//------------------------------//
// Chapter 21 
// Story: The Haunting 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
//------------------------------//

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I was hollow inside, and I couldn’t say how I found my way back home. I certainly hadn’t been following a direct path back to Haywards Heath, but I wound up there eventually with no memory of how it had happened.

I went in through the back door and climbed up to the attic. That was a good place for some quiet contemplation. It was her place, even if she wasn’t here just now. Later, I’d ask Milfoil, but my guess was that the attic—or at least part of the attic—had been her playroom. When her parents had left, they might have forgotten the toybox, or else it was just too painful a reminder.

Maybe that was why they’d never given her a grave; that might have been too final for them. If they did, would she be at rest now? I thought that she might be, and I thought that if that was the case, I was going to have to. Even if I didn’t want to.


•••••


I didn’t feel much better when I finally came down from the attic, but I at least felt ready to face the world again. 

The first order of business was to make dinner, and while I was too late to get anything fresh at market, I had plenty of food in my pantry. I still hadn’t gotten fully accustomed to the pony philosophy of buying fresh food at every market, so I had a decent stock of things that don’t spoil quickly. Luckily, most foods that they sold fell into that category.

In my time in Equestria, my cooking skills had vastly improved. Back on Earth, I could make a few basic meals, and more complicated ones if I found a recipe and actually had all the proper ingredients. Here, I’d begun to learn the skills my ancestors had had, improvising ingredients, estimating quantities, and always keeping a critical eye on what foods were beginning to get past their prime so I could use them before they spoiled. 

I’d also begun to develop a more discerning palate, which I suppose is a natural consequence of experimentation. Not only was I getting better at mixing ingredients on my own without explicit instructions, but I was getting better at tasting specific ingredients in some pony else’s cooking.

Not that I could have replicated Milfoil’s stew. But I came close, I thought.

There were subtle nuances of flavor in pony food, which largely came from things that humans didn’t think of as food. We humans had our food pyramid with dairy and vegetables and fruits and meats, and ponies had their own that exchanged meats for grasses and flowers, something I was still trying to get a handle on. Luckily, there was nothing that a pony could eat that was poisonous to a human.

Sometimes the subconscious knows, and I’d made more than enough stew for myself. Ponies hadn’t invented Tupperware, so the logical thing to do with extra food was to share it, and who better to share it with than a neighbor?


•••••


Thinking back on it, Milfoil must have known before I even knocked on her door that I was going to invite her over for dinner. Or at least suspected that I would, since she accepted my invitation without making any excuses for it being an inconvenient time, or that she’d already eaten, or anything else that a person might have said. 

Or else ponies just had more concern for their neighbors and friends than humans would, and she was willing to let the dinner she had been making spoil in exchange for having dinner with me. It was something I knew I was better off not asking.

I thought my stew had come out decently well, although I resolved that next time I was going to only use one turnip and maybe add a couple more carrots. Milfoil didn’t criticize my recipe, at least. 

Once we’d finished eating, she helped me switch out my flowers, and then it got a bit awkward. I was hovering on the cusp of telling her everything, but not quite ready to do it. I needed some kind of natural way of easing into the subject instead of bringing it up from nowhere. What could I say? ‘So, I found where Windflower died today. You would have known her when she was alive, but you probably didn’t know she was a ghost that used to haunt my house until I scared her off.’ As conversation starters, that was likely to end with the orderlies and their butterfly nets.

Luckily for me, Milfoil decided that a proper dinner had a dessert, and went over to her house to get a pie, since I had nothing to offer. That gave me a few minutes alone to collect my thoughts. A few minutes to wonder if I was taking the right approach.


•••••


It would have been natural to go to the living room to eat our dessert, except that the living room was crowded with flowers and my furniture was still haphazardly stacked against one wall, rendering the room totally useless for entertaining. That was a shame, since the kitchen felt off. It was a weird mix of too formal with the table and chairs, while being too casual at the same time. She didn’t seem to mind the situation, at least.

I still didn’t know exactly how to broach the subject, and as the wedges of pie diminished, I started to think of how this was going to turn into another failure, another setback in a litany of setbacks. We’d finish eating and make casual small-talk for a little bit longer before she left for home, and that would be that.

A noise upstairs turned out to be the perfect opportunity for me. It wasn’t much, and I might not have noticed it if her ears hadn’t turned towards the source, but as soon as they did, I also became alert.

I could tell by her expression that she didn’t know what had caused it, proving my theory that she was completely unaware of Windflower’s ghost, and so I began to tell her everything.

Unlike the old stallion, she was easy enough to read. At first, she didn’t believe me, but as my evidence piled up, it could only lead to one inevitable conclusion, helped along by the occasional noises from the attic.

There was a glorious sort of freedom in telling my tale, and while I’d told the old stallion out of desperation as much as anything else, in her case, I both knew more, and could offer a far more coherent telling.

Still, in the back of my mind, a little voice warned me that if I bared my soul to her, I might regret it later, and my poor nose was a reminder of that basic fact.

I ignored that voice, and told her everything, including the fact that I’d found the spot in the forest where she’d died.

By the time I’d finished, Milfoil had tears in her eyes, and so did I. There was no shame in that. And she began to tell me what Windflower had been like when she was alive, how she’d enjoyed getting her hooves dirty in the garden, how much she’d always loved the flowers. How she played in the attic sometimes, and other times she’d bring her toys out on the lawn and play with them there. How she was curious and adventurous and how excited she’d been when she caught a frog in a box and had to show it off and it got away inside Milfoil’s house because she hadn’t been expecting it to hop out as soon as the box was opened.


•••••


I got Milfoil to promise to be as silent as she could, and the two of us went up to my bedroom. As I opened the door, it felt really weird to me, even though I thought it was the right thing to do. I was a bit worried that she wouldn’t be patient, but she was, and the two of us stood by the window until Windflower left the attic and floated down through the backyard.

She took one exploratory circuit of the garden, and then headed off for the woods.

“Poor thing,” Milfoil whispered.

I nodded.

“So, what are you going to do now?”

That was a very good question, one that cut to the very heart of the matter, and one that deserved a perfectly honest response. “I don’t know. It’s not my place to disturb . . . to disturb her any more. I’ve already—”

“Done enough harm?” she finished for me.

“If only I could do it all over again,” I began.

“You can’t change the past.”

“I know.”

“But it’s easier to say that than to accept that.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought the same thing. If I’d been out in the yard, and seen where she was going . . . You can wash your hooves of it; it happened before you came to town, and there was nothing you could have done, nothing you could have known that would have changed the past. No matter what, she would have been dead.”

“You can’t change the past.” There was no reason not to repeat her words. “Whatever you might have done or not done.”

“But you can change the future.” Milfoil looked back out the window, at the empty yard. “You can welcome her back to her home. That’s a start. I think . . . I think that there’s a lot of things we have to figure out still. It doesn’t seem right to leave her in the forest like that.”

“I’m afraid of disturbing anything. I don’t know what would happen. She might get even more lost than she already is. And if she does, we might never find her again.”