A Properly Unhaunted Place

by William Alexander

  “Shhhh,” Jasper shushed.

  “Don’t shush me, knight.”

  “Copper,” he said.

  “What about copper?” she demanded. “Barron had a copper mine down at the end of Isabelle Road. Said so on his map. Plus the name of this stupid town is a pretty sizable hint. Local ghosts are practically allergic to copper. But he isn’t. He’s okay with stealing pipe fixtures from the bathrooms here and patching up his huge circle. He doesn’t mind copper. But why is his blood green?”

  “I think he’s made out of copper.” Jasper turned to face the staircase behind them, just in case Barron followed them down. “He’s bleeding copper. Using it instead of iron. We bleed red. The iron in our blood gets rusty when it hits the air. But copper rusts green.”

  “Oh,” Rosa said. “Okay.”

  “That’s why Mars is red,” he went on. “Lots of iron.”

  “Got it,” she said.

  “Did you hear about the ghost rivers that Curiosity found on Mars?” he asked.

  “Stop talking about Mars!”

  “Shhhhh,” said Mrs. Jillynip behind them. “This is a library, children.”

  Rosa spun around and very nearly knocked over a stack of rolled-up maps. “You knew,” she said. “You knew about Barron.”

  Mrs. Jillynip sniffed. “It is my job to know about him, and to offer him refreshment. Or appeasement, if you like. A little offering of milk and honey. And I would have thought that a city librarian with your vast experience of hauntings wouldn’t be so troubled by one well-respected ghost in our attic. I do hope you haven’t upset him. I asked you not to go upstairs.”

  “He’s banished all of the others,” Rosa tried to explain, but Mrs. Jillynip wasn’t having it.

  “Go and play somewhere else, the both of you. Children are not permitted in Special Collections. You didn’t sign the clipboard. You are not wearing gloves. And try not to bump any shelves with that stick. Go on.”

  She shooed them out and shut the door in their faces.

  Rosa didn’t move. She just stood and stared at the door.

  “What now?” Jasper asked.

  “I didn’t get groceries,” she said softly. “I was supposed to get groceries. We don’t have much in the kitchen. And we skipped lunch. I forgot all about the existence of lunch. Mom is probably hungry. She couldn’t get groceries. She can’t read labels anymore. She doesn’t have a voice, not even inside her own head. We should go get her. And get some food. Plus this building is the precise center of one great big bubble of banishment, and that bubble is going to pop. Soon. So we should probably leave.”

  “Probably,” Jasper agreed.

  Rosa didn’t move.

  “Is your Mom downstairs?” he prompted.

  “Yeah,” Rosa said.

  “Show me. I didn’t know this place had a basement.”

  Rosa made herself move. She led the way to the door and the stairs in the back, and down they went.

  20

  JASPER THOUGHT THE DOWNSTAIRS APARTMENT was kind of fantastic.

  “It’s a whole set of secret rooms!”

  “It’s a cave,” said Rosa. She did not think that this was a good thing, but Jasper did.

  “Exactly. A secret cave. It’s so quiet down here.”

  “Of course it’s quiet,” she said. “We’re underground, beneath a library, in isolated little Ingot. I miss noise. I miss traffic and people outside.”

  “We should switch places,” Jasper suggested. “Dad’s rumbling voice sounds like traffic, and it fills up the whole house. So does his snoring.” They peered around piles of boxes. “Where’s your mom?”

  “Mom!” Rosa called, even though she already knew that her mother couldn’t answer.

  They climbed over the couch on their way to the kitchen, where they found her. She was slowly unpacking her tool belt and spreading the contents across the kitchen table.

  “Hi Mom,” Rosa said. “Why are you . . . never mind. We need to go. We need to find some food. And we need to figure out what to do before the wall between the living and the dead collapses.”

  Athena Díaz the appeasement specialist did not respond. Instead she set a candle stub at one end of the round table, and another stub at the opposite end. It looked like she was playing chess against herself on a chessboard that made no sense.

  “Mom?” Rosa asked quietly. “Come on. We need to leave. We need to be away from this library before a host of vengeful dead come howling down the mountainside. We need to undo a hundred years of banishment without killing the whole town. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t think anyone knows how to do that. Except you. Maybe. But you can’t tell me. And I’m hungry. We should go. Right this very now.”

  Mom moved more of the tabletop mess around.

  “Look at me,” Rosa pleaded.

  Her mother looked up at her, but Rosa couldn’t read that look. Then Mom took the two candle stubs and set each one on the rim of a coffee mug. Rosa bit the inside of her cheek, hard.

  Jasper picked up a folded photograph from the mess. “Who’s this?”

  She glanced at the picture. “That was my dad.” It wasn’t the best picture of him, though. He looked all serious. Whenever Rosa imagined her father he wore his “oops” sort of smile.

  “He’s dead?” Jasper asked carefully.

  “He’s dead,” Rosa told him, her voice as flat as she could make it. “He wasn’t . . . very good at the family business. I covered for him when he messed up. Which was a lot. Then he transferred to a tiny little library across town. Barely haunted, as libraries go, so he really should have been able to handle the place. He should have known better.”

  “Better than what?” Jasper asked. “What did he do?”

  “He banished a poltergeist that he couldn’t appease. It flattened that whole building trying to come home. And Dad was in the building. Now it’s just a gravel pit. The poltergeist is still there. It tosses the gravel around. Banishment doesn’t work. It doesn’t ever work.”

  Jasper had a thought that Rosa probably wouldn’t like. “People who move to Ingot usually have a reason.”

  Rosa understood, and didn’t like it. “You mean they’re haunted by something they can’t appease? So they come to get unhaunted. Disinfected. Like a stack of old library books here on loan.” She folded the picture of her father back up. “Mom hasn’t been herself. Not since he died. But he wouldn’t haunt us. He wouldn’t do that to us. And Mom would know how to handle it, even if he did. Plus I haven’t seen him. I would have seen him, right? In the mirror, at least. I would have seen him when I put pebbles on the mirror shelves, if he was there. If he was haunting us. Right? Wouldn’t I?”

  Rosa wasn’t sure which one of them she was trying convince.

  Mom didn’t respond to the conversation. She kept her head down and continued to move things around the table. She set a candle stub on the edge of a plate. Then she set another candle on the opposite edge.

  Jasper started to speak, but Rosa waved a hand at him. “Shut up.”

  “I’m only . . .”

  “Shush! Shush, shush, shush. Just watch.”

  Mom reached into an open cardboard box and pulled out the lid to their pressure cooker. She did not look up. She did not do anything communicative in Rosa’s direction. She just set the lid on the table and put two candles on the rim.

  Jasper caught on. “Circles.”

  “Circles,” Rosa agreed. “She’s putting candles on the edges of a bunch of round things.”

  Mom stopped fiddling with stuff on the table. She still didn’t look up, but she did look satisfied.

  “Okay,” Jasper said. “Meaning what?”

  Rosa clapped her hands and rubbed them together. “There’s a whole lot of pressure bearing down on Barron’s copper circle. It gets worse whenever someone here dies. Or looks in a mirror. Or goes through a doorway. Or does anything else that would brush up against ghosts in a properly haunted place. And that pressure will just keep building up un
til—boom. Collapse. Backlash and awfulness. But maybe we can ease the pressure if we invite them back in. Slooooooowly. With candles. Big ones.” She looked up with hope and mischief. “Know where we can find a couple of really big candles?”

  21

  ROSA RUSHED THEM OUT THE door, down the front steps, and onto the sidewalk. The cement was still charred where the tree had collapsed.

  “Mom, do you think you can drive? It isn’t very far. You wouldn’t have to read street signs. And you can’t yell at everyone else on the road the way you usually do, but do you think maybe you can still drive a little ways?”

  Her mother did not respond, and probably would not have responded even if she had a voice. Instead she led the way to their rusty little car in the back of the library parking lot. They all climbed in.

  A medallion of Patron Francesca Romana dangled from their review mirror. This was a sign of respect for highway spirits, and for the ghosts that lurk inside used car parts.

  Rosa thought about the ghosts that used to lurk inside this one. They would have been ripped away as soon as the car reached Ingot, through the highway tunnel and underneath the copper circle on the mountainside. Now all of those little ghosts were stuck on the far side of that barrier, along with the spirit of each haunted thing that Rosa had brought here—every book, every relic, every used piece of clothing. All of her familiar haints were there on the mountain, displaced and disoriented.

  Along with her father. Maybe. Even though they had already settled what was left of him into a memorial lantern behind their old library, so he really shouldn’t have followed them here.

  They reached the fairgrounds. Tree-smashed cars still littered the parking lot, which was mostly empty otherwise. Ms. Díaz drove carefully across the mud, flattened grass, and fragments of windshield to park near the front gate.

  The gate was shut. The festival was officially closed, although a sign in hastily painted calligraphy promised A GRANDE REOPENING ON THE MORROW!!!

  Rosa hoped that Ingot would last until tomorrow.

  Her stomach growled, long and low.

  “Let’s head for the tavern first,” Jasper suggested. “Mr. Rathaus is probably ‘helping’ the repair work by staying open and selling us the same overpriced, overcooked food he sells to tourists.”

  They picked their way through the wall wreckage where the stampeding tree had passed yesterday, then found the Tacky Tavern. Ms. Díaz bought turkey legs. Rosa helped her count out the bills, since Mom couldn’t currently read the numbers. Then they all gnawed on the leg bones of turkeys. This was satisfying, even though the meat didn’t taste like much.

  Rosa watched festival folk while she chewed. They wore half-costumes and carried power tools. Buzz saws buzzed and drill bits whined. Smashed stalls got sorted into piles of salvageable and unsalvageable things. A girl repainted the carved wooden sign for YE OLDE CAPPUCCINOS with slow and deliberate care. A man sat under a tree and plucked out a skipping sort of tune on a battered lute. He wore denim and only denim, the blue jeans and button-up shirt both faded to the same grayish color as his beard. It made him look like an old gray fox, temporarily human-shaped so he could use fingers. The musician didn’t seem to mind that the power tools were louder than his song.

  Rosa listened. In that moment she understood why Ingot had the biggest and best Renaissance Festival to be found anywhere. That understanding hurt.

  Oh, she thought. This is what happens to an unhaunted place.

  The town might not know what it had lost, or why it was gone, but Ingot pressed against that absence like a tongue where a lost tooth used to be. Starved of history, they patched together new echoes from mismatched fragments. Unhaunted, they learned how to haunt themselves.

  This is a funeral, she realized. This is a wake. They hold it every summer, all summer long, to mourn a history they don’t have and don’t even remember losing. It was futile, and flailing, and goofy, and hopeless, and beautiful.

  The musician played on. He would probably keep playing when Barron’s circle broke and all the ghosts came howling home.

  22

  SIR MORIEN STRODE INTO THE tavern. He wore full armor, of course, even though this was an informal day of rehearsals and repairs. All eyes turned to him, just like they always did. He prepared to spin gold from their attention.

  Jasper winced, hunched his shoulders, and wished he could crawl under the table without anyone noticing.

  “What’s going on?” Rosa asked around a mouthful of tasteless turkey.

  “A morale-boosting speech,” he told her.

  “But it probably won’t boost your morale,” she said.

  “Probably not.”

  Sir Dad climbed onto the bar, cleared his throat, and stomped one foot.

  Uncle Fox stopped playing his tune. Nearby power tools all hushed.

  “Our revels have not ended!” Sir Dad roared. “The spirits that disturbed this festive ground have burned away and melted into air. Such denizens may still return, and yet upstage this humble festival—”

  Jasper snorted. He couldn’t take this speechifying seriously. None of Dad’s endeavors were ever humble. But no one else took it seriously, either—and neither did Dad. He pushed his goofball approximation of old chivalry right through silliness and out the other side, to a place that wasn’t serious but carried the same weight.

  “We will not lock our gates, or flee the field like horses driven wild. Sing while you toil. Strike up a tune. Strike nails with hammers to keep proper time. Today we must restore our pageantry!”

  The crowd cheered, and started singing. Of course they did.

  Sir Dad climbed down from the bar and set out to boost morale elsewhere.

  Jasper sat up a little straighter.

  “That was fun,” Rosa said.

  “Yeah,” said Jasper. “Fun.”

  “He was the one in the spotlight,” Rosa pointed out. “Not you.”

  “Always feels like it’s me.” He tossed his turkey bone into a barrel. “Come on. We should hurry before someone tries to put us to work.”

  Rosa took one last bite and ditched the rest. “Mom, are you comfortable enough right here? We’ll be back soon. Hopefully.”

  Mom did not answer, unless putting her feet up on the neighboring bench was a kind of answer.

  Rosa and Jasper left the tavern.

  “We should find more copper,” she said. “If there is any of the stuff left.”

  “Try Nell’s smithy,” he said, pointing. “Tell her I sent you. I’ll go talk to Duncan at the Waxworks. He can be a little persnickety.”

  The two split up on their separate errands.

  Duncan Barnstaple, master candlemaker, labored in a haze of wood smoke and beeswax. He seemed to be melting down broken candles and returning them to the bubbling, primordial ooze from whence they came.

  He did not wear contemporary clothing, even on an informal day of repairs and rehearsals. He wore period clothes beneath a leather apron, and braided his long, blond beard to keep strands from dropping into the wax. Duncan the candlemaker believed in authenticity. He refused to see or acknowledge anachronisms, and would ignore anything spoken out of character.

  Jasper took a moment to find his accent. “Good morrow to you, master craftsman.”

  The candlemaker looked up from his cauldron. “And to you, noble squire. What business brings you here with such clear urgency?”

  “A knightly business,” Jasper said. “To defend the good people of Ingot from harm.”

  Duncan nodded, approving. “Such is your profession.”

  “And to accomplish this, we find ourselves in dire need of your profession.”

  “Strange.” The candlemaker stirred his molten wax. “How may I serve this knightly business?”

  “We require candles. Two of them, and both of a prodigious size. At least an ell in height.”

  Duncan pulled at his braided beard. “I have such candles here. They once burned within the sanctuary of libraries, to assist t
he twilit studies of the patrons there. They are impressive. And most expensive. Note that I have carved the hours, and verses of old poems, into the sides of each.”

  “This is fine work,” Jasper agreed. “But do you have plain, unfinished candles that you might willingly part with? Misshapen, even?”

  Duncan made a face as though Jasper had sneezed on his dinner and refused to apologize. “Misshapen? I would be loath to allow apprentice-level work to leave my shop.”

  Jasper tried not to let his impatience come blazing out of his face. I wish the Fantastical Candle stall was still here, he thought. I could have just said, “Hey, do you have anything really, really tall? It doesn’t need to look fancy.” He swallowed bile and tried to be convincing.

  “I swear by your beard, master of the waxworks, that this is urgent and no slight to your craft.”

  Duncan considered his beard a very potent thing to swear by. “I had intended to melt down a pair of cracked sanctuary candles,” he said. “I may be willing to give them to you instead. But first explain your urgency.”

  Jasper hesitated, and then dove right in. “My friend and I intend to breach a misguided and unnatural barrier that stands between the living and the dead.”

  “Ah.” Duncan considered this. He decided that he would rather not know any more about it. “Very well.”

  23

  ROSA FOUND NELL MACMINNIGAN LABORING over the forge. A rope fence kept everyone else away from this dangerous, clanging activity. Rosa ducked right under the rope.

  Nell stopped hitting metal things together. “I thought people in your line of work respected boundaries,” she said.

  “Usually,” said Rosa, pleased to be recognized. “We’re also pretty good at breaking them.”