“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.
o;I see things, and I don’t care if no one believes me!” he would yell in frustration. And, of course, no one did believe him. No one wanted to hear the ravings of a lunatic—much less the ravings of a burn-scarred lunatic. They just wanted him to go away. So the world forgot he was a hero, and instead labeled him a public nuisance.
For many years he wandered from city to city, state to state, looking for all the things he might see with his dead eye. He lived anywhere he didn’t get thrown out of, which meant he never lived anywhere for long. Mostly he lived out in the open, everywhere from city streets, to country fields, trying to make sense of his visions—hoping that one day it would all fit together and he’d know why he was cursed with this gift of vision.
Clarence was in Memphis the day the Union Avenue Bridge came crashing down.
With his right, living eye, he saw the explosions, and the collapsing bridge . . . but with his left eye he saw the ghost bridge now standing in its place, and the spirit train that rode across it, heading west.
Indeed, things were brewing in the half-dead world, and the only way to find out how bad the brew had become was to capture a spirit or two. If he could do that, maybe he could prove they existed. Maybe a special camera could photograph them. Anything to prove to the world that he was sane and they were blind.
He took up residence in an abandoned farmhouse that looked one storm short of surrender, a few miles west of the Mississippi. To Clarence’s dead eye, however, that farmhouse looked as fresh and fine as the day it was built. There he came up with a plan.
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.