“What?”
Milos climbed up to her, getting right in her face. “All this time you knew, and you left us like sitting geese.”
“Sitting ducks,” Allie corrected, and then wished she hadn’t.
“Did you think that whoever put the church here would attack the rest of us and set you free?”
Allie didn’t answer him . . . because that’s exactly what she thought.
“I am sorry,” said Milos, “but you are far too useful as a scarecrow for me to put you anywhere else.” Then he turned to the others. “I want everyone who sees us coming to know that we are not to be trifled with. I want everyone seeing this train to fear it—to fear us. I want them terrified.”
“Them?” asked Speedo. “Them, who?”
“It took fifty of us just to knock over that church,” said Milos. “How many do you think it took to move it all the way around the lake?”
Speedo said nothing, clearly not wanting to consider the answer.
Allie struggled against Moose and Squirrel but it was no use. “Do you think that tying me up like that will scare them? Whoever they are, they’re not scared of us, and they don’t want us trespassing.”
Milos responded by turning to the crowd and announcing in his loudest, most commanding voice: “I hereby claim this territory in the name of Mary Hightower!” and the crowd cheered even more loudly than before. “Now they are the ones trespassing,” Milos told Allie. “Whoever they are.”
With Allie tied back onto the grille upside down, the train continued forward . . . while beside it, the church lost its battle with gravity and, like a foundering ship, sank into the quicksand of the living world.
PART TWO
The Wraith and the Warriors
High Altitude Musical Interlude #1 with Johnnie and Charlie
There is no wind in Everlost. At least none that occurs naturally. No nor’easters heralding winter, no gentle summer zephyrs. Even Everlost trees that rustle in the wind are only going through the motions, moving with the memory of a breeze long gone.
That is not to say that Everlost has no atmosphere; it does. The air of Everlost is a direct result of the living, and is a blend of many things. The first breath of a baby and the last breath of a life well-lived. The charged air of anticipation that fills a stadium before the start of a game, and the electrified air of excitement when a band takes the concert stage—these all cross into Everlost. Every passage of gas that someone laughed at, every sigh offered up to a glorious sunset are here . . . but so are the screams of victims and the sobs of those who mourn.
Not every breath, but every breath taken and expelled with purpose, be it good or bad, are not forgotten by the universe. These things all blend and make up the air that Afterlights occasionally choose to breathe; air rich with emotions and with memories not entirely lost.
And since these moments are at peace with eternity, they do not bluster and blow. One may ask, then, without a jet stream surging in the sky, how did the Hindenburg—the largest zeppelin ever built and burst by mankind—how did such a massive airship drift across the Atlantic Ocean? The answer is quite simple; one does not need a natural wind to be blown eastward, when there’s an unnatural one.
“I’ve been working on the railroad, all the live-long day!”
On the day that Mary defeated Nick, and her army took over his train, Mary’s former mode of transportation, the giant airship Hindenburg, was set adrift into the sky over Memphis. There were only two Afterlights aboard: the juvenile train conductor known as Choo-choo Charlie, and Johnnie-O; two kids loyal to Nick and caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“I’ve been working on the railroad, just to pass the time away!”
The control room of the airship was empty, sealed by a lock with no key—which meant there was no way to pilot the craft. Its engines were off, its rudder was stuck, and it would stay that way.
“Can’t you hear the whistle blowing, rise up so early in the morn?”
That first day, they sat across from each other with a bucket of Everlost coins between them. Both Charlie and Johnnie-O knew what the coins were for. Holding a coin would pay the passage into the next world. The tunnel would open before them; they would remember who they were in life, and then they would be gone down the tunnel, and into the light. After all these years, they would get where they were going . . . if they held a coin.
“Can’t ya hear the captain shouting, ‘Dina blow your horn.’”
But neither of them had taken their coins. At the time, Charlie was just plain scared, and Johnnie-O knew he wasn’t ready. Something deep inside Johnnie told him he had more to do in Everlost.
When their journey had first begun, the unnatural wind blowing them back from the Mississippi was powerful enough to give them an eastern momentum. The Everlost air offered them no friction, no resistance, nothing to stop their drift, and so a few days after leaving Memphis, they passed the eastern seaboard and were out over the Atlantic Ocean. That ocean seemed endless. Each day Johnnie would look out of the window to see yet more ocean around them, to every horizon.
That’s when Charlie had begun to sing. At first he’d just hum to himself, then he’d mumble the words, and soon he’d become lost in the endless verses.
“Dinah won’t you blow . . .”
For weeks Charlie had been singing the same song over and over again.
“Dinah won’t you blow . . .”
He sang it twenty-four hours a day, with that same vacant, cheerful tone.
“Dinah won’t you blow your hor-or-orn?”
He kept the beat with his head, endlessly banging it against the hallway bulkhead.
“Dinah won’t you blow . . .”
Johnnie-O, who had very little patience to begin with, would have pulled out his hair, were it possible for an Afterlight’s hair to come out.
“Dinah won’t you blow . . .”
Johnnie squeezed his oversized hands into fists, wishing there was something he could bust, but having spent many years trying to break things, he knew more than anyone that Everlost stuff didn’t break, unless breakage was its purpose.
“Dinah won’t you blow your horn!”
“Dammit, will you shut your hole or I swear I’m gonna pound you into next Tuesday and then throw you out the stinkin’ window where you and your song can drown and sink down to the center of the earth for all I care, so you better shut your hole right now!”
Charlie looked at him for a moment, eyes wide, considering it. Then he said: “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah!”
Johnnie groaned.
“Someone’s in the kitchen I know-oh-oh-oh!”
Unable to take it anymore, Johnnie grabbed Charlie and dragged him down to the starboard promenade, where the windows had a dramatic view of the clouds, and the shimmering Atlantic Ocean below.
“I’ll do it!” Johnnie-O screamed, but Charlie just kept on singing. Maybe that’s what Charlie wanted, or maybe he was just so far gone, he didn’t even hear Johnnie anymore. Johnnie had seen spirits go like that. He had seen souls who were so ready to leave and complete their journey, that they had fallen into an endless loop, happy to pass the time, however long it took, until the tunnel opened before them. If that were the case, Charlie would be at home at the center of the earth, waiting for time to end.
But Johnnie-O, tough guy that he was, couldn’t do that to him. He couldn’t give Charlie a coin either. He knew he should, because Charlie was clearly no longer afraid . . . but then if he did, and Charlie went down the tunnel and into the light, Johnnie would truly be alone.
So he put Charlie down, and they sat in the lavishly decorated starboard promenade, and waited for happenstance to take them where it would.
Then, the day after he almost threw Charlie out of the window, Johnnie saw something in the distance that wasn’t ocean. He shook Charlie in excitement.
“Look!” he said. “Look! It’s China!”
Johnnie-O wasn’t an expert in geography. He knew, however, that China was called “the Far East,” and he assumed that their eastward journey would take them there. What he called China was actually the coast of Spain.
Once they reached the coastline, Johnnie contented himself with watching the view, listening to the faint sounds of the living below, and searching for deadspots on the ground. Then, the next day, to Johnnie’s dismay, the sun rose to reveal that they were out over water once more.
“Oh, great,” said Johnnie. “Where are we now?”
“Strummin’ on the old banjo!” sang Charlie.
Johnnie-O suspected this was going to be a very long eternity.
CHAPTER 8
Half-lost
The old man was horrible to behold in both worlds. Half of his face had been ruined by fire. His left eye was dead and unseeing, and his left ear was deaf as a post. His left hand only had the memory of fingers, for it had fallen victim to the flames as well. Occasionally those nonexistent fingers itched. The doctors said it was a very common sensation for those who have lost a part of themselves.
He had long ago given up any attempts to disguise the scarring, or to hide it from the judgmental eyes of strangers—and everyone was a stranger now. Those who saw him always averted their eyes. Charitable people looked away in pity; others looked away in disgust—but in the end no one wanted to look upon him.
Who he had been in the first half of his life meant nothing anymore. The living world was unforgiving of old scars. Sure, there had been great sympathy at first, but sympathy has a short shelf life. The same people who once called him a hero now turned the other way when they saw him in the street—never knowing that this was the celebrated firefighter who had lost the left half of his life in a tenement inferno, while saving half a dozen people. All they saw was a ruined man in tattered rags, panhandling on highway exit ramps.
From the day his bandages came off, Clarence knew that something profound had happened to him—more profound, even, than the burns still raw on his face.
“I see things,” Clarence would tell people. “I see impossible things with my dead eye.”
If he had stayed quiet about the things he saw, he would have held on to his life, and adapted, as other burn victims do—but Clarence was not the kind of man who kept quiet.
“The things I see,” he would tell anyone who would listen, “are terrible, but wonderful, too.”
He would tell of the twin towers, still standing in New York, “touching the sky, just as sure as I’m standing here.”
He would tell of the many ghosts he saw going about their business. “They’re all children! They’re dead and yet somehow they’re not.”
He would tell of the fears that kept him awake at night. “My dead ear can hear them sometimes—and some of them are up to no good. They’ll kill you soon as look at you.” And he talked about how his left eye could still see fingers on his left hand—and those fingers could actually touch all the things that no one else could see!
They gave him medication for a while, convincing Clarence that he was very, very sick—that his brain was damaged by the fire. The medication numbed his senses, and made it hard to get inside his own head—but none of that medicine made his visions go away. That’s how he knew the problem was not him, it was the rest of the world.
