The House on the Hill

by BradyBunch

The Betrayal

The first one to stop screaming was Applejack. Her voice soon cut above the others: “All righ’, everypony! Pipe DOWN!”

The others promptly obeyed, though it took a few moments for each one.

“Gettin’ our tails in a twist ain’t gonna help us get outta here,” Applejack reasoned with the rest of the girls. Their eyesight was gradually improving in the darkness enough that they could see each other’s outlines. “Let’s try an’ see if th’ door’ll budge.”

Fluttershy sped to the doorknob and jiggled it a few times in every direction. “It’s locked!”

“And I doubt a simple kick will be enough to take it down,” Twilight reasoned. “There’s obviously something alive and powerful in here. Something malevolent. Until we root it out, we can’t leave. It’ll just keep us in here and pick us off, so the quicker we destroy it, the better.”

“All right! Butt-kicking time!” Rainbow cheered.

“Are you sure that’s the right kind of attitude to have?” Rarity asked in a hush.

“Of course not!” Rainbow reasoned. “But I’m not gonna give him the satisfaction!” She turned to look down the endless hall. “You hear that?” she yelled into the abyss. “I’m comin’ for you, buddy!”

“Here’s the plan,” Twilight spoke up. “We’re in this together, whether we like it or not. So we’ll explore the house. We’ll come across something suspicious sooner or later.”

Feeling their way down the wide hall in one conglomerated body, the first room they came to was on their left. The ponies filed in one by one.

Shelves lined the walls on every side, filled with dust-caked tomes. On the far opposite end, a cold marble fireplace was strewn in cobwebs. Two couches and a reading chair were in the center, and an elegant glass chandelier dangled from the ceiling.

“This seems like as good a place to start as any,” Twilight remarked, squinting in the dark at the books. “Fluttershy, see if you can get that fireplace started.”

As it turned out, it needed no flint and steel. At the turn of a switch among the moldy logs, flames shot from hidden tubes and ignited the fuel. Some lanterns from the hall were quickly brought in and promptly lit, and soon the library was the most well-lit room in the house. Orange glows illuminated their surroundings and cast everything not lighted into dark shadow.

After some time of the ponies searching among the volumes, Twilight let out a groan of frustration and slammed a book back on its shelf. “These are all just novels!”

“You’d think there would be a book about paranormal activity somewhere in here,” Rainbow said distastefully, skimming through another book before putting it back.

“The more time we waste here, the sooner we’re all going to get killed!” Fluttershy whimpered, sinking into a ball on a musty old couch.

“Let’s make this a safe spot for now,” Rarity suggested, coming behind Fluttershy to rub her shoulders. “We can come back here after we explore more.”

“But where should we go?” Applejack asked.

“Let’s just go to the end of the hall!” Pinkie piped up.

“I’ve got no better ideas,” Twilight conceded. “Let’s take those lanterns and get out of here.”

Back in the hall, now illuminated by the glow of lanterns, the ponies could see that every furnishing was rich. The walls were lined with gorgeous wood, and pastel paintings of plains and rivers were spaced evenly throughout the hall. Doorless openings on both sides of the wide hall led into great, shadowy rooms. About halfway, they saw a staircase open up on either end and meet together on a balcony overlooking the hall, and the ceiling had expanded to great heights.

“Whoever lived here before must have been one heck of a guy,” Applejack commented, eyes wide to fully take in the exquisite detail, even if marred by dust.

“Do you think we can search for records?” Rarity suggested to no one in particular, every step creaking on the ancient planks. “If somepony rich lived here in the past, there would have been some kind of recording in a legister.”

“Or personal items,” Twilight added on. “Perhaps their bedroom! Great idea, Rarity.”

“So upstairs we go-OOO?!” Pinkie screamed at the end of her sentence as the floor beneath her cracked and collapsed.

Rainbow and Fluttershy reacted quickly, grabbing Twilight and Applejack. But Rarity and Pinkie disappeared, screaming as they were sucked down a narrow chute just barely bigger than their bodies just beneath the hole. A lantern shattered and went dark.

“Rarity! Pinkie!” Fluttershy cried, dropping Twilight and flying to the edge of the great hole. But they were already gone.

“No,” Applejack whispered as she was dropped by a stunned Rainbow Dash. “No…”

“Hey!” Rainbow yelled into the hole, voice almost breaking. “Can you hear me?... Hello…?”

Two yelps reached up from the narrow opening. The first voice made a few echoey frets, followed by, “Oh, it’s really quite filthy down here!”

“That was fun!” the second voice drifted up, more bubbly than the first. “It was like a slide!”

“Oh, thank heavens! You’re alive!” Fluttershy praised, eyes shaking with unshed tears.

“Can you make your way back up?” Twilight asked.

“I don’t think so!” the unseen Rarity yelled in response. “The chute’s far too steep and slippery!”

“I’ll go in and get them!” Fluttershy vowed, spreading her wings.

“You can’t fly down there!” Twilight discouraged, holding her back. “It’s too narrow!”

“Well, we can’t just leave ‘em down there!” Applejack added.

“What on earth do you expect us to do?” the faraway Rarity yelled, echoing.

“You explore and find the stairs to the basement,” Twilight yelled down. “We’ll be upstairs, but head to the library once you’re clear! We’ll meet you there!”

“On it, Twi!” Pinkie replied.

Twilight turned her attention to the heaving Fluttershy, the wild-looking Rainbow, and the apprehensive Applejack. “We have to find a way. That means trusting them and doing our own job.”

Applejack was the first to nod in reply. “R-righ’. ‘Til we do what we need to, ain’t nopony gettin’ outta here.”

“Rainbow?” Twilight asked next.

Rainbow looked disheveled, but otherwise okay. “Fine...Fluttershy?”

Fluttershy was the most distressed of all of them, to be expected. A tremor had overtaken her legs, shaking her entire body. But she gave a tight nod, looking at the ground anxiously.

“Then let’s go,” Twilight ordered. “They’ll be okay.”

She turned to go back to the stairs, but it was also so no one could hear her whisper, “They have to be.”

---

The small basement landing was also a square room where the coal from a coal chute was piled, in preparation to enter the furnace in a room just to their left. Pinkie’s, but more notably Rarity’s coats were stained in a dark hue from the coal that had broken their fall. The intense glow from the furnace next door provided them with enough light to see their surroundings.

“Where should we go?” Pinkie burbled, cheerful as ever.

“Oh, the horror!” Rarity bemoaned, brushing her greyed coat. “I’ve got coal dust absolutely everywhere!”

“That’s… not a direction,” Pinkie observed.

“Correct, Pinkie, it’s not a direction. I figured that part out for myself, surprisingly enough.”

“Let’s go this way,” Pinkie suggested, pointing to the right, but in the process cracking something beneath her hoof, which she bent down to examine in the feeble orange light.

It was a hollow skull. A unicorn skull.

Pinkie stumbled back in shock. Rarity, seeing what it was, shrieked and fell on her back on the pile of coal. “PINKIE! It’s…! It’s a…!”

And then they noticed more of them among the coal, about a dozen, lying dashed to pieces but still recognizable. They were blackened and dusty, with some rats inside them, gnawing at what little specks of flesh remained attached to the bone.

“W-we aren’t the first ones down here!” Rarity shivered, frozen stiff. “The missing villagers! We’re gonna DIII-hi-hi-hiiiie!” she wept.

Weak.

Pinkie perked up. “What?”

“I said, darling, we’re going to die! Didn’t you get it the first time?!”

“No, the other thing.”

“What other thing? Y-you must be going mad! I’m getting out of here!” And she sped to the doorway on the right.

She’s weak. You’re strong. Crush her!

It was the authority in his tone, and the choking cold fear of failure it elicited, that drove Pinkie into action. A cold tendril slipped down her throat and snaked in coils in her stomach. It was going to kill Pinkie, and kill Rarity as well! And then the rest of the ponies in the house! The proof was in the bones at her hooves!

Pinkie’s heart wrenched at the prospect. But she needed to do it.

She picked up a piece of coal and rushed to Rarity, who halfway turned at her approach. “Pinkie, da-”

Pinkie slammed the rock into Rarity’s forehead, knocking her against the doorway as well. Pinkie’s forearms hooked around Rarity’s armpits, and she dragged her back into the coal room. Rarity, bleeding from the head, was struggling violently, shouting to let her go.

But Pinkie couldn’t do that. The rest of her friends’ lives were on the line. If she could save them all by just doing this-!

“Please!” Rarity screamed, kicking against the floor violently, sending coal and bones flying. “Pinkie! What’s the matter with you?! HELP! HELP MEEE!”

Pinkie shut her pleas out. They would only make things harder.

The furnace room had its massive cast iron oven sunken into the floor with a pipe at its tippy top, with only a hole in the exposed metal as a place to shovel coal and allow oxygen in. Pinkie dragged Rarity into the furnace room and examined this hole. It was perfect.

“No! No, please! Stop it!” Rarity hyperventilated, struggling harder than ever, but Pinkie’s mind was made up.

As she hurled a screaming Rarity to the furnace hole, her arms found the sides, catching her just before plunging to her fiery doom. The heat made her back fur singe. “I don’t want to die! Please! Pinkie, stop it!”

“No,” Pinkie forlornly replied. “For our friend’s sake, one of us has to burn.”

Pinkie reared up and lunged at Rarity to push her in. But Rarity pushed herself off the furnace and dove at the floor right before Pinkie made contact with her, and instead of pushing Rarity into the fiery hole, Pinkie tumbled in.

She scrabbled at the edge of the metal furnace ledge, but her grip was too weak and slipped. And Pinkie, screaming as much as Rarity had, fell into the fires of hell.

Rarity’s eyes were barely open to protect from the intense heat and light when she looked inside the furnace. But she couldn’t even see an outline of her incinerated body, and turned away sadly, trembling like a house of cards.

“Good!”

Rarity stumbled back. Materializing in the doorway was an opaque, ghostly pale head amid a foggy body of mist. Two wheels covered with blinking eyes spun like hula hoops around the face. It was plain and smooth, like porcelain, every last one of the eyes was black and empty, and though his lips looked effeminate and full, the deep growl coming from them was unmistakably male.

“It seems I misjudged you. You shall serve my purposes just fine.”

Comments

[SnowOriole]

Oooo. That was pretty sick.