Seven weeks have passed, Mother and Father, and during this time, I have told not a soul but you about my haunting and the mysteries it unraveled. To keep my sanity, I have kept busy. I have revamped Curios. Let me share with you an exhibition I have designed called Curiouser and Curiouser. Esther suggested the title, which comes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a fictional book I intend to read one day.

Tonight is the grand reopening of Curios. In the past weeks, I moved every object in the museum’s collection into basement storage at the library. Down went our dollar coins, Chinese kite, batteries, out-of-order phones, personal computer (a new arrival), condoms, diapers, Encyclopaedia Britannica Volume Ma to Mi, roll-on deodorant, pet terrariums, animal replicas, corned beef, boxes of Hamburger Helper, lucky rabbit’s foot, ceramic statue of Jesus’s supposedly virgin mother, wallaby postal stamps from Australia, and on and on.

As for the little revolver, I threw it down the garbage chute. It is gone forever. Or perhaps not forever, because for all I know Zig may boomerang it back one day.

After I moved all the curiosities downstairs, I began traveling to Town’s infirmaries, which, over the years, have all received photocopiers from Zig’s warehouse deliveries. I spent day after day photocopying the documents I planned to display as part of Curiouser and Curiouser.

Tonight is October 31. As on every Halloween, I simply throw a white sheet over my head. Through its eyeholes, I can gauge the reactions of my visitors, who come as zombies, witches, mummies, monsters, archangels, goblins, and the like. They come with their fake blood and gore. They come with fake arrows through their heads. They come with fake knives sticking out of their backs. These dead children walk around the halls of my museum in wonder. I cannot always see their wonder under their masks and makeup, but I can sense it.

There are no displays tonight as such. Instead, the actual walls are the exhibits. I have divided the museum into thirteen areas, each identified by a large number painted its own distinct color on bristol board. Using simple glue sticks, I wallpapered the walls with photocopies of every page of the surviving rebirthing books from the thirteen infirmaries. On these pages are listed newborns’ names, the city they came from, the date of their rebirth, the cause of their passing, and the zip code of their assigned address. Most of the pages are typewritten, but the oldest books (I found one dating back to 1938) are handwritten, the ink so faded it is often illegible. The pages run chronologically in a horizontal fashion across the walls, the oldest in the top left corner, the newest in the bottom right corner.

Curiouser and Curiouser is a memorial to everyone who has ever come to Town. My aim is for each of my fellow townies to feel he or she is a beautiful, curious object.

I did not know how people would react. Would they be impressed? Bored? It appears the former is the case. They are reading the documents as though they are pages from a fascinating novel. Council president Reginald Washington (a pirate) is here, as are jail warden Lydia Finkle (a witch), asylum manager Dr. Albert Schmidt (a ghoul), and former Schaumburg resident Sandy Goldberg (a giant felt peanut).

The irksome twins Tim and Tom Lu come as well, wearing fake mustaches and carrying canes. They are dressed as Thompson and Thomson from Tintin.

Tim says to Tom, “I wonder if after all these years Oliver Dalrymple is still the victim.”

“Would it were true,” I reply.

Like many other visitors, Tim and Tom climb the stepladders placed in the halls to search for their own names on the rebirthing lists. Meanwhile, Pierre weaves in and out of people’s legs and yaps like a mad dog and, when egged on, does his wee-ooo-wee-ooo.

My friends are here too. Thelma is dressed as Sherlock Holmes in a tweed deerstalker, Esther as a gypsy medium in a headscarf decorated with signs of the zodiac, and Ringo as a mummy wrapped in white bandages stained with fake blood.

Ringo’s costume reminds me of your old red-and-white barber’s pole, Father and Mother. Did you take it with you to Alaska? I do not know for sure you went there, but I do like thinking of you mingling with bears and moose in downtown Anchorage and admiring the aurora borealis at night.

I tell my friends to meet me in Johnny’s room. I have a toast to make. I go to my office and, from my bottom desk drawer, fetch a bottle of a French red wine called Château Bel-Air, which came to Town in 1977. I conceal it, with plastic glasses and a corkscrew, in a wicker picnic basket.

When I arrive in Johnny’s room, the section of the exhibition I reserved for the reborn children of Eleven, my three friends are waiting with Pierre, who, if he is from Paris, is perhaps familiar with Château Bel-Air (ha-ha). I tell any other visitors to clear out for a moment because I have vital business to attend to. Once the others are gone, I close the door and press its push lock.

I show my friends what is in the picnic basket. Ringo, who claims to have been a virtual wino back in Detroit, says, “That’s bloody fantastic, mate!” Esther, Thelma, and I have never tasted wine before. I ask Ringo to do the honors, and he clenches the bottle between his bandaged thighs and deftly threads the screw into the cork. He yanks out the cork with a sound like the pop of a pistol. We all sit in the middle of the floor as though in a powwow. I fill the glasses halfway and pass them around.

Thelma gets giggly even before taking a sip. “Reginald better not find out. We’ll get detention for a year.”

I raise my glass and say, “A toast to Johnny Henzel.”

My friends raise their glasses. The girls both give me nervous grins. We rarely speak about Johnny nowadays. Maybe Esther and Thelma made a pact long ago to avoid mentioning him in front of me. Or perhaps they just stopped thinking about him years ago and are embarrassed they have forgotten all about their old friend.

“He was born in America on Halloween,” I add.

“To Johnny Henzel,” they all say, clinking glasses.

I like to think that Johnny’s stay in Town was no mistake. Zig wanted him in Town, at least for a little while, so we could become friends, the fast friends we should have been in our earthly lives. Had we been best friends back then, Johnny might not have slashed his wrists and I might not have stolen Uncle Seymour’s gun. We could have helped each other in America the way we helped each other in the sweet hereafter.

My friends sip their wine. I lack a mouth hole in my costume, so I must raise my glass beneath the sheet to drink. The wine is warm and syrupy.

Esther says, “This stuff tastes better than I expected.”

Thelma says, “It tastes like adulthood.”

“It tastes nutmeggy,” Ringo says. He inspects the label on the bottle. “Seventy-seven was an ace year.”

“Nutmeggy?” Esther rolls her eyes.

Ringo gulps from his glass. Then he says, “So where the hell’s Johnny boy?”

“Is he cooped up in the basement?” Esther asks.

I shake my head. “He flew the coop.”

Esther and Thelma lift their eyebrows. Thelma then holds up her Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass as though to examine the ghost before her more closely.

“He re-redied,” I clarify.

“I’ll be damned!” Ringo cries.

Thelma puts down her magnifying glass. “He vanished?”

“Poof!” I say.

“When?” Esther asks.

“On the seventh of September,” I say. I do not mention Johnny turning into Town’s first man. I am not ready for full disclosure at the moment. One day, perhaps.

“Cripes, Boo!” Esther says. “You should have told us!”

“We could have held a funeral,” Thelma says. “We could have honored him.”

“I honored him for thirteen years,” I say from beneath my sheet. “Maybe that was enough.”

Thelma pats my ghost head. “You hunky-dory?”

“Not really.” I take a big gulp from my wine, which warms my belly.

Ringo asks if I organized Curiouser and Curiouser as a distraction from my mourning. “Keep your mind off things?” he says.

I nod, even though I am not sure this is true. I do not know if I have been mourning Johnny Henzel. Maybe I have been. He was, after all, a kind of hero to me. But the person I have really-been mourning is Oliver Dalrymple.

The boy I thought I was but was not.

My friends and I drink the rest of the bottle of wine. Ringo keeps saying, “Feel anything? Feel anything?” as though we are on the verge of becoming whole different people.

But I am already a whole different person.

My friends giggle when they notice that their teeth are stained purple. I swallow my last gulp of wine and stand. I am dizzy and queasy but a bit hunkier-dorier. I go to the wall where Johnny’s bed once was. I wave my friends over to see a page from the infirmary in Eleven. It is pasted in the middle of the wall. Esther must stand on tippytoe.

“I typed that up,” Thelma says about the page.

“Your spelling is atrocious,” Ringo says.

These are the first entries on the page:

A dozen entries down, this is how the page ends:

I point to my cause of death. I tell my friends that I think the hole in my heart has finally closed over. “I can’t feel it twinging anymore,” I say. “I don’t know if this is good news.”

Esther’s zodiac scarf has slipped down, and the scorpion seems about to pinch her nose with its claws. She says, “It’s good news, Boo.”

Thelma agrees: “It means you’ve healed.”

“Thirteen years is a long time to heal,” I reply. “In my healing ledger, it is record-breaking.”

“Too bad that people down in America don’t heal fast,” Thelma says. “Like our moms and dads and sisters and brothers after we passed. If only their hearts healed lickety-split.”

We all think of our families and get a little blue, perhaps because we are blotto—a word you liked to use to describe yourselves whenever you drank dry martinis after work.

Mother and Father, I now keep locker No. 106 in my office and occasionally check inside to see if it opens onto another world. So far, no, but perhaps one day there will appear an Alaskan barbershop. Inside the locker, I store the book I have written, which is ready and waiting for delivery. I will hand it to you and then retreat back to my world, and you will read my story and finally understand the nitty-gritty of my life and afterlife. Afterward, you will close my book and lay me to rest, and my ghost will no longer haunt you.

Esther interrupts everybody’s reveries. “Let’s not be sad and confused tonight,” she says.

I tell my friends there is a second bottle of wine in my office. A bottle of white wine from the Napa Valley.

“Oh, go get it!” Ringo cries. “We can get sh*tfaced and then go to that big Halloween do in the Northeast Corner.” He is sparkly-eyed beneath his bandages. “Let’s go wild and crazy tonight!” He does a cartwheel across the room, a miracle given his costume and his bellyful of wine. Pierre barks and bounces up and down on his woolly legs. Ringo scoops the dog up and does a pogo dance with Pierre in his arms.

“Can you go wild and crazy, Estie?” Ringo shouts to Esther.

“You better believe it.” Esther bounces on her toes.

“What about you, Thelma?”

“Lordy, yes.”

“And you, Boo? Can you go wild and crazy?”

I mull the question over.

“There is a distinct possibility,” I say.