In the shadow of Marekham Asylum
I look into the eyes of the stallion opposite me. Grey coat, flat as asphalt. Stringy green hair. Dull purple eyes like overripe blueberries; swollen and rotted.
“I hate you,” I tell him, honestly, and he sneers at me.
“I hate you too.” His voice sounds exactly like mine. Whiny and nasal, but above everything else, so unutterably tired.
I turn away from him in disgust and begin again. A pushing sensation. A squish and a suck and a popping noise, and then there he is. A third, exactly the same as the other two.
We look each other in the eyes, ugly purple the same shade as bruised flesh, and we curl our lips. “I hate you,” we say.
The rusted gate swings open to receive me, carried in the yellow magic of a bored guardspony. An arch rises overhead, the peeling paint picking out the letters of the sign in faded white. Marekham Asylum.
An old building, a great rambling pile of bricks and ivy, with a thousand barred and slitted windows peering suspiciously out at me. It looms above me like a crow, hunching its wings and croaking to itself. Is that noise just the wind, or is it the moaning of some hidden inmate, trapped beyond view?
Behind me the gate clangs shut and I jump a little before forcing myself to walk calmly on. There’s hero blood in my veins. I can handle this.
Nine of us now. Ten, eleven. Each of us quivering and multiplying in turn. I look out on the world through one viewpoint and eleven, all swimming in my head at once. When I’m too many I can get confused. Stumble. Falter. But it doesn’t matter if I stumble now, does it?
Twenty-two now. Flanks pressing up against each other. Forty-four, and we’re rammed up against the walls. Eighty-eight, and it’s getting hard to breathe. One hundred and seventy-six, and suddenly my little cell is filled to bursting. All is a jumble of grey limbs and green tails and pain as I stand on myself, breathe in my own exhaled air, struggle over myself to stand.
Once more. One more time, and perhaps it will end. The door is tempered steel and spelled for durability. If I am right, I will give way before it does. Three hundred and fifty-two.
The warden gives me a sour look over his newspaper. “Who’re you supposed to be?”
“Hello, sir!” I say nervously, praying that my voice won’t squeak. It does. “I’m here for my first day of shadowing with Dr. Harlequin.”
He scowls. “What?”
“You might have gotten a letter from me last week?” I suggest hopefully. “Or the one a month ago? I think I wrote to you a month or two before that as well.”
I’ve written to him twice a month for the last six months, trying to confirm my work placement with anything beyond the initial ‘sure, anything for you’ he sent to my mother. But no dice, and even now, he stays blank.
“I’m a trainee psychiatrist,” I explain — again, like I have in every single one of my letters. “Back home on summer break from Canterlot U. We spoke via letter last year, and you gave your permission for me to come here this summer and spend a few weeks with Dr. Harlequin.”
His ugly expression turns uglier. “Never heard from you in my life. Dr. H. is busy, kid, and she hasn’t got time to waste teaching.”
He doesn’t need to tell me how busy she is. She’s the most brilliant criminal psychologist in Interquestria, and I read every single paper she puts out. She’s the answer to the question what do you want to be when you grow up?
The warden is already standing up to usher me out, reaching for the buzzer to call somepony to escort me. But I leveraged every single connection I have to land this placement, and I’m not about to let him take this from me.
I plant my hooves and finally, reluctantly, play my trump card. “You remember me. I’m Lil Cheese. Diane Pie’s daughter.”
He’s still blank.
I sigh. Mumble, “You know? Fili-second?”
Instantly, his demeanour changes. “Fili-second? The Fili-second? Well, why didn’t you say so sooner?”
I did. Six months ago when I had my mother reach out and ask him for this. But I paint a smile onto my face and nod. “Yep, that’s her! Fastest thing on four hooves. I’m really interested in Dr. Harlequin’s work and I’m so excited to meet her.”
He’s all smiles now. Bustles out from behind his desk, ushers me down the hall. “Her office is right this way. You know, now you mention it, you do look a lot like your mother. Something about the eyes — and that hair, of course!”
We come to a halt outside an office door. I can see the nameplate — Doctor Harlequin Star, MD — and everything inside me is fizzing to meet her. To learn from her. To make the world better, like my mother does, but with words instead of powers. To heal the most broken ponies and make them whole again.
But the warden is still rambling, misty-eyed now. “Seems like yesterday when the Power Ponies first arrived in Maretropolis like yesterday. Your mother was the best of the bunch. Still is, of course. As fast as she was in her prime! Shame that the Power League takes them out of town so often these days, but they still remember old Maretropolis!”
I am itching to get through that door and meet the mare I’ve spent the past two years idolising, but I force myself to sit and smile.
“And when they took out the Sandmare! Boy, what a week that was. I remember we were cleaning sand out of the—”
His words are ripped away in a huge wall of sound. A sound like a scream, that rises from the walls, from the vents, from the very floor beneath my hooves. A single scream wrung from a thousand throats.
The pleasure vanishes from the warden’s face and his eyes narrow. I am staggering, trying to recover from that onslaught, but he just grits his teeth and mutters something under his breath.
“What was that?” I whisper.
Before he can answer, the door whips open, and there she is. Her lavender coat covered by a sensible white uniform, her royal purple mane with the blue streaks bound back in a sensible bun. She shoves her glasses back up her nose and glances from the warden to me.
“He’s trying it again,” she remarks, and before I can work out if she was speaking to the warden or to me she’s shouldered between us and galloped down the corridor.
Another rumble of sound builds beneath my hoof, and the warden slaps his hooves over his ears.
The great chorus of screams crescendos, and I begin to run.
I’ve beaten myself to death in a thousand different ways. I know how to break every bone, what it feels like when it snaps. I’ve been smothered, strangled, bludgeoned and trampled. I’ve ripped out my own throat with my teeth more than half a dozen times.
Unfortunately it never seems to stick. They left me to rot in here, but it’s hard to rot when you grow new bodies like weeds. I’ve tried over and over to take matters into my own hooves. It never works out. Cloning is a pesky power and instinct is strong. I’m always healthy again just in time to watch myself expire.
But this is new.
Crushed beneath the weight of four hundred me’s, all of them dead or dying, bursting into being and filling the straining room up yet more. Each body is averaging a life of only fifteen seconds now, each of them more painful than the last. Divide, suffer, expire. I float above it all, the mass of grey and green before each set of eyes never changing, the enormous weight of my own flesh bearing down on me heavier with every new birth.
My breaths are like avalanches. Is this the last time? Have I cracked it at last? My rips crackle like dry leaves as they crumple, and the process begins again.
“Dr. Harlequin!” I shout over the thunder of running hooves. “Hi! I’m Lil Cheese! I’m so excited to meet you!”
She doesn’t even look back.
At least the sound of the screams has died away. We’re going at top speed to the rescue of whatever poor creature made those terrible noises, but in the meantime, the chance to make a good first impression won’t come twice. “My mother sent you a letter of recommendation! And I’m such a big fan of your work! The way you rehabilitated the Smooze was so inspiring, and I—”
“Neon Brush!” she bellows, skidding to a halt beside one of the many white-painted steel doors. Her magic snatches up the bolts and wrenches them back. “How many times do I have to tell you—”
Whatever she was about to say is lost in the tidal wave of corpses that swamp her.
The door snaps open and the mess of dead me spills out. Two of me still breathe, on the verge of death, and the good doctor is digging through the mess in search of me. Panting my name, ragged with anger. Levitating body after body and hurling them down the corridor.
“You are my patient, and I will not let you engage in these ridiculous acts of self-destruction—”
She’s almost reached the first, buried near the splintered remains of the bed, but the second lies in the corridor beneath a heap of others. I have a choice — let it go and stick with the one in the cell, or multiply. Through pain-clouded eyes I can see a young mare staring at the profusion of bodies, horror in her expression. She’s too shell-shocked to notice a thing.
For the first time in years, I have a shot.
Two become four, and as the first two breathe their last and the doctor pounces on the third, the fourth slips away down the corridor, unseen and unheard.
“Dr. Harlequin?” I call, almost ashamed of the tremor in my voice as I wait at the limits of this abattoir.
I’ve studied the equine body in extremity. I’ve seen skeletons and diagrams. Brains from less enlightened times pickled in jars, arranged as neat specimens in the lab.
But I’ve never seen anything that could come close to this. Hundreds of ponies, pulverised almost beyond recognition. Snapped and squashed in a thousand different ways. My gorge rises, and I squeeze my eyes shut and try with all my might to swallow the vomit back down. Not on my first day here.
When I open my eyes, I see one of them stumble to his feet, incongruously healthy, and I’m so relieved to see a survivor of the carnage that I don’t even think to call out. He staggers away down the corridor, and I try to summon up the courage to step over the closest body.
“Aha!” Dr. Harlequin crows from inside the cell, and a dozen more corpses splat into the wall outside the door, thrown by her magic. They’re piled almost to the ceiling now, all the same grey stallion, and I don’t understand how any of this is possible.
But she emerges, dragging another identical stallion by the ear, a triumphant grin on her face. “Got him.”
“Dr. Harlequin, what’s going on?”
“This,” she brandishes the stallion, dragging him aloft in her magic, “Is Neon Brush. My least favourite inmate.”
“Least favourite?” I echo uncertainly. That doesn’t sound like the compassionate mare who brought Cozening Glare back from the brink of insanity and rehabilitated her into a functioning member of society.
She laughs grimly. “Neon here keeps half the medical schools in the country supplied with corpses to practice on, don’t you?”
She gives him a shake and he gasps with the pain of being suspended from his ear.
I blanch. “But surely that’s not ethical?”
Her smile dims. “Obviously nopony makes him kill himself. But if he’s going to do it anyway, why shouldn’t the students benefit?”
“He’s a supe?” I ask, finally catching on. What a horrifying power. A corpse generator. Grisly and unpleasant and a million miles away from the flashy, beautiful powers of my mother and her friends.
“Not just a supe. One of Mane-iac’s.”
The stallion twists miserably in her grip. “I was nothing to her,” he says bitterly. “Just bodies. Grunts. You know the Unconditioner was in here once? She broke him out three weeks in. They ran past my cell. We shouted for them. We screamed. They didn’t even look back.”
“I know,” Dr. Harlequin says crossly. “Don’t remind me. Mane-iac was here, inches away from me. If we’d managed to contain her — what a breakthrough I could have made with her. What a triumph.”
Her eyes are burning with some distant fire, a yearning to possess. And though she isn’t how I imagined at all, there isn’t time to dwell on it. I’m realising that the grey stallion who slipped away is probably very, very bad news.
“Um, Dr. Harlequin,” I manage, “I think we may have a problem.”
Lower security wing with wider bars on the window. Empty cell, smash the glass. Head through the bars and hold my neck between bloodied hooves and twist — and out I pop, pushing myself forward as the old body perishes, throwing me out beyond the window and out of Marekham at last.
The two mares are still talking, and already I’m dizzy with the distance from my other body, but what does it matter? My hooves are on solid ground, I’m moving beyond those cursed four walls, and I’m out at last.
The door slams behind Neon Brush as Dr Harlequin hurls him inside. He lands awkwardly, stumbling to his knees, and I gasp to see a patient treated so roughly.
“Which direction?” she demands, rounding on me.
I fall back from the fervour in her eyes. “Um — that way?”
“It’s not too late for a tracking spell.” Her eyes gleam dangerously in the light of her horn and she lowers her voice to a whisper. “He’ll go back to Mane-iac. He’ll lead me straight to her. The ultimate case of psychosis.”
“Won’t it be simpler just to ask Neon Brush?” I venture, but she just laughs and pushes past me. Trampling the bodies underfoot like they are nothing, her hooves slick with gore.
“He’d never tell us. No. I’m going to do this the old fashioned way.”
She thunders away, and hesitantly, I pick my way over the corpses and peer in at the stallion standing atop a small mountain of his own bodies.
“Are you…alright?” It’s a stupid thing to ask, but my professors say compassion is the first part of understanding. And understanding is the first step on the path to healing.
He smiles up at me, gaze half-hazy as he looks past me to something far away. “Oh, yeah. Thanks to you I’m grand, kiddo."
I tie the last knot in the noose and look up at it with a smile. They let me have sheets and a lightbulb to hang them from, because a hanged Neon Brush will always result in a new Neon Brush staring up at the old. But this time there’s more of me, out there in the world. The trapped body is not the last, and this time there will be no second watching the first choke out its final breath. And though it makes my head hurt to be so far from myself, my time in Marekham is almost at an end.
There’s only once place left I can go.
I step into the empty warehouse that hides the way to Mane-iac’s lair. I step onto the edge of my bed. I pull the lever to raise the trapdoor. I lower my head into the noose.
In two bodies, I descend into the dark. My new life begins today.
