“Thanks,” Gladys-Marie said. She started to say something else, but never got to it.
The cafeteria chatter grew strangely quiet, and then very loud. Trays clattered as other students stood up quickly, mouths open. They tried to shout. Nothing happened, so they just tried harder. Others pointed at them and shouted instead.
Rosa stared at her panicking schoolmates as they struggled to speak, or shout, or scream. She remembered what it had felt like when Isabelle had torn her own words away. For one long and thin-stretched moment she relived that memory as if it were still happening, and would always be happening.
Then it ended. She made it end by pulling the fire alarm.
* * *
Everyone knew what to do next. Flailing uncertainty fell away as the cafeteria full of students lined up in silence, marched outside, and waited there without coats. A snizzling misery settled over them.
Teachers counted students and gathered up strays—except for the teachers who had eaten the soup and couldn’t speak, or count, or read their attendance lists.
Jasper tried to explain things to the firefighters who had shown up expecting some sort of fire to fight. The chief seemed extremely uncomfortable with the nature of the actual emergency. “Ghosts got into the kitchen water and haunted the soup?” Luckily the chief was also captain of the royal guard in summertime, so Jasper knew him and how best to talk to him.
Rosa’s heart beat to a faster tempo than she would have liked, but her earlier shock had faded. Mostly. She noticed that Englebert the Awful had sipped some of the soup himself, and she savored a moment of delight at his misfortune.
Mrs. Smoot, the assistant principal, called Rosa’s name. Mr. Ahmed was with her. He still came to work every day, even though he couldn’t do any principaling until he got his own voice back.
“Hi,” Rosa said.
“Hello, Miss Díaz,” said Mrs. Smoot. “Do you have any clear notion about what happened here?”
“Yes. I think a bunch of child-ghosts from an old well got into the kitchen water and took voices away from everyone who ate the soup. But I don’t know what they want with all of those voices. They aren’t very talkative.”
“I see.” Mrs. Smoot had a high and sugar-coated voice. Rosa sometimes wondered if she might be a ghost who remade herself out of marshmallows. “If the water itself is so badly tainted, then we will have to close the school until the matter is resolved.”
Rosa nodded vigorously. “I think so, too.”
“And how long do you think it will take to resolve this, exactly?”
Rosa pointed at the Lump. “Until I get through that mulchy whirlwind over there and flush out whatever is hiding inside it.”
“How do you plan to do that?” asked Mrs. Smoot.
“I really don’t know,” said Rosa, but she said it with courage and determination.
The assistant principal sighed. “We’ll discuss this later, then. Right now I need to mobilize school buses, get everyone home, and explain haunted water to several dozen unhappy parents.” She went away to do her principaling. Mr. Ahmed went silently with her.
Rosa watched the Lump and the wet leaves that still spun around it. “Just. Tell. Me. What. You. Want,” she growled. “How many more voices do you all need to confiscate before you remember how to use a single one of them?”
A loud car engine growled and popped nearby. Nell’s truck drove up to the sidewalk in a sudden spray of slush puddle. She rolled her window partway down—which was as far down as it ever went—and shouted at Rosa through the three-inch gap. “Get in! We’ve got an emergency.”
“I’ve got an emergency already unfolding right here!” Rosa told her.
“Is your school on fire?” Nell asked.
“No,” Rosa said.
“Is anyone trapped inside it?”
“No one living.”
“Then your emergency is less of an immediate emergency than my emergency,” Nell said. “It’s the Talcott place, understand? Your mother is there already.”
Oh crap. Rosa yanked the door open and jumped into the truck.
Bobbie and Humphrey overheard and came running.
“What was that about my house?” Bobbie demanded.
“Climb in,” Nell said. “All of you. And you too, Chevalier!”
Jasper left the discombobulated fire chief to join them. All four kids squished uncomfortably together.
“We don’t have enough seat belts,” Bobbie complained. “We can’t buckle in. And the whole fire department is standing right there watching us. You’ll get some sort of reckless endangerment ticket.”
“I’m not worried.” Nell said as she shifted gears. “Chief still owes me money from poker night.”
Bobbie was not mollified. “Gambling debts won’t save us if you crash into something.”
“Guess not,” Nell said. “I’ll try not to crash.” She punched the gas hard and lurched away from the curb.
22
ROSA SAT NEXT TO BOBBIE. this pleased Neither of them.
“What happened?” Rosa asked Nell, which helped her ignore everyone else.
“They got the fence working,” Nell said.
“Good,” said Bobbie.
“Bad,” said Rosa. “Very, very bad. You should have just planted those stupid tulips.”
“I did plant tulips,” Humphrey admitted. “Just like you said. But I couldn’t get Bobbie to go through with the rest of it.”
“We don’t need to go through with the rest of it.” Bobbie said smugly. “We don’t need to make any sort of memorial. The fence is done. Finally. Our house won’t be haunted anymore.”
“You’re wrong,” Rosa said. “If that banishment fence really is done, then pretty soon your house won’t be standing anymore.”
Finger-shaped folds in the scarf tightened. Bobbie coughed. Rosa heard the softly vicious sound of her grandmother’s whispers.
She snuck a pinch of salt from her tool belt and casually flicked it behind Bobbie’s head. The whispering sputtered and stopped.
Nell pulled up at the bottom of the Talcotts’ long driveway. She couldn’t get any closer. A long trench cut across the driveway asphalt. The mayor and her husband stood on the far side of that trench. Geoff and Po were with them. Both landscapers carried their shovels like spears.
Athena Díaz stood outside that circle. Many ghosts joined her there. Household revenants, echoes of ancestors, spirits of mirror reflections, and the ghosts that lurked in every latch, window, and threshold had been cast out of the house at the top of the hill. Now they made bodies for themselves from the mud and gravel unearthed by ditch-digging. They made mouths and eyes to hold wide open in their misery.
“What is your mother doing?” Bobbie demanded. “Is she trying to break our fence?”
“No,” Rosa said. Her voice sounded calm. That surprised her. “Mom is holding your fence together. She knows what will happen as soon as it breaks.”
She climbed right over Bobbie, Humphrey, and Jasper to get out of the truck. Then she wove carefully between the ghostly figures to stand at her mother’s side.
Mom had her eyes closed and her hands open. She recited the Litany of the Seventh Lyceum over and over and over again. Her forehead was sweaty, even though it was cold. Snizzle still fell from the sky.
I’m here, Rosa didn’t speak out loud. She didn’t want to distract her mom. I’m here to help.
Other people became very loud and distracting. The mayor called out for her children to join them inside the circle, where she thought it would be safe. Bobbie and Humphrey tried to jump over the ditch. They failed, because Bobbie fell down screaming. Humphrey couldn’t help her get back on her feet.
“Let me go!” she cried out. She wasn’t talking to her brother. Her scarf writhed around her throat.
“You are mine,” whispered a harsh, husky voice behind her. “You are mine. And you have locked me out of my own house, you miserable, ungrateful, undeserving thing.”
Mom star
ted up the litany again. Her hands shook.
Do something, Rosa told herself. She tried to stay calm in the midst of the chaos and noise.
“Better do something,” Nell said. “Or else tell me what to do. Tell me how to help your mother. Anything. Quick.”
Rosa’s own pumping blood was magma in her veins. She couldn’t tell how much of her rage properly belonged to her, and how much of it was borrowed from the displaced ghosts around her.
“Should we cross over?” Jasper asked. “I could try to hold the circle together from the other side.”
“No,” Rosa told him. “Please no. You could, but don’t. This bubble of a barrier is going to pop at any moment and you’ll die if you’re inside when that happens.”
Barron had spent most of his life and all of his death perfecting the banishment circle that once surrounded Ingot. This slipshod fence was far less perfect. It wouldn’t hold. It couldn’t hold. The circle would break. Every banished ghost would come rushing home again, and the force of that homecoming would leave nothing standing inside.
Rosa had seen it happen before.
“Can we break this circle carefully?” Jasper asked. “Just like last time?”
“We can’t,” Rosa said. “We can’t. Because we don’t live there.” Then she understood what needed to happen. “But Humphrey and Bobbie could do it. The wall might not come crashing down if they invite their ghosts to cross over and come home.” She raised her voice. “Did you hear that? Bobbie? Humphrey? If you want to keep your house and parents then you should help us break this fence.”
Humphrey looked helpless and bewildered.
Bobbie glared her absolute refusal. She tried to say something, but the tightening scarf wouldn’t let her say much.
Bursts of coppery green fire flared up from the trench. “Too late anyway,” Rosa said. “Nell, can you just yank them out?”
The mayor and her husband held their hands out to Bobbie and Humphrey, still imploring both of them to come inside. Nell reached over the barrier, grabbed those hands, and pulled them out. Mr. and Mrs. Talcott sprawled in the mud, surrounded by the muddy figures of their ancestors.
“Geoff and Po!” Nell called out. “Move!”
The landscapers looked terrified, but they dropped their shovels and jumped across the trench that they had made.
Rosa heard her mother’s voice catch and stumble.
The circle broke.
Time stretched itself thin. Wind and fire tumbled inward as the banished ghosts came home. Every tree, blade of grass, and carefully trimmed garden shrubbery became scattered ashes in their wake.
Rosa looked up. She saw the house on the hill in its very last moment, right before it collapsed.
She saw her father standing on the porch.
Then he was gone, and so was the porch, and so was the house.
23
TEN PEOPLE STOOD OUTSIDE THE broken copper fence.
Nothing and no one stood inside it.
The Talcott family home had been reduced to an unrecognizable pile of rubble. Household spirits pieced themselves together from the pieces that they found there.
Rosa stared at the wreckage, afraid to blink or breathe.
What did I just see? It was him. I saw him. He was there. Haunting the threshold of the house, right before everything else that should have been properly haunting that house knocked it down. I saw him. But was it really him? Was that just a jumbled memory of the last time I watched this happen, when his own foolish bit of banishment collapsed around his library, and so did the library, all of the books and brick walls crumbling down around him? I was outside. Across the street. On a swing. Doing nothing but sitting there. Mom made it out, all scraped and bloody, but he didn’t. That’s how he died. This is how he died. Maybe I only saw him just now because I wanted to, because I needed to give him another chance to get out before the circle broke. But it’s too late. His circle already broke. He’s already gone.
Her mother stood up, dusted her hands, and sighed.
Geoff and Po mumbled some hasty condolences. Then they ran away.
The living Talcotts huddled together and gaped at the place where they used to live.
Rosa tried to tell Bobbie that she was sorry. She tried not to say I told you so. But Bobbie cut her off before she could say either.
“This is your fault,” the other girl said. Her eyes hardened like two pale puddles freezing over. “All of it is your fault.”
Rosa turned right around and got back into Nell’s truck.
She wanted to sharpen her own words into icepicks and use them to explain, with brutal precision, that Bobbie’s parents had been rescued from the death that Rosa’s father got. But Rosa didn’t say anything. Instead she waited for her mother, Nell, and Jasper to join her. Then she spent the whole drive home carefully crafting, polishing, and sharpening the points of everything she wished she had said.
Once there Nell built a fire in the library’s big stone fireplace. Smoke wraiths danced over the logs as they caught and blazed. Jasper and Rosa sat on the floor, right next to the hearthstone, until the snizzle-induced chill began to leave their feet and fingers.
Some wraiths made bodies for themselves out of fire.
“That one moves like Tim,” Rosa said, pointing.
“Who’s Tim?” Jasper asked.
“A dance choreographer. He used to volunteer at our old library, back in the city. I don’t think it is Tim. I’m pretty sure he’s still alive. And he knows exactly which theater he means to haunt after he dies, so he wouldn’t come here. But that little fire ghost does move like him. Sort of.”
Her voice sounded as flat as a sheet of blank paper.
Mrs. Jillynip bustled over to make sure that they didn’t accidentally burn down the whole building.
“The weather report now calls for thundersnow,” she said. “Honestly. It said that ‘snizzle will gradually become thundersnow this afternoon.’ I truly do not know what that means.” She went fretting away again.
“That sounds like a terrible name for a band,” Jasper said. He strummed an imaginary guitar. “Thundersnow.”
Rosa laughed a very little bit.
“Have I made you listen to Zwerchhau Whirligig yet?”
“No,” Rosa said. “I have never listened to . . . Zwerk Ow Whirligig.”
“Zwerchhau. They’re pretty good.”
“Okay.”
Behind them, away from the fire and near the magazine rack, Rosa’s mother tried to have a grown-up conversation with Nell. They didn’t try very hard. The kids could still hear them.
“Will the mayor blame us for what just happened?” Nell asked. “Will she blame you?”
“No,” Athena said. “I mean yes. Probably. But it won’t matter. There’s too much evidence of what really happened. And I’ve already called for backup from banishment experts and research librarians. They’ll get here tomorrow. Maybe even later today, if we’re lucky. Then we’ll track down whoever helped them put that misguided fence together.”
“Good,” Nell said. “What do you need in the meantime? Anything?”
“Nothing,” said Athena. “No, wait. That’s not true. Takeout? Burgers? We might need burgers. I can’t bear to microwave dinner tonight.”
“Burgers,” Nell said. “Check. I’ll be back with burgers.” She tapped the top of Jasper’s head on her way to the lobby. “Come with me, Chevalier. Let me drive you home through all of that wintery mix. You need to check in with your parents before they hear about the day’s chaos and worry that you got caught up in it. Which you did. So I should get you home.”
She gave Jasper a Significant Look to also suggest that the Díaz ladies needed to be alone.
He understood. “I’ll see you later.”
“Okay,” Rosa said.
Her voice still sounded thin. Jasper wanted to know why, but she had closed and shuttered all the doors and windows of her face. “Send word when you need backup.”
“Okay,” she sa
id again.
Nell and Jasper left.
Athena Díaz knelt on the floor next to her daughter. They pressed their shoulders together and watched more wraiths make bright new bodies for themselves.
“That one move like Tim,” Rosa said. “See?”
“I do see,” said Mom. “But I don’t think it’s him.”
“Me neither,” Rosa said.
“Tim plans to benevolently haunt a whole theater when he dies.”
“I know,” Rosa said. “It isn’t really him. It just looks like him. Sort of. And that keeps happening to me. With Dad. I saw him again today. Maybe. But I don’t know whether or not that was really him, either.”
Her mother’s whole body stiffened. “Where?”
“Back at the mayor’s house.”
Mom nodded, very slowly. “That might have really been your father.”
Rosa felt strangely relieved to have that confirmed. “But why?” she asked. “Is it because he died the same way? Doing the same thing? Bumbling into some clumsy banishment to get rid of a ghost that he just couldn’t handle?”
“That’s not how your father died.”
Those few words caught Rosa completely off balance and shifted the shape of the world.
“What did you say?”
“That’s not how he died.” Mom said again. She closed her eyes. Then she opened them quickly as though she didn’t like what she saw behind her eyelids. “He didn’t foolishly dabble in just a little bit of forbidden banishment. He was devoted to it.”
“How do you know that?” Rosa’s whisper was almost too small to hear, but Mom heard anyway.
“I found books he kept hidden. Most were about Ingot. The Unhaunted Valley. The Transcribed Notebooks of B.T. Barron. A Natural History of Banishment has two whole chapters about this little town, and those chapters were full of margin notes and Post-its. He was a dedicated Lethean. And he was obsessed with Ingot. He wanted to learn how to do what Barron did here.”
Rosa did not want to hear this. She didn’t want to know any more about it. Stop it, she thought. Stop talking. Please stop talking now.
A Festival of Ghosts Page 11
