The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit
She hardly paid any attention to my box-fort and went downstairs right away.
I should have left the book open on the desk. I could have weighed down the pages with something; that might have enticed her.
Right on cue, I heard one of the cupboard doors bang against the wall. It wasn’t that loud, and it could have been a door slamming somewhere else, except that ponies didn’t slam their doors.
I’d thought about bringing a clock with me, so I could get an exact reckoning of how long she spent in the attic, and now how long she spent downstairs. But I thought that the ticking of a windup clock might alarm her.
I could have brought an egg timer. The sand swishing through the glass was nearly silent, and while it only kept time for a few minutes—however many minutes it took to cook an egg—I could keep flipping it over. Put tally marks on the wall. I didn’t have one, but I’d seen them for sale at the market.
People aren’t that great at keeping time in our heads, and after I’d waited a while I started to get a bit edgy. One day I was going to be up here and not notice when she left, and I’d wind up spending the whole night in my box-fort.
Maybe tonight would be that night. Maybe tonight would be the night that she decided that instead of going back out through the attic, she’d use the kitchen door like a proper pony. Well, assuming that she could open it or drift through it.
I heard another soft clunk from downstairs. Another cupboard door. I could put the book in the kitchen cupboards; she’d be sure to spot it then. She might wonder why it was there, but I didn’t think she would wonder all that much.
It fell silent downstairs again and I leaned up against the knothole, waiting for her to arrive. Not for the first time, I wished that the doors in my house were squeaker. It would be easier to figure out where she was. Maybe there was some way to un-oil the hinges.
I’d started to get eyestrain and she still hadn’t returned to the attic. She’s still in the kitchen, looking at things.
Just as I thought that, there was a faint glow coming up the stairs, and she reappeared. She got out a couple of her toys, but her heart wasn’t in it, and she listlessly moved them around for a little bit before putting them away again and vanishing through the roof.
The moment the glow in the thatching had faded, I moved over to the window, intent on finding out where she went when she left my house.
She drifted down to the garden and circled around it a couple times before moving into the rows and making her way between the plants. She went through the whole garden in that fashion before finally heading off to the east.
I thought she would have been visible for longer than she actually was. The moon painted the landscape in strange shadows and bright spots and once she’d moved beyond my backyard, my view got blocked by an oak tree, and I thought I saw her come out the other side, but I wasn’t sure.
It was hard to believe that other ponies in town hadn’t seen her. Earth ponies and unicorns, I could believe. Her route took her out of town quickly, and after dark most ponies who were still awake would have had lights on in their houses, making the outside even darker. If they saw anything at all, by the time they got a good look, she’d be gone, and they would probably pass it off as either a trick of the light, or the glow from a unicorn’s spell.
What about the pegasi? There weren’t as many of them out and about at night, true, but for those who were, I thought that she wouldn’t be that hard to spot, and if spotted, she wouldn’t be that hard to follow.
Even if she were trying to actively avoid the living, she obviously didn’t have any kind of supernatural sense—I was nearly certain that she didn’t know I was watching her.
It was possible that ponies simply couldn’t see her. That their eyes were unable to perceive her, and mine were. I could prove that by either catching her, or inviting an open-minded pony to join me in my box-fort.
•••••
Did the stallion know she was here? Could that be the actual reason for his awkwardness during our last conversation? Did he stay awake at night wondering if humans couldn’t see pony ghosts? I could have said something. Dropped a little hint, maybe. I wasn’t sure what, though. It would depend on what he knew. Saying I’d found toys in the attic, that might work.
Or I could tell him that my kitchen cupboards kept coming open at night. That might be safe. Ask him if he knew a pony who could fix them, or if he could fix them himself. Lots of older men were hobby carpenters, and maybe the same applied to ponies. If he thought I was revealing that I knew that there was a ghost, he’d probably come over even if he didn’t have a clue how a screwdriver worked.
Maybe I could invite him to share the box-fort with me. Although that probably wouldn’t be a wise thing to offer right away.
Or I could broach the subject with Milfoil tomorrow. I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d bring it up, though. I’d have to come over on a pretext . . . say I needed to borrow a cup of sugar. Or I could cook her a casserole or something. Of course, if the old stallion was trying to play matchmaker, that might be misconstrued.
It was about time to admit that I was going in circles and not getting anywhere. I could feel that it wasn’t going to be much longer before I’d be at the market, looking at all the other ponies suspiciously, wondering what they knew that they weren’t telling me. Thinking that every time two ponies had a quiet conversation that it was about me.
I was scared. Not of the ghost, but of the other ponies in town thinking I was crazy, of them shunning me. Word gets around in a small town, and it wouldn't be too long before my boss took me aside and said that he was sorry that he had to let me go but it just wasn’t good for business to keep me on, and if that happened I’d never get another job in Haywards Heath because word would travel faster than my resume.
•••••
I spent the next evening on the outskirts of town. I didn’t think that I was on private land; most of the time, when ponies owned land they grew something on it, and this land had nothing but weeds and shrubs and a few trees.
There were a couple spots where I could see the back of my house and I mentally drew out a line where I’d seen her go. If she did indeed come this way—if it had been her and not some trick of the moonlight I’d seen on the other side of the oak tree—she’d pass by this way.
On a bit of a ridge, there was a pine tree with thick, bushy branches. It would be a decent enough hiding place; I didn’t think that she would be checking out all the trees and shrubs on her way to my house. She’d have no reason to suspect that I was there.
Leaning up against the trunk of a pine tree as the sun sets and darkness falls isn’t nearly as comfortable as I’d imagined. Practically everywhere I touched there was sap, and I kept thinking that there were ants or some other bugs crawling on me. I didn’t dare try to swipe them off, because if I did, that might alert her.
It also got cold quick when the sun went all the way down. As furry as the tree seemed, it wasn’t doing all that much to keep the cold out, and if it had been much later in the year, I would have been really uncomfortable.
Luckily, I didn’t have to wait all that long; she went by right on schedule.
I lost sight of her for about a minute, and then she popped up over the backyard and went into my house. Even from this distance, it was no less weird to see her morph through the thatches.
One thing that was great for preventing sleep during times of boredom was discomfort. I’d never fallen asleep in my box-fort because it wasn’t terribly comfortable there, but it was infinitely more comfortable than my pine tree post. At least now that I knew she was in the house I could move about a bit more freely, so I unstuck myself from the sappy trunk and moved around a bit, scratching a number of itches and slapping a few twitchy spots just in case they were bugs.
I suspected that I’d see her when she came back out, and I did. It also gave me insight into how she might have escaped detection from my neighbors thus far: there were no lights on in any of the surrounding houses, suggesting that everypony was in bed.
I froze in place until she’d passed, and then quietly moved around to the other side of the tree. She tended to avoid bushes and tall grass, even though I was sure that she could pass through them if she’d wanted to.
When she had an ample lead, I stepped out of the tree and followed. I was somewhat careful with where I put my feet, but not overly so. I thought that any noise I might make could just as easily have been a small woodland creature, and unlike her, I didn’t glow in the dark.
Whether it was me, or her normal behavior, she almost seemed to speed up, and pretty soon I lost her completely.
Even though it was dark, I took a look around me. I thought I could see a faint path into the woods. Nothing pony-made; it looked more like a game trail to me. I felt fairly certain that she’d been following it, and I did, too, until the woods started to close in and I considered the possibility that there were monsters in the woods—something that was a very real concern in Equestria.