//------------------------------// // Chapter 8 // Story: The Haunting // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// The Haunting Admiral Biscuit There were times that I wished that ponies had invented trail cams. I could have set several of them up around every place of interest around the house, at least assuming that a ghost would set it off. Certainly, it would have been better than spending hours in a box-fort and seeing nothing for my troubles. Ghosts ought to have a regular schedule. All the proper ghosts did. Well, I didn’t know that for a fact, but it felt like the kind of thing that ought to be a fact. A proper haunted mansion would have a ghost who showed up on schedule, did some spooky things, and then left. Although it would have been suspicious if that were the case. Being a ghost wasn’t a sundown to sunrise job. Besides, my ancestors must have spent time in the woods waiting for dinner to show up. That’s what my grandpa would have said. Sitting and waiting builds character. I felt that my character was plenty built. Bringing a book along wasn’t a bad idea, and that was a thought for the future. All the comforts of home in the box fort in my home. Surely that would be a selling point for the house; not only does it have a ghost, it’s got a fully-appointed ghost-watching box-fort. It was too bad that there wasn’t a way to put a ghost sensor on my roof. She arrived on her schedule, not mine. Her point of entry was generally approximately the same. I could have gone and marked it with paint if I’d felt like it, but close enough was good enough. She came through the roof where it faced the backyard between two of the dormer windows, each and every time she arrived. I had one spy-hole that faced in that direction. I’d gotten a bit of practice in my box-fort, and was pretty good at knowing where I could catch her entrance out of the corner of my eye. The dim glow gave it away, especially since I always felt hyper-sensitive when I was in my box-fort. It was boring, but an alert kind of boring. She came in the usual way, and I moved as stealthily as I could from one spyhole to the next, being careful to not make any noise that might disturb her. One day I was going to have to make my presence known. I thought about that when I was laying in bed. She had an awareness that things weren’t the same as they’d been before I moved in, and she seemed to want to avoid things I’d put in the attic. I wasn’t sure why--she was curious about it, so clearly she could see it and knew it was there, but she didn’t do anything with it. She got out her toys and arranged them. After the first time, that was something that I’d really paid attention to. It had occurred to me that she might be trying to send me a message, or that she had been somehow trapped in some kind of a loop. If that were the case, she would arrange them the same way every time. But that was not what she did. Nor did she play with them the same way every time. I was no expert at reading ponies, but I knew that the ears were the right place to direct my attention. Of course, who knew if that held true for ghosts; maybe I should have been paying attention to the wispy bits that made up her back half. Still, even I could tell when she was focused and when she wasn’t. There were times when she’d get lost in her toys. Telling herself some kind of story, perhaps. And there were other times when she wasn’t as focused--those were usually short nights for me. Sometimes she didn’t even get all her toys out. Sometimes it was only one or two and at first her ears would be alert but then they’d start to turn back and droop and before too long, she’d put them away and leave. ••••• I don’t know what impulse made me think of it. The trowel had been sitting in the kitchen, undisturbed. The only thing that could be said about it was that it was getting older. It probably wasn’t getting dirtier, since it was already caked with dirt. Given its location, my box-fort was movable. After all, I’d wanted to still have access to the attic. If there had been a pony Harbor Freight, I could have gotten little wheels for it and made it really nice, but even without that, the basic form was just a stack of boxes comfortably big enough for a human with strategic knotholes. The whole thing probably didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, and there were a couple of box-tops that were kind of just sitting on it rather than being properly attached with nails. I could lift them up as the world’s worst trap doors, and while there were a few times that the lack of box-fort security bothered me, she hadn’t made any serious attempts to get in. Besides, she was a ghost, and there was no chance a thin board would stymie her if she wanted to get through. That felt self-evident. I don’t know what impulse made me think of it, but I took the trowel and set it out in the attic, in the middle of the floor. Blatantly obvious; so obvious as I sat and observed that I was certain she’d see it for the trap it was. It wasn't, but that was beside the point. Many many years ago when I was in Boy Scouts, I’d gone fishing in a rowboat. The lake was clear, and I’d baited the hook with a hot dog. Not the best thing, but it was what I’d had. Three bluegill had swum up to the hook and regarded it warily. One of them had finally deigned to come up close, and then he’d reported back to his friend that it was a trap, and the three of them swam off together, and I’d learned that I was not as smart as a fish. I was apparently smarter than a ghost. She found it straight away, and what happened next was a comedy of errors. She picked it up in her mouth and went right over to the roof. She passed through the thatches without difficulty, but for the trowel it was a different matter. It was made of solider stuff, and it would not go as effortlessly as she did. Several attempts later, she realized the problem and attempted to open the dormer window. I’d looked at them already and come to the conclusion that they were not opening easily. I hadn’t tried one, which was perhaps an oversight on my part, but I had her to do that for me. They would not open. It was easy to imagine that a ghost couldn’t bring her strength to bear like a non-ghost might be able to. What I witnessed was an episode in frustration. She was able to get the latch open; that didn’t seem terribly difficult for her. But after that, she had no luck whatsoever. Paint and rust and time had taken their toll on the windows and they were now effectively ghost-proof. When that route was lost to her, she circled my box fort several times, the trowel held in her mouth. I don’t know what she was expecting to happen, but whatever it was didn’t, and finally her ears fell and she relegated herself to hiding it as well, picking a spot that was different from where her toys lived but also close to the backyard. ••••• I should have felt like I’d accomplished something when I finally departed my box-fort, but I didn’t. I felt hollow, like I’d taken candy from a baby or managed some other task that was not only meaningless, but perhaps unnecessarily cruel. My mind kept replaying her pushing uselessly on the dormer window and I finally got back up out of bed and went to the attic. The window was stiff but not a match for a human, and I got it open. Just to make sure I wasn’t crazy, I took one look at the hollow where she’d hid the trowel and it was still there. I left the window cracked open, wide enough that a trowel would fit through it, and retired to bed.