Content warnings for this episode include: Animal death (many dead birds, Shank as usual), Suicidal ideation, Violence, Death + Injury, Blood, Birds, Strangulation/suffocation, Emotional Manipulation, Spiders, Bugs, Body horror, Life Support, Brain Death/Coma
The Interrogation - We Spoke
Auditor
Did you speak with him?
…Did you speak with him?
Nikignik
Yes.
Auditor
Elaborate.
Nikignik
He was almost ready to emerge. The heart was designed to resuscitate him free of interruption from myself or Syrensyr. He allowed me to detect him, as the hour drew near. To speak before his waking.
Story 1 - Hope and the Black Fog
The trick to getting to explore on your own was not to ask for permission. If you asked, ‘can I please go out and wander the decks of this rusty cruise ship looking for the man-eating monster’, your parents were prone to say ‘no’ or ‘we’re suspicious now that you asked, don’t expect to be let out of our sight for the rest of the trip young lady’. Whereas if you waited until they had all diverted their attention elsewhere and then slipped out, half the time you would be back before they even noticed. And the other half of the time, it was more fun to ask forgiveness than permission.
This line of thought led Hope J. Torres-Williams to stalk the deck of the East Wind by herself. Darkness never truly fell on the ship; bright electric lamps kept the deck lit like the daytime at all hours of the night, with only the occasional flicker. She lurked in what pools of shadow she could find, waited for the night watchmen to drift by her hiding places before moving on. There were twice as many of them as there had been the night before; increased security, no doubt. Or increased dinner opportunities for the thing that was haunting the ship.
Buck loved to get caught up in lengthy conversations and monologues, and Marco’s eyes were usually on whoever was nearest and most dangerous, and Brooklyn had her clipboards and notes to take, which meant that there was no one to watch the rest of the world. That was her job. And she scrambled up across the roof of one of the shipping container cabins, ascended a rusty little ladder, and pulled herself up to a perch that sat between two larger stacks of crates and had a nice vantage point of the deck for hundreds of feet in both directions. She took off her backpack, making sure that the plush Nighty’s head and antlers poked out only, and removed one of her treasured possessions from it, a pair of large binoculars with a cracked lens.
With them she could make out the bad-smelling cigarettes that the night watchmen were lighting in cupped hands by the front of the deck, the mustache of the one drifting back across the rear.
Something traveled past her view as she watched him; a smudge in the air. She lowered her binoculars and scrubbed at the lens with her sleeve and went to look again, but he was even more blurrily obscured. She used her eyes instead, and found with those that a fog had begun to drift across the deck in curling wisps—the sky above was full of grey clouds that encircled the moon, but the fog seeping across the ship was black as smoke from a pyre. She held her backpack close as she watched the atmosphere darken around her, until in the billowing waves of darkness she could not see the deck at all.
A few emotions conflicted—wanting to make it back to her parents’ cabin as quickly as possible, and wanting to stay here in her hiding spot and wait until this fast-arriving darkness passed, and wanting to see anything that could help in the case. And Hope was not a coward.
She slipped down from her perch in the stack of crates, descended one clambering drop at a time until her small boots hit the deck. Down here, in the midst of the black-hued fog, she could only make out the shapes of the crates and rails and equipment around her, marked in silhouette. The roiling shadow overpowered the lights of the deck, suffocated their flickering eyes.
She did not see it; only felt it. The hair raise on the back of her neck, a shudder run down her breakable spine. And she dropped to the deck just as something sailed out of the fog over her, like a great bird of prey. She could imagine claws just missing her as she fell.
In the fog, she could only make out its outline thirty feet down on the deck as it landed—legs, yes, but from the waist up a confusing torment of shapes, twisted triangles of spined wings and other limbs folding in one crackling rustle at a time as it contorted into something resembling a human shape. And its head jerked up in her direction, and she scrambled to her feet, began to run backwards.
The dark fog enveloped the deck, and made it hard to see exactly where she was running as she dashed across the metal grates, putting out her hands to feel for the side of the wall of shipping containers or the railing of the deck, and briefly could not feel either, felt that she was falling, and then she was yanked off her feet entirely as something got a hold of her backpack and dragged her across the deck.
She kicked, but did not scream; or if she did, she could not hear herself. The fog suffocated sound as much as it did light. And then all was still, and she could hear her own gasping breath, and the sound of a match striking. The spark of flame illuminated the wrinkled, bristly face and glinting headwear of the Humble Boot, and he used it to light a candle in a little brass dish, set it between them like the world’s smallest campfire.
“The mists of doom is a bad place for a child to be playing,” he said. “If I hadn’t pulled you in here when I did you might have been boot leather.”
“I was on a case,” she said. “What was that?”
“You don’t know?” said the Humble Boot. Glancing around, Hope could see that his shipping container was mostly filled with open steamer trunks, each of which contained an assortment of potted plants and various onions and herbs. “The face of evil. Those who have obtained their boots through dark and terrible bargains. An assassin, sent to kill me, no doubt, to make sure that I never reach Europe.”
Hope and the Humble Boot both looked over to the doors of the shipping container as footsteps, nearly silent, came to stand in front of it, and the Humble Boot crossed himself and his boot. Neither of them dared to breathe a moment. And then the presence passed, and a sliver of light returned to sit beneath the door.
“It flew,” said Hope. “It made that fog, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” breathed the Humble Boot. “That’s what vampires do.”
Story 2 - The Mallory Dream
Clem considered herself hard to shake. Her job required that she felt as little as she could. And yet, when she beheld the massive silver angles of Box Polaris sitting in its crater in the titanic woods, it reminded her of exactly who she had been, where she had been, the last time that she had stood outside of a Dreaming Box.
The silver panels of that great cube did not reflect the sky as clearly as they once had—the metal was tarnished, patches of rust and green moss crawling up the sheer sides untended. She was not sure it comforted her that even the Botulus Corporation’s sterile dreaming crypts were not free of the decay that filled the Hallowoods.
“Stay here. I’ll radio in when I have some news,” Valerie called to the rest of her Scout regiment, who manned the two forest crawlers they had taken down here. Those haphazard treaded vehicles were about the only thing that could navigate well over the nest of giant roots these days, and they ran on some potent biofuel that Milo had cooked up, in the absence of a steady supply of solar panels and the complete lack of gasoline that had been making its way north lately.
Valerie went to help Clem down from the doorless seat, but Clem dropped her one functioning leg to the ground, and hoisted a crutch to use instead. She was not sure if it might have been one of Danielle’s very own, once upon a time. The idea brought her some comfort.
“It will be okay,” said Valerie. Clem turned to look at her, but had no words to refute such a hopeless lie. She shook her head and began shuffling forward angrily, one step and swing of the crutch at a time. Box Polaris was hundreds of feet high, and it sat in a crater of ash in the forest, ringed by a heap of bones that stretched out on either side of her, and she paused for a moment at the edge of it, wondering how to get over without accidentally crunching any tiny bird skeletons.
“Let me help you,” Valerie said, coming up beside her, but Clem hurried that much faster, shouldered her away, and swung herself over the line of bones, and as she did, Box Polaris awakened. Its front surface was a huge distorted mirror, hundreds of feet high and perfectly square, and within the glass a glowing eye began to burn, seething with heat.
“Ethel!” Valerie screamed, and raised her hands, waving. “It’s me! It’s Valerie. We need to talk!”
The laser-powered eye of Box Polaris burned red-hot beneath its mirrored surface, watching them both, and for a moment Clementine thought it would be hilarious if she died not from crumbling apart like a pencil eraser, but instead getting zapped into oblivion because her mom had the dumb idea of paying a day visit to their worst enemy. Unfortunately, the eye powered down, bubbled back into reflection, and a voice echoed out over the surrounding five miles.
“Val?” thundered Lady Ethel Mallory, and her audible smile made Clem shudder. “It’s been too long.”
The Tapes - Don't Let Them Love You
There are no safe spaces, in a case. If you let your guard down for even a moment, life will reach through the gap and peel something away from you that you’ll never get back. It might hurt them, to be kept at arm’s length. But you’re keeping them safe.
…Maybe, if things go south, you’re keeping yourself safe too. Or if you’re in danger, at least it’s only you. No one else.
Story 2, Continued - The Mallory Dream
They rose through darkness on an elevator platform deep within the superstructure of Box Polaris. Clem could see the glinting red lights of visors in the shadow, and knew that for each crimson point, someone was locked forever dreaming of a better world. She could barely make out their bodies, emaciated and intubated, corpses out of their coffins, clinging to their perches level after level like a nest of insects. It was not the organization or sterile light that she remembered from Box Andromeda, but she supposed that was what happened when you disconnected a Dreaming Box from the rest of the company and turned it into your personal illicit dreaming den.
“I must say, Val, I thought your last diplomatic envoy was very rude,” said Lady Ethel Mallory; her voice buzzed on loudspeakers in the walls as they ascended through the levels of dreamers.
“My last diplomatic envoy never returned to Scout City,” said Val, staring up into the seemingly endless darkness.
“Let’s just say I made them an offer they couldn’t refuse,” said Lady Ethel, and the platform came to a hiss and a stop in a large chamber. It was unlit except for the narrow red visors that adorned its residents; they were arranged like crypt skeletons along the support beams and in great arcs across the ceiling. The light that they provided was only enough to illuminate a large shape in the former drone hangar that stretched out before her; a ship or a structure of some kind, Clem thought.
“Speaking of which,” the Lady continued. “Have you finally decided to commit Scout City to Box Polaris? I’m sure I can find some room for you.”
The Lady’s voice no longer rang through the speakers, but now from the center of the room, huge and breathy.
“I’m here for my daughter,” Valerie said, squinting into the darkness. “Something’s wrong. I need you to fix her.”
The shape in the center of the hangar shifted in the dim red light. From its mountain of darkness, long objects extended that Clem thought were pistons at first but quickly recognized as titanic legs, expanding sixty feet in each direction across the hangar’s walls and floor, scraping the metal until they found a suitable perch. And then the center of the shape’s mass lifted, like a house rising into the air, and Clem could think of nothing but a fat forest spider that had hung outside her window in Scout City. The shape became clearer as the Lady floated towards her with a shift of her body, and a thousand warning signals in Clem radiated danger.
The lady’s lower half was a stony swollen husk the size of an aircraft, huge spidery legs that stretched out, larger than most buildings in the Stumps. Her upper half was not quite as strange to Clem’s memory; still much taller than Clementine, but not nearly as monolithic; her torso jutted up from where Clem might have expected the head of a gigantic spider to be, and from it the Lady’s smaller hands and arms were crossed disapprovingly. The Lady’s skin, where skin remained instead of a thicker grey exoskeleton, was spotted and burst with thick wire-like hairs. Clusters of pale white eyes watched from behind the lenses of a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. Lady Ethel grinned, and her grin was sharp, straight white teeth that shone with the reds of the visors above.
“I’m surprised that you would think to keep this thing around all these years later,” said the Lady, the massive platform of her body lowering to bring her closer to the both of them. “Given that it’s not your real daughter. I did so enjoy our conversations back in the day. Did you miss the Prime Dream, honey? Did you want to go back? My own version of it is very nice.”
“She’s my daughter and she’s mine,” said Valerie, stepping in front of Clem slightly. For once, Clem did not stop her. “But when you made her, you made her wrong. She’s not healing. She’s hurt. I need you to put her back together.”
“Val, I don’t expect you to know, because I’m not even sure you went to university,” said the Lady, waving a hand, and a line of visors flashed and sparkled in the darkness. “But business is a two-way transaction. I don’t know the first thing about what Anderson did when he was left to his own devices in Box Atlas. I haven’t spoken with him since he betrayed me and got me fired from my company. You haven’t even paid me a visit in all these years, and now you storm in here making demands. I can offer a wonderful free-to-enter subscription to the Mallory Dream. If you’d like to make your goodbyes we can get the other Riot here taken care of.”
Clem’s eyes were adjusting; the dreamers were not strapped in secure gurneys or platforms at all, but almost lashed to the building with thick black ropes of web.
“No,” said Clem, shifting herself forward to face the gigantic spider; they were in the center of the web, she knew. “There have to be company records. Things you can access. And if you can’t, then I need to talk to Anderson myself.”
“I don’t need to remind you that I’ve been fired,” said the Lady, teeth flashing. “Box Polaris is my own independent operation for the time being, until I find a way to take control of the rest of the company I’d built. You’d better have an excellent value proposition for me to make this worth my time. Or to let you out of here at all, frankly. I think I would enjoy giving you both some nightmares.”
“Careful,” said Valerie in a low voice. “She’s changed. I don’t think either of us know just how much. I’m going to offer her a trade.”
“No the hell you’re not,” Clem said, and spoke up louder so that Ethel could hear. A bead of sweat, or maybe blood, ran down her temple. “Ethel! About that. All those years ago, when we broke out of Box Andromeda, did you ever wonder how we pulled it off?”
Ethel paused in her titanic spidery shifting.
“I’m listening.”
“We had a friend, named Danielle,” Clem continued, and begged forgiveness in her head. “She can hack the Prime Dream with her brain. The reason you’re still stuck here is that you can’t access the network, right? You can’t find a way to hurt Botco. But she can. And she’d do me a favor if I asked her. We could open a door for you to get out of here, and get back to California. This could be your only chance.”
“Clem,” Valerie breathed, wide-eyed. Clem grit her teeth. Lady Ethel Mallory shifted towards them in the darkness, sitting on the throne of her own midsection, and tipped her glasses down to watch her with a handful of eyes over the edge.
“Now that,” said Lady Ethel, “is the way I like to do business.”
Story 3 - It's Only Ninety Minutes
Shelby waited at the door, and was unsure if she should knock again. It was curious, she thought, that the idea of knocking again when it was not expected troubled her, but burying a meat cleaver in Shank’s back had not merited a second thought.
She waited a painfully long time. She had probably not been heard, was all. But she could not go home to her brother, because if she did, she feared that she would collapse and not be able to pick up all the pieces again. The case was all that mattered. It was all that she could allow to matter.
Improbably, there was movement from within the funeral home, and the black wooden door slid open an inch.
“Hello, Miss Allen,” said Vincent, and an eye watched her from the other side.
“Hello, Vincent,” she said. “I’m sorry to disturb you. I need to see the body of Mr. Greenstreet. I’d like to know anything that you’ve found.”
“What. What I’ve found,” repeated Vincent, and his eye leaned away from the door momentarily, and returned. “Yes. Of course. Let me open the door.”
A chain was undone, and the door swung open fully; Vincent held his puppet close and under his arm, as was his norm. Shelby stepped in, scraped her mud-caked boots on the welcome mat. Vincent stalked through his dim parlor like a thin grey spider, and clasped his web of hands together.
“I am terribly sorry about Mr. Greenstreet,” he said.
“It’s… it’s nothing,” Shelby said, which wasn’t exactly right.
“I mean about viewing the cadaver,” Vincent clarified, and patted his hands dry on his trousers. “I’m afraid the surviving Mr. Greenstreet has requested the corpse not be viewed any further. For dignity.”
“I see. For dignity,” Shelby said, and felt weak again—she had felt out of breath ever since running through the forest in the early hours of the morning, and she had not slept in most of two days. She found her way heavily into one of his parlor chairs.
“Miss Allen,” said Vincent, setting his puppet upright in a chair as he sat down urgently beside her. “Are you quite well?”
What she meant to say was, I have some questions to ask you about the body and how it connects to the investigation. That was not what came out.
“How do you do it?” she said, voice cracking.
Vincent blinked, and winced.
“Do what, precisely?”
“Handle it,” she said, and put her hands to her face to keep herself from falling any lower. “Losing people. Over and over and over. Without wanting to die. Without wanting to hurl yourself off a cliff and end it. What is the point of doing any of it if it hurts so goddamn bad?”
Vincent was quiet for a long moment. He did not put a comforting hand on her shoulder or pat her leg; he crossed his legs and folded his hands one way and the other.
“Do you remember the movies?” he said at last.
“What?” said Shelby.
“They might have been before your time,” he sighed. “But they were spectacular. You would go out, to a big dark room where the audience was gathered. And they would project on the wall moving pictures, like a stage play, with actors and music and lights and action. And over the course of ninety minutes they would tell you a story.”
“I’ve heard about movies,” said Shelby.
“Yes,” said Vincent. “Well, the thing about movies was that some days, you would leave your house and go out and see a movie, and it would be so powerful and so moving and so stirring of the soul that you would weep. You would laugh. You would feel every emotion that a human being can handle. You would walk out of that theater forever changed, transformed by the story you just beheld. Those were good movies. But other times, you would walk out of the theater saying, that was terrible. The plot was nonexistent, the lines were poorly written, the actors were shoddy, the third act twist was predictable, unjustified, the whole thing was a grievous waste of potential.”
“So sometimes it was a waste of time,” said Shelby.
“I don’t think so,” said Vincent, blinking. No pictures moved on the dark walls across from them. “Because even then, I would say, aren’t you glad we got out of the house for a little while? That we could forget everything for ninety minutes? Aren’t you glad we went to see a movie?”
“I haven’t seen a movie,” said Shelby.
“No,” Vincent sighed. “But I like to think of life as a kind of matinee. When the story of our lives flickers through its last credits, and you and I walk out of this life, Shelby, it is not into the surprising, blinding light of the sun, but to an unexpected fall of night. And who knows what lies beyond that parking lot?”
He sat for a silent moment. That was how Shelby liked to spend most of hers.
“All I am trying to say,” he said, “is that yes, sometimes, maybe more often than not, life is unpleasant. At times lonely, at times tragic. But even if it’s all bad, even if you can’t find any beauty in it, even if it can’t possibly be redeemed by a sequel, it’s better than nothing. Anything is better than nothing, and this is anything. It only plays for one showing. So even if it’s the worst story we’ve ever seen, what’s the harm in staying seated? Let it play out. Who knows. Maybe they can still turn it around in that third act. It’s only ninety minutes.”
Shelby wished something inside of her would break, so that she could cry. Or maybe what was broken was that she could not. She glanced down the hall; the door was open, and through it there was a glimpse of a white sheet which lay over the body that could only be Mr. Greenstreet.
“I need to talk with you about the case,” she said. Somehow that came out instead of any thank you’s. “We think that the pig, Shank, isn’t the only one at play. The Instrumentalist killings are someone else. Someone very skilled, who knows the Instrumentalist’s methods. Someone close to home.”
Vincent seemed suddenly pale, but before she could ask him about that further, there was a heavy knock at the door.
“Vincent!” a voice called. “Open up!”
“I’m sorry,” Vincent said, and rose, stepped over to the door, and let it swing open.
Shelby knew the people that stood there—Sheriff Virgil, and all of his deputies, smelling like smoke. Heather had her jacket off, revealed her arms and the gift from the rains that decorated her skin. Her muscles had been supplemented with glistening bands that peered through gaps in her bicep, tricep, and enabled her to lift heavy objects like the corpse in her arms.
The corpse was taller than her, of huge proportion, and had the head of a pig, with skin blackened and charred, meat fresh from a barbecue. Heather’s banded muscles strained under the weight of carrying the hulking figure.
“Vincent,” said Virgil. “I’m about to trust you with a hell of an autopsy.”
The Conversation - I've Been Dreaming
Nikignik
How can you not understand that when you died, I died also. Have you seen what I have been doing? I have not your power, nor your creations, I scarcely have a physical form at all, and yet I have been waging war of my own in your memory.
Marolmar
I’ve noticed. It’s been quaint. I’ve been enjoying these little stories of yours.
Nikignik
You’ve been listening?
Marolmar
I’ve been dreaming, haven’t I?
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'File 6: The Botulus Corporation', and is available on Patreon.com/hallowoods. Because Hello From The Hallowoods is created without advertising or sponsors, we rely on patronage to make this show possible!