Pop!
Lyra Grows Fingers
“Like rats, for example,” said Lyra.
“Vile little creatures. Why would you want to be like a rat?” Bon-Bon grimaced, taking a cutting board from beside the stove.
The two ponies were making dinner, and, much to Bon-Bon's chagrin, Lyra had once again steered the conversation in the direction of hypotheticals.
“Actually, for the record, fancy rats are really clean. I'm just saying that–”
“Here, chop this celery. And don't get any sewage on it, please,” said Bon-Bon.
“Oh, hilarious.” Lyra pulled a chef's knife from drawer and set to work, holding it rather shakily in her horn field so that she could still talk. “See? This is what I mean. It would be so much easier if we had limbs with fingers instead of hooves. Like rats!”
“They'd just get in the way. You'd end up lopping them off or something. Besides, the fact of the matter is the we have hooves, and idle speculation isn't gonna change that.” Bon-Bon dropped vegetables into a saucepan.
“For Celestia's sake, Bon-Bon, why do you always have to be so –” In a moment of distraction, Lyra's horn field flickered, and the knife dropped, blade glancing off her right shoulder and opening the skin on the way to the floor. Lyra yelped and slapped her hoof over the wound.
Bon-Bon dropped what she was doing and rushed over. “Oh great, look what you've done now. Here, move your hoof. Let me look at it … Okay, it doesn't seem too bad. Go upstairs and clean it. I'll finish dinner.”
“But –”
“Now.”
Lyra grumbled but conceded. She trotted upstairs, leaving a muttering Bon-Bon in the kitchen. By the time she reached the top of the stairs, she was thinking about fingers again. The accident had become just another mundane annoyance.
In the bathroom Lyra washed the wound and inspected it in the mirror. Shallow, about three inches long. It had already stopped bleeding. Everything was fine, then. She'd been lucky. Thus assured, her thoughts were once again elsewhere while she taped gauze over the wound.
*
Lyra lay daydreaming on the floor of the lounge while Bon-Bon read. The rest of the evening had been uneventful, save for Bon-Bon snapping when Lyra kept asking her odd questions.
“I think I'm going to go to bed,” said Bon-Bon, closing the book.
“'Kay. I'll be up in a little bit,” said Lyra.
Bon-Bon smiled and ruffled Lyra's mane. “Alright, lass,” she said. “Don't stay up all night again, all right? You have students coming round tomorrow.”
“Oh yeah. Heh. What would I do without you?” Lyra took Bon-Bon's hoof.
“Living on the streets unable to remember how you got there, probably. How's the shoulder doing?”
Lyra glanced at the gauze, white and unstained. “It doesn't hurt any more. Actually, I'd forgotten about it.”
Bon-Bon rolled her eyes. “Well, there's a surprise. Goodnight, anyway.” The two nuzzled for a brief moment.
After Bon-Bon had gone upstairs, Lyra sat poking at her shoulder. There was a lump under the gauze, but it didn't hurt all all. Curiosity aroused, she got up, walked over to the mirror in the hallway, and pulled the dressing from her shoulder.
The cut was still there, livid but dry. But now it lay across a lump … no, four lumps in a row the length of the cut. Lyra poked them again. They were hard. It felt like there were chunks of bone just beneath the skin. That was disconcerting. Was there an infection? Had she not cleaned it properly? She couldn't remember if she had or not.
Lyra made a mental note. Then she remembered some earlier advice (and gentle chiding) from Bon-Bon and grabbed a post-it from the table beside the mirror to make a physical note instead: See doctor about freaky shoulder thing. Satisfied, she stuck the note on the mirror, put the issue out of her mind, and went to bed.
*
Lyra woke bathed in sunlight. Eyes still closed, she reached out a hoof to the other side of the bed and found it empty. Bon-Bon had already left, but not before opening the curtains. Muttering, Lyra squinted at the bedside clock. It was 9.30. Enough time for for a snooze before having to work on her lesson plans.
Lyra sighed contentedly and rolled over to take advantage of the full width of the bed. Something rubbed against her shoulder. She shifted position. There was still an uncomfortable pressure there. Slightly annoyed, but still not willing to go to the trouble of opening her eyes, she felt the area with her hoof to see what the problem was.
Then she leapt out of bed.
The lump on her shoulder had grown and now felt very odd indeed. Touching it sent shivers up her spine. She took a moment to slow her breathing and calm herself from the unpleasant shock. Then she walked to the bathroom to investigate.
When she saw her shoulder in the mirror, Lyra's hooves went out from under her. If one was being charitable, one might say she had tried to leap backwards, slipped, and gone sprawling on the linoleum floor. She didn't mean to. It was pure animal reaction. As she lay there, gasping and almost mewling, it struck her that she couldn't recall what about her shoulder had sparked such a reaction.
You woke up quickly, she told herself. Just the remnant of a creepy forgotten dream. That happens, right? There's nothing there really. Just a cut from a perfectly mundane accident. She peered up at the mirror, saw the ceiling reflected in it. A perfectly normal ceiling seen through a perfectly normal mirror. Her throat felt tight and she was shivering. She didn't want to look at her shoulder again.
She let out a small, barking laugh. This was absurd! Filled with dread over a mirror, for pony's sake! Slowly she rose, forced herself into a standing position, and looked at the reflection of her shoulder again.
This time Lyra didn't jump, or slip, or do anything that might be charitably interpreted as such. She just froze, locked into a daze as she studied the reflection.
The cut on her shoulder was livid. It had opened again. It still wasn't bleeding, and it didn't hurt. But through it, from beneath the skin, sprouted four fleshy protuberances, twitching, an inch and a half. They were covered in fine, short fur the same colour as her coat. Each had a rounded tip with a soft pad on one side and a small flat plate on the other, like a bizarre, misshapen, ineffectual hoof.
Slowly, Lyra brough a shivering hoof up to her shoulder and prodded them. They had two joints: one in the middle and one just beneath the skin where they emerged. Lyra fiddled with them, testing their range of motion.
Ouch! Okay, that showed two things: one, the middle joint didn't bend backward; two, she could feel through them.
Not taking her eyes off the reflection, Lyra put her hoof back on the ground for fear that she might fall over if she didn't. Then …
Pop!
… each protuberance grew. Rose up through the cut. Now each one had three joints. The waved like fronds in a breeze, flexing and twitching.
Lyra considered calling off her lessons for today.
She peered at the .. things … again. And then – finally! – she realised what they were. Fingers! Like a rat's. Poking out from her shoulder, moving unbidden.
Still dazed, slowly to ensure her rubbery legs didn't give out again, Lyra backed out of the room and slowly closed the door. She stood in the hallway for several minutes, breathing heavily.
“There's … nothing wrong with my shoulder,” she said eventually. “It's just a dream or a fever or something. That's right, girl, you were thinking about fingers last night. It's just your mind going off on one.” It made sense. She always did have an active imagination. This was just another manifestation of that. Might be an infection. Worth going to see a doctor when the … the hallucination … recedes.
She decided she would take students. To do otherwise would be to admit that there was something seriously wrong with her. Something like having fingers growing out of a wound in her shoulder for no reason.
Now her day was decided, Lyra felt a bit less giddy, a bit more confident. That just left the issue of …
Lyra took a deep breath and entered the bathroom again. She avoided looking at the reflection of her should, and instead pulled out gauze and tape from the cabinet. She dressed the wound, just as she had done the previous night. She winced when she put the gauze against her flesh, feeling in a new way, feeling it from her –. No. She didn't. She just put the gauze on her shoulder and taped it down. She didn't wince, and she didn't take care to avoid bending any joints the wrong way, and she definitely didn't see a quivering lump beneath the gauze afterwards.
Thereafter her day progressed just as she had expected: Lyra breakfasted, threw away the note on her mirror, didn't think about fingers, prepared lesson plans, tuned her harp, didn't think about fingers, practised, read a book, didn't think about fingers.
Snails – her first student of the day – came round as expected and Lyra spent an hour helping him with arpeggios The lesson went well; the only interruption was a pop! noise which came out of nowhere. Lyra assured Snails that it wasn't worth worrying about and bade him continue playing.
After the lesson, Lyra spent the next hour working on another lesson plan and not thinking about fingers. She thought she heard a sound – pop! – at one point, but decided that she'd just imagined it. Absent mindedly, she almost scratched her injured shoulder to relieve the increasing pressure there, but stopped herself when her hoof was inches away. Wouldn't want to risk opening the wound again, after all.
Her next student was Sweetie Belle, a much more advanced student. Looking concerned, she asked about Lyra's shoulder, and Lyra recounted the incident with the knife and assured Sweetie Belle that there was absolutely nothing to worry about. Lyra taught her how to get use a horn field to get tremolo out of a harp. Then Sweetie Belle practised singing while Lyra played accompaniment. There were no more popping noises, but the pressure beneath the gauze was increasingly distracting. After the lesson, Lyra asked Sweetie Belle if she knew when Twilight Sparkle would be back in town – what with being a sister to one of the Elements and all.
“I don't know,” said Sweetie Belle, rubbing her chin with a hoof, an imitative thoughtful gesture. “Rarity said they'd all be busy for at least the next two days. So it's probably that! Yeah, two days. Rarity said it!” She peered at Lyra. “Why do you want to know?”
“Oh, uh,” said Lyra. “There are just a couple of spells I want to ask her about. Nothing special, really.”
Sweetie Belle looked suspicious for a moment, then shrugged and flipped back to being chipper. “Okay, Lyra!” she said, grinning widely.
Two days! Two whole days! Okay, okay. Calm down. Two days isn't too long. I can wait it out.
After Sweetie Belle had left, Lyra followed her normal post-lesson routine. She made some tea, packed her harp away, and flopped down on the couch with a book.
Except that didn't happen. When she tried to make tea, she found she was shaking so much that she could barely life the teapot, not with hooves or horn field. She felt too fatigued to even start packing away her harp. Finally she gave up and settled for just a book.
This went well at first. Reading calmed her, and it only took her two tries to get through the first paragraph. Then, at the end of the second: Pop!
The book flew into the air and landed with a thump, open, creasing its pages. Lyra found she was shaking again. The pressure beneath the gauze had increased. There was motion, and she felt something rubbing and scratching the skin. In her peripheral vision she could see the gauze twitching. And, very faintly, she heard the sound of the tape pulling away from the hair on her shoulder.
Lyra couldn't stay still. And she couldn't think of anything helpful to do, so she simply paced. She could go to the hospital and … and what?
(“Hi, doc! Do you have anything to stop the fingers poking out of my shoulder from misbehaving?” The doctor stares at Lyra in silence and then points her down the corridor to the psychiatric unit … or maybe, much worse, he doesn't.)
Lyra heard gauze rip. The motion in her peripheral vision increased. More ripping. Then a fingertip briefly appeared directly in her field of vision, before sinking again.
Lyra yelped and fell backwards.
While she sat there, dazed and gasping, she felt more poking. Poking at her collarbone, poking at the top of her leg, poking at her chest. The shock subsided and was replaced with a chill and, for some reason, anger. She couldn't put this off any more. Lyra leapt to her hooves, steadied herself, and cantered upstairs to the bathroom.
In the mirror, for the first time in several hours, Lyra saw the fingers again. He breath caught and, for a moment, her resolve faltered. They were longer. Each had six joints now. They looked almost serpentine. Each finger rotated in its base beneath her skin independently of the others, snaking about and stroking or rubbing or prodding her skin in a way that seemed halfway between carnal and comedic.
Lyra watched (and felt) this for several seconds, mouth hanging open. Then her anger returned.
“What? What do you want!?” she shouted at the fingers, which snapped to attention, lined up and pointing their tips at her, as if listening. Lyra glared at them, a staring contest with eyeless digits.
The fingers said nothing.
“Go away!” said Lyra. “Go back, I don't want you around! Leave me alone!”
The fingers moved a little, but didn't appear to be shrinking. If anything, they reminded Lyra of ponies listening to a boring speech and eager to get away so they could stretch their hooves.
“Listen to me! Go! Shrink, retreat, fall off and live on your own, whatever! I don't want you!”
The fingers slowly fell from attention and returned to their previous motions.
Lyra was outraged. Such impudence! Such disobedience! Words abandoned her. With an incoherent yell she grabbed the finger closest to her head and tried to force it back down into the cut on her shoulder.
That hurt.
Lyra cried out and fell to her knees. When she got up, there were tears in her eyes. The finger that she had assaulted was now pointing at her again.
Pop! All the fingers grew another joint, extending their reach.
The closest finger reached up and, stretched to its full length, flicked her nose.
“You … You ...” Lyra was starting to lose coherence again. Her epithet devolved into a snicker halfway through.
Pop!
The finger, now with eight joints, enlisting its three companions, made a rude gesture at her in the mirror.
Lyra closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Then another. Then three more. This helped a little.
“Okay,” she said quietly (now to herself), voice quavering. “Gotta … gotta go to the hospital … get these things amputated … now.” The fingers slowed their motion as she spoke. Lyra didn't care. Let them hear! Let them worry! No, even better: Let them suffer, impotently wait in terror at the prospect of their fate! The little bastards.
The closest finger flicked her nose again. Lyra didn't respond. She knew was was coming. She retreated from the bathroom.
Pop! Whatever. Nine joints now, none tomorrow.
As Lyra was walking towards the stairs, the finger flicked her nose, harder than before. Lyra bit it. The pain was shocking. She faltered for a moment, but regained her composure quickly. The finger retreated, blood drawn from its tip.
“Serves you right,” she said.
She got downstairs without incident save for another: Pop! She ignored it and trotted slowly towards the front door.
Then the fingers attacked her. One snaked round the top of her foreleg and pulled. One jabbed her in the eye. And two pushed down on either side of her throat. Bewildered, choking, her eye stinging, Lyra fell forward and hit her head on the floor. Bang! She felt another jolt of pain as one of the fingers got caught between her skull and the floor. As she rolled over on her side, groaning, she saw it pulling away. The last few segments flopped about from a dislocated joint. Lyra moaned. And then: Pop!
The closest finger flicked her nose, and her composure broke.
Lyra leapt up again, screaming at the finger. Just that one. The closest. The ringleader. Her nemesis. “Okay, you little fucker, you wanna do this the hard way? Fine! We'll do this the hard way!”
She stumbled to the kitchen and, with her horn field, grabbed a bundle of string from beneath the sink. Bon-Bon had always looked askance at Lyra's tendency to keep odd objects around the house “just in case”. Not any more, not after this incident, no sir!
Pop!
Glaring at the fingers, now still, Lyra pulled a length of string from the bundle. Hoping to catch them by surprise, Lyra grabbed the tip of each finger in her horn field and quickly brought the string towards them.
The fingers struggled. They were strong. Lyra managed to hold on to them all as she looped the string around their ends and knotted it. They pulled from her grasp as moment later, but now, at least, they were hampered, tied together.
Lyra readied another piece of string while the fingers writhed. The cut on her shoulder popped twice, and the fingers grew another two joints in quick succession.
Lyra looped another piece of string over the fingers, hoping to tie them to her leg so she could constrain them. Hopefully that would do until she got to the hospital; she was starting to worry about their rate of growth. And …
… Whack! The bundle of fingers flew up and smacked her in the horn, hard. The bundle of string went down. Lyra also went down. This time, the fingers didn't let up. They smacked her again on the nose. They writhed, trying to get free of the string. They grew again. More pops; Lyra had stopped counting the joints.
Lyra tried to get up. The fingers thumped her again on the jaw. She fell again, whacking her left shoulder on the counter and grabbing at a drawer for purchase. The drawer opened and fell from its recess, sending cutlery clattering across the floor.
Dazed, Lyra scrambled at the floor uselessly. The clang of metal against linoleum hurt her ears. Her nose was bleeding. Her eye stung. Her horn burnt. Her left shoulder ached. And loud and clear through the noise was the agony of the dislocated finger, still pulling against the string.
The bundle of fingers hit her again. And again. Lyra shielded her face with her hooves and wimpered. The fingers didn't slow down, hitting wherever they could reach.
Then Lyra saw the chef's knife, lying less than a foot away from her.
She waited a few seconds until the fingers moved their attention to her belly, trying to wind her. Then she grabbed the knife with her horn field and – no time for finesse! – jabbed its blade into the bundle repeatedly. She hacked, twisted, sliced, stabbed. And she felt it. All the pain so far paled in comparison. But she kept going for fear of what would happen if she let the fingers get the upper hand again.
Moments after the attack, the fingers hit her horn again, hard enough to tear it from the root a little. Lyra was prepared for this; as the knife fell she snatched it from the air with her mouth and continued her attack.
There was blood. A lot of blood. More than Lyra would have thought possible from such spindly things. The fingers looked terrible, riven with dozens of cuts. In a couple of places bone was exposed with ribbons of ragged flesh hanging from it.
The fingers stopped attacking her, and the bundle flopped down on the floor, still twitching and bleeding. Lyra dropped the knife. Her ears were ringing. She was sobbing; she hadn't noticed it until now.
She stood up. The fingers hung from her shoulder. Her knees shook, but she didn't fall. “Hospital,” she muttered under her breath and shuffled towards the door.
Pop!
Lyra froze. The bundle of fingers still hung there. They were a little longer than before.
Pop pop pop! The bundle started to move.
Lyra wasted no time. She swung round, grabbed the knife from the floor with her mouth (her horn no longer worked), and flopped the growing bundle of fingers onto the counter, and stabbed it again, as close to the root as she could. The fresh pain made her yelp. The fingers came alive. The injuries from earlier stopped them from lifting their tips, but still they twisted and wriggled. Lyra kept stabbing, trying as best she could to ignore the pain coming with each cut.
Crunch. And the tail end of one of the closest finger came away, leaving a short – but rapidly growing – stump waving about freely with splintered bone poking from its tip. Lyra stabbed it.
Crunch. Another. Crunch. And another. The string now only held dead tips trailing several feet of stationary, mutilated flesh. Lyra kept stabbing at the new growths.
“Lyra!”
Lyra's heart caught in her throat. She looked up. Bon-Bon stood before her, a horrified expression on her face. There was a pause. The mares stared at each other. The only sound was the popping of Lyra's shoulder. Lyra felt bizarrely and profoundly embarrassed, as if Bon-Bon had walked in on her masturbating or on the toilet rather than trying to cut off malicious fingers growing from her shoulder.
“Sweetie Belle said … I … what should I do?” choked Bon-Bon.
A finger with a ragged stump lashed out at Lyra's knife. She pulled it out the way and brought it down on the offending finger's newest joint, severing another length. “Go! Get help! Quick!” she said, muffled through the knife, and lopped off another finger that came at her face. It was getting difficult now. Cutting through so much bone was blunting the knife.
Bon-Bon still stood there, gaping. As she turned to leave …
The closest finger stabbed Lyra's eye. Pushed its ragged, bleeding tip against the cornea, paused momentarily at the reistance, and – Squelch – kept going. Warm, sticky fluid ran down her cheek, dripped off her muzzle and her chin. It hurt. More than anything had hurt in her life. Lyra screamed and stumbled. The knife clattered against the floor.
Bon-Bon turned back and, reason abandoned, galloped towards Lyra. A finger snaked out across the floor and curled around Bon-Bon's foreleg before she had covered half the distance. Bon-Bon tumbled and – Crack! – went headfirst into the sideboard. She fell to the floor, a bloody gash across her forehead, and didn't move.
The fingers came at Lyra again. She had no time to reach for the knife. She had no other implements to hand.
Lyra bit the fingers. At the root, as close to her shoulder as she could. She was lucky: She caught all four at once. She bit down as hard she could. She felt bone against her teeth and tasted blood for the first time. The fingers faltered. Lyra bit down harder, ground her teeth, twisted. She heard the crunch through her skull and – finally – the long ends of the fingers came away in her mouth. She spat them down on the ground and then spat again to get as much blood out her mouth as she could.
She had to finish this quickly. She needed to get Bon-Bon to the hospital.
Pop pop pop pop! The stumps continued to grow. That was all right. That was all right. Lyra had a plan. She picked the knife up from the floor and drove it into her shoulder, opened up the wound from last night. She pushed it in deeper and felt it clunk against the bony mass under the skin. There, just had to get that thing. She pushed the knife in again at a different angle, beside the lump and then pulled the handle sideways, trying to lever it out. The bone started to shift and –
The closest finger, just long enough to reach, flicked the knife from Lyra's mouth across the floor.
Oh well. Lyra bit the finger – not hard this time, just enough to get a grip – and pulled as hard as she could. The finger writhed and its compatriots reached towards her. It shifted, newest joint now visible above her skin. And, with a sucking sound, the mass of bone, the true root of the fingers, fell from the cut on her shoulder. For the second time in as many minutes, Lyra spat out a dead finger. The bone with four finger stumps erupting from its side hit the ground with a dull, wet thud.
None of the fingers moved.
Lyra stood watching the monstrosity for a moment, panting. It looked bizarre. Four lumps of mottled brown and grey bone slicked with red, one for each finger, strung together with bits of suppurating gristle and fat. She burst into laughter: a choking, joyless sound that echoed through the house. Pain seeped back into her awareness. It felt like it was everywhere.
Now. Now she could get to the hospital. And take Bon-Bon with her. Just needed to... Lyra grabbed a dishcloth from the counter and held it against her ruined eye to stem the bleeding. She ambled across the kitchen to check on Bon-Bon.
Bon-Bon was breathing. Shallowly, but breathing nonetheless. There was a ridged lump where she had hit her head, but she wasn't bleeding. Lyra sighed in relief. On the whole Bon-Bon probably looked better than she did.
Curiosity piqued, Lyra stumbled out into the hallway to see how she looked. She could barely recognise herself in the mirror. Almost all of the hair on her face was matted with drying blood. From beneath the dishcloth, white flesh with a smidgen of gold lay slicked down her cheek. It looked like an albino slug. Lyra swallowed and pulled the dishcloth from her face.
A dark, gaping hole, larger than seemed possible. Eyelids flopped, useless, torn, and limp. It wasn't bleeding. Just a smear of dry blood over the lower eyelid to where the remnants of her eye lay. That was odd. Surely such an injury wouldn't heal so quickly?
Something moved inside her eyesocket. Shivering, Lyra moved closer to the mirror, adjusted the angle of her head to get a better view. In the darkness she could just about make out three objects. Three...
Three fingertips.
Pop!
(pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop)
*