Everlost (Skinjacker 1)

“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;

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.”