“I’m surprised he told you something like that.”
“He didn’t,” Pinhead said. “I was the one who set him free.” Then Pinhead looked at her, studying her face. “I’ve answered your questions,” Pinhead said. “Now I have a question for you. I want to know if you really are teaching the McGill to skinjack.”
Allie carefully sidestepped the question. “Well, it’s what he wants.”
“The McGill shouldn’t always get what he wants.”
She wasn’t expecting that response from Pinhead. “But…don’t you want your master to have that skill?”
“He’s my captain, not my master,” Pinhead said, some indignance in his voice. He thought for a moment, looking down, then returned his gaze to Allie. It was now a powerful gaze, full of urgency, and maybe a little accusation. “I don’t remember a lot from my living days, but I do remember that my father—or was it my mother— worked in a madhouse.”
“A mental institution,” Allie corrected.
“When I was alive, they didn’t have such nice words for them. Sometimes, I would get to go in. The people there were very sick—but some were more than sick. Some were possessed.”
“Things have changed,” Allie pointed out. “They don’t think that kind of thing anymore.”
“It doesn’t matter what they think; I know what I know.”
Pinhead’s thoughts drifted away for a moment. Allie couldn’t imagine what it would be like to walk through an old-world asylum. She didn’t want to know.
“Even when I was alive, I knew the difference between the sick ones and the possessed ones. You can see it in their eyes. My mother—or was it my father — said there was no such thing as possession, but you know it happens, because you’ve done it yourself.”
“I didn’t drive anyone crazy.”
“Well,” said Pinhead, “all I know is that if I were a living, breathing person, I wouldn’t want something like the McGill living inside of me.”
“Why should you care? If he skinjacks someone and leaves Everlost, you get to be captain.”
“I’m not the captain type,” he said, and he offered her a slanted mudslide of a grin. “Don’t have the head for it.”
Allie went back to her cabin and lay down, running what Pinhead had said about the Steel and Steeplechase Piers over and over again in her mind, until an idea came to her: a way to defeat the McGill, or at least a way to distract him enough for her and her friends to escape. The plan was simple, and it was dangerous, but it was the best hope she had.
All she needed was a small slip of paper…and a typewriter.
Although the McGill liked no one, he was beginning to suspect that if he ever did like someone, it might be Allie. This troubled him, because he knew she would abandon him and escape with her friends if she could. The McGill, however, believed in the power of blackmail. As long as he had her friends dangling like carrots before her, she would do what he wanted. He knew he would never trust her, because, for the McGill, trust had been left behind with the human condition. The McGill trusted no one but himself, and even then, he was often suspicious of his own motives. He wondered, for instance, if he believed Allie’s twelve-steps-to-possession only because he wanted it so badly. Or worse, did he believe her only because he had begun to like her?
Since he couldn’t trust himself, he decided he needed verification of Allie s honesty, and so, once Allie was below deck, he called up an oversize kid known as Piledriver. Piledriver’s claim to fame was that he had died in a living-room wrestling mishap, while costumed as his favorite professional wrestler. The McGill often brought him along on shore raids to inspire fear in Greensouls who had not yet realized that pain and joint dislocation were no longer an issue.
Today, however, the McGill had a different mission for Piledriver.
“Take two crewmen and a lifeboat,” the McGill told him, after he explained the nature of the mission. “Leave in the middle of the night, when the rest of the crew is below. Don’t tell anyone, and once you find what you’re looking for, meet us at Rockaway Point. I’ll hold the Sulphur Queen there until you return.”
Piledriver dutifully left, pleased to be given such an important task.
The McGill reclined in his throne, picking at the jewels on the armrests. If Piledriver did the job right, they would soon know if Allie was telling the truth.
In her book Everything Mary Says Is Wrong, Volume 2, Allie the Outcast has this to say about the nature of eternity: “Mary may have invented the term ‘Afterlights,’ but that doesn’t mean she really understands what it means to be one. Maybe there’s a reason why we’re here, and maybe there’s not. Maybe it’s an accident, and maybe it’s part of some big-ass plan that we’re too dumb to figure out. All I know is that our light doesn’t fade. That’s got to mean something.
Finding answers to questions like that is what we ought to be doing, instead of getting lost in endless ruts.”
Chapter 21
Web of the Psychotic Spider Down in the chiming chamber, Nick had grown more and more determined to throw off his shackles. So much of his life had been a game of follow the leader.
During his living days he had followed friends and trends, never sticking his neck out to do anything on his own. Then, when he first arrived in Everlost, he had followed Allie, because she was the one with momentum. She had always been the one with a goal, and a plan to reach it, however misguided it might be. His time in a pickle barrel had certainly changed his perspective on things. During all that time, he could do nothing but wait for rescue to come from the outside.
Nothing was worse than that limp, lonely feeling that he had no power over his own fate — and yet here he was again, strung up like a side of beef, just waiting for someone else to help him.