Everlost (Skinjacker 1)

She could tell that the Finder was excited about the car, tut he was a good negotiator. “Well,” he said, “I already do have a pretty sweet ride….”

“Yes,” said Mary, “you talked about it last time you were here. As I recall, it’s more trouble than it’s worth, because you can never find a place to park it.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I guess I could do with something smaller. Okay—it’s a deal!”

He shook her hand a little too forcefully, finally letting his true excitement show. “A Jag. Wow!” His smile stretched right into the middle of his ears, and Mary simply had to say something about it. Someone had to.

“You should try to remember that the living only have thirty-two teeth.”

He looked at her, stunned by her directness.

“Eight incisors,” Mary continued, “four canine, eight bicuspids, and twelve molars, if you’ve got wisdom teeth.”

“Oh,” he said, getting red in the face.

“It’s clear you put a lot of importance on your smile, but when you think about it too much, it starts to take over.”

Even before he turned to leave, Mary could see the information taking effect;

his mouth was shrinking back to sensible proportions.

In her book Spectral Visions: An Afterlight’s Guide to Looking One’s Best, Mary Hightower writes, “If, at times, you find others looking at you strangely, and you don’t know why, chances are you’re losing touch with your own self-image.

That is to say, your body, or your face, is beginning to distort. Remember, we look the way we look only because we remember looking like that. If you forget that your eyes are blue, they may just turn purple. If you forget that human beings have ten fingers, you may suddenly end up with twelve.

A simple remedy to image-loss is to find a picture that you think resembles you — and if you happened to have crossed over with an actual picture of yourself, all the better. Study the picture. Take in as much detail as you can. Once the image is firmly in your mind, you’ll start looking like your old self in no time. Never underestimate the importance of remembering how you looked in life.

Unless, of course, you’d rather forget.”

Chapter 6

Scavengers Nick remembered everything about his life in perfect detail. How he looked, how his parents looked, what he had for lunch before the miserable accident that landed him here. It troubled him, though, that Lief had become such a blank slate over the years he had been in his forest. If memories aged badly, fading like an old newspaper, how long until Nick suffered the same loss? He didn’t want to forget anything.

Having been used to travel at sixty-five miles per hour, Nick’s southbound trek with Allie was a slow one. Hiking was not one of Nick’s favorite activities. In life it would make his joints ache, and he would invariably stumble on some rude protrusion of nature, and skin a knee. This hike-after-death was no more pleasant. True, the bruises and body aches were gone, but he could not deny how thirsty it made him. Thirsty and hungry. Lief had told them that they no longer needed to eat or drink, anymore than they needed to breathe, but it still didn’t stop the craving. “You get used to it,” Lief had told them, back in the forest.

Nick wasn’t sure he ever wanted to get used to an eternity of longing.

They also discovered their spectral bodies didn’t actually require sleep, but, as with food, it didn’t change the craving for it. Nick and Allie had agreed that they would take time to sleep, as they would have if they were still alive.

It was a connection to the world of the living that they did not want to lose.

The simple act of resting, however, couldn’t be done just anywhere.

“How can we sleep if we sink?” Nick had asked on the first evening. The road-shoes they wore did their job while Nick and Allie walked, keeping them mostly on the surface of the road, but if they stood still for too long, the ground began its slow swallow. They couldn’t find a way to keep from sinking that first night, and so they kept walking.

It was on the second day of their journey that the solution came. When the mountain road became treacherous, they began to find odd little patches of asphalt that weren’t like the rest of the road. They were solid! The patches were never more than a few feet wide. It was Allie who figured it out when they came across one that was marked with a small white wooden cross.

“I know what this is!” Allie said. “I saw them when we visited Mexico. They put little crosses by the side of the road where people died in car accidents. I never thought to look for it here in the States, but I’ll bet there are people who do it here, too.”

“So the passing of a spirit must leave a permanent mark on the spot where it happened, turning it into a dead-spot!” Nick had to admit it was an exciting, if somewhat morbid discovery.

They rested on one of the so-called dead-spots, close together, because the spot was so small, and as they basked in the light of their own glows, they allowed themselves the luxury of small talk. They discussed all those subjects that didn’t matter much in the larger scheme of things, like what music they liked, and who they thought won the World Series during their nine-month transition.

Their conversation took a sober turn, as late night conversations often do.

“When I get home,” Allie said, “I’m going to find a way to make them all see me.”

“But what if they never see you?” Nick said. “What if they just keep on living their lives like you’re not even there?”