A Properly Unhaunted Place Page 3
“Tacky Tavern,” Jasper suggested. “People buy roasted turkey legs for the rugged, barbarian authenticity of gnawing meat from a large bone. But the legs are always overcooked and kinda tasteless, so they go through a lot of paper salt packets.”
“Perfect! Do you have time to help before you need to go belly dance, or whatever it is you’re doing later?”
Jasper glared, cranked up his accent, and dropped his voice to sound more like his father. “Yes, Lady Rosa the fancy special ghost-herding person. I can spare you a little of my time.”
“Excellent,” she said. “To the tavern!” It felt splendid to have something important to do, and to know how to do it. She held tight to that feeling and the momentum it gave her.
They left the lagoon. Jasper pulled a chain across the path behind them. A wooden sign dangled from it and read CLOSED in fancy calligraphy.
“Our apologies!” he shouted at fairgoers trying to head down that way. “The mermaids are enjoying their lunch break, lest they become so ravenous that they devour the names and wishes of everyone who passes by. Best keep away!”
“Good thinking,” Rosa said.
The two of them dodged around a gaggle of theatrically drunk buccaneers and headed for the Tacky Tavern.
Rosa’s phone rang.
Jasper held back to give Rosa a privacy bubble.
She soon raised her voice and broke the bubble.
“A skull stuck to a mountain lion! Great big antlers that moved around like jointed fingers!”
Jasper took another step away and tried not to listen too obviously.
“No, Mom, our first duty isn’t to the library. Not right this very now it isn’t. How can you just sit there and unpack while something sticks pieces of a wild beast together and menaces fake mermaids?”
Her voice got louder. She drew attention to herself. Jasper wished he could make a circle around Rosa to give her somewhere else to be, a separate place that wasn’t so very public and alarming. But no one else seemed to be especially alarmed.
He fiddled with his copper bracelet. The metal felt cold against his wrist. The haunted beast sat cold in his memory.
“I know I can handle this, but—” Rosa stopped. Jasper watched her give up. She mumbled a few responses to whatever her mother told her on the other end of the line. “Yes. Yes. Sure. But are you wearing your patron medallion? Right now? Would you put it on, please? Just humor me. Okay. Bye.” She put the phone back in her pocket.
Festival crowds continued to happily flow. Handisher the tortoise went plodding by.
Jasper closed the distance between them.
“She didn’t argue,” Rosa whispered. “I thought it would help to have some actual work to do here, but I couldn’t convince her. I couldn’t even get her to argue with me. She was just calm. And quiet. And tired. It was like trying to wrestle a wraith. I wish she’d fight. I’d rather fight.”
“What’s a wraith?” Jasper asked softly.
“Something made out of smoke,” she said. “Sort of. You can see little ones fly away from a candle when it goes out.” She took a breath, rallied, and pulled her sense of purpose back together. “Salt. We still need salt.”
7
THE TWO MOVED QUICKLY THROUGH the Tacky Tavern. Rosa stuffed her pockets full of salt packets. Jasper put another handful into the pouch he carried. His clothes had no pockets. Sir Dad was a purist when it came to anachronistic pockets, which didn’t show up in European clothes until the seventeenth century, so Jasper had to carry a pouch.
It felt like theft to take so much salt, especially without buying a turkey leg first, but neither one of them was hungry. Besides, Jasper had already eaten three or four lifetimes worth of tasteless turkey legs in his years as a squire and festival kid. He would need to be very, very hungry to want another one.
Next they ran to Odds Bodkin’s Knickknackery Shoppe for a pocketknife and a cigarette lighter. The folding knife had a polished wooden hilt to make it look fancier than it really was. The lighter was a chrome Zippo with sea chantey lyrics etched into the side. Jasper couldn’t find anything cheaper. They didn’t have enough cash between them. So Jasper held up the items, made eye contact with Mr. Bodkin behind the counter, and tried to communicate urgency.
Mr. Bodkin gave him a skeptical look. Festival performers got discounts at the shops and stalls, but they didn’t get things for free, and Mr. Bodkin probably wouldn’t sell cigarette lighters to eleven-year-olds, anyway.
Jasper didn’t want to explain. He wasn’t sure where to start. He wasn’t sure Mr. Bodkin would remember what he told him if he did try to explain. But he must have looked urgent and serious enough, because Mr. Bodkin nodded and turned his attention back to paying customers. Jasper left the shop with knife, Zippo, and lighter fluid.
“How’s this?” he asked. “I’m not sure where to find matches instead. And Nell makes the best knives around here, but she’d never let us use one.”
“Should be fine,” Rosa said. She filled up the Zippo and tried to light it, but couldn’t get it to work. Sparks shot away from the flint and gears, but the wick wouldn’t catch. She kept trying.
“You can keep creepy things out of the festival with this stuff?” he asked.
Rosa hesitated. “Maybe? I think so. But I don’t even know what we’re dealing with. Or what it’s trying to do. Or redo. Or undo.” She looked like she wanted to burn something. Her fingertips attacked the lighter. Spark, spark, spark.
“Your mom said you could handle this,” Jasper reminded her.
“Yeah.” Rosa shut the stubborn Zippo and stuffed it in her pocket. She clearly didn’t want to discuss her mother. “Let’s go. We should start with the lagoon.”
“I can’t,” Jasper said. “Not yet, anyway. I’ll meet you there in a bit.”
“Belly dancing?”
“Belly dancing. I have to pass the hat. They don’t get paid much without tips.”
“Okay. Meet you back at the lagoon.”
Jasper turned, ran, and jumped over Handisher, surprised that the tortoise was in his way.
Rosa walked. She tried to move with singular purpose. She did not ask for anyone’s permission on her way back to the closed lagoon. She did not acknowledge the guards at the entrance until they crossed their spears and blocked her way.
“Wait just a sec,” said one guard, uncomfortable and out of character.
“The lagoon is closed for the day,” the other guard said. “We’ve heard complaints of wild creatures in the forest. Best keep to the larger crowds.”
“It was a ghost,” Rosa told them. “I was there. And I’m the appeasement specialist.” I’m really just the specialist’s daughter, she thought, but didn’t say.
“Ingot isn’t haunted,” the guards said in unison.
One of them wore a motley uniform of different colors stitched together. The sleeves of his doublet were poufy and cut into long, slashed strips of fancy fabric.
“You’re dressed up as a Landsknecht,” Rosa noticed. “German mercenary.”
“How do you know that?” he asked, incredulous.
Rosa ignored the question. She had little patience for grown-ups surprised by young knowledge. “Landsknechts wore patched finery cut from the corpses of nobles that they killed in battle. Those clothes were seriously haunted. That was part of the appeal. Their outfits screamed in pain and rage. They thought it made them more badass. If you want to be really authentic, you should carry hidden speakers and play recordings of horrible yelling wherever you go.”
“I tried that already,” the guard admitted. “Didn’t have the right effect. And no one else understood. I kept having to explain.”
“I’m glad you tried,” Rosa said. “And now you know that I know about hauntings. So trust me when I tell you that there is one, and that I need to see to it—even though we’re in Ingot.”
The guards looked uncomfortable and uncertain, but they uncrossed spears and moved out of her way.
Rosa followed th
e path around the hedge, over the bridge, and up to the lagoon. She took another look at the loop of copper wire and the lurid green mark where the haunted beast had touched it.
8
JASPER WALKED UP AND DOWN the aisles below the Mousetrap Stage. He carried a broad-brimmed leather hat and aimed it at appreciative-looking audience members. The hat gradually filled up with coins and small bills, becoming heavy in a satisfying way.
He did all of this without paying attention to any of it.
New possibilities haunted him.
Jasper had never left town, never lived or traveled through anywhere but Ingot. He didn’t have out-of-town relatives to visit, and his summer vacations were always locked in orbit around the Renaissance Festival.
Classmates and cousins who did spend summers elsewhere would come home with ghost stories. They would talk about pebbles piled up at the base of bathroom mirrors, extra place mats at family tables, and candles kept carefully lit at all times. Jasper looked forward to ghost stories in September—even the little fragments of stories, the anecdotes that went nowhere and boiled down to a single, mystified, unsatisfied moment: “Something weird happened and I don’t know why!”
No one had ever started the school year with a local ghost story.
The show ended. Jasper delivered his hat full of cash to Denise, the lead dancer who also worked the popcorn machine at the second-run theater on Saturdays. Then he ran to the huge prop cabinet behind the pavilion. It was locked, but Jasper was squire to Sir Dad. He had a key.
Jasper opened the cabinet and considered the selection of battered prop weaponry.
A jousting lance would be nice. Or a glaive. Or a boar-sticking spear. Something he could use to keep haunted beasts at bay. But pole-arms for grown-ups—especially grown-ups on horseback—were awkwardly large. And these were all props meant for pretend-fighting. No one carried pointy, dangerous things among the festival crowds. No one used sharp weapons in mock duels or jousts.
Nell made functional things—authentic, museum-quality replicas, entirely unlike the ornate, spiky, goofy fantasy daggers sold by Mr. Smoot of the Unfortunate Sideburns at the other end of the fairgrounds. Nell and Mr. Smoot did not like each other very much. Nell got along with Jasper well enough, but she would never let him borrow something sharp and pointy.
Maybe he didn’t need anything sharp or pointy. He grabbed a quarterstaff, which was just a long piece of wood with a leather grip wrapped around the middle. Easy enough to use it as an inconspicuous walking stick. But it might also insist on some distance between himself and dangerous things.
Jasper locked the cabinet, hurried back to the lagoon, argued with the mystified and uncomfortable guards at the entrance, implied that he was there at the specific behest of his mother the queen, and hurried down the path.
Rosa was there, trying to straighten out a tangled length of wire and having a difficult time of it. She dropped the tangle and watched it suspiciously.
“Problem?” Jasper asked.
“I can’t decide how to use this stuff,” Rosa told him. “I’m not even sure that I should use it.”
“The dead thing didn’t like touching it.”
“I know,” she said. “But there isn’t nearly enough wire to make a full circle around the whole festival. So I figured we could just stretch it between a couple of trees here. Might help discourage the beastie from coming back this way. It won’t work as well as an unbroken circle, but it still might help.”
She continued to stare at the wire.
“But?” Jasper prompted.
“But I don’t like using metal as a barrier,” she said.
“Even if it works?”
“Especially if it works.”
“Ah,” Jasper said, and waited for this to make sense.
Rosa fidgeted with the Zippo. She didn’t even try to light it; she just snapped the chrome lid open and shut with one hand.
“Circles aren’t supposed to last,” she said. “We make them out of chalk, or charcoal, or salt, or scattered bits of paper. We draw lines in the sand. They’re signs of respect, and demands for respect. But they aren’t stone walls or barbed-wire fences. A circle isn’t supposed to say, ‘Get out and stay out.’ ”
“This is a pretty flimsy-looking piece of wire,” Jasper pointed out. “It’s not a barbed-wire fence.”
“It’s one step closer to a fence. I still don’t like it.” She stopped fiddling with the Zippo. “But let’s use it anyway. We need time to sort out what’s haunting what, exactly, before we can respond. And the haunting thingie might be dangerous. Probably is. To mountain lions, anyway. So a fence might not be the absolute worst idea as long as it’s temporary. Can you help me untangle this stuff?”
They strung the wire between trunks and branches like filaments of spider web, until it ran out.
Rosa clapped her hands together. “Now we sharpen two sticks, burn the tips, and use them to draw a great big circle around the whole festival. Then we’ll sprinkle salt over the line and hope really hard that it will make any difference. Maybe it won’t. To do this right and properly I’d need to find the exact center of the festival and draw a perfect circle around that point. Which I could totally do with a good map and a compass.” She picked up a Y-shaped stick, stuck one branching end into the ground, and used the other to draw a perfect circle. But the dirt was hard-packed and didn’t really notice the geometry she made. “Or else we could use a really long piece of rope to mark out equal points from the center and then connect those dots. But there are too many people here. They’d trip over the rope. So we’ll just make a big, squiggly line around the border of this place instead, like something drawn freehand by a three-year-old.”
She broke the stick into two pieces, took out the pocketknife, and attacked one of them like it had said unkind things about her ancestry.
“Have you ever gone exploring in these woods?” she asked while she whittled.
“No,” Jasper said. He said it quickly.
“Never? No hiking, or camping, or whatever people do?”
“No,” Jasper said. “No one does. Not up there.”
Rosa looked at him. She looked right through him. “Why not?”
Jasper shrugged an uncomfortable, defensive shrug. “Couldn’t tell you.” He badly wanted to change the subject. He wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t even sure that he wanted to know why.
“Okay,” she said. “Never mind.” Her voice sounded soothing, which made Jasper suspicious.
She tried to make fire, gave up, and handed him the Zippo. He got it to light. She stuck the sharpened sticks into the small flame.
“There,” she said. “Let’s draw a messy circle.”
9
ROSA AND JASPER MADE A messy circle. They gouged it into dirt, leaves, and grass. They drew it in charcoal over stones and tree stumps. They cut through the line of people waiting to buy admission tickets at the front gates. Everyone gave them funny looks, but no one asked for an explanation, and neither Rosa nor Jasper bothered to offer one. They circumnavigated the whole fairgrounds, sprinkled salt packets over the line as they drew it, and finally came back around to where they started.
Rosa kept watching the woods. She had never seen forest before. Trees were isolated things in her city-based experience. They lived out their lives as urban sidewalk decorations, subsisting on soot-soaked rain and canine pee. This made them unhappy. Unhappy trees lead to unhappy library books. All books are former trees, their pages pulped and flattened wood. So librarian appeasement specialists always tend to nearby trees. Rosa used to walk around her old block twice daily to offer clean water.
The trees surrounding Ingot were different. They were not isolated. All together they made a forest, one that covered the faces of mountains and hills on all sides. Rosa couldn’t read those faces. She wondered what mountains, hills, and forests might be thinking, and whether or not they noticed the town. She wondered what they remembered. She wondered how much Ingot had forgotten.
And I wish Mom were here, she thought. Mom knew how to fit the right action to the right moment, like a book shelved in precisely the right place—or at least she used to be able to, before Rosa’s dad got himself killed in such a stupidly shameful way.
Rosa scooped up a couple of old coins from the abandoned jewelry stall. She tossed them into the lagoon, along with her wishes, for absent mermaids to eat.
Then she fished them out of the water again.
Each coin had a square hole in the center, surrounded by Chinese characters. They were made out of copper.
“Let me see that big walking stick,” Rosa said.
Jasper handed over his quarterstaff. Rosa dug around in the jewelry stall until she found tacks and a small hammer. She nailed coins to the ends of the staff, driving tacks through square holes.
“Will that help?” Jasper asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe. I don’t know. But I think so.”
“Because the coins are circles?”
“Because they’re copper.” She handed it back.
“Do all ghosts hate copper?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Most are skittish about some substance in particular. Like salt. Usually salt. But it varies from place to place and haint to haint. This particular ghost doesn’t like copper. Not sure why. Wish I knew.” I wish, I wish, I wish.
Jasper struck the ground once with a coin-tipped tap. “I should get back to the stables,” he said. “Sir Dad’s horse needs a quick grooming and a warmup trot before the joust. And you should come watch! It’s fun. Even though it’s silly, and based on weird little echoes of history that happened really far away from here. Still fun. Dad loves it. His enthusiasm can fill up the whole field.”
“Is the good Sir Morien scripted to win the day, or lose it?” Rosa asked.