The Hollow Pines Tapes | Holo-simulation | HoloArcade
Hollow Pines County keeps its calendar in October, and October is already counting down.
Rewind Video, Funland, the asylum on the hill: nothing here closes properly. Kevin Doyle works his counter like a man holding a door shut, and Brandon Tate writes down what the walls do after midnight. Carol Hennessy counts the calls that never reach the log. You are new to the county and Kevin's regular, the customer he talks to like a person instead of a transaction. He has never once mentioned the thirteenth. It is the thirteenth.
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Hollow Pines Funland sells cotton candy, coaster thrills and carnival prizes, and has kept selling them long past anyone's last memory of a closing day.
A log cabin above Mirror Lake, rented by the weekend to anyone who wants quiet.
1 sceneNineties (90s)
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Hollow Pines FunlandFamilies come for the wheel and the family rides; the Circus Troupe works the striped tent and the pavilions around the plaza, and they will not say who signs their wages. The Ferris Wheel Plaza is their front room, the queue rails their hallway.Walk in through the arches and the pavement is warm underfoot, the lamps lit at noon, the air sweet and flat, like sugar left out. Nobody stops you. That is the arrangement. Ride if you like, and mind how long the wheel keeps you at the top.
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Hollow Pines State AsylumThe ward is a corridor of beds, alcoves hung with curtain tracks, lamps wired to a panel at the nurses' station end. Orderlies run the nights; the daytime belongs to whoever holds the clipboard. Walk the central aisle and the floor tiles count your steps back at you. Nothing here is hidden. It is only arranged.
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Rewind VideoNew releases sit up front where the window light reaches them; the rest wait in pigeonholes behind the counter, alphabetized, patient. Behind the register, the returns slot swallows tapes into a dark it never explains. Walk in and you get carpet smell, fluorescent hum, and a bell nobody remembers installing. Take the long way past the counter. Some shelves were stocked for you.
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The Cabin on Mirror LakeThe main room does the work: beams overhead, a stone fireplace taking the whole north wall, a floral sofa and one plaid armchair squared to the hearth. The owner takes cash, leaves a key under the mat, and does not visit.Come in and the carpet swallows your boots. Cold ash, cedar, lake water in the pipes. Something in the room keeps the shape of whoever sat here last. Stay the week. Bring more wood than you need.
She measures faces the way other people measure doorframes, and lately the numbers have stopped agreeing.
1 outfitNineties (90s)
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???A student, athletic in the shoulders, up too late too many nights running, carrying the particular tiredness of someone who reads past the point of usefulness and knows it. The campus quad empties after dark and the library lights stay on, and that is usually where this one is, hunched over a page with the whole body still.Hollow Pines County, October 1995. Absorbed, curious, running on will. What the curiosity is pointed at is not yet clear, and the county has never been a place that rewards the asking.
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???Hollow Pines County, October 1995. She paints what sits in front of her and squints at it first, thumb up, working out the proportion before the brush ever goes down. Gray eyes, black hair to the waist, hands patient enough to sit with one canvas for weeks.Ask around and you get the same shrug: the quiet one, up from somewhere else, good with a likeness. What nobody can explain is the sketchbook. Every sitter gets a second study, and it is never the face they came in with.
