//------------------------------// // Chapter Two. Of The Torment Of Miss B. Bon And The Disappearance Of Miss Heartstrings. // Story: Don't Look A Gift Horse In Innsmouth // by Bronio Kröger //------------------------------// Chapter Two. Of The Torment Of Miss B. Bon And The Disappearance Of Miss Heartstrings. As unsettling as these dreams were, we as a village slowly grew inured to them; for, each night, the town would hear the playing of Miss Heartstrings' lyre begin as the sun set. Jarring at first, a dark and dissonant complement to the morning's rooster-call, the jangling chords would assemble into their unspeakably and unattainably beautiful harmonies as the last light evacuated our fair land. I mean no hyperbole when I say evacuated -- for, you see, my dearest Princess, I began to notice the days grew ever shorter and the nights grew longer. It was as if the sirenic lullaby was exorcising the light from the land; as if your bountiful sun was fleeing the corruption that threatened to envelop and devour it. Each night, we endured this little ritual, and though we detested it as much as the cry of the cockerel at dawn, we endured it with gritted teeth and a sense of resignation. As I look back upon those days and their evolution into weeks and later months, I wonder why nopony dared beg an end to this. A foul miasma had descended upon us, clouding our minds and bewitching us into delusion. Each and every pony truly believed that the night's "lullaby" was indeed as essential a part of town life as waking and working. Each and every pony was mazed by this music; the thought to question why it was essential occurred to nopony. In retrospect, my dearest Princess, I fear this was the first symptom of the gibbering madness that has indelibly branded us all. Our dreams grew ever more fitful and beset by dark dreams interspersed with memories of long-extinct abominations. Though I knew them not, I knew to fear them; and fear was the blanket which swaddled my ever-feverish mind. What is happening to me? To us? To Equestria? I recall thinking. Moreover, it was increasingly evident that I was not alone in this affliction. The other ponies of the town grew more irritable, prone to outbursts and continually shifting their gaze hither and thither, as if catching glimpses of unseen assailants. Our insecurities became fears; our fears, phantasms. Yet we spoke not of our nightmares to one another. Rather, we silently and abashedly shared this bond as a burden; rather than taking solace in our shared torment, we shared the unspeakable weight of guilt. It was as if we all had willfully taken part in bringing our doom to ourselves, and we bore it upon our withers, as if it were our due. In retrospect, your Highness, I know not where this falsehood originated, nor how it shaped our minds; insidiously it changed us from rightful victims to accomplices in some nameless taboo. Indeed, perhaps we were willing participants in some foul desecrating ritual; for two of our rank exhibited changes in behavior far beyond that of irritation and neurosis. Bearing the greatest brunt was Miss Heartstrings' faithful friend Miss B. Bon; Miss Heartstrings' flat-mate, she was an unmarried mare known for her jovial disposition and goings-about-town. Her affliction -- which I will recount in great detail, for I took it upon myself to note her condition -- bordered upon damnation itself. Miss Bon's suffering, though extreme, was of the same type as our own; she was merely the most acutely affected of our number. Miss Heartstrings, however, exhibited a number of other changes in temperament. At no point did she lose her cheerful optimism or easygoing nature; perhaps, looking back, this is part of why we grew to accept the curse among us, for it was brought with open hooves and an earnest smile. Instead, Miss Heartstrings grew more obsessed with matters most esoteric. Yet this obsession with the academic and the strange, itself, would scarcely have been noticed among us ponyfolk at the time, were it not for the curiously apparent indifference Miss Heartstrings had toward Miss Bon's suffering. Even we citizens, fatigued and agitated as we were, could notice these signs in one another; as aforementioned, we held to ourselves an unspoken pact to never broach the subject explicitly, yet only a fool could not notice these events. Miss Heartstrings appeared to play the part of that fool most expertly; for during the many occasions during which Miss Bon's tenuous grip on sanity would weaken and she would have fits of screaming or apoplexy or cataonia, Miss Heartstrings would prattle on about her pursuits obliviously. More curiously, when Miss Bon recovered from her fugue or stupor, it was she who apologized to Miss Heartstrings. My dearest Princess; though I am not a physician, I am enough of a natural scientist to know when a sensible body is rebelling against an enthralled mind. It was during the second week of Miss Heartstrings' ownership that Miss Bon paid a visit to the library. It was late afternoon -- or should I say early afternoon, scarcely a quarter to one, but your sun had already grown low in the sky -- when Miss Bon paid a social call. "Please, Twilight, can I stay her for a while?" asked a shivering Miss Bon, as I surveyed her. She had clearly not slept or eaten much for the days since Miss Heartstrings' first concert; her ribs showed under sallow, dry flesh. Her coat was unkempt, though not through matters of sloth or slovenliness. Rather, it seemed as if Miss Bon had been washing too much, constantly; cracks in her skin were evident. "Certainly, come in," I responded, unsure of my new and welling urge to force Miss Bon back to her home. My dear Celestia, I cannot explain this sudden emotion which took root at that moment; as if a thought other than my own had possessed all faculties of my mind, I felt nothing less than an overarching and primal motive to send Miss Bon back to listen to the music. Were it not for my training at your hooves, dear Celestia, and my mastery of the cosmic energies of magic, I would have been unable to summon the discipline to quiesce the wellspring of malice I felt at Miss Bon's presence. Quelling my urge, I escorted her inside, wondering why I felt such hostility at her presence. "It's almost about to begin, you know," mumbled an increasingly agitated Miss Bon. Aghast, I gaped -- Miss Bon had broken the unspoken rule and spoke of it -- and immediately was shocked back to action when I saw the pitiful and ragged state into which Miss Bon had descended. In the relatively good light of the library, I noticed her eyes darting to and fro; her ears swiveled constantly to match. Miss Bon shifted her weight from hoof to hoof, constantly ready to run; sniffing the air, her lips curled back in a sneer. Were I a biologist and not a student of magic, dearest Celestia, I would have concluded that Miss Bon was behaving not like a civilized pony, but like a crazed beast of prey. What inauspicious hex, my dear Princess, could turn a pony into a prey animal? Truly, the natural order of things had been upended. I immediately felt an illness welling within me; it was only pity which stayed my hoof, and bade me listen to Miss Bon's ghastly tale. "Twilight ... " she croaked, as if her devolution into a beast of prey was slowly robbing her of the faculties of speech, "... I don't know what to do. She plays it, all the time. I can't sleep. I can't dream. All I see ... all I see ... is them!" Upon saying this, a twisted rictus of horror overcame Miss Bon, and she started laughing. Her head thrashed back and forth, while her eyes swiveled in their sockets, perpetually locked upon mine, and conveying a visage of extreme terror. Miss Bon's maniacal laughter, dark and deep and hoarse, was wholly incongruent with the look of horrified resignation in Miss Bon's eyes. Clearly, she was no stranger to fits of this sort, and had given up and resolved herself to let the fit pass. It was then that I realized the hoarseness in her voice was due to this. The laughter died down, and Miss Bon collapsed to the floor, exhausted. "It's ... it's not right," she continued, panting. "This ... thing she has. It's not right. And ... she's talking to it, Twilight. She speaks to it." For a second, Miss Bon paused, licking her lips, as if pondering whether to continue. After a brief glance into my eyes, and seeing my rapt curiosity, she did. "Twilight ... I'm going insane," she said, "but I've heard it. She talks to it ... it talks back." This was too much to bear, and too great of an affront to my senses of logic and reason. Though plagued by the inexplicable and the unsettling, I knew that no magic could imbue the inanimate with sapience. I found it difficult to believe a mare in Miss Bon's state was anything other than a confabulatory delusion. Yet even then, not even two weeks into the nightly ritual of lyre-playing, I had noticed Miss Heartstrings' callous indifference to Miss Bon's condition. So it was, then, that I put an arm around her wither, and silenced her with a tender look and an understanding embrace. Mad she was, I had concluded; but even the mad deserve our pity and well-wishes. At that moment the sun finally dipped -- or should I say fled? -- below the horizon; and all the ponies of the town, myself included, stood stock still and facing Miss Heartstrings' residence. As the lyre's horrid cacophony started, sounding less like a stringed instrument and more like the piping of alien flutes, I felt the visions overtake me. Once again I walked in the hooves of strange, inchoate, malformed creatures, and spoke their accursed and harsh tongue. I felt my anatomy stretch and deform; bones that were once long grew short, and those once short grew long. It was a strange and tickling sensation, not unlike pulling a muscle. My thoughts -- or were they my thoughts? -- bubbled to and fro like a buoy in a seething ocean; one of my few lucid memories was feeling the aching pain of my bones warping and thinking to myself, I am the lyre. The lyre is me. What time passed to my insensate mind, I do not know; but when I returned to normal, the clock had advanced well past four o'clock in the morning. Miss Bon was nowhere to be found, though I saw hoofprints in a viscous red fluid leading to the open door. Was it -- I recall thinking, is it -- oh dear Celestia, it is blood! As I realized this, I recoiled in horror, only to notice the selfsame blood on my hooves. At dawn's light, I set off at a full gallop to Miss Heartstrings and Miss Bon's residence.When I arrived, I knocked on the door for ten minutes. At long last, the door opened, and a wide-eyed Miss Bon answered. Though I knew something terrible had happened, I was unsure what it was; the sight of Miss Bon as the door slowly creaked wide confirmed my worst fears. Miss Bon was covered in bandages that had matted over and crusted with blood. Her flank had clearly been injured; whether by my hooves or something else, I am unsure. She trembled to see me; eyes bloodshot and filled with terror, she bared her teeth and snarled at me. "Stay back!" she hissed, rearing on her hind hooves and threatening to strike me. "You will bring them!" "Miss Bon," I pleaded, "I don't know what befell me last night, and I assure you that I mean you no harm, but --" I was rudely interrupted by Miss Bon's furious hooves striking me in the cheek. "You bit me! You struck me! Then, you -- " as if thrust by galvanic currents, she leaped across the room. "You -- you became them." "Pray tell -- who," I begged, "are they? What happened?" I recall feeling my heart racing within my chest; for I was accused of something I clearly knew was untrue, and yet I could not dismiss out of hand. "When it started, and you began to hum," Miss Bon said from across the small room. "You ... you turned to me," she hissed, "and then... you changed. You weren't Twilight Sparkle anymore, you were one of the things that Lyra speaks to. She speaks to them with it. And they tell her ... they tell her ... they ..." Lyra's shaking turned into great heaving sobs, and her speech grew increasingly incoherent. I made a halting move toward her, but a bloodshot glare stopped me in my tracks. Whatever Miss Bon claims I have done, I thought to myself, she truly believes. I decided prudence would be the proper course of action. "Miss Bon," I said softly, "I will take my leave. But mark my words," I vowed, "I will find whatever is causing these strange goings-on in Ponyville, and put an end to them. I will bite this problem in the bud." A look of befuddlement passed over Miss Bon's face. "You don't even realize you said it, do you?" Perplexed, I responded. "Said what?" "Bite. You nip a problem in the mud. Biting is something carnivores do. Something you did to me last night." Miss Bon gestured, gingerly, to her blood-encrusted wound dressing. Miss Bon's words awakened a strange emotion within me. Though I do not, to this day, remember the events of that night; suddenly I was overtaken by the memory of the flavor of Miss Bon's blood. The metallic, warm taste, flowing in my mouth; the memory at once disgusted and piqued my appetite. It was a forbidden pleasure, a taboo so dark and unspeakable as to be denied escape from the vaults of my memory; yet here I was, experiencing a revenant of whatever had occurred that night. I was snapped from my reverie by the insistent glare of Miss Bon. "I'm ... I'm sorry, I misused a word. Mental slip." "It's okay, Twilight," an exhausted Miss Bon sighed, her eyes puffy and world-weary from too many tears. "Lyra bites me, too, now. She says its' a joke, but she always draws blood. She doesn't think I notice it, but I see her licking." This claim was too much to bear. To make claims of an attack, I could believe; but to accuse another pony, much less her dearest friend, of carnivory was a claim too fanciful to believe. I reiterated my vow to investigate the strangeness and bid Miss Bon farewell. As I trotted home, I wondered where Miss Heartstrings herself had gone. Indeed, I noticed, she had not been in town at all during the day; where she went, no one knew or remembered. Her return was the herald of the nightly music to be played again; and after the music, she would retire, or so we thought. Yet my appearance at Miss Heartstrings' and Miss Bon's house indicated that Miss Heartstrings was in fact not there. Where has she gone? How does she get there so fast? I recall thinking. Miss Heartstrings, though a unicorn and possessed of magic as all of our kind, was never one to master teleportation; her limited range would preclude the use of teleportation from town. Yet she was clearly nowhere to be found. I resolved to follow Miss Heartstrings, though the vow seemed empty, for I knew not how she came and went. Oh, my dearest Princess! If only I had not been clouded by that dark artifact! If only I had known that the lyre itself was responsible!