HFTH - Episode 215 - Gravities

Content warnings for this episode include: Abuse (reference to), Animal death (a Hallowed Boar), Suicidal ideation (reference), Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Spiders, Strangulation/suffocation, Static (including sfx), Drowning, Body horror, Consumption of Inedible Materials (a Hallowed Boar), Smoking, Child Death (Little Mikey as usual)

Intro - The Sleeping Fear

You were once a black hole, swallowing everything you touched. From a drop of blood you were born, and all that you touched you became, and you grew until you were an ocean of flesh. You grieved the creatures you could not ever encounter without pulling them into your expanse, and you were lonely, for you were all that you knew. Until, one day, you touched a friend, and everything changed.

You wonder sometimes if you have lost yourself, but it is far more complicated and simple than that. You rarely raise your voice, because the voice of Mort is gentle and guiding and speaks for you all, for the multitude that you have become. And, more often than not, it is Mort’s friends and family that you are surrounded by, and it is best that you all present under his umbrella. But there is also that you are realizing your voice is born of sorrow, indomitable loneliness, and as you feel those things so rarely lately you simply have less to speak about.

It is frightening, at times, that once you were the sole voice of your oblivion, and now you are scarcely a whisper, sleeping in the subconscious with all the others. Stirring when needed, when a rise of panic, of desperation is called for, but otherwise the fear that you embody is so, so small in the vast warmth of Mort’s embracing friendship. You have lost control, or in many ways, you have found control for the first time.

You are your fear. Rizwana Mirza is your command. Evelyn Fry is your rebellion. Chancellor Ward is your magic. August Palls is your foresight. Ruth Esther Barnes is your wisdom. Cindy Lockheart is your resolution. Melvin is your violence, Boss your tenacity, Liv your curiosity. A thousand lives that you have claimed have become a thousand parts of you, but above them all, Mort is your kindness, and more often than not lately, you are kind.

And yet, as you perch on the shoreline, ebbing through the water like a black tide off the coast of France, watching the black shape of the Abbey Saint Loris, waiting for news from any of your friends, you begin to rise. A little fear. A little panic. A little soul-devouring worry that everything you loved has been obliterated. That kindness, that unwavering certainty that things will be alright, struggles to stay. A little longer. A little longer. And it misses the days when everyone was together, and the world seemed to be bright and full of beginnings, and there was a long walk with Apollyon through wild Ontario, and strange trees greeted you with a Hello From The Hallowoods.

Theme.

Right now, I am in my second-favorite place to be: the plane of dream. It is at all times near, and yet, only accessible to the slumbering, wandering mind, and all minds that dream are lights here. A single journeyer travels, in the brief minutes of battery life that her glasses have left. Her eyes are closed, but the sight that this dream affords her, she hopes, will help her see where her daughter has gone. Where she is going.

My favorite place to be is beside you, dreamer, stooped on the end of your bed as you fall deep into your nightmares. The theme of tonight’s episode is Gravities.

Story 1 - Three Percent

The dream was spectacular. That was to say, Brooklyn hated that she still, after all these years, thought it was spectacular. There was nothing like that otherworldly experience of leaving your body, of rising, of becoming connected to millions of dreaming minds across North America. And although she was crouched in the twilit dust in France, she was back, and she raced across Botco’s menus as fast as she could. The lithium batteries in her glasses only had three percent of their total power remaining, and on top of that, she was a woman laying unconscious next to a road in France, so she could not afford to dilly-dally much in dream or in reality. But thankfully, her glasses were still capable of creating the sleep impulse that was required to connect her with the Prime Dream. She did not bother to test her own logins—her considerable security clearance still might not have been high enough, and besides, it was guaranteed that her information would have been deleted when she fled the company with Marco in a runaway helicopter all those years ago.

No, she went straight to Lady Ethel Mallory’s. Username: MalloryE@botco.com. Password: #TheNewMonroe, capital T, N and M. Same as it always had been. And she was in. But to her surprise, she discovered that Lady Ethel’s clearance was actually higher than it had been before. Ethel’s clearance had been widesweeping, but nevertheless restricted compared to Oswald Biggs Botulus’ own, and even Anderson Faust’s as the chief technician on the Prime Dream. Now... she could see everything.

A monster with a thousand eyes, a thousand faces, a thousand hands. She was everywhere.

Two percent now, but her mind raced. She combed over to the Prime Dream’s administrator systems, and sure enough, there it was.

The big red button, as it had been referred to discreetly. In truth, it was the piece of equipment that projected the field that hosted the Prime Dream. It was not that without it, no dreaming visor or dreaming pod would work; it was just that the Prime Dream would go down, and they would all be disconnected. It would be possible to restore it, but not without putting every dreamer in the Botulus Corporation through the shock of disconnect.

The temptation was there, but she restrained herself. There was a certain population who would not survive a single disconnect from the Prime Dream. And ultimately, by now, the vast majority of people in the Prime Dream were those who either wanted to stay or needed to.

She withdrew from the Big Red Button, and began beelining towards her next destination, but her eye was caught by a feed of information. Dreaming Boxes across America were broadcasting a dreaming signal on a massive scale from the Botulus Corporation’s advertising feed. Probably every sleeping mind in America was seeing the same image, one that stopped Brooklyn cold, rose every hair on her sleeping body: a drone-mounted camera was following Lady Ethel Mallory as she hauled herself, huge and flaming and monstrous, across the sands of some distant place. A building collapsed into dust as she ploughed through it. Brooklyn was momentarily stunned, and horrified—she had thought Lady Ethel was a terrifying sight before, when she had merely been over ten feet tall and grey and boney and multi-eyed and bird-eating. But now she was almost a different creature entirely; her top half was much the same, and from that Brooklyn was able to identify her, but from her waist down she was a garbage-truck sized abdomen and legs, some broken, that stretched like the wings of a plane beyond that. Brooklyn had known Ethel was still alive, of course; rumor had long been that she had taken up residence in Box Polaris. But why she was fighting now, and who she was fighting against, and why the cameras were watching, Brooklyn was unsure.

Brooklyn was frozen, for a moment. But time was short. Out of curiosity, she opened the menu of operational Botco camera drones, and then from there scanned quickly for anomalies until she found what she was looking for: whereas most Dreaming Boxes only had a dozen drones or less operational at this point, fifty-six operational drones were concentrated in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

And fifty-four of them had operational lightguns.

A cursory glance revealed three other people being spied on with the cameras—a woman with a bob of curly brown hair and a checkered southern sun dress that Brooklyn did not recognize, and whose legs appeared to be filled with tiny, toothy mouths. A round, bald, red-cheeked man in a business suit with long tailcoats. And a woman with dark hair, a chef’s apron over her combat leathers, her outfit staccatoed with knives. None of them Brooklyn knew. But she had a choice to make, and there was no time. Was Oswald Biggs Botulus hunting her for sport? Was Lady Ethel broadcasting this on purpose? What could be the point?

Whatever it was, she knew, she might never know the ramifications of. She was, after all, half a world away.

Well, she thought. If I wasn’t fired already...

One percent battery remaining.

She selected the Botco camera drones in question, arranged in a great ring around Truth or Consequences, and without further hesitation, activated their combat protocols, and gave them a single target.

And then she moved on to the satellite feeds. Botco’s surveillance of the rest of the world, unbeknownst to anyone, had been quite extensive and flown under the radar in favor of more pressing political issues. She felt almost like Lady Ethel Mallory herself, multi-eyed and calculating, as she observed France from orbit through many, many eyes. The targeting assistance caught something curious before she delved further down—there was a single aircraft in the atmosphere above France, hovering. Possibly a weather balloon or something akin to it, but deeply curious. And then, she realized, it might be the Daedalus, the airship Dashiell was hunting down, the home of Olivier Song’s family. Interesting that it hadn’t left Europe after all, then.

But what concerned her more was down on the surface. She allowed the AI search function to comb through the satellite footage for anything moving; headlights on a road. There could only be so many vehicles driving in France.

And then she found them.

It was a large truck, metal-backed, old-fashioned. Roving down the winding country roads in the darkness. Hope was in that vehicle, she knew. They were already fifteen miles away. But Dashiell was not a fool, she knew. He would be heading toward something, not away from. And while fifteen miles seemed insurmountable on foot, if she knew where they were going, she could cut them off. She searched quickly, bringing up topographical layers, major landmarks, former institutions. Any major signs of human settlement, perhaps, as maybe he was headed somewhere like Abbey Saint Loris, a place where survivors gathered and might know more about where his daughter, Belladonna, had gone.

But then she saw it—exactly what he was heading for, and her heart froze.

And then she was awake, in the dim evening light, holding her dead glasses in her hands. She put them on—they were nothing more than simple corrective lenses now—and stood, looking out over the road away from the deadly olive orchard. As the sun faded, and the clouds overtook the sky, she began to run. It was all that she could do.

She could run thirty miles. It would take her all night, even if she did not get lost. She just needed them to stop when they got there. Please, she thought. Just rest, Dashiell. Give me time to reach you.

Her sprint did not last long; maybe thirty seconds before she was forced to slow to a steady jog, and she gasped for air. Sweat fell from her brow quickly, and she tore off her business jacket and threw it to the roadside, unbuttoned her shirt and rolled up her sleeves as she went to try and let her body breathe. She took off her glasses and tucked them into her waistband as she dashed down the dusty country road.

She could not remember the last time she had been forced to run, and she had never run so far at one time. She suffered, at first, but then she began to find a rhythm, like the beating of a drum. The pulse of her veins, the beat of her heart, the thrum of her feet on the soil. She lost herself, and let there be only the road, and her body, racing over it like a great predatory animal, and somewhere out there ahead of her, her daughter, growing closer with each thundering impact of her shoe upon the ground.

Interlude 1 - Aristocracy Notice

Attention to residents of France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic. If your village or township has traditionally held offerings to the Aristocracy, who descend from the sky once every few weeks to collect their tribute in exchange for your ongoing necessities such as rain or protection from evil, you may desist. Keep your tribute. Reserve your crops and livestock for yourselves. You will need them. The Aristocracy have not deigned to descend to the surface of Europe in months, and any rain that falls is only that which the earth yields naturally.

Where have the Aristocracy gone? Who could say, for who could profess to know the mind of the gods that reign over Europe? Some believe that they have abandoned humanity entirely; others that some arrogance has been committed by a neighboring country and prayers must be uttered to bring the Aristocracy back. All that is truly known is this: on very clear nights, when all the stars are out, a miniscule light blinks, high up, so small that it can scarcely be seen. And by this some are comforted that the gods of Europe are watching down over their people still.

We go now to one who does not know she is being watched.

Story 2 - Keys to the Sky

When Hope awoke, it was to the slam of the van door. She rubbed her face and sat up in the battered seat of the olive delivery truck. It was still dark out, and cold; her hands were almost numb. Dashiell’s coat had been thrown over her, which struck her as an odd gesture from him, and she could see him moving outside of the windshield. She sunk low in her seat again, and dived into the pockets. A sheaf of wrinkled papers that appeared to contain a map, a wallet, a pocketknife, found their way out of the coat’s inner compartments and into her hands, and she tucked them into her waistband beneath her sweater to inspect later. Dashiell’s revolver was not among the possessions stored in it, though. He must have kept that closer to chest.

Her door was pulled open, and she tried to act as natural as she could, as though she had just awakened.

“Where are we?” she said, laying it on thick with the grogginess. Hunger had burrowed down into her stomach again and was growling away as it snored, and a dusty thirst lingered in her throat.

“Get out,” Dashiell said.

“I can stay here and watch the truck,” Hope said, still unsure of what was happening.

“Suit yourself,” Dashiell said, and closed the door again. He was wearing his hat, and the sleeves of his sweat-stained dress shirt were rolled up. There was a slight hint of wildness in his demeanor that she had not detected back when they had first met at the Liberty City harbor. A twitch in his grizzled jaw, a hunter’s intensity in the grey eyes. He moved fast, like a caged animal searching for an exit. She watched him depart into the morning dark through the fogged windshield, and blinked. Suddenly she was aware that she was cold, and outside of the jar of black ooze that sat at her feet, she was alone. The keys were also missing from the ignition, so any hopes of commandeering the vehicle were gone.

“Good morning,” vibrated the voice of Mort from the jar of black sludge. “Where are we?”

“No idea,” said Hope. “But I guess we’ll find out.”

“We’re too far from the rest of the colony,” a voice said from the jar, although it lacked Mort’s signature rumbliness. “You don’t know what you’re doing and it’s all falling apart. If you like her so much just take her and we can go back to the ocean.”

“What?” said Hope quietly. “Mort?”

“Sorry,” Mort said. “We’re... I’m getting a little nervous. I hope we find your parents soon.”

“Yeah,” Hope said, and tapped on the glass reassuringly. “Me too.”

She scooped up the jar in her arms, although not without a little hesitation, and pulled the coat around her shoulders, sliding her arms into the too-long sleeves, and tied up the slack around her waist, and slid out of the truck. Dashiell didn’t care about leaving her behind, but whatever he was investigating, she wanted to be in on—and there might be food. There was certainly no more in the olive truck.

It was colder outside than it had been in the van, and she shivered within the baggy coat, holding Mort close. Dark fields stretched around them, wild tall grass wet with mist. They were parked next to a metal fence with bars six feet high and barbed wire coiled at the top. In front of the truck, fifteen feet away, was a gate. The gate seemed to have taken damage from something very large moving through it, as its metal bars were bent and splayed apart, and the gate sagged almost flat onto the road. At this point, the only thing it was keeping out was maybe the rabbits.

It was hard to make out what lay beyond the fence in the dark, but she could see a set of low stone buildings, decorated with ornate castle-like bricks and high, round windows. Antennas and satellite dishes clung to their roofs and stretched into the air. And there were objects, pale monoliths, stretching out across the flat wasteland of pavement beyond the fence. She recognized them only from picture-book illustrations.

Airplanes.

They varied in size, some only as large as the olive truck they had driven in on, some as large as a house. They seemed to be in various stages of disrepair, with wings collapsed or turned on their sides, fins poking into the air like long-dead fish.

But by now, Dashiell was making his way carefully over the fallen gate, and Hope hurried along after him, carrying the jar.

“Mister Spade?” she said. “What are we doing here?”

“Quiet,” he said, looking up to the airfield beyond. “Something took down this gate, and recently. It could still be here.”

Hope followed along, stepping through the gaps in the fallen gate.

“Do you think Belladonna is here?” Hope whispered, needling for information.

Dashiell had no response to that as he came to the end of the fallen gate, and scoped out the low, decorated stone buildings beyond.

“I’m going to assume yes,” she said. “Why would she go to a place with planes?”

“I’m confident that she came here after the abbey,” said Dashiell. “And the Daedalus is an airship.”

Hope was not certain what an airship was, but she pictured the cargo ship they had travelled on, sailing through the clouds. And suddenly she had a sinking feeling.

“And we’re at this place with all these planes because...”

“They probably have a radio that can get in contact with it,” Dashiell said. Hope’s sinking feeling lifted.

“Right,” she said. “Cool. Yeah they probably do.”

“And if they don’t,” Dashiell said, “then I might be able to get one of these wrecks off the ground.”

The sinking feeling came back in force.

“Are you sure,” Hope said, following him off the gate and into the yard. It was a quick jaunt across the open pavement and grass to the buildings. “That she actually wants you to find her?”

“Probably not,” said Dashiell, as they came to a stop beside a thick wooden door that led into one of the stone buildings. “I don’t care.”

“It seems like it would be a lot of effort to get to her if she didn’t want to talk to you once you did,” Hope said.

“Listen,” said Dashiell, sizing up the door and the round windows, a little too high to reach. “We didn’t say goodbye. Nothing. She just... left. I have to say goodbye, at least. Make sure she’s alright. And if we can work something out, great. If not, then at least I have that, and we can move on with our lives. I can’t let her go through life thinking that I didn’t care. That I wasn’t willing to fix things. She... she never gave me the chance.”

Hope wondered if either of her parents had survived the explosion at Abbey Saint Loris, when the darkness of the chapel came thundering out into the open. And if they would be looking for her, and how far they would go. They, too, had not gotten to say goodbye.

Dashiell tried the door handle, and found it locked.

“In my coat,” he said, gesturing down to her. “There’s a wallet.”

Hope flinched. It wasn’t in the coat, at this point, but tucked in her waistband behind her back. She thought about how to stretch and reach so as to pass it safely from one spot to the next, but in that moment there was a horrible scream that echoed from somewhere beyond them, and as Dashiell looked up, she took the wallet out quickly.

“Stay close,” Dashiell said, and his revolver was immediately in his hand from the holster he wore on his vest. He took the wallet from her hand, seemingly without noticing, and removed a thin golden tool from it. “This is a lockpick. You use the pointed end to press down on the locking pins inside of the keyhole. Very gently. Try it while I see what we’re dealing with.”

Hope took the tool, and knelt beside the door handle, and slid the tool inside. It was funny that he thought she didn’t know how to pick locks. She’d picked up all sorts of tricks while on eternal watch duty for her parents. How else were you supposed to get into all the useful places? Or get the evidence they needed while her parents kept the suspect busy talking?

The horrible scream echoed again—it sounded like the shrieks of three women at once, opening and closing one mouth and three throats—and the pavement shook beneath Hope’s feet. Dashiell braced himself for a moment, then peeked out from behind their building, then pulled back.

“What is it?” Hope said. Four pins had gone down quietly. The fifth was being a bit finicky.

“Ugly,” Dashiell said. “And coming this way.”

Then something at least as big as the olive truck thundered past their building, a huge black shadow, and as it scraped across the gravel and wheeled around, Hope got a look at its ugliness for herself.

It was a boar, of sorts. It had more than four legs; bundles of them sprouted from beneath the boar in branchy, bent formations, terminating in twisted hooves. Tusks, equally numerous, corkscrewed from its mouth, and its eyes were small and white and multifarious. Its huge, broad head reminded Hope of a battering ram or a plow, and almost immediately, it screamed again with that awful three-tone shriek and began charging in their direction.

“Shit,” said Dashiell. “Scatter!”

Dashiell took off to one side, but as Hope felt the lock click open, she pressed against the door and pulled the handle. She fell inside the building, and kicked the door shut behind her, and did not bother to lock it again as she backed away as fast as she could, barely noticing the room around her—coathooks and chairs, desks with large tables of equipment, headphones and microphones. It was just as well that she did not linger; she had barely thrown herself halfway across the dark control room when the door, and much of the wall surrounding it, exploded into rubble. She screamed as spears of wood and fist-sized chunks of stone hurtled around her, one wood splinter flying into her forearm, and she fell against the stone floor. She nearly dropped Mort’s jar, but carried it further back as she kept kicking back. She could see the massive face of the boar now, pressed against the opening it had smashed in the rock, champing with its tusks as it struggled to get any further in after her. But for a moment, it seemed stuck where it was; its great head was wedged in the splintered doorway, and it could neither push further nor pull itself back out.

There was another door at the end of this room, unlocked, that cut the small building in half, and Hope went through it, slamming it behind her. This door had a glass window with a wire mesh, and through it she watched the boar, whose shaking and struggling ceased. But then something hard to see was happening, and she rubbed the glass to get the fog of her own breath off of it. She was pretty sure that the boar’s head was still there, poking in through the shattered door, but its jaws were no longer champing. It was as if the lower jaw had fallen down to the floor and split into several long tentacles each tipped with a collection of tusks, and the jaw-tentacles were snaking their way across the floor towards her door as the boar sniffed and snorted.

Neither was she alone in the room.

“Espèce d'idiote!” gasped a voice behind her, and she looked back to find that there was a person in here with her; she could only see a little by the dim dawn light that filtered in through the high window. He was slumped against the back brick wall, between two shelves of cabinets stacked with papers and yellow envelopes. His hands were bloodstained, and he clutched a gaping red hole in his stomach where he seemed to have been gored open. He was older, maybe sixty, with a wispy grey mustache, and aviation goggles around his neck.

“Sorry,” Hope said, and yanked a chair quickly in front of the door, braced it under the handle. It was just in time for an impact to shake the door; the boar-tentacles were thrashing against it.

Hope backed away and took stock of her surroundings. There was only a high window, small, and filled with glass. It did not look like it opened, so it would be very difficult to try and escape through. There was the bleeding Frenchman. And there were the shelves, which were too huge and heavy for her to drag against the door. There was a table back here, too, with another control panel and endless little dials with illegible labels.

There was a bang from the door, and she looked up to find that one of the tusk-ended tentacles had skewered through the metal. The tusk corkscrewed back out, leaving a jagged hole in the door.

“Hey,” said the jar, and she looked down. “Hope?”

“Mort?” she said.

“Yeah,” it said, although its voice was different in pitch than Mort’s usual rumble. “Sure, it’s Mort. Listen. There’s something we can do here. Just throw me towards the thing, alright? I can help.”

“Are you sure?” said Hope, and screamed as glass exploded into the room then; two of the tusk-tipped tentacles had collided with the window. The wire mesh that had been within the glass held them at bay for a moment, bouncing in the air, but then the tusks began to twist through the grate, tearing the wire apart. Hope did not wait for a second confirmation, then; she unscrewed the lid to the large glass jar, and flung it towards the door.

The black ooze that was Mort cascaded out of the jar like paint, splattering the wire grate and the tusks. And just as quickly, it was in motion, peeling itself off of the flat surfaces, travelling up, into the room with the boar, flying in droplets to blanket the tusks. The tusks and tentacles retracted, and she could catch a glimpse of the boar poised in the room beyond, ready to throw another deadly volley of tusk from its jaws towards her.

It never came.

She slowly crept from the back of the room towards the shattered window, looking out as the boar began to shriek again, and writhe, jaw-tentacles twitching in long snaky paths across the floor. Slowly but surely, the glistening dark color of its flesh was consumed by the obsidian pitch-black of Mort, and its jaw-tentacles grew languid and eventually formless, leaving black trails across the ground like paintbrushes as they splashed about. Finally, the consuming ooziness leapt from the boar’s tentacles to its face, clambering over its jaw in a mucus film, and almost as quickly the hair and skin was gone, and slowly the pale white bones of the boar became apparent within the mass. And in moments, there was no boar at all, just a boar-sized heap of black sludge and drifting bones poised in the doorway.

“Mort?” said Hope. “Is that still you?”

“Yeah,” said Mort, and the voice was the same familiar one that she had become accustomed to. “It is.”

She turned back to the man, hoping to try and communicate something about the radio, but found that he was dead, or sleeping at least. An object sat in his upturned, bloody palm. A pair of keys. And she knew, instinctively and immediately, what they were for.

Marketing - Battle Begins

Lady Ethel Mallory

This is the spot, I think. Look at this—this intersection is going to have all three of them approaching from one of two streets. I think this is a church I’m poised on top of.

sound of a ringing churchbell

You hear that, Otis? Mandy? Dinah? This is your doom! Come and get it! We’ll have a fair fight. And...

Rupert?

Something is wrong. There are lights in the sky.

My lights.

My drones. They’re supposed to form a perimeter around Truth or Consequences. Rupert?

Rupert

I’m sorry, my lady. There appears to have been some malfeasance—I cannot get control of them—

Lady Ethel Mallory

What do you mean, you can’t get control of them? I’m supposed to have control. But I’m issuing commands that are doing nothing. Rupert, they’re right on me now. They’re...

sound of lightguns firing

Lady Ethel Mallory

Agh! I’m... agh, stop it! It burns, Rupert! It...

Story 2, Continued - Keys to the Sky

What Lady Ethel Mallory was trying to say, before she was so rudely interrupted by this broadcast, is that while bazooka might not excel at cutting through her exoskeleton, the laser-light flashes from the lightguns of Botco security drones is more than capable of doing so. The smell, of course, is ghastly. And while she does have eight legs, and many small limbs, and the ability to cast long black webs to snare drones out of the sky, there are fifty-four of them.

We return now to Hope Torres-Williams.

“Hope?” Dashiell called from outside the control house. “You alive?”

“Yeah,” Hope said, watching the dead body of the French pilot. “I’m okay.”

She pushed the shattered door carefully back, and had to kick it a few times to really get it open. Beyond it, she could see Dashiell standing in the doorway to the building, and beyond in the field, the huge black shape of the boar—now gone from a black-furred animal to a smooth, shiny black surface, like liquid ink. Hope made her way across the room’s floor of broken tile and shattered glass, and pushed past Dashiell to follow the boar out onto the field.

“Mort?” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” said Mort, tilting his new boarlike head. There were no white eyes or yellow tusks, now; just their black silhouettes in his oozy surface. “I remember lots. I—we—the boar, ate a lot of people here. They were running. Trying to hide.”

“What exactly are you?” called Dashiell, revolver pointed in Mort’s direction, hands shaking. Hope noted that she had not heard his gun fire during the conflict.

“I’m Mort,” said Mort. “And now I’m a boar. And I’m lots of other things. And things that I touch, I can make part of me. Their bodies and their memories.”

“Speaking of bodies,” said Hope, nodding back to the dark room. “Can you tell me anything about that guy?”

“I can,” Mort said hesitantly, and a long lash of goop flung out from his form, connecting with the chest of the dead man, and dragged him across the floor until he was pulled into Mort’s body, which grew that much more. Dashiell and Hope watched expectantly as the great boar oozed and trembled for a moment.

“His name was Raphael,” said Mort. “He lived here for years and years. He kept planes running. For a high price he would fly people to different parts of Europe. There were families here, at this airfield. Then the boar came. It wrecked everything. Ate a lot of them. Tasted good. Wait, that one’s not his.”

“Belladonna,” whispered Dashiell, pale and quite still. He cleared his throat. “Did he ever meet someone named Belladonna?”

“Yeah,” Mort rumbled. “Months ago. He let her use the radio. And half an hour after that, the sky opened. A ship came down. A big balloon.”

“Mort, can you remember how to use the radio?” Dashiell said. “Exactly the same way this Raphael did for Belladonna.”

Hope stepped to the side as tendrils slid off from Mort’s mass, slithering through the air to the dials and levers of the radio, and flicked the devices on, twisted knobs, and little green lights began to shine throughout the dashboard. Then Mort’s tendrils retracted, falling back into his surface until he was huge and smooth again. The skull of the boar, sockets twisted into the bone, drifted beneath the black surface.

“I didn’t know you could do all this,” Hope muttered to Mort, as she came to stand beside him; Dashiell moved for the controls.

“I don’t like to,” said Mort in a low way. “Once things end up in here, they never go back out.”

“Hailing the Daedalus. Hailing the Daedalus. Please respond. Over,” said Dashiell, pressing the button on the microphone. “Daedalus, please respond.”

A faint static poured from the speakers, but after a few seconds, there was no response.

“Daedalus, please come in. I have urgent news. Over,” Dashiell tried again.

“What’s your urgent news?” said Hope.

“I just need them on the line,” said Dashiell. “Anything to get them to respond. Mort, you’re sure this is the right channel?”

“Yeah,” said Mort. “I remember.”

“Daedalus, do you copy,” said Dashiell, and waited again, a long minute. Finally, he sighed, and gripped the edge of the table.

“So now what?” said Hope. “We could look around for some breakfast maybe.”

“If Belladonna is up there,” said Dashiell, pointing up at the roof, and at the dark dawn sky beyond it. “Then I’m going to follow.”

Hope nodded, and looked back to the controls to avoid eye contact.

“How do you plan to do that, exactly?” she said. “Since it’s an airship... and I’m guessing that means it’s in the sky.”

“If this Raphael kept a plane in working order,” Dashiell said, “then it’s got to be here. Hopefully it’s still in that shape, and no one has stolen it. Otherwise, I’ll have to see if I can get one of the others on the tarmac into flying shape.”

“That sounds like it’ll take time,” said Hope.

“Probably,” said Dashiell, and turned, slamming the headset back down on the desk and walking out of the control room.

Once he was outside, Hope put her hands against the desk.

If her parents had survived—and oh, what a hopeful, stupid ‘if’—she was already a long way away from them, and she hadn’t left much of a way to find her. But going into the air really would be the end of the trail. Of any hope that they could come find her, rescue her.

But if her parents were dead, or taken by the darkness, or knocked unconscious by the collapsing abbey and drowned in the Atlantic—then there were only two paths left for her. The first was to stay behind while Dashiell went for the sky, and fend for herself in a broken airfield. And she knew, if France was anything like the forest she had grown up in, that the boar was hardly going to be a unique specimen of wildlife. It would be something new tomorrow, and the day after that. And she would be alone, except for Mort, who was being increasingly weird.

The other path was into the sky. And Hope had certainly never been in a plane. She looked down at the keys in her hands.

“What have you got there?” Mort said, surprising her, and she jumped. Outside, she could see Dashiell doing a circle around one of the planes parked on the concrete, a work of smooth glass and white metal. She suspected it was the working one; most of the others she could see had flat wheels or were missing wings or panelling. She looked up to the huge, rippling face of the Mort-boar.

“I think I have the keys to that plane,” she whispered. “I don’t know what to do. I think I should go with Dashiell. But my parents...”

She faltered, and looked to the plane, and back to Mort.

“You know how you split off from the big Mort?” she said. “Are you able to do that again? I don’t know if all of you will fit in the plane.”

“I could,” said Mort slowly. “But I don’t want to. I am Mort, but also, I am everything else that I’ve absorbed. I am Raphael. I am the boar. I am... other things. A lot of other things. I was just enough Mort for the amount of me that was with you; now I’m... struggling. If I split off again, there won’t be much Mort in there at all. And the rest of me isn’t always as safe to be around.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You shouldn’t have taken the boar. We could have found a way...”

“Go with Dashiell,” said Mort. “I’ll stay here. And I can look for your parents. If I find them, I can let them know.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and thought about hugging his huge boar head—after all, she remembered being carried by Mort in past times—but decided against it, and then went running after Dashiell towards the tarmac.

“I found these,” she said, keys in her hand. “By the dead guy. I think he dropped them.”

A look crossed Dashiell’s face as she produced them—a deep fear, a scouring hopelessness, shifted into something solid. A plan of action. For a moment, the man, grizzled and scarred and battered, seemed happy, overjoyed. And the next moment, he was his usual serious self.

“You’re amazing, Hope,” he said, taking the keys. “Good eye. If I’d been half as capable at your age, I probably would have turned the world upside down. Instead of just my life.”

“It’s... fine,” she said. “So... does that mean we’re going to fly?”

“It means we’re going to try,” Dashiell said, unlocking the door to the plane with the keys. “And if we can get this antique off the ground, well. I have a bad feeling if the ooze is right, that Belladonna was taken by the Daedalus. That she’s still up there. And we’re going to get her back.”

Interlude 2 - In Much the Same Way

What goes up, dreamer, must come down. Stars flare to life that must one day burn out. Planets are spun into existence that must at some time fling themselves back into dust. And living beings rise, and reach their zenith, and dwindle again into fallen and twisted shapes before they return to the soil.

These lessons you should be well aware of, dreamer. You watch stars blink on and off from your vantage point in the cosmos. You can see from your sky planets being born and those siphoned into destruction. And the very earth beneath your feet is rife with the bones of the beings who have ruled the earth before you.

What were they destroyed by, dreamer? Plague and the change of climate and impacts from celestial bodies? Are you immune to these things?

No, the means of your expiration have already made themselves clear. It is to be death by disintegration. Your species will evolve at incredible speed until it no longer resembles its old form, and splinter into a thousand new shapes, and like all your earth, become part of a green dawn for the Earth. Nowhere is the change more profound on earth than in the Hallowoods, but all across your world now it is known.

But even though you fall, dreamer, as all things must—is there no comfort to be found in that? Your path is well-trod, and the footsteps carved out ahead in the soil. And just as dead planets vanish into an event horizon and forever change the orbit of what remains, and stars collapse into brilliant supernovas, and the fossils of primordial life have become your delight to study and learn from, you will be known long after you are gone, and the life that comes after you will look back with wonder and curiosity at all that you built. They will wonder, very much, if you were like them. If you laughed, and cried, and loved, in much the same way. And the answer is that you were, and you did, all the way to the end.

We go now to one who is face to face with the ending.

Story 3 - Dreams of Oblivion

Buck sat on a waterlogged pier, mossy and rotting, that stretched out over the surface of the water. The water was not clear, but rather its surface ebbed with iridescent oils, floating miasmas of weed and moss, and beneath it was a deep black expanse. He leaned out to study his reflection—his face in the rippling water was at times young and scrawny, at times older and wrinkled. He reached out his hand curiously towards the surface.

Quite suddenly, a hand reached up from the water—weed-encrusted and decrepit—and seized his wrist, before he could pull away. Its skeletal fingers sunk deep into his skin, and a head of wet blond hair, bog-blackened skin, and ember-green eyes rose.

“Let me go!” Buck cried, trying to pull back; the fingers of the revenant pulled so tight they cut.

“Oh come on, you really thought you could get away?” said Rick Rounds, yanking him over the edge of the dock. Rick was held up by other forms beneath the water—Little Mikey, with his shaven head and wide burning eyes, and a dozen more beneath them, towering down into the depths, a scaffold holding Rick Rounds up to the surface. And then Rick pulled, and Buck came sliding free of the dock, and hit the water with a splash.

Buck was submerged, and the black water filled his lungs like bile as he struggled against the sinking weight of his own body. But he was not choking; indeed, he could breath just fine. And around him, Rick and the ghoulish drowned boys were completely gone. Instead, there was a being in front of him, hanging in the water. He knew it to be his own skeleton, one crooked leg and all. Particles of flesh and lakeweed wreathed his bones; his ribcage was a home for a clutch of frog eggs. Twin green flames burned in his eyes, and he wore a wreath of pine boughs over his head, needles pulled this way and that by the tide. His skeletal jaw creaked open.

“And even now, in the valley of the shadow of death,” his skeleton said, although the preacher-like voice belonged to Bob Wicker. “When the veil of death itself has touched thee, do not fear, nor tremble. For I am with you. The purifying rain of my presence thou hast drank, and thy salvation hath been assured long ago. In thy veins and vessels, I am. In thy heart and mind, I am. I am the water in thine eyes and the sweat upon thy brow. And as thee stare into the face of eternity, and feel his presence brush past thee, and he doth quicken your heart to terror, know that even in thy darkness I am with thee. And I shall give thee eyes to see when all light is gone, and illuminate thy path with my heavenly fire.”

“Thank you, father,” said Buck to his own skeleton. “I take your blessings with thankfulness.”

“Have thee regrets?” said the bones.

“I have none,” said Buck. “I have loved a man and a woman, and loved them well. I have strove to bring justice to those who could not secure it for themselves. I have left behind in my place a faithful student, Clementine, to watch over Scout City. I sailed the ocean and I travelled the world. I have forgiven those who have wronged me, and the hurt they caused is long healed. I regret only that I was unable to stop the Saint Loris. Unable to save the ones I loved. Unable to save myself.”

“No one can ever save themselves,” said his skeleton, and reached out to touch his chin, and turned his gaze up, back up towards the surface. He would have expected the underside of the water to be a mirror, but it was smooth, black. A nothingness. And Buck was rising towards it, and fell into it.

He found himself standing, completely undrenched, in a round stone chamber that seemed to have no entrance or exit. It was a low ceiling, a little taller in the middle, and odd brickwork formed the walls in mosaics of dark tile that stretched from floor to ceiling. In the center of the spiral, a wet white lump was lying naked, head shaved, emaciated spine jutting from her back. It took him a moment to recognize the deathly figure as the Saint Loris, curled up in the fetal position.

“Loris?” he said, sliding a few steps closer down the tiles. “Are you alright?”

She was shuddering, but as he came close, she went still. He peered over her body, trying to examine her face, and her head snapped up to face him suddenly, at an off angle from the rest of her. Her eyes and mouth were gone; only black holes, tiled like the room itself, stretched down infinitely into her skull, and from them issued a howling torrent that stripped the flesh from his bones...

And there was darkness. He floated among the stars, out in an infinite black universe, far, far away from any world or creature or semblance of life. The distant glimmering white points of stars surrounded him, watched him, serenaded him.

One went dark.

Then another.

Then dozens, in languid patterns, leaping from one point of light to the next, expanding the limitless darkness. Faster and faster the darkness swelled, and the stars became scarce and faint, and then began to dwindle into numbers he could count. A thousand. A hundred. Twenty. Ten.

One star, one final point of light, breathed out and was gone.

“Hello,” said Buck. “Who’s there?”

There was no answer.

“Is this all there is?” said Buck. “Is this what you want?”

The darkness said nothing.

“I know you,” said Buck. “I have known oblivion.”

The darkness, then, was not all-encompassing; a night sky, and he stood on a plane of obsidian beneath it. But he was not alone now; someone stood beside him, shorter by a bit, wearing a yellow jacket bedecked with patches and smoking a cigarette.

“Yeah,” Clementine said, and breathed out smoke that rose into the black expanse of heaven. “Oblivion isn’t so bad once you get used to it.”

“I have to believe that oblivion is not particularly bad, or good,” Buck said, measured. “It is just an absence, isn’t it? And we, we feel that an absence is evil because we only know what lies in the light. That neutrality means the end for us, and all the things we hope and care and dream about.”

Clementine nodded, and breathed out smoke again, watching him from the side of her eye. “You trying to kid yourself?”

“No,” he said watching her, and he put his hands together on his cane, and tapped it on the obsidian stone. “I’m saying that I understand. You’re not evil. Not on purpose. It’s just your nature versus us. Your nature versus mine. Darkness and light.”

“If you were capable of truly seeing things that way,” Clementine said, turning away from him, and she began to walk away. “You’d be the first. You’ve got a lot of nice words to bury the fear under. But you can’t hide behind that. Not when it matters.”

“I’m not trying to hide,” said Buck, stepping quickly across the obsidian plane to follow after her. “Truly. I am just trying to understand you.”

Clementine whirled on him, then, and she was dangerously close, and her eyes were devoid of all color.

“Then,” she said, with a sharp-toothed snarl, “understand me.”

Her hand lunged for his face, and he then, finally, understood.

His eyes blinked open to find that he was staring into a great golden eye, a row of teeth. Things were blurry; faded in and out as they moved. He knew that eye, those teeth. He could hear Marco’s voice somewhere nearby.

“Marco?” he said, although his words came out faintly. “I understand now.”

“You’re sure?” Marco said, and Buck registered that Marco’s large muscular hands were at his waist, lifting him. He felt his limp hands in thick fur, and held on to two fistfuls. “Just hold on, okay? Yaretzi found us. We’re going back to her friends, and from there we can get you help.”

Buck looked to the sky, head tilting back of its own accord as he was placed on the great wolf Yaretzi’s back, and Marco clambered up after him. A blood-red dawn was beginning to shine, and only a single star was left to be seen.

“Marco,” he tried again, feeling himself lurch forward, and Marco’s arm scooped around him to hold him upright. “It’s not the only one. It just looks that way from here.”

Marco said nothing, only held Buck tight against him as the great wolf rose beneath them, and began to pad quickly across a landscape of sloped grassy fields. Morning mist ebbed on all sides past them.

“Please be alright,” Marco muttered quietly. And then, louder, “Yaretzi, do you think your friends will be able to help him?”

“If anyone can,” growled the wolf beneath them; her voice reverberated through Buck’s whole body.

“Ahead,” whispered Buck. “Careful.”

“Just hold on now,” said Marco, ignoring him. Buck tried to muster the strength to speak again, but the slowing of Yaretzi’s running told him that it was already too late.

“Hang on!” Yaretzi barked, and jolted sideways as a sheet of pure nothingness rolled across the fields like paint running down a wall. Her paws were barely outpacing the spreading dark, and as Buck watched the golden grass vanish on either side of them, he looked over Marco’s arm behind them.

The fields were overtaken by shadow, blanketing the shapes of grass and weed and bush, turning them into a pitch-black expanse that held only their silhouettes. And there, out in the fields, shepherding the shadow, was she.

The Saint Loris.

Her body was smooth, featureless, porcelain. A black halo was suspended over her head, and it was adorned with tiny porcelain bones; the ribs of sparrows. Her own ribcage was exposed, and at first he thought she had porcelain ribs herself, on the outside, but on further inspection it was clear that they were each tiny porcelain arms, tipped with two-fingered claws, and her porcelain ribs rattled and reached for him like the manifold mandibles of a crustacean, beckoning him into an inner darkness. She had no other arms, but her legs were smooth, naked, porcelain also, broken black joints at the knees, and they trailed down to meet where her two porcelain feet were nailed together with the same twisted black nail. She hovered, armless and crucified, several feet off the ground, but the shadow that poured from her wounds spread across the ground in long black pools. A sword of pure shadow hovered near her, and as quickly as light itself, it came racing for them.

“I’m sorry,” Buck whispered to her, and he twisted past Marco to raise an arm towards the oncoming blade, and he closed his eyes.

I understand, he thought. I know oblivion. I have begged for it many times. I have woken up a thousand days of my life without hope for my life, for another day of living. I have wished for nothingness to take me again, and again. And I know that one day it shall.

But not today.

Not yet.

I have wished too long for this. The love that I have, and the family I have found, and the people I can save.

Let me have my time.

When he opened his eyes again, he found the blade of shadow frozen in the air, growing farther away with each leap and bound as Yaretzi carried them. And he looked back to the Saint Loris, necrotic and hovering. And tears fell from his face as he turned, then, and looked away from the darkness towards the light of the fields ahead of them. Yaretzi’s paws danced a furious dance across the fields, racing the border of the all-consuming dark, and carried them fast for safety, and for the Bellevue Hostel, and for the dawn light.

Outro - Gravities

Gravities. You have lived your entire life, dreamer, tethered to your world. If you wish to understand why it is that the large things in the universe must draw everything else towards them, take it up with Olbsalolb, Master of Matters, and he will no doubt talk until your remaining lifespan is exhausted. But it is unavoidable, each day that you rise, that you must rise at all, and brace yourself against the very force of your world pulling you down.

You do this for many forces, dreamer. Forces of cosmic importance leveraging their power upon your life and your world. Forces of nature, huge and inalterable, forcing you to adapt to change. Forces of politic and violence and unrest, turning your fellow human beings into enemies. Just as against gravity, dreamer, when you choose to rise in the morning, you rise against it all.

And just as your planet’s pull does not stop you from continuing to wake, let not any power stop you from doing what you must as a living thing upon your world: to, despite everything, live one more day. To pursue all that you love, all that inspires you, as though there was no darkness. As though it were not ending. As though every day was the most meaningful day you would ever have, because it is. And to ignore, until the sun goes down, the forces pulling you down, inevitably, again, to stillness.

Until the apple falls far from the tree, I am your loyal host, Nikignik, waiting gravitically for your return to the Hallowoods.

The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Slice' 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, if you find yourself alone in a space station, the answer is yes, you are alone. Proceed with your plan to return to the Earth, and do not talk to ghosts in or out of the spacecraft.