The sky to the far west had grown cloudy, but the conditions in Maritime Bay continued to remain excellent. The town's beloved sheriff had not even needed to issue a watercraft advisory for the beach, which was as extensive and beautiful as always. Ponies went about their day, working their pony jobs and doing their pony tasks—none moreso than that very sheriff, who had taken the streets for his daily afternoon patrol.

Hitch hummed to himself as he trotted through the streets, greeting the ponies he met and making sure their issues concerning health and safety were both heard and met. He also kept a careful eye out for the scourges of their just and kind pony society, the fatal crimes of littering, jaywalking, neighsaying, or violating safety standards when moving heavy objects.

The air was fresh and clean, with a pleasantly nautical scent as per usual. The sun was bright and warm. Hitch could not help but smile as he examined his beloved town, content in the fact that he was doing his part to keep it safe and clean—although his mood was still slightly tainted by a slight darkness he did not wish to express but also could not manage to purge from his cheerful mood.

It had creeped him out. Skulls were already scary things, but whatever it had been, it was somehow worse. Hitch found himself increasingly believing that it was, somehow, not a skull—and the unknown that said piece of knowledge had forced him to face was even less pleasant than allowing himself to believe that somepony had simply lost their head.

Equestria was old. It was widely assumed that Twilight and her friends had walked the land perhaps a few hundred years prior, or maybe a thousand—but nopony knew for sure. And, of course, there were things from even before then. Things buried deep in the soil that were best left forgotten.

Which was where he had assumed it must have come from. The thought that it had somehow come from above was just too much to bear.

These abstractions, though, were not what scared him. The fear was far more visceral. The artifact—whatever it truly was—made him desperately uncomfortable. Even being near it disturbed him, and even when it had been wrapped in cloth and stored in a small box he had not wanted to touch it or lift it. Even as Zipp, Sunny and Izzy all took turns lifting it—and all commented on its unusual weight.

In a way, he had been glad he had not needed to file it as evidence. It bothered him that such a lapse was technically a breach of protocol, as the investigation should have been a police matter—but the idea of it sitting there, wrapped in cloth in the evidence locker on the far end of his office, made him feel sick. He was glad that Zipp had taken it for her own scientific analysis.

Which left Hitch to tend to his own business. He tried to push back his apprehension as he descended a small set of stairs to the beach itself. He looked out across the calming ocean. The white crash of the waves and the reflection of warm sunlight that almost hurt his eyes. A smile crossed his face as he proceeded down the beach, greeting the crabs and gulls by name as he went. The warm sand felt good beneath his hooves.

It also pleased him that ponies were safely enjoying the late-summer day at the beach. Various ponies were playing ball, a few were building sandcastles; an older couple were sitting in chairs, watching the ocean, and a young colt was reading a book. No one was swimming, which was appropriate as no lifeguards had been assigned to the afternoon on that day.

Everything was perfect. Hitch made a mental note to bring Sparky to the beach, possibly before dinner. For obvious reasons, he could not have a baby dragon on patrol with him—caring for a child while at work was simply infeasible, as it would distract form his job and also put poor Sparky at risk of being traumatized by the horrors a police pony might see—including the greatest crime Hitch had ever witnessed, a case of vandalism two years prior. He still had nightmares about it: the silly face painted on the wall of the local ice-cream shop glaring at him with utter disdain. Sometimes, thinking about it made him cry.

He proceeded on a standard route to the far side of the beach, which was less popular due to the strong currents in the bay—and at a distance, he saw three fillies standing close together. Staring at something on the sand not far from the high-tide line.

Hitch approached them, recognizing them as Glory, Seashell and Peach Fizz, the so-called Pippsqueaks.

“Hey girls,” he said. “Everything okay on this end of the beach?”

They jumped, surprised, and they seemed suspicious. Hitch tilted his head, looking past Seashell—and he saw what they were standing around. Something that had washed up from the water.

For a brief moment, Hitch felt a sudden cold shock of fear—but suppressed it out of professional habit.

“What is that?”

“We don’t know,” admitted Seashell.

“Yeah,” said Glory, stepping aside and allowing Hitch to approach. “We were trying to figure it out. Peach was poking it with a stick to see if it moved.”

“It didn’t,” sighed Peach. “I was watching really close.”

Hitch looked down at the object. He felt a shiver run up his back, the hairs standing on end, even though he logically knew it was innocuous.

It was the size of a pony—exactly the size of a pony. Because it resembled one almost exactly. Even wrapped in pieces of seaweed with its legs sticking out stiffly and almost comically, Hitch immediately understood what it was.

“A mannequin,” he said, leaning closely. “What was this doing in the water?” He sighed and shook his head. “If I found out who’s polluting the bay, I’ll will write them such a ticket.” He felt his rage intensifying. “I’ll even have them write an apology letter to all the sea creatures whose home got ruined up by this thing floating by.”

“It might have been an accident, though,” suggested Seashell. “Maybe it fell of a boat or something?”

Hitch paused, and then realized she was probably correct. It may simply have been lost, either during transport or in one of the early summer storms a while back. He knew that the local dressmaker and tailor used dummies like it for assembling clothing. Or it might have been one of the Mrs. Cloverleaf’s, which she had formerly used to test safety gear on. Unsure, he leaned closer, hoping someone had written their name on it.

And in doing so, his distress suddenly increased. He was not sure why, exactly, but something about it was odd.

The surface was white and smooth, almost like the kind of dummy used by department stores to demonstrate their wears—and like the dummies that also got to wear hats, as it had a complete head. Like any ordinary department store dummy, it had no face. Instead, the features had been replaced with contours to give the impression of one. It even had ears.

It did not look like plastic, though. And it was not entirely white. Somehow it had not been stained in any way by the ocean, but instead was marked with a peculiar pattern of blue, textured lines. They were almost like a kind of fanciful clothing themselves, or at least the outline of it, except they seemed to be built into the surface itself rather than worn on top of it.

There was also something about the proportions. It took Hitch a little bit to notice, but when he did, he could not find a way to unsee it. How the legs were just a little too long, a little too thin, and the oddly segmented neck seemed to be twisted in a way that was not quite natural.

“Well,” said Hitch, clearing his throat. “I can’t just leave this here on the beach.”

“You want the stick?” asked Peach. "Poking it makes me feel powerful."

“The fact that it doesn’t have eyes kind of makes me feel scared,” said Glory.

“Trust me,” said Hitch, approaching it and sighing. “It’s so much worse when they do.”

He reached down and grabbed the thing—and almost immediately recoiled. It was oddly cold and clammy, and certainly not made of plastic—but he was at least heartened to learn that it felt nothing like an actual pony either. He had never felt a texture quite like it. The closest he could imagine is if he had suddenly touched ice-cold glass—but with a level of give more appropriate for a decaying melon.

“Come on,” he implored the dummy, grabbing it again. “You’re litter and you can’t be here...ugh...why are you so heavy? Come on, dummy...maybe Izzy can...unicycle you or...guh...”

He could not manage to free it.

“Is it heavy?”

“No, just awkward and half-buried. I’m going to need a shovel.” Hitch looked back at his tracks. The tide was coming in, and some of them were already being washed away. “And there’s no way I can carry this all the way back, I’ll need a cart.” He turned to the fillies. “You three should go home. The tide’s going to get here soon.”

They looked at him, and Hitch noticed that they, too, seemed oddly nervous.

“Yeah,” sighed Peach Fizz. “That’s probably not a bad idea.”

“My mom has frozen pizza!” said Glory, suddenly. The other seemed to be greatly enthused by this revelation.

“Be careful about using the oven!” warned Hitch as they ran off. "Follow the instructions EXACTLY and be sure to take the plastic off the top! And the cardboard off the bottom! And put it on a PAN!"

“Don’t worry, no oven will be involved at all!” called one of the fillies back as they departed.

Hitch turned back to the his work, staring at the shape on the beach. It was, at least, a problem he knew how to deal with—even if for some unknown reason he really did not want to.

When Hitch returned to the spot on the beach, he did so with the appropriately marked police sheriff’s department cart and corresponding sheriff’s department shovel. Pulling a cart across the sand was by no means easy, even for one of the fittest earth-ponies in all of Maretime bay, so when he arrived to the spot the sun had already sunk low in the eastern sky. The sunset would surely be beautiful, but ponies were already leaving the beach. Even in the summer, the bay grew cold at night—and the waves more choppy than was safe to be around. Especially at high tide.

The beach was mostly empty. The wind had started to pick up. Hitched turned the corner toward the secluded part of the beach where the mannequin had washed ashore. That area was even more abandoned than the rest, as few ponies went there anyway—and in the distance, he was able to see the spot where his quarry was waiting to be picked up by the appropriate authorities.

It was about two hundred yards down the beach when Hitch stopped. He squinted into the distance. Something had caught his attention at the site, but it was too far for him to see properly. He found hims mind trying slowly to make sense of what he was seeing, and when it came to a conclusion he was sure it was some kind of bizarre optical illusion.

Something was sticking up. A small, vertical stalk he could barely see. A white thing protruding upward vertically, although exactly what it was or even how large it stood was impossible to determine.

Hitch shivered as he convinced himself that there was no way it could be a pony looking at him—even though that was what his mind said. A white pony’s head, staring at him from a long neck. Standing perfectly still in the wind.

Hitch blinked and shook his head. He squinted his eyes closed again and again—and then looked again. He saw it again. Exactly where it had been.

“What the...”

Then it moved. It dropped to one side as if knocked over, falling back to the sand and vanishing behind a slight dune.

Hitch paused. He did not want to go forward. Something told him to stay. The air suddenly felt so very cold. Still, he knew he was being ridiculous. He was the sheriff, and he was afraid of a piece of pony-shaped flotsam. One that was clearly not dangerous in the slightest, or even especially disturbing.

He resumed his walk, now with an even faster pace—and even with the weight of the cart, he quickly came to the place where the mannequin had been.

Which left Hitch confused as he stared at the spot. The place where it had been was still disturbed and caked with old seaweed—but the mannequin itself was gone.

“Izzy must have gotten to it first,” he groaned to himself, wishing she had told him ahead of time so that he would not have wasted his patrol time fetching the cart. As he looked, though, he saw that there were no hoofprints leading to it in the sand—but there were a set leading away.

Hitch approached them, leaning down. A single set led away from the site, down toward the water’s edge. The first few were shallow but essentially the familiar heart-shaped prints of a pony. Then, though, they degraded. They shifted and became something else. Strange and distorted, and in a pattern that did not correlate to a quadruped. They were trilobal, and there were too many of them—like a creature with a great many legs had left them as it scampered away.

The majority of those stranger, more ominous prints were already being washed away by the sea.

Slowly, Hitch turned his head up to look out at the water. The sunlight looked so beautiful glimmering off its surface—and it was so beautiful that he almost did not see it. In the distance, just on the edge of his vision but now very much perceptible, a white, faceless head on a long neck poking out of the water.

Hitch took a step forward, squinting.

“Dang it,” he said. “It must have washed back out to sea.”

Except that the tide had not yet reached the place where it had been lying. Except that, even assuming it somehow floated in an upright position, it would have bobbed with the motion of the waves. But it did not. It was perfectly still, the waves crashing around it. It did not move up and down, it was not pushed back to shore—as if it had been set standing on the bay’s bottom. Except Hitch knew the topography of this part of the bay; it was deeper than the rest, which was why ponies rarely swam there and largely used it only for the spring rigata. Where the mannequin was floating was at least three times deeper than the average pony—perfect depth for a boat, but far too deep for a pony to be standing on the rocky bottom below. Let alone a mannequin with legs that did not even articulate.

Hitch took another step toward the water, but stopped himself. He felt an urge to jump into the water and swim out to catch it, lest it pollute the sea even more—but going out in the water all alone would simply be too dangerous. Even in the shallower, less choppy parts of the bay.

He convinced himself that it would set a bad example should any pony see him doing it—let alone for to retrieve a piece of debris that would eventually return to the shore anyway.

“I’ll get you next time,” promised Hitch as he turned away from the sea. He sighed, annoyed that he had not been able to catch it—and that he had been essentially outsmarted by a dummy. Zipp could never know, or she would never let him forget it.

He chuckled—but found no humor in the situation. For some reason, he only felt unnerved. Having it behind him. He turned back and looked again. It was still there—except it had shifted position slightly. Surely a result of the wave action. It had turned, slightly. The faceless head was now facing him. And Hitch squinted, for a moment sure that it had somehow gotten closer.

With a great expense of willpower, he turned away, feeling a shiver run through his body as he broke into a light trot. It was not easy to do so on sand, even if he was in the damp part just beyond where the waves were landing.

There was no need to look back. Hitch knew this. And yet his heart was racing. His legs were shaking with the desire to run. To not even bother to unhitch the car tied to him, holding him back. To drag it at full speed, even if it fell over and he was forced to pull it on its side. To bolt all the way back home.

Then he stopped. He tried. To stop himself from looking—and it felt like someone else was turning his head.

It was still there. Still distant—but he could no longer convince himself that it was in the same spot. It had moved. As if it were following him.

“Which it isn’t,” he insisted, still staring at the blank face fifty yards out that was staring back at him. Without moving in the waves whatsoever. Perfectly still and unalive. Hitch chuckled. “It’s a trick of the ocean current. I should know, I personally checked for every possible riptide. There aren’t...any.” He shook his head. “It’s stuck in a horizontal flow. That’s it, that’s all. Isn’t that right, Ms. Pinchygrabb...”

He looked down to the ground, knowing that he was near his crab-friend’s hole—but she was not there.

He looked up. There were no crabs out at all. No birds in the air. For the first time, he realized that there were no animals at all—and no sound aside form the inorganic environmental noises of the waves repetitively crashing on the beach. No bird song. No clicking of crabs, no squirt of the native geoducks—nothing. He was completely and utterly alone.

A shiver ran through his body and he picked up his pace, telling himself that he needed to get the cart back quickly. In case somepony else needed it. Even if he was the only one that ever used it.

He looked back, over his shoulder, and saw that it was still there. Still at a distance, but in a new spot—and the distance between them had decreased almost imperceptibly. Hitch began to panic, even though he knew it was ridiculous—but he could not stop himself from wondering. If it really was getting closer.

The cart began to rumble and jump—and Hitch knew that if it fell over, as strong as he was, he would be taken over with it. He would be stuck on the wet beach, desperately trying to free himself—and for some reason he knew that something very, very bad would happen if he was overturned. If he stopped, even for a second.

He ran past the stairs to the boardwalk, and immediately up a ramp. Several passing ponies jumped out of his way, confused and somewhat concerned. Being around others seemed to help, and Hitch paused, breathing hard.

“Sorry, ponies,” he gasped. “Cart is...almost past it’s sign out time, just official...gasp...official sheriff business.”

They smiled awkwardly at him and continued on his way. Hitch tried to regain his composure and his breath, and was able to—but he was not unable to resist the temptation to look out at the water again.

It was still there. Except now it had turned again. Although it was still far out in the water, it had once again turned to face him. Watching with its eyeless, unseeing face as it sat perfectly still in the water. Waiting to once again come ashore.

All Hitch could do was stare at it—until he could bring himself to turn away and leave it out there. He forced himself to dismiss the thought that this time it might not stop at the high-tide mark.

Author's Note

As apparent here, this story was originally intended to have a horror-like structure.

Horror, as a genre, however, tends to preclude especially advanced plotting in favor of suspense (the two emotions tend to run counter). As such, I am hesitant to classify it specifically as a horror story due to the way the plot tends to move in later chapters.