WARNING: The following transcript is the last known statement of Tritone Interval, following his arrest for gross misuse of musical numbers. Playback of the magnetic tape containing the interview is expressly forbidden unless confined to a soundproof chamber.
TRANSCRIPT BEGINS
This may surprise you, officer, but after the events of the past two days, it is something of a relief to sit quietly, with only you and a tape recorder for company. I imagine you are used to dealing with uncooperative perpetrators, but the whole mess has been chaotic and surreal enough that I welcome the chance to put my side of things on record.
My friendship with Blues Noteworthy began some years ago at a chance meeting in Canterlot, but it was only in recent months that we began the experiments you Versebreakers have taken such exception to.
The theory was simple: The cosmic magic involved in musical numbers not only influences the electrical charges to and from the equine brain, but also allows ponies—and the universe itself—to bend or break the laws of normal reality. Therefore, we believed the right sort of music, channeled through the right sort of number, could raise the dead.
Nopony else we knew had the right sort of mind to entertain a thought so unbelievable and, I suppose, horrifying (though I call that a matter of opinion). As it is possible for a pony to start a musical number alone, we believed the two of us, with our pooled money and talent, could make the breakthrough if given enough time.
We chose two instruments: the drums, to invoke the beat of a living heart; and the electrical guitar, to kick-start the charges that move a body. For a practice space, we rented a cottage on the outskirts of the village of Ponyville, because its cemetery is built on marshy ground, and many of the bodies would not have decayed, but rather chemically transformed into casts made of a waxy substance called adipocere. When the time came, there would be plenty of, shall we say, "volunteers."
We started with frogs, for we knew that a dead frog can be made to twitch with an electric shock. But how were we to make the connection between that and a musical number? And we could not give the project our attention all the time, as we both had commitments to our respective orchestras, and Noteworthy had a fiancee in Canterlot.
We recorded our efforts on magnetic tapes. (I swore by them when they were a new technology, and am pleased to see they have caught on among the Versebreakers.) At about one cassette per day, we assembled a large and rather costly collection as the months went on, though you will not find much of substance on them. On the rare occasions when we were able to initiate a musical number, the subject always turned to our hopes for the project, or our fears that it would ruin us, or Noteworthy's concern about the relationship he had been neglecting.
As time went by with no progress and our money dwindled, we both grew frustrated. Noteworthy took it worse than I, and day by day I watched his temper shorten. While I maintained orchestral quality in my drumming, he began taking his annoyance out on the guitar, thrashing out chords and increasing tempo without realizing it. I let him to it, as we had already tried nearly every known genre in every style, and were now trusting more in random chance. Many great breakthroughs come from accidents in laboratories, and two days ago, our happy accident arrived.
As we made to take the day's first break, Noteworthy tripped on his guitar's cord, and in the process of flailing about to save himself, put his hoof through a corner of his amplifier's front projector. After working through all the expletives he could think of, he stuffed the hole with wadded newspaper, and tried to readjust the dials to compensate for the growling distortions that now accompanied the notes. I suggested taking the rest of the day to buy another amplifier, and in response he played harder than ever.
An hour before we had originally planned to retire for the day, Noteworthy put the guitar down and announced he had had enough. I said nothing, noting a dangerous glint in his eye that I had not seen before. From behind the drum kit, I watched as he put his metal shoes on, and wondered if he could ever be convinced to return.
But as he made to leave, there came a knock at the door. After a short exchange with a courier, he returned with a telegram and a much-subdued manner. His face was now blank, save for the eyes, which flitted across the card again and again. At last he sat heavily on his rump and let the card drop as his shoulders sagged.
"She's left me," he said.
It did not sink in all at once, but in the silence that followed we both thought the same things: Money could be made back, and lost time made up for, but Noteworthy's relationship was irreplaceable. When I had met her many months prior, I had in earnest told him he was a lucky stallion. But now...
Of a sudden, he threw back his head and let out a scream so animalistic I nearly jumped out of my hide. He seized his guitar and began thrashing out a high-speed solo of fiendish minor chords. Never had I heard such a racket as his metal shoes made, scraping and hammering against the strings. Then he began to wail lyrics, of a sort. I assume the verses, such as can be deciphered, are already known to you, along with those on every tape you confiscated. But I will never forget the thrill of danger that ran through me when he first screamed out the chorus—a simple blasphemy, repeated four times: "Celestia hates us all!"
Shocking, I know. When, in all of history, has any such thing been so much as thought, let alone shouted aloud? It is not true, of course, but the effect upon me, and later others, is evident. For as Noteworthy played, I felt the magic of a musical number upon me: Electricity through my spine and limbs, unbidden suggestions in the back of my mind, and a feeling of synchronicity with everything around me. I picked the drumsticks up, matched the rhythm on the cymbals, and pedaled on the bass drums faster than I had ever before. In short order, rhythm and bass guitars from nowhere joined in. Altogether, it was as if an iron foundry were singing a duet with a battery of siege cannons.
How shall I describe the style? There were riffs made up of grave, serious minor chords; but it was also layered, complex, and grand, like the more bombastic concertos. Somehow, elements of rock 'n' roll, a genre we were only passingly familiar with, made their way in throughout.
It only lasted about four minutes, but it seemed much longer, in part because the whole thing felt as if it might fall into cacophony at any second. But we pulled through, ending on a particularly ugly, drawn-out minor G.
At last, Noteworthy dropped his guitar and slumped upon the floor again. Meanwhile, I was rubbing my ears and trying to banish the most awful ringing I had ever been left with from a performance. As it died down at last, I heard some sort of vocalization—not words, but something between a groan and a grunt.
"Beg pardon?" I said.
"I didn't say anything," Noteworthy said flatly.
Then it came again: Not a groan or a grunt, but a croak. I looked around, ears swiveling to catch the source. My gaze fell upon the glass case at one side of the room, just as it emitted a rapid croak-croak-croak.
I bolted from my seat and fairly galloped to the case. There was nothing for a living frog's comfort in it, except a single stone and a few inches of well water. But upon that stone, still pale from its recent death, sat the frog we had put there that morning, its dewlap bulging in and out as it croaked contentedly.
I blinked, stared, and blinked again. As my friend approached the case as well, I tapped the glass wall, and at the sound, the frog leapt into the water and began swimming about. I rounded on Noteworthy, grinning so broadly I thought the top of my head might fall right off. "We've done it, we've done it!" I said.
For the next few moments, all our troubles were forgotten as we pranced about, giddy as schoolcolts at the start of a holiday.
"Stop, stop!" Noteworthy said at last. "We must be able to repeat the effect. We'll need more frogs, to start. I'll go and set all our traps straightaway."
At first we had bought frogs from a member of Princess Twilight's Council, who bred pets on a homestead at the edge of town. But when she began asking too many questions, we started trapping them in a bog some distance to the south. Though prime frog-hunting ground, it was always dangerous, as the area was a well-known haunt of ferocious monsters.
"Right then," I said. "And I'll study the tape and try to transcribe the music." I said "try" as a hedge in case the tape had not picked everything up, but I need not have worried. The tapes we used were of the highest quality, and able to record even higher registers of sound than the equine ear can hear—like a silent dog whistle.
I rewound and played the piece over and over for hours after Noteworthy had gone on his frog-hunt, and by midnight the whole thing, near as I could make it, was written down on a thick stack of sheet music. Before turning in, I dropped a couple of slugs into our living-dead frog's case for its supper.
But when I woke the next morning and went to check on it, the slugs were where I had left them. The frog was dead.
Perturbed at this complication, I hurried to Noteworthy's room and knocked on the door—once, twice, three times before opening it to find he was gone. Further searching turned up no new frogs. He had not returned.
I stood still a moment, trying to think of some innocuous explanation to prevent panic from seizing me. Previously, we had always gone to the Bog as a pair, for safety. Now, I could think of no other reason for his absence than a monster attack.
Though speed would make no difference now, I bolted from the cottage and headed southeast. Autumn rain had softened the ground, and I soon picked up Noteworthy's tracks, heading toward—only toward—the Bog. I expected to find nothing, except perhaps the prints of whatever beast had carried him off. As it happened, I rounded a corner in the trail and nearly fell over his corpse.
The body, on its side in the mud, seemed almost unharmed but for the wide eyes and screaming mouth—his final expression. Then I noticed the mark on his leg. Out of all the dangerous animals he might have met, he had been killed by a common adder.
If you have ever lost a close friend or relation, you know that the facts do not sink in at once. A pony is utterly gone from this world, and any remaining business is left unfinished. There is no avoiding the grief process, nor the unenviable task of informing everypony known to the deceased of what has happened.
But the pang of losing a friend did not materialize, and vaguely I wondered why. I supposed I should go for help to move his body back to town, and report his death to the authorities. Again, something prevented me—some notion that began as a whisper in the back of my mind, then moved to the front little by little, in spite of whatever remained of my common sense.
Perhaps if I hurried, the whole matter might be moot...
I galloped back to the cottage to fetch the old wheelbarrow the landlord kept in the wood shed. It was so badly rusted, I feared it would fall to pieces under Noteworthy's weight, but with much effort I managed to get him into it, and covered him with a tarpaulin. I began pushing him back to the cottage, and moved in such a hurry, with my eyes lowered to avoid the gaze of any passersby, that I nearly blundered into two members of the Apple clan, who were pulling a rather large wagon of goods across a bridge. I barely kept my composure when the mare, Applejack, wished me "Good morning."
"Oh. Yes. To you also," I said.
I wanted to hurry on, but it took a little time for the pair to haul the wagon across the bridge, and there was no room for a wheelbarrow to pass. I only had to wait a few seconds, but it felt much longer, as I knew how nosey small-town ponies could be.
Just as their wagon cleared the bridge, they stopped, and Applejack said, "Say, wacha got there? More instruments?"
"I was out of firewood," I said, trying not to panic.
"Well, you didn't need the tarp," she said. "The thunderstorm today is 'sposed to be a dry one."
A thunderstorm! I would have to hurry. This town's electrical system is first-generation, and often fails during such storms, which frequently get out of hoof.
"Oh," I said. "Glad to hear it."
"How's practice comin', by the way?" Applejack said.
"Fine, fine," I said. "But busy. Excuse me; I must get back to decomposing—I mean, composing."
I tried to start pushing again, but the wheel hit a loose stone, and I had to jump forward and clamp the tub's edges with my forehooves to keep the whole thing from spilling on its side. The sudden jerk caused the body within to roll and pull a bit of the tarp with it, so that in a fraction of the time it takes to tell, I found myself looking straight into the face of the late Blues Noteworthy—close enough to catch his breath, had he any left.
With no free limbs, I used horngrip to pull the tarp back into place, and resisted the urge to look back at the two ponies I had just passed. I might have blocked their view of the corpse by standing over it, but they had surely seen me covering something when there was no threat of rain.
I hurried off without another word, and felt eyes on me as I went. I might have had hours or even minutes before Applejack mentioned this odd encounter to her friend, Princess Twilight. I cursed my decision to conduct experiments in a small town.
I reached the cottage, and with care, lay the body on the back porch. A pony is much larger than a frog, so I imagined I would need greater volume, and no pony-made barriers between the music and the universe.
I had a new kind of recording machine, which could play back a magnetic tape while leaving out certain ranges of sound. There were not enough extension cords to run everything from the indoor sockets, so I connected it to an industrial battery we kept for such occasions (you must not forget this detail). I adjusted it to filter out my own part of the piece, then assembled all the equipment on the porch, put in a pair of earplugs, and turned the speakers up all the way.
They had to have heard it in Ponyville. I admit I am curious to what the townsfolk thought of it. On the first attempt, it seemed my plan would not work: I barely kept pace with the recording, and no musical number began. As I hurried to rewind the tape for a second try, I looked up and cursed the town's weather team for their speed. The pastel dots above had already assembled the storm cloud, and were now hurrying away from it for safety. I had minutes at most to try again.
I set the machine to play and hurried back to my kit. But as I again picked up the drumsticks, there came the first flash, with a boom of thunder close behind. I was too late.
I did not then know how long a body could decay before it was beyond resurrection. We had only used fresh frog corpses, painlessly put to sleep with ether. If I waited for the storm to pass, Noteworthy might be beyond help. Princess Twilight would probably soon hear about my odd behavior and, with her authority as the township's feudal lord, investigate. That would be the end of the whole endeavour.
Again, the opening guitar riff blasted from the speakers: pure anger in the form of sound waves. A voice—mine—screamed, "Blast it all to Tartarus!" And I began to flail on the drums faster than ever.
The piece had been like thunder and lightning before, but now it was joined by the real thing. Soon another type of electricity was there too: that of a musical number. All the frustration from my failures, and the late-arriving grief for my dead friend, came out through the music. I now knew what he had known the day prior, when he screamed "Celestia hates us all." Through this sort of music, we can express things too obscene, too horrible to say in conversation. In doing so, we drive them from out our souls, and they leave us in peace, at least for a time.
Just after this number passed its crescendo, I looked up from the kit and saw I was not alone. The porch opened onto a fallow field, and onto this field had trooped several dozen ponies while I played. As I watched, more arrived in ones and twos, all from the northeast. This was odd, since the town proper was to the west, and I saw no ponies coming from there. At first they stood off disparately, their features mostly hidden under the cloud's shadow. But something inspired me to make them feel welcome.
I picked up the tempo again, playing with all four limbs and my horn in a fast, heavy solo. The cosmos's music followed suit, and I shouted "Thank you!" aloud to it, for the tape had run out. Almost at once, the gathering crowd rushed forward as one and stopped right at the porch's edge, shoulder-to-shoulder and flank-to-flank. If I had not been locked in the midst of a musical number, I would have turned and fled, for I now saw their features as clearly as I see yours.
My audience were not from Ponyville. They were from its cemetery!
There they stood—foals who had died of colic, elders who had passed from age, working-class stallions still bearing wounds from the accidents that killed them, and many, many other sorts. Some were nearly skeletons, while others were quite well-preserved, or converted by time and nature into the waxy adipocere form. As I watched, a few groups of the larger ones parted to give the smaller a better view. Off to the left, I recognized the late Mr. and Mrs. Apple, with her sitting on his back for a better view. All eyes, and a number of empty sockets, were cast toward the porch.
They were there to listen to me.
Now, musical numbers will sometimes include a few lines of spoken word, as needed. This was why, during a pause, I was able to rear up and shout with all my might, "Let me hear you, Ponyville Cemetery!"
Though their flesh was cold, they now acted more alive than the Canterlot Symphony Orchestra's audiences ever had. They waved their forehooves in the air, leapt up, or danced on two legs as they gave a hearty hurrah. Their voices were desiccated croaks, but they made quite a din all the same.
To my surprise, I realized I was not afraid.
Through all this, Noteworthy still lay where I left him. I picked up the tempo again, and happily, the cosmos's instruments followed.
"Rise!" I cried, addressing the corpse before me.
"RISE!" came the roar of the crowd.
"Live!" I screamed.
"LIVE!" the crowd answered.
A twitch. A shiver. At last, with many grotesque contortions, the body of Noteworthy obeyed us. The legs moved before the rest, kicking stiffly as they tried to find purchase. He stood inch by inch, leaning against the porch's railing until enough strength returned for him to stand by himself. At last, he looked about—at the storm cloud, at the crowd, and at last at me. His eyes focused, his expression lit up, and he smiled in triumph, for he knew we had truly succeeded.
In my haste to bring all our equipment outside, I had included Noteworthy's guitar, and set it up on its rack off to the left. He now lept upon it with a cry of "Ah-ha!" and scraped his shoe across the strings hard enough that I worried they might break. The resulting jangle was not music, but the crowd roared in delight all the same. Noteworthy was clearly caught up in the number, for he slung the strap over his neck, leapt to the railing, and shouted, "Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump!"
If you have ever thrown a pebble into a pond and watched the ripples radiate outward, you can imagine what the crowd did next. Each jumped up after the one in front of him, and they were now so close together, heads sometimes bumped into rears. They did not stop, but jumped even faster when Noteworthy's guitar joined the number with some sort of screeching improvisation from low on the neck. By now, some of the fresher ones were bleeding. A few were vomiting what had to be embalming fluid—on the ground, on themselves, and sometimes on each other. Nopony cared.
When it wishes to be, Nature can be just as good at verse-breaking as you are, and is perhaps even more fickle. At that moment there was a terrific crack, and a lightning bolt conducted through my cymbals sent me flying backward. The back of my head hit the cottage's metal window frame, and that, as they say, was that.
My hearing came back first. I thought the steady thump-thump-thump was my heartbeat in my ears, but it was much too fast. Then I felt floorboards pressing against my whole right side, and little by little I remembered what had happened. I tried to move, but my limbs were stiff, as if the shock had fused the joints together. I cracked first one eye, then the other. My vision was more or less undamaged, but the tints were a little dimmer, and dark places a little brighter than before. There were the planks of the floor and wall; and the tall, blocky rectangle of the special tape-recorder; and Noteworthy, fiddling with its dials.
With difficulty, I worked my jaw and managed a croaking request for help. Noteworthy hurried to my aid, and in a few moments had me on my hooves again. For the last time since, I was able to look around and take stock. Nearly all of our equipment was destroyed—the speakers were blown out, and my drum set was a scorched, half-melted mess. The only untouched piece was the special tape-recorder, which Noteworthy had wheeled back into the main room. I took stock of myself, too. My senses of smell and taste now felt strangely dulled, and have been since. But for some reason, my hearing was now quite acute, as evidenced by that distant, steady thumping. As the minutes went by, I picked up more instruments—much like our arrangement from before, but now with a keyboard and a rather large chorus. Even at this distance, I could tell the latter were not well synchronized.
"What's that music about?" I said, perhaps stupidly.
"The number ended when the lightning hit," Noteworthy said. "But the crowd started another right away, without my help." He looked out the window toward the town. "Then they went there. We seem to have started some sort of musical. They'll give the locals quite a fright, of course, but they don't seem intent on hurting anypony—except themselves, perhaps."
"But look here," I said, "this is tremendous. Blues Noteworthy, dead of snake bite this morning, and now standing here talking as if nothing happened!"
"Yes," he said. "Though it's odd—my heart hasn't started beating again, and I don't feel any hunger, even though I haven't eaten in, er, a long time."
Just then, a horrible thought struck me. "But wait," I said. "What if it doesn't take?"
"What do you mean?"
"The frog is alive again now—it's trying to swim through the glass. But when I woke up this morning, it was dead. Suppose you only stay alive a short time after the music stops?"
Noteworthy would have blanched, if any blood remained in his face. "But wait," he said. "Does it have to be a proper musical number, or will the recording do?" He hurried to the recorder and replayed the tape. I cannot tell you how glad we were to hear the chaotic strains of our earlier recording proceed from the speakers.
But how, you may ask, was this possible when all our other equipment was destroyed? We supposed the heavy metal casing of the machine must have protected all the contents, and as it was connected to a separate battery, the power surge from the lightning could not reach it.
As I said, my hearing had now grown more acute, and at that moment, when the distant music stopped, both our heads turned toward its final source.
"That wasn't a proper cadence," I said.
"Versebreakers," Noteworthy said. And you should know he was right.
We hurriedly conferred on a plan. Versebreakers would ruin everything if they could, and so (begging your pardon, officer) we knew we must outwit them. We set to work on what we would need, and by the time your colleagues and a band of angry townsfolk drove Ponyville Cemetery's tenants back across the field toward the safety of their graves, all was ready. We wished one another luck and parted ways, with him joining the crowd and myself waiting for my arrest, which came soon after.
There is one more thing on my conscience, which I must state for the record before we close this interview. You see, I have made several sins of omission. The blow to the back of my head did not merely knock me senseless. The equine skull is weak at the back, and a hard enough blow can kill. Fresh and properly bandaged, I have easily pretended to be alive since you arrested me.
No, no, there is no need to panic. I mentioned before that the new sort of magnetic tape is so good, it can record sounds too high for the equine ear to pick up. But this is only true for a living equine. For some reason, one who has returned can pick up these frequencies, even from a great distance, in the same way a dog responds to a silent whistle. That was why I returned to life: Noteworthy had been playing back our initial recording at different frequencies, testing the new capabilities of his own ears.
Being musicians, we knew a few things about the Versebreakers already. For instance, your policy of debriefing ponies involved in particularly unusual phenomena. You had me searched before you brought me here, of course, but your colleagues did not open the stitched and bandaged wound on my side. It is not a wound, but an incision I made myself and used to smuggle in my own tape. There was more than enough room, after I realized I no longer need my spleen. With a little simple sleight of hoof, I switched the blank tape in your recorder with my own.
Since you started recording, that tape has been playing "Celestia Hates Us All" again and again, in a range too high for living ponies to hear, but at the same time quite loud. I have no doubt they heard it in the cemetery.
You could switch it off, but it would make no difference now. The dead travel faster than you might think, and I doubt anypony has been able to stop their approach. After all, no one would expect them to rise a second time.
There may be nothing I can do to allay your irrational fears, but I will try regardless. We do not wish to harm the living, but only to be left alone, to play this new music undisturbed. In a short while the others will take me from here, and we will leave for some uninhabited hinterland where we can carry on our lives—or unlives—in peace.
And just like that, my friends have arrived. Good day, officer.