Mikey took a step away from the bars just in case, then said, “No, what do you do?”
The wraith stood, took a long swig from his bottle, and eyed Mikey in that sideways way with his Everlost eye. The moon came out from behind a cloud, and it made that crossed side of his face glow—almost like the glow of an Afterlight, but not quite. “You’re a wise guy,” he said. “I don’t like wise guys.”
“Mooooon!” said the Ogre. “Tranquility . . .” Then he pointed at the full moon. “Neil Armstrong walked in a Sea of Tranquility.” Then he added, “It’s made of cheese. But you have to take off the plastic before you put it on your burger.”
Mikey sighed.
“What’s his story?” the wraith asked.
“He’s chocolate,” Mikey said.
“I can see that,” snapped the wraith.
“Why is he chocolate?”
“Because it’s all he can remember of himself.” Mikey thought that the wraith would ask for more, but he seemed satisfied with the answer.
“You boys got names, or do you just . . . ?”
“I’m Mikey. This is Nick.”
“Clarence,” he said. “Can’t say that I’m pleased to meet you.”
“No,” said Mikey. “The displeasure is mine.”
That made Clarence laugh. He sat back down, drank some, ate some, rocked some, and finally said: “If you’re real—and I think you are—you’re gonna tell me how to make other people see you.”
“We can’t do that,” said Mikey.
Clarence didn’t seem bothered. “Guess you’ll stay in there forever, then. . . .”
Mikey rattled the cage in frustration. “We can’t do everything!”
“But you can do some things. You can make yourself look like a monster. All those claws and bulging eyes, like you did when I first caught you.” He leaned all the way back in the chair. “Do it again.”
“No! I’m not a circus monkey.”
“Well, seeing as you are in a cage,” said Clarence, “maybe that’s exactly what you are. . . .”
“I wanna see the monkey!” said the Ogre, thrilled at the prospect. “Mikey, be a monkey, aw, pleeeeze!”
Mikey ignored him. Not just because he didn’t want to be a monkey, but also because he couldn’t. Like a kid doodling in a notebook, Mikey was great at monsters, and twisted miscreations, but drawing up something real was beyond him. A monkey-faced lizard-thing was probably the best that he could do.
“Listen to me,” said Mikey, trying his best to keep his temper under control. “The girl we’re trying to rescue is a skinjacker. That means she can prove we’re real. She can possess anyone, and that will make people believe you.”
Clarence looked doubtful. “You’re making a joke, aren’t you? Having a laugh at my expense. You watch out, because . . . because . . .”
“Because what?”
Clarence stood up, hurling the bucket of chicken and his bottle far into the living world. “Because I don’t know what!” Then he started pacing back and forth, almost tripping over his own half-dead foot as he did. “Now that I got you, I don’t know what to do with you! All I know is that I can’t let you go—not now and not ever.” Then he looked off toward the moon, like it held some answer. “I can’t go back to panhandling, and benches, and all those eyes that won’t look at me. I can’t go back to being what the living people see. You’re my ticket . . . my ticket to . . . to . . .” Then Clarence collapsed back into the chair, buried his head in his hands, and began to sob. “I don’t know where, I don’t know . . . I don’t . . .” He sobbed to himself for a while, like he forgot they were even there. Then the sobs faded into snores. The wraith was asleep.
“Can we go now?” the Ogre asked.
Mikey couldn’t get mad at him anymore. “No, Nick,” he said. “I’m sorry, but no.” He gently patted his hand on Nick’s soft shoulder. When he took his hand back, it was covered in a thin layer of chocolate
. . . soft shoulder . . .
The moment the truth dawned on Mikey, he realized what an idiot he had been—how narrow his own thinking was. If Allie were here, she would have thought of it right away. Even Nick would have figured it out if he were his old self.
“Yes!” said Mikey. “Yes, Nick, you can go. You can walk out of this cage right now!”
“Okay,” said the Ogre. Then he stepped forward, then took another step, pushing himself up against the bed frames . . . then forced himself through, like fudge pushed through a screen. For a moment, he stood there halfway in, halfway out with the brass and steel of the cage right in the middle of him. “Feels funny,” he said. Then he took one more step and he was outside the cage, leaving chocolate dripping from the frame.
“You did it!”
“Yes. Your turn now!”
But Mikey knew he couldn’t squeeze through any more than he could become a circus monkey.
That’s when Clarence woke up and panicked. He stood, the chair flying out from behind him and tumbling to the ground. “What? How did you? Don’t you . . .”
Mikey leaned as close as he could to Nick and whispered, “Don’t let him touch you.”
But Clarence seemed more afraid of the Ogre touching him. “Stand back! Stand back or I swear I’ll . . .” Then Clarence turned and ran back to the farmhouse.
“Go,” said Mikey. “Go and find Allie. You can do it. I know you can. Just follow the tracks.”
“Follow the tracks to Allie,” repeated the Ogre.
“Think about her,” Mikey told him. “Think about her as much as you can. It will help you to remember!”
“Allie,” said the Ogre. “We met in the dead forest. Only it wasn’t dead.” For a moment, there was more shape in the Ogre’s face, cheekbones and a firmer chin. A different shade of brown in his eyes. It lasted for only a moment, but then it was gone. “Find Allie,” the Ogre repeated. “Follow the tracks.”
The door of the farmhouse banged open again, and Clarence came out holding a sawed off shotgun—which was only sawed off in the living world. In Everlost the barrel was hard and solid and pointing right at the Ogre.
“Don’t move . . . don’t move or I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
If the touch of a scar wraith could extinguish you, could the blast of the scar wraith’s shotgun do the job too? Mikey didn’t want to find out.
“Run, Nick!”
Nick did what he was told. He ran, and although Clarence aimed at him, he didn’t fire. In a moment the Chocolate Ogre had disappeared into the night.
“Damn it all to purgatory!” shouted Clarence and aimed the shotgun at Mikey, who put his hands up.
“If you shoot me, you’ll never know.”
“Never know what?”
“Everything,” Mikey said. “All the things you want to know.”
Slowly Clarence lowered the weapon. “Tell me,” he said. Then he went to get the toppled chair, set it upright and sat down again, laying the half-dead shotgun across his lap. “Tell me.”
“Okay,” said Mikey. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything, just like you said. Everything there is to know from the very beginning. And if I don’t like what I hear, well, let’s just say . . .” Then he stroked the shotgun like a favorite pet sitting in his lap.
Mikey sat down in the middle of the cage, took a moment to compose himself, and began.
“More than a hundred years ago, my sister and I were hit by a train as we were walking home from school. . . .”
CHAPTER 11
Chocolate Reign
Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick.
The Chocolate Ogre knew very few things for sure.
Allie, Allie, Allie, Allie.
So the things he did know, he held onto with a passion.
Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, Mikey.
He found that being a spirit of limited self-awareness, while frustrating, was also very liberating. He felt a freedom he suspected he had never felt in his previous life. He had few expectations, and fewer fears, and whenever he felt anxious it passed quickly like a summer storm cloud, too small to give rain.
All in all, it was good being the Chocolate Ogre, although he didn’t feel much like an Ogre. Ogres have a bad temper, they ruin things, they chase people. Ogre was the wrong word. He felt more like a Chocolate Bunny. He told Mikey that, and Mikey instructed him never to say that again. “Bunnies are timid and fearful, and stupid,” Mikey had said. “You’re none of those things.”
“Yes, I am,” Nick had insisted. “I’m stupid!”
“No, you’re not,” Mikey had told him. “You’re just not yourself. That doesn’t make you stupid, it just makes you . . . muddled.”
It only served to confuse him, because if he wasn’t himself, then who was he?
Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick.
He ran from the cage and the farmhouse and the crazy scarred man, happily reciting the three things he knew that he knew. He kept to the train tracks as Mikey had said. They were easy to follow because the tracks had crossed into Everlost.
Allie, Allie, Allie, Allie.
He was content to live in the moment, but he sensed a certain sadness deep within himself. A longing for all the things he had once been, whatever those things were. He knew he had once been very clever. He had led hundreds of Afterlights, and, in fact the train he was following had once belonged to him. Mikey had said so.
Mikey, Mikey, Mikey, Mikey.
While he couldn’t grasp the memory of these things, he knew that who he had once been, was not gone completely. The memories were still out there, divided among the people he knew and loved. Seeing Mikey had brought some of those memories back to him.
Allie, Allie, Allie, Allie.
And seeing Allie would bring back even more. Only in gathering those memories, could he gather back all the pieces of the boy called Nick.
Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary.
The name stopped him in mid-stride. It had come out of nowhere—and he knew that nowhere often spat forth some very important things. A feeling came over him then, warm enough to melt him inside, but cold enough to harden him solid. It was joy poured hot into chilly foreboding. The feelings blended until he couldn’t tell one from another—and when he looked at his hands, he could, for the first time, see something resembling fingernails.
Nick, Mary, Nick, Mary, Nick, Mary.
He felt a fluttering inside his chest that he mistook for an air pocket—probably left from when he pushed himself through the cage. He had no way of knowing that the fluttering was a single beat from the fleeting memory of a heart.
CHAPTER 12
Universal Justice
Mikey told Clarence everything he knew. The crossing of himself and Mary into Everlost, his many years at the center of the earth, and the many years it took to get out. He told Clarence of his time on the ghost ship, and how he was the McGill, the most feared monster of Everlost. Mikey told him about Allie, and although he tried to hide how deep his feelings for her were, Clarence saw right through it.