Smells Like Finn Spirit

by Randy Henderson

  Dunngo regarded me with his gleaming obsidian eyes, and said in a voice filled with gravel, “Why you destroy me? You kill Dunngo so not have to give own life?” His voice grew louder, sharper, with each question as he continued. “Why want so bad do it again? Why not admit you have grandfather’s darkness inside. Why you not kill self before darkness make you big bad like grandfather!”

  “WHY?” they all asked again.

  “No!” I said. “I am nothing like my grandfather! I … I didn’t mean to do any of that! I was just trying—I didn’t have—” I turned and ran again.

  I didn’t look behind me. If I didn’t look, they wouldn’t be there.

  “WHY?” they asked again, causing my shoulders to hunch as if I might be struck in the back.

  I needed to get away. I needed to take control.

  It was hard to concentrate on any thought, to build up a plan, each idea slipping away before I could stack the next on top. But this was not so different from the wildlands of the Other Realm, or the chaos of the fairy paths. I just had to assert my will, banish this nightmare, banish these ghosts—

  I was Finn Gramaraye. I was in a snack bar. I needed to get out of here. I needed to get away.

  I tried to hold the memory of the drive-in theater in my mind, the large screen, the rows of raised earth for the cars to park along, the go-kart track—

  Go-karts! If I could get to one, I could get away! I could drive into small places and hide from the ghosts. Go-karts were fun, a game, and gods I wanted to go back to life being fun, to playing games without feeling like I was stealing time away from Dawn, from my responsibilities in the necrotorium and the work of building a real life for myself, from helping free Alynon, from helping Pete and Vee and Mattie and Father and—

  “WHY?”

  I ran, and the go-kart track appeared ahead of me, with the miniature racing cars waiting.

  It was working! I could escape!

  I jumped into the first one, a Formula One–style red and blue car, and zoomed away, laughing.

  A red turtle shell went zinging past me, and bounced off of the track wall ahead.

  Startled, I looked behind me. All of the ghosts were now in cars, chasing me.

  Dunngo hunched over in the first car, making him look like a stone turtle, gravel from the track flying up to form a shell on his back. Even as I watched, the shell flew off of him and for my head. I ducked, and swerved, then looked behind me again.

  Pete drove the next car, dressed now in green overalls and matching cap, both covered in blood.

  Mother wore a rotting pink princess dress, the wind blowing away her hair to expose bald spots as she sped along.

  Alynon’s skin had gone a scaly dinosaur green, and his spiky hair had gone red to match his car.

  Zeke, already an intimidating figure, had swollen to even greater size, wearing what looked like a giant Viking shield on his back and studded leather armbands, his eyes filled with berserker fury as he sat squeezed into his car.

  Sal hunched over in the next car, looking more apish than ever as the fringes of his red-brown fur flapped in the wind.

  Felicity, a witch who’d had some special skill with plants, now wore what looked like a poisonous mushroom cap as a hat, the poison running down and leaving angry red welts across her face.

  This was insane. I knew it was insane, and ridiculous, and couldn’t possibly be real.

  Yet the crawling sense of terror that filled me was certainly real. And it propelled me forward, screaming for me to get away from this mob.

  A glowing cube appeared ahead of me like a portal. A way to escape? Or a trap?

  I heard Zeke shout something, and from the words I realized he prepared to summon wizard lightning down on me.

  I swerved into the glowing box.

  Time slowed to a crawl, and I heard a sound like one of those electronic prize wheels spinning past choices, slowing down with each beep.

  Images appeared in the sky, one replacing the other, quickly at first then slowing down in time with the electronic beeps:

  Sal holding his sister in his arms, howling in heartbreak.

  Felicity laying dead on the floor of Alynon’s trailer, staring at me, dead, her face frozen in a scream of horror.

  Pete hurling a cologne bottle at Mort’s television as I revealed that we had lied to him about being a waerwolf most of his life.

  The image of mother laying in her bed, wasted and frail—this last image rushed up to swallow me.

  * * *

  I held Mother’s hand. It felt too light, too fragile, too thin. Like the rest of her, it had withered away in the final days of the cancer. She lay with her eyes closed now, her breath rattling in her throat.

  I hadn’t come to see her for a week, unable to face what had become of her, as if my memories of her smiling and healthy would be forever lost, and with them the last remaining hope that she might somehow really, miraculously, be healthy and smiling again someday.

  Bottles of medicines from both mundy and arcana healers covered the bedside table. But there were some things even magic couldn’t fix. Healing potions sped up the body’s natural healing processes, but couldn’t heal something that the body itself could not. And if anything, magic had led to Mother’s death, her body weakened by a Talking session gone wrong, allowing the cancer to take hold.

  I wiped the tears and snot from my face with my free hand, and focused. I refused to believe there was nothing I could do. In the histories, necromancers had restored the dead to true life, bound living spirits to skulls and artifacts, had even made decapitated heads live on for days. Maybe Grandfather and the other necromancers were afraid to break rules or risk their own health, but I wasn’t, not when Mother was about to die.

  I summoned up my magic, and fed a trickle of my own life energy to my mother’s body.

  I felt a weak resistance from Mother, a barrier of will that felt more like tissue than steel. She squeezed my hand with what little strength she had. “Don’t,” she whispered.

  I opened my eyes to find hers looking at me, golden brown and glazed over with pain and exhaustion, but I knew she was fully aware of who I was and what I was doing.

  “But I can help—”

  “You can’t do anything for me,” Mother said. “And that’s okay, mijo.”

  Tears started to stream from my eyes. “I can’t—” I choked up.

  Mother squeezed my hand again. “Oh sweetie. Mira, I need you to look after your brothers and sister when I’m gone.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” I said emphatically.

  “Of course I am,” Mother said, patting my wrist. “We are necromancers. We can’t be afraid of death. And when I am gone, you will need to help your siblings. Especially Mort.”

  “Mort?” I said. “He’s older than me, and—” I stopped. I didn’t want to say bossy, or anything else bad, not now. “And Petey and Sammy are younger.”

  Mother gave a weak smile. “Samantha has my fire within her. And you all look after her as the youngest anyway.” A tear leaked from the corner of her eye. “Petey, he is so sweet, he draws love to him. But your brother Mort, I worry for him, mijo. He is so angry, so worried about all the wrong things. Don’t let him push you away. He—” Mother winced, her breathing grew quick for a second and her body tensed. When she relaxed again, her breath hissed out in a long, slow exhale before she continued to breathe in that weak rattle once more.

  I cleared my throat, which had grown tight. “Do you need water, or—”

  “I’m okay,” she said, her voice weaker now.

  Understanding fell on me like a collapsing building then. This was it. This really was it, the last time I would get to spend with her. I had lost precious days with her, and I couldn’t get them back no matter what I did, no matter how powerful a necromancer I became. I wanted to beat myself bloody, scream at myself for being so stupid, such a coward.

  Mother coughed, then said, “Just promise me, sweetie, that you’ll remember
what I’ve taught you.” Her hand rose trembling to press against my chest. “You have such a gentle heart. Follow it, trust it, not just with your family and friends, but with everyone, every being, and you’ll be okay. You’ll be happy. And you’ll do great things. I know it.”

  “I will,” I managed to choke out.

  “And you’ll take care of your brothers and sister?”

  “Yes,” I declared emphatically, as though to convince the entire universe. “I’ll take care of them, I promise.” I would not let my fear or stupidity make me lose time with anyone else, ever again.

  “Good. You each hold a little piece of me within you. As long as you have each other, you’ll always have me around, too.”

  I began to sob. “Yes, Mother.”

  “I love you, Finn. Now please, go and get your father.”

  * * *

  The memory began to flash brightly at the end, then suddenly evaporated like a movie projected onto a wall of smoke as I broke through it.

  My head whipped back as the go-kart propelled at double speed around the track. Within seconds I had nearly lapped the others, coming up on the rear of the horde.

  At least now they could not hit me with their shells or lightning. Not without hitting each other, or—

  Felicity’s car began to drop bananas, brown-spotted and swarming with flies, and as they hit the ground the gravel hissed and steamed as though struck with acid.

  I swerved to avoid the acid bananas, and despite my best effort was forced into another glowing cube.

  Again, the roulette of images:

  Zeke charging to his death as Heather’s son Orion blasted him with lightning.

  Alynon’s expression as I escaped Chauvelin’s grasp in the Other Realm, after Alynon had betrayed his own Demesne just for the chance of keeping me there.

  The image of the light fading from Dunngo’s obsidian eyes as the last of his body and his life washed away into the river.

  The image of mother holding open the changing room door at the Salvation Army thrift store. Again, this last image rushed toward me, swept over me, transported me …

  * * *

  I stepped into the changing room and Mother closed the door behind me with a click. I wore my school gym outfit, because it was loose enough to fit. I had grown several inches taller while sleeping away the week: my first experience of being rapidly aged from using my “gift” of Talking to the dead.

  And my first experience with someone I knew dying.

  I had been raised around death in the family’s necrotorium, helped prepare bodies, learned the theory if not the practice of summoning and capturing spirits, dissipating spiritual energy safely, capturing the lingering magical energy from the dead, and the dangers of trying to animate the dead. But I had never seen someone actually die, not until Johnny swerved his bike into the path of that speeding truck.

  I winced, suddenly back in that moment, and the memory of holding his head in my lap, Talking to his spirit until the police and ambulance arrived—

  “You okay in there, Flaco?” Mother asked in a gently teasing tone.

  “Yeah,” I lied, and began hanging up the items I’d brought in with me, the metal hangers clicking softly on the wall hook. Two pairs of loose pants, several shirts including T-shirts with Thundarr the Barbarian and Star Trek: The Motion Picture on them, a mustard tweed sports coat, and a vintage military-looking wool jacket.

  Mother sighed. “Ah, mijo, it isn’t easy, I know. Death of your friend, and the loss of your own life, and you had to deal with both at the same time.”

  “I’m fine,” I lied again. “I just don’t know why these changing rooms always have to smell like BO.”

  I pulled off my gym clothes and slid the pair of brown cargo pants off the hanger. As I did, I could see in the mirror all of the changes that had happened while I slept.

  “Mother, I don’t think I want to be a Talker,” I said as I slid on the pants.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to be an old man at twenty.”

  “You won’t be,” Mother said. “You won’t be asked to use your gift unless absolutely needed, and never as much as you did this time.”

  “Well, all the kids are going to look at me weird if I have a full beard by the time I’m a sophomore.”

  Mother laughed. “Mira, interesting fact,” she said. “Sleeping Beauty was an alchemist who actually put herself into a magical sleep. Do you know why?”

  Despite myself, I said, “No, why?” I pulled the sports coat down.

  “Well, she was betrothed to a neighboring prince, and could find no way out of it. Even though he was just a year younger than her, she was only fourteen. And Beauty knew enough to know that many young men, well, let us say their love is but a fleeting thing when young, in more ways than one. So, if she was to be forced into marriage with this boy, she decided she would rather wait until his apples were ripe, as it were.”

  “Mother!”

  “I’m just saying, don’t complain too much about aging a few months, not at your age.”

  I blushed, and said, “It’s still lost time.”

  “I’m surprised you would even notice. You spend too much time in your room with that computer, it isn’t healthy. And the Krowleys’ daughter is back from that fancy private school for the summer. I seem to remember you following her around like a love-struck unicorn last summer—”

  “MOM!”

  I thanked all the gods that we were alone in the store except for the employees, and that they must be well out of earshot if Mother was talking about magic.

  Mother laughed, and said, “All right, all right. Come out, let me see how it looks.”

  I sighed, and opened the door.

  “Oh, look at you,” she said, and held my cheeks for a second, then tugged at my lapels. “You look so like your grandfather at your age. Though your looks are all you got from him, thankfully.”

  I blinked, my head shifting back to look at her more fully. “What do you mean?”

  “Ah, pea soup, nothing. I shouldn’t have said that. I just have too much on my mind these days.”

  “Would me being like Grandfather be bad?” I pushed. For some reason, I had begun to become uncomfortable sometimes in his lessons, but couldn’t put my finger on why.

  “Of course not,” Mother said. “But being like your father is better, for you.” She smiled fondly, and touched my cheek again. “Your head is in the clouds too much, I think, just like your father, but if you ever learn to pay attention to the people around you, to get your head and your heart lined up, you will do amazing things.”

  I didn’t tell her my plan was to create a computer game empire. Actually, it had been to build that empire with Johnny. But now he was dead. Forever, he was gone. He wouldn’t play a single other game, wouldn’t ever see our game ideas made real.

  My eyes started to burn for the tenth time that day. Damn it!

  Mother saw my expression, and pulled me into a hug.

  Gods, now I really hoped none of my friends walked into the store.

  “It’s okay, mijo. It is not your fault,” she said softly.

  “If only I’d paid attention,” I said suddenly, the words coming out as if spoken by someone else. “I should have watched out for him when he went to cross the street. If I’d just looked back over my shoulder to check on him, or stopped and waited for him—”

  “No, no, no,” Mother said, and released me. “I meant what I said, you will grow up to do amazing things, but not if you keep taking too much on yourself, and also not if you are too afraid of mistakes. There are too many people already who do nothing with their lives because they are too afraid of making the wrong choice.”

  “But Johnny died!” I said.

  “Did the thought that he could die come to you before you crossed that street?”

  “No.”

  “Because we are not gods, Finnito. Not even seers know everything that will happen, what every choice will bring. We must ju
st trust in this,” she touched my chest, over my heart. “And if something bad happens, be kind to yourself, but be honest, too. Learn, and try to make better choices next time. That is all we can do.”

  I smiled weakly. “You sound like a Brady Bunch episode.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “You watch too much television.”

  “Probably,” I said, then grew serious again. “My heart still tells me I should have stopped to make sure Johnny was safe.”

  “No, your guilt tells you that,” Mother said. “Guilt is like a Jekyll and Hyde creature, of two natures. Sometimes it shines a light upon those things we need to admit to ourselves, so that we can do better. But sometimes it speaks from our fears and doubts, because hiding in their shadows is easier than risking another choice.”

  “I feel like we should have had, like, the Chariots of Fire theme playing just then,” I said. “That was totally inspirational. Really.”

  Mother slapped my arm. “Your sense of humor is what will really get you in trouble some day, young man.”

  “No, really,” I said. “You should go on a tour with Mr. T talking to school kids about making good choices and drinking their milk.”

  “You’re going to keep making fun of your mother?” she asked. “And I was going to take you for pizza when we were done here.”

  “What? Really?” I didn’t wait for her response, jumping back inside the changing room and closing the door as I said, “You are the best mother ever! I mean it.”

  “I know you do, mijo.”

  * * *

  The memory flashed, and again dissipated.

  No burst of speed followed this time. Instead, the memory had released something inside of me, something that had been growing and pushing against the constraints of my guilt and doubts for the past several days as I confronted my grandfather at the diner; as I confronted Mort in the Other Realm; as I fought beside Dawn, and Sammy, and Pete, fought for my family, fought for the brightbloods, fought for a life not dictated by the poisonous hatred and greed of people like my grandfather, or by the daunting barrier of years lost and experience ungained.