“What?”
“Goblin is trying to tell you something.”
“Right, I told them to shut up. They… Fuck!”
She turned, and I had to move fast to stay inside the patch of light from the mirror.
It was Molly. She’d followed us, but her back was now to us, facing the site of the little memorial.
“Fuck me, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Mags said.
I looked at my cousin’s ghost. “Why are you following us, Molly?”
“I’m so alone,” she said, a whisper. “Everyone’s against me.”
There was a flicker, suggesting that she wasn’t quite so autonomous as Evan had been.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been there.”
“I can’t sleep. I think they’ve been getting inside the house. I hear stuff in the living room, or upstairs, and they were getting to me in my dreams, before I figured out the circles to stop that, except now I don’t dream at all.”
“No refuge in sleep, huh?” I asked.
“I can’t even go to my family, because if I do, then someone might target them, I had to drive them away.”
“You should have called me,” I said. “…Except you couldn’t. I didn’t exist, before you died. Shit.”
“Now they’re coming for me,” she said. “Goblins and spells to trip me up.”
“Molly,” I said, “Did you have a reflection? Or were you a reflection? A person in the mirror, one way or another?”
“All alone,” she said, in an exact repeat of her earlier statement.
“Guess not,” I said. “Well, that clarifies something, and leaves more questions.”
“Can you not be so crazy calm about this?” Mags said. “One Thorburn has them all talking in concerned voices. Two will have them taking decisive action. Three fucking functioning or semifunctional Thorburns, each with serious fucking issues? The rest of those guys are going to be doing one of two things. Some are going to be flying around in a mad panic, propelled here and there by the sheer violence with which they’re shitting their pants, and the rest are going to be getting organized to murder you and pointing the finger at me!”
“I’ve noticed you’re swearing again.”
“Fuck, yeah I am!” She said. She was pacing, but she at least held the mirror in the same general direction, so I didn’t have to pace with her. “Alright, number one goal here is to keep this from steamrolling into a serious problem.”
“I’ve dealt with ghosts before,” I said. “It’s not as big a thing as you’re making it out to be. She’s an echo, not a proper Thorburn, and there’s a limit to what she can really do.”
“She’s making me a little panicky just by being here and being outside that circle, and I was already feeling pretty crummy about the whole shebang here, and now it’s like, all of it’s coming together, past, present, and prophecy.”
“Prophecy?”
“Damn it,” Mags said. She pulled off her hairband, ran her fingers through her hair, and then put it back on, “Okay, look, I showed you Molly because I wanted to make it clear that I’m not against you, right? And I feel like human garbage for having to say no when you were pretty cool before, but those are the circumstances. I thought I’d make it up to you by pointing you to Molly, so you don’t get the wrong idea.”
“Appreciated,” I said.
“Well, this wasn’t something I was all that keen on explaining, because it’s not something I enjoy thinking about. But if I’m responsible for stuff going down a bad road, then chances are pretty damn good that it’s going to turn out a hell of a lot worse than it otherwise might. I’m supposed to help bring about three incidents of blood, fire and darkness.”
“You or ‘Maggie‘?” I asked.
“Me. And with everything going on, this looks like a ripe opportunity, okay? I’m a little freaked.”
A lot freaked, I thought, but I didn’t say so.
“Alright,” I told her. “Alright, fine.”
“Fine?”
“I believe you. I’m game, whatever the game is. What do you need?”
“She’s… I’m pretty sure she’s following you, because she didn’t follow me before. Can you stay put? I’ve gotta go get something to bind Molly with, so she stays where she’s at.”
I looked at Molly. She still stared at the depression of land below the slope. Now and then she flickered, turning to stare at where the hill led to the North End. An echo of her Self in the time before she’d died, debating which way to go.
“Salt,” I said.
“There’s salt on the road.”
“Salt holds power because it’s pure,” I said. “It was used to preserve. It held off rot and it stopped the emergence of life, if you salted the earth with it. It flavors food. Life, consumption, death, it fits into a niche in the cycle of life and death. Dirty, gritty salt, I don’t know how effective that’d be. Probably enough for something as weak as Molly is, but…”
“Probably isn’t a hundred percent.” Mags said. “Got it. Good tip. A box of salt, then. There’s a convenience store just a minute away. Goblins, stay, keep him company, keep the mirror available for Blake, uhhh… Blake, can you promise not to use it against me if I tell them to listen to you?”
“I promise to do my best,” I said.
“Good. Listen to him,” she ordered them. “You can occupy yourselves but don’t cause problems for anyone or anything. No lasting damage to any human, plant, animal, or human-made object, nothing that would cause suspicion.”
The one she’d called Cumnugget groaned for the Nth time. The other one only bobbed its head in a nod.
Mags sprinted off. I could hear her retreating footsteps.
Cumnugget stuck the handle of the hand mirror into the snowbank, then plopped down in the snow. The other goblin did the same a short distance away.
A snowball went flying, hitting Cumnugget hard in the head.
Cumnugget packed up a snowball, squeezing it hard to compact it, and sent it back
Neither goblin tried to move out of the way, they were so focused on the attack. Making more snowballs, harder snowballs, rubbing snowballs in the salt and gravel at the edge of the road, and generally holding nothing back in weaponizing the snowball fight.
Cumnugget was enduring a hail of snowballs to the back and the back of the head, hunched over, while busily sticking one snowball full of twigs so they radiated out in every direction. Sharp teeth chewed off the end of one twig, sharpening it where it had been blunt before.
I could have ordered them to stop, but it was kind of amusing, in a slapstick Saturday morning cartoon sort of way.
“Stop that,” I heard a woman say.
She stepped into my field of view, and plucked the snowball from Cumnugget’s hands. Cumnugget watched, eyes gleaming like forlorn puppy dog eyes, nose bleeding freely from a hurled chunk of ice earlier in the snowball fight, the blood leaking past the buttoned up collar of the jacket, which covered the goblin’s mouth.
The woman bent low, and I had a view of her face as she pulled a kleenex out of a coat pocket and handed it to the snowsuit-clad goblin. “Use this to stop the bleeding.”
Aunt Irene, joined by Callan, my second-oldest cousin.