HFTH - Episode 164 - Plans

Content warnings for this episode include: Implication of physical abuse from a partner, Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Sexism and misogyny (Rick Rounds), Strangulation/suffocation, Emotional Manipulation, Body horror, Religious Violence, Amputation of a limb

The Interrogation - Short of Countless

Nikignik, Alone

It will be worth it. It will be worth it. It will be worth it. It is not for myself, dreamer, I need you to know that. It is for you, and a trillion lives like yours. For all life, describable and otherwise. For a forest of black pines and watching trees. For starwolves and demons and vampires. For ravens and rats and frogs and fastidious rotwhelks. For night-gaunts and needletooth hares. For the hallowed and the human and the dog and the dead. Even for cats. And for Lolgmololg. I must do this. I have no choice… no. Well. I do have a choice. But for all your sakes, this is the one I must make. And what is the loss of a few eyes? I still behold the universe, a fraction less than I did before. I am only now a little short of countless.

Story 1 - Everything to Lose

Clementine liked to think of herself as someone with nothing to lose. And yet, with death closing in on four sides, she could not help but think of all the things that she was about to.

Shelby, and the little apartment on Fisher Lane with her good desk in it.

A three-legged beagle.

Her mother, against all odds.

Riot, out there somewhere, somehow, someday.

A mess of red string and notes and pictures on the wall of her office. Red strings that stretched all the way across Scout City, wound through homes and branches, and all led to the four strangers that surrounded her. She glanced from one to the next. Fiddle, drum, horn and piano. Their masks were more art than function. A mask for a robbery was supposed to be as ubiquitous as possible. These were one of a kind, unmistakeable. Of value either to send a message, or of a more ritual nature known only to the wearers.

Each of the four strangers closing in around her, with their black clothing and cloaks and gaudy music masks, carried a dagger—thin, curved, long. But in the remaining four of their hands, thin lines of moonlight flashed in the air as wire stretched out from fiddle to horn and drum to piano, and she was caught between the lines as the Quartet yanked them taut.

Her crumpled hand caught on one of the wires and contorted with the tension of the line; it opened her skin where it touched, but she was out of blood to bleed. The other wire caught in a fold of her jacket, and she tried to bow out of the cables’ grasp, but there was a snap and a twist, and a loop trailed around her arm, the other around her leg, and as she kicked for space, her neck. Four sets of hands, like a great spider, ensnared her with a sharp pull, and a seam opened in her wherever the wire touched, and she flipped face first into the ground.

“You feel good about this?” she said, spitting fluid and teeth into the dirt. “Real fair fight.”

There was a sharp kick in the back of her neck, one that broke something and made her whole world spin in points of white light. The world she could see with her remaining eye, that was.

“Keep her quiet,” said the drum. “Hoist her up.”

The wire was tight around her neck, then, and the sound of metal rattling as the wire was flipped up over top of a branch that crossed her alley. She had four stage hands hastening to their orchestrated parts, and she was about to be Scout City’s next big show, and there was no strength left in her.

Almost none. She bit someone’s gloved hand; she kicked out as she was dragged up from the forest floor to her knees. It didn’t matter. They were strong, and her body was collapsing with every blow now. The rush of her dying circulation filled her ears, drowned out all other noise. Her heart was a drum itself, tapping out a strange tune for a finale. If she screamed, she could not hear it, and neither could Scout City.

There was a sound, then, that wasn’t musical at all. It was a ferocious roar that she had not often heard—the grinding wheeze of the RV-Lution, or the hum of the Stonemaid helicopter, or the cantankerous buzz of the rootcrawlers. A mechanical engine of some kind, small but vicious, and a light illuminated the end of the alleyway.

Shelby Allen stood at the end of the alley, trench coat torn and spattered black with blood, hair pushed back in the night wind. Her eyes were wide. She neither smiled nor grimaced. She held in one hand a flashlight, which was the kind of thing Shelby always remembered to bring, and had no other hand at all. Where a graceful, cold, surprisingly strong hand had been, there was a wrist wrapped in strips of her coat, and leather belts that bound to her forearm the source of the noise: an electric saw.

Fourteen inches of serrated metal teeth reciprocated along a swordlike edge; yellow paint had flaked from the housing and battery and a silver handle that looped around Shelby’s arm. It was built a lifetime ago for turning a carcass into neat, manageable pieces, and Shelby used it for work, and she used it for work now. Shelby lowered the whining saw into one of the wires stretched across the alley, and the blade chewed through it instantly, and Clem felt air rush into her again as the tension around her neck released; the Quartet member with the mask of saxophone brass made a kind of stifled grunt as the wire snapped into them and left a cut in a wrist, above the black glove.

And then Shelby stepped forward, saw flickering with violence, and the Quartet was suddenly in motion. Four ghosts in black cloaks, flowing to the back of the alley, and as swiftly as they had appeared, they were scaling from the ledges between the two gigantic stump buildings to the rooftops. Even through the grimy haze of her vision, Clem noticed that one of them made the thirty-foot jump in a single hefty leap.

And then the last of their cloaks passed over the edge of the rooftop above, and Shelby was beside her, the only light in this foul night. The saw Shelby had affixed to her arm bit through the remaining wire and Clem fell free, and landed on her knees again. And there were a thousand things Clem wanted to say. Hey, what’s up with the hand. Guess why we’re never having mushroom stew for dinner again. Guess why else. Where have you been all day. Wish we had stayed together. But there was not time for any of it, because there was only the case, and it was slipping away.

“Come on,” Clem grunted. “Help me up. We’re going after them.”

Story 2 - An Escape from Violence

“What does it look like, Buck?”

Rick Rounds was close, and his voice sent a shiver down Buck’s spine that was difficult to interpret. Closeness could mean tenderness with Rick, or it could mean pain, and often both together. He loomed behind where Buck sat in the tent, transgressively close.

“What does what look like, Rick?” Buck said.

“Fort Freedom,” said Rick, and Buck felt Rick’s hands lean on the back of his chair, and it creaked under the weight of both of them. “Don’t act like you don’t know. What do you do all day if it ain’t listening in to what people are sayin’.”

“Well it’s fine, Rick, it’s fine,” said Buck. Rick swallowed, and Buck felt he was not going to escape so easily.

“I get the sense it ain’t,” said Rick.

“I reckon Mrs. Wicker is up to something,” Buck conceded; suddenly safety lay in honesty.. “Talkin’ to the wives while you and the boys are out on patrol. One of her bible studies. Far as I’m aware she ain’t saying anything out loud exactly, but she casts you and your leadership in a light that ain’t too pleasant.”

“Wives?” said Rick Rounds. “I’m not worried about what wives at Fort Freedom think, Buck.”

“Well, the thing about ‘em is that what they tend to think ends up bein’ what their husbands end up…”

“Buck, I do not give a damn,” said Rick, and Buck felt Rick’s grip tighten on the head of the chair, and the man’s voice behind him lowered nearly to his neck. “Fort Freedom is mine. It’s gonna take more than the nagging of old housewives to shake things up around here. No one takes what’s mine.”

As it turned out, sometimes people did in fact take what was Rick Round’s. Satan took Rick’s hand and Mrs. Wicker took his title and Buck took his leave and that was the end of Rick Rounds. And Buck had, though all the storms of the latter days had buffeted him, taken step after step out of Fort Freedom and into a life that was free.

Plans back then had been simple. Studying the elaborate social hierarchy of righteousness and violence that made up Fort Freedom and its people—even within the rows of people seated in the pews listening to the sermons of Bob Wicker, there had been nuances. People motivated by fear or reward, who felt the world was an enemy or a tribulation. Mrs. Wicker had a keen eye for it, and by the time Rick Rounds left on his final mission, she already had instilled herself in half of the community’s subconscious. And Buck, who had not necessarily known words like hierarchy or subconscious at the time, had been keen too. And he was a decade and a half, and half an ocean away, from Fort Freedom and the memory of Rick Rounds.

He was holding a tiny pair of binoculars and looking out a rain-streaked window halfway up a cargo ship control tower, watching a man that he did not have to hide loving pretend to be a night watchman. Marco paced the hundreds of feet of deck below, lantern waving in the billowing clouds of rain, and then reversed course, conspicuous only by his isolation on the empty and rainswept portion of the deck. He passed the binoculars silently to Brooklyn, and she took vigil at the window.

“With respect, I still can’t believe you agreed to let him do this,” said Brooklyn.

“Frankly, neither can I,” said Buck. “But he was dead set on it.”

“You trust these knights to keep him safe?” Brooklyn said, not wavering from the lenses.

“No, not exactly,” said Buck, and that did merit a sharp look up from Brooklyn. Her clothes were neat even despite the rainstorm, the dark braids of her hair up in a bun, and her hand clung to a pen and a paper pad perched against the windowsill, even when she wasn’t paying attention. There was a thumping of footsteps somewhere in the metal stairways beyond that made Buck nervous.

“Although they did give their word. I’m betting on their drive to hurt this thing. Above all else,” Buck continued. “Right now, though, it’s delicate. Captain Branston doesn’t know what we’re up to, as far as I’m aware—I have yet to uncover the exact nature of his relationship with this night predator, but I suspect it to be a complicated thing and I am not sure if he would intervene. As for the Humble Boot and Captain Shaw, I know they have a vested interest in seeing this beast destroyed but I do not trust them to do it reliably.”

“And Mr. Spade,” said Brooklyn, studying him.

“I worry Mr. Spade is caught up in playing a game he cannot win,” said Buck. “And that makes him dangerous.”

There was a rap on the door, then, and a rattle of the rebar that Buck and Brooklyn had used to bar the door to the hall.

“Mister Silver,” said Dashiell Spade on the other side.

Buck and Brooklyn were silent for a moment, and Buck took his cane in both hands. Brooklyn pushed back the fold of her long coat and her hand moved to the device at her hip; a makeshift taser built from the husk of a Botco enforcing drone.

“Mister Silver, I know you’re in there,” Mr. Spade continued. “Open the door.”

“The last time we spoke, you said you would offer me no more help,” Buck said, although he guessed Brooklyn would have had him stay quiet. “Forgive me if I am skeptical to oblige you.”

“I was mistaken,” said Dashiell. “There is a game being played, and there’s no way to win. Something is beginning.”

“Buck?” Brooklyn said, standing up suddenly from the window. “I can’t see Marco.”

Buck took the binoculars, and looked out, but could not see Marco, or for that matter, half the deck. The spotlights that usually illuminated the deck flickered and were smothered with dark clouds, and he could not even hear the sound of the thunder or rainfall outside.

“I’ve met the creature,” said Dashiell, from the other side of the door. “The game, the notes. It’s been a distraction for us. Tonight she goes on the warpath.”

The Tapes - Completely Alone

Clem

And when it all falls apart… I don’t know what to do when that happens. I see it coming. I’m like a man-eating deer in headlights, and the future is rushing towards me and I can’t get out of its way. I think you’ll find bits and pieces of me. Smeared across the front bumper, buried in the glass of the windshield. I’m going to leave a mess.

Story 2, Continued - An Escape from Violence

Buck stepped from the control tower onto the deck, with Brooklyn and a frenzied Mr. Spade at his back, and it was shocking how quickly they disappeared. There was no moonlight, and the rain and wind were felt but not heard or seen; his cane mapped out the grate of the deck beneath his feet, but otherwise the veil of shadow that had descended on the ship was complete.

He turned back, reaching out for either Brooklyn or Mr. Spade, and felt neither—perhaps they had passed him in the black fog already. There were muted flashes of sound, whispers that should have been roars, hints of distant grinding metal. He felt for the rail of the ship, nearly slipped as the deck shifted angles beneath him, and clung to it for dear life, and when he had a good grip, began inching forward into the darkness. He called for Marco, or for Brooklyn, although he could not hear his own voice in the shadow. He hoped the Knights of New England had come better prepared to fight this darkness than he had.

Dashiell’s words weighed on him—the Countess. The Duchess. The game. It was unclear now if the second note mattered. If it was a promise their opponent would still uphold. The winning prize: your daughter lives. But the immediate priority was finding Marco and making sure that he had not been mauled. In truth, Buck was a bit frightened of what he might find. He felt sometimes a breeze pass him in the shadow; was unsure if it was the rising storm or knights or fell creatures passing in the night. He continued along the railing for what seemed like an hour, although it must have been only minutes, and resisted as he felt several heavier swells of the boat that leaned him against the edge of the rail.

He felt, then, a small, frigid hand grab his, and pull. He stumbled on his feet a moment, coughing silently in the infernal smog. The hand was Hope’s, he was fairly sure, and so he followed it—although if it was not hers, but the vampire’s, it was to his end. Then the ground suddenly disappeared, and he was falling, collided shoulder and head with metal stairs as he came to land in a crawlspace beneath the deck, and the trapdoor swung shut on rusted hinges above. Hope sat up there, drenched by the rain and shivering on the steps.

“Sorry,” she said. “Are you okay? I wasn’t trying to trip you but I couldn’t see.”

“Hope,” said Buck. The deathly silent fog did not penetrate here, and there was a dull orange light flickering in the metal hall. He sat up, rubbed at the cut on his forehead, came away with blood on his fingers. “I’m quite alright. But you were supposed to stay in your room.”

“I met her,” Hope said, eyes wide and her chin on her knees. “The Duchess is the vampire.”

“I had been informed as much by Mr. Spade,” Buck said. “You should not have been talking with this woman.”

“She tried to swoop me into the air but then I fell into the ocean,” Hope continued. Buck blinked and hoped that he had been too concussed to understand her correctly. “But then her friends rescued me. And I think we’ve got it backwards. They’re being hunted, by the knights and by the captains.”

“We did not board this ship to shed blood, but to escape violence,” said a voice, and Buck looked up to find a woman at the end of the rusted hall. She wore an elaborate black dress as the Duchess had, but her veil was lifted. Her face was brown and round and framed by dark hair and golden beads, and he knew immediately that he had seen her before, a lifetime ago. Roaring at the knives and chains of Fort Freedom, cast into a fighting-pit, rising to confront the great heron Frogsticker amidst the froglin bones. A wolf in the shape of a woman. That was the day the devil had come to Fort Freedom, and the beginning of the end for Rick Rounds, and the beginning of a change for everything in Buck Silver’s life. Escape violence indeed.

If she recognized him, she gave no sign of it.

“If you know what is happening out there,” said Buck. “I would be keen to hear it. Hope’s parents are up there. There are knights waiting to ambush whoever has been killing nightwatches.”

“I cannot guarantee that anyone will be safe in the violence that is beginning,” said the wolf. “Neither your loved ones, nor mine. I only know that by the dawn, much blood will have been shed aboard this ship.”

“Thank you for returning Hope safely,” Buck said cautiously, although felt his weight shift to put himself more between the wolf at the end of the hall and Hope on the stairs.

“Of course,” said the wolf. “I am not a monster.”

No. But am I, Buck wondered, and am I still? Only this night will tell.

Story 3 - Shelby and Clementine

Shelby was only a little cold, and she wondered if this was how Shank had felt when he butchered her parents. She had awoken in a basement in an empty warehouse in the shipping district in the lower trunk; no names or owners that she could identify immediately. Her things had been set neatly, almost carefully, on a table, and only footprints and the trail of her own dragged body disturbed the dust. The immediate thing had been how to stay conscious despite the pain, gather her things, and rise through the doors into the dim twilight. Scarcely a thought had passed through her; she moved like a weapon, unfeeling and calculated. The pain was present; her hand was not. The electric bone saw was hastily adapted to her arm, but it was something that could harm, that she would not need to manage once she locked it on—Bern’s crossbow she had loaded, but would not be able to reload easily. And then she had begun to search.

The search led her to Clementine, who was one eye short, skin cut in a dozen places, one arm and hand a crumpled heap, barely able to stand. Urging her to help her rise, to chase the black cloaks escaping over the rooftops of the Stumps.

Somehow, they made it to the roof. Really with Shelby hauling all of Clementine along with one hand, and then they both had their footing on one of the rusted roofs that stretched out across the lower neighborhoods of Scout City, and she could see the four strangers in the distance, leaping from rooftop to rooftop as they made their getaway. She knelt, pulled out the crossbow with her free hand—loaded for one shot only, and braced it against her chest and knee, and fired. A silver-tipped bolt whistled through the moonlight, and sunk into a leg four rooftops away, and one of the black cloaks went down, rolled across the roof, and then the hunt was on. Clem hustled ahead, clutching her side, and Shelby was right behind her, and for a moment it was just like it had been for years. Side by side, again, and the end of a case ahead of them, so close that she could taste it like blood in the air.

The other three members of the quartet gathered around their fallen member, who screamed something fierce, and Shelby and Clementine, Scout City detectives, closed in not to kill but to unmask the truth. And Shelby looked over, caught Clementine’s gaze in the moonlight; the boss smiled.

And then the bosses’ eyes closed, and Clementine fell to a heap, slid across the large flat roof of one of the great stump buildings. Shelby came to a halt a few feet later, and stood against the night sky. She watched the Quartet, four roofs away, helping the fourth member to their feet. They watched her back, masks glinting in the starlight. They stood like that, for a moment. Hunter and prey, although neither quite sure who was who.

And then, one by one, the Quartet vanished over the edge of their roof, and were gone. And Shelby knelt next to Clementine, sat down beside her on the roof, and took Clem’s head into her lap with the single hand that she had. Darkness was beginning to wash over her own self too, now, thrumming waves of her body catching up with her brain. Clementine was still breathing, and that quiet, whimpering sound was a music to Shelby’s ears.

This was not how she had expected their final case together to go. And she wondered, as she ran her fingers through Clem’s hair, how she would write the ending of this one in the report for the newspapers and magazines and casebooks later. If it would get an ending at all. Perhaps it was best if this one stayed unwritten. If the end never came, perhaps she would never have to leave this final moment, where she and Clementine still lived, still bled, still breathed together.

The Conversation - For Us Once

Nikignik

How could I ever forgive myself?

Marolmar

Think of the universe ahead of you, one that will be forever grateful. Think of the next ones like you and I - they might be out there even now, listening to these dreams of yours, too afraid to take a step out in the starlight for fear of what might happen.