Content warnings for this episode include: Animal death (Dogsmell as usual), Death + Injury, Needles, Emotional Manipulation, Body horror, Terminal Illness
The Interrogation - Ballpark
Nikignik
Tell me, Auditor, if you can. What kind of punishment waits for the murderer of an indescribable one?
Auditor
The consequences shall befit the actions committed.
Nikignik
Give me a ballpark.
Auditor
What?
Nikignik
Ah. It is an expression. It pictures a wide field used for sport, in which a small sphere might be struck with a bat. An estimate. A prediction without fear of being overly precise.
Auditor
I was present.
Nikignik
Present when? Now I feel like the Auditor.
Auditor
I was present when the Industry of Souls opened their door to earth. I and a hundred Auditors and a thousand Demons, and the Burning Forge himself, and the light of Tolshotol Who Guards a Thousand Suns. I remember when we visited Earth, and came across Marolmar in the ice-encrusted wastes.
Nikignik
I don’t like to relive that moment.
Auditor
I remember watching the skin of a god dissolve into ash, and then the miasmic superstructures, and the hundred invisible energy fields disrupted and bursting. Antlers shattered, eyes blackened.
Nikignik
Why are you recounting this?
Auditor
You asked for a ballpark.
Story 1 - A Farewell for Fishbone
“I’ll be back in just a moment,” said Clara, from the door.
She was hungry, but not in any way that dinner would be able to satisfy. It was disorienting, to be caught between two places. On the one hand, the fresh air of the Hallowoods in the spring, a living experience full of light and other people. On the other, the abyss. And yet they were both tempting in their own ways, and fire and sunshine fled around in her head and made her dizzy. Not so dizzy, of course, that she could not see the ghosts. They laughed and lingered over the living girls in her kitchen; Dogsmell, with a dozen souls manifesting into a long snout and flowing ears and inkwell eyes, looked up to her, betrayed. She shook her head. Don’t give me that look. I’ll never be gone that long again.
They barely noticed her lingering for a moment at the edge of the room. And why would they? They had so much to catch up about, and she was half a ghost to them anyway. She closed the door quietly, and passed through the twin surgical tables in her operating room where Riot’s preserved corpse lay beneath the sheet, the crowded shelves of large jars pulled from the mire of the Mend Mansion, sewing supplies in rusted tins. And on the other side, her study. There had been a time in her childhood when books were treasured, prized, each stain upon a page a tragedy.
At some point, the books in here had become more about function, and then she had gotten comfortable tearing out the pages that mattered in her haste and tossing the rest of it, and then she had come to find that most of the pages could not help her either, and so the room was one large nest of rotting paper with a solitary visible hole down to the floorboards where she sat, more often than not, reading. She pulled the Compact from where she had hidden it beneath the top layer of the nest—it was ancient, and yet preserved in a way that far outshone the crumpling pages that filled the rest of the room. Glyphs were inscribed on its surface that were red and glinting. And she crossed her legs, sat in her hole in the center of the paper nest, and opened the Compact, and then she was back.
It always started you at the top of the labyrinth—and it was a labyrinth. Every crypt and archive was a facade, lies to distract you from the burning table. The first stage was the only one where you could still see the sky—blood-red clouds bathed in the light of an invisible red sun. That was the common denominator for all fourty-seven of the potential starting locations. They were nearly identical, save for small markings and details—a chip in the high stone wall, a painted sigil of a grinning demon looking left instead of right.
You had to identify which of the fourty-seven courtyards you began in because each one came with different doorways, and from those you had important choices to make about where to enter the labyrinth proper. She did not descend any tempting staircase, but continued through the right pattern of stone arches until she reached what she had deemed entry courtyard one of fourty-seven, where the fountain sat. It was sculpted of white stone, and depicted curling sea monsters of a medieval exaggeration, bulging eyes and knifelike teeth and wide smiling jaws. In the bone-dry basin lay the only truly living thing she had ever encountered in the Compact.
“Back again already,” said the scaly green fish. It had a cynical yellow eye, and a toothy jaw that did not properly form words when it spoke, but drifted open and shut in an approximation of speech. Its body was too long and its spiky fins too peculiar to ever have been a proper swimming fish, but then again, Fishbone was not a fish at all, and it was dangerous to think of him as one.
“Yes,” said Clara, and she came over to the edge of the fountain.
“S’no surprise. I’m irresistible, I’m told,” said the demon.
“I’ve gotten it, haven’t I,” said Clara. She fixed her glasses, although she had no real need of them here.
“Can’t give any answers or direction,” said Fishbone. “Even if I did, I wouldn’t trust ‘em, on account of the malice. Might run you into dead ends and doldrums for fun.”
“You’re tireless,” said Clara, and she did something that she had never in untold centuries of exploring the Compact. She sat down in the fountain basin next to Fishbone.
“You look ridiculous down here,” said Fishbone. “There’s no secret doors, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“Fishbone,” she said, leaning against the carved serpents. “Thank you.”
“Haven’t given you nothing,” said Fishbone, but there was a note of fear in his lazy yellow eye. “Have I?”
“No, you haven’t,” said Clara. “But it’s been… incredibly long. Hundreds of years. Maybe thousands. And you’ve never once been kind or helpful.”
“Buttering me up’ll do no good to you,” said Fishbone, flapping a fin.
“All in all, you have been a terrible guide and a worse friend,” said Clara. “And I never would have come to understand the nature of this place without you.”
“Never claimed to be either of those things,” said Fishbone. “It’s funny that you think you understand it. Sure you do. Haven’t heard that one before.”
“I think in some way you’re obliged not to acknowledge what I’m about to say,” said Clara. “And that’s alright. But I wanted to thank you for always being there, for a thousand years, even if you’ve led me into traps and watched me die in a million ways. But I know I’ve found the answer now. What I was missing. Buried in a thousand stone layers of terms and conditions. I’ve double, triple, quadruple checked my path. I understand the price that has to be paid now. And that means you’re going to stop seeing me. I’m going to be back, one more time, later tonight, and that’s it.”
“It’s always one more time,” said Fishbone. “That’s how it is. When you hold the power of life and death in your clumsy hands. You’ll be back, again and again… I’ll be seeing you.”
“Fishbone,” she said, and lowered her head to his flat scaly one, and planted a kiss on his shiny fish forehead. “I’m saying it up front. Goodbye. Thanks for everything. Which was nothing. But I would have gone insane without someone to talk to.”
“Seems you went insane either way,” said Fishbone. “Who’re you trying to save? Must be someone very special. Is it your father?”
“You’ll find out soon,” Clara said, and closed her book only seconds after she had opened it, and rose for dinner. And then, after dinner, it would be time for a final journey, and a solved equation, and the end of a thousand years of work.
Story 2 - The Flip Side
Working the kitchen was not the same with one hand. Shelby found that things slid around on the countertop without the subtle support of the other, and pain radiated through her remaining stump whenever the tension went too strongly through it, and she kept it bound close to her, which made managing the knife with the other hand difficult. But she managed, and she did not entirely mind the pain.
Pain was just meat trying to communicate, to say that it was in a bad way. And the parts of her that were not meat—she had grown suddenly more aware of her own soul in a way she had never encountered before meeting a ghost today—were not in a good way either. She would, if given the chance, cut off her other hand instead of cutting off the part of her that sat at the dining table, talking to the ghost.
Her bone saw lay on the countertop; her crossbow by the door. She drew her cleaver across the piece of animal to turn them into portions—some forest boar that had turned up on the front porch overnight. It was something she could do, and do well, and under her care the strips of pork sizzled and browned, were combined with savory herbs and a mushroom-based gravy. She was out of other ways to help now.
The witch’s house was dirty, and that worried her. She was gathering the impression that some kind of surgery was supposed to happen, but surgery was supposed to be clean, sharp, precise. This shack and all of its inhabitants were chaotic, decrepit, decaying. And she was about to entrust the rest of Clementine’s life to this addled witch in the woods.
The witch returned from the back rooms of the rotting cabin a moment later, and circled the dining room where Clem sat talking to Percy about vampires, and came into the kitchen. There were tables behind that door that reminded Shelby of Vincent’s morgue.
“How is dinner coming along,” said Clara. “Anything I can help with?”
“Where were you?” said Shelby.
“Oh. I just had to check up on something,” said Clara. “Making preparations.”
“Not just now,” said Shelby, and she tightened the grip on her knife as she brought it down into the greenery she was chopping, made sure that it resounded against the chopping block. “Clementine respects you. But she and her mother have been worried to death about Riot for years. Scout City has been waiting for any sign of what happened up there, in the north. You knew. Percy knew. But you never came back. Where were you?”
“That’s a curious question, metaphysically, of course,” said Clara, pushing up her glasses. “The body’s location is accounted for when reading the Compact, but whether the soul is still…”
Shelby’s knuckles cracked as her grip on the cleaver tightened, and it lay still on the block. Clara gulped.
“I like simple answers,” said Shelby.
“I can understand that. Sometimes there aren’t any,” said Clara, and she took a step closer, to stand beside Shelby at the counter, and her weathered hands took up the next bushel of herbs, and a thin small knife, slightly rusted. Pots simmered on the old stove, and she seemed not to pay mind to Shelby’s stature or her knife as she went about cutting. “I never met Riot’s mother, but I heard a lot about her, almost as much as Riot heard about mine. And I’ve only been to the Scoutp… Scout City, twice. Once to let Riot know that I was going to keep studying at Downing Hill, and once because I was thinking about leaving. I went north to accomplish a mission, one that was similar to Riot’s, but my own. And I abandoned it to try and save her. I’ve thought about going to Scout City, to tell everyone, but Riot asked me not to. Something about not wanting to get Valerie’s hopes up. In case I couldn’t pull this off.”
“Her ghost said this,” Shelby said.
“She’s here, even if you can’t see her,” Clara said, and looked out to the dining room. “And frustrated as hell about that. It’s my fault, really. I haven’t taught her how. Because I’ve been here, in this cabin, head buried in a book, doing everything I can to learn how to stop her from drifting away and disintegrating. And that all comes together tonight.”
“She’s tried to tell me what you’re doing,” said Shelby, reluctantly turning to sample the gravy. “So have you. So has the ghost. I still don’t understand what it is you’re going to do to her.”
“I’m going to try something that has never been successfully tried yet,” said Clara. “And if it works, I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like. I don’t recommend getting your heart set on…”
“This is the end,” said Shelby, and put the lid on the pot. Clara quieted at that, and she looked over to the disheveled witch, met her magnified gaze. “I know that. I carried her into the woods, knowing that no matter what we found out here, it was the end. I’m not looking for hope. I know it’s not here. I’m not going to hurt you or blame you if she dies. I know that’s already happening. I am going to blame you if she ends up trapped, or unhappy, or in pain in any way. She can’t become just one more ghost waiting around for you to do something. For that, I would hold a grudge.”
“Good,” said Clara, and added her greens to the heap on the cutting board. “Then we’re on the same page.”
Shelby found the likelihood of that remote, but she did sit a little easier through dinner, and she kissed Clem on the forehead as she distributed plates of meat and tubers, gravy and herbs.
“For a last supper, babe, you’ve outdone yourself,” said Clem.
“It turned out good, I think,” said Shelby. “For what we have to work with.”
Clem waited until Clara and Shelby had both acquired a mouthful of food before rapping her glass with a spoon. Percy’s outline, a phantasm of light that appeared every so often, flickered beside her. Clem mimed looking around to make sure the audience had quieted, and then slid her yellow tape recorder up onto the table, and clicked it on so that it whirred with life, and she raised her glass.
“We are gathered here today because when they made me they fucked up,” she said. “And because pretty soon my body is going to wear out like old bedsheets and my soul is going to float out, if I even have one. Sorry about that, Shelby, I know you’re kind of attached to said body. I don’t know what it all looks like after tonight. There’s a very real possibility that Clara will just kind of cut me open and nothing will happen and I’ll just be dead and gross.”
“That will probably happen either way,” Clara clarified.
“But other, weirder stuff might happen if the witch’s spell works out,” Clem continued, and Shelby could only take in how much beauty lay in that face, missing eyes and teeth as it was. The smile despite everything.
“So. To all my friends,” Clem said. “Thank you to Percy, for sacrificing a few of your precious afterlife moments to come watch me die. Thank you to Clara, for trying to make something useful out of me. Good luck. Absolutely no thanks to Cole Kane, wherever you are. You suck and you’ll never be a good investigator let alone a detective. To Riot, if you’re here. I wish you’d made it back in one piece. And to Shelby.”
Shelby sat awkwardly as Clem raised the glass in her direction, and Clara and Percy both looked at her.
“These last few years have been my favorite ones,” said Clem. “Don’t get me wrong, living the high life at Botco was nice. But the best thing about my life has been getting to be beside you. Solving cases and thinking about things and enjoying when we both get time off at the same time. You have always done so, so much without me ever asking. Thank you for saving my life a dozen times. For carrying me out here on your back. For having my back when no one else does. Thank you for everything, Shelby. You’re the best part of my world.”
“Right,” said Shelby. “Anytime.”
Clem smacked her glass into everyone else's and then downed the contents immediately, and Shelby afterwards wished she had chosen better words to be immortalized on the tape. And unfortunately, the night began to drift. That was how it went, trying to savor every last moment and in the end finding that they slipped by faster than she had hoped.
Those glances, the light caught in Clem’s eyes, the wayward hairs of her eyebrows or wisps of poorly dyed hair tucked behind her much-pierced ears. These were small facets, and yet all she could cling to. The words flowed in and out like water.
And then dinner was over, and plates were removed, and no one wanted to say anything. And then plates were washed and dishes set in neat stacks, and no one wanted to say anything. And then she sat with Clementine alone on the porch, while the witch prepared, and she felt the witch probably had been ready for half a year already, but gave them time, uninterrupted.
And she could not find what to say. Night fell, and the fireflies returned, and when Clementine ran out of cheerful, silly, helpful things to say, she closed her eyes and very nearly cried into Shelby’s shoulder, and tears found their way out of Shelby’s head. She wept, which she knew was only normal, but she could not decide precisely why. Was it because it was ending? Was it because she knew she was going to be alone? Was it because all those little beautiful things were temporary now and fleeting and soon to be done forever? She did not know any of those things for certain. And yet the possibility alone was vast and overwhelming. She was in a closet, she was in a box, she was holding Mulder tight and scarcely believing that they could survive. The only difference was, this time, she was allowed to cry.
But then the tears passed too, dreamer.
And she was sitting, cheeks clammy and dry, dark hair sticking to her face, and the tears were gone, and Clementine had become similarly still, and they were out of time even for sadness, and the witch was leaning in the door, waiting, and Shelby knew that somewhere in the back the sheets had been pulled from the operating tables.
And Shelby hugged Clementine for the last time in her life, and kissed her with chapped lips, and finally rested their foreheads together. And she should have said that she loved her, that she always would, that was romantic and necessary and probably right.
“I wish I could do something,” said Shelby.
“You’ve done everything,” said Clem, and kissed her again, and smiled a toothy grin. “See you on the flip side.”
And then Clementine was out of her arms, and she walked with Clara down the living room with a hundred artifacts scattered across the floor, and the door at the end of the hall slid shut. And Shelby stood on the porch. There was the night wind around her, and the swing drifting a little in the breeze. And she wondered at that. Shelby Allen had been many things, but alone was not one of them. Always her brother to protect, and later Clementine.
And I know it, dreamer. That kind of silence. Shelby steps down the porch stairs, and circles to the back of the cabin. There is a small yard, surrounded by arches of pines on each side, and overgrown with daisies. Shelby takes off her coat, and lies down among them, so that they shroud on each side of her vision the starlight in the pine-tops high above. And she does not sleep the night that Clementine Maidstone dies; only watches the stars turn above, and lays like the dead herself, waiting for the dawn.
The Tapes - Words
Shelby
Hey. Sorry for stealing your tape recorder. But I want you to know that I love you. I don’t always have the words to say it. Words aren’t really friends of mine to begin with. So for all the times that I’ve been too quiet to make you hear it…
I love the way your brain works.
I love your saxophone music, even if I need to listen from the other room so it’s not too loud for me.
I love the way you smile when you win a case. I even love the way you frown when you lose.
In life I feel like a stranger with my thumb out by the highway, getting passed by car after car. When I’m with you I feel like I’m on the road, and the breeze is flying by, and I’m where I belong in the passenger seat.
I don’t know what it looks like after this. I’m terrified. I know you are too. But I want you to know. I love you. Always. I love you. And if this was temporary, if I have to carry this all on my own… I wouldn’t have given this up for the world. This was worth being here for. So. Like you always say. See you on the flip side.
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'File 10: The Compact', 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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