Clarence still held out his hand, waiting. “A gentleman’s agreement requires a handshake. Didn’t your mother teach you manners?”
Mikey considered telling him the truth, but instead he said, “I’m unclean! Yeah—I’m an unclean spirit. And out of respect for you, I shouldn’t touch you.”
Clarence looked at him, but didn’t drop his arm just yet. “How does a spirit become ‘unclean’?”
Once the lie had been launched, Mikey found it hard to change its trajectory. “It’s not my fault—I had a curse put on me by . . . uh . . . by a graveyard ghoul. That’s why I walk the earth.”
“Graveyard ghoul, huh?” Finally Clarence put his hand down. “In that case, we’ll skip the handshake. Because, you know what they say . . .”
“Yeah,” said Mikey. “Yes, I know what they say. Boy, do I know what they say!”
As it turned out, they didn’t need newspapers. Over the next few days Clarence scoured the Internet from the computer in Hollow Oaks’s recreation room. What Clarence found confirmed Mikey’s suspicions. San Antonio, Texas, had become a center of bad luck. Not just the car pileup, but a school fire and a bleacher collapse, and a freak electrocution. Although Moose and Squirrel never appeared again in any of the news clips, the circumstances were all similar. There was always a suspect or two, who had been seen by reliable witnesses—once even caught on surveillance video—and yet each suspect claimed to have no memory of what happened.
There was no question in Mikey’s mind that this was where the ghost train went—which meant Allie was there too. More than anything, Mikey wanted to find Allie, but he also knew he had to stop these random crimes against the living.
Mikey had no particular love of the living world, but he did not despise it the way his sister did. He tried to tell himself that Mary wasn’t the one behind all these terrible things—but he had to accept the truth: Milos, Moose, and Squirrel were now working for her. Alone, they had been just a nuisance, but in the hands of someone like his sister—someone with vision—they were incredibly dangerous, and could manipulate the living world in ways too frightening to imagine. Yes, they were Mary’s weapons, whether she was standing there with them or not.
So how does one fight against weapons that powerful? By having one’s weapon: a weapon could wipe out the very existence of Mary’s skinjackers. Clarence would be Mikey’s weapon—his “balance of power.”
Of course Mikey couldn’t tell Clarence that. If he knew, he’d be gone in a heartbeat. That’s why Mikey had to lie about why they couldn’t shake hands. It wasn’t the worst of lies, Mikey figured. In fact it was bound to help everyone. And besides, Mikey had turned over so many new leaves, the ground before him was practically carpeted green. He could afford to turn one back. He could afford one simple white lie.
Only much later would he realize that he was very wrong. Not only couldn’t he afford it, but there weren’t enough coins in all of Everlost to pay the cost.
CHAPTER 23
Uptown Boy
While Allie was freeing the innocent, and Mikey was preparing his ultimate weapon, the Neon Nightmares were hunkering down in their lair, lying low.
With the threat of the Chocolate Ogre somewhere in the city above, the Neons had set their security alert on red. All lookouts were given orders to sink themselves if spotted, rather than lead the monster back to the Alamo again. They had been lucky the first time, but would not escape detection a second time.
After the first few days in lockdown, Jill went through a sort of skinjacking withdrawal, aggravated by the adrenaline rush infused into them all by the vortex above. It was like being wired on caffeine twenty-four hours a day, and since sleeplessness was the normal state of Afterlights, it only made things worse. In the Alamo basement, everyone was an insomnoid.
Knowing how hard it was on Jill, Jix decided to give her a gift.
The Crockett Street tunnel was guarded by two Neons whose routine involved endless knock-knock jokes. Unfortunately they only knew about twenty, and so they just kept repeating the same ones over and over.
“I’ll tell you a new knock-knock joke,” Jix told them, “if you let Jill out the back entrance, and let her return without telling Avalon.”
The two Neons agreed that it would all depend on the joke . . . and so Jix introduced them to the Interrupting Cow, which is perhaps the only knock-knock joke in existence that is actually funny.
The joke sent the guards into a giggling fit that lasted the better part of an hour, and it bought Jill the right to come and go as she pleased. When Jix told Jill, she was thrilled by the possibility of escaping the dungeon, if only for a while.
“Why don’t you come with me?” Jill asked, but Jix had inserted himself into so many of the Neons’ routines, he knew his absence would be noticed.
“Go skinjack,” he told her, “but I see no need for you to reap.”
“I’ll do what I want,” she answered.
Jill left first thing the next morning for her day on the town, and once she was gone, Jix went about his own day; the same games, the repeated conversations. In this way he maintained a foothold in the routines of as many Neons as he could—because by becoming a cog in the routine, it gave him the power to bring the gearwork to a grinding halt if he wanted to.
After he made his obligatory rounds, he took some time to visit the root cellar, which was the farthest, darkest room in the maze of the Alamo underground. Few places were actually dark down there, because there were so many Afterlights that their glow illuminated most spaces—but this room was where they put all the Interlights captured from the train—those sleeping souls waiting to be born into Everlost. The Interlights gave the Neons the creeps because they didn’t glow, so Jix could go there and not be bothered.
He found the girl he had inadvertently killed, and sat beside her. He had no idea what her real name was, so he called her Inez. Inez was his sister’s name, and it comforted him to think of this girl in that way. As he sat there, he thought about Jill. It intrigued him that she felt no remorse for the souls she had intentionally brought into Everlost, but also troubled him. It troubled him enough to find his own Afterlight dousing the room into darkness, just as Jill said a truly bad feeling would. He practiced it, strobing his light on and off. He couldn’t say he enjoyed it, but as stealth was an important part of being a scout, the ability to feel miserable, and douse his afterglow, was a skill worth knowing.
Then, at a point when his light was fully doused, he realized there was still a glow in the room. He looked up to see Jill standing there at the entrance to the chamber.
“I thought I might find you here,” Jill said. She wove through the sleeping Interlights, and noticed which one Jix sat closest to. “What is it with you and that girl?”