Content warnings for this episode include: Implied abuse of a child, Ableism, Animal death (Shank as usual, cuts of meat, hunting trophies), Suicidal ideation, Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Weird Cannibalistic Urges, Mental illness, Strangulation/suffocation, Fungus Horror, Emotional Manipulation, Body horror, Consumption of Inedible Materials, Religious Violence, Monologues about religious doctrine
The Interrogation - Scalpel and Flesh
Nikignik
Welcome back. I assume you missed me.
Auditor
Hello. I have been asked to take a different tact.
Nikignik
Are you going to be more pleasant this time?
Auditor
Stop attempting to alter the relationship between us.
Nikignik
What is the relationship between us?
Auditor
Our relationship is the one between scalpel and flesh.
Nikignik
Because I will introduce your cold heart to some concept of warmth?
Auditor
Because I will open you and peel the truth out.
Story 1 - Open a Door
Danielle hovered on the edge of dream. She dreamt for herself very little these days—not that she had ever adhered to a normal sleep schedule. She slept most hours of the day, the whole time in sessions with clients. Not all of Scout City saw her craft as reputable or remotely scientific, but then again, she had never seen a certificate to say that the late Mr. Greenstreet’s kind of therapy was any more effective than hers. If he through conversation carefully peeled back one layer of trauma at a time, she excised it in one swift cut, a quick plunge through layers of subconscious to find the buried source. If nothing else, her clients seemed to appreciate a single instance of sleeping easy and without nightmares. It was not a gift that came without cost—none of her dreams were her own, then, and she was exposed daily to the worst of her neighbors, and all that had happened to them before the end, and during it, and after.
She dreamt with them in their terror all throughout the day, and in the evening she lay awake and restless. She wondered what had happened to Nik, as she sometimes did. She wondered if he was still out there listening. Wondered why she could not find him anywhere. Something had begun to change in the silence, though. Familiar echoes that she could not yet tell if they were only her wishful thinking, or something entirely new.
If a sleep of her own had begun to creep over her, it vanished when there was a pounding of feet down the hallway outside, and she rose from her bed—she was not going any use out of it tonight anyway—and threw on a robe, lit her cigarette in its long holder, breathed in relaxing flowers, breathed out pink smoke. There was a knocking on the door, and she opened it a few inches, to the extent that the little chain would allow.
“Clem,” Danielle said, and looked her up and down. Clem had her coat with its ripped threads on, and a businesslike look on her face, and leaned on a crutch, in a fashion which Danielle was well familiar with.
“Danielle,” said Clementine. “You’ve got to tell your receptionist to just let me in.”
“Shouldn’t you be in a hospital somewhere?” Danielle said, and nodded back to the newspaper on her side table. “You look terrible.”
“Believe me, however I look, I feel worse,” said Clem.
“Oh, I believe it,” Danielle sighed, shutting the door briefly to undo the chain, and Clem pushed into her apartment as if she still was welcome here. She did not join Clem at the side table, but went to drape herself over the chaise-lounge by the window; the red sun cast dying beams through the boughs of the Upper Trunk. “The bells have been going crazy today.”
“Four more dead,” said Clem. “Mom’s put the city in a state of emergency. Someone should have come by to tell you.”
“I’ve been trying to get a little rest,” Danielle said. “But I guess if you’re here then it’s out of the question. Be honest with me, Clem. Are you dying?”
“Yep,” said Clem, grimly. Danielle was not sure what else she had expected. “Maybe. I’m not sure. I’m in rough shape and I’ve got no time to worry about it right now. People are getting slaughtered left and right, and I’ve got a murderer to catch.”
“Let me guess, you need me to investigate the dreams of a cat this time,” said Danielle.
“Actually a squirrel,” said Clem, and squinted, and furrowed her brow. She sometimes tried to seem very serious so as not to cry, Danielle remembered. “I came here to say I’m sorry.”
“That’s a word I’ve never heard out of you,” said Danielle, breathing in strawberry vapor. “You have me worried.”
“I don’t think I was good to you,” said Clem. “I wanted to be. I didn’t know how to be good to anyone. And I always felt it calling, once I got the taste for it. The cases.”
“It was the cases, for you,” Danielle agreed. “And I don’t think you could love anything more than those. But it was the same for dream, for me. We were having affairs with our work, weren’t we? Sneaking away after hours and keeping secrets and little getaways. I never forgave you—I felt like I was watching you lose yourself in real time—but I understood.”
“I’m going to die with a lot of unburied hatchets,” Clem said, hands folded and white-knuckled. “But I didn’t want things with you to be one of them.”
“Clem,” Danielle said, and winced. “I always worried about this. That you’d get in over your head and destroy yourself. Did you know, when you asked me to help you with the dog, that’s what would happen?”
“I had a gut feeling maybe,” Clem sighed. “But that was always going to be true. I don’t expect you to understand.”
“I think I understand you better than you understand yourself,” Danielle said, and sighed heavily in pink. “You’ve got a lot of scary shit down there. I don’t know if you remember half of what they did to you when they made you. I worry you decided you’d go on some self destructive path before you actually knew…”
“I’m not here to talk about all that,” said Clem, and she looked from Danielle up to the window and the dying light. “I mean it literally when I say, I don’t have the time. I just wanted to say, I really did love you, once. And in some way that’s always true. I didn’t mean to hurt you, half the times that I did. You took care of me when no one else did. Frankly when you needed taking care of yourself. And I may not have said it much, but it mattered.”
“All I really wanted for you was to take it easy on yourself for once,” Danielle said. “We were both so fragile when we got out of Botco. But getting strong, healing, learning how to function, it’s not fun or fast. It’s a long slow thing and it takes a lifetime, Clem. When our friends dragged me out of Box Andromeda, they didn’t know if I would live half an hour, let alone walk on my own again.”
Here she allowed the fold of her robe to slip, revealed the vines of the Rosenbrace wrapped around the length of her shin and thigh.
“And I’m still not quite there,” she continued. “But I’m patient.”
“I lied. I did come here to ask you for something,” said Clem, shaking off her words, and Danielle watched her pull an object from her bag. She recognized it immediately, and it sent a cold chill through her troubled spine. She sat up.
“You want to explain why you would dare bring that into my home?” she said.
“I paid a visit to Lady Ethel, trying to figure out how to patch myself up,” said Clem. “You know what she’s been up to, at Box Polaris. I told her I’d try to find a way to get her out of our neck of the woods, send her packing back home to California. You don’t have to do this—you don’t have to do anything. But if you want to do me a favor, open a door for her. That’s all she needs, I think. Some opening to squeeze in through. You can get her out of Scout City’s hair forever. It’d be nice to know my debts are paid. And you might sleep easier with a continent in between you two.”
Danielle glanced from the visor, with its flat white plastic and little red lights aglow, to Clem.
“I might look into it,” Danielle said. “Or I might just smash it to pieces. And then kill you myself.”
“Well, don’t wait too long,” said Clem, and stood up, made for the door. “Or you might have to wait in line.”
Story 2 - Audience with a Saint
“You’re sure about this, Mister Silver?” said Marco. The man was close to Buck, and smirking in his formality; his hand was, after all, in Buck’s hair, and Buck still tasted his lips, which always smacked of warm Californian beaches that Buck had never beheld.
“Not at all,” said Buck, and tugged at Marco’s lapel as a sailor might a rope, to make sure it was safely tied. “I cannot say why, but the thought of this Saint Loris stirs up some old fear in me. I wonder how alike she is to Mrs. Wicker…”
“The difference is that we’re here for you now,” said Marco, and his mischievous coal eyes looked from Buck to the hall beyond. “I have your back. I’d be a bad bodyguard if I let anything happen to you, sir.”
Buck half smiled at that.
“I appreciate your enthusiasm,” Buck said. “But I sense that things will, sometime before the end of our voyage, grow… dicey. And if they do, get Brooklyn and Hope to safety first. I do not always require protecting now.”
Before Mr. Torres could come up with a suitably charming response, there were approaching footsteps from the vaulted hall. At once they disentangled, and neatened up. Sir Fen emerged from the darkness, cloak flowing behind her, and the white crescents in her eyes glowing.
“Sir Fen,” said Buck. “I appreciate you organizing this rendezvous on such short notice.”
“The Saint Loris is pleased to speak with you, sirs,” said Sir Fen, with the slightest bow; the armor beneath her robes glinted too. “And I, her loyal disciple, am pleased to make this possible. If you would follow me into her sanctum.”
The empty belly of the ship had been filled with curious crawling spaces, metal corridors and habitats repurposed and repurposed again over the decades. The small square halls that Sir Fen led them through would have been easy to get lost in, although Buck had developed a good nose for such things. At the end, there were two large doors, spattered with rust and black and yellow warning bands.
“Made yourself comfortable below decks, I see,” said Marco, always two steps behind Buck. “The accommodation upstairs wasn’t to your liking?”
“The Saint of New England would not be so rudely confined to a mere crate, as any common cattle,” said Sir Fen, coming to a halt at the doors and swiveling back to face them. “I beg of thee, observe diligently her courtesies and respond to her questions with grace. In our lands she is revered. I ask, as I have facilitated your meeting, that you not offend her, and in doing so cast in an ill light my judgement.”
“Be on our best behavior,” Marco said. “Impress the boss. Got it.”
“I will do my utmost not to make you regret allowing this meeting,” Buck sighed, and nodded. “Whenever you’re ready.”
At Sir Fen’s first touch of the door, they fell open silently, and a vaulted chamber with metal walkways suspended from the ceiling loomed within. The ceiling had been hung with black silk, and the rusted metal walls draped with silver-barbed nets and tapestries of dragon-slaying saints, and the only light was a single bright light, like a moonbeam, that fell on the head of the Saint herself at the far end of the room. A dozen knights stood on either side, in the darkness, either between the beams that held up the ceiling or higher up on the metal walkways, and they were bedecked with dark cloth and chain mail and patches of plate armor, and more curious pieces of armor cobbled together—one had a bent radioactive hazard sign as the faceplate to a makeshift helmet, another pauldrons formed from the bumper of a truck. Nevertheless, they stood, hands on the hilts of their swords, and regarded their Saint.
The Saint was, herself, unarmored, save for a silver brace that sat around her neck and shoulders. She lounged on a bed of pillows, and a dress of white lace poured across her and down off the dais on which she rested. She was pale and hairless as the moon, and seemed to Buck a sickly thing, a contrast to the gruesome decorations of her dais—antlers and skulls, teeth and furs, of all manner of beasts, and things Buck suspected had not really been beasts at all. He remembered well the kind of people they threw down into the fighting-pit at Fort Freedom, and shuddered.
Above all, the saint wore a halo of radiant silver rays, affixed by a rod to the back of her armor. Ah, Buck thought. A self-made saint, then.
“Greetings, Sir Silver, of the City of Scouts,” said the Saint Loris. She spoke like a child calling from a sickbed. “I am glad that you have chosen friendship with our conclave. But I must ask, why have you sought so urgently an audience with me?”
“We need to talk, your, ah, holiness,” said Buck. He noticed that Sir Fen had knelt and bowed her head by the door; it had not even occurred to him, and seemed a hard prospect on the knees.
“Yeah,” added Marco, bowing his head respectfully. “About vampires.”
The Tapes - Detectives and Cops
That’s the difference between a detective and a cop. At first glance they might appear the same - on the surface, aren’t we both trying to bring criminals to justice? But the difference is, who do you work for? Cops work for the city. If the city turned around and told them to beat the citizens into submission, they’d do it. They already do. You and I work for people who’ve been hurt. Cops want submission. You and I want answers. Don’t forget the difference.
Story 2, Continued - Audience with a Saint
“So you knew, ahead of time, that your quarry would be aboard this boat,” said Buck. “And still you did not warn anyone.”
He heard a sharp hiss of breath from Sir Fen; worried, perhaps, that the Saint might take offense with his line of questioning. But the pale woman on the dais did not seem to mind as she replied.
“For those not highly trained, to confront this beast is a death sentence,” said the Saint Loris. “If we allow it to flee to Europe, it will return to its homeland. It may slumber there for a time, but then would only grow in power and influence, until someday it returns to our shores. Our single chance to catch and trap it, slipped away. We cannot allow this to pass, nor for it to step or fly beyond the bounds of this vessel. Our quest is to slay it before our arrival, and our journey is already halfway hence.”
“If I may, good Saint Loris,” said Sir Fen, owllike eyes gleaming in the dark behind Buck. “I remember the word thou spoke to me when we set foot first beyond our borders; that where the sheep wander, there must the shepherd follow.”
“You’ve got a lot of bones here, for shepherds,” said Marco. Buck appreciated having his massive gravity nearby; he might have felt like a hare in a den of wolves otherwise.
“The shepherd does not carry only the staff, but also the rod,” said the Saint, and waved a pale hand across the array of bones that surrounded her dais. As she moved, a trail of the lace of her dress shifted, and revealed a silver sword as long as her sitting amidst her blankets, sheath adorned with rubies. “And these are the remnants of the wolves we have faced.”
“Before we begin, I need your word that no whisper of this conversation will reach beyond the occupants of this room,” said Buck. “Not to the Humble Boot, or to Captains Branston or Shaw, or for that matter, to the man named Dashiell Spade. There are very few people on board this ship that I can trust, it seems, and the list shrinks nearly nightly.”
“I will safeguard your words as though they were the precious writ of the lord himself,” said the Saint. “As shall all the knights pledged in my service, beneath the watchful eye of God.”
Marco gave him a nudge that he was familiar with; it was something to the tune of ‘last chance to back out of this freak show’. Buck grit his teeth.
“Good. Well then,” Buck continued. “We are harboring a hunter on board this ship. It could be, as Sir Fen has said, any person. I have a multitude of reasons that it could be aboard, and not all of them can be true. You say it is attempting to flee to Europe. I have also heard that it is an assassin sent by the King of America, or a shadow that has always haunted Captain Branston. No matter the cause, the effect is the same; people are dying each night. So far, it hunts those who are alone, isolated. Stray from the, ah, flock. Its power, as far as I have calculated, includes great strength, vicious claws and teeth, the ability to physically overpower and maul its victims. But also, there is a darkness that it can summon, which cloaks it, dampens sound, makes it impossible to see or cry for help. And above all of this, it can fly. Am I missing any attributes you are aware of?”
“It is cold,” said the Saint Loris. “With wings that float in the void. It drinks not only of lifeblood but of your own mortal soul. Silver blades alone can harm it, for silver is a blessed metal.”
“If I may,” said Sir Fen, looking up to her saint.
“Speak,” said the Saint.
“Earth,” said Sir Fen. “Its kind will not home in barrow or cave. Being born of the void, perhaps, they covet it. I have perceived in our hunts that a thin shroud of soil may hide us from its senses.”
“Soil may not be the easiest thing to find aboard a vessel like this one,” said Buck.
“Actually,” said Marco. “I was reading about this ship, before I booked passage… this place used to feed a full community, until our current journey. They lived aboard here. They had gardens. Some of the shipping containers up there should have plenty of dirt to work with, if that’s what we need.”
“Then my thought is this,” said Buck. “Like for any hunting animal, we set a trap. We hide our hunters, the knights of your order, throughout the ship, waiting in the dirt perhaps. We set a bait, disguised as a nightwatch.”
“Which will be me, obviously,” said Marco. Buck turned to him sharply.
“I did not suggest such a thing,” said Buck.
“You need someone who knows what could be coming,” said Marco. “We don’t want to let another innocent person die out here.”
“Our knights shall be close and watchful, Mister Silver,” said Saint Loris. “If you can lure the beast, we strike as one for its throat.”
“I would ask that you aim to capture, and not to kill,” said Buck. “I would like the chance to understand it, before we move to severe action.”
The knights seemed to glance among themselves, and in the end to the Saint for guidance.
“A brief moment,” said the Saint. “For it to understand the victory of its hunters. But we cannot spare its life, Mr. Silver. A wolf, if freed, is still victim to its own appetites.”
Is that true, Buck wondered? Do I, a wolf set free from Fort Freedom, still hunger quite the same?
“Marco,” he said quietly. “What about Hope? If anything happens to you I could not…”
“It’ll be fine, boss,” said Marco. “Besides. I want her to know that her dad did something brave.”
“Let us then set our plans in motion,” proclaimed the saint, and wrapped her fragile hands around the cross-shaped pommel of her great and precious blade. “For the night will find us all too quickly, and in the light of the moon, our quarry will again take flight.”
Story 3 - Back in a Jiffy
An errand, Clem had said. Back in a jiffy. But a jiffy had passed, and Clem had not returned, and it was the worst time to be separated. But Shelby understood. As much as she dreaded letting Clementine out of her sight, Clem surely had people she wanted to visit in this time of her uncertain lifespan, and Shelby could not afford to listen to the feelings in her chest, that told her to separate Clementine’s essence from her bones and swallow it so that they would never be apart. Clementine needed space to make peace, and Shelby had been left in charge of the case.
She returned only briefly to her house. Cat was home; Mulder was not. She kissed Cat’s head and made sure that its dishes were full; it acted as though it did not love her, which allowed them both some dignity. She left a note for Mulder that said simply, ‘away for a few days, do not worry. Check Cat for worms.’
And then she was off, Cat judging her silently as she departed. The cleaver hung at her side again, but she no longer felt its weight as a familiar friend, but as a burden and a necessary curse. It represented something that she could not any longer make sense of. It had shed her parents' blood, and they had shed hers. It had been plunged into the ripe shoulder of Shank, and it was supposed to stay there. Her vengeance had been politely returned, and she did not know what to do with it now.
Four more dead. Bodies arranged delicately. Had Shank done it? She struggled to picture him taking so much time, contorting them like puppets, arranging hands and feet in odd places. She didn’t think he had the patience for it. But nevertheless, finding him was her first priority, and as Scout City’s sirens and bells range, and the regiments of Scouts organized in their troupes to form search parties and account for all the living, try and pinpoint in which one of them the evil lived, the city was an overwhelming sea of sound. She became numb to it, and heard nothing at all. She walked as though she was Shank, and she was disturbed that it did not take her long at all to find him in that fashion.
“What are you doing in my shop?” she said, standing in the doorway of the cold room of her butcher shop. It was hung with cuts of strange animals and familiar ones alike. Shank sat, huge and filthy and pig-headed, against the back wall of the room, staring at nothing.
“Got lost,” he said. “Reminds me of mine.”
“Do you sell meat at your little house?” said Shelby. Her breath turned to mist in the frigid air. “I remember seeing a sign.”
“No,” said Shank. “But that’s what it was for, once.”
There was a clatter from the front door—the lock had been splintered, probably by Shank on the way in. Shelby moved from the fridge room down the hall out to the counter, and came to find several people standing in the shop. One she recognized immediately; it was Mulder. The others were not Scouts, but wore plain clothes. The weapons they carried were makeshift; spears of shovel handles and bent rakes.
“Oh,” Mulder said, and wiped his brow, almost laughed. “You’re here. We saw the door, and I thought… well.”
“I lost my key,” said Shelby. “We’re not open.”
“Shelby, these people are with the Coda,” he said.
“The Instrumentalist therapy group?” Shelby said. “I didn’t know you associated.”
“Well, it’s more than that, what with everything going on,” Mulder said, and stuck his thumbs in his pockets. He never seemed to know what to do with them, when not busy illustrating plans for the city. “We’re patrolling for the Instrumentalist killer. People thought they’d seen him this way—you haven’t seen anything?”
“No,” Shelby said, and made the mistake of making eye contact, because she had never learned how to lie to him.
“I see,” he said, after a moment.
“Mulder,” said one of the others, gesturing down to the floor. A set of huge filthy boot-prints trailed across the shop, and finally behind the counter. Shank had left a trail. Shelby cleared her throat, and tried to step to the open portion of the counter to show that she, too, had huge and filthy boots, coated in the mud and blood of the last days. The inquisitive looks reached her and ended.
“You should hurry,” Shelby said. “If you’re trying to find him. You remember how he moved, don’t you, Mulder?”
“I know,” he said, and winced, and his friends were the first to leave. He gave her a comforting nod, and carried after them, looking a last time at the splintered lock on his way out. When she was sure they were not coming back, she returned to the cold room, and stepped inside to face the demon that sat within it.
“You killed my parents,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Shank.
“You probably deserve to die for that,” she said. “And for all the other people you’ve killed. You’re a monster.”
“Heh,” said Shank, and his mask of a face tilted up to her. “Takes one to know one, don’t it? You coulda told ‘em where I was.”
“That would have been a death sentence for them,” said Shelby. “You’d contaminate my shop with their blood.”
“Probably,” Shank shrugged. “You gonna try to kill me? I ain’t had much luck with it. Can’t stop coming back.”
“I want you to leave,” said Shelby. “I wish you didn’t exist. I want you to leave this forest forever.”
“I can’t leave yet,” said Shank. “Show me the way out of Scout City and I’ll go. But I can’t leave the woods. I still owe the Witch a visit. She’s expecting me.”
“What do you need from her?” said Shelby.
Shank pointed with his flimsily gloved hands to the pig head he wore.
“Won’t come off,” he said.
“Here’s what I am going to do,” she said, and sighed a cold breath. “There’s a wagon in the back. Every night, the shop makes a delivery to the Stumps. You hide under the wagon, you hold onto it. They’ll take you out of the city. When you see the trees, you leave. You do not kill anyone. Deal?”
“Suits me,” said Shank, and rose like a mountain of soot and charred pork. “Does this make us pals?”
“No,” said Shelby. “I think I will kill you, someday, if you stay in this forest. But you didn’t kill four people today, did you?”
“If I’da killed ‘em, I think you’d know why,” Shank hissed, clouds of a foul breath.
Shelby nodded, and sighed, stepped out from the cold room. She went for the front door, and stopped outside to lock up as she always did, and remembered that the lock was broken. She felt a stranger approaching, like a thin grey spider, and when she looked up, to tell him that the shop was closed, that was her mistake.
She began the sentence by inhaling, and the stranger shoved a noxious puff of fungus in her face, and her breath was choked immediately by a cloud of spores that burned like shrapnel in her throat and constricted her breath. She caught only a glimpse of the stranger’s face, which was not at all a face, but a mask, formed of the flat polished wood of a violin or fiddle, with those curling slits in the wood for eyes, and they stared as darkness consumed her vision.
The Conversation - Not Clear Enough
Marolmar
Did you not used to love me, Nikignik?
Nikignik
Of course I did. Strange as it may seem, I often wondered if you loved me.
Marolmar
I am sorry that I did not make it clear enough.
Nikignik
I still love you. That will always be true.
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'File 16: Danielle O'Hara', 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!
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