A Properly Unhaunted Place

by William Alexander

  But then Rosa’s father died. Shamefully. Because he turned out to be the worst appeasement specialist. And Mom waned. The job took more out of her, even the easy bits of the job that Rosa could have handled. So Rosa started to handle them. She dealt with minor hauntings so her mother wouldn’t have to. She protected the silent books, dealt with rogue statues, and listened for the Miasmic Thing’s tinkling bell while she waited for Mom to return to herself.

  It had felt good to be useful, to become a specialist in her own right. And being useful had helped Rosa distract herself from the absence of her beloved, idiotic dad and his embarrassed smile. “Don’t tell your mother,” he’d say after blundering through something that should have been easy. And Rosa would promise, delighted to share his secrets. She would help him clean up whatever mess he had made. Because it felt good to be useful.

  Rosa wanted to explain all of it to Jasper, but she couldn’t speak. For one single moment of panic she thought that her own voice was gone, stolen away by a haunting in an unhaunted place. Then she found her voice, but she still couldn’t say much. “Mom should be fine. We just need to find that ghost.”

  “How do we do that?” Jasper asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think I need your help. Maybe. Probably. Please. Unless you’re too busy picking up broken pieces of festival tomorrow. I guess our messy circle didn’t protect it much.”

  “I can help,” he said quickly, because he did want to help her hunt for haunted things—and also because he felt uncomfortable and wanted to change the subject. So far he had avoided thinking about the broken stalls, or the shredded remains of the royal pavilion, or the trampled fortune-teller’s tent where Doris the Seer threw down tarot cards. He wanted something to do instead. Something important. “Find me tomorrow. I’ll be at the farm. And I should probably get back there. We have some spooked horses to soothe.”

  And maybe Jerónimo made it home, he thought. Maybe he’ll be waiting outside the stable. Maybe.

  “Okay,” said Rosa. “I’ll find you. Don’t take off that bracelet. Feel free to wear any other copper you can find. Stick copper coins to yourself with Band-Aids, maybe.”

  “I’ll keep the bracelet on,” he promised. “Bye.”

  “Bye,” Rosa said.

  Her mother tried to speak, and couldn’t. She tried to wave, but the gesture became just a flick of the hand.

  Jasper left. The painted eyes of Bartholomew Theosophras Barron did not watch him in the lobby. Outside the sun was setting. Someone had hauled away the ruined tree, leaving a scorched sidewalk behind.

  Mrs. Jillynip came fretting back to Rosa with an ancient and battered first aid kit. The Band-Aids inside had probably given up, died away, and lost all their adhesive.

  “Thank you,” Rosa said. She meant it, though she might not have sounded like she meant it.

  The older librarian gave a terse nod. “Tend to your mother,” she said. “It is good to meet you, Mrs. Díaz.”

  “Ms. Díaz,” Rosa said automatically, but Mrs. Jillynip didn’t seem to notice.

  “I’ll be closing up the library and leaving now,” the older librarian said. “If you must come and go yourselves, then you’d best have your own way to lock up.” She handed over two keys to the front door. “I trust you’ll keep out of Special Collections while I’m away.”

  Mrs. Jillynip turned abruptly, switched off most of the lights, and left before Rosa could respond to her mix of condescension and kindness.

  “Hi,” she said to her Mom.

  Mom smiled a little, but it wasn’t really a response.

  Rosa rolled up her mother’s sleeve, cleaned mud from the scrapes and cuts, and applied goopy, greasy burn cream. Then she bandaged up the whole arm, and probably used too many bandages. It looked lumpy.

  “Do you know what that was?” Rosa asked. She couldn’t help asking. “Do you know what used that tree as a new set of clothes?”

  Mom struggled against her lack of voice.

  “Never mind,” Rosa said quickly. “Never mind. Come on. I’m hungry. Let’s unpack some rice and beans in our dungeon apartment.”

  They went downstairs where all of their familiar things were stacked in silent, unfamiliar piles.

  13

  JASPER WOKE EARLY. HE USUALLY did. And on this morning his brain instantly snapped to fully awake. He had haunted things to think about.

  The Chevalier home was a very old farmhouse. Most of it creaked whenever stepped on or leaned against. Jasper knew which floorboards had the loudest voices, but he still couldn’t avoid creaking noises entirely while he moved around upstairs. Not that he was trying to be sneaky. Both parents would be up already. He just liked to move without making much noise.

  As in most old farmhouses, the bathrooms were tiny and the staircase too narrow for anyone wider than three sheets of paper. Broad-shouldered Dad had to turn himself sideways to go up or down the stairs, but Jasper still fit. In the bathroom he used very pale Band-Aids to stick pennies to each shoulder. In the stairwell he skipped several steps on his way down. He also skipped breakfast until after he had checked in on the stable.

  He brought his staff with him. The coin at the tip made a clink, clink, clink noise against the driveway and the stable’s cement floor.

  Jerónimo was still missing. Twelve stalls on the right stood full, but only eleven on the left.

  The four grooms who worked for the family went about their business, performing their morning rituals with brush and sponge, checking the bandages over yesterday’s cuts and scrapes. And the horses themselves seemed fine, unhaunted by memories of a haunted tree. Horses spook easily, but they also calm down quickly.

  Jasper mucked out Jerónimo’s stable and put down fresh bedding, even though he didn’t need to, even though the horse hadn’t come home last night. Jasper still needed to do this. He did it every morning. It meant that the day would unfold as it should.

  He went back inside the house. His staff clinked against the driveway as he walked.

  The Chevalier kitchen, like the Renaissance Festival itself, was a gleefully anachronistic place. Their shiny chrome fridge sat beside a stone hearth large enough to stand up in. Sometimes they boiled stew in a massive cauldron over an open fire, but not very often. It set off the smoke alarm. And good stew takes forever to make properly.

  A long wooden table took up most of the kitchen. It had benches rather than chairs, and seemed suitable for feasting bands of merry warriors.

  Mom and Dad—Emily and Morris Chevalier—sat sipping ye olde cappuccinos with the other two directors of the Ingot Renaissance Festival: Timothy Rathaus, who used to joust with Dad at the very beginning but had since retired from the lists to run the Tacky Tavern, and Nell MacMinnigan the smith, who was still the smith. Mr. Rathaus sported a trim goatee on his chin. Nell had short red hair, a torn T-shirt, and an armband that swirled around her smithy-widened bicep. She rarely laughed. Right now she looked very far away from laughing.

  Jasper got himself a bowl of cereal, joined the adults at the table, and listened to them talk over and around him.

  The four directors met to decide the fate and future of the Ingot Renaissance Festival, large portions of which had been flattened by a tree yesterday. And they seemed to remember that tree stampede, which was a huge relief to Jasper. They didn’t pretend that it had not happened. But they also didn’t seem concerned that it had happened.

  “We can reopen tomorrow,” Mr. Rathaus insisted. “We can rebuild by then.”

  “Seems doable,” said Mom, cautiously optimistic. “But I might have to cut down on royal processions.” She stretched out her leg. Jasper scooted aside to give her sprained and bandaged ankle more room on the bench.

  “We really can’t afford to close for longer than that,” Rathaus went on. “Not so early in the season.”

  “We also owe it to the out-of-town performers,” Dad agreed. “I doubt they’ve even recouped travel expenses yet.”

  Nell hunched her
shoulders and stared at her mug as though scrying their future in the dregs of cappuccino foam. (Jasper knew and liked her well enough to think of her as Nell rather than Ms. MacMinnigan.)

  “A few out-of-towners have skipped already,” she said. “They know what can happen to historical reenactments in haunted places. Echoes of actual history crop up to argue with performers.”

  “Ingot isn’t haunted,” said Mom, Dad, and Rathaus in unison.

  Nell looked up. “Trees don’t decide to flip over and run downhill all by themselves.”

  Rathaus shook his head. “That’s just the exception that proves the rule.”

  “Nope, nope, nope,” Nell insisted. “The rule is that this never happens. Ever. Not here. But it happened anyway. So that exception very definitely disproves the rule.”

  She couldn’t convince them. Rathaus only pretended to listen. Mom had her mind firmly set to optimistic problem-solving. Dad was tired, a little sad, and clearly worried about the horses. But he couldn’t imagine shutting down the festival. He couldn’t see it as necessary, or even possible. And a haunted Ingot was an alien idea to them, one that they couldn’t even look at directly.

  Jasper had felt much the same way before Rosa made him a rough bracelet out of copper wire.

  “We have safety volunteers patrolling up and down the tree line,” Rathaus said.

  Nell was not mollified. “I saw some of that. Local boys itching to take some kind of action. They formed their own ghost hunting militia. Now they’re all marching around in costume with pointy, poorly balanced pole arms they bought or borrowed from Smoot. Young Humphrey, the mayor’s own kid, is carting around a homemade flamethrower with brass gears glued on to make it look sort of Victorian. I feel very, very safe now that those brave lads stand ready to protect their homes and kill some ghosts. But you can’t kill something that’s already skipped through dying and come out the other side. We aren’t used to hauntings here. We don’t know how to respond. I’m pretty sure that this isn’t how we should.”

  “We do have a new appeasement specialist in town,” Jasper told them.

  Rathaus gave a dismissive chuckle. “But this is Ingot,” he said. “We’ve never needed one of those before.”

  The three directors wouldn’t budge. They still remembered what happened, but those events had ceased to be viscerally real or cause for concern. Something had sanded away the rough edges of their memories.

  Nell gave up, swallowed the dregs of her cappuccino, and went outside to smoke.

  Jasper slurped down his cereal milk and followed. He found her on the porch, stuffing tobacco into a long wooden pipe with the tip of her pinky finger. Then she looked for a light.

  He gave her the Zippo.

  “What’s this?” she asked, suspicious and muttering around her pipe stem. “Are you taking up bad habits? Smoking is all kinds of bad. I’ve inhaled so many fumes from melting down metal that I figure my lungs are wrecked already, but yours aren’t. Not yet. Stand back. Even second-hand stuff is bad.”

  “No bad habits,” Jasper said. “Rosa needed fire yesterday. The appeasement specialist. So we picked this up.”

  “That the girl I saw you racing around with?”

  Jasper nodded.

  “Interesting.” Nell lit her pipe, puffed the smoke, and looked out across the fields like a sailor watching the sea. “We’ve got ourselves a tiny specialist.”

  “Two of them,” Jasper said. “One is less tiny. But she’s in rough shape after she took down the tree.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” Nell said. She gave him back the Zippo. He stuck it in his pocket. “Still. Took down the tree. Good to hear. Your father didn’t have much luck jousting against it. Which came as no surprise.”

  Jasper considered her spiraling piece of jewelry. “Maybe his lance wasn’t made of the right metal. Is that copper on your arm?”

  “Mostly,” Nell said. “Almost entirely. It’s bronze, and bronze is just copper with a little bit of tin tossed in for strength and flavor. Is there something I should know about copper?”

  He showed her the thin wire bracelet on his own wrist. “The ghost didn’t like touching this stuff.”

  “Is that right,” she said. “I’ve got a bit of a Bronze Age collection back at the shop. Not much. Collectors usually go for more renaissancy replicas, but I do have a bit . . .” She stopped. “Forget it. Forget I said anything. And don’t go telling anyone else about this copper business. The very last thing I need is to have every would-be ghost hunter come begging for my Bronze Age collection. It wouldn’t protect them, or anyone else. It would just put danger in their hands—the sort of danger that might lash out at anybody. Know what adrenaline does?”

  “Yes,” he said in a way that would, hopefully, forestall a lecture about adrenaline. Sir Dad loved to give lengthy explanations of things that Jasper already knew, so he had to endure this pretty often. “It makes you faster. And stronger.”

  “It also makes your hands shake.” Nell took the pipe out of her mouth and pointed the stem at him. “No matter how brave you are, or level-headed, or filled with knightly virtue, your hands will still shake from the force of adrenaline and you will be simply unable to do anything precise with anything pointy. Unless you practice for years. And keep practicing. Every day. Our new, volunteer militia of ghost hunters aren’t so skilled. Maybe they’re trying to be usefully brave, but I figure they’ll be clumsily dangerous instead. And I won’t add to that disaster. I won’t give weapons to boys who want to feel more in control than they really are. Won’t make any difference against an undead, irate tree anyway. You just stand clear of dead trees. Can’t kill ghosts with a Bronze Age spear.”

  “Can’t kill ghosts at all,” Jasper said, by which he meant, I’m with you. We’re on the same page. Stop reading me that page aloud.

  Nell crossed her blacksmithing arms. The left one bulged inside its armlet. “Nice staff,” she said, nodding at the spot where it leaned beside the door.

  “Thanks.”

  She peeked at the old coin hammered onto the end. “Zhou Dynasty, looks like. Probably a replica. Can’t read the characters. One of my tattoos is in Chinese. Got it when I was young and dumb. It was supposed to be a list of the five elements. Turns out it reads, ‘This is a tattoo.’ ”

  “At least that’s accurate,” Jasper said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Could be worse. I wonder what your coins say. I wonder how much it matters. But I’m glad you’ve got that staff. Proper kind of defensive weapon. You can use it to keep your distance from dangerous things without becoming a flailing, reckless, stabby sort of dangerous thing yourself. I’ll worry less about you if you walk softly with that. But don’t go around thinking that a stick makes you invincible. It’s not a talisman. It’s not a symbol of your mightiness. It’s just a stick.”

  Jasper took it by the leather-wrapped grip in the center. He didn’t swing it around or do anything flashy, even though he really wanted to.

  “Just a stick,” he promised.

  Nell went to the railing and knocked ashes from her pipe onto the lawn. “Thank your parents for the coffee. I should make my rounds and check all the horseshoes.” As a real, actual blacksmith Nell was also the town farrier and horseshoe expert.

  “The grooms checked already,” Jasper pointed out.

  “Yeah, but I don’t trust them to do it right. And then I need to go back to the fairgrounds, clean up my smithy, hide my wares from amateur ghost hunters, and get ready to reopen. Which is, for the record, a terrible idea.”

  “Bye Nell.”

  She waved and headed for the stables with her pipe in her teeth.

  14

  ROSA WOKE UP THAT MORNING without knowing where she was, or what time it was. Probably the middle of the night, she figured, given the absolute darkness around her. But she needed the bathroom, so she climbed out of bed—except the bed wasn’t a bed so much as a mattress on the floor, and Rosa couldn’t find the bathroom because it wasn’t where i
t was supposed to be, and also because piles of boxes stood between her and wherever the bathroom had hidden itself.

  She knew where she was, now: in Ingot, underneath the library. But that knowledge didn’t help her find the bathroom in the dark.

  “Why do we live in a basement?”

  Mom switched on a lamp. The sudden change was eye-stabbing. Rosa shut hers, and then blinked them back open.

  “Sorry I woke you up,” she said. “What time is it? Four in the morning?”

  Mom fumbled around for her phone. She looked at it and tried to make sense of it.

  Rosa started to get worried. “Can you tell what it says?” She grabbed a book from one of several dozen boxes marked “books” in black Sharpie. “Can you read this?”

  Mom took the book. Her forehead furrows deepened as she concentrated.

  “You can’t,” Rosa realized. “I think you understand me. You seem to understand me. But that’s my voice. Not yours. And when you read, you hear your own voice in your head. Yours is gone. So the words aren’t in your head.”

  Mom set down the book and smiled a wistful and not-at-all reassuring sort of smile. Rosa tried to swallow the understanding that her mother, a librarian, could no longer read.

  “I’ll find your voice,” she promised. “I’ll get it back. I will.” She glanced at the phone. “And it’s almost ten o’clock. But we live in a basement without real windows, so we can’t tell the difference between the middle of the night and the middle of the morning. I’m going to start pitching a tent on the main floor.”

  She navigated the cardboard labyrinth on her way to the bathroom, where she stacked up a cairn of pebbles underneath the mirror. Then she lit a candle stub with a match and set it beside the cairn. Maybe that mattered. Maybe it didn’t. Nothing on either side of the mirror seemed to notice or care. Nothing used the candle flame to pass from one side to the other. But she still felt better for doing it. And the bathroom began to smell a little less musty.