Good Gomes
Gomes, like humans, are not always all good or all bad but in this category I will describe gomes that do seem to be helpful to Finnley, Hadley, and their friends. I am putting them roughly in the order that they appear in the story as it unfolds throughout the books.
WULLIE
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As Hadley is fond of saying about Wullie, “You are just totally amazing!” We know more about Wullie than about any other gome by the time the Blackhope Scar story is finished, but we don’t know how much of his amazing talents and powers are unique to him and how many other gomes can do similar things. In his petrified state Uncle Hugh refers to him as being like a “very special Scottish paperweight” although very few paperweights smell as bad and feel as damp as Wullie does. He is about eight inches tall, with a reddish-brown pointy end, a damp plump mossy middle and a flat solid gray flat bottom end. Here is a picture of Maggie Crabtree meeting Wullie for the first time in her dad’s study in Edinburgh. She is not at all sure what to make of him:
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When he comes to life the pointy end is a dirty red-brown wooly hat that covers his very sharp-tipped titanium skull. The green middle becomes a jacket and the gray flat end becomes scruffy trousers and black tackety boots (which are working boots with small metal studs pounded into the soles a bit like studded winter snow tires).
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Wullie has lived for thousands of years and has met many amazing people along the way. He is very intelligent because he has spent years being used as a paperweight in libraries and studies around the world. He considers his home to be the southwest part of Scotland near Mahaar in Wigtownshire and at Lady Bay on the coast nearby. Unlike most gomes who eat rocks Wullie likes to eat metal. He eats a big variety of types of metal and uses their properties to help him. He has some flint in the palm of his hand so that he can create sparks just by snapping his fingers. He uses this to light his pipe.
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Wullie has several disgusting bad habits. He smokes dried cow dung (or “cowdie”) in his pipe. Wullie will tell you that the different varieties of cowdie smell of the different kinds of plants and flowers that the cow was eating at the time (like fresh spring clover or heather bells) but Finn and Hadley think that all cowdie just smells like poop. Wullie especially likes to smoke cowdie if he needs to think things through very carefully. He says that cowdie helps him to concentrate, but that may just be an excuse that Wullie gives so that Finn lets him smoke more often. Another bad habit that Wullie has is that he likes to drink Scotch whisky. He can even absorb it through his mossy green jacket so that if he lies in a puddle of whisky he can get drunk. When he is drunk he will sing, out of tune, awful Scottish songs with dozens of verses. The next day he often has a hangover and feels terrible. He takes this out on anyone around him by being even grumpier and more bad-tempered than usual, which is hard to imagine, I know.
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Wullie can also absorb other scents inside his body. He can give off a wide variety of smells when he wants to, to confuse his enemies.
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Wullie is incredibly strong and has a lot of stamina to work hard for hours at a time. However, if he has exerted himself too much he becomes thinner in the middle and loses strength. He then needs to petrify to conserve his energy. A good feed of iron-filings-oatmeal or a little aluminum-foil-and-ball-bearing-burrito will restore his strength.
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Wullie carries a little lizard skin backpack with him at all times. He keeps an amazing array of cool and helpful things in his backpack.
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In Blackhope Scar we see him use powders and potions that create stinky purple smoke bombs, multi-colored fire crackers, and a yellow sticky goo. He stores all of these powders and potions in tiny leather pouches or glass bottles. He uses magic dust that he got centuries ago from the King of Persia to create a cloud of mist that makes whatever is behind it become invisible. The Persian King dust also smells of peppermint and vanilla and helps keep people stay calm when they are in danger. Wullie also has an amazing gossamer thin cloak that he can throw over humans when the air around them is poisonous. This protects them against fire and allows them to breathe. We don’t know where he got the gossamer cloak from. Wullie’s back pack also contains coils of strong thin wire with hooks on the end to allow him to climb onto things.
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In addition to conserving his energy Wullie uses his petrified state to ignore humans if Wullie is “taking the huff” with them. He can still hear and see when he is petrified and he says he can concentrate better to be able to figure out puzzles if he is petrified. He can also be thrown when he is petrified and is incredibly tough and hard when he crashes into things. He can function well under water, even in his un-petrified state.
Wullie has lots of powers. I am not going to share all of them with you yet, because I want you to be amazed, surprised, and delighted to discover more as the adventures continue, but here are the ones that we learned about in the Blackhope Scar story. He is incredibly strong and can bite through metal as if it were licorice. He can use his titanium-tipped pointy head as a weapon. If someone grabs him by surprise, whether he is in his living state or petrified, he can sting them through lots of places on his surface. Sometimes these are like nettle stings but he can also squirt a green-goo into his stings that spreads a green color into the skin of the person who grabbed him. Another thing he can do when he petrifies is to clamp his flat base solidly onto any surface he is standing on so that he can’t be budged. And then he can unpetrify the top half of his body so that he can speak and use his strong arms and hands. It’s a sight to see, so it is, and can come in very handy.
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Wullie is very well-educated and well-read. He has an incredible memory and can speak many different languages. So far we know that he speaks English, Scottish, and Latin but there may be more. When he gets angry, grumpy, and frustrated he uses more and more Scottish slang words and so Finn needs to consult his copy of Munro’s Scottish-English Dictionary: A compendium of old Scots words and slang phrases.
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Wullie has a great sense of smell and hearing. He can also impersonate the voice of anyone he has heard speaking. Wullie can use this to confuse his enemies.
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Wullie has very few weaknesses but he does hate too much heat. If things get really hot he needs to petrify to survive it and has to stay petrified until his surroundings cool down. There are a lot of other amazing things that you will learn about Wullie in future stories.
BIG SANDY
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Gomes live for a very, very, very long time (unless they get crushed or smashed into pieces that can’t be repaired…) and over the centuries they begin to adapt characteristics of the geographical area that they inhabit the most. They overhear the local humans, too, and gradually adopt some of the habits and mannerisms of those locals. A good example of this phenomenon is Alexander Clambucket Targomshie, a coastal sandstone gome who comes from the area near the Calanais (pronounced Callanish) Standing Stones on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Known as “Big Sandy” to his friends, he is indeed very large for a gome. Almost two feet tall and two feet wide, with massive hands, he strikes a remarkable figure in the gome world. When he is solid he has a pinkish-brown, smooth, sandy surface. He is very comfortable in the water. His eyes are close set, small, and limpet-like. His mouth is large, moist, and gloomy.
In his petrified state he looks like an unremarkable block of sandstone that has some barnacles, seaweed, and limpets sticking to the surface. Sandy uses this disguise to blend in with other boulders and rocks in fields so that he can spy on things going on around him. He does this in Twilight Cave to figure out what might be about to happen at the Calanais Standing stones. Unfortunately an itchy sheep uses him to scratch its fleece on which makes it harder for him to hear things clearly.
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Coming from the Western Isles of Scotland Sandy has adopted some of the characteristics of this part of the world. Sandy is a morose, gloomy, pessimistic, and fatalistic creature with a lilting, soft Highland accent. He is weary at how wicked and violent the world is. He pronounces his “j’s” like a “ch,” and his “v’s” like “ff’s” so that he might well say, “The world iss a terrible, wicked, depressing place, so it iss. People is always r-r-rushing and hurrying efferywhere. They neffer haff enough time to chust sit still and share some amusing stories, and maybe a choke or two.”
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Sandy is one of Wullie’s oldest and closest friends. They have had many adventures together, only a tiny amount of which we have been told about, so far. Although Sandy seems to move and think at a very slow pace he is a deep thinker, and is afraid of nothing. He has absorbed a lot of water inside himself and can quickly turn parts of his body to a sandy slushy mixture while keeping the rest of his body hard. He can use this as a defense mechanism to confuse his enemies. He put this to good use when he protected Finn from being attacked by Baldo-The-Bladderwort on the misty beach near the Invertoshan military facility. When Baldo was attacking Sandy with his lobster-spike Sandy made the part of his body where the spike hit him become soft like slushy sand so that the spike just pushed through and out the other side. But when the spike was removed Sandy hardened that part of his body up again and healed over where he was struck. Big Sandy is a reliable and dependable friend to Wullie, and is someone whom you would like to have on your side when things look bleak.
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Here is a picture of him walking along the beach near his home, worrying about something:​​​​​​​​​​​​​
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Gomes live for a very, very, very long time (unless they get crushed or smashed into pieces that can’t be repaired…) and over the centuries they begin to adapt characteristics of the geographical area that they inhabit the most. They overhear the local humans, too, and gradually adopt some of the habits and mannerisms of those locals. A good example of this phenomenon is Alexander Clambucket Targomshie, a coastal sandstone gome who comes from the area near the Calanais (pronounced Callanish) Standing Stones on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Known as “Big Sandy” to his friends, he is indeed very large for a gome. Almost two feet tall and two feet wide, with massive hands, he strikes a remarkable figure in the gome world.
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When Big Sandy is solid he has a pinkish-brown, smooth, sandy surface. He is very comfortable in the water. His eyes are close set, small, and limpet-like. His mouth is large, moist, and gloomy.
JADE-TSI-DONG
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Jade-Tsi-Dong is a very powerful Translator. His body is partly made out of polished green jade. He came from remote mountains in China and is also a longtime friend of Wullie’s. We meet him for the first time on Level Two of Barcelunda where he is working at his Divining Bench in a Chinese Medicine store in the International District of the city. This is how Hadley describes it in Chapter XXXV of Twilight Cave:
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“Wullie strode through the doorway and disappeared. Hadley tried to hurry after him but once she had squeezed through the door it was impossible to hurry anywhere. The interior was like a cross between an overstuffed junk shop and an animal cemetery from Hell. The low ceiling was held up by several pillars. Dangling from the ceiling by their shriveled tails was a forest of dehydrated lizard skins of all species, sizes and colors. With her extra height Alina’s hood brushed against them causing a dry rattling sound to follow her into the store. The pillars were wound round with hideous ropes made out of the poisonous spines from stonefish, porcupines, scorpions, and jellyfish. Strings of snakeheads jostled for position with necklaces made from insect carcasses, spider fangs, Praying Mantis jaws, biting ants and giant centipedes. And displayed on the walls were rows of antlers, horns, tusks, teeth and claws.
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As she approached the high wooden counter Hadley could not see Jade-Tsi-Dong at first. Wullie, who had clambered up onto the counter at Hadley’s head height, was addressing himself to a silk and bamboo parasol that seemed suspended in mid-air behind the counter. But just as Alina joined her the parasol moved up and away so that the girls found themselves staring face-to-face with the strangest gome they had ever seen. Like a pale green icicle his thin pointed body glistened with a polished shine. A sky-blue silk robe flowed behind him. The parasol appeared to be attached to the back of the robe to shade his eyes, which shone with a penetrating yellow glow from within narrow slits in his face. A long nose and turned down mouth completed the picture of sad intelligence. His arms, hands, and fingers were long and thin. In one he held a small mallet; in the other a small chunk of brown rock. Hadley had never been face-to-face with a gome whose face was at the same height as her own.
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Jade-Tsi-Dong shook his sad head before bending over, once more, to attend to his task. He placed the rock in a large bowl and began pounding it with the mallet until it was reduced to gravel and dust. As he pounded the rock he spoke to it in a gentle singsong voice. When he was satisfied with the consistency of the remains he laid his mallet down, bowed to the bowl, took a pinch of grit, and then turned to a table behind the counter. On the table were eight or nine shallow bowls filled with dark liquid. Jade-Tsi-Dong sprinkled a tiny amount of grit into each of the bowls in turn. Hadley and Alina’s eyes went wide. Sometimes the color of the liquid changed when the dust landed; sometimes it boiled furiously and gave off a howl of sadness or a shriek of pain. Some bowls remained quiet and unresponsive while others emitted colored smoke or sparks. As he moved from bowl to bowl the tall green gome mumbled to himself as if in a trance.”