A Festival of Ghosts Read online

  Rosa nodded. “I noticed that, too. But I’m still not sure why you think it’s my fault.”

  “All of this is your fault!” Bobbie closed the gap between them and tried to loom over Rosa. “All of it. You control the ghosts.”

  Rosa shook her head. “I really don’t.”

  “You can make them go back to wherever they came from.”

  “I really can’t.”

  “Why won’t you help us?” Bobbie demanded. “Isn’t that your whole job?”

  Rosa leaned forward and spoke very slowly. “I am helping. But they came from here. They belong here.”

  Bobbie took another step closer. “Who are you to say what belongs in this town and what doesn’t?”

  “I’m Rosa Ramona Díaz. I live here now. And you’re Blanche Barbara Talcott, right?”

  “Bobbie.”

  “Really? I heard that it’s Blanche.”

  “Bobbie.”

  “You do know what ‘blanche’ means, right?”

  “Yes. It means ‘fair.’ ”

  “It also means ‘to turn sickly pale with fear and disgust.’ ”

  Bobbie blanched. Then her face flushed the same color as her freckles. “The ghosts weren’t here before you came to town. You brought them. I bet they’ll leave if you do. They’ll follow you out of Ingot if we force you to go.”

  “Nope,” Rosa said. “Not how it works. I’d love to leave, but you wouldn’t be any better off if I did.”

  Bobbie smiled. “We’ll have to test that.” She turned around and stalked away. The two boys fell in behind her.

  “I think I kind of like her,” Rosa said.

  “She just threatened to run you out of town,” Jasper pointed out. “What’s to like, exactly?”

  “She really thinks that I can command the dead,” Rosa explained. “She thinks that graves open right up at my word. Wow. I’d be terrified of me if I thought that. But the fair Bobbie Talcott stood up and offered me a challenge anyway, so I guess I’m impressed. And flattered. I mean, she is wrong about pretty much everything, but her ignorance isn’t my problem.”

  “It kinda is though,” Jasper said. “She means to make it your problem.”

  “She can try.” Rosa stood up, clapped her hands, and rubbed them together. “Are you coming over?”

  Jasper shook his head. “I need to put in my daily search for Handisher.”

  “Need backup?” Rosa asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yep. Thanks, though.”

  I don’t think you’re going to find that tortoise, Rosa’s expression said. Even if you do, you’re probably not going to like the shape that you find him in.

  “Good luck,” she said out loud.

  Jasper walked down Isabelle Road, toward the fairgrounds and home.

  Rosa went inside. The smell of old and comfortable books welcomed her. Wisp lanterns winked as she walked underneath them.

  Mrs. Jillynip sat behind the front desk and kept silent order with the force of her eyebrows. Rosa waved hello. The older librarian looked askance at Rosa’s bloody shirt, but she didn’t ask questions. Rosa didn’t volunteer any answers.

  She found her mother sorting small bottles of salt on the floor of their basement apartment. Appeasement specialists have many uses for salt.

  “Hello, little love,” Mom said. “How was school?”

  I may have seen a glimpse of Dad in a stranger’s face, she thought, but did not say. He might be haunting me. Is he haunting you?

  “The school drew first blood,” Rosa told her instead. “But I think I can handle it.”

  Mom looked up. “Ouch. Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay. Do we have any peanut butter?”

  “I don’t think so,” Mom said. “Never liked the stuff. Why?”

  “Never mind.”

  Rosa went to her room, shut the door, and took her sword down from the wall. Then she grabbed the knot of her gum-stuck hair and cut it off.

  9

  JASPER FOUND THE FESTIVAL GATES already unlocked. A whole team of carpenters came tumbling out with their power tools, clearly terrified. This did not bode well for the cleanup and repair efforts.

  “What’s going on?” Jasper asked. He recognized Geoff and Po among them. Both played royal guards in summertime.

  “The pavilion’s fixed,” said Po.

  “Good,” Jasper said. “That is good, right?”

  “We’re not the ones who fixed it,” Geoff explained while running away.

  The carpenters all fled across the field.

  Jasper went though the gates and dropped his backpack, which was heavy. He didn’t want to be burdened if something encouraged him to leave very quickly.

  He found ghosts in mining caps still clustered near the Tacky Tavern, though they stood on the ground this time. Some swayed back and forth. Others turned in a circle, very slowly, as if dancing to music played at half speed. Jasper had gotten more and more comfortable with ghostly company lately, but this particular group made him want to bolt like a horse spooked by snakes. He forced himself to walk in a calm and measured way.

  Something tortoise-shaped moved nearby.

  “Handisher?” Jasper whispered as he crouched. “Is that you? No. It isn’t. You’re just a rock.”

  The rock raised itself up, hovered above the ground for seven seconds, and then thumped back down.

  “Hi,” Jasper said. “Were you ever a tortoise? You are roughly the right size and shape, but I can’t tell what you used to be.”

  The rock stayed put. Jasper waited for it to stir again, but it didn’t. He moved on and made his way toward the royal pavilion.

  This was the heart of the festival, the place where it had all begun. Twenty years ago Jasper’s dad and a few other reckless history buffs had taught themselves how to joust. Then, last summer, a stampeding tree had wrecked the pavilion completely. But now that wreckage had all disappeared. Every stick and scrap had pulled together to become something else.

  A crowd of figures stood like scarecrows, tattered cloth wrapped around their wooden bones. They didn’t seem to notice Jasper. Instead they watched the lists. A long stretch of packed dirt and sand had been swept level again.

  Two scarecrow knights on scarecrow horses charged at each other.

  They met, and clashed, and shattered. Scraps fluttered slowly to the ground.

  The crowd moved their arms as though clapping, but they lacked hands to clap. Their applause made a soft rustling noise.

  The broken knights and their steeds remade themselves, piece by piece and scrap by scrap. They took up their places, clashed, and shattered again. The crowd rustled with more soft applause.

  One of the knights carried himself like Jasper’s father. His steed of wood and cloth moved just like Fiore. The scarecrow horse shook her head the same way, and made the same little skip-step right before the joust began.

  That makes no kind of sense, Jasper thought. Dad is alive. So is Fiore. So what sorts of ghosts are these?

  * * *

  “Ghosts of the living,” Rosa told him.

  She set her cell to speakerphone, put it on her bedside table, and went back to practicing sword drills. Cut high. Cut low. Parry high. Parry low.

  Her head felt light without a ponytail’s worth of hair weighing her down.

  “Meaning what, exactly?” Jasper’s buzzing phone voice asked.

  “Meaning that the fairgrounds remember,” she said. “Whatever important stuff happened in a very haunted place is always still happening. That’s what makes theaters so haunted. Actors play the same role in the same place, over and over, and then the role sticks around after the show is done. I’m glad Mom is a librarian rather than a stage manager. Theatrical appeasements are more stressful. Anyway, that knight isn’t really the ghost of your Dad.”

  “It’s the ghost of Sir Morien,” Jasper said. “Dad’s festival character.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So th
e whole festival is still there. It’s just happening without us.”

  “Seems like.” Cut high. Cut low. Parry high. Parry low. “Do you think this’ll make it easier or harder to reopen next summer?”

  “Harder,” Jasper said. “We can’t clean up that mess and rebuild if ghosts are using the mess to build themselves new bodies.”

  “We’ll figure something out.” Rosa paused to stretch out her sword arm. “I should probably go. I can smell dinner defrosting. Or maybe I’m smelling some other bygone meal. Smells don’t always go away in a home without windows.”

  “All the important stuff that happened in your kitchen is still happening,” said Jasper.

  “Nothing important has ever happened in our kitchen,” Rosa said. “See you tomorrow.”

  “See you.”

  The phone blurped as the call ended.

  Rosa cut the air one more time. She very much wanted to keep her sword close at hand. But she still couldn’t bring it to school, not if tiny pocketknives got confiscated there.

  “My huge, awkward backpack isn’t really a portal to another place,” she mused aloud, “but maybe I can make one.”

  She shoved her bed across the floor. Four cairns of small, stacked pebbles stood where the bed used to be. Rosa whispered an apology to household spirits as she moved each distinct pile to a new resting place under her bookshelf. Then she drew a perfect circle on the floorboards with chalk and string.

  Nothing is stronger than a circle, Catalina de Erauso wrote centuries ago. Nothing more whole in itself, nothing freer in its motion, for the scholars say that motion is most perfect when it rotates around a central point.

  Rosa used a camping compass to find and mark all four cardinal directions on the circle. She set the sword inside with its hilt against the easternmost edge and the tip of the blade pointing west. “East is for beginnings,” she said. “West is for endings. We don’t start fights, but we do finish them.”

  She pushed her bed back into place to hide both the circle and the sword.

  OCTOBER

  10

  RED AND YELLOW LEAVES GATHERED in drifts on the sidewalk. Jasper kicked them as he walked, which made a crunchy, satisfying noise.

  Carved pumpkins decorated roughly half of the doorsteps he passed by. Candles burned inside those pumpkins, even though it was morning on a sunny day.

  The other half of the houses he passed had curtains drawn and windows shuttered like eyes squeezed tight, or like ears with fingers stuck in. Lalalalalalaaaaaaaaaaa. I don’t see any ghosts, I don’t hear any ghosts, and ghosts are most definitely not welcome here, nope.

  Jasper shook his head at the ignorance of his neighbors. The pumpkins give wandering ghosts a place to rest and keep warm, he thought. They’re much more likely to wander right into your house if you don’t give them a lantern instead.

  Yesterday he had carved four pumpkins for every entrance to the farmhouse and the barn. His mother had helped with the carving. His father had helped set the huge pumpkins into place. But neither one of them had wanted to talk about why they were putting big candles inside orange gourds. Both parents had been reluctant to discuss haunted things lately. This was frustrating. Jasper wanted to ask them what they thought about the fairgrounds and the fact that the Ingot Renaissance Festival carried on without them. It continued to reenact all of its summertime celebrations, without living performers or a living audience, even though summer was over. Jasper still didn’t know what would happen when summer returned.

  His mother said optimistic things like, “We’ll work it out somehow,” and then changed the subject. His father kept finding other places to be, other sorts of work to do. And he no longer practiced swordplay in the morning. That worried Jasper more than anything else.

  Rosa waited for him on the front steps of the Ingot Public Library. She sat next to several pumpkin lanterns, some newly carved and others already smashed. Humphrey, Bobbie, or Englebert must have come visiting with baseball bats last night. Or maybe other kids had done it—kids who lived in one of the houses with tightly shuttered windows.

  Rosa seemed cheerful enough despite the pumpkin wreckage. She wore a dress over blue jeans and her tool belt over the dress. Her hair had grown out a little bit since she had hacked it all off with a sword.

  “Hey,” she said. “You seem grumpy.”

  “Hey,” he said. “You don’t seem grumpy enough. I need someone to share my ire.”

  “Can’t help you there.” She stood up and set out for school. “Today I am feeling unstoppable.”

  “Careful,” Jasper said. “You’re temping fate to prove you wrong. Aren’t you worried about jinxing yourself ?”

  “Nope,” Rosa said. “I don’t see any jinxes nearby.”

  She started whistling.

  Jasper kicked another leaf pile. “How can you be so cheerful? Most of the other students cross the hallway to avoid you.”

  “True,” Rosa said.

  “The girls’ bathroom empties completely the moment you go in.”

  “I like my privacy,” she said. “And it’s much easier to talk to people inside the mirrors if everyone else clears out first.”

  “Bobbie Talcott put out a rumor that you can give a person haunted hair by making eye contact.”

  “I know!” Rosa said. “I love that rumor. Her own lovely locks would be doomed if it were true.”

  “What would haunted hair be like?” Jasper wondered.

  “It mostly acts like it’s out in different weather,” Rosa said. “Soaked on a sunny day. Windswept even when you’re indoors with all the windows closed. That sort of thing. The hair gets stuck in another time and place. Kind of annoying, but not really a big deal. Except for Mr. Frumkin. He was my teacher the last time I tried to go to school. It didn’t go well. His apartment building had burned years and years ago, and he had the same haircut as someone who died in that fire. The place remembered the hair.”

  “What happened?”

  “I tried to help. It sort of worked. Once he was bald the building didn’t think that he should be on fire anymore. Hauntings do settle down by themselves sometimes. The chemistry lab stopped making that horrible noise.”

  “True,” Jasper allowed, “but the lights still flicker whenever Ms. Giliani tells a joke.”

  “The lunch lady loves us now that we coaxed The Thing from Behind the Cafeteria Refrigerator into a more suitable place.”

  “The food is still awful, though,” Jasper complained.

  “Fie on you, Sir Chevalier. Nell MacMinnigan could forge horseshoe nails out of your grumpiness, but I am enjoying my bubble of contentment and I’ll thank you not to burst it. Good day.” She meant to cheer him up, or at least annoy him out of his funk, but it didn’t work. Archaic words and fake European accents were a festival thing. Reminders of the festival did not improve his cheer.

  They approached the school. Jasper looked up and saw what waited for them there.

  “Rosa . . . ,” he said.

  She stuck out her chin. “I said good day.”

  “Rosa!” he insisted. “Look at the Lump.”

  She looked at the Lump.

  A whirlwind surrounded the hill behind the playground. The King of the Lump had shed all scarlet leaves, but none of those leaves touched the ground. Each one remained aloft and spinning.

  Rosa crossed the playground and stepped right up to the edge of that spiraling wind. She tried to stick her hand through it.

  “No good,” she said. “This is a strong circle. I can’t break it. Can you?”

  Jasper pushed with his own hand, even though it felt like a dumb idea that might possibly cost him his fingers.

  Air thickened around those fingers and pushed right back.

  “No good,” he said.

  “Something must be buried under that little hill,” Rosa mused. “Something that wants to be left alone. I should look at the library’s map collection after school, see if I can figure out what’s down there.”


  “Meanwhile we’ll need a new place to eat lunch,” Jasper said.

  “Do we have to use the cafeteria?” Rosa asked. “I hate the cafeteria. Even though the lunch lady loves us. I don’t want to navigate through the treaties, alliances, and grudges between all the different tables.”

  “It’s not that hard,” Jasper said. “And it’s getting too cold to eat outside anyway.” He led the way to the front doors, where other kids poured out of school buses and gathered into clumps. They stared at the whirlwind. They stared at Rosa and Jasper. Then they stared at the ground and shared urgent whispers with each other.

  “Not that hard for you, maybe,” Rosa said. “You grew up here. Plus you’re ridiculously attentive to the living, and can tell at a glance which best friends aren’t best friends anymore. Or which people started kissing over the weekend and don’t want to tell anyone else about it.”

  “Like Lucy and Chetna?” Jasper asked.

  “What?”

  He nodded his chin in their direction. “Pretty sure they’ve just started kissing. But don’t say anything. They don’t know how to feel about it yet.”

  Rosa raised one eyebrow at him, inspired by Mrs. Jillynip’s constant expressions of disbelief and disdain. “You’re creepy. How can you possibly know that?”

  He wasn’t really sure how, so he thought about it for a bit before answering. “Because I’m a festival urchin. I’m the festival urchin, really. Other performers’ kids came and went, but I was there all day, every day, every single summer of my life.”

  Rosa’s eyebrow remained raised. “You learned how to read minds by spending lots of time in the middle of a pseudo-historical costume party?”

  “No,” he said. “I just got a sense of where other people were at. And what connected them. That’s all we were doing, really. I mean, we also played with swords and sang ballads with terrible puns in them and pretended to be on another continent, a thousand years ago, while talking to tourists from the present day. But everybody works together, aware of each other. They have to be. Otherwise it all breaks down.”

  Jasper felt sadness creep back across his body like frostbite. We’ll fix it, he insisted to himself. We can still rebuild, repair, and reopen next year. Even though the grounds are so chaotically haunted that no one is willing to go back there but me.