//------------------------------//
// Part Three 
// Story: Mr. Brannigan's Ghosts 
// by Moose Mage 
//------------------------------//

	Days passed.
The sky loomed perpetually gray over Ponyville, and life went on for Twilight Sparkle. The normal routine returned, her days were spent with her friends, with Spike, talking, laughing, reading and studying. Twilight told herself that she would certainly get Mr. Brannigan more books, that she would do anything she could to settle his mind. But with every passing hour, without conscious will or direction, thoughts of Mr. Brannigan became insubstantial, half-remembered dreams. A confused, frightened mare in Twilight’s mind pushed Mr. Brannigan out, as one disposes of a hornet’s nest that has settled too close to home.
Five days after Twilight’s trip to Ponyville Hospital, the snow began.
The snow was nothing that stuck to the ground, nothing that would last, but the flurries of flakes in the air were just enough to break the dull colorless monotony of late fall. The icy brilliance of winter was on its way at last.
It was late in the evening, and Twilight was walking down the streets of Ponyville under the lamplight with Rarity and Pinkie Pie, after a day spent in the Apple family barn with the rest of the gang, sheltering from the cold and generally causing a ruckus, which frightened the chickens greatly.
“Really, Pinkie,” said Rarity, adjusting her new silken earmuffs, “I wish you’d left those poor birds well enough alone. Going after their eggs like that!”
“I just wanted to help keep them warm!” said Pinkie, bouncing alongside Twilight and Rarity. “It’s all snowy, and wintery, and… and freezy! Is there a word for frozen eggs?” 
“Pinkie!” Rarity cried.
“Just wondering! Anyway, I’m off to Sugarcube Corner. Gummy needs a bath. And a floss. See you tomorrow!”
And away Pinkie Pie sprung, disappearing into the depths of Sugarcube Corner. 
Rarity sighed. “Just when I think I understand that pony… Well, I should be off, Twilight. Ta-ta!”
Rarity sauntered off to the Carousel Boutique, and Twilight waved after her. “Good night, Rarity!”
There was the click of a closing door, and then Twilight was alone.
She shivered, and pulled her scarf tighter around her. She began the walk back to Golden Oak Library. The sky was black, the snow drifting down, collecting and swirling under the lights of the streetlamps, the ghosts of whirling storms. Twilight kept walking, the street ahead of her isolated in the total blackness of the night, as if she were walking down a tunnel of light in the darkest recesses of space. Alone and shivering in the ghostly snow.
And then there was movement.
Up ahead, a figure emerged from the darkness. Cloaked in shadows by the angled lights of the street lamps. Twilight squinted through the flurry, drawing closer. Strange, that a pony should just be standing there, after dark, and in such cold.
As Twilight approached, the figure took a few tottering steps forward, walking from the light-pool of one lamp to the light-pool of the next. There was something unnerving in the way that this pony moved. Stiffly. Lifelessly.
Now Twilight and the stranger couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away. As Twilight closed the distance, she recognized the pony’s shape, and was at once relieved and surprised.
“Mr. Brannigan!” she said, smiling as best she could, joining the old pony under his lamp light. “I didn’t expect to see you out so late! What brings you to – Oh! Of course, those books. You’ll be happy to know, Mr. Brannigan, that I sent out a few letters to nearby libraries and booksellers, and I found a few titles that – ”
She saw his face and faltered.
“… that might be of… might be of interest… to…”
Mr. Brannigan had changed.
This was not the face of a kind old pony looking for help. This was not the face of a terrified, hysterical victim, beginning to slip. The lights in his eyes had gone out. Those eyes, dull and vacant, stared at Twilight, stared through her, unseeing, bloodshot. The grooves in his face seemed to be deeper than they’d been four days ago. He stood with a vague instability, as if he were a puppet on the thinnest of strings.
He stared. And then, with a horrible, wet sound, he opened his mouth wide.
All of Mr. Brannigan’s teeth had been torn out, leaving only ravaged black and red flesh to line his mouth. His tongue had been cut out. The stump sat languidly in the back of his throat. The gaping black chasm in Mr. Brannigan’s face threatened to swallow everything, every light in the street, every house, all the world. 
Twilight could not look away. She took a trembling step back. Her insides melted, her eyes watered, she tried to speak.
“You… you…”
A single drop of blood ran down Mr. Brannigan’s chin. And still he stared, with those dead eyes, through Twilight, past her. She could no longer move, her bones were fused together.
And then Mr. Brannigan closed his mouth. The dribble of black blood remained on his chin, unnoticed. Finally his eyes shifted away from Twilight. And then, in that strange, puppet-like way, Mr. Brannigan walked past Twilight and down the road.
Twilight did not even have the strength to turn as the phantom walked past her. As if her slightest movement would invite that black hole back again, to swallow her up forever. Still as stone, she listened above the murmuring wind as the sound of clumsy hoof-steps behind her grew softer and softer, until there was no sound at all.
She stood there, unblinking, and slowly gained the courage to turn around. The street stretched out behind her, that tunnel of lamps in the darkness of space, deserted but for the flurries of snow, still falling through the inky night.
Twilight turned and ran, ran down the street all the way back to Golden Oak Library, breathing hard, eyes wide, certain that if she turned around she would come face-to-face again with that hideous hole of blood and black.


Twilight hardly slept that night. The following day was restless and dazed. She sent Spike out on errands early  in the morning, to occupy him for as long as she could, and spent the rest of the day pacing her room, pacing the library floor, thinking on the terrible encounter from the night before.
After conclusively deciding that what she had seen had not been a dream, Twilight was faced with a new question. What would she do? Her first thought was to contact Ponyville Hospital immediately. If Mr. Brannigan was harming himself, if he was in such a state that he was capable of self-mutilation… It was the only logical option, to send for doctors. Mr. Brannigan needed help, whether he liked it or not. And Twilight was obliged to help him. If he had to be dragged kicking and screaming back to Ponyville Hospital, so be it.
But.
Even now, after what she had seen, a voice persisted in the deeper chambers of Twilight’s mind. You’re still his friend, it said. That’s what you told him. And he believed you. Are you his friend, Twilight? Are you really?
Twilight sat on her bed, looking out the window over Ponyville. Of course I am, she reassured herself. I only want to help…
But to betray Mr. Brannigan… to risk driving him to hatred and despair by sending him to a place he so despised…
As much as reason dictated that Twilight should contact the hospital, she was not sure that she could bear to.
It was a struggle between the power of logic and the trust of friendship.
The daylight waned, and then, before Spike got back, Twilight abruptly made her decision. She jumped off her bed, snatched her scarf from the floor and started down the stairs.
I’ll visit him, she thought. I'll go talk to him. Maybe he could write something down, he's probably unable to speak. I’ll try and convince him to go to Ponyville Hospital. And if he refuses… well, I’ll deal with that later. He told me he lives on the outskirts of Ponyville; I’ll look his address up in the phone book, his house shouldn’t be hard to miss. 
I’m going to find out what’s going on.
She found the address and set out into Ponyville for Mr. Brannigan’s house. Night began to fall.


The flurries began again as Twilight made her way down the dirt road, the houses and buildings become fewer and farther between as she neared her destination. The flakes were utterly silent as they filled the sky and dissipated on the cold, hard ground. And now the gray sky was turning black again. Soon, Twilight used her magic to conjure up a point of light on the end of her horn for visibility. That light, a beacon in the dancing snow, was a bit eerier than Twilight had been hoping for.
And finally she arrived.
The home was very large by Ponyville standards. Erected some one hundred feet off the road, Mr. Brannigan’s house stood three stories, painted a dull white in the light of Twilight’s horn. An impressive home, but strange looking, as if it were lonely. There were no other homes immediately around; Twilight had left the bulk of Ponyville behind her a long while back. And though the house obviously wasn’t very old, the paint on the outside seemed already to be turning weary, preparing for the peel. And none of the lights were on.
Maybe he’s asleep, then, Twilight thought. I don’t want to wake him. I could always go back, I could always come back tomorrow…
But Twilight did not go back. Somewhere deep in her gut, she knew that if she turned around, she would never have the courage to come back to this place again.
She shivered and began the walk to the front door.
The front of the house seemed a bit too flat, a bit too blank, in Twilight’s stark magical light. She mounted the steps in front of the large double doors, dark wood, heavy and elegant. On the doors were large brass knockers, just as heavy and ornate, the shine rubbed away by years of use and indifference.
Fighting to keep her hoof steady, Twilight reached up and knocked three times. 
Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
The emphatic pounding of the knockers echoed in the bowels of the dark house. Twilight waited, for a sound, for a pony to come to the door, anything. But nothing stirred in the big white house. She knocked twice more.
Clunk. Clunk.
For five more minutes she waited, and for five more minutes there was nothing. She moved to lift the knocker once more – but then she was possessed by a flash of initiative. She placed her hooves on the brass door handles and gently pushed.
Slowly, the doors swung open.
Something seemed to freeze in Twilight’s stomach. Oh, why in Equestria did I do that?
To bite the bullet. He must be here. And we need to speak.
Twilight took her first tentative step inside the house, hardly able to breathe without – 
Crunch.
Twilight gasped, her front hoof flew up off the floor. She’d stepped on something. She focused the light from her horn into a flood light, washing the room before her in that eerie stark white. The ceiling loomed high and imperious over her, all the way up to the roof, a crystal chandelier gazing down suspiciously on the intruder. A grand staircase rose before her, stretching up to a landing on the second floor, and then further up to the third. And on the floor at Twilight's feet; even with the light of her horn distorting and draining all colors, the floor was unmistakably white. Twilight thought for a moment that some flurries of snow must have come in through the door and stuck on the carpet. But no – she examined the spot where she had stepped.
Salt. The entire floor was dusted with salt.
There were spots where Twilight could barely make out any floor at all. All around her, on the stairs, down the hallways, a coating of salt. And all around Twilight were inconsistencies in the even spread, hoofprints, signs of walking, signs of running.
Twilight slowly stepped inside and closed the doors behind her.
She cleared her throat and called out. “Mr. Brannigan? Are your awake?”
She swept the light of her horn around the room. On her right, a long hallway, leading to who knows where. In front of here, the monstrous staircase. And to her left, an open door.
A light reflected back into Twilight’s eyes, making her squint; she turned down her light. She’d projected her light into a mirror; the door on her left led to a bathroom. She took a step closer, looked inside.
Beneath the mirror was the sink, and sides of the sink were dripping with red blood. The salt on the floor was stained as well, a twisted distortion of the pure white. And on the edge of the sink, carefully placed, were Mr. Brannigan’s teeth. Yellow and red, trailing bits of gum. And then in the sink, in the center of that red, red sink, there sat a red-brown lump in the drain, a dried out, deformed strip of flesh...
Twilight turned away, her hoof on her mouth, holding back the vomit. The floor began to tilt, and she squeezed her eyes shut tight, just trying to breathe, just to breathe.
After a moment the disorientation passed. She opened her eyes and took one last look through the open door at the bathroom sink. That blood was dry. But for how long? Over a day?
Twilight tore her eyes away from the open door. 
Just to remind herself that she was there with a purpose, just so she could hear a voice in this dead, white quiet, Twilight called out again. “Mr. Brannigan? It’s me, Twilight Sparkle. I wanted to talk to you. Please, I just want to help…”
Something drew Twilight’s eyes to the stairs. All over the floor, the salt showed signs of disturbance. But on the stairs, a single set of hoofprints, leading up. Just one set.
So he must still be up there, Twilight thought.
At once wide awake and unsure of the solidity of reality around her, Twilight started up the stairs, following the prints in the salt, her pace measured and slow.
She arrived at the first landing, and now she could see that it hadn't just been the first floor and the stairs; everywhere had been coated with salt. There were bald patches on the rug here and there, obviously not hoofprints, more like spots where Mr. Brannigan had run out of salt. But that was not the most remarkable thing about the landing. Twilight’s attention turned to the wall on her right.
It was a painting; or, at least, it had been. A life size picture in a beautiful golden frame, dominating the wall. On the left of the picture stood Mr. Brannigan. But oh so much younger. His mane was full and unflecked by gray. There were no deep grooves in his face. And even filtered through a painter’s imagination, there was a humility and a kindness in his eyes, something Twilight remembered from the day Mr. Brannigan first set foot in Golden Oak Library.
The right side of the painting had been slashed to ribbons, ripped away, left shredded on the floor and hanging from the edges of the golden frame. As if Mr. Brannigan had not always been alone in his painting on the wall. But now he was.
Twilight looked down at the floor again. The prints did not lead to the painting; it must have been shredded long before Mr. Brannigan spread salt throughout his house. Instead the hoofprints kept leading up, up to the third floor.
Twilight stole one last glance at the mysterious shell of a painting, and continued her ascent.
She reached the top of the stairs, her climb at an end. She paused, looking to the floor for directions. The prints remained, and they led straight forward.
Underneath a closed door, just in front of the grand staircase.
Twilight steadied herself, knowing who had to be inside. Again, she called out. “Hello? Mr. Brannigan? Please, sir, can you hear me? It’s Twilight Sparkle. I just want to help…” She followed the steps in the endless salt, and stood outside the closed door. Her stomach was revolting against her again – she fought it and won. 
Twilight lifted her hoof and knocked. The clock-clock-clock made for a surprisingly heavy echo behind the door; if this was a bedroom, it was enormous. Carefully, as if afraid to make any sudden movements, Twilight turned the handle, and the door gently swung open. Scarcely daring to breathe, Twilight stepped inside.
The room was indeed large; Twilight turned up her light, and then she was able to see everything in a sickly, sallow glow. The room was the last thing Twilight had expected. She had walked into some sort of makeshift concert hall. On her left, at one far end of the hall, a grand piano stood importantly, as black as if she had never used the light of her magic to illuminate it. And stretching across the rest of the hall, far to Twilight’s right, there were wooden chairs, set up in two long blocks, an aisle running down the middle. There must have been at least two hundred, maybe three hundred chairs in all. A small concert space for the small concerts of an old musician, entertaining his friends and family. On the far wall, opposite the piano, there were enormous, beautiful glass windows. The snow could just be seen through them, silently falling in the world outside.
And in the very last row sat Mr. Brannigan.
His black winter coat was gone, and even in the dim pale light, Twilight was shocked by his appearance without it. Mr. Brannigan wasn’t just skinny, he was skeletal, his ribs plainly visible, his belly as sunken in as his eyes, his front and back legs, bones held together with skin. 
Mr. Brannigan did not stir at Twilight’s appearance. His eyes stared into nothingness, and nothingness seemed to stare back into him. His mouth was slightly agape, and now all of his chin was a mottled red. A strand of thick blood melted from his mouth into his lap.
Twilight stared at this flesh statue from across the hall.
She tried to make her presence known without scaring him. She walked in front of the piano to the mouth of the long aisle, past Mr. Brannigan’s line of sight. He continued to sit, unmoving.
She took a few steps toward him, down the aisle, her hooves crunching on the ground – even here, salt on the floor, so much salt. “Mr. Brannigan?” she called out to that husk of a pony, made tiny by the space of the room. “Are you… I hope you don’t mind, the door was open, I… I-I wanted to see you…”
She slowly advanced. The distance began closing, and she kept speaking.
“When I saw you in the road the other day – I was just so… surprised… I really am very worried about you, Mr. Brannigan. Are you all right? All I want to do is help…”
She was now halfway up the aisle. Mr. Brannigan never even blinked.
A terrible, unthinkable thought struck Twilight like a splinter of ice in her heart. That ghastly, unearthly stillness… the glaze of his eyes…
Surely, he’s not… No, he couldn’t be…
She stopped. Now she could feel it, warm tears welling up, clouding her vision, running down her face. “M-Mr. Brannigan? Are you awake, sir?” She sniffed. “I just want to know if you're okay – ”
Mr. Brannigan blinked.
Twilight yelped, she stumbled backwards, heart racing. Mr. Brannigan's eyes were locked on her now, with that same expression of complete blankness, the blood still dribbling from his chin. His head twitched towards her, so that now the two looked at each other squarely – then his whole body began to tremble, his legs shook, his breathing came fast, and then he was on his feet, facing Twilight in the aisle, the puppet alive at last.
The two of them stood there, thirty feet away. Twilight tried to find words, tried to find lucidity, but there was nothing to be found. Just Mr. Brannigan and his cold, cold eyes.
And then there was a change. Mr. Brannigan’s face twisted, and suddenly there was a crack in the nothingness; something was starting to show through. Mr. Brannigan raised a shaking hoof, pointing down the aisle at Twilight, and now the look was clear, terror had found its way back into Mr. Brannigan, an unspeakable horror which bent and contorted his face, that bubbled up inside him and seeped out of every pore, every orifice, chilling the room, chilling Twilight to the bone. Mr. Brannigan’s mouth spasmed, he took a clumsy step backward. The circle of blood that remained of his mouth opened wide, and he shouted, a desperate, gargling noise:
“Ergh! Ergh!"
He kept pointing, he kept backing up, and Twilight was lost, unable to advance or retreat, confusion and fear pounding down all around her. And then something about the pointing hoof, the panic and the madness on his face, made her realize what Mr. Brannigan had meant to say:
There! There!
Her eyes went wide, she whirled around, and there directly behind her down the aisle stood the piano, the black, black piano with the gapingly empty seat, with the keyboard lid that was flipped up, that must have been flipped up from the moment Twilight set foot in the room, absolutely must have been.
She turned again, and Mr. Brannigan had broken into a full on run, the last of his strength driving his pitiful cracking shell of a body to its last limits, he screamed a high, unearthly scream, his limbs flailing, running away, away from the piano – 
CRASH. 
Mr. Brannigan went sailing through the enormous glass window.
Twilight screamed.
Suddenly everything she ever knew, everything she’d ever learned about the value of bonds between ponies, eclipsed her fear, and she turned and ran out the door, through the salt, down to Mr. Brannigan, down the great stairs, past the hoofprints and the shredded painting and the bloody bathroom sink and back out into the cold night air.
She searched outside, under the indifferent, ashy snowfall. It didn’t take long for her to find him, underneath the smashed window high up on the third floor.
Mr. Brannigan’s back had snapped on the cold, hard earth, and now there he lay, broken and bloody and dead. His limbs had been twisted and mangled beneath him. His mouth still bled. 
And the liquid eyes of Mr. Brannigan were not blank, or terrified, but windows to a well of bottomless surprise.


In the following days, the snow began to come down in earnest. A blanket of soft white to match a sky of soft gray. Winter had truly arrived.
Some weeks after the death of Mr. Brannigan, Twilight Sparkle and Spike found themselves on a familiar errand.
In the morning, Twilight bought a bouquet of lilies from the local flower shop. Then, she and Spike made the long trek to the far side of Ponyville, out past the houses, to the peace and solitude of Ponyville Cemetery.
There, she and Spike stood, beneath a massive old dead tree, ankle deep in snow, before a fresh tombstone.
Twilight lowered her bouquet onto the ground. She always made sure to enchant the flowers she brought before they arrived at the cemetary, so that they wouldn’t freeze to death out there in the cold, but wither and fade like a flower in spring.
The bouquet fell to the snow like a head on a pillow. The carved words of the grave looked solemnly down on the pink and white petals of the lilies:


ARGUS T. BRANNIGAN


An artist, a kind soul, and an inspiration to us all.


Spike lowered his head before the grave. He heard Twilight sniffling in the cold. Abruptly, the sniffling increased. Spike looked up, and for the first time since the night of Mr. Brannigan’s death, Twilight cried. Her eyes shut tight, her legs gave out beneath her, and the sobbing began. Spike rushed to comfort her, throwing his arms around her.
“Shh, shh,” he said. “I’ve got you, everything’s okay…”
Twilight wiped her eyes. She spoke as soon as she could draw enough breath. “Oh, Spike,” she said, “I’m sorry, it was my fault, it was all my fault, I could have called the hospital, I could have – I should have – ”
“Hey, shh, none of that now, come on,” Spike crooned, hugging Twilight all the tighter. She buried her head in his shoulder. “Don’t you go blaming yourself,” he said softly. “You did what you thought was right, and that’s all you can ever do. It’s okay, I’m here…”
They stayed there for some time, neither wanting to let go. Finally their grips loosened, and Twilight stood again, her eyes red. “I still can’t make sense of it, Spike,” she said. “I just don’t understand what happened to him.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know,” said Spike, staring at the words on the grave. “We’ll have to be satisfied. He was a pony who struggled with his mind for years. His best friend passed away, and he didn’t quite know how to take it. So he was taken into Ponyville Hospital. And then, after everyone thought he’d gotten better, it started again. There was no sensing it, no preparing for it, and no way anyone could have known.”
Twilight nodded; they’d been over it before. The fall of Mr. Brannigan. The decline of a pony who lost his best friend, and then went onstage without him on the night of his death.
Twilight’s lip trembled, but then she mastered herself. 
“I just wish,” she said, “that things had gone differently…”
“Me too, Twi,” said Spike. “Me too.”
And by unspoken consent, the two of them turned and began making for the exit of Ponyville Cemetery.
A breeze murmured by; Twilight paused, her head tilting. Behind her, in the branches of that massive dead tree. A sound that almost wasn’t the wind. A sound with the rich timbre of a saxophone. And the soft simplicity of a casual, contended piano. And the haunting passion of singing voices.
Spike stopped. “Twi,” he said. “You all right?”
Twilight blinked. She shook her head, shaking the sound out of her ears.
“Yes,” she said. “I think so…”
And so they left. And that breeze that murmured in the dead tree branches and through the maze of tombstones in the cemetery would float down to the lands around, through the empty halls of Mr. Brannigan’s massive white house, through the streets of Ponyville, in the barns and the bakeries and the boutiques and the bookshelves.
And if a pony were ever to listen to that breeze, that haunting, haunted winter wind, they might have heard more than just a wind. They might have heard two voices, echoing and intertwining and making the sweetest and saddest of music…

When the sky goes gray,
And the air gets colder,
And you’re lookin’ to lean on a shoulder,
How ‘bout mine?

When the neighbors bray,
Or you’re sick with fear,
I’ll be right there to lend you an ear.
We’ll be fine.

I’ll be there, buddy.
As long as our music plays.
I’ll be there.
Always.




Always.










Always…





The End