A Properly Unhaunted Place

by William Alexander

  Jasper shifted his posture as he slipped into character. “This part of the show is unscripted, and will unfold according to fate and the skill of each knight. Come see for yourself. We should hasten before rabble and groundlings fill up the front row.”

  “Lead the way,” Rosa said.

  Jasper led the way. “Dad usually wins,” he added.

  10

  THE JOUST BEGAN WITH TRUMPETED fanfare, scripted taunts, and genuinely impressive feats of fancy horsemanship. Mounted knights galloped back and forth in front of the queen’s pavilion. They speared apples and rings held up by squires. Her Majesty sat in finery and politely applauded. She waved at Jasper. Jasper waved back. Hi Mom. Then he juggled a set of five rings for Sir Dad’s fancy, climactic feat before the real jousting began.

  Sir Morien took his place at the far end of the field. He rode Fiore, a seventeen-hand gray Percheron and his favorite. They would come galloping down and spear all five rings in a single pass—provided that Jasper tossed them up into a single line. This was a new trick, one that they had never performed in public before, but they had it down cold in rehearsal.

  Jasper slipped and almost dropped a ring.

  It mattered that Rosa was here, in the audience, watching. Weird. This was an unfamiliar sort of feeling. Jasper never thought of himself as theatrical. He didn’t like spotlights or standing onstage. He didn’t like school presentations at the front of the classroom. He didn’t enjoy bluster or posturing. He didn’t like to put on a show. That was Sir Dad’s thing. Jasper was backup. The assistant. The assist. Don’t look at me. Watch my father in all his glory while he thunders across the field.

  But he still wanted Rosa to notice how well he juggled. And he also didn’t, because juggling rings seemed suddenly trivial. Rosa had a much more interesting set of skills. Jasper didn’t know how to handle moving statues and bodiless bird wings.

  Focus, he thought. Right now the only thing you need to know how to do is juggle.

  Sir Morien spurred his steed into a gallop. He stood up in the stirrups and steadied himself.

  A strong wind came galloping down from the mountains in that same moment.

  Rosa felt the temperature suddenly drop. She also felt her sense of time fracture and fragment into isolated moments. Clouds darkened the sky and peered down as if interested in the outcome of the tournament.

  She knew what sorts of things could make time stutter alongside sudden gusts of cold air.

  Something big, she thought. That squiggly circle we drew isn’t going to help. I should have—

  A broken tree burst through the fairgrounds and knocked over half the pavilion before Rosa could finish the thought.

  The tree had flipped itself upside-down. It ran on thick branches that pretended to be legs. Leaves covered the lower half like a long, green gown. Inside that gown the branches snapped and broke, unjointed, unable to bend but bending anyway. Shattered wood scraped against itself as it splintered into knees.

  You remember a time when you had knees, Rosa noted, but you’ve put on new clothes that don’t fit.

  Mud-soaked roots reached up to the sky, and in their center roared the head of a mountain lion. Light burned red inside its gaping mouth.

  Oh, Rosa thought. That’s where the head ended up.

  The haunted thing screamed through its stolen head. The crowd scattered, but not very quickly. Crowds do not move fast.

  Royal spectators scrambled away from the ruined pavilion, Jasper’s mother among them. She seemed to be limping.

  Sir Dad and another knight—Sir Agravain, who owned the local hardware store—tried to hold their ground against the angry tree. But Agravain had never won a joust. He usually tumbled off his horse with excellent comedic timing. His slapstick horsemanship wasn’t up to this sort of challenge, so his steed decided to bolt in a sensible panic instead. Sir Agravain fell off and rolled aside—which was what he was best at doing anyway.

  Sir Dad kept Fiore from panicking, probably by singing to her. His voice could convince horses to trot calmly through a burning barn.

  He called out a challenge, still in character and also very much himself. He was trying to defend the realm, and to distract a dangerous thing before it trampled people beneath all of those branches that it used for legs. Sir Dad charged, raised his lance (the pointy kind, meant to spear apples and juggling rings, and not the blunt kind used for whacking against another knight’s shield), and stabbed the tree beast in the center of its trunk.

  The lance broke. The haunted thing did not seem to notice or care. It ignored both knights as it lurched across the field.

  Jasper didn’t have his quarterstaff readily at hand. But he did have five juggling rings, and realized that they might be more useful, so he tossed them into the tree beast’s charging path.

  It stumbled and slowed to avoid stepping inside those small circles, but it did not stop.

  The crowd scattered like a flock of startled pigeons. A tree with the head of a lion bore down on them, and they got out of the way.

  Rosa did not get out of the way.

  She dropped to a crouch, clicked the pocketknife open, and gouged a deep ring in the dirt around her. The knife blade broke just as she finished drawing her protective geometry. She tossed the hilt aside and stayed put, perfectly still, while the tree thundered in her direction.

  It stopped outside the circle.

  Wood creaked, shrieked, and shattered as it bent down. Roots writhed like grasping worms, but they all remained outside the boundary. The open mouth of the mountain lion shone its red lantern glow into Rosa’s face.

  “Speak to me,” she said.

  The lion’s mouth screamed.

  Rosa winced. She looked down and away. A single strand of copper wire caught her attention. It lay embedded in the bark of a leg-branch. Scorched wood smoked around the metal.

  Wisps of smoke also curled up from the medallion around Rosa’s neck.

  The haunted tree stood and moved wide around her circle, branches creaking. Then it lurched and lumbered toward town.

  Rosa followed.

  11

  HORSES RUN WHEN THEY PANIC. Sudden, thunderous, directionless freakouts have always helped them avoid predators. The festival horses indulged in this instinct just as soon as they saw an otherworldly combination of predatory animal and upside-down tree—all of them but Fiore, Sir Dad’s own steed, and probably because Dad sang to Fiore.

  The haunted tree did not seem interested in chasing horses. It lurched away from the fairgrounds. But the horses did not notice this. They ran, and ran smack into things like food stalls and fences.

  Jasper spotted Jerónimo in the mess and chaos. The young Belgian horse was already prone to unpredictable footwork and sudden lunges, even when he wasn’t spooked by a moving tree. Now he tried to outrun his own uprooted hitching post. The post trailed behind him and whacked into his legs, which spurred Jerónimo to further frenzy. He screamed as he ran.

  Jerónimo was Jasper’s own horse. Sort of. He was Jasper’s responsibility, the one he groomed daily. And now he was screaming.

  Jasper ran. He tried to catch up with his horse. But Englebert the stable boy got there first.

  Oh no, Jasper thought. Not him. The older boy had worked at the farm and festival for two summers, just to pay for riding lessons, but he remained willfully inept. Now he had Jerónimo cornered behind Mousetrap Stage.

  Englebert tried to calm the horse by yelling at him to be calm. It didn’t work. Obviously. Jerónimo jumped sideways and back again, ears flat and tail clamped. He rolled his eyes as though sarcastically panicked.

  Jasper slowed down and approached from the side.

  Englebert took off his tunic. He clearly intended to lunge at the horse’s face and use the cloth as a blindfold. It didn’t work. Obviously. Jerónimo shied and reared back as though frightened by a snake underfoot. Then he lunged. The hitching post whipped around like a mace on a chain.

  Jasper caught the post before it wh
acked into him. He only noticed this after he had already caught it. Once he did notice, he pulled. Jerónimo veered away sideways instead of trampling Englebert, and Jasper felt triumphant for one tiny moment before he got pulled off his feet.

  The worn tether broke away from the hitching post. Jerónimo galloped off, finally free of the thing that had harried and tormented him. He disappeared into the forest.

  Jasper stood up. He knew that he needed to follow his lost horse into the trees. Now. Right now. But he also knew that he wouldn’t.

  Englebert seemed similarly unwilling to keep up the chase. They picked their way slowly back to the wreckage of the pavilion. Jasper noticed that he still held the hitching post, and dropped it.

  He spotted his parents, upright and in charge of things. Then he looked for Rosa, and couldn’t find her—but he did find a broken knife and a circle carved in the dirt.

  Branches and scattered leaves made a trail away from that spot and through a wrecked hole in the festival wall.

  Rosa followed the tree through the festival parking lot. It climbed over cars and crushed them underneath its bulk. Square fragments of windshield glass crunched under Rosa’s sneakers as she ran after it.

  The tree moved with difficulty. Branches broke away with every step. It made moaning creaks and the sharp snaps of bending, breaking, living wood that wouldn’t be alive for very much longer. But it still took long strides. It moved faster than Rosa.

  The patron medallion of Catalina de Erauso grew painfully cold. Rosa pulled it out and clutched it in one hand. She tried to remember what she would need to do when she finally caught up to the tree.

  Establish a circle around each harmful thing, de Erauso wrote four hundred years ago in Dialogues of the Skill, her great book of appeasement. Nothing is stronger than a circle, nothing more whole in itself, nothing freer in its motion, for the scholars say that motion is most perfect when it rotates around a central point. Draw flawless geometry around the point of danger. Draw flawless geometry around yourself. Understand this boundary between danger and yourself Understand yourself as dangerous.

  Catalina de Erauso had dressed as a boy and fought as a mercenary in Spain and South America before she became a traveling librarian. She had also dueled and killed at least a dozen people—including her brother, though she didn’t know who he was at the time. He haunted her. She taught herself appeasement.

  The circle is not a cage. It is not a trap. It is an expression of respect. It is the orbiting danger of each powerful thing within the boundary of its reach.

  Rosa wondered what she could use to make a circle. She still didn’t have chalk, and her pockets were all out of salt.

  She stumbled over a fallen branch, but caught herself before she fell. Then she ran faster. Her legs hurt.

  Speak to danger in its language, or offer it your own. The spirits of the living and the spirits of the dead will strive to speak their histories. A librarian must listen.

  The tree wouldn’t talk to me! Rosa argued back. Already tried. I’ll have to try harder. But first I need it to hold still.

  The trail of broken branches led to the front steps of the Ingot Public Library.

  Rosa came to a stumbling, stuttering stop. Her breath seemed to keep going without her. She tried to catch it.

  Mom stood at the top of the steps, eye to eye with the head of a lion.

  Athena Díaz, the appeasement specialist, threw down two handfuls of shredded paper cut from old encyclopedias—out of date, and out of print, but still soaked with the knowledge of ten thousand things.

  The paper scattered like confetti at a wedding. It formed perfect circles when it fell across the library steps; one around the upside-down tree and its skirt of leaves, one around Rosa’s mother—which touched the first and formed a figure eight—and one huge, third circle encompassing them both. The final shape looked like an eye with two pupils.

  “Hello,” Mom said. “I didn’t expect this. Thought I’d have more of a break than a single day.”

  The beast screamed with the lion’s mouth. Reddish light glowed brighter inside it.

  “Speak,” Mom said, resigned. “Find your voice. If you have none left then you may borrow mine.” She held out her hand through the place where two circles touched, and took hold of a twisting, muddy root.

  “I am no dog you can command to bark,” the thing said with her borrowed voice, but so distorted by the mountain lion’s mouth that it didn’t sound like her.

  “Clearly,” Mom answered. “You’re a cat stuck to a plant. Say what you came here to say. Tell me how you came to be the only haunting in Ingot.”

  “I am not the only one,” the lion’s mouth growled. “Give him to me.”

  Who? Rosa thought.

  “Who?” Mom said.

  The tree cracked and tore as it leaned forward. “Give him to me. He is already mine, and I know where he hides. I will find him. I will bring remembrance.”

  “I’m also a servant of memory,” Mom said, her voice unshaken when she used it herself.

  One of the tree’s branching legs caught fire and burned in lurid, shimmering green. “Everyone and every thing within this town and valley will burn in memoriam.”

  “That sounds less appealing,” Mom said.

  The green flame spread from the tree to the geometry of paper scraps that surrounded them both. “It will burn.”

  “No.” Mom’s voice was not flammable.

  “You will not prevent this.”

  “No,” she said again.

  “The boundary is breaking. He cannot maintain it. I have come home to claim him.”

  “No.”

  “You live in my house!” the thing raged. “You crawl through my cellar!”

  This is getting ugly, Rosa thought. She tried to rush into the circle, but the fire grew and kept her out.

  “I live here now,” Mom said.

  “You are unwelcome,” said the thing. “This house is mine, as he is mine, as your voice is now mine. I will take the voice and keep it.”

  Mom tried to pull her hand away, but the tree root wrapped itself tight around her arm.

  Rosa shouted something. She wasn’t sure what.

  Her mother reached out with her free hand, grabbed the lion’s head by its teeth, and tore it away.

  The head made a thick, wet sound when it hit the sidewalk. The tree collapsed, still burning. A howling noise faded away southward.

  Rosa couldn’t see her mother through the wreckage and flame.

  12

  JASPER FOUND ROSA KNEELING BESIDE a towering bonfire on the library steps. He thought she was tugging on a branch, trying to pull it away from the rest of the blaze. But it wasn’t a branch. It was a woman—her mother—who did not budge. Jasper helped pull.

  The mountain lion head lay nearby, looking up. Its eyes moved wildly. Its mouth opened and closed twice. Then eyes and mouth stopped moving.

  Fire climbed up high and threw sparks in crackling bursts. Rosa yelled her frustration. It sounded like the sort of noise that mountain lions make.

  Her mother stirred. She unwound the root that held her arm. Rosa and Jasper half-carried her up the front steps.

  A fire truck arrived behind them and doused the burning tree. The blaze billowed steam. It took its time extinguishing. Once gone it left behind a scorched, cracked shape that looked more like bones than branches.

  The trio turned away and went inside. They found a big leather chair beside a magazine rack. The chair was fancy, but also old, worn, and patched together with duct tape. Athena settled in and sighed.

  “Are you okay?” Rosa asked. “Mom? Tell me you’re okay.”

  Her mom tried to answer. She couldn’t.

  “Write me a note,” Rosa grabbed a Sharpie and a scrap of paper from the suggestion box near the entrance—a wooden box with a slot in the top, through which library patrons could make secret requests, complaints, and invocations.

  Mom tried to write. It came out all confused and squ
iggly.

  “What’s wrong?” Jasper asked. “Did she hit her head?”

  “She lost her voice,” Rosa said. Her own voice sounded a thousand miles distant. “A ghost took it. Not just the part she shapes by breathing. All of it.”

  Mrs. Jillynip came fretting in their direction. “What is going on here? And what is going on outside?”

  “Shush,” Rosa said automatically. Mrs. Jillynip spoke too loudly for a library—even this library, where loud noises would not wake the books or anything asleep between the books.

  “Do not shush me, child,” snapped the irate librarian. “Who is this?”

  Rosa took a breath. Then she took another. “This is your colleague, Ms. Athena Díaz, the best librarian of appeasement you’ll ever find anywhere. And she just saved this library from a vengeful tree. Her arm looks banged up. Do you have a first aid kit? One with burn cream? I would use ours, but we haven’t unpacked yet so I don’t know where it is.”

  Mrs. Jillynip raised one eyebrow like an axe, but she went back to the front desk and rummaged around for a first aid kit.

  Mom closed her eyes. Rosa poked her knee, hard. “Stay awake! Just in case you really did whack your head.”

  “Are you okay?” Jasper whispered.

  “Yep,” Rosa said quickly. “Fine. Unhurt. No problem. Definitely fine. Yes.”

  Her voice sounded brittle. He wasn’t convinced. “You seem a little twitchy.”

  “I’m fine,” she insisted in a very loud whisper. “And Mom is fine. She’s going to be fine. You should have seen her. You should have seen her! She stood up to the tree. She threw down circles. She was herself.”

  Rosa wanted to explain what that meant. She wanted Jasper to know just how much respect Mom once commanded among the living and the dead. Because she was the best. Vengeful spirits set aside centuries-old grudges to chat with her. Lost and overdue books came home when she called. Even the most malicious, gossip-mongering, disembodied spirits of cell phones and pocket screens hushed in her company. And when the Miasmic Thing tried to devour storytime last summer, Athena Díaz sent it limping back down to the boiler room with a bell around its neck. She was the absolute best.