Ghoulish Song z-2

by William Alexander

  “The Captain came,” the Snotfish said, suddenly excited again. “His hand folded back and he had the Mayor’s stamp inside his arm to stamp the counter with.” The Snotfish moved his own arm around to demonstrate. “Maybe he has a sword in his arm, too, right next to the stamp. Maybe it shoots out of his arm like this when he fights!”

  “Did he do it?” Kaile asked, hoping to stall the inevitable pantomime of combat. “Did he stamp the counter?” Mother’s second-best bread should have been good enough to pass.

  “His eyes went tick-tick-tick,” the Snotfish said, as though that answered her question.

  “Yes,” Kaile agreed, trying very hard to be patient. “They do that. But did the Captain stamp the counter? Did we pass Inspection?”

  “I got supper and you didn’t!” her brother announced, gleeful.

  Kaile stood up. “Get out of my room, Snotfish.” He scampered out. She shut the door behind him, and then fetched the flute from its hiding place.

  Kaile breathed into it. She played a single note. It was a sad note. It sounded like a breeze that would rather keep still, and never could.

  She tried to play the tune she had just made up. Then she tried to play the music from The Seven Dancers, the one the old goblin had played on bandore.

  The flute resisted both tunes. The notes all came out wrong. Kaile wrestled with it, trying to make the music in the room match the music in her head, but she couldn’t manage to combine the two.

  She let the flute have its own way. It played a song that she had never heard before. The notes of that song resonated inside Kaile’s rib cage, making it difficult to breathe even as the music demanded more breath from her.

  She played, and she kept on playing. The sound insisted that she hear it, that she understand everything it sang about. She didn’t, and she was not at all sure that she wanted to. Kaile felt a shudder pass from her fingers to the tips of her toes. She stopped playing, and opened her eyes.

  Mother, Father, and the Snotfish all stood in her doorway. She hadn’t even heard the door open. Her family stared at her, and they stared at the wall behind her. All three of them looked stricken. Kaile began to suspect that they had not passed Inspection.

  It turned out that they were worried about something else entirely.

  “You don’t have a shadow,” the Snotfish said. “Only the dead don’t have shadows.”

  Fifth Verse

  MOTHER KNELT NEXT TO Kaile and checked to see if she was breathing.

  “Of course I’m breathing,” Kaile said. “I wouldn’t be able to say anything if I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be able to play a flute, either.” Her mother ignored what Kaile said, and checked the warmth of her skin, and looked into each eye without actually looking at Kaile at all—only at her eyes. Mother looked underneath each foot, where the lamplight couldn’t reach, where the girl’s shadow should still be hiding. She lifted them carefully, as though they were made out of breakable stuff. No shadow hid under her feet.

  Kaile laughed, nervous and annoyed at the odd attention. She was not as worried about this as everyone else seemed to be. Her head was still in the music, even as the tune drifted away downstream to wherever music goes once played. She put the flute down on the chest of drawers behind her as though it were nothing important, as though it were something that she had certainly not received from goblins. No one else paid any attention to the flute. No one else laughed, either.

  “Did we pass Inspection?” she asked, because she wanted to know, and because she wanted to deflect attention onto something that was not herself or the bottoms of her feet. Then she thought about why they might not have passed Inspection, and regretted asking. The second-best bread should have been good enough, she thought.

  The Snotfish started to answer her, but both Mother and Father shushed him, and he let himself be shushed. Kaile was a little bit astonished that the Snotfish let himself be shushed.

  “Send for Doctor Boggs,” Mother said, “and for the witchworker.”

  “Where does the witchworker keep her shack today?” Father asked, already moving and not waiting for the answer.

  “South of the rail station,” Mother called after him, without facing him, without taking her eyes away from her daughter. Her voice was quiet, and quietly stumbled over itself. It cracked as she spoke. That never happened. It sounded like a crack in solid stone.

  Mother wasn’t angry. Kaile didn’t know what Mother was, but angry wasn’t it. Mother looked down at her daughter like she didn’t quite know what Kaile was, either.

  Kaile looked away. She kicked her feet against the side of the chair. Then she stopped, because she didn’t want to call attention to her feet and what was no longer underneath them, between them and the floor.

  She wondered why Mother had sent for old Chicken Legs. They never had dealings with the witchworker. Mother didn’t like heavy charms, or heavy curses—but maybe it would take a heavy charm to find a missing shadow.

  She wondered where her shadow had gone.

  * * *

  Doctor Boggs hadn’t paid a visit to Broken Wall since the Snotfish broke his leg—again—by doing exactly the same thing he had been doing the first time he had broken his leg. He fell from a crate stacked on top of another crate, which he had stacked on a table in the public room. He had been tying several lengths of twine to the rafters. Kaile didn’t know why the Snotfish had been tying twine to the rafters, and she had never asked. Either he wouldn’t answer, or else he would answer for hours and hours, and either way she would regret asking.

  She heard Doctor Boggs arrive. He took a long time to huff his way up the stairs, and once in the room he paused to wipe sweat from his forehead. He must have run all the way from Borrow Street. Doctor Boggs was a wide man with big sideburns, and he wore spectacles in thin wire frames.

  Mother moved out of his way. The Doctor knelt on the floor. He focused his attention on Kaile without seeming to actually notice that she was there. Kaile looked back, her eyes full of questions that weren’t asked or answered.

  “She is not breathing,” the Doctor said.

  Kaile gasped, just a little. Then she coughed. She realized that she had been holding her breath. That made her laugh, again—a nervous sort of laugh that jumped out of her mouth before she could think to hold it back.

  Doctor Boggs squinted at her, suspicious, as though he suspected Kaile of pretending to breathe. He checked her wrist with slow care. Everyone seemed so very afraid that she might be breakable. Then he sang a little tune. Doctors usually used songs to find the rhythm of a heartbeat, or tease out the shape of a broken bone, but Doctor Boggs’s voice was painfully bad. Kaile wanted to cover her ears.

  “Her heart is beating,” the Doctor finally announced, “and she is warm to the touch—though if this has only just happened, then of course she would still be warm to the touch. Her skin would not yet have had the time to cool. And she has no shadow. That much is certain. That is the most important thing. She has no shadow at all.” He looked under one of her feet, and then under the other, just as Mother had already done.

  It was crowded in Kaile’s room, much too crowded, too full of people who had barged in to examine her without looking at her, and to speak of her as though she were not there and listening.

  One more followed.

  A girl walked into the middle of the room. She looked to be only a couple of years senior to Kaile, but she acted very much older. Her clothes were dirty and badly patched, but she had an imperial way of standing. Kaile didn’t like it. This is my room you’re standing in, she thought, but did not say—and no longer really believed, because there were too many other people in her room and none of them had knocked before coming in.

  Doctor Boggs stood up with a harrumphing noise. “And who exactly are you, young lady?”

  “I am exactly Vass,” said Vass. “You sent for a witchworker. Graba’s busy, and couldn’t be rushed, so I’m the witchworker you sent for.”

  “I see,” said Doctor Bog
gs. “Someone with more experience might be a little more helpful.”

  The girl Vass crossed her arms in front of her. “You don’t see,” she said. “Your glasses are broken, and cannot be mended.”

  Nothing at all happened. Doctor Boggs smiled. Then his spectacles slid from his nose, fell to the ground, and broke.

  He made a quiet harrumph and began to pick up the pieces. “That was unnecessary.”

  Vass ignored him. She took a closer look at Kaile—and actually looked at her, looked very much too closely at her. Kaile felt like squirming. She stared right back.

  “Has anyone bothered to ask her how she lost her shadow?” the young witchworker said to the room, though she watched Kaile while speaking.

  Mother looked as though she might answer. Doctor Boggs answered instead. “The unquiet dead must not be spoken to. And one can always spot the dead by their lack of a shadow. Those who do not properly touch the world always lack shadows.”

  Kaile turned her glare on Doctor Boggs. He was not actually a very good doctor. He had failed out of the medical school in Northside before setting up his practice south of the River, and he liked to sound right more than he liked to be right. But people in Broken Wall always listened to him, even if they made fun of him later. He was their doctor. He belonged to them, and he could set broken legs well enough, so they forgave him his bumbling and his stubborn, unfounded opinions.

  “That right there is a load of impsense and grubbery,” the witchworker scoffed. “Her heart beats. She’s alive, whatever her shadow might be up to. That’s the thing to concern yourselves with: her shadow, and why it left her. That’s the thing to find out.”

  “Don’t offer these good people false hope,” the Doctor snapped. “Once a shadow is gone, there is no calling it back again.”

  The young witchworker’s eyes flicked over to the flute on the dresser, and then to Kaile. Don’t tell them, the look said, clear as anything. They’ll take the flute away if you tell them, and you will be needing it. Then she turned and left the room without another word to anyone. She had said what she had to say, and whether or not they listened was no further business of hers.

  “What a rude child,” said Doctor Boggs. Then he yelped and stuck his finger in his mouth, bleeding from a sharp piece of spectacle lens. He stood up, put the rest of the pieces he had found in a handkerchief, and tucked the bundle into his pocket. “I am very sorry,” he said. “I know this is a sudden shock, and terrible, but you mustn’t waste time if you mean to prevent a more serious haunting. We should speak downstairs.”

  He spoke to Mother, looked at the Snotfish, and gave a nod to Father in the doorway. He did not look at Kaile, or speak to her. The others followed him out of the room. They did not smirk behind his back, the way people always did whenever Doctor Boggs had been particularly useless, and they left the bedroom door open.

  “Tell me if we passed Inspection!” Kaile called after them.

  No one answered at first. Then the Snotfish stuck his head in the doorway, whispered, “We didn’t,” and ran off.

  Kaile stared at the open doorway. “The second-best bread should have been good enough,” she said to herself.

  The Snotfish crept back in. “Are you really dead?” he asked. Then he ran off again before she could answer.

  Kaile closed the door, hoping that this would make the room belong to her again.

  Someone climbed the stairs, opened the door, and returned downstairs. The footsteps sounded like Father’s.

  Kaile stared at the open doorway. “Never keep a door closed on a haunted room,” she said aloud. It was something she knew. It was something that everyone knew. “The dead will never clear out if you keep the door shut.”

  She stood still for a moment. She could tell that her heart was beating by the way it pounded. She shifted her weight, and something tiny and sharp—a shard of Doctor Boggs’s broken spectacles—drove into the heel of her foot. “Ow!” she said, loudly, and was suddenly furious. This was too much. Everything else she could handle, but glass stuck in her foot was more than anyone could reasonably be expected to tolerate.

  She pried out the shard with her fingernails. Then she put a warm shawl on her shoulders, picked up the flute and her bedside lantern, and left the room that no longer felt like her own.

  Sixth Verse

  THE KITCHEN WAS EMPTY. Kaile fetched her rain boots from under the stairs, stuffed a piece of stale pastry in her mouth, and peered into the public room. The domini men still played at the usual table, but otherwise it stood empty of customers. Mother herself held a hushed discussion with Father and Doctor Boggs at the far end of the room, where the goblins had briefly set up their stage. They kept their heads down. The domini men also kept their heads down, focused on their game. One rattled the tiles in his hand as though more interested in the sound than in taking his turn.

  “Drop those bones,” another said, nudging him. “Drop those bones.”

  No one noticed Kaile as she slipped back inside the kitchen.

  The stale pastry sat heavy in her stomach. “We failed Inspection,” she said to herself. She tried to wrap her mind around such a strangely shaped idea. Mother never failed Inspection. Something that never happened had finally happened. “It wasn’t my fault,” she said, her voice quiet and firm. “The Snotfish spoiled that first batch. I only gave away the second batch to protect all of us from curses—and it was Mother’s fault that the goblins were throwing curses around, anyway. Their show was good, and the music was beautiful. They weren’t doing any harm. She shouldn’t have kicked them out.”

  Kaile’s skin was angry and her bones were angry and her heart was angry, and also beating, so obviously she wasn’t dead.

  She left the kitchen through the back door and crossed the yard under a dim and dusky sky. Then she climbed up into the hayloft over the guzzard pen, where she used to hide when she was younger and less a part of the ordinary business of the day.

  Some of the birds slept below while standing on one foot. Others made gurgling noises at her and hunched up their shoulders as if flapping wings that they didn’t have.

  The loft smelled like hay and guzzard. Kaile cleared loose straw from a patch of floor and set the lantern down. She sat beside it, turned the flint crank, and lit the wick. A warm glow filled the small space.

  Kaile glanced at the wall behind her, where her shadow should have been. The lantern light passed right through her and left no sign that she was even there.

  “Where did you go?” she asked.

  Here, a voice whispered back.

  Kaile jumped up to standing, and almost knocked the lantern over.

  Be careful, the whisper said. Don’t put out the light.

  Kaile turned up the wick. “Who’s there?”

  She caught a glimpse of a wispy and indistinct shape near the ladder. Then she lost that glimpse, and had to squint to see it again.

  Your shadow, of course, the shape whispered. Kaile thought she glimpsed a face and features as it spoke. It looked a little bit like Kaile’s own reflection in window glass—but only a little bit. There was no shared movement and no spark of recognition, no sense that This is me.

  “Tell me why you left,” Kaile said. “Tell me why you aren’t attached to my feet anymore.”

  I heard music, the shadow said. It was beautiful and wrenching. It unmoored me. It cut me away from you. I huddled in our room while so many other people came in. Then they all left, and you left with the lantern. You left me almost in the dark. I followed. The only thing I know how to do is follow you. I don’t want to. You never noticed me when you dragged me across the ground while walking. You never noticed when someone else stepped on my face. I don’t want to be anywhere near you. But near you is the only place I know.

  Kaile wasn’t sure what to say to all that. “I’m sorry if I splashed through too many puddles,” she said. She wasn’t sure she was actually sorry, though she tried to be. She felt as though she probably should be, but no one had ev
er told her to be careful where her shadow fell—and no one else ever seemed to care about their own. “I’m sorry, but I still wish you hadn’t left. Now everyone thinks I’m dead. Or at least Doctor Boggs does. He thinks I’m a dead thing that won’t stop walking around. A ghoul. He’s probably trying to convince Mother and Father to hold my funeral already.”

  Sounds as though he managed it, the shadow whispered. I can hear a funeral.

  Kaile listened. She held her breath to listen. She heard only guzzards. Then her ears caught the faint sound of a funeral song.

  She scrambled for the ladder, leaving the flute and lantern and shadow behind.

  * * *

  The public room was packed. Kaile saw all sorts of neighbors and relations in the dim light, all of them softly singing. She hadn’t seen the place so full since Grandfather’s funeral.

  Nice of you all to come so quickly, she thought, but there really isn’t any need.

  Grandfather’s coffin had rested on the floor in the very center of the room, surrounded by candles. Kaile pushed her way through the crowd to stand in the center, where a small and empty coffin rested. It almost looked like a cradle, like the Snotfish’s cradle when they had gathered around him to sing his nameday song. (Not that the name Cob had actually stuck.)

  Kaile noticed in that moment that a nameday song and a funerary song had much the same shape and movement. That made a certain kind of sense to her. You wave to say both hello and good-bye, she thought. The same motion means opposite things.

  Doctor Boggs stood at the head of the coffin, conducting the funeral. He took the lead with his terrible voice. The hair of his sideburns stuck out wide around his face, which turned ruddy colors when he noticed Kaile standing there. But he did not stop singing, and neither did anyone else. Heads turned halfway, startled, but no one looked at her directly—no one except for the Snotfish, and Mother gently reached down and turned the Snotfish away. Everyone looked elsewhere, pretending hard that Kaile was not nearby.