//------------------------------// // Chapter 11 // Story: The Corner of (Our) Eyes // by Daemon McRae //------------------------------// Chapter 11 I recoiled as the empty facade fell away to the howling winds to reveal the reality I’d been standing in. Flakes of blank white gave way to angry, blistering deadwood; boils and weakly pulsing veins stretched across plywood and rafters. I pulled my hooves away as the ashen paint stripped away in the gale like dust, revealing almost fleshy carpet and hardwood. As if the entirety of my home had turned into a sickly, dying thing underneath me. I scrambled to the side as I noticed the heavy, slow pulse resonating through my hooves, only to realize I couldn’t escape the very floor beneath me. Shuddering, and ashamedly repulsed by my own home, I cast a hesitant glance at the furniture. I immediately wished I hadn’t as the last of the paint fell away, drawing my gaze to what now was a throbbing, unidentifiable organ where my couch used to be. It curled in, folded into a meaty shelf as if trying to imitate the couch whose space it had usurped. It didn’t take me long to notice that although the furniture and the walls were now fleshy, diseased shadows of their former selves, the rest of the house had become more than a fatal organism. Where the windows once sat in the wall were now metal clamps; large square spiky contraptions that dug into the wall, piercing the helpless tissue as it trickled blood. An unhealthy shade of green pooled in the corner where floor met wall beneath the malicious contraptions. The doors were similarly fashioned, yet still somehow functioned as doors. Large metal slats with handles were punched into the living walls as vicious metal claws victimized its surroundings to hold itself in place. I shuddered at the thought of what lie beyond them. Unfortunately, unless I wanted to stay in this cancerous mirror of my living room, I would have to go through one of these doors. Besides their placement in the room, the doors themselves were identical; emotionless, intimidating slats of gray steel (assuming it was an identifiable metal in the first place) held in place by those torturous clamps. I noticed the same pooling green liquid underneath the doors, as well. I glanced behind me to see if the front door was like the others, only to find that, somehow, it had disappeared entirely. I wasn’t surprised, somehow, but had noticed that my previous lack of apprehension, and my strange sense of curiosity, had been driven forcefully out of my mind. Replaced by repulsion, nausea, and an otherwordly fear that, were I in the presence of mind to process objectively, should have been present from the start. It was as if the… whatever it was that held me here had been viciously clamping down on my emotions like bars on the walls of my mind, suppressing my innate instinct to flee danger until it could be sure I didn’t have the option anymore. Destructive emotions battled within me as my natural repulsion to the deathly flesh battled my paralytic fear of what could be worse than this, as I scrambled back and forth trying to decide whether or not to leave the room or stay and see what would become of my home next. I noticed as I paced frantically that the floor made squicky, gushy sounds beneath my hooves, and I felt some kind of sticky gunk come away with each step. Eventually I had had enough of this tortured place, my revulsion overtaking me as I squished my way to the nearest door: the kitchen. I stared at the door for half a second, trying to decide if I should shove or tug it open, and wondering if I had the strength to do so, when I noticed the sound of clicking gears and grinding metal, barely making itself audible over the heavy, weakening pulse on the air. The door dragged itself open, swinging away from me, and I noticed that the spikes even extended underneath it, digging deep, gashing wounds into the floor below. I tried not to stare and the helpless flesh, almost feeling sorry for it amidst my disgust, when I noticed that the flesh was not, in fact, the entirety of the floor. Beneath maybe an inch or two of sickly flesh lie a layer of gears and cogs, a malicious machine upon which grew its victim. Not wanting to think about the implications of such a device, I looked up to my now-open kitchen door. I let out a small gasp as my hoof flew to my mouth in horror. --------------------------------------- The girls scrambled to the flower stands, chattering desperately among themselves as they tried to find Rose’s namesake flowers, a frenzy of hooves and a torrent of manic prattle until Daisy pulled out a bouquet on her roommate’s cart tagged for delivery. “I got it!” She shouted. The other girls turned their heads and smiled in relief, as their rather tenuous plan gave them some hope, and the sight and smell of the roses reminded them of their friend. As the girls scrambled back to the alley, Vinyl paused for a moment, a familiar sensation stopping her in her tracks. She felt a pulsing beneath her hooves, like a distorted bass line, and stared in the direction of the beat. A chill ran down her spine as her eyes fell on Rose’s house, and she ran after the girls as if to escape the implications. When they finally collected around the gap down which Ditzy assured them Rose had disappeared, Octavia raised a rather pointed question. “Ok, what now?” Ditzy seemed to think about this for a second. “Well, we could just throw it in?” “I dunno if that would work,” said Vinyl. “I mean, it could just land somewhere in a corner, and maybe she’d never see it?” The girls mused this for a second. Then Daisy said, “What if we throw them in one at a time?” Octavia shook her head. “No, it would be like we threw them in all at once, I think. They’d all just show up in the same spot. I think we need a way to make sure they spread out. Ditzy, maybe if you flapped your wings? Maybe we should just throw the petals in, and leave the stems. Then Ditzy could blow them in with a breeze.” The girls seemed to circle in on this idea, as Ditzy jumped into the air. Flapping her wings excitedly, she saluted mid-flight. “Count on me!” Vinyl spoke up again, asking, “So do we just tear them off and throw them in the air or whatever?” Her question was immediately met with a smack to the back of her head from the cellist. Octavia grumbled tiredly, “You. Are. A. Unicorn.” “Oh, right,” the DJ smiled sheepishly. She then proceeded to pluck the petals from the stems in a wave of blue magic, hovering them in the air in front of Ditzy. The pegasus gave a hearty flap, as the petals caught the wind and seemed to eagerly dance into the gap, as if more than Ditzy’s wings were guiding them. “Let’s just hope it’s enough,” Daisy muttered. ------------------------------------ It was too much, I think. My kitchen, normally full of life and laughter, had become a prison. Almost a torture chamber for everything that once flourished there. The pots I kept my flowers in had become black metal cages for overgrown, tortured vines and dead petals. Thin, cute daisies had become engorged, bleeding things pulsing against the edges of their cell. Vibrant roses strangled themselves, tangled in horrendous messes around spikes and razor edges, somehow holding together even as they choked the life out of themselves on unforgiving steel. My pots and pans had been replaced with shears and sickles, my sink now a trough of plant corpses. My fridge was now a latched metal box, covered in chains and padlocks, from within which echoed the dying screeches of some helpless thing. I felt dizzy. Helpless. Blood drained from my face and my hooves grew weak. If I couldn’t even turn to my special talent to find light in this hellhole, what could I- My sense of defeat was put on hold as a familiar smell broke through the putrid decaying odour of the rooms. I felt a gentle breeze, and smelled, of all things, roses on the air. I looked around, and saw a wave of petals pour in from the stairwell on the side of the kitchen. They wafted on the air gently before falling to the ground. I noticed with some remaining sense of sorrow that the petals were all shriveled, dead, as they alighted on the fleshy floor. One petal, however, caught my attention, as it drifted in front of my face. It wafted gently before lighting on my nose, and I saw that it had some life in it. It shriveled and died like the rest, but somehow, that one petal felt… real. I felt the emptiness of the room around me sink in as if some kind of veil was being lifted. As I stared at the dead petal, focused on it, the fleshy walls around me seemed to give way to something else. Like an illusion giving way. It gave me a sense of relief and the thought that maybe I wasn’t truly trapped lit a beacon of hope somewhere in me. That is, until the house screamed.