//------------------------------//
// Chapter 10 
// Story: The Haunting 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
//------------------------------//

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

A week of observation went by without learning anything new, aside from that she did use the trowel. In the attic, she played with her toys, and she didn’t breach the box-fort.

I’d left the book downstairs, just sitting out on the blotter on my desk. I’d very lightly drawn in where its corners sat with pencil, which I didn’t think would be obvious at all—I really had to squint to see them. She didn’t move the book, so either she hadn’t found it, or she wasn’t interested in it.

I knew that she’d been in the house proper before, or at least I assumed she had. Cupboard doors hadn’t been opened since I built the box-fort, and there hadn’t been any other changes in the house since I’d done that. While it was theoretically possible that the weight of the box-fort had somehow shifted things around in the house in such a way that the cupboard doors would no longer open as the house settled, that was really unlikely. She’d be the one who had done it; I was absolutely certain of that.

Therefore, the only reasonable explanation was that she couldn’t or wouldn’t go downstairs if the box-fort was in place.

There was no logical reason I could think of why that would be so. Potentially, there could be something in the walls that kept ghosts out, maybe something that wasn’t even there intentionally. My walls were plaster, and I knew that sometimes that was applied to a screen; maybe a fine metal mesh was ghost-proof. Maybe the only way she could get in was the attic.

I’d been keeping the windows closed at night, since it was autumn and it got cool. It was possible that she couldn’t open them. I wasn’t sure why she couldn’t squeeze through the glass if she’d wanted to, but there could have been a reason for it. Maybe glass was also ghost-proof.


•••••


The next thing to do was to move my box-fort off the attic stairs.

Ideally, I would have made a second access route to the box-fort. I could have cut a hole in the ceiling and put up a ladder. Otherwise, I was going to be trapped in my box-fort for as long as she was in the attic.

I didn’t think that that would be a big problem, though. From my observations thus far, she didn’t spend all night in the attic, so after a couple of hours it would be clear to go back downstairs.

It took me half the afternoon to get everything arranged, and by the time I was done, I needed a nap.

Of course I overslept, and by the time I woke up it was dark in the room and I was confused for a moment, then I heard a bumping noise downstairs.

I knew it was her.

I didn’t know how to proceed.

One option would be to slowly and carefully head downstairs and see what she was up to.

The second option was to just stay where I was, maybe pretend to be asleep. Would she come into the bedroom, or did she know I was here? Had she checked already? If I opened the door, would she be suspicious? Would she come in, if she hadn’t yet?

The third option was to get up to the attic and sit in the box fort and wait.

While I was immensely curious, I didn’t know how long ago she’d gone downstairs nor how long she would stay downstairs. If she’d just passed by, she was probably going to be there for a little while, but what if she’d been there for hours already? She might be on her way upstairs even now.

I got to the bedroom door and cracked it open slowly and cautiously, and peered down as much of the hallway as I could see through the gap. She wasn’t there.

I hesitated for one more moment. Now was the difficult part; I didn’t think that she knew she was being observed, but if she saw me climbing into my box-fort, that would give the game away for sure.

Still, I thought I could get into that thing pretty quickly, so I opened the door wide and stepped into the hall. I rushed up the stairs into the attic, glad that I’d thought to pad them. Bare feet on felt make practically no noise, except for the creaking of the hinges on the ladder as I put my weight on it. She might mistake that for noises the house made as it settled.

I hadn’t ever tried to get into my box-fort from the top after dark, which was an oversight on my part. It had seemed obvious enough during the day, but now I was fumbling around feeling for the lid that wasn’t nailed down, getting more and more nervous at the thought that she might be right behind me.

I finally found the correct lid, got partway through, got myself stuck, and had to twist around uncomfortably until I finally awkwardly backed in and pulled the lid shut.

As best as I could tell by the moonlight filtering into the attic, her toys weren’t out. Perhaps as soon as she’d arrived, she’d taken the open trap as an invitation and headed downstairs in lieu of playing with her things.

That probably meant that she planned to spend a good amount of time exploring, and I felt like I’d made the right choice to hide in my box-fort rather than disturb things downstairs.

On the negative side, that meant that I was going to spend who knows how long peering through holes in the box in hopes of seeing something. At least I still had a good bead on the attic stairs.


•••••


Sitting and waiting with nothing to do is boring, something which I had already established from previous nights of observation. This time it felt longer, as I began to wonder if she would come back to the attic after all. Maybe she’d just leave the house from downstairs; maybe my first sign that she was gone would be the sun rising. Assuming of course that she couldn’t be out in the day, which I certainly didn’t know.

I thought I still heard occasional noises from below, but I could have been imagining them. I did get occasional visual hallucinations, likely from the light in the attic shifting just a bit. A cloud scudding in front of the moon, perhaps, or even the brief shadow of a pegasus in flight.

My patience was eventually rewarded when she did come back up the attic stairs. She didn’t walk on them; instead, she just sort of drifted up through the trap.

She paid my box-fort no attention. It could be that she’d already had plenty of time to study it in its new location when I was asleep, or perhaps she’d been distracted by other things.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d just left, but she didn’t. She got a couple of her toys out, and then she also got out a chipped teacup that was smeared with dirt. That was something new, something I hadn’t seen before.

I watched, fascinated, as she had a small tea party with her toys, the cup serving both the role of a teapot and also a communal cup.


•••••


She finally put her toys away and left, and once I was sure she was completely gone, I got out of my box-fort and went to the window. There was an unopened window right by me, and I crouched down and looked through it, in the hopes of getting some idea where she was going.

With some modifications, I could back my box-fort right up to that window, and get a look at her as she left to wherever it was she went. That was something that I should have thought of before.

I didn’t see her in the garden, and if she’d gone straight back home—wherever home was for her—she was long gone.

I should have gone back to bed and gotten some more sleep, but I didn’t. Instead, I went downstairs and got a lantern, and went through the lower parts of the house, trying to figure out where she’d gone.

She’d definitely been in the kitchen; a couple of the cupboards were open again. Maybe she’d been hunting for more teacups to use. She could have taken some of mine, and I wasn’t sure why she hadn’t. Granted, they weren’t a match for the one she had, but would that matter? If she was willing to give that cup dual roles in her tea party, why would she be concerned that my cups didn’t match hers, and weren’t proper teacups?

As far as I could tell, she had not touched Bathtime for Biscuit. It was still sitting with its edges touching my pencil marks.

That was still more information than I’d had before, and I sat down at my desk and considered it. It could be that she didn’t know how to read, although I would have thought that the illustrations in the book would be compelling to her.

That didn’t feel right to me, though. Most of the ponies in town seemed literate, and while I couldn’t rule out that she was a very old ghost, perhaps from before there had been a school in Haywards Heath, it didn’t feel right to me.

She might not have seen it, and that was the most logical explanation. She was too busy with her other explorations. She’d been in the office before and there’d been nothing interesting there, so why check again?

That didn’t feel quite right to me, either. If my box fort had actually kept her out of the house for so long, she surely would have been curious to find out what changes had happened in her absence. 

What if it was something really dumb, like she couldn’t read the book because it was too dark?

I mulled that thought over in my mind, and that did seem a possibility. I turned down the lantern wick until it guttered out, and then picked the book up and opened it. If I brought it right up to my face and angled it just right, I could read it, but it wasn’t any fun at all; it was like trying to decipher a puzzle. I could see that being a source of great frustration for her.

Just out of curiosity, I took the book outside. I could read it in the moonlight reasonably well, so that was a possibility she might not have thought of.