Mikey immediately felt bad for losing his temper, and for a moment he longed for the good ol’ days when he could lose his temper as much as he wanted and not have to feel sorry, or apologize for anything.
“I didn’t mean to call you a moron,” said Mikey. “I’m sorry.” But the Ogre didn’t seem the least bit bothered, and that just made Mikey feel worse about it. “Just make sure you stay away from that… that thing that captured us. Trust me-you don’t want to know what happens if he touches you.”
Mikey shivered, which made his afterglow flicker like a failing lightbulb. To be extinguished. To not… be…
In life, people feared it. In Everlost, souls denied the possibility-but it was always in the back of Mikey’s mind, lurking among thoughts of hell and the distant memory of pain. Mikey feared the light because he wasn’t ready to be judged, if indeed he would be. However, that was a fear he knew he would overcome when he was ready.
… But the fear of not existing at all? He doubted he’d ever get over that.
A few hours later, after it got dark, the scar wraith returned with a broken flashlight that cast its beam only in Everlost. He shined it in their eyes. “Third degree,” he said. “Age-old technique of interrogation.” Then he sat down in the chair with a bucket of chicken, and ate it in front of them. “Hungry are ya? It’s like my grandma always used to say…” Then he went on eating without finishing the thought. The way he talked, one was never quite sure when he was done, because nothing he ever said was entirely complete. His words kind of trailed off, leaving a person waiting for more. It made Mikey just want to slap him-but he knew that slapping a scar wraith was not a good idea. He’d be extinguished in an instant.
Mikey was thankful that it was living-world chicken, because he couldn’t smell it, and even if the wraith threw it to him, he wouldn’t be able to eat it, or even catch it-it would pass right through him like everything else in the living world. Still, watching him eat it all right down to the bone was a little bit torturous. Third degree, indeed.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” the wraith said, his mouth full of food. “Because if you don’t…”
Mikey wasn’t sure if anything he could say would win their freedom, but staying silent on principle would definitely not help the situation. The wraith took another bite of chicken and washed it down with whiskey straight from the bottle. It made Mikey wonder if the man’s liver had also crossed.
“There was a train,” Mikey said.
The wraith leaned forward, the rocking chair reaching its limit. “Go on.”
“It was heading west. We were chasing it.”
“Why?”
“To rescue someone.”
“Do you expect me to believe that?”
“Why would I lie?”
“Because it’s what ghosts do,” the wraith said. “Ghosts are the best liars. You have to be if you’re gonna lie to death, and to yourself, making yourself think you’re still alive.” He pointed an accusing chicken bone at him. “But I know what you are. You’re all demons, up to no good. And you know what they say about demons…” But apparently he didn’t know, because that’s all he said.
“We can’t be both demons and ghosts,” Mikey pointed out. “We’re either one or the other.”
“You’re whatever I say you are, so you can just shut up about it.”
And then Mikey realized something. “You’re not convinced we’re real, are you?” Mikey smiled in spite of himself. “They’ve been telling you that you’re crazy, and you still wonder if maybe they’re right!”
“Now you’re making me angry,” the wraith said. “And you know what I do to ghosts that make me angry!”
Mikey took a step away from the bars just in case, then said, “No, what do you do?”
The wraith stood, took a long swig from his bottle, and eyed Mikey in that sideways way with his Everlost eye. The moon came out from behind a cloud, and it made that crossed side of his face glow-almost like the glow of an Afterlight, but not quite. “You’re a wise guy,” he said. “I don’t like wise guys.”
“Mooooon!” said the Ogre. “Tranquility…” Then he pointed at the full moon. “Neil Armstrong walked in a Sea of Tranquility.” Then he added, “It’s made of cheese. But you have to take off the plastic before you put it on your burger.”
Mikey sighed.
“What’s his story?” the wraith asked.
“He’s chocolate,” Mikey said.
“I can see that,” snapped the wraith.
“Why is he chocolate?”
“Because it’s all he can remember of himself.” Mikey thought that the wraith would ask for more, but he seemed satisfied with the answer.
“You boys got names, or do you just…?”
“I’m Mikey. This is Nick.”
“Clarence,” he said. “Can’t say that I’m pleased to meet you.”
“No,” said Mikey. “The displeasure is mine.”
That made Clarence laugh. He sat back down, drank some, ate some, rocked some, and finally said: “If you’re real-and I think you are-you’re gonna tell me how to make other people see you.”
“We can’t do that,” said Mikey.
Clarence didn’t seem bothered. “Guess you’ll stay in there forever, then…”
Mikey rattled the cage in frustration. “We can’t do everything!”
“But you can do some things. You can make yourself look like a monster. All those claws and bulging eyes, like you did when I first caught you.” He leaned all the way back in the chair. “Do it again.”
“No! I’m not a circus monkey.”
“Well, seeing as you are in a cage,” said Clarence, “maybe that’s exactly what you are…”
“I wanna see the monkey!” said the Ogre, thrilled at the prospect. “Mikey, be a monkey, aw, pleeeeze!”
Mikey ignored him. Not just because he didn’t want to be a monkey, but also because he couldn’t. Like a kid doodling in a notebook, Mikey was great at monsters, and twisted miscreations, but drawing up something real was beyond him. A monkey-faced lizard-thing was probably the best that he could do.
“Listen to me,” said Mikey, trying his best to keep his temper under control. “The girl we’re trying to rescue is a skinjacker. That means she can prove we’re real. She can possess anyone, and that will make people believe you.”
Clarence looked doubtful. “You’re making a joke, aren’t you? Having a laugh at my expense. You watch out, because… because.. .”
“Because what?”
Clarence stood up, hurling the bucket of chicken and his bottle far into the living world. “ Because I don’t know what!” Then he started pacing back and forth, almost tripping over his own half-dead foot as he did. “Now that I got you, I don’t know what to do with you! All I know is that I can’t let you go-not now and not ever.” Then he looked off toward the moon, like it held some answer. “I can’t go back to panhandling, and benches, and all those eyes that won’t look at me. I can’t go back to being what the living people see. You’re my ticket
… my ticket to… to…” Then Clarence collapsed back into the chair, buried his head in his hands, and began to sob. “I don’t know where, I don’t know… I don’t…” He sobbed to himself for a while, like he forgot they were even there. Then the sobs faded into snores. The wraith was asleep.
“Can we go now?” the Ogre asked.
Mikey couldn’t get mad at him anymore. “No, Nick,” he said. “I’m sorry, but no.” He gently patted his hand on Nick’s soft shoulder. When he took his hand back, it was covered in a thin layer of chocolate
… soft shoulder…
The moment the truth dawned on Mikey, he realized what an idiot he had been-how narrow his own thinking was. If Allie were here, she would have thought of it right away. Even Nick would have figured it out if he were his old self.
“Yes!” said Mikey. “Yes, Nick, you can go. You can walk out of this cage right now!”
“Okay,” s
aid the Ogre. Then he stepped forward, then took another step, pushing himself up against the bed frames… then forced himself through, like fudge pushed through a screen. For a moment, he stood there halfway in, halfway out with the brass and steel of the cage right in the middle of him. “Feels funny,” he said. Then he took one more step and he was outside the cage, leaving chocolate dripping from the frame.
“You did it!”
“Yes. Your turn now!”
But Mikey knew he couldn’t squeeze through any more than he could become a circus monkey.
That’s when Clarence woke up and panicked. He stood, the chair flying out from behind him and tumbling to the ground. “What? How did you? Don’t you…”
Mikey leaned as close as he could to Nick and whispered, “Don’t let him touch you.”
But Clarence seemed more afraid of the Ogre touching him. “Stand back! Stand back or I swear I’ll…” Then Clarence turned and ran back to the farmhouse.
“Go,” said Mikey. “Go and find Allie. You can do it. I know you can. Just follow the tracks.”
“Follow the tracks to Allie,” repeated the Ogre.
“Think about her,” Mikey told him. “Think about her as much as you can. It will help you to remember!”
“Allie,” said the Ogre. “We met in the dead forest. Only it wasn’t dead.” For a moment, there was more shape in the Ogre’s face, cheekbones and a firmer chin. A different shade of brown in his eyes. It lasted for only a moment, but then it was gone. “Find Allie,” the Ogre repeated. “Follow the tracks.”
The door of the farmhouse banged open again, and Clarence came out holding a sawed off shotgun-which was only sawed off in the living world. In Everlost the barrel was hard and solid and pointing right at the Ogre.
“Don’t move… don’t move or I’ll… I’ll…”
If the touch of a scar wraith could extinguish you, could the blast of the scar wraith’s shotgun do the job too? Mikey didn’t want to find out.
“Run, Nick!”
Nick did what he was told. He ran, and although Clarence aimed at him, he didn’t fire. In a moment the Chocolate Ogre had disappeared into the night.
“Damn it all to purgatory!” shouted Clarence and aimed the shotgun at Mikey, who put his hands up.
“If you shoot me, you’ll never know.”
“Never know what?”
“Everything,” Mikey said. “All the things you want to know.”
Slowly Clarence lowered the weapon. “Tell me,” he said. Then he went to get the toppled chair, set it upright and sat down again, laying the half-dead shotgun across his lap. “Tell me.”
“Okay,” said Mikey. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything, just like you said. Everything there is to know from the very beginning. And if I don’t like what I hear, well, let’s just say…” Then he stroked the shotgun like a favorite pet sitting in his lap.
Mikey sat down in the middle of the cage, took a moment to compose himself, and began.
“More than a hundred years ago, my sister and I were hit by a train as we were walking home from school…”
CHAPTER 11
Chocolate Reign
N ick, Nick, Nick, Nick.
The Chocolate Ogre knew very few things for sure.
Allie, Allie, Allie, Allie.
So the things he did know, he held onto with a passion.
Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, Mikey.
He found that being a spirit of limited self-awareness, while frustrating, was also very liberating. He felt a freedom he suspected he had never felt in his previous life. He had few expectations, and fewer fears, and whenever he felt anxious it passed quickly like a summer storm cloud, too small to give rain.
All in all, it was good being the Chocolate Ogre, although he didn’t feel much like an Ogre. Ogres have a bad temper, they ruin things, they chase people. Ogre was the wrong word. He felt more like a Chocolate Bunny. He told Mikey that, and Mikey instructed him never to say that again. “Bunnies are timid and fearful, and stupid,” Mikey had said. “You’re none of those things.”
“Yes, I am,” Nick had insisted. “I’m stupid!”
“No, you’re not,” Mikey had told him. “You’re just not yourself. That doesn’t make you stupid, it just makes you… muddled.”
It only served to confuse him, because if he wasn’t himself, then who was he?
Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick.
He ran from the cage and the farmhouse and the crazy scarred man, happily reciting the three things he knew that he knew. He kept to the train tracks as Mikey had said. They were easy to follow because the tracks had crossed into Everlost.
Allie, Allie, Allie, Allie.
He was content to live in the moment, but he sensed a certain sadness deep within himself. A longing for all the things he had once been, whatever those things were. He knew he had once been very clever. He had led hundreds of Afterlights, and, in fact the train he was following had once belonged to him. Mikey had said so.
Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, Mikey.
While he couldn’t grasp the memory of these things, he knew that who he had once been, was not gone completely. The memories were still out there, divided among the people he knew and loved. Seeing Mikey had brought some of those memories back to him.
Allie, Allie, Allie, Allie.
And seeing Allie would bring back even more. Only in gathering those memories, could he gather back all the pieces of the boy called Nick.
Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary.
The name stopped him in mid-stride. It had come out of nowhere-and he knew that nowhere often spat forth some very important things. A feeling came over him then, warm enough to melt him inside, but cold enough to harden him solid. It was joy poured hot into chilly foreboding. The feelings blended until he couldn’t tell one from another-and when he looked at his hands, he could, for the first time, see something resembling fingernails.
Nick, Mary, Nick, Mary, Nick, Mary.
He felt a fluttering inside his chest that he mistook for an air pocket-probably left from when he pushed himself through the cage. He had no way of knowing that the fluttering was a single beat from the fleeting memory of a heart.
CHAPTER 12
Universal Justice
M ikey told Clarence everything he knew. The crossing of himself and Mary into Everlost, his many years at the center of the earth, and the many years it took to get out. He told Clarence of his time on the ghost ship, and how he was the McGill, the most feared monster of Everlost. Mikey told him about Allie, and although he tried to hide how deep his feelings for her were, Clarence saw right through it.
“‘Love is the finest and foulest thing in the world. It will drive a man to greatness even while driving him into despair.’” Clarence proclaimed. “To quote the famous philosopher…”
“Which famous philosopher?” asked Mikey.
“If I knew, I would have told you.”
Mikey knew both the fine and foul sides of love. It was his love of Allie that had lifted him up from darkness; letting him see a better way than the way of the monster. But once that love took hold, it also left a fear in him, which always lingered in the back of his mind, and made him intensely jealous. It was the fear of losing her.
“Love turns a heart to crystal,” said Mikey. “Much more valuable, but much more fragile.”
Clarence put down his bottle. “Who said that?”
“I did,” said Mikey. “Just now.”
Clarence raised his Everlost eyebrow. “You oughta be a poet.”
Mikey was very pleased with himself. It had been a long time since anyone complimented him on anything he said or did.
“How’s this?” Clarence said, and then he held up his Everlost hand, moving it before him as if the words were written in the air. “The face that launched a thousand ships… never heard of hurricane season.”
Clarence laughed so hard it made Mikey laugh too. They were still laughing when the policemen came across the weedy field toward
them-or more accurately toward Clarence, since they couldn’t see Mikey, or the cage that held him.
“Looks like you’re having quite a party,” the bigger of the two men said. “Wish I could be in there with you.” Then the two smirked to each other.
Mikey’s first thought was that they had been skinjacked, until he realized that “in there with you” meant in Clarence’s head. They took him for a lunatic talking to himself.
“I’m sorry but this here is private property,” said the larger officer, clearly the leader of the two. “We’re going to have to ask you to leave.”
“You’re renting!” shouted Mikey. “Tell them you’re renting this place. They won’t be able to kick you out until they check.”
“You shut up!” shouted Clarence. “I don’t need a freak like you telling me what to do!”
It was the wrong thing to say, because the officer thought that Clarence was talking to him. The man calmly reached his hand down to the hilt of his baton, and the other officer unsnapped the strap on his holster. “Now, none of us wants an incident,” said the lead officer. “We could arrest you for trespassing, but it would be easier for everyone if you just moved on. You understand?”
“I’m renting,” said Clarence. “Four hundred bucks a month. Check it out with my landlord if you don’t believe me.”
The officers looked to each other, then back at the dilapidated farmhouse, which, from their point of view probably wouldn’t be worth four dollars a month, much less four hundred.
Clarence glanced at Mikey, more resentful than thankful, then took a couple of steps toward the officers, staggering as he went. Mikey figured Clarence was drunk most of the time Mikey had been in the cage-but he’d never seen Clarence stumbling drunk.
“Go on-get out of here, and maybe I’ll pretend this harassment never happened.”
“Tell you what,” said the lead officer. “Come with us, we’ll check out your story, and if it’s true, we will bring you back here, no harm no foul.”
“I got rights,” Clarence said, “and I believe you are violating them right now.”
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