Sparks tried to scream, but a strong hoof hooked around his neck before he could utter a sound. He batted at the leg of whoever it was attached to, grunting and moaning for help as best he could, before another hoof clocked him on the head and what little vision he’d regained faded away again and filled with glowing spots.
“Shut up!” a voice hissed in his ear, ragged and unsteady as if its owner couldn’t decide whether to keep pulling him down the hallway or break his neck right then and there. By now, Sparks didn’t care what his captor wanted to do to him so long as he got away before he found out, so he kept struggling until he saw the casings of a wooden doorframe pass by on either side of him. The stallion that had dragged him there threw him inside with a vicious growl and swung the door closed once it entered behind him. They were in a storage room of some kind, filled with empty metal shelves and lit by nothing but the soft glow of what looked like moonlight sneaking in through the window.
“Shut up shut up shut up!” came the voice again. The stallion thrust his hoof into Sparks’s and leaned in so their faces were inches apart. Sparks's vision was filled with a pair of twitching, foggy blue eyes for a few seconds, then the stallion pulled away and scuttled over to the door, peering out into the hallway and muttering something unintelligible.
“W... w-wh...” Sparks cleared his throat and found his voice, and his tone solidified into something angry enough to draw the other pony’s attention. “Who are you?”
The stallion made a noise and jerked his hoof in a violent motion, but Sparks was having none of it. “No, I’m not gonna shut up until you tell me who you are and what the... what is this pla–”
“No, nononono, you’re ruining it, you’re ruining it!”
The stallion came at him again, and Sparks had backpedaled all the way up against the wall before he stopped. With their noses nearly touching and the light from the window catching half the stallion’s face, Sparks could see a bit more of him now. His mane was gritty and clung to his scalp like wet paper, and he was dressed in what looked like hospital scrubs stained with long-dried blood.
“Don’t you know?” the stallion whispered. He stared Sparks down for another second or two, but then he cocked his head to the side and wiggled his brow, white teeth flashing inside his mad grin. “When the stars come out, there’s ghosts about.”
He bobbed his head up and down and bounded back over to the door again, and Sparks swallowed back the lump in his throat. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said.
“Oh, but you do, Doctor Sparks,” the stallion immediately replied. “You most certainly, indubitably do.”
Sparks sucked in a breath through his nose and squared his jaw. After everything he’d just been through, the last thing he needed was some nutcase in a surgical gown making things worse. “What in the hell are you talking abo–”
“Ah-ah! Ssssssh, ssh-ssh-ssh-ssh! You hear that?”
Sparks returned the stallion’s giddy look with what he hoped was one of fiery disapproval. “Hear what?”
Shaking his head vigorously and groaning, the stallion hooked his foreleg around Sparks's neck and yanked him forward, shoving his forehead against the tiny gap between the door and its frame. “He’s coming, he’s coming,” he whispered. “Listen listen listen.”
“I don’t hear anything, get off m...”
Sparks trailed off, and for a moment he could’ve sworn the other stallion had poured a bucket of ice water over his back. He could hear something in the distance... grinding. Jagged metal, scraping against the floor. Shuffling. Muffled breathing. Moaning.
“Stars out, Doctor Sparks,” the stallion whispered, bouncing up and down in place. “Look look look.”
Sparks licked his lips and raised his eyes towards the corridor junction a few yards away, and his flesh crawled like it was ready to jump right off him. A lone earth stallion trudged into view from the right-side hallway, so malnourished that he was barely more than skin stretched tight over wobbling, creaking bones. His gown was tattered and torn, and filthy bandages wrapped around his entire upper body, covering every inch of skin and fur. Limp wires and tubes trailed behind him, connecting his leathery hide to a battered, rust-coated gurney that was missing three wheels and dripping with some dark, unidentifiable substance. The bare spokes carved deep furrows into the floor, and the tubes pulled on the stallion’s skin as he obliviously dragged it behind him.
“What is that?” Sparks whispered, his breath leaving his lungs unconsciously and happening to form into the words he was screaming inside his head. “What is that?”
The stallion behind him scoffed. “Oh, don’t give me that,” he said as he pressed Sparks's head harder against the door, leaving him with no choice but to keep watching as the thing outside finished crossing the hallway and shuffled out of sight again. The stallion released him and Sparks went limp, his nose pressed into the ground and his eyes staring blankly at wherever they happened to fall on the floor outside. Had he not felt the breeze as the air next to his head was displaced, he probably wouldn’t even have noticed that the stallion had yanked the door back open.
Sparks lifted his head and watched as the stallion trotted over to the hallway junction and peered around the corner, his head jerking back and forth so quickly that Sparks doubted he could see anything clearly. When the stallion apparently decided he’d seen enough anyway, he turned back towards Sparks and his Cheshire Cat grin returned.
“Spooky scary skeletons...”
He waved Sparks towards him just before he disappeared around the corner, his cheery tone carrying all the way back to the storage room as he continued his song.
“Send shivers down your spine...”
His heart buzzing with curiosity again, Sparks got to his hooves and followed the stallion’s humming, eventually catching up to him again outside a square archway patterned with tiny blue tiles. From somewhere within, he could hear the sound of running water splashing against porcelain, as well as something else he couldn’t bring himself to guess at.
“Hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm skeletons are silly all the same,” the stallion went on under his breath. “They’ll smile and scrabble slowly by, and...”
His gaze drifted up towards the ceiling, and he kicked his hoof against the ground. “Always forget that part,” he muttered. Without another word, he straightened up and trotted through the archway, his posture indicating that he expected Sparks to follow. Without much better of an idea about what to do, Sparks went ahead and complied.
The archway led into a locker room, pitch-dark but for a candle the stallion had seemingly produced out of thin air. The sound of the water was louder in here, and Sparks spent a few moments trying to place it before realizing the stallion had stopped just outside another archway from which the noise seemed to be emanating. Holding his candle aloft with his horn—enough to illuminate a sign nearby that read “Showers”—the stallion craned his neck out and looked inside. When he turned his head to the left, his motion hitched, and his gasp bore the tone of somepony who’d just remembered that their birthday was tomorrow.
“Be very, very quiet,” he said back to Sparks, his eyes wide and his hoof raised in warning over his lips. “This one doesn’t like crowds.”
Before Sparks could even form a question in his mind, the stallion hopped over the threshold into the shower room and trotted onward. His candle bobbed over his head, throwing twisted shadows over the tiled walls and, every so often, glistening off the back of somepony sitting under the running shower over to his left.
Driven forward by nothing more than a naïve hope that the stallion was leading him to safety, Sparks stepped gingerly inside the shower room and, inch by heart-stopping inch, crept over to where the stallion had stopped in the middle of the room. The other pony, as far as he could tell from the glances he occasionally threw in their direction, was a mare this time, and a pegasus. Her long, dark mane was plastered down her back, covering up the small square of muscle where her limp wings connected to her spine.
The mare never turned around, even when Sparks slipped and bounced off the wall as he found his footing again, but she was moving slightly. Her right hoof was pressed flat against the wall and slowly sliding down towards the floor, producing a constant, squealing drone as her wet sole rubbed against the sweating tiles. By the time Sparks reached the stallion, the mare’s hoof had clacked against the ground, and without a sound she slowly raised it again and placed it as high as she could reach onto the wall, beginning the process all over again.
“Shame. Shame,” the stallion said with a shake of his head, not tempering his voice at all despite the eerie presence of the third pony. She didn’t seem to react to him, though, so perhaps he knew better than Sparks did.
“Tragic case, really,” he went on. “Manic-depressive, rotten home life, no job, no hope. Tried everything. Didn’t work.”
The stallion turned to Sparks and nudged him in the shoulder. “And now she’s here,” he said, his tone now inexplicably upbeat. “With us. With you.”
Sparks half-listened to the stallion’s raving, but most of his attention was focused on the mare in front of him. Just like the colt before, she seemed so eerily familiar... in fact, every creature, or ghost, or whatever they were, had felt like this somehow. Had he had this nightmare before? Was this all just one big recurring fantasy he couldn’t remember in the midst of the dream?
“It’s not a dream, by the way.”
Gooseflesh rose up on Sparks's neck, and the nonchalant shrug the stallion gave him once he turned around only made things worse.
“You were wondering if this was all a big, crazy dream,” he said plainly. “It’s not. It’s real. You’re...” The stallion paused and seemed to consider something. “Well, I guess you’re... here, and then you’re there, and then... you’re kind of everywhere, actually.”
An attempt at a reply withered in Sparks's throat, and a deep, rumbling pulse cut off any chance at making another go at it. “And pretty soon, you’ll be everywhere again,” the stallion said. Sparks stared at him, and the tempo of the pulses increased.
“Wh… who is she?” Sparks shouted as the walls began to glow.
“Suicide’s never the answer, Doctor Sparks,” the stallion said with a grin. “Until one day, technically, it is. And speaking of which...”
Sparks's eyes went wide, and he turned away from the stallion back towards the mare. Her hoof had reached the floor again, and her face was pointed straight at him. As their eyes met and the walls shuddered and flashed around him, her eyes lit up, and her lips split apart into a wide smile. In the same motion, a yawning red incision under her jaw opened as well.
The room went white, and Sparks’s vision was blasted away. When he came to a moment later, the mare’s twin smiles still hung in the air in front of him, flash-burned onto his retinas like a brand into a hunk of wood.