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“Quiet,” shouted Allie. “Listen!”
There came the sound of far off footsteps on metal that quickly grew louder. It wasn’t just one person descending into the bowels of the ship, but dozens.
Allie was the last. Allie was the first, just as the fortune had said: She was the last to be chimed, and the first cut down.
The McGill burst into the chiming chamber with the full complement of his crew behind him. He came straight to Allie.
Allie found the McGill even more hideous when looking at him upside down. She could see into his massive misshapen nostrils full of metaphysical nastiness.
Fortunately she didn’t have to look for long, because with a single slash of his razor-sharp claws, he cut Allies rope, and she fell headfirst to the sulphur-dusted floor. She got up quickly, determined to stand eye to eye with the beast.
“Where are we?” she asked. “Why did we stop?”
The McGill never took his eyes off her, but he didn’t answer her either. Instead he spoke to his crew. “Cut them all down,” he said, “and use the ropes to tie their hands behind their backs.”
“You’re setting us free?” asked the high-strung Boy Scout, to which the McGill answered, “I’m sending you to your reward.”
“Yay!” cried Lief.
“It’s not that kind of reward,” Allie told him.
Lief gave her an upside-down shrug. “Yay, anyway.”
The McGill grabbed Allie’s arm, and although she tried to shake him off, he held tight. “You will come with me, and you will do exactly as I say.” Then he brought her up on deck.
Allie had lived in South Jersey before her fateful car crash —Cape May to be exact, the state’s southernmost tip. Yet even though it was only an hour from Atlantic City, Allie had never been. Her parents despised the crowds and general vulgarity, and so they avoided Atlantic City as if they were making a political statement.
Still, Allie knew where she was the moment she came onto the deck of the Sulphur Queen. She had to hide her excitement or the McGill might be suspicious. Her plan had worked! Or at least it had worked so far. There was a long way to go — a dozen things that could go wrong—but there was one thing she knew she could count on: the McGill’s arrogance, and his blind faith in her false fortune.
Perhaps that would give the Twin Pier Marauders the edge they needed to defeat him again. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, thought Allie. No matter how savage the Marauders were, if they brought down the McGill, they would be good friends to have.
The McGill led her to the gangway. The ramp sloped down sharply from the Sulphur Queen’s deck to the boardwalk surface of the Steel Pier. “You first,” he said, and prodded her along. So she was the bait. “Go!” he demanded, and so Allie stepped down the gangway and onto the vast boardwalk of the pier.
“Keep walking,” the McGill said. He waited with his crew just off the gangway—perhaps ready to make a quick escape if the situation called for it.
Allie strode forward, past shops and signs: Schmidt’s Beer, Planter’s Peanuts, Saltwater Taffy, Chicken in a Basket. They were all empty. If any food had crossed over when the pier had burned down, that food was long gone.
At first the only sounds were seagulls and eerie calliope music coming from the Steeplechase Pier. The utter soullessness of the place reminded her of the feeling she got when she had walked the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Then she spun at the sudden clatter of hoofbeats on wood, and saw the strangest thing. Toward the end of the pier, a horse leapt from a platform that had to be fifty feet high, into a tank of water with a great splash. Then the horse climbed a ramp out of the tank and wended its way up the ramp toward the high dive again. This diving horse was part of the pier’s memory, and was the only animal Allie had seen that had crossed into Everlost. She felt an intense pity for the creature and its peculiar eternity.
s dusk by the time they reached old Penn Station—a glorious stone-faced, glass-domed building that had been torn down half a century ago, in the questionable name of progress, and replaced with a miserable underground rat warren beneath Madison Square Garden. The new Penn Station was generally considered the ugliest train station in Western civilization, but luckily, the old Penn persisted in Everlost, if only out of its own indignation.
Nick was duly impressed—and also impressed that Mary was willing to ride a train, considering the nature of her death. As for the conductor, he was an old friend of Mary’s: a nine-year-old Afterlight who called himself Choo-Choo Charlie. In life he was obsessed with model trains, and so to him, old Penn Station, with its many ghost trains, was as good as making it to heaven.
“I can’t take you to Atlantic City,” he told them. “On account a’ there’s no dead tracks down there. I can get you halfway, though, is that okay?”
“Can you get us as far as Lakehurst?” Mary asked. “I have a friend there who can take us the rest of the way.”
Then, with Charlie in the engine, the ghost train lit out on the memory of tracks, heading for New Jersey.
They arrived in Lakehurst a few hours later, but it took the rest of the night to seek out Mary’s friend there: a Finder named Speedo. After meeting him, Nick decided he preferred a chocolate eternity to an eternity in a wet bathing suit.
Nick figured Speedo must have been a pretty good Finder though, because he had himself a late-model Jaguar.
“It’s a sweet ride,” he told them, as he drove them around the dead-roads of an old naval air station, showing the car off, “but it can only go on roads that don’t exist anymore — do you know how hard those are to find?” Then he threw an accusing look at Mary. “You never told me about that when you gave me the car!”
Mary smirked. “You never asked.”
Speedo told them it would take weeks to navigate a dead-road course all the way to Atlantic City, but Mary didn’t seem concerned.
