Content warnings for this episode include: Animal death (Shank as usual), Death + Injury, Blood, Static (including sfx), Emotional Manipulation, Bugs, Body horror, Brain Death/Coma
Intro - You Slept
Once, when you were young, you slept at the end of the world. You did not know much, but you knew that it was the end, and each moment that passed could be the last. The sun was dark and red, and the rain black tears, and the world had no place for you in it.
But when you slept, you had nightmares, and the nightmares told you of a place, darker than your dreams and farther north than you remembered. Of a forest where life and death meet. You dreamt of landscapes and faces strange and familiar, of people that you had never met. And although each dream was terrifying, you could not bring yourself to wake.
The dreams ended, then, for a time, just when you needed them most. They were gone for years. And you grew, and each day was followed by another, and you have begun to understand what the end means. And why it is that I have returned to your dreams, and speak again in nightmare to bid you a very fond Hello From the Hallowoods.
Theme.
Right now, I sit in the driver’s seat of a rusted combination car. It has been many things, to many owners. An ambulance, a hearse, a work vehicle, an heirloom, a wreck, and in time, a decoration chained the ceiling of the Scout City Groundskeeping Office. And currently, a bed for a sleeper freshly returned from the grave. The theme of tonight’s episode is Histories.
Story 1 - Already Late
When Riot woke, she wished that she had not, and she waited to stir from the back of Walt’s hearse until the morning light had somehow found a way, reflecting from sun to lightwell to hearse mirror to glare directly into her face. Despite everything, she still hated mornings.
She slept without blankets; it was warm enough even within the relatively sheltered depths of the Lower Trunk, even at night. When she rose it was first to crawl into the front end of the hearse, and to catch a glimpse of her face in the rearview mirror. A long line of black stitches interrupted her freckles as it cut across her nose and cheeks. One of her bodies had been frozen, died, and kept preserved on a table in the forest in north Ontario for a decade and a half, and eventually been resurrected with string and soul-binding by her ex. Her other body had been ageless to begin with, made wholesale by a corporation for a marketing campaign, and she had outlived their expectations tenfold before wearing out. What remained of that one had been interred in a glass case in the Museum of Broken Promises, above a plaque that said Clementine Maidstone.
The name. She had given a lot of thought to the name. There were many factors riding on it—that she had given up half of her soul as Riot, and half as Clementine, and what remained was still all her, more or less. That Clementine had been born from miniscule particles of Riot, and that Clementine had been so much more. That the newspapers and their mother and the world assumed they both were dead. Except Riot had died in an expedition that had gone North to find the end of the world and never returned, and Clementine had her death blows inflicted by a mad pig man and a mad mushroom man and the Instrumentalist Killers which had come to be known as the Quartet.
There had been the option of continuing as Clementine, which was perhaps the easiest to explain. I got better, everything is normal, the case continues. But it felt wrong to her, because more than half of her had never earned the respect in Scout City that Clementine had, and she knew almost nothing about being a detective, beyond the tapes and case files she had been left. There was also the possibility of changing her name to something entirely new, but that likewise did not appeal to her strongly on account of that it would have been untrue. She was very much still Riot, and still Clementine, and to deny either of her histories would have been a waste of them. This left, then, remaining Riot. That was who the body was, on the surface; it was the origin of them both, in some way. And it felt right in order to share all that had happened to her in the North.
The air was stifling in the upper height of the groundskeeping office, and it was the final push to get her to pull on a tank top and Walter Pensive’s Groundskeeping coveralls, although she tied the top half around her waist. It was all that she could bear to wear in the early summer heat that had descended upon Scout City, and she didn’t mind showcasing the lines of stitches that curled around her arms, ran down her stomach. They were neat, at least, uniform. Clara had a steady hand for that sort of thing.
“Good morning,” she called, swinging open the driver’s side door of the hearse. She peered down; twenty feet below her was the floor, where a long table occupied the lower floor and was covered in all the papers of the groundskeeping business, and both of her coworkers sat, getting an early start on the day’s reports.
“It’s past lunch,” replied Russell, whose hair was one large ginger cowlick. The McGowan family curse. When she had been familiar with him, he had only been a child whom Walt had pried from the burial mound of a man-eating squirrel. Now he was older than her depending on how you did the math, and by rank, her boss.
“I saved you sandwiches,” said Arnold, a froggy fellow who was somewhat familiar with returning from death himself, it seemed.
“Crap,” said Riot, and flung herself out of the driver’s side door of the hearse, and slid down a rope ladder that hung from its step down to the ground floor. She made for the basin in the shower room off to the side, rubbed her hands in her buzz cut, scrubbed at her face until it was clean and red, and bolted back across the main floor.
“We’re leaving in ten for a disturbance in the Stumps,” said Arnold. “Probably a griffocaugh or something.”
“Can’t,” Riot said, snatching up a sandwich from the table and giving Arnold a thankful nod before she leapt up the stairs towards the door, and she paused at the top, chewed, and swallowed. “Already running late!”
And then she was out into the street. The sun cast long beams through the gaps in the walls of the great tree, so much more gigantic than she had left it, and the air was hotter outside already. It was only June, and yet she was already suffocating. And it was only the beginning, because it was time to meet with her mother, now that all the teary reunions had been made, and have a serious talk about the end of the world.
Interlude 1 - Scout City History
Decades ago, some that fled the devastation of the Black Rains went north, where they thought that no one else would be. They were mistaken, for many others had the same thought. But rather than tearing each other apart, they found collaboration, and with whatever they could scavenge wrought the Scoutpost. A humble collection of sheet metal and splintered wood buildings rose into a fort, bound by walls of sharpened pines, which sat in a crater of felled trees and beside a lake full of sleeping prophets.
And with each passing year, its farm and industry grew, although it was beset by terrors. Gigantic beasts that ate flesh and could only be satiated with books, and a rising tide of froglinkind, and killers who aimed to shake its foundations. It was transformed with each trial, and again when a Herald of the End planted a tree around the city. Time has not brought any shortage of trials; betrayals and barkbeetles and brutality. But Scout City, as it has come to be known, has survived each tribulation, and grown taller with each year that passes, and been hollowed and cultivated and carved with the lives of all who dwell within and without it.
But there is no peace in Scout City now. There is heat, and a deathly stillness, and the fear that their reckoning is still close at hand, and with it the end of all they have fought for. We go now to one familiar with such endings.
Story 2 - Coming Back
Diggory Graves knew many things. The most prescient among them was that Riot was likely to be late; nevertheless, they had risen early from their sleepless rest, and stalked down the hall as quietly as possible, before the sound of clatter from the kitchen informed them that there was no need.
“I’m on back to back sessions today, so I won’t be able to talk until tonight,” said Danielle as they entered. Her dark hair was back and out of her face, and the previous night’s makeup was still a smear, and she worked at turning speckled eggs into an omelet. Her shins and ankles, where her bathrobe did not hide them, were wrapped in dark vines. “But good luck with the conference. Are you worried?”
“Why would I be worried?” said Diggory. “They are all friends.”
“I don’t like to think about the expedition and I wasn’t even there,” said Danielle, seizing a knife and rendering cheese into smaller pieces before it made its way into the fold. “Just losing touch with each of you. That would give me nightmares. You’re sure it’s not re-opening old wounds?”
“All my wounds are sewn shut,” said Diggory, and paused. “Save one.”
Danielle looked back to them; her glance flicked to the crater in Diggory’s face where they had clawed out the eye of Irene Mend.
“Is she still in there?” said Danielle.
“She always will be, in some small way,” Diggory said. “I am made in her image. Her soul is a part of mine. But the runes that she wrote for control, for power, are gone, and with them her voice.”
Danielle nodded, and then moved quickly to remove her omelet from the skillet before it burned. “Is Percy going to be there?”
“No, I do not think so,” said Diggory, brows furrowed. They leaned against the door, long sharp fingertips rasping against the doorframe. “Last that I heard, he was still out of the city, fetching his… partner.”
“You seem tense where he’s concerned,” said Danielle, moving over to a small breakfast table. She cleared a stack of mail from the other half so Diggory had space to sit. “Just an observation.”
“Oh dear. I do not mean to be,” said Diggory, lowering to sit in the chair, crossing one long leg over the other. “It is just, I feel there is air we have not cleared between us. We did not much more than say hello when Riot was remade. I worry that he will be… disappointed, in some way. How little I have changed, when he has changed so much.”
“How do you know he’s changed?” Danielle said, around half the omelet.
“He mentioned as such, several times,” said Diggory. “He has a life, and people he has cultivated, and I am very happy for him. I have… the work I have done is difficult to describe. And solitary. And quiet.”
“Why do you still care what he thinks?” said Danielle, who by this point was washing her plate. “Not that it probably means as much to you and him as it does to me, but it’s been like. Thirteen, fourteen years? But being a little nervous reconnecting with someone like that makes sense.”
“Does it,” said Diggory, and they rose from the table. “If I return early, I will try not to disturb your sessions.
“I could try it on you, sometime, if you’d like.”
“Peering into my dreams?” Diggory said, and smiled briefly as they fetched their blank Scoutpost jacket from the hook by the door. It was yellow. They liked yellow. “I do not think it would be very pleasant. But I have no fear of dreams. There is nothing in them. All of my troubles are in the world that wakes.”
Marketing - Back to Greatness
Lady Ethel Mallory:
Is this thing on? You know who it is. Even if my pictures have been pulled from the walls and my name has been scrubbed from every memorial, I know you haven’t forgotten me. The Botulus Corporation has changed since I last worked here. I can’t say I’m a fan of your business model. I helped make this company what it was at the height of its greatness. Look to how far you’ve fallen without me. Losing half your customer base because you let them walk away? Pathetic. But don’t worry, I won’t let you decline and die. The way your profits plummet is sickening. I’m going to help you fix everything. Tell Oswald I’m coming for him.
Story 2, Continued - Coming Back
Valerie Maidstone was someone that Diggory had always looked to as a friend, even before they had met her. She lived in their fragments of memory as young and fierce, screaming into a microphone or planning ways to make her disdain for the Botulus Corporation’s buyout of democracy known. There was something of her there, still, in the woman who sat at the far end of the Scout City mayoral meeting table, which was a circle cut from a fifteen foot stump so that you could see its many hundreds of rings. Valerie had changed, become frailer, shakier, and her blonde hair darkened and grayed. She studied Diggory when she thought they were not looking, as though testing herself by looking at something painful again and again.
Valerie had summoned them there, but she was not the only one; Bern and Violet, who had run Scout City with careful words and deadly crossbow when Diggory first arrived, were old and sleepy in their chairs. There was Sheriff Virgil, who had once just been Virgil, who had regarded Diggory with a mild note of concern but not so much as he did now. There was Milo, a former botanist who Diggory had met once on a summer day in Toronto, and the vines that trailed around Milo’s waist led to the massive pink blooms of the Venus, which rested at the moment on top of Valerie’s roof. And lastly, there was an empty chair.
“Are we sure she is coming?” said Milo, helpfully.
“No way of knowing,” said Bern, arms folded.
“Must run in the family,” Virgil sighed.
The front doors opened with a boom, and there was Riot, with the sun and several sentinel scouts glaring in behind her. She almost skidded past her chair before twisting into it, coming to a rocking halt beside Milo.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m here.”
“Tardy,” said Violet, although she smiled warmly.
“Diggory, Riot, it’s so good to see both of you,” said Valerie, straightening a sheaf of paper in front of her and then using it as a fan. Her mayoral jacket had been laid on the back of the chair behind her. “Scout City has been through so much in these last few months. The Instrumentalist killings, losing Clementine. You both returning to us, which seemed impossible for so long. And while I’m sure we could talk for hours about what’s happened, in an official capacity, Scout City needs to know. In the winter of 2051 you left. You went north, on a mission with Cindy Lockheart, former wife and chief of security for the Prime Minister of Canada, Rizwana Mirza. Your goal was to destroy what Rizwana’s intelligence had decided was an object in the Arctic Ocean which was responsible for the Black Rains. Or what Diggory referred to as the Heart. For all of Scout City to know, what happened on that mission? Was it successful?”
“I can tell you what I remember,” said Riot, stepping in first. “Which isn’t a lot, because memory is a struggle here. But we went North with everyone—Jonah and Hector, Percy and Diggory, Mort, Cindy, Olivier, me. We ran into Big Mikey for a little bit. Almost got eaten by Night-Gaunts. But things were going okay until we arrived in the Northmost woods. A giant rotting polar bear began chasing us and that’s when the group started to split up. Hector and Jonah were the first to go. And we were running, and I nearly died for like the millionth time, and then we made it to the arctic. The ocean there wanted to kill us, and we got separated from everyone else, and Olivier… I’m not sure what Olivier tried to do. Protect me, or protect herself, or maybe she wasn’t in control at all. But she went all blizzard mode and flew into the sky, and a storm started. And I was alone in it. I remember rabbits. Hungry rabbits. Then I think I died and went to heaven. And Walt was there. But it was still really depressing. So my ex Clara brought me back and here I am.”
“Right,” said Sheriff Virgil, and inspected his notes and clipboard. “So you did make it to the arctic.”
“We were all separated,” Diggory said. “As Riot said. I was frozen in the ice, and Percy broke the last remaining thread that he had to send for help. I learned that my creator, Irene Mend, had planned for my seeking of the heart. That each time over the year prior I felt its presence in the North, I felt her guiding hand on my heart, compelling me towards it. When I escaped, it was with the knowledge that I was not going to return, for if fulfilled my purpose, absorbed the heart’s power into myself and dismantled it, then I would be in Irene’s thrall forever, and she would live fully in my flesh. I chose to bear this burden, although I was offered chances to abandon it. When I reached the Heart, Percy tried to sway me from this course but I could not bring myself to turn away. He left, and only Mort remained. Together, we descended into the darkness, and the ocean returned. Its name was Creep. And Mort gave his life, became one with it. Whatever he did, it worked. Creep fled, and I was left alone, in Mort’s metal suit, to fall to the ocean floor.”
Here they studied Riot, Valerie, Virgil, each of the pairs of eyes trained on them.
“I saw it,” said Diggory. “The heart, beating in the ocean rock. And I stepped forward, with my hand outstretched, to take it for my own. Irene Mend put me to sleep as she began her awakening, drawing its power into her… into our, body. For a moment I felt like starlight, like a thousand heavens, I was transcendent and endless. But I awoke. And when I did, I destroyed my eye, which had once been a part of her. It ruined her ritual, only halfway completed; the heart was drained and ready to rupture. And then the large case of explosives I had brought went off.”
“So the heart,” said Milo, speaking up. “It’s destroyed. It’s not polluting the ocean any further.”
“I believe so, yes,” said Diggory. “And I thought myself quite lost in the aftermath, but I was recovered, restored, by the Museum of Broken Promises.”
“A museum?” said Virgil.
“It’s not exactly a museum,” said Riot. “It’s more like a big bug.”
“I do like big bugs,” said Milo.
“It is a collection of significant objects,” said Diggory. “A preserved memory of our world. It was created to keep some trace of us, when all our other history dies. Its keeper is a friend. I was not entirely functional, for a time. I swam in voice and memory. All that I had taken in from the heart, and lost in Irene. But eventually I was myself again.”
“Why did you stay away so long,” said Violet, from her armchair. “We were all so worried about everyone who left. Clementine most of all.”
“I did not think it was in my purpose to leave the museum again,” said Diggory. “I helped tend the exhibits. I wandered with it throughout the world and in the universe. Its places of travel were never expected or planned. It was not until a promise was broken, with the death of Clementine, that I found us in the Hallowoods again, and at Mx. Morell’s urging, I have returned for a time.”
The mention of Clementine had caused Valerie to wither a little more, Diggory thought. But she cleared her throat and looked over to Milo.
“Does it change anything,” she said. “Your math.”
“I’m afraid it only makes it worse,” said Milo. “If the rate of change, of adaptation, that we have been seeing was spurred by the heart, there could have been some hope of destroying it to slow it. But if this is all ambient, from what remained, then it is all the more frightening.”
“The heart was preparing to evolve,” said Diggory. “And if it had, the rise in power of it would have been so great as to split the surface of the earth asunder. I am sorry if it was not enough. It is the most that I could do.”
“No one could have asked more of you, Diggory,” said Valerie. “We’re just glad you’ve returned home, to tell us. At least we can tell Scout City that our mission was worth it. That it worked.”
“Good news will be welcome in a time like this,” said Virgil. “Although frankly so much of this is abstract and fantastic that I don’t know if it will make a difference. All the respect in the world, for what you’ve done, but the knowledge that this heart was destroyed over ten years ago doesn’t change where we’re at. If anything, as Milo says, it just confirms that we’re stuck with our problems.”
“If I can help, with anything,” said Diggory. “Please, let me know.”
“Virgil, now is not the time,” said Valerie.
“If you’re talking about whoever’s been killing people and pretending to be the Instrumentalist,” said Riot, and looked over to Diggory. “We’ve got some experience with that. And I think it’s time to put an end to this.”
Interlude 2 - A Seat at the Table
It’s quite soon, dreamer. I am almost out of time, in fact. The first council meeting. Well, the first meeting I shall have been invited to. I sometimes listened in on them, from the gates where I watched. But that was a far distance, and so I caught words and phrases. My daydreams oscillated, between abandoning my post and rushing into a wide universe, or being brought in, to have a seat and a voice. To be given the opportunity to let my perception shape the nature of things. Now, I am almost to have such a chance, and I do not know what I will say, what will be expected of me. It will be a great deal of time and responsibility, to attend to your dreams and to pay attention to lengthy deliberations about starlight and soul quotas and scientific logic. But I can do both. Your dreams are over in a flash, and not very demanding, and the vast majority of council business will not involve me. I can do both. All will be well. If I do not make a fool of myself in front of the Burning Forge. It is strange. Of all the good things I wished to be known for, the murder of Marolmar never struck me as a possibility.
We go now to one seeking vengeance.
Story 3 - A Button
Shelby Allen stood in the dust as it billowed around her long coat, and cursed. No moonlight reached through the small windows of the storage vault, nested between the roots of the Lower Trunk. But she had attached a flashlight to her saw arm, and with it she could already tell that they were in the wrong place. No bodies suspended from the ceiling, no cruel killing machines with corpses locked inside. The Quartet had not killed once since they had fled across the rooftops, the night that she let them go in favor of a fading Clementine. But Clementine was gone now, or changed, and should not have been in her thoughts at all, had nothing to do with the fact that she had picked the wrong warehouse.
And then the front door collapsed inwards in an explosion of splinters and rubble as a hulking figure walked through it, and came to stand beside her, shedding debris. He was huge, and his face was masked in a pig’s head, dark sockets and a tongueless tusky smile.
“I don’t see nobody,” said Shank.
“No,” said Shelby, and stepped further into the dark. Dust piled across the rough surface of the wooden floor, which was grown in one whole piece of the Trunk rather than individual floorboards, and filled with curves and imperfections. It was a roughly square, empty space with a vaulted ceiling, and a few empty crates piled against a wall. “I swear this is where my leads were pointing. Activity at night, lights. But this should have been peak time. And nothing.”
“Maybe we break in next door,” said Shank. “And the door after that. And the door after that. Until you find somebody I can kill.”
“No more doors tonight,” said Shelby, and as Shank’s hulking form turned to walk back through what remained of the warehouse’s loading door, she looked down, kneeled. She plucked up a button in her hand, and held it up to the light.
“Find somethin’?” said Shank. “I know we agreed to do things your way, but if you ain’t got nothin’, I say we do things my way. I’ll get somethin’.”
“Give me a little more time,” she said. The button was small, and white, and had a flower carved into it.
“One thing’s for certain,” she continued, and looked back across the dusty storage house again. “Someone’s been in here that wasn’t supposed to be. This is a button. It isn’t dusty. I know I’ve seen this pattern before. I can’t remember who, but… I will. And if the Quartet are using this place for something, one button might just have cost them everything.”
Shank wheeled back down, knelt, huge and seething, and his foul breath curled like smoke in her light.
“Well then,” he said. “It ain’t much. But it’s somethin’.”
Outro - Histories
Histories. What will become of mine, when all this is done? What will become of yours? They are intertwined now. That was never my want, when this began. I intended to remain a watcher, a truthful narrator, one who would only transcribe what the end of your kind looked like. But now, I have woken two, and in doing so I have altered your world forever. Or rather, a world remains. And so you and I can dream together, now, of Scout City, and the world beyond it. Histories are a curious thing, however. There is danger in remembering too much of them, and there is a danger in forgetting. Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, but those who remember it wrongly may choose it knowing full well the damage it will bring. For our chapters yet to come, I am your loyal host Nikignik, waiting historically for your return to the Hallowoods.
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'File 31: Me and is available on the Hello From The Hallowoods Patreon. Consider joining for access to all the show's bonus stories, behind-the-scenes and more! Until next time, dreamers, please remember to clear your browsing histories. Searches like ‘how to convince loved ones I have not been possessed by a brain worm’ and ‘what to do in human body after possession’ and ‘how to answer questions that only a real person not a brain worm would know’ can complicate your life greatly if discovered.
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