“Twilight, you’re so boring!” Spike complained as he lay on his mat by the campfire. “Nopony wants to hear about nuclear-thermodynamics… again.” He flopped down to his belly and sighed. “We get it. You’re smart.”
Twilight shook her head, biting her lip as she did so. “Well, if you really want to hear a scary story…”
Rainbow Dash and Applejack nodded, eager to hear something other than science lectures for the night. Rainbow Dash had her turn, and Applejack wasn’t particularly interested in scaring the baby dragon before bed. She owed him that much.
“Well…” Twilight rubbed her chin in thought. She didn’t mind sharing, considering the crusaders were already asleep. Spike was always complaining about being treated like a child, so perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to indulge him this once? Twilight nodded and laid her eyes on Spike. “Once upon a time…”
When I was just a filly, a teenager actually, I used to live in a two-story family house in Canterlot. It was a nice house really; it had three bathrooms, an open kitchen, tons of closets and the like. It was really everything that you could ever ask for in a home, and I lived there with my mother, father, and big brother. You know my big brother, Shining Armor! He was a very cheerful boy, always cheering me on. He’s a few years older than me, but he loved to run around and play outside.
He was more of the “outside” kind of pony, while I was more of your stereotypical nerd, reading books all day and preferring to spend my time in the library. Still, I loved him, even as the joking trickster that he was. Since he liked to play sports so much, in my junior year of high school he joined the school tennis team.
Now, this meant that a lot of the time, I would be home by myself for a few hours after school. I didn’t mind it much really; I knew that both of my parents had to work to support our family, and my big brother’s interest in sports would really help to get him into college. So I would walk home, open the door and leave the chain unlocked for my brother to come in once he got home from practice, and go about my daily routine. This of course involved the normal teenager things such as doing homework, doing chores, and then reading a book on physics or economics.
I remember a certain day like it was yesterday. I had just walked home from school, not really paying any attention to anything, but just thinking out loud to myself. That was what I usually did on the long, thirty minute walks home from school, since I didn’t have anybody to walk with. On the days that my big brother did have practice, he would walk a different way, since we both liked to take different paths home, each one of us believe stubbornly as children do that our path was the fastest.
Of course, this meant that on those days I wouldn’t know that my brother was walking home until I got home, where he’d be waiting in the living room with a smug grin on his face for having beaten me home. On very few rare occasions however, I would manage to arrive home before the athlete. Whether it be by sheer luck, or the fact that I had left the school before him, I would call out his name and then sit down on the couch, laughing at my victory.
On that particular afternoon, I remember getting home early, due to some sort of “school rally” or something like that. I never really attended those things, after all, I didn’t really think it would be worth my while. As I unlocked the door, I noticed the house was still quiet, and my big brother’s backpack wasn’t in the place where he normally put it when he got home early. Still, he could have taken it upstairs to type on the computer, since that was the only one with a working printer in the house, and he often got homework assignments that required the use of it.
“Hey Shining, you here?” I called out, checking to see if my brother had arrived before me. Waiting for a few seconds and not receiving an answer, I decided to go make myself something to eat. As soon as I took a step forward, I heard a faint voice call to me from upstairs, seemingly calling me to it.
“Yes...”
I took a step back, looking up the stairs to where I heard the soft voice come from. Usually he was much more vocal than that, but maybe he was just hungry or tired from the walk home. I shrugged it off, calling up to him again.
“Hey, are you alright? Do you need me to make you something to eat or something?”
I waited for several minutes with no response before growing concerned. Usually, he wasn’t one to ignore or shrug off questions, even if he was tired. I started to climb up the steps, looking down both sides of the hall to see where Shining was hiding out. Surprisingly, every door in the hall was open, every single door that is, except for the door at the end of the hall.
This was extremely out of place, as the room behind the door functioned as a store house for our old toys that we used to play with. Old toys that we had grown out of or broken: Coltas the Tank Engine toys, Pokemon, and every other toy you could possibly imagine getting a child for Hearthswarming Eve. Neither of us ever went in that room any more normally, as we saw no use for the old toys, leaving them there to gather dust. Today for some reason though, my brother had chosen to seek refuge in the old room.
I tried to shrug it off again, trying to find a logical reason why he was in the room. Maybe he just wanted to feel a bit of nostalgia? I know that sometimes when I was feeling lonely or down, I would go into the room and just look at all of the toys. Old memories would come rushing back to me, and I’d suddenly get the urge to take them out, dust them off, and play with them a bit again. That had to be the reason why he was in there of course. It had to be; why else would he be acting so strange?
As I reached the top of the stairs, I called out again, “Hey, are you alright in there?” No response yet again, as I looked straight at the closed door. “Shining, please talk to me; are you all right in there? Shining?”
Again the voice called out with a soft, “Yes…”
This time it was louder, since I was closer to the source than before. Still, I couldn’t help but feel… off about something. There was something about his voice that made the fur on the back of my neck stand on end. His voice… It wasn’t the normal, jovial voice of my big brother. This one was soft, almost emotionless as it hung in my ears. Something was wrong here, but I had to get to the bottom of it.
As I walked slowly towards the door, I began to get a strange feeling of uneasiness in the pit of my stomach. The sort of uneasiness that you get when you know that you get when you know that you’re not supposed to be somewhere, and like something bad could happen at any moment. At the same time, I felt a strong urge to go back downstairs, to see my brother, and to just not be alone in the house. As I shakily and slowly approached the door, I felt the feeling growing stronger in the pit of my stomach.
As I approached the door, however, I heard the downstairs front door unlock and open. My brother walked in, panting dropping his saddlebags into the usual spot, running to the fridge to get some water. I looked at the door, suddenly, the fur on my back now standing up straight, and my hoof now shaking steadily. If my brother had just arrived from the long walk home, then who was behind the door, answering my calls earlier?
“Hey, Twi, you home?” my brother called out, probably seeing my saddlebag lying on the floor like it usually was.
I stepped back away from the door, startled and turned to the stairs to respond to my brother, “Yeah, just upstairs looking at something.”
“Come on, get down here! You know how mom is about us finishing our homework and doing the chores first!”
I remember taking a few steps down the stairs and looking at my answer, “Yeah, yeah, I know. J-just… Let me finish up real quick and then I’ll be right down.”
“Your turn to do the dishes today!” he called.
I was feeling slightly better, and chuckled at my brother’s statement. I turned around and gasped. The door at the end of the hall had been closed before, but it was now slightly ajar, and I could feel a slight breeze coming through the door. I slowly started to panic, and took a huge gulp as I slowly approached the door. Grabbing a small, broken plastic tube from the hallway, I approached the door. My shaky hoof and rested on the handle as I held my improvised weapon, ready to strike at whatever was behind the door.
As the handle turned, I felt my heart beat skyrocket, my body bracing itself for what was to come. I opened the door, only to be heavily confused at the sight. No unwelcome guest was in the room, but some of the toys, I knew for sure were out of place. I knew that they couldn’t have fallen off of a stack of toys and come to a rest; those toys had been on the ground already. Slowly, I approached the window, looking at it. To my surprise, it was still closed, and had not been moved in some time, as evidenced by the thick layer of dust on the frame.
I knew that nobody could have run past me when I had been at the stairs, which confused me immensely. Spreading out and covering the whole area, I couldn’t find the intruder, or anywhere that they could have hidden. As I entered the room to look out of the window again, I could still feel the unsettling feeling in my gut, but it wasn’t as strong as before. Out of the corner of my eye as I looked out of the window, I saw movement coming from the second story window of the house next door.
This I knew for sure was impossible, as our neighbors had been evicted many months ago, and the “for sale” sign was still in their front yard. Nobody had been to look at the home ever since the neighbors had left, so I knew that I couldn’t chalk it off to somebody just checking out the home. Rubbing my eyes to make sure I was seeing things clearly, I looked back, only to see nothing there. I wondered for a moment if my eyes had been playing tricks on me, but I knew that the door was closed when I first came up to the second floor.
“Twi, what the hay is taking so long?”
I jumped, only to turn around and see my brother standing there and looking a little annoyed. I sighed and laughed, relaxing a bit now that I wasn’t alone upstairs.
“Hey, did you close this door earlier?” I asked him curiously.
“No… We never use this room anymore dude. Dad says that we’ve got to clean it out soon. Say, why were you in here anyway? Get an urge to play with the old toys again?” he chuckled, punching me in the shoulder.
“No reason, you can go back downstairs, I’m done up here,” I said, watching my brother run back down to the first floor.
As I turned my head, I thought out of the corner of my eye, that I saw something. It was only for a split moment, but in the closet in the corner of the room, I thought that I saw a face. I thought I saw a pale, white face, peeking out at me from behind a stack of toys that we’d piled at the edge of the room. My heart jumped as I blinked, only to realize that nothing was there. I let out a sigh of relief and went downstairs to join my brother, no longer wanting to spend any more time than I had to on the second floor.
I never ended up telling my family or anyone else what happened after that. I never did figure out what I had actually seen that day either. Many days and nights, I would spend them thinking about what I had seen, about any possible explanations that I could find to describe what I had seen. I couldn’t though, no matter how I tried. And it never happened again while I lived in that house.
After that experience though, it was never the same. I couldn’t bear to be upstairs by myself anymore, especially not at night or in the dark. Every time I was upstairs, I could feel someone watching me, like they were just observing from a distance. My fur would always stand on end, and I never did go into the toy room ever again. Eventually, I finally moved out of the house and to the castle for my studies. I remember though, for a split second as I looked up to say goodbye I could see clear as day, out of the corner of my eye, a pale face, watching me from the upstairs window.
Twilight finished her story with a sigh, remember the creepy sensation that bristled through her fur many moons ago. The fire crackled and dimmed, turning into faint embers. Rainbow Dash and Applejack had fallen asleep on top of each other, snoring in contest. Spike, however, was chewing on his tail.
“You alright there, Spike? she asked, stepping off the log she had been sitting on. “It wasn’t that scary, was it?”
Spike lowered his tail and lifted his claw, pointing. His eyes were dull and he was shivering seemingly from the cold. Twilight took a step forward, wondering why he was acting so strange. Her eyes traced his arm to his claw, and followed the direction by looking over her shoulder. Behind the bushes, she could…
“No… NO!” Twilight shrieked as she jumped in the air. It couldn’t be real, it just couldn’t! She fell onto the ground and rolled into a frightened ball. Spike began laughing as she rocked.
“I can’t believe you fell for that!” Spike fell off the log and landed on his stomach. He pounded the ground with his fists as he rolled. “Alright Sweetie, you can come out now!”
Nothing moved in the bushes. Pale white was obscured by the bushes. Spike stood on his feet and waved. Twilight growled as she picked herself up, humiliated. She turned around to the bush again and yelled.
“Sweetie Belle! That isn’t funny!”
“What? I’m trying to sleep…” The filly in question poked her sleepy head outside her tent.
Spike and Twilight exchanged a shock look, breathed in deeply, and screamed.