Everlost (Skinjacker 1)

There had once been a nickel, but it had been stolen by the first kid he came across in Everlost—as if money had any value to them anymore. He had found all these items marooned on the small dead-spot he had awoken on, and when he had stepped off the little spot of dried mud, onto living-land, his feet had begun to sink in. The sinking was the first lesson he had learned. You had to keep moving or down you went. He had kept moving, afraid to stop, afraid to sleep.

Crossing from towns to woods, and back to towns, he had come to understand his ghostly nature, and although it terrified him, he endured it, for what else could he do? Why was he a ghost and not an angel? Why did he not go to heaven?

That’s what the preacher always said: Heaven or hell — those were the only choices. So then why was he still here on Earth?

He had asked himself these questions over and over until he tired of asking, and just accepted. Then he had found the forest; a huge dead-spot large enough to make his home. It was a place where he could actually feel the trees—a place where he did not sink—and he knew in his heart that the good lord had provided him with this forest. It was his personal share of eternity.

As for these new kids, they would spend forever with him. It was the design of things. They might leave now, but once they saw what the rest of the world was like, they would come back to him, and he would build them their own platforms in the tree, and they would laugh together, and they would talk and talk and talk to make up for all the years Lief had existed in silence.

Down below, Nick had watched Lief climb up the tree until he disappeared into the lush canopy. Nick found himself trying to balance his feelings of sympathy for the boy with his own confused feelings about being dead. He felt queasy, and wondered how that could be if, technically, he didn’t actually have a stomach anymore. The thought just made him even more queasy.

“Well,” said Allie. “This sucks.”

Nick let loose an unexpected guffaw, which made Allie giggle. How could they be laughing at a time like this?

“We have some decisions to make,” said Allie.

Nick didn’t exactly feel in a decision-making frame of mind. “You think it’s possible to have post-traumatic stress disorder if you’re dead?” he asked. Allie had no answer.

Nick looked at his hands, which were smudged with everlasting chocolate, like his face. He rubbed his arm. If he had no fleshly body, why could he still feel his skin? Or maybe it was just a memory of skin. And what about all the things people told him in life, about what happened to you when you died? Not that he was certain about any of it. His father had been an alcoholic who found God, and it changed his life. His mother was into new age stuff, and believed in reincarnation and crystals. Nick always found himself caught in some uncomfortable in-between. He had faith in faith, though—that is to say, he deeply believed that someday he’d find something to deeply believe. That “someday” never came for Nick. Instead, he wound up here—and this place didn’t fit with either of his parents’ versions of the afterlife. And then, of course, there was his friend, Ralphy Sherman, who claimed to have had a near-death experience. (According to Ralphy, we’re all briefly reincarnated as insects, and the light at the end of the tunnel is actually a bug-zapper.) Well, this place was not purgatory, Nirvana, or any sort of rebirth, and it occurred to Nick that regardless of what people believed, the universe had its own ideas.

“At least now we know there’s an afterlife,” Allie said, but Nick shook his head.

“This isn’t the afterlife,” he said. “We never made it to the afterlife. This is kind of an interlife. A space between life and death.” Nick thought back to that light he had seen at the end of the tunnel, before he had crashed into Allie on the way. That light had been his destination. He still didn’t know what was in that light—Jesus, or Buddha, or the light of a hospital delivery room where he would be reborn. Would he ever know?

“What if we’re lost here forever?” he asked.

Allie scowled at him. “Are you always so full of gloom and doom?”

“Usually.”

Nick looked at the forest around them. Was this such a bad place to spend eternity? It wasn’t exactly paradise, but it was kind of pretty. The trees were full and lush. They’d never lose their leaves. He wondered if the weather of the living world could still affect him. If not, then it wouldn’t be so bad staying here. Certainly the boy they called Lief had adjusted, so couldn’t they? But then, that wasn’t the real question. The question was, did they want to?

Lief waited in his tree house, and soon they climbed up to him, as he knew they would. He quickly hid his special things as Nick and Allie reached the platform, both of them huffing and puffing, as if they were out of breath.

“Stop that,” he told them. “You’re not out of breath, you just think you are, so stop it.”

“Lief, please, this is important,” Allie said. “We need you to tell us about the ‘others’ you were talking about before.”

There was no sense trying to hide it now, so he told them what he knew. “They come through my forest every once in a while. Other kids on their way places.

They never stay long—and none have come through here for years.”

“Where do they go?”

“Anywhere. They’re always running. They’re always running from the McGill.”

“The what?”

“The McGill.”

“Is that a grown-up?”

Lief shook his head. “No grown-ups here. Only kids. Kids and monsters.”

“Monsters!” said Nick. “That’s great. That’s wonderful. I’m so glad I asked.”

But Allie wasn’t shaken. “There are no such things as monsters,” she told Lief.