Content warnings for this episode include: Abuse (Shelby’s parents), Animal cruelty or animal death (Shank, Cannibal the Beagle), Self-mutilation, Eye horror / gore, Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Mental illness, Strangulation/suffocation, Emotional Manipulation, Drowning, Bugs, Body horror, Puppets
The Interrogation - One Eye
Auditor
You learned that Marolmar was within the heart, regenerating, prior to completing these arrangements?
Nikignik
Yes.
Auditor
Did this alter your decision.
Nikignik
Sighs
Auditor
Answer.
Nikignik
How could I answer a simple yes or no to that?
Auditor
You refuse to answer?
Nikignik
No.
Auditor
…to which of my queries are you responding.
Nikignik
Did you just make an error?
Auditor
You were warned of the consequence of befouling this process.
Nikignik
Wait, I…
Auditor
One eye.
all sound goes silent
Story 1 - Vicious Natures
What happens when you subtract one from infinity, dreamers?
What happens when you subtract two?
I do not think they completely understand what I am. Then again, neither could you. It is not just that I am looking out at the universe, that I see all—I am everywhere. Watching from every shadow, every door, behind every eye that beholds the universe.
And then I was one less, stolen into a blade that has passed from one pair of hands to the next over your centuries. And although I yearn for its return, I know where it is. It is safe.
Where has this one gone? To a jar on Syrensyr’s Desk? Or has it been erased entirely? Which place am I not, that I was before?
They are precious to me. My eyes are beautiful. My best feature. My only feature. And to lose one is one of the greatest pains I have ever felt—second only to losing Marolmar, and losing him again. If you feel an agony in the darkness, dreamer, a cry from every shadow, know that it is I. I cannot dwell on it for long and retain thought. We go now to somewhere else, far away from this interrogation chamber, where I am nothing except a thought. We go now to Arnold Eggers.
People expected that Arnold would not be afraid of death. After all, he had died before, more or less. He had been chewed up by man-eating deer until only a twitching hand remained, and it had taken him most of a decade to regrow from that, carried around by Harrow and Victoria, nursed back to health. He had not known, at the time of being devoured, that any trace of him would remain. And he was not anxious to test a second time how close to death he could venture before it consumed him completely.
“Arnold, you’re breathing really fast,” said Russell. The chief groundskeeper was revving the rootcrawler slowly through the night, scaling root embankments and gliding through valleys of deep dark flowers.
“Sorry,” said Arnold. “Was just thinking. Are you sure we should be doing this? Chasing the pig man? What if he’s Solomon Reed? Or took his bones? Or the ghost is in him? What if he makes us into fiddles?”
“I don’t think I’d be a fiddle,” Russell said. “Maybe a banjo or something.”
“It’s not funny. I don’t want to think about it,” said Arnold, and clutched his stomach. “We should have packed dinner.”
“We’ll make a big breakfast when we go back to the Scoutpost,” said Russell. “With bacon.”
“Not funny either,” said Arnold.
“I just can’t believe you’d think of food right now,” said Russell.
“Listen, you try regrowing a body from scratch,” said Arnold. “See what it does to your metabolism.”
“If we’re lucky, neither of us will have to try that,” said Russell. “And I think you’re better at it than me.”
“Where are we going?” Arnold said, putting his hands up on the dashboard and peering into the darkness.
“Not to the northern logfall,” said Russell. “He’s headed somewhere else.”
Arnold looked up to find the pig-man standing in the center of their headlights, then. He had a silver saw in one hand, and his other was a clenched fist. He stood in the middle of the downhill path, the empty eyes of his pig head glaring into their headlights. Only for a moment. And then they collided, and the front end of the rootcrawler buckled around him, and the back end of the vehicle rose and the light was gone as the world pitched violently.
“Russell?” said Arnold. His whole heart moved beneath his chest when it beat, and it beat fast. He was alone in the cockpit, hanging upside down, with the rootcrawler hissing and crackling above him. He slipped out of his seat into the wet vines and leaves of the underbrush below, and could only see crevices of light, where the headlights were not covered by the soil or the greenery.
There was a cry from somewhere beyond, and Arnold wriggled out from beneath the wreck to catch a glimpse of the pig-man passing by a beam of light, a hand wrapped around Russell’s face. Russell struggled against the massive grip, and one hand held relentlessly to his sharp-edged silver shovel. Arnold pulled himself free completely, and rose beside the wreck.
Shank stood in the remaining sliver of the beam of the headlights, nearly unfazed by his connection with the front of their vehicle. Russell struggled against the grip of its hand over his face, but could not with all his prying so much as lift one of the pig’s sausage-like fingers. And the huge head of the pig tilted to look at Arnold, half a dead grin on its face.
“Arnold,” Russell gasped, “run away. Get help.”
Arnold had seen the pig’s kind before. A predator. Something that would leap suddenly and gnash your bones apart. Sink its teeth into you with no remorse, no fury. Just the wild-eyed hunger of its own nature. His heartbeat stilled, and his breath grew steady. And despite Russell’s warning hand, he stood up in the catastrophic night.
“Hello,” said Arnold. “I know what you are.”
The pig-man laughed at that, so low that Arnold could barely hear it at first, and then a sound that chortled over the strained hum of the rootcrawler’s broken engine.
“I don’t think you do,” said Shank. “Or else you’d be runnin’ and not talkin’.”
“Arnold,” said Russell, and then yelled as Shank’s grip on his skull tightened; he slammed his fists against Shank’s wrist but could not shake him.
“We’re not here to hurt you,” said Arnold. “He’s not here to hurt you. There’s no need for violence.”
“What’s wrong with a little violence?” said Shank, and shook Russell like a rag doll; Russell tried to keep his own neck from snapping. “It’s a violent world. You sit tight and don’t hurt nobody, you’re gonna get hurt yourself. You wanna protect somebody, you gotta get mean. That’s why you gotta turn around and go home, froggy. You don’t got it in you, and I sure do.”
“Were you always like this?” said Arnold. It wasn’t what he’d meant to say, but the words escaped him before he could come up with any that might save Russell’s life.
Shank seemed to pause at this, lopsided pig head tilted, like a halloween mask that fit poorly.
“No,” he said.
“Please don’t hurt him,” said Arnold. “He’s my friend. I don’t have many. We weren’t trying to hurt you. We were just trying to stop it, was all. Stop all the killing. He doesn’t deserve this.”
“Deserve?” said Shank, and he shifted his grasp on Russell’s head as a butcher might the neck of a chicken, grabbed a hold of Russell’s neck with both gigantic hands. Russell’s face was blotched and red.
“Arnold, he’s going to kill me, and then he’s going to kill you,” Russell said. “Run. Please run. Please please run.”
“Do you like to grind your boot into a down man’s hand until his fingers pop? Do you like to string people up and make ‘em squeal? Follow ‘em back to their homes and burn ‘em out like rabbits?” Shank hissed, hands tightening and twisting on Russell’s neck, and Russell let out a cry, struggling in vain against the butcher’s might.
“No,” said Arnold, staring into those empty sockets where no eyes lingered. “That’s not what we do.”
Shank stood, staring Arnold down, and Russell’s breaths were shallow as Shank’s hands were heavy on his neck.
“What am I?” said Shank.
“You’re an animal,” said Arnold, softly, imploring. He had no weapon, no magic, no special skills. He had one hand that was fresh and one that wasn’t. All he had was himself, and his slightly webbed hands raised. “And killing is your nature. But it didn’t used to be.”
“No,” said Shank, and a heavy, foul breath escaped from him. “I wasn’t always an animal.”
“Then you remember,” said Arnold. “What it was like to be like me. To be afraid of losing a friend.”
“Arnold,” Russell whispered.
“I remember what it was like to be like you,” said Shank, and he stepped closer to Arnold, one step, two, dragging Russell along, but his attention had shifted and Russell breathed in a gasp of air. “Weak and begging. Hoping, praying they’d stop. They don’t stop. They keep going, and they love your screams as they rip you apart.”
Arnold was only a few feet away from the towering hulk of pig and dead flesh, now, and Russell trembled silently in his grasp.
“I know,” said Arnold. “That’s what animals do.”
Shank stood as still as a statue for a few moments, and then his grip softened, and Russell collapsed to the underbrush, holding his throat and gasping for air.
“Run away, little piggy,” said Shank. “Go home.”
And he turned, and began walking, a slow and tireless trudge, away from Arnold and Russell and the ruined rootcrawler.
“If I see you again,” said Shank, “I may not remember. Animal may be all that’s left of me. And I won’t weep when I tear you limb from limb. So best you give a wide berth of my neck of the woods. That’s the funny thing: life will make animals of us all. Give it a little time.”
I think it’s the opposite, Arnold thought, as Shank vanished into the dark. Try as hard as it might, it hasn’t made me vicious yet.
“Arnold,” said Russell, rising to his feet with the help of Arnold’s slimy hand and clapping him on the shoulder. “When we get back to the Scoutpost, you are so getting promoted.”
Story 2 - All of it Backwards
Clementine saw nothing, and also everything. Somehow she felt herself falling through her own memories.
Surrounded by living, smiling corpses in Box Polaris. Shank’s great ugly head by flashlight. Crashing down through the deadly skewers of the northern logfall. Case after case after case after case. Sleepless nights and the ever-changing web of her red string theory boards transforming in real time, scrolling backwards like a tree losing all of its leaves over and over again. Cases with Shelby. Cases with Danielle. Cases following behind Buck Silver. A jacket without badges and a jacket with them. A swarm of mothers, Violet and Bern and Valerie in an endless cycle of support and tough love and paralysis.
Knocking at her mother’s bedroom door unanswered, and then more and more answered. Somehow in reverse it was like watching her come to life again. The last time she’d spoken to Riot, and the briefest flash of sisterhoods clawing its way out of bitter resentment. A girl floating on the night air, while Riot and Olivier danced in a crowd below.
A road trip that, when reversed, was the story of how she was dragged from the Scoutpost and flown back across the country for Box Andromeda and cleaned up and put in a sterile box where no infection could touch her perfectly synthetic body. Being the good daughter of the Botulus Corporation, the perfect union of the Stonemaid rebellion and the marketing department of the most powerful corporation on Earth.
Valerie’s smile, so, so glad to see her. The educational departments, helping her to remember a life she’d never lived. And then flashes of white and black, consciousness longer buried. Knitted together by a thousand needles shifting like the legs of a spider on a table of ancient stone, screaming like a newborn as she was woven in the image of a girl she had never met, while her true father watched grinning like a mad god in the early days of the universe.
She was forged, like a document. A copy, a hollow promise. The fires of creation burned cold for her, and no life or love had been poured into her by the table. Only a hollow semblance, a manufactured shell, and all that she had tried to fill it with had only gotten into her gears and burst her seams, and now she was split on all sides.
A life in fourteen years. All the while wondering how it would end. She had lingered on long after the sister she was supposed to embody. Ironic, that, the copy outlasting the real deal. What was all of it for?
And that question was a vast and solitary darkness, and she drifted eternal in it.
She wondered, in that endlessness, what will become of all my tapes, still unfinished? How does a good detective die?
There was, in the darkness, color. A twinge of warmth when she could feel otherwise nothing.
The Wickers had not been cast out from Scout City. They had gotten to stay, and more or less work out their differences. Their youngests grew up among Scout City’s children with no memory of the atrocities that came before, and were loved like any child of the community, and she watched their hate dwindle over the years.
Medical supplies had been recovered from the Scout City Bandersnatch, really a large horrible squirrel bird that had taken up residence in the infirmary walls and hoarded the shiny little tins the medication came in. And a season of Scout City residents had lived as a result, and gone on to contribute art and food and music.
She had solved why Berne’s bees were changing; the sweet black sap that they had been dining on, and got them to continue producing good honey in time for the spring solstice dishes.
She had taken up the case of people who were lost or murdered or wronged. She had delved into affairs so intricate that the Scout City deputies could not have begun to dissect their nuances. And even if she had no thumbprints, in a thousand little motes of light, numberless crossed stitches in the city’s tapestry, she was written.
Would you look at that, she thought. Wolf cut and patchless jacket and all. When you think about it, I’ve left footprints all over this city. They won’t forget me easily. I’ll come up, again and again, in quiet moments. Shelby’s writeups will outlive me. And someday, a kid like me might pick up one of these stories. Put on a hat. Set out to become an amateur detective.
Yep, she thought. There are worse ways to go.
The Tapes - Push Yourself
Someday, you’re going to push yourself too hard. That’s part of the gig too. It’s not true for everyone. But I think it will be true for you, because I know you, and I know how strong you think you are. And I know you don’t give a crap about yourself when it comes to helping other people. I think you’re like me. And I know you’ll ignore the breaking threads until they finally fray… apart. And all of you spills out.
Story 2, Continued - All of it Backwards
It was not what usually happens when a sharp scalpel makes contact with a human eye. It was more that at the slightest touch, her eye burst, like a sac full of water, as though it had been on the verge of disappearing already. She also suspected you were supposed to feel something when that happened, except that beyond the sudden loss of her depth perception, there was nothing. Vincent was not a heavy man, and yet even his spidery weight on top of her was enough to send reaffirming cracks and groans along the fragile cage of her ribs. One of her hands was entirely useless, the other pinned by his stronger grasp, far stronger than she would expect an elderly bachelor who spent his days inside to be. His fingers gripped her wrist so hard they broke the skin, although to be fair, that was not hard to do now that she was dissolving by the hour.
There was, suddenly, the swing of a rusted golf club—a rare and rarely used artifact—expertly driven into the side of Vincent’s head, and the impact sent him reeling off of Clementine and rolling across the fluorescently moldy soil of the Mortal Grove. She looked up to see Raj Greenstreet, the iron over his shoulder.
“I’m sorry Vincent,” he said. “It’s not personal.”
He knelt down beside her, keeping a careful eye on the writhing mortician.
“Oh,” Raj said softly, looking her over. “Oh dear.”
“I’m fine,” Clementine grunted.
“My dear you most certainly are not,” said Raj, and reached down to try and pick her up one-handed, struggled with her weight. She looked over with her remaining eye to Vincent; the wooden box that he’d worn to hold Voltaire on his back had splintered, and now the ventriloquist’s dummy sat in the dirt, staring up with painted eyes and hinged mouth agape, speaking words that only Vincent could hear. It might have been just her imagination, but its head seemed to roil with black smoke, pouring out like a vapor from its mouth.
“You can’t possibly,” whimpered Vincent.
“What have I told you about consequences?” said Vincent. “You’re going to watch. You’re going to watch so that you understand.”
“We’ll never be allowed in Scout City after this,” said Vincent. “You’ve ruined everything. Everything.”
“It’s just going to be you and me, Vincent,” said Vincent. “We’ll find someplace new where it can be just us. Best friends. Like we was always supposed to be.”
“I don’t want to go,” said Vincent.
“Funny,” said Vincent. “I don’t remember giving you a choice.”
“I’m not enjoying this puppet show,” muttered Clem. “Doesn’t seem suitable for kids.”
“Come this way,” said Raj, and he pulled her to the foot that worked best; she had no good way to hold her crutch at this point, and hopping along with his support was a slow business, and Raj leaned heavily when she pulled; he was not of a strong build himself.
“You can’t make me,” said Vincent, standing up; he rose as if pulled to his feet by unseen strings, limp and unwieldy limbs pulled into action.
“I want you to remember,” said Vincent. “You did this all to yourself. There’s nobody to blame for this but you. You let this happen.”
Vincent pivoted around on one foot with the grace of a ballet dancer, arms swinging back and forth, the scalpel still clutched in his fingers, and the widest grin upon his face.
“Please,” Vincent whimpered.
“Kill them,” said Vincent. “Kill them both.”
Story 3 - The Empty Trap
Out in the woods, alone in a clearing of fallen leaves and empty trees, a beagle’s paw had been caught in a rusted trap, and she had gnawed her own paw to the bone. Shelby wondered if she had known why, at the time. What it was that made the beagle that anxious, not content to sit and wait. What made escape matter more than anything, more than pain, more than even life itself.
The trap had been designed for larger prey. No doubt the hunters were disappointed that a scrappy hound was all that they had caught, before they had themselves been caught by a very different kind of hunter. And now Cannibal limped along on three paws, as curious and resolute as ever. Still free. Still alive.
Shelby lay in the box, just as she had lain still in the cupboard in the side of their wagon while Shank had passed over her family and robbed her of her parents. Her hand pressed over her brother’s mouth, keeping both of them from even breathing. Keeping them still and quiet and alive. Yes, she was familiar with the box. And all the tragedy that transpired while she hid. And she could wait, until it was all done, and no one could say that she had made the wrong choice. But the difference was, she thought, I don’t have the patience for it.
Shelby’s hunters had made a mistake. Of course they had. They were not so careful as she was, or as thoughtful. They had left her clothes on. She could not feel the crossbow, or any of her other bags; was not sure if they had been thrown away in an alley somewhere or were sitting just outside the box. Certainly, some of her materials would have helped. But she had been able to reach down to her waist with her free hand, and loosen her belt, tie it around her arm until she had lost all feeling.
She knew the marks of their craft. The holes they bored through Mr. Greenstreet’s corpse had been accurate and clean. The wire—it was undoubtedly wire, now—that they had used to saw through Abraham Walker’s bones had been sharp. And what wrote runes in flesh that cleanly must be well maintained. Clean, and sharp. She was hinging everything on that.
She could do as she was told, and wait, utterly still, and wait for the end. Wait for death to pass, and for it to strip away all the ones that she loved. Clementine, her brother, Bern. She was not sure that any of them were safe. Not in a world where murderers did as they wanted in Scout City. If they were to repent, who among them had not sinned? Who would not be put upon the crucible in time?
She had waited, once. But she had become a more feral animal. Was she the kind, she wondered, who would chew her own arm off to be free? To roam loose, maw stained with her own blood and the taste of her own flesh, to revenge upon her captors? To arrive in time to save the people she loved?
In a heartbeat, she thought.
And within the confines of her wooden box, arm caught in a bladed trap that she could not see, she rose.
Out in the woods, alone in a clearing of fallen leaves and empty trees, a beagle’s paw had been caught in a rusted trap, and she had gnawed her own paw to the bone. And in some other place and time, it snapped entirely, and she ran through the forest underbrush, bloodsoaked and free, and when the hunters came, she was long gone, and only the rusted trap and a gnarled paw remained.
The Conversation - If You Love Me
Marolmar
Well, that depends on if you love me.
Nikignik
I do. You know I do. But I cannot…
Marolmar
You refuse to let my heart complete its process. Very well. Although it not how I would have dreamt it.
Nikignik
‘Very well?’
Marolmar
I ask, then, that you do something for me.
Nikignik
What would that be?
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'File 12: The Mortal Grove', 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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