Текст книги "Everlost"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

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 intuit 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 Peter 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.”

“For all we know,” Heimlich said, “she could be leading us straight to the Sky Witch.”

“Shut up,” said Johnny-O, “there ain’t no such thing.”

“Sky Witch?” asked Allie.

Johnnie-O waved it off. “Just a stupid story they tell to scare little kids about some witch who lives in the skies over Manhattan.”

“She devours kids’ souls,” said another kid.

“Yeah,” said Raggedy Andy, baring his teeth and hooking his hands like claws.

“She grabs you and takes a deep breath sucking your soul right up her nose.

That’s why they also call her the ‘Queen of Snot.’”

Johnnie-O gave them a Three Stooges—like slap that got all three of them. “What, were you born stupid or did you just die that way?” He turned to Allie. “Some kids will believe anything.”

Allie,wisely, said nothing.

“We should make her skim,” said Raggedy Andy. “That way we’ll know whether she’s worthy.”

Johnnie-O explained that all prospective members of the Altar Boys had to take a coin and skim it on the Hudson River. If it skimmed at least twice like a stone, then you were worthy of joining the Altar Boys. You had to use a coin you crossed with, and you only got one chance because once your coin sank, it was gone for good.

Allie was confused. “But…how can you skim an Everlost coin on living-world water? It wouldn’t work – it would just fall straight through.”

“Well,” said Johnnie-O with a wink, “I’m the one who decides whether or not I saw it skim.”

The next morning, they came to the George Washington Bridge, which crossed the Hudson into the northern tip of Manhattan. There they halted. Allie looked back to see them all milling around near the on-ramp.

“We don’t do bridges,” Johnnie-O said and Allie smirked.

“Oh, are you scared?”

Johnnie-O narrowed his eyes into a glare. “If you ever tried to cross a bridge you’d know how easy it is to sink right through it, and fall into the river. But I guess you ain’t bright enough to figure that out.”

Allie was about to fire right back at him, about how she had already crossed this bridge, and maybe his name should be Johnnie-Zero, instead of Johnnie-O, because he had zero guts—but then Raggedy Andy said, “We lost more than twenty kids once trying to cross the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was awful.”

Everyone looked down sadly, realized their shoes were sinking into the road, and began to shuffle around again.

“Old news,” said Johnnie-O, clenching his fists, “but we don’t cross bridges no more.”

Allie swallowed everything she was about to say. She wondered if she, Nick, and Lief would have sunk through this bridge, if they hadn’t been wearing their road-shoes.

“Maybe she is working for the Sky Witch,” said one of the little kids. “Maybe she wants us to sink.”

The others looked at her now with frightened eyes, but the look quickly mildewed into threatening.

“Johnnie-O’s right,” Allie said, “we shouldn’t risk it.”

“We’ll take the tunnel,” Johnnie-O announced, and led the way.

Flurries were falling by the time they reached the Lincoln Tunnel four hours later. Although there was a narrow service catwalk along the side, Johnnie-O led his crew right down the middle of the road, intentionally letting oncoming traffic barrel right through them.

The Everlost version of macho, thought Allie. Although she would have much preferred the catwalk, she didn’t want to show any signs of weakness, so she walked side by side with Johnnie-O, ignoring the annoying sensation of through-traffic.

By the time they reached the Manhattan side of the tunnel, the flurries had grown into a full-fledged snowstorm, the first of the winter. A violent wind tore at the coats of the living.

Snow felt different than rain or sleet as it passed through Allie. It tickled.

As for the wind, she felt it, and it was indeed cold. But like all other weather conditions, feeling it and being affected by it were two different things. The cold did not, could not, make her shiver. And yet as unpleasant as it seemed for the living people fighting the snowstorm, Allie wished she could be one of them.

But Johnnie-O, like Mary, had no interest in the living. Allie wondered how long until she became like that.

The going was slow, because it seemed every single city block had a Chinese restaurant, and Johnnie-O was making them cross the street, or turning down side streets again and again to avoid them.

“This is ridiculous,” Allie said. “Chow mein does not carry the plague.” The next time, she refused to cross the street, and walked right in front of Wan Foo’s Mandarin Emporium.

“Wow, she’s brave,” said one of the little kids, and so Johnnie-O was forced to do the same, just to prove he was just as brave as Allie.

When they finally reached the Haunter’s place, Allie could tell something was wrong. The steel door that had been so securely sealed now hung wide open and was slightly bent.

Johnnie-O looked to Allie as if she could explain, but she only shrugged.

Maybe, she thought, Nick and Lief fought their way out.

Johnnie-O, for all his swagger and big-fisted boisterousness, wasn’t about to be the first one in, so Allie took the lead and cautiously stepped inside.

The scene inside was not at all what Allie expected. There was no longer food hanging from the ceiling. Instead, half-gnawed carcasses of roast chickens and pieces of meat lay strewn about the floor.

“My God,” said Allie.

“You said it,” said Johnnie-O. “I haven’t seen so much food in fifty years!”

Unable to control himself, he raced forward and the Altar Boys followed, grabbing the carcasses and meat off the floor and shoving them into their mouths. There was no need to fight because there was enough for everybody.

“No!” yelled Allie. “The Haunter! He could be anywhere!”

But they weren’t listening.

Allie braced for the moment the Haunter’s hollow minions would descend on them, slapping them into barrels, but as she looked around she realized the barrels were all gone. All, that is, but one single barrel that sat in the center of the mess.

Allie noticed shredded bits of black cloth mixed in among the scraps of food—and then something else caught her eye. It was a turkey– a big one—a twenty-five pounder, maybe. It was a bird the Haunter had probably ecto-ripped into Everlost right off someone’s Thanksgiving dinner table. One thing though…the turkey had a bite out of it. A huge jagged bite. It was as if a dinosaur had sunk its teeth into it and ripped it apart—you could still see the teeth marks.

What, thought Allie, could leave an awful bite mark like that?

Suddenly her attention was drawn to the single barrel in the center of the room.

Someone was inside it, pounding and screaming. She couldn’t make out the words but she recognized the voice. Just hearing it chilled her far more than the blizzard ever could.

“Johnnie-O! Over here!” she called.

With a chicken in each of his fists and grease dripping down his chin, Johnnie-O looked a bit more comical and less menacing than usual. Reluctantly he handed his chickens to Heimlich with a look that said, You eat them, you ‘re dead.

He came over to the barrel, and both he and Allie knelt down, putting their ears close to the wood.

“Who’s out there?” the voice inside said. “Let me out, let me out and I shall give you whatever you want!”

It was the Haunter.

Johnnie-O looked to Allie for direction. She had, after all, led them to the biggest feast of their afterlives, so she was now held in some sort of reverence.

“Let me out!”yelled the Haunter. “I demand you let me out!”

Allie spoke loudly enough to be heard through the wood and brine. “What happened here? Who did this to you?”

“Let me out!” screeched the Haunter. “Let me out and I shall rip food from the finest restaurants in the living world and lay it at your feet.”

But Allie ignored him. “Where are the other barrels?”

“They were taken.”

“By whom?” Allie demanded.

“By the McGill.”

Johnnie-O gasped, and his mouth dropped open in astonishment. His cigarette would have fallen out if it could. “The McGill?!”

“His ship’s in the bay, out past the Statue of Liberty,” the Haunter said. “Let me out and I will help you fight him.”

Allie considered it, but then she looked around. The strips of black cloth were squirming on the ground like snakes. Frantically they danced about, and Allie realized what the Haunter was doing. Even from within the barrel, the Haunter was trying to bring his air-warriors together to capture them. They tried to reassemble themselves, but it was useless. The McGill had shredded them far too well for even the Haunter to put them back together again.

Allie looked at the barrel and tried to find some compassion for this creature inside, who had so mercilessly imprisoned her friends. In the end she found her compassion did not reach that far.

“Leave him in there!” she said loudly enough for him to hear. “Let him stew in his own juices.”

“NO!” the Haunter screamed within the barrel, and around the room bones and bird carcasses began to fly like meteors, randomly tossed about by the Haunter’s rage.

Allie didn’t care. She turned to Johnnie-O. “Can you and the Altar Boys come with me?” she said. “I won’t be able to fight the McGill alone.”

But Johnnie-O backed away. “We got what we cane for,” he said. “Ain’t nothing anyone can say, living, dead, or otherwise that would get me to fight the McGill. You’re on your own.”

And then, almost as an apology, he reached down and grabbed a leg from the turkey that had been bitten by the McGill. He ripped the leg free and held it out to her, almost like a peace offering.

“Here, take it,” Johnme-O said. “You deserve to eat too.”

And so she did. She dug her teeth into the turkey and relished its flavor—the first flavor she had tasted in all her months here. It was like being in heaven.

Yet as good as it was, it couldn’t outweigh the hell she knew she would soon have to face once she tracked down the McGill.

She turned to leave, but before she could, Johnnie-O called to her. “You never told us your name,” he said, then tilted his Marlboro up with a grin. “I gots to know it if we’re gonna tell stories about how you went off to fight the McGill and all.”

Allie found herself oddly flattered. Johnnie-O had decided she was worth being turned into a legend.

“My name is…” and for a moment she couldn’t remember. But the moment passed.

“Allie,” she said.

Johnnie-O nodded. “Allie the Outcast,” he said. Allie had to admit she liked it.

“That’s right.”

“Good luck,” Johnnie-O said…”Hope you don’t get eaten or anything.”

Allie left and headed toward Battery Park– the tip of Manhattan, where she was sure to see the McGill’s ship, if it was still there. She was terrified, and yet at the same time, she felt ennobled. Fighting to free her friends had felt like a desperate mission for a lone girl, but now she was Allie the Outcast, on her way to battle the McGill. Kids would tell her story, whatever that story might be. This was no longer just a mission; it was a quest. And she was ready.

PART THREE The McGill Everlost CHAPTER 15

The Brimstone Ship On February 7, 1963, a ship called the Marine Sulphur Queen left the world of the living. A few days after setting sail from Beaumont, Texas, the ship vanished off the coast of Florida without as much as a single radio message. All they found was an oil slick, a few life jackets, and the persistent smell of brimstone—the awful odor associated with rotten eggs, and, coincidentally, the smell also associated with hell.

There was, of course, a perfectly logical and nondemonic explanation for the smell. The Sulphur Queen was an old World War II tanker that was now being used to transport liquid sulphur—also known as brimstone. However the eerie smell, combined with the fact that the ship mysteriously vanished in the Bermuda Triangle, naturally led people to consider a dark, supernatural end to the unlucky brimstone barge.

In truth, the death of the Sulphur Queen was extremely bizarre, but not exactly supernatural. Stated simply, the Sulphur Queen was overcome by a very large ocean fart.

On that fateful February day, a massive ball of natural gas, two hundred feet wide, burst up from beneath the ocean floor, and when the bubble surfaced, the entire ship dropped into it in less than a second. The bubble burst, water rushed in, covering the ship, and it was gone. The Sulphur Queen was very literally swallowed by the sea.

There were the expected few moments of utter panic and mortal terror as the crew of the tragically submerged vessel made their final journey down that path of light, to wherever they were going. Then, less than a minute later, the ship itself got to where it was going—namely the bottom of the sea.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

Because what no one knew was that the old vessel was the last of its kind. It was the final ship built by a failing shipyard, which closed down the day the Sulphur Queen first launched out of dry dock. The workers, knowing an era was coming to an end, built the ship with as much care as a team of shipbuilders could muster. Their love of this ship was welded into every rivet. Such an ignoble death to this well-loved vessel could not be suffered lightly by the fabric of eternity. And so, when the waters surging about in the methane-heavy air finally settled, a ghost of the Queen remained, permanently afloat in the half-world of Everlost.

Since no soul had crossed over with it, the ghost of the Sulphur Queen drifted for years; no crew, no passengers. It drifted, that is, until the McGill found it, and turned it into the greatest pirate ship ever to sail the waters of eternity—and, except for one nasty run-in with the Flying Dutchman, its supremacy on the seas had never been challenged.

Since the evil smell of brimstone still surrounded the vessel, the McGill found it useful for inspiring fear, because the McGill knew that when it came to being a monster, image was everything. One only needed to sniff the brimstone to be convinced that the Sulphur Queen was a ship from hell, rather than a ship from Texas.

The McGill had remodeled the tanker into as proper a pirate ship as possible. It wasn’t too hard to make it menacing, for the ship was already rusted and rancid when it crossed into Everlost. That, the smell, and the McGill’s fearsome reputation were ail it took to make the Sulphur Queen the floating terror of Everlost.

On the open deck, the McGill had fashioned himself a throne made from pieces of this and that: pipes torn from the ship, fancy portrait frames, curtains from old buildings that had crossed over. The throne was studded with jewels that were glued on with old bubble gum. It was, in short, a monstrosity—just like the McGill himself—and it suited him just fine.

The McGill’s most recent adventure had been a raid in New York. He had long heard rumors of the Haunter, and his mystical little dojo where he taught kids to haunt, with weird discipline, like it was some sort of martial art. The McGill had no patience for legends that didn’t involve him. As far as he was concerned, such legends were competition, and needed to be silenced.

The Haunter was silenced well. Oh, he had put up a fight, levitating, and summoning up wraiths in black robes that walked like human beings—as if any of this could impress the McGill. He had learned early on that one’s physical strength in Everlost had nothing to do with muscle mass. It had all to do with the strength of one’s will—and the McGill was surely the most willful creature that ever lived. After he had shredded the wraith-warriors with his claws, the McGill took on the Haunter himself. The little Neanderthal had put up a fight – but in the end he was no match for the McGill.

“If you ever get out of there,” he had shouted at the barrel where the Haunter had been sealed, “you had better NEVER cross my path again. Or I’ll find something worse for you.”

He wasn’t sure if the Haunter had even heard him, because he never stopped cursing from within the barrel.

The McGill had dined royally on the spread of food that this Haunter had somehow pulled from the living world. He feasted for hours, and threw his scraps to his associates, who were happy to have them. That’s what he called his crew:

“associates.”

Now, still full from the feast, they had returned to the ship with a dozen barrels, leaving behind only the one that contained the Haunter.

“So what do we do with them?” asked Pinhead, as the McGill sat in his throne, looking at the barrels now arranged haphazardly on the deck. Pinhead was the McGill’s chief associate. Somewhere along the line, Pinhead had forgotten the correct proportion of a human head to its body, and so the size of his head had receded like an apple left on a windowsill. The difference was not so profound that he looked like a complete freak. It was subtle. When you looked at Pinhead, you knew something was wrong, but you weren’t quite sure what it was.

“Sir? The barrels—what should we do with them?”

“I heard you,” the McGill snapped.

He rose from his throne, and loped in his awful crooked stride toward the barrels.

“According to the Haunter, there’s someone inside every single one of them,”

Pinhead told him, with a certain excitement in his voice. In life, Pinhead must have been the kind of kid who would rip through a cereal box to get to the prize at the bottom.

“We’ll see,” the McGill snapped.

“And I’ll bet these kids have been pickling for so long,” Pinhead said, “that they’ll worship whoever sets them free.”

This gave the McGill pause for thought. He stroked his chin, a bulbous thing as rough and unshapely as a potato. It was an interesting idea. Others feared him, but never was he the subject of worship and complete adoration. “You think so?”

“Only one way to find out.” And then Pinhead added, “If they’re ingrates, we’ll put ‘em back in the barrels and dump them into the sea.”

“All right, then,” said the McGill, and he gestured to his associates lurking in the shadows. “Open them up.”

Although not even the Haunter knew this, Afterlights were very much like wine when sealed in a barrel. The longer a wine is left to age, the better it gets…unless of course something goes wrong, and it turns to vinegar.

Neither Nick nor Lief had turned to vinegar, however. Both had adapted in his own unique way to their situation. While Lief became like a baby in a womb, and lost any sense of time and space, Nick did the opposite. He was aware of every passing moment, never forgot exactly where he was—and didn’t even forget WHO he was, so those stupid little pieces of paper he had written his name on weren’t an entire waste of time.

Nick found he could pass the time by taking an inventory of everything he remembered from his life, and his afterlife. Even though some key memories had already been lost, he was still close enough to his earthly existence to remember quite a lot. He tried to list alphabetically every single song he knew, and sang each one. He cataloged every movie he remembered ever seeing, and tried to watch them in his head. With nothing to reflect on but himself, he came to realize that he had spent far too much time complaining and worrying. If he ever managed to get out of that barrel, he knew he’d be a different person, because nothing—not even sinking into the Earth—could be worse than this. And so, both Nick and Lief had been profoundly changed by their pickling experience: Lief had found a bizarre state of spiritual bliss, and Nick became strong and fearless.