A Festival of Ghosts Page 6

  He shifted the focus of the conversation back to Rosa. “How can you always tell at a glance what’s haunting what?”

  Rosa shrugged. “It’s obvious.”

  “Not to anyone else.”

  “Then I’m gifted and brilliant.”

  “Or you grew up with it. Same as me. You know the dead like I know the living.”

  “Yeah, well, the dead are more consistent.”

  Everyone else hurried inside, eager to get away from the uncanny whirlwind surrounding the Lump. They also knew to keep clear of Rosa whenever she approached the unwelcoming entrance.

  Jasper went first. He braced himself against the open door. Rosa took a running start. The door pushed and strained against Jasper’s shoulder, but he held it until after she made it through. Then he followed. The door slammed shut behind them in protest.

  “Thank you kindly, Sir Chevalier,” said Rosa.

  He mock-bowed.

  “It’s fun to say ‘Sir Chevalier,’ ” Rosa went on. “Like a tongue-twister. ‘Sir Chevalier sighed with a somber countenance. Sir Chevalier sang silly songs on Saturday.’ ”

  “Come on,” Jasper said. “We’re going to be late for homeroom.”

  11

  THE HISTORY CLASSROOM REMAINED THE most haunted place inside the haunted school of a very haunted town.

  Jasper knew that he needed to get to class early, just in case something unsettling happened. But he was running late because the toilet water in the boys’ bathroom had started to boil and he needed to deal with that first.

  Billowing steam filled up the whole bathroom. Unseen fingers wrote messages on the mirrors. Jasper tried to read what they wrote, but all of the letters dripped into an illegible smudge.

  He flushed a pinch of salt down every toilet, which calmed them down and stopped the boiling. The mirrors remained unreadable, so Jasper rushed to class. Air in the hallway felt brisk and chilly compared to the sauna that the bathroom had turned into.

  Six students stood in line for the water fountain right outside the history classroom. Mike and Tracey were two of them. Mike waved, and then took his turn drinking.

  “You’re all flushed,” Tracey said to Jasper. “Slow down. Looks like you ran a marathon to get here.”

  He couldn’t help but laugh when she said “flushed.” “Things got weird in the bathroom.”

  Tracey held up one hand. “Do not overshare.”

  “It was gross,” he said. “Unspeakably gross.”

  “I’m not listening to yoooooooooou,” Tracey sang loudly as she filled her plastic water bottle.

  Jasper grinned and went in.

  Most of the desks were taken already. Gladys-Marie sat in the back and kept the desk next to her reserved for her twin. Rosa sat in the front with emptiness to either side. Chairs close to Rosa always filled up last. She pretended not to notice this. Instead she looked up at the posters of history quotes. Virginia Hamilton declared, The past moves me and with me, although I remove myself from it.

  Something tugged at Rosa’s hair, even though it was short. She glanced back to make sure that nobody living was messing with her. Nobody was.

  Jasper sat down next to Rosa.

  “Your face is all sweaty,” she said.

  “Toilets started boiling in the bathroom,” he told her. “Fixed it with salt.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “I know it was.”

  The last of the students trickled inside. Tracey sat next to her sister while taking a long sip from her water bottle.

  Mr. Lucius came in and set his silver cane against the desk. “Good morning, everyone. Today we’re going to talk about why the Roman emperor Aurelian was known as the Restorer of the World. Who can tell me one of his accomplishments?”

  Rosa squirmed in her small chair. She knew a lot about history. But it made her classmates uncomfortable whenever she showed off just how much she knew, so she usually tried to keep a lid on her overflowing knowledge. Rosa also didn’t like talking to Mr. Lucius, or catching his attention in any way whatsoever.

  No one else spoke up. Awkward silence stretched across the room.

  “Anyone?” the teacher said, still hopeful. “Come on. We went over this last week.”

  Bobbie Talcott raised her hand. Mr. Lucius called on her, clearly relieved.

  “He built a really big wall,” Bobbie said.

  “Yes! Correct. He protected Rome by commissioning the great Aurelian wall. What else?”

  “He burned the Library of Alexandria,” Rosa muttered, just loud enough for Jasper to hear. Emperor Aurelian was not well loved among librarians.

  Tracey raised her hand.

  “Yes, Gladys-Marie?” Mr. Lucius asked.

  He never could tell the twins apart. The real Gladys-Marie started to correct him, but then shrugged and gave up.

  Tracey lowered her hand. She tried to answer. Silence followed. No words came out.

  Everyone else started talking at once—or at least they tried. A few other kids silently panicked as they noticed their own voices missing.

  Mr. Lucius clapped his hands together. “Quiet, please!” Then he looked embarrassed for having said that, because quietness was clearly the problem here.

  “Take attendance,” Jasper suggested. “Quick.”

  The teacher found the class list in his binder and called out names.

  Six students could not say “here.” Tracey, Mike, Chetna, River, Genevieve, and Lex had all lost their voices—or else those voices had been forcibly taken from them.

  Mr. Lucius shut the binder and raised his own voice in what was obviously supposed to be a firm and decisive way. This did not fool anyone. “Okay . . . okay. The six of you go to the nurse’s office. The rest of us are going back to the library for another research assignment.”

  Gladys-Marie refused to leave her twin. She went with the silent six. “Someone who can still talk needs to tell the nurse what just happened.”

  “Right,” said Mr. Lucius. “Okay. Good thinking. Everyone else, please follow me.”

  Rosa and Jasper did not follow him to the library. They went to find the principal instead.

  Mr. Ahmed came with them to the history classroom, where they all lingered in the hallway outside. No one wanted to go back in.

  “How soon can you sort this out, Miss Díaz?” the principal asked.

  “Anywhere between minutes and months from now,” Rosa said.

  Mr. Ahmed made a noise between a grumble and a squeak.

  “Whatever haunts this place must have something to say,” she went on. “They wouldn’t steal voices otherwise. We should listen.”

  They all moved a step closer to the open classroom door.

  “I don’t hear anything in there,” the principal whispered.

  “Me neither,” said Rosa. Think think think think think, she thought. Then she took out a notebook and wrote all six names: Tracey, Mike, Chetna, River, Genevieve, and Lex. “Why did this happen to those six kids in particular? What else do they have in common? Are they all on the same sports team? Do their names spell out some sort of message?” Rosa, Jasper, and Mr. Ahmed stared at the names and silently rearranged their letters.

  “Give, exert, carry keen evil achievement,” Mr. Ahmed said. “That’s one anagram. It sounds sinister, but otherwise makes no sense to me.”

  “Mix viler reek the teeny grievance cave?” Jasper suggested.

  “I’m key revenge!” Rosa said. “Hear excretal invective.”

  Mr. Ahmed sighed. “This is both alarming and unhelpful.” He went over to the water fountain and took a sip.

  Something tickled at Jasper’s memory. “All six kids were standing together right before class started. Right over there.” He pointed at the fountain. “Tracey could still talk at the time.”

  The principal stood up slowly and tried to speak. He couldn’t.

  “Well, okay then,” Rosa said. “That explains why it happened to those six in particular. Thanks, Mr. Ahmed. Maybe you
should go to the nurse’s office too?”

  The distressed and silent principal left.

  Rosa sat on the floor in the middle of the hallway. She turned to a new notebook page and filled it with every letter of the alphabet.

  “More word games?” Jasper asked.

  “Sort of,” she said. “We should shut off this fountain before it steals more voices. But there’s something I want to try first.”

  She ran the water over the fingers of her left hand.

  “Shouldn’t you wear gloves before doing that?” Jasper asked.

  “Probably,” Rosa agreed. “But I’m guessing that the water only takes your voice if you drink it. And I’m still talking, so I seem to be right.”

  She flicked wet fingers at the notebook page. Water droplets smacked into the paper.

  “Talk to me,” Rosa whispered to the water and whatever might be haunting it.

  The letter T began to smear, followed by the A, L, C, and O. Then the T smudged again until it almost disappeared.

  “Talcott,” Jasper read.

  “Interesting,” Rosa said. “If it was Bobbie Talcott you wanted, then your voice-theft just missed her. You hit six of her classmates instead.”

  She wrote out the alphabet on a new page and tried again. This time the P smeared first. R and O followed.

  “Protect?” Jasper guessed. “That looks like ‘protect.’ But the T is so faded that I can’t really tell. Might be ‘project’ instead. Or ‘protract.’ ”

  “Let’s go with ‘protect,’ ” Rosa said. “Does that mean they want to defend the Talcotts, or defend against them?”

  She wrote the alphabet on a new page and tried again, but the soggy notebook refused to spell any more messages.

  12

  JASPER MADE AN OUT OF order sign and taped it to the front of the fountain. Then he wrapped the whole spigot with a few layers of tape, just in case somebody ignored the sign.

  “We should find Duncan and ask him to shut off the water properly.”

  “Duncan Barnstaple?” Rosa asked. “The festival candle maker?”

  “That’s the one,” Jasper said. “He’s also the maintenance guy here at school.”

  They both paused to look at the open classroom door.

  “We have to go back in there, don’t we?” Jasper asked.

  “Yes,” Rosa said.

  “I’d rather not,” he said.

  “Likewise,” she said.

  They went inside the history classroom and shut the door behind them.

  Every small hair on their arms stood up and suggested that they were not welcome.

  “Feel that?” Jasper asked.

  Rosa nodded. “At least it means that they’ve noticed us. They might listen. Might even talk now that they’ve got several voices to use.”

  She took up a piece of chalk and wrote Hello on the board in very large letters.

  They waited. Nothing happened.

  Rosa tried again. She wrote Talcott who? What do you want with them?

  More nothing answered her from the other side of the chalkboard.

  “Come on,” she muttered. “Use the voices you took.”

  A dust bunny crawled out from underneath a shelf, took on the shape of an actual rabbit, and went loping across the floor before it dissolved back into dust, hair, and lint.

  “That was Lafayette,” Jasper explained. “Mom kept his hutch in that corner. He lived to be twelve, which is more than a century in rabbit years. And he seemed content right up to the end. I don’t think he’s the voice-stealing type.”

  “Hi Lafayette,” Rosa said to the lint pile. “I’m glad you lived a good life. The hamsters that haunt our homeroom all died of fright.”

  “I hear Mr. Griffin plans to get another one,” Jasper said.

  “Really? Hasn’t he accidentally slaughtered enough of them already?”

  She continued to watch the chalkboard, which still did nothing.

  “This might take a bit,” she said. “Whatever haunts this place only just took those voices a few minutes ago, so they might not remember how to use them yet. We can wait. Which means skipping lunch. Are you okay with skipping lunch?”

  “I’m very much okay with skipping lunch,” Jasper said. “Especially now that we can’t eat on the Lump.”

  “Hmm,” said Rosa. “I’d forgotten about the Lump. Strange that it picked today to toss up a whirlwind circle around itself. So how is that hill and tree connected to a voice-confiscating water fountain?”

  She put two candle stubs on the tray beneath the board, scratched ἀλήθɛια into the side of a match with the tip of a pin, and used that match to light each wick.

  “There,” she said. “Hello. We’re listening. Tell us what you need to say.”

  They waited, read books, and ate granola bars that Rosa kept in her huge backpack for just this sort of sudden, meal-skipping vigil.

  Both candles burned all the way down to nothing.

  Rosa made an impatient noise.

  Jasper looked up from his book. “The school day is almost over.”

  “Yeah,” Rosa said.

  “So what happens now?”

  “Now I plan to sulk. Eventually I’ll ask Mom for help. She’s probably too busy to help us out, though. A huge stack of interlibrary loans arrived yesterday. Extremely haunted books. Libraries in other cities haven’t yet realized that they can’t disinfect their most disruptive books by shipping them through Ingot. Not anymore. So Mom has her hands pretty full. She’ll tell me that I should be able to figure this out myself. After that conversation I’ll probably sulk some more.” She cleaned up the two wax puddles and erased the unanswered questions from the chalkboard. “Maybe I could skip all of that and have dinner at your house instead?”

  “I don’t think my house will be any less tense,” Jasper said. “I should tell Mom about the haunted things happening in her own classroom, which will make her unhappy. Then I’ll ask Dad how the festival repairs are going, and he’ll tell me that they’re going nowhere because no one is brave enough to go in there for more than five minutes before they run away screaming. So I’d rather not head home yet, either.”

  “What should we do instead?” Rosa asked.

  Jasper packed up his bag. “Let’s go outside and glare at the Lump until we intimidate it into giving up its secrets.”

  “Sounds good.”

  They went outside, stood in the playground, and glared at the Lump.

  It gave up none of its secrets.

  “I wish we could break through this circle and take shovels to the hill,” Rosa said. “I want to know what’s buried underneath.”

  “I don’t really wish that,” Jasper said.

  Rosa picked up a stick and tossed it at the Lump. The whirlwind took it and kept it aloft with all the spinning leaves.

  School officially ended for the day. Other kids poured out of the building, avoided the playground, and hurried home.

  “There goes Humphrey Talcott,” Jasper noticed.

  “Yeah . . . ,” Rosa said thoughtfully.

  “Think we should follow him?” he asked. “Try to find out what his family name has to do with a haunted water fountain?”

  “Yeah,” Rosa said, so they followed him.

  Humphrey kept checking his pocket watch as he walked. He loved that watch. He preferred Victorian history to the medieval and renaissance flavors of the festival.

  “This feels weird,” said Rosa. “Like we should be hiding behind trees instead of walking behind him, right out in the open.”

  “That would look a lot more suspicious,” Jasper said. “We’re just walking. Nothing weird about that.”

  Rosa whistled the sort of casual tune that people out walking might whistle to themselves.

  They followed Humphrey as he hurried up a long, winding driveway to a huge house surrounded by manicured gardens.

  “The Talcott household looks fancy,” Rosa said. “Have you ever been there before?”

 
; “Once or twice,” said Jasper. “The mayor throws big midwinter parties. Mom hates them. Dad is better at the schmoozing. All of the important local business folk are expected to go, and my parents are the festival directors—the only directors now that Mr. Rathaus quit. Plus we run a big horse farm. So they go to the party, and sometimes bring me. It isn’t fun.”

  Two landscapers dug a long, narrow trench at the base of the garden. Jasper recognized them both. “That’s Geoff and Po. They play royal guards in the summer. And they promised to help with repairs, but then they got spooked.” He waved. They waved back.

  “What are you doing?” Rosa whispered. “I thought we were being sneaky.”

  “We are,” he said. “Just act like we’re supposed to be here.”

  “How?”

  “Pretend you’ve got your sword with you.”

  She did. It helped.

  They left the driveway to say hello to the ditch-diggers.

  “Good day to you, noble squire!” said Po with forced cheerfulness. He stood next to a gardening cart covered up with a tarp, and he tugged on the tarp to make sure it stayed covered.

  “And to yourselves,” Jasper said. A slight echo of his festival character haunted his voice. “What are you working on?”

  “An invisible dog fence,” Geoff told him. “For the dog.”

  “Really?” Jasper asked.

  “Yes,” said Geoff. “Really.”

  “They don’t have a dog,” said Jasper.

  “They’re getting a dog,” said Geoff.

  “And we’d best get back to work,” said Po. “The good mayor is a taskmaster. Taskmistress. Something like that. Goodbye.”

  “Farewell to you both,” Jasper said.

  The two kids trudged up the hill and toward the house.

  “Well,” Rosa said, “that was just a little bit suspicious.”

  “A bit,” Jasper agreed. “Plus Humphrey’s allergic to dogs. He could barely breathe at Mike’s seventh birthday party, because Mike’s family has several dogs.”

  “Interesting,” Rosa said.