//------------------------------// // Chapter 9 // Story: The Haunting // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// The Haunting Admiral Biscuit She must have come back after I’d gone to bed, because after work and before laying down for my afternoon nap, I checked the attic and the trowel was gone. I should have gone to bed; that would have been the sensible thing to do. After all, surely she’d be back after dark, and I could watch her some more. But I did want to know where she’d taken the trowel. Obviously, it was meant to be used in the garden, so that was the logical place to look for it. It had been kind of in the open before. That wasn’t something that had registered right away, but it should have. I’d always had a bad habit of not rolling up my garden hose, and it didn’t take all that long for the grass to grow up over it if I was lazy with the lawn mowing. Had the trowel been left there since before I moved it, it would have been covered by something, which led me to believe that she had been using it in the garden. To what end, I had no idea. There weren’t any mysterious holes or missing plants. It wasn’t in the garden. I suppose it could have been buried in the garden, but then it could have been buried anywhere. My next thought was that it was on the roof. A thatched roof would be a pretty good hiding spot; she could have tucked it alongside one of the dormer windows or really anywhere, and I’d never find it. She hadn’t done that. Instead, it was in the crotch of a tree, at nearly eye-level for me. That would have been a decent enough hiding place against an earth pony or a unicorn, but once I’d started to look around and consider other places to check, it was quite obvious. I should have cleaned it off before; that way I would have known if there was fresh dirt on it now. I thought that there was, but I couldn’t be sure. Wiping it off on my pants wasn’t really the best idea. Ponies were lacking in washing machines and laundromats, and it was kind of a pain to get my clothes cleaned, but old habits die hard and I did it without even thinking. As I was putting it back in the tree, I thought about her toys. She must have known that they were being tampered with, so she hid them where I wouldn’t find them. They weren’t well-hidden, but then kids often didn’t think things through as much as adults would. Why would she want the trowel? Obviously, since I’d seen her in the garden before, it was to work with the plants. It had been fine to leave it out, but then she’d discovered it wasn’t where she’d put it before—she might have looked in the garden for it before coming to the attic, or she might have immediately recognized it when she saw it on the attic floor. Either way, she knew that someone had found and moved it, and so now she was trying to hide it so it wouldn’t get taken again. That suggested that it was entirely possible that she had other things hidden other places. I didn’t know where else in my house she went. While I’d only seen her in the attic, it was possible that there was a rubber duck hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the bathroom, or a dollhouse jammed up the chimney. There could be any number of secrets in the house that I hadn’t found yet. I cast my mind back to my first days in the house, trying to tease out a memory of finding something else weird, something that I’d maybe just pushed back into my mind because I hadn’t considered supernatural explanations. I didn’t come up with anything of significance. Would she have known that the house was being sold? Would she know what a sign out in the front yard meant? Did she even ever go out in the front yard? Is a pony dollhouse actually a stable? ••••• While I could have torn the house apart looking for mysterious things, I didn’t. I had a vague notion that that way lay madness. Pretty soon I’d be tearing off wallpaper looking for things behind it, I’d be bashing in the ceiling looking for toys hidden in little voids up there, in a place where a ghost could get it out but a human couldn’t. I did wonder if she had some kind of supernatural sense for where her things were, and I considered going back outside and moving the trowel somewhere else, just to see if she could find it again. I didn’t have a good hiding place where I could watch the backyard, though. That wasn’t an unsolvable problem; I just needed more boxes. Before too long, I’d have to start naming my box-forts so I could keep them all straight. One on each level of the house; two in the backyard, and one in the front yard would give me decent coverage. After all, if a ghost hadn’t been interesting enough for my neighbors to mention, maybe they’d ignore my box-forts, too. Did ponies have zoning regulations or HOAs? Too many box-forts might net me a fine. ••••• She hadn’t stolen any of my stuff. Maybe she was honest, and knew what was hers and what wasn’t. Or maybe I just didn’t have anything that was appealing to a filly. There was no reason that she couldn’t have come and looked through my clothes, but what would she want with a pair of pants? Maybe cups would be worth taking for tea parties, and maybe she had in the past. That could be why she was frustrated that the attic stairs were blocked, since I now knew that she couldn’t take objects through the roof. The office had some paperwork in it, nothing terribly important since ponies in general didn’t really see the appeal. In that way, they were much wiser than humans. It was hard to imagine a ghost reading through paperwork, anyway. I’d never seen a ghost reading anything. That did raise an interesting question in my mind. If I found a kid’s book, would it interest her? There was a bookstore in town. That was a possibility. What I’d do with it when I had it was another question. I could put it in the center of the attic floor, and see if she’d fall for the bait again, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that she might not. The trowel was something that was hers, but a new book might make her suspicious. It would be more natural to put it in a place that such a book might naturally be found—a bookshelf or a table. But then how would I know if she’d found it? If it was gone, that would be obvious, but if it wasn’t? Was she conscientious enough that she’d put things that weren’t hers back when she was done with them? If she was having tea parties with my dishes, she was. Still, there was of course no harm in finding a book first and then figuring out what to do with it later, so the next day after work I went book shopping. ••••• We humans had lost our way with stores. They were almost all the same, and while people often thought of that as a good thing—that there was some advantage to getting the same double mocha grande latte with soy milk at every Starbucks, it took some of the fun out of buying. The stores all looked the same, and they all felt the same. There was no fun in going to a store and discovering something new and unexpected. Ponies generally sold whatever they felt like in their stores. While that was in some ways a disadvantage, thus far I hadn’t found a bad shopkeeper. Maybe it had something to do with their cutie marks, or maybe it was because virtually all of them owned the store, were related to the owner, or were an apprentice. Which is a roundabout way of saying that on Earth bookstores were either new bookstores or used bookstores and there generally wasn’t overlap. In Haywards Heath, the pony who ran the bookstore—who was named Bradel—had decided that a book was a book and its provenance didn’t matter, so he stocked both brand-new and well-used books all intermixed. That shouldn’t have seemed all that strange to me; Amazon worked the same way, and as often as not a link for a book would give both new and used prices. It was still weird to see them arranged on the shelf like that, though. After muddling around for far too long trying to figure out what kind of book a filly might like, I just asked him. Of course, he wanted more specific details, ones that I couldn’t provide. But I said that she liked playing with dolls and also enjoyed gardening, and was both inquisitive and shy, and I also admitted that I wasn’t all that good at estimating pony ages and it was kind of embarrassing to not be able to be more specific but surely he could understand. He didn’t, but he nodded politely anyway and showed me a section of children’s books. I picked Bathtime for Biscuit, since it was lavishly illustrated and starred a puppy. Surely a filly would like that. Plus, it was gently used, which I thought would make it seem less suspicious.