Chapter 3 – The house (Twilight)
It was actually cooler inside the house, although the putrid smell was stronger here. At least it was partially offset by the equally strong, but less nauseating smell of dust and old, sun-baked wooden planks. Then again, it was highly unlikely that no small critters had snuck into the house and died here over the years.
The front door led her into a small vestibule. Along the wall opposite the front door there were stairs leading up. To the left the wall opened to a large room which, as she could tell from the derelict stove that stood against the opposite wall, had been the kitchen. Another door on the right was closed, as was one under the stairs.
Twilight first turned left towards the former kitchen, away from the door to the right. It was a simple wooden door, made from the same bleached, skewed planks as the walls of the house, but something about it felt very wrong, and she was very grateful that the massive iron lock bar was firmly in place. She assumed that the unpleasant smell’s source was somewhere behind the door. Better to keep the door closed.
The kitchen’s floor was covered in ancient linoleum, its design not discernible in the twilight that lingered in the room despite the broken and wide open windows. It was, in fact, as if the sunlight only fell into the room in concentrated window-shaped beams and had no interest in diffusing from there, so that the room was unexpectedly dark.
Besides the derelict stove, a massive iron monstrosity whose lid had been torn off, there were a few other pieces of furniture, namely a ceiling-high cupboard, a corner seat without cushions, and two halves of a massive table that had been split in half.
Twilight slowly trotted towards the stove, curious what was inside the firebox behind the destroyed lid. For a second, she wondered why Applejack wasn’t following her; it was very unlike the farmer to be scared of something as insubstantial as an old deserted house. She missed her, especially after she had shared her fears and doubts about her relationship with Rainbow Dash.
As she approached the stove, she noticed a toppled pot lying in the corner next to it, its bottom turned towards her. Not unlike with the other room, the one with the barred door, she preferred the possible contents of the pot to remain unrevealed. She lowered her head to get a better look at the stove’s lid and, to her surprise, didn’t find any ashes or half-burned pieces of wood. There were only the congealed remains of some brown liquid that had, at some point, oozed out of the firebox and onto the floor. It looked a bit like sticky, brown icicles. Twilight stared at it, unable to figure out what the undoubtedly disgusting substance was, careful not to touch it.
She backed up into the middle of the room, then turned around, curiously staring at the table. It had been cleanly split in half, along the fiber of the wood. That was when she heard the rustling behind the other door. She turned around and looked at the door. It was of the same making as the barred door which she didn’t want to open. Something about it made her feel uneasy, but in this case not enough to quell her curiosity.
Twilight let the split table be and slowly walked over to the door. Whatever it was, it rustled again behind the door, furtively, as if it knew of her presence and didn’t want to be heard. She reached out for the lock bar to open the door, but hesitated. Maybe she didn’t want to let the thing behind the door know that she had heard it.
From somewhere far away she heard Applejack say her name. It sounded almost muted, as if she were just lazily saying her name without expecting her to actually hear her. That did it. With a sudden jerk of her hoof she pulled the door open, not even considering using her magic.
A plume of pungent smell flowed over her, but unlike the unnatural stench that, presumably, had its origin in the other room this was the perfectly natural and reasonable smell of rotten food supplies. It permeated from the cupboards that lined the walls of the tiny room which contained a plethora of pots, jars, kegs, and boxes that were all smashed or broken. Obviously, this had been a storeroom. Liquids had congealed on the cupboard, and rotten bits and moldy pieces had fallen to the ground.
The rustling came from the huge disfigured rat that was lying in the shattered remains of a box. It had bright orange fur and was covered in small red pustules. It was bloated to the size of a cat, but its legs were rudimentary and short, and it was doubtful whether it was at all able to leave its nest. When Twilight noticed it, it had its ugly head turned into her direction, staring at her from green eyes. It bared its teeth and screeched malevolently at Twilight.
With a startled shriek, she tumbled back out of the room, her eyes closed. The rat hissed in disappointment, tossing and turning in its nest, but unable to do anything else.
Twilight stumbled backwards into the kitchen and lost her balance on the sticky, grimy floor. With a thud, she fell on her haunches and found herself sitting in the congealed brown liquid that had oozed out of the stove. She wondered why this surprised her; the icky brown goo had been covering most of the kitchen floor the whole time after all. Nonetheless, she stood up as fast as she could, not wanting to sit in the undefined slime any longer than she had to. In the storeroom, the rat-thing screeched in its mindless, impotent rage.
The centaurs on the wallpapers who had been dancing idly through forests of willow leaves when she had come in–
Which centaurs? Which wallpapers? Had they been here all along?
–were now staring at her with bloodthirsty eyes, brandishing spears and spiked clubs. They were still just hideous drawings on equally hideous wallpapers, but Twilight could feel their hatred. Had they been any more real, any more three-dimensional, they would have been after her blood, of that she was sure.
Maybe, she thought, she should return to Applejack. Knowing the caring earth pony, it was likely enough that she was worried about her. She turned to the kitchen windows which, following her understanding of geometry, should have opened towards the veranda in front of which Applejack was probably waiting for her, but beyond the veranda all she could see was the endless range of the prairie. Even though she was careful not to step into the sunlit rectangles—she missed the bright light, but didn’t trust these particular light beams, not after the rat thing, no—she noticed the temperature rising while she was looking out of the windows. When she withdrew into the shadow of the kitchen, she was sweating again.
Turning around towards the kitchen door, she noticed that it was slowly closing on its own account. With a terrified yelp, which was immediately mirrored by the creature in the storeroom, she launched herself towards the door. Her coat brushed against the closing door as it tried to keep her inside, but she managed to squeeze through before the door fell shut with a mighty thud.
Slightly out of breath, her knees wobbly, she stood in the vestibule again. The dust had increased; she could hardly see the opposite walls of the tiny room. She could see enough though to notice that where the house’s front door had been, the planks of the walls had contracted almost like a living muscle, bending and breaking, folding themselves around the front door and thus blocking the exit. The splinters of the broken boards looked like pointy teeth surrounding the door and keeping her from even trying to pry her way outside. They cracked menacingly.
Twilight told herself that she was not going to panic; panicking would only make things worse; she needed a level head to get out of this house. She hastily looked around. The door opposite the front door was still there, and to her great horror she noticed that the iron lock bar of the other door had moved. It still kept the door locked, but it had moved. A thin trickle of brown viscose liquid was oozing out from between the door boards and the lock bar.
She stared at the unsuspicious door. It was way too close to the other door for her liking; she’d have to pass it in less than two paces distance.
“You want me to think that, right?” she mumbled. “But I don’t think so.” Carefully, her eye never leaving the lock bar, she stepped to the less suspicious door. The lock bar stared back at her and didn’t move. Without looking, she pushed the door open and entered the room.
It had once been a bathroom. Floor and walls had been covered in hideous brown and red tiles, most of which were shattered or torn off. The sink just left of the door was still intact, the once white china encrusted with brown grime. In the opposite corner stood a bathtub on stylized hooves, and a pale pink curtain was drawn around it so she couldn’t see the state of the tub. On the other side of the sink were the remains of the toilet, blown into countless shards of china which only added to the splinters of shattered wall tiles on the floor.
If there was a window, it was probably behind the tub curtain.
She didn’t want to see what was behind the curtain. Not another rat-thing.
As if it wanted to mock her, a sudden burst of sunlight shone through the curtain, basking the room in pale red light. Suddenly, the grime in the sink looked very much like congealed blood, and Twilight had to turn away, gulping heavily.
Huffing, she pulled back the curtain with one swift motion. With a disgustingly wet ripping sound, the curtain was torn in half and fell down, covering the bathtub and unveiling the wall behind. To Twilight’s great disappointment, there was no window, but only a glass panel behind which scores of swollen and disfigured fireflies were crawling about, casting the room in bright light.
Her gaze fell on the curtain which now lay in the bathtub. It was covering something, but she refused to make any sense out of the small, somewhat spiky shape which looked way too much like a–
Don’t think it don’t you even dare to think–
–dead foal–
The shape moved.
Twilight screamed and backed out of the room as fast as she could, almost bumping into the splintered wooden teeth surrounding the front door. They were gnawing on thin air, grinding, constantly moving. She didn’t even pause before she ran up the stairs, just away from the teeth and the rat and the thing in the bathtub.
She heard the loud scratch when the lock bar finally slid open, but she refused to acknowledge it, almost halfway up the stairs now.
The bat launched itself into her face the second she set hoof on the second floor landing. She instinctively closed her eyes and violently shook her head as the bat tried to scratch her face. It gave off the same pungent smell as the house, only now it was directly in Twilight’s nose, additionally amplified by the frantic flaps of the bat’s wings.
Finally breaking into panic, Twilight fell onto her haunches and began tearing at the fluttering, squirming bat with her hooves. The creature viciously lunged at her face with its claws, trying to get a hold in her flesh with its claws, but Twilight barely managed to block it off with her hooves.
“Let go off me!” she yelled. With a final tug, she was finally able to yank the critter off and hurled it across the room. There was no gratifying impact when the thing hit the wall, but it was a flier after all.
She stared into the murky room and caught a glimpse of the bat just as it fluttered to the partly opened door just opposite the upper end of the stairs. It was about the size of a large rat, but instead of fur it was covered in bluish-grey dusty feathers. It stared at her from glowing pink eyes and hissed before it vanished in the darkness behind the door. Twilight was about to launch herself after it to finish it off, to undo the disgusting abomination, to tear it to pieces, when she suddenly realized that the door it had flown into led to the room right above the room behind the other door. That realization immediately quelled the unnatural rage that had overcome her at the attack of the bat.
Absentmindedly wiping some sweat and dust off her face with a hoof, she looked around. There were three more doors, one to the left, above the bathroom; one behind her, above the kitchen; and one in front, the one into which the bat had disappeared. Her mind’s eye showed her the bat lurking in the shadows, waiting for her, mocking her, daring her to come in—
She deliberately bit on her tongue, and the sharp, stinging pain brought her to her senses. Something about that bat, about its unnatural being, just filled her with a primordial rage, but she was again able to shove it aside.
Twilight considered her options and quickly decided on the door behind her. She made her way through the small room which was completely empty and only paused shortly before she opened the door.
The stallion was dead and had probably been dead for quite some time. The dry prairie heat had mummified him, but something had bitten big chunks out of his body. He hung from one of the ceiling beams, his face turned towards the door as if he was expecting somepony. He smelled vaguely like old, dried spices, not entirely unpleasant and hence all the more revolting.
Besides the dead body, the room only contained some pieces of furniture in varying states of decay and destruction. The brown goo was seeping out of a bed whose mattress had been slashed open.
The windows in the wall to the left led to the same empty prairie that wasn’t quite the same prairie Twilight and Applejack had crossed, and the incoming light painted the same bright rectangles on the floor. Motes of dust danced around in the sunbeams.
In that moment the screeching started outside the room.
Twilight jolted around, only to see the bat and the rat-thing rolling around on the floor, locked in a deadly embrace. The bat had its dug its claws into the side of the rat-thing, and the orange creature was screaming in agony while brown blood was trickling from the wounds. It tried to bite the bat, but the bat was too quick, and the struggle only resulted in more rolling around.
Something snapped in Twilight’s head. She hated the bat, and all she wanted to do was kill it, bite it in two with her own teeth if necessary. She charged forward and gripped the bat with her mouth, pulling it off the rat-thing. The rat-thing remained where it was, screeching and screaming and tossing its body back and forth.
Twilight hesitated for a second with the disgusting feathery creature in her mouth, and the bat seized the moment and squirmed free of her teeth. It flapped its wings and darted through the door in the opposite wall. Blinded by rage, Twilight galloped after it and through the door, and barely skidded to a stop before she fell over the edge where the room’s floor was missing.
As she looked down, the sense of vertigo was overwhelming. She was looking down on a vast plain from a height that was very reasonable for being in second floor. But the plane seemed to extend limitlessly in all directions, even underneath her, where, as she well knew, the vestibule was.
The ground was of a dark gray color and very flat and covered by a web of small cracks. Apart from the cracks, it was entirely featureless. A chain of jagged mountains raised far to her left, the peaks the same color as the barren wasteland right underneath her door. She extended a hoof to steady herself at the door frame as another surge of vertigo hit her.
Above her was a black sky, dotted by unnervingly unblinking stars. No familiar constellation was to be seen, and that made Twilight feel even more lost than anything else. The bat had disappeared, and her unnatural rage had quieted down.
Nonetheless she felt a strong urge to explore these plains. If she went downstairs and used the other door, she could safely get out there without the risk of hurting herself. The rational part of her brain cringed at this insane logic, but at the same time it made perfect sense. She wondered idly if she was beginning to lose her mind.
She wondered what she would find in those mountains.
She slowly backed up out of the door and turned towards the stairs. The orange rat-thing was still lying there, watching her from shifty green eyes. It had stopped screeching and looked rather satisfied despite the fact that it was still bleeding from the scratches the bat had inflicted.
Twilight felt an unexpected pang of pity for the hurting creature. She grimaced in disgust. Why should she feel sympathy for a revolting creature like this?
She pushed the though away, telling herself that she had no time for this. There was a mountain range to explore. She descended the stairs, already knowing that now the lock bar would be unlocked, and perhaps the door would already be opened.