And now it was a week later, two hundred miles away. It was raining. It always rained over Aunt Grey’s house.
She’s requested it specifically from the pegasi. Or rather, she’d “requested” it in the only way Aunt Grey ever requested anything, which was loudly and with wide gestures and always by impressing upon the poor cringing target that they were still in diapers compared to her great age, that they had just defiled the lovely new carpet by spilling dinner over it, and that an eternity in the naughty corner was too good for them.
Under the patter of the rain against her bedroom window – barred with iron like a prison – Caramel could hear nothing else. She knew Aunt Grey was downstairs, and – here, she looked up at the clock over the tombstone-like door – that Aunt Grey was stooped over the day’s crossword puzzle. She’d heard legends that Aunt Grey used to go out on nights to play bingo, but Caramel had never seen it happen. Apparently, too many old friends had died.
Caramel turned back to the decaying flesh – no, she blinked it back – the tattered grey shawl flopping over her bedside table. Focusing her energies through her horn, she clicked the knitting needles together with the clinical ease of a surgeon stitching up an incision.
The rain, she’d heard her aunt explain, was therapeutic. Everyone knew, after all, that arthritis kicked in right before a rainstorm hit the house. So, with patient dullness and several verbal smackdowns, Aunt Grey told her that it was patently obvious that the only solution was to have the rainstorm already here. You couldn’t get “a case of the arthritis”, as she’d called it, before a storm when the storm was already here and would always be here.
Caramel had given up picking holes in the idea years ago. It made no difference that rain and arthritis had nothing in common, that in a big enough world there were always going to be “cases of the arthritis” before a storm, and that it was all too easy to confuse “and” with “because” if you had little else to go on. Aunt Grey, she’d been told by the mare herself, did not get “cases of the arthritis”, even when she winced and took pills and muttered about the inferior rain you got these days.
The needles clicked together, and she stopped to roll the ball of wool back towards her with her magic. Although she was mangling the edge of the shawl fluidly enough, she hadn’t knitted in years, but Aunt Grey had always had her knit during the Crossword Hour, and so “knit during the Crossword Hour” she would.
Underneath her bed, the trunk lay where she’d jammed it in. She hadn’t bothered unpacking. If she kept everything there, it would give her that abiding hope that she was just a moment’s away from leaving.
Apart from the bed and the table and the clock and the trunk, the room was Spartan. Not Spartan like her old kitchen had been, with everything shoved off into other rooms out of the way, but Spartan in the Aunt Grey way, because ornamentation was the sign of an idle mind. Idleness was a crime.
Caramel’s stooped back stiffened for a moment, and she let out a sigh before sinking back into the deep.
Some time into the drudgery-imposed trance, she saw Mom’s face bursting with terror, flecked with black spittle, and her scream drowned out by the screech of the tatzlwurm. In hindsight, it was utter stupidity. How could she, Caramel, have ever thought this was a good idea? She could’ve led up to it gently, she could’ve tried something inanimate first to make the point, she could’ve just NOT shown it.
Mom had screamed the house down even after it was gone, but the screams had become words and they hammered into her here, crossing over the miles and the weeks to crack her ribs and batter her heart against her back. It was Dad all over again. How could she have been so reckless as to bring things like that into the house? What the blazes had she been up to? She, Mom, knew the filly’s fancies should have been stamped out of her.
“Oh, Caramel, why didn’t you think? Don’t you realize what you could’ve done?”
Mostly, it was the shock. Caramel kept telling herself that, because the thought that it could’ve been anything else was lurking in the shadows, staring out at her. She felt her spine chill.
While she continued to twist the hemline into tatters, Caramel tried to keep the spark in her mind from going out. Aunt Grey was just going to keep her until she started at the academy, which suddenly seemed a lifetime away. The spark had to stay alive until then.
She frowned and stopped to untangle a few knots.
Why had she done it? The question had ambushed her a few times over the past month or so, but this time there was a bite of Aunt Grey in it. Silly thing to do, really. Mom didn’t need to know where the black ink was coming from. And what, when you got down to it, was the point of using Haycart’s Method, especially on that thing?
Feebly, an inner Caramel said she’d wanted to do both. Show the source of the ink. Show how Haycart’s Method could hide things away.
And the new voice answered: Don’t you think it’s wrong to put real things into paper?
Under the patter of the raindrops on her window, Caramel pouted. It hadn’t occurred to her that it might be wrong, but her mind threw up images and pointed accusingly. Using it on objects? That’s an invitation for smuggling, not to mention it would make it easy to conceal evil talismans and dark amulets. Using it on animals? It didn’t take long to conjure up creatures worse than the tatzlwurm; Equestria was a net exporter of monsters.
On ponies, her imagination shut down in protest.
But then, said a treacherous thought in the darkness, what was it like, being an illustration in a book?
None of the tomes she’d read had mentioned it, since it was invariably done to others rather than done on oneself, which in any case was considered a nigh-impossible feat. Would you see in paper and hear in words? Or would it be like a deep sleep, and if ponies forgot you were there, then you’d simply sleep forever? Could the spell be adjusted to make ponies move, or would they be frozen pictures only? What if someone destroyed the book?
Caramel shuddered and hissed. No, something like that had to be stopped. She must’ve been mad to try it. What had come over her?
Wonderful ideas, that’s what. Haycart’s Method was hard to do – the meagre imitation she’d tried on the tatzlwurm had left her unable to cast spells for days – and it couldn’t be that hard to track ponies capable of using it. There had been no grim incidents in the centuries of its admittedly limited use. Besides, storage was a real problem in Equestria. Museums and libraries would hail her as a visionary. Ponies could travel in greater numbers than was normally possible. If they ever amassed enough magical power, maybe even whole buildings could –
No, said the Aunt Grey in her head.
Why? said her own younger self, but the conviction was draining away. The spark dimmed.
It was wrong. Messing with magic was unnatural and wrong and dangerous. It’s book buses and library libraries one day, and then the next day the newspapers are telling horror stories. It was madness. Why couldn’t she just leave things alone?
The spark vanished.
So she sighed and bent lower and took up her knitting. Madness was nothing but trouble. Dad proved as much.
Before the hour struck, Caramel ducked under the bed and fished out the diary. The page was blank. She’d thrown out the tatzlwurm long before coming here, as soon as Mom had told her Aunt Grey was at the front door to collect her.
There had been no tears; they would’ve been wasted on the thing, and she’d passed beyond tears hours beforehand. Besides, at that point it had been trying to eat her face. The idea that she’d coddled the thing as though it were a fairy was suddenly insane.
The clock struck.
“CARAMEL!” yelled Aunt Grey from below. “CARAMEL! IT’S TIME FOR MY PILLS!”
The yellow mare glowered and enchanted the bedroom door aside. Irritating old bore! She was a dead mare walking, and still she was trying to make ponies miserable!
Only for a few seconds the thought lived, and then it vanished into the darkness. Caramel sighed, and then she slipped off the bed and shuffled out of the room.
The guards all agreed it was a dreadful novel.
It began In Media Res, a term they heard a lot from the giggling mare in the cell, and which they could only translate as “you’ll immediately have no idea what the heck is going on”. The central hero could only quip one-liners and attack hordes and hordes of enemy ponies, which they were sure was beyond the scope of the average journalist in real life. Three quarters of the plot could’ve been solved if the hero had ever once stopped to ask; “Am I playing into the villain’s hands here?” It made mere pulp look like the classical work of the Bard.
A few noted how it always looked freshly bought, even after weeks and weeks of being in the same cell as the giggling mare.
They’d only let her have it in the first place because the yellow mare doctor had come down on the first day, dropped it through the flap, and insisted she have it. They never questioned why. The doctor’s bronze badge waving in their faces was enough to discourage out-of-place questions.
The Suit came round regularly and told them to keep it well away from the giggling mare, “just in case”. All of them nodded in his presence and levitated it out, but after he’d left, they always slipped it back through the flap of the door. It was either that or listen to her try to “read aloud” the contents of the daily gruel bowl, which she seemed to translate as some kind of spitting and coughing gibberish. It just seemed too ridiculous – and too harsh – to deny her a book simply because… well…
“How can you get lost in a book?” said the guard to the left of the padded cell door. “Especially that book?”
“Something about a portal, from what I heard,” said the guard to the right. “Figuratively or literally. Or some horse apples like that, anyway.”
They were both staring ahead, down the corridor and past the other doors to the distant entrance of the ward. Neither of them had a watch, and there were no clocks in sight.
“I think the Suit needs a padded cell of his own,” said the guard to the left, “if he’s spouting stuff like that.” His voice was monotone and carefully slowed down as though any variation would spell his doom.
“Ha. I dare you to say that the next time he’s here.”
Both guards grunted, which was the closest they ever came to a chuckle. Inside the cell, the giggling mare cocked an ear and leaned closer.
“You ever wonder how a mare goes mad?” said the guard to the left.
The guard to the right sighed. “I always assumed it was the stress of their work. I don’t read academic papers, you know.”
“I read once about this stallion who once mistook his mare for a hat. And then there was this mare who developed… music-philia, or something. Don’t ask me; I don’t remember it.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Sometimes, they’re just born with it. Sometimes, they get it over time out of nowhere. And sometimes, they get it when a giant iron spike explodes up their skull.”
“Yes. Yes. What’s your point?”
“What I mean is that this mare we’re guarding, right. She’s had none of that. All she did was misappro… misappriate… uh, spend funds wrong. So what’s she doing in a padded cell?”
She saw the guard on the right shrug. “Dunno. A pony trying to swindle a billionaire business pony for a comic book gimmick? Sounds pretty mad to me.”
“She seems pretty nice to me. Greets me every morning. Talks normal apart from the odd giggle, and I’ve heard worse in here. You’d swear she weren’t a nutjob. Seems wrong to trap her in a cell.”
Nothing followed this for hours. Instead, the giggling mare curled up in an opposite corner and spread out the pages of the novel. Her eyes were two black holes, sucking in every word, capturing every nuance of meaning so that not even the most obscure of allusions escaped the gravitational pull of her mind.
What foals they were! Trapped? She was as free as a bird, a stamp away from having her every wish fulfilled. Why, she only had to close her eyes, and once she opened them again, she would be standing on a distant beach, or above a sea of clouds, or under the stalactites of a forgotten cave. Such poor deluded souls!
Before her, the novel screeched and whined like an orchestra being conducted by twelve ponies while beating each other with their own instruments, but that was precisely the point. The schlock kept her normal, kept her sane, and reminded her that, for every level and every number and every field conceivable under the sun, there was always the zero, the nothing, the least point below which a lesser point could not be conceived. It kept her tethered to the real world.
And they thought she would escape with it? Oh, how she giggled at the thought. It never seemed to get any less ridiculous.
Each day, the Suit came back and peered through the bars looking increasingly flustered. An earring would be forgotten in his haste to get here, or the necklaces and pendants would become entangled, or his mane would stick out like a drunk hedgehog that had been struck by lightning. Yet she would be there, ready to look up from her novel and giggle and wave at him.
“Has she ever been let out of her cell?” he said after the twelfth week.
Both guards shook their heads and continued staring at the opposite wall. Between them, the Suit peered through the bars with a suspicious eye.
“Take that novel away,” he said suddenly.
“With all due respect, sir,” said the guard on the right, “it’s a harmless enough book. Our orders were to –”
“Who pays to keep this place running?” The Suit had lost his smile totally. His face was nose-to-nose with the offending guard’s. “Who’s your generous sponsor? Who’s legally entitled to shape policy here? For the last time, I want that book shredded.”
She watched him march back up the corridor. So he had seen her! She giggled when he slammed the doors shut.
Sadly, the two guards unlocked the doors and cast the sleeping spell on her. When she awoke, the book was gone. For several hours, she paced her cell; she was no longer giggling and no longer content to curl up in a corner.
“You OK, miss?” said the guard on the left after several hours of shuffling and pacing. His voice was edgy as though he half-expected her to leap through the door at him.
“I want my book back,” she said simply, trying to hide her panic.
“Sorry, miss. The Suit has spoken.”
“Fine. Then a newspaper’ll do. A crossword puzzle. Anything. Please.”
“Sorry, miss. The Suit has spoken.”
The only other visitor they received that day was the yellow mare doctor, who strode right up to the doors with some kind of package levitating beside her.
“I got her another book,” she said dully. “Keeps the monotony at bay.”
The guard on the left shook his head in what he hoped was a saddened but sympathetic manner. “Sorry, doctor. Orders from above. No more books for this mare.”
To his relief, she took it all without fuss. “Here's a card, then. Surely, she’s allowed that much.”
The guard on the right squinted at the message. “‘GET WELL SOON’. What a nice thought, ma’am. We shall see to it that she gets it.”
They summoned their magic and the card slipped through the bars. Both of them nodded at the squeal of delight from within. It was so rare for someone to treat patients like this; most ponies were too frightened or ashamed to so much as come by. It was so rare that the guards marked it down on their work calendar that evening.
The next morning, they found the card ripped into two on the cell floor. “GET WELL SOON” had been peeled off to reveal a short story of – here, they paused to count – exactly one hundred words. It was about a lovely little carrot called Baldric. It made the journalist stuff look like The Canterlot Tales.
When the Suit next burst through the doors and marched up to the cell, it was empty. He said nothing. He stared for a long while at the emptiness. He stared at the guards, who stared down the corridor and said nothing. He staggered back the way he came with a trembling of gold all over him. Only when he had passed the corridor did he break into a gallop.
In a neighbouring office, the remains of the card lay crumpled in a wastepaper basket. It wasn’t considered evidence, reasoned the guards, because it was just a card, and in any case what was it evidence of?