"Please," said Milos, "let me teach you. Let me show you some of the things I know. I promise you will not be disappointed!"
Allie shook her head, then nodded, but then shook her head again. Finally she settled on telling him, "I'll think about it." Then she turned and hurried back to the others, for once glad to be in the company of Moose and Squirrel.
It was hard for Afterlights to hide at night. Their afterglow always gave them away. Mikey just wanted some time alone, to brood, maybe sit on a rock, look at the moon, and let all those unpleasant feelings work themselves out, if indeed they ever would. The problem was, the only rock large enough to sit on was living-world, and Mikey had to continually pull himself up out from it. It was annoying.
Then, the last person he wanted to see emerged through a tree trunk, easily finding him by his glow. Mikey wasn't sure whether to stare Milos down or just ignore him. So he did one, then the other.
"Allie is worried about you," Milos said.
"I really don't care," grumbled Mikey.
"This does not surprise me."
"Why is it your business anyway?" Mikey snapped. When Milos had no response to that, Mikey said, "Tell her I'm fine, and I'll come back when I feel like it."
Milos lifted his feet to keep himself from sinking, but didn't leave. He just regarded Mikey with a detached kind of curiosity.
"Why do you hold her back?" Milos asked.
"Excuse me?"
Milos took a step closer. "She could go so much further. She could be so much more. But you--you keep her from using her skills. You are very much an anchor around her neck. This is very selfish." Mikey came off of his rock to face him. "You don't know what you're talking about!"
But Milos remained calm, and sure of himself. "Is it my words that anger you," he asked, "or is it because you know I speak the truth?"
If there was any hope that Mikey might warm to Milos-- maybe even become a reluctant friend, that hope was now gone. "Allie and I ... Allie and I care for each other. We've been through a lot together--you have no idea!"
"You are right," said Milos, "but I do know that she bears a certain sadness. You must see it."
Yes, of course Mikey had seen it, but he wasn't about to admit it to this skinjacking outsider. "Like I said, you don't know anything."
"You claim to care for her, but I do not see this. If you cared for her, perhaps you would see that your destinies now lie on different paths."
"Do not anger me!" Mikey roared. "I am not to be trifled with!"And he heard in his own voice a roughness and a rawness he hadn't heard in a long time. Overtones of the McGill.
Milos put his hands up in surrender, as if he were backing down--but Mikey knew this was just another calculated move. "Then pardon me." Milos said, "I meant no disrespect."
"You say that a lot," Mikey pointed out, looking him right in those weirdly distracting speckled eyes. "But I think disrespect is exactly what you mean."
"I am only thinking of what is best for Allie," said Milos with a gaze that penetrated uncomfortably deep. "Are you?"
Then he left Mikey alone with his rock, his thoughts, and the moon. * * *
The next day, they came to the town of Lebanon, Tennessee, and again Milos asked Allie if she wanted to come skinjacking with him. She broached the topic as gently as she could with Mikey.
"There are things he can teach me about skinjacking," Allie told him. "Things that could probably help us."
"Why are you telling me?" Mikey snapped. "If you want to go, then go. Why should I care?"
"I'd feel much better about it if you weren't acting so childish."
"Maybe I don't want you to feel better about it."
Allie clenched her fists and growled in frustration. "I swear, Mikey, sometimes ..."
"Sometimes what? Sometimes you wonder why you put up with me?"
Allie took a moment to calm herself down. "I know why I put up with you. What I don't understand is why you don't trust me."
Mikey looked down and aimlessly kicked the ground. The living world rippled like waves in a pond. "I trust you," he said, his voice a low grumble. "Go learn something useful."
"Thank you." She gave him a gentle peck on the cheek, then went off to join Milos.
Once they were gone, Moose and Squirrel approached him.
"Why don't you come with ush, Mikey?" Moose asked.
"Yeah, yeah," said Squirrel. "Skinjacking can be fun to watch, too. Especially the way we do it."
And although tagging along with the two of them was the last thing he wanted to do, he went along, because it was better than spending the day thinking of Allie in the company of Milos.
Mikey had to admit, watching Moose and Squirrel skinjack that day was entertaining, in a blood-sport sort of way. The were both ingeniously inventive, and decidedly deranged.
First they skinjacked two older teens who were on their way to summer school, but instead used them to get into an R-rated movie. Then, when they got bored with the movie, they skinjacked two policemen and took their squad car for a joyride, leaving the policemen and the car in a ditch, to wonder how they had gotten there.
Each time they skinjacked, they left their fleshies stuck with whatever bad situation they had created, and walked away scott-free. Hit-and-run jackers, he dubbed them.
"We're just having fun," they complained, when Mikey suggested that their activities were depraved. But then, who was he to talk? He had been the McGill--yet even though he had perpetrated a good many mean-spirited, spiteful things, his depravity had a little more class.
Next, Moose and Squirrel went into a bar, got two middle-aged fleshies exceptionally drunk, then peeled out of them just before they were ready to puke.
"No harm, no foul!" said Squirrel. "Right? Right?"
"Yeah," added Moose, "They were gonna do it anyway."
Mikey concluded that these two were the lowest bottom-feeders he'd ever had the misfortune to know. "Does Milos know you're abusing fleshies?" "Milosh and ush got a 'don't ashk don't tell' polishy," said Moose.
"Yeah, yeah--and anyway, we don't abuse no one--we just play hard, that's all."
Mikey only hoped that when it was finally their turn to go into the light, their pit would be deeper than his.
When Moose and Squirrel skinjacked a couple of nuns, and took them on a shoplifting spree, Mikey decided it was time to call it a day. He crossed through a forest that he hoped would take him back to their makeshift campsite by the highway. The forest had quite a few trees that had crossed into Everlost, and so provided him with spots to rejuvenate, and maybe regain some self-respect. His spirit felt greasy after the way he had spent the day.
There was a house in the woods--a shack, really, but sturdy and cared for. Evidence of ash in the living world suggested it had burned down, but whoever lived there must have loved the place, because it had crossed into Everlost. The sight of it filled Mikey with sorrow. A ghost house with no ghost. What could be sadder? Then he realized why the house bothered him. This shack was him without Allie. Solitary and unvisited. An unknown artifact waiting for eternity to free it from its vigil.
It was at that moment he realized that his spirit was truly human once more. For he no longer remembered how to be alone without being lonely. In her groundbreaking book on skinjacking You Don't Know Jack, Allie the Outcast writes:
"Forget all you've heard about skinjackers; forget the idiotic ramblings of other so-called sources of Everlost information. Skinjackers are just like any other Afterlights. They can be honorable or dishonorable, smart or stupid-- it all depends on the individual. There are two things that hold true for all skinjackers, though. The first is a driving, almost instinctive need to skinjack. The second is the overwhelming burden that such a power puts on us. With such a power, the potential exists for incredibly good deeds, and for acts of unthinkable evil. I think it's fortunate for both the living and the dead that most skinjackers are too clueless to do much of either."
CHAPTER 11
Surfin
g Tennessee
In her days on the Sulphur Queen, Allie had pretended to teach the McGill how to skinjack. Of course her lessons were bogus--skinjacking can't be taught--but it can be perfected, and Milos was a master. He could do things Allie had never even thought to do. Things she never dared to do!
At first, he just showed off. They came across a basketball court where a choose-up game was in full swing. He skinjacked the player with the ball, then passed to another player--but Milos got to the other player before the ball did, skinjacked him, and caught his own pass. Allie watched, laughing in spite of herself, as he bounced himself around the court, becoming one player, then another, then another, passing the ball to himself, stealing the ball from himself, shooting and scoring. Allie got dizzy trying to keep track of where and who he was.
By the time he was done, the players were all a bit dazed and confused, not quite sure what had just occurred.
"Jill and I would play many sports together," Milos told her. "We would jump from player to player--that was always part of the game." The memory brought a smile, but a measure of pain to Milos's expression.
"Did you love her?" Allie dared to ask.
Milos took a few moments before answering. "We came upon a wedding once," he told her. "We skinjacked the bride and groom."
"You didn't!"
"Well, I skinjacked the groom, but Jill's legs were cold."
Allie looped that back through her mind. "Do you mean she got cold feet?"
"Yes, she got cold feet. Instead of the bride, she went to hide in the flower girl. That should have told me something, you think?"
"I'm sorry, Milos." Then a silence fell between them that was decidedly awkward.
They made their way to the heart of the town, and found a street fair in full swing taking up all three blocks of Lebanon, Tennessee's main street.
"For your first lesson, I think I will teach you to surf."
Allie laughed. "Well, as the nearest beach is hundreds of miles away, I sincerely doubt that."
"Not that kind of surfing," he told her. Then in a flash he was gone. Allie thought she saw him leaping into a kid eating ice cream, but the kid just continued on.
"Milos?"
"Over here!" His voice was coming from somewhere far away. She looked down the street, and finally caught sight of him--he wasn't skinjacking now, he was just standing in the middle of the street fair, two whole blocks away, waving at her. How on earth had he done that?
Then he vanished again, and a few seconds later, there he was standing right beside her.
"Boo!" he said, and she jumped in spite of herself.
"Did you just ... teleport?"
"More like tele-phoned," Milos answered. "Wires conduct electrical impulses, yes? Well, the living conduct us."
"I don't understand."
"I call it soul-surfing. It is a very good way to travel, when there are many people nearby." When Allie first learned to skinjack--before she knew what it was called-- she had called it body-surfing. But this feat of relaying oneself across a crowd in seconds--this truly deserved to be called surfing. She wondered if it felt as invigorating as riding a wave. Milos looked around at the modest crowd of the little street fair. "Okay, your turn."
"Wh-what?" Allie sputtered. "I can't do that! I wouldn't know where to start."
"Start with her." Milos pointed to a woman sitting on a bench, reading a newspaper.
"Make as if you mean to skinjack her, but don't take full control. Instead, you must use her to slingshot to the next person, then the next, then the next. Once you get a rhythm, you can work your way to the end of any crowd in seconds."
He climbed into a passing pedestrian, vanished, then a few seconds later appeared across the street. "Try it!" he called. "From there to here. Short hop."
Allie leaped into the woman on the bench, but lingered too long, and had to peel herself out, which never happened quickly--it was like peeling off a glove. Since Allie didn't immediately put her to sleep, the woman knew something funny was going on. She stood up, looked around, and walked away, unnerved.
Milos had already surfed back and was beside her.
"Well, that didn't work," said Allie.
"Because you took hold. Do not stay long enough to hear the thoughts--just long enough to get a small glimpse through the eyes, then push off."
Allie tried it again with a different person, but still stayed an instant too long, and got drawn in. Milos was patient with her, and encouraging. "Think of Tarzan," he said. "It is like Tarzan swinging on ropes." Then he beat his chest and made a Tarzan yell that made Allie laugh. She tried it again, and the third time was the charm. She began to jump out before she was done jumping in, and it worked! She pushed off from one person to another. Images passed before her like snapshots, but all unrelated and random. Every fleshie was looking in a slightly different direction, and saw things differently. Colors changed, eyesight changed. Each person she surfed was focusing on something different within their field of vision--but now that Allie had the rhythm she could keep herself moving. She began to feel dizzy, and finally took root in a fleshie to stop herself, and--
--nagging nagging nagging--if she doesn't stop nagging I'll go crazy--nagging nagging nagging-- She found herself sitting in a restaurant, holding a spoon and looking across the table at a very old woman.
"Harold? Harold? How's the soup, Harold?" the old woman said to her.
Allie, in the body of the woman's elderly husband, tried to speak, but could only burp.
"Too spicy. I knew it!" Then the old woman called for the waitress.
Allie peeled herself out of Harold the Henpecked Husband, and when she was back in Everlost she made her way out into the street. Once outside, she got her bearings, and realized she had crossed the avenue, turned a corner, and had unexpectedly bounced herself into a delicatessen. Milos found her a few moments later.
"What happened?"
"I guess I got lost."
Milos laughed. "It happens. It is hard to keep a sense of direction, yes? You will get better, it just takes practice."
And so they practiced. It got a bit harder once the crowd thinned, but it just served as a challenge to her. She found that if she pushed off hard enough, she could leap from one person to another who was about ten feet away.
"Moose and Squirrel have been doing this for years, and they can not jump that far," Milos told her. "You are, as they say, a natural!"
After a couple of hours Allie was exhausted. She had surfed her way through hundreds of people--some of them several times, and she had begun to recognize the "signature" of their bodies. "Do they know we're here?" Allie asked Milos. "We're only in them for an instant, but still ... can they sense us the way we sense them?"
Milos raised his eyebrows. "Do you remember when you were alive," he asked, "and you suddenly forgot what you were about to say?"
"Yes ..."
Milos smiled. "Perhaps someone was surfing through you."
The thought gave Allie a shiver. Even though she was no longer in flesh, having surfed through so much of it, her spirit held onto some phantom physical feelings. One of those phantom feelings echoed within her when she looked at Milos, and she shivered again. She resisted the urge to move closer to him, and feel his afterglow mingle with hers. It was, after all, just a phantom feeling, easy to dismiss, wasn't it?
"Congratulations," he said gently. "You are one of the Deadlies now. You are one of us." His smile became wider, and that made her all the more uncomfortable. She turned away.
"In any case, soul-surfing is good for crowded places, and big cities," he said. "I can get through a city faster than anything." Then, with a gentle toss of his head, he said, "Although sometimes I prefer to drive if I can skinjack a good-looking man, with a Ferrari."
Allie shook her head, warding off an unpleasant memory. "I tried to jack and drive once. It didn't end well."
Milos puffed out his chest. "So then I do the driving. You ride shot put." "Shotgun," Allie co
rrected. His butchered expressions always made her smile, but the smile faded quickly. "I still think it's wrong to skinjack people just for fun."
"What makes fun wrong?" he asked. And when she didn't have an answer for him, Milos said, "What we do is right. It is natural--or else why would we be able to do it? If we are skinjackers, we are meant to skinjack."
"We provide a link between Everlost and the living world--perhaps the most important one," Allie insisted. "Maybe we were meant to use it for something important."
"Maybe we were meant to simply enjoy it."
She wanted to argue, but between his easy logic, and his easier smile, she found her argument had no teeth. She looked down to see that, while Milos had continued to shift his feet to keep from sinking, Allie had not, and had sunken into the sidewalk to her ankles. She pulled her feet out, feeling embarrassed that he had caught her ankle-deep.
"In life did you ever do something just for fun?" asked Milos.
"Yes ..."
"So why not be as you were in life? And if it hurts no one, why is it wrong to enjoy skinjacking? This is what we are."
"No, it's what we do!"
"No, Allie, it is what we are." Milos gently put his hand on her shoulder. "It is what you are."
"So was it fun?" Mikey asked.
Allie shrugged, trying, for his sake, to hide how much she had enjoyed the soul-surfing lesson. "It was tiring. I prefer being me, rather than the crowd. What did you do?"
"I took a walk."
"Through town?" She wondered if he had been downtown, and had seen her with Milos. If she were a fleshie she would have flushed at the thought, then she got mad at herself. She had nothing to feel guilty for.
"I went into the woods," he told her. "There's an oak grove where half the trees have crossed over. And in the middle of it I found a house that crossed over too. It would be a nice place to live. That is ... if you wanted to."
"We can't 'live,' "she reminded him.
"No, but we could enjoy our existence here. I'm tired of being a finder. I'm tired of moving around. I'm tired of everything."
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