To whom it may concern

The fountain in the centre of town had frozen over and the cold had made the things that lived below it listless and sluggish.

Sluggish, but still hungry.

The sanitation engineers - the title was an important distinction in a town where Garbagemen were not men and collected things that were not garbage - used pool hooks to tug the larger pieces free from the pink-stained ice. The smaller parts, fingers, toes, teeth and the single still-blinking blue eye that bobbed, untethered, in a shallow pool of melt-water, would require the use of a shrimping net.

A shrimping net, and much caution.

Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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It's Tuesday, so today you get a choice between two prompts. Pick one, combine both, pit them against each other - on Tuesday, you choose!

This week, your options are:

Basketball Team versus Creepy Garbage Guys

It's Tuesday, so today you get a choice between two prompts. Pick one, combine both, pit them against each other - on Tuesday, you choose!

This week, your options are:

Canine Arrest Team versus Creepy Garbage Guys

Watch out for scary garbage guys in mirrored shades, because we're about to rewatch the Lost Hour.

Some #EerieIndiana thoughts from today's binge as I take a tea-making break:

— William Arthur (@Wart_M) August 16, 2020

Foreverware:

-I love that the props are literally just tupperware with a Foreverware sticker
-I'm all for liberating the twins but I'm pretty sure Marilyn Teller would not have gone down the 'seal children in tupperware to preserve them' route

— William Arthur (@Wart_M) August 16, 2020

The Retainer:

-I still can't decide if Steve survived this episode...
-Also I love the continuity of pre-flashback Syndi wondering where her walkman is and then Marshall stealing it and using it to...hear dog thoughts

— William Arthur (@Wart_M) August 16, 2020

ATM with a heart of Gold:

-SIMON HOLMES IS THE PUREST AND MUST BE PROTECTED AT ALL COSTS
-Marshall is kind of extra clueless about Simon's home life in this episode and it's So Fcking Sad

— William Arthur (@Wart_M) August 16, 2020

The Losers:

-What if the garbage men in The Lost Hour are just there to redirect lost persons to the bureau of lost and they're just creepy cuz they've been alone in an empty time bubble for so long they forgot how to People?

— William Arthur (@Wart_M) August 16, 2020

off to make some tea and get a snack and then it's time for more #EerieIndiana!

— William Arthur (@Wart_M) August 16, 2020

(Oh, also, the line "If you're rich it's because somebody else is poor" from ATM With a Heart of Gold" continues to be entirely too relevant to Life) #EerieIndiana

— William Arthur (@Wart_M) August 16, 2020

it occurs to me that a lot of the 'evidence' Marshall and Simon gather doesn't make much sense without context (which is probably why he keeps the journal) #EerieIndiana

— William Arthur (@Wart_M) August 16, 2020

Bartholomew J. Radford passed the crew of Garbage Men, anonymous in peaked caps and mirrored sunglasses, who laboured in the long shadow cast by the rust-spotted hulk of their refuse collection truck.

The quiet of the early morning was well and truly shattered by the whine of pneumatic drills and the air was thick with the smell of hot tar.

"Winston," he said, bypassing the labyrinthine corridors of City Hall's interior and slipping directly into the Mayor's office via a hidden door in the side of the living building. "Please tell me you haven't put time-travelling sanitation engineers on roadworks?"

Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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"Remember," read the tall red safety warning on the back of the garbage truck, "If you can't see my mirrors, I can't see you."

Janet Donner, blindfolded and feeling equal parts Perseus and some particularly stupid strain of ostrich, groped her way around the hulking, hissing metal monstrosity until she felt the passenger-side footplate under her trembling fingertips.

The scrape and clatter of metal trash cans being dragged across the sidewalk told her that the Garbage Guys were at least four doors down from their idling vehicle.

She reached up, felt the cool, curved shape of the wing mirror.

Wrenched.

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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The stream that wound it's way through Deadwood Park was choked with water weeds and body parts, and though the sun was barely up, the day was already hot and the air was quickly becoming thick with both unpleasant smells and great clouds of black and buzzing flies.

The Garbage Men's faces were hidden behind mirrored sunglasses and beneath the shadows cast by peaked caps, but a cautious and careful observer might have detected the flared nostrils and pinched white lips thinned in disgust.

Not at the violent loss of life, of course. Just at the disorderly and unscheduled mess.

Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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Ongoing Verse: The Children

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The Garbage Men had painted a pizza on the side of their truck, presumably as part of a scheme to lure any potential time anomalies to their retroactive erasure from reality with the promise of melted cheese and reclaimed meat products.

It wasn't the worst artwork Marshall had ever seen - he still shared a house with Syndi, after all - but it nevertheless gave the impression of something that had never eaten pizza trying to recreate it from rough description.

The fact that it was stuck onto what was still quite clearly a huge garbage truck really didn't help matters, either.

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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"Back so soon, kid?" asked Billy Millions, glancing up from the freshly-shined chrome exhaust in which he was admiring his newly-trimmed beard. "You lose something?"

"No," said Marshall, whose arm was wrapped in hastily-applied gauze that smelled strongly of antiseptic. "I came to warn you that the Garbage Guys are planning to burn your clubhouse to the ground later today. You need to clear out your recycling now before they put the torch to all those old newspapers."

The Unkind One's leader gave him a long, considering look.

"Well," he said. "That's alarmingly specific, but I expect if you tell me any more, we'd be risking the collapse of the space-time continuum, right?"

"Right," said Marshall, then, "Wait, how did you-"

"I might have had this conversation before," said Billy Millions, rising to his feet with a creak of very tight leather clothing. "But I can't say more, because I'm bound by causality and my given word."

He turned towards the open door of the clubhouse and beckoned to someone inside.

"I also happen to have a ball of dino-proof twine lying around," he said. "Which you may have a use for, at some unspecified point in time."

Marshall gaped.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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He reached for the handle, but was unsurprised to find it remained flat and two-dimensional. Of course, she would have shut it tight behind her. Sara Sue Haverstock tended not to leave a lot of open doors in her wake.

Still, as Marshall stared at the calendar with it's crossed-out mass of unlived days, and the smudgy door that was now only ever a drawing, he had an idea.

He rolled up the sleeve on his right arm, the one that was usually covered to the elbow in more than a dozen watches. Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he used the gritty dirt of the unswept floor to draw a rough circle on the pale, exposed skin.

At his back, the door that was not and had never been a door creaked encouragement through non-existent hinges. A faint breeze blew from beneath it, smelling of newly-cut grass and the spring tide that was always slightly pink with blood.

He opted for roman numerals, figuring the straight lines would lend itself better to writing on skin with the greasy black grime of the prison cell. He drew a minute hand, and a shorter, thicker one to mark the hours.


Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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Marshall leaned back on the hard stone floor with a groan, running his fingers through his hair as he struggled to come up with a winning scenario. The groan became even more heartfelt when he realised he'd only succeeded in rubbing more prison cell goo on himself.

He rolled onto his side, and that's when he saw the calendar. Scratched into the wall, probably with one of the many sharp-edged bits of stone he could feel digging into various parts of his anatomy, it showed dates more than ten years into the future.

All of them had been crossed out.

Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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"Gross," muttered Marshall, trying to wipe his begrimed hands off on his t-shirt and succeeding only in smearing the mess around even more.

He looked down at his blackened palms, feeling the panic rise and trying to push it back down.

It wasn't that bad. Simon would be missing him by now. He'd get help. People would come for him.

But the Unkind Ones had tried, hadn't they? He'd seen the flames rising over their clubhouse, thick black smoke and choking fumes like a thousand tyre fires. Even if enough of them had survived to mount a counter-attack, they were effectively out of commission for the time being.

Time. The Dairy. The Dairy would... well, the Dairy would consult the Great Cow of the Cosmos and if causality demanded he be lost, then they'd shrug their white-coated shoulders and resign themselves to plucking a different Marshall Teller out of his home reality and starting all over again.

Radford would miss him, of course, but he'd been firmer about his policy of non-interference since his stock room turned into a hollow-backed Hollywood set and he'd had to pay for an extensive and inexplicable refurbishment, not to mention replacing all his supplies.

Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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It's Tuesday, so today you get a choice between two prompts. Pick one, combine both, pit them against each other - on Tuesday, you choose!

This week, your options are:

ForeverWare Ladies versus Creepy Garbage Guys

The ravens had covered it with fallen leaves and clumps of torn up grass in a half-hearted stab at concealment, but it was still pretty obviously a body.

Sergeant Knight, impervious to their raucous scolding as he was to everything else, knelt beside the corpse. The eyes were gone, but that would be the birds' at work, like as not.

The uneven covering of plant life looked to have come from the surrounding greenery but he gathered a few samples, sealing them in ForeverWare just in case.

He saw the name badge, blank except for E=MC2, and the sunglasses.

Fuck.

Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Marshall hadn't expected to find a viewing portal to another time zone in the back of a milk truck, but he'd been happy enough when the Milkman had shown it to him.

If he'd thought about it, he probably would have said it was logical to expect bags filled with nasty things in the back of a garbage truck. Even in Jersey, the back of a dust wagon wouldn't have been a particularly pleasant place to find himself.

In Jersey the garbage men probably didn't carry holdalls filled with torture implements, though.

He held his breath and emptied the gasoline.

Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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The recycling bins were torn open, glass jars and old newspapers mixed in amongst tin cans and plastic bottles. Trash popped and crunched under Dash's boots as he surveyed the damage, cursing quietly in a language not native to earth.

"Wow," said the fox, picking it's way through the debris on dainty black-stocking'd paws. "What'd you do, mix green glass in with the clear stuff?"

Dash shook his head absently.

"The Order only uses green and yellow packaging," he said. "Really dedicated to the theme."

The fox looked worried.

"Then the Garbagemen are sending you a message," it said. "Beware."

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Simon was pretty sure the sidewalks were eating people.

He'd passed an overturned concrete mixer on his way to school, the huge drum scratched and dented where doomed construction workers had scrabbled for purchase as the ground rose up to swallow them.The storm drain where the sewer clowns gathered was empty save for a single enormous shoe floating in a puddle of blood, and the lamprey-mouthed pothole outside their house had started refusing the snacks Harley brought it.

He might have suspected a new, more voracious breed of Garbage Men at work, except he'd found those sunglasses, bitten in two...

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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Someone had painted a giant blue-and-white cow on the side of the garbage truck. It rumbled and hissed as it moved down the street, the sounds of a large vehicle in motion completely drowning out the tinny tinkle of a stolen ice-cream van song.

It pulled up to the curb outside the Teller home, completely blocking out the midday sun streaming in through the living room window. Marshall scowled.

Outside, three Garbagemen in blood-splattered Eerie Dairy uniforms emerged from the cab. They'd daubed rough red crosses across the front of their scavenged jackets, but whatever they'd used had dried to flaky brown.

"Pathetic," said Marshall, and got up to lock the door.

Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Janet applied the last layer of silvery glaze, handed the empty bowl to Tod and stood back.

"What do you think?" she asked.

Tod deposited the ramekin into a sink already full of dishes soaking in hot, soapy water, turned back around, and considered.

"Looks great," he said. "I mean, it's a giant-sized bust of a Creepy Garbage Man made of filo pastry, so it looks terrifying, but it's an excellent likeness."

"Good," said Janet, wiping her floured hands on her apron before picking up a rolling pin. "That's what I was going for."

Tod rested one elbow on the scarred wooden worktop that ran the full length of BF Skinner Junior High's only designated Home Economics classroom, flipping through the food-stained pages of an ancient and well-worn cookbook.

"What do you want to do with it?" he asked. "Technically it's not baklava if you don't layer the nuts and butter before baking, but mix them with honey and stuff them into the head cavity and I bet you'd still get-"

He was cut short by the crunch of a rolling pin being driven through several dozen paper-thin layers of crisp, golden pastry, followed by a resounding crash as her swing carried through to strike the table beneath. As he watched, Janet drew back her arm and delivered several more crushing blows to the confectionary Garbage Man, reducing his hollow skull and vacant face to slivers and shards of dough.

After a few moments, Janet set the rolling pin aside, breathing heavily. A fine mist of airborne flour drifted between them, like gunsmoke after a showdown in an old Western, settling in their hair, on the counters, and on the shattered effigy between them.

"Thank the Corn," said Tod. "That thing was way too creepy to eat."

Janet laughed.

Ongoing Verse: Janet

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Winifred Swanson screamed, the kind of scream that scours the throat, empties the lungs, and strips away sanity as it goes.

The thing pulling itself inch by pitiful inch along the asphalt had been a little girl, once. A few strands of platinum-blonde hair still clung to the shrivelled skull and a pretty, lace-trimmed dress the rich green of pea soup swamped the withered, skeletal frame. It stretched out one shaking hand, arthritic fingers twisted into claws and topped by thick, yellow nails.

"Mommy," it gurgled around a mouthful of soft and rotten teeth. "Mommy. They broke my vacuum seal. Mommy..."

Winifred dropped to her knees, the high shine of her white patent boots scraping against the buckled sidewalk. Those scuffs would never come out.

"Freshness," she whimpered, almost too soft to hear above the ringing silence that echoed in the aftermath of her howl. "Oh, my little Freshness..."

She reached for her daughter, but the Garbage Men pressed down on her narrow shoulders and pinned her in place. Their faces, hidden beneath peaked caps and concealed behind mirrored sunglasses, never moved, but still the way they stood gave the impression of a smile.

The sole surviving ForeverWare lady wept.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Watching the most German movie I have ever seen, the plot of which is roughy “what if pippi long stockings was immortal and fighting G-Man over the theft and commodification of linear time?”

— chris person (@Papapishu) February 6, 2020

I respect that they managed to summarize this weird plot entirely in the full German title of this book. pic.twitter.com/BqxKKkM3GE

— chris person (@Papapishu) February 6, 2020

Isn't this the plot of an Eerie, Indiana episode?

— Will-io's Woods: Bakushō Version (@KasmKave) February 6, 2020

When the last barricade falls, Syndi can feel it. It's in the quality of the screams, the sounds of shifting debris. Something is coming to an end.

Her Miss Tornado Day sash, once a blinding satiny white any bride could be proud of, is fraying, grubby, and caked with gore. She slips out of it and unpicks the knot holding the two ends together.

Part of her is glad that Marshall can't see this, sure that he'd offer up some smart-alecky comment as she pushes sweat-damp hair off her face and keeps it there with a John Rambo-style bandana fashioned from a ribbon that once marked her out as a sacrifice for a sentient tornado.

Part of her wishes he was here anyway.

And another part of her wonders if she should have gone to Old Bob, when she was seventeen and her year was up, when the town chose a new Miss Tornado Day and she'd been sent out into the cyclone to die. Things might have turned out differently. For her, for the people she loved, even for Eerie.

If Marshall was here, she'd ask him about becoming the Harvest King. About the mountain and the wolf that howled in the night, and whether blood spilled under an October moon might have prevented all of this.

If he was here with her, hiding in the ruins of the Eerie Bingo Parlour, she would ask him whether it might have been worth it.

The tombola drum near the western windows begins to spin, slow at first, a handful of human teeth inside clicking against the rusting metal. Syndi reaches for the last remaining incendiary device - homemade hand grenades fashioned from stripped-down bingo dabbers and some sort of fruit cordial she'd discovered at the very back of the Parlour's walk-in refrigerator, covered in warning stickers and pulsating faintly.

Outside in the dark, something moves. The room she's in is three floors up, but the Garbage Men know how to climb. She'd seen them swarming like lizards over the surface of City Hall, the living surface of the building twitching and flinching at every touch.

She didn't blame it. In it's place, she'd have torn out her own foundations to avoid those clammy, grasping hands. Of course, in a very real way, the Garbage Men had already done that for her.

Syndi flicks open Janet's lighter and steps towards the glass.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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Marilyn knows it isn't Edgar, not really. A few lines of code designed to mimic character traits he thought people would respond to. A face that bears only the most superficial resemblance to a husband who is gone and never coming back.

Still, as she touches bloodied fingertips to fractured glass, she wishes she could believe.

"He'd be so proud of you," she says, and feels the truth of it deep inside her frozen core.

Mister Wilson's face twitches - calling it a glitch seems pointlessly cruel at this point - and he mumbles something that gets lost in the staticky void between worlds. She understands anyway, and laughs a choking, clotted laugh.

"Me too," she said. "I loved being a party planner. Loved my little stand at the Mall. Loved meeting all the people, even the ones who stopped by for a chat and a look-see and would never become paying clients. Always was a people person."

In the darkness, a thousand headlights gleam. The light is blinding and the thought occurs to her that Eerie could never have supported a sanitation force of this size.

She climbs to her feet and holds her head high as the Garbage Men advance.

Ongoing Verse: The Children

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Ongoing Verse: Milkman

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Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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yeah I just played Pokemon Go in the ruins of an old cult, what's it to ya? creepiest town ever, I've never counted so many offbeat sects of the Christian Church

— not a ghostwriter (@patronofthe) December 14, 2019

it's crazy it's not even evangelicals like I'm used to it was all these very small ... idk I'm doing some research and writing on it

— not a ghostwriter (@patronofthe) December 15, 2019

Oh totally ! was NOT trying to shade at all! i was raised in a strange ass small town started sect of christianity so i was like total mood

— bell (@journeythot) December 15, 2019

I was like agreeing and adding to the mood haha it was creepy. eerie indiana

— not a ghostwriter (@patronofthe) December 15, 2019

Hahaha Indiana is like a strange state to me to begin with! also ok i’m totally horrible with tone over the internet so i was like “!” also it’s incredibly eerie to see the leftovers of these long forgotten extremely strict sects 🤭🤭

— bell (@journeythot) December 15, 2019