Nightmare Night

3/21/15

I remember walking home from school on Halloween Night. Daddy was back at home counting his money. Iwas free to roam without anyone else watching over me. I was a big girl and I was proud of it. Imagine my surprise when I saw Silver Spoon trotting towards me. We giggled and bumped our rumps together. We went trick-or-treating. Nightmare Night was one of those holidays fillies just didn't skip. And Ponyville was one of those towns that never got in trouble. So we were safe, you know. To us, foalnapping was just a myth.

I waltzed over to the nearest house, which was dwarfed by a few, taller oaks and barely off the border to Ponyville Train Station. The trees provided heavy, impenetrable shade. And it swallowed the house away. All we saw was the front door. Nothing else was visible. At first, I joked around.

"Hey, Silvie. What if this house is too ugly for the others? Whoddyou think lives here?" I chuckled, rocking my body about in childish energy.

"I dunno, Tiara, maybe we should stay away. It's too dark here. What if it's haunted?"

'Haunted?', I thought pompously.

There was no such thing as ghosts. Ghosts, like all boogeymen, were made to spook the younglings. I wasn't that dumb, I told myself. I wasn't that naive. But I was. I ignored her warning. I stepped away from her lingering and ominous premonition to knock on the door. It barely cracked open and somepony whispered from the other side.

"Candy...? It's been a long time since I've had visitors."

So it gave us candy. A worn, almost sickly foreleg bent around the door space and presented crunch cat bars. They were tiny little waifer treats that mewled when you bit into them, some kind of magic that Twilight Sparkle had bored us about two weeks ago in class; 'psychic acoustical engineering' she called it: manipulating the magnitude of mechanical soundwaves, or engineering it to sound exactly the way an acoustician wanted it.

Before we could skip away, because we took our time opening the candy then and there, we were taken away. Somepony had bagged us kicking and screaming. I never told anyone but I was so frightened, so crippled with fear that I wet myself in the burlap. That was my first, real taste of fear. My second was hours later; by that time, I was insensate and barely awake. I was limp and numb from realizing I'd been kidnapped by a complete stranger.

We were kids. We were just fucking kids. I was barely eleven and I was already living a nightmare. They set us up in different rooms. I knew because when I finally came to, Silver Spoon was gone and all I saw were iron bars. They locked me in a cage. It was hardly a pet carrier, hardly a cramped vessel. My containment vessel was three times my size with a doggy bowl in reach of the padlock and another doggy bowl filled with meat. I stepped backwards and did the only thing I knew how.

I cried.

I cried and cried when I realized that was my home from then on. The other fillies were crying too. Most of them were wailing at that point. Some of them were dry-heaving from the meat scents.

Ponies will never be predisposed omnivores; our bodies aren't supposed to process it. They were just kids put in cages like savage animals, starved and bruised in places I never even touched. My peers were younger than me. I was the oldest. And I, by some measure of guilt, was the healthiest.

The others were caked in shit, you know. They were heavily bruised on their flanks, on their shoulders, chests and necks; everypony else was a replica of every parent's nightmare. I scuttled to the back of my cage. Somepony had opened the door to the room. Inside walked a skinny, developed stallion, a skinny, athletic type of stallion with nothing but a candy cane tie on.

His mane was pitch black and his coat was canary yellow.

He wore this mask, a fairly pristine one made of dull plastics. His mask was a deer skull replica, a doe one to be exact. It was slimmer than his actual face, but hid the important bits.

I could never see his eyes. And I never saw his jaw elevate or sink. It seemed he had no soul. No equine nature. Because even the lights cowered before him. Our only source of luminescence in that dark, dusty space was a cluster of hanging lightbulbs. Some were dotted with a darker substance, the origins of which I repressed from memory.

He shuffled forward with a characteristic laziness. A certain relaxation was stolen away from us. Because he was quiet. The deer skull stallion was a patient pony. His casual glances left and right disoriented us.

It seemed he was enjoying himself, because, at odd intervals, he'd chuckle or chortle just below speaking volume. We were huddled all to ourselves, against the very bars that kept us inside. That was our only comfort, that maybe, if we stayed isolated, nothing worse could happen to us.

In his hoof was a flower. A white daisy, to be exact. The alarming distance he showed at first burned away right before us. He took to warm, satisfied chuckles. And they were just that, a step below laughter in short bursts of happiness, to show how uncontrollably lost he was in all the splendor.

"I love you... I love you not." He giggled, picking the first petal away.

Two mares slipped out of the doorway and they stood by the outlier cages, the farthest on each side of me. I was the closest left to the middle. I was lucky. The others soiled themselves. We were all panicking.

A silent majority of us pressed our lips shut. Others, who chose to cry, were tazed with cattleprods between their bars. The mares shocking them always covered front and back, or either side of their victim. Even if the filly screamed, even if she begged them 'no' or 'please', or 'I want my mommy', all they did was giggle.

They giggled at our misery. Every convulsion, every painful seizure that slammed them against the bars was simply entertainment. One of us wouldn't stop sobbing. Her cutiemark was a heart, I realized, just barely able to discern the shape. Her coat was charred and smoking. Or, rather, her insides were smouldering. By the time I had the courage to open my eyes, I could see her own frozen in time. Her eyes were circles with how rotund and wide they were. I wanted to scream.

"Valentine! Valentine, wake up! Wake up...! No, don't- don't leave me, please! Please-!"

An identically filly just her age struck her corpse violently in vain denial. They were twins. Because she'd raised her voice, they electrocuted her, too. They dragged her out of the cage and struck her sensitive spots. Her rear, her inner-thighs and neck were all burnt by the end of her punishment. I tried to look away. But I couldn't. Their eyes had never closed. One died wide-open. Her sister convulsed wildy, twisting and slamming against her cage.

Amidst the thrashing, amidst her piercing wails, her left radius snapped and hung limply by threads of sinew and fat. I could spot her marrow streaming dowm her coat. It gave way and so did her body, forcing her comatose from shock.

"Anyone else wanna fucking cry?!" Asked the taller mare, tossing the comatose twin back inside.

We didn't dare make a noise. We didn't dare show ourselves. She took to smirking and lit a cigarette. I thought it was over. I wanted it to be over. But they did it all over again. When the skull colt picked a petal away, he said his trademark line.

"I love you, I love you not."

It bore into us. The three of our captors circled our cages. And they forced us to watch. If anypony turned away or shut their eyes, they were tased. I had three burns over my body. When he reached 'I love you not,' he ordered one of the other kids out their cages. And when they left, he made them shock the 'unloved' child. That very same child could've been their family, or friend. Or, in the case of the colt I electrocuted, classmate.

Did Featherweight deserve to die shitting himself and burning to a crisp. No. Never. None of those foals did. I spent the rest of my night curled up and shaking. His pleas were still ringing in my ears; they wouldn't stop. And the way his eyes melted out his sockets, I could only wretch and rock myself to sleep.