Then something materialized out of the fog. Something huge.
“Oh my God!” said Allie. “What is that!”
It was so massive, it didn’t just assault the eye, but the mind as well, until it blocked everything else out.
“I’m here,” cried the McGill in absolute joy. “I’m heeeeeeeere!” And he spread his arms wide, opening his entire soul to receive his reward as it descended in glory from the heavens.
Not everything that meets an untimely end crosses into Everlost. Like the atmospheric conditions that lead to a tornado, conditions must be right for crossing. The love of the living, and the occasional sunspot both play a part—but perhaps the most consistent factor is the persistence of memory. There are certain things and places that the living will never—can never forget. These are the things and places that are destined to cross over.
In Everlost, Pompeii is a pristine city, and the great library of Alexandria still houses the wisdom of the ancient world.
In Everlost the Challenger is still on a Florida launchpad, forever hopeful of a successful blastoff, and the Columbia is on the end of the runway, basking in the moment of a perfect landing.
The same is true of the world’s largest airship.
Zeppelin LZ-129, better known as the Hindenburg, crossed into Everlost in May of 1937 in a fiery hydrogen blaze that sent thirty-five passengers where they were going, and brought one German boy with it, crossing him into Everlost. Thus, the great airship was reborn, flight ready, filled with a memory of hydrogen gas, and freed from the swastikas on its tail fins, which were denied admittance into Everlost when the rest of the ship crossed.
As for the boy, he eventually took on the name Zepp, and had the distinction of being Everlost’s first airship pilot. His plan was to offer rides to any Afterlights he happened to come across, in exchange for whatever they could give him. However, like so many in Everlost, he fell victim to his own rut, and for reasons no one has ever been able to explain, he did nothing for sixty years but fly the thing back and forth between Lakehurst, New Jersey, and Roswell, New Mexico.
It caused quite a stir when sunspot activity briefly made it visible, but that’s another story.
Eventually Zepp traded the Hindenburg to the Finder known as Speedo for a few cases of bratwurst, and Speedo became the proud owner of the largest airborne vessel ever constructed by man. A sweet ride, if ever there was one.
***
The nose of the great gray zeppelin seemed to materialize out of the fog as if arriving from another dimension.
“I’m here!” cried the McGill in absolute joy. “I’m heeeeeeeeere!”
Most of the airship’s eight-hundred feet were shrouded in fog as it settled down gently on the Steel Pier, right in front of the McGill. It used its own tiny piloting gondola, which hung beneath, as a makeshift landing gear.
A gangway opened in the airship’s superstructure in front of the pilot’s gondola, revealing that the great gray balloon was not a balloon at all, for it was filled with structure. It was all silver flesh stretched over a steel skeleton, and massive lungs holding their hydrogen breath, giving more than a hundred tons of lift against gravity. It was a marvel of engineering, but the McGill did not see a zeppelin at all. He saw a chariot of the gods.
“I’m here!” said the McGill again, but such was his awe that this time it came out as barely a whisper.
The lowering gangway touched the deck of the pier, and the McGill waited to get a glimpse of the being with magic enough to give him back his life. It didn’t matter that the living world had moved on without him, or that anyone he knew would be long dead—he barely remembered any of them anyway. Once his spirit was housed in a living body again, he would adapt to this twenty-first century, reclaiming the right to grow, and grow old—a right that death had denied him.
Three figures descended the gangway, but it was the first who seized the McGill’s attention. A girl in a green velvet dress. As she stepped onto the pier, and strode toward him, the McGill’s crooked jaw went slack, his arms went limp, and the two tiny fortunes he clutched in his claw fell to the ground. This could not be. It simply could not be!
“Megan?”
The girl smiled at the sound of the name. “Megan,” she repeated. “Now I remember. That was my name.” She stood there ten feet away from the McGill, and as she looked at him the smile faded from her face, but not entirely. Only now did he notice the other two who had come out with her. A small boy with curly blond hair, and another boy with a face smudged brown. Hadn’t the McGill chimed that boy?
“Megan,” she said again, clearly enjoying the memory of the name. “But that was a long time ago. Now my name is Mary Hightower.”
The veins in the McGill’s mismatched eyeballs began pulsing. “You’re Mary Hightower? No! That’s not possible!”
“I knew you’d be surprised. But I’ve always known who you were, Mikey. How could I help but know?”
Through the crew, and even among the captive kids, a whisper rolled like an ocean wave… Mikey Mikey she called him Mikey…
“Don’t call me that!” yelled the McGill. “That’s not my name! I am the McGill: the One True Monster of Everlost!”
“You,” said his older sister, “are Michael Edward McGill. And you’re no monster. You’re my little brother.”
A second wave rolled through all those gathered, this time a bit louder… Brother brother he’s Mary’s brother…
The McGill was filled with so many conflicting emotions, he felt he would blow into a thousand pieces, and didn’t doubt that such a thing was possible for an Afterlight who was tormented enough. He was filled both with joy at seeing his sister again, and the fury that this was not the deliverance he had waited for.
He was filled with humiliation at having been exposed for who he truly was, and the dread of being forced to face it.
“I have a gift for you, Mikey,” she said. “It’s a gift I should have given you a long time ago.” She reached up and opened the silver locket she wore around her neck, then held it out toward him the way a priest might hold a cross up to a vampire – and although the McGill tried to look away, the gaze of his eyes, both the large and the small, was transfixed by what he saw.
In one half of the locket was an old-fashioned tin picture of his sister, looking exactly as she looked now. And in the other half was a picture of the boy named Michael Edward McGill.
“No!!!” screamed the McGill, but it was too late; he had seen the picture, and knew it for what it was—he knew it right down to the core of his being. “Nooooo…” he cried, but the slithery slipperiness of his voice had already begun to change, because Mikey McGill suddenly remembered what he looked like.
To those around him—to Nick, to Allie, to the crowd and the crew, the transformation was nothing short of miraculous. The McGill went from beast to boy in seconds. His head shrunk, and his spidery tuft of hair coiffed into a short, neat cut. His dangling eye drew back into his face, and his swollen one deflated. He sprouted five manicured fingers where once claws had been. Even the fetid rags that covered his body stitched themselves back into the memory of the clothes he wore in the photo, and when it was done, the McGill was nothing more than a clean-cut fourteen-year-old boy who could have been his mother’s pride and joy.
Mikey touched his face, realizing what had happened and screamed. “You can’t do this to me! I am the McGill! You can’t do this!” But it had already been done.
The monstrous image he had taken years to cultivate was gone, replaced by his own humanity. Mary closed her locket. Mission accomplished.
Allie could only stare. This boy, this Mikey—could this be the same person who had captured and chimed a thousand kids? Allie had to remember that humanity had returned to his face, but it would take much more than a photograph to return it to his soul.
While everyone else just gawked, it was the high-strung Boy Scout who saw this moment for what it was. This was the moment of their liberation. And the moment of t
heir revenge.
“Get him!” he screamed, and he raced forward. With his hands still tied behind his back, he hurled himself at Mikey McGill, knocking him to the ground. The others were quick to follow, and in a few seconds, a thousand kids were pushing forward. With their feet their only weapons, they began kicking him, and with so many of them, they could have kicked Mikey clear into the next world.
“No!”yelled Mary, “Stop!” But mob mentality had taken over, and no one was listening to her. The crowd became louder, wilder, as if the spirit of the Twin Pier Marauders had filled them.
In the middle of it all, Mikey suffered the stomping and kicking of this nightmare dance. It could not kill him. It could not even bruise him – but the pain of his absolute humiliation was far greater than any physical pain could have been.
“Stop them!” he yelled to his crew, but he had no power over them now. Instead of obeying his orders, his entire crew deserted, running from the pier in a panic, escaping into Atlantic City just as the lone Marauder had. Mikey was now truly alone.
Then someone began cutting the ropes that bound his captives’ hands, and they weren’t just kicking him anymore, they were swinging and pulling and trying their best to tear him apart.
This was not what the fortune predicted. The fortune was wrong! How could the fortune be wrong? It was only now, whipped and beaten down by the fury of the Afterlights he had enslaved, that he came to see the truth. He was not the brave man the fortune spoke of. He was the cowardly soul.
With what strength Mikey McGill had left in him, he fought through the angry mob, toward the far end of the pier—because jumping into the sea and sinking back to the center of the Earth would be a better fate than this.
There were very few who did not participate in the punishment of Mikey McGill.
Allie, Nick, and Lief did not. Neither did Mary, Vari, or even Pinhead, who was the only crewman with the courage to stay. They didn’t join the mob, but they didn’t stop it either. Mary did keep calling to the crowd, begging them to calm down and leave her brother be, but her voice was not even heard. In the end, she could only turn away.
“He’s getting what he deserves,” said Nick.
“But we should do something,” said Allie. “This is awful!”
“No,” said Pinhead, sadly. “He came here to find his destiny, and he did. We have to let destiny take its course.”
They watched the mob push closer to the end of the pier with Mikey somewhere in the middle. and Allie found, like Mary, she couldn’t look. Instead she turned to Pinhead, who picked up the two fortunes Mikey had dropped.
” ‘Your victory waits at the piers of defeat.’” he read. “You wrote this, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Allie admitted, “but that one about the thousand souls—that was real.”
“Not exactly,” said Pinhead. “You see, I found that old typewriter long before you did.”
Allie was both impressed and horrified. Pinhead shrugged. “I had to think of something to keep the McGill busy for the last twenty years.”
The mob was almost down to the far end of the pier now. Allie almost hoped that Mikey would find a way to escape back onto the Sulphur Queen, but that wouldn’t really be escape at all, because the mob would simply chime him, and spend the rest of time using him as an unbreakable pinata.
Allie could do nothing to help Mikey McGill, and so rather than pondering his fate, she tried to fill her mind with the job that was now at hand. Her plan. Her goal. Allie knew what she had to do now, because she had imagined it and worked out every angle even before arriving in Atlantic City. Although Mikey McGill didn’t know it, by coming to Atlantic City, he was bringing her within sixty miles of home—the closest she’d been since arriving in Everlost.
Allie had freed her friends, and now she was free from the McGill. All that remained was for her to complete her journey home.
“Gotta go,” she said, catching the others by surprise. She quickly hugged Lief, and then Nick, thanking him for everything, and for being her accidental companion on the journey.
“Allie, I—” but Allie put up her hand to shut him up. She despised long emotional good-byes, and refused to let this turn into one.
Then she turned to Mary. In spite of everything that had gone on between them, she gave Mary a respectful nod, and glanced at the Hindenburg. “You win the award for Best Grand Entrance.”
“We’ve got a lot to do here,” Mary told her. “Why don’t you stay and help us?”
“I would, but I’ve got other plans.”
Mary accepted it without asking what those plans were. Allie figured she knew.
“We could have been friends,” said Mary, with some regret.
“I don’t think so,” Allie said, as politely as she could, “but I’m glad we’re not enemies.”
Then Allie turned, and, forcing herself not to look back, she strode past the giant airship, and left the pier.
The mob levied its fury on Mikey McGill as he fought his way toward the end of the pier to escape. He was fully prepared to take the plunge once more.
Fate, however, had other plans for him.
As he neared the end of the pier a sound came to his ears, faint behind the raging mob, but he heard it all the same. Hoof beats. A whinny. A splash. He turned to see, through the flailing arms and legs of the mob, Shiloh, the Famous Diving Horse, climbing out of his “water tank, onto the ramp that would take him up to the high dive again.
Out of the water will come your salvation.
Mikey McGill made a sharp turn, pushing his way through the angry mob, and toward the horse.
Allie once more had to get used to the soft, sucking nature of living ground.
The Atlantic City boardwalk kept drawing her feet into it, and she had to stay on the move to keep from sinking. She could walk the sixty miles home. She could even make a fresh pair of road-shoes to make the journey easier, but she didn’t even know which roads to take.
“Excuse me,” she said to a passing couple, “could you please tell me how to – “
But the couple walked by as if they didn’t see her.
Well duh, of course they didn’t see her. Had she forgotten the simple fact that she was a ghost? Yes. She could admit it now. “Afterlight,” and all the other nice words for it, didn’t change the fact. She was dead. She was a ghost. But she was also a ghost with powers… As she considered her options, she heard a sound that made her look back toward the two dead piers. It was the sound of hoofbeats on wood. She waited for the telltale splash of the diving horse, but this time there was none. Instead she saw the horse—now with a rider—race out from behind the giant zeppelin.
Following the horse was a mob of kids in pursuit, but the horse was too fast.
The moment the horse hit the living-world boardwalk, the sound of its hoofbeats stopped, but its momentum barely slowed. It turned toward her, surging forward—and in a moment it was close enough for her to see the rider. Mikey McGill. He saw her at the same moment she saw him, and she could see the anger in his eyes.
Allie was terrified. To her, the eyes of this angry boy were even more frightening than the eyes of the monster.
She tried to run, but it was useless, the horse was too fast. Mikey was bearing down on her, and there was nothing she could do. He would trample her, he would capture her. He would punish her for betraying him. She looked back again; his eyes were still on her. Those eyes said, “You will suffer for what you did to me.” Those eyes said, “You can’t hide from me!”
And then Allie realized that maybe she could.
In front of her was a girl in sweats, jogging down the boardwalk. She was nineteen or so, her hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Allie turned to look behind her once more. Mikey McGill was only a few yards away. The horse was in a full gallop, and he was already leaning to the side, reaching for her. With no time to lose, Allie leaped into the girl, catching the wave of her body, and surfing it for all she was worth.
In the hiccup of an instant, Mikey McGill and his horse vanished. The piers and the Hindenburg vanished. All she could see was the misty morning of the living world through this living girl’s eyes. Allie felt the full chill of the day and goose bumps on her skin. She felt the pounding of a heart. She felt the exhaustion of a body that had jogged up and down the boardwalk for at least an hour.
Mikey McGill and the mob of kids that chased him were still there, but they were invisible, and she was untouchable. Nothing and no one in Everlost could get to her now, for she had hitched herself a ride into the living world.
What’s going on? said the confused soul who owned the body Allie had skinjacked. Why can’t I move my arms and legs? What’s wrong with me?
“Shhhh…” Allie told her. “It’s going to be all right.” Then Allie turned and jogged away.
CHAPTER 27
All Souls Day
Mikey had gotten away, and although Mary accepted that the monster known as the McGill deserved the mob’s wrath, she was secretly relieved that her brother was not sent back to the center of the Earth. Whatever had happened to make him such a monster, she would never know. But now the monster was gone—at least on the outside. What Mikey made of himself now would be entirely up to him.
The crowd had returned from their fruitless chase of her brother, and now looked to her for guidance.
Beside her, Nick surveyed the sheer mass of the crowd. “There didn’t seem to be this many when we were hanging upside down.”
Mary looked at the airship. It was only designed to carry about a hundred passengers. It would be crowded but it could be done. The passenger compartment was only a small portion of the ship. Most of it was catwalks and girders, holding the massive hydrogen bladders that gave the airship lift. There was room up inside for a thousand Afterlights, and Speedo assured her that weight wouldn’t be a problem since, technically, Afterlights had no actual weight, only the memory of it—memory enough to sink the unwary to the center of the Earth, but not enough to ground an airship determined to fly.
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