The Statement of Randolph Carthorse
The Statement of Randolph Carthorse
I assure you, gentlecolts, that your questions are pointless. I shall explain how I came to be here, and the rest, but I must begin at the beginning. Everything I tell you is true, to the best of my recollection, and should I omit anything it is not through deception.
It is true that Bon Mot and I had been the closest of friends for some months, although it now occurs to me how little I knew of the stallion, aside from his admission he had once been expelled from Celestia’s School from Gifted Unicorns. Whatever he had learned there served him in good stead in our conversations about the oldest secrets of Equestria, and the mysteries of the Everfree, and the strange tales that came to Ponyville from lands far across the sea, or from times long ago. It is true that my passion, my talent, is for unlocking such enigmas, and in retrospect I should have asked why he was expelled. I will not deny that we had entered the Everfree with the express intent of reaching the Palace of the Two Pony Sisters, bearing lanterns, spades, and a curious device my friend claimed as his own invention. All these played a part in the subsequent disaster, and the events that brought me here, a shaken pony.
As I said, my friend’s weird studies captured my imagination, and his books had hinted at certain discoveries we might make at the ruins. The path was dangerous, it is true, and were it not for Bon Mot’s encouragement, and hints of secret knowledge, and the wild theories he proposed about why the former capital was abandoned, I suspect I would never have set hoof within those overgrown confines.
As for the ruins themselves... it stuns the mind to think they have stood, even as crumbled as they are, for a thousand years and more. The manifold signs of age, of time, were all around us. In some windows the twisted fragments of stained glass blinked in the lantern-light, and the statues of ponies long dead crouched under their shrouds of weeds and cobweb. I would have sworn, had I not known better, that we were the first living beings to disturb those halls in centuries. We heard beasts moving in the undergrowth, and I admit I felt faint at the sounds, and disturbed by the way the trees clutched at the waning moon above, but it was the ruins that struck me dumb. I could barely stand, such was my excitement and apprehension, as we found the courtyard my friend had described, and set to work unearthing the marble slab he claimed once sealed the catacombs below the palace.
We rested on our shovels for a moment, once we had dislodged that slab and revealed the steep stone staircase beneath, and the stygian darkness that beckoned below. I recall my friend turned to me then, eyes bright with excitement, but a sympathetic note to his voice. “I don’t mean to offend you, Carthorse, and Celestia knows we’ve waited for this long enough, but you look as though you’re about to fall down. I’ll go ahead, but I promise to keep you informed of every discovery. As you can see, my device should reach more than far enough, if my sources are correct.”
I recall I protested, at some length, if not entirely sincerely, but he merely smiled and unpacked his device – a simple but ingenious construction of string and two cans, that he had demonstrated for me the day before. With it, I was sure, we could communicate at will. And thus he went ahead, down into the catacombs, the light of his magic fading with a curious rapidity, leaving me alone in the silence of those ruins, in the weak light of the lantern and the waning moon. It seemed less than a minute until the clop of his hooves became inaudible, however hard I strained to listen, and I hissed my inquiry into the device.
“Can you hear me? What can you see?”
There was no answer, at first. I waited for as long as I could stand, and repeated my question. The response was an explosion of noise from the can I had pressed to my ear, a scuffling, a gasp. My friend’s words are impressed on my mind with terrible clarity, and I felt the very blood drain from me at the sound of them.
“Sweet Luna! If you could only see what I am seeing!”
I couldn’t answer. My tongue was thick in my mouth, my throat seized with sudden fear.
“Carthorse, the things! The things that are down here!”
I found my voice then, and poured questions into the mouthpiece of Bon Mot’s device. One I said over and over “What is it? What is it?”
And my friend answered, voice apparently twisted by the strength of his emotion. “Carthorse! I can’t... no pony should... we shouldn’t have come here, Carthorse! Get away! Replace the slab and get away while you still can!”
I assure you, officers, that if I had moved more swiftly I would have gone to his aid. As it was, I hesitated too long, and from the device a cacophony of horrible and piteous cries arose, and I dropped the can in my horror, cutting off the sound instantly. When I recovered and shouted my own demands, my questions, my need for instructions, there was nothing, and the line had become completely slack. I stood, ran to the aperture, shouted down into the darkness, but received no reply. I waited frozen, paralysed by indecision.
I called again, and strained to listen for any sound from below, any sign that my friend was coming back, any light from his horn or noise from his hooves. There was nothing, for long minutes, as my vision blurred and my breath rasped in my chest. And then... then I heard it. A sound of something... dragging. I croaked out my friend’s name, imagining him injured, crawling towards the exit. He gave no response. Only that terrible slouching, thumping, heavy tread, nearer and nearer in the darkness. I called again, begging him to at least acknowledge me.
It came to me, then, as I was a about to reach for the lantern and head in after my friend, regardless of his warning, that there was something terribly wrong about that tread... something about it that implied more than four hooves upon the steps. And I imagined the kind of things that might have bred or lingered in the darkness under those ruins, waited for a thousand years for some fool to come release them. That was when I dropped the lantern, and in my sudden blindness clutched for the tools we had brought with us, as a pathetic defence against whatever imagined horror was dragging itself up towards the moonlight...
And THAT, officers, is why Pinkamena Pie is currently being treated for concussion, and why you shouldn’t jump out at a shovel-wielding pony from a dark stairwell and go “BOO!”
