Fluttershy stepped out of her cottage and greeted the day with a chipper, “Good morning, Equestria.”
And it was a good morning. The sun was shining, the skies were clear and blue, and the gentle songs of her bird friends filled the air with joyful sound.
She breathed deeply, letting the crisp, cool air fill her lungs and clear away the last vestiges of the morning ‘blahs’. She spread her wings and hummed a tune as she glided down the walkway and over the stream that separated her cottage from the road leading into Ponyville. She dropped onto the dusty path and trotted up to her mailbox. The flag was up, meaning that Mister Zippy the poststallion had already been by.
“What a wonderful day to be alive,” she hummed contentedly as she opened the box and pulled out a small stack of mail. She quickly scanned the pile of bills and advertisements to make sure they were all addressed to her. Mister Zippy was a nice stallion, but he was a little nearsighted and sometimes delivered the wrong mail.
She paused as she came across a plain white envelope with her name scrawled on it messily with some kind of red marker. Oddly, it didn’t even seem to have a stamp. Curiosity getting the better of her, she put the rest of the mail back into the box and opened the mystery envelope.
Inside was a slip of thick, white paper, hastily folded and crammed awkwardly into the envelope. She unfolded it and read the contents of the letter. There, written in the same red ink, in the same messy cipher, was the message: “You stupid idiot, I am going to murder you for what you’ve done to me.”
She blinked.
Fluttershy double checked the envelope to make sure it was still addressed to her. It was.
She cocked her head curiously at the letter, reading it a few more times to be sure she completely understood what it was saying. A few hard minutes of scrutiny later and she realized that something about the ink was very strange. The shade of red was very dark, almost black, and flaky. She brought the letter to her face, sniffed it, and gave it a quick little lick.
“Oooooh, I see!” she said in recognition. “It’s blood!”
Then she passed out.
* * *
“I don’t believe this…” Rainbow Dash said as she read over the neatly arranged letters sitting atop Fluttershy’s coffee table. “Who the hay would…? I just… How long has this been going on!?”
“For a week,” Fluttershy squeaked as she shrunk further into her couch. “I’ve been getting one a day, every day, for the past week.”
“And you only just told me this now!?” Rainbow Dash snapped as she spun to gape at her friend is disbelief. “Why would you not tell me, or Twi, or anypony, about this for a whole week!?”
“I, um… I didn’t any reason to scare anypony unnecessarily, in case it’s just a prank…” she whimpered timidly from behind her mane.
Rainbow Dash threw her hooves into the air in utter frustration. “Bargh! I can’t believe somepony is making threats against your life and you wouldn’t even come to your best of the best friends about it! This is serious! Way super serious!”
“I just didn’t want to be a bother,” Fluttershy said with a meek little cough to clear her throat. “I did ask my bear friend to sleep on the couch until I found out who’s been sending them, but yesterday he was called away on a business trip, so…”
Rainbow Dash tilted her head curiously. “What kind of business trip would a bear get called away on…?”
“I try not to pry,” Fluttershy answered with a shrug. “He’s a very private fellow.”
“Look, that’s beside the point,” Rainbow Dash said with a shake of her head. “Rainbow Dash is on the case now and she’s going to take care of this.”
“You’re not going to involve the other girls, too, are you?”
Rainbow Dash shook her head and scoffed derisively. “You kidding? Some jerk thinks he can make threats against Rainbow Dash’s oldest pal? I’m taking care of this myself. They don’t call me the Element of Loyalty for nothing.”
Rainbow Dash punched her hooves together excitedly and gave Fluttershy a grin that was supposed to be reassuring, but came off more predatory than anything.
“Ohhhhh…” Fluttershy muttered quietly to herself as Dash snagged a magnifying glass from the bookshelf and began analyzing the letters. “This’ll all end in tears, I know it…”
* * *
Fluttershy opened her front door just a smidgen and peeked out the crack. It was a beautiful, sunshiny day, just like every other beautiful, sunshiny day that she’d received one of the anonymous death threats. The only difference was that the sounds of birdsong were eerily absent. She’d been worried for the safety of her animal friends, so she’d sent them away until this whole ugliness was dealt with.
It had taken a good amount of bribing to get him to agree, but she’d even sent Angel Bunny away to stay at Sweet Apple Acres for a few days. Applejack had wondered why, but simply shrugged when Fluttershy told her that they just needed a couple of days apart.
Fluttershy moaned nervously and opened the door slowly, causing it to creak noisily in the ominous silence. She leaned her head out and saw she was alone.
“Oooohhhhhh… please, Mister Murderer,” she whimpered pleadingly, in case somepony was hiding within earshot, “I don’t want any trouble. I just want to check if you left me another note…”
Fluttershy stepped out of her cottage and immediately dropped to her belly, combat crawling along the ground the whole way to the mailbox. It took a little while, but she eventually made it to her goal and rose on shaky legs.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Fluttershy,” she laughed nervously to herself. “You’re being a big fat silly scaredy-pony… Everything’s going to be fine…”
“Good morning, Miss Fluttershy!”
Fluttershy let out an “Eeep!” of surprise and went rigid. Every muscle in her body locked up and she tilted over to the side, landing in the dirt road with a thud.
“Golly, sorry about that,” said the stallion standing over her prone form. He was adjusting his powerfully thick glasses and blushing sheepishly at the reaction his greeting had elicited. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”
Fluttershy sighed as she realized it was just nice Mister Zippy, her mail-carrier. He was smiling, as he always was, as he scratched at his snow-white mane in embarrassment. She’d known him to complain in the past that his mane and dark gray coat made him look much older than he was, but Fluttershy thought it made him look distinguished.
“Gosh, I’m so relieved it’s you,” she giggled. “You wouldn’t believe the week I’ve had.”
“Oh?” Zippy the mailpony said curiously as he reached down to help her stand. “What sort of trouble would a nice, quiet mare like you get herself int—“
Zippy’s question was cut short as he disappeared in a cloud of spilled letters, comically spinning prescription glasses, and a damningly prismatic contrail.
“I got you now, you dirty little creep!” Rainbow Dash shouted as she shook the culprit violently. “Spill the beans, perp! What’s your game!?”
Fluttershy rose to her hooves in a panic. Dash had tackled the unsuspecting stallion at near-top speed, and was now thrashing him around on the ground some twenty paces away, at the end of a shallow furrow left by the impact.
“Rainbow Dash, no!” she cried in horror. “Stop! That’s Mister Zippy! You know him!”
“Yeah, I know this freakazoid,” Dash stated loudly as she gripped him by his blue postal worker’s overcoat, “and what better cover for slipping horrible notes into somepony’s mailbox than being a postalpony? It’s the perfect crime!”
Zippy shook bonelessly as Rainbow Dash marehandled him in an attempt to rouse him back to his senses.
“Quit playing possum, ya lousy mug!” Rainbow Dash commanded, channeling her inner noir detective. She reared back a hoof and gave him a rough slap across the face, but to no avail.
Fluttershy rushed over and shoved her athletic friend aside with surprising strength. She examined the unmoving stallion for injuries and noticed immediately that he wasn’t breathing. She put an ear to his chest and found no heartbeat. Combined with the unnatural angle at which his neck bent, she came to the logical conclusion: “You… you killed him…”
Rainbow Dash’s jaw dropped. “No, I didn’t,” she said in protest.
“Yes, you did,” Fluttershy retorted as she spun to glare at friend in disbelief.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes. You did. You killed him.”
Rainbow Dash grabbed a nearby stick and approached the quickly cooling corpse. She poked it twice in ribs, once in the tender part of the belly, and even gave a quick jab to the eye just to be sure. Nothing she did elicited even the hint of a response.
“Well, I’ll be damned, I did kill him…” Rainbow Dash whispered reverently. She fell to her rump and stared, shaking in disbelief, at her hooves. “I… I’ve never killed anypony before…”
Fluttershy stood on her hindlegs and bounced excitedly, shaking her hooves and flapping her wings hysterically.
“Ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh,” she chanted in panic. “Weeeeeeee killed somepony, ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh-ohmagawsh! We’re going to go to prison!”
Rainbow Dash’s head snapped up at the mention of prison. She quickly stood and slapped a hoof over Fluttershy’s mouth to stop the steady stream of incriminating blabber. She tensed up and scanned frantically for any witnesses.
“Quiet down,” Rainbow Dash whispered harshly. She removed her hoof from Fluttershy’s mouth and looked her straight in the eyes. “Nopony’s going to prison.”
Fluttershy’s irises shrunk to pinpricks. “You think they’ll send us to the moon? Or hang us? Or hang us on the moon!? There’s no gravity on the moon, Rainbow! No gravity! It’ll take forever to hang us without any gravity!”
Rainbow Dash shook the panicking mare gently. “Stop! Nothing’s going to happen to us because nopony’s going to find out about this!”
Fluttershy watched in shock as Rainbow Dash darted around picking up every spilled piece of mail. Rainbow Dash slipped the carrier bag off of Zippy’s shoulder and stuffed every last letter back inside, along with his glasses. With a flick of her head, the whole kit and caboodle arced gracefully through the air and landed in the creek with a splash.
“What’re you doing?” Fluttershy asked fearfully.
“Getting rid of the evidence,” Dash informed her as she began smoothing the trench they’d made back into even ground. She trotted back to the corpse and motioned for Fluttershy to join her. “Grab the other end, we gotta bury this thing.”
“It’s not a thing!” Fluttershy said indignantly. “He’s a very nice stallion and we killed him!”
Rainbow Dash grabbed Fluttershy again and held her close to her chest, stroking her mane tenderly and whispering softly. “Shhhhh, it’s okay, we’re going to be okay, everything’s a-okay.”
“Oh… I desperately want to believe that,” Fluttershy said, blinking away the tears in her eyes.
“Then believe it!” Rainbow Dash said. “We’re in this together, you and me, just like back in school. Just think about it like this: we’re heroes. We’ve saved everypony in Equestria like fifty-frajillion times. What’s one or two murders, huh? I say we’ve got a couple of freebies saved up.”
Fluttershy blinked. “That… that doesn’t make even a little bit of sense…”
Rainbow Dash set her friend down and gave her a serious glare. “Do you want to go to prison?”
Fluttershy shook her head vigorously.
“Or get executed on the moon?”
Fluttershy shook her head again.
“Then help me figure out where to hide this body!”
Fluttershy groaned uncomfortably. “Are you sure this is the right thing to do…?”
“It’s the thing we have to do, Shy,” Rainbow Dash said as she fumbled awkwardly for a good grip on the limp stallion’s torso. “It’ll be fine, long as we stick together. Together we can accomplice anything.”
“Accomplish.”
“Just grab his legs,” Rainbow Dash said with a sigh.
* * *
“I can’t believe you’ve had a cellar this whole time,” Rainbow Dash said as she dragged the body down the stairs. Each yank of the body was accompanied by the loud thunk of the skull striking against the creaking wooden steps. It was hard work, but the white bed sheet Fluttershy had insisted on wrapping him in gave her something to grip onto.
“Nopony does,” Fluttershy said meekly as she stepped into the shadows, out of the shaft of light shining down from the open hatchway above. “I had some of my underground friends dig it for me. It’s just a storage place, and none of my animals are allowed down here. There are too many fragile… things.”
“What kind of fragile things?” Rainbow Dash asked as she got the body to the bottom of the steps with a final grunt. She coughed as the corpse striking the dirt floor stirred up a small cloud of dust that blew into her face. “Ugh, musty down here.”
There was a quick click from the darkness and the cellar was immediately bathed in a dull yellow light. Rainbow Dash’s eyes opened wide at the sight she beheld. The entire room was filled with wooden racks and shelves, each practically groaning with the weight of the bottles they held. In the corner were several very large wooden casks – the kind that Applejack kept her cider in.
“What… the… actual… Tartarus…?” Rainbow Dash whispered as she took in the room. “What is this…?”
“It’s my wine cellar,” Fluttershy said, her defensiveness bringing a little steel to her voice.
“You drink wine!?”
Fluttershy blushed. “My… um… doctor said that a glass of wine every night was good for my heart.”
“This is a little much for a glass a night,” Rainbow Dash suggested.
“Look, taking care of animals is really stressful, okay!?” Fluttershy snapped tersely.
“Whoa, ease up!” Dash said as she held up her hooves placatingly. “Just saying… it’s a lot of wine.”
“Can we just get this done, please?” Fluttershy said with a low whimper.
Rainbow Dash nodded and pointed to a bare corner of the room. A round indentation in the dirt indicated that the spot had recently held one of the many heavy barrels. “What’s in those barrels?”
“Amaretillado,” Fluttershy said with pride. “It’s a very rare foreign wine. Berry Punch and I have the only casks in Equestria.”
“We’ll dig there,” Rainbow Dash said with a quirk of her eyebrow as she learned more about her oldest friend’s secret passion. “Then we can put some of the barrels on top of the spot so nopony notices that it was recently disturbed. Later maybe we can wall it up with some stones or something.”
“Nopony comes down here though,” Fluttershy said.
“Better safe than sorry,” Rainbow Dash stated confidently as she pulled the body to their hiding spot. “You got shovels in the garden shed, right?”
Fluttershy nodded and began following Rainbow Dash as she left the room. She paused at the base of the stairs and looked at one of the many nearby racks. She smacked her lips thirstily, went to the rack, and tucked a bottle under her wing. A chill went up her spine at the memory of Mister Zippy and his broken neck, so she grabbed a second of the big glass bottles.
“Definitely a two glass night…”
A bottle under each wing, she headed for the kitchen to hide them from Dash. She’d made it halfway back up the cellar stairs before spinning around smoothly and walking back to the rack.
“Three glasses,” she muttered around the bottle neck clenched between her teeth. “Three glasses and that’s it.”
* * *
Fluttershy sat up in bed, sweat pouring down her face. The sheets were soaked with perspiration from the horrible dreams she’d been having. She kept reliving the moment of Mister Zippy’s murder.
In the dream, the sun wasn’t shining, and Mister Zippy seemed so much smaller, frailer, than he was in real life. When Rainbow Dash came crashing in, her attack wasn’t silent and sudden, it was preceded by a Rainboom and accompanied by the harsh sound of snapping bones. Rainbow Dash herself was huge in the dream, monstrous even. She was easily bigger than their friend, Bulk Biceps, and every time she slammed Zippy to the ground she’d give a rumbling “Yeah!” of such force and volume that it could shame a dragon’s roar. It didn’t help that her parents, her primary school teacher, and all their friends were there, alternating between clucking their tongues in disapproval and making out with each other.
Dreams were weird. Hopefully the weirdness would be enough to keep Luna from getting suspicious if she popped in during one of her dream patrols.
Fluttershy held her face in her hooves and began taking long, deep breaths to try and circumvent the fast approaching fit of hyperventilation that came with the idea of the princesses getting even a hint at what was buried in her wine cellar. At least none of her animals were home yet, so she was free to freak out in relative peace. Three whole days without her animals made her feel more than a bit lonely, but she couldn’t risk and of the critters finding out. Not a lot of ponies knew it, but animals were notorious gossips – especially chipmunks. If Puffy-Cheeks or Nut-Breath found out what was going on, the entire forest would know within the hour.
She looked at her alarm clock and sighed. It wasn’t even quite midnight yet, and she was wide awake. Not even her usual nightcap was enough to keep her down, not at night, with the nightmares and the creaking walls of her house settling in the coolness of night.
The only good thing that seemed to come from all this horribleness was that she hadn’t received a threatening letter in days. It really did seem like Zippy the postal worker had been the one sending her the threats all along.
A crash sounded from downstairs, suddenly breaking the silence and startling the cowardly girl back under her covers. She shivered with terror and raised her ears from their flattened position to focus her hearing.
Silence.
“Oh… come on, now, Fluttershy…” she whispered encouragingly to herself as she slowly pulled down her blankety defenses. “Nopony’s there. You’re just jumpy. All your animals are in their forest homes, Angel’s still at Applejack’s, and the killer was caught… well the attempted killer… Technically only Rainbow killed anypony, and you were an accessory after the fact, which also kind of makes you a murderer… Oh Celestia, I live in a murder-house…”
Fluttershy brushed that train of thought away with a shiver.
Carefully, slowly, she stood in bed and floated off with a gentle stroke of her wings. She hovered towards the stairs, airborne so she wouldn’t make a sound stepping on the floorboards. She descended the stairwell, down to the main floor, and peeked cautiously into the living room.
Luna’s moon was bright, casting its rays into the room through the windows and bathing the whole house with a calming, blue-tinted light. To Fluttershy’s surprise, and despite the earlier commotion, nothing seemed out of place.
“Is anypony down here…?” she asked cautiously, expecting something to leap from the shadows any second now. The lack of response somehow made the situation even more disturbing.
Fluttershy let out a sigh of relief, touched down, and walked the rest of the way down the stairs.
“See?” she told herself. “Nothing to worry about, you silly pony…”
Another thud, like the one from before, but louder by proximity, filled the room. Fluttershy backed up in reflex, heedless of the fact that she was on the stairs. She tripped and went for a tumble down the last few steps, managing to avoid serious injury but still giving herself a good bump on the head against the end table near the couch. She stood groggily, momentarily forgetting the sound, only to be reminded by a third, more forceful thud.
“Eeep!” she squeaked as she leapt into the air. She hovered above the floor, gaping in astonished fear as she realized the noise was coming from under the floorboards.
The sounds were becoming more regular, coming in pairs and at rhythmic intervals.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
Thump-thump.
It was like the beating of some hideous heart, there, beneath her floorboards!
Fluttershy gasped as the sound of shattering glass and splintered wood joined the rhythmic thumping.
“My medicine!” she shrieked in terror. Someone was in her cellar, destroying her precious wine collection – the collection that had taken her years to refine and gather in secret.
Fluttershy rushed to the carpet in the middle of the floor and yanked it away, revealing the secret hatch leading into the cellar. She was about to leap into the darkness when something half-hidden by the shadows turned towards the stairs and roared with an unearthly howl.
Fluttershy slammed the hatch shut and sat atop it, blinking in confusion at the sudden silence. She got off the door, lowered herself to the ground, and opened it just enough to peek inside.
The thing in the cellar screeched again, and once more went silent the moment she closed the door.
She trotted away numbly, braced her head against the couch, and pushed it very slowly – the legs scraping loudly against the floorboards the whole way – onto the cellar door.
Fluttershy opened wide, filled her lungs to full capacity, then screamed as loud as she could before flying out the front door faster than she’d ever flown before. She tore through the sky, a yellow blur against the indigo night, her hooves stuffed into her mouth to muffle the screams she wasn’t able to suppress.
Rainbow Dash’s cloud home came into view after only a minute or so of terrified flight. Fluttershy landed on the stoop, stood on her hind legs, and kicked the door in without so much as a knock.
Rainbow Dash was awake despite the hour and standing in the living room. She spun around at the sudden intrusion and gasped.
“What the hay!?” Rainbow Dash shouted. Fluttershy had removed her hooves from her mouth and was now wailing at a volume Rainbow Dash hadn't known she could reach.
Rainbow Dash ran over to he friend and shook her by the shoulders. “Fluttershy! Snap out of it! What’s wrong!?”
“Monster! Zippy! Undead revenant! Revenge! Wine!”
“You’re not making any sense!” Rainbow Dash shouted.
Fluttershy slapped her friend’s hooves away and began shaking Rainbow Dash back. “There’s a monster in my cellar and I think it’s Mister Zippy as an undead revenant out for revenge against my wine!”
Rainbow Dash shrugged off Fluttershy’s admittedly strong grip and chuckled.
“Oh, is that what this is?” she said with a sad chuckle. “Shy, you’re freaking out over nothing. There’s nothing in your basement, it’s just the house settling at night.”
“I know what creaky floorboards sound like, Rainbow!” Fluttershy sputtered in protest.
“You’re a real nervous pony, Shy,” Rainbow Dash said with a sigh. “It’s okay. I understand how stressful this has been, living in the house above the… evidence…”
“It roared at me, Rainbow Dash,” Fluttershy declared with a stomp of her hoof against the pillowy soft cloud floor. “Creaky houses don’t roar.”
Rainbow Dash groaned tiredly and plopped to her haunches to rub at her temples. “Look, I’m sorry, Fluttershy, but I don’t have time for your freak out just right now. I can deal with it later, but I’ve got kind of a crisis on my hooves, over here.”
“Nevermore!”
Fluttershy blinked owlishly. “Nevermore what?” she asked.
“That wasn’t me,” Rainbow Dash said morosely.
“Nevermore! Nevermore!”
Fluttershy looked around the room for the source of the shrill call. Sitting atop the cloudy chandelier was a bird, black as coal and staring at the pair of ponies with a curious tilt of its head.
“Is that a raven?” Fluttershy asked.
Rainbow Dash got to her hooves and glared at it with absolute and unfiltered hate in her eyes. “It’s a bastard, is what it is!”
“Rainbow Dash!” Fluttershy gasped. “I’m surprised at you! It’s just a cute little birdy!”
“Nevermore!”
Rainbow Dash ran to the nearly bare bookshelf and hurled her copy of Daring Doo and the Secret of the Ooze at the horrid thing. The raven dodged with a light flap of its wings and returned to its perch to preen itself in contempt of her anger.
“It’s not a bird!” Rainbow Dash declared hotly. “It’s a demon, straight from Tartarus!”
Fluttershy gaped as she realized that the entire living room was in a state of chaos. Books were sticking halfway out of the cloud walls, almost all the furniture was broken or toppled over, and everything that wasn’t nailed down seemed to have been scattered carelessly about the room.
“What’s going on?” Fluttershy asked with concern.
“That monster has been haunting me for three days now!” Rainbow Dash declared with an accusatory point of her hoof.
“Nevermore!” the raven crowed.
“See!?” Rainbow Dash asked desperately. “Do you see it!? It’s all he says! Nevermore, nevermore, nevermore!”
“Nevermore!”
“I know nevermore!” Rainbow Dash shrieked furiously. She collapsed to the ground and bit her lip painfully, trying to hold back the sobs building in her chest. “I’m just so tired. I haven’t even been able to sleep because the damned bird just starts shouting even louder. Tank left two days ago. He’s been sleeping in the lake. And I can’t even go to a hotel because this… thing… follows me wherever I go.”
“Have you tried catching it?” Fluttershy asked.
“That’s the first thing I tried,” Rainbow Dash snapped. She stood and waved her arm dramatically over the wrecked living room. “He’s wily, that one. I’ve broken nearly everything in the house chasing him down. He’s not fast, but I’ve never seen such a nimble bird in my life.”
Rainbow Dash threw herself back to the floor at Fluttershy’s hooves. “You gotta talk to him, Shy! You know animals! You can make him leave! Or trick him into a pie with twenty-three other black birds or something!”
Fluttershy nodded and set her shoulders as she gave the bird a stern glare.
“Mister Raven, my name is Fluttershy,” she said politely, but with enough steel in her voice to let the bird know she meant business. “I need you to leave my friend alone so she can come and help me get rid of the thing in my cellar.”
“Nevermore,” it replied.
“I see,” Fluttershy said with a nod.
“What’d it say?” Rainbow Dash asked, her voice laced with suspicion.
“It said, ‘Nevermore’,” Fluttershy answered with a sigh. “It’s speaking Equish, Rainbow, not Bird. It’s saying what it’s saying.”
Rainbow Dash threw her hooves into the air and growled. “Great! Wonderful! Splendid! Everypony has gone insane!”
Fluttershy frowned at this assessment, but with the night she’d been having she couldn’t fully discount it.
“Can you just come and help me with my problem first?” Fluttershy asked. “I promise we can take care of the raven right after.”
“No,” Rainbow Dash said with a firm shake of her head. “No, this bird comes first. This is personal. He bucked the cloud and now he’s going to get the lightning.”
“Please!” Fluttershy pleaded. “We can’t let the other girls find out about this! You’re the only one I can turn to! Remember what you said? Together we can accomplice anything!”
“Shy, I barely remember my own name right now, I’m so tired.”
“Nevermore!”
“Fine!” Fluttershy shouted with uncharacteristic anger. “I’ll just go get eaten, then! I’ll get eaten and then you’ll finally be happy!”
“Sounds great,” Rainbow Dash mumbled as she stroked her chin thoughtfully and plotted the death of her feathery foe aloud. “Maybe some sort of ballista… Or a sexy lady crow decoy...”
* * *
When Fluttershy returned, the cacophony from her house had reached a new pitch. The thing from the cellar seemed to have escaped his confines, and she could hear furniture being tossed around, along with the growls of righteous undead fury as the thing that had formerly been kindly, middle-aged Mister Zippy tore her house apart.
All in all, it seemed like the best move to simply wait outside until he tuckered himself out. She parked herself in the dirt road leading to her cottage, hiding behind her stream and some half-remembered superstition about evil creatures being unable to cross running bodies of water.
Finally, after an hour or so, the noise finally died down. After only another hour of bravely keeping vigilant watch, Fluttershy felt that enough was enough.
“Just go in there and apologize,” Fluttershy said to herself as she worried a rut into her own lawn with her pacing. “He’s going to be angry, but of course he will. You murdered him. You’d be angry if somepony murdered you. You’ll just have to explain it was an accident… an accident that you tried to cover up by burying him in your basement…”
Fluttershy crept slowly up to the door, tiphoofing closer, an inch at a time, until she was right up against the door. She turned the knob and peeked in cautiously.
A lamp had been switched on at some point during the monster’s rampage, and the light it cast revealed a curious sight. The room was spotless – nothing was broken, or even mildly out of place.
“Huh…” she muttered as she stood up straight and walked in.
“Oh, hello there, Miss Fluttershy,” came the cheery, kindly voice of Mister Zippy.
The left half of Fluttershy’s body went numb and shut down from terror for a split second, nearly dropping her to the ground for a second time that night. She held it together, tensing up in preparation to flee the house again if need be.
Sure enough, sitting on the couch was Zippy, smiling as widely as she’d ever seen him, despite the damp earth that clung to his mane and overcoat. He had a bottle of wine resting in his lap, and he lifted it to his lips for a quick sip.
“That is you, isn’t it?” he asked, his smile dimming a little as he squinted at her. “Don’t got my glasses so I can’t quite make you out. I see yellow, pink, and a pair of wings, though!”
“Um… Yes…?” she answered timidly.
“Oh good,” he said with a sigh. “Welcome home. Hope you don’t mind, but I helped myself to one of your bottles.”
“I… you… uh… I… what?”
“What what?” he asked curiously.
“What is going on here…?” she asked carefully. “Aren’t you…?”
“…dead?” he said. “Seems that way.”
“And you’re not…?”
“…angry?”
He picked up the bottle and took a long pull from it, swishing it around in his mouth as he toyed with the bottle thoughtfully.
“I was,” he explained. “But then I got to drinking.”
“You mean thinking?” she asked.
He grinned and wagged the bottle at her. “If you do enough of one it always leads to the other.”
Despite the desperately awkward terror Fluttershy felt, she giggled. Zippy always could make her laugh.
“You know – and I’m a little ashamed to admit this – I fully intended to come up here and murder you,” he said with a laugh.
Fluttershy’s eyes went wide.
“Oh, no, don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “I’m over it. I figure a nice, sweet, pretty gal like you had to have a reason for what you did.”
Fluttershy blushed at the compliment and cleared her throat.
“Oh, well… you see… I’ve been getting these notes in my mailbox since last week…”
It didn’t take all that long for Fluttershy to explain about the situation on her end. Zippy had been quiet the whole time, nodding politely as he worked his way to the bottom of the bottle.
“Well that’s quite a story,” he said once gotten him up to speed. “I can tell you, though, that I didn’t send you any of those threats.”
Fluttershy frowned in confusion. “Then why did they stop after Rainbow Dash… um…?”
“…killed me? No idea. Might’ve just been a coincidence.”
“Oh, I wanted to ask,” Fluttershy said. “If you weren’t angry anymore, why were you making all that noise in the living room a little while ago?”
“Oh!” he exclaimed. “I was looking for my glasses and bumping into furniture! I tried to put everything back the way it was, but I’m not sure how well I did. I can’t see a thing without my darned specs.”
A tinge of pink came back to Fluttershy’s face at the explanation. “They’re in the creek… Rainbow Dash threw them and your mail bag in there to dispose of the evidence.”
“Smart move,” he chuckled. “She should’ve dumped them further away, though. No matter, I have a spare pair at home.”
“So then,” Fluttershy said nervously. “What do we do now?”
“Well, I should probably get back to work,” Zippy said with a sigh as he got off the couch. “They’re not going to be happy about me being gone for…”
“Three days,” Fluttershy answered.
“Wow… okay I hope I didn’t get fired,” he said worriedly.
“Oooooooh, if there’s anything I can do to make this up to you,” Fluttershy exclaimed as she threw herself at his hooves. “I’ll do anything! Just name it!”
He scratched his chin thoughtfully.
“Well… How about a date?”
“Yes!” she said with a vigorous nod. “Of course! Anything!”
“Sounds great,” he said. “I’d better mosey along then. I’ll talk to you later, Miss Fluttershy.”
“Yes!” she shouted after him with a wave as he walked off into the sunrise. “Have a nice day!”
She shut the door and leaned against it heavily. “Well that was certainly exciting… Wait, do I have a date with a ghoul…?”
* * *
Fluttershy pranced about her living room, tidying up and doing a bit of dusting. Her new coltfriend would be stopping by after work, after all, and it wouldn’t do to have such a messy house.
The date had gone surprisingly well. She had always been very fond of Zippy. He was kind, and courteous, and always had a smile and a joke for her. She was pleasantly surprised that they even shared a lot of the same interests in literature. And it didn’t hurt that he was just so adorable, the way he squinted at everything when he read.
Sure he was a rotting, undead creature of the night, driven by a supernatural need to take vengeance on his murderers, but nopony was perfect. These days, and at Fluttershy’s age, sometimes you just had to settle for what you could get.
And besides, as the old proverb goes: Living well is the best revenge.
Luckily, Zippy hadn’t lost his job. Even more luckily, nopony noticed the rather earthy… musk, that the stallion now had, or the cloudy irises, or the oddly wobbly head… Honestly, it was nothing that a neck brace, a few pints of formaldehyde, and regular bathing couldn’t cover up.
Not that he was ashamed of what he was, but Zombie-Equestrian relations were rather strained at the moment, if popular culture was to be believed. They’d both agreed that maybe it would be best to keep his status as one of the trotting-dead a secret.
A knock at the door brought her out of her musing.
“Oh, you’re early!” she sang happily. She trotted to the door with a lightness in her steps that wasn’t wholly because she was a pegasus. She threw the door open with a grin, expecting to see Zippy’s smiling face, but what met her instead was Applejack’s sour frown.
“Heya, Flutters,” Applejack greeted without cheer in her voice. “Sorry to bother ya, but I’m afraid I gotta bring this critter back to ya.”
Applejack stood aside to reveal Angel Bunny, tied up with a length of rope and sitting in a small cage while he glared daggers at them.
“Oh my,” Fluttershy said. “What happened?”
Applejack removed her hat pulled a few sheets of folded up paper from the lining.
“Dang rascal was stuffin’ these into the family mailbox,” Applejack informed her. “Reckon it’s a dark little hobby this thing’s picked up.
Fluttershy blinked as she looked over the notes. They were death threats, of varying levels of violence and crudeness, written in blood, exactly like the ones that had started this whole mess.
“I don’t believe this,” Fluttershy said tiredly. She looked at the young bunny and met his rebellious glare with a stern, motherly one of her own. “Thank you, Applejack, for watching him. Rest assured that somebunny is going to be going to bed without dessert tonight.”
* * *