A Festival of Ghosts

by William Alexander

  “I cannot deny that,” the dead man agreed. “What does your youthful curiosity desire to learn?”

  She started to tell him, but then Jasper cut in.

  “Tell us about the open field to the west of town.” He pointed, though none of them could see the fairgrounds through the trees and fog. “What was it like before, when Ingot was new?”

  The dead man rustled his leafy mustache.

  “Please tell us,” Rosa said, though she wasn’t sure why Jasper had asked.

  “Music,” said Barron without looking up. “I remember the music. They held dances there, in the old meeting hall, once in midsummer and once in midwinter. I understand that those were the two most terrible times for refinery work, the former being too hot and the latter too cold, so in that time they danced to relieve their difficulties. Franz played piano, as I recall.”

  “Franz Talcott?” Rosa asked. “The engineer?”

  “Yes. The very man. Quite capable. He became our first mayor. They offered the position to me, of course, but I declined.” He drew more marks in the dirt. “You should know that you are not the first to come with questions about Franz, and about the projects that we accomplished together—including the great barrier that once stood on this very spot. I consider this a very curious coincidence.”

  Rosa considered it curious, too. “Who else was here? Mayor Talcott? I mean the living mayor, not any of the other ones.” Rosa’s mother had already tried to gently discourage the mayor from building a copper fence around the Talcott family home, but that hadn’t worked—which was probably fine, since the fence itself wasn’t likely to work, either.

  Unless they ask questions of those who practiced and perfected the forbidden arts of banishment in Ingot, Rosa realized. If they do that, then they might figure out how to make the fence work. And that would be bad.

  “No,” the dead man said. “It was not she. Nor any other she. I did not recognize him. And he spoke to me imperiously, which I did not care for, so I answered very few of his pestering questions.”

  Rosa was relieved. She tried to keep from sounding imperious herself. “Did your other visitor also ask about the well? The first well, dug near the schoolhouse?”

  Barron looked up sharply.

  “I remember the taste of that water,” he said. “Clean and clear. Shockingly cold. So cold it hurt the teeth to drink. And very clean. We chose the spot carefully. He assured me that no runoff from the mine would ever reach it. No waste from the refinery would touch that water. It was clean. Clear. And so very cold.” He scraped hard in the dirt with his fingers, agitated now.

  “Then it was poisoned,” Rosa said, tiptoeing closer to things that she needed to know.

  “It was not poisoned.” Barron’s dry voice twisted with inhuman sounds. Ronnie reared up, kicked the air, and shied sideways away. “Franz assured me that this was so. Good water flowed from the well he made, smooth as music, clean and pure. He promised me this. But they would not listen, the dear ones who fell ill. And she would not listen. No peace until I silenced them. No peace until forgetting.” He tore a length of iron rail from the ground, a relic of the old mining carts, and used both hands to twist it into the shape of a jagged blade.

  Rosa held one hand high and snapped her fingers.

  Look up here! the gesture said.

  Barron looked up at her hand.

  “Now,” said Jasper.

  Rosa jumped. Jasper swung low with the quarterstaff. It passed under Rosa’s feet and knocked the dead man’s legs out from under him.

  He fell apart as he hit the ground.

  “Thank you for your time,” Rosa said politely to the pile of bones.

  The specialists gathered up those bones and stacked the cairn over them again.

  “Was that useful?” Jasper asked. He soothed the agitated Ronnie with another sugar cube.

  “Maybe,” Rosa said. “I’m not sure yet. We need to figure out who else is asking about banishment. It has to be somebody connected to the Talcotts, right? They’re the ones still trying to do it.” She extinguished all the candles, stuffed them in her coat pocket, and immediately regretted it when hot wax spilled on her hand. “Ow.”

  Jasper used a fallen tree as a step and mounted up. Rosa scrambled after him.

  “What was that about the fairgrounds?” she asked him.

  He shrugged. “Just something my dad said about the ghosts of old Ingot. They’re searching for the place they remember, and not finding it, because we made up a bunch of medieval memories to play around with instead. I’m trying to sort out what that bit of land was like when they were still alive, before it was a fake village. Maybe we can give them something familiar, something that welcomes them home. Maybe we can find a way to give them what they want.”

  “Maybe . . . ,” Rosa said. “But they seem to want the festival gone. Completely and utterly. Two different sets of memories are trying to coexist. And they don’t like each other very much.”

  “They really don’t,” he admitted. He clicked his tongue twice to ask Ronnie to move. The haunted horse stepped carefully away from Barron’s cairn.

  Jasper’s stomach growled.

  “I skipped breakfast, too,” Rosa said. “Do we have time to eat something before school starts?”

  “If we hurry.”

  “Never mind. Hurrying seems dangerous.”

  “Says the specialist who just stood unarmed before her enemy.”

  Rosa didn’t respond. She had already closed her eyes and clenched her teeth together.

  Jasper clicked his tongue again and nudged with his heels.

  The stones that were Jerónimo cantered quickly down the mountainside.

  20

  RONNIE SCATTERED HIMSELF NEXT TO the library parking lot. Jasper pocketed one of the fallen pebbles while Rosa unlocked the back door.

  The two specialists snuck into the apartment downstairs. Jasper stashed his quarterstaff in a corner of the living room behind some moving boxes full of books that hadn’t been unpacked yet.

  Mom stuck her head through the kitchen doorway. “You two were up early.”

  “Research trip,” Rosa said.

  “Learn anything useful?”

  “Maybe.”

  “If we knew what we were doing, then it wouldn’t be called research,” Mom pointed out. “Need breakfast?”

  “Yes,” Jasper said. “Very much. Please. Yes.”

  Mom filled up their extra-large toaster with bagels and heated up some café con leche that was mostly leche. Then she turned on the kitchen radio. Static hissed, crackled, and murmured words in dead languages like Latin and Sanskrit. Mom turned the dial and found the weather report, which announced that it would soon begin to snizzle outside. None of them had ever heard the word “snizzle” before. They argued about what it might mean.

  “Sounds like boiling rain sizzling when it hits pavement,” Rosa said.

  “Boiling rain would be a good reason to stay home from school,” Jasper said.

  The toaster dinged. The specialists stuffed their faces full of warm, buttered bagel.

  “Hey Mom,” Rosa started to say.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Mom said with her mouth full.

  “Barron told us that someone came asking questions about banishment and how it works. Someone living. He didn’t recognize them, so they weren’t anybody local.”

  Mom choked on her bagel. She had to spit some of it back onto her plate. “He said what? And you spoke to Barron without me? Don’t ever do that.”

  “It was fine!” Rosa insisted. “We’re fine. I mean, he did try to kill us with a rusty iron rail. But we handled it.”

  Mom invoked her middle name. “Rosa. Ramona. Díaz.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rosa said quickly. “We won’t go chat with Barron again. Not alone. Not without you.”

  “Promise,” Mom insisted.

  “I promise,” Rosa said.

  “Good.” Mom took a long drink of her caffeinated milk. />
  Her hands shook. Jasper noticed. “Do you know who else went to talk to him, Ms. Díaz?” he asked gently.

  “No,” she said. “Not if it was someone living, and from out of town. The Talcotts wouldn’t know how to summon Barron, and they would be too terrified to try. But I do know exactly what sort of person would want to have that kind of conversation.”

  “Who?” Rosa asked. “Who could possibly be that stupid?”

  Mom folded her hands “Dearest daughter, you tend to think that everyone knows and agrees with the basic tenets of appeasement—in this case, that banishment is bad and doesn’t really work.”

  “Right,” Rosa said. “I do. It’s obvious.”

  “Not to everybody.”

  “They’re wrong,” Rosa said. “Every time. Look at Ingot.”

  “People do look at Ingot. They scrutinize and study Ingot. A successful banishment circle stood here for more than a hundred years.”

  “And then it failed,” Rosa said.

  “And then you ended it,” Mom said. “The two of you ended it. Bravely. Wonderfully. But who knows how long it might have lasted otherwise?”

  Rosa felt the molten core of herself spin faster. “About five minutes, I’m guessing.”

  “Less,” Jasper said.

  “You know that,” her mother said, “and I know that you’re both right. But some would disagree.” She finished her café, poured another, and kept her voice carefully even. “When librarians work alone we end up wandering through deserts with a donkey-drawn cart full of outlawed books. When we work together and get organized we build magnificent libraries like the ones in Alexandria and Tenochtitlán. But either way, we keep the world’s memory.” Mom sat back down. “Banishment is usually practiced alone, by someone desperate to make a single haunting go away.” Rosa looked at the floor and tried not to think about her father. “But sometimes forgetters get organized, band together, build walls, and burn the libraries of Alexandria and Tenochtitlán.”

  “Letheans,” Jasper and Rosa both said at once.

  “Letheans,” said Athena Díaz. “We light candles to read by. They light books on fire. And they are very interested in Barron’s circle—interested enough to summon up his ghost to ask him how he made it.”

  The radio lost its signal and slipped back into staticky Sanskrit. Mom turned it off.

  “You’re both going to be late for school,” she said. “Off you go. I need to call up some friends at the Library of Congress, tell them that Lethean things are still actively happening in Ingot. Then I need to see the mayor. If her little copper fence is a desperate act of amateur banishment, we have nothing to worry about. But she might be getting more knowledgeable help.”

  “How can we possibly go to school with all of that happening?” Rosa demanded.

  Mom shook her head. “If you skip school today you’ll just bounce around our apartment, eager to pick a fight. That would be good for neither of us. Go to school. Tend to those classroom hauntings. That’s where you’re needed.”

  “But—”

  “Rosa. That is where you need to be. That is what I need you to do.”

  * * *

  Jasper and Rosa walked to school in the snizzle, which turned out to be a relentlessly drizzling mixture of snow and semifrozen rain.

  They reached the schoolyard and checked to see what the King of the Lump was up to. It still hid inside a whirlwind. Fallen leaves had not fallen any farther. Snizzle clumped those leaves together as they spun.

  Rosa threw a slushball at the Lump. It joined the spinning leaves and spun right along with them.

  “You can’t keep hiding in there forever,” she said. “Speak up already. Why would you steal a whole swack of voices if you’re not going to use them to say anything?”

  Nothing responded to her words or her slushball.

  School buses disgorged students at the front entrance. Rosa and Jasper kept to the very back of the crowd, and the crowd moved to keep well clear of them. No one wanted to be knocked over by the inhospitable door.

  Cold snizzle assaulted their faces while they waited.

  “Have you gone back to the festival grounds?” Rosa asked.

  “No,” Jasper said. “Not for weeks. But I know they’re still fighting. I can hear them at night, and see the glow of all those headlamps.”

  “They might start to use ice and snow for bodies now that they have some to work with. Dozens and dozens of snowmen locked in an endless fight that neither side can win. Or maybe they’re snizzlemen now.” She tried not to laugh. A grim sort of giggle escaped from her anyway.

  “You’re ridiculous.” Jasper didn’t want to laugh either, but it was contagious.

  “Beware the never-ending battle of the snizzlemen!” Rosa picked up a stick and waved it in the air.

  The other students hurried indoors and away from the snizzle until only Rosa and Jasper were left.

  “Let me see that?” he asked. She handed him the stick.

  The front door tried to slam shut as they approached. Jasper threw the stick. It got stuck, pinned between the door and its threshold. Rosa used it as a pry bar to lever the entrance back open. They went through. The door closed in a sulking sort of way.

  21

  MORNING CLASSES PASSED SLOWLY AND without any serious hauntings. This was frustrating. Rosa itched for a problem that she knew how to fix.

  She checked in on the history classroom right before lunch. It was dusty and unused. All of Mr. Lucius’s classes were held in the school library now. A poster of James Baldwin smiled down at her and insisted that History is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

  Rosa put down a coin on the tray below the chalkboard, picked up a red piece of chalk, and tried to start a conversation. Hello. My name is Rosa. Please talk to me.

  She waited until the lunch bell rang. Nothing on the other side of the chalkboard answered her.

  “Rage,” she said softly to herself, just to gain a little power over the sudden surge of feeling by naming it. “Frustration. Disgruntlement.”

  We never use the word gruntlement, she thought. Does anyone ever feel gruntled? That should be the opposite of disgruntled, but it doesn’t sound like a good feeling.

  She set out a fresh bowl of rabbit food for Lafayette and left.

  The lunch line was already long by the time Rosa got to the cafeteria. She took her place at the end, right behind the Talcott siblings. Both of them forcefully ignored her. Neither had spoken to Rosa, or even made eye contact, since she had offered Humphrey appeasement advice. That was fine by her. She was usually content to keep her distance. But today Rosa had crawled out of bed very early on a cold and snizzly morning. She had confronted Bartholomew Theosophras Barron unarmed. And she had learned that Letheans were likely here in Ingot, trying to perfect their ways of poking holes in the world’s memory. Rosa was in no mood to be ignored.

  “Humphrey,” she said.

  He pretended not to hear her, but he wasn’t very good at pretending.

  “Humphrey Hieronymus Talcott.” Rosa had been itching to say his middle name aloud ever since she’d found out what it was.

  Both siblings turned halfway to look back at her. Bobbie wore a thick scarf around her neck even though the cafeteria felt uncomfortably warm.

  “Do any gardening lately?” Rosa asked.

  “What are you talking about?” It wasn’t really a question. Humphrey turned back around before she could answer him.

  Guess not. Rosa thought. Oh well. Not my problem. Unless you learn how to finish your cowardly copper fence, and I will become your problem if that ever happens.

  Bobbie did not look away. She maintained a steady glare as though still trying to win a staring contest. Rosa offered an answering glare. But then she noticed movement in the fabric of Bobbie’s scarf. It clumped around her neck in handlike shapes. Rosa saw bruises peeking out from beneath those fabric hands.

  “Turn a
way,” said a harsh, dry whisper. “Don’t look at her. Don’t associate with her.”

  Bobbie turned away. She coughed as the scarf continued to tighten around her throat. But she stood tall and made sure that no one else noticed her suffer—not if they didn’t already know what to look for, and how to look for it.

  Ick, Rosa thought. You’re still carrying around a vicious grandmother. Okay. Maybe I can find a way to make this my problem.

  * * *

  Jasper was already seated at the quiet table along with Gladys-Marie and all six silenced students. They still couldn’t speak. They also couldn’t write. A voice can express itself in writing, and voice was something that they no longer had. Mike couldn’t sign anymore, either. Both of his parents were deaf, so his hands had always been fluent, but now both hands were as empty of words as his voice box.

  The six couldn’t do schoolwork, but they still came to school and stuck together.

  Rosa joined them.

  Jasper nodded hello, but said nothing aloud. No one spoke at the quiet table—not even those who still could.

  He took a bite from his sandwich. It turned out to be a good and lucky thing that he had chosen a sandwich instead of the soup.

  Gladys-Marie got up and waved Rosa over to the wall, well away from the table-size cone of silence. Rosa was hungry, but she left her food tray next to Jasper and followed Gladys-Marie to a place where they could talk.

  “I’m sorry it’s taking me so long to get your sister’s voice back,” she whispered. “I think I know who took them all. But so far they haven’t used those voices to say anything, which is frustrating and weird. But I’m trying. I’m sorry.”

  Gladys-Marie crossed her arms like they made some kind of armor. “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Just tell me if there’s something I can do. Choir auditions are next week, and Tracey really wants to sing. Can the two of us share a voice? Or swap? Is there some kind of voice transplant that we can work out?”

  “Maybe . . . ,” Rosa said, considering the idea. “It’s trickier to do between two living people. But maybe. I’ll look into it.”