Something Sweet to Bite: A New Generation

"I have always been here before" - Roky Erickson

The Autumn wind whistles playfully, carrying the sounds of children's laughter along with the last few ragged leaves stripped from the bare bones of Maretime Bay's trees. The town is alight with the glow of jack-o-lanterns, pumpkin light spilling out of windows and shining on porches all around town. Downtown is no different, where ghastly green and putrid purple lights flicker between buildings, vying for space with spooky spider webs and scary skeletons. The creepy silhouettes of shadowy ponies leer down on giggling trick-or-treaters as they dash from building to building crying, "Nightmare Night, what a fright, give us something sweet to bite!" The sounds of costume parties in full swing and other such revelries fill the crisp Fall air and, despite the chill of the evening, the warmth of fun and friendship permeate the air.

Mane Melody was no different, as it was packed to the brim and almost visibly shaking from side to side as the Nightmare Night Monster Par-tay got underway. The costume fashion show had been a huge hit and everywhere you looked ponies were shaking their tails and having a wonderful time. Jazz had to admit that Pipp’s idea to throw the huge bash at the salon had turned out to be a great success, although she was still uncertain as to how exactly it was meant to drum up business. Still, sometimes you just had to do things for the fun of it, and Jazzy and Rocky had certainly had a great time hanging the decorations and getting all the snacks together for the event, even if it meant Jazz ended up cutting it almost too close for comfort to select her own costume for the fashion show.

Last minute though it had been, Jazz's costume had gotten its fair amount of cheers and she'd had fun partying with all her friends despite the few hiccups along the way. Still, all good things had to come to an end, and after a few hours of dancing and drinking things were starting to wind down. The proprietress of the shop and her inner circle, that was to say Pipp Petals and her friends, had already left to go ‘trick or treating’ earlier on. It sounded like they were going to have a blast, even if they were a little old to be doing such things, but as an employee Jazz was responsible for staying until the other party guests left so she could close up the shop and clean. The party tried to carry on after Pipp and her crew left, but without the main attraction of Mane Melody the event soon fizzled to an inevitable end.

Now, as Jazz waved goodbye to the last of the partying patrons and she closed and locked the door behind them, it was down to just Jazz Hooves and Rocky Riff. With the last guest gone it was time for the pair of ponies to start cleaning up and getting the shop back in order for tomorrow - Or at least that was what was supposed to be happening. Only Jazz found herself suddenly completely alone. Where had Rocky gotten to? The Earth Pony mare couldn’t find the flighty Pegasus stallion anywhere!

“Rocky, it’s time to close up! Come help me sweep and put up the chairs so we can head out!” Jazz figured the decorations could stay up until they came in the next day but they really ought to at least get all the confetti, streamers, and deflated balloons off the floor before somepony slipped on them. She could probably handle most of the clean up on her own but it would be nice to have some help hauling out the trash bags afterwards. “Where is that pegaus?” Jazz asked herself aloud, exasperated.

Jazz hoped that Rocky hadn't found some cute pony from the party to take out back for a little ‘Rocky and roll’ as the stallion crassly liked to call it. Although he had never been so vulgar as to ask Jazz to join him for one of his ‘rock sessions’ as of yet, it still irritated the young stylist whenever he'd disappear like this when they were on the clock. Jazz had known him to sneak off fairly often, only to return with his feathers ruffled and a self-satisfied smirk on his ridiculously punch-able face. Being an Earth Pony, maybe Jazz was just naturally more grounded, but she felt that there was a time for work and a time for play and she felt that mixing the two the way Rocky sometimes did was pretty unprofessional.

With a sigh of vexation, Jazz decided to just go backstage and try calling for Rocky again just in case he was 'too busy' and hadn’t heard her the first time.

The mare struggled to climb up on stage, the flippers and inner tube that were part of her costume making it somewhat difficult to get around. Getting backstage from there wasn't a problem, but what was a problem however was the fact that she found the backstage area to be completely dark. Jazz groped for a light switch in the pitch black room, and after a few unsuccessful attempts she realized she might have better luck if she remove her flippers first. At last her hoof grazed a switch but, a few fruitless flicks, she realized there was no points and the lights just weren't going to come on.

It wasn’t that surprising that the power had gone out as a salon slash sound-stage could pull a lot of power. In fact there had been a problem with the power earlier that very night during the party, although that had turned out to just be from somepony tripping over the cords and unplugging the power strip everything had been plugged into. Accidents could happen, and maybe the breaker had been tripped, but then why were the lights out front still on?

Jazz had a sneaking suspicion that there might be something more going on here than just a simple power outage. She smelled a Nightmare Night trick.

“Hey Rocky, if this is your idea of a holiday prank then it’s pretty lame! I stopped being afraid of the dark when I was a little filly!” That wasn't entirely, true as Jazz still slept with a night light even now. She kept it purely for safety purposes, of course, so she wouldn’t trip if she got up to get a drink of water in the middle night, but her co-worker didn’t need to know about that. “Or... are you not alone back here? Ugh, I really don't need to see something that scary tonight. Seriously, if you’re back here messing around with somepony, just wrap it up so we can go home already, okay!?”

Jazz stepped further into the darkened back rooms. It was really quite difficult for the little pony to see anything, even with the light from the front of the store. For example, at first she didn’t react at all to the presence of the other mare that sat just a hairsbreadth beside her. The stranger was silhouetted in front of the vanity mirror, her reflection only visible as a dark shadow against the silvery glass. With a pop and a buzz the bulbs that framed the mirror suddenly lit up and, from Jazz's perspective, it was as if the stranger suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The image in the cold glass caused Jazz to jump, a squeak of a scream slipping from her as if a bucket of cold water had just spilled down her spine as she realized she wasn't alone!

Although who could blame her for such a reaction? The mare in the mirror was pale as a ghost, with long strands of scraggly red hair that draped limply in front of her face in thick dark cords. A pair of piercing pink and blue eyes that almost seemed to glow stared blankly from behind that thicket of unruly mane, freezing Jazz to the spot like a spooked deer. The apparition was coated from her muzzle down her front with a slick and sticky red substance that could only be blood! The stylist shrieked again in classic Scream-Queen fashion, but her cry of horror died slowly away in her throat as the stranger in the make-up chair remained perfectly still, like some sort of lifeless doll. She didn't even so much as twitch a muscle at Jazz's cry, leaving the mare feeling rather foalish for reacting as she had.

After all, it was Nightmare Night. Seeing ponies dressed up in weird and spooky outfits should have been an expected occurrence. Getting a hold of herself, Jazz realized she must just be looking at one last party goer that had somehow ended up backstage. The blood was obviously fake, too bright red to be real, and her entire look was clearly that of some stereotypical ghostly-zombie. It was almost ridiculous how stereotypical it was, like some fright out of an old horror movie. It was the kind of look that had been all the rage a few years ago when they had 're-discovered' movies from ancient Neighpon that featured long haired ghostly mares that haunted the living - the embodiment of some long forgotten grudge. Jazz's embarrassment was only compounded as she remembered how badly those films had made her jump after she had bragged about how there was no way some dirty haired mare could scare a professional stylist. It seemed she was eating crow all over again.

“Oh wow, you gave me quite the scare just now,” she admitted, embracing the truth even if her cheeks were burning hot with shame. The mare needed a moment to catch her breath and calm her pulse. Even if her brain knew she shouldn't be frightened, if she didn't relax her heart might beat its way right out of her chest! “That is a nice costume! Very creepy. Too bad you didn’t enter the fashion show earlier, you would have won for sure!”

Jazz got no immediate response from the mare in the chair with the mile long stare, leading to an awkward drawn out silence. Then, as if somepony somewhere had flipped a switch, the stranger suddenly tilted her head so hard to the side that her spine audibly snapped making Jazz involuntarily jump again. In a voice as cracked and dry as an old tomb, but also high and brittle as glass, the ghastly mare whispered “Ni-ce cos-tume…” the stranger seemed to roll the words around in her mouth, a black and orange striped tongue flicking out to taste them, “Nice… costume…” she said a little louder, with more confidence. The chair she was sitting on whipped around and suddenly the pony was staring right at jazz, a huge smile splitting her face wide open to show twin rows of sharp shark-like candy corn teeth between pale white lips. In a perfect mimicry of Jazz’s voice the grotesque mare chirped, “Nice costume!”

“Uh, thanks,” replied the stylist, not sure if she had really heard her own voice come out of that frightening gash of a mouth or not. Instead she focused on the compliment. Although her Rainbow wig had been pretty last minute, she thought she pulled it off rather well with the addition of the aquatic gear. It might be a little out of season but everypony loved a Summery look on a mare, especially the stallions. The praise rang a little hollow though, coming from so creepy apparition, but Jazz didn't give that a second thought. There was every possibility that this pony party guest had just had a little too much punch and was only repeating the phrase rather than giving a genuine compliment. Either way, Jazz forced a professional smile of her own, “Anyways… We're closing up soon and you’re really not supposed to be back here in the first place. As the saying goes 'you don’t have to go home but you, uh, can’t stay here', okay?”

The stranger just continued to smile at Jazz, those disturbingly glowing eyes boring into her. There was something not quite right about this one, the stylist decided. Now that the she had a moment to better assess this mare's look, was it only a costume? The drool dripping from her fangs looked pretty convincing; and while the strangers skin had looked uniformly pale to the point of transparency before, Jazz began to notice how irregular and patchy her fur was, as if it were a poorly tanned hide rather than any fabric she'd seen before. Beneath the layer of fur Jazz could pick out bits and pieces of something shiny that glistened disturbingly in the light from the vanity mirror. Were those some sort of chunks of candy? The make-up in those scary movies that Jazz had seen in the Maretime Bay Cinema hadn't been as unsettling as this mare appeared to be. Either she had some sort of Bridlewood level magical stylist or...

As Jazz's vision adjusted to the glow from the vanity, the stylist noticed that what she had taken for 'fake' blood before was in fact dripping into a pool of that was spreading beneath the strangers chair. From there it had been smeared across the floor, leaving a trail that went past Jazz's own hooves and behind her to…

The fluorescent lights finally flickered fitfully back on with a plaintive whine and hum. As Jazz turned to follow the crimson trail she could see why the lights had not worked at first, as many of them were damaged beyond repair, broken by dents in both the fixtures and the ceiling that held them. The ceiling itself, like the floor, had been splattered with blood, along with the walls and the other vanity mirrors. In fact the vanity that sat opposite from the one Jazz stood beside had been bashed to pieces, a shower of sparks sizzling from the broken bulbs around the shattered wooden frame. Glittering shards of smashed glass were strewn everywhere across the tile floor and reflected the light in a fashion not unlike a disco ball might, if it had been stained scarlet.

Jazz took all of this in very calmly but, when her eyes fell on the crumpled heap that lay slumped in the vanity’s remains, she couldn't help but raise a hoof to her mouth in shock. It was hard to tell what exactly she was looking at, as first as the lights were flickering on and off. However it was not long before Jazz's eyes grew wide with the horror of recognition when she realized she had at last found her missing co-worker... Or at least what was left of him.

Rocky had been ripped wide open from groin to gullet.

Earlier in the night Rocky had been wearing a simple skull mask and now his actual skull had been expose, the flesh flayed carefully from his face. His lower jaw was missing, and his rib-cage had been broken open, spread apart in an obscene facsimile of his broken feathery wings. All of his internal organs were gone, leaving his tongue hanging limply from his skull into the vacant cavity where his innards had once been. His fore and hind limbs were in tatters from the broken glass embedded in them and were bent at agonizingly impossible angles, the bones twisted and broken until they poked through the ragged flesh. A few tears still pooled in the hollow sockets of his blank, dead eyes, indicating that as sudden and violent as his end had clearly been he had still been conscious for far too much of it. The blood Jazz had mistaken for fake was in fact his. Viscera and chunks of meat that had belonged to him were splattered all around his maimed remains.

On the wall beside his body were scrawled two words in congealing blood.

“~Candy Mare~”

“Hungry…” whispered the stranger in a voice made all the more disturbing by its close proximity to Jazz's ear. There had been no other sound, no indication of any movement, only the sudden overwhelming presence of the creepy pony crouched right next to the stylist!

Jazz tried to turn, to flee, but too late she felt cords wrap around her legs and sweep her off of her hooves. She fell with a splash into a puddle of Rocky’s gore. She looked down to see what had caught her and gasped in horror to see that it was the strangers dirty looking hair that had snagged her! No longer limp, the thick strands of red and black were now alive and writhing like a nest of vipers! Jazz could feel that what she had taken for mere strands of filthy hair were in fact long strands of cold, steel-like living whips of what looked like licorice!

Worse, Jazz realized that the stranger had indeed been wearing a costume of sorts, but it was not that of a ghoul or ghost. No, instead it was a makeshift pony costume made from Rocky's skinned hide! Beneath the raw hide and tufts of fur the stylist could now see that the creature before her was made entirely of candy! As the flayed flesh fell away like a sticky peel to reveal the truth that lay beneath, the mad mare hummed a creepy little tune as the coils of her mane tightened around Jazz's struggling limbs.

With sudden violence Jazz felt herself sent hurtling through the air with enough force to rip the ridiculous rainbow wig from her now upside-down head. She was turned in midair to face her captor and found the end of her muzzle to be mere inches from the grinning monsters malicious maw. As that predators grin parted, she distinctly heard this time the monster speak in a voice that mocked Jazz's own, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!”

With that, Jazz was whipped around and felt her face smash into the other vanity mirror. Sparks of electricity and hot glass rained down in what felt like slow motion as jolts of pain snaked through her shattered cheekbones and jaw into her teeth and the rest of her skull. The stranger wasn't satisfied with that alone, however, so without a shred of mercy she whipped Jazz back and smashed the mare's body into the jagged shards of the swiftly splintering hunk of furniture. She did this over and over again, the crooked spikes of glass and wood ripping into the Earth Pony's flesh! Tears flooded from Jazz's bruised and bulging eyes as the stylist realized that this must have been the exact same treatment that Rocky had endured, and it was likely that the stranger was intending to do everything else that she had done to the stallion to Jazz as well!

A wail of despair turned into an ear splitting screech of pain as Jazz felt her bones twist and break, popping out of socket as more and more shards of wood and glass were driven into her flesh with shotgun force. The scream rose in pitch higher and higher before resolving into a muffled gurgle as a tendril of living licorice snaked into her mouth to wrap around her broken lower jaw. Without warning, Jazz felt the mandible ripped the from her skull in a spray of spit and blood, her tongue left flapping uselessly from the hole in her face!

The brutality didn't stop there as Jazz felt her skin stretch as it was taken with the jawbone! At last, it began to shred apart as the licorice whips stripped her open, pulling away a huge chunk of flesh from her underbelly that exposed her insides from her throat down to between her hind legs. With the light swiftly dying in her eyes, Jazz stared at her reflection in the broken mirror with numbed horror as her killer took the wad of flesh she had torn off and plastered it against her own chest, covering up the blood slicked candy horror that she was and giving her the appearance of being just another pony. The effect was far better than what she had previously achieved with Rocky's skin, so that at first glance she could almost be mistaken for a normal pony.

With her oncoming death fogging her mind Jazz felt tendrils tugging at the skin that was still, for the moment, plastered against her skull. As they began to peel off her face like a cheap Nightmare Night mask, the mare suddenly realized 'Oh! I guess what she meant was that she thinks I would make a nice costume…'. That epiphany was the last thing to flash across her brain before she finally succumbed to the shock and blood loss from what had been done to her.

The Candy Mare tore the shreds of Rocky's face off and threw them unceremoniously on the floor to don Jazz's own and, with a maniacal cackle, celebrated by prying open the young mare's rib-cage to feast on the soft delicacies within.