Ghoulish Song

Sixth Verse

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.

She almost laughed. She also felt panicked. What she really wanted was for everyone else to laugh. They all looked so stricken and serious. Mother and Father were both such sensible people. Why would they even listen to old Boggs? Couldn’t they tell that she was still here and still breathing, still entirely alive?

The Doctor hit an especially bad note. Kaile winced. How could any of the dead rest in peace with a voice like that singing them down? Two fiddlers from the bridge had come to play and sing for Grandfather, and they had done so perfectly. Everything Kaile had felt on that day had spilled out into the shape of that music, and then the same music had tied her back together again—just as Grandfather had promised her. Now, at her own funeral, the music might just make her throw up. She wanted to leave. Maybe this was how the Doctor thought he could prevent a haunting: sing so badly that the dead were forced to leave.

Kaile was starting to think of herself as dead.

Stop it, she told herself.

“Stop it!” she told everyone else. “I’m fine. I’m right here.” She needed to explain, but she wasn’t sure how to explain.

The singing faltered and stumbled, but did not stop.

“My shadow’s in the hayloft!” she protested. “If you’ll all just wait a moment, I can try to coax her back inside. Just wait. Don’t finish the funeral. Don’t finish the song.”

The singing grew louder to drown out her voice. Practically everyone she knew in the world stood in that room, and they all ignored her.

Kaile looked down at her feet. Without a shadow it seemed as though they didn’t really touch the ground. It looked as though she didn’t really touch the world.

She looked up at Mother. Mother was singing, even though she almost never sang. She didn’t like the sound of her own voice. And Mother was grieving, actually grieving. This wasn’t a punishment, not for goblins or inspections, not for anything. This was mourning.

They really did believe that Kaile was dead.

“I’m not a ghoul,” Kaile insisted—but she said it quietly, because now she wasn’t entirely sure.

Doctor Boggs gathered up a handful of greasy ashes from a bowl, took Kaile’s arm roughly with his other hand, and smeared the ash across her forehead. He sang loud and only inches from her face. Then he pushed her through the crowd and through the public door.

No one else tried to stop him.

Doctor Boggs shut the door behind her.

Kaile heard the song and the funeral end on the other side of that door.

She went slowly around the alehouse, across the yard, and up into the hayloft. There she sat with her legs over the edge and stared at nothing. Guzzards scratched in their sawdust below and dreamed the sorts of dreams known only to guzzards.

It could have been worse, her shadow whispered nearby. It used to be worse. People used to bury suspected ghouls rather than just ignore them. They buried ghouls in three separate graves spaced far apart—one for your head, one for your heart, and a third for all the rest of you.

“Shut it,” said Kaile. She tried to wipe the ashes from her forehead. The ash stain was sticky. It smelled like they had mixed wood ashes from the oven with butter in order to make the stuff.

The stain marked her as a dead thing. She kept trying to rub it off.

“The funeral’s over,” she said. Her voice sounded flat and lifeless in her own ears. “My funeral song is over and sung. That makes it true. That changes the shape of things.”

You aren’t dead, her shadow told her. Your breathing is obvious and loud.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Kaile. “Everybody in Broken Wall knows that I’m supposed to be dead. It won’t matter to them that I’m still moving and breathing and talking. They sang my funeral.” She noticed, as though from a distance, that she was crying. She wondered how to stop.

You aren’t dead, her shadow said again, with more impatience than sympathy.

“No help from you,” said Kaile, as soon as she was able to say anything. “If you had stayed stuck to my feet, then this wouldn’t have happened. If you had just come back inside with me, then it probably wouldn’t have happened, either.”

I don’t want to be tied to your feet.

“Then why are you still here?” She heard another sob in her voice, and hated it.

The shadow’s whisper faded, sounding embarrassed and barely audible. I’ve only ever stood near you. That’s all I know how to do. That’s the only place I know where to be. I’d rather not. But I don’t know where else to go. And it’s dark outside.

“That shouldn’t much matter,” said Kaile. “You’re a shadow. You’re made out of the dark. You shouldn’t be afraid of the dark.”

I disappear in the dark, the shadow lashed out, voice rising almost above a whisper. It feels like drowning. I never know which part of me is me, or whether I’ll ever come back again. I might not come back, now that I’m not anchored to you. But shadows are darker and stronger in bright lights. If that lantern burns out, then I might disappear and be forever gone. Turn up the wick as high as it goes.

“No,” said Kaile. “If I turn up the lantern, then the oil will burn out before morning. It needs to burn low if you want it to last until sunrise.” She turned down the lantern wick. Her shadow made angry noises, but did not make any further protests.

Kaile wiped her nose, wound up the lantern base, and watched familiar animal silhouettes turn in a slow circle on the walls around them. Then she took another long look at her own shadow, which was easier to see now that Kaile had the knack of looking.

“What’s your name?” she asked her shadow. “Do you have one?”

No, the shadow said.

“I have to call you something. I could call you Shade.”

The shadow didn’t agree. She didn’t protest, either. She didn’t say anything.

Kaile curled up in the hay, away from the edge of the loft, and tried to get comfortable. She wouldn’t return to her bedroom, not tonight, not if her family had made her unwelcome, not if they wanted to keep the household free of haunting. Hopefully they wouldn’t mind having a haunted hayloft.

She closed her eyes. When she finally slept, she dreamed that she was building the Fiddleway Bridge out of bones and bread loaves.

If Shade dreamed, they were the sorts of dreams known only to shadows.