Everlost: Chapters 15–23

On that fateful February day, a massive ball of natural gas, two hundred feet wide, burst up from beneath the ocean floor, and when the bubble surfaced, the entire ship dropped into it in less than a second.

The workers, knowing an era was coming to an end, built the ship with as much care as a team of shipbuilders could muster. Their love of this ship was welded into every rivet. Such an ignoble death to this well-loved vessel could not be suffered lightly by the fabric of eternity.

The throne was studded with jewels that were glued on with old bubble gum. It was, in short, a monstrosity—just like the McGill himself—and it suited him just fine.

“So what do we do with them?” asked Pinhead, as the McGill sat in his throne, looking at the barrels now arranged haphazardly on the deck.

"Only one way to find out.” And then Pinhead added, "If they’re ingrates, we’ll put ’em back in the barrels and dump them into the sea.”

All the while he never stopped screaming. Poor kid, thought Nick. That could have been me. But it wasn’t. And it was a great consolation to know that he had survived his time in pickle purgatory.

Although few knew it, there was more to the McGill than mindless looting and pillaging.

Some were girls, some were boys, but in truth, it was impossible to tell the difference anymore. Nick dubbed them "Ugloids," and wondered if they were as ugly inside as out.

With the Ugloids gaining on them, Nick pushed open a hatch, and found that it opened onto one of the ship’s holds—a cavernous space thirty-feet deep, forty-feet long, and smelling horribly of rotten eggs.

The fall would have killed them, had they been alive, but things being what they were, it was merely a nuisance. They crashed loudly into furniture and picture frames and statues, and when they managed to get their bearings, they found themselves in the middle of the McGill’s grand treasure trove.

“Don’t. Large bodies of water are very dangerous for us Afterlights—for if the land is like quicksand, then water is like air. If you happen to fall into a lake, river, or ocean, you’ll find the water about as buoyant as clouds to someone falling through the sky...."

Almost reflexively, she turned to look back at the city.

Slogging her way through the steel of the ship’s hull took everything she was worth.

“Something bite yah?” asked the younger pilot. “I’ll tell yah, the bugs here don't know it's winter. They breed down in the engine room, and crawl up here between the bulkheads."

The bow of the McGill’s huge vessel rammed right into the ferry’s starboard side, but rather than slicing it in half, it simply passed through, as if the ferry wasn't there.

In a moment the ferry was gone, chugging steadily toward Staten Island, and Allie was clinging for all she was worth to an anchor suspended above the churning water of New York bay.

Silently thanking her parents for forcing her to stay in gymnastics for four years, she climbed the anchor chain, and deftly flipped onto the deck of the ghost ship.

If there was one thing she had learned, it was that monsters only had the power that you gave them. But she also knew that monsters didn’t deal well with blatant disrespect.

The creature eyed her for a few moments more. “So then, you’re telling me that you know how to usurp, possess, and control the living? You can actually skinjack?”

She marveled at what she saw in each of the chambers, wondering how these things had crossed over. Had someone died in this leather recliner? Was this stained-glass window so lovingly made that it crossed over when the church burned down? And what about this armoire, complete with wedding dress and tuxedo hanging inside?

Since it was impossible to hurt someone in Everlost, and since the McGill so wanted to inflict distress, he came up with a whole new form of torture, functional in several different ways: first, because it provided an efficient way of storing those Afterlights he had no immediate use for, and second, because he created a hopeless sense of abject boredom in his victims.

She tried to count how many of them there were, but there were simply too many to count. There were numbers scrawled on their chests, and some of those numbers were up in the high hundreds.

Lief's calm acceptance of his plight just made Allie feel all the more miserable. “This is horrible! How could the McGill do this!?"

The McGill tossed his head in a calculated gesture of disdain. His greasy hair whipped around, and flung some slime against the wall. “You will teach me how to skinjack now."

Once he was gone, Allie let her revulsion out, shivering and squirming, and then she returned to her bed, disgusting herself further with Mary Hightower’s volume of misinformation.

Either way, she knew she’d have to make a quick escape when it was all over, because when the McGill finally figured out that he was being duped, his fury would reverberate through all of Everlost.

Either way, she knew she’d have to make a quick escape when it was all over, because when the McGill finally figured out that he was being duped, his fury would reverberate through all of Everlost.

Allie took one look at that swollen, turgid finger, purple and pale like a dead fish three days in the sun, and she pulled away from him, revolted.

Then the McGill looked at his gnarled claws. “It helped to imagine myself as a monster clawing my way up from the depths, and so when I finally reached the surface that's exactly what I was. A monster. And it's exactly what I want to be.”

The McGill held his temper as he stood behind Allie in the throne room, watching her steal his fortunes. Never before had anyone pilfered his fortune cookies, and his fury at her was deep, but for once he resisted the urge to lash out.

“Explain yourself!” The McGill’s voice came out in deep guttural tones, like the growl of a tiger at the moment it pounces.

"He was defeated there," Pinhead told her. "It happened at the Steel Pier. See, there are two amusement piers in Atlantic City that burned down years ago, and crossed over into Everlost. The Steel Pier, and the Steeplechase Pier. They became a hangout for ‘The Twin Pier Marauders,' a gang of really rough Afterlights—probably the nastiest gang there is...."

Grumbles of “Stop it!” and “Leave us alone,” began to echo around the chamber, but Nick would not be deterred.

As he was wearing a Boy Scout uniform, Nick figured he knew just the thing. “Ever make a lanyard at Boy Scout camp?” Nick asked. “You know—those plastic strings you weave together to make whistle chains, and stuff?

An idea came to him, and it amazed Nick that no one in the chiming chamber had thought of this before, being so deep and docile in their upside-down ruts. But then, Nick himself hadn't really been thinking outside the box until today, had he?

Nick had made it out, but there was nowhere on the Sulphur Queen for him to go. Everywhere, at every staircase, every gangway, every hatchway was some Ugloid cleaning.

The problem was, he had no idea where she was, and he wasn’t in any position to go traipsing around the ship looking for her.

Allie wanted to just grab him and shake him. It was an insulting suggestion. It was preposterous. It was true.

The best way to get Nick off the ship would be to do it secretly, and in such a way that there were no telltale signs that he had gone.

The boat was lowered to the water, the McGill ordered the motor started, and they were off. No one paid much attention to the mooring rope tied to the lifeboat's bow, which dragged in the water. Had they pulled that rope in, they would have found Nick, submerged beneath the waves, holding on with the rope wrapped around his arm twice as the boat powered its way to shore.