Текст книги "Everfound"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

CHAPTER 17

And Then Along Came Mary . . .

A few days later, Mary’s coffin mysteriously disappeared from the root cellar, where all the other Interlights were being kept, and appeared in the middle of the common room. No one knew who had carried it there. Avalon, too proud to admit things were going on behind behind his back, made it seem as if he meant for it to happen.

“You may look at my property,” he told everyone, “but you may not touch it.”

There was a small African-American boy who walked around with a big ceramic piggy bank as if it was his only friend in the world. Everyone called him Little Richard. One day Jix caught him staring at Mary, as if she might open her eyes. Impossible, of course, considering she still had several more months of hibernation before her.

“Wurlitzer meant for her to come here,” said Little Richard. “It’s like that ‘Let It Be’ song. You know, ‘In times of trouble, and all that.’”

“Did Wurlitzer ever play that?” Jix asked him.

“No,” said Little Richard. Then he said with absolute confidence, “But he will when she wakes up.” Clearly he was part of whatever conspiracy had moved her here.

The Neons, fancying themselves a military unit in everything they did, set up a twenty-four-hour watch over Mary’s coffin, in case someone moved her again, or as some Neons secretly believed, she teleported herself to a different location.

By now, both Jix and Jill had come to understand the nature of the Neons’ constant battle-readiness, and why everyone there was macho to the extreme—even the girls.

“This place oughta be called the Abyss of Abysmal Aggression,” Jill told Jix, after getting into an all-out brawl with another girl.

It was Jix who figured it out. “The vortex above us is filled with the adrenalina of all the men who died here, I think. Down here, we still feel its effects. It can turn anyone into a warrior.”

“So how come it doesn’t affect you?” Jill asked.

Jix smiled and puffed out his bare chest. “It doesn’t get more macho than this.”

Jill scowled at him. “You’re an idiot.”

In truth, Jix did feel the effect of the vortex. There was a powerful urge to fight, and to challenge Avalon. But he was also disciplined and knew how to control those impulses. He had to have that much discipline to control the impulses of the cats he furjacked.

By now both Jix and Jill had come to see that the Neons’ various activities were, like so many Afterlights, repetitive day after day until they had become like rituals. The group of kids who played poker, then fought; the girl who read the same book cover-to-cover every day, then fought; the gym-rats who bench-pressed a barbell that would be far too heavy for them to lift in the living world, then fought. Only scouts and lookouts left the cramped labyrinth to search the city for Afterlights with coins, and to protect their hideout from nonexistent attackers. The Neons lived their deaths as if they were an army under siege.

While Jill wanted nothing to do with the Neons, Jix smoothly inserted himself into their routines, just as he had done on the train, making sure that each Neon knew him, and was comfortable with him. Comfortable enough to answer innocent questions that they wouldn’t even remember he had asked.

“How long has Avalon been high priest?”

“Since Wurlitzer played ‘See You Later, Alligator’ to the last one.”

“How did Wurlitzer even get down here?”

“Probably the Crocket Street tunnel—it leads to the old Grenet house.”

“Has it ever played on its own, without someone asking a question?”

“No—why would it?”

There was one girl rumored to have been here so long, she had no memory of being anywhere else. Her name was Dionne, and she spent much of her time polishing a Bowie knife—perhaps the original one. He saved the more important questions for her.

“How many songs does Wurlitzer play?” Jix asked. “Thirty? Forty?”

Dionne shook her head. “There are more songs in there than you can imagine,” she told him. “And sometimes it’ll play songs some of us have never heard before.”

Her answer confirmed what Jix had suspected; that this machine was not a simple mechanical device. It was something much, much more. Wurlitzer held the memory of every song that anyone has ever loved.

Then he asked the big question: “Has Wurlitzer ever been wrong?”

Dionne paused her knife-polishing and took a moment before answering.

“Once,” she said. “But if you ask me, it was Avalon’s mistake, not Wurlitzer’s.” Then Dionne leaned closer and whispered, “A few years ago, Avalon asked Wurlitzer for a mission, and Wurlitzer played two songs in a row when only one coin had been dropped in. The first song was ‘The Chapel of Love’ and the second was ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo.’ Avalon’s usually pretty good at figuring out what it all means, and he seemed pretty sure about this one too. He made us trek all the way out to this little town called Love, Oklahoma, looking for a chapel that had crossed over—and sure enough, we found one. Then he said we had to lift it up, and move it over to some railroad tracks that had also crossed over. We went home, and nothing ever came of it. Crazy, right?”

“Sì,” Jix agreed, “loco.” But Jix knew it wasn’t loco at all. The only reason Milos rammed the train into the mansion was because of that church. If that church hadn’t been on the tracks, Milos would never have been led to think the mansion could be knocked off the tracks, too. If it hadn’t been for the church, they would simply have sealed up the train when they saw the Neons coming, like a turtle pulling into its shell—which means Jill and Jix and Mary would not have been here now . . .

. . . which meant they were here because of Wurlitzer. Jix felt a phantom shiver run through his entire spirit. Wurlitzer didn’t just advise the Neons on matters of the present; it also anticipated the future—which meant it was truly a force to be reckoned with. Was it friend or foe? Jix wondered. Or was it fickle and unpredictable in its intentions?

When Jix crossed into Everlost, he had taken on the beliefs of his Mayan ancestors—for in this mystical world, a rich tapestry of magical beings suddenly seemed to make sense to him. Mayan gods were often mischievous, reveling in human folly, and there were dozens of them. It would have been less complicated if it came down to Wurlitzer being either the voice of God or the devil—but for Jix, there could be many other alternatives.

Or maybe it was just a talisman, a powerful luck-object. If it were like the coins and the cookies, then it was a messenger of comfort—a lifeline, thrown out to those caught in this middle realm. He wanted to believe that, but the only way to know for sure would be to ask it a question. The machine, however, was always guarded. And besides, Jix had no coin.

Jix discovered that, while Wurlitzer was fed every coin the Neons stole, there was one “emergency coin” inside Little Richard’s piggy bank. One problem, however: The piggy bank was the old-fashioned kind—it didn’t have a rubber plug on the bottom, it was solid all the way around. The only way to get the coin out was to smash the bank . . . but in Everlost, things didn’t break unless it was the object’s purpose to break. One might argue that a piggy bank’s purpose was to eventually be shattered, but the universe would argue back that such a thing could not happen until the bank was full. In such arguments the universe always won. Thus, the piggy bank was about as secure as Fort Knox.

Little Richard spent much of his days holding the piggy bank upside down and shaking it to make the coin come out of the tiny slot. He had been at it for several years.

“It will come out when it wants to,” Jix told him. But that didn’t stop him from shaking the bank.

Jill, who was listening, looked at Jix doubtfully. “You talk like the coin has a mind of its own.”

“Not a mind,” Jix said. “But a purpose. Nothing exists without a purpose.”

Jill smirked. “Did the jaguar gods tell you that?”

Jix knew it was meant as an insult, but he chose not to take it as one. “No,” he answered. “My mother did.”

Jill was not impressed. In fact, she was never impressed by anything. Ever. This fact impressed Jix a great deal. At least once a day, Jill would get in Jix’s face, insisting that they leave. “We’re skinjackers, we need to skinjack,” Jill said to him one day. “Even if you don’t, I do!”

They had been there about a week, by Jix’s reckoning, although the days did blend together—especially when they couldn’t see daylight.

“You would leave Mary?” he asked Jill.

Jill looked over to the glass coffin. It sat like a centerpiece in the common room, like a diamond in the middle of its setting. While Wurlitzer was covered with a quilt, Mary’s glory remained unhidden. More and more Neons had begun to revere the beautiful girl in the green satin gown. They knew nothing of her, had read none of her writings on the nature of Everlost. She arrived here without the thunderstorm of legend that usually preceded her arrival. Yet still, these Afterlights were drawn to her.

Jill considered Mary for a moment more, then said, “I don’t owe her anything, and right now she’s useless to me.”

Jix smiled. “Self-interest suits you, verdad? But sometimes a predator needs to look further than the eyes can see.”

“What are you blathering about? More of that jaguar-god nonsense?”

“No. I’m talking about successful stalking.” He looked around, and saw that the poker kids were beginning to get louder, preparing for their daily fistfight—which included a crowd of others cheering them on. Jix took Jill to the corner farthest away, so they could not be heard. “Cats stalk with their instincts—but you and me—we stalk with our minds. The way I stalked all of you on the train.”

Jill gave him a twisted grin. “You didn’t stalk anyone—we let you stay.”

“Why?” asked Jix. Jill had no answer for him. “I’ll tell you why. Because you never saw me as a threat. And yet I was. I knew you all so well—and had earned the respect of so many of Mary’s children, I could have easily taken over the train if I wanted to.”

Jill looked a little shaken. “Was that your plan? To take over?”

“No,” he told her, then leaned in closer. “But it is now.”

* * *

The following day, one of the lookouts—a skinny kid they called Domino—came down from up above, announcing that he had been seen by a group of refugees from the train crash. Avalon was not pleased. “I should push you down myself!” Avalon yelled at him. Then he ordered the Neons to prepare for battle. “We beat them once,” he said, “and we’ll do it again. And this time, we’ll send every last one of them downtown!”

“But they’ve got a monster now,” said Domino.

“What do you mean, monster?”

“I don’t know what else to call it. I’ve never seen anything that strong. And here’s the weird part,” he said, looking around, almost afraid to say it, as if they wouldn’t believe him, “It’s made . . . of chocolate.”

Jill gasped, then pretended she hadn’t.

“It’s true!” said the lookout, and showed them the brown stains on his clothes where it had grabbed him.

“And you led it right here, didn’t you?” said Avalon in disgust.

The lookout began to stammer. “I . . . I . . . I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Imbecile!”

Up above them, in the Alamo complex, a woman screamed and an alarm began to blare. Even though living-world business meant nothing to them, today it added to the tension. The Neons were all looking to Avalon for direction, so he pulled out the one remaining coin from his pocket. “We’ll ask Wurlitzer what to do.” Everyone agreed. He strode toward the machine, tugged off the blanket, and all the Neons fell to their knees. Even Jix did, for fear of angering it, whatever it was. Jill had to be forced to her knees.

Wurlitzer’s light cast a multicolored glow around the common room, caught and refracted by the many bits of glass that made up Mary’s coffin, which sat just a few yards in front of the jukebox. It almost seemed as if her coffin was a part of Wurlitzer now: an altar before the figure of a god. Jix couldn’t help but wonder if Wurlitzer wanted it this way—that even the attention given to Mary somehow reflected back on the mystical machine.

Avalon dropped the coin in and waited for it to clink its way down to the coin box and then he asked his question. “Mighty Wurlitzer, what do we do about this chocolate monster?” He pressed a random button on the machine’s console, and Wurlitzer came to life. It pulled a record from its apparently infinite spinning rack, dropped it on the turntable, and with clicks and pops the song began to play.

“Oh, don’t it hurt, deeeeep inside . . .” sang a man in falsetto.

“I don’t know this one,” said Avalon.

“What does it mean?” someone asked.

“Shh! Let me listen.” Avalon put his ear to the glass as if that might help his hearing, then he squinted through the next few lines as if squinting might make him smarter. “This is a difficult one.”

But then Jill said, “Wait for the chorus. . . .” because she did know this song. In fact, it had been one of her grandfather’s favorites.

The music built to the chorus, and Frankie Valli sang, “Silence is golden . . .” and there was a collective gasp from the room.

“Wurlitzer has spoken,” Jill muttered, clearly a little freaked by it.

“Quiet!” yelled Avalon, then realized his error, and whispered, “Quiet . . .” Avalon went to the back of the machine and turned the volume down as low as it would go. In a couple of minutes, the song ended and when it was done, silence fell and it remained. No one spoke, no one moved. From the Alamo gift shop above them, they heard a voice.

“I know you are here somewhere!” someone yelled. Someone with a Russian accent. “And I won’t rest until I find you!”

Jill stood up.

“No!” whispered Jix.

“I’m done with this place,” said Jill. “I want out. Even Milos and his morons are better than this.” The others threw angry gazes at her, and Dionne brandished her knife—but silence was not golden for Jill—not when her fate was being decided by a glorified music box.

Jix grabbed her, getting face to face. Then looking into her eyes, he said, “It’s time for you to choose, then. Choose that life . . . or choose me.”

Jill looked at him with bitter fury.

“You must make your decision now,” he demanded.

She glared at him a moment more, then she pulled him close, kissed him hard, then slapped him even harder.

“I really, really don’t like you,” she said.

“Will you be quiet!” snapped Avalon. Jill sat back down in silence, not sure whether this was victory or defeat . . . while up above, things began to break.

CHAPTER 18

You Put Your Whole Self In . . .

Milos’s team of refugees had been scouring San Antonio for days, but it was a big city. There was no telling where the Neons were holing up. Wherever they had gone, they were well-concealed.

“Maybe they’re not here,” Moose suggested. “Maybe they went shumwhere elsh.” But Milos was not ready to give up. There were still too many places to look.

Shortly before Wurlitzer played its song about silence, Milos and his crew finally caught sight of a single Neon watching them, trying to appear like a Christmas elf in a department store’s holiday display. The kid ran when he was spotted, but Moose caught him and brought him to Milos.

“I will make a deal with you,” Milos told him. “Tell us where you are hiding and return Mary to us, and we won’t send you to the center of the earth.”

The kid laughed in his face. “I won’t tell you a thing.” Clearly, he meant it. He would rather sink than give away the location of the Neons.

“Very well,” said Milos and he called for the Chocolate Ogre, who came lumbering forward. “Say hello to my little fiend,” said Milos.

“I think you mean ‘friend,’” Squirrel corrected.

As soon as the Neon saw the Ogre, his face filled with terror. “What is that thing?”

Milos ignored the question. “Now I’m giving you one last chance. Tell us where you are holding Mary.”

“And Jill!” added the Ogre.

The kid still shook his head, but all the while stared at the Ogre. He seemed almost ready to break. Milos turned toward the Ogre. “Show this miserable Afterlight what we do to those who don’t cooperate with us.”

“Okay!” Then the Ogre thought for a moment. “What do we do?”

Milos sighed. “We show our strength in a way that they will never forget.”

“That makes sense,” said the Ogre cheerfully. Then he grabbed the Neon, lifted him off the ground, and threw him all the way over the building in front of them.

Milos stood there, stunned. “Why did you do that?”

“Because I didn’t think he’d ever forget it,” said the Ogre.

The whole mob of Afterlights ran to find him, but he wasn’t on the next street, or the next, or the next. Milos had begun to think that maybe he had landed hard enough to sink—but then they finally saw him in the distance, turning a corner. Once they reached the corner he was long gone—but then one of the other Afterlights noticed something. “Hey, what’s that?”

They went down a narrow alley that opened up to a street with stone-paved sidewalks and crowds of living people. On one side of the street were older, living-world buildings, but their facades were insulted by garish, blinking signs advertising everything from a wax museum to a mirror maze, and across a large plaza was an old stone mission.

“I think itsh the Alamo,” said Moose. “But I thought it would be bigger.”

“Look at it, look at it!” said Squirrel, pointing at the familiar face of the structure.

The entire building, and the stone walls that surrounded the complex almost seemed to be squirming; randomly shifting in and out of focus. The stone itself appeared to swirl in and out of phase, as if it couldn’t decide whether it was in Everlost or in the living world.

“It’s a vortex,” Milos said. Milos didn’t even try to hide his disgust.

“You don’t think they’re in there, do you?” asked Moose.

“You can’t make me go into a vortex!” said the complaining Afterlight—the one who always doubted Milos. “You never know what a vortex will do to you!”

“If you don’t go, what I do to you will be much worse,” said Milos. No one else gave him an argument.

They crossed the plaza, then stepped into the main building, a stone church full of arches and iron chandeliers called “the Shrine.” The ground felt strange beneath their feet; one moment soft, the next moment solid.

“We shouldn’t be here. . . . ,” complained the complainer.

It was midday, and there were way too many tourists for Milos’s taste. He had been denying himself his skinjacking pleasures, putting the search for Mary ahead of his own desires, but having so many living, breathing bodies around him was insanely tempting. “We need to clear this place out,” Milos told Moose. “Go skinjack someone and pull a fire alarm.”

Then a living woman, blueberry-plump in a cranberry pants suit, looked at Milos. Not through him as if he wasn’t there, but at him—and she screamed. The vortex had made at least a part of his face visible for an instant. It was a complication he did not need.

The alarm began to blare before she stopped screaming, and guards ushered the living out. Milos was startled by the woman, but he could not be deterred from his mission. Vortex or not, he was finding the Neons.

After the living left, it was easier for Milos to move through the Alamo grounds and look for signs of Afterlight activity. Unfortunately, the alarm masked any sounds that hiding Afterlights might have made. He sent teams into every building, and through each courtyard and garden of the compound—and while voices in the Long Barracks were promising, they turned out to be the trapped words of soldiers, spoken more than a hundred and fifty years ago. A vortex could be annoying that way.

When the fire threat was determined to be false, the alarm was reset, and the living were allowed back into the building—including the cranberry woman who was as loud as she was large, and demanded that security be on the lookout for ghosts. She insisted that a ghost had probably pulled the alarm. Security, however, had already nabbed her nephew as a suspect, an obnoxious boy with a history of lies and mischief. The woman insisted that Ralphy had been possessed.

Milos could not stand listening to her endless nattering. “Will you go skinjack her,” Milos told Moose, “and make her shut up?”

“Do I have to? She’s really not my type.”

“Just do it!”

Reluctantly, Moose jumped into the woman, and she immediately stopped talking. Then, commandeering her body, Moose took her out into the middle of the courtyard and started her doing the Hokey Pokey. By the time she was putting her left arm in, other tourists had begun to join in the spontaneous fun, until about a dozen Alamo visitors were doing the Hokey Pokey in the courtyard. Not to be outdone, Squirrel skinjacked an elderly gentleman in the Arbor Garden, and started doing the Chicken Dance, but nobody joined him.

Milos went back into the Shrine, and saw the Chocolate Ogre standing beneath a stone arch, looking at a series of historic Texas flags. He seemed thoughtful—which worried Milos. He did not want the Ogre thinking too much.

“People died here,” the Ogre said. “A hundred and fifty of ’em.” And he pointed to a full-fledged deadspot in a small grotto that didn’t shift in and out of phase like the rest of the building. “Jim Bowie, Davey Crockett, William Travis . . . I did a report on the Alamo once. . . .” And as he remembered, his shapeless face started to change. “I wonder if I could find the spot where Bowie died. . . .” The memory was strong enough to bring form back to his face. Cheekbones and a jawline.

“But what about Jill?” Milos said quickly. “Remember. That’s why you’re here; to find Jill.”

“Right,” said the Ogre, losing his focus. He looked around as if coming out of a trance—never realizing that this was the trance. “Well, she’s not here,” the Ogre said, then strode out to search another building.

Milos walked the grounds’ inner perimeter, getting increasingly frustrated—and then he heard something. Music—and it didn’t have the hollow timbre that living-world music had to Everlost ears. It was coming from the gift shop!

By the time Milos had gotten to the gift shop building, the music had stopped. Now the only sounds were the inane conversations of the living.

Milos stood in the middle of the gift shop and called out, “I know you are here somewhere, and I won’t rest until I find you!” Then he wandered the room, listening for something, anything. Finally he heard whispering. Yes, he was sure of it! It was coming from behind the southern wall. Then he heard the distinctive sound of a slap.

He leaped at the wall.

The first time, he bounced off of it, so he waited until the wall shifted out of phase with Everlost, and he leaped at it again, this time going right through it and out into the courtyard where Moose was still leading tourists in the Hokey Pokey. Milos jumped back through the wall again and again but found nothing—no secret passageway, no concealed Neons, just stone, several feet thick. He tried to leap through in another spot, and just as he passed through the wall, it began to shift into phase again. He felt it solidifying around him—but he was out of the wall an instant before it became solid. He didn’t want to think what would happen to him if he was caught within the wall the moment it solidified. Would he become a permanent part of the wall? He didn’t want to find out, and he knew he couldn’t risk it again.

A sudden fury filled Milos like a rush of adrenaline, spiking his anger. He wanted to battle, he wanted to defeat the Neons and he wanted to do it now. He knew the sudden surge must have been an effect of the vortex—but it was serving him, and as long as it served him, he had no need to fear or fight it.

He knew what he had to do.

While Moose, still as Madame Cranberry, put his whole self in, Milos decided to do the same. He went to the gift shop entrance and skinjacked the guard who stood there. A sudden rush—the beat of a heart, the taste of a mint, and—

–uniform’s tight / gotta lose weight / gotta work out / when’s lunch?—

Milos felt a moment of vertigo as he took hold of the man’s body, and the thrill of skinjacking once more. He listened to the man’s thoughts for a moment, then he sent the man to sleep.

Milos, now wearing the body of the security guard, looked around him. To the living, nothing appeared unusual about the Alamo. The living felt a sense of history, and a sense of power to the place, but they did not see it shifting in and out the way Afterlights did. If there was a secret passage within the walls, a living body was the only way to find it. A living body, and brute strength.

“Something wrong, Wayne?” the girl behind the counter asked him.

“Yes,” Milos said. “But it will all be fine soon.”

Then he went over to a display of Alamo chess sets against the wall and began to knock them to the floor, ripping out the whole shelving unit. People gasped and the cashier called for other guards, but Milos didn’t stop. Shelf after shelf—mugs, T-shirts, pewter figurines. Tourists raced out in a panic, then another guard came in.

“Wayne, what the heck—” He tried to grab Milos, but Milos shoved him into a glass display case, shattering it. Milos destroyed everything against the western wall, ripping out bookshelves, looking for the telltale signs of a passageway hidden behind them, but there was nothing but the same coarse stone walls.

He began to doubt himself. Maybe the voices had come from the living after all. Maybe the Neons were elsewhere—the mirror maze or the wax museum. Or maybe that escaping Neon ran to a different part of the city entirely.

Just as he was about to rip down a shelving unit full of paperweights, three more guards came in, grabbed him, and pinned him to the ground. Milos peeled out of Wayne the wayward rent-a-cop, leaving the man to deal with the aftermath of Milos’s rampage.

Filled with furious, yet exhilarating, determination, Milos gathered all the Afterlights in the Shrine where the effect of the vortex was its greatest—knowing he could use the vortex’s power to help rally them.

“The Neons are not here,” he announced. “But we will find them, and when we do, we will show no mercy because they showed no mercy to us!”

And they all cheered, the battle fury of the vortex filling them. “Remember the Alamo!” Squirrel shouted, and Moose smacked him.

“So what do we do until we find them?” someone asked.

And all at once Milos realized what they needed to do. All this time Milos had resisted, but now he was ready to accept his mission—his purpose. He had lost nearly a thousand of Mary’s children. Well, by the time Mary woke up, he would make absolutely sure that there were at least twice that many; maybe three times; maybe ten. It could be done, if they all worked hard enough.

“Mary made it very clear what she wanted us to do,” Milos said.

“Go west?” someone shouted.

“No,” said Milos. “We stay here. We stay here until we find her. And in the meantime we increase our numbers . . . by reaping.”

Milos never enjoyed reaping, but maybe that was because Jill had done it in such a cheap, sleazy manner. But with nearly fifty Afterlights waiting in Everlost to catch crossing souls, Milos’s reaping extravaganzas would not be sleazy at all. In fact, they would be nothing short of epic.