Chapter 1
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The Haunting

Chapter 1

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I didn't really think too much of the house at first. There was some work that needed to be done, and when I'd looked at it, I'd seen the signs of hasty and slightly unskilled repairs, but that wasn't something that scared me off. I'm not a master carpenter by any means, but I know my way around less-than-stellar houses. After all, my first house was a crappy seventies mobile home, and I'd followed it up with a bank repo in Klamath Falls during the height of the housing crisis.

Ponies didn't have professional home inspectors, but really, what was there to see? No electrical system to worry about, and rudimentary plumbing that was just one step above a gravity system fed by a rain barrel. The central heating unit was the fireplace, and for air conditioning, the windows opened.

I had looked through it anyways, and there wasn't anything too alarming. No weird sags or falling plaster; no evidence of termites or any other pests. The yard was overgrown, but that was to be expected. And I assumed the roof was in decent condition, simply based on the lack of water damage. I honestly didn't know very much about thatched roofs.

At the time I didn't know it, but real estate agents were kind of rare in Equestria. The stallion that had been the seller's representative was a little bit twitchy and seemed kind of out of his league. It was only later that I learned he wasn't a realtor in any sense of the word; he actually worked for the mayor's office, and she'd pressed him into the role. Presumably he’d taken the job because he didn't have enough seniority to refuse.

I'd kind of gotten the sense that something wasn't quite right with him from the moment we'd first met, but I'd chalked it up to inexperience. Which I guess was fair; this was something that hadn't been in his job description, after all.

It was fair to say that I was sort of eager to buy property. I'd come to terms with the idea that I was going to be in Equestria for the foreseeable future, and to be honest, it wasn't the worst place I could have wound up. Everybody—everypony—I'd met thus far was friendly and kind, and none of them particularly seemed to care that I wasn't a pony. I got some weird looks every now and then, but no more than I would have expected, given the situation.

Sitting through the closing was just as boring as it would have been on Earth, although there was a lot less paperwork. Instead of giving them evidence of my earnings and savings and outstanding debts, the bank manager herself vouched for me, and there was hardly any paperwork at all. I got the sense that when the bank manager and mayor's assistant bumped hooves with each other and then with me that the deal was closed, and my signature on the deed was a mere formality.

It was certainly better than any deed I'd ever gotten before. The mobile home had come with a title that was essentially the same as the one for my car. The actual house’s mortgage papers had been a bit lacking on the decorative, unphotocopyable scrollwork, but had made up for it in sheer volume of computer-generated paperwork: a hundred pages of legalise that was drier than Moby Dick.

Pony titles, on the other hand, were printed on proper Ye Olde Paper, sealed with both an actual gold-foil seal and a wax signet, and it even came with its own brass tube that I could store it in. And I signed it with a quill pen dipped in an inkpot.

There were no keys to be given at the title signing, because like most pony houses there were no locks. That was something that I'd always found a bit strange, but I guess that since unicorns could easily bypass a lock if they wanted to, and pegasi could get in through any window they cared to, locks were considered an unnecessary extravagance.

I wasn’t too worried about crime. I got the sense that burglary was essentially unknown to the ponies. Maybe that wasn't true; maybe it was something that the newspapers never reported to give ponies a false sense of security. But nopony I knew locked their doors ever.

I don't think that we're born with an inherent distrust of our fellow man; I think that that's a lesson that has to be learned. And it could be that ponies have never learned that lesson—and if so, good for them. I can't help what I am, so I didn't ask for any options for moving services until after the closing was complete, because I didn't want them to think that I was some kind of a rube.

Back on Earth, that wouldn't have been a problem. I could have packed everything into my minivan and moved it piecemeal, or rented a U-Haul and done it that way. Both were familiar options. Here in Equestria, though, there were no minivans or U-Hauls, and while wagons were commonplace, I didn't fancy towing one that carried my worldly possessions.

It turned out that that wasn't much of an issue. Both the bank manager and the mayor's assistant cum realtor knew lots of ponies who had a wagon and would be willing to help me out for a reasonable fee. Probably not coincidentally, their first suggestions were relatives. Having spent most of my life living in small towns, that didn't seem all that odd to me.

It didn't take me long at all to arrange for a mare and a wagon to be at my service for a day, and unlike U-Haul, she didn't charge mileage. She even helped me carry boxes out to the wagon, and then into my new house. I hadn't expected that to be part of the deal at all, and I gave her a rather generous tip, which she initially refused.

That was one thing I'd learned about the ponies that I really liked. When there was business to be done, none of them ever complained that that wasn't their job, or that they weren't getting paid for it, or anything else that a steady stream of former employees at my shop had done. They just did it.

Thus it was that two days after buying my first Equestrian house, I had moved in and begun the process of settling.

•••••

There's a process to settling in to a house you own that's different than an apartment. When you get a rental, you know that you're stuck with the current arrangement. You know that you have to live with the kitchen setup or the undesirable fuel-oil furnace in the basement. You make your choice based on what you see and what you know you can live with.

When you own the house—even if you have a mortgage—you already have in your mind the changes you're going to make. Maybe it's renovating the bathroom or improving the kitchen; maybe it's something more major like deciding that you want an addition or a back porch. You tend to care more about how it sits upon the land, because that's your land. A green thumb, or a wannabe is going to imagine new landscaping around the place, and how the light might look as it comes through aspen trees outside the bedroom, and if you own it, it's worth planting those trees. You're putting down roots, just like those trees are.

Unless the house happens to exactly fit your needs or you have an enormous budget, you start off compromising some. You've already spent a lot of bits to get it, and now you have to prioritize the improvements.

From what I'd seen on House Hunters, Property Brothers, and countless other HGTV shows, the really rich get all that done before they move in, but that wasn't in my budget—either financially or temporally. Instead, I sort of envisioned a rough timeline of changes that spanned from 'as soon as possible' to 'when I get around to it.'

Perhaps it was laziness, but I did want to get a sense of how the house fit me and how I fit the house before I decided on anything major. There were some painting projects that I had in mind, and a few repairs that I thought should be early priorities, but for the most part, since I wasn't really that used to pony houses anyways, I figured I could live with it the way it was, and I'd sort of postpone my to-do list until I'd found the things about it that really annoyed me.

•••••

An empty house always seems bigger than it really is, and it's only when you start to move all your belongings in that you realize that the house isn't as large as you imagined, or else you own too much stuff. Luckily, the latter wasn't the case at all. I did have more clothes than there was closet space for, but that wasn't something that was a surprise. The mare who had helped me move said that fancy unicorns in Canterlot were the only ponies who owned as many clothes as I did.

One benefit to ponies of their clothing-free lifestyle was the general lack of window curtains. Back on Earth, there were so many options for window dressings at nearly every store, up to and including the dollar store, that I'd never imagined a world where such things were seen as an extravagance rather than necessary, and it went without saying that there were no provisions in my new home to hang curtains on the windows.

That was one thing I'd been prepared for, and a few nails and some scrap cloth made serviceable enough curtains for the bathroom and bedroom. Later on, I could put up proper curtain rods and maybe have a seamstress make actual curtains, and I could putty up the holes I'd just made in the window trim, but that was really a low-priority project.

Maybe the curtains weren't really needed, anyways, but I had the thought in my mind that I'd be taking a shower and one of my new neighbors who was a pegasus would just fly up to the bathroom window. Or maybe when I was sitting on the toilet.

I don't think they'd find that awkward at all, but I know that I would.

Aside from that improvement, I set up my bed and got a few boxes of clothes opened. Like most people, I had grandiose plans for organization at the beginning of the moving process, and as moving day approached, the plans defaulted into a 'throw things into a box and hope I can find it later' form. Luckily, I only had a few critical boxes, and those got packed last and thus were on top when the wagon was loaded. That, of course, meant that they were the first boxes moved into the new house, but at least I knew that they were on the bottom of the pile.

•••••

There's a process to getting used to a new home. Everything is strange, and to the lizard-brain possibly a threat. And on top of that, there's a weird sort of eagerness, a feeling deep down that this is mine and I need to explore it. I think it's a little bit dampened on a rental, but when it's something that you own, you're in a state of hyper-sensitivity to everything, even the things that aren't an issue at all.

My house in Klamath Falls had glow-in-the-dark stars and planets on the ceiling of the bedroom, and I somehow didn't notice them until the first night, and they freaked me out. Plus, there was less traffic than I was used to, so instead of a constant roar from a nearby highway, it was mostly silent and each car and truck that passed seemed louder and closer.

And there's also the strange noises the house itself makes as it settles.

That's what really gives a home a personality; the little creaks and pops it makes. I have to assume that it makes them in the morning when the sun's light hits it and causes things to expand, but I’d never heard them, or just dismissed them if I had.

At night, every noise and shadow is possibly a threat, and it doesn't take the lizard-brain too long to start filling in the blanks and telling you that each one of those noises is something that's going to get you if you fall asleep.

I'm sure my rental house made similar noises, but if it had, I'd forgotten every one of them, and the nighttime paranoia set in as I was laying in my bed in my empty except for boxes bedroom. I had a hard time determining what came from the house itself and what came from outside, but one thing I was sure of was that I heard hoofsteps above my head.

Chapter 2
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The Haunting

Chapter 2

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I noticed when I went to make breakfast that one of the cabinets was open, and I was sure I'd left them all closed the night before, but it didn't really stand out in my mind. Could be that I'd forgotten it, or else it wasn't quite plumb on the wall. Ponies either hadn't invented magnetic latches for cabinets, or else they were like door locks—something that the snobby ponies in Canterlot had, but nopony else bothered with.

I pushed it back shut before I accidentally banged my head on it, my mind already on my plans for the day. There were more boxes to be unpacked and things to be put away and I was already going to have to re-think my plan for the second bedroom because once I got a couple of bookshelves in there, the space I'd planned for a desk was awfully crowded. Besides, the window was lower than I'd thought, and I wasn't sure I wanted to block the bottom quadrant.

It took longer than I'd anticipated to get hot water from my shower—rather than have a water heater in every home, Haywards Heath had public hot water, and either I was at the far end of the system, or else it wasn't well-insulated. But when it did start flowing, it was quite pleasant, and as I was showering, half the ideas I'd had for arranging things washed out of my mind completely.

Springtime would have been the best time to have moved into a new house, but I'd had to settle for what I could get, and it was the beginning of autumn. The mornings were a bit chilly, and I didn't open the bathroom window until I was almost done bathing. I might not have even then except the clouds of steam reminded me that without an exhaust fan, I might wind up with a mold problem in my new house, and I didn't know yet if Kilz was a thing that ponies had invented.

The showerhead was too low, which was something I'd have to get changed. It felt like the kind of thing that should take priority, although my grandmother had never had a shower in her house, so maybe I could just get used to taking baths. At least the bathtub was plenty big enough.

Of course I'd forgotten the towels—I was just used to them being in the bathroom.

I darted across the house, keeping a wary eye on my windows, just in case there was some pegasus outside spying in, but I didn't see any.

Downstairs, it was even worse. The towels were in one of the last boxes that I'd panic-packed, and I felt stupidly conspicuous in my living room with open windows on all sides of me. By the time I'd finally found the towels, I was seriously considering getting blackout curtains made for all the windows, even though I hadn't seen a single pony in all the time I was downstairs.

I scampered back to the relative safety of the bathroom, even though it was probably unnecessary. I'd mostly drip-dried by the time I'd found my towels.

At least I had remembered to bring clothes upstairs.

I hadn't unpacked my cooking utensils yet, and I didn't really feel like learning the idiosyncrasies of the stove just yet, so I thought that I'd go to a bakery or restaurant for breakfast. That would also give me a chance to meet some of the townsfolk.

•••••

In America, towns were generally laid out in a grid. Ponies didn’t feel the need for that kind of restriction when it came to urban planning. They also didn’t go for paved roads, which had taken some getting used to at first. There wasn’t always a clear delineation between what was the road and what was somepony’s front lawn. Sometimes there were fences as boundaries, other times it was a row of flowers, and on some occasions there simply wasn’t anything. In those places, I figured that it was safest to either follow other ponies, or walk in an essentially straight line to the next clear border, assuming that the middle part was the street.

I hadn’t gotten yelled at to get off the lawn yet, so either my plan was working, or ponies just didn’t care if you walked on their grass.

The curved roads and half-timbered houses with their thatched roofs gave the town a medieval sort of feel, and that was reinforced by the way that ponies who sold things usually did so out of their homes. Combined with no zoning that I could identify, it meant that on any given street, I might walk by a few ordinary houses with a coopers shop tucked in the middle. Some enterprising ponies grew vegetables all around their house, and more than one in-town resident had free-range chickens to provide them with eggs.

Haywards Heath was unsurprisingly surrounded by farmland, not only growing the staple crops I was used to—corn and wheat and hay and beans—but also flowers. It was really weird to see every color of tulips stretching out in neat rows.

Fruit trees were also commonplace, both in town and also in orchards outside town. Apples were popular, pears less so. We were too far north for anypony to attempt to grow citrus trees, but there was one pony who had a cluster of cherry trees and who offered a wide variety of cherry treats at the market. One day, I was going to try her cherry leaf tea, since it seemed popular with the other ponies.

If the winding streets, thatch-roof houses, and cottage businesses hadn’t been enough to give the town a comfortable old-timey feel, ponies going about their business towing wagons completed the picture. It was hard to imagine that it hadn’t been so long ago in human history when this sort of traffic was commonplace. While there were places back on Earth that offered horse-drawn carriage rides—which kind of gave the idea of the way things were—it lacked the authenticity of two ponies pulling a beat-up flatbed wagon piled high with crates of merchandise from the railroad station to the general store, or the occasional pony passing through town towing an agricultural implement. I’d usually give those ponies a wide berth; I had no idea how good wagon brakes were and didn’t fancy being run over by one, especially since the road and the sidewalk were the same thing.

•••••

I could generally read Equestrian, although not if it was overly stylized or abbreviated. Luckily, a lot of pony restaurants had outdoor eating areas, which made them easy to find even when they were the lower floor of a house.

I'd gotten a good general idea of the layout of the town, and it didn't take me too long to pick a little cafe that looked popular. I got a few stares as I went inside, but that didn't bother me too much.

I asked the cook to make me whatever she thought was best and got a big mug of coffee. I was looking around for a table, when an older brown stallion waved me over to his table.

I took the seat opposite him and stuck out my hand. He regarded it somewhat warily, but finally reached up to give me a hoofbump.

Most of the ponies I'd met thus far were friendly, but some of them took time to warm up to me, and he was no exception. Aside from his brief greeting, he didn't speak to me and I couldn't help but wonder why he'd even called me over to share his table if he didn't want to make conversation. Surely it would have been easier to size me up if I'd been sitting at a table further away, and then he wouldn't have had to pretend that he wasn't staring at me as I drank my coffee.

Looking back, I can't even remember what I ate for breakfast, because I'd gotten kind of fixated on him. He had grey hairs in his coat, and really bushy white eyebrows and a little splotch of jam on the corner of his mouth that I really wanted to wipe off.

He didn't say anything until I'd cleared my plate. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to bring my dishes back to the counter or leave them on the table for a pony to clear off, and I'd been paying too much attention to him to notice the other tables around us.

“Good to see somepony new movin' in,” he said.

“It's a nice town.”

He nodded. “You need anything, just let me know.” And then he got up and walked out, leaving his plate behind while I puzzled over his words.

I wasn't fool enough to think that it was some kind of noble obligation he'd just made. While I didn't know for sure—maybe ponies here were a lot different than the ponies in Manehattan had been—I was positive he didn't want me following him home and asking him for a cup of sugar, or for a guided tour of the local grocery store.

Somehow, his words sounded almost ominous, like something that a random person might say in a horror movie, and I'd only realize as I was being chased by a vampire that I should have listened to him.

As if on cue, the inside of the restaurant darkened a bit. Since I didn't hear any panicked shouts from outside, I assumed that a pegasus had just pushed a cloud across the sun.

Chapter 3
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The Haunting

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 nights 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 was 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.

Chapter 4
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The Haunting

Chapter 4

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

There’s something about the night. Something special, as if the veil between the mystical and mundane is thinner in the darkness. Perhaps it is.

In the bright light of the morning, all my thoughts of the night fled as if they were dreams, as if the light chased the shadows away. In the light of the morning, the idea of ghosts was silly. The idea that my house might be haunted was absurd.

And yet.

Sure, I’d seen things that were mysterious. The strange light in the flower garden; that was something I couldn’t explain. The way that my cupboard doors sometimes opened, that was another thing. I’d wiggled around the cabinets, just a bit, and the doors didn’t come open. But I’d never tried that at night, or first thing in the morning, when the house was still settled.

In the light of day, it was easy to imagine that the house might settle in such a way that the cupboard doors had a proclivity to creep open, one which they did not have during the day.

In the light of the day, it was easy to imagine that the ghost-light I’d seen in the garden was some unicorn spell that had gotten away. Their horns glowed when they cast a spell, and the target of the spell usually glowed, but what happened if they missed their spell? James Thurber thought that mis-aimed spells clanged off the moon, but it seemed more likely that they might just drift around.

Those were the kind of thoughts that I never would have had back on Earth, but here in Equestria 'magic' was a perfectly logical explanation for a phenomenon, and I still didn't know what the limits of magic were. It was something that I hadn't really asked too many questions about, not after I'd figured out that the average pony couldn't really answer the question properly anyways.

That was frustrating when I first moved to Equestria. Obviously, books on Earth had been written on the subject, and I had read some of them, but they were either written at a primer level, or a dense theoretical paper that might as well have been Greek. I'd foolishly assumed that unicorns could explain it better, but that wasn't the case. They could tell me what spells did, and what spells they knew and didn’t know, and that was about it. I’m sure there were unicorn prodigies like Twilight Sparkle who had a much deeper understanding, although odds are if she was given a question about magic, I wouldn’t understand the answer. What I really needed to find was a pony in the middle ground who maybe wasn’t a genius, but who could also explain how it worked so human would understand it.

Could a unicorn make a spell that would make it appear that there was a ghost in my house? Perhaps yes, but why? The only reason I could think of would be to chase me out, and there’d be more effective ways to do that. Repeated swarms of wasps, for example. Maybe a dumb teenage prank, but all the ones I’d participated in as a teenager were a lot less subtle.

I made my first of what would turn out to be many forays to the library. Ponies of course don’t use the Dewey Decimal system, and I was worried that the events from last night had already made the rounds. The last thing I needed was to get a reputation for being eccentric

Naturally, there weren’t any non-fiction books about ghosts in the library. Not even in the self-help section, which felt like a logical place to find them if ghost infestations were a problem facing the average pony.

•••••

After dinner, I went back up to the attic. I'd been thinking over the night before, and the one detail that had stuck in my mind was stepping on a toy. And sure enough, it was there, a little wooden duck pull-toy with one broken wheel.

I didn't have enough stuff to really need the attic, and that box hadn't been in my way. When I'd first moved in, I'd thought that I might track down the old owner of the house and see if he wanted it back, but that was a dead end now. And then I'd decided that I was going to take it to a secondhand shop, or maybe put it out on the street with a “Free” sign on it, but I hadn’t. Out of sight, out of mind.

I sat on the attic floor and turned the wooden duck over in my hands, thinking about how there had been a young pony in this house once. Perhaps more than one; the duck could have been passed from sibling to sibling. And at some point, the children had gotten too old for their toys, so they'd been boxed up and maybe brought upstairs as memories.

It didn't tell me anything, and after I'd brought a couple of empty boxes into the attic, giving me a convenient excuse to be up there, I tossed it back in the toybox.

•••••

For the next couple of days, nothing weird happened. The stallion who had been up on the roof with his marefriend apologized, and said that he’d pay for any damage. Since the roof hadn’t leaked the last time it had rained, and since I reasoned that roofs were probably designed to have pegasi land on them, I told him not to worry about it.

I watched ponies as they passed by my house, but none of them were crossing over to the other side of the street as they went by, or pointing, or making the sign of the cross as they went by. That didn’t rule out a spirit, I decided, but did suggest if there was one, it wasn’t well-known around town. Or else ponies didn’t fear it—I was really getting nowhere.

I would have put the whole incident down as some kind of panic attack or hallucination brought on by the stress of moving to a new town, if it hadn't been for a filly coming by to see if I had any extra boxes.

I did, so I went upstairs and opened the attic, and damned if the toybox wasn't tipped over on its side, with no toys to be found anywhere.

For the longest time, I just stood there looking at it, trying to formulate some rational explanation for how that could happen. There were no locks; burglars could have done it. But why steal toys? There was plenty of better stuff, and none of it was missing. And if it was burglars, why not take the box, too? It’d be a lot easier to carry that way.

I was completely lost in thought, so when I heard a girl’s voice behind me, I nearly jumped out of my skin. But it was just the filly . . . she’d wondered why it was taking me so long and come inside to investigate.

I helped her stack boxes on her wagon until it could carry no more, and then once she’d gone down the street, I went back upstairs to the attic. There were a couple of windows to let some light in, and they could open, but the hinges were stiff with disuse and there was a thick layer of dust on the sill. I was confident nobody—or nopony—had entered my attic that way.

The only other option was the attic stairs, and while that was of course a possibility, I’d cut the string shorter so it didn’t brush against my head, and a pony would have had to jump to pull it down.

Even if one had, why the toybox? Why not something else? All the other boxes were where I’d left them.

•••••

Building a box-fort was no real effort, and it tucked neatly into a corner of the attic, almost behind a diagonal support on one side, with the chimney stones on the other. I used my pocket knife to enlarge a knothole on one of the boxes—that actually took longer than I thought it would. All the while, I was wondering if I was insane.

Crouching behind it wasn't the most comfortable position ever, but it was something that I could handle.

I remembered reading in one of Clancy's novels how John Clark did recon disguised as a drunken bum, and then I also remembered that in the novel, Clark had been smart enough to bring food and water. I had neither.

I hadn't thought to bring a clock upstairs, so I had no idea how long I'd waited. Long enough for my throat to dry out in the dry attic air, long enough for my legs and back and neck to be reminding me that I wasn't ten years old any more, and almost long enough for me to come back to my senses.

I say almost because I always believed somewhere in the back of my mind that I was just imagining things. It was like there were two people in control up there, the rational one, and the one that believed in the paranormal, and they were taking turns.

If rationality had won out a few minutes earlier, I would have gone downstairs and perhaps given up the whole thing as a bad job, but then I heard a scrape and froze in position.

And then I saw her.

Chapter 5
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The Haunting

Chapter 5

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

Throughout all my life, I’d dismissed ghost stories as just that—stories. Nobody ever seemed to be able to describe them better than ‘a spirit’ or ‘a feeling’ or something equally vague. Any picture I’d ever seen of a supposed ghostly encounter looked either conveniently fake, or so blurry as to be potentially anything.

And at first, there was just a bit of a glow at the thatches, something that could have just as easily been my imagination. I’d heard that trying to stare at one thing too long could lead to hallucinations, and that could have been the case here.

At first there was just a bit of a glow, and it was immediately followed by a muzzle and that was immediately followed by the rest of her, eyes and a mane and a bow and forelegs and a torso and—and then it just trailed off into nothingness.

Not for the first time, my brain was at war with itself. My lizard-brain wanted nothing more than to run screaming from the house and never come back. That was tempered with the rational side of my brain saying, ‘told you so!’ and between the two impulses, I just completely froze up.

Later on, I’d play through the entire encounter again and again, trying to tease out just a bit more detail from what I’d seen, but there was a moment where I was entirely lost, where my whole mind was otherwise occupied and whatever I’d observed, I had no memory of. How long that moment was, I could never know, but it can’t have been too long, because I did remember her going over to the toybox.

Her forelegs were moving slightly, almost like a doggy-paddle, or maybe like she thought she was actually walking on the floor. I could imagine that if she’d had all four legs, that would have been a natural way for her forelegs to move.

Maybe that was just me trying to put some meaning to the movement; maybe that’s a natural sort of motion for ghosts as they move.

She went over to the toybox and hooked the edge with her forehooves, pulling herself up slightly to get a look inside, and if I’d had any doubts that she was a ghost, they were settled at that moment. That movement was completely inexplicable—she was floating above the floor and clearly didn’t need to boost herself up—which made it utterly, undeniably factual.

I knew there was nothing in there, although it would not have surprised me one bit if she’d pulled out something. Some ghost of a toy.

Instead, once she found the box empty, she moved over to the edge of the attic and reached where the floorboards butted up against the edge of the roof. There was a little recess in there--whoever had built the house hadn’t want to cut boards to fit the gaps between the rafters.

She fished out the duck, holding it gently in her mouth, and then set it in the middle of the floor, then went to get another toy.

Before too long, she had an entire collection of toys—all of which I remembered having seen in the toybox—arranged around the center of the attic. Not a neat circle or lines or anything like that, but not a pile, either. There was certainly some sort of logic to how they’d been arranged, although I couldn’t figure it out.

Apparently, the arrangement wasn’t right. She circled around it, closely studying her toys, and then moved off to another recess, looking inside. I hadn’t really paid attention to those, and didn’t know if they opened into my walls. Could be that she could get into my walls if she’d wanted to.

•••••

That wasn’t her intention. She checked a couple of recesses, presumably looking for more toys, and then moved close to my pile of boxes. I lost sight of her as she got close, and of course she made no noise as she moved around.

I didn’t dare budge—not out of fear, but out of wonder and curiosity. I was certain she’d sniffed me out, that she could feel my presence or hear my heartbeat or something. Maybe I had an aura around me, one that I couldn’t see but she could, so I concentrated as hard as I could on not being seen.

She made no noise as she moved around, and she could have been anywhere. I resisted the urge to move, to turn, to even reach behind me and kept my eye focused through the hole in the box until my vision started to blur. Where was she? Had she gone down the attic stairs? I’d left the trap open. Or was she on top of my pile of boxes? I wouldn’t have heard her get up there.

Was she even now inexorably oozing through the gaps in the boxes? Creeping slowly towards my back, ready to pounce? Ready to turn me into a ghost? I had to know, but I couldn’t move, so I concentrated as hard as I could upon being one with the boxes, pressing down the urge to blink or to breathe or to do anything at all, and finally my patience was rewarded as she came back around into my view.

Her back was to me, although I wasn’t sure that that mattered with ghosts.

She was holding a threadbare stuffed pony with button eyes in her mouth. That was a toy I hadn’t seen before, and it must have been the one she was looking for.

•••••

Once she had all the toys set out to her liking, she played with them. She wasn’t speaking, not as far as I could tell, although her back was to me, so I couldn’t be sure if she was moving her mouth.

If any of the toys had started to lift up off the ground or move around on their own or do any of the other things that toys do in horror movies, I would have made a break for the trap, but they didn’t. They were no more lively than they should have been, moved only by her ghostly forehooves.

They did make noise on the floor, and that was undeniably the source of some of the noises I’d been hearing at night.

I don’t know how long she played with them, but she finally got bored of whatever she was doing and picked them all up one-by-one and hid them again. Each one had its own spot, and I could tell that she was doing her best to remember where they were supposed to be.

When her play area was clean again, she went and looked back in the toybox one last time, presumably to make sure that she hadn’t missed anything, and then she drifted back out the attic the same way she’d come.

I’d been tempted to rush right over to one of the windows, where I might be able to see her moving through the sky or across the lawn or even climbing down a rope ladder she’d strung up the side of my house—given how far my mind had already been bent, anything was a reasonable possibility.

But I didn’t move, not far. I slowly, quietly, cautiously moved into a more comfortable position and then pondered the mysteries of life. Who was she, would she be back tonight, why was she haunting my house? Or was it me specifically she was after?

I must have sat there for an hour, and come to no conclusions, so I finally crawled out of my box-fort and carefully made my way down the ladder. I was completely numb and completely exhausted and knew full well I wasn’t going to be sleeping at all.

Rather than frustrate myself lying in bed and waiting for sleep that wasn’t going to come, I went all the way down to the living room and lit a lantern.

And then I just sat and thought some more.

Coming to Equestria had been a constant string of amazement, of disbelief, of wonder. It had had its highs and lows; there were times where everything felt right and other times that I’d cried myself to sleep.

Somehow this was different. This touched me more deeply.

There’s a constant human longing to know what happens after we die, and of course it’s an unanswerable question. We know what happens to the body, of course, and I’m sure humanity has known for thousands upon thousands of years. But the question of whether there is some spirit, some soul, some part that’s separate from the body, that’s a question that’s never been answered, that perhaps never can be answered.

And yet, she was there.

I pondered her all night long and while some small skeptical part of my brain insisted that there might be some practical explanation for what I’d seen; the idea of a ghost or something that looked like a ghost could be a perfectly natural occurrence given all the other wonders of Equestria, a land where ponies could fly and maybe pigs could too. A land of unicorns and magic and the occasional monster.

I rejected that theorem. I knew what I’d seen, and it was a ghost. A pony ghost.

If it had just been a brief glimpse, that could have been explained away. A trick of the light, swamp gas, some unicorn playing a practical joke on me—although to what end? If I’d been drinking, it could have been a hallucination, but I was sober as a judge. It was no hallucination.

I’d watched her. I’d watched her deliberately gather her toys. Play with her toys. Put her toys back away. I didn’t know how long it had taken, but it hadn’t been just a few minutes. Maybe an hour, maybe longer. Maybe next time I’d take an egg timer with me so I’d know for sure.

Because there was going to be a next time. I hadn’t known that when I started my pondering, but I knew that now. I had to know more. I had to build a better observation point—more spyholes, for starters. Maybe put it right over the stairs. Bring something to snack on while I waited and watched.

Chapter 6
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The Haunting

Chapter 6

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I knew I had research to do. Before I’d seen her, I had been trying to figure out generalities and I hadn’t come up with anything, but now I had at least some specifics. First, that there was in fact a ghost. That was not a question; that was the undeniable truth. Second, said ghost played with toys in my attic, and perhaps also in other attics—that was something I could pursue. Was she a local spirit, one who lived in the neighborhood, or did she only haunt my house? Did other ponies know her?

Did she ever show up during the day? I didn’t think she would, but maybe she did and there had just been enough noise in town for me to not notice. Her color was not unlike sky-color, and just like stars can’t be readily observed during the day, maybe she couldn’t be, either.

If she was tied to my house, it had to have been either because she’d lived there before, or because some pony gypsy had cursed either me or the house, and I figured if it was a curse, the ghost would be more baleful. Maybe gypsy curses were friendlier in Equestria.

•••••

Sometimes the things that happen in the night are revealed for the nightmares or illusions that they were in the clear light of day, but not so this time. I was still completely convinced that there was a ghost in my house, and after the sun had well and truly risen, I went back to the attic and checked the little voids where the floor met the wall. Sure enough, the toys I’d seen her hiding were there, exactly where she’d put them.

They say that if you’re crazy, you’re the last one to know, but I didn’t feel crazy. I didn’t believe I’d hidden those toys there in some kind of a fugue state, or seen them before and remembered subconsciously that that’s where they were. In fact, while I could clearly remember having seen most of those toys in the toybox before, I had never seen the plush pony. I was absolutely certain of that.

I didn’t want to take any of them from their hiding place, even though I could imagine myself doing that some time in the future. I thought that there was a chance that one of the locals might recognize them, but I also thought that I’d have to work my way up to that. Back on Earth, at least, if I’d gone around holding a plush pony and asking anyone if they recognized it, I’d probably wind up in an institution before too long. I was a stranger in town, a new face, and they at least tolerated me--nopony shunned me or gave me the evil eye or anything like that—but if I just started proclaiming there was a ghost in my attic, there was a very good chance that everyone would start avoiding me. Ponies with butterfly nets would come after me.

Maybe not; maybe that was a thing that they all knew and I was the last one to have discovered it.

I turned that idea over in my mind while I was in the shower. It was a simple enough proposition: pony ghosts are real, and all the ponies know that. They’ve all seen them before. Maybe they have pony Ouija boards and summon their ancestors for advice under the light of a full moon.

I decided that probably wasn’t the case--surely if it had been, I would have heard something about it by now. None of their other abilities like cloudwalking or weather manipulation or unicorn magic or what was essentially terraforming had been hidden from me.

Just the same, if the topic just hadn’t come up yet, and I all of a sudden started talking about ghosts they’d probably think I was a simpleton, somebody who hadn’t yet figured out what everypony else knew. Like I thought I’d just made a great discovery that when you rubbed two sticks together long enough they got hot and maybe you could make fire.

If it turned out that I was following a well-trod path, so be it. At least I would have learned something before I went off half-cocked.

•••••

In terms of research, a week’s worth didn’t net me much. Not, at least, in terms of positive results. A trip to a bigger city with a better library was an option, and that was still on the table if needed, but it felt to me that I ought to be able to pin this down locally. Maybe I was being foolish, but I couldn’t ever remember reading a book or watching a movie where the case had been solved by going somewhere else, and while taking to fiction as my modus operandi was perhaps not the best idea, as a human that was the only place I’d encountered ghosts before, so it felt that it ought to work that way.

I had been clever enough to read through several promising foal’s books, figuring that if spotting ghosts was common enough, that fact would be mentioned in one of them.

It wasn’t. Not in foal books, not in young adult books, and not in adult books.

A really well-stocked library no doubt covered topics that everypony knows. Things like fire is hot or it hurts when you fall from a height. That you need to breathe and eat food to live, that everybody and everypony dies eventually. Although that last statement wasn’t a hundred percent certain, at least when it came to their princesses. Still, it was likely that the eventual heat-death of the universe would finish them, too.

At home, I’d improved my observation post. I’d redesigned my box-fort significantly, after scrounging for some new boxes to make it larger. Ponies didn’t have pre-packaged granola bars or bottled water, but they did have canteens and some kind of dessert bar that was basically chocolate and sugar which would be plenty to keep me going through the night if needed.

I got felt to nail to the steps on the ladder to the attic, which would soften my tread, and I moved my bedroom to be on the other side of the ladder so I wouldn’t have to sneak around it. That was a temporary arrangement; once I’d solved the mystery I’d change it back.

I started shifting my sleep schedule, going to bed in the afternoon and waking for the night. While proper blackout curtains would have to be custom-made, I was able to get some thick black velvety fabric to cover the windows in my temporary bedroom, which turned it dusky all day long and pitch black at night. The only downside was that with those in place and the door closed, it got rather hot in the room, and I didn’t sleep well.

I don’t think I would have been sleeping well anyway.

•••••

Despite striking out on the research front, I made more progress with observations. She showed up several more times over the next week. Once she played in the attic with her toys, but not before examining my improved box-fort. She moved all around it, studying it from all sides, but she seemed unable or unwilling to touch it or interact with it like she did with her toys. I didn’t know how to explain it, and it was kind of unnerving to be inside and to see her moving close, and then lose her for a bit until I found a spy-hole that got her back in my view for a little bit.

She seemed kind of frustrated that I’d blocked off the attic stairs. That was a silly thing for me to think; she went through the roof--how would a pile of boxes over the attic stairs stop her? It’s not like I’d specified ghost-proof wooden boxes, after all.

It did put a germ of an idea in my head, something I thought I could somehow test. Pony magic didn’t always interact well with humans, and it was possible that the same thing extended to spirits. I wasn’t quite sure yet how I’d apply that idea, but it was something that I could explore.

I also saw her in the backyard in the old garden, the one that the colt hadn’t mowed down. She moved among the plants slowly and deliberately. I couldn’t tell what she was interested in; I didn’t want to move from my kitchen observation post at all.

I would have sworn that I saw her attending a little cluster of plants but the next morning when I went out I couldn’t find them. I chalked it up to me not knowing all that much about plants, and how different things looked at night instead of during the day, but at the back of my mind I was wondering if there were ghost ponies, might there also be ghost plants?

Chapter 7
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The Haunting

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.

Chapter 9
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The Haunting

Chapter 9

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

She must have come back after I’d gone to bed, because after work and before laying down for my afternoon nap, I checked the attic and the trowel was gone.

I should have gone to bed; that would have been the sensible thing to do. After all, surely she’d be back after dark, and I could watch her some more. But I did want to know where she’d taken the trowel.

Obviously, it was meant to be used in the garden, so that was the logical place to look for it.

It had been kind of in the open before. That wasn’t something that had registered right away, but it should have. I’d always had a bad habit of not rolling up my garden hose, and it didn’t take all that long for the grass to grow up over it if I was lazy with the lawn mowing.

Had the trowel been left there since before I moved it, it would have been covered by something, which led me to believe that she had been using it in the garden. To what end, I had no idea. There weren’t any mysterious holes or missing plants.

It wasn’t in the garden. I suppose it could have been buried in the garden, but then it could have been buried anywhere.

My next thought was that it was on the roof. A thatched roof would be a pretty good hiding spot; she could have tucked it alongside one of the dormer windows or really anywhere, and I’d never find it.

She hadn’t done that. Instead, it was in the crotch of a tree, at nearly eye-level for me. That would have been a decent enough hiding place against an earth pony or a unicorn, but once I’d started to look around and consider other places to check, it was quite obvious.

I should have cleaned it off before; that way I would have known if there was fresh dirt on it now. I thought that there was, but I couldn’t be sure.

Wiping it off on my pants wasn’t really the best idea. Ponies were lacking in washing machines and laundromats, and it was kind of a pain to get my clothes cleaned, but old habits die hard and I did it without even thinking.

As I was putting it back in the tree, I thought about her toys. She must have known that they were being tampered with, so she hid them where I wouldn’t find them.

They weren’t well-hidden, but then kids often didn’t think things through as much as adults would.

Why would she want the trowel? Obviously, since I’d seen her in the garden before, it was to work with the plants. It had been fine to leave it out, but then she’d discovered it wasn’t where she’d put it before—she might have looked in the garden for it before coming to the attic, or she might have immediately recognized it when she saw it on the attic floor. Either way, she knew that someone had found and moved it, and so now she was trying to hide it so it wouldn’t get taken again.

That suggested that it was entirely possible that she had other things hidden other places.

I didn’t know where else in my house she went. While I’d only seen her in the attic, it was possible that there was a rubber duck hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the bathroom, or a dollhouse jammed up the chimney. There could be any number of secrets in the house that I hadn’t found yet.

I cast my mind back to my first days in the house, trying to tease out a memory of finding something else weird, something that I’d maybe just pushed back into my mind because I hadn’t considered supernatural explanations. I didn’t come up with anything of significance.

Would she have known that the house was being sold? Would she know what a sign out in the front yard meant? Did she even ever go out in the front yard?

Is a pony dollhouse actually a stable?

•••••

While I could have torn the house apart looking for mysterious things, I didn’t. I had a vague notion that that way lay madness. Pretty soon I’d be tearing off wallpaper looking for things behind it, I’d be bashing in the ceiling looking for toys hidden in little voids up there, in a place where a ghost could get it out but a human couldn’t.

I did wonder if she had some kind of supernatural sense for where her things were, and I considered going back outside and moving the trowel somewhere else, just to see if she could find it again. I didn’t have a good hiding place where I could watch the backyard, though.

That wasn’t an unsolvable problem; I just needed more boxes. Before too long, I’d have to start naming my box-forts so I could keep them all straight. One on each level of the house; two in the backyard, and one in the front yard would give me decent coverage.

After all, if a ghost hadn’t been interesting enough for my neighbors to mention, maybe they’d ignore my box-forts, too.

Did ponies have zoning regulations or HOAs? Too many box-forts might net me a fine.

•••••

She hadn’t stolen any of my stuff. Maybe she was honest, and knew what was hers and what wasn’t. Or maybe I just didn’t have anything that was appealing to a filly. There was no reason that she couldn’t have come and looked through my clothes, but what would she want with a pair of pants? Maybe cups would be worth taking for tea parties, and maybe she had in the past. That could be why she was frustrated that the attic stairs were blocked, since I now knew that she couldn’t take objects through the roof.

The office had some paperwork in it, nothing terribly important since ponies in general didn’t really see the appeal. In that way, they were much wiser than humans.

It was hard to imagine a ghost reading through paperwork, anyway. I’d never seen a ghost reading anything.

That did raise an interesting question in my mind. If I found a kid’s book, would it interest her? There was a bookstore in town. That was a possibility.

What I’d do with it when I had it was another question. I could put it in the center of the attic floor, and see if she’d fall for the bait again, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that she might not. The trowel was something that was hers, but a new book might make her suspicious. It would be more natural to put it in a place that such a book might naturally be found—a bookshelf or a table. But then how would I know if she’d found it? If it was gone, that would be obvious, but if it wasn’t? Was she conscientious enough that she’d put things that weren’t hers back when she was done with them? If she was having tea parties with my dishes, she was.

Still, there was of course no harm in finding a book first and then figuring out what to do with it later, so the next day after work I went book shopping.

•••••

We humans had lost our way with stores. They were almost all the same, and while people often thought of that as a good thing—that there was some advantage to getting the same double mocha grande latte with soy milk at every Starbucks, it took some of the fun out of buying. The stores all looked the same, and they all felt the same. There was no fun in going to a store and discovering something new and unexpected.

Ponies generally sold whatever they felt like in their stores. While that was in some ways a disadvantage, thus far I hadn’t found a bad shopkeeper. Maybe it had something to do with their cutie marks, or maybe it was because virtually all of them owned the store, were related to the owner, or were an apprentice.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that on Earth bookstores were either new bookstores or used bookstores and there generally wasn’t overlap. In Haywards Heath, the pony who ran the bookstore—who was named Bradel—had decided that a book was a book and its provenance didn’t matter, so he stocked both brand-new and well-used books all intermixed.

That shouldn’t have seemed all that strange to me; Amazon worked the same way, and as often as not a link for a book would give both new and used prices. It was still weird to see them arranged on the shelf like that, though.

After muddling around for far too long trying to figure out what kind of book a filly might like, I just asked him.

Of course, he wanted more specific details, ones that I couldn’t provide. But I said that she liked playing with dolls and also enjoyed gardening, and was both inquisitive and shy, and I also admitted that I wasn’t all that good at estimating pony ages and it was kind of embarrassing to not be able to be more specific but surely he could understand.

He didn’t, but he nodded politely anyway and showed me a section of children’s books. I picked Bathtime for Biscuit, since it was lavishly illustrated and starred a puppy. Surely a filly would like that.

Plus, it was gently used, which I thought would make it seem less suspicious.

Chapter 10
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The Haunting

Chapter 10

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

A week of observation went by without learning anything new, aside from that she did use the trowel. In the attic, she played with her toys, and she didn’t breach the box-fort.

I’d left the book downstairs, just sitting out on the blotter on my desk. I’d very lightly drawn in where its corners sat with pencil, which I didn’t think would be obvious at all—I really had to squint to see them. She didn’t move the book, so either she hadn’t found it, or she wasn’t interested in it.

I knew that she’d been in the house proper before, or at least I assumed she had. Cupboard doors hadn’t been opened since I built the box-fort, and there hadn’t been any other changes in the house since I’d done that. While it was theoretically possible that the weight of the box-fort had somehow shifted things around in the house in such a way that the cupboard doors would no longer open as the house settled, that was really unlikely. She’d be the one who had done it; I was absolutely certain of that.

Therefore, the only reasonable explanation was that she couldn’t or wouldn’t go downstairs if the box-fort was in place.

There was no logical reason I could think of why that would be so. Potentially, there could be something in the walls that kept ghosts out, maybe something that wasn’t even there intentionally. My walls were plaster, and I knew that sometimes that was applied to a screen; maybe a fine metal mesh was ghost-proof. Maybe the only way she could get in was the attic.

I’d been keeping the windows closed at night, since it was autumn and it got cool. It was possible that she couldn’t open them. I wasn’t sure why she couldn’t squeeze through the glass if she’d wanted to, but there could have been a reason for it. Maybe glass was also ghost-proof.

•••••

The next thing to do was to move my box-fort off the attic stairs.

Ideally, I would have made a second access route to the box-fort. I could have cut a hole in the ceiling and put up a ladder. Otherwise, I was going to be trapped in my box-fort for as long as she was in the attic.

I didn’t think that that would be a big problem, though. From my observations thus far, she didn’t spend all night in the attic, so after a couple of hours it would be clear to go back downstairs.

It took me half the afternoon to get everything arranged, and by the time I was done, I needed a nap.

Of course I overslept, and by the time I woke up it was dark in the room and I was confused for a moment, then I heard a bumping noise downstairs.

I knew it was her.

I didn’t know how to proceed.

One option would be to slowly and carefully head downstairs and see what she was up to.

The second option was to just stay where I was, maybe pretend to be asleep. Would she come into the bedroom, or did she know I was here? Had she checked already? If I opened the door, would she be suspicious? Would she come in, if she hadn’t yet?

The third option was to get up to the attic and sit in the box fort and wait.

While I was immensely curious, I didn’t know how long ago she’d gone downstairs nor how long she would stay downstairs. If she’d just passed by, she was probably going to be there for a little while, but what if she’d been there for hours already? She might be on her way upstairs even now.

I got to the bedroom door and cracked it open slowly and cautiously, and peered down as much of the hallway as I could see through the gap. She wasn’t there.

I hesitated for one more moment. Now was the difficult part; I didn’t think that she knew she was being observed, but if she saw me climbing into my box-fort, that would give the game away for sure.

Still, I thought I could get into that thing pretty quickly, so I opened the door wide and stepped into the hall. I rushed up the stairs into the attic, glad that I’d thought to pad them. Bare feet on felt make practically no noise, except for the creaking of the hinges on the ladder as I put my weight on it. She might mistake that for noises the house made as it settled.

I hadn’t ever tried to get into my box-fort from the top after dark, which was an oversight on my part. It had seemed obvious enough during the day, but now I was fumbling around feeling for the lid that wasn’t nailed down, getting more and more nervous at the thought that she might be right behind me.

I finally found the correct lid, got partway through, got myself stuck, and had to twist around uncomfortably until I finally awkwardly backed in and pulled the lid shut.

As best as I could tell by the moonlight filtering into the attic, her toys weren’t out. Perhaps as soon as she’d arrived, she’d taken the open trap as an invitation and headed downstairs in lieu of playing with her things.

That probably meant that she planned to spend a good amount of time exploring, and I felt like I’d made the right choice to hide in my box-fort rather than disturb things downstairs.

On the negative side, that meant that I was going to spend who knows how long peering through holes in the box in hopes of seeing something. At least I still had a good bead on the attic stairs.

•••••

Sitting and waiting with nothing to do is boring, something which I had already established from previous nights of observation. This time it felt longer, as I began to wonder if she would come back to the attic after all. Maybe she’d just leave the house from downstairs; maybe my first sign that she was gone would be the sun rising. Assuming of course that she couldn’t be out in the day, which I certainly didn’t know.

I thought I still heard occasional noises from below, but I could have been imagining them. I did get occasional visual hallucinations, likely from the light in the attic shifting just a bit. A cloud scudding in front of the moon, perhaps, or even the brief shadow of a pegasus in flight.

My patience was eventually rewarded when she did come back up the attic stairs. She didn’t walk on them; instead, she just sort of drifted up through the trap.

She paid my box-fort no attention. It could be that she’d already had plenty of time to study it in its new location when I was asleep, or perhaps she’d been distracted by other things.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d just left, but she didn’t. She got a couple of her toys out, and then she also got out a chipped teacup that was smeared with dirt. That was something new, something I hadn’t seen before.

I watched, fascinated, as she had a small tea party with her toys, the cup serving both the role of a teapot and also a communal cup.

•••••

She finally put her toys away and left, and once I was sure she was completely gone, I got out of my box-fort and went to the window. There was an unopened window right by me, and I crouched down and looked through it, in the hopes of getting some idea where she was going.

With some modifications, I could back my box-fort right up to that window, and get a look at her as she left to wherever it was she went. That was something that I should have thought of before.

I didn’t see her in the garden, and if she’d gone straight back home—wherever home was for her—she was long gone.

I should have gone back to bed and gotten some more sleep, but I didn’t. Instead, I went downstairs and got a lantern, and went through the lower parts of the house, trying to figure out where she’d gone.

She’d definitely been in the kitchen; a couple of the cupboards were open again. Maybe she’d been hunting for more teacups to use. She could have taken some of mine, and I wasn’t sure why she hadn’t. Granted, they weren’t a match for the one she had, but would that matter? If she was willing to give that cup dual roles in her tea party, why would she be concerned that my cups didn’t match hers, and weren’t proper teacups?

As far as I could tell, she had not touched Bathtime for Biscuit. It was still sitting with its edges touching my pencil marks.

That was still more information than I’d had before, and I sat down at my desk and considered it. It could be that she didn’t know how to read, although I would have thought that the illustrations in the book would be compelling to her.

That didn’t feel right to me, though. Most of the ponies in town seemed literate, and while I couldn’t rule out that she was a very old ghost, perhaps from before there had been a school in Haywards Heath, it didn’t feel right to me.

She might not have seen it, and that was the most logical explanation. She was too busy with her other explorations. She’d been in the office before and there’d been nothing interesting there, so why check again?

That didn’t feel quite right to me, either. If my box fort had actually kept her out of the house for so long, she surely would have been curious to find out what changes had happened in her absence.

What if it was something really dumb, like she couldn’t read the book because it was too dark?

I mulled that thought over in my mind, and that did seem a possibility. I turned down the lantern wick until it guttered out, and then picked the book up and opened it. If I brought it right up to my face and angled it just right, I could read it, but it wasn’t any fun at all; it was like trying to decipher a puzzle. I could see that being a source of great frustration for her.

Just out of curiosity, I took the book outside. I could read it in the moonlight reasonably well, so that was a possibility she might not have thought of.

Chapter 11
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The Haunting

Chapter 11

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I’ve lived both in big cities and in small towns, and I think I like small towns the best. In a small town, everyone knows who you are—and as long as you don’t get a bad reputation, people will stop you on the street and talk to you. At restaurants, they know your order, where you like to sit. At the market, the mares wave to you and beckon you over if they’ve got something that they know you like.

On Earth, though, even in a small town it would be a bit unusual for someone to sit down across from you at a restaurant unless invited. That apparently wasn’t a part of pony culture, though.

Once a week, I treated myself to dinner at a restaurant. I was halfway done with my meal when he sat down across from me, and the waitress was right behind him.

He didn’t speak until she’d set his drink in front of him and he’d had a sip. “How’re you finding Haywards Heath?”

I shrugged. “It’s nice.” There were a hundred other things I could tell him, I suppose. How weird it was that the grocery store didn’t sell produce—I had to buy that from the market instead. How plain the walls of my house looked without electric sockets in them. How every day I felt that I’d fallen into a Thomas Kinkade painting. How my smugness over having hands was shattered each and every day when a pony did something I wouldn’t have imagined was possible.

“Sometimes it’s hard to settle in,” he said. “To get used to new neighbors.”

Or ghosts. “Well, it’s quiet where I live,” I said. “Peaceful.”

He nodded, and just then the waitress came by again. “The usual.”

Did local ponies even bother with menus? I hadn’t paid attention, but now that I thought about it, I couldn’t remember ever seeing any of them looking at a menu. Was that going to be the moment that I really fit into town? When I sat down and didn’t pick up the menu?

He frowned and for a moment I thought that he was going to criticize my choice of dinner, but he didn’t. He took another sip of his drink instead and let any thoughts that he might have had about my dining choices pass unremarked.

“Milfoil’s a nice mare,” he said.

I wracked my brain for the name. I’d heard it before, I was sure of that, but I couldn’t remember where, and I didn’t want to admit that to him.

“She’s my neighbor.” A last, desperate grasp at a straw.

His eyes narrowed, and for a second, I thought I’d failed the test. He’d point an accusing hoof and declare me a fraud, a person not fit to live in Haywards Heath.

“To the south,” he admitted.

“We haven’t talked much. She brought some flowers when I moved in.” I’d put them in a cup until they’d finally wilted. She’d said something about how nice it was to see someone moving in to the house and I’d given a non committal answer.

Maybe she’d talked to him about how sometimes there were lights at really odd hours around my house, or how she’d watched out her window as I stood in the front yard in my skivvies and yelled at the pegasi on my roof. How she’d seen me deep in contemplation as I examined the garden, looking for signs of a ghost. Maybe she was wondering if I wasn’t right in the head, if I had toys in my attic, and in a small town word got around.

Or maybe this had nothing to do with that, and he was trying to be a matchmaker. I hadn’t seen a Mr. Milfoil.

That would have been even more awkward.

Why hadn’t I thought to ask her? Everybody knew that ghosts haunted familiar places, so it stood to reason that my ghost had lived in my house before I’d owned it. Surely she might be able to provide some insight, something that I hadn’t found at the library or the cemetery. Obviously, I couldn’t just go and bluntly say that I wanted to know who the ghost was, but if I was careful in how I worded it, I might get lots of information out of her. Neighbors were always gossipy.

Heck, if the previous owners had left in a hurry because of a haunting, she’d know all about it.

For a moment, the thought of a pony huddled in a box-fort waiting for a ghost to show herself played across my mind. What if the house was indeed cursed, not with a ghost, but with some curse of insanity?

I shoved that thought into the deepest recesses of my mind. I knew what I’d seen, and I wasn’t crazy. Not at all.

Even if the ponies in town thought otherwise.

“Must be a bit different to be living in a pony town. In a pony house.”

“It’s taken some getting used to,” I said honestly. “It’s more quiet and peaceful than a human city.”

“Is that so?”

“Well, most of the time.”

He leaned forward ever so slightly.

“It’s kind of noisy on market days.”

“It is.” He moved back as the waitress brought his lunch. It never got old watching Earth ponies using their forehooves in ways that I never would have considered possible. She smoothly slipped the plate off her back and onto the table with a forehoof with just as much effortless delicacy as a human would have done.

•••••

I wasn’t sure if it was rude to leave while he was eating, so I stayed. I didn’t have anywhere to be; it wouldn’t be dark for a while yet. There was plenty of time to get back home and take a little nap and then change into my ghost-watching clothes. To climb up the stairs and hide in my box-fort. This time I was going to pay particular attention to where she went after she left the house. That might be a useful bit of information for later.

How it would be useful, I didn’t know for sure. I felt like she would be active all night long, and if that was so, she must be doing something when she wasn’t in my house.

Where did she get the teacup from? I could have sworn that it had never been in my house before. It smelled weird; a smell I couldn’t quite place but that I knew I knew. Was she raiding other pony houses? Had she stolen all the toys, too? Had I put a temporary end to her pilfering by blocking the attic stairs?

“Are you all right?”

I blinked back to the present. His plate was empty.

“Sorry. I was just, just thinking. About, um, work.”

It wasn’t a great lie, but it satisfied him. “Don’t worry about dinner. I’ll pay. And listen: if you need anything, just let me know.”

“Thanks.” I hadn’t expected him to offer to pay for my dinner. Did that mean I was obliged to him? Of course, ponies took friendship very seriously, and he was surely being sincere. “I appreciate that.” I reached over the table and he bumped my fist.

•••••

That night while I was sitting in my box-fort, I replayed our conversation in my mind. It had been nagging at me that he seemed a little bit slow to reply to anything that I said. Like he had to think about it for a moment.

I was probably reading too much into it. He might have been a bit hard of hearing, and heaven knows my Equestrian wasn’t the greatest. Add in some background noise in the restaurant, and it was likely he did have to think about everything I said for a moment. It gave him a bit of a weird vibe, but I was surely jumping at shadows. He was being completely honest about wanting to help me out if there was any help I needed.

What would he have said if I’d told him that I had a ghost? Would have have galloped out into the street to find a pony priest? Did ponies even have priests? Would he think I was crazy? Or would he nod and say that he knew about it already and would I like some help taking care of it?

I didn’t think that I would.

I thought I had things completely under control.

I suppose if I later found myself as a desiccated corpse, I might sing a different tune. Maybe if that happened and I came back as a ghost, too, I could stop by his house and apologize.

There was a brief flash of light through the window, more imagined than seen, and I pressed my face against the rough wood of the box, just in time to see her muzzle poke through the roof.

Chapter 12
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The Haunting

Chapter 12

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

She hardly paid any attention to my box-fort and went downstairs right away.

I should have left the book open on the desk. I could have weighed down the pages with something; that might have enticed her.

Right on cue, I heard one of the cupboard doors bang against the wall. It wasn’t that loud, and it could have been a door slamming somewhere else, except that ponies didn’t slam their doors.

I’d thought about bringing a clock with me, so I could get an exact reckoning of how long she spent in the attic, and now how long she spent downstairs. But I thought that the ticking of a windup clock might alarm her.

I could have brought an egg timer. The sand swishing through the glass was nearly silent, and while it only kept time for a few minutes—however many minutes it took to cook an egg—I could keep flipping it over. Put tally marks on the wall. I didn’t have one, but I’d seen them for sale at the market.

People aren’t that great at keeping time in our heads, and after I’d waited a while I started to get a bit edgy. One day I was going to be up here and not notice when she left, and I’d wind up spending the whole night in my box-fort.

Maybe tonight would be that night. Maybe tonight would be the night that she decided that instead of going back out through the attic, she’d use the kitchen door like a proper pony. Well, assuming that she could open it or drift through it.

I heard another soft clunk from downstairs. Another cupboard door. I could put the book in the kitchen cupboards; she’d be sure to spot it then. She might wonder why it was there, but I didn’t think she would wonder all that much.

It fell silent downstairs again and I leaned up against the knothole, waiting for her to arrive. Not for the first time, I wished that the doors in my house were squeaker. It would be easier to figure out where she was. Maybe there was some way to un-oil the hinges.

I’d started to get eyestrain and she still hadn’t returned to the attic. She’s still in the kitchen, looking at things.

Just as I thought that, there was a faint glow coming up the stairs, and she reappeared. She got out a couple of her toys, but her heart wasn’t in it, and she listlessly moved them around for a little bit before putting them away again and vanishing through the roof.

The moment the glow in the thatching had faded, I moved over to the window, intent on finding out where she went when she left my house.

She drifted down to the garden and circled around it a couple times before moving into the rows and making her way between the plants. She went through the whole garden in that fashion before finally heading off to the east.

I thought she would have been visible for longer than she actually was. The moon painted the landscape in strange shadows and bright spots and once she’d moved beyond my backyard, my view got blocked by an oak tree, and I thought I saw her come out the other side, but I wasn’t sure.

It was hard to believe that other ponies in town hadn’t seen her. Earth ponies and unicorns, I could believe. Her route took her out of town quickly, and after dark most ponies who were still awake would have had lights on in their houses, making the outside even darker. If they saw anything at all, by the time they got a good look, she’d be gone, and they would probably pass it off as either a trick of the light, or the glow from a unicorn’s spell.

What about the pegasi? There weren’t as many of them out and about at night, true, but for those who were, I thought that she wouldn’t be that hard to spot, and if spotted, she wouldn’t be that hard to follow.

Even if she were trying to actively avoid the living, she obviously didn’t have any kind of supernatural sense—I was nearly certain that she didn’t know I was watching her.

It was possible that ponies simply couldn’t see her. That their eyes were unable to perceive her, and mine were. I could prove that by either catching her, or inviting an open-minded pony to join me in my box-fort.

•••••

Did the stallion know she was here? Could that be the actual reason for his awkwardness during our last conversation? Did he stay awake at night wondering if humans couldn’t see pony ghosts? I could have said something. Dropped a little hint, maybe. I wasn’t sure what, though. It would depend on what he knew. Saying I’d found toys in the attic, that might work.

Or I could tell him that my kitchen cupboards kept coming open at night. That might be safe. Ask him if he knew a pony who could fix them, or if he could fix them himself. Lots of older men were hobby carpenters, and maybe the same applied to ponies. If he thought I was revealing that I knew that there was a ghost, he’d probably come over even if he didn’t have a clue how a screwdriver worked.

Maybe I could invite him to share the box-fort with me. Although that probably wouldn’t be a wise thing to offer right away.

Or I could broach the subject with Milfoil tomorrow. I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d bring it up, though. I’d have to come over on a pretext . . . say I needed to borrow a cup of sugar. Or I could cook her a casserole or something. Of course, if the old stallion was trying to play matchmaker, that might be misconstrued.

It was about time to admit that I was going in circles and not getting anywhere. I could feel that it wasn’t going to be much longer before I’d be at the market, looking at all the other ponies suspiciously, wondering what they knew that they weren’t telling me. Thinking that every time two ponies had a quiet conversation that it was about me.

I was scared. Not of the ghost, but of the other ponies in town thinking I was crazy, of them shunning me. Word gets around in a small town, and it wouldn't be too long before my boss took me aside and said that he was sorry that he had to let me go but it just wasn’t good for business to keep me on, and if that happened I’d never get another job in Haywards Heath because word would travel faster than my resume.

•••••

I spent the next evening on the outskirts of town. I didn’t think that I was on private land; most of the time, when ponies owned land they grew something on it, and this land had nothing but weeds and shrubs and a few trees.

There were a couple spots where I could see the back of my house and I mentally drew out a line where I’d seen her go. If she did indeed come this way—if it had been her and not some trick of the moonlight I’d seen on the other side of the oak tree—she’d pass by this way.

On a bit of a ridge, there was a pine tree with thick, bushy branches. It would be a decent enough hiding place; I didn’t think that she would be checking out all the trees and shrubs on her way to my house. She’d have no reason to suspect that I was there.

Leaning up against the trunk of a pine tree as the sun sets and darkness falls isn’t nearly as comfortable as I’d imagined. Practically everywhere I touched there was sap, and I kept thinking that there were ants or some other bugs crawling on me. I didn’t dare try to swipe them off, because if I did, that might alert her.

It also got cold quick when the sun went all the way down. As furry as the tree seemed, it wasn’t doing all that much to keep the cold out, and if it had been much later in the year, I would have been really uncomfortable.

Luckily, I didn’t have to wait all that long; she went by right on schedule.

I lost sight of her for about a minute, and then she popped up over the backyard and went into my house. Even from this distance, it was no less weird to see her morph through the thatches.

One thing that was great for preventing sleep during times of boredom was discomfort. I’d never fallen asleep in my box-fort because it wasn’t terribly comfortable there, but it was infinitely more comfortable than my pine tree post. At least now that I knew she was in the house I could move about a bit more freely, so I unstuck myself from the sappy trunk and moved around a bit, scratching a number of itches and slapping a few twitchy spots just in case they were bugs.

I suspected that I’d see her when she came back out, and I did. It also gave me insight into how she might have escaped detection from my neighbors thus far: there were no lights on in any of the surrounding houses, suggesting that everypony was in bed.

I froze in place until she’d passed, and then quietly moved around to the other side of the tree. She tended to avoid bushes and tall grass, even though I was sure that she could pass through them if she’d wanted to.

When she had an ample lead, I stepped out of the tree and followed. I was somewhat careful with where I put my feet, but not overly so. I thought that any noise I might make could just as easily have been a small woodland creature, and unlike her, I didn’t glow in the dark.

Whether it was me, or her normal behavior, she almost seemed to speed up, and pretty soon I lost her completely.

Even though it was dark, I took a look around me. I thought I could see a faint path into the woods. Nothing pony-made; it looked more like a game trail to me. I felt fairly certain that she’d been following it, and I did, too, until the woods started to close in and I considered the possibility that there were monsters in the woods—something that was a very real concern in Equestria.

Chapter 13
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The Haunting

Chapter 13

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I spent a little time in the afternoon exploring further into the wilderness. I hadn’t been wrong about there being a game trail of sorts. It was one of those things that wasn’t obvious when I tried to look for it specifically, but with a broad view, it stood out.

I walked along the trail for fifteen minutes or so--just long enough that I started to worry that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. I hadn’t seen anything of note in the woods. Not that I had any idea what I might be looking for, exactly. A ghostly nest up in a tree? A mysterious cave with a weird moaning coming from its mouth even though there wasn’t any wind? A small cemetery or burial ground?

I thought that if there was something big to be seen, I would have seen it.

She might have a second collection of toys in the woods; if she did, I didn’t find it.

Would a ghost leave a scent on something? Could I track her with a bloodhound? I could just imagine how that would go if I started asking around for a bloodhound that could track a ghost. Maybe a ghosthound. Could the ghost of a dog track the ghost of a pony?

I kicked at a tuft of grass, which was rooted better in the ground than I’d thought. The pain in my foot helped re-focus me, just a little bit. There was no doubt that I was skirting the edge of madness—if one of my friends back on Earth had told me half the stuff I’d seen, I would have recommended he go right to the doctor and get a prescription for some heavy-duty psychotropic drugs. Or at the very least, an intervention. This kind of obsession couldn’t be healthy.

•••••

I could sit in my box-fort a little ways back from the window, and see her approach the house. I didn’t think she could see me from there, not with the lights out.

I saw her as she passed the oak tree. She didn’t come right in the house, so I eventually moved closer to the window and looked down at the garden, figuring that that would be the other place that I might see her.

Sure enough, she had her muzzle down in the dirt, and it looked like she was digging. I couldn’t tell for sure--binoculars might be another thing to invest in. At least I’d gotten an egg-timer; that was sitting within easy reach. The mare who had sold it to me had also informed me that it counted for three minutes, but only after rolling her eyes when I’d demanded specifics. I guess when I asked how long it kept time for, ‘long enough to cook an egg’ was a reasonable answer.

Since I had it, I started the egg timer.

She spent about a half hour in the garden, which was plenty of time for me to speculate on what she might be doing. From the way she moved through the rows, I finally came to the conclusion that she was weeding it, or at least attempting to.

When she put the trowel back in the tree, I moved back away from the window, back into the darkness where I wouldn’t be seen. Just in case she thought to examine the dormer windows before entering.

She came through the roof and instead of spending any time in the attic, she went right downstairs.

A few moment later, I heard running water below me.

This was completely new, and I had no idea what to make of it. She’d never turned on a faucet before, so why now? Were her hooves dirty from digging in the garden? How was that even possible?

Which faucet was it? It sounded closer than the kitchen, but it was hard to tell.

I was debating if I should get out of my box-fort and investigate when she came back up the stairs, went over to the edge of the flooring, leaned down, and came back up with her duck in her mouth. The one with the pull-string and the broken wheel.

I was regretting that I hadn’t built a system of box-forts.

I very cautiously lifted the lid and stuck my head up. I could hear the sound better now; it was undoubtedly the bathtub filling.

While I wasn’t the sneakiest guy in the world, I thought that it would cover any little noises that I made, so I got out of my box-fort and walked over to the attic stairs.

Since I didn’t see her when I stuck my head through, I hurried down the stairs. I was wishing that I’d had some kind of a ninja suit to make me less obvious, but it was too late for that now.

I could see that the bathroom door was mostly shut, but I thought it was more open than I’d left it. It was hard to be certain. If I’d been smart, I would have been setting things up in the house a particular way every single day so I’d know exactly where she’d been. Maybe little bits of thread tied to all the doors so if they were opened, the thread would break. Spies did that.

There was time to go back. What if she knew I was hiding in the boxes? She might be a lot smarter than I was. Maybe she was trying to lure me into the bathroom and she was going to brain me with the duck and then drown me in the bathtub.

Admittedly, that was one of the dumber ideas I’d had, but here in the hallway, alone in my dark house that had a ghost in the bathroom filling the bathtub, it seemed plausible.

Just the same, I moved slowly along the wall, all my muscles tense in case she did decide to come through the wall and get me.

She didn’t.

I took a moment to consider the layout of the bathroom. If she was in or near the bathtub, I could get by the door and not be observed.

If the door had been just a little bit further closed, I wouldn’t have been able to see anything, but I was able to get the slightest glimpse of her in the bathtub--not from the latch side of the door, but from the hinge side, the little gap between the door and the frame. More of a glow than anything specific.

Knowing full well that this was stupid and I should retreat while I still could, I very cautiously pushed the door slightly further open. Not all at once, where I might set up an air current that would betray me, but just a tiny bit at a time. A quarter inch at the most each time.

I felt reasonably certain that I wouldn’t be spotted. The spy-holes in the box-fort were bigger, and she hadn’t seen me yet, as far as I knew.

She was taking a bath, at least as much as a ghost can take a bath. I could guess by her movement that she was pushing her duck around in the water, and the occasional splashes I could hear reinforced that idea.

I wouldn’t have thought of the duck as being usable as a bath toy, but it was wooden so it would float.

She leaned forward and turned off the faucet, and from that moment I stayed completely still, almost afraid to breathe. Without the water running it was deafeningly silent, and there was no way that I could escape her notice if she heard something suspicious and got out of the bath. I might not even see her; she might get out the other side of the bathtub.

If I left now, I’d surely make enough noise to alert her, so I kept my eye up to the crack in the door and continued watching her.

When she pulled the drain plug, it was time to go. Being a ghost, she wasn’t going to have to dry herself off, and I didn’t have much time to hide.

I moved as quickly and quietly as I could back to the safety of my box-fort and I think I made it undiscovered. It was another few minutes before she came back upstairs, her duck in her mouth, the string trailing out along the ground.

She put it back in its hiding place and circled around the attic once, then went back through the roof.

I quickly looked through the window, and watched her disappear to the east.

•••••

She’d never come back after she’d left, not as far as I knew, so I climbed back out of my box-fort and went back to my bedroom.

While I got undressed, I pondered some more. Sooner or later I was going to have to confront her, somehow. Make her actually aware that I was here, but I was scared to. I didn’t know how she’d react. Assuming that she wasn’t aware of me, and that was a big assumption.

It was hard, sometimes, to remember little details from the past. Before I’d known she was here, before I’d built my box-fort, she could have come into my bedroom while I was sleeping. Perhaps she had; except for when I’d blocked the attic stairs, the whole house had been fair game for her. If she was curious at all, she would have noticed me. How could she not have noticed me?

Carrying that line of thought along, if she’d wanted to be aggressive towards me, she could have done something while I was sleeping, completely oblivious to her presence. Could have brained me with her duck or suffocated me with a pillow—could have done anything. So she probably wasn’t malevolent.

Probably.

How does one address a ghost? It would have been better if I’d known her name, but that seemed to be a dead end, unless I was willing to fold other ponies into my delusions. No, that wasn’t right, they weren’t delusions. She had a physical effect on her surroundings.

I got up again and went to the bathroom. The bathtub was wet. That was a fact. Not a delusion. The cupboard doors had been opened. There were toys hidden in my attic. Those were all facts, undeniable facts. There was no other explanation, not unless I had been doing it myself and not remembering that I’d done it.

What if I had?

I had a lot to think about.

Chapter 14
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The Haunting

Chapter 14

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I wasn’t going to visit my box-fort tonight. What was the point? I knew she was there. I didn’t need to gather any more evidence, not really. There was a ghost in my house. It stood to reason that any pony in town who wanted to see it could, so long as they didn’t mind waiting in a box-fort.

But who would I show?

If I’d been going around town talking about the ghost and ponies had laughed at me, I could have had the one who laughed the loudest spend the early part of the night in the box. Or if he didn’t want to do that, he could wait in the fir tree.

Nobody had laughed at me, though, because I hadn’t told anyone. What would they have had to laugh about?

Would she notice if I moved her toys? If I put them in different spots? Would she think that I’d messed with them, or would she just think that she’d done that and forgotten about it? How good was a ghost’s memory, anyway?

I was getting claustrophobic in the house, so I went out into the backyard to have a look at the garden.

At first, I didn’t see anything, and my brain fought with itself trying to make sense of it. I didn’t see anything because there wasn’t anything to see; the idea of a ghost gardener was ludicrous, a product of an unhinged mind and what I really ought to be doing is finding out if the town has a pony psychiatrist before it’s too late. That was counterbalanced by all the clear evidence I’d seen and if I was going to start doubting what I’d seen, how did I know my house was real? How did I know I was real?

And then I did see evidence that she’d been digging. There were plants which I assume were weeds that were dug up and laid over on their sides. No animal I was aware of would have done that. She hadn’t taken them away—maybe she couldn’t—but she’d dug them up.

I grabbed a handful of them and walked slowly, calmly, sanely over to Milfoil’s door. “Are these weeds?” I asked, resisting the urge to thrust them in her face.

She blinked at me, flicked her tail a couple of times, then nodded. This is not how a normal pony would greet his neighbor.

“Why do you ask?”

“I, um, was curious. They were dug up.”

“Dug up?” She looked over at my garden, the corners of her mouth downturned in a small frown. “By what, I wonder?”

“I don’t know.” I’d already said too much. I was starting to sweat. I’d never been good at lying. “Some animal, maybe?”

“Or a pony who doesn’t like an untidy garden,” she said. “It wasn’t me, though. I would have asked if you minded first. Some ponies prefer ferals to cultivars, you know.”

Implied in that statement was that ponies who prefered ferals weren’t all there in the head, so I nodded. “I wonder if you’d help me with the garden? In the spring? I’d like it to look nice.”

“Of course I would!”

Was she too eager? Had I been right that the old stallion was trying to play matchmaker? Was she an attractive pony? What made a pony attractive, anyway? “Well, thanks,” I mumbled.

I could feel her eyes on me as I walked back to my house, all the while considering how I might have handled that encounter better. If she didn’t already think I was a little crazy, now she would for sure.

If I had gotten through the first part of our conversation better, I might have been inclined to ask her some questions about her former neighbors, the ones who had left my house in a great hurry.

Although it was obvious why they had. They couldn’t deal with the ghost. They surely gave some other reason, because they didn’t want ponies in town to think they were crazy. Maybe they’d be coming back here sometime although I got the impression that they moved far, far away. Farther than a ghost would think to chase them. That was the logical explanation.

I tossed the weeds on the ground near the garden, far enough away that if they decided to re-root themselves in the spring, they’d get mowed down.

•••••

I’d told myself that I wasn’t going to visit my box-fort tonight but of course I did, and while I waited for her I replayed my entire conversation with Milfoil. What was I going to do if she knocked? I could pretend I was asleep; all the lights were off.

And if she came in anyway, she wouldn’t find me. I was safe in my box-fort. She’d never think to look there.

Did the ghost know I was here? Was she just ignoring me since all I ever did was watch her from the shadows? Was she teasing me? Why had she ignored Bathtime for Biscuit but wanted the trowel? Did she prefer digging in the garden to reading?

What was she doing in the kitchen? Why did she keep looking through the cupboards? What did she expect to find? That was something I’d never really investigated. Maybe there was something in them, something that she’d hidden, and I’d covered it with something she couldn’t move for whatever reason.

Why did I keep hiding in my box-fort, night after night? What did I hope to learn that I didn’t already know?

There was a soft glow at the thatches and she came through and circled around the attic once and peered into her toy box as if something new might have appeared.

When she found nothing, she got out some of her toys and arranged them around the cup again. I expected her to have another tea party with them, but once she had everything set up, she floated through the trap and down the stairs.

She’s looking for tea, or more teacups. Maybe there had been a set that had matched the one she had. Hers had been out in the backyard and that’s why it was in such poor shape, although if she was willing to use it as both a cup and a pot as her play demanded, why couldn’t some of my cups stand in?

I pushed the lid up on the box and climbed out. I had no plan whatsoever, and half a mind to just climb back in there and repeat the whole thing again.

I moved down the attic stairs like a wraith. She wasn’t in the hallway, and all the doors were closed. She tended to not close doors when she went into a room, so she probably wasn’t in any of the rooms upstairs.

Even so, I started checking until I heard a cupboard door bang open below me.

The Ghostbusters had some sort of beams that trapped ghosts and a box to keep them in; I did not. Priests had holy symbols to keep ghosts at bay, and I did not. At the back of my mind I considered what I might do if she turned aggressive, and the only answer I could come up with was run away. Not much of a plan.

I stuck my head around the kitchen door. She was up on the counter, in a completely inexplicable position. Her forehooves were rested on the countertop, while her truncated torso trailed off towards the ground, as if she were standing on the hind hooves she didn’t have. There was no sense in that; if she could float up to the attic, why not the cupboards?

What she was looking for, I had no idea. Maybe she was just taking an inventory of my canned goods for her own personal satisfaction. That was unlikely, but no less likely than a pony ghost.

I could have just waited and watched, hoping that she gave me another clue, another piece of the puzzle. But I didn’t. For better or worse, I was past that now. I moved into the room, and then without a moment to consider, I said “Boo!”

Her ears turned and her head jerked up and she turned and saw me standing in the doorway and then she vanished through the cupboards. I rushed to the window, expecting that she’d stop out in the garden and look back, but she was already gone.

I had just scared a ghost off.

Chapter 15
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The Haunting

Chapter 15

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

In every ghost story I’d ever read, the one of the major plot points was getting rid of the ghost. How that was accomplished varied by the story. In that regard, I had succeeded, at least temporarily. And it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that surprising her might work again—of course there was a real big asterisk after that; whether or not ghosts could actually learn new things being chief among the downsides to scaring a ghost off.

Nevertheless, I’d done it at least for tonight.

I should have felt victorious, but instead I felt like the biggest jerk in all of Haywards Heath. She’d done nothing to me, and I was one hundred percent certain that she had lived here before I had—I was the interloper in what had been her house. I was also one hundred percent certain that when I found out who she was and why she was here, I was going to regret what I’d done all the more.

I could have pushed the cupboard doors shut, but I didn’t. I left them just as she had, and I went back upstairs and laid in my bed and I didn’t sleep, I just kept replaying in my mind the look of shock on her face, and the way she’d just vanished, and that kept me up the rest of the night.

Not that it wasn’t without its humor—I’d scared off a ghost. But man, I felt like a jerk about it. Especially when she didn’t come the next night.

Or the next.

Had I actually scared her off for good? And if I had, where had she gone? Back to the woods? Back to the spirit realm? Someplace else in town? Did she have some other routine, one that I was completely unaware of? I’d never tracked her all the way back into the woods, to wherever she came from. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to; perhaps some questions were best left unanswered. Perhaps I should be satisfied with what I knew and what I thought and the fact that my house was now ghost-free, perhaps now I could start sleeping on a normal schedule and not spend the early parts of the night huddled in a box-fort, waiting for her to arrive. Not spying through the windows of my house at what she did in my yard.

What if she had a routine? Maybe she haunted my house and then she went back into the woods and a little bit later she haunted the Smith’s house, or the hotel, or who knows what.

It wasn’t hard to imagine where that line of thinking might lead me. Stalking around town in the dark of the night, searching for some sign. Hiding in the woods half the night, huddled up in a pine tree watching and waiting, going into work the next morning half-asleep, getting more and more paranoid that some pony was going to ask me why I was up all night long, why I looked like death warmed over every morning.

Milfoil gossiping about her weird human neighbor. A system of box-forts arranged around town, in places where ponies didn’t go.

I had to think like a ghost.

I didn’t know what kind of resolution I expected, if any. Maybe there are some things that just aren’t meant to be known, and maybe I’d accidentally stumbled into one of those mysteries through no fault of my own, and maybe I’d be best to just give it up now. If I stopped spying on her, she might eventually come back, perhaps more wary and more cautious than she was before. I was sure that there was something drawing her here, and if I wasn’t going to be egotistical, it probably wasn’t me.

I didn’t sleep much. Even though if I’d been the protagonist of a story, I would have felt victorious at vanquishing the ghost. Real life wasn’t neat and tidy like a proper story. And sometimes real life never answered questions. What was it that Westley had said in The Princess Bride? “Learn to live with disappointment.”

•••••

It seemed to me that she would be suspicious of my box-fort. She’d spent a lot of time studying that after I’d first put it up. So I took it apart and brought all the boxes downstairs. I closed up the attic stairs at night, as well. I thought that that would help. It would make the attic seem safe again.

I was glad that I hadn’t confronted her up there. That was the one place I was reasonably sure she might still go. I tried to put myself in her shoes, to come to the conclusions she would have. Seeing me downstairs—well, surely she knew that someone new had moved into the house.

She ought to have been expecting to see a resident.

There was no way of knowing if she’d been in the attic. It wasn’t like she was going to leave ghost footprints, and the ponies were lacking in surveillance systems. I pondered that for a while, before deciding that I’d see if I could rig some kind of telltale on her toys. Something that wouldn’t scare her, that wouldn’t let her know I’d messed with them. It would have to be subtle, something like a hair tied to each one of them, or something placed on top of them that would fall off when she picked them up. And I might want to vary my method, too, just in case she was clever enough to notice that each of her toys was now tied down with a strand of hair.

And then I remembered how the toybox had been tipped over and emptied. Why would she have done that? Was it clumsiness, or something else? Maybe it was more expedient for her to dump all the toys on the ground and move them that way, rather than pick them out one at a time. Pony mouths weren’t as dexterous as human hands, although I had to admit that they were pretty close.

She must have known that I was in the attic moving things around. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure that out, and she might have been afraid that I was going to take away her toys.

She wouldn’t have been wrong to think that, either. I had contemplated taking that box to whatever passed for pony-Goodwill in Haywards Heath, but it had been such a low priority I hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

I went back up in the attic and studied her toys thoughtfully. I didn’t touch them, but just observed them. Ponies didn’t go for mass production in the same way humans did, so there weren’t any clues to be had there. But—if there were toys, there were toymakers. Somepony in town had made the stuffed animal, probably, and the duck, and since I was all out of other ideas, I thought I’d look around town and see what I could find that looked like her toys—maybe the toymaker would be able to provide some clue about her.

That was something I should have thought of long before. I was never going to make it as a private detective. That was one thing I could cross off my list for sure.

•••••

The bathroom was probably a dead end. She’d taken a bath, although it was a complete mystery as to why. I suppose it could have been as simple as her getting dirty working in the garden, but that was a dumb thought. Ghosts didn’t get dirty; how could they? But I didn’t have any better ideas as to why she’d done that. I’d never heard of a ghost haunting a bathtub.

The kitchen was a different matter. There was something she’d been looking for in the cupboards, and more than once. That suggested that she hadn’t found it.

There were, of course, a lot of things that she wouldn’t find in the kitchen. The Hope Diamond wasn’t in there, nor was my aunt’s missing handkerchief. Thinking about what she didn’t find was as losing proposition, unless of course there was something there that I hadn’t found. It was certainly a possibility; not only had I not had a ghost inspector examine the house, I hadn’t searched for hidden compartments. Why would I? Why would anyone? And yet I’d known a guy who’d kept his drug money stashed under the drawer liners in his cupboards, and when he’d been raided, the cops hadn’t found it.

While I wasn’t expecting drug money, I was expecting something, but there was nothing there. An entire afternoon spent with nothing to show for my effort—the cupboards were a bust. Whatever she was looking for was something that wasn’t still here, I was as sure of that as I could be without actually demolishing the cupboards.

Buried treasure in the backyard was another possibility, but I ruled that out for two reasons: The first was that if there was something buried in the backyard that she knew about and I didn’t, she’d have spent more time digging and less time playing with her toys. The other reason was simple laziness; I had no urge to dig up my backyard to see what was there. Emptying the cupboards completely was more than enough work for me.

Chapter 16
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The Haunting

Chapter 16

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

Most of the weekly market revolved around food, and while it had taken me a while to get used to that idea, it was actually a lot of fun to shop like that. I got to talk to ponies I might not have otherwise, and all my food was farm-fresh. There were some staples that the general store had, but for anything fresh, the market was the place to go.

But that wasn’t the only thing that they sold. Lots of ponies had little cottage industries of their own, and so you could buy soaps and candles and wooden plates and wicker baskets—in fact, if you came by early in the day, you could order a wicker basket to your specifications and it would be done by the time market closed. I spent a lot of time watching the wicker mare working, skillfully bending and weaving her creations.

Some ponies also sold second-hand goods, and it was there that I got an inspiration. One of them had a stuffed pony that looked a lot nicer than the one she had. The eyes were nice and shiny, there weren’t any obvious repair stitches, and even the plush was still silky-smooth.

I knew full well that a new toy would never take the place of a beloved toy, but at the same time, I thought it might be a good peace offering, so I bought it and added it to my day’s purchases.

I wasn’t sure where to leave it. Right in the center of the room, while obvious, might also appear to be a trap. Then again, I wasn’t sure if she’d see it that way, and sometimes the simplest solution was the best, after all.

But, if she thought it was a trap when it was open and obvious, I wouldn’t get a second chance at it. She’d think it was a trap no matter what I did with it after that.

So I thought that I’d start by sort of hiding it. I knew that she explored boxes—her toy box was a prime example of that—so I could put it in a box, ‘forgotten,’ and see if she took it. If she didn’t, then I could consider something else.

I found a box downstairs that was way too small for me to fit in, just in case it had occurred to her that I might be hiding inside a box to surprise her.

That wasn’t the only thing in there. I put it on top of some of my winter clothes, and I paid attention to exactly how everything was sitting, lest she decide to rummage through the box and then put things back when she was done. In hindsight, that was a silly idea, but it made sense to me when I did it.

I went up to check on the box every day, around lunchtime. I figured that no self-respecting ghost would be out in broad daylight, not even in an attic.

She didn’t take the bait.

•••••

As strange as it sounds, I missed the ghostly noises at night. They’d been creepy and unnerving before I knew what they were, but now that I did know, the house felt lonely without them.

On occasion I’d look at her other toys, just to make sure they were in the same place they’d been. Just in case she decided she wanted to move them farther away from me. I didn’t think that she knew that I knew that they were there, but then she’d hidden them which suggested that she didn’t trust that nobody would take them from her.

I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had, and if I’d gone up one afternoon and they’d all been gone, at least that would be some closure.

Was she looking for a new house to haunt, having found this one untenable? Maybe she had, and maybe that was why she didn’t want her toys any more. Maybe she’d gone somewhere else that had better toys for her to play with, but in case she hadn’t, I made sure that the dormer window stayed wide enough open to let her pass.

Down in the yard, her trowel remained untouched as well. I checked on that, too; surely that was something she could grab quickly and get away with if she’d wanted to, but she didn’t.

I could write her an apology note, and I could put it under the trowel. Maybe she’d see it, maybe she’d read it—if she could read. Or maybe she wouldn’t; maybe it would get rained on and ruined.

I wished that I knew who she was, and I wished that I knew where she was when she wasn’t at my house, and I wished that I hadn’t scared her off.

•••••

Even though it wouldn’t accomplish anything, I went around the cemetery again, just in case I’d missed something I should have seen the first time around.

I found nothing that felt right. Granted, I could still be missing the obvious; I could have looked at her grave multiple times and just not known, but I was sure I hadn’t.

Back on Earth, or even in Equestria before the ghost, I would have thought I was being silly to think that I might somehow know what grave was hers. She could have died dozens of years ago or more; any graves of young ponies could be the right one. Especially since their names didn’t seem to be gender-specific. But back before I’d moved to Haywards Heath, I’d had no belief in the supernatural, and now I did.

I felt that if I’d only had a camera and taken a picture of her—assuming that it showed up on film—I could have showed ponies in town and they probably would have recognized her. Without that, though I had no real evidence to show, just my word. And I knew full well that the word of a transplant to town wouldn’t carry very much weight, not without either evidence to back it up, or a predisposition by a pony to believe what I had to say.

If I only knew her name. I didn’t know if she could speak, but I knew she could hear, and I thought that I could call for her. Even if she was too wary to approach me closely, she might approach close enough that I could plead my case, that I could beg for forgiveness.

I wasn’t going to learn it in the cemetery, and another few afternoons in the library didn’t turn up any promising leads, either.

Nothing in the attic had been touched since I’d scared her off, nor had I seen any new evidence of nighttime gardening.

•••••

My house felt emptier without her, which was strange. It was no more empty than I thought it had been when I moved in, and yet, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that houses in Equestria carried something with them, something that I’d broken with my stupid actions. When I walked down the street and saw my house among all the others, it looked cold and lonely and uninviting, and that was something that I’d never noticed before.

Maybe it was just familiarity setting in, and maybe a little bit of the idea that the grass was greener on the other side of the fence—maybe if I’d instead bought Milfoil’s house, I would be thinking the same thing when comparing that to the house I’d actually bought.

I was going to have to ask around in town. And there were two ways to do it. The first, the one that hadn’t been successful thus far, was the subtle way. Ask loaded questions, vague questions, do my best to obscure my line of questioning. Of course, I knew full well that all I’d get in response were vague answers, or something completely off-topic, and while there were probably people skilled at reading between the lines, I wasn’t one of them.

Milfoil would be the obvious choice. Since she lived right next door, she’d be the most likely to have observed the ghost before, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I still was worried that I was the only one who’d seen it, either because ponies couldn’t, or because I was crazy. She wouldn’t want to know that she was living next to a crazy person, that would keep her up at night wondering what crazy thing I might do next.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought the old stallion would be my best bet. He’d said more than once to come to him if I needed anything, and he also seemed just a little bit off to me. Maybe it was age; maybe his memory wasn’t as sharp as it had been, or maybe he was a little bit crazy himself. He might be willing to believe, anyway.

It was a pity that ponies didn’t have phone books; still, it was a small town, so it wouldn’t be any trouble to find him.

Chapter 17
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The Haunting

Chapter 17

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

For all their rainbow of hair and coat colors and their unique cutie marks, it turned out to be harder to find a particular pony than I’d imagined it would be, especially in such a small town. I’d occasionally spot a pony at a distance who looked like him, but every time it turned out to either be a false alarm, or they were gone before I got over there. He didn’t seem to be a regular at the market—at least, I never saw him there.

There was surely a reasonable explanation. He could be on vacation, or else he worked different hours than I did. Maybe his wife did all the shopping. Maybe he was a travelling salesmen. Maybe he stayed home all day and worked on his garden or put ships in bottles.

Or maybe I’d not only imagined the ghost, but I’d imagined him, too. That was an idea I didn’t want to dwell on at all. Imagining a ghost was enough of a mind-bend for me to process; if I was imagining flesh-and-blood ponies too, I was far gone.

If that was the case, what would come next? How soon could I expect the nice ponies with butterfly nets? Were they already on their way? Were they in a nearby house, watching me from their own box-forts?

•••••

When I did find him, he was at the restaurant, eating breakfast. I didn’t even bother with pretext; I just sat down across from him, and as soon as he looked up from his pancake, I told him everything.

Other ponies might have overheard. That wasn’t even a consideration—I was so relieved that he was actually real that I started talking with no care of who might eavesdrop. Even though it was still in the back of my mind that I was sitting at an empty table, talking to an empty chair.

For as open as ponies generally were with their emotions, he had very little reaction as I told my tale. He just sat there, absorbing everything or maybe wondering if he could signal the waitress to summon nurses to take me away.

I can only imagine that the entire thing was a barely coherent explanation of what I’d seen and what I thought I’d seen and what I’d done and what I might have imagined. In my head, it probably made sense, but in hindsight it would have been wise to have practiced getting my thoughts and observations in a sensible order rather than just vomiting them out willy-nilly.

And yet, I must have gotten my point across, because after I described how I’d sneaked up behind her in the kitchen and scared her off and she hadn’t come back since then, without a single flicker of emotion, he reached across the table and punched me in the face.

In a movie, I might have indignantly asked what that was for, but I didn’t have to; I knew exactly what that was for, and I had it coming.

Every eye in the room was on us as I picked up my napkin and pressed it gingerly against my nose. It was probably broken, although I wasn’t entirely sure; I’d never had a broken nose before so I didn’t know what one felt like. It was certainly bleeding a lot.

The entire restaurant was silent. I’d never noticed before how creepy it was to have so many eyes looking at me and I wondered what I should say, if anything. Should I apologize? No, he was the one who hit me. Should I reassure all the ponies that things were okay, that there wasn’t going to be a fight? Did ponies even have bar fights?

A smart person surely would have fought back or fled the restaurant in shame, but I didn’t. The two of us just sat there until the other ponies started to look away. Maybe they didn’t want to get involved or maybe they had figured out that the situation was under control and was none of their business anyway. Maybe one of them was going out the back entrance to get the police.

I was wondering if it was possible to bleed to death through my nose when he reached for my face again. I cringed back as much as I could while remaining in my chair, but this time he meant no harm. He touched his hoof lightly to the bloody napkin, and I went cross-eyed focusing on it—this was the closest I’d ever seen a pony hoof and even though the pain, I couldn’t help but notice the gleaming edge of his shoe, the small ridges and chips in the wall of his hoof, and the neatly groomed hair of his leg.

I was about to warn him about the dangers of blood-borne pathogens, until I felt a tingling warmth on my face. The bleeding slowed to a trickle, then a few drips, and then it stopped.

I suspected my nose was still broken, though. Either his hoof’s touch didn’t extend that far, or he didn’t feel I deserved such mercy.

He reached down and dropped a few bits on the table. “Come with me.”

I could have refused, but I didn’t.

•••••

He lived in a small house on the southern side of Haywards Heath, a tidy little house set just a bit away from his neighbors. He offered me a chair—too short for a human, but I took it anyway—and got me a clean towel to finish getting the rest of the blood off my face.

I hardly noticed the house at all; my eye was drawn to a black and white photograph on the table. There were two ponies in that picture; one was obviously him, and the other was almost certainly my ghost.

“Who was she?” I asked softly.

“My grand-niece,” he said. “Her name is Windflower.” He shifted around on his hooves and sighed. “I’m sorry for hitting you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I really couldn’t blame him, so he had no reason to be sorry. Maybe I was just being silly from head trauma, but I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t thought about punching myself in the face as a way to knock some sense into me. It was surprisingly effective—things felt a lot clearer than they had.

“She was out in the woods . . . shouldn’t have been, not by herself, but it was a nice summer day. When she didn’t come home for dinner, ponies started looking, but it was too late.

“Her parents were completely devastated, and left town as quickly as they could.”

He fell silent again, and I considered what he’d just told me. It left a lot of questions, but I wasn’t sure I should ask them. I was confident that there would be time for that later.

“I’m sorry that I scared her off. I didn’t mean to.”

“We all do things that we regret later,” he said softly. “Or don’t do something that we should have.”

“How can I convince her to come back?”

He closed his eyes and for a minutes, went away. There was no other way to describe it. He was there, he was still in the living room, but he wasn’t. I could have gotten out of my chair, made myself a cup of tea, and come back, and I don’t think he would have noticed at all.

I could imagine what he was thinking. Was I just some collector of exotic butterflies, aiming to lure one more into my collection, or was I truly contrite, without any other motive than correcting my error? There was every chance that when he came back, he’d kick me out of the house, and I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had. I couldn’t even imagine what I’d have done if the situation was reversed.

“Valerian and yarrow. Those are her favorite flowers.”

“It’s not the right season for flowers. Any day now, it might start snowing.”

“We haven’t even run the leaves yet. There will be hothouse flowers. If they’re kept in pots, and kept warm in the house during the day, they’ll do okay outside,” he told me. “Teazle grows both.”

“Does she—Windflower—visit here?” Maybe his house had been where she’d gone after leaving mine. Maybe she’d told him all about me scaring her off. If so, I’d been lucky to leave the restaurant with just a broken nose.

He shook his head.

“But you’ve seen her.”

Rather than answer, he beckoned with a hoof. “Come here.”

I followed him back to a small bedroom. The bed was filly-sized, made up for a pony who would never use it again. “I don’t know if this will help, but she’ll recognize this blanket. If she’s still got some of her toys, this might also provide her with a little comfort.”

•••••

I spent the afternoon buying and arranging flowers. Two cartloads of them. Milfoil watched over the fence at what I was doing, but I paid her no mind. I put a row of new flowers around the garden, then walked around the perimeter of the yard taking a look at it. It really did brighten up the yard, although I wasn’t looking forward to having to carry the pots in every night. Nor did I have a place to put them inside yet, but that didn’t matter; I didn’t use my living room for anything much; I could move things around and fit them in there.

I thought about what I’d tell Milfoil—I figured that I owed her an explanation, although it was tempting to tell her nothing.

“It looks nice,” she said, practically right in my ear. I hadn’t expected her to just walk over into my yard.

“Thanks.” I scooted another pot into place.

“What happened to your nose?”

That was sure to be the subject of town gossip any time now, but apparently word hadn’t gotten around yet. “I walked into a lamp post.”

“It looks painful.”

“Not as much as you’d think.” As long as I didn’t touch it or breathe too much, I hardly noticed.

“It’s a little late in the year for flowers outside, you know.”

I nodded. “I thought I could keep them inside some of the time, to let them warm up. It’ll make the inside of the house look nicer, too.”

“Your house will be crowded with flowers.”

“I don’t mind.” I stood up and brushed off my knees. “It’ll make it less gloomy, and I’ll plant them properly in the springtime.”

Chapter 18
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The Haunting

Chapter 18

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

There was no reason to expect instant results, so of course I did.

The attic was still deliberately off-limits during the night, just in case she decided to come back. I left the dormer window open, this time far enough for her to get out with the blanket if she chose to do so. I still wasn’t sure if she’d trust the plush toy I’d gotten for her, but if she came back and saw the blanket—and if the old stallion wasn’t lying—she might take it.

I’d piled up everything in the living room so I’d have enough room to room all the flowers, and I also debated moving my bedroom down a floor. That would give her an extra layer of safety in the attic, which might be beneficial; on the other hand, if she knew where my bedroom was, she might not like it if I moved it somewhere else, and she found me by surprise.

I should have asked the old stallion if he would come over and watch for her, but that might have been awkward for both of us. If he’d asked, I would have said yes, but I didn’t want to broach the subject with him, not yet. I might wind up getting hit again, and I didn’t want that. My nose couldn’t take it.

As I lay in bed, I felt more comfortable than I’d been in a while. I was sure she’d be back in no time, and while I’d have to figure out a way to approach her without scaring her, I was confident I’d figure out a way to accomplish that. Just as soon as she came back.

Of course, she didn’t come back. Maybe she was coming close, or maybe she was just staying wherever she normally stayed during the day. Maybe she’d found another house to haunt.

The flowers hadn’t been as enticing as I’d thought they would be, and while I considered getting more, I was getting tired of lugging them into the house every day and then back out for the night.

Who put flowers out at night, anyway? I was sure that Milfoil was wondering about that, but she hasn’t said anything to me yet. Had the old stallion been messing with me? It didn’t seem likely.

In short, the experiment was turning out to be a complete bust, and I had an idea that either I’d had some sort of weird persistent hallucination, or else that she was gone for good.

Things would have been simpler if that had turned out to be the case.

•••••

Even though I wasn’t trying to actively spy on her any more, I had windows in my house and I looked out them, and one night I noticed a faint glow at the edge of my yard. Something that I ordinarily would have ignored, but not this time.

I’d been in the process of getting undressed for bed, and I just stopped, afraid to make a single additional movement. I had no idea how good her vision was, and I didn’t want to spook her.

She hesitated at the very edge of the yard for a long time before finally getting up her courage and zipping across the yard to the flowers. They’d been getting kind of ratty over the last few days; I hadn’t been paying as much attention to them as I should have been. They weren’t getting the sunlight they needed, and it was a pain to water them all.

Since it was only a border of flowers, it didn’t take her too long to get inside the row of pots, back into the actual garden, which I hadn’t touched at all.

While it was hard to be certain from my position, I was sure she hesitated when she saw that the garden proper wasn’t blooming like the rest of the flowers. She circled through the plants, cautiously at first, and I saw her stop a few times and put her nose down to the dirt.

I might have moved and startled her, or perhaps something else had, because she suddenly made a beeline out of the garden and away from the backyard, back to the woods.

I didn’t think I’d see her back, so I finished putting on my pajamas, but instead of laying down in bed, I sat on the edge where I had just a little view of the garden, and after about a half hour, she was back again.

This time she approached with a bit more confidence, and this time she took a detour to the tree, where her trowel was still sitting safely.

If I’d moved very slowly and cautiously, I could have gotten to the window and gotten a better look at what she was doing, but there was no need. She was back, and that was a start.

•••••

I got up early the next morning.

My first stop was the attic, which I approached with what turned out to be an excess of caution. As I had my hand on the rope for the attic stairs, it occurred to me that there was a very small possibility that during the night she’d decided that the house was safe again, and she’d gone in the attic, seen her blanket, and decided to lie down for a nap. If I just yanked open the trap and stormed up there, I’d lose what tiny progress I’d made.

I got a chair from the kitchen and put it in the hallway, and then pulled down the trap just far enough to get a glimpse into the attic, considering all the while if ghosts actually slept. Before I’d seen her, I would have confidently said that they did not, but after watching her take a bath, I was less sure about what ghosts might do.

It was still dark outside, and I didn’t see any ghostly glow--of course, that could fade when she slept. If she did. Maybe ghosts were out in the daytime, too, but it was just too bright to see them.

From what I could observe through the crack, the blanket was where I’d left it, so I edged the trap open a bit further and when I still didn’t see her, pulled it down all the way.

If she’d been planning on braining me with her duck, this would have been the perfect opportunity. She could have played whack-a-mole with my head as I stuck it above the trap.

I hadn’t really expected her to be in the attic, and she wasn’t, so I closed the trap back up and took the chair back to the kitchen before going out into the backyard.

Her trowel was gone--apparently she’d decided to take that back with her, or else she’d found a better hiding place for it. It didn’t matter.

There were a few more plants that had been dug up, but not that many. Most everything was going dormant for the winter, so that wasn’t overly surprising. Weeds mostly took the winter off, too. I hadn’t had to have my lawn mowed a second time, although it was looking a bit shaggy. Not too shaggy, though, not enough that I was worried about it. Surely some pony would have complained if it was overgrown.

It was probably my imagination, but when I stood back and didn’t focus on anything in particular, the garden did look a bit neater.

•••••

By the time I’d moved half the flowers into the living room, I was considering the advantages to building a potted plant conveyor belt system. Or something on tracks--back on Earth there were people who build garden railroads, and while it was unlikely that they used the railroad to actually move their garden, I couldn’t think of a reason why that wouldn’t work, so long as the track was sturdy. Each plant could have its own train car, and I could build a spiral in my living room where it could park them, and I’d have the only locomotive-powered garden in Haywards Heath. That was something to look forward to. I hadn’t seen any toy trains at the market or in any of the shops, but if they had real trains they almost certainly had toy ones.

Milfoil came out while I was finishing up, and watched me with the same skeptical look she had on her face every time I moved my plants inside for the day. Ears forward, that was interest, and one eyebrow cocked, that was confusion. It was an expression I’d learned quite well.

One of these days, I was going to tell her the whole story, but for now she was just going to have to remain in the dark as to why I kept my plants inside during the day but outside at night.

Chapter 19
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The Haunting

Chapter 19

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I’d made another trip to the cemetery, just to verify what I already knew. There wasn’t a marker for her of any sort, and I couldn’t help but wonder why she wasn’t interred at the cemetery. I knew that back on Earth, people had historically also been buried in churchyards, or around their own homes, but that practice had mostly stopped. And of course sometimes they were cremated and their ashes either kept as an heirloom or else scattered somewhere. Was that what they’d done instead? Ponies might have different customs. Although the cemetery seemed about the right size for Haywards Heath, at least based on my rough calculations.

The old stallion would know, of course, and Milfoil probably would, too, but I was still leery of asking either of them. I’d already been punched in the face once, and it was something I would rather not have repeated. Especially since just asking either of them what happened to her body might be overly personal.

Luckily, there were lots of other ponies in town who I could ask, at least once I figured out the best way to frame the question—it would be weird to just come up to a random pony on the street.

There was the possibility that it was something that just wasn’t discussed in town. All small towns held some secrets, things that weren’t spoken of or gossiped about, and Windflower’s death might have been one of those things.

I wasn’t sure how good ponies were at record-keeping, or what were even considered public records. The town clerk might have a copy of her death certificate, if that was an avenue I wanted to pursue.

Now that I knew what to look for, though, when I was done with work I went to the library again and started skimming through old copies of the newspaper one more time, just to see what I could find.

There wasn’t much. No obituary, although I already knew I wasn’t going to find that. I hadn’t found one the first time I’d looked, and it hadn’t appeared the second time, either.

I did come across one article that piqued my interest: it was about something dangerous that was living in the woods outside of town. Some kind of a monster, but I didn’t know what exactly—I didn’t know what the Equestrian word used to describe it meant. Before coming to Equestria, I would have scoffed at the idea of a monster, but now I knew that they did have monsters, especially in areas that ponies hadn’t tamed.

I considered asking the librarian for some assistance, but it was nearly dusk, well past the closing time of the library, and she was asleep at her desk. It would have been rude to wake her up, so I just stacked the newspapers neatly back where they belonged, and closed the library door on my way out.

•••••

My flowers weren’t doing very well. The cold night air was damaging the leaves and flowers, making them discolor and wilt, and some of their stems were getting floppy, too.

I didn’t know what I could do to help them. Obviously, not leave them out at night, but that defeated the purpose of having them.

I had cut back on the number of plants outside each night—now that I’d lured Windflower back with the plants, I didn’t need as many in the yard. Half of them stayed inside, and when I got home, I switched the healthiest ones for the ones that were outside. That way, all but the sickest ones spent a day in the sun and then the next night outside.

Milfoil’s curiosity over what I was doing with my flowers—or sympathy for the injured plants—finally brought her over into my yard again.

She rejuvenated them as best she could, and without thinking I invited her into my house to help out with the rest of them, the ones that were kept in my plant hospice.

We went through the back, since that was the most convenient entrance, so she didn’t get a full view of my madness until she looked into the living room, where all the furniture was piled up at one end of the room, completely unusable. At least with the plants going outside in shifts, there was a better corridor through to the hallway and front door than there had been. It had looked a little bit like a hoarder’s living room, although I figured it probably smelled a lot nicer.

“Sorry it’s kind of crowded,” I said. “I couldn’t think of a better arrangement.” Some of my disassembled box-fort had been repurposed as plant stands, so that more of the flowers could get sunlight through the living room windows.

Her attention was drawn to the worst plant, of course. I’d put it right by the window in the hopes that sunlight would help revive it, and I’d also wrapped its pot in a blanket to keep it warm, although I couldn’t say why I thought that would help.

“If you really want to keep the plants out at night,” she said, worming her way through the rows of pots, “you need to cover them and protect them from frost. A little bit of frost doesn’t hurt the plant, but if it gets inside the leaf, it starts freezing the water inside the leaf and that hurts the plant cells.”

“I know, but I can’t do that.”

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“It’s important to me,” I said. “I . . . I can’t explain why.”

She took her hooves off the sick plant and looked me right in the eye. “You’re up to something. I don’t know what, and maybe it’s none of my business anyway. I know you lied to me about how you hurt your nose, I heard all about that from other ponies—not that I believed your story anyway since there aren’t any lampposts in town that you could have walked into.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be.” She flicked her tail and went back to examining the plant. “I think it will live, but I don’t think you should put this one outside any more. Where are you going to put them all after the running of the leaves? It’ll be too crowded in your house.”

“I don’t know.” I hadn’t thought that far ahead in my plan. Once it got to the point where I wasn’t moving them in and out all the time, I could spread them around the house. That might make it more inviting for Windflower, too. I could put a couple up in the attic, near the windows. If I rotated them around, I could even put a mini flower garden up in the attic. She might like that. “Do you want to adopt a couple plants for the winter?”

She wrinkled her muzzle. “I suppose I might as well. But only if you promise me you’ll tell me what you’re up to that’s so important that these poor plants have to suffer.”

“I will, I promise you. But not right now.”

“It isn’t good to keep secrets.” She picked up the sick flower and balanced it on her back. “They eat at you.”

“I know.”

“You’ll feel better when you’ve told somepony. And maybe they can help you, with whatever it is.” She held up a hoof before I could open my mouth to replay. “Maybe I’m not the right pony to tell, I don’t know. But if you think I am, you’re welcome at my house any time.”

I couldn’t help but watch her as she wove back out of my plant-maze, the sick valerian balanced perfectly just behind her shoulder blades, right about where a saddle horn would be. I didn’t understand how ponies could do that so casually.

•••••

There was a stallion who was often at the market who made his living selling whatever. He was essentially the pony Goodwill—he had a cluttered shop in town which had been a great source for many of my home essentials. He tended to like to bring a wagonload of trinkets that might catch a pony’s eye, and he never had the same thing twice.

I often took a glance at what he had to offer; his prices were reasonable, and every now and then, I’d find something I didn’t know I’d needed.

This time, one thing got my immediate attention: a small wooden dog, painted brown with white spots. It was well-used, well-loved, and the paint was worn thin. One of the ears had been broken off, and the string tied to it was a replacement: whoever had put it on had not bothered to cut all of the old one off.

I bought it in an instant.

“I didn’t know you had any foals,” he remarked.

“I—it’s for a friend,” I said. “You don’t happen to know who made it, do you?”

He shook his head. “I got it in trade.”

“From who?”

“I don’t remember,” he admitted. “Sometimes, I’ll just get a box of stuff, you know, and I kind of glance at it to get an idea of its worth, but a lot of times I don’t rummage around in it. It’s rude! So if it was at the bottom of a box, you know, I might not have particularly noticed it at the time, and later on when I was sorting stuff out and saw that it was in—well, it’s in kind of poor shape.”

I bet he wouldn’t have said that if I hadn’t already paid for it.

“Still! Foals can be rough on their toys, you know, and I bet with a little bit of paint it’d look as good as new again.”

“Wear is the sign of a well-loved toy,” I said. “Well, listen, if you remember who you bought it from, let me know. This is the kind of toy that my friend really likes. You don’t know if there’s anypony around here that makes them, do you?”

“Long Bent,” he said. “He’s got a shop over on the south side of town, you can’t miss it. You know, I’m surprised you didn’t know it was there, if you’ve been buying toys.”

“I haven’t been until just recently,” I admitted. “I—well, it’s a long story. Alright, thanks!”

•••••

I stopped at my house long enough to put my food purchases away, and then I went looking for Long Bent’s shop. Even though I no longer needed an answer as to who Windflower was, I thought that if he made toys, he probably had a soft heart for foals, and if he had a soft heart for foals, he might be the one to tell me exactly what had happened to her. Surely he’d know.

Plus, I had a ready-made pretext. I’d seen the dog at the market, and that had reminded me of the wooden duck in my attic—the wheels were identical, and I’d be willing to bet my entire collection of valerian and yarrow that he was the pony who’d made both. Since ponies generally preferred selling their goods directly when they could, there was every chance he’d remember Windflower or her parents, and then he’d either tell me that nobody spoke of that, or else he’d tell the story.

Chapter 20
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The Haunting

Chapter 20

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

In general, ponies were different than humans. Obviously, they had hooves and tails and ears and most of them were bright pastel colors. Having spent most of my life on Earth, I had certain expectations whenever I was about to meet a pony, expectations that I’d built up over the years on Earth.

Ponies generally confounded those expectations, but that didn’t stop my brain from making assumptions every single time.

Thus, I had an image in my mind of a kindly old woodcarver, wearing a green woodworking apron, with a long white beard. I could picture his workshop, too; I’d seen enough episodes of This Old House to know exactly what a proper woodshop ought to look like.

Long Bent exactly met my expectations. He had a green apron and a long white beard. He even had glasses.

His workshop and his sales floor were one and the same, just cordoned off into separate areas by shelves displaying his toys. A sensible arrangement; he could carve when there weren’t any customers in the shop.

When I came through the door, he was working. He had a half-finished toy clamped in a vise, protected by a towel. He had a little wood chisel clipped onto one hoof, and he was lightly tapping it with the shoe on his other forehoof.

He looked up when I entered, and efficiently unfastened his chisel before coming over to the counter to greet me.

We exchanged pleasantries, and then I showed him the toy dog I’d bought at market. “Did you make this?”

Long Bent nodded. “Couple dozen moons ago. For . . . let me see.” He rolled it towards himself and examined it carefully. “Yes, I made that for Mint Flower. He loved it, named it Spots. Sometimes he’d drag it around town like it was a real dog, but colts grow up and get other interests. It still rolls well, though.” He pushed it across the counter to demonstrate. “I always put beeswax on the axles—that keeps them from rusting. Do you need it repaired? I could make a new ear for it, repaint it, and put a new string on it.”

“I kind of like it the way it is,” I said. “It shows that it was a beloved toy. That wasn’t what I wanted to ask you about, though. I saw this at the market, and I bought it because it reminded me of another toy I’d seen.”

“Another dog?”

“A duck. It was in the attic of my house when I moved in.” As far as I knew, it was still there—it had been this morning, still tucked down between the attic floor and the roof. “I saw the wheels, and they were just the same.”

He got a little frown. “Yes, that would have been Windflower’s. Such a shame, what happened to her.”

I thought he was going to tell me everything without further prompting, but instead he fell into silent contemplation, so after a somber moment, I prompted him again. “I heard that she was out in the woods.”

He nodded slowly. “Yes, it was a nice day, the kind of day where it doesn’t seem anything could go wrong, and you know how close the house is to the edge of town. Fillies and colts are always playful and adventurous, and she went off into the woods.

“Nopony knew that an aenocyon was hunting in the woods.”

Now I knew how the word I hadn’t recognized in the newspaper was pronounced, but I still didn’t know what it meant. “What is that?”

“A terrible wolf,” he said. “Big and mean and fast. It might have stalked her for a while, until it was sure she was far enough away from town.

“When she didn’t come home for dinner, a search was organized, but by then it was far too late for her. There wasn’t much left, poor thing.

“It was her grand-uncle that found her . . . and the aenocyon. Luckily for him, he wasn’t the only pony there, so it didn’t attack him, just abandoned its lair and ran off deeper into the woods, but everypony knew it would be back.

“The town was in a tizzy for a week until a detachment of Royal Guards took care of the wolf. Nopony went out after dark until the monster was dispatched, and foals weren’t allowed to be outside.”

•••••

I went home in a daze and fell into my lounge chair, the wooden dog held on my lap. I’d gotten the answer I’d been looking for, and now I wished I hadn’t.

I was still sitting there when the sun went down. I was vaguely aware that I should probably eat dinner, but I didn’t feel like it. I also needed to move the flowers, but I didn’t feel like doing that, either. Surely the ones that were outside would be fine for another night.

Milfoil, it turned out, didn’t think so.

I might have dozed off, or I might have just been completely lost in thought. I certainly didn’t hear her knock, but then she might not have knocked. She might have just let herself in through the back door.

My first indication of her presence was when she nuzzled my arm, and I think I screamed.

She jerked back but didn’t run for the door. “Are you okay? Were you having a nightmare?”

“Yes.” I clutched the wooden dog tightly. “Yes and yes. Well, a vision of sorts.” A vision of a cute little filly in the woods, unaware of the wolf just behind her, and maybe she saw it at the last moment when it was already too late to run, or maybe she only realized as its teeth were digging into her flesh.

“You look pale.” She braced herself on the arm of my chair and touched a hoof to my forehead. “Are you sure that you’re okay?”

“I . . . don’t think I should be alone right now,” I said. “I’m not right in the head at the moment.”

“Is it your secret?”

I nodded. There was no point in pretending that it was anything else.

“Can you tell me?”

I shook my head.

“Well. I have some stew I made, I’ll bring some of that over, you just sit here. That might help you feel better, and I’ll move your flowers for you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I do.” She turned for the kitchen. “You just stay right here, I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

•••••

Milfoil left long after dark, after I’d assured her multiple times I was feeling better. Neither of us talked much, and she didn’t press me to tell her what was on my mind.

I didn’t sleep well at all.

•••••

The next morning when I went to the attic, the blanket was gone. The other toys were still in their places, and I picked up the duck and took it downstairs and put it next to the dog, idly pushing the two of them instead of making breakfast or getting ready for work like I should have been.

I knew what I had to do next.

My boss was understanding when I said that I had to take the day off.

•••••

I took the duck with me and headed off into the wilderness.

It was foolish of me to think that I’d ever find her hiding place in the woods. I had nothing to go on at all; this was the fool’s errand to end all fool’s errands. A complete waste of time. What I should have been doing was explaining everything to Milfoil, or going back to the old stallion’s house and apologizing to him over and over again.

It was foolish of me to think I’d ever find her hiding place in the woods, but I did.

It was down in a natural depression, ringed partially around with bushes, and half-blocked off with the decaying trunk of an enormous tree. I could just see a corner of the blanket sticking out from under it.

As if that hadn’t been an obvious enough clue, there were some bones scattered about, partially covered by the leaf-litter.

Long Bent had mentioned a cave, and this wasn’t it. I knew in my heart that the ponies hadn’t found this. I could picture it as clear as day—the old stallion had found the cave, had found the wolf, and they’d chased it off, maybe had a few pegasi patrolling from above to track its movements, but it wouldn’t have come back here.

They might have thought that she wandered into the cave to explore and that’s where the wolf got her, but it wasn’t. This was the spot.

I was going to have to bring the old stallion out here. I had no right to disturb this place, no right to touch anything. I would not approach any closer than I already had.

I set her toy down near the edge of the clearing, where she’d be sure to spot it. A bright yellow duck against the greens and browns of the forest, completely unmissable.

Was she there right now? Did she hear me? See me? She could have been hiding under the tree; that might have been her final refuge.

I wasn’t a religious man by any means, but I knelt down and bowed my head and said a prayer for her, and I asked for her forgiveness for my foolish actions.

Chapter 21
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The Haunting

Chapter 21

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I was hollow inside, and I couldn’t say how I found my way back home. I certainly hadn’t been following a direct path back to Haywards Heath, but I wound up there eventually with no memory of how it had happened.

I went in through the back door and climbed up to the attic. That was a good place for some quiet contemplation. It was her place, even if she wasn’t here just now. Later, I’d ask Milfoil, but my guess was that the attic—or at least part of the attic—had been her playroom. When her parents had left, they might have forgotten the toybox, or else it was just too painful a reminder.

Maybe that was why they’d never given her a grave; that might have been too final for them. If they did, would she be at rest now? I thought that she might be, and I thought that if that was the case, I was going to have to. Even if I didn’t want to.

•••••

I didn’t feel much better when I finally came down from the attic, but I at least felt ready to face the world again.

The first order of business was to make dinner, and while I was too late to get anything fresh at market, I had plenty of food in my pantry. I still hadn’t gotten fully accustomed to the pony philosophy of buying fresh food at every market, so I had a decent stock of things that don’t spoil quickly. Luckily, most foods that they sold fell into that category.

In my time in Equestria, my cooking skills had vastly improved. Back on Earth, I could make a few basic meals, and more complicated ones if I found a recipe and actually had all the proper ingredients. Here, I’d begun to learn the skills my ancestors had had, improvising ingredients, estimating quantities, and always keeping a critical eye on what foods were beginning to get past their prime so I could use them before they spoiled.

I’d also begun to develop a more discerning palate, which I suppose is a natural consequence of experimentation. Not only was I getting better at mixing ingredients on my own without explicit instructions, but I was getting better at tasting specific ingredients in some pony else’s cooking.

Not that I could have replicated Milfoil’s stew. But I came close, I thought.

There were subtle nuances of flavor in pony food, which largely came from things that humans didn’t think of as food. We humans had our food pyramid with dairy and vegetables and fruits and meats, and ponies had their own that exchanged meats for grasses and flowers, something I was still trying to get a handle on. Luckily, there was nothing that a pony could eat that was poisonous to a human.

Sometimes the subconscious knows, and I’d made more than enough stew for myself. Ponies hadn’t invented Tupperware, so the logical thing to do with extra food was to share it, and who better to share it with than a neighbor?

•••••

Thinking back on it, Milfoil must have known before I even knocked on her door that I was going to invite her over for dinner. Or at least suspected that I would, since she accepted my invitation without making any excuses for it being an inconvenient time, or that she’d already eaten, or anything else that a person might have said.

Or else ponies just had more concern for their neighbors and friends than humans would, and she was willing to let the dinner she had been making spoil in exchange for having dinner with me. It was something I knew I was better off not asking.

I thought my stew had come out decently well, although I resolved that next time I was going to only use one turnip and maybe add a couple more carrots. Milfoil didn’t criticize my recipe, at least.

Once we’d finished eating, she helped me switch out my flowers, and then it got a bit awkward. I was hovering on the cusp of telling her everything, but not quite ready to do it. I needed some kind of natural way of easing into the subject instead of bringing it up from nowhere. What could I say? ‘So, I found where Windflower died today. You would have known her when she was alive, but you probably didn’t know she was a ghost that used to haunt my house until I scared her off.’ As conversation starters, that was likely to end with the orderlies and their butterfly nets.

Luckily for me, Milfoil decided that a proper dinner had a dessert, and went over to her house to get a pie, since I had nothing to offer. That gave me a few minutes alone to collect my thoughts. A few minutes to wonder if I was taking the right approach.

•••••

It would have been natural to go to the living room to eat our dessert, except that the living room was crowded with flowers and my furniture was still haphazardly stacked against one wall, rendering the room totally useless for entertaining. That was a shame, since the kitchen felt off. It was a weird mix of too formal with the table and chairs, while being too casual at the same time. She didn’t seem to mind the situation, at least.

I still didn’t know exactly how to broach the subject, and as the wedges of pie diminished, I started to think of how this was going to turn into another failure, another setback in a litany of setbacks. We’d finish eating and make casual small-talk for a little bit longer before she left for home, and that would be that.

A noise upstairs turned out to be the perfect opportunity for me. It wasn’t much, and I might not have noticed it if her ears hadn’t turned towards the source, but as soon as they did, I also became alert.

I could tell by her expression that she didn’t know what had caused it, proving my theory that she was completely unaware of Windflower’s ghost, and so I began to tell her everything.

Unlike the old stallion, she was easy enough to read. At first, she didn’t believe me, but as my evidence piled up, it could only lead to one inevitable conclusion, helped along by the occasional noises from the attic.

There was a glorious sort of freedom in telling my tale, and while I’d told the old stallion out of desperation as much as anything else, in her case, I both knew more, and could offer a far more coherent telling.

Still, in the back of my mind, a little voice warned me that if I bared my soul to her, I might regret it later, and my poor nose was a reminder of that basic fact.

I ignored that voice, and told her everything, including the fact that I’d found the spot in the forest where she’d died.

By the time I’d finished, Milfoil had tears in her eyes, and so did I. There was no shame in that. And she began to tell me what Windflower had been like when she was alive, how she’d enjoyed getting her hooves dirty in the garden, how much she’d always loved the flowers. How she played in the attic sometimes, and other times she’d bring her toys out on the lawn and play with them there. How she was curious and adventurous and how excited she’d been when she caught a frog in a box and had to show it off and it got away inside Milfoil’s house because she hadn’t been expecting it to hop out as soon as the box was opened.

•••••

I got Milfoil to promise to be as silent as she could, and the two of us went up to my bedroom. As I opened the door, it felt really weird to me, even though I thought it was the right thing to do. I was a bit worried that she wouldn’t be patient, but she was, and the two of us stood by the window until Windflower left the attic and floated down through the backyard.

She took one exploratory circuit of the garden, and then headed off for the woods.

“Poor thing,” Milfoil whispered.

I nodded.

“So, what are you going to do now?”

That was a very good question, one that cut to the very heart of the matter, and one that deserved a perfectly honest response. “I don’t know. It’s not my place to disturb . . . to disturb her any more. I’ve already—”

“Done enough harm?” she finished for me.

“If only I could do it all over again,” I began.

“You can’t change the past.”

“I know.”

“But it’s easier to say that than to accept that.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought the same thing. If I’d been out in the yard, and seen where she was going . . . You can wash your hooves of it; it happened before you came to town, and there was nothing you could have done, nothing you could have known that would have changed the past. No matter what, she would have been dead.”

“You can’t change the past.” There was no reason not to repeat her words. “Whatever you might have done or not done.”

“But you can change the future.” Milfoil looked back out the window, at the empty yard. “You can welcome her back to her home. That’s a start. I think . . . I think that there’s a lot of things we have to figure out still. It doesn’t seem right to leave her in the forest like that.”

“I’m afraid of disturbing anything. I don’t know what would happen. She might get even more lost than she already is. And if she does, we might never find her again.”

Chapter 22
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The Haunting

Chapter 22

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I still had to tell the old stallion that I’d found where Windflower’s ghost stayed, but I wasn’t ready to do that yet. I should have, but I didn’t want to rush things too much, not while Milfoil and I were still pondering over what the right thing to do was. He might be too emotionally attached to make the right choice. Of course, I might be, as well, which was another good reason to move slowly and deliberately.

Milfoil had started to help me move around the plants, coming over when she saw me begin to carry them in. She devised a much more complicated rotation system than I had, including assessing the health of each individual flower before it was moved outside.

She also decided that since she was coming over anyway, she was going to teach me a thing or two about cooking, and I wasn’t going to refuse. Trial-and-error had served me well enough, but unsurprisingly, there was plenty of room for improvement.

I did a lot of the busy work that involved hands, and I think she was jealous of how effective they were at cutting vegetables, compared to her methods. To her favor, though, she wasn’t likely to accidentally cut a hoof.

We both agreed that Windflower was more likely to approach her than she was to approach me. She probably thought I was some kind of monster who had driven her parents off—that’s what I would have thought in her place. Milfoil was not only a pony, but a pony that she had known. Thus, it was only logical that Milfoil stay, until Windflower had come and gone.

The kitchen wasn’t the most comfortable place to relax after dinner, so I spent part of an afternoon reorganizing the living room, enough to at least make it somewhat usable. Distributing some of the sicker plants that couldn’t go outside any more to other rooms of the house freed up some space.

Milfoil went to her house briefly after each dinner, and brought back a dessert. I asked her why she didn’t bring it over right away, and she said that I would enjoy my dinner more if I wasn’t thinking about a pie or a cake or cookies throughout the entire meal.

She was probably right—if I was better at baking, I might have eaten nothing but sugary treats instead of the vegetable-based diet that ponies had.

Once we finished our dessert, I’d put a kettle on the stove for tea, and we’d go to the living room and sit and talk.

There was a lot Milfoil wanted to know about life on Earth, and a lot I wanted to know about Haywards Heath, so we were never lacking for conversation. She’d seen pictures and even a couple of movies about Earth, and she’d talked to some ponies who had visited, but didn’t know any who had actually lived on Earth for any amount of time.

•••••

Milfoil had a better sense of hearing than I did, although of course Windflower was practically silent except when she was playing with her toys or exploring the house.

“Will she come downstairs, do you think?”

That was something I’d been wondering myself. How long would it take her to get her courage up again? If the attic trap was open, would she see it as a potential trap, or as an opportunity?

“She has every reason to be wary,” I said. “I think it’s too soon. She needs to build up some more confidence before I risk changing anything in the attic. I haven’t been back up there since I took her duck out to the woods.”

“I wonder if she can hear us talking? Or moving around?”

“Two floors up, and with the trap closed? I doubt it.”

“What if you opened it, just a little bit? Enough that she could hear our voices downstairs, but not wide enough for you to fit through? Would she be curious enough to come investigate?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to screw this up, not again. She deserves better.”

Milfoil tutted. “You didn’t mean to frighten her off, and now you’re trying to make amends. Some ponies wouldn’t. Some ponies would want to scare her away and keep her away.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. Sometimes ponies aren’t very trusting of strangers. In fact, I—well, it doesn’t matter.”

I got out of my chair and moved over to the couch. I thought about sitting down next to her, but she was stretched out on her belly, and I didn’t know whether it was customary to sit at her head or her tail, so I just squatted down in front of her. “You were nervous about your new neighbor, weren’t you? And all the weird things I was doing didn’t help, did they?”

Her cheeks turned an interesting shade of red and she lowered her head, momentarily hiding her face behind her bangs before she nodded. “But it turns out that you were doing it for a good reason, and that’s what matters.”

“I should have made a casserole and brought it to your house as a welcoming present.”

She looked back up at me. “People do that?”

“Well, I think it’s the neighbor who’s supposed to bring it to the new homeowner, but yeah. That’s one way we bond with our new neighbors. Or have a cookout and invite everyone. I should have introduced myself to you right when I bought the house.”

“You had a lot on your mind, I’m sure.” She frowned as I shifted around. “Crouching like that doesn’t look comfortable at all. Why don’t you have a seat on the couch?”

“I wouldn’t want to crowd you.”

“It’s fine, there’s plenty of room.” She got her hooves under her and pushed herself up to a sort-of sitting position. There was probably some name for it; it was a favored posture of dogs and cats alike. And, of course, ponies.

I took a seat on her right, since her tail was stretched out to her left. I’d underestimated the space available between her and the armrest, and bumped hips with her as I sat down.

•••••

Running into Milfoil at market wasn’t all that surprising; it was a small town, after all.

I wouldn’t have asked her to help me barter with ponies or help me decide what to buy, but she took it upon herself to do so just the same. I didn’t mind; it turned out that the food was a little bit cheaper when she was with me.

I’d suspected that salesponies gave little discounts to ponies they liked, and perhaps a bit of a surcharge for a stranger, but the daily prices were always a bit volatile, so it was impossible to be completely sure. That was one thing that always bothered me about Equestria—things never cost quite the same day to day.

Milfoil, I noticed, wasn’t buying all that much. But why should she? She’d eat dinner over at my house again, and there was no sense in her purchasing food that would just spoil.

She was buying pie ingredients, which I figured out when she bought some fruit.

“I’ve never had pear pie before,” I said, looking at the golden fruit.

“You’re not supposed to know what kind of pie it is before you eat it,” she told me. “And these aren’t pears, anyway. They’re quinces.”

“I don’t know what a quince is.”

“They’re good,” the salespony said. “Well, not raw. They taste really bad raw, unless they sit on the tree until the frost softens them. But when they’re cooked they’re delicious.”

Milfoil nodded. “You’ll like it, I promise.” She glanced around the market, and then looked back at me uncertainty. “In fact . . . I think you’ve learned enough about cooking, you can help me make it.”

“Really?”

“Sure, if you want to. But—” She held up a hoof. “I need to get a secret ingredient.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you, then it wouldn’t be a secret. Go on, head back home and get your stove warming up, and I’ll come over and we’ll cook dinner and bake a pie.”

•••••

It took longer for her to arrive at my house than I’d expected. I had assumed that she knew exactly what secret ingredient she was getting—that she knew who sold it and if they had it—but maybe it had been harder to find. Or maybe she’d gotten to gossiping, or had decided to stop at home first and freshen up.

She’d been wearing saddlebags at market, which she’d taken off before coming over. That turned out to have been a bad decision on her part, since she had to make three trips to get all the supplies she needed over to my house. Not only did she need the pie ingredients, but also a pie crust guide and a rolling pin and a pie tray.

I expected to get right to baking, but she had a different idea. “I think that tonight’s the night that you should open the trap.”

“It’s still too soon, don’t you think?”

Milfoil shook her head. “I’ve got a good feeling. The yard is less interesting now that we’re getting closer to winter, and maybe it will help Windflower hear our voices. She might be able to smell the pie, too.”

“Did her mother bake quince pies?”

Milfoil nodded. “We all did—right at the end of the fall, they were the most popular then, right when the quinces are still fresh.”

“Well . . . if you think so. I’ll go upstairs and open the trap.”

“Wait just a minute. Let me show you how to make a pie crust first, and then you can do that while I’m rolling it out.”

She worked by eye, scooping out the appropriate ingredients and mixing them into the dough for the crust, and I did my best to follow along, even though I knew that there was no chance I’d be able to duplicate the recipe, not without written instructions.

When it was time to mix, I went upstairs and opened the trap door. I wanted to take a quick look upstairs, just to see if there were any new toys that she’d brought to the attic, or if any of the old ones were missing. If she’d found the one I’d left for her in the box.

But I didn’t. I might wind up getting carried away with exploring, and I didn’t want to wind up leaving Milfoil preparing dinner on her own.

Chapter 23
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The Haunting

Chapter 23

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

After dinner, we sat together on the couch. “I have a confession to make,” Milfoil said. “There wasn’t really a secret ingredient in the pie.”

“So the spices you put in wasn’t it?”

“No, that was just ginger, allspice, clove, and cardamom. I got something else instead.” She slid back off the couch. “Stay right here and I’ll get it.”

She was only gone for a moment, and she returned with a bottle of wine in her mouth. “It’s a honey white.” Her ears drooped. “I should have brought cups, I didn’t think of that.”

“I’ll get some.” I didn’t have proper long-stem wine glasses, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have chosen them unless she insisted. I had no idea how she’d hold a wine glass with her hooves.

By the time I got back to the couch, she had the bottle opened, with no sign of a corkscrew.

That mystery was solved after she’d poured two generous measures; she stuck the cork back in the bottle with her mouth. Presumably, she’d gotten it out the same way.

•••••

It might have been the wine talking, but I thought that Windflower was up in the attic. Milfoil had one ear cocked up as well. “Do you think she’ll come downstairs?”

“I doubt it. I think she’ll be cautious this time. She might not even go down the stairs.”

“I wonder if she can smell the pie?”

“I don’t know.” I leaned back against the couch—pony wine was powerful stuff. “Does having a cutie mark in winemaking make wine stronger?”

“Probably.” Milfoil giggled. “I don’t see why it wouldn’t. Ponies with flower cutie marks grow bigger flowers and ponies with baking cutie marks cook better food, so why wouldn’t a pony with a wine cutie mark make better wine?” She leaned forward to get the bottle again, bracing herself with a hoof on my leg. The bottle was slightly out of reach her and for a moment I thought she was going to go off the couch, so without thinking I grabbed onto her mane and tugged her back.

“Oh, god! I’m sorry about that—that must have hurt.”

“Going muzzle-first into the carpet would have hurt more.”

“I would have grabbed your shirt if you’d been wearing one. It was just reflexes.”

“I should have put the bottle closer. I—” she cocked her ear. “Listen. That’s got to be her. Where is she?”

I was about to say that I didn’t know, but then I heard a familiar creaking noise. “That’s the bathroom door.”

“So she did come out of the attic.”

“I guess so. Maybe she wants to take a bath again.” How often did ponies normally bathe? That wasn’t a question I was comfortable asking Milfoil.

The door creaked shut and I waited in eager anticipation for the sound of running water, but it never came. Maybe she’d just wanted to peek into the room to make sure that nothing had changed in there.

I don’t know when Windflower left. She didn’t come all the way down to the ground floor, and she didn’t spend much time upstairs playing with her toys.

•••••

“You’ve never seen the Running of the Leaves, have you?”

I shook my head.

“You have to come. It’s a town-wide holiday, and we gallop along to help the trees shed their leaves.”

“That’s not how it works,” I protested.

“Maybe not on Earth, but that’s how it works here. There’s a big shindig after that, and tomorrow’s Winter Dawn.”

“I’m not much of a runner.”

“Well, you can just watch, but it’s more fun to run. It’s not competitive, it’s social. Nopony gets a prize for winning.”

“How about coming in last?”

She stuck her tongue out at me. “If you promise to run, I’ll stay with you, and even if you’re as slow as a sloth, I promise you I’ll cross the finish line behind you.”

I wasn’t worried about coming in dead last, even though I probably would. It was more the idea of running or jogging that I didn’t like. What was the point of it?

But sometimes the way to fit in in a small town was to do the things the locals did, and it would be fun to spend a day with Milfoil, a day where I could put my thoughts and worries aside. A day to just cut back and relax.

“Okay, fine, I’ll do it.”

“Great! We start kinda early, about an hour after sunrise. Everypony meets up at the town square, and then we make our way to the edge of town.”

“An hour after sunrise? Is it too late now to change my mind?”

•••••

This was the first time I’d seen the majority of ponies in Haywards Heath all together, and it was plenty crowded in the square. Race officials were going around, taping numbers to ponies, and everyone was just talking and having a good time. I even got a set, which I moved to the front and back of my shirt.

Milfoil left me alone for a little while to talk to some of her friends, and I studied the crowd. The pegasus couple I’d chased off my roof was there, both sporting numbers, and they weren’t the only pegasi who were running. The event looked like it was open to all ponies, or at least all adult ponies—I didn’t see any runners who didn’t have a cutie mark.

By mid-morning, race officials had led us to the starting point. No one explained the rules; although since it was all for fun, I suppose there was no reason to have to.

When the starting whistle sounded, the entire herd took off. Milfoil had lied a bit; there were some ponies who did treat it as a race, and they galloped off quickly. They looked like mostly younger ponies, perhaps ones that felt like they had something to prove, or were showing off for their significant others.

The rest of the crowd was a lot more restrained, going at an easy trot, something that even I could keep up with. At least if the race wasn’t too long.

“Do you think that Windflower is watching?”

“She might, if she can come out during the day.” I could see the route that the leaders were taking, and we were going to pass along the edge of the forest where she lived.

“Even if she doesn’t, she’ll feel the change. Any Earth pony would. You might, too.”

I shook my head. “Humans can’t feel magic.”

“You say that, but how do you know? Maybe you just think you can’t, because you never try.”

I didn’t have a good answer to that.

•••••

We didn’t finish last, so Milfoil didn’t have to make good on her promise of crossing the finish line behind me. Although, as we got close, her own competitive streak cut in, and she took off at a full gallop.

I caught up to her briefly, and then she left me in the dust. Rather than exhaust myself completely, I just slowed back down and watched her. There was something magical, something beautiful about seeing a pony gallop. It was much more coordinated than a human running. With the whole crowd together, it almost looked like ocean waves.

Once we’d crossed the finish line, we were given a drink of water, and then we stayed to cheer on the rest of the racers.

Milfoil hadn’t been lying about the racing pulling the leaves off the tree, either. They’d been falling during the entire run, more than felt normal, but now that I was looking back at the end of the course, the change was obvious. A steady rain of leaves was coming down, and when I looked the other way, all the deciduous trees were completely leafless.

A few ponies congratulated me on my first Running of the Leaves, and once the final ponies had crossed the line, everybody went their separate ways to get ready for the party.

•••••

Most of the ponies went around their daily business unclothed, and while that had been odd at first, I’d gotten used to it.

It threw me for a loop to see Milfoil in a dress . . . not just a dress, but an entire ensemble. She even had fancy boots on her hooves, a necklace, and matching earrings.

I must have hesitated when I saw her, because she furrowed her brow. “Is something wrong?”

“I—you, I’ve never seen you wearing clothes before.” That sounded completely wrong. “I mean, I just didn’t expect such a fancy dress.” It looked like a prom dress to me, or something for a fancy ball; it wasn’t the kind of thing even a woman would normally have worn on Earth.

“Not everypony wears really fancy clothes, I could have worn something more casual.”

“No, no, it’s really pretty,” I assured her. “You look gorgeous.”

•••••

She wasn’t the only pony who was dressed up; in fact, nearly all of them were wearing something, and about half the mares were wearing dresses every bit as formal as Milfoil’s.

I’d been wondering how all those ponies were going to fit inside the town hall, but they hadn’t planned on that. Instead, the party was outside, in the market square. It was a bit chilly, at least for me, but not too bad as long as I stayed moving.

Staying moving wasn’t a problem at all. Besides milling about and going into the town hall for occasional snacks, there were also dances. At first, I said that I wasn’t going to participate in the dances because not only did I not know how to do human dances, I certainly didn’t know how to do pony dances.

Milfoil refused to accept that, and shot down my argument by explaining that if I never tried dancing, I’d never learn how, so then I drew the new line at not doing any dances that required me to be on hands and knees. She accepted that.

There were some dances for pairs, and other dances for groups, some of them with complicated footwork that I utterly failed to replicate. The only thing that I’d seen that came close was Riverdance, and ponies had four feet to do the moves with.

I didn’t trip over my own feet or knock anybody down, so in that regard, I was successful.

Chapter 24
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The Haunting

Chapter 24

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I should have expected that a day named Winter’s Dawn would feature snow, although I hadn’t been expecting it at all. I didn’t notice until I walked into the bathroom and looked out the window, where snowflakes were gently drifting down.

On my way to work, I took the time to look up at the pegasi working overhead. They must have started at the first light of dawn, or perhaps sooner, getting the clouds in place.

It looked really pretty. The first snowfall always does.

Foals were bounding around on their way to school, enjoying the first snow of the season. I thought it was kind of cruel to make them go to school at all, but then I realized that if the snow kept up at this pace, there’d be a good blanket of it by the time school got out, and they could build snowmen or snow forts or go sledding or whatever else foals did with snow. Maybe that was how they’d planned it.

•••••

I hadn’t been wrong about the afternoon. It looked like three or four inches had come down, and now the skies were mostly clear again: a small team of pegasi were clearing out the few remaining clouds. The entire town glittered like a wonderland.

It wasn’t until I got home that I thought about Windflower. I still hadn’t told the old stallion where her resting place was, and I didn’t know if I could find it under a blanket of snow. I should have left some kind of marker nearby, like a ribbon tied to a tree or something that could be easily seen from a distance.

If I’d been thinking straight when I’d gone out there, I would have used something to mark the entire path. I wasn’t confident any more that I’d find it again, and that wasn’t right at all. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

What would Windflower do for the winter? I didn’t think that snow would affect a ghost; I didn’t think that they could really feel hot or cold.

It looked really strange for the living room to be filled with flowers, and then to look past them all to the snowy panorama outside. It was the strange dichotomy between inside and outside, of things not aligning like they ought to.

As I looked at the boxes some of the flowers were sitting on, I wondered if I could build a ghost-nest up in the attic. In case she did want to stay inside for the winter. A couple boxes could be laid over on their side, near the roof so she could get in and out quickly if she wanted to. At the opposite end of the attic from the trap, as well.

It wasn’t all that much effort to carry a few upstairs and arrange them into a little ghost-house. I put the wooden puppy and the stuffed pony nearby—even if she didn’t want them, they might pique her curiosity. Maybe she’d think that there was another filly in the house.

All her other toys were where she’d left them, and the wooden duck was still gone. I hoped that if she’d left it out last night, she’d found it again.

I didn’t feel like making dinner, and I also didn’t feel like reorganizing the living room again so I could get to the fireplace. I was probably going to regret that tomorrow, but the stove also put off a fair bit of heat, and I figured that would be sufficient.

I was going to have to ask Milfoil how ponies kept their houses warm during the day, when they weren’t home. It didn’t seem safe to keep a fire in the fireplace or the stove burning all day. I couldn’t help but wonder if the answer was going to be that they didn’t, since they always had fur coats on. Maybe I was going to have to learn to get used to the cold. Invest in winter clothes.

Still, they must do something to keep their houses above freezing—there was plumbing in my walls, and if it got too cold, the pipes would freeze and burst.

•••••

I’d gotten motivated enough to start a fire in the stove, but rather than cook anything, I’d just eaten raw vegetables. They tasted a lot better than they ever had on Earth. It could have been because they were fresher, or home-grown, or different varieties than were available at big box stores, or I could have been getting more used to them. Maybe it was a combination of factors—that was also a possibility.

I heard the kitchen door open and hoofsteps on the kitchen floor. For a moment I considered what Milfoil would do if I just walked into her house someday, and immediately realized that she probably wouldn’t be bothered by it at all.

“Were you going to make dinner?”

I shrugged. “We can if you want some. I’m not really hungry any more.”

“I’ll be fine.” She came into the living room and hopped up on the couch. I was sitting in my armchair. “I brought over some hot chocolate, although it needs to be warmed up. I thought you probably didn’t know that on Winter’s Dawn it’s traditional to sit in front of the fireplace and drink hot chocolate with a friend.” Her ears drooped as she saw my blocked-off fireplace. “Maybe we should go to my house instead.”

I considered that and then shook my head. “I’d hate for Windflower to think that she’s been abandoned. I don’t think she would, but. . . .”

“She must feel so alone out there. You’re right. It won’t take long at all to get the flowers moved around.”

•••••

We spent the next hour cleaning up the living room. By the end of it, there was a more sensible single row of flowers in front of the living room window with a second smaller cluster behind them of the sick but not too sick flowers—Milfoil had those—and there were also now flowers in every room in my house except the bathroom.

While I was pushing the couch and armchair into their new positions, Milfoil came back with a bundle of twigs, which she set right in the fireplace. “They’re all fruit twigs, and it’s traditional to start the Winter’s Dawn fire with them.”

“Sort of like a Yule Log,” I said. “That’s a human tradition some places, although people don’t use fireplaces much any more.”

“Why not?”

“We have other ways to keep our houses warm,” I said. That was the simplest explanation. There were probably building codes involved and the expense of chimneys and the availability of clean and simple vent-free fireplaces, but she didn’t need to know all that.

“I don’t think I’d like that.” She struck a match against the stone of the fireplace and held it to the bundle of sticks.

Once it got going, I started building up the fire the rest of the way while she went to the kitchen and warmed up the hot chocolate.

•••••

The hot chocolate was more than I’d bargained for—it was loaded with brandy. I was glad I’d just sipped at it rather than guzzling it.

It was also amazingly delicious, thick and rich without being too sweet. “Did you make this?”

Milfoil nodded. “Do you like it?”

“I’ve never tasted anything like it. Where do you get the mix?”

“Um, I got the milk from Évolène’s dairy farm, cornflower from the miller, cocoa powder from the general store, cinnamon from Cassia Canna’s stall, and the brandy from Pomace’s.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. “So you made it from scratch?”

“How else would you make it?”

“Usually on Earth, you can buy all the ingredients already mixed.”

“Oh, like a broth.”

“Just the dry ingredients, so it’s a powder.” I took another sip. “This tastes so much better, though.”

“My father always said that to do something right takes time.”

“We humans lost sight of that a while back, and now we usually prefer faster and cheaper.”

“I don’t think I would like Earth,” she admitted. “You must be bothered by the slow pace of things here.”

“I’d rather do things the slow way. That’s why I moved out here from the city. Plus, it’s prettier.”

She took a sip of her hot chocolate and then leaned over against my shoulder. “You should see the town in springtime. It’s so beautiful. We— “ Her ears snapped around and she turned her head down the hall. “Oh . . . oh, you poor dear.”

I didn't budge. Windflower’s first impression of me hadn’t been a good one, and surely that was who was in the hall. I hadn’t even heard her come in; she must have heard our voices or the crackling of the fire and come downstairs to investigate.

I couldn’t see her at all—she was still back behind the corner.

“You can join us, Windflower. It’s okay.”

I wished that I could see her. I thought I could see a glow from the hallway, but that was probably just my imagination. Surely she wasn’t glowing brighter than the fire.

I had to stay still. Not threaten her. Even though I wanted to see her come into the living room, I didn’t think that would happen. Not right away; it was too soon. She would be scared to go any further.

Milfoil shifted on the couch and I wanted so badly to scooch over and look for myself but I had to put my trust in her. She was a pony Windflower knew, a pony she trusted. She would do more to build confidence in Windflower than I ever could.

If I got up now, I could move away without ever being in her sight, but I was afraid that if I did, she might come around the corner just when I was trying to be sneaky, and she might think I was stalking her. And I was sure if she thought that, she’d flee and never come back.

Had she even seen the wolf before it got her? She must have, at least when its jaws clamped down on her.

This was not a good line of thought, so I instead focused back on the fireplace and concentrated on the dancing flames, the glow of the coals, and the hissing and crackling noises.

Milfoil left the couch and approached the hallway, very slowly, very cautiously. I thought that was risky—it was wiser to let a skittish filly approach on her own, rather than push her.

“You don’t have to be scared,” she said softly. “Nopony is mad at you, okay? You’re welcome here. I won’t let anything hurt you.”

Milfoil wasn’t moving forward any more. Was Windflower?

I wanted to think she was, but even if she wasn’t, if she just stood her ground, that was progress.

Milfoil tried a couple more times to coax her out of the hallway, but Windflower wouldn't come. Finally, she turned back around and climbed back on the couch.

“Poor dear. She’s so lost and scared and confused.”

“Do you think she knows?”

Milfoil shook her head sadly.

Chapter 25
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The Haunting

Chapter 25

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

Once again, I skipped buying food at the market, although I did purchase a roll of ribbon. There was probably enough food left in my pantry to get me through another day, or if not, I could just get dinner at the pub when I got back to town.

It was time to tell the old stallion where Windflower’s bones were, but to do that I had to find them again first. I didn’t think he’d appreciate me bumbling through the woods with him in tow, especially if I couldn’t find it right away.

I did tell Milfoil where I was going, and that I’d do my best to be back by nightfall. That way if I didn’t return, she could organize a search party for me.

•••••

It was a pity that ghosts don’t leave footprints. It looked like everything else that lived in the woods had. I wasn’t much for identifying them, although I could guess some from context: squirrels went in looping paths, usually ending at trees, and deer didn’t.

Had Windflower made friends with any of the animals in the forest? Or would they run off in fear if they saw her? A lot of animals were inquisitive, and if they thought that she posed no threat, they’d approach her eventually. Perhaps if I knew forest animals better, they might have been able to lead me to her.

My original intent had been to leave ribbons on my path on the way in, and I’d used up about a dozen before I realized that since I didn't know where I was going yet, the smarter thing to do would be to find her glade again and then use ribbons to mark my way back.

I wasn’t going to retrace my steps and untie the ones I’d already put up, though.

•••••

I didn’t find it. I’d told myself that I was going to go back to Haywards Heath when the sun was at the tops of the trees, but when it got there, I was feeling that I was close, and that I could stay just a little bit longer.

Then I decided that I’d stick with the original plan, and I was glad that I had. It was nearly dark by the time I got into town . . . once the sun went below the horizon, it got dark quick. I didn’t fancy the idea of bumbling through the woods at night, trying to find my way home.

I hadn’t asked Milfoil to start a fire in my fireplace or make dinner for me, but she’d done both of those things. It wasn’t anything fancy—just a pot of vegetable stew.

I got myself a bowl and sat at the kitchen table. I half expected Milfoil to get off the couch and join me, but she stayed where she was.

I was still in the kitchen, eating my soup, when Windflower came downstairs again. Milfoil’s ears perked up, and she moved off the couch.

I stayed right where I was. Windflower would approach closer if she didn’t see me, and it was natural to be in the kitchen. It felt like it would be even more natural for me to be stirring the pot of soup, so I got the spoon and started stirring. Monsters don’t stir pots of soup.

Hopefully, Milfoil wasn’t offended by excess stirring of her soup. I didn’t think that she would be. Soup probably couldn’t be ruined by stirring it too much anyway.

•••••

I didn’t know exactly what I was expecting to happen. How close would Windflower be willing to get? I couldn’t imagine her sitting down on the couch or curling up on the rug in front of the fireplace. Not fleeing when she saw us was probably the best that we were going to be able to accomplish for a while.

The next thing to work on was somehow communicating her wants and desires. I wasn’t sure if she could speak, but of course that wasn’t the only way to communicate. She could hold things in her mouth, and lots of ponies wrote like that. Maybe she could, too. If there wasn’t any significant progress today, I could ask Milfoil about getting pens and paper for her.

Wood stoves couldn’t be turned down, and the vegetables were getting mushy—maybe I could ruin the soup by stirring it too much. I got out a cooling rack and carefully set the pot on it.

•••••

The next afternoon, I went out in the woods again. The ponies hadn’t brought any more snow, and my own wandering footprints were easy enough to find. That was good; that kept me from following the same tracks again.

I searched until dusk, didn’t find her hiding spot, and went back home again in defeat.

•••••

Before I set out the third time, I invited Milfoil to dinner at the restaurant of her choice. It wasn’t fair that she was spending so much time cooking and watching the house for me, and I wasn’t doing anything in return.

She accepted immediately.

I cut my unsuccessful woods exploration short, so that we’d have plenty of time to eat before Windflower arrived.

It was a little bit strange for her not to be at my house when I arrived, although it was too early to wait for Windflower, and there wasn’t anything for her to cook.

She probably wants to get ready to go out to eat. That was an odd thought. Ponies were always ready, weren’t they? They didn’t have to put on clothes or anything.

I hesitated at her door. True, she’d been letting herself in to my house numerous times in the past, but maybe it was different if I just let myself in.

Milfoil might be expecting that, though, and might be confused if I knocked. Especially if she was in the middle of something and thought it was some pony knocking and then got upset because she’d had to stop whatever she was doing to let me in.

And I didn’t remember ever having told her that she could just walk right into my house, which led me to believe that that was a thing that ponies did.

It was the first time I’d seen the inside of her house. It was a lot nicer than mine—it wasn’t one particular thing I could pin down. The construction didn’t look any better, she didn’t have more furniture than I did, and she certainly didn’t have as many flowers. There were a few photographs and trinkets here and there, but nowhere near what my parents house back on Earth had.

Overall, though, it looked more lived in, more cared-for than my house did. More alive.

“I’m upstairs,” she called.

“Are you—” decent, I didn’t say, because I wasn’t sure what that would mean to a pony. “I mean, can I come up?”

“If you want. I’ll be down in a minute.”

It would have been safer to stay where I was, but I had been invited upstairs.

She was standing in front of a mirror, putting on makeup. She’d also put on a short skirt, sort of like a summer dress. A saddle-piece covered her back, and it fell to about mid-leg. Not enough for a human in winter, but in her case more than she usually wore.

“Sorry.” I backed out into the hallway. Even though she wouldn’t have invited me up if she hadn’t wanted me to see her in the bathroom. Or was the invitation something I should have known I wasn’t supposed to accept? A complicated sort of thing where she had to say I could come up for politeness’ sake, and where I was supposed to refuse for decency’s sake?

As promised, she came out of the bathroom a minute later, and when she saw me, she leaned over and brushed her muzzle against my side.

“Did you find her?”

I shook my head. “Not yet, but I will.”

“I know.”

“You look pretty.” That sounded dumb after I said it, but it was true.

“Thanks!” She did a weird little bouncy thing with her legs, a pony flounce. “I should have asked, where are we going for dinner?”

“I was thinking Sweet Clover’s,” I said. It was the nicest restaurant I knew of in Haywards Heath. “Unless you have a better idea.”

“It’s nice. Her food’s good.” Milfoil turned back. “Are you really hungry now? ‘Cause I could put my mane up.”

I didn’t know much about pony fashion, or fashion in general, so it was safest to let her decide. “Whatever you think is best.”

•••••

Unsurprisingly, she had a wide variety of brushes that were all designed to be held with a hoof. It felt like it would be rude to stay in the hall as she finished grooming herself; if she had a problem with brushing her mane with an audience, she would have told me to wait downstairs. Just the same, it was weird to watch. Like I’d accidentally stumbled into the girl’s locker room and they were too polite to kick me out.

She twisted her mane up into a half-bun and held it in place with a couple of springy metal clips with enameled flowers on them.

It took me embarrassingly long to notice that they matched her cutie mark.

•••••

After dinner, we went back to my house. It was dark out, but only just—we’d cut our night a bit short in deference to Windflower. I could have had a bit of a fire going, but I hadn’t thought of that; I was still too used to human conveniences as opposed to the slower tempo of things in Equestria.

Milfoil went up to my bathroom, and when she came back down she wasn’t wearing her skirt anymore. I wasn’t entirely sure what to think about that.

She did have a blanket folded over her back: the comforter off my bed.

There was no telling when she’d put the bottle of wine under the couch. She’d had plenty of opportunity, and while back on Earth I would have thought it strange that my neighbor was going into my house without my knowledge, here it felt natural.

We snuggled up on the couch together, vying for position until we’d found a way to sit that was comfortable to both of us, and then we waited.

I was still the furthest away from the hall, in order to give Windflower a comforting pony face to see first.

There wasn’t a lot to do while we waited, and back on Earth I might have suggested watching some throwaway movie, but they didn’t have TVs in Equestria. So we talked, and I found myself running my hand through Milfoil’s mane, even though some small part of my brain said that I shouldn’t, especially once I’d unfastened her pins and let her mane down.

I don’t know how long we sat in front of the fire, cuddled up under my comforter. We’d killed most of the bottle of wine, and I’d gotten up a few times to add more logs to the fire, and then suddenly Milfoil’s ears were turned away from me, down the hallway, and not long after that, a ghostly muzzle appeared, followed by most of the rest of Windflower’s head.

Chapter 26
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The Haunting

Chapter 26

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I didn’t want to spook Windflower, so I very slowly lowered my hand until it was resting on top of Milfoil’s back. Just in case it looked like I was attacking her.

Windflower was trembling but she didn’t turn and flee. She kept her eyes and ears locked on the scene in front of her, undoubtedly trying to make sense of it.

I couldn’t think of anything I could do that would be comforting to her, except for nothing. No noises, no movements—if I could force myself to look away, no eye contact. Certainly nothing that could be considered a threat either towards her or Milfoil.

The three of us probably stayed frozen like that for a couple minutes, and then Windflower took a step forward.

It wasn’t a proper step; how could it have been? Nevertheless, she moved one foreleg and then the other and more of her came into the living room, and at long last she took her eyes off me, just for a moment, turning instead to see the row of valerian and yarrow plants lined up by the window. It was the first time she’d come into the living room that I knew of since I’d put them there. Where had the flowers in the garden gone? Did she feel a bit of pride at having solved that particular puzzle?

If the living room arrangement had been a little bit different, I could have gotten up off the couch and retired to the kitchen. She and Milfoil could go over and look at the plants, since they drew her interest. But as it was, I’d have to get up and move a little bit closer to her to get into the kitchen, and I was sure that would be too much movement.

For just an instant, I wondered what she’d do if I went the other way and started grabbing flowers and yanking them out of their pots. Would she try and stop me?

If she didn’t, Milfoil would.

I should have been better prepared. I knew she’d be coming downstairs; she’d done it the past few nights. I could have had something ready for her, something else that would draw her attention, something that might demonstrate that I wasn’t a threat anymore.

Milfoil eased out from under the blanket and when she had all four hooves on the floor, she took a couple of sideways steps along the couch.

Windflower took another hesitant step forward. Now the majority of her body was in the living room, and she had the opportunity to look around more.

The fire also drew her attention, but not for long. She kept looking back at Milfoil and me, maybe making sure that we weren’t trying to sneak up on her.

She finally had had enough of her exploration, and backed into the hallway. Once her head had vanished entirely, she turned—I caught a brief glimpse of her ghostly tail—and then she was gone.

•••••

Milfoil thought she might come back. I was less sure—she’d never come back before, but then she’d never been aware of me and not fled, either. Granted, I had only one example to draw on, and in that case I’d scared her, but still.

There was more wine, and it was cozy on the couch, so there was no reason for us to cut the night short.

•••••

I hadn’t meant to spend the night on the couch with Milfoil. It had just sort of happened. As it got late, it felt like it would be rude to kick her out, and I also thought it would be rude to go up to my bedroom and leave her down in the living room all by herself.

I could have moved to my armchair; that would have been less intimate, but it wasn’t nearly as cozy.

While I was no expert on pony social customs, I thought that there was a good chance we’d moved past what was a normal relationship with a neighbor. Like so many other things, I didn’t really have an expert to ask. Milfoil was the pony I most trusted for advice, and in this case she was unlikely to be a neutral source.

•••••

I usually made a simple breakfast for myself, just eggs and toast, and I had more than enough to share.

•••••

It was snowing when I left work—it wasn’t a market day. The ponies seemed to be trying to keep the clouds over Haywards Heath, although many of them were drifting over the woods. Occasionally, they’d get wrangled and brought back to town, but it looked like if they got far enough away or weren’t producing enough snow, the pegasi just let them drift off.

It always felt colder when the sun wasn’t out, but at least there wasn’t any wind.

Right from the beginning, I should have set up a search grid. I had no idea how I’d found it so easily the first time around. I was more convinced after each day of searching and not finding that some power had led me there.

I hadn’t asked Milfoil if she’d help, but I was sure she would. I thought that she didn’t want to step on my toes.

I should have asked. I shouldn’t have to be doing this all by myself.

There was still no sign of her hollow, and I was sure that I was further to the west than I should have been. It was hard to know for sure; with the snow on the ground and the leaves off the trees, nothing looked the same as it had before.

If there had been a higher power guiding me, the problem might be that I wasn't listening like I ought to have been. The last time, I’d been distracted, unfocused, but perhaps more open to spiritual guidance. Or maybe it was because I didn’t have one of her toys.

What if her resting place was hidden from me since I didn’t have a token of hers? On Earth, that would have been a crazy thing to think, but here in Equestria is was just possible.

I hadn’t climbed a tree in years, but since there was one with inviting branches that I could get up easily enough, I thought that the additional distance it would allow me to see would be worth it. Maybe I’d find something that triggered my memory.

Sometimes the best way to find something is to not look for it. So instead of focusing on something specific, I tried to get a sense of the forest in general, a feel for the overall shape of things.

That might have worked in a story, but it didn’t work for me. There was nothing that I could see that looked anything like the little hollow where she lived.

I didn’t climb down from the tree right away. Windflower would have known I was out there, since she’d surely found the duck. Would she have made an attempt to hide her resting spot? Did she not want it to be discovered?

Maybe the thing to do would be to leave it alone until springtime, or until she led me back to it herself.

Or maybe I was just rationalizing my failure, and the right thing to do was look until I found it, even if it took me the entire winter.

The woods are a big place, and they look different in the snow, I told myself as I slogged back to my house. If nothing else, when we’ve got more trust between us, she’ll lead me back. If that’s what she wants.

What did the world look like to her now? Heck, what did the world normally look like to ponies? Real equines were colorblind. Ponies probably weren’t, since they came in so many different colors, but maybe they were and didn’t know that they were so many different colors. Or maybe they had better vision than I did, and saw things that I could not.

That had been on my mind when I’d first seen Windflower, and I’d dropped it from consideration after Milfoil had also seen her, but did she see things that I didn’t? Was I being dumb again, and if I invited Milfoil to go with me, she’d be able to track Windflower?

It wouldn’t hurt to ask. At the very worst, there would be two of us bumbling through the woods instead of just me.

•••••

Milfoil didn’t hesitate at all when I asked, and once I got home from work, the two of us set out into the woods. It was snowing again, and she wore a hat and scarf and a set of snow boots. That seemed like overkill; surely her shoes would be plenty. If she wore them, that is. I realized that I didn’t know for sure; since the old stallion wore shoes, I’d made the assumption that all ponies did, but I hadn’t really looked that closely at her hooves, or else I had seen and I just hadn’t really noticed. And now that I was wondering about it, it was going to bug me until I did get a look.

The new snow covered the tracks I’d made before, and I regretted not using the ribbon to mark where Windflower wasn’t.

We probably spent more time talking than looking, and concluded that it was impossible to know for sure if our vision was equivalent or different by just discussing it. I thought about trying to make some color blindness tests, but I didn’t know the science behind it well enough to prove anything. Still, if they had them for ponies, I could see if I could pass it, and that might tell me something.

Milfoil wasn’t sure if they existed—she’d never taken one—but told me that there was an eye doctor who came around every month or so and that I could ask him.

She did have a better sense of smell and better hearing than I did, which I thought was unfair.

We stayed out later than I would have by myself, and didn’t get back to town until after dark. The clouds had cleared and the moon was out, so we weren’t stumbling through the woods.

Ironically, it was Windflower who guided us home. I spotted her as we came across a ridge, and the two of us both watched for a moment as she glided across the snow, her front legs moving across a ground she no longer touched.

When she was almost out of view, I tied two ribbons to a tree, and then the two of us jogged along behind her.

“Do you think she’ll be mad that there isn’t a fire?”

“I don’t know.” Milfoil was in better shape than I was, or quadrupeds were natural sprinters. “I don’t think so. She might wonder why not, though. We’ll want to be cautious when we go in the house.”

“Just opening the door shouldn’t scare her. She knows you live there.”

“I’m not sure if she does.” I ducked under a branch. “She should.”

“I’ll go in first, and get a fire going, if she hasn’t come downstairs yet. If she has, we’ll play it by ear.”

“I don’t want to scare her. Can you give me some kind of a sign when you want me to come in the living room? Wag your tail or something?”

“I’m not a dog.”

“I’m not implying . . . I haven’t got a tail, I don’t know what you call all your tail movements, okay? Something like a dog wagging its tail; that’s something I can understand. Like a happy wag, not an angry sort of thing.” Did dogs have an angry tail-wag? They probably did.

Milfoil sighed. “I’ll . . . I guess I can wag my tail. If I have to.”

Chapter 27
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The Haunting

Chapter 27

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

“She isn’t in the living room yet,” Milfoil whispered.

“She might be playing in the attic, and planning to come down later. She’d probably know that since there isn’t any smoke coming from the chimney that nobody’s downstairs.” I had to make a decision—wait in the kitchen or sit in the living room with Milfoil. Since I was hungry, it was an easy decision to make. “I’ll cook dinner. I guess if she doesn’t show up by the time it’s ready, we’ll rethink the plan, otherwise—”

She sighed. “Wag my tail.” Her ears drooped and then perked back up. “Or I could just come into the kitchen and get you.”

“I think—I’m still worried about moving too quick, about scaring her again. But, you should do whatever you think is best. I’ll keep an eye on your, on your tail.”

Milfoil turned her head and stuck her tongue out at me, then went the rest of the way into the living room to get the fire started, while I got the stove going again. I’d figured out how to bank the fire decently well so it kept radiating out some heat and would relight itself when new wood was put in.

As I prepared a pot of soup, I kept looking into the living room. Milfoil had taken a seat on the couch where I could see her easily enough, and whenever I caught her eye, she’d shake her head.

I hadn’t thought of this before, but it was possible that Windflower was hiding in a cupboard. She might have been downstairs already, looking in the kitchen, and when she heard the back door open, went for the quickest bolt-hole available to her.

There wasn’t much I could do about that, except open the doors slowly and not open any if I didn’t have to.

What was she up to? Why hadn’t she come down yet?

•••••

The soup was progressing nicely when it finally hit me, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t already realized why she wasn’t coming down. She must know by now that there was a fire, and that meant that somebody was home—but she didn’t hear any talking, so for all she knew, it was only me.

“I don’t think she’s going to come downstairs,” I said. No sense in whispering it. She could be upstairs listening for our voices, maybe just far enough away that if she heard me walking up the stairs she could beat a hasty retreat. “Not when it’s quiet.”

“You might be right.” Milfoil looked down the hallway one more time. “I could call for her.”

“I think she’d be happier coming down when she wants to. She’s not a dog to be called into the living room.”

“If she comes on her own, you could ask her to wag her tail.”

“I’m sorry.” I went to the kitchen door and leaned against the frame. “Look, if I had a tail, I’d want to wag it.”

“First, how do you know? If you had a tail, you might think differently. Second, you’re dripping soup on your arm.”

“I am?” I was still holding the spoon, and I was indeed dripping soup on my arm, so I did the logical thing and licked the drops off. “Hmm, not bad.”

“Is that how human chefs taste their food?”

“Not normally,” I said. “Well, I don’t know for sure; I’ve never worked in a professional kitchen. But I’ve watched Gordon Ramsay on TV, and he never did it.”

Milfoil giggled, and I swear she wagged her tail. “It smells good.”

“I’d like to let it reduce down some more before we eat,” I said. “It’s still too thin.”

•••••

I didn’t need Milfoil to signal me that Windflower had come downstairs; she turned towards the hallway and so I went back to the pot, keeping an eye out for a signal.

Once again, Milfoil wound up leaving the couch to approach Windflower more closely. I almost completely lost sight of her, but whether by accident or design, I could still see her right flank and more importantly her tail.

Milfoil lowered her voice and shifted her tone into mommy mode. “It’s okay, Windflower, nopony’s going to hurt you. You’re safe here.”

There was a bit of a hesitation, and while Windflower didn’t say anything—I was fairly certain that she couldn’t—she must have gestured towards the kitchen, towards where she’d heard my voice.

“He’s not a monster. He’s nice. He’s kind of dumb sometimes, and he’s really sorry that he scared you. He didn’t mean to.”

I wished that I could see what she was doing, but I didn’t dare move from the soup pot. She was engaging with Milfoil and that was the most important thing. Maybe I was kind of dumb sometimes, but but I wasn’t dumb enough to go into the living room and ruin everything.

“Yes, the flowers are pretty, aren’t they? He got them for you, because he knew you liked them.”

Another little pause, then: “You can go over and look at them closer if you want. He’ll stay in the kitchen, I won’t let him come out.”

I got the message loud and clear. There was going to be no tail-wagging as a signal; if Windflower decided she wanted me to come out of the kitchen, Milfoil would tell me directly; if not, I’d stay right where I was.

Luckily, I didn’t have to move around much, so I kept my back to the door. As curious as I was about what the filly was up to, I thought in the long term I’d get a better result if I was looking the other way if and when Windflower decided to look into the kitchen. Monsters didn’t stir soup.

•••••

After Windflower had left, the two of us ate dinner. The soup wound up a little burned, but we didn’t care.

“She’s still really nervous,” Milfoil said. “She kept looking into the kitchen to see what you were doing.”

“I don’t blame her.” I didn’t—I was surprised that she was brave enough to come into the living room at all.

“She’ll figure out that you’re not a threat sooner or later,” Milfoil promised.

“Just dumb.”

She had the courtesy to blush at my words. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Why not? It’s true. I was dumb, and I’m doing my best to make it better.”

“I know.” She touched a hoof to my shoulder. “She’ll come around, you’ll see. It might take her a while, because—”

I nodded. “I just wish that we could find her resting place. I’d feel a lot better about that. I—I’m the only one who’s seen it, who knows where it is, and if something were to happen to me. . . .” But I didn’t really know where it was, either. If there weren’t snow on the ground, I’d recognize it if I saw it, but for all I knew we’d gone past it already.

“I know, too. And now that we know it’s out there, we can keep looking until we find it. You don’t have to talk like that.”

“Just seeing her, it reminds me of my own mortality.”

“Ssh, don’t think about that.” She leaned forward, and her muzzle brushed gently against my cheek, and without even thinking I turned my head and kissed her right on the nose.

She jerked back and I stammered out an apology, which became far more heartfelt as she pressed her forehoof to my lips. She did wear shoes, I noticed.

“I wasn’t expecting that.” She touched her hoof to her nose. “I thought I was gonna have to be the one.”

“I’m not that dumb.”

Her cheeks were flushed and mine were, too. “It’s, a lot of stallions are kinda oblivious and you’ve gotta sort of—I wasn’t sure, you’re hard to read.”

I put my arm around her. It was strange, she didn’t sit like a human, she had her rump on the couch and was also supporting herself with her forelegs, so my hand was touching her shoulder and sort of her bicep or whatever that was on ponies. “I’m not exactly an expert on pony body language, you know.”

“So now what?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of customs ponies have about this kind of thing—about dating.”

“And I don’t know what humans do. I read one book that says that my family is supposed to give you a herd of goats.”

I laughed. “That’s for a marriage, and that’s not something that most people do any more. Were you reading books on human dating and marriage customs?”

“Maybe.”

“Were you going to leave them lying around where I’d see them if I didn’t pick up any of your other hints?”

“I could have. They’re not due back to the library for another week.”

“I should have gone to the library and found a book on how to tell if a mare’s coming on to you. I never thought—”

She brushed her cheek against mine. “Hmm?”

“All of this. I never would have thought that my house would have a ghost or that I’d fall in love with my neighbor who probably thought I was crazy.”

“You grew on me, ‘cause even though you’re kind of crazy, you’ve got a good heart and you’re really nice.”

“We should kiss again.”

She nodded. “But this time, let’s do it right.”

“I agree.”

She leaned in again, and this time we did it right.

Chapter 28
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The Haunting

Chapter 28

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

Milfoil and I spent another fruitless afternoon trekking through the woods, finally stopping our search as the sun touched the tops of the trees.

“I don’t think we’re going to find her,” Milfoil said.

I’d been thinking the same thing, but hadn’t wanted to say it. “This weekend, we could spend a whole day looking.”

“And if we still don’t find it, what then? Keep looking all winter long?”

“If that’s what it takes.” But my heart wasn’t in it.

“We might not be going into the woods deep enough.”

I nodded—I’d thought of that.

“I hate to give up on her.”

“We’re not giving up on her,” Milfoil reminded me. “If she was still alive and lost in the woods, I’d be out here until she was found—you know that. When we first searched for her, nopony grumbled or suggested that we could go home and try again later.”

I’d thought about that, too. There would have been a flood of ponies streaming into the woods, pegasi flying overhead, unicorns might have used spells to search for her. One thing that ponies had was dogged determination, and I was willing to bet that every single one of them would have looked until they collapsed on their hooves and not once complained about it.

And I hoped that I would have done the same.

I also hoped that I’d never have to find out.

“She can lead us,” I said. “I’ve thought about trying to follow her after she leaves my house, but it’s too risky.”

“If she sees you, she’ll think you’re hunting her.”

“If she wants, though, she knows where to go. She might beckon you to follow her.” She probably wouldn’t make the same offer to me, and I didn’t blame her for it.

“I could wear a ribbon in my mane, or a bow on my tail,” Milfoil said. “And then tie it to a tree on my way back out of the woods.”

“Yeah.”

•••••

Tomorrow, instead of going into the woods, I was going to go to the market. I was nearly out of food in my house and while I was sure that Milfoil had plenty, it didn’t feel right to ask. I’m sure she wouldn’t have minded at all, and it was just my foolish pride, the idea that as a man, I should be the provider, even though Milfoil would have been a better choice.

“How long does it take for a pony to know if she can trust someone?”

“You just sort of get a feeling,” Milfoil said.

“Is it always right?”

“No. I wish it was.” She fell silent for a moment, blowing on the embers in the fireplace. “It’s not some kind of pony magic if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“So it’s kind of like on Earth—words and actions are what matter?”

“Yeah.” Milfoil stepped into the kitchen. “Mostly. I knew even though you were lying to me about walking into a lamp post that you were a good po—person. You had a good reason to lie.”

“I must have felt something, too,” I said. “Us humans are usually wary, and I don’t think I would have admitted what I was doing if I didn’t think I should trust you.”

“I think that Windflower kind of knows. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have come back at all, even after you put all the flowers out. Maybe she didn’t think you were doing it for her, but it was enough to overcome her fright.”

“I need to tell her great uncle. Or, you know him, you could ‘happen’ to meet him and bring it up.”

Milfoil shook her head. “You ought to be the one—he’ll think you’re up to something if I do it.”

“I’m just—”

“I’ll come with you,” she said. “He was asking me about her, you know.”

“What?” I didn’t know; that was something she’d never mentioned before.

“Oh, yes. He thought she might not be resting easily, but he didn’t know. He said he had a feeling, but I thought it was just grief and indulged him. I should have had a better watch.”

“There was no way you could have known.” That raised a lot of questions in my mind, and for a moment I thought about trying to press her for more answers, but what good would it have done? The past was gone, unchangeable, and I would have scoffed if she’d come over and warned me that there might be a ghost haunting my house. Especially if she said she had it on his word.

“We’ll do it after market tomorrow,” I decided. “I want to get some more food—I’m almost out.”

“I’ve got plenty at my house. You should have said something.”

“And then we’ll see if he’s at the restaurant,” I said. “We can go together, have dinner there, talk to him, and let him know what I know—what we know. Invite him over, maybe? Windflower might be more receptive if he’s here.”

•••••

She met me at work, which was sure to send the gossip machine into overdrive. I didn’t care; I was sure that we could navigate the market more quickly with her at my side.

At least she hadn’t dressed up. I would have questioned her motives if she had. That was a rude thing to think, but I couldn’t help being a suspicious human. Maybe in time such thoughts would fade into the background, but for now they were still present.

She didn’t introduce me as her boyfriend to all the ponies selling produce and pasture grasses. That was something that I’d worried about a little bit: there would be questions and I didn’t know how I might answer them. I didn’t know how ponies in general felt about interspecies dating.

Luckily, it never came up. We were just two beings shopping together for whatever reason, and nobody questioned it, and in all honestly it didn’t feel any different than it had the last time she’d helped me out at market.

Still, the idea nagged at me, but I ignored that tiny bit of doubt, attributing it to leftover human expectations or human morals.

•••••

Milfoil didn’t question my organizational system in the cupboards, and after we’d gotten all my purchases put away, we got ready for dinner. It was so much easier and efficient to work as a team. I didn’t get the hang of her brushes right away, but she was patient with it. As for my own grooming, she was far better than a mirror, and offered helpful criticism. And I had to admit that while I’d been a bit tense at first, it was calming to brush her and to have her comb my hair. At least once I’d gotten over the irrational fear that she might stick the comb in my eye.

Normally, I’d have been looking for a restaurant based on the menu, but this time we walked around looking through the windows for a sight of him. I let her guide me; she surely knew his routines better than I did.

We must have passed three quarters of the restaurants in Haywards Heath before she finally turned and pushed open a door, and sure enough, there he was, sitting alone at a table. His ears went up when he saw me and then they kind of flicked back and dropped a bit before perking up again.

There were some restaurants in Manehattan that were fancy enough that a maître d' sat me, but this was a far cry from that. It was honestly the pony equivalent of Waffle House.

“Mind if we sit here?” I asked, just to be polite.

He nodded his assent.

•••••

I waited until we’d gotten our drinks and ordered food before laying it all out for him. At first, Milfoil stayed mostly silent—there wasn’t much she could add. I had the vague hope that her presence would deter him from taking another swing at me, if that was what he had in mind. That, and moral support. I probably would have muddled my way through it or just wimped out and kept my mouth shut, but I couldn’t do that with her sitting next to me.

All things considered, it probably wasn’t the best place to have had this conversation. In a movie, it would have been in the living room, or maybe the cemetery, or possibly the woods. I did keep my voice low; I was still a bit nervous that other diners might overhear and label me as crazy, although if I was, at least I wasn’t alone in my delusion.

He occasionally glanced over at Milfoil, as if to verify that what I was saying was true. A couple of times I caught her nodding at him when he shot her a questioning look. Given that I was sitting in a pony-operated restaurant located in a pony town in a world that was full of ponies and magic, I didn’t think a ghost story was all that far-fetched.

Once I’d gotten to her returning to my house and interacting—talking was too grandiose—with Milfoil, she took up the tale, and I breathed a sigh of relief at having gotten through the entire conversation without taking a punch to the face. I think he was having trouble processing it all, and there was a brief moment that I felt bad that his dinner was completely cold. He hadn’t taken a single bite since I’d started talking.

I had assumed at the end of the tale, he’d provide some sort of guidance, some instruction about what to do next. I’m sure Milfoil expected the same.

He had no idea.

I should have considered that possibility and not gotten my hopes up. Should have considered that he would be just as clueless as we were. If hauntings were commonplace in Equestria, the situation would have been resolved before I even got to Haywards Heath. One of the ponies would have seen Windflower already and would have known what to do.

I sort of faded into the background as he and Milfoil discussed a few possibilities. There wasn’t much that I could add, I didn’t know the ponies in this town, and therefore didn’t have any idea who might be able to shed some additional light. If I had, things would have turned out quite differently.

We could have stayed at the restaurant all night, discussing our options for going forward, but both Milfoil and I wanted to get back home before Windflower. It was looking unlikely that we’d make a big breakthrough at the restaurant, and it was better to spend our time making small progress with Windflower.

The old stallion must have thought that, too, because he finally had the waitress clear the half-eaten food off the table, and over our protests paid for dinner for all of us.

I’d gone in half convinced that we should invite him over. Milfoil was more neutral, pointing out that we didn’t know what he might do, nor did we know how she might react, to which I’d countered that she’d taken the blanket and I honestly didn’t think it was because she was cold. If a blanket provided her some comfort, how much more might he be able to provide? No matter what I wanted or Milfoil wanted, what mattered most was what Windflower wanted, and I couldn’t forget that.

“Do you want to come over and see her?” I asked. Milfoil’s ears drooped—I probably should have discussed it with her further, or at least phrased it better.

Chapter 30
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The Haunting

Chapter 30

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

The fire had burned low before Milfoil poked me with a hoof. I couldn’t remember how long I’d been on the floor; I might have fallen asleep.

Windflower was still on the floor next to Milfoil. Her eyes were open, but I thought she was dozing, since she was only glowing dimly.

As soon as I moved, though, she started glowing more brightly again, and I wondered if it was fright. That was a poor defensive mechanism, although since she was already dead, it probably didn’t matter.

I looked away from her and tended to the fire instead. If she was going to leave, there was nothing I could or would do to stop her. If she wanted to stay, it would be much more comfortable for the living if I built the fire back up.

It would have been nice to have a blanket or two, but I didn’t want to scare her by cutting off her escape route. I also wondered what would happen if I tried to put my blanket over her. Would it go right through? Or was that something that she could turn on and off at will? Now wasn’t the time to find out. Tomorrow, perhaps, we could sit in front of the fireplace with blankets and offer her a spot under the blanket if she wanted.

When I went back to Milfoil, I laid down on my back. That was more comfortable.

•••••

Neither Milfoil nor I got very much sleep. Windflower finally left about an hour before sunrise. I didn’t hear her leave but when I looked over, she was gone. So was the fire.

Milfoil was awake, and I rolled on my side and put my arms around her. It wasn’t fair how much warmer she was.

She nuzzled my cheek, then kissed it, and I scratched her lightly behind the ear.

“Mmmm, that’s nice.”

“Human fingers are the best.” I reached out to get her other ear. “What time did Windflower leave?”

“Not that long ago.” Milfoil sighed. “She tried to hug me and . . . it didn’t quite work out. Not like she expected it to. She was pretty frustrated about that, poor thing. I told her that it was okay, and I told her that she was welcome back any time. Then she nuzzled my cheek. That was really cold, but I didn’t flinch away from it.

“She went over and looked at you for a bit and I thought she might want to nuzzle you too, but she didn’t.”

We’d probably dodged a bullet there; if she had, I would have jerked awake and scared her off. “Do you think we’re helping?”

“I don’t know.” Milfoil got her legs under her and stood up, then stretched out, cracking several joints in the process. “Stars, that feels better. I don’t think I’ve spent that long lying on the floor since I was a filly.”

Since she was up, there was no point in me attempting to get a bit more sleep. “Me, either.”

“You used to be a filly?”

“You know what I meant.”

She stuck her tongue out at me. “Are you gonna take a shower before work?”

“I probably should. Clear out some of the cobwebs, and relax my muscles.”

“I’ll make breakfast, then.”

•••••

I spent my day at work alternating between trying to find a comfortable position and trying not to fall asleep. I was too old to spend a night on the floor and be at my best the next day, and once work was done, I really wanted to take a nap. I’d promised Milfoil that I was going to go to market with her, though, and she’d be expecting that.

When I knocked on her door, she didn’t answer.

It still felt weird, but I let myself into her house. She wasn’t downstairs, nor was she upstairs. It wouldn’t be like her to be hiding from me for some reason, and I didn’t think she’d have forgotten that we were supposed to meet and go to market.

Which meant she was probably at my house.

I’d been stupid to not go there first. I pulled her door shut and looked at my house, expecting to see her at a window, although if she’d been watching it was more likely that she would have just come over when she saw me enter.

Her saddlebags were in the kitchen, draped across a chair; other than that, there was no sign of her.

“Milfoil?” I didn’t shout, but I was loud enough that she should have been able to hear me anywhere but in the attic.

She didn’t reply.

I was feeling a bit apprehensive. She’d been nuzzled by Windflower last night, what did that mean? Was it friendly, or something else? Was that a kiss of death? Had she been lured out into the woods herself? Or just turned into a ghost where she stood? Her saddlebags were neatly on the chair, they didn’t look like they’d been dropped, but maybe she’d had the presence of mind to take them off first when the transformation started to happen, or maybe she’d picked them up after. Windflower could carry some things in her mouth, and Milfoil was a neat enough pony she wouldn’t want to leave her saddlebags on the floor.

The house was too quiet.

I thought about just leaving. Just walking out the door and never coming back. We’d been wrong; Windflower wasn’t as innocent as she pretended to be. It was a trap, and Milfoil had gotten caught. That was why the old stallion had refused my offer: he knew. Maybe Windflower would find peace now and Milfoil would be the one doomed to wander, until she had lured some poor soul into her trap. This whole thing had been a setup from the very beginning, and I’d fallen for it hard enough to drag Milfoil in, and she’d been the one to pay the price.

•••••

I found Milfoil in my bed, fast asleep. Sprawled out on her side, hugging a pillow between her forelegs, and I resisted the urge to just run over and poke her to make sure she was still real.

It was completely obvious why: she was just tired from last night. She’d come over to wait for me and decided to take a nap and of course that wouldn’t have been comfortable with her saddlebags on, so she’d taken them off.

She hadn’t left a note because she hadn’t felt the need. She’d probably planned on a short nap, but had been so tired she fell deeply asleep and didn’t wake up when I came over. I’d gotten all worked up over absolutely nothing. If there was a prize for jumping to conclusions, I’d win it for sure.

I could have woken her up and we could have gone shopping, but I figured that between the two of us, we had enough food to last until the next market, and if we didn’t, there were always restaurants. It was best to let sleeping ponies lie.

And I was tired, too. It was so much easier to just join her, to forget about the market.

She only half-woke when I stole the pillow from between her forelegs, and as soon as I’d settled into bed, she draped a leg across my chest and tucked her muzzle against my neck, and before too long she was fast asleep again.

•••••

When I woke, there was something hard pressed against my mouth, something that tasted a bit like metal and dirt and grass and I resisted the urge to swat it away.

I opened my eyes and it took me a moment to figure out that there was a hoof pressed gently against my lips, so I cautiously turned my head towards Milfoil.

When our eyes met, she removed her hoof and tipped her head towards the foot of the bed.

We’d slept longer than either of us had intended. We’d slept through market and through dinner and well into the night.

Windflower had come, and she hadn’t found us downstairs. Maybe she’d checked upstairs first; whatever the case, she’d found us in my bed, and she’d decided to join us.

She was curled up at the foot of the bed, her muzzle tucked down on her forelegs, and her ghostly back half looped around her like a long tail.

She’d also brought her raggety stuffed pony down from the attic; that was sitting beside her.

“She’s so cute,” I whispered.

Milfoil nodded. “I was gonna yell at you for not waking me up for market, but. . . .”

“We’ve got plenty of food. It doesn’t matter.” I glanced back down at her; her ear wasn’t pointed in our direction, which meant she probably wasn’t awake enough to overhear us. Just the same, I picked my words with care. “Before, when I was—when I had my box-fort, I would take a nap in the afternoon so I’d be awake when she came.”

“You told me.”

I nodded—I was thinking out loud. “And we don’t know when she normally sleeps. If she’s generally keeping a nocturnal schedule, maybe we should try and do the same, for her benefit.”

“Stay up all night?”

“Not all night, but later. Be ready for her. I got a book for her, and I’d like to see if it draws her interest, now that she trusts us more. Read it to her.”

“She can read.”

“She could read,” I reminded Milfoil. “We don’t know if she can now.”

“How would she forget?”

I shrugged. “You ever been a ghost? Maybe she can’t see what we can see.”

“Well, it won’t hurt to try,” Milfoil said. “She might enjoy that.”

Chapter 31
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The Haunting

Chapter 31

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I met with the old stallion to keep him updated on our progress. It didn’t seem like we’d made all that much, but when I considered that a few weeks ago she wouldn’t even go to my house at all, and now she felt comfortable sleeping at the foot of the bed, it was remarkable.

Obviously, Milfoil had played a big part in that. The flowers I’d bought had certainly helped entice her, but if it had just been me in the house, I think Windflower would still be shyly peeking from behind the plants at the very best, and likely quickly vacating whenever she saw me. But since Milfoil didn’t think I was a monster, Windflower didn’t, either.

I also told him that we were still not sure what outcome we were moving towards, that Milfoil was still working on getting her to communicate what she wanted.

“Sounds like you’re starting to get attached to her.”

The way he said that, it sounded like a bad thing, but I wasn’t sure what the right answer was. “She’s—I think that she’s sort of like a surrogate child to Milfoil.”

“Mares are like that. Always wanting to coddle and protect. It’s a natural instinct, but if the time comes, is she going to be able to make the right choice?”

“I hope so.” I wasn’t going to lie to him; he’d know if I did.

“Because if she wants to go, you’ll have to let her. You’ll have to help her.”

“Yes.” That would have been easier before I knew her, before I’d seen her playing with her toys or digging at the yard or resting in front of the fireplace. Even so, I knew she wasn’t a filly anymore, and I’d told myself that it was my duty to help her find peace in whatever way possible.

Whether I could do it or not would remain to be seen.

“What if she wants to see her parents again? Can you arrange that?”

“If I have to drag them all the way back myself, I will.” He sighed. “It would be hard on them, especially to see her and then lose her again, but if that’s what has to be done. . . .”

•••••

It was nice that it was wintertime; there wasn’t all that much to do in the afternoons. We’d have to figure out a schedule for market, but I could do that on my way home from work. At least get the staples. We could cook late, or honestly skip dinner completely. I’d done that sometimes when I was spying on Windflower. Breaking up my sleep left me feeling tired and it had gotten to the point where obsession and exhaustion had overcome hunger pangs.

Milfoil might have ideas, too. Ponies didn’t go for TV dinners or microwaves, but they surely had low-prep meals, things they could eat in a hurry. Hopefully it was something I could also eat, and not just a few mouthfuls of hay.

I had to do a little bit of rearranging in the living room, shifting around the armchair so that it also faced the hallway. I wanted Windflower to always be able to see who was in the room before she entered; that way, she’d be able to choose rather than be surprised when she came in.

Bathtime for Biscuit was still where I’d left it, so I got that out and set it on the table while Milfoil built the fire. And that was it; our preparations were complete.

“We’re going to have to wake up this time,” I reminded her. “Before she goes through the house looking for us.”

“I know. It’s weird taking a nap when you’re not all that tired and the sun’s still up.”

“It takes time to get accustomed to, trust me.” I folded the covers back and sat on the bed to take my shirt off.

•••••

We didn’t sleep, but I still felt at least a little bit refreshed when it was time to get out of bed.

Milfoil wanted to see what would happen if I was alone in the living room when Windflower came downstairs, so she offered to cook dinner. She thought it would be a good measure of Windflower’s confidence. I thought it might scare her, and she might not be willing to approach. Thus far, she’d wanted to make sure that Milfoil was between us, or I was asleep.

Still, I was also interested in finding out, and no matter what we’d learn something. If I did scare her off, Milfoil and I could switch places. She’d probably retreat and check again, rather than leave entirely.

Since I didn’t want to be just staring down the hallway when she arrived, I picked up Bathtime for Biscuit. I’d paged through it, but I hadn’t read it, and even though it was far below my age level, I was interested in seeing how it turned out.

Unsurprisingly, Biscuit did not want to take a bath. And I was somewhat proud of myself for figuring out that the filly was going to fall into the wash basin a few pages before she actually did.

The book did very little to alleviate boredom. There just wasn’t that much to it, and I didn’t learn anything new on a second reading. I should have gotten a different, smaller book and put it inside.

It was hard to pretend to be engrossed in a foal’s book. Still, if it worked, it would be worth it.

•••••

In movies at least, there are secret agents who pretend to read newspapers while spying on their targets, and the audience is meant to believe that they had been on station before we see them, watching alertly while pretending not to. If such people existed in real life, I admired them. It was something I wasn’t cut out to do.

I finally put the book back on the table; I couldn’t look at it any more. I just couldn’t. Even though I knew that if Milfoil saw she might be upset I was deviating from the plan.

I told myself it was only going to be for a minute, and then I’d pick it back up and pretend to be interested in it again.

How aware of our schedule was Windflower? Did she do any reconnaissance before she came into the house? I’d never really noticed, but how hard would it be for her to see a pony shape silhouetted in the kitchen? That would give her a location for Milfoil, but she wouldn’t know where I was.

When she’d come downstairs when we were in front of the fire, she was unlikely to have seen us, unless she went around to the street side. There wasn’t a clear line of sight from the kitchen window.

Of course, that was assuming that her vision still worked like a pony’s. Maybe she could see our auras through the wall.

That didn’t make sense, though: if she could see auras through walls, she would have known I was in the box-fort from day one.

It was too complicated to figure out, and there weren’t any answers to be had in Bathtime for Biscuit.

•••••

Windflower came downstairs when I was putting more wood on the fire. Neither of us spotted each other at first, and then we both saw each other nearly simultaneously. Her ears folded down and then snapped forward again as I took a step back.

She looked around the room and didn’t see Milfoil, so she retreated back to the safety of the hallway.

Once I sat down on the couch, she took a cautious step forward, so I picked up the book and opened it again.

I could tell she was interested; she kept moving forward and back again. She still didn’t trust me enough to approach me without Milfoil, it seemed.

That would come in time.

Her ears turned at the sound of a pot moving on the stove. “Milfoil’s in the kitchen,” I said.

“I’m making stew.”

Windflower’s ears turned in that direction, and she trot-floated along the wall and stuck her head into the kitchen to verify that that was the case.

I could have followed her in, but I didn’t. I stayed where I was and wondered what would happen if she tried to eat something. I was certain she couldn’t, and equally certain that she knew she couldn’t. But what would she think if we set out only two places for dinner? Or if we did set out three, would she sit down and try to eat? Would she get frustrated that she couldn't pick up the spoon and then stick her nose into the stew? What would happen if she did?

Luckily, I didn’t have to find out. When she was satisfied that Milfoil was really in the kitchen, she came back out into the living room. She went around and inspected the plants for long enough that I finally put the book back down and leaned my head back against the cushions and sort of zoned out until she came over to the table and leaned down to look at the book.

•••••

I’d already foreseen the trouble she was about to have. Her hooves couldn’t touch the book, so she leaned down and tried to open the cover with her snout, and that didn’t work, either.

She tilted her head and got a good look at the edges to verify that it was indeed a book and that it ought to open, and then tried again with the same result. I could see that her hooves were slipping into the book and then coming back out of it again, which I suppose was a problem with being incorporeal.

“Here.” I reached for the book myself, and she shied back, away from my hand.

I opened the book to the first page and waited. Her eyes flicked between me and the book, until her curiosity finally won out and she moved forward again.

When she’d read to the end of the page, she moved back from the table and looked up at me hopefully, so I turned the page for her.

•••••

By the time she’d gotten to the end of the book, she was no longer moving back each time I turned a page, no longer nervous of my hands. That was important progress, I thought.

Chapter 32
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The Haunting

Chapter 32

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

Our first week of the new schedule was complicated. I didn’t want to have to read Bathtime for Biscuit ever again, and I was sure that Windflower would get tired of it, too. That meant more foals’ books, which meant a stop at the library, and that cut into naptime.

Therefore, food purchases were delegated to Milfoil. She was quicker at the market and had a better sense of what to buy, anyway, although I couldn’t help but wonder if she was slightly offended that I was pushing human gender roles on her. Or was that something that ponies even cared about?

Sometimes we napped at her house, and sometimes spent the night there after Windflower left. Her house was more lived-in, more comfortable than mine. It fit her like a worn-in baseball glove; it had been fitted to her needs and wants over a period of years, whereas I still hadn’t finished unpacking all my things, and half the house was still in a state of disarray from reorganizing things to fit Windflower’s needs, something I hadn’t anticipated needing to do when I’d first moved in.

All the little trinkets and knick-knacks also really helped out. She didn’t have nearly as much stuff as an equivalent human might have, but she had more than I did. Not that I was jealous of it. Less clutter meant it was easier to keep things clean.

•••••

“Do you have any family to visit for Hearth’s Warming? That’s coming up soon.”

“Yeah, but. . .” Going back to Earth wasn’t really worth the hassle, especially around the holidays. Everything was crowded and busy unless I left early and returned late, and weather could throw even more delays into travel. It was much smoother to go over the summer and spend a week or two.

None of us really cared that much about presents, but we’d always get a few things for a Christmas in July; other than that, I just mailed a few small items for my nieces and nephews.

“. . . I wasn’t planning to.”

“Not planning to!” She turned from the pie crust she was rolling. “That’s what Hearth’s Warming is all about!”

“I’m here, and my family’s back on Earth, and it’s just a pain,” I said. “Not really worth it.”

“Hmm.” She turned back to the crust.

“You’re planning something, aren’t you?” I knew her well enough to ask that question.

“Well, sort of,” she admitted. “My family is getting together for Hearth’s Warming at the farm, and you’re invited.”

“Thank you.”

“And you’ve got to see the pageant. That’s the day before.”

“That’ll be interesting—I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never watched it before.”

Milfoil picked up the crust and set it in a pie tin. “We’ve got to do something for Windflower, but I don’t know what.”

“I don’t know, either.”

“That might be the time to invite her great uncle over. I’ll have to talk to him about it. And we’ll have to decorate your house, too. It wouldn’t be right to leave it so barren.”

“I don’t really have much in the way of Christmas—Hearth’s Warming decorations.”

“That’s okay. We’ve still got time. We can make them together, that will be fun.”

•••••

We’d moved on from Biscuit books. Milfoil and I both agreed that those were below Windflower’s reading and comprehension levels, and the only reason she’d been interested in them at all was because they were new and had pictures.

The librarian had suggested Stranger on a Train, and so far I liked it, and so did Windflower.

•••••

She still was a bit hesitant to come into the living room. She’d always stick her nose in first and see who was there, and she still didn’t trust me alone. As long as she found Milfoil, though, she was content to approach me.

It hurt, a little bit, but I knew that that trust would come eventually.

Sometimes she’d bring one of her toys down from the attic, and one night instead of reading we had a small tea party, all sharing from the common cup. I thought about getting more from the cupboard, but that didn’t seem right.

“I recognized that cup,” Milfoil said after Windflower had left. “I’ve got the rest of the set.”

This was an interesting bit of information. “One of yours? She stole it?”

“Not until recently, and not stole.” Milfoil sighed. “It was a couple of years ago. She’d sometimes have tea parties in the backyard, and I remember that cup got dropped. She asked me if I could fix it, and I said that I couldn’t. She was really upset, and thought that her Mom would be mad at her for breaking it—you know how foals are sometimes.”

Milfoil leaned against my shoulder. “So she got to keep it as a toy, since it wasn’t much use for tea any more, and then after she died, and her parents were moving out, they sold the rest of the cups and I bought them.”

I didn’t want to press her, but I needed to know. “Because they reminded you of her?”

“Because I needed teacups.”

“Oh.”

“I guess that might have been on my mind, too. But I didn’t buy them just for the memories.”

“Her parents sold most of her things, didn’t they?”

Milfoil nodded. “Or just gave them away to other ponies.”

“Do you think she ever goes looking for them? And if she finds them, do you think she steals them back?”

“She might. Do you think that’s something I should ask her?”

“Probably not,” I admitted. “I’m curious, but I don’t think it’s all that important to know.”

•••••

It was well after dark, beyond the usual time that Windflower arrived, and I was starting to get antsy. Over the last few weeks, we’d established a pretty regular schedule—plus, I was curious who the stranger on the train would turn out to be. I had a guess, and I wasn’t going to spoil it by reading ahead.

“Why isn’t she here yet?”

Milfoil shrugged. “Maybe she’s upstairs playing with her toys?”

“We would have heard her, at least I think we would have.”

“Maybe she’s out playing in the snow.” Milfoil got up off the couch. “I’ll go look.”

“Do you think she would?”

“Why not? I would.”

“Alright.” I got up as well and followed her to the kitchen.

The two of us crowded up to the window, and it didn’t take us too long to find her. She was exploring the garden, moving through the stalks that had bent down from the weight of the snow on them, and I swear she was sometimes phasing into the snow and then popping back out somewhere else.

“We should join her,” I decided.

Milfoil had already decided the same. She’d already put a hat on and was stepping into her snow-boots.

It only took a minute or two for us to get dressed for outside. “You go first,” I suggested. “She won’t run from you.”

I saw Windflower’s ears perk up as Milfoil opened the back door, and she cowered into the shelter of the plants before moving back out into the yard. She didn’t stay in the garden very long; she zipped around the border of my yard.

Milfoil wasn’t content to let her have all the fun, and galloped off after her.

I watched them make two laps of the yard together before I remembered I was supposed to go outside and join them. I wasn’t too worried about Windflower fleeing at the sight of me since she was right next to Milfoil, and she didn’t.

Instead, as soon as she saw me, she cut a diagonal line straight across the yard, racing right up to the back steps before ghost-galloping back to Milfoil. It was plainly obvious what she wanted.

Running in snow-boots sucked. I don’t know how Milfoil was managing. Since she was a better runner than me normally, it stood to reason that she’d be better in boots, too; maybe that was it.

I didn’t want to wimp out on them right away, so I did my best to keep up, stumbling and shambling along through the snow.

They lapped me anyways.

When running in circles had gotten boring for Windflower, she made a smaller lap of the garden and then burrowed in with all the plants again. Milfoil followed her, although she mostly stuck to the edges.

Every now and then, Windflower would pop out and then vanish again just as quickly.

It was a game I didn’t think I should participate in unless invited, so I started rolling up snow to make a snowman.

That eventually got Windflower’s attention. She watched me first from the garden, and then moved out in the open when I stacked the middle piece on the base.

Every time I saw a picture of a snowman, it was a neat, orderly thing; mine wasn’t at all. The rolls of snow that made up its body were lopsided and stuck with leaves and other little bits of debris that the snow had picked up. He leaned a little bit, too: I thought he was going to topple when I set the head that Milfoil had rolled up on top of him.

I didn’t have any coal for eyes and a mouth, so I used chips of bark that were sitting at the bottom of my woodpile, and gave him a couple of arms made out of branches.

Windflower studied it, looking at it and then at me, and she finally shook her head.

“She’s an art critic,” I muttered, just loud enough for Milfoil to hear.

“I’ll fix it.” Milfoil stood on her hind legs and grabbed my hat off, then stuck it on the snowman. “There, now it’s the spitting image of you.”

“I’d like to see you do better.”

“You’ll have to wait till tomorrow, and I’ll make a proper snowpony.” She turned to Windflower, who didn’t seem overly impressed by the addition of the hat. “Do you want to come inside and warm up by the fire and read more?”

Windflower nodded, and followed us in through the kitchen door.

Chapter 33
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The Haunting

Chapter 33

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

“Where are you going?”

“Work.” I didn’t want to get up; the house cooled down overnight and Milfoil didn’t. Still, a hot shower helped, and as long as I got dried off and dressed quickly it wasn’t too bad.

“You don’t have to work today.”

“I don’t?” My mind was fuzzy; I still hadn’t gotten entirely used to our new sleep arrangement. And then I remembered. “It’s the weekend.”

“Yup.”

“So I can be lazy all day.”

“No.” She grabbed the covers with her mouth and pulled them back up over me. “But you can be lazy for a while longer.”

“I’ll take what I can get,” I said. Then, since I was already awake, “That set of cups you have, do you think she’d recognize them?”

“I’d be surprised if she didn’t. She recognized her blanket, didn’t she?”

“Yeah, but that’s not the same thing. I don’t think it’s the same thing. Maybe we should bring them over, and . . . well, I don’t know, set them where she can find them, or maybe have another tea party with all the cups.”

“Hmm.” Milfoll had tucked her head just above my shoulder, and was tickling my neck. I didn’t want her to move, though. “I could do that, if you don’t mind if I borrow some of your teacups even though they’re a mismatched set.”

“Bachelors don’t worry about matched tea sets,” I told her. “You can drink coffee out of whatever, that’s a rule.”

“Bachelors, huh?”

“Well, I mean until recently. I haven’t had time to shop for a new set of teacups.”

“And lace curtains.”

“What?”

“For the windows.”

“I don’t need lace curtains for the windows. I don’t need any curtains for the windows except in the bathroom in case a pegasus happens to be flying by. You don’t think I need lace curtains for my windows, do you?” I’d been in her house plenty of times, and she didn’t have lace curtains on her windows.

“The fancy kind, that have a top curtain that’s always over a window and matches the wallpaper.”

“You don’t have them on your windows,” I pointed out. “Not lace, anyway.”

“’Cause I’m an uncaught mare, and I don’t need curtains.”

“You . . .” I leaned over and bopped her lightly on the nose. “Really, though, I don’t need lace curtains, do I? Because I will buy them. There’s this old pony at the market—”

“Chantilly.”

“—yeah, and she totally checks me out every time I walk by.”

Milfoil rolled her eyes. “Don’t be too full of yourself.”

“I promise, I’m not. I will buy you a matching tea set, though.”

“Your cups are just fine. I’m not some snobby Canterlot elite, you know.”

“I know.” I rubbed the sweet spot just behind her ear. “Well, I mean, I don’t know for sure because I’ve never met a snobby Canterlot elite, but there were some ponies in Manehattan that were really stuck-up. Ponies out here are more down-to-earth.”

“It’s ‘cause most of us have our noses in the ground half the time.” She grinned and rubbed her muzzle across my face. “Do you want to make a snowpony with me?”

“Have we come to the sleeping in but not too much part of the morning?”

Milfoil thought about that for a moment. “Not yet—let’s sleep in a bit more.”

•••••

It was unfair that she made an objectively better snowpony. She had a few advantages, I thought: it was daylight, for one; secondly, the pegasi were dropping fresh snow; and finally, she probably had more practice making snowponies than I ever had making snowmen. And I could have done a better job if I’d really tried hard. I could have spent more time shaping the rolls that made up his body and head, and I could have searched around and found some more arm-like sticks.

Even if I had, it still wouldn’t have looked as good as her snowpony.

She’d taken the snowboots off her front hooves to more easily shape it, and she’d also sat in the snow more than once as she worked on her sculpture. I felt cold every time I saw her sit on her bare rump in the snow.

“It only needs one more thing,” she said. “That’s a tail.”

“A branch?”

“Brooms are traditional,” she said. “Can I use yours?”

“If you don’t complain about dirt on the floor.”

“Have I ever?”

“Not yet,” I admitted. “It’s in the kitchen.”

“I know, I saw it on my way to the yard.” It only took her a minute to grab it, and she lined it up and then shoved it into the snowpony’s rump until only the bristles were sticking out. “There we go. Now it’s got a spine, too.”

“Are all pony spines wooden?”

“Probably—I’ve never seen one.” Milfoil stepped back and studied her creation. “I haven’t made a snowpony in a few years. Putting the broom in is sometimes tricky—when I was a foal, I couldn’t always push it hard enough to get it all the way in. Some ponies like to put the broom in early, ‘cause it helps hold the barrel in place.”

“I admit that it’s better than mine. I don’t want you to think that I won’t admit it.”

“I knew you would. I’m pretty decent with my hooves.”

“I think with lots of practice,” I said, “it would be easy. I always thought of hooves as a disadvantage, but you guys make it work.”

“I don’t think I’d know what to do if I had fingers. You make it look easy every time you move your hand.”

“Like this?” I reached down and brushed her forelock back. “I suppose when we’re babies we don’t know and figure it out, but I can’t remember that far back. I remember being clumsy holding a pencil in kindergarten, though.”

“I can remember when my teacher was trying to tell me how to hold a quill and write letters with it, and I thought I’d never figure it out. I wasn’t very good at it, and my mom made me practice and practice until I could make letters right.”

•••••

I brushed all the snow off her before we went back inside to warm up and eat a snack, then she put on her front boots and we went into town so I could make good on my promise to buy more teacups, even though she said it wasn’t really necessary.

“Does it bother you that you cook most of our meals?” I asked. I’d meant to ask her that before. “Or that you’re doing the shopping for food?”

“Not really. You’re still bad at cooking.”

I nodded—that was true.

“And you don’t know all that much about vegetables and fruits and pasture grasses, and it makes sense for a pony who’s good at something to do it instead of a pony—a person—who’s not. You don’t have to feel bad, a lot of stallions are bad at cooking. And pegasi, most of them are, too.”

“I just really never had to learn.”

“A lot of chefs at famous restaurants are stallions, though. So it’s not like it’s just a stallion thing.”

•••••

We were in one of the second-hand shops. I’d visited it once and then decided not to come back because it was too cluttered and I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

Milfoil liked it, though, and if she was happy roaming around the crowded store, so was I.

“What do you think about this?”

I looked at the object she was pointing out. It was a strange contraption of thick wires with some sort of a hoof-friendly handle on it. “What is it?”

“A potato masher. And you can mash all sorts of other stuff with it, too: turnips and rutabagas and I think I’ll buy it.”

“Don’t you already have one?” I vaguely recalled seeing her use something like that before.

“It isn’t as nice. Do you have a potato masher?”

“I don’t.”

“Well, I’ll give you mine and I’ll use this one and we can both mash potatoes.” She grabbed it in her mouth and put it in her saddlebags. If somebody had done that on Earth, loss prevention would be following them around, making sure that they emptied everything out of their bags before they left.

I assumed that ponies were more trusting than that, but maybe they put spells on things instead. Maybe if you tried to walk out of a store without paying for something, you’d set off a magical trap.

“You really ought to have a toaster, too,” she said. “I like toast in the morning.”

“Find one and I’ll buy it.” I’d never found anything that looked like an Earth toaster, and I was too much of a guy to ask what a pony toaster looked like. It was easier to just live without, or cook it on the stovetop which worked decently well as long as I remembered to flip it before it burned.

•••••

“I sometimes wonder how humans know what they’re good at. Without having a cutie mark.”

“We just muddle along, I guess. Sometimes—some people know right away what they want to do, and learn that, but sometimes people don’t figure it out until they’re in college or maybe even after. Have a bunch of jobs and then finally find the one that’s right for them.”

“And how would you even know if another human was good at something if you didn’t know them first? It’s usually pretty obvious when you look at a pony.”

“Is it?”

“Well, if they’ve got the right cutie mark.”

“How do you know what the right cutie mark is? You’ve got a flower—half the ponies in this town have a flower or a fruit or an ear of corn or a stalk of wheat.” A lot of them had blended together in my mind. At first I’d paid attention to them and tried to figure them out, but now they didn’t tend to stand out unless they were something really strange. There was a younger stallion I saw sometimes that had what looked like a paper bag as his cutie mark. Did that mean that he was destined to be a bagger at a grocery store?

“Well, you just do. When I’m at market, and I go to a stand—”

“You expect to see the food in question, I know, but what if I’m at the carrot booth and there’s a colt with a wheel for a cutie mark selling carrots.”

“That’s Oxheart’s son. He’s gonna apprentice to a wheelwright starting in the spring.”

“But if you didn’t know him, would you buy carrots from a pony who had a wheel for a cutie mark?”

To her credit, she thought about that for a little bit before shaking her head.

“And you’re good at other stuff besides flowers,” I said. “You make really good pies.”

“You’re just saying that. They’re not as good as Razzleberry’s.”

“No, it’s true. Have you ever considered that a cutie mark might hold you back? Make you do something that you don’t want to do?”

“A pony can’t get a cutie mark in something she doesn’t want to do. That’s just how it is. You can try lots of stuff, and some ponies do, especially ponies who don’t get their cutie marks until late, but you can’t get one in something that you don’t like.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. If—if you could feel magic, you’d understand.” She stopped walking. “I don’t know how to explain it better. Maybe it’s something that you just can’t understand as a human, and if that’s true, it’s sad. Did you feel anything during the Running of the Leaves?”

“Pain? As I got tired, like I couldn’t get enough oxygen?”

“You didn’t feel the pull from the trees at all? Or the magic radiating from all the ponies?”

“No, not really.” But was that true? Had I felt something? Something more than being freshly in love?

“I don’t want to think that you can’t,” she decided. “Maybe you really haven’t, or maybe you have and just don’t know what it is yet.”

Chapter 34
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The Haunting

Chapter 34

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

Windflower didn’t spend as much time studying the snowpony as she’d spent with the snowman. If she’d seen snowponies before, it might not have had as much interest for her. Or maybe she didn’t want to be outside today.

I lost sight of her as she went up to the attic, so I left the kitchen and went to the living room. We still had more of Stranger on a Train to get through.

She did her usual little pause in the hallway before entering the room. This time she had her stuffed pony with her, held in her mouth like a kitten.

Milfoil usually was a lot better at picking up what Windflower wanted, but this time even I could figure it out. The book was on the coffee table, and she just tapped it with her hoof before gliding up to the couch and taking the spot next to me. She dropped her pony right next to my leg and put her head down on it.

I really, really wanted to see if I could pet her, but I was terrified of scaring her.

Or scaring myself.

So I just opened the book and began reading.

•••••

She fell asleep before I finished the chapter. She was almost touching my leg, or maybe she was and I just couldn’t feel it. Milfoil had said that Windflower was cold, and I thought I’d be able to feel if there was something cold pressing against my leg, but maybe my pants blocked it. Or maybe it had to be deliberate; maybe when she was sleeping she didn’t have her cold-touch powers.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Milfoil whispered. “She’s comfortable. Let her be.”

“But . . . I want to.”

“The day she comes into the living room without hesitating, that’s the day that she trusts you’re not a monster.”

“It’s so hard sometimes. Thinking of her like a little girl—but she’s not.”

“We’re just watching her, doing the best we can for her, until it’s time for her to move on.” Milfoil looked down at Windflower. “We shouldn’t be talking about this right now. I don’t know what she can hear and what she can’t, and I don’t want to upset her.”

•••••

I’d seen stores in Manehattan put out Hearth’s Warming displays, and just like back on Earth, you could buy ornaments, garland, and all the other festive bits and bobs.

That apparently wasn’t how they did things in Haywards Heath—stores simply didn’t sell decorations.

I’m sure I could have bought them if I’d wanted to. There was a daily train, and ponies had also invented mail-order goods. I could have found decorations in a catalog and had them sent in plenty of time for the holiday. I hadn’t bothered, because why decorate my home for myself? What was the point?

But of course it had to be done for Windflower, so I went out with Milfoil to get supplies.

•••••

“I had half a mind to have you help me decorate my house first,” Milfoil said. “So you’d get an idea what it ought to be like. But you’ve seen Hearth’s Warming decorations before, haven’t you?”

“In store displays, and humans have Christmas, which is a lot the same.”

“It’ll be interesting to get a human perspective, I think.”

“And you’ll tell me if I’m not doing it right.”

She nodded, and I stuck my tongue out at her.

We were sitting at my kitchen table since it was the only decent working surface I had in the house. The kitchen counters were covered with more supplies—Milfoil insisted I get the simple things accomplished first and then she’d move me on to more complicated tasks.

The first order of business was making the daisy-chains. I had vague memories of doing that as a kindergartner, and it wasn’t all that complicated, just repetitive.

And, of course, slightly embarrassing, since Milfoil was better at it than I was, despite not having hands, although I started to get much quicker as I got the hang of it.

I hadn’t been thrilled by the idea of making my own decorations at first, but I quickly warmed to the task. Yes, they were more crude than what I could have bought from a store, but it was more personal this way.

“Do you normally make new decorations every year?”

“A few. Not everything, though. These will keep for years.” She glanced over at our diminishing supply of colored paper. “I think we’ve got enough daisy-chains for now. It’s time to make some garland.”

“With the rest of the paper?”

“No, with the evergreen boughs, silly.” She smiled. “When I was a filly, my sisters and I would hunt through the woods for good boughs and we’d gather it up a little bit at a time. Sanguinary—she’s my oldest sister—said that mom and dad didn’t know how to make garland, so we had to do it, but we had to do it in secret, ‘cause they thought that deer brought it. When I got older I realized that that was dumb. Of course our parents knew we were the ones making it, and of course they knew how.”

Garlands weren’t all that hard to make. There were lots of different evergreen tips and it was a matter of overlaying them and tying them together, and she had florist’s wire for that. Cut to length, and none of it was straight, suggesting that this wasn’t the first garland to be made with that wire.

•••••

We spent the whole afternoon making decorations, and I had to admit I was really feeling the holiday spirit. We were both going to be tired tomorrow, since we’d skipped our usual afternoon nap, but that didn’t matter.

I started a fire, and we just had sandwiches and salads for dinner, then Milfoil filled up my watering can and said that while we waited for Windflower, she was going to check on the flowers.

It was always fascinating to watch her working with the plants. She was as thorough as a nurse with a patient, touching the plants with her hooves and her nose, and even talking to it in a language I didn’t know. She’d put her snout right in the dirt as well, checking the moisture or something. Maybe she could smell if it had the right amount of nitrogen or phosphorous or whatever it was that plants ate.

I was so busy watching her work, I didn’t notice when Windflower came downstairs. All of a sudden, I felt something cold brush up against me and jerked away, which in turn scared her.

Rather than flee back upstairs, she rushed across the room to Milfoil, who made a bit of a show of yelling at me for being mean to Windflower.

At least she didn’t smack me.

Once all that got settled, we went into the kitchen, where the Hearth’s Warming decorations were laid out. “We thought we’d let you decide where they should go,” Milfoil explained.

Windflower studied the decorations and then went back to assess the living room.

It took her a few trips back and forth before she was ready. Without thinking, she tried to pick up the daisy-chain.

Her ears dropped, but Milfoil was ready. “We can hang it all up, but you have to tell us where it should go.”

She wasn’t ready to give up just yet, and tried grabbing it somewhere else, and then with her mouth, only to fail every time. Finally, she admitted defeat and backed off.

I gathered up the bundle of paper rings and waited for her to lead me into the living room. And waited—even I could tell that she was frustrated and agitated; she went over to one of the strings of garland and tried to pick that up, but couldn’t.

She floated up on top of the counter and opened the cupboard door and then slammed it shut again, as if to demonstrate that she could at least interact with parts of the house, then tried for the garland instead.

When she failed to lift it, she instead went through the kitchen window and into the backyard.

“She’s not dealing with this well,” I muttered.

“You just keep holding that daisy-chain. And let me do all the talking, unless she ask you a question directly.”

“Fine.”

A minute later, something thumped against the window. Both Milfoil and I looked over, and then she shook her head. “The poor thing.”

Milfoil opened the window, and Windflower came in triumphantly with a dead flower from the garden, still trailing a bit of dirt from its roots.

She took it into the living room and set it proudly on the mantle, where it did not look festive and in fact did nothing to improve the room’s decor.

I kept a fake smile plastered on my face anyway. So long as she didn’t bring the whole garden in, I wasn’t going to try and stop her.

I don’t know if she was aware of our disappointment in how this experiment was going, or if she herself realized that a dead flower was a dumb decoration, because after she backed up a little bit to look at her handiwork, she shook her head and fled into the safety of the flowerpots, finally winding up right against the wall.

I looked over at Milfoil, and I wanted to say something about how stupid this idea had been or how it had backfired, but I couldn’t.

She pointed to the couch, and I nodded. I set the daisy-chain back on the kitchen table and sat down on the couch and Milfoil joined me, laying her head down on my lap where she could keep an eye on Windflower.

As I ran my hands through her mane and along her back, my brief anger at this misguided attempt to help Windflower feel more at home evaporated. Tomorrow we’d put this behind us, decorate the house ourselves, and that was that.

Chapter 35
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The Haunting

Chapter 35

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I woke up completely disoriented. I was cold and stiff and sore, and as soon as I opened my eyes it was plain that I was alone on the couch.

Milfoil and Windflower were both gone.

I wasn’t going to get into a panic this time. Milfol was an adult, and she could take care of herself. If Windflower could turn others into ghosts, she would have done it already. Since she hadn’t, she wasn’t going to.

Plus, there were lots of perfectly rational reasons why Milfoil might be gone. Chief among them was that the couch was not the most comfortable place to spend the night. She could have woken me up when she left, but she might not know that couches weren’t comfortable for people, and decided to let me rest.

But there was no reason to sleep on the couch, not when I had an actual bed, so I went upstairs and Milfoil wasn’t there.

I thought she might have gone to her house, and I thought about going over there. Even though I didn’t want to leave the house empty in case Windflower came back, but then she wasn’t likely to want my comfort.

I tried to consider it logically, which wasn’t the best thing to attempt in the middle of the night. If Milfoil had left because she was mad at me, she probably wouldn’t appreciate it if I came over to her house in the middle of the night and tried to crawl into bed with her. And if she had some grander plan and I just didn’t know what it was because she hadn’t woken me up—which there could be a perfectly good reason for—then she’d expect to find me again where she’d left me, so I got my blanket so I’d at least be warm and went back down to the living room.

The dead flower was still on the mantle, and I almost just threw it in the fire, but I didn’t. Windflower could touch it, could interact with it, and there were very few things that she could. Something made this flower special.

I thought that Milfoil had said that these plants would bloom in the spring again, and even if I was remembering wrong, it would have a better chance of surviving if it were in moist dirt. There were still some roots left on it, after all.

Loose dirt I had plenty of. One of the valerian plants surely wouldn’t mind if a few handfuls were gone from its pot.

I put it in the biggest bowl I had, packed the dirt around just firmly enough that it could stand up, and then set it with all the other plants, in the hopes that they might inspire it, and then I laid back down on the couch again and fell asleep again.

•••••

I woke up with a cold nose pressing against my cheek. I was already sort of awake, and vaguely aware that I’d heard the back door open and hoofsteps across the kitchen. I might have thought it was Windflower, except that this nose was still breathing.

“Milfoil?” I mumbled. “Where have you been?”

“I’ll tell you later,” she said. “Get up, we have work to do.”

“I don’t want to have to do work,” I mumbled, but I pushed off the covers anyway. “Do you want coffee?”

“And toast,” she said. “Please. Now, what did you do with the plant Windflower brought in?”

“I put it in a bowl.” I pointed over to the rows of valerian and yarrow.

“Good, that’s good. I might be able to save it.”

“I’ll cook breakfast.”

•••••

I got the toast done before the coffee, and I brought it out to her and held it while she nibbled at it. Cooking gave me time to think. She wasn’t rested, wasn’t groomed. There was snow on her coat and mud on her legs, and I knew she’d been up to something, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask what it was. I trusted her; she’d tell me in good time.

She’d replanted the flower with one of the valerian plants—I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that—and was giving it a thorough examination.

“It had gone dormant,” she said. “That’s how it was surviving outside in the snow. And normally in the spring, when the air warms up and the snow melts and the ground thaws, it would start to bring nutrients back up from the soil. It’s inside and starting to warm up, so it probably thinks that it’s spring.”

“So it’s going to try and pull nutrients through its roots.”

“But there are hardly any left. Not enough to support it, so it will starve and die unless I help.”

“By putting new roots on it?” Was that something that ponies could do? Some plants could be grafted, but I wasn’t sure that that was a thing that could be done with flowers.

“It can grow new roots, as long as it gets enough nutrition for that. This is going to be difficult and take most of the day and I don’t know if it will work, but I’m going to try.” She turned back to the flower.

•••••

By the time the coffee was done brewing, she was in full plant doctor mode, and I didn’t want to disturb her. She had both hooves in the dirt, crowded in next to the flower, and her muzzle lightly pressed against its stalk.

I set the coffee down next to her, so she’d have it as soon as she wanted to take a break, and I thought about cooking myself some eggs, but then decided that I’d stay and watch her work for a bit. I’d never really gotten a chance to see what an earth pony could do with her plant magic.

•••••

Ever so slowly, the flower was changing. It was subtle; I couldn’t see it happening, but where the stalk had been brown and grey its entire length, now it was very slightly green. The curled-up dead leaves had fallen off one-by-one, and tiny little buds were in their place.

Milfoil had barely moved from her initial spot. She was completely lost in concentration. I wondered if she’d worked as hard on the plants I’d made sick from the cold—I hoped not, but I was afraid that she had.

She hadn’t looked away from her work, hadn’t touched the coffee at all. I didn’t know how long she’d been at it: I had no idea what time it was, just that there was sunlight streaming in through the window.

The plant was looking better, even to my untrained eyes.

Milfoil wasn’t. Her coat was still wet from the snow outside, so I left her side for a minute to go to the kitchen and grab some towels to dry her off with.

I probably didn’t do the best job of it, but felt like I’d helped her just a little bit, and there wasn’t much else I knew to do.

Since my blanket was still on the couch, I put it over her back.

•••••

The flower looked like it was going to live. The stem had turned a healthy green, and the leaves had grown out.

I put my hand on Milfoil’s back, and I could feel an odd pulsing hum that was almost like music. Like feeling a speaker vibrate on a piece of metal, almost, or an electric motor running.

That was something to concentrate on. Was she humming, too softly to hear? Maybe.

But the longer I listened, the more certain I was that it wasn’t her. It was something else, something deeper, something older. Primal. The song of the land, channeled through her.

I don’t know why I thought that. The rational part of my mind wanted to insist that she was just humming, and nothing more. But there was a ghost, and that alone threw rationality out the window. Plus, the humming and her breathing didn’t exactly coincide, and I thought they ought to if it was her doing it.

Furthermore, I wanted to believe.

Was that the magic that Milfoil had talked about? Was that what I was feeling? Was it the pulse of the universe, focused through her and unto a single plant that she was bound and determined to save?

Was I considering pushing away what I was feeling because it wasn’t a grand thing? I understood the power of a crowd, or at least thought I did, and I understood the flashiness of a unicorn’s spell or the miracle of a pegasus’ flight, but this was subtle and this was deep. It was like the unicorns and the pegasi touched at the edge of what was and what could be, while the earth ponies were down at the depths, understanding it and using it in a way that was subtle, slow, and immensely powerful.

I wanted to sing. Melodies floated through my mind, half-formed, just out of reach.

My hand was on her back, and the universe flowed against it.

The spell was broken when she spoke.

“I think that’s all I can do.” Her voice was raspy, dry, with a bit of a ragged edge to it. “I haven’t—”

“You did great. There’s coffee—it’s cold, but I can make some more. Do you want a drink of water? Does the plant need more water?”

“Yes, water for the plant, there should still be some in the watering can.” She backed off the flowerpot, shaking on her hooves. “I’m going to lie down.”

I thought she was going to go upstairs to my bed, or at least the couch, but she just laid down on the floor.

Chapter 36
View Online

The Haunting

Chapter 36

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

After checking to make sure Milfoil was still breathing, I picked her up and carried her to the couch. I was going to take her all the way upstairs, but she was heavier than I thought, and she wouldn’t appreciate if I dropped her on the way to my bedroom.

Once I had her settled I went upstairs to the bathroom. She had a selection of brushes and combs that she left at my house, and I had a decent idea what they were all for, so I set them down on the end table and built up the fire in the fireplace.

I was a bit leery of brushing her mane. I didn’t want to get the brush caught on any tangles and hurt her pulling them out. Her coat was short enough that that wouldn’t be an issue, so that was where I chose to start.

Milfoil had rolled on her side—I wouldn't be able to completely groom her unless I rolled her over. That was a problem for later.

I started on her back, brushing along the grain of her coat.

She had little bits of gravel and mud in the fur on her belly and legs, and I puzzled over where that could have come from. I didn’t think she could have picked it up between her house and mine, and she hadn’t gotten that involved with Windflower’s plant.

Milfoil liked to brush herself a little bit before bed and again in the morning to get her coat in order, but she might have forgotten. She might have been in a rush to heal the plant.

Once I’d finished her coat—as much of it as I could—I moved on to her mane. I took my time, and if I caught a tangle, I worked it slowly and carefully with the brush, doing my best to not tug at her hair.

I was no stylist, but I thought it looked presentable when I was done.

Her tail was reasonably easy—I should have started with that. I could just sit on the couch with her tail on my lap and brush it that way.

On the down side, it was more tangled than her mane. But unlike her mane, I could just wrap my hand around her dock and keep from pulling hair out that way.

•••••

Windflower came in while I was still brushing Milfoil’s tail. I waited until her curiosity drew her over to the couch before putting the brush down.

Since I was already the bad cop, I didn’t think it would hurt our relationship too much to use that to my advantage.

“Did you know that Milfoil spent all day trying to save that flower that you pulled out of the ground? It exhausted her completely—she fell asleep as soon as she was done.”

Windflower’s ears dropped and she shook her head and then turned to look at the mantle. When she didn’t find it there, she looked back to me, and I pointed to the pot that was its new home.

She took a couple of ghost-steps towards the plant, then turned back to me. “It’s okay, you can go look at it. She healed it for you, after all. She won’t mind.”

I could have gone back to brushing Milfoil’s tail, but I watched Windflower instead. She was eager to see the plant, and she put her nose right down against it, just like Milfoil had. She touched it with her hooves and it moved and surely it was just my imagination that it stood a bit straighter and she faded ever so slightly.

At least it hadn’t died when she’d touched it. I wonder what she would have done if that had happened? I wonder what Milfoil would have done?

•••••

After her initial examination, Windflower was content to just sit and watch the plant. It didn’t do anything, of course. It was only a plant, and there wasn’t much it could do.

Still, it had her attention, and despite yesterday’s fiasco, things were smoothed over, at least for the moment.

Milfoil was still sound asleep. I wasn’t sure how that would work out—did Windflower trust me enough to stay when Milfoil wasn’t supervising me, wasn’t preventing me from doing something dumb? Or would she shy away if I tried to move her—if I tried to move us a bit out of our comfort zone?

The only way to know was to try. While I hadn’t been intending things to work out this way in the beginning, I could use Milfoil’s sacrifice to our advantage. Maybe.

“You know,” I said softly, “I think Milfoil would really like it if she woke up and the living room was all decorated for Hearth’s Warming.”

Windflower’s ears dropped again, and she looked around the room uncertainty, then moved to where she could see the kitchen. All the decorations were still where we’d left them.

She pointed at the plant and then went over to look at Milfoil, and then she nodded and floated into the kitchen.

•••••

Both Windflower and I were frustrated by our communication difficulties, but we got it figured out. She’d point to what she wanted me to hang and where to put it, and I’d hold it about where I thought it should go, and then look for a nod of approval or a headshake.

I kept waiting for her to get upset and act out again, but she didn’t. I think she felt bad about what had happened yesterday.

Milfoil woke up as we were finishing the decorations. She yawned and that got Windflower’s and my attention. I couldn’t really do anything, since I was standing on a kitchen chair holding one end of garland and a hammer and nails.

Windflower ghost-trotted over to the couch and nuzzled Milfoil, then she pointed over at the plant. Just to make sure that her message was getting through, she zoomed across the room and pushed it gently with her hoof, rocking it slightly, before going back to Milfoil.

•••••

After we finished getting the living room decorated, I read Windflower half of a chapter of Stranger on the Train—she lost interest and instead wanted to play with the plant some more. I didn’t exactly understand the appeal, but I wasn't going to object. It completely justified Milfoil’s efforts.

Windflower eventually left, and Milfoil and I went up to my bedroom. I was completely exhausted, and so was she, even though she’d napped half the evening. And we were both hungry—she hadn’t eaten all day, and I’d missed lunch and dinner. Neither of us had wanted to put forth the effort to make a meal, so we’d snacked on bread and cheese and a bowl of timothy grass for her.

“How come my coat’s all matted up on one side?”

“I—” Shouldn’t I have brushed her? “Your coat was all matted and dirty and I thought you’d—”

She nuzzled my cheek. “I know. I saw all my brushes on the table. Thank you. That was really sweet of you to think of that.” She sighed. “I really should go downstairs and get my brush and finish my coat. It’s going to bother me if I don’t.”

“I’ll do it,” I offered. “I owe that to you.”

“No, it’s fine. It feels a little bit weird, but not that weird. I can deal with it.”

“You scared me,” I said. “You shouldn't have worked so hard to save that flower. Or at least told me what was going to happen!” There had been a moment, right after she fell asleep on the floor, that I thought she might have passed out and I had no idea what to do about that.

“It took more work to save it than I thought it would,” she admitted. “Plus, I was tired already. I was up all night. I—maybe I shouldn’t have, but last night after Windflower left, I was worried about her. So I followed her into the woods.”

Which explained how her coat had gotten so dirty.

“I don’t know if she knew I was following or not. She might have known. I tried to be quiet, and I didn’t ever see her looking back.

“I could tell that she was . . . oh, I don’t know quite what the right word would be. Not exactly annoyed, and not exactly frustrated; she wasn’t fleeing. . . .”

“She was just done with it?” I suggested.

“Maybe. Maybe that was it, maybe she was frustrated enough that she just didn’t care. I don’t know.”

“When I watched her, when she went into the woods, Windflower was kind of, kind of purposeful. She knew where she was going, and she wasn’t hurrying along, but she also wasn’t trying to shake a tail.”

“Shake a tail?”

“That’s a human expression. It means trying to lose someone who’s following you.”

“She wasn’t doing that,” Milfoil said. She put her head on my chest, and I wrapped my arm around her back.

“I watched as she went under the log, and then I stayed a little while longer just in case she came back out, but she didn’t. I walked around the perimeter, wondering if I might get a glimpse of her, but I didn’t. I could feel that she was still there, though. She’s . . . she’s unique. The forest—”

“’The forest’ what?”

Milfoil was silent for a long time. Long enough that I thought she might have fallen asleep again, until she finally sighed. “It’s not something that you would understand. And I can’t explain it in a way that would make sense to you, but once I felt it I knew it for what it was.”

“When I was half a furlong away, I started marking trees so we can find it again.”

“How? Do you carry around spray paint? A hatchet?”

She bopped me lightly with a hoof. “Us earth ponies have our ways.”

“I should have thought of something when I went out. Been resourceful. But I wasn’t exactly thinking of that at the time.”

“Well, we can find it again now.”

Chapter 37
View Online

The Haunting

Chapter 37

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I couldn’t sleep.

What was the forest doing? What had Milfoil felt in the forest?

If I got an explanation at all—which was unlikely until the morning; she was fast asleep—I probably wouldn’t understand it. And that just made it worse. I could imagine any number of ponies all standing around and nodding, all feeling whatever she did, and me left out of the loop.

Or did they not feel it unless they wanted to? Unless they actively sought it? Unless they, too, went through the forest and felt it for themselves?

I thought that that was a possibility. If there was some major disturbance in the force, surely they would have all felt it in town.

Wouldn’t they?

Nature was complicated, and sometimes it didn’t take too much to upset the balance, and then what? Maybe I hadn’t felt the magic when I did the Running of the Leaves, but I’d sure seen the leaves fall as ponies went by the trees, and there was no human explanation for it. It had to be pony magic causing it.

What had Milfoil felt?

She hadn’t been overly concerned—at least I didn’t think she was. I wasn’t the best at reading pony emotions, but I would have known if she was scared of something. If she thought that Windflower was unintentionally turning the forest into a monster. So I could rule that out—I should rule that out. What possibilities did that leave?

Sometimes, back on Earth, there would be clusters of dead trees alongside the road. Something had killed them, probably something mundane like bugs or a tree disease. Could that happen here? Was her existence sapping the life of the forest? Would the trees fail to bud in the springtime?

That was unlikely. That was something that Milfoil could have explained to me. I wouldn’t have known the exact mechanism, but if she’d said ‘the trees are dying,’ I would have understood that. So that couldn’t be what she’d felt.

Maybe it was a rejection she was feeling. The forest knew that she didn’t belong, and was reacting to that. Which made me wonder if it was trying to push her out, somehow.

And if it was, did Windflower feel it, too? If she could, did she not know why?

•••••

When I got home from work, there were a bunch of crafting supplies on the kitchen table.

“More Hearth’s Warming decorations?”

Milfoil shook her head. “Well, sort of. You should make a Hearth’s Warming doll.”

“A doll?”

“Sure, it’s tradition.”

“What is it supposed to look like? I’m not good at making dolls. I’m not good at sewing.” I didn’t know that for an actual fact since I’d never tried, but it seemed likely.

“It doesn’t matter what it looks like,” Milfoil said. “A doll is traditional, but how its made, a lot of ponies have different ideas. Like, cloth or sticks and plants, or even rocks. We always made them out of fabric, but you don’t have to. Do what feels right to you.”

“Will you help me?”

She nodded.

I looked down at the supplies. This felt like a spiritual quest. How was I supposed to know what to make? I didn't think spiritual quests were real, anyway. People would just say that they felt something they didn’t, I was sure. Or they’d hallucinate because of boredom or sleep deprivation or drugs. But my inner skeptic couldn’t explain away pony magic.

“Is this one of those pony magic things? Does the inspiration just flow through you?”

“It’s not exactly the same,” she said. “Maybe for some ponies it would be. Unicorns sometimes do spells where the magic channels itself through their horn, I’ve heard of that. Especially when a pony gets her cutie mark. Earth pony magic doesn’t usually work that way; it’s like listening to the sound of the land and adding your own song to it.”

“Is that why you were humming when you were healing Windflower’s plant?”

“I wasn’t humming.”

“Yes you were. I could feel it.”

“You—” Her eyes went wide. “You felt the magic! That’s what it was.”

“I don’t know. . . .”

“Trust me.” She leaned forward and kissed me. “You’re turning into a proper pony.”

“How long before my hands fall off and I grow a tail?”

“Silly.” Milfoil blew a raspberry. “I wish it was springtime, that’s the easiest time to feel it. All the plants are singing then. But I think that when we go out into the forest again, we can try it—it’s probably going to be easiest for you to feel it when you’re in the woods instead of the house. Plus, it helps to have your hooves on actual soil.”

“Maybe if I had a pot of dirt to put my feet in, I’d be more inspired with my Hearth’s Warming doll.”

She turned her head towards the living room. “You’ve got plenty of flowers, and they wouldn’t miss a bit of soil.”

•••••

Milfoil didn’t make good on her threat to provide me with a pot of dirt, and I did manage to make a Hearth’s Warming doll. It looked kind of like a gingerbread man, with one leg just a bit longer than the other. She assured me that that was just fine.

I had started to get into it once I began crafting. I made a few paper templates before moving to fabric, just to get an idea what it might look like once I was done. That had really helped, and had given me a pattern to work off of. If I’d been smart, I would have folded it down the middle when I cut it out, and it would have been symmetrical at least.

The stitching wasn’t all that great, either, but it did the job.

“I assume you already have a Hearth’s Warming doll.”

She nodded.

“What about Windflower? Should we make her one?”

Milfoil thought about that. “It’s really not traditional to make a Hearth’s Warming doll for somepony else. I suppose in some cases, it would be all right; some families do make them for their foals when they’re too young to make their own, although that’s with the idea that they’ll get replaced once the foal’s old enough.

“Plus, if we did, it might not mean anything to her—it might not be how she sees herself.”

I picked up my creation. “I don’t see myself in this.”

“It’s not supposed to be an exact likeness. It’s just something that you made, not something that I made, or that you bought at the store. Your doll has a personal connection, and every time you see it, you’ll remember making it.”

I suppose that was true. Back at home, my parents’ tree contained a few ornaments I’d made in elementary school. I didn’t specifically remember making them, but I did recognize kindergarten me’s sloppy handwriting on it, and even if it didn’t bring back specific memories of sitting in class and making it, it did remind me of being a kid every time I saw it.

“Maybe her great uncle still has one of hers. She might have made one with him, or he could have kept one as a keepsake. If he does, that would be perfect. I’m sure he’d let us put it on the mantle.”

“We still need to take him back into the woods,” I said. “Now that you’ve marked the path. Maybe we can do that tomorrow; and we could ask him then, after we’ve shown him her resting place.”

•••••

We didn’t put the Hearth’s Warming dolls up on the mantle—Milfoil thought that it might distress Windflower to only see a pair of dolls. I thought she might be distressed just seeing mine, and I wouldn’t blame her if she was.

It didn’t really matter. Once again, she was eager to play with the plant. She ghost-galloped right into the living room without even waiting to see who was there, and she did a few eager circles around the pot before focusing her attention directly on it.

She traced her hooves up and down the stem, and touched all the leaves with her muzzle, working her way up from the base.

“We ought to get it its own pot,” I said. Windflower wasn’t paying any attention to me anyway.

“One that’s more appropriately sized. I can do that tomorrow, it won’t be any trouble at all. And we ought to adjust the plants some so that it gets plenty of light, too. It might start to curve towards the fireplace if it isn’t getting enough natural sunlight.”

“Plants wanting to get close to a fire could only end badly.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s got some kind of attachment to that plant.”

Milfoil nodded and lowered her voice. “I think she planted them herself. That’s very important for an earth pony. I know the whole garden wasn’t hers, but she had a row to herself. And I think that she never got to see them grow and bloom. I think that when she came back to the house, they were already going dormant for the season, and she never got to see them in bloom.”

“Does that work with the timeline?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know when she came back. But I do know that the garden got abandoned right after . . . right after it happened.”

I put my hand on Milfoil’s back. “Do you think she came back just to watch her plants blossom?”

“I might,” Milfoil admitted, then she shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s motivating her, and I don’t know if we’ll ever solve the whole puzzle. Maybe in the springtime she’ll be a garden ghost.”

“I’m sure she could do a better job of it than I could.”

Chapter 38
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The Haunting

Chapter 38

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I hadn’t bothered to check the weather schedule—I still thought of it in my head as a prediction, even though it was always what it said it was going to be—and so I hadn’t expected snow.

Either Milfoil didn’t know, either, or didn’t mind snow.

My bet was on the latter.

•••••

We all met at my house so that I could change into appropriate forest exploration clothes, and then we headed into the woods.

We didn’t talk. I didn’t have a lot to say, and I thought that it would be best to leave the old stallion alone with his thoughts. Milfoil was in the lead, and she needed to concentrate on finding her marks—whatever those were. I hadn’t seen anything obvious.

Even though I knew intellectually it wasn’t all that far, it felt like a doomed expedition that had overestimated its abilities. Especially for me—once Haywards Heath disappeared behind a curtain of snow, I realized that if the ponies somehow abandoned me in the woods, I wouldn’t be found. I’d have to shelter up somewhere until the snow stopped. If I was lucky, I’d still be able to see our footprints; if not, I’d have to estimate by the position of the sun and hope that I could find my way back.

Perhaps I could find a tree on a bit of a rise, and climb that high enough to see town.

I did my best to look for landmarks, even though I knew deep inside that it wouldn’t do any good. I wouldn’t recognize them later; wasn’t the fact that I couldn’t lead Milfoil to Windflower’s resting place proof enough of that?

I suppose there was a chance that Windflower would find me.

Hopefully while I was still alive.

•••••

I had one advantage over the ponies—the snow was only up to my thighs in drifts. It was up to their chests, and they either had to bulldoze their way through it or sort of hop up and crash through. And the old stallion . . . I got colder just watching him plow through the snow. Why hadn’t ponies invented some kind of knitted underwear for this exact circumstance?

Every now and then, Milfoil would hesitate, looking for her next trail marker. He’d look around, too, and every now and then he’d spot it before she did.

He wore a small frown and his ears were far more active than hers. I wondered if that was because he couldn’t hear as well any more, or if he was feeling whatever it was in the forest that she hadn’t told me about. Was he looking for it, whatever it was? Surely he felt it. I had the idea that ponies got wiser in the ways of nature as they got older.

“We’re getting close,” Milfoil said. I jerked in alarm—it was the first thing she’d said since we’d left town. “I think from here on out we should be quiet. We don’t want to scare her.”

What would Windflower think? I hadn’t seen her when I’d found her resting place, but she might have been hiding under the log, too frightened to come out. I’d probably sounded like a herd of elephants trampling through the woods, and she would have had plenty of time to hide.

Of course, maybe she didn’t stay there all the time. Maybe she roamed the woods. That was her forest home, but when she wasn’t there she might go around and watch the trees or chase bunnies or who knows what. Maybe she was sometimes out during the day but just couldn’t be seen because it was light out.

I didn’t think that was the case; I could see her just fine when she was in my house, and while lamplight and a fire weren’t as bright as the sun, she didn’t seem any more translucent than when she’d been in my attic.

•••••

I saw it first. Milfoil was still in the lead, but I had the advantage of height.

I almost called out, and then just in time remembered that we were supposed to be silent.

If we’d been closer together, I would have signaled to them that I was going to hold back, but we weren’t.

Part of my hesitation was that I didn’t want to be the one to give us away. I thought that I was likely the most clumsy one when it came to moving through the forest.

Overriding even that was the realization that it wasn’t right to be there with them. It would have been even better if the old stallion had gone alone. That couldn’t be helped; Milfoil knew the way.

She must have thought the same thing, though, because she stopped and when he drew abreast of her, she pointed to the hollow and whispered in his ear, and then she slowly retreated back to where I stood.

We didn’t say anything—we didn’t need to. I sat down on the snow and she sat beside me and we watched Windflower’s great uncle have his heart broken again. I could have told him that it was even worse when there wasn’t any snow on the ground and you could see her bones scattered on the leaves.

•••••

We sat and we waited. I was getting cold but that didn’t bother me at all. Occasionally, a gust of wind would obscure him behind a cloud of snow, and then it would clear again and he was still standing there, head down.

It was practically silent in the woods. The wind blew gently through the trees and very occasionally I heard a distant bird call. I suppose most birds hunker down for snow storms.

As we sat, I began to grow aware of a faint humming noise. It was right on the edge of audibility; whenever I tried to concentrate on it, it vanished again.

It was like a magic eye picture, and I was never very good at those.

I peeled one glove off and put my bare hand on Milfoil’s back. I had to slide it through the snow that had accumulated on top of her coat and I did briefly wonder if I was disturbing the insulating layer of air that was trapped under her coat, but she didn’t move to stop me.

Her skin was warm, warmer than my hand. If I was going to turn into an earth pony, the first thing I wanted was a coat like hers to keep me warm in the winter.

The humming noise got a bit louder, and it also changed slightly. In the past, I would have scoffed at myself for having such a thought, but I knew it was true.

And I also knew it for what it was, and I listened as we waited.

•••••

It never got louder. I wished that it had gotten louder. I wished that I had understood it, although I knew that some understanding might come in time.

More importantly, it didn’t completely disappear when the old stallion finally came back, tears frozen to his cheeks, and it didn’t come back when we got up and I brushed the snow off my butt and legs and then off Milfoil.

The song was still there. It was quiet, it was faint, but it was still there.

Our own passage out of the woods mostly drowned it out. The false wind of our breath, the noise of my clothes, the sound of their hooves and my feet crunching through the snow, all of those things covered it but it was still there and now that I could hear it faintly, I noticed that as we got closer to town, it changed ever so slightly.

This made perfect sense. Haywards Heath had a different song than the forest.

•••••

The light was fading fast when we finally crossed out of the forest and back into town, and there was still plenty to do before Windflower arrived.

Too much to do, and not enough time.

Sometimes that helps push along difficult decisions. Of course, decisions made in haste aren’t always the best ones, but sometimes it works out.

I built up the fire as quickly as I could, while Milfoil talked to the old stallion in the kitchen. They kept their voices low and I tried not to eavesdrop but I couldn’t help overhearing them.

Even if I hadn’t known what she was going to ask me, I would have agreed anyway.

•••••

“I heard it again,” I said quietly.

“Really?”

I nodded. “When we were sitting in the woods.”

“Is that why you put your bare hand on my back?”

“I wasn’t sure at first. It was like a song that I knew but whenever I focused on it, it was gone again. And I thought that maybe you could strengthen it.” Had I known that song once? I’d thought about that on our way back home. It hadn’t felt right to talk on the way back either.

“When I was a kid, I believed in a lot of things that weren’t true. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. And at some point as I grew up, I learned that they weren’t real. I learned that magic wasn’t real. That’s a human lesson, that magic isn’t real.”

“Magic is real.”

“Not for humans. Not magic like you have. Unless—have we blinded ourselves?”

“I don’t know many humans,” Milfoil said. “In fact, you’re the only one that I really know. I’ve seen a few before, and I remember once thinking that they had wide-eyed looks, and I thought it was like a foal who’s trying to figure out the world.”

“I suppose there’s some truth to that,” I said. “When I was a kid, I heard the story of Saul who was on the road to Damascus and the scales fell off his eyes and he saw and I don’t think I ever really understood that before coming to Equestria.”

“Do you understand now?”

“Not exactly,” I admitted. “Hearing about ponies and reading about ponies and then being around ponies, there was a lot of culture shock for me, but humans are pretty good at taking things in stride and we get jaded after a while and just accept the new reality and deal with it the best we can.

“This feels different. Like it’s a whole new part of me that I’m only just discovering, or else it’s something I did know and then forgot about. And I can’t help but wonder what would happen if there was some kind of magic potion that made me suddenly able to see and hear and feel what you do?”

“I don’t know. I think it would be too much, all at once.”

“Yeah.”

•••••

From her kitchen table, I could see my backyard and just a corner of my house. If I’d sat on her side of the table, I might have been able to see more, but even then I wouldn’t have been able to see through the wall.

“I hope we did the right thing,” Milfoil said.

“I think we did.” I didn’t know—neither of us knew. We wouldn't know until tomorrow. “I hope she wasn’t excited for the next chapter of Stranger on a Train.”

Milfoil bopped me lightly with her hoof. “I think it will be the last thing on her mind.”

“Yeah.” I glanced out her kitchen window again. “I think so, too.”

Chapter 39
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The Haunting

Chapter 39

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

We met in the living room of my house. It was the most logical place.

The old stallion—it was probably my imagination, but his muzzle looked a bit greyer, and I wasn’t sure if he’d slept at all. Not that I didn’t understand why, if that was the case.

Back on Earth, I wouldn’t have given a person free rein of my house; I wouldn’t have had him stay unsupervised. Especially since he’d already broken my nose. Justifiably, but still.

I hadn’t gone over to check in the morning, so I didn’t know if he spent the whole night there—but I was sure he had. I think that when Windflower had finally left, he’d just stayed in the living room, wondering if she’d return.

He must have known she wouldn’t, but stayed anyway in case she did.

Were my couch cushions a little bit more flattened than they’d been the night before? Or had he paced the living room, checking out the plants like she often did? Had he gone upstairs? Gone into the attic? Had he sought out her little hiding places for toys in the rafters?

I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter.

Had he spoken to her? He must have, and what did he tell her? What did she tell him? Did she give him a ghostly hug? Surely she did. And what then? Had he told her about the wolf, the aenocyon? Or had he not wanted to mention that?

Had he explained to her how her parents had moved away, stricken by her death? Had he told her that we were trying to help? Had he read the next chapter of Strangers on a Train?

Had he told her how that very afternoon, we’d been trekking through the woods, visiting her glade? Maybe she’d known—we’d left there awfully late.

I didn’t know—I couldn’t know.

And that was probably for the best. Whatever private conversation had passed between them ought to remain private. While I still wasn’t entirely convinced about his motivation, Milfoil hadn’t warned me and I trusted her. She would have picked up on hints that he wasn’t thinking in Windflower’s best interest, and she would have told me.

•••••

We met in the living room, and it reminded me of an old Victorian melodrama. Virtually all the elements were there—a gathering, a fire in the fireplace, tea . . . we were just lacking a butler and a grandfather clock.

I didn’t want to be the one to break the silence, although I suspected that if I didn’t, we’d still be sitting here, sipping tea, when Windflower arrived. If she got her chipped mug, she could join us.

“Where do we go from here?”

Milfol set her teacup down and flicked her tail.

“I—” The stallion looked over at the fire, as if it might provide an answer. “She’s . . . confused.”

That wasn’t much, but it was a start. An avenue to pursue. “What do you think she wants?” It wasn’t the best question, but it was the best I could think of.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think that she was hoping to lead us to her, her bones, so that we could give her a proper burial and she could find peace?”

Milfoil frowned, and I half expected him to either fall silent, or punch me again.

“I don’t know.”

That wasn’t much of an answer; on the other hand, it was about the same as the conclusion I’d come to thus far.

“Should we?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t, either,” I said. “Let’s suppose that we do. What happens then?”

He shook his head, and I thought that I should choose my words very carefully. “Milfoil said that there was a . . . a something in the forest, I don’t know what, I can’t feel magic like you do, but did you feel it, too?”

“Yes.”

I could have pressed him on that point, asked him if he thought it was bad, but I didn’t. It wasn’t my place to do so. “We humans don’t have the connection, the magic, that you ponies do. We don’t have ghosts, but we have stories about ghosts, and sometimes they want you to find their remains and give them a proper burial or a marker or something else to allow them to rest in peace. And I think it’s not right to make her stay if she doesn’t really want to, so if that’s what she wants, we should go out and—we should do the right thing for her. For Windflower.”

He nodded, but it was hesitant. She hadn’t told him what she wanted, or hinted at it. Perhaps she didn’t know.

I turned that idea over in my head. What did she know? It was pure speculation on my part. I’d put some pieces together and I thought I had enough of the puzzle, but maybe I didn’t.

I’d made it this far without getting punched in the face, so I reasoned that I might as well continue. “If she’s happy, I am too. If she wants to show up every night and look at the flowers or listen to me read a book for her or help me decorate the living room or play with her toys, I’m satisfied with that.

“And you’re welcome to come over any night, as well. I have no problem with that. Things can continue on in the same way. Maybe she doesn’t trust me enough to do the right thing for her. Maybe she’ll confide in you.”

•••••

Windflower came ghost-galloping down the stairs right on schedule. I’d been a bit worried that meeting her great-uncle might change her habits, but apparently it hadn’t.

Or else the eagerness to see her plant overrode whatever difference his presence had made.

I hadn’t really focused on her examining her plant before—I’d watched, but I hadn’t listened.

Maybe it was too much to expect. I was a complete novice at hearing the things that earth ponies could. Foals surely heard better than I did. I didn’t like to think that, but there was no sense in pretending that I was better than I was.

I listened just the same as she circled her plant, studying it. As she put her ghost-hooves on its stem, on its leaves. I listened as she touched her muzzle to the dirt in the pot, and as hard as I listened, I couldn’t hear anything.

“You’re trying too hard,” Milfoil chided.

“You don’t know what I’m trying,” I whispered. But of course she did.

“I know exactly what you’re trying. I can smell you.”

“You . . . you can smell me? Is that a thing that earth ponies do, too? I mean, I know that ponies have a better sense of smell than I do, but you can smell my thoughts now?”

“Smells like wood burning.”

“Really? That’s—wait a minute.”

Milfoil stuck her tongue out at me. “I wasn’t wrong, about what you were trying, though.”

“No, you weren’t.” I crossed my arms. “What are you supposed to do when your girlfriend is insulting you?”

“Make her sleep on the couch?”

“That sounds like I’m punishing myself, too.” I turned to her. “What’s she feeling right now? Is she singing?”

“Sort of.”

•••••

I couldn’t hear the song, but I could watch it being sung. That was a start.

•••••

The old stallion did have a Hearth’s Warming doll for Windflower. He brought it over for us to put on the mantle, and we also put mine and Milfoil’s in place.

It was weird how there were rituals for some things and not for others. Making the doll had been like a spirit quest, but now that the three were assembled in one place, they got unceremoniously put in place and that was that.

I suppose if every tradition also had a ceremony surrounding it, nobody would ever get anything done.

Besides, the important part wasn’t how they got on the mantle, it was that they were there. That was what counted in the end.

“I can make another one, can’t I?”

Milfoil nodded. “If you want to. A lot of ponies do. There’s no rule that you can only have one Hearth’s Warming doll. Some ponies make a new one every year.”

Like Hallmark ornaments. “Would it be the right thing to do?”

“I can’t answer that question—it’s what’s right for you, not me. I think that a new one should be made to celebrate the year before. If something momentous happened.”

“Well, I moved here, I met Windflower, and I met you.” I ticked off on my fingers as I spoke. “That counts as three, at a minimum. I could probably think of a few more milestones, too. Do ponies ever have more than one on their mantle at the same time?”

She furrowed her brow. “I’ve never seen that. I suppose if a pony was really vain, they might. But that doesn’t feel right to me.”

I imagined an army of my cloth gingerbread mutants lined up on the mantle, flanked by two ponies. “Yeah, that would be weird. For humans, there are people who really obsess over a particular holiday, and go all out. Other people are more restrained . . . are ponies like that, too?”

“We were just at my house yesterday; what do you think?”

I nodded. There were a few decorations; neither of us had felt right leaving it undecorated for Hearth’s Warming, but my house was certainly the more-decorated of the two. “I think that children—foals—want the ritual more than adults, most of the time. We decorated my house for the benefit of Windflower.”

“Yes.”

“So older ponies who might not have any guests over, they might not bother to do anything.” I frowned—I had an idea that the old stallion had an undecorated house. “I think we should make it really clear to him that he’s welcome here any time. Just in case he was thinking of spending Hearth’s Warming alone.”

Chapter 40
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The Haunting

Chapter 40

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I hadn’t expected Windflower to spot her Hearth’s Warming doll right away: she normally had such a focus on her plant that I didn’t think she saw anything else. She’d certainly stopped waiting to see if Milfoil was around before entering the living room.

Maybe her doll changed the song of my living room, and she could hear that.

Maybe I should see if I could hear the song of my living room. Just as an experiment. And see if it was different when Milfoil was present.

I had a feeling if I could hear it, it would.

She’d zoomed into the room and then halfway across she slowed and her head turned, and she saw her Hearth’s Warming doll.

If I’d seen it in isolation, I would have said that it was a crude thing, crafted at the hooves of a child, but in all honestly it looked better than mine. It was a vibrant yellow pony-shape, crafted of yarn, with a green mane and tail. She hadn’t bothered with eyes or other facial features when she’d made it.

I’d wondered when I first saw it if those were her colors, but I hadn’t asked. Maybe they were close, or maybe those were the colors of some plant she particularly liked, or maybe that was what yarn she’d had available when she made it. It felt too personal to ask the old stallion that, and I wasn’t sure it was the right question to ask Milfoil, either.

Mine was a salmon-color, since of all the choices, that was the best that Milfoil had had to offer.

And now that I was thinking about it, I wondered what would have happened if I’d insisted on a more appropriate fabric selection?

For just a moment, I had the image of an actual filly in my mind as she stretched out towards her doll, and then it was shattered as she floated effortlessly up and examined it more closely.

This was a thing she could touch. She picked it up and held it close to her muzzle, then set it back on the mantel, then she looked at our two dolls as well.

One was human and one was pony, so it can’t have been hard for her to figure out which one belonged to Milfoil and which one belonged to me. Just the same, she looked at them and then the two of us on the couch and the she looked back at them again. Finally, she made a scrunching motion with her hooves, implying that they ought to be closer together.

I could fix that. I got up and went over to the mantel and pushed all three figures close together, like a little fabric family.

Judging by her nod, she was satisfied with the arrangement.

Now that the Hearth’s Warming dolls were in what she’d deemed their proper place, she went over to her plant and started on her nightly inspection ritual, and I listened.

•••••

It was no good.

I didn’t want to be negative with Windflower in the room, so I kept my mouth shut and hoped, but I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t hear anything.

It was my fault, I was sure of that. I was trying too hard, or not hard enough.

I was sure that Milfoil knew, too, and I felt bad for her. She was hoping, and I was just a dumb human who was deaf to the sounds of earth pony magic, and that was that. There was nothing that could be done to change it; it would come in due time or it wouldn’t. It was possible that I’d already gone further than any human had thus far, and if that was actually the case, I ought to feel like I’d accomplished something, but ‘you did your best’ didn’t seem good enough.

I shoved those thoughts as far down in my psyche as I could. It wouldn’t be fair to Windflower or to Milfoil to be anything but the person Mr. Rogers thought I could be.

Even if I couldn’t hear her, I could watch her and that was good enough. It was like a Norman Rockwell painting—there was frost around the windows, Christmas decorations everywhere, a cheery fire, enough plants to stock a nursery, and an interspecies couple sitting on the couch while a ghost-filly played with her plant.

•••••

When Windflower got done with her plant, she went back over to the mantel and looked at the Hearth’s Warming dolls again, then she came back to the couch and tapped the book.

Who was she doing it for? Did she really care who the stranger on the train was, or was that just for me?

Did it matter?

I picked up the book and opened it to where we’d left off. She glided up on the couch between me and Milfoil.

•••••

“I’m nervous about meeting your family.” It sounded silly to say it out loud, but I needed to. “I . . . I’m worried they won’t accept me.”

Milfoil nuzzled my chin. “They will.”

How did I explain the difficulties of an interracial relationship, to say nothing of an interspecies? Ponies might not have such hang-ups, but humans often did.

Civilized people had a different way of disapproving than uncivilized people. And as much as it pained me to admit it, the uncivilized response was more honest.

“Your dad isn’t going to go after me with a shotgun?”

“A shotgun?”

Ponies were innocent, I had to remember that. They didn’t have guns. Of course, with their magic, they didn’t need guns.

“He’s not going to resort to violence?”

“Of course not. Don’t be silly.”

“Your brothers and sisters, they aren’t going to take every opportunity to cut me down?”

“I’ve only got one brother, and two sisters,” she said. “And they won’t. Really, Steve, you’re worrying over nothing. They’ll be happy that I’m happy, and that’s all there is to it.”

“What about subtle hints about having a kid?”

“A kid?”

I should have thought that through before I spoke. “A child. A foal.”

Her eyes sparkled in the darklight of the bedroom. “Is that what you want?”

There was a time when a man realized that he’d just walked right into a minefield and that it was too late to get out again.

I didn’t have the biological urge that a woman felt to produce offspring, at least I didn’t think that I did. But was that just a comforting lie that I told myself? I was the one who’d said it.

If I skinned all the biological impossibility off it, was that the secret that lay in my heart of hearts?

I couldn’t answer, but I couldn’t not answer, either. “Windflower is sort of like a kid.”

“Yeah.” Was it just my imagination, or was there sadness in her voice. “Poor thing.”

Back on Earth, there were myths about people doomed to such fates. Mostly Greek.

How did a person deal with a child that wasn’t normal? It boggled my mind; what little thought I’d ever had on the subject had only considered a normal son or daughter, although I knew that sometimes that wasn’t what you got. Was it an emotional thing or a biological thing, or was it something that I’d only understand if it happened to me?

Had it already happened to me?

I was reading a book to a filly who was dead.

I’d changed around my schedule for a filly who was dead.

I’d fallen in love with Milfoil because of a filly who was dead.

Human experience only went so far, and I was hopelessly, irrecoverably beyond that point. I could look back and coldly analyze every decision that had lead up to the present, but did it matter? It was what it was, and if I had the opportunity to change it, I wouldn’t have.

“Sometimes there are perfect moments, the kind of moment where everything is right,” I said. “I might not have pony magic, but I know this. And I think we’re in one of those moments.”

“Yes.” She had a distant look in her eyes.

“We could have been anything, and here we are. It wasn’t what I was expecting. It wasn’t what I could ever have imagined.”

“Nor I.”

“But it feels right. It feels like we’re where we belong.” I ran a finger over the back of her ear. “Like we’re doing the right thing.” I sighed. I’d been the one to broach the topic, so I might as well continue. “Could we have a child together? Is there some kind of pony magic that would allow that? Because it wouldn’t work on Earth.”

“There might be spells,” Milfoil said. “Or else we could adopt. We have plenty of time to think about that.”

“We . . . we kind of already have, haven’t we?”

“You did.” She poked my nose lightly with a hoof.

“You helped.” I booped her back. “Do you think I’d be a good father?”

“I think you already are.”

Chapter 41
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The Haunting

Chapter 41

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

Milfoil’s family didn’t come after me with pitchforks or shotguns or any other kind of hostility. They were kind and generous and not at all upset that she’d fallen in love with me. I hadn’t really expected that, even though Milfoil had assured me that that would be the case.

Just the same, Hearth’s Warming Eve was stressful. I didn’t know pony traditions, and I was sort of a third wheel in every conversation except for those that were directed at me—mostly questions about how different Equestria was from Earth or how we celebrated Christmas. I generally gave short, easy answers, since I didn’t want to take up everybody’s time with a long, involved explanation.

I think I made a good impression. At the very least, I didn’t make a fool of myself. And Milfoil’s mother—White Ginger—was very thoughtful, telling me what was in every dish she’d made so that I’d know if I could eat it or not.

I was pretty sure that I could eat most any plant that a pony could, although it might not have any nutritional value to me, but just the same I figured it was safest to stick to things I’d eaten before. Getting sick at the table was not a way to make a good impression.

•••••

We left their house late in the afternoon and made our way back to my house.

“Emerald Fern’s cute, isn’t she?”

“Yeah.” That was Sabi Star’s daughter. She’d been afraid of me at first, hiding behind her mom’s legs, until her curiosity overcame her fright and she finally wound up falling asleep on the couch next to me. “I didn’t want to bring it up, but, unless I missed something Sabi’s husband wasn’t there.”

For just a second, I thought I’d screwed up. Maybe he’d died—maybe he’d been killed by the wolf, too. Or maybe—

“She doesn’t have a husband. Is that something that humans have to have in order to have a foal—a child?”

“No,” I admitted. “That’s why I didn’t ask.”

“Is that something people expect?”

“Well, yes.” I was already sorry I’d brought the topic up. I should have kept my mouth shut. “It’s not like that’s always the case, though, but a lot of people expect it. Some people in my family were always saying bad things about my cousin who got pregnant even though my dad’s on his third marriage. Maybe his fourth by now, I don’t know.” That was a weird thing to think, but it could be true. My parents could have gotten divorced in my absence and not bothered to tell me. “It’s complicated.”

“I think now isn’t the time for complicated. It’s Hearth’s Warming Eve!”

“So we should run through the snow like damn fools?”

“I think so.”

•••••

As if the Running of the Leaves hadn’t proved it, Milfoil was much more athletic than I was. In fact, she was almost certainly holding back; she could have made it to my house and cooked a second dinner by the time I got there.

“Give me a basketball, and I’ll show you,” I muttered to nobody but myself. Truth was, she’d probably show me up in that, too.

There was some tiny part of my mind that was bothered that she was faster than I was, but that tiny part of my mind was overridden by the happiness I felt at her joy of life. Joie de vivre. That was her, that was pure, that was elemental, and I ran along behind her feeling like a clumsy ape, like a marionette being controlled by a drunk puppeteer.

•••••

I heard the song, even though I wasn’t trying.

•••••

My house was a respite. Quiet. It was a place of peace, a familiar place, a sanctuary. Opening the back door was familiar, comfortable. It was a known quantity.

We’d invited the old stallion over, but he’d declined. I wasn’t entirely disappointed that he had. I think that Windflower might have liked to have him there, but maybe not. She hadn’t been haunting his house as far as I knew, and she could have been if she’d wanted to.

Even though we’d spent plenty of time together, and even though the house had been decorated for a while, today was the real deal, and it was to be savored. We were both breathing heavily from our run through the snow, and I tossed my parka off and collapsed on the couch with her. Even with the cold, we were both sweaty but we didn’t care about that. For the moment, it was just the two of us and the world revolved around us.

•••••

Milfoil had found a couple of gifts for Windflower. Old books that she’d owned, books that had her name written in them. We hoped she’d be able to interact with them, but we weren’t entirely sure she would, and had debated back and forth on this. It didn’t feel right to not give her anything for Hearth’s Warming Eve. I would have been crushed as a child if I hadn’t gotten any presents for Christmas.

On the other hand, we both agreed that books she couldn’t touch presented in wrapping paper she couldn’t open would be even worse.

So we ultimately both agreed that the best course of action was to put them out in the living room. She’d either pick them up and read them herself or else I’d do it for her.

I was also curious about how aware she was of her situation. Milfoil assured me that large amounts of gift-giving wasn’t the pony way, and she was confident that Windflower knew that her parents were the ones who gave her gifts and since they were gone, she wouldn’t be expecting anything. That hadn’t deterred me from getting Milfoil several gifts, but those would wait for later.

•••••

Windflower came in and went right over to her plant and did her usual inspection of it. If she saw the books at all, they didn’t interest her like her Hearth’s Warming Doll had.

Once she’d made sure that her plant was still thriving, though, she did go over and examine them, finally settling on a book about garden plants. I should have seen that coming.

We were on the edge of our seats as she laid her hoof on the cover, and both breathed a little sigh of relief when it didn’t pass through.

Windflower experimentally lifted the cover of the book slightly with her hoof, then picked it up in her mouth and looked up at us on the couch.

We’d left enough room for her to sit between us if she wanted to, so she floated up on the couch with her garden book and we watched attentively as she opened it up.

She pointed to her name on the first page, and then to herself.

“It’s your book,” Milfoil said. “We can keep it here in the house for you or you can take it with you if you want.”

Windflower nodded. I hoped she wasn’t going to take it with her; it would get ruined out in the woods.

Although maybe that didn’t matter. If it made her happy, who cared what happened to the book?

She opened it up and started paging through it, examining the woodcuts of flowers and plants and occasionally pointing out one that she particularly liked. When she got to the valerian, she pointed to the plants in pots.

“What are the other ones?” Milfoil asked.

Windflower scrunched her brow and flipped through the book, finally settling on yarrow.

“And what’s your plant?”

This was quicker. The book practically fell open to the page. Amaranth.

When I was a kid, I’d been interested in tropical fish, and my parents had gotten me a book on them, and the binding was loose or broken on the pages of my favorite fish, so I nodded my head as she bent down and re-read a description she’d surely already memorized.

•••••

She left the book in the living room, on the table. I’d half expected her to take it with her, and either hide it in the attic, or take it back to the woods with her, but she didn’t.

I’d lost all sense of time. It was late, it was surely past our bedtime, but it was Hearth’s Warming Eve—technically, certainly Hearth’s Warming by now.

We could have opened our presents for each other. That was surely allowed by the rules. But we didn’t. We sat on the couch as the fire burned low. I thought about Christmases past, and I’m sure Milfoil was doing the same. Or maybe she was thinking to the future. In my minds eye, I could almost see us sitting on the couch together, watching a child open presents. Sipping hot chocolate, and we’d both be wearing matching sweaters. Admittedly, that was an odd thing to think; I’d never seen her wear a sweater. Some unicorns in town had them, though, so it wasn’t an idea that was completely foreign to ponies.

Or hoodies. She’d look adorable in a hoodie.

I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead, and she leaned into my chest, nuzzling my breastbone before tilting her head up for a proper kiss on the lips.

When we finally went up to my bedroom, I didn’t expect that I would sleep, but I did.

Chapter 42
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The Haunting

Chapter 42

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

Based on what I knew from Earth, Christmas had been scheduled based on old Pagan festivals, which were originally meant to celebrate the fact that the days weren’t getting shorter any more, that they were getting longer. Winter would come to an end.

From a purely astronomical point of view, that made sense. If I was planning out on paper when to have a holiday celebrating a nascent new year, that’s where I would have put it.

But seasons lagged, not only on Earth, but also in Equestria. Back on Earth, Christmas was situated more towards the beginning of winter rather than the end, and the ponies had made the same mistake when it came to timing.

Hearth’s Warming wasn’t a halfway point; instead, it was fairly early in the season. Yes, the days were getting longer, that was an undeniable fact, but the weather stayed snowy and cold. Colder, in fact, than it had been for Hearth’s Warming.

Some of that was probably subjective. There was the Running of the Leaves and not too long after that Hearth’s Warming decorations started to appear, and while at first it seemed that was too soon, the holiday just rushed up and all of a sudden it was there. There was lots to do before the holiday, and little to do after.

Just the same, another month wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch. The ponies could have pushed it back and that would have provided more time to plan, and possibly better weather for travel. That would have provided longer days, while still having the snow cover required for a proper winter holiday. More importantly, that would have shifted it more toward a halfway point, at least in terms of the average person’s understanding of winter fading into spring.

Maybe Earth ponies thought differently; maybe the song of the land spoke to them in a different manner, so I didn’t suggest to Milfoil that the holiday ought to be moved.

But it was hard to remember that the days were getting longer, that the tilt on the axis was changing, that spring was just around the corner, when it was still cold and snowy.

The first snow of the season was special, and a few storms after that were memorable, and then as winter continued on, they became a chore. The excitement over fresh snow was replaced with disappointment each time.

I had to remind myself that that was a human thought. Foals, especially, seemed to enjoy each new snow. And I hadn’t heard any ponies complaining about it, either.

While I could have tossed market pony gossip as an unreliable source, since it stood to reason they’d say whatever it took to make a sale—regardless of their actual feelings on the matter—I couldn’t really dismiss Milfoil’s opinion.

I never asked her directly, but the evidence piled up nonetheless. She didn’t share my opinion that winters were best spent cooped up in the house looking at the pretty landscape outside, and dragged me into all sorts of outdoor activities.

Which she and the other ponies participated in mostly nude. In fact, I came to the conclusion that hats and scarves were as much of a fashion accessory for ponies as anything. Granted, having a fur coat was a blessing when it came to that—I wasn’t going to go outside in just my boxers and a hat.

•••

Windflower kept returning on her usual schedule. I got the sense that she was also getting tired of winter, although maybe I was projecting my thoughts on her. She’d often circle the snowed-in garden restlessly, examining the dead stems of the plants that stuck above the drifting snow.

We’d kept up the Hearth’s Warming decorations longer than normal, but eventually it came time to take them back down again, and they got packed in boxes and put up in the attic for next year.

Windflower’s doll was returned to her great-uncle. If she was still around next year, he’d let us borrow it again.

•••

My cooking skills improved, slowly.

Besides Windflower’s nightly arrival, one of the highlights of the winter was watching Milfoil care for all the potted plants in the living room—and at her house. I followed her around, and we experimented with ways for me to hear the song. I would lightly touch a plant when she was watering it, or rest my hand on her back as she nipped off a few dying leaves. I tried putting my hands in the soil, and tried again when she touched her nose to it, or her hooves to the pot.

Sometimes it was frustrating. Sometimes it felt like I was making no progress at all. I’d try something new, expecting that it might be the breakthrough that we were both hoping for, and nothing would happen.

Other times, it was within my grasp, at least for a few moments. It was faint, and it might have been as much imagined as actually heard, but it was undeniable.

As the winter dragged on, the successes started to accumulate faster than the failures. I was learning how to clear my mind, how to pick up at least a little bit on the melody, and we began to move to the next stage of experimentation.

“No two ponies hear the song quite the same way,” Milfoil said.

“So I won’t have any luck finding an Earth Pony Magic for Dummies book that explains it all?”

“You’re not a dummy. Well—”

“I know what you mean.” I leaned in and kissed her on the nose. It didn’t bother me that there were a few crumbs of dirt stuck to it. “Is it because ears are all different?”

“That’s part of it, and your own magic also blends into the melody.”

“Even though I haven’t got magic.”

“You must, or else you wouldn't hear.” She said that with utter certainty. It reminded me of an episode of The Simpsons where Bart sold his soul and then discovered that automatic doors didn’t work for him anymore. While it was a silly premise, I could understand Milfoil’s thinking, and although I knew that automatic doors didn’t detect souls, I couldn’t be sure if it was actually a requirement of the melody to be able to change it before it could be heard.

Although back on Earth I could at least do blunt things to plants to change their lives, and that might have been all that was required.

“So how are we testing it? Impartial observers? A blindfold?” I’d heard of various ways of proving and disproving psychic powers.

“Just keep your ears forward, and you’ll start to understand,” she said. “I remember being kinda frustrated as a filly when Sabi would know things that I didn’t, but then I got the knack for it and I started to really understand what I was hearing. It’s not something that you’ll be able to comprehend all at once. For me, the more I heard, the more I was able to make sense of it all, and I think it will work that way for you, too.”

“Do you think that Windflower still sees the world like that?”

Milfoil frowned. “I think . . . I think not exactly. Not anymore. I think by the way she acts sometimes, she’s not hearing all of it, and I think that sometimes she knows that something is missing and other times she doesn’t.

“Sometimes after she’s left, and you’ve fallen asleep, I think about it. I wonder if she’s still fading away or if she’s been pulled back at least a bit by what we’re doing, and I wonder how it happened and I wonder what we can do to fix it. I worry that if we let it go on for too long, something will happen that we haven’t anticipated, and I’m afraid that it will be bad.”

“Bad? Like ‘the forest dies’ bad?”

“I don’t think that bad. But, it would be bad for her, I’m sure of that. And it could—there are plant diseases, and some of them I don’t know how to treat. If I had a favorite plant that got sick and I didn’t want to cull it for the good of the rest, the disease would spread. I don’t think this is the same, but I’m not completely certain that it isn’t.”

“That’s a worrying thought.”

•••

Back on Earth, winters varied from one year to the next. Snow came early, snow came late, snow kept coming even when it shouldn’t. One year I distinctly remember snow on the first day of spring, and other years I remembered wearing shorts in January. Weather was complex.

For the ponies, it was simpler. The snow came when pegasi wanted it to, and as the month turned the countdown began to Winter Wrap-Up. That was the official end of winter, not something guessed at by a woodchuck but instead an official decree.

I knew that there were parts of winter I’d miss. The pervasive smell of woodsmoke in the air, the beauty of frost creeping around the edges of the windows, the magic of fresh snow. The blessing of cuddling up with a warm pony. I thought of nights with the covers pushed back and the desperate hope for any breeze to evaporate the sweat on a hot, humid July night, and I reminded myself how I’d be longing for the snow and cold then.

As winter inexorably drew to a close, the stark, almost black-and-white beauty of the winterscape would be replaced by a softer, less-defined palette of greens and browns, dotted with bright splashes of color. The house would turn from a comfy blanket to more of a hot prison.

I was sure that the weather schedule was published well in advance, and unlikely to contain many surprises. Sometimes the weatherponies made mistakes and had to fix them, but that was uncommon. I was used to the weather app on my phone giving different predictions from one day to the next as the model was refined, but when I was in Manehattan, the weather calendar was almost never wrong.

Had I wanted to, I could have likely gotten a copy of the annual weather schedule. Something like the Farmer’s Almanac, but far more accurate. But I didn’t want to. As winter drew to a close, I felt more and more that I preferred the mystery of it.

•••

There weren’t many days left of our cozy living room arrangement. Of Windflower checking her amaranth, and then weaving through the other pots of plants. Of the fire crackling in the fireplace. The calendar inexorably marched towards Winter Wrap-Up and as we got closer and closer I wanted to drag it back.

Chapter 43
View Online

The Haunting

Chapter 43

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.

Chapter 44
View Online

The Haunting

Chapter 44

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I’d never seen a ghost cry, and I pray that I never do again. Windflower dropped her head down into her hooves and her whole body—what there was of it—shuddered as she wept.

There was nothing we could do to console her, either. She’d crossed over, and that was that.

Even so, neither of us was so heartless as to just leave her alone in her sorrow. We weren’t so shallow as to offer false hope where there was none, but we both knew that just being there for her would help. Her home wouldn’t be empty; she wouldn’t have to face her mortality alone, not this time.

I think she’d known all along, but she’d buried all the implications of her new form when she came back. Pretended that things were normal, found some way to justify new abilities and lost abilities and I couldn’t help but feel pity for her, now that she was forced to face the awful truth.

She cried for the better part of an hour, before she finally managed to get back to her hooves and shakily made her way over to her amaranth plant, sadly circling its pot. She wouldn’t move close enough to touch it, undoubtedly terrified of hurting it more, even though it was probably far too late for that to be a concern. Even to my dumb human knowledge, there was a difference between hibernating for the winter and having the life sucked out of it: seeing it in plain view, undistracted from Windflower’s distress, made it look even worse than I’d initially believed.

A year ago, I never would have imagined such a thing, but I knew it now for what it was—she’d drained the life out of the plant, stolen its life essence for herself.

Was that what was going wrong in the woods? Was that what Milfoil had felt? Something that she either couldn’t correctly identify, or something she was afraid to speak aloud?

It was a thing I didn’t know how to cope with. It was something that was in books and movies but not in real life, and the realization of it was more terrible than I wanted to consider.

She didn’t do it intentionally. That was a slender ray of hope, but even if it was unintentional, I wondered if there would be anything blooming in her grove this year, or if she’d sucked the life out of every plant there just to stay behind.

•••

We couldn’t just leave her plant like that. We had to try to save it, somehow. I didn’t know how, but I knew I’d do anything to make it happen.

Milfoil walked slowly up to the plant and touched her muzzle lightly against the stem, and Windflower watched hopefully, moving up alongside her.

I joined them by the plant and put my hand on Milfoil’s back. She glanced in my direction, and I nodded.

There was so much about pony magic I didn’t know, so much I didn’t understand. I didn’t know the method, but I’d seen the results, and I did my best to will my own strength into her. To reach out and join her song.

At first, there was nothing but the feel of her silken coat under my hand, and then I began to hear it, familiar and comfortable to me. Her ears perked, then Milfoil reached out and touched the plant ever so gently.

There was a slight change, a flattening almost, and I remembered back to her collapsing after the first time she’d fixed the plant. I didn’t want that to happen again, so I focused in on myself, on my feelings for her and for Windflower, and I tried to will that and my strength into her.

I could hear the song changing, and at first, that was all, but then I started to feel it. It was like standing on a beach and having the waves wash the sand out from under my toes, and then became a steady pull, almost like being caught up in a current.

And then behind that came the pain. Not physical, not exactly. And it wasn’t just psychological, either. It was something else, something I had no words for, something I had no experience of.

Nor was it bad. It was undeniable, and it was the price that I was paying, the price that Milfoil had paid alone the last time, because nothing comes without a cost but when it’s a thing worth doing, it’s worth everything.

It was a cost I would have paid tenfold if that was what it took to make things right.

•••

When I opened my eyes, the amaranth was whole again. Windflower had her hooves around the pot, her muzzle brushing lightly against the plant, briefly lost in happiness.

I felt like I’d run a marathon, fought a bear, run a hundred yard game-winning touchdown, and then gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel full of rocks.

Milfoil looked as strong as always. Stronger, even.

“I think I’m going to,” I said, and then fatigue hit me like a freight train and I collapsed to the floor.

“Steve?” Milfoil stuck her muzzle against my neck. “Are you okay?”

I couldn’t remember how to form words, so I gave her a thumbs-up, which in hindsight was a completely meaningless gesture.

“Steve?” She leaned in and nuzzled my neck. She had little hairs on her muzzle, and they were tickly.

I’m fine. I just want to lie here on the floor.

She sat down and reached out for my hand. It felt natural to grip on to her hoof and squeeze it—it wouldn’t hurt her, it was a hoof.

Windflower finally noticed that I was laid out on the floor and came over to investigate. I’d never really paid attention to it before, but it was weird to see things through her. They weren't bent or refracted or anything like that, at least not that I could tell.

I also marveled at the fact that I was on the ground, probably helpless, and there was a ghost hovering over me. In any horror movie, that would have ended badly. But I wasn’t worried about that at all. In fact, when Windflower touched me I wasn’t worried at all, despite the chill of her ghostly hoof against my skin.

•••

There is darkness, and I am adrift.

I am at peace. I am drifting, afloat, aloft, beyond my physical self, and I do not know where I wander, but that doesn’t matter. I have become a part of the song.

I think that Windflower might have killed me. A plant isn’t a person, it isn’t a pony. No matter how alive it is, it isn’t alive enough. I understand this.

My family. They’ll be upset when they find out, and I hope that Milfoil tells them that it was for a good cause. They won’t understand. They don’t know what I know, they don’t understand what I understand.

I do.

A life for a life.

A fair trade.

•••

There is darkness. Not blackness, just darkness. My back is stiff, and most of me is cold. Not all of me—there’s a warmth against my right side, and in the hazy dreaminess I reach out towards it, not with my body but with my mind, needing to know it before I turn.

Milfoil has a forehoof across my chest, and her muzzle pressed up against my neck. She’s got little hairs on her muzzle and they tickle my neck.

My hand is clutched on her hoof, like a drowning man might clutch a life-ring. I relax my grip, even though I don’t need to. Her hoof is hard, unyielding.

I’m in the living room. I don’t spend a lot of time studying the ceilings in my house, memorizing their features, but I know where I am. I know who I am and what I am, and I squeeze her hoof lightly, and I don’t know if she can feel it but I know she feels it.

Her cheeks are moist from tears and I want to tell her that she shouldn’t cry. Everything is okay.

•••

Morning comes, as it always does. My back is stiff, and Milfoil is curled up against my right side. The sun turns her mane into a halo, and I marvel at it.

•••

We could talk, but we don’t.

She’s in the kitchen, making pancakes.

I’m off.

I don’t have the experience to understand how. It’s like I was on a slightly delay, or else the rest of the world was. Like a picture that’s out of focus, just slightly. Enough that the details can sort of be made out, but not really. Everything in the image isn’t as there as it pretends to be.

It wasn’t like being stoned or being drunk. Maybe there are other drugs which caused such an effect, but they were ones I’d never tried. Some part of my mind suggested that an acid trip might turn out this way.

But . . . I still understood the difference between reality and hallucination. And not in the sense that I thought I knew; this knowledge was fully realized.

•••

The inevitable scolding came after breakfast. After she’d washed the dishes and put them away. I insisted that she leave the soup pot for me, since it was my fault it had burned.

“You are such an idiot.”

“I know.” I wasn’t exactly sure how I was an idiot, but I knew she’d tell me.

“I’m an idiot, too.” She nuzzled my chest, and I responded by leaning down and kissing her ear. “I should have been more careful, worked more slowly. We don’t know how much—and you can’t focus at all. You’re like a minotaur charging through a shop.”

“And I could have given too much.”

“You did.” She smacked my leg with her tail. “You could have been laid out for days.”

I still would have done it. “We need to practice more.”

“Yes, but you need to rest before we do. It’s not good to work yourself so hard. You need to take foal steps until you know how to control yourself.”

Chapter 45
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The Haunting

Chapter 45

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

Spring was coming, and it would soon be time to put the flower garden in.

Already, the ponies in Haywards Heath were preparing. Greenhouses were doing brisk business from dusk till dawn. Seed catalogs arrived in Milfoil’s mailbox, and they provided some diversion for Windflower, even though Milfoil had to flip through the pages for her.

As often as not, that would lead to corrections in the garden drawing.

I wasn’t much help in that department; I knew a few flowers and common vegetables and that was about it. Nevertheless, I’d sit in the kitchen with them, studying the catalog and watching as Windflower found a new plant she thought she might like and then considered where it might fit in the garden.

Surprisingly, she didn’t change things around as much as I thought she might. At her age, I would have been changing what I wanted on a daily—even hourly—basis. Windflower was more constrained. I wondered if that had something to do with their cutie marks, if they never wanted to wander too far afield from what their cutie mark said, or would say.

That was a thought that kept me up at night sometimes. I’d learned before coming to Equestria that a pony got one when she discovered what made her unique, and there had been endless theorizing about what that actually meant. There were times that I thought that cutie marks would be a disadvantage, that they would limit a pony to only doing one thing for her entire life.

But then I remembered that there were people on Earth who did that. Some people fell into a rut and didn’t have the courage or the skills or the desire or the opportunity to learn something completely different from what they’d done before. People in waning industries often clung on to what they knew as long as they could, even though the writing was clearly on the wall.

And it wasn’t like the ponies were automatons. That was something I’d quickly learned. They could do plenty of things unrelated to their cutie marks. Some ponies didn’t even have jobs that related to their mark, at least as far as I could tell.

Granted, a lot of my observations had been at arm’s length. I couldn’t say what the stallion in the general store who had a measuring cup for a cutie mark did in his free time. He knew the stock that the store had, he was friendly, and more than once he’d suggested a new product I’d never tried that I wound up liking. I couldn’t relate his cutie mark to customer service, and at best it was a fuzzy connection to inventory or retail in general. Maybe in his free time he measured things really accurately, sort of as a hobby.

My relationship with Milfoil had furthered the notion that a cutie mark didn’t prevent other skills. While it was true that Milfoil seemed a bit wistful, a bit depressed during the winter—something I would have expected, since she couldn’t grow plants in the winter—Windflower changed the equation. If she hadn’t been around, how might Milfoil have acted?

Then again, if she hadn’t been around, I never would have had the opportunity to meet Milfoil, and we probably would have stayed cordial neighbors and nothing more.

One day, this was going to be the strangest love story ever.

•••

Just looking at catalogs and sketching out a garden plot was not adequate preparation for the looming spring.

I only really considered landscaping when the big box stores suddenly opened their garden centers, but of course there was all sorts of prep work that must have gone into stocking them. Managers deciding what would sell and what wouldn’t, then ordering it and scheduling deliveries at the right time. Developing plan-o-grams for the shelves and for the open pallets.

We had to think about that in advance, too.

I could have gone into a seed store or a greenhouse and showed them the drawing, and since I trusted ponies more than I trusted human salesman, I probably would have gotten what we needed, in the quantities we required. It would have taken forever, because I surely would have gone from one store to the next, not knowing who carried what.

Milfoil did. So I followed her lead, I stood by patiently as she discussed what was required with the shopkeepers. I helped her hitch up to her market wagon and unhitch when we got to stores, and I learned how to put her harness on and take it off again and I marveled that ponies could do this with hooves and mouth while I struggled with hands.

There were plenty of things to order, as well. Seeds and bulbs that weren’t stocked—I was used to just finding things in a catalog and making a phone call or even better, just clicking a few buttons on the computer and waiting for things to arrive at my door a few days later.

A couple of flowers we did order that way—although by mail instead of mouse clicks—while for the most part, Milfoil knew who to ask, who did business with which larger suppliers and could get a discount, or who piggybacked orders on top of each other to save money on shipping or qualify for bulk rates.

There were tools to buy, as well. I wasn’t much of a gardener, but I had an idea that by the end of the springtime, I was going to be.

We could have gone into dozens of stores and never found tools that were right for me. I imagined that minotaurs would have similar hand tools to humans, but there weren’t any minotaurs in Haywards Heath.

But there were plenty of craftsponies, and it turned out in Equestria, you could buy the iron parts of a tool by themselves and make your own handle.

Or, if you weren’t much of a craftsman, you could take it to a pony who was.

Thus, I found myself spending an afternoon in a wood shop, working with a couple of craftsponies named Snead and Helve. Both of them welcomed the challenge of making something new, and to my mind charged far too little for the finished products.

•••

We had plenty of plants to work with. Literal wagonloads, wagons that I’d helped load and helped unload.

Milfoil had decided that we should keep as many as possible over at her house, and I didn’t question that decision.

She’d also decided that with so many plants, it was a good time for me to start really learning proper earth pony magic, before I did something dumb again.

On one hand, it was kind of a disappointment to have to go back to kindergarten after I’d experienced the full effect of pony magic. On the other hand, I’d nearly wound up killing myself with my utter lack of control, and that was something she wanted to avoid in the future.

Human kindergarten had been practicing forming letters. Cutting things out with safety scissors, learning to color inside the lines, and not eating the paste unless the teacher wasn’t looking.

Here, I got to fill little starter pots—which were arranged like oversized egg cartons—with soil, and then carefully put a single seed in each. Sometimes that was easy; they were big and I could grip them. Other times they were tiny, no bigger than a grain of sand.

Milfoil had mouth-held tools to help her with them, which she let me use.

Each time we’d fetch a new seed packet, she’d instruct me to hold it in my hands, in order to feel its unique song, and I did my best to hear and understand.

She taught me how to feel the soil for its content, whether it was wet or dry, how tough it was. When I’d started to master the basics, she started mixing things together and every day when we were finished with planting and fertilizing and watering, she’d give me what she called a challenge jar, containing a mix of two soils we’d worked with before.

Once I got decent at identifying a mix of two, she bumped it up to three and then four—and she didn’t tell me that she was doing it. I had to figure that out.

We also practiced sharing our magic. Even though I knew the risks, I wanted to push it, but Milfoil was more cautious, sometimes frustratingly so. As dumb as it sounded, I kept my focus by imagining movie montages, all the parts of the training that they left out of the finished movie because audiences would get bored. I was in the un-montaged version of the film, the extended edition where I rested my hand on her back or held her hoof as she worked with a seedling. And then I tried to replicate what she’d done, what I’d felt as she guided me.

The waters muddied; she was my mentor and my love, she was my boss and my partner, and sometimes it was hard for my human brain to completely sort the conflicts and it was easier to just cast off what I had been on Earth, what I had known. It was easier to just start over, to focus on the now, to become a child again, where the world was fresh and new and where possibility was still somewhat undefinable.

I’d never imagined that I’d celebrate the first showing of a sprout, but I did. Cynically, I knew that a plant did what it did, that eons of evolution had resulted in a seed that would sprout despite my clumsy skills and unfocused magic, but I celebrated just the same as the first little shoot emerged from the soil. It was nothing short of a miracle, and I wanted to parade it around town, to show the ponies that I, too, could make a plant grow.

Chapter 46
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The Haunting

Chapter 46

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

It would have been nice if we could have brought spring by just running through the woods.

I knew that wasn’t how it was going to be, but I still pictured that in my head—like in Excalibur, where King Arthur rode with his knights out of the castle and the land bloomed behind them.

Winter Wrap-Up was nothing but work, from dawn to dusk.

We got up before sunrise, and I had an unpleasant reminder of what farming used to be. The two of us ate a quick breakfast of cold oatmeal, and then I helped Milfoil into her harness.

To save her the effort, I dragged her wagon around front, and tossed my shovels inside, then the two of us made our way towards the center of town.

There might have been an honor in being the first pony in the green. Some ponies might have been lining up since last night, or there could have been some way that Hayward’s Heath decided who the Winter Wrap-Up Queen was, and nothing would start until she made her way onto the field. The oldest pony in town could be the one, as well, or the youngest.

I could have asked her, but I was content to listen, both with my ears and with my mind.

•••

As the crowd grew, I began to feel a shift in the song. It was a happy change, welcoming—as well it should have been; we were all gathered to welcome Spring back. To draw the land out of its winter hibernation.

By sunrise, the entire square was full. All the ponies looked to the east as the rim of the sun broke the horizon, and stood in place until it had completely crossed into the sky.

I’d expected there to be an inspirational speech, but they didn’t go for that here. They didn’t need to. All the pegasi took flight again, briefly shadowing the ground-bound ponies in a thunder of wings, then the crowd dispersed from the village green in all directions to wrap up winter.

Were I back on Earth, any such event would have been barely-controlled chaos. Between foals and malingerers and unclear instructions and simmering small-town feuds, it would have happened, but not neatly.

Ponies didn’t operate that way.

I should have known that from the Running of the Leaves; I should have known that from the song. When they all decided to get together and do something, they really did. They went all-in, and they made it happen.

Had I been left to my own devices, I would have managed to screw something up. Milfoil knew that as well as I did, and she was constantly at my side, patiently explaining what I needed to do next.

Back on Earth, I might have bristled at the commands, I might have tried to exert some autonomy, but I was growing to understand that I was a small part of a symphony, even if I didn’t understand exactly what it was or what my role in it was. I trusted that at least Milfoil did, so I never once questioned her as she told me what I—what we—needed to do next.

We ended the day at the family farm, and that felt proper to me. I wound up steering a plow towed by Sabi Star and Sanguinary. I would have felt better doing it behind Milfoil, but she had correctly figured that I would be terrible at it, and need constant instruction in how to operate a plow. So she walked next to me, giving direction while steering a plow pulled by her parents.

As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t claim that I was good at it. My ancestors would have smacked me upside the head for being unable to master a skill they’d no doubt possessed, at least assuming that cotton required plowing in order to plant. That was something I’d never wondered about before today.

•••

I didn’t want to lie about why we had to leave after the day’s work was done.

Luckily, I didn’t have to.

There was never an excuse to miss a holiday, not back on Earth. I couldn’t say that I didn’t want to visit my parent for Thanksgiving because Uncle Terrance always found a new way to ruin the holidays, so I had to lie. Come up with a prior commitment or car trouble or the fact that I was in Equestria now and they didn’t have telephones.

Milfoil didn’t lie or make an excuse. She just said that we needed to get back home. No questions were asked, there was no attempt at a guilt trip, nobody said that it wasn’t right that she wanted to spend time with me instead of her family.

She stated a fact, that fact was accepted by her family, and that was that. There weren’t protests; nobody said that this year it wouldn’t be sleeping on a cot because Wal-Mart had had a sale on air mattresses and there was at least some privacy in the corner of the living room.

There were nuzzles all around, and a few hugs, and of course the ritual gift of food, along with the presentation of a bottle for later.

We didn’t talk of anything of great import on our way home. Milfoil could have asked me what I thought about participating in Winter Wrap-Up, and I could have asked her if I might have been more useful doing literally anything besides trying to wrangle a plow built for ponies. We could have discussed how much the holiday was symbolic and how much it really mattered for pony agriculture, and whether or not her parents would re-plow the wavering trenches I’d made, or deal with a crooked crop come the fall.

•••

The only thing that would have perfectly completed the picture would have been if Windflower was impatiently tapping her hoof when we arrived home.

She wasn’t. She’d gotten out the plant book and had it open on the kitchen table. I was more sure than ever before that she already had the whole thing memorized, that she could have told us about every plant on every page with little to no prompting.

As soon as we walked in, she pulled the drawer open and pointed down at the sketches of the garden. Milfoil obliged her and set them on the table while I put away the food and bottle.

I’d expected that Windflower would want to go back to her planning, but that wasn’t what she had in mind at all. She pointed to the drawing and then to the backyard.

I wanted to protest. I had every reason to. It had been a long day already, and we were both exhausted. This was a thing that could wait until tomorrow.

But we all knew it couldn’t, so we followed her out back and began digging.

•••

I didn’t know how to translate the sketch that Milfoil and Windflower had made into an actual garden, but that didn’t matter, because they knew, and once again I was more than willing to follow their lead. To have them tell me where I needed to dig, what I needed to do.

Milfoil and I didn’t work alone: Windflower dug, too. She only had her little trowel, but that didn’t dissuade her one bit.

•••

By the time the moon was over the trees, we’d stopped talking, as there was no longer a need. Whether it was from exhaustion or tiredness or openness or something else, I could clearly hear and understand the song, and I knew what the land wanted, so I kept moving forward, turning over one shovelful of soil after another.

The moon was high overhead when I noticed the old stallion was working with us as well. I had no idea how long he’d been there.

For a while, every part of my body cried out to stop, that I’d done enough, and I ignored it and the shovel bit into the dormant sod again and turned it aside and I moved forward a few inches. Everything else in the world faded out until there was nothing left but us and the nascent garden and the song.

•••

The false light of dawn was in the sky when we finally finished. Windflower was gone, no doubt back to her forest glade, and the entire garden was dug.

The three of us staggered back to the house—it wasn’t right to send the old stallion back home—and he settled onto the couch while we went upstairs.

Milfoil still had her harness on and I fumbled with the buckles and straps: I could barely uncurl my fingers enough to work them. She leaned down and unlaced my shoes for me, and I lifted each foot long enough to let her pull them off.

We got in the shower together, just long enough to rinse off the sweat and the mud and then dried off as much as our fatigue allowed before collapsing into bed.

Chapter 47
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The Haunting

Chapter 47

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I should have been completely exhausted and slept the day away—we both should have—but we woke around noon.

I wanted to say something about the state of Milfoil’s coat and her mane, but before I could even open my mouth she gave me a death glare, and I just grabbed one of her curry combs and started working the tangles out of her coat while she tackled her mane.

Running the brush through her coat was relaxing, even though I had to work carefully to avoid tangles. Besides what the water and sleep had matted together, there was mud that hadn’t been washed out last night, and I was going to need to wash my sheets when we were done.

Milfoil noticed that, too, and shifted her hooves around, so I put a hand on her back. “It’s fine. You worked so hard yesterday.”

She set her mane-brush down, and leaned in for a kiss. “So did you.” She giggled. “You’re not very good with a plow, though.”

“Who ever is their first time?”

“Sanguinary never got good. That’s why she has to pull.”

“So you just decide who’s the best at any task on the farm?”

Milfoil nodded. “Isn’t that the logical way to do it? You can’t pull a plow when you’re small, it’s too heavy, so you have to steer one first, and if you aren’t good at it, you graduate to harness.”

I thought about that. It made sense; farmers were practical and cared about getting the crop in, rather than showing favoritism, and then a realization hit me. “I should have been pulling a plow.”

She nodded. “But you haven’t got a harness, and I thought you’d want to participate.”

“I did.” I leaned over and poked her nose. “Even though I suck at it.”

Milfoil rolled her eyes. “You should have seen the first time I tried. I was barely big enough—I hadn’t even gotten my cutie mark yet. I convinced Sabi and Sanguinary that Mom and Dad would be happy if we helped out. Sanguinary’s harness was too big for me, so they let me steer, and they didn’t get too far before I’d dug the blade so deep into the soil that they couldn’t move it at all.

“Well, they thought maybe we’d hit a rock, ‘cause that happens a lot.”

I knew all about rocks, I’d kept hitting them, too, which would send the plow off-course. I would have thought that after a few years all the rocks would have settled down below the level the plow was at, but that wasn’t the case at all.

“I’d just buried the cutting edge in the soil, and it took a while to get it back out. After that, I spent the next couple of years riding the seeder, until I got big enough that Sabi taught me how to use the cultivator. Sanguinary didn’t like that very much, ‘cause she had to keep stopping and backing up while Sabi was showing me how it worked.

“Once I got good with that, though, the plow was easy.”

•••

There were lots of plants to move. It was easiest to bring them across from her house to mine in her market wagon. I could lift up the front end and steer it while she helped push from behind, and that way we could move a lot of plants at once.

By dusk, my house looked like a hoarder’s. We’d completely filled the entire first floor with flowers, to the point that neither of us could get upstairs any more.

I assumed that she had some sort of logic for the arrangement—I hoped it involved the plants closest to the back door being used first.

I’d expected to feel more tired than I did, and I’d expected to be dreading the night’s planting, but I was actually looking forward to it, if for no other reason that doing helped mute thinking.

“How do normal ponies handle planting in the spring?” Surely they couldn’t all be doing this.

“Sheds, better planning in the fall, and generally not trying to do this much at once. But we don’t have a choice, do we?”

“No, we really don’t.”

“If you hadn’t gotten so many valerian and yarrow plants, it wouldn’t be so crowded in here.”

“I know. But it worked out all right in the end and that’s what matters.”

“And I got a few more than we really need, because I want Windflower to have a chance to look them over and pick the ones she likes the most.”

I looked at the cluster of plants again. “Do you think we’ll get them all planted tonight?”

“I doubt it. But there’s always tomorrow night.”

I sighed. “I don’t know how much more time I can take off work.”

“Thaler will understand,” she assured me. “Even if you don’t want to tell him exactly why. Everypony is planting in the spring.”

“That’ll make it even worse. He’ll be shorthanded.”

“But nopony will be doing much,” she countered. “So there won’t be much work. You’re new in town, so you don’t know how it is. When it’s time for planting, nopony expects much else to get done. Everypony’s busy with that.”

I hoped she was right. I could think of a million arguments against her point, but then I remembered visiting Paris once and discovering that outside the tourist areas, everything shut down for lunch between noon and one p.m. A nice system for the worker, maybe not so much for the consumer.

•••

Windflower was paler than she’d been yesterday, although not lacking in spirit whatsoever.

We’d left the back door open and she just came in through that, rather than by way of the attic.

I imagined that she’d made a brief circle of the backyard before coming into the house—a last inspection of last night’s handiwork—and I regretted that Milfoil and I had been talking instead of watching outside.

Naturally, she noticed all the plants immediately, and began to examine them, starting with an orbit at ceiling level to get an idea of what we had.

Milfoil was biting her lip as Windflower settled down among the pots for a proper inspection. “I hope we’ve—”

I cut her off with a kiss. “Of course you have.”

Indeed, Windflower appeared to be satisfied with all the plants. She zipped around like a general inspecting her troops, pausing at each pot before moving to the next.

She worked her way back into the kitchen, and finally pointed to one pot that was reasonably close to the back door, one of the amaranth plants, and we began to work.

•••

Maybe the ponies didn’t see it, but I felt like there was a bit of ceremony in placing the first plant. It was like digging the first shovelful of dirt before the excavators moved in, or tossing out the first pitch in a baseball game.

I carried it out and set the pot in the garden, right next to the spot that Windflower indicated. The soil had already been turned up, so it only took Windflower a few scoops with a trowel to make a big enough space for the root ball.

Milfoil carefully lifted the plant out of its pot and put it in the soil, and I shoveled dirt back around it.

In hindsight, that was the moment before going over Niagara Falls. The moment that the roller coaster is at the peak of the lift hill, almost but not quite to the point where gravity takes over. The brief moment of focus before the ride begins in earnest.

•••

I’d once watched a construction documentary where the foreman had graphed out every single step of the process, with time estimates and branches leading off at different key points. Was the north end or the south end of the pipe closer after the crane dropped the valve in place? Did the welds pass initial inspection or not? How long would X-rays take, and would there be repairs needed?

This was not that organized. Not by a long shot. And that didn’t matter one whit; we did what Windflower asked. We put the plants where she wanted, we fulfilled her final vision.

When the old stallion arrived for the night, I got demoted to carrying duty, and I found I didn’t mind a bit.

As the night progressed, Windflower got better at managing us; she’d point to a few pots at a time, and I’d take them out one-by-one, and let the ponies put them in place.

There was a point I realized that the yard had gone from turned-up dirt to meaningful rows of plants, and another point when I realized that I’d worked my way into the living room and there were only a few stragglers left at the corners of the kitchen. Those might have been unworthy plants, or they might have been on the docket for tomorrow, I didn’t know.

It wasn’t warm, but I still had my shirt off. I was vaguely aware that I was operating on autopilot, although I came back into focus when Windflower finally left for the night.

•••

We were all covered in mud and sweat, and I had to imagine that both ponies were as sore as I was. And if I wanted to be negative, there was still a lot of work to be done. I knew how many plants were left over at Milfoil’s house, to say nothing of the seeds and bulbs which would all have to be individually planted as well.

And yet, we’d made enough progress that I could almost see what it was going to be when we finished. How it might look as the plants grew and the flowers bloomed.

When I was a kid, I’d camped out in the backyard, which had been a grand adventure. As I grew up, the confines of the yard lost their appeal, but now seemed like a fine time to try again. The sheets were muddy anyway; a little more wouldn’t hurt.

I didn’t have a proper tent, but there wasn’t any rain scheduled yet, so after Windflower’s great-uncle left, I went upstairs and bundled up all the bedding and dumped it out in the backyard.

“Are you serious?”

“Why not? It’s a nice night.”

“You humans have weird customs.”

“Yes.” I spread the sheet out on the lawn. “Didn’t you ever camp out in the backyard when you were a kid? A foal?”

“Sure, but that was years ago.I ought to just go over to my house, and I can watch you from my bedroom. See how long you last.”

“I can make it the rest of the night, easy.”

“I don’t know why I hang out with you,” she muttered. “You lie about walking into lampposts and want to sleep outside when there are two perfectly good houses to spend the rest of the night in.”

I shrugged. “Probably because I’m a lovable idiot.”

“You’re my lovable idiot.” She kissed me on the nose and then settled down on the blanket. “We’re going to the spa tomorrow, and you owe me so you can’t say no.”

Chapter 48
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The Haunting

Chapter 48

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

Sleeping on the lawn turned out to be a lot less magical than I thought it would be.

I’d anticipated it would get colder outside than in the house, and I’d brought extra blankets. I’d also assumed—rightly—that between her higher body temperature and her fur, Milfoil would help keep me warm.

However, morning dew didn’t discriminate in what it stuck to, and the ground breathed as well— something I should have remembered from watching episodes of Man vs. Wild.

Neither of us slept very well, although that made the experience no less rewarding. Every time I woke up, I was surrounded by nature; greeted by the sprinkling of stars overhead, and then the early pre-dawn light, unfiltered by a bedroom window.

Early birds were already flying around and pecking at the lawn, only slightly wary of the interlopers in their domain.

I wasn’t any less sore than I’d been last night, and I didn’t feel all that rested either, so in a physical sense the night hadn’t done me any good—but I felt that there was something else giving me energy once again.

If earth pony magic worked through the land, was the land and all it contained, were the flowers helping Milfoil and I in return for helping them? The idea initially seemed ludicrous on the face of it, the kind of weird idea that could only come from half-awake dreaming, yet Windflower could pull life from a plant, and Milfoil and I could offer it to them, so why wouldn’t they be able to offer us sustenance even if we didn’t demand it? Even if we didn’t actively pull it forth ourselves?

Or was that something that earth ponies did unconsciously, and maybe now I was doing it, too?

That was too much for me to ponder for so early in the morning, so I just put my head back down, nestled against Milfoil, and watched a robin hop across the grass in search of the early worm.

•••

I must have dozed off again, because the next thing I was aware of was Milfoil playfully nibbling on my ear.

“You gotta get up,” she said when I swatted at her nose. “The field won’t plow itself.”

“The field? What field?”

“Sabi always said that to me when I was being lazy in bed.”

“Ah.” I yawned and twisted to give her a kiss, morning breath be damned. Then I looked back at the garden, glittering in morning dew. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I bet it’s going to look amazing once the flowers start blooming and the plants fill in.”

“Mhmm. Are you going to want to spend more nights sleeping outside? By the garden, like a filly with a new toy?”

I had the idea she’d done that as a filly. “So what if I am?”

“Next time, we’ll get a wooden pallet to sleep on; that’ll help with the ground-dew. And the rocks.” She pushed the covers off her back and rolled over, twisting around like I’d seen horses do sometimes, before getting on her belly and putting her hooves under her. “Let’s eat some breakfast, and then we’ll go to the spa.”

•••

Pony spas had taken a bit of getting used to. I’d had to remind myself more than once that it was just like what they did in Japan, so it wasn’t that weird. And there had been some joking at my expense the first few times I’d gone with my pony friends in Manehattan, and then it was like a switch had been flipped in my mind and I’d started to wonder how this wasn’t a thing more places on Earth.

The hot tub was pure bliss.

I wasn’t as much for gossip as ponies, so I tended to be a little less social when in the tub, and perhaps even more so this time around since I was tired. None of the ponies seemed to mind. More than a couple of them were occasionally covering yawns with a hoof.

Milfoil left the tub early in order to get her coat groomed and her hooves filed—that was something I didn’t have to worry about. Instead, I availed myself of a massage and left the table with a pleasant numbness.

We treated ourselves to a late lunch at an outdoor cafe, and then spent some of the afternoon once again admiring our work in the backyard. It was still a mess, of course; there were raw scars crisscrossing the yard where plants had yet to go, but for all that it was coming along nicely. I could clearly see the promise of what it would be, something that I had not seen in the sketches she’d worked on with Windflower.

Unicorns worked in the immediate present. Spells went off and things changed pretty much right away.

Pegasi worked in the near future. They moved clouds around on a daily basis, bringing the weather.

Earth ponies worked in the future. What was a barren field would one day bring forth a crop; what was a torn-up yard would one day blossom.

I thought about telling Milfoil that, but of course she already knew.

•••

The afternoon brought more plant-moving in preparation for the night’s efforts. This time rather than help her with her harness, I hauled the wagon back and forth myself, with her leaning on the tailgate to keep the front of it off the ground. It didn’t feel any more productive but I was too proud to ask her to put on her harness.

I think she knew I was being stubborn, but she didn’t say anything.

We once again filled the living room, and put a few more plants around the corners in the kitchen. A couple new packets of seeds were spread out as well, and Milfoil went over them picking the best: those would be planted in the front with the others behind them.

“Is this a certain thing?” I turned over one of the less-good seeds in my fingers, first seeing if there was any visual difference between it and the others, and then if I could feel that it had a different song than the others. I couldn’t hear anything from it, no matter how hard I concentrated.

“This one will have petite salmon-color blooms on short stems, which make it perfect for a border,” she said, pointing to a seed.

“You can tell all that?”

“It says so on the packet.” She stuck her tongue out at me. “They’re still dormant. I could easily tell if one of them was already dead, that happens sometimes, but I can’t tell much more than that about them. Some ponies who have a skill for it can sort of wake them up a little bit and find out more specifically how each seed’s gonna grow, but most ponies can’t do that.”

•••

It wasn’t until we were eating dinner that I remembered that I still hadn’t made time to wash my bedding.

“Do unicorns have spells to clean sheets?”

“Probably.”

The two of us were hunched over the dolly tub, hard at work. There was a cleaner’s in town, but it was closed for the night. I could have brought them my sheets in the morning, but I was feeling stubborn, and I could almost hear my grandmother say how doing laundry was good bonding. Maybe she was right. There was something more honest about good physical labor than working in an office, although not for the first time I wished that I could pick and choose which old-fashioned tasks I had to do. Gardening without a Rototiller had worked out okay, and I wouldn’t have changed a minute of the time I’d spent. Washing sheets wasn’t as much fun, nor was it done with a noble purpose.

Even if we got them clean before Windflower arrived, there was no way that they’d be dry before nightfall. Clotheslines didn’t work that fast.

Not that that mattered; I had a second set of sheets for this very reason.

I didn’t let my foolish pride win out this time. Pony washboards were designed for pony hooves, and Milfoil could apply far more pressure to the sheets than I could hope to with my delicate palms, so I let her take the lead until it was time to wring them out.

Ponies had wringers—what my grandma had referred to as a mangler, for obvious reasons—but I’d chosen to go without, at least for the time being, and twisted the sheets to drive the water out.

•••

The sheets were hung and we sat on the back stoop waiting for sundown, waiting for Windflower to arrive.

We hadn’t spoken for I don’t know how long—neither of us had anything that we needed to say. I had my arm around her and we watched as the light faded and the night stars appeared in the sky, a few at first and then dozens and then hundreds and then thousands.

There had been precious few times I’d ever sat out and watched day turn to night, and I regretted missing out all my life. There had never been an occasion in the past, and I was the poorer for it.

•••

Neither of us moved as Windflower came into the yard. We just watched as she made a circuit of the plants, no doubt ensuring that they were all where they belonged.

She looked pale and I wanted to think that that was just a trick of the light, but I knew it wasn’t.

It wasn’t easy to get up and go to work, but we did. I fell back into plant-moving duty, carrying pots out to their prescribed locations.

Once again, the old stallion showed up, and just fell to his tasks the same as Milfoil and I had. I wondered about that, but not too much. I didn’t think he waited around the corner until he was sure we were working; I think he knew and that was fine. There was a significant portion of my life that had recently moved into the ‘don’t ask questions’ category and in other circumstances I might have questioned it, but now was not the time nor the place. Later, perhaps, we could discuss it.

We worked until the moon was setting, once again nearly completely clearing out my house, and I was sorry when we were done for the night. I knew, deep down, that things were going to change when the garden was completely planted, and we were getting close.

Chapter 49
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The Haunting

Chapter 49

The Haunting
Admiral Biscuit

I could have made my bed with new sheets, but instead we spent the rest of the night at Milfoil’s house.

Even though I was tired, it took me a while to fall asleep. Her house made different noises, and the things in the bedroom cast different shadows in the moonlight. Her bed was softer than mine, and her pillows were harder.

Still, she was with me, and that made all the difference. When I put an arm around her, that was familiar. When I pressed my nose into her mane, that was a comforting smell, and that was enough to get me to finally relax and drift off to sleep.

•••

I had a moment of discombobulation when I woke up. I was alone in bed, in a foreign bedroom and most importantly I couldn’t remember where the bathroom was.

Luckily, that feeling only lasted for a second, and I got out of bed and found the bathroom and waited patiently by the door for her to come out.

She was already starting breakfast by the time I came downstairs, building up the fire in her stove. “What are we having?”

“Pancakes.”

I nodded and found a bowl and the flour. “How hungry are you?”

“We can always have leftover pancakes later.”

“You haven’t got a lot of flour left anyway; might as well use it all.” I still measured it out; I hadn’t gotten the hang of estimating ingredients.

“I know. I’ve been meaning to go to the miller and get more.”

“I’ve got plenty.” She’d insisted I buy a sack last time we’d gone to the miller's, and I didn’t bake as much as she did. “So we won’t have to rush. Besides, good romances always start with giving your neighbor a cup of flour.” Or was that sugar?

“Oh, do they?”

“I swear, it’s true. It’s a human tradition.”

Milfoil stuck her tongue out at me.

“What do ponies do? How do hackneyed pony romances start?”

“Well, that depends on the tribe. Pegasus stories are full of ponies who fly in and save somepony else, and unicorn stories are all about special spells and sometimes potions even though potions are more of a zebra thing.”

“Let me guess, earth pony stories involve plants?”

“Well, why shouldn’t they? Farming is good. Spells won’t fill your belly, but alfalfa will.”

I cracked a couple eggs into the mix. “I can’t argue with that logic.”

•••

There weren’t very many plants to move around any more. It was empty inside my house without them. They’d brightened the living room and taken up the space that my meager furnishings hadn’t, and I suppose it was a human thing to think, but I’d kind of considered that my house was a store of sorts, and now the shelves were barren. That hurt my modern human sensibilities; shelves were never supposed to be empty. Things weren’t supposed to run out.

But, every time I went back into the yard to get another flower, I saw all the plants in their proper place, and it eased the minor discomfort I was feeling.

•••

By the afternoon, we had nothing to do. Everything was prepared for tonight, and I was getting antsy. Tonight would be the last night planting, and I didn’t know what was going to come next. I thought that when we finished planting the garden, Windflower would move on, and I didn’t want that, even though I knew that that was what should happen. She needed to find peace; she couldn’t go on as a ghost forever.

And we did, too. It fell to us to help her finish what had been left undone, for her and for us.

I went over and gave Milfoil a hug—she was swishing her tail and flicking her ears more than usual, and pacing around the ground floor of my house like a caged animal.

It would have been smart to take a nap, be well-rested, but there was no chance that was going to happen, so we needed something to distract us. Something to get our minds off tonight, but I had no idea what would do it. There wasn’t TV, and I doubted that a book would be distracting enough.

I walked over and petted her mane. “I hate waiting.”

“Me, too.” She nuzzled my stomach. “You know, it’s warm enough, let’s stretch our legs a bit.”

“Well. . .”

“Race you!”

That wasn’t fair at all, but I ran out the door after her and through our backyard and out of town. Intellectually, I knew that she was holding back, but that didn’t matter. I wanted to catch her—I needed to catch her.

Houses and fields and farms blurred by and then we were on a road through the woods and my thinking brain had tuned out completely. Everything narrowed down to just the chase.

She darted onto a small side-trail and I followed behind as we climbed a bit of a rise. Up ahead I could see what looked like a bit of a drop-off, and sure enough, she leapt off the edge of it, curving in a perfect arc from nose to tail and a second later I was at the edge and it wasn’t ground on the other side, but rather a pond.

I didn’t even hesitate; I cannonballed in right after her.

My timing couldn’t have been more perfect; she’d just got her head above the surface as I crashed into the water, sending up a satisfying splash.

The water was colder than I’d expected. I should have anticipated that; it hadn’t been that long since there’d been snow on the ground. Still, for the moment, I was hot and dripping sweat and it felt just perfect.

Milfoil paddled to shallower water, and I followed her, swimming until I could put my feet down. My only regret was that my shoes were wet; it would take hours for them to dry, maybe days, and I didn’t have a second pair.

I reached down in the water and unlaced them and then waded ashore to set them on a sun-warmed rock, followed by my socks.

And then the rest of my clothes as well. They wouldn’t do me any good in the water.

I thought about chiding her for not telling me to bring a towel, but her heart was in the right place.

•••

Once we’d cooled off in the pond, we played around for a bit. I was no Michael Phelps, but I was still a better swimmer than she was.

I was shivering when we finally made our way to shore, and the few bare rocks around the pond weren’t flat enough or big enough to fully lie on. She shook herself off, and I didn’t embarrass myself by trying to imitate her technique.

My clothes had gotten mostly dry, save my shoes. I dried my hair off with my shirt as best as I could before getting dressed again, and the two of us just lay on the shore lost in our own thoughts until it was time to go back home.

•••

“I don’t like the look of this.” Milfoil’s eyes were to the sky, where dozens of pegasi were moving around clouds, silhouetted by the setting sun.

I wasn’t too keen on it, either, but: “You ponies control the weather; what did the schedule say?”

“I didn’t look.” She sighed. “It doesn’t matter what the schedule said anyway. Sometimes in spring, they’ve got to have a storm even if it isn’t scheduled. There’s a lot of magic in flux, and it doesn’t always balance like it ought to.”

“Balance?”

Milfoil nodded.

“Like, there’s too much on the ground and not enough in the sky, so they have to give us clouds?”

“Exactly.”

I hadn’t expected to be right.

“Everything is a circle, and when one part of it goes out of balance, another part brings it back to where it should be.” She glanced back up at the sky. “Hopefully, it doesn’t last too long.”

“And if it does?”

“I don’t know. We plant in the rain if it comes to that. The flowers won’t mind, and we’ll just be muddier. It’ll keep us cool.”

I deepened my voice. “Our arrows will blot out the sun.”

“What?”

“Then we will fight in the shade.”

Milfoil frowned. “Have I ever told you that humans are weird?”

“Frequently,” I said. “That’s why I love you.”

•••

Windflower came before the rain. She circumnavigated the garden, inspecting the flowers and approving their location before coming up to the back stoop. We stayed sitting, content to just watch her.

She hesitated long enough for us to stand and then zipped into the house. We’d already set her garden sketch on the kitchen table—not that she needed it—and she spared it a glance before going into the living room to examine the last remaining plants, and then the work began. Once again, Milfoil and the old stallion planted while I carried plants out of the house and into the garden.

We were nearly done when a flash of lightning lit up the yard as bright as day. Windflower shot up and looked around before racing back into the house like a frightened child.

I started gathering up our tools as big fat raindrops started hitting the ground.

“Leave them,” Milfoil said. “A little rain won’t hurt them.”

So the four of us crowded into the kitchen and watched the storm roll through. I could see pegasi in the air, occasionally illuminated by the bright flashes of lightning.

Windflower stayed between Milfoil and the old stallion until the storm had moved off in the distance, then rushed back outside to inspect the garden.

There was a little damage, but not much. Milfoil set about straightening it up, while the old stallion planted and I fell back into my role as a plant carrier.

•••

I took off my shoes and socks and worked barefoot. It felt right to have the muddy soil against my feet and I’d be tracking in my house shoes or not. That didn’t matter; that could be cleaned later. We were running out of time and we were running out of plants.

Any other time I’d been faced with a large task, I’d have been counting down towards the finish, but not this time. The thunderstorm had been a blessing; it had given us a few more precious minutes together.

There was only one more plant left, and I hesitated before picking it up and going into the yard one last time. I wasn’t sure if I should announce it was the last, but just in case she were to vanish suddenly when it was planted, I knew I ought to.

Windflower led us over to its spot, just as she had for all the other plants, and I stood there as the hole was dug, keeping my eye on her. She had the same concentration as always, but I swear she flickered as the plant touched the ground.

The ponies moved back, and we stood around uncertainly while Windflower drifted up and got a bird’s-eye view of her garden.

She circled the perimeter, and then dropped back to ground level and started going through the rows. She’d occasionally brush up against the plants. Most of them didn’t respond to her, but the amaranth did, bending slightly as she passed.

I thought she’d return once she’d looked over the garden, but she didn’t. She reached the end of a row and then moved across the yard, fading from sight as she crossed the street.