“In that case,” said the Haunter, “your lesson is over.” Then he snapped his fingers, and there came a thundering that had nothing to do with the weather.
The steel door behind them slammed itself shut. Then, down a flight of old wooden stairs came a dozen figures wrapped from head to toe in black robes, and they headed straight for Nick. Before he knew what was happening, dark gloved hands lifted him off the ground.
“Stop! What are you doing!”
“The price of failure,” the Haunter said calmly, “is an eternity to think about it.”
And then they turned Nick upside down, and plunged him headfirst into a pickle barrel that had crossed over into Everlost along with the building. It was still full of slimy saltwater brine. Then they slammed the cover back on, and Nick found himself submerged in salty, liquid darkness. For a horrible instant, he thought he might drown there, but realized he couldn’t. The brine was in him and around him. It sloshed through the place where his insides should be, it filled his mouth and nose, yet still he did not drown, and never would.
Allie stared at the barrel paralyzed with disbelief, listening to Nick’s angry, muffled screams from within as the dark-robed figures nailed the lid on tight.
So this was why no one ever returned from the Haunter. How could she have been so stupid to take this risk? To make her friends take the risk? I did this to Nick, was all Allie could think. I made him come here.
Allie looked at all the other barrels. Were those barrels full of others who failed the test, unable to die, yet unable to escape, left to pickle in their own thoughts for all time?
“The other boy next,” the Haunter said.
Lief shook his head. “No. No, I don’t want to! I just want to go.”
“Bring me the stone and you can go.”
He looked at the faces of the kids around him, but they didn’t seem to have faces beneath the dark wrappings.
“I don’t like this game,” Lief cried. “I don’t want to play.”
“Let him go!” Allie demanded. “What kind of monster are you?”
The Haunter only gave her a single-toothed smile, then turned to Lief again.
“The stone.”
With no choice, Lief went to the stone, and tried to lift it. He grunted in frustration with each grasp, and Allie suddenly found herself thinking of that stupid arcade game, where a claw tried to scoop up a stuffed animal. The claw almost always came up empty-handed. And so did Lief.
“Nooooo!”
The Haunter’s goons were on him, and although Lief and Allie tried to fight them, there were just too many of them. Lief was plunged into another barrel, kicking and screaming and sloshing brine across the floor, until they nailed on the lid. Allie could hear his sobs from within the awful brine.
Then the dark figures pulled open the lid of a third barrel, and waited.
“Bring me the stone,” the Haunter said to Allie.
Allie always prided herself on being cool in a crisis, and coming through when it really mattered. She had to figure the angle here. She had to think them all out of this.
“I’ll bring you the stone, if you release my friends.”
The Haunter did not move. Did not bat an eyelash. Allie knew she was in no bargaining position, yet still the Haunter said “Agreed. Your friends for the stone.”
So this was it, then. She had brought them here, and only she could get them out.
A stone on the ground. It seemed such a simple thing, but she reached for it with the same terror with which she would have reached for a burning coal.
Grabbing the stone was like trying to grab a shadow. Her fingers passed through it again and again, and she found herself angry at the stone: a stubborn piece of the living world, refusing to admit that she existed. “I Am!” She wanted to shout at it. “I exist, and I WILL move you!”
Still her fingers passed through it again, and again.
“Enough!” said the Haunter, and his goons advanced on her.
Move you stupid stone, move!
Allie forced every ounce of her will to the tips of her fingers and closed them again over the smooth rock, and again, her fingertips failed her.
But this time the stone wobbled.
Suddenly the goons stopped moving, and the Haunter stood up. The entire world seemed perched on the tips of Allies fingers.
“Go on,” the Haunter said.
Allie reached for the stone one more time. She had made it wobble. She had moved it. The knowledge that she had done it gave her an inkling of faith that she might do it again. This time she reached for it with not just her fingertips but with both hands, and she tried to scoop it up in her palms.
I will not leave my friends in those barrels, she told the stone. I will not be a victim of this monsterchild. YOU WILL RISE OFF THE FLOOR!
And it did! Although the stone sank deep into her ghostly hands, it came off the ground! Allie did not let her excitement break her concentration. She held her will in the palms of her hands along with that stone. It was heavy. It was perhaps the heaviest thing she had ever lifted, but she did not feel its weight in her muscles. This was a weight she could feel on her soul, and the strain was so great she felt her spirit would tear apart. Slowly she moved toward the Haunter, and his goons backed away.
“Here’s your stone,” she said. He held out his hand and she brought her hands over his. The stone lingered in her hands only an instant longer, then it fell right through, and into the Haunter’s open palm. He closed his palm around it.
“Very good. A skill is best revealed when one has no choice but to show it.”
“Free my friends.”
“Five years of study,” the Haunter said.
“What?”
“You have shown your skill. Now you must develop it, and discover what other skills you have—because where there is one skill, there are more. Study with me for five years, and then I shall free your friends from their barrels.”
Allie took a step back. “That wasn’t our agreement.”
The Haunter showed no expression. “I said I would free them. I never said when.”
This time, instead of coming up with a clever, well-thought-out approach to the situation, she found herself lunging for the Haunter, which of course did no good, because his goons were there to hold her back. Their strength seemed unnatural, even for Everlost spirits—and in a moment she found out why. In her struggle, she grabbed at the scarf covering one of their faces, and what she saw terrified her. She should have known something was wrong from the beginning. If Afterlights all wore the clothes they died in, what were the chances of finding a team of goons, all shrouded in black? These weren’t Afterlights at all. They were shells—and when Allie peeled back the scarf from the face, she saw nothing behind it—just cloth curving around the back of a head that didn’t exist.
Allie screamed, reached for the other faces, and one after another, she revealed them as empty, soulless soldiers. This trick was part of the Haunter’s skill; wrapping clothes around empty air, creating soldiers out of nothing. The more Allie screamed, the louder the Haunter laughed.
Handless gloves gripped her tightly, and carried her to the door. “Come back when you are ready to learn,” the Haunter said.
Then they pulled open the heavy iron door, and hurled her out into the street, slamming the door behind her.
She tried to push herself up on her elbows but found she couldn’t, and realized she was sinking into the middle of the living-world street. She struggled to free herself, but only became more deeply embedded in the asphalt, which seemed more like tar trying to take her down. A garbage truck rolled over her, its wheels rolling straight through her head like it wasn’t there, and it only made her angrier. Angry enough that one of the rear tires blew as it crossed through her.
The truck slammed on its breaks, and pulled over to the side of the street up ahead.
Did I blow out that tire?
But if she did, she didn’t care. Not now. With a heavy for
ce of will, she pulled herself upright. Now standing waist-deep in the asphalt, she worked her legs, and pressed with her hands until she had pulled herself out of the street.
She ran to the door of the Haunter’s lair. For a quick moment she forgot that it was not a living-world door, and slammed into it with full force, as if she could pass through it. She bounced off the solid steel, almost landing back in the street.
She pounded on the door over and over, ramming her shoulder against it. She tried to climb in through windows, but they were eternally blocked with security bars that had crossed into Everlost along with the rest of the building. For hours she tried to find a way in, and by dawn she was no closer to freeing her friends than she had been when she started.
As the jet-dark sky became the motley gray of a stormy morning, the rain turned to sleet, and the pinpricks of rain passing through her became sharp darts of ice. Discomfort, but not pain. Never pain, which just fed her rage. This dead/not-dead state robbed her of her right to feel with her body, and that made the anguish of her soul all the more severe.
Come back when you are ready to learn, the Haunter had said, but Allie already knew she would never be his student. She was no monster, and neither would she study under a monster. She would be back, though. She would come with a force of three hundred kids. Mary’s kids. They would tear the place down brick by brick if they had to, until there was not even a ghost of a ghost of a building.
Allie ran all the way back to the great marble plaza that marked the boundaries of Mary’s towering domain, and hurtled straight through a revolving door, ignoring the surprised looks of the kids on lookout. She raced into the elevator with such speed that she hit the back wall. The entire elevator shook, the doors closed, and in an instant she was surging upward.
She and Mary might have had their little differences, but Allie had enough faith in Mary to know she would sacrifice herself for the safety of the kids in her care. Together they would take on the Haunter, and who knows, perhaps it would forge some sort of bond between Allie and Mary.
She began at the top floor, but Mary wasn’t there. There were kids in the foodless food court, playing their morning games. “Mary! Where’s Mary? I have to find her!”
Allie went to the arcade floor, the publishing room, the TV room, and everywhere she went kids followed, her commotion actually drawing kids right out of their routines, like a speeding train pulling a swarm of leaves behind it, caught in its draft.
Mary was nowhere.
Vari, however, seemed to be everywhere. Everywhere she went, Vari seemed to find a way to get there first.
“Mary knows where you went last night,” Vari announced. “Everyone knows.”
Allie looked around at the other kids, and Allie knew from the way they looked at her, and from the distance they kept, that she had suddenly become an outsider. Someone to be feared. Someone who could not be trusted.
“Mary doesn’t want to talk to you,” Vari said. “Ever.”
“Listen, you little weasel, you tell me where Mary is, or I swear I’ll take you straight out into the living world, and stomp you down so hard, you’ll sink clear to China!”
When Vari didn’t talk, Allie took things into her own hands. Allie had heard that Mary liked to wander the unused floors when something was troubling her. A quick trip to the elevator control room found all the elevators on the usual floors, except for one. There was a single elevator waiting on the fifty-eighth floor.
It was the emptiness that hit Allie first. She knew the unused floors of the great towers were empty, but some were more empty than others. When you stood in the concrete expanse of floor fifty-eight, you felt like the only person in the universe.
Mary was there all right, in a far corner looking out of the windows at the world below. When she turned to see Allie her expression hardened. Other elevators began to arrive, and kids piled out of stairwells to watch the situation unfold.
Mary strode toward her with such sternness about her, Allie felt sure Mary would slap her…but she didn’t. Instead Mary stopped a distance away. Dueling distance, Allie thought. The distance from which Aaron Burr must have shot Alexander Hamilton.
“I want to know where Nick is,” Mary asked. Allie could see she had been crying, although Mary tried not to show it.
“I need your help,” Allie said.
“First tell me where Nick is!”
Allie hesitated. This wasn’t going to be easy. “Lief and Nick have been captured by the Haunter.” At the word “Haunter,” many of the little kids gasped, and clung to older children.
“See, didn’t I tell you?” Vari said. “They brought this on themselves!”
“Shut up, Vari!” It was the first time Allie had heard Mary yell at him. It was the first time she heard her yell at anyone. Now she turned her anger toward Allie. “You deliberately went against my wishes, and my warnings!”
Allie was not about to deny it. “I know. I’m sorry, and you can punish me any way you like, but right now we have to rescue Lief and Nick.”
“Your actions put them in harm’s way.”
“Yes,” admitted Allie. “Yes, they did. I was wrong, but right now—”
Then Mary turned to all those gathered. “Let this be a lesson to everyone that nothing good can ever come from leaving this place.”
Now Allie was getting frustrated. “Yes, fine. I am the poster child for bad choices. Now can we just get on with what has to be done!”
Mary looked at her with the same sadness her eyes held when she looked out from her high window. A single tear came, and she wiped it away.
“There is nothing to be done.”
Allie heard what Mary said, but was convinced she hadn’t heard her right.
“What?”
“Nick and Lief are lost,” Mary said. “You’ve lost them.” And Mary turned to walk away.
Allie shook her head, and felt like lunging at Mary just as she had lunged at the Haunter, but she held herself back. “No! No—you can’t just leave them.”
Then Mary turned on her with a powerful vengeance. “Don’t you think I want to save them? Do you think I want Nick spending an eternity imprisoned by that evil spirit?”
“Then do something about it.”
“That would risk every child here, and I won’t put them in danger. I protect them! I don’t send them out to fight a war! The Haunter leaves us alone. We leave him alone. That’s the way it is with all the monsters. Even the McGill.”
Again, nervous whispers at the mention of the McGill.
“The world out there is not a kind one, if you haven’t figured that out,” Mary said. “Sometimes we sink, and never come back. Sometimes we are captured and are never seen again. Losing Nick and Lief is tragic, and I will not make it more tragic by sending other defenseless children for the Haunter to enslave.”
As breathless as someone who did not breathe could be, Allie said, “You’re a monster. You’re no better than the Haunter! You’re telling me that you’re going to do NOTHING? That Nick and Lief are ‘acceptable losses.’”
“No loss is acceptable,” Mary said. “But sometimes we have to accept it anyway.”
“I won’t!”
“If I can accept it, then so can you,” she said. “If you want to stay here with us, you’ll learn to live with it.”
And all at once Allie knew what was going on here.
Mary was getting rid of her. She was hurling Allie out of the fold, but doing it in such a way that she could remain blameless. If Allie wanted to stay, then she had to accept the loss of her friends, and not even try to rescue Nick and Lief. Allie would never stay under those conditions, and Mary knew it. Maybe that’s why Mary became calm, and in control again.
“I’m truly sorry this happened,” Mary said. “I know what you must be going through right now.”
What made it worse was that Mary’s voice had genuine compassion in it. She honestly did care. Mary’s caring, however, came with too high a price.
&nb
sp; Allie swung her hand with all the strength she could muster, and slapped Mary across the face with such force that Mary stumbled backward. Vari caught her and in an instant a dozen other kids were all over Allie holding her back, pulling her down, tearing at her as if they could tear her apart.
“Leave her alone!” yelled Mary, and almost instantly the kids let her go.
“I wish you could feel pain,” Allie said. “I wish you could feel the sting of that slap.”
Then she turned, marched into an elevator, and took it down alone. She didn’t know where she was going, only that she had publicly renounced Mary Queen of Snots, and was not coming back.
Mary stared at Allie’s elevator door long after it had closed. Allie may not have known it, but Mary had felt the sting of the slap. Not on her face, but in her soul, where it hurt all the more. Even so, Mary had done the right thing.
She had turned the other cheek.
“Go back to what you were doing,” Mary told all the kids around her.
“Everything’s fine.”
The crowd began to split up, and soon it was only her and Vari on the desolate floor.
“Why did you let her go?” Vari said. “She should be punished.”
“Being alone in the living world is punishment enough,” Mary said, and although Vari didn’t seem satisfied with her response, he would accept it. They all would. Mary wondered if Allie had any idea how hard it was to allow Nick and Lief to be sacrificed for the sake of the other children. But the Haunter had powers that Mary did not. Just as it was foolish for them to go there in the first place, it would be doubly foolish to attempt a rescue. Foolish, and pointless. And now Nick was gone. Before she could really get to know him he was gone, and there was nothing she could do about it. For a moment grief threatened to overwhelm her. A gasp of remorse escaped her throat, but she fought it down, just as she fought down her tears. For the sake of all her children.
“You did the right thing,” Vari told her.
She leaned over to kiss him on the head, but stopped, knelt down, and kissed him on the cheek instead. “Thank you, Vari. Thank you for being so loyal.”
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