Content warnings for this episode include: Slurs for LGBTQ people, Homophobic hate crimes, Serial killings, Dismemberment, Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Transphobia, Homophobia, Birds, Strangulation/suffocation, Emotional Manipulation, Bugs, Body horror, Alcohol Use, Religious Violence
Intro - Washed Up
You were young once, and fragile. You were one more desolate wanderer, one among millions of screaming mothers washed out by the tide of death that overcame your country. You were adrift, and the howling of your baby child burrowed deep into your eardrums and lived there at all hours, and the roadsides that you travelled were as barren and smoldering as the deserts of the testaments you believed in. And like so many adrift, you were perfect in the eyes of the church, and when they embraced you, you wept into their arms. They dried your tears, they wrapped your child in swaddling-clothes, they told you that your life was not insignificant and you were not going to die. You travelled with them in their migration, to woods they said were holy, and learned that you knew nothing of religion, and even less of the power of god. The immeasurable nature of eternity. The all-consuming weight of a single hallowed name. You believed; you wanted to believe. You taught your questioning child the nature of faith as he grew, taught him to turn his eyes up to heaven, to focus only on that distant light, to ignore every Hello from the Hallowoods.
Theme.
Right now, it is best not to try and understand where I am sitting. This is the issue with indescribable things. They are many things at once, and none of them. I describe them with words for you so that you can imagine something that is not right, but allows some faint understanding of the idea to be filtered into your mind. Imagine then that I am sitting in a break room, although it is an ironic one for it serves a base of employees who were designed to be tireless. In this break room, two former auditors of souls count their hours carefully. The theme of tonight’s episode is Plots.
Story 1 - The Blacklist
“Did you ever miss it, after you’d left?” said Polly, picking at a nail. Barb leaned against a table in the middle of the break room, which was decorated as though it had been an afterthought, a grey island in between two oceans of cubicles where adjoining halls demanded a small room had to be. The posters that adorned the walls were stoic things, white posters with bold black text that contained motivational phrases like “Audit”, “Conform”, and “Accuracy. Be Accurate”. There was a water cooler with no paper cups in the cup dispenser.
“Left?” said Barb, whose bandages had not been soaked by bloody tears since Polly had caught up with him in the waiting room. Fluids were a material thing, Polly supposed, and the place they were was quite beyond material. But then there was the water cooler. “I never left. I was kicked to the curb. It’s not the same thing. My eyes stayed here, and every valuable part of me died. They threw a gutted wreck out to the cold to starve on my own. And you ask if I missed it?”
Barb spat a black glob onto the spotless grey carpet, and grinned. “No. Not at all.”
Well, perhaps fluids were not out of the question, then, Polly surmised, and sighed, glanced through the break room window again. Through the small blind that hung over the glass, he could see across the hallway of linoleum floors, which was brightly lit with the incandescent light of the Soul-Forger’s fires. On the other side was the target door, a dark metal affair, easily overlooked. The metal letters stamped upon the label read ‘Records’.
“Why,” said Barb. “Did you?”
“I never wanted to come back here,” said Polly. “And frankly, every second that passes I am just wondering… how long is passing on Earth?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“It’s not just the exchange of hours. Yaretzi, Mort, they’re not confined to a human’s lifespan, thankfully. But… has it been long enough that they’ve stopped missing me? And long enough now that they don’t think about me that often? And long enough now that they’ve forgotten me entirely?”
“You’re hopeless,” said Barb, shaking his head. “All worked up about those idiots.”
“You’ve got your idiots too,” Polly said, an eyebrow raised. “I just expect you’d come to terms with losing them a long time ago.”
“Joke’s on them,” said Barb, and shrugged, spread his hands. “Every way I end was always going to be ugly. If they didn’t want to be around to see it, they shouldn’t’a gotten hung up on me. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, you can back out. You’re not the one on trial here.”
“Yet,” said Polly. “I suspect my own guilt in the eyes of the Industry is dependent on the outcome of your case. No one has ever pushed the boundaries to the extent that you and I have on what constitutes rebellion against the Industry. Whether we’re allowed to resign. We’re going to…”
As he spoke, however, there was a reverberation that shook the light fixtures in the hall outside, rumbled the tables and metal chairs, sent gurgling bubbles up the tank of the water cooler. The incandescent lights flickered and buzzed dim.
“It’s time,” said Polly.
“Try and keep up,” Barb said, rising past him and stepping through the door, practically skipping across the hall, and putting his shoulder into the door. Polly hesitated in the break room for a moment, and then paced over to the water cooler, and flicked the blue lever. Water overflowed the plastic grate beneath the spigot momentarily, and then seeped down the side of the cooler to the carpet. Polly left it to run, and then dashed across the hall after Barbatos, who had already bashed his way in.
“The Burning Forge’s attention will be back soon, and the lights with it,” Polly whispered, closing the door on them both and sealing them in the darkness of the records room. He snapped his fingers to suspend a candleflame from the end of his fingertip, a luxury for flair more than for necessity; many of his sights worked fine in the dark, and Barb was in the depths of the filing cabinets already, rustling like a seagull in a pit of garbage.
“Seconds, Barb,” Polly hissed.
“Listen, kid, I’m working blindfolded,” said Barb, and then his yellow teeth aligned themselves in a satisfied grin as he pulled a black folder from a filing cabinet drawer. “And then there was dirt.”
Polly smiled himself, and cracked open the record room door again. The world was beginning to rumble again as, somewhere distant or incredibly near, the Reclaimer of Fire went about his business. There was a sound down the hall he recognized as well—a certain leathery slapping and squeaking scrape on the linoleum tile.
“Barb,” he hissed. “It’s Aggie.”
“Goddamn it,” said Barb, and withdrew, sliding the cabinet drawer shut and stowing the black folder within his red velvet vest. He eked out of the door, and Polly drew it shut quickly, and as the light returned to the hall and the eclipse of Syrensyr’s presence was complete, a long green maw jutting with yellow teeth stuck itself about ankle height from the end of the hall. It was followed in short order by glowing yellow eyes, the corners of a grin, the jolly mosaic neck of an American alligator. The alligator wore a golden leash, and it trailed up to a cold hand, a business suit sleeve, and finally the deep brown personage of Agarus. Upon the grim hall warden’s blue suit jacket shoulder crouched a hawk, whose eyes were glowing lights much like the leashed alligator, and alligator, raptor and hall warden all three waddled in his and Barb’s direction.
“Everything alright, gentlemen?” said Aggie, a tilt of his head, a tilt of the hawk’s. The alligator merely stared in a hungry fashion at Polly’s trouser leg, which sent a shiver down him.
“Perfectly so,” said Polly. “Did you see that eclipse just now? A bit rumbly, that. Might have set all sorts of things in disorder.”
“The comings and goings of our heavenly host do not endanger our operations in the slightest,” smiled Agarus. “Or have you forgotten already in such a short time? Your chair is practically still warm.”
“You know, that’s what I thought too, but uh, go figure,” said Barb. “In even the briefest absence of our miles-wide man in the sky’s protective influence, chaos sneaks in where you least expect it.”
Barb made a worrying gesture to emphasize this. Agarus frowned.
“Chaos,” he said. “Is my enemy, as warden. Rest assured, I will eradicate it wherever I find it.”
“Good,” smiled Polly, nudging Barb along with his elbow. “Well, we had best be going.”
The hawk’s gaze shifted, and Agarus followed, and Polly frowned. He’d noticed, then, that this pleasantry was happening in a deeply out-of-the-way hall adjacent to the records room. The jaws of the alligator opened, and then those of Agarus, but before a word could escape his mouth, water began to flood from beneath the break room door. This brought alligator, hawk and warden all three to focus intently on the floor, and by the time that Agarus had mustered a brave squeak that he would deal with this imminent flooding calamity, and opened the door to let a further flood pour out onto the tiles, Barb and Polly were already in the elevators a quarter mile away, although Polly did not cease clicking the round glowing ‘close doors’ button until the doors had fully locked shut, sealing them within a five-foot mirrored box.
“You never said why we needed these for your case,” said Polly, noting as Barb checked that the black folder was still within his vest. “Management notes for your career?”
“Oh, juicier than that,” said Barb, and patted his chest, folder and all, and smiled, which reflected infinitely in the glass mirror walls of the elevator. “For everyone who’s ever been a problem. Every pair of eyes on Typhon’s desk. This is the blacklist. Now hey, punch in ‘34th Floor’ and ‘9th Floor’ at the same time.”
Polly did, and the elevator jolted, and its lights and buttons flickered; the white lights died, and dim red ones buzzed on.
“What have you done,” Polly said.
“Privacy,” said Barb, hooking his thumbs in his belt. “The elevators are one of the few places around here you can actually get some peace and quiet. Jam it just right and they get stuck outside of the grid.”
He removed the folder from his vest, then, and shook it, and pages began to pour out of the thin black envelope by the hundreds, flooding over the elevator floor and rising to Polly’s ankles and then his knees. Headlines and titles, names and centuries.
“Better get comfortable,” Barb said, descending to sit in the pile and taking up almost all the floor space by himself. “You’ve got a long few years of reading ahead of ya.”
Interlude 1 - Plots of Land
Where are you to go, dreamer, in this ever-changing world? Where are you supposed to stake your ground, claim your plot of land, and live your life? Your cities are ruinous heaps, fit only for ghosts. America is a wasteland where the survivors of the past decades and those returned from shelter in Dreaming Boxes struggle with each other as much as with the poisonous land and deadly wildlife. Your countries are broken, and those that still live take shelter in fortifications of their own making, desperate to keep the evil out. You could walk north, into the heart of your world’s corruption, and lay out the foundations of a cabin beneath twisting stars. You could watch emerald constellations breathe as your years pass. You could farm hideous vegetables. Would you feel at home there, dreamer? Would you feel like a part of the world, or rejected by it, your very presence foreign and forgotten as stranger kinds rise around you, until you and your plot of land are only an archaeological curiosity for frogs?
We go now to one who is familiar with plots of land.
Story 2 - Ratty Always Wins
Vincent’s brush-bristle mustache had fallen off somewhere, and his heavy overcoat was a bit less sweltering now that the sun had gone down and eased the forest into something approaching a neutral temperature. He was out of breath as he slid down a rather steep root embankment into the welcome embrace of a bed of black stinging ivy, and caught only a little on the wrist between sleeve and glove as he regained his footing.
“I am not saying that I doubt the existence of this terrible place we’re looking for,” he said, to himself as much as to the visible traces of the phantoms that drifted ahead of him in the air, like streaks of the aurora borealis. “But it’s taking a long time to reach. We’ve been wandering in the dark for hours.”
The phantoms paused and turned back, twin sets of abyssal eyes studying him. Percy’s phosphorous white shoes and Ratty’s half-visible boots drifted inches over the underbrush.
“Mister Vincent, this is why I said you should stay back at Scout City,” said Percy.
Vincent sighed, and then righted himself and adjusted his overcoat. “Not at all. You heard them at the meeting this morning. We all have our prerogatives. This is part of the investigation, albeit, one that stings.”
“Just don’t like, have a heart attack and die or something,” said Ratty, and then descended to be almost eye to eye with him, silver jewelry glinting in the slivers of moonlight. “Although if you were a ghost you’d probably move faster.”
“I don’t disagree,” said Vincent, eyebrows raised, and hands stuck in his pockets, itching at his wrist with the coat pocket hem. “But I’d rather keep what little flesh I have left, all the same.”
Ratty turned to Percy. “Percy, how close are we?”
“It’s hard for me to say,” said Percy, looking up to the gigantic black trunks that towered into the stars in each direction. “When I was here last, the forest was forty feet high, not a hundred. Maybe it’s overgrown. I’d be surprised if anything from back then was still standing. We should… scout ahead. Probably we can cover a lot of ground, really quickly. Vincent, are you okay to stay here for a minute?”
“Someone should stay with him,” said Ratty, and looked around, and nodded. “And since I don’t know where it is you’re looking for exactly, it’s probably me. Be back soon, okay?”
Percy nodded, and then was off like a streak of lightning, flashing into the woods, and the light of him faded in the trees until Vincent and Ratty were left alone in the avenue of leaves between the rising roots of two great trunks.
“Is it strange, coming back to spend time among the living?” said Vincent, taking off his fedora and smoothing his sweat-crusted hair.
“Totally. There’s just so many things you don’t even think about when it’s like, all ghosts,” said Ratty, sinking slowly in the air. Her eyes stayed looking up at the treeline. “Living people—sorry. People who are still alive—they need to eat, need to breathe, need to go through doors instead of walls. When you’ve been living in a spectre city as long as I have you kind of forget all about that stuff.”
“How did you come to live in a spectre-city?” said Vincent, crossing his hands.
“Well you start living there by dying there,” said Ratty. “Or dying somewhere else and then wandering into it.”
She paused, and licked her transparent lips with a forked tongue.
“Unless you mean, how did I die? Hope you’re not squeamish.”
“I have dealt with hundreds of dead bodies,” said Vincent, smiling pleasantly. “Dissembled them. Removed the important parts, or parts I thought were interesting. Laid them to rest. I am by now quite devoid of squeams.”
The dead teenager grinned, and laid back in the air, resting her hands behind her head.
“Well,” she said. “Buckle up. It’s gonna get gross.”
Marketing - The New Ethel
Lady Ethel Mallory
The peaceful transition of the Botulus Corporation from being run by Oswald Biggs Botulus is already underway. The people have spoken, and they have been loud. Thank you for your wonderful reviews of our patch update here in Box Pleiades. You may be wondering, Lady Ethel, why did it take you so long to return to us? Well, I’ve been busy. I had to take a long hard look at the woman in the mirror. I went through my old autobiography. I stared the old Ethel in the face. She wanted power, fame. Control. She had no idea of the ramifications that her actions would bring on the world.
That is not the Ethel who currently is asking for your support for CEO. I understand what it is I’ve done. To you. To every member of our happy dreaming family. To a sleeping populace for decades. And what I want is the best possible future for you. I want to solve the problems that the Botulus Corporation has caused. I want to use our power to enhance your life, and the lives of your children born after you in the care of the Botulus Corporation. I want to make the Dreaming Box you sleep in the home we promised you. Will you give me the chance? To show you the new Ethel? To show you a brand new dream?
Story 2, Continued - Ratty Always Wins
Tiresome, redundant, an appeal to the emotions forgetting that nobody likes you. Four out of ten, for me.
We return now to Vincent Loren.
Percy had still not returned, and only the wind moved in the high boughs of the great pines, and the occasional song of the breeze moving through some distant canyon or hollow. In the darkness, Ratty continued to speak, drifting in the air over him like a firefly.
“Yeah, I was seeing on my phone that someone had gone missing at one of the clubs that I went to. Which, wasn’t the first time it happened. But I wasn’t really thinking about it when this guy was like, hey you seem super cute, I love trans girls, wanna dance, and I was thinking like, gross, a chaser, but outside I was like yeah totally. So we danced for hours.”
“This led to your death,” said Vincent.
“Well yeah,” said Ratty, and closed her eyes, seemingly quite relaxed in her airborne lounge. “He was like, let’s go outside, and I was super drunk by then. I don’t even remember leaving. But we were outside, and I was laughing about something, and he went up to kiss me.”
Here Ratty drifted down, until her glowing face was inches away from Vincent’s. He studied her quizzically.
“Like this close,” said Ratty, the tiny white points in her all-black eyes flickering. Her hand, sparking like static electricity, moved from one side of Vincent’s neck to the other. “And then he slit my throat.”
“Oh dear,” said Vincent.
“Yeah,” said Ratty, and she hovered back a little, gesturing to the air. “And then cut me in a lot of places, and was saying what a freak I was, how messed up we all were, how we were animals he was going to hunt down one at a time. I managed to like, break his toes, and his nose maybe, but then I was blacked out. And just kind of looking down, watching him take my body apart. He stuffed the parts of me in a recycling bin. And I stayed there, a few hours, watching the rain wash my blood off the concrete.”
“I’m deeply sorry,” said Vincent. “And so that was how you came to be a ghost?”
“No,” said Ratty. “Well, I could have left. The sky was huge and it was pulling me. I felt like it was time to go. But then I was like, hold the fuck up. I just got killed in the most homophobic way possible. And like, if I just float off, they find my body in a few days and write a nice newspaper article that doesn’t really identify me because my parents would be too embarrassed to use my name or tell people where I was when I died, and maybe my friends would see that someone else had disappeared from the gay village, and then it would be them, dancing, when that creep comes back. So I was like, no. No, I’m going to find him and I am going to make his life a living hell.”
“Is that how it works?” said Vincent. “You can choose to stay?”
“I don’t know. I did,” said Ratty, and shrugged, and then grinned viciously. “I enjoyed it too. I found him. His little apartment. I started by just watching, and it seemed like he knew that someone was. He was jumpy. I watched him wake up, brush his teeth, shower, go to work, come home, go to sleep. Disgustingly normal. Then I started messing with him. Moving things around his house. Slamming doors. Breaking windows. I found that the angrier I got, and I was fucking furious, the harder I could hit things that otherwise I’d just pass through. The brighter I burned.”
“I assume you killed him.”
“It wasn’t as cool as I was expecting,” shrugged Ratty. “I was just trying to trip him up a bit, on his way down the stairs. He was going back to the club. But I tripped him too good and his head smashed open like a watermelon on the stairs. And for a moment, his soul was just there, then, and he was like. You!”
“You,” said Vincent.
“Then I ate him,” said Ratty. “And after that, I went outside, and I didn’t really notice that the rain was black. I just liked the look of it. Making puddles in the street, with all the rainbow signs glowing in them. Watching my friends waiting in lines outside the coat checks of our favorite places. Watching a crowd of half-naked gay people dance to 70’s music videos in a tiny room with no air conditioning. When the morning came the world pretty much began to fall apart all at once. But the last night was nice.”
“I remember those clubs,” said Vincent, hands folded over his overcoat; he had come to lean back against the root surface behind him. “I remember dancing. I didn’t go often, it frightened me. But I admired the freedom of it. I was always… reserved. I liked to meet my men at coffee houses, cafes. The cinema. But to watch them, moving to Madonna or the Pet Shop Boys. Utterly themselves, without a care in the world. I liked that.”
“You were one of those weirdos that goes to a dance club and doesn’t dance?” said Ratty.
“I was shy,” said Vincent. “The only dance I knew was the charleston.”
“I don’t know who that is,” said Ratty.
“It went like this,” said Vincent, and rose on straining bones. “You did kind of a step back and forward like this with the feet, and the twist, and the arms…”
“Yeah I guarantee only dinosaurs danced like this,” said Ratty, and smiled with her sharp teeth. “But, uh, I’m sure in grampa time that was great.”
Vincent’s attempt at the Charleston was interrupted by a sound; a trumpeting echo that rang over the treetops, the high and hollow notes of a church organ. Vincent looked up, and the smile disappeared from his face as he realized Percy had returned, shining half-lit in the air. He righted himself immediately. Percy’s hair was a nest of glowing embers, his skin pulsed with waves of static.
“Percy?” said Vincent. “Did you find our missing church?”
“Percy, what’s wrong,” said Ratty.
“It’s… worse than I thought,” he said. “And I am trying very hard right now not to do what I always do which is burn it all down. It’s out there. But I need to talk with the others. Find Diggory, find Riot. There’s a lot. Right now we need to move.”
And then the sound of the far-off organ thundered again over the forest, and Vincent scrambled after the ghosts back the way they had come, but glancing over his shoulder noticed that a masked figure stood between two distant pines, head tilted, the skin of a drum stretched across its face.
Interlude 2 - My Problems
We are on intermission, dreamer, from the Council of Heavens. When the council reconvenes, it is likely that you will be dead. Or, you will have changed so entirely that age has ceased in its meaning, and perhaps death. In either case, my problems are not your problems. Much that I feared is coming to pass. But there are eventualities in motion, and you are more crucial to them than you will ever realize. I do not expect the Council to understand; their aim is fixed on conspiring against me, against each other, shaking hands over the table and dealing cards beneath it. Full of themselves. Skyrekeskrye looks up the thread and sees darkness. I feel it, heavy. Staring inwards. I have known its touch on Earth for long centuries indeed.
We go now to one who enters a place holy to the Black Eternity.
Story 3 - A New Drum
The gates were rusted and black, and open. Cole pushed through them, noted that the path was well-trod. The grounds were somehow preserved against the grasp of the forest, and although the trees spread their roots above and beneath the twin ruined churches, almost entirely enclosed them in a secretive hollow of bark, it must have been hallowed ground that he walked across. Memories of Heather were still burned freshly into his mind; spitting up blood, murdered by the pigman called Shank. Her words about saving this city. But she was not the only corpse that he gave mind to; there had been others.
Abraham Walker, carried in parts by Puck into Scout City. Raoul Greenstreet, suspended over the forest floor by reels of rusted cable. Four bodies like sickening angels in a Scout City park. ‘Repent’, spelled out over the body of the cello player in a warehouse in Scout City’s roots. How much had Heather known? How much had she been a part of? And was he being lured into a trap?
He picked his teeth with the legs of his centipede-like tongue, and kept his hand on the telescoping baton at his side as he stepped across the level church grounds. They were unkempt, overgrown, topiary bushes a decade and a half from any recognizable shape. Two structures dominated the lot; one was ruined, charred timbers and sheaves of modern stone collapsed into ruinous shards. Fire had claimed it, and left barely more than a front door and a skeleton of a hall left standing. The other structure was a humble chapel of large grey stones, and it stood intact and unburned on the far side of the property. Cole saw no hint of others as he crossed towards it, save for the footprints.
He paused, finding the large oaken double doors ajar, and found his resolve. For Heather, he had to hear her out. See this through. And in some way, go where Clementine never had. Into the heart of it. Although, if Shelby really was helping Shank as the newspapers stated, he could perhaps not even trust Clementine’s memory. He pushed against the chapel doors, and stepped in.
The chapel itself was a dark stone chamber, with rows of wooden pews in disarray, shoved back toward his end of the room to make way for construction materials that piled across the floor up at the altar. Towering against the back wall, and rising twenty feet into the air, was an organ of immense power, large wooden and golden pipes, which coalesced into a single wide set of unfinished keys.
The trace of moonlight that shone down from the sky outside was all the light he had, but catching glints of it he could also make out three masks—the open grin of the mask of shattered piano keys, a mask fashioned from a flattened section and keys of a brass instrument, and a mask comprised of two or three plates of shell from a fiddle, with unseen eyes peering through the curved cuts in the wood. The masked figures otherwise had only black robes and hoods.
There was a fourth person in the room, also, who laid across a scattering of cushions beneath the altar, on the steps of the central pedestal. They were draped in long black robes that trailed down the steps, which obscured their body, and they wore a mask that seemed to be made of a half-dozen trumpet ends, flattened and cut to resemble sunflowers. The sunflower mask tilted as he took a first step into the moonlit chapel.
“You came,” said one of the masked trio; Cole was not sure which.
“We weren’t sure if you had it in you,” said another.
“Which one of you is the fifth string?” Cole said, and produced the slip of parchment Heather had pressed into his hand with her dying breaths. “Heather told me to come here. She said what you do is fight monsters. I served alongside her as a Scout City Deputy for years. I owe it to her. To her memory. She’s been killed, tonight, by the pig-man.”
“We know,” said the member whose mask was a shattered fiddle. “We were there. Trying to take him down.”
“He’s still on the loose,” Cole said. “There’s a lot I don’t understand about you. And I need to.”
“It’s too bad anything you learn you’ll have to take to your grave,” hissed the one in the piano mask, cocking their head, stepping forward. In the back, the prone robed figure raised an arm.
“Enough,” they said, and beckoned him closer with a black-gloved hand. “I am the Fifth. Heather asked you to come here because she believed in your potential. Because she thought you could help us. I trust her judgement.”
“He’s the sheriff’s boy,” said the piano mask, looking back to the dais. “He’ll tattle on us.”
“I’m only here to learn,” said Cole, glancing to each of the three standing figures, making sure that none of them circled too far around him as he took a few more paces into the chapel. He locked eyes with the piano mask in particular. “Nothing more.”
“Having a cop on our side was useful, Keys,” said the one whose mask was made of saxophone shells and keys and banding. “Perhaps even essential for our operation.”
Cole stepped carefully down the room towards the dais. The three standing members of the Quartet maintained their places in the pews, watching him. He came to kneel a few paces in front of the Fifth, lounging upon the steps of the chapel. Their mask of golden sunflowers studied him with a half-dozen dark spots like eyes.
“Do you know who built this place?” said the Fifth.
Cole looked around.
“There used to be a religious group of some kind out here,” he said. “Don’t know much beyond that some folks at Fort Freedom had a tangle with them. It’s not far from where the Instrumentalist’s house used to be, either.”
“Yes, Solomon Reed is deeply important to us,” said the Fifth, and they raised another arm, black-robed and gloved, to gesture to the quiet pipe organ behind them. “He built all this. He came so close to fulfilling his purpose. But he was only human, and in the end prone to error.”
“Scout City fills their classrooms with propaganda designed to stoke fear, make the abnormal normal, villainize anyone who stands up for what is right,” said the piano mask behind him.
“But the truth is that Solomon Reed saw the evil creeping into our community. He tried to stop it. Purify it at any cost, so that future generations could be saved. And they slaughtered him for it,” said the brass mask.
“I know you feel it too, Cole,” said the fiddle mask. “The world slipping into madness. We open the door for monsters in Scout City and they creep inside and they corrupt us. Humankind used to be a pure species. Not fucked by the black rains, not slaves to every sin under the sun. Scout City could have been a fresh start for humankind, and we’ve squandered it on a den of debauchery.”
“Repent,” Cole said, looking back from the Fifth to the other three. “What does that mean?”
“What we’re fighting for,” said the Fifth, and Cole returned his gaze to the sunflower mask. “Is to restore what could have been. To complete Solomon’s vision. To purify Scout City of monsters and madmen and pagans and sodomites. There are still good people there worth saving.”
“How many have you killed?” said Cole. “Why did you kill them? What makes you any different from Shank?”
“The pigman is exactly the kind of evil we are trying to drive out of Scout City,” said the Fifth. “A vicious brute who kills for fun. We identify the most important activists for this monster-loving movement in Scout City, and we offer them the choice. Either they repent, or they die. They make the choice. Everyone gets a chance at salvation.”
“Abraham Walker was a faggot who stopped Fort Freedom from butchering that cannibal giant Big Mikey back when they were kids. The blood on his hands is the blood of everyone Big Mikey ever ate,” said the fiddle. “Strike number one.”
“Raoul Greenstreet used his so-called therapy practice as a way to condition hundreds of Scout City residents into accepting the social norms Scout City mayors wanted to promote,” said the brass. “Strike number two.”
“They’re all like that,” said the piano. “Queers and monster-lovers and freaks of nature. Strike three four five six seven.”
“Clementine Maidstone,” Cole said.
“You really believe she’s dead?” said piano. “That her sister Riot came back at just the same time she left? Oh they have you all twisted around.”
“Shelby Allen, probably Clementine, have been in with Shank from the start,” said fiddle. “Shank’s using her to get what he wants. To kill as many people as he can in Scout City.”
“Including the people we care about most,” said the Fifth. Cole’s head was reeling with information, but the Fifth raised a hand and brought his attention back. The Fifth continued.
“We are very careful with who we bring into the fold, Cole. I promise, everything will make sense, the more you learn from us. A world that has been chaotic and broken and meaningless, we are putting it back together one step at a time. Heather gave you that card because she trusted that you were the right choice. To take her place in the Quartet.”
Cole knelt before the Fifth string, and his eyes travelled up to the humble ceiling of the stone chapel. Studied the desolate pipes, and for a moment thought he saw a reflection of light that looked like a boy, hair curled, abyssal eyes, but it was gone the next moment. He turned back to look at the three standing members, who now had come to stand side-by-side in the aisle amidst the empty pews. There was something that glinted above the doors of the chapel, two large wooden doors set high up in the wall that arched to a single point—a mural of saints, perhaps, that could be unlocked and folded out to display inner carvings. A speck of green light shone from within the keyhole.
There was that in some way, he was desperate to know more. There was also the deep knowledge that if he was not on their side, they would not let him leave the chapel alive. And above all, that his next words might allow him to bring Heather’s killer to justice in a way the Scout City sheriff's department would never be able to.
“I will,” said Cole. He could feel rather than see the smiles of the trio behind him.
“Good,” whispered the Fifth, and tilted her head. “We will need you much in the nights to come. To punish the pig. And cut the head off the snakes that run this city.”
Outro - Plots
Plots. There is still time to undo what has been set into motion. But even if we cannot escape the power that has begun to work against us, there is I hope a means to persist. To survive. To suffer the flaying wind to pass, for schemes and regimes rise and fall, but some things are immutable. Love cannot be broken. Empathy cannot be shattered. Kindness is as much an unshakeable part of this universe as matter or its absence. Fear and violence boil over for a time, and then are gone, and we are changed by them and scarred by them but not destroyed. Your tribulation comes a little sooner than mine, dreamer. Until the final plot is revealed, I am your loyal host, Nikignik, waiting schemily for your return to the Hallowoods.
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'The Third Key' 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, it’s time to do what we do every night. Craft an evil plan to stay inside and hide under as many blankets as possible.
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