moisture rising and exhale black rains across your lands, running down into rivers of ink, back into the sea.

Back to a forest where life and death meet. It is past noon, now, and this autumn day is half gone. And yet, with so much to happen before nightfall, a dozen heartbeats racing and a hundred hands preparing and a thousand eyes watching and...

There is a caterpillar.

Or, it was a caterpillar. It was twelve inches long, and covered in long white thorns that might have reminded one of a ribcage and vertebrae. Greater Ghostmoths begin life this way, and are sometimes mistaken for the corpse of a small animal by curious scavenger beetles or ravenous rodents. The caterpillar snatches these up in its bonelike mandibles, feeding for six to eight weeks until it is finally ready to begin a journey that it cannot itself imagine.

You must understand—and I cannot be clear enough about this—the caterpillar does not know that it will one day be a Greater Ghostmoth. The future is clouded. It acts only on its impulse to survive in the present, and is surprised, yet feels it was always deeply inevitable, that its transformation begins.

It crawls up to a crooked branch high in the black pines, to a barren spot where the needles will not harm it. And there, hidden among the pine cones, the caterpillar begins to weave. Delicate strands of silk pour from its mouth as it fashions its own funeral shroud, carefully twisting until it is entirely concealed. And then, within the cocoon, it begins to change. Its bony little body liquifies. It feels like it is dying. It does not, even now, understand what it is going to become. It only knows that the change is tearing it apart.

Diggory Graves lays eyes on Scout City with relief. The great tree is still standing, at least. That is a start. As they and Percy and Ratty and Clara Martin and the ghost-hound speed through the sky back towards it, all they can think of is of endings. That tonight, they will join a fight against the Quartet. They will shed more blood, bathe their hands in it like they did Shank. Some of the lives of Scout City’s own children they will be asked to cut short. And Scout City’s people will move on, leaving behind this era of horror... or so everyone seems to think. Do they really trust that? That the very same beliefs that drove Solomon Reed yesterday and the Quartet today will not drive someone else tomorrow? Will the bloodshed ever really end for long? Or will it continue, year after year, decade after decade, until humanity’s slippery decline into extinction is completed? It was stupid to believe that destroying the heart would change anything, they think. Of course Irene did not fashion them to save the world. Only to save herself from the death of her frail body. What would she have done, they wonder, if she still occupied their empty eye socket? Where would Diggory Graves be now?

Percy Reed is invisible, or as much as he can be. It is difficult to completely hide from Diggory—they have always been able to see him so clearly, and yet somehow also never see him at all. They can’t see that all he has ever wanted from them is to stop throwing their life away, for one second. To stop throwing other people away—the people they should have cared about most. What a tempting lie it is, to believe that you are special. But the truth is most people are hurt, and hurt a lot, and spend their lives hurting until they die, and if they’re particularly unlucky they keep on hurting after that. No one has a grand destiny. It’s just about receiving the hurt, and choosing where to direct it. Where to channel that fire inside you until you burn out.

Ratty understands this, and that is why she clings so closely to him as they hover, like two birds of prey, behind Diggory and Clara on the broomstick, making their arrival to the city. Ratty has been quiet since Percy’s fight with Diggory in the clearing. It is difficult to watch your partner argue with someone they love. Not as difficult as dying, of course, or kicking ass while not having a physical body at all, but close. She wonders when it will be time to go back to Toronto. After the Quartet are gone, probably. Will it and Percy and Diggory and everyone else all go their separate ways again? After so much talk of how much Percy hated it up in this forest, it’s funny how Percy acts like this is his home. Ratty wonders if any other ghosts have tried to move in to their apartment. If they have, she will eat them when she gets home.

Clara Martin is running a process in her mind. It is inspired by the calming exercises that her father taught her to help keep her anxiety in check, but she has made it her own. She breaks the problems she is facing, no matter how overwhelming, into smaller segments. Sometimes a titanic problem, an impossible challenge, is actually formed of small, very possible steps. And after dissecting the problem, she asks herself... what can I do? In this case, though, her problems are that the Quartet killed Riot’s sister, and that Riot is going to throw herself into their jaws tonight, and that the Quartet are a group of murderers who love traps and snares and tampering with volatile old magic. It gives her comfort that if it took her most of a decade to make sense of the Compact, that no matter how astute Indrid Buckley or even the spirit trapped inside of her are, the book will be useless to them only a few weeks later. With luck, when Scout City’s horde arrives, the ringleader might still have her nose buried in the Compact. She might not wake up until it is too late.

In the depths of the tree-born city beneath them, Shelby Allen is on the hunt. In this moment, she pushes through the crowd in the busy afternoon street of the Upper Trunk on her way back down. She spends a lot of time lately hunting or being hunted. She has not given it much thought, but some part of her likes that. Not from her childhood, bathed in blood, was a docile animal going to be born. From the day she protected Mulder while Shank, the spirit of death, passed over them and took her parents, to the day that she sliced off her own hand to come to Clementine’s aid, to the day only a few weeks ago that she faced the Quartet head-on. The hunt is still afoot. But normally, what drives a hunter is hunger, and for her it is a far deeper urge. Her quarry has single-handedly stolen her only happiness. And for all that came to Clementine, she will not stop until she severs Fiddle’s head from his neck and hangs him by his strings.

Lewis, also known as the Count, also known as the former King of America, follows at a short distance behind Shelby, dark wings wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak. He thinks that people perceive him as aloof and mysterious and cunning when he treats it all like a game, Shelby and her hunt included. The fear that there is nowhere to go from here, that this bumpkin tree fort will be his final resting place, that the people in it will turn against him like all people do is hidden, and hidden deep. He holds it in the empty cavity where his heart once beat.

Moth, frantically following Shelby and Lewis as the day’s investigation leads moth down a dark path of murder and covered-up deaths, has only two thoughts floating in moth’s head: that moth really hopes that nothing bad happens after all, and that they all should go somewhere soon where Ray can drive without inhibitions. Down on the ground level of Scout City, Ray would agree. Moth had hoped that the reunion with all of moth’s friends, the people moth had travelled with for a few desperate weeks ten years distant, would be sweeter. But they are entrenched in a community, and all the blood and grief that comes with it. Moth learned early, in Vegas, and again at Glass City, that any home that ties you down has power over you. The only safe place is on the open road.

Russell McGowan is, in this moment, helping Jedediah Wicker down the long dirt path back to Scout City as best he can. Neither of them came away from their house visit to the Wickers unscathed. He has faced monsters before. Mister Friendly, a horrible squirrel-thing, stuffed him as a child into a tree full of acorns and human bones and was going to leave him for winter. But he was saved by Walter Pensive, a man remembered not for his sword but for his gentleness, days before Walter died. And ever since he has carried with him, he feels, Walt’s spirit. He has smoothed things over with vicious Froglin ambassadors. He has discovered that if you ensure some areas of the neighboring wood are not plucked clean of wild blackberries, then Long-Toed Snag Elk will not enter Scout City’s streets in search of them. He has found a two-headed bird that flew into a window, nursed it back to health for both peeping heads, and released it back into the wild.

But he has also killed.

Killed four-foot-long barkbeetles by the hundreds during the summer they invaded Scout City.

Killed frenzied wolfmaws in the depths of the harsh winter.

Killed Scout City’s citizens, by accident but nonetheless, by letting Shank live so long. And now, as he helps Jedediah away from the house where Shank the pig-man has become a ravenous plague, turned the Wicker children into unrecognizable, awful forms, he has to wonder... how many more will he have to kill today?

Jedediah Wicker weeps uncontrollably as he follows Russell. He has lost his mother, brothers, sisters. It came on suddenly, and yet, he knew it was coming, inevitably, for the past weeks of their transfiguration. Their faces slowly changing, their inner violence boiling out. Why did he seek out Russell, of all people? Maybe because he wanted a witness. That there was nothing he could do. That it was not his fault. Because he knows that Russell is a stupid, weak, Scout City goody two-shoes, and that just maybe, if there had been some way to save them, only Russell would have taken the time to find it. Even now, Jedediah wonders, despite having felt their teeth and claws sinking into his flesh minutes ago—is there anything they can do? He thinks of Jacob Wicker’s gun, and all the sickly family dogs they’ve ever had to put down. He thinks of Johannah, out there somewhere, lost in the woods like she always was, waiting to be found. She might be all he has left now. She was not at the family dinner when the Wickers ate of Shank’s flesh and drank in remembrance of him. He thinks of an angel he once dreamt of, in a fox’s hollow, and a beautiful person he thought he might have been.

Shank watches them go, licking his lips in body and body and body. He is only two weeks old, but the flesh remembers something of what came before. The sun shines down beautifully. Beyond this cradle of the living room strewn with skin and tendon, beyond the house, beyond the fence, there is a gigantic tree that rises over the forest. He presses several faces against the window-pane. What wonderful potential there might be out in the city. What new sights to see, what new tastes to taste. It’s going to be a beautiful day.

Scout City Mayor Valerie Maidstone watches from her own window, nearly a mile away in the upper boughs of Scout City. Her chair is uncomfortable, but then again, everything is uncomfortable. Her achilles tendons were nearly severed by the piano-masked Quartet member during their assault on Danielle’s apartment, and it has been a painful process of working with Milo to try and fit a Rosenbrace. In the meantime, the wheelchair is a little rusted, and hard to fit through doorways, and one wheel sticks more than the other does. She is supposed to fix all of Scout City’s problems. That the plumbing system does not work for several residences in the mid-level trunk. That hundreds of Scout City residents were displaced by the wildfire in the Stumps and temporary lodging in the city is packed far past its capacity, and the repairs are not being made fast enough. That multiple out-of-control mob groups, one of which is being led by her own daughter, are determined to take the matter of the Quartet serial killers into their own hands and deliver a kind of Scoutpost vigilante justice quite apart from Scout City’s lawkeeping department.

That’s the thing. One day, you’re riding a motorcycle around San Francisco and wearing black leather with the girls and writing songs about destroying the government and establishing a lesbian-ruled utopia. And then you’re a viral hit, an internet sensation, the Joan of Arc for a tidal wave of angry radical queer feminist anticapitalists who are furious with the way the world is changing. And then you watch as all your shouting, all your passion, all your songs become nothing but an online listens count and an advertising statistic and a record label option as the world’s most corrupt company buys out the government that should have been keeping them in check. And then you get pregnant, and the world ends, and one of your rich friends hides you away in a shelter, and you raise your daughter in a bubble, and then it bursts and she leaves you, and your past catches up with you and you get tortured by the marketing lady you wrote the mean songs about and she clones your daughter to force you to read ads and denounce your life’s work, and then you have two daughters. One of whom goes to immediately die and one of whom you will watch die slowly, never aging, falling apart.

You get elected to become the leader of a far northern community because you wrote cool songs about being a leader, and people remember you as someone who said they would do great things. And the person who spent her youth dodging the cops and talking about the freedom of a lawless world has to determine what system of government is going to keep a rapidly expanding community in check. You don’t want police, a occupying military force in your community, you want dependable, responsible, skilled, sympathetic, accountable individuals that will be deployed to defuse violent situations, of which there are increasingly many as Scout City exponentially grows from a big commune to the largest human settlement north of Toronto.

Before long, you have to organize, and appoint a keeper of the peace who likes to call himself a sheriff, and he chooses deputies, and punitive action against them for overreaching their power is difficult because there are still so few of them in the organization and there is so much to do in Scout City and you need all hands on deck, all the time, and whether a harsh word was given or a full-body-tackle was too much on an escaping thief becomes trivial in the greater picture, and before you know it you are right back to having police in your community. She wonders if it is always like that: tearing the old system down because it is broken, and then installing a new system, and then watching all the faults emerge. There are people, she knows, in Scout City even now who are ready to tear her down and build the next thing. The Quartet. The Coda. Maybe even her own daughter.

What does it all matter? The world is ending. They’re all going to die. That’s the moral of the story. That’s the end of all the songs. The trees around them are telling a story, according to Milo Menken, and it’s about the end of humankind. And yet, as she looks out of the window over her city, she is duty-bound to solve the food shortage issue and the housing issue and the plumbing issue and the police issue and the serial killers issue. She does not know yet that the Shank issue will continue. She has no idea what is coming.

There is fire in Ignatius Thorpe’s heart today. It has been burning hotter and hotter over the past weeks, and there is no one left in this world who can tend it. He dreams of a massacre, of the roasting bodies of all the walking sicknesses that plague this city. The smell to him is sweet. He does not have long left to picture it now before it will be time to begin.

Violet and Bern Keene sit in their small garden, lit by a shaft of sunlight that pours through the twisted wooden wall of the great tree. The past weeks have been strenuous. Even though they rarely leave their house, save for Violet’s morning errands and Bern’s trips to the general store for dirt and to drop off her candles and honeys, they have had frequent visitors. Old friends. Young acquaintances. Searching for guidance on what to do. It is almost impossible to make sense of the news, Quartet and pig-men and radical activist groups and news and false information campaigns. They do not always know what guidance to give in terms of what to do if you think your neighbor might be one of the Quartet, or whether Scout City Groundskeepers really killed Shank or if it was the Coda, or whether you should go tonight to a derelict chapel in the woods and kill whoever you find there. All they can offer is that they have lived through times of hardship and violence. They have lived through times of peace. You are never in either one for long, but love—for a person, for your neighbors, for your community, will carry you from one era to the next. And in the peace, or the violence, you must hold fast to it, and let it guide you to raise your hand and kill, or to stay your hand and listen. At the far end of their garden, a single box of bees, fixed to the outside wall of the city near the window to the outside air, hums with life.

Vincent Loren and Raj Greenstreet stand in the projector room of the movie theater that has overtaken Chateau Greenstreet. One wing of the house is a cinema, now, and in the flickering dark on the level below them, almost every chair is packed for a noon showing. It is a rare find, a Japanese film with subtitles about a man who discovers he is dying, and goes from office to office seeking help before he finds that the world cannot help him, and in his final days he searches for meaning. Vincent watches with a tear in his still-human eye. These weeks of running the theater, firing up his old projector and surveying whatever reel of film he can still get his hands on, have become his playground. His reason to continue a little longer. Just as, he is sure, Shelby Allen’s mission to find her Fiddle, is hers. He makes a mental note that the burned body in the breakfast room will need disposing of before his attention returns to the black and white.

In black and white and a dozen miles away, Friday and Penny Rescher stand and watch reddening leaves tumble from the trees. The Blackwood Coven is their home as it was their mother’s before them, and they have watched it grow and wither and grow again. Among the many witches that come out to form a small crowd on either side of the central lane, there are old familiar faces—Amelia and Laurence Abbott with their shock-white hair and tattoos, and Elin Mend with her patchwork clothing, and Ursula with her aviators and Fortune with her feathers on. The Omen, as forty-three ravens, fills the branches of the Prophet Tree with cawing. But there are new faces, too, even some that were not here when the twins left for their reunion trip with the C.P.E Institute. Rat-faced girls in ragged clothes, who have just left the devouring world outside and begun to embrace their power instead of concealing it. The twins watch Olivier, standing on the street side, as Grandmother Briar is finally carried out of her house on her funeral bed, wreathed in bones and flowers, towards the tree.

Olivier Song watches the funeral procession with lightning flickering in the darkness of her eyes. She cannot help but feel that she has fallen so far. She used to be able to control her power, every aspect of it. It was backwards, she understands, as is the entire Downing Hill philosophy, the philosophy of her parents. The power that comes from a relationship with an indescribable being is not power to be controlled, hoarded, channeled. It is power that must flow from the source. Its tides must be listened to, its directions heeded. And in freeing herself to listen, to be moved by it, to cease when it ceases and go when it goes, she has given all she learned at Downing Hill away. And yet, now, when the tide moves, she is stronger than her old, studious self could have ever dreamed of being. When the power of a cosmic storm flows through her uninhibited, a river rapid finally un-dammed, raging towards the sea. Rage fills her now, at Grandmother Briar, at herself, at every horrible thing that has befallen her friends while she stewarded the Abbey Saint Loris. That rage is quiet in her eyes. But she knows that the wind carrying the autumn leaves out of the trees is hers also. A snowflake catches her eye, drifting. It is too early, for snow, in August. But dark clouds brew overhead, and the wind roars even stronger, and witches hold on to their hair and bones as the weather begins to brew.

Arnold Eggers, back at the Scout City Groundskeeper’s office, is of Downing Hill’s education too. He hopes, as he has had to hope far too many times this year, that his best friend will not die today. If Russell were to die, some part of him would too, he knows, and it would not grow back the way his body did. Harrow being back gives him hope. He wonders if he is a coward, because occasionally he is thankful that his part to play the night Shank died was that he only had to fetch Victoria and ask her to report what she saw. He did not have to be center stage like Russell. He did not have lives in his hands. Maybe that is the responsibility he has signed up for in becoming a Groundskeeper. And he wonders how anyone could possibly be ready for that.

Harrow Blackletter is afraid, and always has been afraid. But now, xe goes to stand beside xir mother in the back of the Scout City Groundskeeper’s office. Director Blackletter is half herself, and half a gigantic porcelain centipede, and Harrow is wondering now from where the shadow in both of them stems. Harrow tells her simply that xe will not be gone long, and not to worry.

Riot Maidstone watches this, and Arnold staring at a wall, and packs her bag with all the things she thinks she will need for war. She looks at the sword she was given weeks ago by the half-sleeper Alice, full of fireflies. Its hilt depicts a radiant sun. Its blade catches two halves of her face, each with a scar running across the cheek. Olivier and Shelby. Riot and Clementine. Groundskeeper and detective. Protector and killer. She wishes that she could take the sword and split herself in two. Riot Maidstone, happenstance hero of Scout City, took Walt’s sword and led the community into battle against the Instrumentalist. It would be excellent to have her here tonight, to lead the charge. Clementine Maidstone, rebel detective, pursued the Quartet when no one else would. She should be here to see the fruits of her investigation. But in truth, neither are here—just an empty shell that others projected a Riot or a Clementine onto. She is a third sister, with a hand on each of her shoulders—one with dirt under its fingernails, and one missing its fingernails entirely. It is a little comfort, but not much. There is a chance she is doing the wrong thing, and that she is leading her friends to their deaths today.

Out in the woods, a mile and a half away, the dragonfly-winged Puck looks up from shoving mushrooms into a bag. There is a sudden change in the temperature; the air breathes differently. They shudder, and begin moving hastily back for home. Only weeks ago, it was unseasonably hot, scalding even, and fires tore through Scout City. But now, dark clouds are brewing, filling the sky for miles in every direction. Impossibly, it feels like it might snow.

Grug watches the clouds from a pool of mud bricks. The high priest of Froglinkind, with his exaggerated, human-like legs, churns over many thoughts in his head. Relationships with Scout City have been good but fraught with tension as Scout City faces fires and famines. The hot weather forced them to take their eggs inside to underground cistern-caverns for long weeks while the rivers dried to a trickle, until blessed Lolgmololg worked her magic to bring rain pouring down across the forests and brought the rivers flooding back to life. And of course, Bruta is out there—beautiful Bruta, sleek and strong. Alas, Bruta is trapped in the other Froglin clan, the one that follows the old Queen, and there will never be peace between their houses, much as they may wish it. The clouds are a bad omen. Lolgmololg must be displeased. He sighs. The job of a high priest is never easy.

The Faceless King stands motionless in the Northmost woods. There are no clouds in this place; only the emerald sky, whose green stars are one by one extinguishing. He has no eyes with which to see them, and yet he senses their disappearance. A pile of rats come flooding out of seemingly nowhere, spilling across the ground, merging into a single mass and then splitting again, writhing in agony, green sparks sputtering over their many tiny heads. The crooked german shepherd that sits beside the faceless king tilts its head in concern, the green points reflected in its all-white eyes.

Johannah Wicker writhes on the barren stone floor of the Old Chapel. She heaves inside of the mask, clawing at its jagged wooden keys, and yet it will not come free of her face. Her gasps and screams come in equal turn. The gift that Tiberius gave her is too much for anyone to handle; how does he do it so easily? Black tar pours out from around her mask and pools onto the stones, stains her hands. She is sure that she is dying. She is almost alone; the other members of the Quartet are busy laying their greatest trap yet. She is faintly aware that Tiberius is sitting, hands folded against his chin, on the steps of the dais, watching her transformation.

The day is halfway done. It is a day that Scout City will remember for generations to come, for better or for worse. The day that the Quartet died. The day of the fire. The early winter. A day that would test Scout City’s soul and determine its direction in the age to come. A day that, looking back, mattered so much to the future.

The silk cocoon, attached to its pine bough, shakes and trembles furiously. Within, the caterpillar has fallen apart. It is all black ooze, shapeless, grotesque, fighting to reform into any shape at all. Not all Greater Ghostmoths make their evolution successfully. For some, the cocoon is destroyed, peeled open by a hungry predator. In other cases, it forms just slightly incorrectly, wings melded into its own body, legs contorted, and it never is able to free itself from its cocoon. It suffocates on the tree. Only time will tell, dreamer, whether this moth will peel itself free and spread its phosphorescent white wings and take flight.

Until this moment of time is unfrozen, and it all comes hurtling again in the rapid, unforgiving pace of the present, I am your loyal host Nikignik, waiting metamorphically for your return to the Hallowoods.

The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'A Stitch in Time' 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, there’s no harm in taking a day off. Stay in bed all day. Become one with your bedsheets. Slip in deeper and deeper until you become indistinguishable from the fabric, and gestate for long, dreamless hours. Who knows what will emerge when you are done.