Neither did Allie, but that really didn’t matter.
“Do you mean a place that’s already haunted?” the McGill asked.
“Yes, that’s it.”
“A place that’s haunted without explanation?”
“Exactly!”
The McGill stroked his swollen chin as he thought. “I know a place like that. A house in Long Island. We went there in search of Afterlights to capture. We didn’t find a single one, but the walls of the house kept telling us to get out.”
“Okay,” said Allie. “Then that’s where our lessons will begin.”
The McGill nodded. “I will call for you when we arrive.”
Once he was gone, Allie let her revulsion out, shivering and squirming, and then she returned to her bed, disgusting herself further with Mary Hightower’s volume of misinformation. She hoped that couched between Mary’s useless tips there might be a clue to defeating the McGill—the trick was finding it.
The McGill, being an arrogant creature, believed he could see through anyone who was lying. It was that arrogance that kept him from seeing how completely Allie was tricking him. He strolled along the deck, pleased with this new wrinkle in his existence. Around him, his crew did their busywork on deck. There was little point to all the cleaning, the swabbing, and the polishing the crew did. What was rusty now would always be rusty. What was covered in sulphur dust would stay that way, no matter how much the crew tried to wipe it away. The best they could do was to clear away the cookie crumbs the McGill often left behind. Still, the McGill insisted that his ship be like a real ship. his crew like a real crew, and cleaning is what crews did. It was always the same crew members cleaning the same things, and at the same time of day. Routine. It’s what made a ghost ship a ghost ship. Allie, however, was a break from the routine.
He proudly strolled past his crewmen, flicking little black bugs at them, or spitting on their shoes—just to remind them who was boss. Then he returned to the bridge and ordered the ship turned around, heading back toward Long Island and the haunted house he had told Allie about. Then he sat in his throne, reaching toward a tarnished brass spittoon that sat next to it. The bowl was originally used for spitting tobacco, phlegm, and other vile things, but it served a different function here. The McGill dug his claw in, and pulled out a fortune cookie—one of many that filled the copper pot.
Mary Hightower was not a fan of fortune cookies, and told her readers so. Just thinking about it made the McGill laugh. What Mary didn’t tell her readers is that fortune cookies were plentiful in Everlost—not quite as plentiful as those faceless coins, but far more useful. For once, Mary had done him a service. If others stayed away from the cookies, it meant there were more for him!
The McGill crushed the fortune cookie in his fingers, hurling the crumbs out on the deck for his crew to fight over like seagulls, then he settled into his throne and read the small slip of paper that had been hidden in the cookie.
Out of the water will come your salvation.
Allie had come to him out of the water, hadn’t she? He leaned back, well satisfied with himself.
The house on Long Island did, indeed, tell them to get out.
It told them loudly, it told them often. It was an annoying house. It was, however, all bark and no bite. There was a young couple living in the house – and although it yelled at them, too, they apparently could not hear it as they were both deaf. Since the house had no appendages by which to communicate in American sign language, it was profoundly frustrated. It must have been very satisfying for the house to finally have spirits within its walls who could hear it—even if they weren’t inclined to listen. Regardless, Allie had to admit it was the perfect location for her first bogus lesson in skinjacking.
“Okay,” Allie told the McGill, “first find a dead-spot in the room,” which was not very difficult since the whole house was spotted with them like Swiss cheese. Apparently many people had died here. Allie didn’t want to think about it.
The McGill took a spot near a window facing the sea. “Now what?”
“Close your eyes.”
“My eyes don’t close,” the McGill reminded her.
“Right. Okay then, keep your eyes open. Face the ocean…and wait for the sun to rise.”
“It’s noon,” the McGill pointed out.
“Yes, I know. You have to stand here, and wait until tomorrow when the sun rises, then stare into the rising sun.”
“Get…Owwwwwwwwt,” said the house.
“If we have to be here at dawn, why didn’t you tell me that before we came?”
“You know what your problem is?” Allie said. “You have no patience. You’re immortal, it’s not like you’re going anywhere. Skinjacking takes patience. Stand here, and wait until dawn.”
The McGill gave her an evil eye, spat out a wad of something brown on her shoe, and said, “Fine. But you wait with me. If I have to listen to this stupid house, then so do you.”
So they waited, ignoring the pointless activities of the people who lived there, and turning a deaf ear to the house.
The next morning however was overcast, and instead of a rising sun, the horizon was filled with a ribbon of gray.
“You’ll have to wait until tomorrow,” Allie told the McGill.
“Why? What does this have to do with possessing the living?”
Allie rolled her eyes as if the answer was obvious. “Staring at the sun at dawn gives you soul-sight. Not every living person can be possessed. Soul-sight allows you to see which ones you’ll be able to skinjack, and which ones you won’t.”
The McGill looked at her doubtfully. “And this is how you learned?”
“Well,” said Allie, “it’s the first step.”
“How many steps are there?”
“Twelve.”
The McGill regarded her with his wandering, mismatched eyes, then asked, “Is anyone in this house possessible?”
Allie thought back to when she caught glimpses of the occupants speaking to one another by means of complex hand gestures. In truth, anyone was possessible, but she wouldn’t let the McGill know that. The whole point of this was to make sure she didn’t teach the McGill anything at all. The whole point was to stall long enough to learn the McGill’s weaknesses. If she could drag him through twelve ridiculous steps, convincing him that at the end he’d learn how to skinjack, she might find the key to defeating him—or at least, a way to free her friends.
Either way, she knew she’d have to make a quick escape when it was all over, because when the McGill finally figured out that he was being duped, his fury would reverberate through all of Everlost.
“The woman is possessible,” Allie told the McGill.
“Show me,” the creature said. “Skinjack her now.”
Allie clenched her teeth. Her experience taking control of the ferry pilot had been exciting, but frightening. It had been an intense experience, but also fundamentally gross—like wearing someone else’s sweaty clothes. Still, if she were going to keep stringing the McGill along, she would have to deliver.
“Okay, I’ll do it. But only if you tell me why you’ve got all those kids strung up in your ship. And why you put numbers on them.”
He considered the question, then said, “I’ll tell you AFTER you skinjack the woman.”
“Fine.” Allie rolled her shoulders like a runner getting ready for a race, then approached the woman in the kitchen. Stepping in was easier this time than it had been with the ferry pilot, perhaps because she was a woman, or perhaps because practice made perfect. The woman never quite knew what hit her. What struck Allie first was the absolute silence. She almost panicked, thinking something was wrong, until she remembered the woman was deaf. The world around Allie now was brighter—the way it appeared to the living—and she could feel the seductive density of flesh. She flexed her fingers, and found that it had only taken a few moments to push the woman’s consciousness down, and take control.
Allie looked around. Through the woman’s eyes she could no lo
nger see the McGill, but she knew he was there. If he wanted proof that she could possess people, he would have proof. She rummaged around in the kitchen drawers until she found a permanent marker, then went to the wall and wrote in big block letters:
BEWARE THE MCGILL
Then she hopped out of the woman, not wanting to spend a second more there than she had to. The living world faded into the muted colors of Everlost, her hearing returned, and there was the McGill smiling through sharp, rotten teeth.
“Very good!” he said. “Very, very good.”
“Now tell me about the Afterlights in your ship.”
“No.”
“You promised.”
“I lied.”
“Then I won’t teach you what I know.”
“Then I’ll throw your friends over the side.”
“Get… Owwwwwwt!!!!”
Allie clenched her fists and let off an angry growl that only made the McGill laugh. She might have held some of the cards, but the McGill would not let her forget that he held all the aces.
“We will come back each morning,” the McGill said, “until we have a bright sunrise. Then we will go on to step two.”
Allie had no choice but to agree. She rode the lifeboat in furious silence back to the Sulphur Queen, even more determined than ever to outsmart the McGill.
As for the woman Allie had possessed, once she regained control of her body, she took one look at the words scrawled on the wall, and concluded that all the stories about this house were true. She immediately contacted her Realtor, and put the house up for sale, determined that she and her husband would move as far away from Amityville as possible.
“Beware of fortune cookies that cross into Everlost,” Mary Hightower writes in her book Caution, This Means You! “They are instruments of evil, and the proper way to deal with them is to stay far away. AVOID TEMPTATION! Don’t even go near Chinese restaurants! Those wicked cookies will rot off the hand of anyone who touches them.”
CHAPTER 19
Evil Chinese Pastry of Death
The McGill followed Allies lead, letting her direct him through the first three steps of human possession. He supposedly now had “soulsight,” allowing him to see which humans were possessible and which were not, however when he looked at the living, he saw no difference between them. He wouldn’t tell Allie this, though. Soulsight would come, he convinced himself. Once he worked his way through the remaining steps it would come. It had better.
The second step was to follow the actions of a living person for twenty-four hours. “The point,” Allie explained, “is to become in tune with the things living people do.” It was a deceptively difficult chore, because the living could travel through the world in ways that the McGill could not. Every single time the McGill chose someone to follow, they would eventually get into a car, or a train, or, in one strange instance, a helicopter, and be carried away too quickly for the McGill to follow on foot.
It took several days until he finally settled on someone who wasn’t going anywhere; an inmate at a local jail. He spent twenty-four hours observing the prisoner’s various limited activities, and the McGill returned to the Sulphur Queen triumphant.
The third step, however, was much more difficult. According to Allie, he was required to commit an act of selflessness. The McGill didn’t think it was possible.
“You could release one or two kids from the chiming chamber,” Allie suggested.
But the McGill flatly refused. “It wouldn’t be selfless,” he told her, “because I’d be doing it to gain something.”
No—if selflessness was what was required then it would be a difficult task indeed. This required consulting with the cookies. After Allie had gone to her quarters, the McGill once more pushed his hand into the spittoon and withdrew a fortune cookie, crushed it, and pulled out the slip of paper. This time it read:
The answer comes when the question is forgotten.
Annoyed, the McGill threw the cookie crumbs over the side, rather than giving them to his crew.
The McGill wasn’t the only one annoyed by this turn of events. Allie silently cursed herself for not being more clever. Did she actually think the McGill would be tricked into releasing her friends? True, the challenge of this “third step” bought her time, but if the McGill was truly incapable of selflessness, it would only serve to make him angrier and angrier.
She now had freedom on the ship—more than any of the McGill’s actual crew—but something was happening to her. Each time she looked in a mirror, her reflection looked a little off. Did one ear look larger than the other? Was this bottom tooth always crooked? She wondered how long it would be until she became no better than the rest of his crew. Allie pondered all this as she stood on deck one afternoon, looking toward shore—only she couldn’t find it. The sky was clear, but all she could see was ocean. It seemed to her that the Sulphur Queen always hugged the coastline, but now they were out in the open sea. It was unsettling, for although she knew she could no longer be a part of the living world, seeing it gave her some connection to the life she once had. By her calculation, they should have been off” the coast of New Jersey—the southern part of the state, where her family lived—but the shore was nowhere in sight.
As she stared out at the horizon, the McGill approached her, lumbering in that awful way of his.
“Why are we all the way out here,” Allie asked him, “if you’re supposed to be checking your traps?”
“I have no traps in New Jersey,” was his only answer.
“But what’s the point of coming all the way out to sea?”
“I didn’t come here to answer stupid questions,” he said.
“Then why did you come?”
“I was on the bridge,” the McGill said, “and I saw you staring over the side. I came down to see if you were all right.”
Allie found this show of concern even more disturbing than the slime that so freely oozed from the McGill’s various bodily openings. The McGill brought his flaking three-fingered claw to her face and lifted her chin. Allie took one look at that swollen, turgid finger, purple and pale like a dead fish three days in the sun, and she pulled away from him, revolted.
“I disgust you,” the McGill said.
“Isn’t that what you want?” Allie answered. From the start she knew he took great pride in his high gross-out factor. He never passed up an opportunity to be repulsive, and was skilled at thinking up new disgusting things to do. At that moment, however, he didn’t seem pleased with himself at all.
“Perhaps my hand could use a softer, gentler touch,” he said. “I’ll work on it.”
Allie resisted the urge to look at him. Please don’t tell me the monster is falling in love with me, she thought. She was simply not the compassionate kind of girl who could handle it. “Don’t try to charm me,” she told him. “The ‘Beauty and the Beast’ thing doesn’t work with me, okay? “
“I’m not trying to charm you. I just came down here to make sure you weren’t planning to jump.”
“Why would I jump?”
“Sometimes people do,” the McGill told her. “Crew members who think sinking would be better than serving me.’ “Maybe they have the right idea,” Allie told him. “You won’t release my friends, you won’t answer my questions – maybe I’d be better off down there.”
The McGill shook his head. “You’re just saying that because you don’t know—but I know what happens when you sink.” And then the McGill became quiet. His dangling eyes, which never seemed to be looking in the same direction, now seemed to be looking off somewhere else entirely. Somewhere no one else could see.
“It may begin with water,” he said, “but it always ends with dirt. Dirt, then stone. When you first pass into the Earth, it’s stifling dark, and cold. You feel the stone in your body.”
Allie thought back to the time Johnnie-O had almost pushed her down. She remembered that feeling of the earth in her body. It was not something she ever wanted to experience again.
Allie wanted to make him stop, but found she couldn’t, for as much as she didn’t want to know, she felt she had to know.
“You sink for years, and from time to time, you come across others,” the McGill said. “You feel their presence around you. Their voices are muffled by the molten rock. They tell you their names, if they remember them. And then in twenty years tame, you reach a place where the world is so thick around you with sunken spirits, you stop. Once you’re there, once you’ve stopped falling and realize you’re not going anywhere anymore, that’s when you begin waiting.”
“Waiting for what? ‘ “Isn’t it obvious?”
Allie didn’t dare guess what he was talking about.
“Waiting for the end of the world,” the McGill said.
“The world… is going to end?”
“Of course it’s going to end,” the McGill told her. “Probably not for a hundred billion years, but eventually the sun will die, the Earth will blow up, and every kid who’s ever sunk to the core will be free to zoom around the universe, or do whatever it is Afterlights do when there’s no gravity to deal with anymore.”
Allie tried to imagine waiting for a billion years, but couldn’t. “It’s horrible.”
“No, it’s not horrible,” the McGill said, “and that’s what makes it worse than horrible.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You see, when you’re at the center of the Earth, you forget you have arms and legs, because you don’t need them. You can’t use them. You become nothing but spirit. Pretty soon you can’t tell where you end, and where the Earth begins…and you suddenly find that you don’t care. You suddenly find that you have endless patience. Enough patience to wait until the end of the world.”
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