Everlost: Chapters 9–14

He simply brought out in Mary the maternal feelings she had for all the children in her care, but Allie, with her incessant questions and her neurosis of hope, brought up feelings in Mary she would much rather have forgotten, and thought she had.

It was a memory Mary had tried desperately to forget, but like the chocolate stains on Nick's face, the harder she tried to forget, the more indelible the memory became.

Mary didn’t say anything for a very long time. There was an unpleasant heaviness where her stomach had once been, but everywhere else there was a strange, ethereal sense of weightlessness.

Mary found her moods were always soothed by Vari’s masterful playing. He could coax the sweetest sounds from the Stradivarius violin—the same violin from which Vari had taken his Everlost name.

He played a few more brooding stanzas of music, then said, “Why do you always want him around? He can't really do anything. Not like some other kids. Not like me."

Like the younger kids, these kids were also caught in repetition, but it didn't take as much to jostle them out of their stupor.

In her book, You're Dead—So Now What?, Mary Hightower offers the following warning for the restless soul: “Wanderlust is a dangerous thing. In Everlost there's safety in staying put...."

"...Afterlights who are cursed with a desire to travel don't last for long. They either succumb to Gravity Fatigue, or they are captured by feral packs of unsavory children...."

“Maybe," said Skully. “If you want, I’ll get you the address."
Allie was going to ask him more, but the doors whooshed open, he stepped out, and a gaggle of little kids swept in from the lobby, on their way to higher places.

A heavy steel door was ominously ajar. Nick didn’t like the looks of it.

The building had been gutted, leaving nothing but clouded windows, a concrete floor, and black girders holding up the floor above.

Allie reached for the stone one more time. She had made it wobble. She had moved it. The knowledge that she had done it gave her an inkling of faith that she might do it again.

If Afterlights all wore the clothes they died in, what were the chances of finding a team of goons, all shrouded in black?

As the jet-dark sky became the motley gray of a stormy morning, the rain turned to sleet, and the pinpricks of rain passing through her became sharp darts of ice.

Allie swung her hand with all the strength she could muster, and slapped Mary across the face with such force that Mary stumbled backward.

“Go back to what you were doing," Mary told all the kids around her. “Everything’s fine." The crowd began to split up, and soon it was only her and Vari on the desolate floor.

Mary’s grief was heavy, but she would find a way to get past it. The turmoil that Allie had brought them would soon be gone.

It only took one city block for her fear to fade into mild foreboding—the type of thing anyone felt when faced with the unknown.

She flashed to that moment mired in the street outside of the Haunter's warehouse. A truck had passed through her—or at least its tires had.

Could this all be part of some innate talent in haunting? Was she special in this ability to intrude into the real world, rupturing a tire, and reading the minds of the living for brief moments?

Some singer, long dead, crooned through a big old-fashioned radio, singing “Embraceable You.”

“It’s because of the Chinese restaurants,” Raggedy Andy explained. “They're supposed to be bad luck or something—at least that's what Johnnie-O heard.” And so they wove a serpentine path down the street, crossing to avoid all four Chinese restaurants in town, proving that superstition was not limited to the living.

Johnnie-O explained that all prospective members of the Altar Boys had to take a coin and skim it on the Hudson River.

By the time they reached the Manhattan side of the tunnel, the flurries had grown into a full-fledged snowstorm, the first of the winter.

"This is ridiculous," Allie said. "Chow mein does not carry the plague." The next time, she refused to cross the street, and walked right in front of Wan Foo's Mandarin Emporium.

Johnnie-O, for all his swagger and big-fisted boisterousness, wasn't about to be the first one in, so Allie took the lead and cautiously stepped inside.

The scene inside was not at all what Allie expected. There was no longer food hanging from the ceiling. Instead, half-gnawed carcasses of roast chickens and pieces of meat lay strewn about the floor.

She had, after all, led them to the biggest feast of their afterlives, so she was now held in some sort of reverence.

She dug her teeth into the turkey and relished its flavor—the first flavor she had tasted in all her months here.

Allie left and headed toward Battery Park—the tip of Manhattan, where she was sure to see the McGill's ship, if it was still there. She was terrified, and yet at the same time, she felt ennobled.