Author’s Note: This short story originally was published in an anthology collection entitled “Bronies Gone Wild”, a collection of shorts assembled by Horrified Press back in 2017. While the story is still available there, the folks at Horrified have terminated the exclusivity portion of contributors’ original contracts thanks to Google Books’ continued inability to keep track of what portions of any of the books they scan get offered up for free reading by the public. Effectively, Google violated our copyrights, but there’s nothing either we or Horrified can do about it, because Google is shielded from litigation thanks to the finding in a similar incident in 2016 by a court that it was not Google’s intent to violate our intellectual property rights, the violation just happened to occur as an unintended consequence of their software doing what it does.
I wish every short story author the best of luck now and in the future if they should contribute to a collection or anthology, because if the collection is scanned for Google Books’ preview program, the authors whose hard work and efforts went into becoming part of those collections may end up yielding them little more than heartache.
With that out of the way, on to the story!
*****************************************************
Standing at the base of the courthouse steps, the rumble and crackle of tires rolling on the pavement serves as little more than an idiot drone in the background of his perceptions. The ever-present city stink, exhaust and the lingering body odor of hundreds of people who press through any given sidewalk space at all hours of the day and night, barely registers, for all Jansen Reed can absorb is the confused, moist-eyed stare of his daughter Sally in the back seat of a taxi as her mother Tracy gives the driver his instructions. The green-and-white sedan pulls sedately away into traffic moments later, dragging his soul to scrape along the street after.
His darling little girl couldn’t possibly have understood most of what was going on in the family court chamber where his ex-wife made her final argument for primary custody, leaving Jansen with only visits which she would approve in advance. The court had accommodated Tracy’s request to have a sitter tend to Sally in a separate chamber, so that she wouldn’t have to hear her mother explain to the judge that her ex-husband was, in her words, a ‘sexual deviant who dressed up like a cartoon character to pork total strangers’. For years Jansen had been able to keep his activities as a furry from her, storing his ‘skins’ as he called them in his work truck, and refraining from ever actually engaging in any sexual activity at the get-togethers he attended. He’d been faithful only to her, ever, but she simply didn’t believe it.
The discovery had come as the result of a simple thing, really. Jansen had intended to send some of the photos he took at a gathering to one of his friends within the community. Unfortunately, his fellow furry’s email address started with the same two letters as Tracy’s, and when the auto-fill put her address in, he simply hadn’t caught his error. One week and dozens of screaming arguments later, she had moved out of the townhouse and had him served with divorce papers.
His ennui rolled over as the taxi disappeared from view, turning onto Sixth Avenue, revealing the bubbling resentment beneath. The judge hadn’t cared to hear anything Jansen or his attorney had to say; liberal as Minnesotans liked to claim they were, politically, societal norms of a conservative or classical bent still ruled the hearts and minds of most. Judge Prescott had proven no different in this, glowering disapprovingly at Jansen every time he and Tracy stood before him.
Under most considerations, Jansen Reed was fortunate as a Midwesterner. He was Caucasian, male, straight, and a Protestant, so there were few aspects of everyday life wherein he didn’t fit into the majority of his region. As someone living in the suburbs of Minneapolis, he even fit in politically as a Democrat. Working as an independent electrical contractor, he made decent money for himself and his family, but was still viewed by his friends and relations as a blue-collar guy, because he worked in a trade instead of behind a desk.
Yet none of this amounted to anything in the view of the court, thanks to Tracy handing over copies of the photos he’d taken. Though he did not engage in the physical relations of other furries at their get-togethers, he always let them know he was willing to be their unofficial photographer. Because the participants all wore costumes, identification became difficult, and it only took Tracy claiming that she ‘wasn’t sure’ if he was in any of the pictures for the judge to concur. The man didn’t outright call him a freak, but Jansen could feel the condescension and scorn shooting from the man’s glare.
Alone, defeated, and wanting nothing so much as to scream, Jansen stomped across the street to the parking structure where his truck was located, got inside, and proceeded to pound the steering wheel with the flat of his palm until he felt certain the bones in his hand must break. Fury spent, he collapsed over the wheel and wept, until finally, drained of everything but the autopilot capacity that steals over us in our bleakest moments, he headed home.
**
Home was a pleasant little townhouse in a community filled with them, located just off of 169. The neighborhood, surprisingly quiet given the proximity to such a major blood vessel in the state’s transportation web, offered a tranquility to the senses that would find no place in Jansen as he turned into one of its streets. He pulled his pickup into the garage, pausing for a moment before closing the door behind him to contemplate leaving the vehicle running and just rolling down his window a crack after shutting himself in.
With a sigh, he opted for life, killing the engine, pressing the little clicker clipped to his sun visor. Once inside, he paused to consider the lower level of the house. In the two months since Tracy had absconded with Sally out of the residence, Jansen had made few changes. The lower level was still effectively the domain of his cheerful little five-year-old girl, with her pictures taped up on the walls, the furniture all perfectly sized for a child except for a single armchair that Mommy or Daddy would sit in to oversee her activities. Agony owing nothing to physical sources tore through him to see it all now, dropping him to his knees on the deep pile carpet to weep once again.
Changes had to be made, he decided afterward, because nobody could live like this.
**
“Woooowww, Daddy! It’s so much different!” Sally walked into the downstairs living room three weeks later, her little kitty-themed suitcase rolling silently along the carpet as she proceeded forward with her head pivoting this way and that like a visitor stepping into Saint Peter’s Cathedral for the first time.
“I know, princess, but don’t worry, your stuff’s not gone,” Jansen replied with a smile, standing in the doorway in a cable knit blue sweater and jeans, watching her take it all in. “I put it all in your room, along with a new dresser and bed since Mommy took your old ones.”
“I wanna see, I wanna see,” she yipped, jumping up and down, suitcase handle dropped in her excitement. Jansen led her, hand resting on the back of her head, to a door off to the right from the entryway between the garage and the lower level. Three doors, in fact, stood down at the end of the short hallway, one directly ahead, and two on the left. He opened the door right ahead, revealing a room that might have been designed by the Disney Princesses on speed, all pinks and purples and filled with all things ‘girly’. Sally gasped in awe, taking it all in, sprinting over to a pair of toy boxes in one corner. She threw open the lids and gasped again, as only children can do. “My toys! But I thought I brought most of these with me to Mommy’s new house?”
“You did, pumpkin, so I went out and got you some to keep here instead,” Jansen said. “I know I probably got some of them wrong, I’m sorry about that,” he began. He might have rambled on, but she flung herself at him then, clamping onto his leg, turning her head to bury her ear against his hip.
“It’s perfect, Daddy,” she volunteered. Stooping down to return the embrace as best he could, Jansen just kept his mouth shut until she finally let him go. “Oh, do you still have Netflix, Daddy?”
“Yeah, well, your mother and I agreed to keep sharing the account,” he said, guiding her toward the downstairs living room with its rearranged furnishings. “Why, is there a show you want to watch?” A bob of her head confirmed as much, and Jansen turned on the television now situated up on the mantle over the gas fireplace and switched it on, then used the Roku remote to bring up Netflix. He selected Sally’s profile, then waited for her input as she clambered up onto the other swiveling armchair, a previously unbeknownst-to-him stuffed animal tucked under her arm. It looked like a neon pink horse with stylized hair and a set of balloons branded on its hindquarters. “So, what am I looking for, kiddo?”
“’My Little Pony’,” she told him, and Jansen scrolled along to locate the program in question.
**
To call the experience ‘transformative’ for Jansen would have been doing the term very little justice. Four months after watching those first six episodes with Sally, he looked back on the moment and wondered, not for the first time, how anybody coming across it could not see the beauty of what was ostensibly just a simple, silly little cartoon aimed predominantly at little girls. Jansen had been raised like many men his age in the Midwest- work hard, play fair, be honest, and be decent to the folks in your community. All of these concepts could be found in the program, and they weren’t even difficult to spot, so far as he could tell.
Never one to oversell himself, Jansen assumed the messaging to be of middling difficulty to see at worst if even he could pick up on it. Twilight Sparkle and company always put in their best efforts, shared responsibilities with one another evenly, treated kindly or at least civilly with each other and even strangers whenever they could, and only resorted to butting heads when no other recourse was available. The concept of being inclusive, even to those whose lifestyles or behaviors or origins were far different than one’s own, shone through like a Mag Light in a darkened basement.
After bringing Sally back to Tracy’s place just a few miles down the road after that first weekend, Jansen had sped right home and dove back into the Ponies’ universe, binge-watching an entire season-and-a-half before going to bed. The following day he’d gone out, worked on a couple of contract projects, and then bee-lined for home to pick up where he’d left off. He lost himself entirely in the show, neglecting even to eat until nearly nine o’clock at night. The four months that followed saw no decrease in this trend, which led him to this very moment.
And that very moment, it turned out, carried with it the spectral sound of brakes being applied so violently that the screeching could almost be heard by his actual ears. Prior to his investment in all things MLP (including a sizable collection of merch, all of which he’d arranged in what he called ‘The Shrine’ up in what used to be his and Tracy’s bedroom on the upper floor), most of Jansen’s time online had been spent on YouTube, Facebook, CNN.com and several trade websites focused on the construction industry and electricians’ forums. He spent a fair amount of this time as well in the furry chat rooms and forums, but this had declined since the divorce.
A few days after dropping Sally off from her most recent stay with him, Jansen had dipped into one, reading through the various brief posts until he came upon one wherein a member had mentioned ‘Bronies’. Unaware of what the term meant, Jansen did a few quick searches, and initially felt the phoenix-flame heat of revelation, thinking to himself, I have found my people! In a manner of minutes, he was joined to no less than five different message boards, all run and populated by folks like himself, grown men who’d become fixated with My Little Pony.
But for every fandom, there is a realm populated by minds so warped the good people who made Twizzlers could have learned a thing or two about being twisted from them, a fact Jansen was now becoming acquainted with. Sitting in his Pinkie Pie-inspired costume in the upstairs living room, all of his shades and curtains drawn and slid shut, he clicked with mounting disgust and horror as he briefly screened fanart and fanfiction from Bronies who, if he had a gun and a map, might end up the cause for his lifelong incarceration. He could stomach it for only about fifteen minutes before he logged offline and shut his laptop with a hardy clap, nose wrinkled, mouth curled in a revolted sneer.
“What the fuck is wrong with people,” he grumbled aloud, heading for the bathroom. He paused to look at himself in the mirror over the sink, pushing back the pony head like a hood. Here stood a man in his mid-30’s, not handsome exactly, but neither looking like the last-ditch, ‘what was I thinking’ goblin some unlucky young woman finally settled on at the end of a long night populated by good friends Alcohol and Ever-Lowering Self Respect. He was just a regular guy, with a respectable job and a dedication to his child’s happiness and well-being that many modern fathers could learn from. So what if he obsessed over something clearly intended for kids? At least I’m not one of those cretins, he thought, using the toilet, washing his hands, and heading back to the living room for another marathon of his material of worship.
**
The Friday morning following his discovery of the underworld of the Brony community, Jansen called on his most trusted employee, Stan, and asked him if he could handle wrapping up one of their jobs before the weekend. Stan assured him that wasn’t a problem, though he did ask if everything was okay. “Oh, yeah,” Jansen said, taking a sip of coffee at the small kitchen table he’d replaced his and Tracy’s old one with. “I just wanted to spend a little extra time with Sally this weekend.”
“That’s a better reason than most of these clowns would think up, boss,” Stan replied. “Helps that I believe you, too. Tell her Big Belly says hi,” Stan said before hanging up. Stan was one of the few people Jansen employed who he socialized with outside of work, a burly, outgoing guy who’d swung over to watch the start of the NHL Playoffs with him. Sally, whose weekend bed times were later than when she was home with her mother, had still been awake and up in the living room with them when the game started, and Stan had been just as friendly with her as he was with everybody he met. He even laughed and waved off Jansen’s warning when she asked if she could call him Big Belly, owing to his girth.
With that seen to, Jansen scrolled through his contacts, coming to Tracy. Of course, like many recently-divorced men, he’d changed the name on her contact; ‘The Bitch’ showed on his screen as his thumb hovered over the call icon. “I should probably change that,” he mumbled to himself, clicking ‘call’. The phone rang twice before clicking over, and he started with, “Sorry to call so early, Trace.”
“Oh, no, it’s not a problem,” his ex-wife responded muzzily.
“Did I wake you up?”
“Yeah, well, not really, sort of. I didn’t sleep very well. Sally climbed up into bed with me last night and kept tossing and turning, mumbling.”
“Did she go to school?”
“Oh yeah, I just got her on the bus a little bit ago. Why, what’s up, do you have to cancel this weekend or something for work?”
“No, actually, I’ve got Stan handling a cleanup today, I was thinking I could swing by the school and pick her up at the end of the day,” he said.
“Oh. Um, sure, that’s fine, that’s good, but I didn’t pack her stuff for the weekend yet. Do you want to swing over here in a little bit and grab it before you get her?”
“That’s not a problem.”
“And hey, while I’ve got you on the phone, I want to ask you about this room you don’t let her go in,” Tracy said, finally broaching a subject Jansen had been hoping they could avoid. “I know you rearranged the house, that’s fine, I don’t care. But what have you got in that room that she can’t go in there, Jansen? Is that where you keep all of your weirdo, stuffed animal kink shit?” Jansen’s free hand clenched into a fist, a Herculean effort the only thing keeping him from slamming it down on the table.
“Don’t worry about it, Tracy, okay? All that matters is I keep it locked, so she can’t get in there, all right?”
“Whatever. Come by about noon, I’ll have her stuff ready.” And that was that, the line gone dead right after. They’d barely spoken to each other since that last court appearance, even when he went over to pick up Sally for the weekends. Mostly they exchanged brief pleasantries, but the unspoken agreement seemed to be to limit interaction, which worked for both of them. Sally had blitzed him with questions at first, but for his part, Jansen had managed to curb most of them by simply telling her that Mommy and Daddy still both loved her, would do anything for her, but they just couldn’t get along with each other anymore. When she inquired why this was, Jansen simply said, “Because we don’t agree on some very important things.”
To Tracy’s credit, he didn’t think she’d given Sally much of an alternative explanation, because nothing Sally ever said or hinted at or asked about would lead him to believe the narrative was any different from Mommy’s end. He’d managed to confirm as much about a month earlier when Tracy deigned to talk to him when he dropped Sally off on a Sunday evening. “I just tell her we were fighting too much, that it was better for her that we not live together anymore,” Tracy told him when he asked her bluntly what her version of the story was for their daughter.
“Well, that’s good of you, Trace, thanks,” he’d said. She shrugged her shoulders at him.
“Whatever else you are, Jansen, you’re a good father,” Tracy replied. “I’m not going to throw you under the bus for a cheap sense of satisfaction.” Finishing his first cup of coffee, Jansen wondered how long that would last.
**
The park, a movie, and then McDonald’s for dinner. Few spring afternoons could better cheer a spritely five-year-old kid, and Sally hummed happily to herself all the way home as the last bits of daylight bled out of the sky overhead, her Pinkie Pie tucked faithfully under her arm. “Now it’s already getting late, kiddo, so it’s going to be a quick shower and then right to bed when we get home, okay?”
“Okay Daddy,” she said. Before she got in the downstairs bathroom’s shower stall, Jansen applied the little suction cups on the floor so the rubberized bath mat would stay in place, then laid out her pajamas on the edge of the sink, a towel on the toilet.
“Now you’re sure you don’t need me in here,” he asked one last time.
“I’m sure, Daddy. I’m five, ‘member?”
“So you are,” he said, tousling her hair. “I’ll be out here when you’re done, come get me so I can tuck you in.” He watched How I Met Your Mother for half an episode before she came and got him, hair still too wet for a pillow, towel rumpled in the hallway. He snickered, then rubbed her head for a minute with the towel until he was satisfied it would be all right for the night. “Let’s go, squirt,” he said, ushering her into the room.
When they were a few feet away from her bed, adorned with a My Little Pony sheet set and comforter, Sally halted so suddenly and stiffly that Jansen almost fell over her. “Whoa, honey, what’s the matter,” he asked, sidestepping and crouching down beside her. She stared at the bed, a look so intense it might make a Buddhist monk in deep meditation crack open an eye to see just what the hell was going on. The sheer terror in her eyes clashed violently with the serene scent of lavender, lingering in her hair from the shampoo.
“Can you lift the bed,” she asked, so hushed he could barely hear the question. But upon hearing it, he suspected he knew from whence came this sudden fear, so without hesitation, he knee-walked over to her bed and hoisted it up, showing her a space clear of anything other than a few misplaced toys. A sigh of relief poured out of her, and Sally wrapped her arms around his neck like a person drowning. “Thank you, Daddy,” she said.
“Of course, sweetie. Did you think there was going to be a monster under there?” She pulled away a little and nodded. “Why is that, honey?”
“Cause there’s one under my bed at Mommy’s. I scare him away with Pinkie, but it’s not working so good anymore,” she confessed, looking down at the floor.
“How long has the monster been there, honey?”
“I don’t know,” she said, fidgeting with her stuffy’s mane. “Couple of weeks?”
“Okay, well, I’ll talk to your mom about getting rid of the monster, okay? We’ll take care of it,” he offered, then helped her up under the covers, placing a single kiss on her forehead before heading to the doorway and turning off the light. Just a normal childhood fear, he thought as he resumed his show. Nothing to worry about.
**
It could have been the rough week he’d had at work, it could have been getting screwed out of getting paid on time by three different clients; whatever it was that clipped Jansen’s fuse down to a nub by Friday afternoon, spotting the purple bruise on Sally’s leg when he helped her up into the truck lit the match. “Wait right here, honey,” he told her, clipping her into her seat and stomping like a berserker back to the door. Tracy visibly flinched when he drew near, spittle spraying from his mouth when he snarled at her, “What the fuck, Tracy?,” finger pointed back toward his truck.
“It happened a couple of nights ago, she was crashing around in her room,” his ex-wife said, fairly cowering from him in the doorway. “I, I went in there, and she’d somehow managed to pin herself under one of the legs of her bed, she came crawling out and crying the second I turned the light on!”
“She’s having night terrors, and you didn’t think to call me, to give me a head’s up? ‘Hey Jan, just a warning, our child’s been bottling up the trauma of our divorce and started thrashing in her sleep and hurting herself, thought you might like to know’? Jesus Christ,” he finished, hands on his hips, turning this way and that, lower lip sucked up between his teeth.
“Kids process these things in their own way, Jansen,” Tracy said evenly while he silently fumed. “Sally told me she has a monster under her bed, said she used to scare it away with Pinkie Pie.”
“Well, it isn’t working anymore,” Jansen said, letting out a deep breath, trying to center himself. “It’s like a comfort versus reality thing, she doesn’t feel the same protection she did at first. The longer we’re apart, the less her stuffy helps.”
“Makes sense,” said Tracy, folding her arms over her chest. Jansen looked at her, taking in the bounce of her auburn curls, the normally impish glint of her big green eyes. He could see these in Sally already, though she had inherited Jansen’s slash-like lips and radar dish ears, an unfortunate result of the roulette of genetics. There was a helplessness now in Tracy’s features, however, a defeat in the slump of her stance as she leaned against the doorframe. “And it’s too bad, because she adores that cartoon. If that isn’t helping, what can we do?”
Jansen’s brain lit up like a Christmas tree, the concept spilling out for his mind’s eye like a rapid fire Power Point presentation. She’ll never fucking go for it, and you’re insane to think she would, the tiny, rational part of his brain hollered. God’s sake, think about why she divorced you in the first place! But instead of listening to that bit of his mind, Jansen cleared his throat, looked Tracy firmly in the eyes, and said, “Get your keys and come over for a bit. I have something to show you.”
**
“It’s official,” Tracy said twenty minutes later. “You’re completely goddamned insane, Jansen.” Sally had promised to stay downstairs and watch television while Mommy and Daddy talked upstairs, which was something she’d gotten used to in the dying days of their marriage. Now, Jansen and Tracy Reed stood in The Shrine, surrounded by My Little Pony paraphernalia of every sort. There were figurines and toys, in box and out of box, arranged on shelves along three walls, play sets carefully laid out to present a replica of Ponyville in one section of the room, and a bookshelf filled with printouts of clean MLP fanfics alphabetically arranged by contributor. When he wasn’t working or dealing with matters related to his small company at home, Jansen swam the waters of all things MLP.
“Could you just, listen, for a minute,” he interjected, trying to get her to let her prejudices go for just a few minutes.
“You’re one of those Bronies,” she said, not a question so much as a jabbing accusation. She flapped her arms, shaking her head at him. “Well, this works out just perfectly for you, doesn’t it? How long has this been your thing, Jansen?”
“Okay, you want to get into this,” he snarled, tucking his hands in his pockets and thumping down into the lone chair in the room. “Fine. That first weekend you let Sally come stay here, almost a month after the final custody hearing, okay? She wanted to watch it, and I sat and watched it with her, and do you know what, Tracy? You should watch it with her, too. You might learn something about not leaping to conclusions about people before you actually get to know them.” He snorted, looking away from her to let his temper subside. Silence reigned for a few minutes before he heard something sliding aside, wood on a metal track. He looked over, and found Tracy staring into the closet, where his pony costumes hung.
“Wait,” she said, lips peeled back, but her eyes narrowed. She reached into the closet, grabbed something, and pulled out the Pinkie Pie outfit. “Is, is this what you’re thinking?” She rattled the outfit back and forth, looked at it, then hung it back up, sliding the closet shut. Arms folded over her chest, jaw set, she stood in the middle of the room and cocked her head to one side. “I think I know what your idea is, but I want you to clarify. And just so you know, I’m not saying ‘okay’ to anything, but I’m willing to hear you.”
So Jansen laid out the plan for her, and though he could tell it grated at her to do so, she accepted it.
**
Sally set to giggling the moment he stepped into the bedroom. After getting her agreement to move forward with the plan, Jansen brought Sally back from the truck to her mother and told her, just before the little girl could burst into tears, that he was going to be right back. “I’m actually going to spend the night here, with you guys,” he said, and oh, how Sally’s face shone at this happy news. The whole drive back to his house, he brooded over what Sally must be thinking. Are Mommy and Daddy getting back together? Can we live together again? Can we be a family now, like we were before? All of this he thought in her voice, the questions setting aflame the forest of his soul. How was he to answer those questions for her? What could he possibly say to her?
The image formed crystal clear in his mind as he stuffed the costume in a laundry bag. There he stood in a small, dank concrete cell, a black mask over his head with slits for eyes to see out of, wearing a correctional officer’s uniform and black leather gloves. Through a bulletproof glass, he looks into a room occupied by three rows of folding chairs, his precious little girl sitting alone in the middle row, clutching her Pinkie Pie in a gray, shapeless dress, sobbing so hard her eyes cannot be opened. Strapped to Old Sparky is a child-like shape with the word ‘HOPE’ drawn in crayon across its chest. His hand is on the lever, and with the sound of bells tolling midnight, he throws the switch.
Shaking loose his mental tableau, Jansen finished his preparations, locked the Shrine, and headed back over to Tracy’s house. The three of them had dinner together, watched some cartoons, and played a game of Monopoly Jr. before Tracy took Sally into the bathroom for a bath before bed. Pausing to listen to the splashes and laughter, Jansen wondered how he’d lost this. Into Tracy’s room he went, the laundry bag in hand.
Half an hour later, he now stepped into Sally’s bedroom in his Pinkie Pie outfit, unable to control the smile that spread across his face. He held his arms out wide to either side and said, “What’s so funny, pumpkin? Isn’t this great? It’s Pinkie Pie, but big-sized! What do you think, kiddo?”
“I think it’s great, Daddy,” she said. She sounded relieved, in a way, and this gave him a fresh burst of hope. The bedroom door opened behind him, and Jansen half-turned to find Tracy standing there with a pillow in hand, blanket draped over her arm.
“Well, honey, Pinkie here is going to sleep in your room tonight, so there’s no way that monster’s going to cause any problems. I mean, look at her,” Tracy said, waving her empty and up and down to indicate Jansen. “You think any monster’s gonna get past this big a pony?”
“Nooooo,” Sally said, collapsing into giggles once more.
“Right you are,” Tracy said, pushing the pillow and blanket into Jansen’s gut. She knelt down beside the bed and gave Sally a hug and kiss. “Good night, sweetie.”
“Night, Mommy,” Sally said, laying down and pulling her blanket up to her neck as she rolled onto her side to face the door. Tracy pulled Jansen back one step toward the door by the crook of his arm.
“We do this once, and that’s it,” she hissed into his ear.
“Not a problem,” he whispered back. “Good night, Mommy,” he said, heading over to the bed and setting the pillow down on the floor next to the headboard, then covering himself in the blanket and laying down on the carpet. Tracy turned off the light, throwing Jansen and Sally into darkness before she pulled the door shut.
“Okay, Mommy’s gone,” said Sally, head poking over the side of the bed. “Tell me a story.”
“Well, once upon a time, there lived a family of foxes in the forest,” Jansen began.
**
The stench of the beast preceded it, and it came to Jansen as a motley blend of gasoline and spoiled milk. Nearly retching, he sputtered awake, eyes still scrunched almost entirely shut, stretching widely as he yawned. He blinked a few times, and after the second blink, every inch of the human survival instinct came roaring to life, throwing switches and levers and contacting the skeletal and muscular system to inform them that this was not a drill.
There was a thing looking at him from under Sally’s bed.
A pool of wavering darkness, blacker even than the shadow cast by the bed itself, shimmered on the floor where the carpeting should have been. Protruding from the center of this pool was a bullet-like head, sleek and glistening, with a single baleful scarlet eye blinking, a feline, vertical pupil fixed upon him. There did not appear to be any kind of mouth or teeth, but behind the tubular head wavered what looked like a scorpion’s stinger, which disappeared down into the darkness.
“Holy Mary Mother of God,” he whimpered, shooting up to his knees. Sally lay stiff as a board in the bed, her eyes open wide, Pinkie Pie plushie clutched under her chin.
“It’s here, isn’t it,” she asked, and Jansen’s hesitation vanished. He snatched her up in both arms and got to his feet as Sally’s bed began to rise, the creature dragging its foulness up into the room. Jansen shuffled backward, Sally burying her face in his fuzzy pink chest as the monster rose in all its splendor into the world, Sally’s bed tumbling down into the darkness from whence it came.
Standing a good three inches taller than Jansen, the creature’s body was a scrawny, angular thing of jutting bones contained in a slime-coated, leathery black flesh, almost humanoid in presentation. Its sunken chest hosted a mouth with gnashing teeth in a ring, like the sucker on some octopus alien in a bad sci-fi flick from the 50’s or 60’s, a forked pink tongue flashing out sporadically. Its arms, grotesquely long, ended in four-fingered claws which dragged along the carpet as it took a step toward them, a segmented scorpion’s tail waggling from its backside.
Jansen saw the thing’s pyramid-like pelvis shifting to one side, and, listening to those survival alarms, took a quick step to his left, toward the door. The scorpion stinger shot through empty air where he’d been, and he hustled backward to the bedroom door, shifting Sally’s weight so he could carry her one-armed for a few feet. He reached behind himself with his freed hand, got the knob secure, and pulled the door open, still keeping his eyes on the beast in his daughter’s bedroom.
A bone-rattling growl escaped from its chest, bringing its clawed hands up into fists at its hips. Clear of the doorway, Jansen risked taking his eyes off of the beast to wheel around and run for the front door. He half-expected to crash into Tracy, but there was no sign of her, and anyhow the thing had clearly come for Sally, so he had a single obligation; get her away from it.
Making no effort to mask the noise of their escape, Jansen pummeled his way through the hallway, into the living room, and out the front door, Sally crying into his shoulder now that she’d shifted her own weight and position to allow him to move more swiftly. Terrified though she might be, a swell of pride filled him for her having recognized the only small way she could help her Daddy and herself survive the situation.
Out in the driveway, he opened the driver’s side door and let her swiftly crawl across the bench seat, letting him clamber in right after her. He dipped his hand down into the cup holder, snagged his keys, and had the engine turning over as the beast swept out onto the front steps of the little rambler home. Its stinger came up over its head, which reared back as a roar escaped its queer chest-mouth, rattling the windows of the truck even as he backed down the driveway into the road.
“Go, Daddy, go,” Sally pleaded, and Daddy did just that, tearing the hell away from Tracy’s house.
“It’s okay, sweetheart, it’s okay,” he said, though his heart threatened to explode from his chest and he believed not a word coming out of his own mouth. “We’re going to go to Daddy’s house now, okay? It’s never showed up there, so it’s gonna be safe, all right?” Through the benighted streets he raced, thankful that he wasn’t pulled over on the brief trip to his own home. They rushed inside, where Jansen led Sally up the stairs and down the hall to the locked Shrine. He opened the door, ushered her through, and turned her around as he knelt before her, hands on her shoulders. “I want you to stay here, okay,” he breathed. Tears streaming down her face, she nodded mutely. “Just stay in here, where it’s safe, and lock the door behind me, okay?” He pressed his keys into her hand, and she gave him a knowing, yet still curious look.
“You can’t get in if I have the keys,” she pointed out.
“Just do what I say, honey,” he said, and she hugged him around the neck, hard, before stepping back and easing the door shut on him, securing the knob lock a moment later. As soon as he heard that little ‘click’, Jansen raced back downstairs into the garage, taking a hammer out of one of his toolboxes before heading back inside. Up in the kitchen, he took up a long knife in the other hand, then settled in with his back to the Shrine door, waiting.
Because things like that don’t give up, he thought. They never do.
**
“Just calm down, ma’am,” the uniformed officer said, pen and pocket notebook in hand. Tracy had been in a good, deep sleep, but the sound of the truck peeling out had cut through the last of her defenses, already worn down by the sounds of movement through the tiny house. When she discovered both Jansen and Sally missing, her sheets tossed aside from the bed like so much flotsam, she knew she’d made a mistake to let Jansen come over. As far as she was concerned, it had been a mistake to let him stay close to their daughter.
The police had shown up within minutes of her panicked 911 call, a unit already nearby on its routine traffic patrol. “I can’t calm down, he’s sick, all right? He’s sick in the head, and he has my little girl with him, and God only knows what he’s going to do to her,” she rambled. The officer, now joined by a second and third unit with their light bars flashing, put one hand on her arm to steady her.
“Ma’am, does your ex-husband live nearby?”
“Yes, yes he does, we didn’t want to have to take Sally too far away, she still loves him so much,” Tracy said, sniffing. She gave the officer Jansen’s address, which he jotted down quickly.
“All right, I’m going to have one of these officers stay here with you, and I’m going to take the other one over to check and see if they’re there, okay? Just stay here, ma’am.” The patrolman walked over to his colleagues, who stood together in the narrow gap between their cruisers parked along the side of the street. “Baker, stay here with Miss Reed. Torez, you’re behind me, we got an address for the father. Let’s go check it out and hope he’s there, because from what she says, the guy might not be all there in the head.”
And so two sets of flashing lights pulled away from Tracy Reed’s home.
**
Subtlety, apparently, was not the creature’s strong suit, because five minutes after sitting down on the floor in the hallway upstairs, Jansen shot to his feet at the sound of the door from the garage into the house slamming open. The beast let loose another of its roars, and the thunder of its footsteps reverberated through his whole home. Sally let out a scream in the Shrine, and Jansen strode from the hallway out into the living room, stopping a few feet away from the top of the stairs.
The stench rode him down, a stallion loosed on the plains of olfactory sensation, but he stood his ground, even as the thing came crawling up the outer wall of the stairwell like a spider, forgoing that grand old tradition of taking the steps. It sprang from the wall at him, and with a grunt, Jansen swung his hammer in a savage uppercut at it. The force and surprise of impact caused something in his elbow to pop painfully, but the shrill shriek from the creature as part of its wet head, down where a mouth would normally be, crumpled in, leaking inky black fluid on the carpet, fed the pleasure center of Jansen’s brain. I can do this, he thought wildly. It bleeds!
The next thing Jansen felt was weightlessness and hellfire in his own face, the beast having backhanded him in retaliation, the raw force breaking his jaw and several teeth free from the gum. He flew backward though the living room, his ass connecting with the back of a couch and dumping it over as he fell back onto the floor with a groan. He kicked himself backward half a foot, springing off of the fallen couch, then strained up to a crouch as the beast came slinking at him, the claws of its left hand carving through carpeting and the wood underneath.
He deftly dodged aside as it swiped at him, though the length of its natural weapons proved too long to evade the attack entirely, four angry slashes cutting through costume and flesh along his chest. Shallow cuts, to be sure, but they stung like nothing he’d ever felt. He backed away further, now closing on the door to the Shrine. “Come on, you son of a bitch,” he snarled with as much bravado as he could muster. The creature bore down on him, a rumbling laughter creeping out of its chest. This is it, he thought, ready to attack, this is where I die.
The door opened behind him then, and the creature halted in its tracks, its neck craning up, singular eye peering widely over his head into the Shrine. A shrill, tiny voice just behind Jansen screamed out, “YOU GET AWAY FROM MY DADDY!” Then came projectiles, tiny, colorful bits of plastic flying at the beast, which flinched and covered itself from the futile assault as My Little Pony collectibles rained down on it, taking half a step back. “I, said, get, away,” Sally hollered, another toy thrown with each shout, another half step taken by the beast.
And though none of this did any damage to the hellish thing from under her bed, it created an opening. Lunging forward, Jansen stabbed the creature right in its singe, glaring eye. It howled and stumbled backward, flailing at the knife sticking out of its head, and Jansen pressed his advantage, bull-rushing the thing to the floor with a crash, smashing its horrid teeth with his hammer as Sally egged him on from behind. He swung and swung, moving from the ruin of its mouth to its long neck next, the world a blur of victorious fury as he pummeled the monster until the only sound around him was the wet, dull smack of his hammer on the already-dead thing.
Panting, barely able to register the dampness of the gore that had soaked though his costume down to his skin, Jansen nonetheless turned his head toward his beautiful little girl as she tugged on his arm. “Look, Daddy,” she was saying, pointing towards the windows in the living room. Pulsing red and blue lights drew towards the house, and part of his brain, recognizing the potential for more danger, took charge.
“Go back into that room, honey, it’s the police,” he said. “I have to go tell them what happened, okay? Remember, the police are the good guys, right honey?” She beamed at him, a little of the gore from the beast dripping down her bangs, its gasoline reek heavy on them both now.
“Right, Daddy,” she said, giving him another hug and kiss. “I’ll be with Pinkie,” she said, hustling away back down the hall. Jansen watched her go, closing the door dutifully behind her. What a good girl, he thought, grunting as he got to his feet. He shambled downstairs, chest on fire from the matching gashes on his chest. He prayed that whatever corruption ran through the beast would not poison him, given that he was caked in its fluids from head to toe.
“Guess I’ll find out before too long,” he mused aloud to himself as he stumbled on legs turning weak from the flush of adrenaline as it drained from his lower extremities. He got to the door leading out to the garage, which he’d left open. “Bit of an oversight there,” he said, chuckling darkly to himself as he pulled the door open. He stepped out into the blinding glare of police headlights and strobes, raising his arm to shield his eyes. “Hey, we’re okay,” he called out. “We’re,” he said, realizing that he was a grown man, in a gore-splattered Pinkie Pie costume, with a hammer in his hand. “Oh, kay,” he managed, just as half a dozen bullets tore through his chest and stomach.
He lay on the filthy garage floor, watching as booted feet rushed toward him in slow motion, clamminess stealing over him. Jansen Reed had been regarded as an anomaly among his fellow furries, not engaging in their erotic adventures as anything more than a photographer. He’d been seen by his spouse of seven years as a deviant and a freak. A judge in family court saw him as a pervert. Most of the general public saw him as a creep, since he was a member of the Brony Brotherhood.
Yet with Death racing along to collect his grim due, Jansen Reed cared only that he’d been a good father, from whom some of his contemporaries could learn a thing or two.
-Fin