Текст книги "Everlost"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

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She surprised a team of unlikely pirates, who grabbed her the second she was on board. They were even more unpleasantly distorted than the Altar Boys. They practically carried her to the highest deck, where something slouched on a gaudy throne.

The thing on the throne was far from human. Allie found it horrifying to look, yet harder to look away. It had sharp, three-fingered talons for hands, and skin as red as a lobster and pocked like the moon. Its mismatched eyes wandered of their own accord, and its nasty tuft of spidery hair looked like it might crawl off the creature’s head at any moment. This thing was beyond grotesque —so far beyond that Allie found her fear balanced by fascination. How could something so horrible exist?

“What are you?” she said. She thought she said it to herself but realized she had spoken aloud.

“I am the McGill,” it said. “Hear my name and tremble.”

And Allie laughed. She didn’t mean to, but that line was so goofy, she couldn’t help herself.

The McGill frowned, or at least she thought it frowned. It waved a dirty claw, and all the assembled “pirates” scrambled away like rats, except for the small-headed one standing beside her.

“I will make you suffer in ways you cannot imagine,” the McGill said, and although Allie believed it, she wasn’t going to let this beast see her fear the way she had let the Haunter see it. If there was one thing she had learned, it was that monsters only had the power that you gave them. But she also knew that monsters didn’t deal well with blatant disrespect. She had already disrespected the McGill once; she would probably not get away with it again.

“I’ve heard that you are the greatest creature in all of Everlost.” She nodded respectfully. “Now I see that it’s true.”

The McGill smiled, or at least Allie thought it smiled. It turned its dangling eye toward the misproportioned boy beside it. “What do you think, Pinhead, should I throw her overboard, or something worse?”

“Worse,” answered Pinhead. Somehow Allie knew he’d say that.

The McGill shifted in its throne, trying to make that unsightly body more comfortable, which seemed an impossibility. “But first I want to know how you snuck on board my ship.”

Allie grinned. “No one’s ever done that before, have they?”

“Actually, no,” said Pinhead, and the McGill threw him a burning gaze before turning back to Allie.

“How did you do it?” demanded the McGill.

“I’ll tell you, but only if– “

The McGill didn’t let her finish. It waved a clawed hand. “‘Only if’ nothing, I don’t make deals. Throw her overboard, I’ve lost interest in her.”

Pinhead moved to grab her, but she slipped out of his grasp.

“No,” said Allie. “Wait—I’ll tell you how I got on your ship.”

Pinhead hesitated. She thought she might get what she wanted if she played this right, but realized that she could not play at all. The McGill did not play games, and truly intended to toss her over. The best she could do was to stall with hopes of finding some way to bargain for the lives of Nick and Lief…assuming they hadn’t already been hurled overboard themselves.

“I took the Staten Island Ferry,” she said quickly, “and I slipped on board as it passed through your ship.”

Suddenly both of the McGill’s wandering eyes zeroed in on her. It gripped the edge of the throne with its claws and pushed itself up.

“That ferry changed course,” the McGill said, “almost as if it was intentional.

Did you do that?”

Allie wondered which response would keep her from being thrown overboard, yes or no. In the end she realized her answer was really the best of both worlds. “Yes and no,” she said.

The McGill took a step closer. “Explain.”

“I couldn’t make the ship turn myself, so I sort of leaped into the pilot’s body and took over for a few seconds.”

The McGill maintained its hideous stare in silence. “You expect me to believe this,” it finally said.

“Believe what you want, but I’m telling you the truth.”

The creature eyed her for a few moments more. “So then, you’re telling me that you know how to usurp, possess, and control the living? You can actually skinjack?

Allie didn’t like the sound of that. Is that what she had done? Had she possessed the pilot? Had she skinjacked him? It sounded so … criminal. “I prefer to think of it as ‘body-surfing.’”

The McGill laughed at that. “Body-surfing. Very good.” It scratched thoughtfully for a moment at the stalk of its smaller, dangling eye. “What’s your name?”

“Allie,” she answered. “Allie the Outcast.”

The McGill, not at all impressed by her title, dug a single claw into its oversized nose, pulling out a booger the size of a roach, and flicked it to the wall where it stuck. Allie grimaced.

“Take her below,” The McGill told Pinhead.

“Shall I chime her with the others?”

“No,” the McGill said. “Put her in the guest quarters.”

Pinhead nodded obediently and took Allies arm with slightly more respect than he might have a moment ago. Allie, however, sensing her bargaining position had now changed, shrugged Pinhead off.

“You took two of my friends from the Haunter.”

The McGill became very attentive. “Friends,” the monster said slowly.

“Are they here?”

“Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t. For now you will go to your quarters.

When I want you, I’ll call for you.”

She sighed, knowing she couldn’t push it any further. “Thank you for being so … merciful,” Allie said. “But I would appreciate it if Pea-brain here would keep his hands off me.”

“That’s Pinhead,” corrected the boy. “Pea-brain works in the engine room.”

The McGill waved a hand in dismissal, Pinhead bowed to Allie in a mock gesture of courtesy, and she was led to the guest quarters with more dignity than any Afterlight had experienced on the Sulphur Queen since its crossing into Everlost.

Once the girl was gone, the McGill lumbered back to his throne and sat down.

From the little perch where the throne sat, he had a view of the ocean before him…They had crossed beneath the Verrazano Bridge, and the Sulphur Queen would soon be out in the Atlantic, on its endless journey up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

The McGill rarely allowed himself flights of fancy—he kept his existence pessimistic, always expecting the negative, and reveling when the worst didn’t come to pass—but this girl had struck a chord in him.

Skinjacking! This was a power more useful than any of the powers he already possessed. To be able to leap from one body to another at will; intruding into the living world, then finding new flesh to inhabit whenever it suited him – how-powerful that would make him! Could this girl teach him how to do that? If so, it would be worth putting all of his other plans on hold. Yes, this new associate offered some exciting possibilities.

The closest Mary Hightower comes to mentioning the McGill is in her book Caution, This Means You! Between paragraphs on the dangers of gravitational vortexes and reality television, Mary writes, “If you find a dead-spot containing something of great value, like jewelry, food that has crossed over, or any other object that seems too good to be true, chances are that it is too good to be true. Stay away from these places, or you may find yourself in a very unpleasant circumstance.” It is commonly believed that she is referring to the McGill’s Greensoul traps, which are rumored to be strategically placed up and down the East Coast. Of course, their existence has never been proven. … Everlost CHAPTER 17

The Chiming Chamber Unlike Mary Hightower, the McGill did not write any books. The way he saw it, information was best hoarded, much like the objects in his treasure hold. The less information others knew, the more power he had over them. Still, the McGill secretly read every book that Mary Hightower had written. At first he found it all very amusing, because Mary’s information was wrong as often as it was right.

The more he read, however, the more he realized that Mary was not getting her facts wrong at all. She was deliberately distorting what she knew when it suited her. In this way, she was very much like the McGill, holding all the best information in. The fact that Mary did not mention the McGill in any of her writings was a constant thorn in his side. He was a legend. He was, after all, the One True Monster of Everlost, and he deserved at the very least a chapter.

Was that so much to ask? Someday, he would take on this Mary, defeat her, enslave her, and then force her to write an entire encyclopedia about him. But for now his interest was in a different girl.

Allie knew her welcome on board the Sulphur Queen would last only until the McGill got tired of her or got what it wanted. What he wanted, because Allie was reasonably certain this beast was male. Either way, her time was limited.

Besides, she didn’t have the patience to wait; she simply had to find out if Nick and Lief were here. Once in the “guest cabin,” Allie waited until the sound of Pinhead’s footsteps faded, then she quietly opened the door and snuck out.

The ship was large and the McGill’s crew was small, so she was able to slip through the hatchways and corridors unseen. On the occasions that she did encounter the McGill’s ugly young minions, they made so much noise that Allie had plenty of time to hide.

A ship has many places to stow prisoners, so she methodically explored every dark corner, ignoring the hideous rotten-egg smell, which grew as she went deeper into the bowels of the ship. Finally she found the ship’s massive holds.

By the stench and the yellow residue on the ground, Allie suspected the holds once carried sulphur, but now they held the spoils of the McGill’s pillaging raids. She marveled at what she saw in each of the chambers, wondering how these things had crossed over. Had someone died in this leather recliner? Was this stained-glass window so lovingly made that it crossed over when the church burned down? And what about this armoire, complete with wedding dress and tuxedo hanging inside? Did the bride and groom “get where they were going” on an ill-fated wedding night? Was their love, like Romeo and Juliet’s, not meant for the living world?

Each object held a story that no one would ever know, and the fact that the McGill treated these things with such thoughtless disrespect made Allie hate the creature even more.

She opened the door to the fourth and final hold, expecting to find more piles of the McGill’s treasure. This room was different, however.

As she peered in, her mind did not entirely comprehend what she saw. Her first impression was that of a giant hanging mobile, like something she once saw in the Museum of Modern Art. Large, lumpy objects hung from chains, all at different heights, all glowing dimly like low-wattage lightbulbs.

Then one of the objects spoke.

“What time is it?” the glowing lump said.

Allie let out a yelp, stepped back, and hit the steel bulkhead behind her. The wall rang out with a dull, hollow thud.

“What time is it?” the lump said again. It was a boy, maybe a year or two younger than her, wearing gray flannel pajamas, hanging upside down from his ankles around five feet from the ground. His pjs had a dorsal fin on the back, and a cartoon of a shark on the front.

“I … I don’t know…,” Allie answered.

“Oh. Okay.” The boy didn’t seem disappointed. He just seemed resigned.

“Careful,” said a girl hanging next to him. “He’s a biter.”

The pajama-boy smiled, showing a set of razor-sharp, sharklike teeth, like the picture on his pajamas. “It’s in a sea predator’s nature,” he said.

Only now did the truth begin to dawn on her as she took in the larger scene around her. The hanging lumps were Afterlights. Every single one of them. There had to be hundreds of kids, all hanging upside down.

The act of churning was invented by the McGill and he was proud to claim responsibility for the idea. Since it was impossible to hurt someone in Everlost, and since the McGill so wanted to inflict distress, he came up with a whole new form of torture, functional in several different ways: first, because it provided an efficient way of storing those Afterlights he had no immediate use for, and second, because he created a hopeless sense of abject boredom in his victims.

Simply stated, the act of chiming was to hang someone upside down from their ankles by a long chain, or rope. It didn’t actually hurt the spirit being chimed, but it was a pretty dull way to spend one’s days, and if boredom was the closest thing to suffering that the McGill could inflict, he would have to live with that. In any case it was entertaining for him, because he would often go down to the hold and begin swinging people. They would collide into one another, grunting and oofing as they bumped, like human wind chimes, and hence it became known as “being chimed.”

When Nick was first chimed, he wasn’t sure whether it was better or worse than being in the pickle barrel. The rotten-egg smell was certainly worse than the garlic and dill of the pickle brine, but then, at least here, he did not feel so alone. Lief, who had reached a state of nirvana in his barrel, took it in stride, smiling all the while, and Nick eventually decided being alone would be better than hanging upside down next to a happy camper—but then, it was better than being next to the screamer, or that kid who was trying to turn himself into a shark.

As soon as the Ugloids had finished stringing them up, they painted numbers on their chests in black. For reasons Nick could not figure out, he was number 966, and Lief was number 266, although the kid had drawn the two backward.

“Your hair looks funny,” Lief said, as soon as the Ugloids had left. “It stands straight up.”

“No,” said Nick, intensely irritated, “it’s hanging straight down.”

Lief just gave him an upside-down shrug. “Up is down in China and you’re part-Chinese.”

“Japanese, dweeb!” Nick reached out and slugged him on the shoulder, but that just started them both swinging into the others who were around them.

“Hey watch it,” some kid said. “It’s bad enough when the McGill comes down here to swing us. We don’t need a couple of idiots making us chime, too.”

His dangling comrades also complained each time Nick tried to climb his own rope, to get to the grate high up above. Through that grate he could see the sky, and he knew if he could get out on the open deck, he’d figure out a way to escape. Unfortunately, the ropes had all been greased, and he never got more than ten feet up his rope before falling down again and swinging into the kids around him, setting off a chain reaction of whining, which in turn reminded the screamer to start screaming, and everyone blamed Nick.

So aside from the occasional fight, and group sing-along, there was nothing to do but wait until the McGill found a use for them. Nick had this fantasy that Mary would come with a hundred of her kids to rescue him. He never dreamed that his rescuer would be Allie.

“Oh my God!”

Allie stood there on the sulphur-dusted floor of the chiming chamber, still unable to believe what she saw. She tried to count how many of them there were, but there were simply too many to count. There were numbers scrawled on their chests, and some of those numbers were up in the high hundreds.

“Are you here to free us?” girl 342 asked.

Since Allie didn’t know if a rescue of this many Afterlights would ever be possible, Allie didn’t answer her. Instead she asked, “I’m looking for two boys.

They wouldn’t have been here long. One is named Nick, the other Lief.”

Then a voice from high above called down to her.

“They’re on the other side.” It was an older boy in a Boy Scout uniform, with rust-colored hair sticking straight down like an upside-down flame. His was the shortest rope; he hung about fifteen feet above the floor, making him the highest one, and the one with the best view of the chamber. “All they do is talk talk talk,” he said. “Tell them to shut up, it’s annoying.”

Allie pushed her way forward into the mass of “chimed” kids. They swung like pendulums as she pushed through them, all of them grumbling and griping at having been disturbed. She tried to be gentle, but the forest of dangling spirits clearly did not appreciate her intrusion.

“Shut up, you idiots,” the high-chimed Boy Scout said. Allie wondered if being strung the highest made the kid the automatic leader of the group, or did it merely make him high-strung?

“I said shut up!” he yelled more loudly. “Keep making noise, and you’ll set off the screamer.”

And next to Allie, the screamer, once more reminded of his job, began to wail in Allies ear. Reflexively Allie clapped her hand over his mouth. “That,” she said, “is totally uncalled for. Don’t do that again. Ever.” The screamer looked at her with worried eyes. “Are we clear on this subject?” said Allie. The screamer nodded, and she removed her hand.

“Can I scream a little?” he asked.

“No,” said Allie. “Your screaming days are over.”

“Darn.” And he was quiet thereafter.

“Hey,” someone called out. “She shut down the screamer!” The chamber rang out with upside-down applause.

“Allie, is that you?” It was Nick. She pushed her way past a few more danglers, and found both of them. Nick hung about five feet from the ground, his head at about eye level. Lief hung about a foot higher.

“How did you get here?” Nick asked. “I thought for sure the Haunter put you in a barrel, too!”

“I got away before he could,” Allie explained.

“And you just left us there?!”

Allie sighed. They had no idea what she had gone through to get here, and now was not the time to tell them. She looked at Lief, who smiled and gave her an upside-down wave with his dangling arms. “Hi.”

Lief’s calm acceptance of his plight just made Allie feel all the more miserable. “This is horrible! How could the McGill do this!?”

“He’s a monster,” Nick reminded her. “It’s what monsters do.”

“Are you going to hang here with us?” Lief asked, happily. “There’s room next to me!”

“Ignore him,” Nick told Allie. “He’s completely lost it.” Nick squirmed, and bent his knees until his hands could get a grip on his ankles. “Can you cut us down?”

Then the kid up top called down to them. “If you free them, the McGill will throw all three of you overboard. He may get so mad, he’ll throw us all overboard.”

Allie knew he was right. The McGill was both mean-spirited and unpredictable—and besides, if she cut them down, where would they go? Even if they got out of the hold, they were still trapped on the ship.

“I can’t free you now,” she told them, “but I will soon. Hang tight.” She grimaced at her poor choice of words.

“So you’re just going to leave us here?” Nick said.

“Don’t be a stranger!” Lief said, merrily.

“I’ll be back soon. I promise.”

“You promise? You also promised the visit to the Haunter wouldn’t be dangerous,”

Nick reminded her. “And look how that turned out.”

Allie made no excuses because he was right. This was all her fault. Allie rarely apologized for anything, but when she said “I’m sorry,” this time, it carried the weight of all the apologies she had never given when she was alive. Then she hugged them awkwardly, setting them both slightly swinging, and left before her emotions could get the better of her.

CHAPTER 18

Skinjacking for Dummies The Sulphur Queen hugged the shore of the East Coast, stopping now and again to send out a landing party in a lifeboat to see if any of the McGill’s Greensoul traps had snagged any new Afterlights. They were simple devices really;

camouflaged nets tied to Everlost trees. A Greensoul would see a candy bar, or a bucket of popcorn, or whatever else the McGill was able to use as bait, but the second the kid grabbed it, the trap sprung, and there the kid was caught until the McGill’s crew came to cut him down. Easy as catching a rabbit.

The McGill was pleased with the current state of his world. Things were coming together nicely. He had to believe that finding this girl Allie was no coincidence. Forces in the universe were conspiring in his favor. Whether they were forces of light or forces of darkness…well, that was yet to be determined.

The morning after Allie’s unexpected arrival, the McGill went down to her quarters, and found her there, reading one of those blasted books by Mary Queen of Snots.

When he entered, Allie casually glanced at him from her bed, then returned her attention to the book. “Mary’s books are sooo annoying,” she told the McGill.

“You can’t tell the truth from the lies. Someday I’ll set her straight.”

It was hard for him not to smile. She disliked Mary, just as he did. This was a good sign.

The McGill tossed his head in a calculated gesture of disdain. His greasy hair whipped around, and flung some slime against the wall. “You will teach me how to skinjack now.”

She turned a page in her book, ignoring him. “I don’t follow orders.”

The McGill paused, not sure whether to spit worms at her, or treat her with uncharacteristic patience. He chose patience. “You will teach me how to skinjack now…please.”

Allie put down the book and sat up. “Well, as long as you used the magic word, sure, why not.”

She did not appear disgusted in the least when she looked at him. This was troublesome. Everybody, even his own crew, found him utterly repulsive. His power to repel was a matter of pride. He made a mental note that he would have to come up with new and inventive ways to disgust her.

What the McGill didn’t realize was that Allie was disgusted, but she was extremely good at keeping her emotions to herself when she wanted to.

Allie had decided that the McGill already had enough power over her; she wasn’t willing to give him the satisfaction of nausea.

“The art of skinjacking,” Allie began; “lesson number one.”

“I’m listening.”

Allie hesitated. She had truly painted herself into a corner here, because if there was ever a spirit that should not know how to skinjack, it was the McGill.

She barely knew how to do it herself, having only tried it once with the ferry pilot—but the McGill didn’t know that. As far as he knew, she ‘was an expert. As long as she acted like an expert, she could get away with just about anything.

“Possessing the living is a very complicated thing,” she said with authority.

“First we must find…uh … a Vortex of Spirit.”

“A Vortex of Spirit,” repeated the McGill. “I don’t know what that is.”

Neither did Allie, but that really didn’t matter.

“Do you mean a place that’s already haunted?” the McGill asked.

“Yes, that’s it.”

“A place that’s haunted without explanation?”

“Exactly!”

The McGill stroked his swollen chin as he thought. “I know a place like that. A house in Long Island. We went there in search of Afterlights to capture. We didn’t find a single one, but the walls of the house kept telling us to get out.”

“Okay,” said Allie. “Then that’s where our lessons will begin.”

The McGill nodded. “I will call for you when we arrive.”

Once he was gone, Allie let her revulsion out, shivering and squirming, and then she returned to her bed, disgusting herself further with Mary Hightower’s volume of misinformation. She hoped that couched between Mary’s useless tips there might be a clue to defeating the McGill—the trick was finding it.

The McGill, being an arrogant creature, believed he could see through anyone who was lying. It was that arrogance that kept him from seeing how completely Allie was tricking him. He strolled along the deck, pleased with this new wrinkle in his existence. Around him, his crew did their busywork on deck. There was little point to all the cleaning, the swabbing, and the polishing the crew did. What was rusty now would always be rusty. What was covered in sulphur dust would stay that way, no matter how much the crew tried to wipe it away. The best they could do was to clear away the cookie crumbs the McGill often left behind. Still, the McGill insisted that his ship be like a real ship. his crew like a real crew, and cleaning is what crews did. It was always the same crew members cleaning the same things, and at the same time of day. Routine. It’s what made a ghost ship a ghost ship. Allie, however, was a break from the routine.

He proudly strolled past his crewmen, flicking little black bugs at them, or spitting on their shoes—just to remind them who was boss. Then he returned to the bridge and ordered the ship turned around, heading back toward Long Island and the haunted house he had told Allie about. Then he sat in his throne, reaching toward a tarnished brass spittoon that sat next to it. The bowl was originally used for spitting tobacco, phlegm, and other vile things, but it served a different function here. The McGill dug his claw in, and pulled out a fortune cookie—one of many that filled the copper pot.

Mary Hightower was not a fan of fortune cookies, and told her readers so. Just thinking about it made the McGill laugh. What Mary didn’t tell her readers is that fortune cookies were plentiful in Everlost—not quite as plentiful as those faceless coins, but far more useful. For once, Mary had done him a service. If others stayed away from the cookies, it meant there were more for him!

The McGill crushed the fortune cookie in his fingers, hurling the crumbs out on the deck for his crew to fight over like seagulls, then he settled into his throne and read the small slip of paper that had been hidden in the cookie.

Out of the water will come your salvation.

Allie had come to him out of the water, hadn’t she? He leaned back, well satisfied with himself.

The house on Long Island did, indeed, tell them to get out.

It told them loudly, it told them often. It was an annoying house. It was, however, all bark and no bite. There was a young couple living in the house – and although it yelled at them, too, they apparently could not hear it as they were both deaf. Since the house had no appendages by which to communicate in American sign language, it was profoundly frustrated. It must have been very satisfying for the house to finally have spirits within its walls who could hear it—even if they weren’t inclined to listen. Regardless, Allie had to admit it was the perfect location for her first bogus lesson in skinjacking.

“Okay,” Allie told the McGill, “first find a dead-spot in the room,” which was not very difficult since the whole house was spotted with them like Swiss cheese. Apparently many people had died here. Allie didn’t want to think about it.

The McGill took a spot near a window facing the sea. “Now what?”

“Close your eyes.”

“My eyes don’t close,” the McGill reminded her.

“Right. Okay then, keep your eyes open. Face the ocean…and wait for the sun to rise.”

“It’s noon,” the McGill pointed out.

“Yes, I know. You have to stand here, and wait until tomorrow when the sun rises, then stare into the rising sun.”

“Get…Owwwwwwwwt,” said the house.

“If we have to be here at dawn, why didn’t you tell me that before we came?”

“You know what your problem is?” Allie said. “You have no patience. You’re immortal, it’s not like you’re going anywhere. Skinjacking takes patience. Stand here, and wait until dawn.”

The McGill gave her an evil eye, spat out a wad of something brown on her shoe, and said, “Fine. But you wait with me. If I have to listen to this stupid house, then so do you.”

So they waited, ignoring the pointless activities of the people who lived there, and turning a deaf ear to the house.

The next morning however was overcast, and instead of a rising sun, the horizon was filled with a ribbon of gray.

“You’ll have to wait until tomorrow,” Allie told the McGill.

“Why? What does this have to do with possessing the living?”

Allie rolled her eyes as if the answer was obvious. “Staring at the sun at dawn gives you soul-sight. Not every living person can be possessed. Soul-sight allows you to see which ones you’ll be able to skinjack, and which ones you won’t.”

The McGill looked at her doubtfully. “And this is how you learned?”

“Well,” said Allie, “it’s the first step.”

“How many steps are there?”

“Twelve.”

The McGill regarded her with his wandering, mismatched eyes, then asked, “Is anyone in this house possessible?”

Allie thought back to when she caught glimpses of the occupants speaking to one another by means of complex hand gestures. In truth, anyone was possessible, but she wouldn’t let the McGill know that. The whole point of this was to make sure she didn’t teach the McGill anything at all. The whole point was to stall long enough to learn the McGill’s weaknesses. If she could drag him through twelve ridiculous steps, convincing him that at the end he’d learn how to skinjack, she might find the key to defeating him—or at least, a way to free her friends.

Either way, she knew she’d have to make a quick escape when it was all over, because when the McGill finally figured out that he was being duped, his fury would reverberate through all of Everlost.

“The woman is possessible,” Allie told the McGill.

“Show me,” the creature said. “Skinjack her now.”

Allie clenched her teeth. Her experience taking control of the ferry pilot had been exciting, but frightening. It had been an intense experience, but ~ also fundamentally gross—like wearing someone else’s sweaty clothes. Still, if she were going to keep stringing the McGill along, she would have to deliver.

“Okay, I’ll do it. But only if you tell me why you’ve got all those kids strung up in your ship. And why you put numbers on them.”

He considered the question, then said, “I’ll tell you AFTER you skinjack the woman.”

“Fine.” Allie rolled her shoulders like a runner getting ready for a race, then approached the woman in the kitchen. Stepping in was easier this time than it had been with the ferry pilot, perhaps because she was a woman, or perhaps because practice made perfect. The woman never quite knewwhat hit her. What struck Allie first was the absolute silence. She almost panicked, thinking something was wrong, until she remembered the woman was deaf. The world around Allie now was brighter—the way it appeared to the living—and she could feel the seductive density of flesh. She flexed her fingers, and found that it had only taken a few moments to push the woman’s consciousness down, and take control.