spatula claws for hands, making it easier to move through the stone of the living world, but he had to face the fact that rising from the depths required more than that. It took willpower and a fury that raged hotter than the bowels of the earth. Mikey McGill certainly had willpower, but his love for Allie had taken the edge off of his fury.
And then there was the added burden of Nick. In the end Nick had become exactly what Mary said he would become. The small brown smudge on his mouth, left there from candy he was eating the moment he died, grew like a fungus until nothing was left of him but that chocolate.
He would have dissolved into nothing, had it not been for Mikey, whose skill at soul-tweaking extended beyond just the changing of his own form. Mikey took buckets of bittersweet spiritual fudge, and with more patience than he knew he had, Mikey had shaped it back into humanoid form.
But Nick was not the same.
He had only the faintest memory of who and what he was. He was like a small child, entirely dependent on Mikey, with no will of his own. He had truly become a Chocolate Ogre.
Still, knowing the risks, Mikey took them both down, letting them sink into the living world.
“I’m scared,” the Ogre had said with a gurgling cocoa-rich voice.
Mikey had sworn to him that it would all be okay, and the Ogre had trusted him. It had taken only a few minutes in the ground, and away from daylight, for Mikey to realize that the task might be beyond him.
“Move your arms!” Mikey had commanded as they sank deeper and deeper. “Kick your legs like you’re swimming.”
“What’s swimming?” the Ogre responded. The spirit that had once been Nick was now a dim-witted thing with no survival skills. And so they struggled, moving ever downward as Mikey tried in vain to move them up.
That’s how it was for weeks. Mikey strained against gravity with the Chocolate Ogre clinging to him, a helpless weight around his neck. Mikey had no idea how deep they had gone, or even if they had moved far enough West to have passed under the Mississippi River, which now flowed somewhere far above them.
“It’s dark!” the Ogre would say every once in a while, each time like it was the first time he had noticed it.
“Dark is good,” Mikey would tell him. “If the rock around us starts to glow, and get molten, then we’re really in trouble.”
Molten magma would mean they were leaving the earth’s crust, and entering the mantle. The heat wouldn’t burn them, but they would sink faster, leaving them no hope of returning to the surface. They would sink until there was no direction but up, and they’d join all the others who were probably still singing a trillion bottles of beer on the wall, which Mikey had started when he was first down there, and calculated would go on for thirty-two thousand years.
But they weren’t there yet.
As long as the stone of the living world around them was dark and relatively cool, they couldn’t be more than a mile or two down, so there was still hope.
“Maybe we should just give up,” the Ogre said to him in the midst of their endless struggle. “Maybe we should give up, and let what happens happen. Let the earth take us where it wants us to go. Is that a good idea?”
“No!” The suggestion infuriated Mikey. He wanted to tear the chocolate creature limb from limb for saying it-and he discovered that the anger gave him strength. Striking back at the Ogre would not help them-but taking that anger and channeling it into upward momentum-that would make a difference.
If Mikey let go of the Chocolate Ogre, he knew he could save himself, but the days of the selfish, self- centered McGill were gone. He wouldn’t do that to Nick. They would rise to the surface together, or not at all.
“This will not be our fate!” he screamed to the stone around him. Whether or not the earth was alive he did not know, but it seemed to have a will of its own. It wanted to draw them down into its womb, and hold them there until the world itself was no more. Perhaps that was acceptable, maybe even desirable for other souls, but not for him. He was not a Centered One. He was Mikey McGill, and he had things to do!
First of all, he had to save Allie! Without him, she would be a prisoner of Mary. Even worse, she would be at the mercy of that two-faced skinjacking slimeball Milos! Mikey could not bear to leave her in his clutches. The thought of it added to his fury, and his fury was transposed into muscle, moving them upward.
He renewed the struggle, and realized that arms and legs in this dense, gritty darkness were useless. He had the power to change, and realized there were forms more suitable for moving in dense, murky depths. He drew in his arms, and turned them into flippers. He fused his legs, and turned them into a fluke. He imagined himself a whale, but covered with sharp, toothlike ridges that could grip stone. Then he sprouted himself a dorsal fin.
“Hold on to that, and don’t let go,” he told the Chocolate Ogre, who, if nothing else, was very good at doing what he was told. Then Mikey began to force them upward through the stone of the living world, imagining all those things that made him furious-all those things that he knew he could change if he could only be back on the surface again.
He had no sense of direction now. But he knew they were moving upward because the earth around him and within him was getting colder and colder. Then after many days, he breached into the light of day, and the sun almost blinded him. It came so suddenly, he didn’t know what to do next. He had almost forgotten what it was to be a spirit in Everlost. Before he could sink again, he found deep in his thoughts an image of who he was. Mikey McGill. Mary’s brother. Allie’s soulmate. Perhaps the one boy who could make a difference in the battle for souls in Everlost.
Before he knew it, his form transformed back into that of a human, and with what little strength he had left, he reached out and grabbed the hand of the Chocolate Ogre, who was already beginning to sink back into the earth.
“We’ve got to keep moving now,” he reminded the Ogre. “If we don’t, we’ll sink again.”
“It’s bright here,” the Ogre said. “Where are we? Where are we going?”
“We’re going to rescue Allie,” he told the Ogre. “I don’t know where we are right now, but we’ll figure it out soon enough.”
Then a succulent aroma came to them, so pungent, it overcame the rich smell of chocolate.
“Do you smell that?” said the Ogre. “It smells good!”
Mikey was wary. He knew that in Everlost that which was pleasing to the senses was sometimes the tip of something much less pleasant. “Whatever it is, let’s avoid it.”
But like a dog fixed on a scent, the Ogre couldn’t resist. He determined the direction of the smell, and took off after it.
“Nick, no!”
Mikey ran after him, trying to stop him-but found that his feet were still welded into a thorn-encrusted whale fluke. He fell flat on his face, and by the time he had transformed his fluke into two human legs, the Chocolate Ogre was bounding away.
There was a honey ham, glistening, as if it had come right off a holiday table, stuck into a post that had crossed into Everlost. Like all Everlost food, it was perfectly preserved and at the peak of flavor.
“Nick, don’t touch it!”
But nothing could stop the Chocolate Ogre now.
Mikey caught up with him just as he grabbed the ham, and the instant he did, a trap sprang up around them both, locking into place. It was a cage! They were locked in a cage!
“Now look what you’ve done!” shouted Mikey, but the Ogre didn’t seem to care. He just joyfully sunk his dark teeth into the ham, leaving behind a ring of chocolate with every bite he took.
There was a shout of glee, then strange maniacal laughter coming from a farmhouse that was slowly decaying itself into Everlost. A figure left the porch, approaching them. As the figure limped closer, Mikey could see that he was alive, but not entirely.
And for the first time in a very, very long time, Mikey McGill was truly afraid.
In her book Everything You Wanted to Know About Everlost, but Were Ashamed to Ask, Mary Hightower has this to say about scar wraiths:
“Scar wraiths do not exist, plain and simple. The very idea that someone could be part-way in and part-way out of Everlost is preposterous. Either you are blessed with admission into Everlost, or you are not. As for those awful legends about a scar wraith’s ability to extinguish an Everlost soul and wipe it out of existence, those legends are entirely false. Nothing can hurt an Afterlight, much less kill one. Let me say this again, in case there is any
