Knowing how hard it was on Jill, Jix decided to give her a gift.
The Crockett Street tunnel was guarded by two Neons whose routine involved endless knock-knock jokes. Unfortunately they only knew about twenty, and so they just kept repeating the same ones over and over.
“I’ll tell you a new knock-knock joke,” Jix told them, “if you let Jill out the back entrance, and let her return without telling Avalon.”
The two Neons agreed that it would all depend on the joke… and so Jix introduced them to the Interrupting Cow, which is perhaps the only knock-knock joke in existence that is actually funny.
The joke sent the guards into a giggling fit that lasted the better part of an hour, and it bought Jill the right to come and go as she pleased. When Jix told Jill, she was thrilled by the possibility of escaping the dungeon, if only for a while.
“Why don’t you come with me?” Jill asked, but Jix had inserted himself into so many of the Neons’ routines, he knew his absence would be noticed.
“Go skinjack,” he told her, “but I see no need for you to reap.”
“I’ll do what I want,” she answered.
Jill left first thing the next morning for her day on the town, and once she was gone, Jix went about his own day; the same games, the repeated conversations. In this way he maintained a foothold in the routines of as many Neons as he could-because by becoming a cog in the routine, it gave him the power to bring the gearwork to a grinding halt if he wanted to.
After he made his obligatory rounds, he took some time to visit the root cellar, which was the farthest, darkest room in the maze of the Alamo underground. Few places were actually dark down there, because there were so many Afterlights that their glow illuminated most spaces-but this room was where they put all the Interlights captured from the train-those sleeping souls waiting to be born into Everlost. The Interlights gave the Neons the creeps because they didn’t glow, so Jix could go there and not be bothered.
He found the girl he had inadvertently killed, and sat beside her. He had no idea what her real name was, so he called her Inez. Inez was his sister’s name, and it comforted him to think of this girl in that way. As he sat there, he thought about Jill. It intrigued him that she felt no remorse for the souls she had intentionally brought into Everlost, but also troubled him. It troubled him enough to find his own Afterlight dousing the room into darkness, just as Jill said a truly bad feeling would. He practiced it, strobing his light on and off. He couldn’t say he enjoyed it, but as stealth was an important part of being a scout, the ability to feel miserable, and douse his afterglow, was a skill worth knowing.
Then, at a point when his light was fully doused, he realized there was still a glow in the room. He looked up to see Jill standing there at the entrance to the chamber.
“I thought I might find you here,” Jill said. She wove through the sleeping Interlights, and noticed which one Jix sat closest to. “What is it with you and that girl?”
“I stole her life. The least I can do is look after her.”
Jill crossed her arms and shook her head. “I still don’t get you,” she said, which was fine. Jix still wasn’t sure he wanted to be “gotten.” Then Jill sat down beside him. “You promised you would tell me about yourself. So far you haven’t told me a thing.”
Jix had promised her that, but he also hoped the opportunity would never present itself. His specialties were reconnaissance, stalking, and observing. Putting himself out in the open and making himself vulnerable was something he just didn’t do.
“Don’t you dare make me say ‘please,’” Jill said. “I don’t do the P word.”
“Tell me about your day skinjacking.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Did you reap?”
“I said don’t change the subject.”
“You didn’t come to the chamber to find me,” Jix said. “You came to bring a new Interlight, didn’t you? Where did you leave it, in the passageway so that I wouldn’t see?”
Jill looked at him coldly. “I do other things than just reap,” she said. “How do you know I didn’t go to a ball game or eat a lobster dinner?”
“Did you?”
“No,” Jill admitted. “But I didn’t reap, either.” Then she paused and looked away from him. “Maybe it’s like you said; I have better things to do with my ‘hunting instincts.’” She reached out and touched Inez’s hair. It gave off a dark, smooth sheen, reflecting their afterglows. “She has nice hair,” Jill said. “Not all of us are lucky enough to die with nice hair.”
“Now who’s changing the subject?”
She gave him an irritated sigh. “If you must know, I skinjacked a girl in her twenties, which is how old I would be if I wasn’t here. I chose her because she was pregnant, and I wanted to see what it was like to feel a baby kick.”
Jix never dreamed that Jill would have such a thing in mind when she went skinjacking, but he didn’t show her any sign of his surprise.
“I took a long bath,” Jill continued, “… and then I brushed her hair.”
Jix reached out to touch Jill’s hand, but she pulled it away before he could. “Your turn,” she said. “Tell me all the things about yourself that you don’t want me to know.”
Since she didn’t back off, Jix had to keep his word. He wouldn’t lie to her, or tell her half-truths. She would probably know if he did. He told her the truth as clearly and as simply as he could.
“I am the long-distance scout for His Excellency, Yax K’uk Mo’, the Supreme King of the Middle Realm. My mission is to find out if Mary Hightower poses a threat to him, and capture her if I can.”
If Jill was shocked, she didn’t show it. In this way, she was a lot like him. “The Middle Realm?” she asked.
“What you call Everlost.”
“So… there are more like you?”
“There are many Afterlights in the City of Souls… but only one like me.”
Jill smiled. “Good,” she said, then she got up to leave. “As far as secrets go, I’d give that a six out of ten.” Then she added, “I thought you were going to tell me you were an alien.”
The next day, one of the Neons’ lookouts found a stray Afterlight.
It wasn’t one of the train refugees; it was a Greensoul, a new spirit, freshly woken from some accidental crossing nine months before.
“He was just wandering around, calling for his mama,” the lookout told everyone. The Neons all laughed at the poor kid, and his lip quivered. He couldn’t have been any older than six. He had a runny nose, which would now continue to run for as long as he stayed in Everlost.
Avalon stomped up to him. “Give me your coin!”
“I don’t got money,” the boy said.
Avalon turned to the Bopper-one of the more intimidating Neons. “Take it from him!” But Jix firmly grabbed the Bopper’s shoulder.
“I’ll do it.” Jix said, and since Jix had become a regular in the Bopper’s daily poker game, he politely said, “Oh, sure, Jix.”
“I didn’t ask you!” Avalon snapped.
“But I can grab the coin without going into the light,” Jix reminded him.
Avalon never changed his unpleasant expression. “All right, then.”
Jix knelt down to the boy. “Do I scare you?” Jix asked.
The boy shook his head, then nodded. “Only a little,” the boy said.
“I won’t hurt you,” Jix told him gently, “but they might, if they don’t get what they want.”
“Yeah, but I don’t got money, just some tissues in my pocket,” the boy whispered.
“You wanna see a magic trick?” Jix asked. The boy’s answer was a wet sniff. Jix then told him to take out his tissues.
“Now,” Jix said, “unfold them.”
The boy did, and as the tissues spread apart, a coin dropped right into Jix’s open hand. The boy gasped. “Where did that come from?”
“Magic,” Jix said, because indeed it was.
The boy grinned,
and wiped his nose.
Avalon had no patience for this, or anything else for that matter. “Put it in my shirt pocket,” he ordered Jix. Jix went over to Avalon and gave him a wide smile.
“Here you go…”
Then he grabbed Avalon’s hand and slapped the coin right into the center of his palm, forcing Avalon’s fingers closed over it.
“ What? No!”
Avalon struggled, but Jix held Avalon’s fist closed. Everyone was so shocked, no one knew what to do.
“No! No!” Avalon shouted. “I’m not ready! I’m not ready!” But apparently he was, because he looked off toward something that no one else could see. No one, that is, but Jix and Jill, for only skinjackers can see someone else’s tunnel. A look of resignation came over Avalon, and he heaved a heavy sigh. “All right, then…” And before everyone’s eyes, he lurched forward, and vanished in a rainbow twinkling of light.
There was absolute silence. No one spoke until a kid called Foul-Mouth Fabian declared something holy that wasn’t holy at all.
“He sent Avalon uptown!” someone said. “What do we do? What do we do?” But without a leader, no one could agree.
“Send Jix down!”
“Throw Jix out!”
Jill looked at Jix incredulously. “You’re crazy,” she said. “You’ve lost your mind!”
But Jix just winked at her, and said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Ask Wurlitzer!”
Everyone fell silent again.
“We can’t ask Wurlitzer,” the Bopper finally said. “You gave Avalon the only coin!”
“There’s one more,” Jix reminded him, then he looked to Little Richard. Everyone’s eyes turned to the kid, and he backed away.
“Not my problem,” Little Richard said. But it was. The Bopper pointed to the bank, and Little Richard went to pick it up. Turning the bank upside down, he shook it. The coin just rattled around inside, as it always did. “See?” Little Richard said. “It’s not going to-” And then the coin fell out of the tiny hole and onto the dusty ground.
“No way!” said Foul-Mouth Fabian, although he did squeeze in a third word in the middle.
“Wow…,” said Jill.
“Just like my mother said,” Jix told her. “Todo tiene su proposito. Everything has its purpose.” It had been a wild gamble, but he had a feeling that the coin was waiting for him. It frightened him that he had been right, almost as much as it would have frightened him if he had been wrong.
The Bopper, now taking the role of High Priest, carefully lifted the coin up in his fingertips and went over to Wurlitzer. Then, with his free hand, he pulled off the quilt. Wurlitzer’s neon glow lit the room in shades of yellow, green, and red. The moment the jukebox was revealed, the Neons fell to their knees, including the little Greensoul boy, savvy enough to get with the program.
The Bopper dropped the coin into the machine, and it rolled around, then dropped into the coin box with a clink. Then he said, “Oh, mighty Wurlitzer, what should we do with Jix and Jill?”
“Avalon already asked that,” Jix reminded him. “It said to let us go.”
“That was then,” said the Bopper. “But things change.”
Then he pushed a button, and Wurlitzer came to life, its record bank spinning like a wheel of fortune. Everyone waited in anticipation, and Jix grinned, wondering what song it would choose.
In her book Caution: This Means You!, Mary Hightower has this to say about Objects of Power, or O.O.P. s:
“One may, on occasion, come across Objects of Power. These are, like many things in Everlost, best left alone. They usually come in the form of a machine that has crossed over-often due to sunspot activity-never because someone loves it. Nobody loves an Object of Power. Thus, love is exactly what it craves. It will, however, settle for subservience. There are those who feel that these objects are possessed by some unknowable spirit, but I say they are merely filled with some faint leftover consciousness of creation, like the irritating static spark when you grasp a door handle on an exceptionally dry day.
Foolish Afterlights will argue until the end of time whether such objects are forces of good or evil-but I know the answer. They are neither. These so-called Objects of Power serve no one but themselves. Therefore if an entity or object:
A) takes something of value from you,
B) claims to know things it can’t possibly know, and
C) draws followers like rotting meat in the living world draws flies; then lift your slowly sinking feet out of the earth, and run as fast, and as far, as you can, for the thing in question will never do you any good.”^ 1
CHAPTER 24
Face the Music
T he smile lingered on Jix’s face, his mouth refusing to accept what his ears were telling him. When you’re alone, and life is making you lonely, You can always go… Downtown!
The Neons all looked to one another-this was one song it didn’t take a high priest to interpret. They all listened to a mockingly upbeat woman repeat the word “Downtown” in almost every line as she sang about the city’s energy and itsneon signs.
“It said Neons!” Someone shouted! “The song knows our name!” and they turned to Jix and Jill with sudden singular purpose, becoming a raging mob.
The friendships that Jix had formed, the way he had delicately woven himself into the Neons’ social structure-none of that mattered now… because Wurlitzer had spoken.
“Downtown!” shouted the Neons. “They’re going Downtown!”
And all at once Jix realized his folly. It was the coins! They should have been a tip-off. Anything truly helpful-anything truly good -would never demand an Afterlight’s coin. Such theft was reserved for monsters and dictators, and, yes even “His Excellency,” who, when it came down to it, was not excellent at all, only power hungry.
As the song reached its chorus, both he and Jill were grabbed by dozens of maniacal hands that practically tore them apart as they lifted them off the ground. Downtown! The song sang, Everything’s waiting for you…
And as Jix looked one last time at that shining, faceless jukebox, he couldn’t help but feel that it was laughing at him.
The Neons had to take Jix and Jill up before they could push them down. For the first time since the attack on the train, all the Neons climbed the stone steps and walked out through the gift shop wall into the Vortex of the Aggravated Warrior. It was daytime, and although the Alamo was open, it was a slow day. Only a few tourists milled about the grounds in the living world-and none of them within reach of either Jix or Jill. There were so many hands holding them, they could barely move, much less reach out toward a fleshie and skinjack their way to freedom.
“Take them out the front gate,” the Bopper ordered, then he turned to Jix, offering a moment of sympathy. “Sorry,” he said, “but Wurlitzer knows best.” Jill spat at him, which did not help the situation. He scowled at her then turned to the Neons and said, “We’ll throw them into the river. That way, they’ll be sure to sink fast.”
Then, as they were carried out through the Alamo’s main gate, Jix saw a glorious sight.
Boy scouts!
At least twenty of them, milling around just outside the main entrance. Never had Jix been so pleased to see living, breathing human beings.
“Do you see that?” he called to Jill.
“I’m way ahead of you!” she answered.
The Neons, who never paid much attention to the living, just walked right through the mob of scouts, and the moment they did, Jix pushed himself into the first fleshie he came in contact with and – candy / candy toys candy / gift shop / twenty bucks / how many toys / how much candy / and a keychain with my name too He quickly put the scout to sleep, took full control of his body, then looked around to orient himself. It never ceased to amaze him how the same spot could be so full of turmoil in Everlost, and yet be so calm in the living world. No sign of the Neons anywhere around them. He could just walk away from here, and never have to face any of this again if he wanted to. Jix looked around a
nd caught sight of another scout looking just as disoriented. “Jill?”
The other kid nodded. “In the flesh.”
A few other kids in troop thirteen looked at them funny. Jix motioned for Jill to step away with him, for a moment of privacy.
“Hey,” said one of the other kids. “Scoutmaster Garber wants us to wait here!” But fortunately the scoutmaster was at the ticket booth, too busy to notice.
Once they were far enough away for no one to hear them, Jill said, “The boy scout look suits you. Now let’s get outta here.”
And although he knew it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, Jix said, “I’m going back.”
“What?” She stared at him, shaking her head. “No! No way! Not this time. If you go back, you go alone.”
“Don’t you see- the Neons don’t know about skinjackers! ”
“Yeah,” said Jill. “Lucky for us.”
“More lucky than you think!” Then without any further explanation, Jix peeled out of the scout and returned to Everlost, leaving both the scout and Jill completely bewildered.
In Everlost, the Neons were at a total loss. As far as they were concerned, the two prisoners simply vanished into thin air. It was at least ten seconds until someone asked the obvious question: “Uh… where’d they go?”
“I don’t know,” said the Bopper, “but I don’t like it.”
Then, just as quickly as he’d vanished, Jix appeared, standing ten yards away.
“Grab him!” yelled the Bopper, but when they tried, he vanished once more into a flurry of live people, only to appear somewhere else a few moments later.
Now the Neons were scared-which is exactly what Jix was counting on. Then an exceptionally annoyed Jill appeared beside him. Jix was counting on that, too.
“Wh… what are you?” someone dared to ask.
It was Jill who answered. “He is the son of the jaguar gods,” she said in a commanding voice, “and the jaguar gods are very… very. .. angry!”
Eyes widened, jaws dropped, and some of the smaller kids ran back into the Alamo to hide, but the rest were too shocked to move at all. In fact they were so frozen in place, they were sinking in up to their ankles.
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