Chapter 7
The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit
Even though I tried to sleep in the afternoon, it wasn’t always possible. My body wasn’t entirely happy with the new sleep schedule, and while Haywards Heath was much quieter than a human town would have been, it still had busy days. Market days brought out lots of ponies, both shoppers and merchants. I usually couldn’t hear the market itself from my house, but there was a lot of foot traffic—hoof traffic, I suppose—by my house those days.
I had to go to market, too, and while I’d been the kind of shopper that preferred getting in and out of the store as quickly as possible, with as little interaction with others as was an option, that really didn’t work in a pony town. I had dozens of individual merchants I had to haggle with, and most of them wanted to make a little bit of small-talk as well.
And now that I had a ghost in my attic, I actually wanted to talk, too. I wanted my next door neighbor to come up and ask me if I’d seen the ghost. I wanted a pony who lived down the street to tell me who she was. I was starving for information, and not getting any.
I was buying a bunch of carrots from a mare named Chantenay. She didn’t sell carrot-shaped carrots, which had put me off at first: they were instead short and fat with blunt ends, resembling a larger version of the mini carrots that could be found in Earth grocery stores. They were also delicious, much richer than it seemed a carrot should be.
She gave me a bit of a discount when I offered to leave the greens behind. Maybe they were a fine snack for a pony or a pet rabbit, but carrot greens weren’t for me.
I’d looked through my flower garden a couple of times already, just to see if there was anything out of the ordinary, but I hadn’t found anything. I don’t know what I was expecting to find, anyway. It was plants and dirt and that was about all that I knew about gardening.
I had read a mystery story once where the murderer had buried a gun in a garden and the iron from the gun had caused the flowers to grow a different color. Since there weren’t any flowers in my flower garden, not this late in the year, that probably wasn’t a useful bit of knowledge. And I wouldn’t have known if flowers were growing the wrong color anyway.
But there were plenty of flower ponies who would know, and several of them were at the market, so I asked one over.
Of course, when I was on my way back home I was kicking myself. It nagged at my mind that a garden would be a decent place to hide a body, and her interest in the garden could be because that’s where her body was. Maybe once I dug it up and interred her properly, she’d go away. Was that what I wanted, though?
And what if there was a body there? I knew that if there was, I hadn’t done it. I’d just bought the house, but I was the outsider. Would the judge say guilty on a make-believe trial? I was committed now; I couldn’t say no. If I did, it would be even more suspicious.
I paced around the house like a caged animal and almost jumped out of my skin when she knocked on my door. I had to remind myself to breathe, to act normal, and why was I trying to pretend when I literally knew nothing? I was not a murderer, and a ghost was not an accusation.
Was it?
Magic threw everything into question. Half of pony names at least were too convenient, and the number might be higher and I just didn’t get the reference. Their names tied into their cutie marks and that was just the way it worked. Surely they were named by an oracle . . . if their cutie marks had been there the moment they were born, that would be one thing, but they weren’t. A filly named Strawberry Shortcake would get a themed cutie mark and be good at making strawberry shortcake and I could feel that I was skating on the edge of madness.
Everything felt off. It should have been a dark and stormy night, but it wasn’t. It was a bit chilly but not too bad, not bad enough to justify my shivering.
Of course, she took it in stride and made a joke about my lack of fur, and then we went back out to the garden.
I was actually contemplating if I could clear the fence in a single leap. Probably; it wasn’t very tall.
I was expecting her to point with an accusing hoof.
She did not.
And in a way, that was a let-down. There was nothing mystical about my garden. There were flowers there, flowers that were mostly dormant because of the season. There were also weeds, because the garden hadn’t been properly tended in some time.
That elicited a small frown of disapproval from her.
There was a rusty trowel that she found, half-buried. It was old; it must have been old. The blade was pitted with rust and caked with dirt. The handle was split, and there was algae or moss growing on it.
That was all she found. It was a perfectly normal garden, and she gave me some advice on tending it and told me what plants were in it, and I probably gave vague signs of understanding, but I could not remember a single word she’d said.
•••••
I sat in the kitchen and looked at the garden. It didn’t do anything.
I turned the trowel over in my hands. I’d thrown that away while she had been exploring my garden—I don’t know what I would have done if she’d asked if she could have it—and I’d recovered it once she was gone.
There wasn’t much to it. It was old, and it had clearly been abandoned outside for a while. It was right on the edge of being repairable . . . back on Earth, I’d have chucked the thing in the wastebasket without a moment’s thought, maybe been thankful that I hadn’t hit it with the lawnmower, and perhaps spent a moment musing about who’d left it behind and then considered it no more.
That might have been what I should have done here, but I didn’t. I sat in the kitchen and I turned it over in my hands and sometimes I brushed a little bit of dirt or rust off my pants and I wondered if it was antique.
In Equestria, it was really hard to judge the age of houses. If there was a progression of architectural styles, I didn’t know what it was. Houses tended to look a lot alike whether they’d been just constructed or were dozens or maybe hundreds of years old, and as far as I’d been able to find, nowhere on the paperwork for my house did it say how old it was.
It was reasonable to assume that the toys in the attic were hers, but how old were they?
What had she been doing in the garden? Was this her trowel? Would she notice that it was gone?
•••••
Haywards Heath had a cemetery.
I couldn’t say if that was surprising or not. I didn’t know enough about pony customs to be sure. But in appearance, it wasn't that far removed from a human cemetery to be terribly confounding. There were some traditional-looking graves, patches of grass that were just marked with headstones. And there were also some more ornate stone structures, cairns or crypts scattered about.
There was also a memorial wall on the east side.
How the graves were marked was remarkably inconsistent. Sometimes there was only a cutie mark; other times there were more details.
I wasn’t an expert on pony ages, but I figured that they’d roughly align with human ages, and even with the frustrating inconsistencies, I sort of figured it out.
I reasoned that as a ghost, there wouldn’t be any disturbed sod above her grave. Had she been a zombie or some other kind of walking dead, there might have been, but it stood to reason that a ghost could just pass through the ground like it was nothing.
Three complete circuits of the cemetery and nothing felt right.
I could have missed it; that was always a possibility. But I didn’t think I had. Nowhere had I gotten the sense of restless spirit, and I was learning that I should trust my gut. She hadn’t been buried here, I was sure of that.
What that meant, I didn’t know. There had been old markers, ones that were surely older than the trowel, but none of them were hers so as the sun dipped over the horizon, I went back to my box-fort and waited.
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9290100
'And if it still isn't mine, I'll figure out how to make one'
The good Admiral usually picks names for a reason and sure enough...
Also, I don't know if we're supposed to think about this but does this guy have a job?
9290141
'and if we don't kill us, we'll survive past the heat death of the universe out of pure stubbornness and creativity'
9290172
'And if we're still not dead after that, everyone else will be'
Is this gonna be one of those stories with a twist ending where he's learns he's actually the ghostly filly haunting his own dreams, or something weird like that?
(Or maybe I've just been drinking the expired radiator fluid again.)
He seems to be spinning circles in his head about this mystery more and more, but I suppose I can't blame him! She is, after all, a ghost.
Just noting that it wasn't clear at all that this meant that he'd asked someone over, until several paragraphs later. Was that deliberate?
9290180
But eventually. some young species, having only just entered the true Space Age, will stumble across one of our still-functioning Von Neuman probes and resurrect us by accident. and then it'll all begin again.
9290167
i.imgur.com/gXdTZ1z.jpg
I can sense he is on the cusp of madness. Haha
Wasn't buried there because she was killed by the Spanish inquisition. Nopony expects the Spanish Inquisition!
madness.
Maybe he should try leaving her a note, asking the ghost for her name. Or maybe leave out some coloring books and crayons (or whatever the pony version is) hoping she would sign her name or cutie mark on it.
Or you know, he could just introduce himself and offer to be her friend. She's a pony ghost, and so would be all for making new friends.
*Looks at picture*
Well, at least she's a cute ghost.
Bill. Flobalobalob.
Ben. Go home Bill, Youre drunk.
Weed. Dont worry. Be Happy.
Any more paranoia, and this guy is going to have to roll up a new character.
Ghost is your Freind.
Could she be buried in an unmarked grave in the backyard?
It's never pleasant to witness somebody slowly losing it.
9290261
And if we're still alive then, we'll probably be dead!
I must have missed something. What is he doing in Equestria? What is his job?
All this worry about not appearing crazy is driving our poor protagonist crazy. It'll probably be better for his mental health in the long run if he just comes and shares his problem, or at least tries to talk to the ghost.
He can't sue for having been sold a haunted house because he'd have to get the ghost to appear in court to prove it, but if he did the defense attorney would just say that we have a haunted courthouse!
9291164
Humorously enough, you CAN sue for being sold a haunted house. We learned about it in the first term at law school.
One side made the point that ghosts were not legally recognized, and thus could not be claimed as proof of deception or deceit on the part of the seller.
The other side pointed out that the house was not only 'well known' as being haunted, but had been a type of attraction that was just conveniently left out of the information for the outside buyer.
There was lots more, but the funny part was when they got to having to prove if it was legitimately haunted and the court was asked who were they (the seller) gonna call to inspect the house for ghosts.
Apparently someone actually did mention the Ghost Busters.
But yes, under the right circumstances, you CAN sue if you bought a haunted house, if it wasn't disclosed to you... at least in the USA.
9292347
I'd like to think of it as more advising than complaining, really.
Biscuit isn't technically doing anything wrong, I just feel that the storytelling is inefficient. It could be a tighter, more engaging reading experience.
I'm having trouble figuring out who this garden-inspecting pony is. One of the flower trio?
9291944 And this is just more proof that lawyers are the devil's work.
9292535
<chuckles> There is more truth to that claim than many cases we had to study, but there are a few good ones.
9292688 Just like there were a few good Daleks...
9290702
Or interred within the walls/foundation of the house.
9291944
Can't you sue over most anything?
Some suits just have a higher chance of being thrown out.
9290100
Yeah, pretty much.
Thanks!
9290156
Who knew there were so many varieties of heritage carrot? Well, you now know at least one.
Yes, although he never specifies what it is. It’s a day job.
9290186
You mean like the twist where Bruce Willis was dead all along? No, not like that.
<tiny text>
You’ve got to drink the fresh stuff for best effect.
(Don’t drink the fresh stuff. Or the old stuff.)
9290204
And how do you investigate a ghost without the whole town thinking your crazy? It’s a dilemma.
No, it wasn’t. I thought it was clear enough in the text, but apparently not.
9290261
That pretty much sums up my life philosophy.
9290308
It’s a slippery slope, too.
9290350
Their chief weapon is fear.
Fear and surprise. Surprise and fear . . . I’ll come in again.
9290378
Correction made; thank you!
9290392
That’s what a ouiji board is for. Or a ouiji coloring book for younger ghosts. Maybe ouiji blocks? I sense an untapped market.
That’s not the worst idea. Not necessarily the best, mind you, but not the worst.
9290418
I think that’s important. I wouldn’t mind being haunted by a cute ghost.
9290550
I know, right? By now he’s got to be wondering if tinfoil hats are ghost proof.
Love the ghost. Embrace the ghost.
9290702
She is not, but it’s not an unreasonable guess.
9290746
It really isn’t.
9290871
He has not stated either, so you haven’t missed anything there.
9291011
It’s like some kind of recursive loop. The more he worries about other ponies thinking he’s crazy, the crazier he gets.
Talking to the ghost might actually be a smart move, although I suppose that carries its own special set of risks. I have to think that a lot of time, you’re better off if the undead don’t know you’re there.
9291164
I’m not sure how that logic would actually work in real life, but it might actually be a decent argument if there’s nothing better to argue.
I can imagine the judge looking over the witness list.
“Ghost?”
“Yeah, she’s a witness for the defense.”
“Is that her name?”
“No . . . I don’t know her name. Oh, also we’ll have to have the case held after dark. Can’t go out in the day. Ghost, you know.”
9291944
Okay, I’ve got to know, who won that case?
9292427
In my slice of life fics, I am generally known for the exact opposite. Stories where nothing happens in the literary sense. Golden Harvest plays with her little sister. Written Script works in the office and then goes home. A pony hitches a ride with a stranger.
That’s not what everyone wants to read, and that’s fine. That’s what some people want to read, and that’s generally what I want to write.
9292504
No, he’s not in Ponyville. It’s not anypony that you know.
9300007
Also a good guess, but no, she isn’t.
9301615
As far as I know from listening to law videos on YouTube, yes, you can basically sue over anything. How far that suit gets depends very much on the merit of the case; if it’s got none, if the judge doesn’t dismiss it as frivolous from the get go, the opposing council can often file a brief that basically says the case is dumb.
How does one "feel like" a pony's burial site is there?