Blank Slate

by Integral Archer

Chapter VII

It may be supposed already that these rooms had not always housed the radio.

While Stable 2 was under construction, a notable developmental doctor, the head of a massive research firm, had already planned to move in. He was quite insistent and influential: he asked for a long hallway, a soundproof room, and an adjoining room that looked upon the first through a one-way window. No other stable had this sort of construction.

Though the stables were built for protection, Stable-Tec took advantage of the opportunity to conduct experiments that might have been regarded by some to be morally questionable. Each stable was built for one of these experiments. Stable 2 was no exception.

We do not know the extent of the work of this doctor of Stable 2. We will tell you only what we do know:

We only know that there were times when a nurse would tell a new mother, a day or so after she has given birth, that her baby had died suddenly in the night. If the mother could manage to, through her tears, ask if she could see the body of her child, the nurse would shake her head, apologize, and say that it had to be disposed of quickly to prevent the spread of diseases.

The newborns had been taken down this hallway and carried through the door on the left. The door was shut behind; no further questions were asked.

This was not limited to newborns. It was not uncommon for a child or two to disappear one day, their parents being informed that they had died playing with a fuse box. In reality, they had been, like the newborns, carried through the long hallway, through the door on the left. They were usually followed by the doctor, who would turn at the last second and go through the door on the right.

The lingering traces of foam that can still be seen are left from the days when that room was padded.

Aside from the crude excerpt of dubious veracity that we have rendered a bit further below, there is no documentation of what took place there. The doctor was known for keeping very poor notes.

His neighbors just knew that he kept returning from work more and more flustered. He began to talk to himself. They saw him scribbling frantically in his notebooks in the cafeteria, in the lounge, anytime they happened to see him. Though he never failed to go down the hallway every morning, he eventually stopped his social life. When he wasn’t at work, he was in his room. He ceased to talk with his fellow residents.

As a prank, a few young ponies snuck into the doctor’s bedroom and stole his notebook. We will not bother to transcribe their findings here; the contents of the diary are incomprehensible, nonsensical ramblings, thoughts unconnected to each other, barely legible, and we would consider reproductions of those words to be a waste of paper and ink.

The doctor did not seem to notice this theft.

One day, the doctor flew up to the overmare’s office, his face covered with sweat. He urged the overmare at the time to enact, from her console, something he referred to only as “the fail-safe.”

After a heated argument, words of which the secretary could not pick out with her ear pressed to the adjoining wall, the doctor and the overmare emerged, the former with an expression of a tension slowly being relieved by a mitigation of an efficacy that perhaps left him a lot to be desired; the latter wide-eyed, every single one of her hairs on point.

Two nurses, who were the doctors assistants, and the stable’s janitor were picked by the overmare for a “special job.” They were not informed as to its nature. They were only made to swear that they would never repeat what they saw while on this job. The nurses never breathed a word of the events. The janitor, who was more unscrupulous than the nurses—or, arguably, more scrupulous—recounted the events in his journal, which we faithfully transcribe here:

“I should’ve known it was a bad idea to agree to this the second that they pulled out the hazard suits. We stood in front of a door near the doc’s office—I didn’t even know there was a door there!—dressed in these damn things, with a few buckets, some detergents—namely, the things I prefer when unclogging toilets. Nothing was said to one another. That’s not true. Before we set out, the doc turned to us and said: ‘If you smell hay, even for a second, if you even think that you smell even the faintest trace of hay, hold your breath, turn back, and don’t stop running until you’re out of here.’ I didn’t say anything, just glanced at the nurses and shrugged. That doc—what a nut! I should have known. How long is the hallway! I thought that walk would never end. We walked in silence. I kept taking the strongest whiffs I could—no hay I could smell. How could I? Those suits are so damn thick nothing gets through. The hallway, in an instant, turned from white to pink. I thought something was going wrong with my suit. We stopped. The doctor gestured toward the floor and nodded with his head. He wanted us to approach it. I went first. I didn’t have my glasses on, so I thought that it was just the wallpaper. When I got closer, it looked like putty. When I got closer, I saw legs, then mouths, then teeth, then eyes, gaping, wide, staring with such an animated force that it made it all the more eerie because they were dead. As I started with my mop on the closest mass of flesh I could find, I felt a nudge on my shoulder. I turned. It was the doc. He was smiling. He bent close to my ear and whispered: ‘Show Stopper.’ I looked back at the teeth. I saw the resemblance. So that’s where that brat went! It had been bugging the hell out of me.”

Comments

[Twi-Guy]

Damn...