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“I disgust you,” the McGill said.
“Isn’t that what you want?” Allie answered. From the start she knew he took great pride in his high gross-out factor. He never passed up an opportunity to be repulsive, and was skilled at thinking up new disgusting things to do. At that moment, however, he didn’t seem pleased with himself at all.
“Perhaps my hand could use a softer, gentler touch,” he said. “I’ll work on it.”
Allie resisted the urge to look at him. Please don’t tell me the monster is falling in love with me, she thought. She was simply not the compassionate kind of girl who could handle it. “Don’t try to charm me,” she told him. “The ‘Beauty and the Beast’ thing doesn’t work with me, okay? “
“I’m not trying to charm you. I just came down here to make sure you weren’t planning to jump.”
“Why would I jump?”
“Sometimes people do,” the McGill told her. “Crew members who think sinking would be better than serving me.’ “Maybe they have the right idea,” Allie told him. “You won’t release my friends, you won’t answer my questions — maybe I’d be better off down there.”
The McGill shook his head. “You’re just saying that because you don’t know—but I know what happens when you sink.” And then the McGill became quiet. His dangling eyes, which never seemed to be looking in the same direction, now seemed to be looking off somewhere else entirely. Somewhere no one else could see.
“It may begin with water,” he said, “but it always ends with dirt. Dirt, then stone. When you first pass into the Earth, it’s stifling dark, and cold. You feel the stone in your body.”
Allie thought back to the time Johnnie-O had almost pushed her down. She remembered that feeling of the earth in her body. It was not something she ever wanted to experience again.
“You feel the pressure growing greater all around you as gravity pulls you down,” the McGill said. “And then it begins to get hot. It gets hotter than a living body could stand. The stone glows red. It turns liquid. You feel the heat. It should burn you into nothing but it doesn’t. It doesn’t even hurt, because you can’t feel hurt, but you do feel the intensity of the heat… it’s maddening. All you see is the bright molten red, then molten white the hotter it gets. And that’s all there is for you. The light, and the heat, and the steady drop down and down.”
Allie wanted to make him stop, but found she couldn’t, for as much as she didn’t want to know, she felt she had to know.
“You sink for years, and from time to time, you come across others,” the McGill said. “You feel their presence around you. Their voices are muffled by the molten rock. They tell you their names, if they remember them. And then in twenty years tame, you reach a place where the world is so thick around you with sunken spirits, you stop. Once you’re there, once you’ve stopped falling and realize you’re not going anywhere anymore, that’s when you begin waiting.”
“Waiting for what? ‘ “Isn’t it obvious?”
Allie didn’t dare guess what he was talking about.
“Waiting for the end of the world,” the McGill said.
“The world … is going to end?”
“Of course it’s going to end,” the McGill told her. “Probably not for a hundred billion years, but eventually the sun will die, the Earth will blow up, and every kid who’s ever sunk to the core will be free to zoom around the universe, or do whatever it is Afterlights do when there’s no gravity to deal with anymore.”
Allie tried to imagine waiting for a billion years, but couldn’t. “It’s horrible.”
“No, it’s not horrible,” the McGill said, “and that’s what makes it worse than horrible.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You see, when you’re at the center of the Earth, you forget you have arms and legs, because you don’t need them. You can’t use them. You become nothing but spirit. Pretty soon you can’t tell where you end, and where the Earth begins…and you suddenly find that you don’t care. You suddenly find that you have endless patience. Enough patience to wait until the end of the world.”
“‘Rest in peace,’” Allie said. “Maybe that’s what they mean.” It was perhaps a great mercy of the universe, that lost souls who could do nothing but wait were blessed with everlasting peace. It was kind of like the weird bliss Lief had found in his barrel.
“I could never imagine being that patient,” Allie said.
“Neither could I,” said the McGill. “So I clawed my way back to the surface.”
Allie snapped her eyes back to the McGill, whose eyes were no longer far away—they were both looking right at her.
“You mean …”
The McGill nodded. “It took me more than fifty years, but I wanted to be back on the surface again, and when you want something badly enough, you can do anything. No one has ever wanted it as much as me; I’m the only one who’s ever come back from the center of the Earth.” 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.”
Although nothing about the McGill’s horrible face had changed since he began his tale, Allie could swear he somehow looked different. “Why did you tell me this?”
Allie asked.
