The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit
“Spring is soon.”
I nodded. It was almost light when I woke up, and the sun was peeking above the horizon as I walked to work. The frost was not as thick on the windows, and chill winds rarely blew.
Spiles and buckets had gone up on maple trees, and I’d occasionally see a pony towing a sledge filled with metal barrels through town to the saphouse.
I could hear the song of nature changing.
“Spring’s a time for growth, for planting, for—” Milfoil wasn’t facing me; she was looking out the window and into the future. “For rebirth. We’ve put it off longer than we should have. We need to make sure that Windflower knows, so she can choose.”
“Are you telling me that ponies can’t—that after they die, they’re stuck as ghosts until the spring?”
“No . . . but—I think that something went wrong, and that the springtime is the best time to make it right again.”
“In human lore, we often associate the autumn and winter with death, and the spring with rebirth.” I stopped stirring the soup and walked over next to her. If it burned, so be it. “Do ponies delay funerals or burials for the right time? There are some humans that believe in auspicious days for doing things—or not doing things, probably. Some days that are unlucky . . . is it like that?”
“I wouldn’t have said so. If you’d asked me last year, I would have thought . . . I would have thought that it always works out like it should. That your spirit knows where to go.
“But sometimes, it must not.”
“I’ve heard of a legend that the first person buried in a new cemetery guides all the souls who arrive later.” I couldn’t remember where I’d heard that, but it didn’t matter.
Milfoil sighed. “If that’s true, we might not be any help to her. But we have to try. I know we have to try, and I think it has to be soon.”
I went over and knelt down on the floor beside her. She leaned her head against my shoulder and the two of us sat and watched night fall in silence.
•••
We were still there when Windflower arrived, two statues, frozen in time.
She darted up to us and poked at Milfoil with a hoof, as if to say that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. And then once she’d gotten our attention, she pointed to the kitchen.
I’d completely forgotten about the soup. Judging by the smell, I’d have to chip what was left of it out of the pot later.
I took the pot off the stove and set it aside. It could have been worse; the stove had cooled a bit due to my inattention.
As I was clearing off the burnt remains of our dinner, Milfoil shook her head. I thought you were learning, she mouthed at me.
I didn’t have a witty reply—I’d thought I was, too.
•••
Windflower picked up her flower book and brought it to the table, then she pointed to the drawer where Milfoil was keeping the sketches for the garden.
“We have something we have to talk about first,” Milfoil said. “It’s really important, okay?”
Windflower’s ears dropped, but she set the book down and drifted back into the living room.
Just then it hit me that I could be the bad guy—I could break the news to her. And maybe I should be the one. Or, if not that, I could at least start. I knew as much as Milfoil did, and it was possible that if I blundered it could be waved away because I was a dumb human.
“How come you live in the forest?” Live might not have been the right term, but I couldn’t think of a better one.
Windflower shook her head and swept her forehooves around. Then she tilted her head and made for the hallway, and the two of us followed her upstairs.
She pointed to a bedroom door. I didn’t need Milfoil to tell me that that had been Windflower’s room when she was alive.
Windflower opened the door to reveal a mostly-empty room, only containing a few boxes I hadn’t gotten around to unpacking yet.
Surely, she should have known that that was what she’d find. I’d seen her exploring the house before. And yet, she looked vaguely confused, as if she’d actually expected to find her bedroom there, just as she’d left it.
She ghost-trotted past us and further down the hallway, then pointed up to the attic.
I obligingly pulled the string to lower the stairs—not that she needed them—and she vanished into the attic, to return a minute later with her duck, held firmly in her mouth. I hadn’t realized that she’d brought it back.
Windflower took that to her room and set it down, perhaps expecting that in so doing it would cause everything she’d lost to reappear, but it didn’t.
She stomped a ghostly fore-hoof in frustration, and then fled down to the living room and the comfort of her plant.
“What happened in the woods?”
Windflower shook her head.
“Do you remember?”
Her shoulders slumped, and she nodded.
She floated into the kitchen and picked up the plant book, then plunked it down on the floor. She flipped through the pages, studying the plants, before finally settling on heath aster.
Windflower pointed to it, and then out into the woods.
“You were after wild aster?” Milfoil asked.
Windflower nodded, and then pointed to the backyard.
“She wanted to transplant it,” Milfoil explained. “It’s pretty.”
Windflower moved over to the ranks of potted plants. It took me a moment to figure out what she was doing as she bobbed her head next to one of the plants, and then I got it. She couldn’t hold the shovel in her hooves; she’d have been holding it in her mouth. She was pantomiming digging up the plant.
She grasped around the stem and mimicked picking it up, and then her ears spun back, pinned, and she dove into the plants.
Either she was really selling this reenactment, or even the memory of the aenocyon brought terror.
“You ran and hid.”
Windflower nodded.
Windflower ducked down behind the plant pots, only the tips of her ears sticking above them. I pictured the clearing in my mind—if it had been there then, she would surely have been under the felled tree, something a wolf couldn’t get in. It would have torn at it, surely, trying to—
Why didn’t it? I wasn’t a woodsman, but I surely would have been able to see claw marks on the tree. Even months later, they would have been evident.
Milfoil had come to the same realization.
Windflower cautiously stuck her head above the pots and looked curiously at the two of us. I hoped the expression of horror wasn’t visible on my face, maybe she wasn’t good at reading humans.
“Did you . . .” Milfoil bit her lip, not wanting to ask the next question.
Was her hiding spot not as good, not as secure as she thought? Not able to keep a reaching paw or slavering jaws out? Or did she not make it at all? Was the transition nearly instantaneous, or was there a period of time that she mercifully didn’t remember?
She tapped her hoof against her breast, and pointed to her hiding spot. Then she pointed to the center of the living room, and did her best pantomime of a prowling wolf.
To further illustrate, she came out of her hiding spot and boldly circled the floor, before pausing and sticking her nose down to the ground only to pull it back up in triumph.
That proved to be too much for her, and she fled back to the illusory safety of the plants, crouching down behind them once again.
•••
It would have been enough for me; I thought that we’d really made progress. She did remember what had happened, at least in broad strokes. The before and the after, and I thought that if she was smart, she ought to be able to put the pieces together from that. If she wanted to—denial was a powerful emotion.
She had to be thinking it in the back of her mind, didn’t she? That things had been different for her after.
Milfoil wasn’t satisfied with leaving things the way that they were, and moved among the valerian and yarrow. “You tried to run,” Milfoil said quietly. “You tried to hide, but you didn’t escape.”
Windflower was frantically shaking her head.
“We know, and I think you do, too.”
Windflower darted between the plants, putting some distance between her and Milfoil, but it didn’t matter; words carried. “We’ve seen the bones in the clearing. Where did they come from? Whose bones are they?”
Windflower flickered, and went through the collection of pots, a faint blur. She raced up the stairs, perhaps to the safety of her room or the attic . . . or perhaps to the woods.
Might she be able to pick up one of her own bones if she wanted to?
•••
“We should look for her,” Milfoil said. “First in the house, and if not—”
“You could have—“ been more gentle. I bit that thought off. There were kinds of bad news where there was no good way to break it, and honestly if it had been left up to me, I might have danced around the topic until next winter . . . or forever.
“She has to know to make a decision. We can’t decide for her.”
“No, you’re right.” I wanted to sit on the couch with Milfoil and take comfort from her warmth, from grooming her mane, from the peace of togetherness, and we would, but now was not the time.
We checked her bedroom first, and that’s where she was. There was no bed to hide under, so she was huddled behind the boxes, rolling her duck back and forth.
It was a lousy hiding spot, and as soon as she saw us, she fled again, flying over our heads and out the door. The duck rolled until it bumped against the boxes.
I never really thought about dying; that was something that I knew in the back of my mind would eventually happen in the far-distant future. Whenever I thought of it sooner, I sort of alternated between dying peacefully or a hero’s death. But if it actually came, how would I really react? Trying to hide actually seemed quite rational. Denying it was happening . . . or that it had happened.
“She probably went to the attic,” I said. “I—do you think that chasing her down is the best idea? I mean, with how she died, and she’s surely already having flashbacks.”
Milfoil clenched her jaw. “I think if I ever come back as a ghost, you’d better tell me right away.”
•••
I hadn’t folded the attic steps all the way down, but that was no trouble for Milfoil. She might have struggled with the pull-rope; I’d cut that short since I was tired of brushing my head against it, but I think she could have jumped and grabbed on.
Milfoil paused halfway up. Ponies on stairs was weird, they made it look natural, but when I really stopped to think about the mechanics of it, I could feel a headache coming on. Of course, the same could be said for lots of things that ponies did.
One other thing she could do, something that I could never manage with a hundred years to practice, was Mom voice.
I could have said a hundred words or a thousand. I could have plead, begged, bartered, cajoled, and none of it would have worked as effectively as a single word from Milfoil.
“Windflower.”
That was it.
That was all she said; that was all she needed to say.
She didn’t get an instant response, but she didn’t repeat herself. She didn’t have to.
A ghostly muzzle poked over the edge of the attic coaming, ears down, contrite.
Something passed between them, something that I did not know, could not know, and then Windflower rushed down the stairs, flying over both of us, zipping through the hallway, opening doors, darting into rooms and coming back out just as quickly.
Milfoil and I followed her, down the hallway and the stairs, back to the living room. We watched as she frantically threw open the cupboards in the kitchen and then rushed back to the safety of the plants, to one particular plant.
Windflower wrapped her forelegs around the pot which contained the amaranth as a drowning man might grasp a life buoy.
She clutched the pot tightly and stuck her muzzle against the amaranth.
The plant shuddered and wilted. Milfoil pinned her ears back and Windflower retreated in horror.
She desperately looked between the two of us, before darting over to Milfoil and wrapping her ghostly hooves around her neck. I saw her flinch for just an instant, and then she leaned over and nuzzled Windflower.