He built himself a trap made of brass bed frames that no longer existed, from homes that were washed away in a flood. To anyone watching, he knew he must have looked mad—dragging invisible bed frames, with invisible fingers, but how he appeared to the world was of no consequence now.

Then, using that same dead hand, he hinged the bed frames with powerful springs, so when the trap was sprung it would snap closed, trapping the evil spirit inside.

For bait he used a glazed ham that would have been someone’s Christmas dinner, had the delivery truck not hit a tree. The truck didn’t cross into the ghost-place, but some of the meals it carried did.

For weeks he waited in the farmhouse, watching his trap out in the fallow field between the house and the highway. He knew something was coming before it even arrived, because he smelled it. It was not an aroma from the living world, because his sense of smell was lost in the fire. It came from the ghost-place, pungent and strong. Clarence had to smile. He had forgotten how much he liked the scent of chocolate.

CHAPTER 9

Assaulting Gravity

The earth is roughly eight thousand miles in diameter. Its center is four thousand miles down. While the living world is not solid enough to hold a stationary Afterlight on its surface, neither is it soft enough to make a downward journey quick. Still, sinking slowly, over a period of many, many years is no one’s idea of fun.

Mikey McGill had been to the center of the earth, which, to an Afterlight, is no more hellish than waiting for one’s father to come home for supper . . . if supper wasn’t coming for a few billion years.

What had struck Mikey as the most annoying part of it was how everyone but he had developed a deep sense of contentment and peace. They had adapted to their situation, and had all come to love the waiting. Ask any soul who has sunk to the center, and they’ll tell you that, at least for now, there is no place they’d rather be.

Mikey, however, never got with the program. He never felt “one with the earth.” He never experienced the joy of Nirvana. The thought of patiently waiting until the end of time—or at least the end of the planet—was as unappealing to him as, oh, say, waiting for his father to come home for supper, which Mikey had actually found extremely hellish in life, because he never had any patience for anything.

There were those among the Centered Ones who believed that their very presence at the core is what allowed the planet to be a green, living thing, rather than just a rock hurtling through space—and that they were not lost to the living world, but a crucial part of the life cycle. Whether they were right or wrong didn’t matter to Mikey. He just didn’t want to be there. So he had decided to climb out.

Since strength in Everlost is determined by the power of one’s will, and since Mikey McGill was the most willful spirit ever to sink to the center of the earth, he was able to climb back to the surface. He didn’t just defy gravity, he assaulted it, and in so doing, became the only soul ever to return from the center. Of course when he emerged, he had transformed into the most heinous of monsters. He called himself the McGill, and struck fear into the hearts of Afterlights everywhere. Being the One True Monster of Everlost suited him for a while—but as much as his sister, Megan (better known as Mary Hightower), loved order and permanence, Mikey loved chaos and change. He couldn’t stay the McGill forever—and although he now possessed the remarkable skill of tweaking himself into whatever form of monster he desired, he found, for the most part, he preferred the form he started with: a boy with slightly unruly auburn hair, who, according to Allie the Outcast, was somewhat decent-looking.

Just as his love for Allie had saved him, however, it now threatened to doom him . . . because in those days and weeks after the collapse of the Union Avenue Bridge, while Allie was taken hostage on a train headed west, Mikey was, once again, on his way to the center of the earth. This time, someone else was sinking with him; an Afterlight once known as Nick, but now more accurately called the Chocolate Ogre.

It had been a calculated risk on Mikey’s part to try to travel beneath the Mississippi river, instead of facing the impassable wind—but he had to go after Allie. He had to rescue her, and this seemed the only way to do it.

The plan was to sink into the living world, move through the bedrock beneath the riverbed, then come up on the other side. He had managed something similar a few years back, diving into the earth on horseback, to rescue Allie from sinking.

This new challenge, however, had proven to be very different. Back when he saved Allie from the depths, he had more of the monster in him—a proud, arrogant fury that made it easier to assault gravity. But Mikey was not the monster he was. His time with Allie had left him far too human. Certainly he could tweak himself up a pair of 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.