Work Text:
The oddest thing about the archives was just how eclectic it was.
The project was fresh and new and still finding its footing, still focused on gathering enough materials to justify its existence. Its scope was the history and past membership of a local organization that had been a fixture in the community for over two hundred years, but as far as Rose knew, the other archivists on the project were taking in everything that was offered. Scope and relevancy were stretched to their furthest extent and then further. Among their materials were the belongings of now-deceased members, salvaged from attics and basements and closets in the homes of their descendants, many of whom she had to assume were hoarders. In one collection she found a box three-quarters full of Beanie Babies, thrown in with a battered old paperback entitled “The Handyman’s Guide to Astral Projection,” a painstakingly annotated copy of the Key of Solomon, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
The second oddest thing was probably the dead people.
Not corpses. These people weren’t that kind of hoarder, thank goodness, though after the delicately wrapped skull in the Audrey Wicker collection, she wouldn’t have been surprised. No, these were the sort of dead people that hung back in the corner of her vision, just outside of her line of sight, like mirages brought on by too little sleep. They were never uncommon in places like this: archives, museums, memorials. Places that held old things.
They weren’t a bother, in Rose’s opinion. All they did was drift around and sing. It was easy enough to ignore if she needed.
“You feeling hearted Christians attend both young and old,” a voice drifted in as she was taking scans of one of the account books from the recently acquired Walter Jacobs collection. “Unto my dreadful Sentence it will make your blood run cold…” Curiosity made her listen a moment longer. “For the murder of Sims Bird, I am condemned to die, Inside the walls of Cork County Jail, upon the Scaffold High…”
Her vision was going blurry from staring at a computer screen for too long. “That’s nice,” she said absently. “Your meter’s a little off, though.”
By Rose’s estimation, the accessioning archivist could have turned down at least half of what they took in, but that wasn’t her decision. All she had to do was man the phones, wrangle interns, and sweet-talk donors and patrons. Her colleagues stayed in the vaults and offices, accessioning and arranging and describing, leaving Rose to be the designated people person.
And so, Rose was the one manning the phones when the call came in.
“Hello, is this the Thaumaturgical Society Archives?” The voice sounded oddly clear over the phone, clipped and melancholy but otherwise forgettable. Rose felt drowsier just listening to it.
“Yes sir, how may I help you?”
“I was hoping to have a look at one of the collections, if that would be possible?” Rose fought back a yawn as she listened; had she always been this tired?
“I can set you up an appointment,” she replied, rubbing her eyes to keep them from sliding shut. “Which collection were you most interested in?”
“The one numbered—hold on just a moment, let me—oh, here it is. The number is… 2016-004. The donor went by the name Mortimer?”
With a few sips of coffee to rally herself, Rose looked up the collection in question. “Okay, that collection’s in offsite storage right now, so we’ll have to send in a delivery request.” Offsite storage was a senior board member’s unused spare room. “Do you know which box you would like to look at?”
“The one with the songs,” the caller replied. “Sorry, the boxes are only numbered on your website, it doesn’t actually say what’s in them. I’m only going by the collection description. If you don’t know, then I may as well request all of them.”
“...Oh.” Rose suppressed the urge to find whoever had handled that entry, and throttle them. “That’s twenty-eight boxes, sir, are you sure about that?”
“I really must see them,” he said. “It’s a matter of death.”
Rose blinked, feeling a bit more awake for the first time since picking up the phone. “Sorry, did you say it was a matter of life and death?”
“Oh, no, just death. It wouldn’t be my jurisdiction, otherwise.”
“Right, okay. So we have a reading room open for appointments from ten to five on weekdays. It’ll take two business days for delivery requests to go through, but from there I can schedule you for whenever is convenient.”
“Perfect.” He sounded as solemn as ever.
“Would you like a phone or e-mail reminder?” Rose asked.
“No need,” he replied. “We always keep our appointments.”
He wasn’t kidding about that. The appointment was set for ten in the morning on Saturday, and ten in the morning was when he arrived. He did not walk in at 10:01, or at 9:59. By some stroke of luck, Rose was looking at the digital clock on her computer when it happened, and saw the numbers flick to 10:00 the moment the door swung open and the man stepped in.
“Good morning,” Rose greeted. “Are you Mr. Pomp?” She paused. How had she known that? They had walk-ins occasionally, and she’d only ever heard his voice.
“That’s me.” As Mr. Pomp walked up to the desk, another figure trailed him in.
“Is he with you?” Rose asked, craning her neck to see the second visitor. It was difficult to get a good look at his face when he kept hiding behind Mr. Pomp.
Mr. Pomp glanced over his shoulder with a vague blink, as if he had forgotten there was anyone with him. “Oh, yes. Don’t mind him, he’s dead. He won’t be a bother.”
“I see,” Rose replied, and got up from her desk. Then she hesitated for a moment, and looked at Mr. Pomp’s face again. He looked back, with a politely blank expression, until Rose was forced to look away. His expression never changed, even as she kept glancing at him; at least, she was fairly sure that it didn’t. It was hard to say for sure when she couldn’t seem to hold his face in her memory for very long. She squinted at his features, going over the shape of his nose and the slant of his eyes and the shade of his skin color, but the moment she turned away, the details slipped from her grasp.
The dead man was much more distinctive. It helped that his mouth was sewn shut.
“I’m sorry about the finding aid,” Rose said, as she led the pair into the reading room. “We’ll probably be keeping this collection on hand to fix that. Hopefully make it easier for people to find what they need quickly.”
“It’s no trouble,” Mr. Pomp assured her.
“So, is this for a research project?” Rose asked. The twenty-eight boxes were laid out in order across a long wooden table, all of them neatly numbered and labeled.
“It’s for work,” Mr. Pomp replied. “We have a bit of a backlog of… I suppose you could call them ‘cold cases’.”
“Oh, is this for a—a criminal investigation?” Rose asked.
“It might be. It depends on what I find.” Mr. Pomp paused. “It’d be a little late for one, I think.” He opened the first box, while the dead man hummed behind his sewn-shut mouth. Rose could swear that she recognized the tune.
Rose helped him as best she could, even though she didn’t quite know what he was looking for, because it was her job and she liked to be helpful. He was looking for songs; she found an ancient, yellowed book of Christmas carols in one box, but he merely shook his head. Two vinyl jazz records were barely given a glance. All the while, the dead man paced the room and hummed until the melody was stuck in Rose’s head.
Nearly an hour after their arrival, another voice joined his. The tune was the same, but the second voice—from lips that weren’t stitched together—sang the words instead of humming. “...This young man whom she courted to the charge gave no denial,” a dead man sang, picking up in the middle of a verse as he appeared in the reading room. “In the dock he stood, before the judge, repenting for his crime, Let us hope he pray both night and day until his fatal time…”
For the first time since he had started, Mr. Pomp raised his head from the folders and documents he was poring through. The dead man stopped singing, and spoke instead. Rose had never heard any of the dead people do that before.
“I’m stuck,” he said to Mr. Pomp. “I’m sorry for what I did. When you leave, can I go with you?”
“You may,” Mr. Pomp replied. “Perhaps you can help me. Do you know where your song is? I’m looking for his.” He nodded to the man with the sewn-shut mouth.
“Box twenty-four,” was the reply, breathed out in a sigh of relief. “Folder twelve. I’m very tired.”
“I can imagine,” Mr. Pomp replied, and Rose moved to open the appropriate box.
Folder twelve, as well as the rest of the folders, held slips of paper so yellow with age that they were nearly brown, the printer ink chipped and faded, the edges frayed by time and vermin. They looked a bit like newspaper clippings, only instead of articles, they held woodcuts and song lyrics.
“Broadside ballads,” Rose said. “You’re looking for broadside ballads?”
“It’s an old trick,” Mr. Pomp told her, carefully turning over each sheet as he inspected them. “They were popular songs in their day, so some would use them to keep the dead fresh in people’s minds. It would keep them here, at least for a time.”
“What for?” Rose asked.
“Amusement, mostly,” Mr. Pomp replied. “And for other, more unsavory things. You can do quite a lot, trapping the dead. And then these things end up in archives and libraries and museums and things, so they stay quite a bit longer. It’s why we have such a backlog now, though it does make these things easier to find and fix. Ah—here’s yours, Mr. … John Murphy, wasn’t it?”
The dead man sang again, as if his mouth and tongue were no longer in his command. “On the 20th of April at 8 o’clock that day, The soul of poor John Murphy is supposed to pass away.”
“And you did,” Mr. Pomp said absently, running a finger over the broadsheet’s mylar covering. “As I said. We always keep our appointments.”
“Does that mean I can go now?” John Murphy choked out.
“I beg your patience,” Mr. Pomp told him. “I have to see to Mr. Brennan first.”
Mr. Brennan hummed again, a little frantically.
“What’s wrong with him?” Rose asked.
“Dead men tell no tales,” Mr. Pomp replied. “Hmm, it’s not in this folder. Are there any other ballads in this collection?”
Rose went to select folder number thirteen. “That’s an odd thing to say,” she said. “Dead people are always singing songs around here. They don’t do anything but tell tales.”
“You misunderstand,” Mr. Pomp said, without looking up from the folder as he accepted it from her. “I don’t mean to say that they don’t speak at all. I simply mean they can’t tell tales—that is, lie.”
“Oh. Then… what does that have to do with Mr. Brennan?”
“Because the dead aren’t supposed to lie, but Mr. Brennan here can’t seem to stop.” Mr. Pomp hesitated for a moment, then nodded to Mr. Brennan. The stitches on his mouth unraveled and he opened his mouth and sang again. It sounded a lot less like singing than it did like choking. Mr. Brennan sang his ballad as if every word was painful.
“Upon that fateful day I chose to God and faith forsake, And took my wife down to the shore and drowned her in the lake.”
He clapped his hands over his mouth and refused to sing another note.
“Not true,” Mr. Pomp said matter-of-factly, still sifting through the ballads in front of him. “Not true at all. We saw to his wife. She died in her sleep at a ripe old age, decades after her husband was hanged.”
“That’s horrible,” Rose said. “But… why?”
“I haven’t the faintest. And Mr. Brennan can’t tell me, because the song has put words in his mouth. But that question is precisely what I would like to have answered… ah.” Mr. Pomp picked up one of the yellowed pages. “Here it is, the full song.”
“Will that help?” Rose asked.
“It certainly allows for a quick solution,” Mr. Pomp replied, and began to slip the sheet free of its mylar covering.
“Wait!” Without thinking, Rose put her hand on his wrist; his skin was cold to the touch, not the way a corpse was cold, but the way a brick wall was cold. “What are you going to do with that?”
“This is recorded history,” Mr. Pomp informed her gravely. “A sensationalized form of it, but still recorded history. Recorded, labeled, stored, and archived—and that is what keeps Mr. Brennan here, instead of where he belongs. He is being held here by a lie.” Rose stared into his face, registering the color of her eyes even though she knew she would forget it the moment she looked away. “As far as I have been able to find, this is the only copy of this song. If it vanishes, then it will cease to exist, and Mr. Brennan can go home.”
“There must be another way,” Rose said. “Something besides destroying it. Please? Let me try and help. I just need a little time, and you said time’s of no consequence. You said that yourself.”
Mr. Pomp pursed his lips. “I suppose I did. If I were to humor you, how much time would you need?”
Rose’s eyes roved over twenty eight boxes, each with no less than ten to fifteen folders within, and did a few mental calculations. “A few weeks. Maybe up to a month, if I take research into account.”
Mr. Pomp was silent for a few moments, as Mr. Brennan hummed and John Murphy fidgeted impatiently. “Very well,” he said at last. He reached into his coat pocket and plucked a white card, which he handed to her. The card was unadorned, and held no name or company, only a single phone number. “If you would notify me when you are finished, or if you decide to agree to my way, then you may contact me.”
With a sigh of relief, Rose took the card. “Thank you. I’ll be as quick as I can. Not too quick, though—I don’t want to get careless.”
Mr. Pomp hummed thoughtfully, tapping one of his long fingers on Mr. Brennan’s broadside ballad. “Just out of curiosity, what do you plan on doing?”
Rose eyed the folders, the boxes, and the broadsheets in their mylar protectors. “First,” she said. “I’m going to fix that damned finding aid.”
It took weeks just to go through everything, item by item, and enter it into the system. Rose felt like an intern again, plugging her ears with music to keep herself focused on the task at hand. Item by item, folder by folder, box by box, she catalogued the Mortimer collection. When she got to Box 24, Folder 13, she struggled over entering Mr. Brennan’s ballad.
The title and description were key, of course. That was the only way she could fix this. Because Mr. Pomp was right; if it vanished from here, then it would cease to exist. So maybe, if she did this right, then she could still change its existence. She could still save it.
But it would not be enough, to simply say that the song was not true. If there was one thing she had learned from grad school, it was to always cite her sources.
Rose pulled out her earbuds and tried to rub the blurriness from her eyes. It was probably a good thing she had given herself room for research.
She read over the broadside ballad three times, and smiled to herself. All the clues she needed were right there in the song lyrics.
The line rang once before it was picked up. “Mr. Pomp?” said Rose. “I think I’ve done it.”
“I was wondering,” Mr. Pomp replied. “Mr. Brennan hasn’t tried to sing for a while now. He seems pleased about it.” He paused. “It’s been a month, like you said it would. That’s good. We do appreciate punctuality. It’s polite.”
“You’re not the only one who can keep an appointment,” Rose replied, with a dry little smile. “The song had the date and the name of the town in it. From there, it was just a matter of finding newspapers that matched up. It wasn’t a walk in the park, but I pooled a lot of resources.”
“And what were your findings?”
“He took his wife across the lake in his boat,” she answered. “They were going to move to a city on the other side, but they didn’t have enough money to go together, so they decided to have her go first, and he’d follow her later. Only, someone saw him take her out in the boat and come back without her.” She sighed. “His mother went to to try and bring his wife back to prove his innocence, but she couldn’t find her fast enough, and he was sentenced and hanged while she was gone.” She fell silent for a moment, pursing her lips. “Anyway, it’s all in the description now, sourced and everything. You said a lie was keeping him here. If the lie’s exposed and the truth is revealed, will that fix things without you having to remove anything?”
“Yes,” Mr. Pomp replied. “Yes, that should do the trick.”
“Good!” Rose sat up a little straighter. “And, before you… take him home… would you mind coming in one more time? I just wanted to do a little follow-up.”
“Certainly.”
And he did come, once again right on time. Mr. Brennan was with him, his mouth unblemished and free of its stitching, with a spring in his step and a smile on his face.
“Thank you,” he burst out before Mr. Pomp could get a word in. “Thank you so much, miss, for all your help. I can’t wait to see my dear old wife again, and it’s all thanks to you.”
Rose grinned back at him, then placed a sheet of notebook paper on her desk and slid it across to him. “Here. You can have this, if you want—or not. You don’t have to take it if you don’t want it.”
Mr. Brennan picked up the sheet and read it. Slowly his eyes widened. “Is this…?”
“Your ballad, Mr. Brennan,” said Rose. “I’m not much of a lyricist on my own, but I can string rhymes together, and I used the meter of the original. I just fixed it, that’s all.”
The dead man laughed. “I like it! It’s not bad at all, miss. I think my Molly will like it, when I see her again.”
Mr. Pomp cleared his throat. “Was there anything you needed from me?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Rose glanced back toward the reading room. “So the collection is still here while I finish up the finding aid, and while everything’s still here… do you think you could take all the rest of them? There’s an Andrew Carr here who keeps singing about killing Margret Murphy, and Timothy Cadogan about someone called Sims Bird, plus a couple of girls who were found dead on a farm… at this point, if I never hear people singing about getting hanged again, it’ll be too soon.” She fell silent, feeling oddly awkward. “I was just wondering if you could take care of them, as long as you’re here, or at least let someone know where they are, just in case they’re part of that backlog you told me about. Whether or not they’ve killed people, I don’t think they want to stick around here anymore. Could you take them home, too?”
For the first time since meeting him, Rose saw Mr. Pomp smile. She was almost sorry that she would soon forget what it looked like. He didn’t seem like the sort of person who smiled very often.
When Mr. Pomp left that day, the archives were blissfully silent.