The Song of the Whip-Poor-Wills
The night was dark and quiet, silence interrupted only by the ethereal singing of the whip-poor-wills. Vinyl looked through the window of her house, watching the distant lights of Ponyville, inhaling the cold air with a feeling of delight. It was her night.
Vinyl didn’t like days. Maybe it was connected to her red eyes, jarred mercilessly by the sunlight, or maybe it was just some inborn defect of her biological clock, she didn’t know. In fact, she never really thought about that, and even liked the fact that at night she could fully enjoy the beauty of the world, without any annoying ponies around her.
Vinyl took one more deep breath and closed the window. The house was empty, Octavia was in Canterlot, playing cello for a bunch of rich snobs. Vinyl liked it that way. After the initial stage of the relationship with a shy mare, when joys of “getting to know each other better” were replaced by a routine of housekeeping, shopping and quick, unsatisfactory sex every Friday between the rehearsal of Octavia’s ensemble and a gig in the local pub, she found out that they, in fact, had almost nothing in common. And, to make things worse, she couldn’t just look in those mulberry eyes and tell her that she wanted to break up. Vinyl was weird, eccentric, as some ponies would say, she could even be cruel sometimes, but hurting Octavia like that was something she’d never do.
She shrugged these thoughts off. Tonight was her night, and nopony was going to spoil it. She went to the kitchen, picking up several energy drinks from the fridge and taking a pack of cigarettes hidden deep inside the cupboard. She smiled upon seeing it intact – Octavia was trying to make her quit smoking, but she still had cigarettes hidden in various places in the house, just for occasions like this one. Fortunately, Octavia almost never visited her in her basement studio, so she wouldn’t smell the smoke.
Levitating the drinks and the cigarettes, Vinyl opened the basement door and trotted downstairs. Here, in that soundproof room, among the multitrack recording devices, synthesizers, microphones, and mixing consoles, lay her kingdom. She sat behind the console, putting her headphones on and taking a sip of the energy drink. Then she levitated a cigarette from a pack and lit it with her magic, looking around the studio, and picking the instruments she wanted to use.
She turned on her TR-909 drum synthesizer and began programming the beat by switching the buttons on it. At first she put the regular “four on the floor” rhythm with bass drum and open hi-hats, but then she added low tom sounds in positions 2, 6, 8, 12, 14, and 15 of the sequencer, creating something similar to hypnotizing calling of the tribal drums. She tried out several tempos, from insanely fast to lazy ones, quite good for rapping, before finally setting on good, old 120 beats per minute. Then she created some variations of the beat to be used in different parts of song, but keeping the bass drum and low toms backbone in most of them.
Glad from her work, Vinyl levitated the TB-303 bass synthesizer to herself and began experimenting with it, pushing various buttons with her magic and listening to the effects. The low, brain-shattering drumbeat was still echoing in her ears and she decided to follow that path, creating a bassline consisting of low, atonal, distorted sounds, along with higher notes, bursting from time to time, almost deafening her and changing into long, modulated cadences. Chills ran down her spine. She didn’t, however, want bass to play from the beginning of the song; recently, she started to carry a dictaphone everywhere with her, recording the unusual sounds she heard around Ponyville and other places she was in.
The main component of the intro of her new sound was a sad cello piece Octavia had recorded for her at the beginning of their relationship. It was, if Vinyl recalled correctly, the only time her marefriend dared to go with her into the basement. It felt almost hilarious for her – the mournful tune, a strange choice for somepony who just found a loving partner, was now the best reflection of the state of their decaying relationship. She additionally slowed it down, and mixed the weeping of the cello with the singing of whip-poor-wills she had recorded earlier. It was playing alone for a few seconds before the drums came in, and then died down in the flood of psychedelic bass notes.
It wasn’t however, everything Vinyl had in store. She downed the energy drink and lit another cigarette, levitating a theremin to her. She put her hoof in its magnetic field, creating an uncanny noise, something between buzzing of a damaged electronic device and cries of a mare who lost her family in some kind of a terrible accident. Vinyl smirked, deciding that it was time for more samples from her dictaphone. Low-quality recordings of a crowd cheering during one of her shows, her own breath and Octavia’s moans during orgasm were all added to the mix, almost unrecognizable after Vinyl merged them together, changing their pitch and distorting them, creating a wicked soundscape consisting of various emotions. Laughter, pity, sadness, arousal, joy, all gathered together in one place.
Vinyl downed another can of an energy drink in one go. She was now seeing everything brighter, hearing better, pulsating rhythm almost tearing her eardrums, resonating under her ribs. She could almost see the sounds, visualising bass drums as a steady, black waves with a silver foam of cymbals. The cello was like the distant breeze above the surface of the black sea of bassline, air having an intriguing orange tint. Vinyl felt as if she was on the beach, wind sweeping the blue dust under her hooves, its whooshing similar to the crowd of cheering ponies, her hoofsteps on the sand sounding like her lover’s moans.
Stunned by the landscape unwinding in front of her, she searched through the files on her computer, looking for something she was really proud of. It wasn’t for the difficulty of obtaining that sound, in fact it was easy – there were lots of ponies in Ponyville who were great singers, and even more who only thought so. Most of them would kill for a chance of meeting a famous DJ who had a home recording studio, and were discreet enough to not tell anypony that she’d invited them.
Vinyl looked on a certain spot on the floor, still smelling of disinfectants, turned the music off and clicked the play button of one of her recorders. Soon, she heard a sweet voice of a white unicorn filly that had been her guest in the studio not a long time ago. She adjusted herself on a chair, half-closing her eyelids. After a few minutes a normal conversation was interrupted by a sound of her own hoof hitting something. Vinyl turned the music on, trying to synchronise the moans and cries of a filly with the song.
Another punch. An explosion of high-pitched cries, begging her for mercy. More punches, punctuated by a hypnotising beat, each of them was like a ray of the sun warming the soundscape she’d created. Vinyl grinned, lowering her foreleg unconsciously and placing it on her marehood.
The filly’s shrieks intensified, filling her headphones completely, interrupted by precise hits. Most of voices was unrecognizable, though she could understand single words from the mess of cries, pleads and screams. Vinyl rubbed her marehood slowly, feeling fluids dripping on her chair. She licked her hoof, tasting them, bobbing her head to the rhythm of the song. The tortured filly’s screams were getting more silent as the tune progressed. Vinyl stroked her clit with her hoof, giving out a long moan of pleasure. The electric signals were running through her nerves, filly’s begging ringing in her ears. Her heart was pounding in her chest, its rhythm becoming one with the bass drum strikes. A hot wave started to crawl over her body, pressure building slowly in her hips. The filly’s voice was reduced to quiet sobbing and some hardly understandable whispers. Vinyl’s red eyes shot open, she turned her chair, staring at the point of the floor where everything had happened, her breath gradually synchronising with the recording of the song of the whip-poor-wills.
A half-formed thought appeared in Vinyl’s head; she felt regret that she had gotten rid of the body, she wanted to play with it some more as she was now going through the final part of the record: the filly’s cries intensified, overlapping with her own moans. She pushed her hoof inside her vagina, recalling the feeling of having the young singer’s little horn there, clenching her muscles around it, smell of sweat and her arousal almost driving her insane.
The song was getting to an end, Vinyl, being at the verge of orgasm, decided to finally push herself over the edge, hearing a final sound of the recording: an audible snap of the filly’s neck which gave up under Vinyl’s weight. The song was getting to an end; Vinyl, her whole body shivering in a climax, muscles spasming when she stroked her marehood for the last time. She rolled off the chair, panting heavily, her heart almost cracking her ribs.
The song ended. Vinyl was lying on the floor in a post-orgasm haze, her hooves slowly getting cold and numb. Even though the basement was soundproof, she was still hearing the calling of the whip-poor-wills, synchronised with her shallow breath. Suddenly, she thought of the old legends, and a chill ran down her spine. In a panic, she tried to get up, only to find out that her hooves weren’t obeying the commands from her brain. She lit her horn, trying to reach her headphones to play the finished song one more time, but only a few, light blue sparks shot from it.
The song ended, soundscape, however didn’t fell apart. The surface of the sea became still, black water having now additional, crimson hue. The wind was still blowing, covering Vinyl with the blue sand, despite her desperate attempts to get herself free. She tried to spit the sand out from her mouth, but it was covering her muzzle, depriving her of air. She thrashed, trying to reach the headphones with her foreleg, but they were too far. Her mind slowly drifted away, drowning in the crimson ocean. When her heart beat for the last time, the whip-poor-wills started to fly around the house, their calls no longer resembling the last breaths of a dying pony but rather a laughter of thousands of demons.
It was an early morning. Octavia had just come back from Canterlot. She was furious; Vinyl was supposed to show up on the station and help her with her luggage. She found, to her surprise, that the door of their house was open. She started calling her marefriend, but Vinyl was nowhere around. She searched through the whole house, knowing that the unicorn liked to fall asleep during the day in the weirdest of places, but there was no trace of her. When she almost decided to just go to sleep after the tiresome train ride, she trotted by the basement door and smelled some foul stench coming from behind them; leaning closer, she recognised the smoke from Vinyl’s cigarettes. Quickly, she pushed the door open and, overcoming her fear of darkness, went downstairs.
Vinyl was lying on her back in a puddle of her own urine, her body stiff and cold, eyes, now almost devoid of colour, staring at the ceiling. Octavia looked at her, too shocked to cry and sat by her side. She winced at the smell, and placed a hoof on her nose. Something about her dead friend drew her attention: one of her forelegs was spread, as if she was trying to reach the headphones hanging from their wire. She noticed that the DJ’s equipment was still on. Curious of what her marefriend was working on before she died, she put the headphones on, and clicked the play button.
On the tree in front of their house, a single whip-poor-will started to sing, calling its companions.
Author's Note
Well, to add some explanation about the "old legends" that were the base of this story:
Due to its haunting, ethereal song, the eastern whip-poor-will is the topic of numerous legends. One New England legend says the whip-poor-will can sense a soul departing, and can capture it as it flees. This is used as a plot device in H. P. Lovecraft's story The Dunwich Horror.
Additional self-imposed challenges while writing:
- Write a story without a dialogue,
- Write a dark story without using the word "blood".
