Part 19
Silent Ponyville: Reunion
Stay away.
Part 19
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The knob finished turning, and with a soft creak the door started to swing inward.
A gasp of surprise forced it's way out of the mouth of the mare outside as the door suddenly slammed shut. There was a moment of stunned silence before the knob attempted to turn again, this time being foiled by the grip of an amber hoof belonging to the pegasus stallion currently leaning his weight against the door.
Lance blinked. Had he actually just slammed the door in his wife's face? Was he really now holding it closed? Had he thought about this in the least?!
"Lance are you...why are you holding the door closed?" she asked incredulously.
No, no he had not thought this through in the least. What was left of his logical side saw no issue with letting her in. The memory through the peephole was altered and falsified, and even if it were not, it had taken place a few years after Posey's death. No pony in their right mind could ever accuse him of infidelity for that. Yet the side that had just all but forced him to throw himself against the door like she was an encroaching monster screamed at him to stay put, to not let her see or hear anything of it, to keep it hidden from her forever no matter how ludicrous an aspiration that was. As much as he wanted to let her in, there was a lingering, irrational terror keeping him glued to that spot.
"I...just...stay out there for a few minutes okay?" he practically begged, spurred on further as he heard a certain illusory mare in the next room let out another moan.
"Why? Lance what's going on? Are you hurt?!"
"No it's fine it's just-"
"If it's fine why are you holding the door closed?!" she inquired pointedly, her voice a mix of worry and confusion.
"I don't want you to see what's in here okay?!" he snapped back at her like a cornered dog.
"What?! What could possibly be so bad that you have to keep me out here alone in the hallway after you wandered through Tartarus and back trying to get me free?!" she snapped back, her growing frustration expressing itself further as she turned the knob and tried to force her way through the door. Lance still had her on weight though, and the scant inch she was able to open the door slammed shut again half a moment later.
"Wait...just please wait, I...I don't want to talk about it right now." His voice lost its edge as the sentence came to an end, dulled by how understandably poorly his wife was reacting. Lance felt her remove the weight of her body from the door and sit down in the hallway with an exasperated sigh.
"At least tell me you're not any more banged up than when I last saw you." She too was a bit more calm now, though her voice was still tinged by tired irritation.
"Well...to be honest I got a bit of a burn on my leg but that's it, nothing serious," he replied with a brief downward look at himself.
"What? Now you found a monster that burns you too?!" she retorted, the sound of her jumping back to her hooves quietly echoing down the hallway.
"Sort of, it doesn't breathe fire or anything but-"
Wait...monsters!
"Posey! There's some sort of nurse out there with you!" he warned her.
"Huh? Where?!"
"It's patrolling clockwise around the hallway!"
There was a brief pause before she spoke again. "Lance, I've been through this entire floor and I haven't seen or heard a single trace of anything in here. I'm perfectly safe out here. Did you really see a nurse out here or are you just trying to change the subject?" she inquired suspiciously.
...
"I saw that nurse and those gurneys just as much as you saw that masked mare and that dog pony thing outside," he answered. It was hard to miss the resentment in his voice from her having suggested that he would take their situation so lightly as to use it to deflect conversation. "I saw that weird vertical hallway and the deaf colt in the elevator too, you didn't think I was trying to change the subject then, did you?" he added.
"You don't have to be so defensive Lance...I'm just worried about you...and you're kind of scaring me right now. I know I said it was this place messing with you before, but why all of a sudden are you seeing all these things and I'm not?" Posey asked, her words more like thoughts spoken aloud than any sort of question directed at him.
There was a pause during which neither of them spoke. It was typical amongst awkward moments in that every second felt like an hour or so, but in this case the time was helpful. Lance felt the building tension in his chest slowly relent as the words of the heated, bitter exchange between the two of them drifted further and further away until they both remembered what they meant to one another. They could hardly be blamed for arguing, considering their position deep underground in the buried floors of an abandoned hospital and all the stress that said position imposed upon them. Lance slowly sat down, still holding the door closed but not quite so emphatically as before. Then Posey finally broke the silence.
"I see it you know. You're not only hurt physically. Something happened besides my dying and it's hurting you even more than your wounds are."
Lance didn't respond, simply letting his head hang and his eyes close as a fresh wave of guilt washed over him. Things were only made worse by the way the sounds made by the false mare next door steadily increased in frequency, pitch, and most distressingly volume. He hoped against hope that she wouldn't hear it from her spot outside in the hallway, or else the hurtful thing he was doing to her would be even more pointless than it was already.
"I want to help you Sweetheart, but...well you're literally holding the door shut on me. I can't think of a more appropriate metaphor than what you're doing right this moment," she continued.
He let out a shaky sigh, keeping his eyes closed as he raised his head again. "Posey...I'm sorry...I can't-"
Their conversation was interrupted by the brief, distant sound of hoof steps at the corner of the hall far off to Lance's right on the other side of the wall. His ears twitched as he heard Posey give a sharp gasp after apparently having turned her head to look. There was another moment of silence, this one much briefer but far heavier. Once more Posey was the first to speak, but this time only doing so in a terrified whisper.
"I think somepony is out here with me..." They both realized that her uttering a single word, no matter the volume, had been a mistake the second the gleeful, hideous snarl and hiss of steam reached their ears.
Lance ignored the noises in the next room, the buzzing of his watch, and the icy terror that shot through his body as he struggled to his hooves as fast as he could before pulling the door open...or at least trying to.
"Lance let me in!" Posey screamed as she realized she wasn't being ignored this time.
A sensation of dread gripped at his heart like a thousand tiny knives as he repeatedly tried to open the door only to find the doorknob remaining stubbornly still. The sensation grew ten fold as he removed his hoof only to see that the door had somehow locked itself and the small tab that could normally be turned to release the lock had been welded into place. Metal shod hooves advanced at a leisurely trot down the hallway as the monstrous alicorn took its sweet time advancing upon the love of his life.
"Lance please!" she cried as she banged on the door.
"I'm trying!" he shouted back as he uselessly fumbled with the doorknob. He quickly gave up and started throwing himself against the door trying to break it open. The thought passed his mind that he would be breaking the only barrier that could possibly stand between the two of them and the sovereign, but doors had long ago proven to be a laughable barrier against her anyway. Between the loud bangs made by his injured body slamming into the door he could still hear the doorknob rattling as Posey tried to turn it from the outside.
"You locked the door?! Why did you lock the door?!" She slammed her hooves into the diabolical hinged wooden panel, her desperation peaking as the approaching alicorn made a sound not entirely unlike an amused hum.
"I didn't lock the door Posey!" he adamantly denied before ramming the door again, heedless of the pain in his shoulder or the protest of his leg.
"Then who bucking did?!"
"I don't know! It locked itself!"
"What, like how you saw that nurse that doesn't exist?!?!" she yelled angrily, throat tightening in sorrow and rage at the apparent betrayal.
He ignored her incisive observation and tried to put his shoulder through the door again. Only after his repeated efforts did it even let off one crack. It was possible for him to break it down but there was no way he would manage it before the sovereign got to her.
"Run!"
He didn't have to tell her twice. Lance heard the flap of wings and a wracking sob as Posey took to the air and flew down the hall to his left. Her pursuer gave a distorted growl of disapproval as the metallic hoof falls came to a stop to the right of the door. Just as he felt a hint of relief that his wife had escaped, he heard her cry out in surprise before she grunted from the impact of being brought back to the floor. As the metal clad monster let out a pleased murmur, the hairs on the back of Lance's neck stood on end as he remembered what had happened when he had tried flying away from her back in the apartments.
"No! Let me go!" he heard her scream as she was dragged back toward the sovereign.
The door cracked a bit more as Lance put every ounce of desperation into throwing himself against it. He didn't care if his shoulder dislocated and every muscle in his leg tore, nothing would stop him from destroying the barrier that kept him from helping his terrified wife.
"Stop! Please! No!" Posey begged, being drawn closer with every word, her protests only further enticing her tormentor.
His eyes stung as tears of approaching despair blurred his vision, every blow against the obstinate door proving entirely too little. He had to keep trying. There was nothing else he could do. He became aware of a metal helm scraping against the door, the sovereign seeming to sense the anguish within the room and savoring it like an alluring perfume. Lance managed to ignore it but was forced to stop in horror by what he heard next.
Posey strained with effort, flapping wildly as she tried to break out of the tendril's grip with pure wing power. The sovereign growled in mild annoyance before slamming her back to the ground hard enough to let her husband hear her bones cracking through the door. If Posey was saying anything he could no longer distinguish words from the terrified wails of pain that forced their way into his ears like jagged ice picks.
"No! NO!!!" he bellowed, going completely berserk and utterly disregarding the damage he was doing to himself as he made a final effort to break the door in time. Her cries of pain stopped, replaced by shallow, terrified breaths and the metallic groan of the sovereign's neck braces. The sadistic alicorn drew another lengthy breath and let it out with a delighted shudder, the same as she had with Lance.
Then there was screaming, tearing, snapping, splattering, and moaning.
The horrendous cacophony was suddenly silenced by a final loud crack of wood as the door failed to hold back the injured stallion any longer. He stumbled until he fell against the opposite wall of the hallway and looked around frantically...but nothing was there. There was no blood, no Posey, no sovereign, nothing but the same empty hallway without a single sign of the struggle he had heard...and the same nurse. She was about two doors down the corridor following her usual clockwise route, and had not failed to notice the abundance of noise he had been making.
For once, Lance was actually relieved to see her, but that wouldn't make her catching up to him any less painful. Knowing that running away would only lead to her catching up to him he quickly glanced about trying to find a hiding place. He remembered there was a storage closet around the corner but he wouldn't reach it before she reached him. The room he'd just broken out of was still fairly well lit and now lacked a door so it would not do for a hiding spot either. That left the operating theater across from it, the entrance to which had been left in a splintery broken mess in the sovereign's wake after his first visit. Even though it too was missing a door, it was much darker, and much roomier. He switched off his light and limped inside, moving along the same wall as before to put some distance between himself and the door.
Through the deathly quiet he heard the barbed nurse's panting move down the hallway and linger in front of the door. She moved closer, perhaps sticking her head into the operating theater to look for him, though Lance obviously couldn't tell in the pitch black. After a few moments she abandoned the pursuit and resumed her patrol pattern, leaving him to safely catch his breath as his watch fell silent. He also figured turning his light back on wouldn't hurt either as long as he was careful where he pointed it. While the dark did keep him well hidden, it still didn't suit him if he had any say in the matter.
Lance clicked the light on and immediately recoiled. A drowning mare's corpse, quite possibly the same one he'd seen before in the basement, was lying there right in front of him. Her body bore an array of bruises making it look like she had been beaten to death. She was at the end of a streaked trail of blood suggesting somepony had dragged her inside quite recently. Since he had stumbled into the room in the dark there was no way he would have noticed before then, heck, he was lucky he hadn't tripped over her. After the initial shock wore off he also noticed the black inked note nailed onto her face.
"So there I was, minding my own business, and out of nowhere this stallion up and walks right into a very private room as though the bucking vault door wasn't a clear enough signal that he was not welcome there. This was even more interesting, because that meant he had gone to great lengths to get the key after all the trouble I went to in order to hide it. How did he find it I wonder? Why did he go inside where he wasn't welcome?
Then it hit me. Maybe he didn't know any better. Maybe this poor stupid stallion was simply unable to feel empathy for the feelings of others at all. I mean that would be strange since only very young and very stupid foals lack such capabilities, but it would explain a lot wouldn't it? Like how he took a lock off of a door he knew he shouldn't touch, or invaded my private room, even after I saved him and then took the extra step of taking that door away when it started showing him things he didn't want to see, those would both be explained by a pathological lacking of empathy.
I decided that I should give this stallion the benefit of the doubt. Since clearly his mind wasn't making him feel sympathy pains like it should have, it was up to me to make him feel those pains in its stead. Now maybe he knows what it feels like to have his private space invaded. Maybe next time he has the opportunity to do something he shouldn't, he'll remember how much it hurts me YOU THICK SKULLED INCONSIDERATE PIECE OF
I'm sorry, that wasn't necessary. You probably get the point by now anyway. But, just in case, I think I'll leave that room the way it is, so that both she and you have something to look back at if you ever forget the lesson in empathy you learned in there.
You're welcome by the way."
...
Lance silently got to his hooves and proceeded to direct a cold glare down at the dead, note laden drowning mare. It was the only expression of his anger he could afford at the time. You're welcome? You're welcome?! Beating him over the head with door 303 had been bad enough, now he was falsifying his memories and fooling him into thinking his wife was being torn to shreds, then expecting to be thanked for it?! Had he been a stallion of less discipline he may have given the drowning mare's corpse a good kick to vent his anger...but he could not afford such venting. He was being watched.
If this 'friendship' with the deaf colt cost having to endure emotional manipulation and obstruction, then he was perfectly happy being an enemy. But just as he had pondered before while trying to size up Rainbow Dash, true enemies didn't invite scrutiny by calling attention to themselves. Therefore, Lance was only going to keep going, and hope against hope that he would soon find the way to free his actual wife, get out of that hospital, and leave the wretched deaf colt to wallow in a pile of unbound chains and open locks.
The tactic of following behind the nurse in the dark had worked flawlessly before so he saw little reason not to use it again. Lance waited at the door with his flashlight off, grimacing slightly at the sounds he could still hear through the opposite wall, until the nurse passed. He silently followed her around two left turns, then stopped and let her limp away far enough to quiet his watch when he heard her make a third. After waiting a while to be safe before turning his light back on, he once more found himself right where he had intended.
It was a short trip around the corner to his right, and then he was at the exit door pushing it open. He stopped in fright once he had done so. The gurneys were back. All five of them were arranged in a neat row against the opposite wall, doing nothing. Lance was frozen in place, unsure of what to do. His watch had failed to alert him before the roller had emerged back in the day room, but prior to that there had been so many times when they had seemingly ignored him. There was one thing he knew for certain though; he wasn't going to get to the elevator any other way besides this hallway. He would just have to take a chance and hope the gurgling noise would be enough warning if they decided to attack again.
Lance crept into the hallway, watching them closely. They did nothing. He limped over to the elevator door and pressed the button, casting his gaze back at them as he waited for it to open. They still did nothing, and they persisted in doing nothing even as he hit the button for the basement, causing the doors to close and block the gurneys from sight. He took a seat, a confused and worried look on his face. It was not as though he had wanted to be attacked again but it was difficult to figure out how to deal with something so unpredictable. Before he had time to dwell on it he felt the elevator come to a halt and then stepped out after the door had opened.
During his trip to the intersection of the T shaped floor layout he thought to glance over to the opposite elevator. The first drowning mare's corpse was indeed absent, leaving nothing behind but the pool of blood it had been resting in. "Sick bastard used her twice," he muttered as he turned into the corridor with the three doors the the keyring in his bag would soon unlock. The most obvious needed fix was to replace the missing fuse in the electrical room so he opted to start there.
There were no terrifying sights waiting for him inside, it was only a plain albeit neglected electrical room. He had expected a generator of some sort but apparently it was elsewhere, leaving little else to the room aside from four fuse boxes along the opposite wall and a utility drawer to his right that stood open with empty shelves. Save for the far left fuse box, each of them were held shut with steel plates that were bolted into the cement wall behind them. Lance took a seat in front of the only accessible one, wincing as he did so. The last health drink wasn't going to last as long thanks to his ramming his way out of Operating Room 2. Now noting that he had even less incentive to waste time, he opened the fuse box and located the empty slot before retrieving the lock box that he had almost been melted over from his pack. Another few moments and the fuse clicked neatly into place, his success punctuated by the lock box it had resided within promptly and quietly burning to a pile of ash next to him.
"Next room then." While he didn't have anything in his rag tag excuse for an inventory that leaped out at him as the solution for either of the other rooms, he was sure he would figure something out.
He struggled back to his hooves and proceeded to the next door, the pump room. True to its name, there was a pump at the far right side of the room feeding a network of pipes that traveled along the wall before curving upward into the ceiling. It was currently inactive, though a small red light on the front panel indicated it was indeed getting power. Hoping for a simple solution Lance simply stepped forward and pressed the conspicuously green "on" button. The pump hummed to life and not a second later the flow of water in most of the pipes was drowned out by the sound of splashing behind him. Lance turned toward the wall and had little trouble tracing the cascade of water back up to the source of the problem.
In the web of pipes there was section conspicuously absent, now leaking a miniature torrent of water that was flowing along the subtly tilted floor toward a drain in the corner. As he stepped closer he started to realize that the length of the missing section and the width of the pipe itself were both stunningly familiar...
"Oh...no..." he said with another grimace as he pulled out his pipe, the only weapon with which he could currently defend himself. "Please don't fit, please don't fit, please don't fit," he muttered as he held the pipe up.
It fit. It fit perfectly.
Lance spent a long moment frowning at the solved problem in front of him before begrudgingly screwing the pipe into place. The flowing of water through the pipes around him was again audible now that the splashing noise was gone. Even though it was technically progress, he couldn't help but feel the sound was just mocking him and his new found disarmed status.
"Whatever's in the shower room pipe better be good," he grumbled as he made his way to the last door labeled 'Boiler Room'. He unlocked the door, the keyring burning to ash in his hoof the second he had withdrawn the key from the lock. After taking a moment to wipe the few bits of ash that persisted in sticking to his hoof, he made his way inside.
It was most definitely a room, and there was most certainly a boiler. This room was a bit more square in shape with the large, only very slightly rusted boiler occupying the entire left half. Despite the rust it still looked quite capable of serving its function, except that, judging by the temperature in the room, it was doing nothing of the sort. A cautious hoof placed on the outer surface only confirmed this further; it was completely lacking in heat. Lance backed off a few steps and looked about curiously, trying to find some way he could re-activate it even though he still wasn't sure how it was going to help him.
"Hello..." he muttered to himself as he limped over to a hinged panel near the floor on the right side of he device. The rust apparently hadn't gotten to it that badly since he was able to pull it open quite easily. After getting down to a lying position with a bit of difficulty, Lance shined his light inside. He could see a small central nozzle next to a series of larger nozzles that lead to the section beneath the main boiler tank that was contained within a heat shield. On the other side of the smaller nozzle was, much to Lance's relief, a button labeled 'Reset'. He was no boiler expert, but this set up looked very much like the sort of home based water heater he had tangled with a few times in the past. All he would have to do is light the small center nozzle then close the panel and turn the gas up without the risk of blowing himself into assorted, charred, amber and red colored bits.
It took him a few moments to locate the small lighter in his saddlebag. Once he had it firmly in hoof he flicked the flame on and held it over the small nozzle while reaching in with his other hoof and clicking the reset button. After a few button presses the flame caught and burned brightly, lighting up the inside of the machine a flickering orange. Lance closed the panel before proceeding to let out a pained groan from the effort of getting back to his hooves. The gas dial was not difficult to find, located just a bit above the panel he had just closed. Strangely enough there were no numbers he could use to set the temperature, only an on setting and an off setting. Seeing little point in waiting for the little flame inside to accidentally flicker out, he promptly turned it to the on position.
It worked, perhaps a little too well. Instead of the expected sound of a series of gas nozzles lighting aflame, the resulting sound bore more resemblance to a small explosion beneath the boiler tank. Lance shied away a step, fearing the machine was going to break open and unleash a gout of flame, but it held steady as the room temperature began to quickly creep upward. The lighter in his hoof also reduced itself to ashes, leaving him to shake ash from his hoof again in the wake of his success.
"Okay...that was worth doing...I guess," he only half reasoned as he turned and made his exit, the room already becoming too hot for comfort. His business in the basement concluded, he returned to the elevator, stepped inside, and hit the button for the top floor. There was an unguarded door and a functioning water valve awaiting him, and it wouldn't do to waste any more time. While he wasn't expecting bright lighting and cupcakes to be waiting for him up top, he at least hoped the gurneys had decided to move on by the time he arrived. Lance got his wish...sort of.
Instead of five gurneys, he was treated to the sight of another, much fresher looking trail of blood on the floor. As he followed it down the hall with his surgical light, he also saw that the pile of empty, bloodied stretchers had been tossed aside on both sides of the bars that were now broken and bent enough to make quite the large gap. The trail lead all the way back to and up the stairs that had first allowed he and Posey to enter, and poking his head around the corner revealed that it also went down the staircase that was just adjacent to him. With a tense gulp and another brief questioning of his sanity Lance followed it downward.
As he descended he wondered if this was the work of the grinning stalker, since making him follow trails of blood had been a major part of her behavior thus far. But that didn't fit. Not only was there way too much blood, but had it been her the bars above would have been cut, not bent and broken. The whole thing was too sloppy to evoke the deaf colt's presence either...which left one possibility that Lance really, really didn't like. This was only made worse as he saw the trail leading through the hole into the middle floor, right where he was headed.
It persisted in predicting his route as he moved further inward through the thankfully gurney-less outer corridor and into the central rectangular hall of patient rooms. The trail lead straight ahead and down the distant right turn, giving Lance the opportunity to divert along the other, much closer right turn and check the shower room first...but he quietly declined and continued following along anyway. If nothing else he needed to see where the nurse was and if he needed to avoid her.
Lance turned off his light again as he rounded the corner. As anticipated, the surgical lamp was now shining brightly and quite capably holding the nurse's attention, leaving the door she had been guarding unattended as she appeared to...nuzzle the lamp. Strange. He wasn't about to turn his light back on and risk her seeing another, moving light source appear, so instead he limped along with one hoof feeling at the wall to his left until he felt a door that was both actually a door and not boarded up. Lance felt around until he found the door knob and started to turn it.
Wait...
Did the blood trail lead inside? He couldn't tell in the dark...and such a thing would be very good for him to know. Figuring that advance warning was worth the risk he carefully pointed his light directly downward at the floor and switched it on. Yes...yes the blood trail was definitely leading inside. What was in there exactly...or rather, who was in there? As much as he suddenly didn't want to open the door he knew there was nothing to be done about it. He'd been lead to that door, and that meant he needed what was inside. Steeling himself for the worst he opened the door and pointed his light inside.
...
"Well...this could have been worse I suppose," he said under his breath.
Unceremoniously pushed into the corner of the floor was another drowning mare, this one much different than the one the deaf colt had been using to toy with him. Her limbs were gnarled and broken, and her body was ravaged by cuts, puncture wounds, and missing bits of skin that been messily torn off. Her blood was left in splatters all over the room, but one spot in particular on the wall commanded the most attention. It was a distinct hexagon drawn in her blood, centered around another ragged, folded piece of leather that was glued to the wall and held shut by very thin wire. Above it was another bit of large lettered writing, this time showing no signs of the writer having run out of 'ink'.
YOU LOVE ME
Somepony he most certainly did not love had been busy since trying to drown him...somepony was also resourceful enough to fly back to the surface and get some replacement 'paint'. On the bright side that somepony was nowhere to be seen or heard.
If there was anything useful in the room it would be in the improvised leather envelope. But as soon as he had stepped into the room his watch began buzzing. He cocked an eyebrow, looking over his shoulder and thinking that the nurse outside was too far away to trigger the watch. If it wasn't her...then that could only mean...oh goddess was she still alive?!
Lance took another step inward and the battered and broken drowning mare gave a hard convulsion and gag. She whimpered and whined pathetically between futile attempts to breathe, trying to get at him but unable to do anything but writhe uselessly on her broken, dysfunctional limbs. He cringed at the sight, the inexplicable sympathy arising again as he proceeded to move around her at a safe distance then pull the piece of leather open and retrieve the note inside. It was the same as the last two he'd found, written in jagged writing with dark red ink on torn paper.
"Stop Partway ThROUGh While They Split In You
And Give Us More To Cut
A Week Or Four Plus Two Days More
To Leave It In Your Gut"
This note was even more cryptic and disturbing than the last two...and he still had no idea what use they were supposed to be! He found the other two in his bag and placed the new one next to them. Even if he didn't know what to do with them he might as well keep them together so he could find them quickly if need be.
Another pained gag brought his attention back to the crippled drowning mare. She was still in the exact same position, her useless struggling more enthusiastic for his being nearer. The pain she was suffering was obvious, and unlike the nurses she would never heal that sort of damage. Putting her out of her misery would have left him somewhat more at ease about the situation, but since he was lacking both his pipe and a pair of buck worthy back legs his only options to do that were all likely to get him sliced up some more. He couldn't risk it.
"Sorry..." he said quietly as he switched his light off and exited the room with a sigh. Lance moved right along the hall, feeling his way through the dark again until he reached the corner and moved out of the nurse's potential line of sight. He clicked his light back on and headed for the shower room, hoping that the lingering smell from the adjacent bathing room would be overpowered by the smell of the rampant mold. Never before would he have ever anticipated being in a situation where he was hoping to smell mold but there he was.
Thankfully he was right, he couldn't detect a whiff of the stench that had almost unmade him. Still, he didn't want to smell the mold for long either so he hobbled his way over to the valve without delay and gave it a few good turns. The water in the pipe began moving swiftly and within seconds he heard the hollow thump of a tennis ball sized off white sphere hitting what was left of the floor tiles and rolling toward the center of a room until it bumped into one of the fungal roots. He picked it up and gave it a brief inspection...finding that the object looked to be composed of very old bone tissue...
...
All recent things considered, Lance found himself unable to feel anything but apathy towards the inexplicably biological construction of the sphere and merely tossed it in his bag. Obviously there was something inside that the layer of bone was supposed to protect from the elements but he could break it open it later.
Two down, one to go. He had to find some way of getting the other sphere inside of the ice column below without freezing to...was the room filling with steam? Lance turned back to look at the pipe. The water flowing out of it was steaming quite energetically, probably thanks to the boiler he'd taken the time to turn on. It reminded him how much he longed for a good shower and a fresh set of bandages...but he wasn't about to trust any of the water from these pipes. As he moved closer the amount of heat he felt also made it quite clear that the water was more than hot enough to horribly scald anypony who dared stick their hoof in. Then it finally struck him, the ice column below and the scalding water connecting in a very obvious way to the thermos waiting in his bag.
Lance pulled out the thermos, unscrewed the cap, and then very carefully held it at an angle beneath the pipe so that some of the water flowed inside while keeping his hoof at a safe distance. Once it began overflowing he just as carefully replaced the cap, not feeling quite as sure of his plan as he had been a second ago. It was only an average sized thermos, even if the water inside was burning hot, how much could he hope to accomplish with so little? But, regardless of his doubts, it was still the only lead he had left, it was worth checking out. He made his way back to the stairwell then down to the improvised lift, fortunately finding that his lift pass was good for another trip.
He soon found himself standing in the cafeteria at the edge of the layer of frost on the dirt, pondering his problem intensely. How could he possibly melt so much ice with so little water? Lance had to think of some way to do it, some very quick way that would get him in and out of the penetrating cold as fast as possible. Was the trick that he had to take multiple trips up and down? No, that wasn't it. The water from one thermosful would surely freeze while he was getting another and make the problem even worse.
"Wait...I don't have to melt the ice..." he said before pushing forward into the kitchen. It didn't take long for the cold to start getting to him, especially with the layer of moisture the steam from the shower room had left on his coat. But it worried him little, this would not take long. As soon as he had the ice column in sight he limped over, pulled out the thermos, then opened it before splashing its entire contents on the surface of the ice at once, trying to cover as large an area as possible.
The effect was instantaneous. Cracks tore through the now steaming column as the sudden difference in temperature compromised the crystal clear ice, like luke-warm water being poured into a glass full of fresh ice, only on a much more extreme scale.
"...I have to break it!" he declared triumphantly as he proceeded to slam the fairly solid thermos against the side of the cracked section. It didn't break, but the sound of the cracks creeping deeper was encouraging. He struck again, a third time, and a fourth time before the ice finally shattered in a hail of frigid chunks that released the orb inside. Lance managed to grab it before it could roll beneath one of the counters and proceeded to make a hasty exit before any of the blood in his limbs could freeze.
Warming himself took even longer this time, but that was fine by him. He had two new items to look over, and hopefully their contents would prove more useful than the note the nurse upstairs had been guarding. Both orbs were identical in every way, right down to the odd bone material that seemed to have been grown that way instead of being constructed. They even had seams reminiscent of a skull, but of what use would such a skull have been to any sort of creature at all when it had nothing in the way of holes for veins or nerves? Lance shook himself out of his wondering, reminding himself that time was still of the essence and his curiosity over such biological oddities could wait. He needed what was inside of them.
Once more taking note of the seams, he got an idea that seemed harmless enough to try. Lance took one of the orbs in each hoof, positioned them so that their seams lined up, and then smashed them together as hard as he could. They both split open with a hollow pop...letting two leather pouches held closed with fine wire drop onto the dirt in front of him.
"Oh no..." he groaned. He pulled each pouch open, and as he had feared they both contained crumpled up notes in dark red ink.
"Split In Two Down To Your Throat
Sever Hooves And SLIcE Through Neck
Stuff Them In And Sew You Shut"
"Cuffs On Hooves
HUnG Upside DOWn
Sawed In Half
Head Saved For Last"
He let out a long, tired sigh. After all the time, work, and pain he had endured, all it had gotten him was a series of five cryptic, threatening notes. There were no keys left. He'd found no codes of any kind. All of his leads had been exhausted, as had he. It was only some ridiculous sense of invested effort that made him put the last two notes into his bag next to the three others before he wearily got back up and returned to the lift.
The only thing left unsolved was the lock box in the vault over which the deaf colt was so protective. When Lance finally reached the vault door it was closed but, despite the deaf colt's zeal, the horizontal rods remained retracted, leaving the door unlocked. Strange, one would think after how poorly his 'benefactor' had reacted to it being opened in the first place that it would be locked tight. Oh well, he no longer had the key for it anyway, so it was better that it had remained unlocked instead of sealing him out forever.
He pushed the hefty door inward again, but rather than the muted groans from the other side of the glass he had been expecting, he heard muffled, vaguely feminine cries of pain and the unmistakable cracking of bone. Lance limped a few steps toward the glass to see what the source of the noise was only to have his watch begin buzzing and blood run cold when a familiar ear-less, faceless colt's head rose into view behind the glass as the sounds of suffering ceased. Though it was impossible to tell what it was exactly through the distortion behind the glass, Lance saw a black vapor dissipating from where the deaf colt's mouth would normally be.
The two stared one another down for a few moments before the deaf colt descended again. The door then slammed shut with a loud clang behind Lance, startling him into turning around and seeing the note now attached to the inside of the door with what resembled a railroad spike.
"You know I'm flattered you want to get my attention so badly, even if it means ENRAGING ME, but really this is just getting pathetic.
How old are you? How old are you, and you're acting like this? You don't consider my feelings, you don't feel gratitude, you don't even think 'hey, maybe I'll close the door behind me', all you see is what you want. You are like a spoiled child crying out for attention. I'm not going to teach you anything by giving it to you though. So you know what? Stand there and watch all you like.
Petulant brat."
Lance turned round again, realizing that the pained lamentation and fracturing of bone had resumed. He did not recognize the voice, nor did it even sound like that of a normal pony. The important thing was that the deaf colt was not currently paying him any more attention, and that suited him fine...it was not as if he had any idea what to do anyway. With a dearth of any other options, Lance limped over and settled down in front of the lock box that was still welded solidly to the floor. The combination lock stared back at him, still at the initial position of "0,0,0,0,0,0". He stared at it in exhaustion, and with no real thought behind the action switched it to "1,0,0,0,0,0" and hit the button. Predictably, Lance had failed to stumble upon the most bone headed simple combination in the history of combinations, and it remained locked. He let out another weary sigh, closing his eyes briefly.
"This isn't going to work..." If all he could do was guess combinations, he could pretty much plan for both he and Posey to die of deprivation and infection before he got anywhere near the correct answer. It was a bad plan and he thus abandoned it, starting to dig through his bag again looking for even the slightest of alternate leads. Also predictably, no magic slips of paper that just happened to have the code written on them had spontaneously appeared in his bag since last he checked. The only things from the hospital he still had were the red inked notes...
"...Fine, let's look at you," he said to himself with a grumble as though somepony had been pestering him about something incessantly for a long time. On closer inspection he concluded that...the writer's hoof writing and grammar were both atrocious. They were adequate in so much that he could tell what the words were and whether each letter was capitalized, but beyond that it was a mess. Almost every word was capitalized for absolutely no discernible reason, save for certain words that were formed almost exclusively from capitalized letters, save for one or two letters in each-
...
Feeling a metaphorical hook catch, Lance took another look over each of the notes. One line in particular seemed to confirm his suspicions:
"HUnG Upside DOWn
In each note, all the words that were fully capitalized contained the same lower case letter. "Okay...that has to mean something..." He pulled his red marker out and reviewed each of the notes again, writing the special lower case letter down below the text of each.
"N...O...H...P...C...wait a minute...." Save for the P, Lance had seen each of those letters in a position of significance twice before. Taking a moment to retrieve the bit of paper he'd written the apartment's saint sequence on, he confirmed that these were the same 'useless' letters from before. So...what did that mean exactly?
"Five Steps Backwards..."
"...Useless pERFECTION"
There had been no P in the saints sequence, but alphabetically it was the letter directly after O. The "Five Steps" bit also made that particular note sound like a starting point. Did that mean the letters were an indication of how to arrange the notes? Having little else to try, Lance took a moment rearranging the notes into the same alphabetical order as before; C, H, N, O, P.
"What next?" he asked himself. There were many ways the notes could be interpreted but his needs of the moment helped trim a great many of them away. Lance needed a number to unlock the box, and the notes were the only thing he had left. If he couldn't somehow derive a number from them, they were useless to him, so numbers were the only logical thing to look for. Assuming the P note was the starting point, Lance moved back to the O note:
"No Matter What YoU LoSE
I'll Still Hurt YoU Twice As Much."
Twice as much, meaning he had to double something. What had he lost that could be summed up in a neat little number though? He spent a few seconds thinking it over before the obvious answer came to him.
"Two wings..." he said while glancing back at his wing stumps. He doubled that number then entered it as the far right number on the lock.
1 0 0 0 0 4
"Cuffs On Hooves
HUnG Upside DOWn
Sawed In Half
Head Saved For Last"
This one was a bit easier as Lance now had a number to work with. There was only seemed to be one mathematically relevant bit too, indicating that he take his 4 and saw it in half.
1 0 0 0 2 4
"Stop Partway ThROUGh While They Split In You
And Give Us More To Cut
A Week Or Four Plus Two Days More
To Leave It In Your Gut"
The image of a saw being left to fester in his gut for so long made Lance cringe a little. Other than that it seemed fairly clear, he split 2 into 1, and then...well, it said 'plus' so he supposed that meant adding the indicated 30 for...
"No that's not right," he muttered as he looked it over again. 'While They Split In You And Give Us More to Cut' made him think he had almost fallen for a trick. A wound was being discussed, and the only things that could both split and create 'more to cut' in a wound were cells, which used that as a method of multiplying. So it instead of adding 1 to 30, he proceeded to multiply 2 by 30.
1 0 6 0 2 4
"Split In Two Down To Your Throat
Sever Hooves And SLIcE Through Neck
Stuff Them In And Sew You Shut"
There was only one note after this one, he was close to the...wait, what? He had found five notes, where had the sixth one come from?
"WHERE DID YOU GET THOSE?!"
Lance looked up to see the deaf colt paying him quite the rapt bit of attention despite his earlier words. The sight only made him even more certain he was onto something, encouraging him to brush his frantically written note aside and resume his work.
The 'split in two' in this note left Lance little in the ways of alternate interpretations, so he divided his 60 down to 30. After that, he noted the 5 total extremities that had been cut off, and how they had been 'stuffed in', obviously alluding to basic addition, which left him with his final number.
3 5 6 0 2 4
Ignoring the sound of the deaf colt's hoof banging against he glass in another bid to get his attention, Lance finally something resembling high hopes as he pressed the button to the side of the combination lock again. This time he was rewarded with the particularly satisfying click of the outer latch flipping open, giving him free reign to take what was inside the lock box. The first thing that greeted him upon opening it was another note resting atop his actual prize:
"LEAVE IT HERE. LEAVE. IT. HERE. PLEASE."
The new note proved about as effective an obstacle as the last. After he had, perhaps a bit spitefully, crumbled the note and thrown it over his shoulder, he picked up the very old looking key beneath it. The design was positively ancient, and looked more like it belonged in an old style castle dungeon or prison than in a hospital...
...rather similar to that door at the far end of the basement now that he thought of it...
His next destination quite obvious, Lance deposited the key in his bag, got up, and turned back toward the door, pausing as he realized the note had changed.
"You look tired...you should really take a break and rest."
"Not going to happen," Lance replied, pulling the vault door open and immediately regretting it. His watch went from the moderate buzz of 'keep an eye out' straight to the harsh mechanical screech of 'you are probably going to die now' as the open door revealed at least seven barbed nurses standing outside that all immediately began pushing their way in. He desperately tried to close the door again, but before he could manage to start moving the heavy metal plate in the opposite direction one of nurses lunged for him, forcing him to stumble backwards to avoid her. The nurses spread out as they entered and by the time Lance had regained his balance they had him surrounded...but, oddly enough they were not advancing. They weren't even looking at him. Instead their collective eyeless gaze seemed to fall upon something directly behind him as he started to hear a ringing in his ears.
He looked back over his shoulder to see the smock clad, bandage covered visage of the deaf colt directly behind him, somehow having gone through the glass while Lance had been looking away. He barely had time to react before his skull was rattled by the strike of his front hoof....
------
Lance's eyes slowly drifted open. He found himself lying in an unfamiliar bed inside of an unfamiliar room, his muscles still pleasantly sore from certain activities that had been indulged before having fallen asleep. His ears twitched and his eyes shot fully open as he heard a mare softly sobbing behind him, his chest gripped with dread as he felt a deep sense that he had done something horrible wrong. Rolling over, he saw the mare in question; a white coated, blonde maned pegasus mare seated on the other side of the bed facing away from him, her front hooves protectively gripping her shoulders as she quietly wept.
He sat up in bed, finding himself at a loss regarding what to do. While he obviously felt the need to comfort her, there was also another nagging feeling keeping him away, as though he knew it would do more harm than good, but not why. As the seconds ticked by and turned into minutes though, his hesitation waned, replaced by the guilt of just leaving her there crying alone. He reached a hoof out to touch her reassuringly on the shoulder.
She reacted the instant his hoof made contact, screaming at the top her lungs as if he'd just stabbed a red hot spike through her shoulder. With a flap of her wings she fled to the corner of the room, beginning to frantically scrape at the walls in a panicked attempt to escape, not daring to look back at him as a red blemish at the spot where he had touched her began to grow and bleed. It soon opened into a full on wound, blood pouring down her back as the flesh inside began to visibly rot. Her screams grew more desperate and distorted as more and more of her body was consumed by the spreading decay.
------
Lance came back to reality mid stumble, barely managing to avoid falling over. Half of his face was numb, the nurses still stood at attention, and the deaf colt was already drawing his hoof back for another blow, having already figured out he wasn't falling down yet.
"I knew it...it was only a nightmare you showed me!" he shouted defiantly, trying to overcome the ringing in his ears as he felt his body growing mysteriously weak. "It wasn't my memory at all-" his continued proclamation was cut short by another strike of a front hoof...
------
"Here you go Mr. Strongshy, congratulations," the doctor said with a smile as he handed Lance his newborn daughter.
"Oh my gosh Lance...she's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen..." Posey said, joy overcoming her fatigue as she lie panting in exhaustion on the delivery room table, tears setting her eyes to sparkling as she looked at the little pink and yellow angel in her husband's hooves.
Lance looked down fondly for a moment at his daughter...then looked toward his wife, saying nothing.
"...Lance?" she prodded, thinking he was perhaps too overcome to think of anything to say. Then she realized the rest of the medical ponies in the room were also staring at her, smiling softly while otherwise doing nothing. Shouldn't they have been checking over their daughter to make sure she was healthy, or at the very least drying her off and wrapping her in a blanket?
...
"What's...what's wrong...what are you all doing?" she asked nervously at their continued silence.
Lance shifted his gaze toward the door, at which point a nurse standing near it reached over and locked it while never looking away from his wife.
"Why are you locking the door?" Posey's voice was beginning to cross over from nervous into outright distressed at the strange behavior around her. "Wh-hey!" she weakly protested as a pair of orderlies then pinned her to the bed. "What's going on Lance?!"
He looked back at her again, smiling a moment longer before he looked back down at their daughter...and placed a hoof over her snout, covering her mouth and nose and preventing her from breathing.
"Lance...Lance what are you doing?!" she cried in alarm, starting to try and struggle against the orderlies who smiled down at her. "Stop it!"
Lance ignored her, watching as his daughter started to ineffectually push against his hoof, her body running low on oxygen.
"Lance stop it! Bucking stop it! What are you doing?!" Tears started running down her cheeks again, these ones anything but happy as she tried with all her might to push the orderlies off of her. But the birth and the drugs had taken too much out of her, she was not going to be escaping their grip. "You're killing her! You're killing our baby!" she screamed in terror and desperation as the hospital staff around her continued to do nothing to stop him.
As his daughter slipped out of consciousness he finally looked back at his wife, the same placid grin on his face as he spoke. "It's okay Honey...this way I get to keep you."
Posey was left to wail and sob in futility, struggling to the last against the serenely beaming hospital staff as she watched her baby girl finally shudder and die in Lance's hooves.
------
There was no stumbling or recovering this time. Something inside Lance had been cut to the core, and it was all he could do to unceremoniously collapse to the floor in a wretched heap from the force of the blow. A sound wanted to come out of his mouth but it caught painfully in his throat, vision once more clouded by tears. He was crying...but why? It...it had merely been another of his repressed dreams right? Besides, what did he care about the fate of a monster? Why should he voluntary shed a single tear over her after what she had taken Posey's life and ruined his?!
He tried to get up but his body was no longer cooperating. His limbs were now so heavy that it took all of his remaining strength just to wipe the tears from his eyes. The ringing in his ears had effectively drowned out all other sound, and the pain of his injuries was receding into a numbness that was spreading through his entire body. He was so tired. Within moments he couldn't even form half a thought anymore as the malaise besetting him began tugging down on his eyelids. Before they closed entirely he managed to catch a glimpse of a note resting right in front of his face.
"No...really...I insist."
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I don't usually tell fanfiction writers this, but...
You're a master of your craft.
Yes
Damn, guy's got some issues.
So many solved puzzles. I think lance has leveled up by now
Reality is going to come smashing down around Lance very soon, and its going to be EPIC.
He is the anti-hero, things are going to get very, very bad for him...and I can't wait.
You know what really makes my day? When I discover that one of those fucking awesome stories I followed on Deviantart are also uploaded in full on the much better and more convenient fiction site where I can read all the chapters in a single part and without the ugly green background, and that there's a new chapter I haven't read yet here to boot.
I really like those days.
DANNYJ HOLY
I ALMOST feel sorry for Lance... almost.
"
"I sure as fuck don't! I'm siding with the deaf colt on this one!
I wonder what he represents...?
"Who cares, as long as he makes that ass-hat suffer then I like him!"
*upload more soon please*
It certainly seems the position of villain is very flaccid—is the broken pony whose tragic love-life ruined his own daughter's childhood, or is it the representations of his own fear and guilt, returning to torment him until he repents?
Quite frankly, I think the good doctor is more of an Anti-hero.
Hopefully, he will find the truth.
I shall read on!
That Deaf Colt sure is a strange one...not really sure what to think of him, still.
Grammar and spelling issues are more present in this chapter than any of the previous ones, thus far. Otherwise, this is still a good read! Oh, the suspense!
If only he had put P O N C H O S in the box. Then he could've gotten the secret joke ending!
Okay, here's how I see it.
The Sovereign: how Lance see's his daughter.
The Deft Coalt: Lance's arragence and refusal to accept responsibility for his crimes.
The Rollers: All of the patients he failed to save.
The Drowning Mares: His guilt of trying to drown Fluttershy.
The Barbed Nurses: His regrets towards Softcure.
The Scavenger: His view of self worth and the early phases of his relationship with Posey.
I love the code puzzle. How’d you come up with it?
9308369
Uh... wow, that was a long time ago now. I don't remember any particular one thing that inspired it or anything, I kind of just knew what answer I wanted it to come to and worked backwards from there... probably complicating things a little too much in retrospect. I'm actually surprised somebody liked it, most of the feedback I get on the puzzle was pointing out that it required Lance to practically employ 1960s Adam West Batman logic to solve it!
Now it's really fucking with him.