“Yahoo!” he cried, covering its bulging eyes with his hands. “Just like the old days, huh, boss?”
Gaspar didn’t answer; he was too busy pounding on the head of one of the aliens. He was perched on its back and had his legs wrapped around its waist. “Vile disruptor of families!” he snarled, giving the Flinduvian another jolting blow. “Now does the Family Morleskievich take its revenge!”
Not far past him Melisande and Ludmilla were holding another Flinduvian by the legs. Every time the alien reached for one of the sisters, the other one would distract him. Gramma was hitting him on the head with her shoe.
But the strangest sight of all in that mad melee was that of my own human body, powered by Grampa. Side by side with Sarah, it was pushing one of the monsters away from the disk—away from me.
No human could stand against a Flinduvian in its full strength, of course. But the Wentar’s sonic disruptor with its agonizing sounds keyed to Flinduvian ears had weakened our enemies enough for my friends and family to hold them back.
Even so, they were risking their lives to do it.
I couldn’t let them down.
With a last surge of strength I lunged forward and grabbed the sonic disruptor. I staggered to my feet. The Flinduvians howled in rage. Feeling as if a thousand bombs were exploding in my brain, I pointed the device at them, and began to herd them toward one side of the room.
Well done! cried Martin. Well done, Anthony!
“Watch out!” cried Grampa, from my body’s mouth.
I turned, just in time to see one of the Flinduvians lunging toward me. I kicked savagely, catching him in the jaw and sending him reeling back against the wall.
“Enough,” said the Wentar, stepping forward. “Enough. It is finished.”
Gently, he took the sonic disruptor from my hands.
Pain overwhelmed me.
I collapsed to the floor, and into a well of blackness.
24
Martin’s Choice
WHEN I OPENED my eyes, my friends and family were staring down at me.
I did a quick check. If I had had a heart, it would have sunk.
I was still in the Flinduvian body.
“Horace, are you all right in there?” asked Gramma.
“That’s not Horace, darling,” said my grandfather, who was standing next to her, still wrapped in my body. “It’s Anthony.”
“If that’s Anthony, then who are you?” cried Sarah, looking at my body nervously.
“I’m your grandfather,” he said, sounding slightly embarrassed.
Sarah’s eyes got wide. “This is too weird,” she said, backing away from him.
“I don’t understand,” said Gramma, her voice quavering. She looked as if she was about to cry. “I don’t understand any of this!”
“I’m sorry, Ethel,” said Grampa gently. “When those monsters snatched Anthony out of his body instead of me, it seemed best not to say anything. I figured anything they didn’t know might be helpful to us later on.”
“A wise choice,” said the Wentar. “Information is always a useful tool. I suspect the reason Anthony was able to seize control of the Flinduvian body was that he is a living spirit, not a dead one. Your silence may well have provided the element of surprise we needed to overcome them.”
“So you weren’t planning to keep my body?” I asked.
“Of course not!” said Grampa. He sounded indignant, but my face had just enough of a blush on it that I suspected the idea had crossed his mind. Oh well. If the situation was reversed, I probably would have considered it, too. It’s what you do that counts, not what you think about doing, thank goodness.
“So how do we get me out of this thing?” I asked, looking down at my horrible alien body.
“I’m not sure,” said the Wentar, sounding uncomfortable.
“Could you use that Flinduvian collecting gun?” asked Sarah. “If it put him in there, shouldn’t it be able to pull him out?”
“It’s worth a try,” said the Wentar, his long face looking gloomy.
“What happened to the Flinduvians, anyway?” I asked. My head was still throbbing, and it was hard for me to concentrate.
“The Ventar called for assistance vile you vere sleeping,” said Ludmilla, sounding very satisfied. “The group that vas here vas hauled avay. I hope they vill receive terrible justice.”
“Once I had proof of their plans, it was easy to get the Coalition of Civilized Worlds to slap a quarantine on their planet,” said the Wentar. “I had long suspected that they were plotting something, but it was impossible to act without evidence. They will not be a menace again for a very long time.”
“Here’s the gun,” said Albert, clumping back over to join us. “Who wants to try?”
“I will,” said Martin. “I know their technology best.”
He pointed the collecting gun at my head. I flinched. On the other hand I couldn’t wait to get out of that horrible body.
“Ready?” asked Martin.
I nodded.
He pulled the trigger. A surge of energy surrounded me. Everything went black.
WHEN I OPENED my eyes, I was still trapped inside the Flinduvian.
“What happened?” I cried in horror.
“Nothing,” whispered Melisande, lowering her head in sorrow. “Nothing at all.”
“I believe I know the source of the problem,” said the Wentar.
“What?” I cried. “What is it?”
“When you went into the red haze, you meshed yourself with the Flinduvian body in a deep way. You were not merely inhabiting it, not merely providing it with energy. You were living in it, in the way it was accustomed to. Now it doesn’t want to let go of you.”
“Does that mean I have to spend the rest of my life as a Flinduvian?” I asked in horror.
No one answered. No one looked happy.
“Maybe I could take his place?” suggested Grampa.
Gramma gasped, but didn’t say anything.
“It might work,” said the Wentar. “But it would be a bad idea. If I’m correct, and the reason Anthony could seize control of the body is that his spirit was still a living one, you would have no such advantage. It is more likely you would end up a mindless slave, as the Flinduvians had intended.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Grampa. “I was married for nearly fifty years.”
“Horace!” cried Gramma in a shocked voice.
“Just joking,” he said softly, and I could tell that the point of the joke had been to hold back his own horror at what he might have to do to free me. I felt guilty for having doubted him before.
“I think I have a better idea,” said Martin. “I will take over the body. I am already used to switching bodies, since the Flinduvians moved me from clone to clone more times than I can count.”
The others started to question him, but he raised his hands. Turning to the Wentar, he said, “It would be a good idea, would it not, to have a spy among the Flinduvians—someone who could pass undetected? In case they decide to . . . act up again?”
“I suspect it would,” said the Wentar uneasily.
“Then it might as well be me.”
Melisande started to cry. Martin actually smiled. “Don’t be sad, sister dearest,” he said gently. “I have been too long gone from this world to ever fit here comfortably again. Horrible as Flinduvia is, I belong there now. As I told you while Anthony was sleeping, it’s been well over two centuries by their time—nearly twenty times as long as I lived on this world. Besides,” he said, smiling wickedly, “I have some scores to settle there.”
And so it was decided.
It wasn’t easy. Before we even started, Gaspar and Martin went apart from the rest of us. They sat and talked for a long time. I wondered what it was like for them, to have been twins, to have lost each other, for Gaspar to have lived with a clone of Martin, for Martin to have lived through more than two centuries in that other world. What could they say to each other now?
I tried not to be impatient while they talked, but I ached to be free of the Flinduvian body, and feared that if we waited too long it might not be possible.
At last they came back, looking sad but settled. Gaspar, so much bigger and older and yet in truth so much younger than his twin, had his hand on Martin’s shoulder.
They nodded at each other. Then Martin’s body slumped, and I felt him come back into the Flinduvian body. Slowly, bit by bit, he replaced my spirit with his. It took hours—the longest, most painful and horrifying hours I had ever known. When he was finally done, we said in one voice, “All right, try the gun again.”
The Wentar pointed it at our head and pulled the trigger. Once more the energy engulfed me. But this time it was different. I could feel myself being wrenched from the body, pulled back into the collecting jar. My panic was brief. It was a matter of but moments to put me back in my own body.
Welcome home, Anthony, said my grandfather. His voice was kind, gentle, and just a little bit sad. You did a good job, kiddo.
We talked for a little while, probably the most private conversation anyone has ever had. Then he disappeared from my body.
I saw his shape floating before me, looking the way it had in the Land of the Dead.
He drifted over to my grandmother. Stroking her cheek—though not really, of course, since touch is only for the living—he whispered, “I love you so, my darling. Be happy. When the time is right, I’ll see you on the other side.”
He blew a kiss to Sarah, then made a salute to the others. Turning back to me, he mouthed the word, “Remember.”
Then he gave me a wink and faded out of sight.
Epilogue
IT’S BEEN A YEAR now since Sarah and I met the monsters of Morley Manor, and a lot of things have changed.
Morley Manor is one of them. Gaspar managed to prove that he was the rightful heir, and once the legal battle was finished (it took until late spring), he and Albert began work on restoring the mansion to its former glory.
Ludmilla and Melisande spend most of their time in Zentarazna these days, but they are often guests at the old house. Sometimes when they come to visit, Gaspar will have a dinner party, to which he invites Sarah, Gramma Walker, and me. Every once in a while the sisters will have some strange new look. The first time they actually had to tell us who they were, which they seemed to find hilarious. But usually they’re in their familiar bodies, Melisande with her snaky hair, Ludmilla with her vampire fangs.
Mom and Dad don’t quite understand our connection to Morley Manor. That’s all right. As I tell them almost every day, “The world is too vast and strange for any of us to understand all of it.”
“You’ve changed this past year, Anthony,” Mom says sometimes. “You’re growing up.”
Maybe. She seems to say that mostly when I’m helping out at the flower shop. But I’ve got a reason for that. It was something Grampa said to me during that last conversation, what he told me to remember. It didn’t sink in completely at the time; there was too much going on, and I was still pretty rattled. But it keeps coming back to me. I suspect he etched it in my brain somehow, leaving it as a little present for me, because I can still hear him say it, as if he was inside my head even now, instead of—
Well, instead of where he is.
Anthony, all your life people are going to tell you to stop and smell the roses. But they won’t usually tell you why. So let me give you one good reason, the one I learned too late. There are no gardens in the Land of the Dead. You have to embrace life now, Anthony—now, while you’re still part of it. Grab it to you. See it, feel it, hold it, love it. Don’t let it pass you by, boy. Don’t shut yourself off from it. Because the truth is, you never know what moment is going to be your last, what scent, what sound, what smell will be the last one you experience. Make it good. Make it real.
Probably pretty good advice, coming from a dead man.
So I spend more time at the flower shop than I used to. I like helping Mom and Dad.
Besides, you never know which rose will be your last.
I also spend a lot of time at Morley Manor, working with Gaspar in his strange laboratory, with its mad mix of magic and science, trying, as he says, to plumb the mysteries of the universe.
I don’t suppose we’ll ever manage to know it all.
On the other hand, I know a few more things than I used to.
Like what it means to have a family that loves you.
We should all be so lucky.
About the Author
BRUCE COVILLE is the author of over 100 books for children and young adults, including the international bestseller My Teacher Is an Alien, the Unicorn Chronicles series, and the much-beloved Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher. His work has appeared in a dozen languages and won children’s choice awards in a dozen states.
Before becoming a full time writer Bruce was a teacher, a toymaker, a magazine editor, a gravedigger, and a cookware salesman. He is also the creator of Full Cast Audio, an audiobook company devoted to producing full cast, unabridged recordings of material for family listening and has produced over a hundred audiobooks, directing and/or acting in most of them.
Bruce lives in Syracuse, New York, with his wife, illustrator and author Katherine Coville.
Visit his website at www.brucecoville.com.
Bruce Coville, The Monsters of Morley Manor
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