Content warnings for this episode include: Animal death (Shank as usual), Eye Horror / Wounds, Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Mental illness, Birds, Drowning, Bugs, Body horror, Fungus Horror (lots of fungus on corpses), Puppets
The Interrogation - Yes or No Answers
Auditor
Were you on Earth for a period of several thousand years prior to the murder?
Nikignik
Yes.
Auditor
Were you aware that the Heart of Marolmar was going to become active in the years prior to the Industry’s quarantine of that planet?
Nikignik
No.
Auditor
I detect some uncertainty.
Nikignik
I had been hopeful, maybe, that his work was not destroyed, was all.
Auditor
Yes or no answers, please. Yet you made arrangements to have his work destroyed?
Nikignik
Yes.
Auditor
At the time that you made the arrangements, you did not know it would destroy him as well?
Nikignik
No.
Story 1 - Working Overtime
“I didn’t want to do ghosts,” said Arnold. “Coming back from the dead freaks me out.”
“Coming back from the dead freaks you out?” said Russell. The rootcrawler was slow going over the great hills and valleys of bark on the forest floor, but it beat walking. “You. And you met Al back in the day. Not all ghosts are scary.”
“The ghost of the Instrumentalist would be scary,” said Arnold. “Al isn’t the kind of ghost I’m worried about.”
“Not arguing with you there bud,” said Russell, and changed the traction lever as they cleared a large gnarled barricade of a root and went rolling into a ravine of brambles below. Night had fallen on their way back to Scout City after the gravedigging expedition, and the headlights of the rootcrawler only illuminated a few bright meters ahead, casting beams into the light mist. The ghastly weather did not seem to help Arnold’s nerves.
“Do you think anything bad happened while we were away?” Arnold continued, as if shifting to the next entry on the checklist of worries.
Russell swerved suddenly as something large and white, radiating a phantasmal sheen, lit up the path ahead of them, hanging in the air. Arnold shrieked, and the rootcrawler treads thumped up and down over the sudden verge in the path, clunking down at an angle and skidding out from the roots into the underbrush. Arnold rose from his seat to watch the apparition floating behind them, fluttering in the air, the pattern of a skull caught many times in its head and back and trailing wings.
“It’s just a moth,” Arnold said, gasping for air. Russell had his hand on the handle of his shovel between the seats, but then the moth moved from its hovering and came flapping towards them again. He reached up and switched off the headlights, left them sitting in the darkness, watching the pale and deathly insect, fully six feet long and wings twice as wide. They had to be close to the Outwoods by now; with the headlights off, Russell could see faint yellow lights of cabins through the giant trees, and without the bright beams of the headlights, the Greater Ghostmoth fluttered away in that direction, and was gone.
“Forget ghosts,” said Arnold. “It’s your driving I should be worried about.”
“You were as scared as I was,” said Russell, and flicked the headlights on again.
They illuminated a long line of the forest floor, great roots reaching in between the trees, and they caught a person squarely in their light. He was tall, of a bulky build, with skin charred pink and black. A white jumpsuit had been stained all the colors of ash, tassels reduced to limp clusters of nerve-like red string. His head was the head of a pig, open-mouthed and empty-eyed, and he seemed to freeze mid-step, stared up at them both.
“Russell?” said Arnold. “You see that?”
“Yeah,” said Russell. “I see it.”
The pig man continued on his path, backing away from the glare of the headlights, and he trudged deliberately on through the trees and into the darkness beyond.
“Russell, what do we do?” said Arnold. “We go back, right? Let the sheriff know? I’m exhausted.”
“Sorry to break it to you, Arnold,” said Russell, “but supernatural threats are our job description. Looks like we’re working overtime tonight.”
And he lurched the rootcrawler into motion, and it twisted across the clearing and back into the woods, following the pig man into the forest.
Story 2 - Eye for an Eye
Clementine kicked the door fully open, and Raj Greenstreet fell backwards with a betrayed sort of shriek. He sat up in the tiled hallway of his chateau, suit rumpled and bloodstained.
“Please, wait,” he said, raising a hand. “You have no right to be here. No right at all. This is the sanctum of my grief, and I will not have it defiled…”
Cannibal the beagle jaunted in of her own accord, sniffing out the entryway, and Clementine stepped in after her, and took a few quick steps across the foyer and in the direction that she had heard the screaming. Raj rose to his feet, but did not seem to try and stop her past that, and she passed into the adjacent parlor. The green sofas and dark wooden furniture must have been difficult indeed to lift this high up into Scout City, and yet it was all shoved aside for a single fixture in the center of the room. It was someone she recognized. It was Vincent, grey hair flattened to his head with sweat, undertaker’s suit ruined with dust and blood, tied to a dining chair.
“Oh, Miss Maidstone,” said Vincent, and tugged at the binds. “This isn’t how I wanted to meet. Not in this dreadful condition.”
“Vincent?” said Clementine. Cannibal went bounding over to poke at his knees, lick at the spots of blood on his trousers. She glanced back over to Raj Greenstreet, who clung to the doorway to the foyer. “Are you alright? According to the deputies, you’re missing, maybe dead.”
“That may be for the best,” sniffed Raj from the door. His posture was slumped, his speech tired.
“You have about ten seconds to explain,” Clementine said, turning around, fists balled up. “What have you done to him?”
“Done to him? Nothing. It’s what he’s done to me,” said Raj, and held up his arms; they were covered in jagged cuts that ripped through his suit jacket.
“It’s been me all along,” said Vincent, closing his eyes as though facing a firing line. “I was the Instrumentalist killer, Clementine. And I hadn’t the least idea.”
“I don’t know if that’s true,” said Raj. “The Instrumentalist killer—the beast that killed my husband—is that murderous pig-man. I thought the fire claimed him, but he escaped the morgue. And in doing so, he interrupted Vincent, who was quite trying to hack me to pieces.”
Clementine glanced from Raj back to Vincent, in his chair.
“Vincent, is this true?” she said.
“I would never dare, in a thousand years,” said Vincent. “But it hasn’t been me at all. Voltaire has been pulling my strings, it seems. He’s troubled, you understand, he’s jealous, and he’s… Please, I need you to believe, I would never hurt anyone of my own accord…”
“Where is Voltaire?” she said, scanning the room.
“In the box, in the box,” said Raj, and he gestured to a wooden box at the back of the parlor. It was wrapped in a length of chain, and padlocked.
“I don’t know how long it’s been,” said Vincent. He seemed odder than usual, not entirely present; his eyes were wide and frenzied. “The things I think he’s made me do…”
“What did you do, Vincent?” Clementine said. She drew a few steps closer to the man on his crucible chair. “You’re talking about Voltaire, the puppet, the inanimate object?”
“He attacked me in the funeral parlor,” said Raj. “And yet, I don’t think he meant to. One moment he was his perfectly charming self, the next he was glassy-eyed, perfectly neutral as he went at me with a saw. He says he doesn’t remember it.”
“Not at all,” Vincent nodded. “I cannot imagine trying to hurt you, Raj.”
“And for what it’s worth, I believe him,” said Raj.
“So you tied him up and brought him back here?” said Clementine.
“I came of my own accord,” said Vincent.
“It was all we could think to do,” said Raj. “He wants to turn himself in, but… I am not sure he should. After you confess to murder it’s difficult to walk it back later.”
Clementine rose wearily from her seat, and went to stand close to Raj, tried to whisper so that Vincent could not hear.
“What I’m hearing is that Vincent is having some kind of violent mental breakdown,” she said. “He shouldn’t be tied to your dining room furniture, he should be in the care ward at the Scout City infirmary.”
“Something is deeply wrong with him,” Raj nodded. “If Raoul were here, perhaps he could get to the root of things. But I do not want to see him locked away, buried somewhere. I think there is something true to what he is saying. Have you really looked at that puppet? Have you touched it? There is something unpleasant that radiates from its very presence.”
She looked back to Vincent, and to the locked box.
“He’s been with you since Shank woke up?” she said. “You can attest to that?”
“On my life,” said Raj. “I heard what the pig man did at the park. That’s why I am so sure that this man is not the killer you’ve been hunting for.”
“Vincent, where is the body of Raoul Greenstreet?” said Clementine.
“Oh. Ah,” said Vincent, and he looked to them both, weeping. “It’s… hidden. Voltaire had… well, I suppose it was me that… I was so ashamed. I can show you. I can show you where he is.”
Clementine glanced to Raj.
“This is not the case I’m supposed to be solving,” she said.
“You’re going to tell the deputies, aren’t you,” said Raj. “They’ll pin as much as they can on him, you understand that. Make an example of him. They will not be kind.”
She thought of the killer slipping away into the dark, a clean getaway while she was tied up tending to Vincent’s catastrophic breakdown. The hours were ticking away, and she was no closer yet to understanding who the killer was.
“Please,” said Raj, pleading. “Let’s hear him out. Let’s see what he and Voltaire have done to my poor husband.”
The Tapes - Not Mistakes
Then sometimes, everyone is going to tell you that you’re making a mistake, but you’ll know somehow you did the right thing. Don’t let them convince you otherwise, when that happens. That’s what you’re here for. Someone needs to.
Story 2, Continued - Eye for an Eye
An hour later, they stood in a place that Clem had never wanted to visit. Between two great dark trees in the Outwoods stood the entrance to the Mortal Grove. An archway of gigantic mushrooms, gills of pale green and purple, caps encrusted with delicate and deadly patterns, shrouded the entrance. Beyond it she could only see hints of the fungal monoliths that filled Scout City’s largest graveyard. Spores drifted through the air like snowflakes, and although Raj Greenstreet wore a scarf around his mouth and nose, Clem breathed them in without fear. She knew her lungs were not fertile ground for any growing thing.
“Vincent,” said Raj. “I am starting to get the impression that you buried my husband without telling me.”
Vincent wore the wooden case with Voltaire in it on his back. Although he strained under its weight, he had refused to be rid of it. Vincent’s hands were bound beneath the folds of his overcoat, at his own behest.
“To be honest, Raj, time has been a hazy nightmare,” said Vincent. “I certainly didn’t mean to do it. I was horrified. But what Voltaire had done, I… I couldn’t risk anyone seeing. A quick trip, while Miss Allen watched the parlor. I shouldn’t have tried to keep it from you. I’m so ashamed.”
“Keep moving, Vince,” Clementine said. “Show us what happened.”
Vincent stepped into the grove, and Raj and Clementine followed quietly after. Scout City would be closing down now, enforcing the emergency curfew, and so they had the Mortal Grove to themselves, and the sunlight dwindling among the high trees that surrounded it. Clementine felt her pockets for a flashlight, and did not have one, and missed Shelby, and stepped along behind the group. There were hundreds of colors and shapes curling around the muddy path. Small puffballs and huge towers of ridged brown and purple, small yellow slime molds and porous red growths that stretched up almost to the trees. It was best to try and see it that way, like a garden, and try not to smell the honey sweet decay.
What Clementine saw, and could not unsee once she had, was not the garden but the bodies. Suspended like calcified angels in the high boughs of fungal trees, skulls peering from the soil beneath a mass of toadstools, dead hands and finger-like stalks nearly identical as they jutted up from the dirt. If you had the privilege of decomposing, you could elect to feed your body to the forest in this fashion, and hope that some part of you nourished the land in which you had perished. There were personal effects, too, the edge of a suitcase, a pocketwatch, a cane, treasured objects entombed in the grove along with their owners. She had left Cannibal at the Greenstreet estate for her own good, lest she go gnawing on the people at rest in the Grove.
The other Mr. Greenstreet was hidden, and hidden well—you had to push through two tall stalks that had lifted bones up with their growth, eye sockets as homes for bouquets of slender white tendrils. It led to a hidden alcove in the back wall of the grove, where the branches of a large, woody fungus formed a wall of red and orange, and a body was tied upright against it, half enclosed already by the hungry folds of the fungus. Where she could still see flesh, there were odd stitches and large seams that ran across the corpse, far greater than the undertaker’s usual cuts. Mr. Greenstreet was already beginning to flower. Vincent fell to his knees in front of the consummated corpse.
“This is where he found me,” said Vincent dreamily, beholding his craftsmanship.
Clementine blinked. His voice was odd. Raj, in his dark overcoat and hat, shot her an alarmed glance.
“Found you?” she said.
“I might have lain in the earth forever if he hadn’t noticed me, listened to my call,” Vincent continued. “We were the best of pals after that. Why’d you have to go and ruin everything?”
“I think you have it backwards,” said Raj. “You are Vincent. You are not Voltaire.”
“You’re trying to take him from me,” said Vincent, and turned back to look at them; the baleful eyes and tremulous lip of an angry child, more than the elderly man that he was. “I don’t like that. You’re poisoning him, against me. I don’t like that at all.”
“Vincent?” said Raj. “I know you’re in there. You wretched thing. What did you do to my husband’s body? You’ve ruined him.”
“That was your fault,” said Vincent, and was on his feet in a moment; the ropes that held his hands severed by a small silver blade which he plucked up from the ground, and then he was in motion towards Clementine, a jumping spider lunging for its prey, and her leg buckled as he collided with her, and then he was on top of her, incredibly strong for his years, and she barely caught his hand with her shattered one as he tried to plunge the scalpel into her eye. She held the trembling blade, there, for a few long seconds, and then she felt the bones of her hand collapse like tissue paper, and then the knife was all that she saw.
Story 3 - Making Friends
“You want to be friends?” said Hope.
“Yeah,” said the skull. The green fires of its eyes were her only light. All around her was oil-slick black, and the shapes of bones drifting in the expanse. She was chilled to the bone, and could barely control the shaking in her arms.
“Who are you?” Hope said.
“I am a lot of people,” said the jelly. “Lots and lots. But one of them is Mort.”
“My name is Hope,” she said, arms wrapped around her knees. “What are you?”
“I don’t know,” said Mort. “I am people and polar bears and whales and seals and birds and seagulls and puffins and albatrosses. And most of all fish. Fish are the best.”
“I’m a girl,” said Hope. “Also an amateur detective.”
“That sounds fun,” said Mort. “What’s a detective?”
“A detective solves mysteries and crimes,” she said, and picked up Nighty the Night-Gaunt from where it had been caught by the jelly. “Like, why is Mort in the water next to the East Wind?”
“My family is traveling on the ship,” said Mort. “What about you?”
“Same,” said Hope.
“I was too big to ride the boat,” said Mort. “But that’s okay. I can swim instead. I’m very good at swimming now.”
“I’m not bad at it either,” she said, and pointed to her jacket. “Look. I got my sprout badge for it. You have to hold your breath for sixty seconds.”
“Wow!” said Mort. “That’s pretty good. I don’t need to breathe at all, because I’m dead. I could stay underwater forever. But I used to walk, in a metal suit. I miss that.”
“Your parents aren’t also jelly fish?” she said. “Jelly lumps?
“Oh. No,” said Mort, and she felt the bubble in his surface that she was contained in begin to move. Bones swam around her as the great dark expanse of the East Wind passed overhead.
“Uh. I’m not supposed to talk to anyone,” said Mort. “I should probably tell my mom.”
“Uh. Who is your mom then?” said Hope. “Is she nice?”
“She’s the best,” said Mort, and Hope was suddenly rising, and Mort lifted her out of the surface of the Atlantic. There was a brief moment of wind and the freezing cold spray of the storm, and then she was passed through a window in the side of the East Wind’s rusted hull. She tumbled onto the metal floor of a room, and a lump of the mass of Mort’s body stayed in the window, skull bobbing up and down.
There was a woman in the room, clearly surprised at Hope’s sudden arrival. The woman wore a loose golden shirt, baggy pants with patterns of turquoise triangles, and she wore golden hoops in her ears, and a constellation of golden ornaments in the dark locks of her hair. It wasn’t until Hope spied a black lace dress at the end of the bed that she surmised she was in the presence of the other Duchess of Boldt Castle.
“Mort,” said the woman. “What have you done?”
“I made a friend!” said Mort.
“I told you not to make any friends aboard this boat,” said the woman.
“I remember,” said Mort. “And I did. But I didn’t find her on the boat. I found her in the water.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Hope said breathlessly, rising to one knee in the presence of royalty, and she stuck out her hand for a handshake. “I’m Hope Torres-Williams, part of the Buck Silver Detective Agency. If you have a crime, we have the time.”
“My name is Yaretzi,” said the woman, and there was a sharp glint in her teeth, and Hope gulped. Was this woman a vampire too? She did not shake Hope’s hand, but looked away from them both, towards the cabin door. “I am very sorry, little girl, for what is about to happen.”
“Did you know that the other Duchess is a vampire?” said Hope. “I think she’s the one who’s been killing all the people.”
“Yes,” said Yaretzi, and her thick brows furrowed, and her eyes flashed gold. “And she is about to kill many more.”
The Conversation - The Essence of You
Nikignik
It is strange. I have loathed Syrensyr and Tolshotol for taking you away from me each moment for the passing of centuries. And now, if I do nothing, it is by my own hand that you are killed.
Marolmar
I wouldn’t flatter yourself. Have you forgotten already? Killing me is not an easy thing, Nikignik. If you allow my rebirth to be disrupted, it certainly ruins me. But I have already scarred this universe. This world, for example. That cannot be undone. There will always be something left of me. Something regrowing.
Nikignik
You would survive this?
Marolmar
Well. Much in the same vein as the life upon this world… I might not. Life goes on. The self is much more fragile.
Nikignik
I am not concerned about the essence of you, I am concerned about you.
Marolmar
Concern seems an apt description for what you’re about to do, sure.
Nikignik
What am I about to do?
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'File 20 Buck Silver', 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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