As the sound of barking filled the night halls of Ponyville Hospital, Nurse Redheart gave a heavy sigh while resting her brow in her hooves. Closing her eyes, the barks were interspaced with loud barks and howls towards the moon before returning to frantic barking once more. Looking towards a secure door, the lone window near the top showed the darkened insides of a padded room... A rubber room as some in Ponyville called it. It was in this room Ponyville Hospital's sole resident resided: Patient 17, or "Screw Loose" as some had come to call her.
Reaching for a key, she unlocked the drawer to her desk and pulled out a manilla envelope with her muzzle. Resting the folder on the desk as she did nearly every night, she opened the folder to reveal pages yellowing as much as the folder holding them. When they found Patient 17, these pages were the only objects inside her saddlebags. Only Nurse Redheart had found these pages, and only she read them nightly to remind herself why Patient 17 was here. Giving a swallow, she began once more to read the pages she knew by heart at this point written in the scrawl of a mad pony....
The branches whip about me, creaking and clawing like beasts from above. I write this missive now, before the final grasp of sanity leaves me, or the one following me finds me in this hiding place. I swallow back the rancid bile in my throat and focus on writing my confession, and I pray Celestia will forgive me for the evil I have unleashed into Equestria on this day.
My partner in crime Fixed Place is dead, and soon these horrors may claim me. I want to say it wasn't my fault, but by Celestia it was! It was! I helped unleash this horror! I helped bring this decaying evil unlike any I've ever seen to Equestria, and may Tartarus welcome me in a hoof basket for it. As the Everfree Woods ring with the screams and foal-like laughter of my pursuer, I must frantically write my tale.
Fixed Place and I were rogue taxidermists, and the world was our plaything to mount in our evil science that was a sin against everything Celestia stood for. I could spend years detailing the sins and atrocities we committed all across Equestria. All manner of creatures large and small were found by us to me meticulously preserved. Our large house just inside the Everfree Forest was a museum of sorts to our perverse talents in mimicking life. And when gryphons, hydras and even diamond dogs were not enough... We even moved to the forbidden art of turning ponies into mummified remains just to prove it could be done.
But our sins, evil as they were, were nothing compared to our greatest sin I must now detail while I can. We saw smoke billowing out of the Everfree forest, deep inside where we had never gone. Where there is fire, there is death. And where there is death, there were bodes to be added to our macabre universe of terror and decay within our home. Packing our saddlebags, we trotted into the forest towards the plume of smoke as dark as our very souls.
Nearing the source of the plume of smoke, the smoke had dissipated out into a thick, silent fog that felt evil. Listen, whomever found these notes, the fog felt evil! Why did I not turn back!? Why did I continue on unabated? But continue into the fog thick with the stench of death as Fixed Place cracked a joke that we’d find some fine corpses to mount this trip. Celestia help me, I laughed... I LAUGHED! I thought it a joke when I should have ran far from that place. By Luna’s plot, why did I not run when given every chance to escape this fate? Why instead did I foolishly trot blindly towards something straight from Tartarus itself?
But trot we did, laughing and mocking the scents of death we knew all too well in our forbidden art form. We only stopped when we realized we’d left the forest, and were now surrounded by the smouldering ruins of buildings. Fixed Place beat his wings to sweep back the smoke, and both of us gasped in horror. All around us--blackened to a crisp with fire--were countless skeletons. But these were not pony bones, but they were!
Listen, reader, know I dedicated my life to understanding bones as a part of my dark craft of taxidermy. My cutie mark of a screw is from my talent for screwing bones into their right places. So know me now when I say these may once have been ponies, but were ponies no more. Each spine was broken a thousand times over, as if to make the pony stand upright. The forehooves were then split into five parts and elongated out for some odd reason. Only now as I write do I know the foul creature they were emulating.
In searching the debris, we found a strange soot-covered corpse wrapped in dirty white bandages with bits of a stringy yellow mane flowing out of the bandages. This wrapped thing, it was shaped like the skeletons we found all around, except it had a flattened-in head. Resting around the neck of this odd and crude mummy was an old red heart-shaped locket. And upon seeing it, I knew in a moment I wanted that locket. Nay, I needed that locket! It must be mine!
Giving a low whistle, I called Fixed Place over to find our gruesome prize for this trip. Laughing together, we tossed the bound body into our cart as I stared longingly at the locket I so wanted. Damn me to Tartarus, why did I not let that mummy lie?
As we began to trot back, we began to hear a low howling on the woods as the fog seemed to follow us. As it grew late, we needed to stop in the woods. The fog was too thick to know if it was still light or now dark, but I started a fire anyhow. Yet still on the outskirts, a howl of some form still rang in the air.
It was at this exact moment when Fixed Place collapsed.
I do not mean collapsed as in fell down. I mean his skin just crumpled to the ground with nothing inside. As in one moment he’s joking, and the next he’s an empty skin on the ground. I ran over, checking the skin of the closest thing I had to a friend to see nothing wrong... And all his bones and organs were simply scooped out as if preparing for stretching over a dummy for taxidermy.
Gripping the skin in my muzzle, I ignored the copper-like taste from inside the skin as I tossed Fixed Place into the back of my cart--yet made sure to keep my now dead partner away from my prized locket and corpse, thinking instead of how I would make a fine statue of my fellow taxidermist. My lust for that locket blinded me to everything but getting home. Home with my now three prizes in tow.
Stomping out the fire in a rush, I then began the long trot towards my home, the howls around me growing louder and wilder with each hoof trot. As I neared my large house, it sounded like the howls and barks were right next to my ears, but each look to my left or right showed nothing but the foggy field around my house.
I trotted towards the cart, my heart set on claiming my locket prize. But when I looked down what I saw was not the mummified corpse Fixed Place and I had stolen from the smouldering village; not dry and soot-laced as we had seen it when placing it in the cart, but covered with caked blood and shreds of pony flesh and hair. But not just any flesh and hair, Fixed Place’s flesh and hair. Evermore so, the blood and hair seeped into those bandages as the thing’s eyes suddenly opened to expose two bloodshot blue eyes staring right at me.
I ran into my house, bolting the door and windows as I heard feminine laughter outside before scraping with a hoof. Peering down, it was Fixed Place! But then those blue eyes stared up... Those were not his eyes! His mane was never yellow! It... The thing was wearing Fixed Place!
And that’s when it started calling out in a feminine voice, “Good puppy! Nice puppy! Come to mommy, puppy! Come on out and be Man’s best friend! Here puppy!” Over and over that voice called up, seeming to mingle with the incessant barking and howling in my ears.
The voice and the barking has gone on for hours now, and I can now no longer write. I finally understand the final madness of Starswirl the Bearded when he peered into the most forbidden of magic... Now, as the calling of that dead monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the barking and howling of those accursed phantom dogs grow closer and closer, I shall seek with this top floor window the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnameable howling the thing wearing Fixed Place has sent upon me...
Nurse Redheart set down the final page and sighed as she did every night before opening the second drawer to reveal a vial given in a shot to help ponies too far gone to sleep forever. Moving aside the vial, she pulled out a dog treat and tossed it in the window of the padded room. Suddenly, the baying stopped and instead the sounds of crunching could be heard.
Putting all the files back together, the nurse shook her head sadly. “No, if even one page of these words are true, you deserve your fate Patient 17... You’ll suffer in pain and torment until you die of old age if I have anything to say about it. Death would be far too good for you.” Closing and locking the file drawer, she shut out the light to leave the insane pony to bay for her long gone master once more...
