Why, the living world was merely a womb! Yes, the pains of birth are great, but oh, the reward! In the end, the womb must become barren, so that Everlost can shine as the glowing product of love’s labor. It was the perfect formula for eternity: Everlost equals the product of Mary and her children—soon to multiply exponentially!
Allie’s eyes were wide with understanding now . . . except for one thing.
Mary was wrong.
Even though Allie’s soul had been injected with Mary’s overpowering vision, as beguiling as moonlight, Allie knew that Mary’s light was false—a trick, just like the glow of the moon, which is nothing more than a dead rock reflecting the light of something far greater than itself.
The living world is not a womb, Allie would have told Mary if she could. It’s the nursery, the school, the home, and the hearth. It is the source of all possible futures. And Everlost? Everlost is no more and no less than the portraits that hang on life’s walls. This would be a bland and bare universe without Everlost, but like a portrait, its place is on the side, not in the center.
Mary’s coiling of Allie’s soul did not win Allie over. Instead, it transformed Allie’s hatred of Mary into pity . . . for Allie realized that Mary could never escape from the dark place in which she existed. There would never be a doorway of illumination for her. How could there be doorways when you’re blind to everything but the walls?
Their spirits were now so intertwined that Mary could sense exactly what Allie was feeling—and what Allie now felt coming from Mary was a virulent, deadly kind of hatred. The kind of hatred that ends worlds.
Mary pulled back, separating her light from Allie’s. Then she looked Allie dead in the eye and said, “I’ve given you one last chance to do the right and proper thing, but now I know there is nothing right or proper left inside you.” She turned to the Afterlights beside her.
“Would you be so kind as to bring the sarcophagus?”
They brought over an old-fashioned refrigerator. It was the kind with rounded edges, and a solid latching handle, like a car door, but unlike a car door, there was no way to open it from the inside. It was powder blue, a friendly color for an object that now had a very sinister purpose.
A team of Afterlights stood it upright at the very edge of the deadspot and opened it, revealing that the shelves inside had been removed.
“Consider it a protective shell,” Mary told her. “A more civilized way to send you to the center of the earth.” Then she glanced over at Clarence, who still had not stirred. “It would be cruel of me, though, to send you down without making sure you understood that it was not my intention to kill, or even hurt, your friend the scar wraith. We did need him unconscious, however. You see, he’ll be doing something very important today. Something terrible, but also something wonderful. It is my belief that the good far outweighs the bad.”
And then she called for Milos.
Shuffle. Deal three. Toss, toss, toss. Choose.
The Three of Clubs.
Shuffle. Deal three. Toss, toss, toss. Choose.
The Nine of Diamonds.
Shuffle. Deal three. Toss, toss, toss. Choose.
The deck is missing the Jack of Spades.
He knew not because he counted the deck, but because it was the only card that never came up when he played Three Card Monte. It disturbed him that something could cross into Everlost incomplete. What disturbed him more, however, was that the missing Jack of Spades was a one-eyed jack. There were only two of them in a deck; the Jack of Spades and the Jack of Hearts. Although it terrified him for reasons he had entirely forgotten, the whole purpose of his game was to find them. Fear overtook him every time he chose one of the three cards to flip. Terror overwhelmed him when that card turned out to be the Jack of Hearts, with that evil eye peeking out sideways at him. And then such intense relief when he shuffled it back into the deck, only to start looking for it once again.
The other Afterlights had come to know him now as Monty, for the Three Card Monte game that he constantly played by himself, never letting anyone else choose the cards. Although many Afterlights knew his real name, they preferred Monty to Milos because Monty didn’t bother anyone.
That’s why, when Mary called for Milos, he didn’t respond right away. It took someone tapping him on his shoulder to make him look up from his cards and accompany his escort to where Mary waited.
“Milos, there you are!” Mary said when he came to her. He smiled, remembering that, yes, that had been his name.
“I am at your service, Miss Mary,” he said, then offered her something he never offered anyone. “I shall deal you the three cards and you can try to find the one-eyed jack, yes?”
“Not now, Milos,” she said gently. “But I do have something else I’d like you to do.” And then she leaned forward, and kissed him with such warmth and affection, it reminded him how much he loved her, how much he had done for her, and how much he still would do. It brought a trace of his failing memories back from the cloud that had enveloped his mind. Then she put her cheek against his, and whispered in his ear, “I need you to touch the scar wraith, Milos.”
Milos followed Mary’s gaze to the living man lying on the ground just a few feet away. Instantly Milos realized that this was the one-eyed jack he so feared, yet felt so drawn to.
“I need you to touch him, Milos . . . to wake up the new skinjackers who sleep.”
Tears began to well in his eyes and he looked to Mary and pleaded. “Will you do that thing that you do to the others? I’ve seen it. The way you touch their souls. Wrapping. Melding. Making them want whatever you want. Will you do that for me?”
But Mary shook her head. “I can’t do that to you, Milos,” she said. “The choice to sacrifice yourself for the greater good must be your choice alone.”
“But it’s what I want,” said Milos, his tears flowing more heavily now. “To be one with you, if only for a moment.”
Mary did not meet his gaze. “I will ask you, but I will not coerce you.”
Milos bit his lower lip and wiped his tears with the back of his hand, embarrassed for his display before all the others.
“Well, then,” he said, “why don’t we let the cards decide.” He went to the roll-top desk that Speedo had so proudly offered to Mary.
Shuffle, deal three, toss toss toss.
When he was done tossing the cards over one another, he steeled himself and chose the card to the right. He held it before him for a moment, seeing only the back, then he flipped it, and when he saw what it was, he laughed. It wasn’t the Jack of Hearts, or the missing Jack of Spades . . . it was the King of Hearts. The one with the sword through his head. The suicide king.
He turned to Mary. “Do you love me?” he asked.
Mary hesitated, and said, “I will remember you more fondly than almost anyone I’ve ever known.”
Milos sighed, realizing that fondness was as good as he was ever going to get.
With everyone watching, and Allie shaking her head, trying to speak behind her gag, Milos dropped his cards and they scattered. He would not need them anymore. He then knelt beside the one-eyed jack that had extinguished Squirrel. Milos knew he had done things in this world that were unforgivable. He knew that if he ever went into the light, he would face the most severe of consequences. He wasn’t sure what those consequences would be, but he feared them all the same. Yet all of those deeds had only been to make himself worthy in Mary’s eyes. Now he had to accept that nothing would ever make him worthy—not even this—but this would bring him closer than he had ever been before. He wondered if he could live with that. And then realized that he wouldn’t have to.
“I sacrifice my existence for you, Mary. I do this of my own free will.” Then he reached down, firmly clasped the hand of the unconscious scar wraith . . . and in a single, silent moment, Vitaly Milos Vayevsky ceased to exist.
Once again pangs of mourning rippled through the world, just as they had when Squirrel was extinguished. In every ocean, massive rogue waves rose from the sea, curling and crashing in places where no ship sailed, so no human eye could see. In the polar ice caps, every glacier calved tons of ice, losing face. And in the Jornado de Muerto desert, a hurricane formed, turning, against all logic, clockwise instead of counterclockwise, and remained fixed over the Trinity site, its clear, cloudless eye the exact size of the deadspot. The storm didn’t just rage in the living world, but in Everlost as well, where there were never such storms.
Again, a sudden, sharp pain wracked the gut of every Afterlight, and it was so severe this time that everyone doubled over, collapsing to the ground.
No one felt the pain more than Mary. It was worse than that knife wound that had re-killed her, worse than anything she had ever felt or ever imagined.
“What have I done?” she wailed. “What have I done? What have I done to myself?”
When the pain had passed, her vision cleared to see the storm raging just beyond the edge of the deadspot and her children surrounding her, terrified. Then, as she rose, regaining her bearings and her poise, she realized that both Allie and the scar wraith were gone.
Clarence had been jarred back to consciousness the moment of the extinguishing. The blow to his head had addled his brain, however. He wasn’t quite sure where, or when, or even who he was, and his head hurt something awful, like the worst of hangovers. When he turned, the first thing he saw lying on the ground beside him were objects that had fallen from the pile of shiny things just a few feet away. A trophy and a silver martini shaker. Having not known where they came from, he concluded this indeed must be a hangover, and the martini shaker was probably the cause of it. Between the trophy and the shaker was a single playing card: the Jack of Spades.
Beyond that were dozens of ghosties, all doubled over, moaning in pain. The doctors had said the ghosties weren’t real, and in his confused state, he thought that maybe they were right. He knew how to make them go away, though. All he had to do was cover his dead eye with his dead hand and he couldn’t see them anymore.
He stood up, feeling dizzy, as if he were in a fun house and the world was shifting beneath his feet. With his dead eye covered, all he saw was a massive plain of fused sand with clear skies above it, but the angry swirling maelstrom of a hurricane raging beyond the perimeter. A few yards to his right was a dead soldier with a gun in his hand, and far away, straight across the patch of fused sand, was a jeep.
Clarence didn’t know very much at that moment, but he did know this was not a place he wanted to be. So, with his dead eye covered and his good eye to lead the way, he staggered across the dark expanse of fused sand toward the jeep.
At that same moment, Allie was incapacitated by the pain, but she knew it gave her an advantage. While the others were doubled over, Allie stumbled over to the Afterlight who had handcuffed her, and thrust her hand into his pocket, retrieving the key. Ignoring the pain in her gut, she jammed the key into the small keyhole, turned it, and freed herself from the handcuffs, dropping them on the ground.
“What have I done?” she heard Mary wailing as storm clouds began to billow beyond the deadspot. Allie tried to advance on Mary, but the pain ended as abruptly as it had begun and everyone began to recover. Allie would not make the same mistake twice: Hurling herself at Mary now would result in the exact same situation she had been in a moment ago. She saw that Clarence was gone, and if she escaped, there would come another time, and another place, to battle Mary. Maybe next time luck would be on her side. And so Allie retreated, running along the edge of the deadspot, until she heard a sound peaking above the surge of the storm. It was the drone of engines. Something was approaching, still unseen behind the storm, and she knew it was headed her way.
