Of Magic, Machines, and Candy Cane Dreams.

by TheSkeletalGent

Foal's Play

The cold rush Autumn air ran through and went straining against the broad side of the barn, red and flaking paint stark against the a brooding coal-smoke sky; windows were pushed inside of their panes and whistled through their cracks, an iron crow was sent spinning aimlessly, helplessly whirring away on a squeaking axle in all the directions of the compass.

Big Mac awoke with a sudden jolt and a breath that hitches into a snort. Sprawled ungainly between his bedsheets, one hoof sticking out and with his neck wedged to his side after the throws of uneasy sleep.

"Well, ah’m up." He thinks, and the thought bounces around his suddenly cavernous and echoing skull. Its the first of anything he thinks that night, the rest is about the house and it’s myriad of rheumatic creaks and groans and wanton bumps, all of which he’s grown familiar with over the years. It’s not what’s bothering him.

The air seems heavier somehow. Too still even for the angry promise of the thunder clouds a look outside would give him. He felt heavier too, still pulled down by the vast adhesive weariness of only a part night’s sleep, but itching with something restless besides, something that seemed to work it’s way into his limbs and fray at his nerves as surely as the wind worked it’s way through the oak and timber foundations of his home. He knew with a rising sense of ire that tonight would be a sleepless one.

He indulged in a drawn-out grunt as he kicked the covers off him, swinging out over his bed before he his mind had caught up enough to slow down and slide his legs gingerly onto the creaking floorboards. Bad enough that he should have to deal with a restless night without waking up the rest of the family. Besides, what cold-comfort he was seeking out now would require some awkward explanations he’d rather not give.

Walking through to the back of his bedroom, he brings around his considerable bulk and pushes against a cupboard on the far side; years of working under the yoke show themselves, really, the closet might as well have been on wheels. The ground under him is insulated by thick carpet, and what little friction there is stays muffled down to a mousy squeak.

The moved furniture reveals a cut in the carpet, a loose plank hitched between the other floor boards that a push of a hoof turns vertical. He reaches in with his head and nips down on loose fabric, pulls out, and with him comes something that looks like its been dragged through a coal shed and left out for a week in bad weather- but it still had an unmistakable, if crude, resemblance to what was a dollmakers idea of an equine, dressed up in spotted denim that rode high on it’s torso and with a face of lumpy dimensions.

Bic Mac throws the item over one shoulder, pushes the closet back with the other, and then, with a jump that seems just a tad to quick and sprightly for a colt his age, throws himself back onto his bed and curls up in a way that was oh so reminiscent of a newborn foal, giving a short, happy nicker and settling the item snugly between his hooves.

Time bled by. There was the endless, droning, ticka-tick-tack of fat raindrops hitting the glass of his window, the rhythmic, shallow sound and sense of his own breathing, and once in a while the all-encompassing groan of protest as a great gust of wind threw itself against his face of the Apple residence, heavy wind straining against wood and groundwork, failing and wilting away as its the momentum of its charge lost out against the solidity of the back to nothing, back to-

‘Bitter batter, pitter patter, bitter rain for little chatter, and round and round and round, doesn’t it just?

Big mac began nod his head in the way you always did to sagely advice; the snippet did have some strange sort of sense to it, if only because his mind had two hooves set in that mystical place where anything and everything made sense, the anywhere of anytime- then his eyes snapped open as he caught himself.

That hadn’t been his voice.

He turned his gaze out slowly, and met up with something like a cross-stitch smile and two gleaming discs that were as bright as silver dollars, but then his eyes blinked away their foggy sleep and saw that the discs were merely buttons, catching out the wan moon-light at an opaque angle.

But, the thing that had them was standing. Whats more, the owner had become an operator, and the head turned to face him on-- what? Eye to eye and hither to thin and with that dreadful cross-stitch grin that had popped into existence-- and did not, as he had dearly hoped in that moment, pop back at the speed of thought-- it only seemed to widen.

His heart did something of a free-fall to the rock bottom of his stomach, but it was still an easy kind of fear. The kind you rode with on as something you just had to endure. He expected, with a kind of deep, inner surety (his heart of hearts,) that his senses would catch themselves, that reality would reassume it’s grip and he’d be staring at something that was as dead as anything of cloth and stitches should be.

Instead, he got the voice again-- reassuring him of it’s existence as crudely as a hammerblow.

“Wha-’ he stammered, Wha-”

“Wha - Wha -Wha whats up, pard?” It mimicked him, mocked him. Then it giggled. “Come on now, close your mouth when you’re talking, its just unsettling is what it is.”

It took the last rags of what was left of his cunning, but managed to bundle it together and get the sense to bring up his jaw. It was likely still slack though. Like an idiot savant that has gotten his first view of fireworks.
It was standing on two legs now- shoulders straight, head narrowed. Narrowed in the sense that it had become thinner, more angular, more masculine. The spots on it’s belly high working bib joined the bug-button eyes in a shine like a burning fever.

“So, then!”the voice exclaimed heartily. “What do you call yourself, my fine foaly fellow? He stared, wide-eyed, as it began to make it’s way towards him across the covers, kicking out folds of linen out of it’s path as it went.
“ What do they yell out in the fields when you go out in the morning and back for the ol’ taters and gravy, or whatever swill you kinds eat? Something like Ranch Rolly, or Yoken Yeller or just plain-old -Red...”

Still staring. Still silent.

The head tilted, as if curious. “Whassamatter? Cat got your tongue?” Now it was half leering, half trusting, the voice of smiling authority with a mind to let loose the mother of all hazings on the latest greenhorn. “Wag that rag, my friend, or you’ll bag a bug!”

The doll thing took a final step forward, and began to reach out.

Somehow, that brought something to snap inside of him, a line over which his mind was turned, and his stomach churned, the final straw.

His hooves burst into frenetic motion, running, gunning, pistoning into a frantic trot like they were positioned over speeding roller bands. The bed sent scraping rudely over the oak floor, the mattress sent flying. The bedsheets were tangled in between his flailing limbs and brought him down on his lower jaw. He didn’t stop, his legs kept moving, fighting through resistance, and there was the thick, sudden sound of tearing cloth. Then he was up again, eyes wide, heart racing, teeth aching, and hooves clocking down on old wood with a noise that tore through the silence like buckshot, like trees being felled and falling down to earth with their whole length at once, but still not loud enough that he couldn’t hear that soft and pleasant voice once more, floating over, ripping like a razor blade:

“Close the door behind you, partner, was you born in a barn?”

He was well into the hallway now, running past a high backed linoleum chair, a heirloom desk, a portrait line, faces set in ovals and ordered by ages, and with light falling in like liquid silver; he was slowing, preparing to take the corner and the first flight of stairs.

He stopped at the edge where the hallway split off into the stair corridor like a triple intersection, front hooves almost scattering over the edge, waiting, willing his eyes to adjust to the darkness, eyes which were for once opened into wide and fearful windows that scanned desperately for movement while his body was coursing through with adrenaline and his mind was running endless circles of WHY and WHAT and calling on Celestia and Luna and and anything else that might be listening as his ears made poised little satellites at the top of his head for a tell-tale rattle or slip or slide of something-

(goddess he hoped it walked but I won't think about that now not just now no not just now)

-moving along the hallway towards where he stood. Was is even moving? Was is still monologuing?

Meanwhile the way down had become clear, and it was with no small measure of relief that he began to reach down towards the vague but still discernible outline of-

The voice spoke just when he reached the first step, and it froze him solid. “Hey-ho, do I smell something?” lazy, languid, a husky whisper right at the edge of his hearing, “Do I smell something... wet?”

As it spoke, he felt the loose little frayed wires- perhaps from stitch-work, or the crows nest that formed it’s hair- brush ever so delicately onto the sensitive skin of his inner ear. It might even have been accidental, but those frayed strings he felt repulsed him. They were living strings, like a probing antennae, or the nerve hairs of some nightmare spider, blood red and as big as a rat, and a bloated body quivering with venom. The image was horribly vital, horribly real, and he was absolutely sure that the thing was poised right next to the soft nape of his neck with black gleaming fangs dripping with clear fluid that would no doubt burn through the floor and leave perfect concentric little circles... and all of this he imagined in an instant.

He screamed. It was a croaking, blubbering sort of scream, coming from a voice not much used to being raised and still in the process of waking up besides, but a good long holler nonetheless... you could call it healthy.

He did it as he went crashing down into the darkness, he did it as his body went hitting the stairs with bone-jarring impacts as it rolled, banged, and tumbled.

And the horrid, happy laughter of the voice followed him all the way down.

“Opal! Diamond! Sapphire! Jade!’” Yelled the voice in cheery falsetto, accentuating each bounce,

“Do I smell Reddie’s lemonade?”

The doll-thing threw itself on it’s back in the little flat place, and laughed some more.

-----------------------------------------ooooooo//~~~~~~\\ooooooo--------------------------------------

Applejack struggled out of delirium with with a breathy hitch and snort, and immediately regretted that she did. The first breath she took already seemed to narrow the canals in her nose and throat down to the bore of a foals water-gun. The whole room felt hot. Not in the same way as she felt out among the apple trees with the sun at it’s peak and hard light beating down on her back, this was worse. This was an inside hot, like she’d swallowed a torch, and it was working itself into her body a terrible kind restless duality between her hooves, which were insisting on the need to move and run an trot, and her mind which thought it too much of a bother.

Suddenly there was a noise. A very loud noise of a very big thing. A loud KAR-THUNK of an object hitting the ground at an edge and then coming down on it’s whole, and it came from above her.

“...Big-mac?” she asked hesitantly. She meant to say it soundly, (practically a yell it as a matter of fact-- her head felt foul and her mood felt fouler,) but the constricted feeling of her throat let it out as not much more that a rough whisper.

She cut off and had to swallow- she felt like a ground pump without the grease to help along the machinations- but before she could call out, the sound above her broke out again. Now there was the jagged pounding of footfalls clocking along his upstairs hallway, boards groaning and creaking and protesting under the weight of those merciless panic-wild hooves. Then a pause when they reached the stairs.

She was up herself now, having kicked off the covers and already trotting down between the door-posts of her own room. She could hear something else now too, something that had bobbed serenely from the top floor down the stairwell to the hallways which connected the living rooms to the central bedrooms, where Applejack was. The voice sounded so far-off and alien that she wondered if she was having throwbacks to a dream.

‘Big-Mac?’ She tried again. Louder now, but still with a softer tone. Wakefulness had brought back awareness of granny and little sister, still dozing away at this ridiculous hour, and she didn’t want to wake them anymore than that she wanted something else to go-

WHAM! came the sound, and then repeated again over and under and onto itself in a relentless staccato beat.

WHAM! WHUMP! WHAM!

Like a knock on wood, like a buck on wood; like a laundry-bag full of soap bars falling limply but heavily on every part of it’s surface- Applejack galloped over to where the sound terminated, surprised, alarmed, a little fearful... but the laughing she heard, or at least thought she heard ringing all about her brought up the idea that this was all some kind of prank; it would be a prank in bad taste perhaps, and uncharacteristic of a pony as soberly self-controlled as her big brother, but that was the thought that her mind threw up in the spur of it all, like a dog biting on the run.

When she ground to a halt at the foot of the stairs, and saw that what had fallen down them had been nothing as simple as a soap bag. And then that little worry became a lot. It became everything.

‘Big Mac!’ She yelled out, not caring much of single bit now even if she’d woken every pony from Acres to Everfree. Her big brother was lying in a heap before her; he lay trembling, his feverish body soaked from tip to crown, his head thumping, his eyes bulging. His throat was closed to a raw slit and he began to struggle for miserable breath. His body began to shake and shiver.

‘Big Mac! She said more reasonably, tenderly, ‘Oh sweet gosh darn Celestia, what in the hay...’

She’d seen scared before. She’d been scared before. She’d stood before the corrupted goddess of the moon, a face that blistered with a thousand years of wrath and hate and envy like the drink broiling from a shattered cider neck. She’d had run-ins with such wonderful little critters like hydras and timber-wolves, things that came on with great leaps, slavering chops and jaws all a-hungry...

This looked worse. His eyes were trapped little balls inside of their sockets- it was an animal kind of fear. Like the eyes of a rabbit with it’s limb caught in a the steel jaws of a trap; it would have no idea of springs or wires or cogs- the size of that thought alone would defeat it’s mind- but there would still be enough to signal that vital and all important directive;

Run rabbit – run rabbit – Run! Run! Run!

So all she could muster out to say- all that she could dare to say, was...

‘What in the hay happened to ya?’

And in response he could only give back a sort of furry moan, but soon he settled down onto his haunches, seemed to try his level best to look back at her with what was a measure of his old composure (She didn’t dare touch him, for he might still go into cramps) settling his shoulders and squaring his jaw, ready to speak-

"HEEEEEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWWW! " A high and undulating cry that cut through her like a cord of ice.

Applejack swerved her head- and could only stare at the thing that had appeared in the center of the upstairs hallway. Although she could see even from she stood that its height would barely reach up to her own knees, it was the face that threw her off-- two eyes that gleamed down at her like the surface of thick spectacles, a mouth that didn’t so much stretch into a smile; rather, it crossed across it’s head like a bolt of jagged lightning.

And that hateful, happy voice.

“Ah say, good day!” It roared merrily. “Ya bumpkins, ya local yokels, ya country cousins, ye hayseeds! How ya’ll doing?!” The figure spread limbs from wall to wall; a spook spreading out it’s cloak. “I have happy news for you!”

He laughed above them and the sound crashed around them, reverberating like surf in a filling cave. “Come one, come two, come all! Come to the midnight-night car--”

A new sound interrupted it. A racketing pound barreling up, the crash like a door falling in, a blur of orange.

“...nival?”

The act was practiced, automatic, instantaneous. She hit the deck with both hooves and whirled on the backs, her whole body turning in perfect momentum, her hair trailing loosely behind the rest of her-- and then the spark inhabiting a very deep place of that well-loved doll felt a great shudder in it’s senses, of pressure and release, and then it was blasted off its feet by a great and invisible shock wave like a corn sheaf spinning in a hurricane.

A sharp whip-crack blow to the back, a sound of breaking glass, then nothing. Rushing silence, roaring dullness, and then a switch back to sudden and violent movements, movements which were now sure and fluid as if the machinations behind it were all of muscle and sinew and bone instead of stuff-fluff and stitches. The host-body of the Voice to hit the ground like a deadweight only to snap back upwards in one convulsive spasm so that it would be free to jack-knife and whip about like something alive and very much in pain.

It didn’t like that. The pain drowned out anything else, shrinking it’s presence, marooning it’s thoughts like a sail-less ship in the eye of the storm. Back home sinuses were firing off ghost signals, bones creaked with imagined strain, and the brain was lighting up with all those wonderful warning colors that threatened to start a blackout. Strangest of all was the hard crystal now falling all around, falling above it and making fragile plinks as they landed, gleaming in it’s eyesight.

So the presence decided it had had enough; it was time, so to speak, to take the curtain call.
It reached out the forefront of it’s mind like seeking tendrils and out towards the passages it had made when it had cast it’s magic; like a trapdoor, a pet-gate carved into the fabric of reality through which the presence could worm into, latch a foothold, and finally spring out into a vast and limitless freedom, where it floated, until the anchor of it’s original body caught it as firmly as a hook in the gullet of a prize fish, and pulled.

In that part of the world, the presence winked out and was gone like snap of air.

-----------------------------------------ooooooo//~~~~~~\\ooooooo--------------------------------------

Applejack nudged her hooves out over the wooden banister and risked a peek, scanning over the countryside, watching, seeking. Nothing but acres of shadowed trees and rolling hills still steeped in gloom. Finally, she glanced down, eyes still glancing for a moving target, and saw the tiny figure of a foals doll sprawled amid the glass shards now turning to ambers in the morning sun.

‘Darn tootin’ splithooves...’ She murmured, glancing about again. Had she missed the real culprit? Was he (or she!) even now skulking out in the dying shadows, or galloping out to their escape?

A sound behind her made her turn. Big Mac was trotting up the stairs, still wary but seemingly more himself, at least. She smiled at him the best she could.

“Sorry big brother. Ah thought I’d knocked his light’s right out, but mah hooves musta just clipped the rascal.”

Now she was looking out again, squinting.

“He won’t get far though, you can write me down on that one.” A hoof went up to shield her eyes. “Hit like that should at least hobble him, and besides-- he sounded crazier than a snake bit varmint.”

He looked out over the railing, staring down at the same sight.

“Big mac?”

He didn’t answer her back, but his body was shuddering again, and his eyes stared like stark white cue-balls right at his own hooves, as if they might sink to the floor unobserved.

“Sis,” He says, and now his voice is a tone closer to hale and hearty. “Sis, what’s wrong with me.” his complexion was turning a couple of shades from its usual colour to-- she hated the thought even as she had it-- apple green. The great mound of his back shuddered in vibration and was still again.

“The sweatin’?” She asked. “The lung-pumping? The jelly-legs?” He nodded weakly. The way he looked shook her up more fiercely than anything in the whole ordeal had.

“Shoot big mac, all you got is a cold-cut case of the skitters.” He looked up, his face dull, uncomprehending.

“Fear, big brother.” She forced the smile to stay. “You just have more of it ta’ get used to, is all.”

He lowered his head for a few moments, took a long, fortifying breath, then looked up at her.

“The doll.”

Now it was Applejack’s turn to look surprised.

“Is the doll... done?”

She blinked owlishly, then she glanced over her shoulder out of habit, the mention bringing about her attention.

“Well, ah suppose the glass might have scratched it up a notch, but nothing that Granny can’t stitch up if you’re feeling sentimental.”

“That’s not what ah meant-”

“Whats all that noise?”

Both red and orange heads turned at the sound of that third voice, staring down the stairway to see yellow poke it’s it’s head out from behind the barrister. Orange hitches her breath a moment, stealing a glance at red.

“It ain’t nothing Applebloom. Go back to sleep.”

“But wah’t was all the racket?”

Both red and yellow now glance at each other with something that they both recognize, the slightly wide eyes for a little white lie.

“Crow.”

“Eeyup.”

“Poor thang flew right into a window. Glass everywhere. Big mess.”

Appleblooms head paused, and then one brow arched upwards in a questioning bow. “Just a crow couldn’t have made all that stompin’”

The glance again, quick as an arrow.

“Well ya see-- that was me” Applejack suddenly grimaced and began to worry her head, like she was grabbing for gulps of empty air. “I had to wrastle that panicky featherball back out the window, didn’t want em to smash anything else up... like, you know...” Her eyes darted up and back to center. “you know, pictures.” She finished, a little lamely.

It was at this pint that big mac began to amble down the stairs, his head tilting a motion that Applejack should follow.

“We were gonna go out to clean up. Outside. Right now.”

“Well- well-- can’t I come help?”

Applejack, now trundling down the stairs herself, raised her head to address her littlest sister; she caught the gesture when she saw her older brother standing a few steps behind, his head furiously shaking left to right.

This prompted a raised eyebrow of general doubt, but after a moment she decided she’d go along with it; there was nothing left of the shivering wreck she’d encountered not a minute ago. Whatever her brother had in mind right now, he was wholly sure of it.

“Better you should check on Granny.” Applejack suggested. “You know how she gets panicked
with that poor old ticker of hers.”

The little filly bobbed her head with feverish enthusiasm, her face beaming, simply happy to be given something to do. Any doubts or reservations gone with a gust of wind, she scuttled out between them on foreshortened legs, out onto the lacquered tiles of the kitchen, and was gone again.

Applejack turned bag to her brother “Why are we going outside?” She asked. Glass out in the open could have somepony hurt, true, but the way he was looking...

“Because, with what I’m about to have to rationalize for the the both of us, were going to need that fresh air.”

This brought up another weird look from his sister, but not another word. He looked back to his usual self now, his eyes were back to that half lidded look that might have made him out as bored or stupid but, as family, she knew as something which projected a mind that was thorough and coldly contained. She didn’t call out another word until they reached out the back of the house and were staring down on the cross-stitched doll (scary to one, quite quite still-- the doll was done.) and he told her what he had seen, and how he knew what he had seen.

And his prediction about the fresh morning air turned out to be very right indeed.