Finn Fancy Necromancy

by Randy Henderson

  More pictures of Mother had been arranged on boards to either side of the double doors. I moved past them, away from them, to the hall where people had hung their coats, where I could wipe at the tears that burned my eyes without being watched by everyone.

  “You like Star Trek, right?”

  I turned, startled as much by the question as the voice. Dawn stood there. It was the first time I’d seen her in a dress, and with bows in her cornrows.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I saw this one movie where the pointy-eared dude—Spork?”

  “Spock.”

  “Right, Spock, he died. But they put him in this missile thing and shot him onto this planet that was, like, a paradise.”

  “The Genesis planet,” I said automatically.

  “Yeah. And someone told me in the new movie, the planet brings him back to life. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, it’s messed up seeing your mom in a casket. I know, because I did too. But maybe just think of it like one of those missile things, and really she’s just being shot off to paradise, where she’ll be reborn.”

  “Actually, the Genesis planet became a hell and fell apart. And Spock was reborn because he transferred his consciousness into Doctor McCoy.” I couldn’t tell her, of course, that doing that might actually be possible if it wasn’t entirely forbidden. Or that the reason my mother got cancer in the first place was because she’d weakened her body and spiritual barriers by Talking to spirits who, as far as I could tell, weren’t in any paradise.

  “Oh. Shit,” Dawn said. “I suck at this, I guess. Well, here.” She went to her jean jacket and reached into the pocket. She pulled out a Walkman. I’d been asking for a Walkman since the previous summer, but Father said we didn’t have the money, and Mother—

  I turned away.

  “I picked strawberries all last summer to get the money for this,” Dawn said. “This year I’m going to get a ColecoVision. If you want, you can come with me. To pick strawberries I mean, not to get the Coleco. Though you could do that too. Here.” She handed me the headphones, tapping my arm with them to get my attention. “Put them on.”

  I did as she instructed. Her tone and manner made me feel that I didn’t have a choice.

  “I listened to this after my nana died,” she said, and pushed a button on the Walkman. A few seconds later, the music started. The sound quality was amazing, like my father’s good stereo.

  A man began singing in a deep voice filled with sadness and longing. Leonard Cohen, singing “Hallelujah.” The lyrics didn’t speak to my feelings, not really, but the feel of the song, the emotion of it, hit me hard. I didn’t believe in any particular god—knowing the truth behind the mundy myths made that a little difficult—and I didn’t get the sense that the singer did either, but when he sang the word “Hallelujah,” I burst into fresh tears.

  I turned away from Dawn, embarrassed to be crying in front of her. She put a hand on my arm.

  The music, and Dawn’s touch, felt like they possessed some kind of magic—not one of the five known branches of magic but a power that reached deep within me and tore down the dams holding back my grief. I wanted to talk then, to let my thoughts and feelings come pouring out, but I swallowed the words. Dawn was a mundy, and so much of what I felt and thought was tied in one way or another to our family’s magic, and to the Talker gift I shared with my mother. I couldn’t share the truth about magic with Dawn, no matter how much, in that moment, I wanted to.

  I had some idea then of why Grandfather always said I would never be truly happy with a mundy partner, that when the time came, I should marry an arcana girl.

  * * *

  “Almost there,” Vee said. “I just need to fill in the edges—”

  “How much more of this are you going to make me relive?”

  “Just enough,” she said. “What?” Her tone suddenly held worry, fear.

  “What what?” I asked, but then I realized Vee wasn’t speaking to me.

  * * *

  “Grab a partner,” my biology teacher said.

  Grab a partner. Words not quite as bad as “pick teams” for a thirteen-year-old geek like me but still less fun than, say, a physical exam.

  Then Heather Flowers stood next to me. “Wanna be partners?” she asked.

  “Uh,” I replied. Despite my worries about being the last person in the room without a partner, I wasn’t sure how to respond. Time slowed down to a bionic crawl as I felt the eyes of my classmates on me.

  I knew who Heather was, of course. Her family were arcana, alchemists, though Mother forbade any of us kids from going to their home, and the Flowers family rarely showed up to local arcana gatherings. They were among the black sheep of the local magical community.

  But that wasn’t why I hesitated. What really made me hesitate was the fact that being a lab partner with Heather Flowers was dangerous. Not in the social reputation sense, though that possibility squatted in the back of my mind like one of the dead clammy frogs waiting for our dissection. No, what made her a risky partner, the reason I felt pretty sure she was talking to me and not one of her fellow brains in the class, was that she tended to make things go boom—in her chemistry class, in photography class, even in home ec. Plenty of students had made cakes implode, but how did you make a cake explode?

  Alchemy gone wrong, I felt pretty certain.

  “Have you been, like, sniffing the formaldehyde?” Heather asked.

  “What?”

  “Well, you’re just staring at me like you’re totally stoned or something.”

  “Oh, uh, sorry.” I glanced around. Everyone else had partnered up. Awesome. “Sure, we can be partners.”

  “Bitchin’,” she said.

  The whole Valley Girl thing had been cool for, like, a week the previous year. Heather had never exactly been on the leading edge of cool. But like me, I guess she hoped to start fresh as a freshman, to put the nerd label from elementary and middle school behind her.

  For me, that meant a spiked haircut with a rat tail, a new wardrobe from the thrift stores that looked like Adam Ant’s castoffs, and plans to make the creepiness of my family’s “mortuary” business work for me rather than against me. I was sure to make new friends any day, and not just the ones in my programming class.

  Heather’s attempt at reinvention had been even less successful. She did cut her hair short over the summer, Pat Benatar short, and started wearing this cool shirt that buttoned diagonally across the front in a flap like the new Starfleet uniforms. She also stopped wearing her glasses except when reading. But that just meant she walked around squinting all the time. The only groups she joined were still academic groups. And she wore that one same “cool” shirt every other day for weeks.

  And then there was that whole tendency to make things go boom.

  “Seriously, hello?” she said. “Do I have a booger showing or something?”

  “Sorry,” I said and blinked. “I just have a lot on my mind.”

  “Uh-huh. Come on, let’s go dissect Kermit.”

  I followed her to the nearest lab station where a frog waited in a shallow pan, and the sharp smell of the formaldehyde made my nose burn.

  “Uh, do you want to cut the frog or take notes first?” I asked.

  “Actually,” she whispered and glanced around us, then leaned in a bit closer. “I wanted to see you make the frog jump.”

  “What?”

  “You can do that, can’t you? Animate it, make it, like, a zombie frog?”

  Now I glanced around to make sure nobody could hear us. “Are you serious? Even if I could do that level of nec—of stuff, you know we’re not supposed to do … stuff without permission, not until we’re ARC licensed. We shouldn’t even be talking about it.”

  “I know, but—” She looked out the windows at the gray clouds a second, then said, “You know about my parents, right? Of course you do. I know the other arcana, they talk about us.”

  I shrugged, feeling very uncomfortable. “Yeah, I mean, it’s
not like my family sits around gossiping about you or anything, but I heard maybe your parents were … doing stuff they shouldn’t be?” Like dealing potions illegally to the feybloods, and maybe even being potion addicts, though if that were true I didn’t understand why the ARC hadn’t done something about it. I knew that the Flowers were the poorest arcana family in Port Townsend, so they couldn’t be making much money selling potions if it was true.

  “Yeah. Well, I’m not going to end up like them, okay? But you know how the ARC is, they stick their noses in when they shouldn’t, and totally ignore it when people are doing stupid crap if it helps whatever bogus secret plans they have. If I try to just leave, to get a good mundy job, they might screw it up for me just so I have to do alchemy for them.”

  I frowned. “Really? I don’t think the ARC would—”

  “How would you know?” Her harsh whisper took on an edge as cutting as a Ginsu lightsaber. “You live up in your nice little house with your nice little family sucking magic out of dead people and giving it to the ARC, of course they wouldn’t give you any problems. But how nice do you think they would be if you stopped doing what they wanted, stopped giving them all that magic? Even if it was making your life hell, even if—”

  She choked to a stop, her face going red. I glanced around, and realized several students were watching us. I gave a nervous smile, and a couple of the students gave me a “Dude, glad I’m not you” look before pretending to go back to their work.

  “I’m sorry,” I said once the masking buzz of other conversation finally began again. “I guess I didn’t really think about it.”

  And it was weird to hear my family being held up as a desirable one. I mean, my parents didn’t beat me or anything, but they were also constantly making me work and study necromancy, and putting all kinds of restrictions on what I could do or who I could hang out with and—but I guess, as Little Einstein would say, it’s all relatives.

  “Yeah, well, forget what I said,” Heather snapped. “I’m not asking you to apologize for the ARC. I just want to know if you’ll make the stupid frog jump.”

  “Why? How would that help?”

  “I need something to pay off the ARC with, a new alchemical formula that’s really worth something. I think I’ve even found someone who’ll help me, if I can make the right potion for him.”

  “And the frog?”

  “The mundies use formaldehyde to preserve dead flesh, but I think I can use it as a base for a formula to actually reanimate dead flesh. If you animate the frog, I can sneak some samples of it, break down the alchemistry of it.”

  “Uh,” I said. “Don’t get mad, but you sort of have this reputation for making things blow up, and I don’t want a Michael Jackson Pepsi incident here, end up running through the halls with my hair on fire or something.” A valid concern, since I had enough Dippity-Do for a half-dozen candles holding up my spikes. “Besides, I really can’t animate the frog. It’s forbidden, part of the dark necromantic arts. It’s like … turning lead to gold for alchemists.”

  “I won’t catch you on fire, I promise,” Heather said, a promise I wondered if she’d given before; a promise, I thought, one should not have to make at all in a high school biology class. “And I don’t care about the ARC’s stupid laws. Alchemists are forbidden to turn lead to gold because the gold always ends up radioactive. But the only reason necromancers can’t make zombies is because the ARC says so, because the ARC doesn’t want anyone having more power than them.”

  “I don’t know about that.…”

  “Come on, what are they going to do, exile us? You think my … accidents in those other classes are the only times I screwed up? No. And do you see any enforcers dragging me off?”

  “I guess not,” I said. “But really, I can’t do it. I don’t know how.” And I had no desire to be grounded for life even if I could.

  “Fine. Whatever. Let’s just do the stupid assignment then. I’m sure you know how to cut up a dead body better than me, so you cut, I’ll write.” She picked up the worksheet and held it close to her face, squinting at the instructions.

  We did the assignment in a cloud of awkward silence and chemical stench, exchanging only enough words to identify the various organs and other body parts, to make slides for the microscope and agree on the results.

  As we worked, I got to really study her, up close. She wasn’t shy, or afraid to talk or assert herself like I’d thought, at least not when it came to getting the class work done. I caught her squinting at me a couple of times, studying my face as I worked on the frog. So I looked at her when she squinted and focused on writing out the results. She really was pretty cute, actually. And I felt bad that I hadn’t made more of an effort to be friends.

  After class, we entered the stream of students in the hall and headed in opposite directions, but I stopped and hurried back after her instead.

  “Hey, Heather, wait a second.”

  She flinched and turned to face me. “What?”

  We stepped close to the wall, out of the flow of students.

  “Look,” I said. “I was thinking, maybe you’d want to come over to my house and hang out sometime?”

  “What?” She sounded as surprised as I was at the question.

  “Uh, well, we have a whole library of books on necromancy and stuff, I just thought maybe you could learn something to help you. And, well, we could play games, or you could hang out with my sister, if, you know, you didn’t want to go home or whatever.”

  She squinted at me a second, frowning, perhaps trying to figure out if I was serious. Was she blushing?

  “Okay,” she said. “I mean, yes, that would be really cool. I—”

  Then something weird happened in her chest area. There was a light snapping sound, and a twitch, and suddenly it looked like her small breasts had shifted to either side of her chest, impossibly far apart. It took me a second to realize what had happened, and then only thanks to the fact that I had a sister. Heather must wear a padded bra, and it had snapped apart in the front.

  Her light blush turned into a full red glow, and she turned and ran up the hall, one arm held across her chest.

  * * *

  “Finn! Wake!” Vee’s voice cut through the desire to rest, and I rushed up toward white, fluorescent light.

  * * *

  I emerged from the world of memory to the bleachy antiseptic smell of Vee’s room, and to my arm and hand tingling from the pressure of my forehead. My watch blurred into focus. 10:27 A.M. Only seven minutes—

  My head jerked up at the sound of the door crashing in.

  Vee screamed, and I blinked as my brain attempted to make sense of what my eyeballs were shouting at it.

  The door to the room leaned open and dented, the door frame splintered, and from outside came shouting and growling and howls of pain.

  And just inside the door, Elvis threw a karate kick at Petey.

  11

  Burning Down the House

  “Pete!” I shouted, as though he needed my warning.

  Petey doubled over as Elvis’s foot made contact with his gut.

  “Ha!” Elvis said, and ran a hand through his glossy black pompadour. “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, son!”

  He wasn’t the real Elvis, of course. As should be no surprise, the real Elvis was an arcana. He hoped to forge the perfect musical weapon against the Fey, who enjoy human music the way a slug enjoys a salt-covered hammer. But the Fey managed to infect him, turning him into a waercreature. Although the resulting change in his metabolism led to tragic consequences for his waistline and his life, even worse is that those infected by the Elvis waerform turn into pale imitations of him when the conditions are right—for some, if they hear an Elvis song; for others, when they enter the dark energy vortex of the Las Vegas area; or, in some extreme cases, if they smell peanut butter and banana.

  I jerked to my feet, sending my chair tumbling back, and rushed to my brother’s aid. Vee was a step ahead of me, several steps actually
, and shouted as she swung her chair at Elvis’s head.

  “Ki-YAH!” Elvis shouted, and punched through the chair, breaking it to pieces. “You’ll have to do better than that, pretty momma.”

  Pete howled like a wolf, and charged shoulder first into the waerElvis, lifting the portly man from the ground and sending him flying back out into the hallway.

  Vee followed Pete, wielding a chair leg like a club and making a weird chirping, chittering noise.

  “Wait!” I shouted to the empty doorway as I chased after her. Unsurprisingly, the doorway didn’t respond.

  The hallway was a chaos of noise and motion and bodies.

  The orderly who’d shown us to the room lay just outside the door like a welcome mat, eyes closed. Vee knelt beside him, slapping him—I assumed to wake him and not as some kind of payback.

  A number of other bodies lay on the floor around the doorway: a leprechaun, a satyr, a reptilian dog with quills I assumed was a chupacabra—the mana-drug addicts. The Legion must have released them somehow. Perhaps the Legion had even addicted them to begin with.

  I had a sudden memory of Harriett, the female sasquatch, saying she needed juice.

  To my right, Zeke fought a small troll. By small I mean it only stood as tall as Zeke, even though every part of it was four times as thick, and hard as stone.

  But Zeke wasn’t just fighting. He’d gone berserk. Literal, old-school berserker. He shrugged off punches from the powerful gray creature, and responded with two-handed blows of his baton that sounded like a hammer clunking into concrete. The troll barked in pain and fell back step by lumbering step. Zeke laughed maniacally, spittle flying into the air, and shouted a string of words that sounded mostly like gibberish.

  To my left, Petey battled Elvis, and a kappa—a feyblood with yellowish skin, beaklike nose, a humpback that was hard like a shell, and an indentation on its head that held water. The creature’s indent was covered with an upside-down plastic bowl secured with an ace bandage.

  Pete landed a punch that floored Elvis, but at the same time the kappa threw itself backward at Pete in a kind of wrestler move, hitting him with its hard shell. Pete tripped backward over the fallen satyr and tumbled to the floor. The kappa advanced, its mouth snapping.