Everlost s-1

by Neal Shusterman

  Vari beamed.

  As Allies elevator went down, theirs went up. Mary’s grief was heavy, but she would find a way to get past it. The turmoil that Allie had brought them would soon be gone. Soon there would be happy children playing ball and jumping rope, which was as it should be, and as it would be day after day, forever and ever.

  In her book Everything Mary Says Is Wrong, Allie the Outcast writes: “There are mysteries in Everlost. Some of them are wonderful, and others are scary. They should all be explored, though – perhaps that’s why we’re here; to experience the good and the bad that Everlost has to offer. I really don’t know why we didn’t get where we were going, but I do know this much: being trapped doing the same thing over and over again for all time is no way to spend eternity—and anyone who tells you so is wrong.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Learning to Surf

  The sense of isolation Allie felt after leaving Mary’s domain was as overwhelming and complete as if she had been sealed into a barrel herself. Being out in the living world left her infinitely lonely. Mary could act like the living world didn’t matter anymore, but for Allie it was an ever-present reminder that she could witness, but not participate, in life. For days she tried to work out a plan for rescuing her friends from the clutches of the Haunter, and as she schemed, she walked, because she had to. She was like a shark, always having to stay in motion—and although she had found many dead-spots in the city where she could rest, she never lingered long. Then one day, she had a moment of clarity, and she realized that she had been drawn into her own endless loop. She had been walking the exact same streets in the exact same pattern, and she had been doing it not for days, but for weeks. She had thought she was immune to getting trapped in a ghostly pattern, but she was wrong. The sense of helplessness of it—the sense of inevitability—almost made her spirit cave in, and give in to the pattern. She almost continued in her repetitive weave of the streets, because it was easier than fighting it. It had grown comfortable. Familiar. It was the thought of Lief and Nick, still trapped in those barrels, that broke her out of it, because if she stayed in this rut, she would never find a way to free them.

  The first step was the hardest. She turned left instead of right on Twenty-first Street, and an immediate sense of panic set in. She wanted to take back her step, and return to her old pattern – but she resisted, and took one more step, and another, and another. Soon the panic settled to mere terror, and the terror settled to normal fear. It only took one city block for her fear to fade into mild foreboding—the type of thing anyone felt when faced with the unknown.

  Careful not to begin retracing her steps again, she forced herself to go places she had avoided. New York was a crowded city, but there were areas that were less traveled. These were the places Allie had stuck to, for she couldn’t handle the crowds that would pass through her as if she wasn’t there.

  Now she forced herself to go to the crowded places. It was as she passed through midtown Manhattan during lunchtime that she discovered something Mary had probably never written about in her various volumes.

  The streets were crowded. More than just crowded, they were packed. The midtown towers flushed out thousands of people during the lunch-hour rush, and of course, they all barreled through Allie as if she wasn’t even there. It was terribly unpleasant to feel them pass through her – much worse than when something inanimate, like a car or a bus passed through, because a living person had a strange organic commotion about it. The instant a person passed through her she could feel the rush of blood, the beating of a heart, the rumble of intestines still digesting whatever they had eaten for breakfast. It was, to say the least, profoundly icky.

  Much stranger, though, was the sudden disorientation that fell over her when a tightly packed gaggle of businessmen crashed through her. Her thoughts became strange and random—the way thoughts become just before sleep sets in.

  —stock about to split/need that raise/no one suspects/ah, yes, Hawaii—

  And when the businessmen had passed, all that remained were the high-decibel sounds of the city. She assumed she was just hearing little bits of their conversations, and left it at that. Then it happened again when a crowd of tourists tromped through her, on their way to the theater district.

  —too expensive/aching feet/what is that smell/pickpockets—

  This time she knew she wasn’t hearing their conversations, because most of them were silent, and the ones who were talking were speaking French. Now she understood exactly what was going on. It was like channel surfing—but she was channel surfing people’s minds.

  She flashed to that moment mired in the street outside of the Haunters warehouse. A truck had passed through her—or at least its tires had. She had been angry—furious—and in that instant the tire blew out, as if her anger had caused it to burst. What was it the Haunter had said?

  …You have to discover what other skills you have—because where there is one skill, there are more…

  Could this all be part of some innate talent in haunting? Was she special in this ability to intrude into the real world, rupturing a tire, and reading the minds of the living for brief moments?

  And then she thought—could those moments be made to last…

  The next time she mind-surfed, she did it intentionally, with hopes of catching the wave.

  Allie found a girl who seemed to be about her age. She was a society-type girl, wearing a uniform from some ritzy prep school. Allie followed behind her for a few blocks, matching her pace. Then Allie took a sudden leap forward, and stepped right inside of her skin.

  —i could but if i do it might not work and they might not like me but then they might and if i don’t they certainty won’t even notice me and this skirt is definitely too tight am i gaining weight oh there’s that pizza place no i’m bursting out of this stupid ugly skirt but it smells so good—

  Whoa! The girl made a sharp turn right, and went into the pizza place, leaving Allie there on the street reeling from the experience. She had surfed the girl’s mind for ten seconds at least. By the time Allie recovered, she was knee-deep in the street, and had to pull herself out.

  I shouldn’t have done that, Allie told herself, but even so, she wanted to do it again. That scared her, and so she left Sixth Avenue, ducking down a smaller side street, making sure she had absolutely no contact with another living person for the rest of the day. I’ll have to tell Nick and Lief about this, she thought, and that reminded her that unless she rescued them, she would never get to tell them anything. They would spend the rest of their unnatural lives pickling.

  The only way to rescue them was to find others who could help her, and she had to do it before a new routine set in. Mary and her little club were of no use, so Allie would have to gather her own allies. The question was, where would she find them?

  She began looking for “ghosts” of buildings that had crossed over when they were demolished. Only a few buildings did. Maybe one out of every thousand that met the wrecking ball was deemed worthy by God, or the universe, or whatever, to cross into Everlost.

  The old Waldorf-Astoria hotel was the most promising—after all, it was a hotel, so what better place for dead/not-dead kids to stay?

  She pushed through the revolving door to reveal a lobby done up in plush art-deco splendor. Some singer, long dead, crooned through a big old-fashioned radio, singing “Embraceable You.” There was a huge bar just off the lobby, but no bottles graced its cherrywood shelves. Instead a big sign read BAR PERMANENTLY CLOSED DUE TO PROHIBITION.

  “Hello? Is anybody here?”

  She called twice, and rang the bell at the reception desk. Nothing. The combination of 1920s music and the absolute emptiness of the place gave her the horror-movie creeps. The hotel wasn’t merely deserted, it was soulless, like the Haunter’s hollow soldiers. She left as quickly as she could.

  She had to face the fact that most every Afterlight in the city ended up moving in with Mary. Safety in numbers. Mary’s little kingdom
was simply the place to be in this part of the world. But then, thought Allie, Everlost did have other territories… Everlost

  CHAPTER 13

  Time in a Bottle

  Lief was accustomed to being alone, but there was quite a difference between being alone in a lush green forest, and being jammed into a pickle barrel.

  At first he felt sure Allie would rescue him right away. When it didn’t happen in the first few minutes, or the next, or the next, he began to get scared. Then the fear turned to anger, and then the anger itself pickled into resignation. He could hear very little in the brine, and could feel even less.

  Then, as the days went by, his mind began to play the most amazing trick on him.

  He was able to forget where he was. The darkness became a starless infinity that stretched into empty space. His spirit filled the emptiness from one end of infinity to the other. This, he knew, is what God must have felt like before creation. A single spirit in a formless liquid eternity. It was a feeling of such power, time itself seemed to stop in its tracks. Lief felt as if he was the entire universe, and nothing, at the same time. So glorious was this sensation of timelessness, that he was able to lock himself inside of it just as tightly as he was locked in the barrel.

  Nick, on the other hand, was miserable.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Alter Boys

  WELCOME TO ROCKLAND COUNTY! It was a road sign Allie was sure she’d never see again. The last time she had seen it, she was pushed into the Earth, and if it hadn’t been for Lief and Nick, she wouldn’t have made it out. I must be crazy coming back here. Well, crazy or not, here she was.

  “Johnnie-O!” she called out at the top of her lungs. “I want to talk to you, Johnnie-O!”

  Allie knew it wasn’t just bad luck that had brought Johnnie-O and his little team of morons to them that night. The way Allie figured it, any new arrivals in Everlost in this area would follow the main highway, and would pass this way. If Johnnie-O wasn’t here himself, chances are he had a lookout keeping an eye on this very spot, waiting for some poor unsuspecting Greensoul to rest beneath the WELCOME TO ROCKLAND COUNTY! sign.

  She figured right. It took a few hours of calling, and making noise, but finally word had been relayed back to Johnnie-O, and he showed up at around noon. This time he came with a dozen kids to back him up, instead of just four. Nothing was going to scare them away this time. The cigarette was still hanging out of the corner of his mouth, smoldering away, and Allie realized that cigarette was going to be stuck there until the end of time.

  “Hey—it’s that girl who tricked you!” said the kid with the purple lips, and the lump in his throat.

  Johnnie-O hit him. “She didn’t trick me,” he said, and nobody contradicted him.

  He assumed a kind of gunslinger posture, like this was a showdown. He looked more comical than anything else, with his huge hands.

  “I thought I sent you down,” he said.

  “You thought wrong.”

  “So what? Did ya come back so’s I could send you down right this time?”

  “I’m back with a proposition.”

  Johnnie-O looked at her, his expression stony. At first Allie thought he was doing it for effect. Then she realized he didn’t know what “proposition” meant.

  “I want your help,” Allie explained.

  Raggedy Andy tossed his weird red hair out of his eyes and laughed. “Why would we wanna help you!”

  Johnnie-O smacked him, then crossed his heavy arms and said, “Why would we wanna help you!”

  “Because I can get you what you want.”

  By now even more kids had arrived. Some were real little, others her age, maybe a bit older. They all had menacing scowls—even the little ones.

  “We don’t want nothin’ from you!” Johnnie-O said, and his chorus of bullies grumbled their agreement. This was all posturing, Allie knew. He had to be curious—if he wasn’t, he’d already have pushed her down.

  “You attack Greensouls for the crumbs in their pockets, and pre-chewed gum.”

  Johnnie-O shrugged. “Yeah, so?”

  “What if I told you I knew where you could get real food. Not just pocket crumbs, but whole loaves of bread.”

  Johnnie-O kept his arms crossed. “And what if I sewed your lying mouth shut?”

  “It’s no lie. I know a place where salamis and chickens hang from the ceiling, a place where you can eat all you want, and wash it down with root beer!”

  “Root beer,” echoed one of the little kids.

  Johnnie-O threw him a warning glance, and the kid looked at his toes.

  “There ain’t no such place. Whadaya think I am, stupid?”

  Well yes, Allie wanted to say, but that’s beside the point. Instead she said, “Have you ever heard of ‘The Haunter’?”

  If the rest of the kids were any indication, they all knew about the Haunter.

  There were whispers, a few kids backed away from her, and the lump in Purple-puss’s throat bobbed up and down like a fishing float. For a second Allie even thought she could see fear in Johnnie-O’s eyes, but he covered it with a wide grin that tilted the tip of his nasty little Marlboro to the sky.

  “First you tell me the McGill is your friend, and now the Haunter?” His smile turned into a frown, and the cigarette tipped downward. “I’ve had enough a you—you’re going down!”

  “Send her down!” the other kids started yelling. “Down! Down!”

  They advanced on her. She knew she only had a split second before mob mentality took over, and then nothing she could say would save her.

  “I lied!” she shouted. “I lied about the McGill to stop you from sending me down—but this time I’m telling the truth.” Johnnie-O put up his hand, and the kids hesitated, waiting for his signal.

  “The Haunter captured my friends, and I can’t rescue them alone! I need somebody strong,” Allie said, looking right into Johnnie-O’s eyes. “I need somebody smart.”

  Allie watched the tip of his cigarette. Would it tip up, or would it tilt down?

  It wavered for the longest time, and finally it tilted upward. “You came to the right guy.”

  They took Allie to the nearest town, the place Johnnie-O and his band of juvenile hoods called home. Johnnie-O made a point of crossing the main street several times, for no sensible reason.

  “It’s because of the Chinese restaurants,” Raggedy Andy explained. “They’re supposed to be bad luck or something—at least that’s what Johnnie-O heard.’ And so they wove a serpentine path down the street, crossing to avoid all four Chinese restaurants in town, proving that superstition was not limited to the living.

  They brought Allie to their hideout. Stupid that they called it a hideout, because they didn’t have to hide from the living, who couldn’t see them anyway.

  Like Mary, Johnnie-O had found a building that had crossed over, and had made it home. His was a white clapboard church—which struck Allie as funny. This kid probably never went to a church in his life, and now he was stuck living in one.

  At least there was some justice in the universe. There were about thirty kids total, all disciples of Johnnie-O, like he was running a tough-guy school. They called themselves “The Altar Boys,” because they lived in a church, but the way Allie saw it, they were also “alter” boys—that is, every single one of them had something about him slightly altered from his living self; like Johnnie-O’s hands, or Raggedy Andy’s hair.

  “How come there are no girls?” Allie asked.

  “Girls come by once in a while, wantin’ to join,” Johnnie-O said. “We send ‘em packing.” And then he added, “I don’t like girls much.”

  Allie couldn’t help but grin. “I think you died about a year too young.”

  “Yeah,” Johnnie-O admitted. “And it really ticks me off.”

  Now that she was accepted by their leader, the other kids kept stealing glimpses at her, like she was some sort of exotic creature. Great, she thought, I’m playing Wendy to a delinquent Pete
r Pan and the Lost Boys of Juvie Hall.

  She told them all about the pickle factory, and the Haunter’s air-soldiers.

  “His magic ain’t no match for us,” Johnnie-O said proudly. Allie wasn’t entirely convinced, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  “The hard part will be getting in. There’s a big steel door—not living-world steel, but steel that crossed over with the building. I pounded on it for hours and couldn’t make a dent.”

  Johnnie-O wasn’t bothered. “That ain’t a problem. We’ll use explosives.”

  “You’ve got explosives!?”

  He called to a kid on the other side of the church. “Hey, Stubs, get your fat butt over here!”

  The kid came running.

  “A few years back,” Johnnie explained, “Stubs here was sellin’ illegal fireworks out of his garage. They caught on fire, and Stubs won himself a one-way trip to Everlost. Anyways, it turns out part of his fireworks stash came over with him.”

  And then Johnnie added, “Which is more than I can say for most of his fingers.”

  “Yeah,” said Raggedy Andy, laughing. “That’s how come Stubs can only count to three.”

  Allie and the “Alter” Boys left at dawn, the members of the gang all carrying baseball bats, chains, and various other makeshift weapons that had somehow crossed over. They would have been terrifying in the living world, but with the threat of pain and death not applicable in Everlost, it was all pretty much for show; fashion accessories for bad boys who didn’t get where they were going.

  All the while as they marched south toward the city, Purple-puss kept giving Allie dirty looks. Not too long into their journey, he broke his silence. “I don’t like this, Johnnie-O,” he said, the bulge in his neck ping-ponging up and down. “She’s not one of us, we shouldn’t oughta be trusting her.”

  Johnnie-O smirked. “Heimlich here don’t trust nobody.”