Content warnings for this episode include: Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Strangulation/suffocation, Emotional Manipulation, Drowning, Bugs, Body horror, Claustrophobia, Razor Blades, Religious Violence
The Interrogation - The Second Series
Auditor
I will ask you a series of questions. You will answer yes or no to each one. If you do not answer, or I detect that you are lying, we will exercise punishment.
Nikignik
I have already stated that I am trying to be honest with you.
Auditor
Your actions do not entirely comply with that statement.
Nikignik
I will suffer all the shocks and pangs to have my name cleared.
Auditor
We will determine the status of your record by the end of this series. However, the punishment is not the voidstone for this series. For each question that you do not answer correctly and truthfully, we will take one of your eyes.
Nikignik
My eyes? You cannot do that. I have already lost one.
Auditor
You alone have the power to prevent losing more. Let us commence.
Story 1 - The Duchess
Hope hated this part the most. She had gotten used to it by now; nodded along as Marco said that everything was going to be fine and Brooklyn said to keep the door locked and the lights off and Buck said that with luck it was all going to go down peacefully, without a drop of blood shed.
She did wait for the first half hour, exactly as instructed, in the dark shipping container that was their cabin, with the lights off and not even the courtesy of a window. A crack of light from under the door shone as the ship met the first throes of a night storm. Rain cascaded across the many roofs of the crates above hers, and wind ran through all the seams in the metal, and the floor tilted back and forth with a heavy sway. It was a bad night for one’s father to nearly sacrifice himself to a vampire.
She could not hear any commotion beyond the sounds of the storm itself, and she sat cross-legged in front of the door, listening for anything at all to indicate how far along the plan was. She pictured the Knights of New Hampshire taking refuge in corners throughout the ship, burying themselves like corpses in the old garden beds. Marco walking the deck, in his silly outfit. Walking. Walking. Gone.
They had tried not to let her see the body of the nightwatch that the vampire had claimed instead of her; the way he had been torn apart and smeared across the rail. She was seeing him with a face, when she closed her eyes, and the face was her father’s. If anything went slightly wrong, if they underestimated it, if that veil of shadow made everything hard to see and he was lost…
She might ruin it all, by stepping out of their crate cabin now. She might distract one of her parents at the wrong crucial moment and plunge them all into deadly danger. Better, certainly, to do as she was told.
But then again, none of them had seen it the way that she had. What if they didn’t see it coming until it was too late? What if her father was about to die and she would be locked in here, unable to help? What if she could change it?
There was no harm, at least, in finding a better vantage point.
She undid the heavy locking mechanism, and the doors creaked open, and immediately the rushing wind was in her hair, the lightning in the stormclouds over the ship an angry white glow. She had a first-class view of the dark Atlantic as the ship leaned towards it, and the clouds of rain drifting down, illuminated by the few deck lights that still functioned aboard the East Wind.
Alright, she thought. Now to find a place to watch. She was not high enough on the scaffold outside their cabin to see what was happening all around; indeed, she could not see a glimpse of her parents anywhere. Her attention turned to a large cargo crane that towered up from one side of the deck, there was a ladder up its side, and she could see a sort of open seat at the top. Perhaps the best place to watch on the whole ship, except for the captain’s deck in the control tower at the back of the East Wind. She scrambled down the metal stairs for the deck, and within moments, was climbing the ladder.
The rain made the rungs slick, and the rebar was sharp on her hands, but she climbed up relentlessly, with Nightie the Night-Gaunt waving precariously from her backpack. The storm had enveloped the ship fully now, dark clouds billowing across the sky, lights flickering in the rain. She lost her footing only once, and nearly lost a shoe as she dangled forty feet over the deck, but managed to pull herself close to the ladder and continue to ascend, until she reached the open chair at the top. If it had once been enclosed by glass, it was not any longer; just a bucket seat and a nest of levers and buttons within the metal frame. She pulled herself into it gratefully, and held on for support; the wind was ferocious this high up, and she shielded her face with her hand in order to spy on the deck below.
He was there, on the other side, in a nightwatch uniform that did not fit him. Marco patrolled the decks, passing beneath one of the deck lights, waving a lantern about like a mouse sniffing for a cat.
And then there was a flash of lightning, and Hope looked up in horror, and could not quite believe her eyes until a second flicker of the sky confirmed it.
There was a person standing on the end of the crane, as still and silent as a ghost, watching the deck below. Her dress was of dark black lace, swept by the wind, and she wore a veil that clung to her face. Hope had seen her before; it was the tall woman in black whom she had seen boarding the East Wind; she had come in a golden carriage. Hope was not sure which of the two women she had seen was the Duchess of Boldt Castle. The dark duchess turned to look at her in the fading glow of the lightning, and was standing much closer in an instance, just outside the metal frame of the cabin. Hope shrieked, and almost threw herself back out of the cabin to try and slide down the ladder, but the voice of the duchess cut through the storm.
“What are you doing up here, so far from safety, little one?”
Hope froze, and the woman’s veil gave her no expression. The duchess stood on the rainswept metal arm of the crane without holding on; her balance did not even sway.
“Are you the one who’s been killing everyone?” Hope said. She thought she saw a glint of a smile beneath the veil.
“It’s not wise for a child to ask too many questions,” said the Duchess, her voice clear in Hope’s head despite the rush of the wind around them both. “It’s how they end up dead. Or worse.”
The Duchess reached out then, quickly, for Hope, and she could not even run away as fingers, sharp like claws, dug into her skin. Immediately the Duchess was a blur of wings and lace, ruby red lips over needle teeth, and Hope was dragged free of the cabin and upside down into the storm. The wind roared around her, and the black whirlpool of the ocean spun beneath her, flashes of the deck in a rusted blur. Nighty the Night-Gaunt went flying into the air and was lost in the wind.
Something took over Hope as she was carried viciously into the sky; she slid a small knife from the inside pocket of her coat, flipped it open without dropping it. It was a Fort Freedom knife; ugly silver etchings written into the blade. But she remembered the Groundskeeper’s lessons well, and she twisted up towards the hand of the vampire, where those long pale fingers in jagged silk gloves clawed into her ankle, and raked it across the knuckles.
In an instant, she was falling, the lights of the ship sailing past her, and then the ocean swallowed her.
And she was caught gently. Her impact slowed as the dark ocean enveloped her, until she had come completely to rest on a surface that was not exactly solid, but squished like a jelly. It oozed between the fingers, and then withdrew, as if resisting the urge to devour her completely. She moved a hand; found the wet but plush surface of Nighty the Night-Gaunt, intact after all, but it brought her no comfort in this deathly moment.
It was another crack of lightning above her that cast any light on her situation; the distant glow shone through several feet of ocean waves, and through the gelatinous surface that surrounded her, and within its dark expanse she could see an endless sea of bones. A single skull ebbed to the surface of the wall of her chamber within it, and then its eyes lit like a striking match, a multitude of little burning green fires.
“Hello,” said the jelly. “Will you be my friend?”
Story 2 - Last Case Scenario
“You understand that this is very serious, Clementine,” said Sheriff Virgil. His mustache was not quite so long or curled as it would later become. “Willfully trying to hide the evidence is as good as doing it. And these are weeks of supplies we’re talking about. It’s not just that you’d be dropped from training as a Deputy, you would lose your honor as a Scout of the Scoutpost. Scout City.”
She had tried not to give him anything, just tipped her chair back, picked at a loose thread in one of the many patches that lined her jacket. She had earned each one, wanted them so badly, volunteered community hours, learned how to track and fish and hunt, learned how to handle knives and bows and javelins, learned how to tie knots and swim and negotiate with wild animals. It was surprising to her, now, how little she cared for any of it.
“What Sheriff Virgil is trying to say, I am sure,” said Mr. Silver, from the chair to the side of the interrogation table. He had his hands clasped together, studying her almost philosophically. “Is that if you were not a part of the disappearance of all this missing foodstuff, now is the time to say so.”
She glared at him, and his eyes caught hers. Buck Silver was a small man, always looking messy and a bit underfed, but his eyes gleamed with a veiled intelligence. He knew. She knew that he knew.
“Sorry,” she said. “Yeah, it’s me. The supplies aren’t coming back. Neither is the evidence. You’ll have to tell Cole he’s going to have to find a different big case to graduate with. This one’s back to square one.”
“Then I regret what’s about to happen, Clementine, I really do,” said Virgil, and he grit his teeth, put his hands on the desk as he stood. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you. You had real potential. I… I wish you’d cooperate on this. Open up. But as it stands, you are fully admitting to destroying the evidence around this case and burying the answers we need. I’m afraid my hands are tied. During a famine like this, this is the kind of selfishness that could kill our community. And we have to make an example of it.”
If he wanted to apologize, he did not say it, and he left the room like a passing storm, and left Clementine and Buck sitting in silence.
“If I may ask,” said Buck. “You have made a choice, clearly, and it is too late for anyone to save you from the consequences now. But you are doing this to protect someone, and I would be very curious to know who, for posterity.”
This gave Clementine pause, and she thought about making Buck promise not to breathe a word of it outside the room, but knew that was already going to be the case. She thought of Johannah Wicker, teary-eyed in the dark. How terribly afraid she had been that Scout City was going to find out what her brothers had done. What it meant if that last straw broke and they were banished from Scout City. It was a situation Clementine had often feared herself.
“I did the right thing,” she said.
“I have no doubt,” said Buck, and he stood with a groan, tested his weight on his knee. “If you happen to be in need of occupation, and I suspect you shortly will, I think you should stop by for tea and a talk. I may have need of someone of your… scruples.”
Clementine remembered the week that had followed much less well—lots of yelling voices and sleepless nausea about the choice that she had made, and the snip snip snip of the threadcutters peeling the patches off of her jacket, Cole’s dirty looks and indeed that of a whole city half-aware of what had actually happened, rumors spreading and the magnitude of what she had done growing more ridiculous with each passing whisper.
\
And, despite it all, a sort of malicious thrill. It was the first moment that a case had ever really gripped her. And the Wickers had remained safe in Scout City, and she had hungered for a feeling like that ever since. Making a difference in some small way, somewhere. Preserving something that would otherwise have vanished without a care in the world. Leaving a legacy of things broken and saved.
And it had followed her ever since, and Buck had only opened up the doors for it to consume her entirely—finding where secrets festered, where injustice was buried beneath the smiling neighborhoods of Scout City. And the years had fluttered away like a fistful of moths, and then she was in a chair, contemplating a little yellow tape recorder, seventeen and a half cases in, staring down the end of the line.
The Tapes - Mistakes
I’m going to tell you something that’s going to be hard to accept. Sometimes, you’re going to make mistakes. Not always accidents, even. Sometimes you’re going to choose something that you thought was right at the time. You made a choice. And sometimes, you’re going to choose wrong, and people will get hurt. You need to hold yourself accountable when that happens. This is on you. And this is the heaviest part of the job.
Story 2, Continued - Last Case Scenario
Clementine took Cannibal out on a leash, let her sniff the streets as she walked. Shelby had not been at their office when she returned to the Stumps, nor had she left a note, but this was not unusual for her—Shelby was the sort who was comfortable disappearing for hours or days at a time, especially on a case. Their approaches were a little different in that regard; Clementine assembled a case like a net, something you had to carefully twist together until you could catch your quarry in one fell swoop. Shelby, on the other hand, was a persistence predator, and once she began marching on the hunt, nothing would still her course.
The atmosphere of Scout City had shifted, and she had not felt it so heavy since the worst of the Barkbeetle crisis. Perhaps briefly in the weeks leading up to the Southern Swamps Froglin Alliance, when it was still unclear what kind of age they were walking into, or whose slimy hand they were shaking. The usual clatter and chime, murmur of voices and storefront bells and wheels of wagons climbing up the great spiral of Scout City’s central avenue, were all absent. What remained were the melancholy emergency bells, and the rush of a chill spring wind, and the occasional muster calls from parties of Scouts assigned to search the city for further signs of violence, and take census of every person they could.
It was in times like these that she felt the various threads that brought them together strain and unwind; those who had helped found the Scoutpost, those who had flocked to Scout City in the latter years, those who had once fought against it. Those who had lost people to the Instrumentalist, those who had clung to pacifism despite his reign of terror. Those who were doing so now, for one side or another. She could already feel that lines were being drawn, tendrils of the string snapping. It was a matter of time until something broke, quite disconnected from the Instrumentalist killer. And when Scout City began to devour itself, it would make it difficult to get anything done. She wondered if she would live long enough to see it.
There was nothing to do but to chase the case, and to expect to cross paths with Shelby early on the trail. By the time she arrived at the park, they had already begun ruining the macabre display of corpses—or rather, taking them down for dignity. She spied the sign with her mother’s etched face; the one that said ‘repent’. She had wondered, perhaps, when the demands would begin. Repent of what? And for Valerie, or Scout City, or both?
She decided not to wait for the deputies to accost her, and made her way for Vincent’s morgue, to perhaps beat them to the body delivery.
The door was open when she arrived, and she pushed inside, found that the parlor had been wrecked. Someone very large and shankly had walked through a wall, and rubble piled down onto Vincent’s nice carpet. A lone figure stood in the middle of the hall, perusing the debris.
“Cole,” said Clem. “Where’s Vincent?”
“You shouldn’t be here,” he grunted, looking up sharply at her. His tongue seemed to twitch in his cheek.
“Afraid I’ll take this one from you too?” she said, hands in her jacket pockets.
His brows lowered, and he ground his teeth.
“Not what I meant,” he said. “As far as I’ve heard, you’re living on borrowed time, is all. If I had a few days to live, this isn’t how I’d decide to spend it.”
“Well, that’s why you’re a deputy and not a detective,” said Clementine. She nodded to the ruined parlor. “Can’t imagine Vincent’s happy about this. And the four from the park are on the way.”
“I shouldn’t give you anything,” Cole said. “You might burn the records on me.”
“How about one more time, for old time’s sake.”
He looked her up and down, and pitied her, which she wanted to punch him in the gut for.
“Vincent’s gone,” he said. “Last he was seen was yesterday, before the big fella woke up.”
“Is Vincent dead?” she said.
“No trace of him,” said Cole. “Maybe the killer dragged him off somewhere. Maybe he’s one of those bodies in the park.”
“I think she would have mentioned,” Clem ruminated, and ignored Cole’s quizzical look as she let Cannibal nose around of her own accord, sniffing across the rubble-dusted carpet, raising especially at the shattered cold room and toward the operating chamber. A thought occurred to Clementine, and she glanced over the place, to be sure.
“Dammit,” said Cole. “What did you find?”
“Nothing,” she grinned, and scooted out of the parlor as fast as she could. “If it’s my last case, I’ve gotta beat you to it.”
“Clementine,” he called after her, as she crossed out of Vincent’s broken door. “For the last time, you are not on this case!”
She was too busy solving it to hear him. There were four bodies missing from the morgue. The first was Vincent’s himself. The second was Shank, whose location she suspected Shelby was hunting down. The third was Mr. Greenstreet’s, and she was sure that he had not had a funeral yet, because half of Scout City would have been invited and even more would have invited themselves. And the last body was Voltaire, who was not anywhere in the morgue, and she could not imagine that a killer would have brought the decrepit little puppet along if Vincent had been taken against his will. So her first step, overall, was to follow up on the disappearance of body three, which brought her to the regal branch in the Upper Trunk on which resided Chateau Greenstreet.
She waited for a few moments at the gate, after pulling on the bell chain, before she decided to just see if it was open, and it was. She crossed a courtyard of mosses and winding paths of bark, beds of white and yellow flowers, before reaching an ornate front door; the mansion occupied the end of the gigantic branch.
“Hello, Mr. Greenstreet?” she said, when the door swung open. “You know who I am. I came to ask some questions about, well, the other Mr. Greenstreet.”
Raj Greenstreet cut quite the figure in his suit, although he did not look well. People often did not, after losing their loved ones. He stared at her with wide, teary eyes; his hair was tousled, his suit covered in debris and red spatter. Those last things were somewhat less typical.
“Haven’t I answered enough questions about this whole painful ordeal?” he said, pressing a hand to his chest. “I must admit, miss Maidstone, I am surprised to see you. The papers do not describe your condition with much kindness. Perhaps go away, get some rest. Come back another time, now is terribly inconvenient.”
There was a crash; a clatter, from somewhere deeper within his home, and the sound of a muffled scream.
“Mr. Greenstreet,” said Clem, dropping Cannibal’s leash. The dog bounded for the door, even as Raj Greenstreet tried to slam the door shut, and she stuck the heavy toe of her hiking boot to jam it. “Who do you have in there?”
Story 3 - One Hand Tied
When Shelby awoke, it was to utter darkness. She initially could not discern between her eyes being open or closed, except that closed yielded little spots of purple and green and orange beneath her eyelids. The darkness spun around her, and her head reeled still, and her throat was parched. She coughed up dust and dried spores, and then tried to sit up, and hit her head on a hard surface, probably wooden, and felt a sharp pain against the skin of her arm.
“Don’t move,” said a voice, from beyond the wood surface. Her best guess was that it was a coffin, except there seemed to be a hole for her arm in one side, and it reached out somewhere that she could not see.
“Let me explain this to you very carefully,” said the voice. “You are in a trap. Your wrist is caught in a kind of razor. The more you pull, the more you will cut into your own arm. If you try to sit up, you will sever it completely. For this reason, I advise you do not move.”
Shelby was still. She could already feel the blades pressing hard against her skin, and she was not at all struggling. It would not take much to collapse them, trying to so much as roll over within her coffin might well be the end of her.
“You’ve kidnapped me,” said Shelby. “Not an easy thing to do, or smart. Why?”
“Believe it or not, it’s for your own good,” said the voice, a low, distorted whine. An affect, almost certainly, but she could not place who was speaking, so a successful one.
“So I will repent?” said Shelby.
“So you will stop interfering in the redemption of this city,” the voice said. “This is where you should be. Quiet. Hidden. While the angel of death passes from door to door.”
“You’ve been framing Shank for the killings,” said Shelby.
“He’s a killer,” the voice hissed. “It’s hardly framing if it’s true.”
“You killed four people today,” said Shelby. “Mr. Greenstreet. Abraham Walker. Joshua Wicker.”
“The Wicker boy was already dying,” said the voice. “Skewered to a tree. What I did was a mercy, and a warning. But Scout City won’t listen to warnings.”
“Why does Shank matter to you?” said Shelby. “Aren’t you worried he’ll get all the credit for your work?”
“Nice try,” said the voice. “He is this place’s sin. Their corruption. He’s going to be a part of their reckoning. And if you play along, you might live to see it.”
Shelby tried thrashing with her loose fist against the coffin’s ceiling; cursed as she accidentally pulled her other arm too tight, and she was not sure if the blades broke skin. The commotion seemed to surprise her captor, who might have fallen off a chair; there was a crash and a clatter, and she screamed as loud as she could. There were voices, incredibly faint, from somewhere high above, but immediately there was a hand jerking her arm back into place, resetting the blades, and a fist pounding on the other side of the wood.
“No more of that,” said the voice. “There’s no point. No one can hear you down here. If you leave the box, I will have no choice but to kill you. And I don’t want to do that to you, Shelby. I don’t want you to serve the lord’s eternal purpose just yet.”
“What is his purpose?” Shelby said; the air in the box was stifling as the grave already.
“Judgement,” said the voice. “Cleansing. Preparing Scout City for a new and holy age.”
The Conversation - Kill Me Already
Nikignik
Loving you was not an easy business. But I do not regret any of it. The memories I have of us were beautiful ones.
Marolmar
They don’t have to be the last, you know.
Nikignik
I know.
Marolmar
Just so long as it’s clear that you do have a choice here. You are making a choice.
Nikignik
I know.
Marolmar
So? Get it over with.
Nikignik
What?
Marolmar
Wake this soul-stitched ghoul and kill me already. Hit me with your very best.
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'File 5: Voltaire', 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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