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Chapter 3

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

It took about a week to get partially settled in. Inside the house, I'd unpacked most of the must-haves and arranged them once, and in some cases twice. It always looks like there's more cupboard space in a kitchen than there really is. I hadn't found a proper wardrobe yet, but a pair of broom handles and some twine made a serviceable enough closet, and with my extra bed sheet hung over the front broom handle, it actually looked fairly tidy.

I didn't have a dresser, either, but stacking some of the extra wooden crates on their side was enough to organize things for the time being. I took the rest up to the attic, where they joined a few leftover boxes from the former occupant. Since I had plenty of room up there, I wasn’t too worried about cleaning up their stuff.

When I looked back at my handiwork, it made me chuckle. In some ways, it was kind of like a college dorm room or a first apartment. Poor guy chic.

Outside, it was too late in the year to do any yard work besides basic maintenance, enough to make the house not look abandoned. I didn’t have a lawnmower, so I contracted most of that out to an enterprising foal with a strange tow-behind reel mower.

He left one patch unmowed, and when I asked him why, he said that it was a flower garden. I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t tell the difference between bloomless flowers and weeds, so I just nodded. I think he knew, though.

That would be something to look forward to in the spring. I’d bought my bank repo early in the spring, and was quite pleased to discover that the former owner had planted tiger lilies all around the back porch.

I met lots of new ponies during that week, and did my best to keep their names straight. Fortunately, most of them had built-in mnemonics; most pony names and cutie marks tended to track pretty well, although there were a few exceptions to that general rule.

Everypony was a little bit friendlier now that I was living in town. I hadn't really noticed it in the big city, but in a small town like Haywards Heath, everypony knows who lives there and who's just visiting.

That did throw me for a loop the second day. I guess it must have taken most of the first for my name to get all the way around town; after that, everypony knew who I was before I'd even introduced myself.

•••••

There were still noises at night that I hadn't gotten used to, and every now and then I'd be half-asleep and certain that I'd just heard a door creak open, and once I thought I heard faint singing.

I hadn't wanted to get out of bed right away—most likely, it was somepony at the pub who'd had a few too many, although the pub was the opposite direction. Maybe it was some pony down the street singing a lullaby to a foal.

I eventually got curious enough to get out of bed and go to the window. I stuck my head outside, and strangely, the singing seemed to get a bit fainter.

Pony houses didn’t have wall sockets or overhead lights, and I’d gotten enough used to the arrangement of my house to not need lights to go through it. I couldn’t quite pin down where the noise was coming from—did pony burglars sing while they worked? That was a really dumb thought, but just the same I thought I ought to investigate. Creaks and pops and bumps and rattles in the night were one thing, but singing was a whole different matter.

My lizard-brain insisted that I ought to have a weapon for self-defense, and the best bet was in the kitchen. Cast iron frying pans were fine weapons, after all.

The singing got fainter as I went downstairs.

I managed to bash my head on an open cupboard door, and for just a moment I was ready to rip it right off its hinges, but then I remembered since I owned the house, I was going to have to fix it if I did.

The pans were on neat hooks behind the stove, and I grabbed the biggest one, twirling it around in my hands.

I’d intended to go back upstairs, but glanced out the kitchen window. Out in the yard, about where the flower garden was, I thought I saw a bit of light. Some faint apparition moving among the stalks, just far enough away that I couldn’t quite piece it together.

Back on Earth, sodium and mercury lights always played tricks with vision at night, but ponies didn’t have those, so that couldn’t be what I was seeing. Moonlight remained constant, and while it was giving some illumination to my yard, I was sure that it wasn’t the cause of what I was seeing.

But what was? St. Elmo’s Fire? Swamp gas? Neither of those things seemed likely, and looking around at my neighbor’s houses didn’t reveal any sources of light that might be causing whatever it was that I was seeing.

Since I was appropriately armed, I went down the hall to the back door and opened it, then took slow steps down the back stairs into the yard. I heard a bit of rustling, surely just the wind, and the strange ghost-light I was seeing vanished deeper into the flowerbed.

The grass was cold on my bare feet.

I walked deliberately to the stalks, but there was nothing there. Whatever I’d seen was gone. I wasn’t willing to go into the flowerbed, not at night, not when I had bare feet and I didn’t know what I might step on, or what might be there, hiding among the stalks.

I could have scared it off—probably had.

A bit of movement above me caught my attention. It was a pegasus, flying past at just above rooftop level, and I all of a sudden felt like a fool. No doubt, I’d heard a pegasus singing earlier. And then in the backyard, that could have been a white cat or an opossum I’d seen out the kitchen window. I’d scared it off once I’d opened the back door, and it had fled.

But there was still a nagging doubt at the back of my mind. I knew what I’d seen, what I’d heard. The singing—if it had been a pegasus, why would it have gotten fainter when I stuck my head out the window? And whatever had been in the flower garden looked bigger than an opossum or feral cat. It had seemed almost pony-sized.

•••••

A few night later, I was laying in bed when I heard muffled hoofsteps above my head. For a second, I thought I was imagining it, then I heard it again, accompanied by soft, melodic giggling.

I’d taken to keeping my frying pan by my bed, just in case, so I grabbed it, jumped out of bed and dashed down the hallway. The trapdoor to the attic had a long string—long enough that a pony could pull it without stretching—and then bolted up the attic stairs.

I dropped back down almost instantly, thinking it might be some kind of a trap, and I stayed with my head just below the attic floor for a few moments before remembering that if some kind of malevolent nocturnal spirit wanted to do me in, it could just as easily murder me in my sleep.

The noises were still going on. If anything, they were a bit louder, so I stuck my head back up and looked around. I didn't see anything in the attic. It was dark, of course, but I had the idea that a ghost, if it existed, would be kind of glowy. Like what I’d seen in my garden.

Besides, now that I had my head stuck through the trapdoor, it sounded like the noises were still coming from above me.

After boosting myself up into the attic and accidentally stepping on a toy from the box the previous occupant had left behind, I determined that the noises were in fact coming from my roof.

I was utterly convinced I was going to catch the ghost in the act, and I was sure that it didn't know I'd been in the attic, so I bolted down the stairs and into my backyard, my attention completely focused on that moment of satisfaction when I'd see it with my own eyes, thus proving that I wasn’t crazy.

What I hadn't considered was how I was going to get a good look at my own roof from two stories below. I could only see half of it from the backyard, and that half was completely ghost-free.

I could see the rest from the front yard, though. I ran around the corner of the house as quietly as I could, and there was a white, almost-glowing pony shape on the roof. Vindication!

Until I got all the way around front, and realized that what I was seeing were actually a pair of teenage pegasi making out on my roof.

I also realized that I was standing in the middle of the street in my skivvies.

Given that the ponies in Haywards Heath are all habitual nudists, it surely wasn't that big of a deal, but it still felt wrong, and after shooing off the pegasi, I sheepishly made my way back into my house and went back to bed.

I was still convinced that there was something in my house, but I knew I was going to have to be more careful and coy in order to figure out what, and this time I wasn't going to jump the gun.

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Emtu

Emtu #1 · Nov 5th, 2018 · 34 · ·

*shakes pan* "Get off my roof, you hooligans!"

Venerable Ro

Venerable Ro #2 · Nov 5th, 2018 · 21 · ·

Oi! This house is occupied! Go find a cloud!

Booster Spice

Booster Spice #3 · Nov 5th, 2018 · 17 · ·

Lets go snog on the old haunted house down the road. Whys it haunted? Cos teenagers like to go snog on the roof at night and make weird noises.

rikusorasephiroth

rikusorasephiroth #4 · Nov 5th, 2018 · 2 · ·

My lizard-brain insisted that I ought to have a weapon for self-defense, and the best bet was in the kitchen. Cast iron frying pans were fine weapons, after all.

Indeed they are! Just ask Conker the Squirrel.

badninja