The Back Forty

by Snooj


Chapter Six - Family Values

Applejack stared at the door for a long time. She knew it was foolish to expect her friend to come bursting back through in just a few minutes. Even with Twilight in a hurry, running to Celestia, presenting her case, and getting permission to free them, it could take hours. In fact, how much sway did Twilight have over the Princess? Would she have to wait in line? However that whole fancy court system worked, it probably involved a lot more steps than just getting apples to market.
The musty air bothered her. There was no fresh produce to smell, no newly tilled soil to dig her hooves into, no sunlight to play warmly on her face. This dark room was so far from the outdoors. This might be longer than Applejack had ever gone without being outside. What time of day was it, even? They weren’t brought food at regular intervals, there was merely a dank supply of hay festering unceremoniously in one corner. The guards hadn’t even entered the cell except to reassure her that her efforts to break down the door were unappreciated. Her face was still tender from that visit. At least Twilight had noticed. As far as she could figure, Twilight was the only key out of this prison.
Prison. The word sounded awful to her, and the idea that she was stuck here brought up a fear she had been refusing to think about since uncovering those bones. No one was allowed to go onto those back forty acres of land, Granny had always made that clear. No one ever spoke of what might be out there, they were contended enough to leave it alone. What if the thing they uncovered was bad, what if they were going to be punished. What if no one was intending to let them out of here? Twilight was a good friend, but she was more a small-town pony every day. What if Canterlot had forgotten her?
The walls once again closed in on Applejack, the threat of never seeing the outside again made her heart pound, her breathing intensify. She leapt to her hooves to take some kind of action, anything, just to take her mind off of all the horrible possibilities.
Once again she circled the cell, examining the walls in another futile attempt to find a way out. As she slowly prodded at the walls, she felt that strange presence again. Her rabid imagination was inserting shadows into the dark corners. When she walked, she could hear whispers echoing alongside her hoof steps. As her imagination dominated her rational thought, a strange voice gurgled down the hallway, shocking Applejack back to reality. “Hey, you, the apple pony over in that cell. What’s your name?”
Another prisoner in the complex? Why hadn’t they said anything before? Applejack ran to the window, feeling a subdued excitement.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
“Oh, my name, you say. Well, what’s yours? And why do you perchance to favor a visit in my happenstance dungeon? Of darkness?”
Oh. The voice was raspy and bubbly, but the delivery was suddenly familiar. “Pinkie Pie, is that you?”
“Of course not AJ! That was Mr. Puddlesworth. He’s stuck in here with me and Rocky. They are just collecting the prisoners down here! Hey, so what did Twilight say? Will we be out in time for dinner?”
“Hones’ly Pinkie, I was hopin’ we’d be out in time fer lunch.”
“Well that would be impossible, lunch was hours ago. It’s four thirty-five right now.”
“Pinkie, how do you know exactly what time is it?”
“I don’t know exactly, it’s hard to keep track of seconds. All I know is it’s four thirty-five and something seconds. Maybe forty-two. That’s usually the answer. I have an internal clock! It’s never wrong, approximately, unless I forget to set it ahead after Winter Wrap-Up. Then I’m eating lunch at one in the afternoon, going to bed late, I don’t know what time Sugarcube Corner opens and closes, it’s chaos!”
“Uh, right.
“But we’re being rude. Mr. Puddlesworth wanted to come visit, can he?”
“Um, sure Pinkie. Why don’tcha send him on over?”
“Okay, he’s there.”
“Oh, well, howdy there, Mr. Puddle.”
“You have to address him. Look down.”
Applejack was disconcerted when a quick examination of the floor revealed a small puddle of water. Had it been there before? Did it just appear there? No, scratch that. It must have been there all along. She couldn’t remember specifically searching the floor, and this was a dank cell with moist walls. Of course there would be puddles. But how would Pinkie have known she wasn’t looking at it?
“Pinkie, are you messin’ around with me?”
“I always find life easier to understand if you don’t think about it too much.”
Without missing a beat, her voice became bubbly again, the sound a puddle might make if it were talking. Applejack felt a strange relief that the noise was clearly coming from Pinkie’s cell and not the puddle on the floor.
“Applejack, is it?”
“Uh, yeah. Applejack.”
“Applejack, do you love your family?”
“Well of course, puddle, I do love my family. More’n anything, I suppose.” She felt absolutely ridiculous, but at least Pinkie was interacting with her. The neighboring cell had been disturbingly quiet all night.
“Good, then listen,” continued the voice.
Applejack paused in anticipation of the forthcoming wisdom. After a few moments of silence, she ventured, “yes?”
“You love your family, right?”
“I do!”
“Then listen!”
Applejack waited a moment for the puddle to speak. Losing patience, she snapped, “well?”
“I said listen!”
“I am!”
“Not if you’re talking you’re not. I said listen!”
Applejack had to check herself before slamming a hoof down into the insolent puddle. It was just a puddle, and the voice was just Pinkie being silly. That filly possessed an amazing temperament to keep a light heart in awful situations like this. It was beyond Applejack’s understanding.
“Good. Glad you’re listening. Keep it up. I’m going back to see Pinkie Pie. Just remember, listen!”
Applejack didn’t stop herself, she raked her hoof sideways against the small puddle, dispersing it. “Pinkie, can you just come back down to solid ground for a second?”
“Oh, can’t talk now, Mr. Puddlesworth just showed back up.” sang out Pinkie Pie, followed by a quiet succession of gurgly conversation sounds. Applejack supposed that was the answer.
Listen. Listen to what? She’d rather keep bucking at that door, but didn’t want to risk another visit from the guards. What was the puddle telling her to listen to? When things got too quiet in the cell, she could hear her own breathing echoing from the closely confined walls, providing a solemn reminder of what stood between her and freedom.
Listen. There was nothing to listen to down here. Pinkie, nearby, mumbling nonsense to her rocks and water and whatever else she could find to talk to. A skittering noise, probably a rat or mouse, skulking in the darkness. Dripping water, a sound so constant it had faded into her subconscious. Some kind of rhythmic tapping, probably Pinkie tapping to herself.
The tapping. Like a hoof. A hoof on stone. That rhythm. Three short measured beats following by three in rapid succession. Tok…tok…tok. Tok-tok-tok. There was a long pause and then it sounded again. Three measured taps, three in rapid succession. The noise tugged at something, a memory buried deep inside Applejack. She closed her eyes, listened to the noise, tried to unearth the desperate familiarity.
Tok…tok…tok. Tok-tok-tok. It was nighttime, she was small, helpless, alone.
Tok…tok…tok. Tok-tok-tok. A figure towered over her. It lifted a dark hoof.
Tok…tok…tok. Tok-tok-tok. It started tapping near her face.
Tok…tok…tok. Tok-tok-tok. It was a code. He was talking to her. A glint of moonlight caught the side of his face and she saw into his deep emerald eyes. It was like looking into a mirror. It was…
Dad!” she yelled. It all came back in a flash, bursting forth from her past. Her father was a stoic pony, a hard worker who rarely spoke. He always said goodnight in his special way, tapping out a message on her bedpost in the quiet of the night.
Tok…tok…tok. Tok-tok-tok.
I...love...you. Applejack.
It was how he said goodnight, every night. Until he disappeared.
Dad!” The tapping was coming from the back wall of her cell. She leapt to the wall in a single bound, spun on her front hooves and slammed the rear wall with her back legs. “Dad! It’s me, Applejack!” The stone wall offered complete resistance. The door she had felt buckle and crack, but this stone was unyielding. Bucking it was pointless, but it didn’t slow her down. She hit the wall again. Was this the strange presence she had felt in the cell? Tears began to well in her eyes. “Dad! Can you hear me?” she hit the wall again, so hard that she felt something shift in her ankle. When her feet hit the floor, her left leg buckled and she faltered.
The pain was sharp, but not debilitating. She stood up and faced the wall, listening, almost unwilling to let reason regain control. What had she been thinking? Listen? What impractical advice. Now her ankle hurt, and for what? Stupid wall. Stupid tapping noise. Stupid block.
Probably the darkness was playing tricks on her, but it did look like one of those blocks was pushed in a bit. She closed her eyes for a minute, trying to clear her mind of whatever nonsense was affecting her. She wasn’t built for this, not for being underground, not for being caged up like an animal. She was losing her mind, just like Pinkie. She’d be talking to the rock next.
It moved.
She stopped breathing, eyes wide, staring at the block in the darkness. If she was going to lose her mind, might as well watch it happen.
It moved again. It was a large block, slightly bigger than her head, but no different than the other impenetrable slabs that made up the wall of her tiny room. But it was definitely, definitely moving. It didn’t make any sense, a solid buck could have shifted it, if there was hollow space behind, but it wouldn’t have kept moving.
Yet there it went, again and again. Small shifts, slowly edging away from her, creating a deepening hollow in the cell wall. She lifted up her front hoof and touched the rock, as if needing the reassurance that her eyes weren’t failing her. It continued to move in short bursts. She would have helped push if her hind leg weren’t starting to throb. Instead she watched, transfixed, her front leg reassuring her that the rock persisted in its forward motion, freeing itself from the wall.
The block gave way with a graveled crunch and a sound like clanking metal. Applejack was shuddering. A dim yellow light spilled through the new opening. She peered in, squinting her eyes, was that a shape, moving slowly? Something approached, a dark silhouette bringing with it the sound of dragging metal, clanking chains, and suddenly, through the void that previously held a solid chunk of stone, there was a face. A large red face with sparkling green eyes.
Applejack swallowed. “Dad?”
“Sis?”
Big Mac? What in tarnation, what the hay, what, how … Big Mac?”
“Eeeyup.”
“How’d you find … What’re y’all, I mean, Big Mac? Is that you?”
“Eeeyup.”
Foolishly, but unable to contain herself, she asked, “Are you alone?”
“Eeeyup.”
“How did you find me?”
“No time. Old tunnels. Granny’s waiting. C’mon now.”
“Hold on a sec,” she galloped back two steps toward the cell door before being reminded of her hoof and nearly falling again. She couldn’t reach up on her hind legs to stick her face through the window so she yelled to her friend, “Pinkie! Pinkie, sit tight! Big Mac is rescuing us!”
“I don’t feel very rescued.”
“Just wait, there’s a tunnel behind the cells. We be there in a minute, jus’ hang tight darlin’!” she cantered back to the opening, took off her hat, and passed it through to her brother. “Big Mac, take this. I can just squeeze through but I think I busted up my ankle so I’m gonna need some help.”
With minor difficulty, she managed to reach her front legs into the hole, Big Mac helping her along, and together they slowly fed her body out of the cell and into the crisp air in the tunnel beyond. No sooner had her four hooves touched the floor next to Big Mac that they heard a commotion in the hallway beyond.
“The guards!” hissed Applejack. “C’mon, we gotta get that stone back in place before they spot it!” Big Mac supplied most of the heavy lifting, as they rapidly hoisted the stone off the hard floor and set it on the edge of the hole. Applejack noticed a thick metal loop attached to the back with a chain leading off. That must have been the metallic sound she heard earlier and explained how Big Mac was able to pull the stone straight out of the wall. It didn’t explain the existence of the tunnel, though, or how he had found her or why the … whoa there, girl. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Plenty of time for supposin’ later. Now they just had to get out.
The stone wasn’t pushed all the way in when they heard the slam of the large fortified cell door. They both froze in the darkness. They could hear loud, anxious voices. “Escape” and “prisoner” and “Celestia” were some choice words that echoed from the tiny cell.
She whispered to Big Mac, “we gotta get Pinkie out lickety-split, before there’s trouble!”
“Uh,” came the quick reply from the darkness.
The voices in the cell faded, there was a crash of the door closing again.
“Big Mac,” said Applejack, a little louder now that the immediate threat had passed, “Pinkie is in the cell next to me. We gotta get to her out before they come back. There can’t be much time!”
“Uh, the next cell?”
“Yeah, hurry, where do we go?” Big Mac had a small lantern set on the floor, casting a warm yellow glow on the walls. They were in a very narrow tunnel, dug straight up to the back of her cell wall. The chain from the block was hooked onto a harness he was wearing. It all looked old and rusted, a remnant from a time long past. This escape system had been used before. How did her brother know about it?
“Sis, there’s just this tunnel. Granny told me to follow it, maybe find you.”
“But.” Applejack felt a squeezing on her heart, “but, we need to get Pinkie out. We can’t leave her. The … the guards.”
“I dunno, sis.”
Applejack stared helplessly at the back side of the stone wall. The guards knew she was missing. She couldn’t just magically show up back in the cell. What would happen to Pinkie? “Open ‘er up!”
“Huh?”
“The stone, pull it out!”
Big Mac could never turn down his sister. With a single fluid motion he ran the length of the chain, pulling it taught, and the stone, already loosened, slid out so fast that Applejack has to jump backwards to avoid it. She climbed back through the hole to find her cell unchanged, an optimistic hope that the door would be open was quickly crushed. She ran to the small window and winced as she stood on her hind legs and spoke loudly through the opening.
“Pinkie! Pinkie, you there?”
“Of course, AJ. Been here all along.”
“Pinkie, Big Mac is here. There’s a tunnel, he can get me out.”
“Say ‘Hi’ to Granny Smith for me!”
“But, Pinkie, there’s only one tunnel. We … we can’t get you out just yet.”
“It’s okay Applejack. We’re fine here, we’ll wait.”
“We? Oh, uh, yeah. You and yer friends.”
“You’d better hurry, it’s a long walk back. I’ll be fine, okay? There’s lots to do here and I’ll probably see Twilight soon!”
Applejack backed up. Was this the right thing to do? Would her other friends have abandoned Pinkie like this? Well, obviously Twilight would, but would Rainbow Dash leave a friend in this place? Did Rainbow Dash even know they were here? Had Twilight told anyone else?
Distant hoofsteps broke her trance.
“Sis, we gotta go.”
She darted to the hole as quickly as her ankle would allow. She knew it was going to cause a lot of trouble, better get it splinted up as soon as possible.
Big Mac practically dragged her through and lifted the stone by himself to set it back in place. Applejack marveled at his speed and strength. She always considered herself to be pretty athletic, strong, and reliable, but Big Mac was so soft spoken it was easy to forget the power he contained in those massive flanks.
He pushed the stone until it was flush with the wall. They were alone in the narrow tunnel, both appeared dark gold in the dim lantern light. Sounds from beyond the wall barely registered with Applejack. She regretfully put Pinkie out of her mind. “What now?” she asked her brother.
“Uh, Granny knows.” With his teeth he grabbed a short stick attached to the lantern and started walking. Applejack had no choice but to follow. The tunnel had rough dirt walls with a few wooden supports, but only stretched on for about 50 feet before opening up into something far more majestic.
It was a cavern, unlike anything she’d ever seen. The ceilings disappeared into darkness, the meager lantern they held was unable to penetrate its depths. All around them the walls weren’t the coarse dirt of the tunnel, they were covered in crystals. Huge, magnificent gems protruded from every surface, reflecting a thousand small lanterns in their facets.
“What … what is this?” asked Applejack, lost in their darkened splendor.
“Dunno,” replied Big Mac, “ask Granny.”
“Is she here somewhere?”
“Eeeyup.”
“Big Mac, how did you know to tap on my wall? I mean, to tap out what you did? That I’d know it was you? Not you, but y’know.”
Big Mac didn’t answer. Applejack decided she had strained her brother’s talkative powers enough for one day and limped slowly along behind him, being careful to try and walk normally whenever he glanced back.
They walked for a while in silence, Applejack frequently glancing around at the jagged structures. They looked pretty useless, but she knew Rarity might burst a blood vessel if she knew something so faaaaabulous was down here. The caverns all looked the same to her but Big Mac seemed to know the way so she followed in silence. Her foot was starting to give her trouble she couldn’t ignore. She would have to get off it soon or she would be in serious pain. The crystalline caverns stretched on forever, but before she could convince herself to tell Big Mac to slow down, a shape rose up out of the darkness.
“You got her! Oh, you big beast, I knew I could count on you!” It was Granny Smith, looking exhausted. She still had enough fire in her when she turned on her granddaughter and spat out “at least one of my grandkids knows how t’ follow directions! Now c’mon!” She turned and started making her way through the jagged crystal structures.
Applejack was taken aback. Wasn’t she the one Granny should be happy to see? Still, her own safety was second to that of the friend she left behind. “Granny, I wasn’t alone. Pinkie was with me.”
“Well good, where is she?”
“She’s still back there, we couldn’t rescue her, Big Mac said there was only one tunnel. She was in another cell, next to mine.”
“Yeah, there’s only one tunnel, and them fellers probably know yer gone now. Leave it.”
“But Granny, Pinkie is still back in her cell!”
“Don’t you worry there, she’s fine. Smart lil’ cracker, that one.”
“Granny, it’s Pinkie Pie I’m talking about.”
“Yeah, that one really has a handle on things. She can take care of herself.”
“The pink one, Granny. The one who eats cake for a livin’. You’ve met her.”
Granny Smith spun around with surprising agility, “Consarn it young’un, don’t you treat me like I’m old and worthless! I know who yer talkin’ about. I know her parents, I knew her parent’s parents, and I know her. She’ll be fine, and if she isn’t, it's you to blame! You know we don’t go on the back forty. Never. Now get’cher self moving and not another word!”
Applejack fell in step but had too many questions nagging at her. “Granny, one thing I don’t get. How’d y’all know where I was? I mean, you never even saw me leave!”
The slow-moving shape stopped. Its head drooped down as if the question drained all its energy. “Cuz I been here before.”
“What, you were in this cell? Why didn’t you ever…”
“No, no, I weren’t in the cell. I visited the cell. Then I led the effort to dig the tunnels. To break ‘em out.”
“Who?”
“Don’t ask me to explain it now.”
“Who?”
“We gotta git yer foot bound, that’ll help the healing…”
Applejack lunged forward, cutting Granny Smith off in one decisive move, ignoring the sharp pain in her hind leg. She planted her hooves firmly in front of her grandmother, and with an audacity that should have been bred out of her at a young age, she glared directly into her eyes and demanded, “Who was in the cell, Granny?”
Granny Smith had tears in her eyes. She looked sad, forlorn, lost. Applejack was about to back down when Granny spoke.
“This was the last place I ever seen ‘em. I got to say goodbye, and then I planned to get ‘em out, but by the time we finished the tunnel, we was too late. The cell was empty. I didn’t want that to happen again to you. Not after they took my daughter and her husband. It was your parents in that cell. There, you got’cher answer, now you comin’ or what?” The old green mare gave a resolute snort and pushed past Applejack, stomping off into the darkness of the cavern.