“…entering from the front door.” Twilight said with a gulp, staring around the entrance hall with wide eyes.
The hallway stretching before them was paneled with old, worn-out wood that creaked with every shift of their hooves. A threadbare rug the color of dull wine lay in the center of the hall and led to a burnished grand staircase to the second floor. A few flickering candles shed barely enough light to see by, only barely enhanced by the light straining to come in through the soot-stained window above the door behind them. Ancient cobwebs adorned every corner in sight. Four closed doors, two on either side, seemed to sag in their frames with age. A dry rasp echoed down the long hall as the old building settled around them, and a little shower of dust drifted down from the ceiling.
“Alright, no.” Fluttershy said, spinning around and diving for the doorknob. She twisted it desperately this way and that, but somehow the door had gotten stuck after they’d entered. No matter how she pulled at it, it didn’t budge an inch.
Twilight put a calming hoof in her shoulder and calmly but firmly turned her back around. “There’s no going back now. Nothing for it but for us to move forward.”
“…do we have to…?” Fluttershy squeaked, trying to hide behind her own hair.
“So let me get this straight,” Rainbow Dash said slowly, surveying her surroundings, “Anything we find in this place, we get to keep?”
“Unless you want to share it-” Twilight started.
“All I needed to hear!” Rainbow interrupted, launching forward with a powerful flap of her wings. She zoomed across the hall and shot up the stairs before anypony could stop her.
“Wow, she sure can move fast,” Pinkie whistled, shading her eyes as if she could still see her, “I don’t start with anywhere near that much speed!”
Applejack stomped her hoof and called out after her. “Hey, we haven’t made a plan yet! Don’t go rushin’ off on your own like that!”
Rarity smirked and adjusted her mane as she walked past the farmer towards the closed door to the right. “Oh calm down, darling. Just let her go off and do her own thing for a while. We can cover more ground if we split up, after all. Now let’s see what’s to find behind door number ouuuaaaahhhh!”
The rest of her words were cut off in a shriek as the door swung in to reveal a stark metal chute covered in rust and coal dust instead of a floor. Rarity scrambled for a grip on the door as she teetered over the edge, but it was useless. With a wail she overbalanced and tumbled down the chute, quickly vanishing into the shadows below.
“Rarity!” Her friends cried, rushing to the door. Unfortunately the chute dropped down into absolute darkness so they couldn’t see anything. It didn’t seem to be very deep, but the fashionista’s scream just kept getting softer and softer until it disappeared.
“…can I freak out now…?” Fluttershy asked softly.
Applejack sighed and pushed her hat more firmly onto her head. “It doesn’t look like she can get back up from here, so ah’ll go down after her and we’ll try to find stairs or somethin'. There has to be some way back up. You girls search up here and we’ll meet up when we can.”
She faced the chute, took a deep breath, and leapt. “Yee-haw!” she shouted as she hit the ramp hard and coasted down into the darkness.
“Guess it’s my turn!” Pinkie Pie said cheerfully, bouncing off to the door next to the one with the chute. She batted it open with her head and flounced in, shouting, “Ohh! What is THAT?!”
Twilight watched her go with a wry smile, and then leaned down and lay a hoof on Fluttershy’s quivering back. “Fluttershy? I’ve got to go now. Are you going to be alright?”
“…”
“We have to find the way up for Applejack and Rarity, right? And for that, we need to explore.”
“…”
“Would you rather I stay here with you?”
Fluttershy tensed up at the suggestion, but shook her head after a moment. “No,” she said softly, but then gathered her courage and repeated in a louder voice, “No. you should go. I don’t want to hold you back.”
Twilight bit her lip but decided not to press it. “Alright, but you really should look around too. You never know what you might find.”
The princess gave her friend one last encouraging smile and turned to the remaining two doors on the floor. After a moment’s consideration she strode over to the one opposite the one Pinkie had entered. She laid a hoof on the splintery wood, steeled her nerves for whatever lay on the other side, and pushed the door open.
She took a step through the portal and her hoof sank into loamy soil. The scent of moss and rich earth assailed her nostrils and the air was noticeably fresher. She realized she was standing in a small graveyard, enclosed in a cage of old iron bars. Mist curled in the air on the other side of the fence, concealing whatever lay more than a few inches outside and inexplicably not flowing into the graveyard. The yard itself contained at most a dozen small gravestones that she could see and even a large tree, devoid of leaves and tall enough to brush against the ceiling above.
Twilight blinked and leaned forward. Unless her eyes were playing tricks on her, there was some kind of movement on the other side of the tree. “Excuse me, is somepony there?” she called out, pacing forward over the slightly damp ground.
It only took her a minute to reach the tree and peer around it. An old earth pony with a brown coat was working with a shovel in the far corner of the graveyard, whistling tunelessly as he worked. He wore a threadbare vest hanging open and a shapeless hat, and a piece of straw hung from one corner of his mouth.
“Hello,” Twilight said, walking forward, “I didn’t expect to find anypony so quickly. Can you tell me anything about this house? I need to find a way into the basement.”
The old pony froze in place when she started speaking and clutched his shovel tighter. He slowly started turning and some instinct cut Twilight’s next question short. He faced her and she took a startled step backwards with a soft cry of dismay. The pony had a look of such pure hate on his face that it left no doubt in her mind about his intentions.
The pony let loose a wordless roar and lurched forward, raising his shovel high. Twilight dodged the first swing and backed away, but one of her hooves caught in one of the tree’s exposed roots and she went down in a sprawl. She landed on her back hard enough to expel the breath from her lungs and for a few precious seconds all she could do was flounder and struggle to get her bearings. When she could focus again she saw that the old pony was standing directly above her with his shovel raised.
The two of them each let out a scream as the shovel came whistling down… and vanished inches before it connected with her face. Twilight blinked, hyperventilating as adrenaline coursed through her in a fiery river of nerves. She flicked her head in all directions, but the old pony was gone. As if he’d never been there at all. She jerked up into a sitting position and scooted backwards until her back was pressed flat against the tree.
“What… what was that?” she gasped, struggling to calm down. She took stock of her surroundings and immediately became aware of two things.
First, even though the strange groundskeeper had vanished, his hoof prints had not. She could clearly see the places where he’d lurched after her in the slightly muddy ground. Whatever that had been, it hadn’t been just in her head.
Secondly, there was something hard poking her in the back.
Licking her extremely dry lips, she felt around behind her and pulled out from under the tree a small silver bell. She tilted it slightly and it rang with a clear note that seemed just a little too resonant for its size. She immediately encased it with her magic to stop the ring, lest it attract any more unwanted attention.
She looked around the graveyard, but she didn’t relax until a full minute of inactivity. For better or for worse, for the moment at least, she was alone.
Applejack managed to keep her hooves beneath her all the way until the last few feet, when the chute unexpectedly dipped down on a hinge under her weight. She was dumped unceremoniously into a fairly large pile of coal. She tumbled tail over teakettle, limbs flailing wildly to arrest her fall. She finally coasted to a stop at the foot of the pile, quite liberally covered in an itchy layer of coal dust.
“Pah!” she spat, blowing a small black cloud of dust from her mouth and flicking her tongue over her teeth to get rid of the taste, “Let’s not do that again. Rarity? You here?”
She stood up and took stock of the area. She was in a square room with four empty doorways, one on each wall, and she couldn’t make out any details of what was on the other side of them. The coal chute had dropped her into one of the corners and had sprung back up on its hinge once she was clear. Even if she climbed up the pile of coal, she wouldn’t be able to reach it.
And of course, Rarity was nowhere in sight.
“What did ah really expect?” Applejack sighed. She looked down and noted that there were many different sets of sooty hoof prints on the floor, leading to all the doors. Whelp, no help there…
The farmer tapped her chin in thought, but there really wasn’t anything else she could do. So she picked a door at random and walked boldly through it.
That boldness didn’t last long, however. Her chosen path had led her into a long hallway, lined on either side by large stone busts and statues of ponies. Time had worn their features unrecognizable, but she could make out some of them clutching stone spears and shields. At least one had been knocked over at some point in the past, and she had to step lightly over pieces scattered all over the floor.
“Rarity, you better be somewhere this way,” Applejack said in a carrying whisper, not really wishing to be too loud. The back of her neck was starting to twinge and the uncomfortable feeling that the statues were watching her stuck in her mind.
In fact, her neck was really starting to itch. She paused in the middle of the room and twisted her head to the side to see if that’d help. She’d brushed as much of the dust off her as she could while walking, but what she couldn’t reach shouldn’t itch all that much.
“What in tarnation?” she asked, reaching back to scratch it directly. Something clicked by her ear and something with too many legs crawled up onto her foreleg from her back. She had barely a second to realize that a spider the size of a dinner plate was crawling rapidly up her leg before the thing hissed at her and jumped directly onto her face!
Applejack screamed bloody murder and reared back, swiping blindly at her head to dislodge it. The spider avoided her first swing and crawled up under her hat, entangling itself in her mane. AJ whipped the hat from her head and sent it flinging away in her panic, bucking wildly back and forth across the hall. She head-butted one of the statues by accident and the world spun wildly for a moment.
There was a sharp pain on the back of her neck and she cried out, slapping at in instinctively. She got lucky and hit the spider head-on, dislodging it from its perch along with a number of long hairs. The spider hissed again and scuttled into a hole in the wall.
Applejack staggered away, one hoof pressed to the back of her neck. Her hoof came down wrong on a piece of statuary and she flopped to the ground for the second time in five minutes. She lay where she was for a minute, just focusing on breathing and calming down.
She stood and discovered that she’d twisted her leg a little when she’d fallen. Spotting her hat lying against the wall, she limped over and picked it up, checking to see if there were any more arachnids inside before putting it back on.
She glared around the hallway. “You know, ah don’t think ah like this place much,” she grumbled. The statues stared back at her expressionlessly, but Applejack felt sure that they were mocking her.
Drip… Drip… Drip…
“What was that?” Rarity asked, cocking her ears behind her at the door. For a little bit there she could have sworn she’d heard somepony calling her name… but no, there was nothing.
“Just my imagination,” she muttered, returning to her task. “Just this house, trying to play a trick on me.”
She’d managed to find a small room, wide but not any longer than her if she sat on the stone floor. And sitting she was, before a large metal door set into the wall just out of view of the way back into the horrid coal room. It was like the door to the vault in Ponyville’s one small bank, save that the large spin-wheel handle also contained a combination lock with four tumblers. She was currently spinning those tumblers with her magic, with one ear pressed to the steel door in an attempt to hear the slightest of sounds.
“Think of what such a large door must be hiding,” she said aloud, concentrating too hard to realize she was talking to nopony. “Bits, jewelry, something else equally precious… but most importantly…”
Drip… Drip… Drip…
Water! She might have passed by this room entirely if she hadn’t caught the sound on the edge of her hearing. She’d already scoured this small area and couldn’t find the source of the sound, so it had to be coming from the other side of the door. A steady dripping means there might be a sink or, please Celestia, a bath on the other side! I can wash this filthy black filth out of my fur!
She thought she heard a slight tumble and she leaned back eagerly, giving the door a firm tug with her magic. The wheel rattled in place but didn’t budge an inch to either side.
“Arrgh!” Rarity exclaimed in a very unladylike fashion, stamping her hooves petulantly before starting in on the door again, “I will not be beaten by a hunk of metal! I will get through!”
Drip… Drip… Drip…
That sound. It was like a needle, rhythmically stabbing at her brain. Unbeknownst to Rarity, her left eyelid had started to twitch in perfect harmony with the sound. But she pressed on regardless, determined to reach the promise of water.
Drip… Drip… Drip…
There was a creak of settling wood from the doorway behind her and Fluttershy nearly jumped a foot into the air with a squeak of terror. She spun in place and stared down the offending door just in case it got any funny ideas and reluctantly retreated until she was in the center of the hall.
“OK, big scary house,” she whispered to herself, scrunching in to present as small a target to potential predators as possible, “Big, scary, rundown, absolutely-haunted-for-a-fact, house. But I’m not scared.”
A soft sigh of wind ghosted across her back and she spun in place, eyes as wide as saucers.
“Alright, I am scared! But you know what, that’s fine. It’s perfectly natural to be scared in a haunted house. It is exactly what I should be feeling. So I don’t need to go anywhere. I’ll just stay here, by the entrance, and wait for the others to get back.”
Fluttershy started nodding to herself. “Yes, that’s it. I’ll just wait here. The others will probably be coming back this way when they are done exploring and they might miss each other if I’m not here to greet them. If you think about it, this is the smartest thing I can do right now. There’s no need for me to go any further inside. I’ll just wait right here and be ready when everypony comes back!” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, determination easing the worst of her racing heart. She looked up at the empty hallway and mentally prepared herself for the task ahead.
At which point a hideous shriek boiled down the stairs from the second floor like a living thing. The soul-rending sound raised every hair on Fluttershy’s body and locked her muscles tight. Rainbow Dash was the only one who’d gone upstairs, but this didn’t sound like her at all. The shriek kept growing in volume until it cut out like a knife. In the sudden silence, Fluttershy’s panicked breathing was almost painfully loud.
“Or-maybe-I’ll-go-find-them-instead!” she said in a panic, rushing blindly out of the hallway in whatever direction would take her away from the stairs as quickly as possible.
She charged through the door to the left of the entrance and found herself in a mostly empty room. A threadbare rug was the only decoration in the room besides an old decrepit radiator against the far wall. A thin layer of dust coated the floor and gave the room the firm impression of having been abandoned.
There were three other doors out of the room but the pegasus gave them no mind, making a beeline for the radiator. She squeezed herself into the small space created by it in the corner and cowered, dreading the return of that blood-curdling scream. Or whatever it was that had made it. After a while, she realized her straining ears could hear something. A low panting. Coming from right next to her.
Fluttershy almost panicked again, but something held her back and she considered the sound again. There was a note of fear in it that she was instinctively reacting to. She knew that sound. It was…
“A dog!” she said, immediately perking up and scanning for the source of the panting. She quickly discerned that it was coming from the far side of the radiator and inched her way along the floor until she was a little closer.
“It’s OK, you can come out,” she said coaxingly, “I’m not going to hurt you. My name is Fluttershy. What are you doing in a scary place like this?”
Her soft tone seemed to get through to the scared animal and the dog slowly crawled out from her hiding spot. When she spotted Fluttershy’s face she bounded to her feet and started running around her in an excited circle, barking with evident relief.
Fluttershy blinked, startled that she recognized this dog. “Winona? What are you doing here, girl? How did you get here?”
Winona, of course, couldn’t answer her. Instead she came to a stop in front of the pegasus and held out her paw, as if to shake.
Fluttershy held up her hoof hesitantly. “Do you want to come with me?” she asked. Winona barked and continued to hold out her paw.
As Fluttershy reached forward there was an eerie sensation, as if the entire house was holding its breath. The air seemed to still, the various creaks and groans seemed to quiet, and the flickering from the few candles providing light slowed. The moment held… and then passed. Fluttershy took Winona’s paw and shook it firmly and the dog barked happily as she ruffled the fur on her head with her other hoof.
“Alright, let’s do this together,” she said, looking around the room with new purpose. “I’m sure we can bring you back to Applejack safe and sound.”
She picked a direction at random and the two of them set out, proceeding deeper into the mansion.