William Alexander - Ghoulish Song

He spoke to Mother, looked at the Snotfish, and gave a nod to Father in the doorway. He did not look at Kaile, or speak to her. The others followed him out of the room. They did not smirk behind his back, the way people always did whenever Doctor Boggs had been particularly useless, and they left the bedroom door open.

“Tell me if we passed Inspection!” Kaile called after them.

No one answered at first. Then the Snotfish stuck his head in the doorway, whispered, “We didn’t,” and ran off.

Kaile stared at the open doorway. “The second-best bread should have been good enough,” she said to herself.

The Snotfish crept back in. “Are you really dead?” he asked. Then he ran off again before she could answer.

Kaile closed the door, hoping that this would make the room belong to her again.

Someone climbed the stairs, opened the door, and returned downstairs. The footsteps sounded like Father’s.

Kaile stared at the open doorway. “Never keep a door closed on a haunted room,” she said aloud. It was something she knew. It was something that everyone knew. “The dead will never clear out if you keep the door shut.”

She stood still for a moment. She could tell that her heart was beating by the way it pounded. She shifted her weight, and something tiny and sharp—a shard of Doctor Boggs’s broken spectacles—drove into the heel of her foot. “Ow!” she said, loudly, and was suddenly furious. This was too much. Everything else she could handle, but glass stuck in her foot was more than anyone could reasonably be expected to tolerate.

She pried out the shard with her fingernails. Then she put a warm shawl on her shoulders, picked up the flute and her bedside lantern, and left the room that no longer felt like her own.

THE KITCHEN WAS EMPTY. Kaile fetched her rain boots from under the stairs, stuffed a piece of stale pastry in her mouth, and peered into the public room. The domini men still played at the usual table, but otherwise it stood empty of customers. Mother herself held a hushed discussion with Father and Doctor Boggs at the far end of the room, where the goblins had briefly set up their stage. They kept their heads down. The domini men also kept their heads down, focused on their game. One rattled the tiles in his hand as though more interested in the sound than in taking his turn.

“Drop those bones,” another said, nudging him. “Drop those bones.”

No one noticed Kaile as she slipped back inside the kitchen.

The stale pastry sat heavy in her stomach. “We failed Inspection,” she said to herself. She tried to wrap her mind around such a strangely shaped idea. Mother never failed Inspection. Something that never happened had finally happened. “It wasn’t my fault,” she said, her voice quiet and firm. “The Snotfish spoiled that first batch. I only gave away the second batch to protect all of us from curses—and it was Mother’s fault that the goblins were throwing curses around, anyway. Their show was good, and the music was beautiful. They weren’t doing any harm. She shouldn’t have kicked them out.”

Kaile’s skin was angry and her bones were angry and her heart was angry, and also beating, so obviously she wasn’t dead.

She left the kitchen through the back door and crossed the yard under a dim and dusky sky. Then she climbed up into the hayloft over the guzzard pen, where she used to hide when she was younger and less a part of the ordinary business of the day.

Some of the birds slept below while standing on one foot. Others made gurgling noises at her and hunched up their shoulders as if flapping wings that they didn’t have.

The loft smelled like hay and guzzard. Kaile cleared loose straw from a patch of floor and set the lantern down. She sat beside it, turned the flint crank, and lit the wick. A warm glow filled the small space.

Kaile glanced at the wall behind her, where her shadow should have been. The lantern light passed right through her and left no sign that she was even there.

“Where did you go?” she asked.

Here, a voice whispered back.

Kaile jumped up to standing, and almost knocked the lantern over.

Be careful, the whisper said. Don’t put out the light.

Kaile turned up the wick. “Who’s there?”

She caught a glimpse of a wispy and indistinct shape near the ladder. Then she lost that glimpse, and had to squint to see it again.

Your shadow , of course, the shape whispered. Kaile thought she glimpsed a face and features as it spoke. It looked a little bit like Kaile’s own reflection in window glass—but only a little bit. There was no shared movement and no spark of recognition, no sense that This is me.

“Tell me why you left,” Kaile said. “Tell me why you aren’t attached to my feet anymore.”

I heard music, the shadow said. It was beautiful and wrenching. It unmoored me. It cut me away from you. I huddled in our room while so many other people came in. Then they all left, and you left with the lantern. You left me almost in the dark. I followed. The only thing I know how to do is follow you. I don’t want to. You never noticed me when you dragged me across the ground while walking. You never noticed when someone else stepped on my face. I don’t want to be anywhere near you. But near you is the only place I know.

Kaile wasn’t sure what to say to all that. “I’m sorry if I splashed through too many puddles,” she said. She wasn’t sure she was actually sorry, though she tried to be. She felt as though she probably should be, but no one had ever told her to be careful where her shadow fell—and no one else ever seemed to care about their own. “I’m sorry, but I still wish you hadn’t left. Now everyone thinks I’m dead. Or at least Doctor Boggs does. He thinks I’m a dead thing that won’t stop walking around. A ghoul. He’s probably trying to convince Mother and Father to hold my funeral already.”

Sounds as though he managed it, the shadow whispered. I can hear a funeral.

Kaile listened. She held her breath to listen. She heard only guzzards. Then her ears caught the faint sound of a funeral song.

She scrambled for the ladder, leaving the flute and lantern and shadow behind.

The public room was packed. Kaile saw all sorts of neighbors and relations in the dim light, all of them softly singing. She hadn’t seen the place so full since Grandfather’s funeral.

Nice of you all to come so quickly, she thought, but there really isn’t any need.

Grandfather’s coffin had rested on the floor in the very center of the room, surrounded by candles. Kaile pushed her way through the crowd to stand in the center, where a small and empty coffin rested. It almost looked like a cradle, like the Snotfish’s cradle when they had gathered around him to sing his nameday song. (Not that the name Cob had actually stuck.)

Kaile noticed in that moment that a nameday song and a funerary song had much the same shape and movement. That made a certain kind of sense to her. You wave to say both hello and good-bye, she thought. The same motion means opposite things.

Doctor Boggs stood at the head of the coffin, conducting the funeral. He took the lead with his terrible voice. The hair of his sideburns stuck out wide around his face, which turned ruddy colors when he noticed Kaile standing there. But he did not stop singing, and neither did anyone else. Heads turned halfway, startled, but no one looked at her directly—no one except for the Snotfish, and Mother gently reached down and turned the Snotfish away. Everyone looked elsewhere, pretending hard that Kaile was not nearby.