Endless Loop Nick spent the next few days following other Afterlights in Mary’s domain, and it confirmed what Allie had shown him. For these kids, each day had become a repetition of the same day-and although he wanted to ask Mary about it, he didn’t, because he knew she would find some way of giving it a wonderful, positive spin. He wanted to sit with it for a while and think about it himself without Mary’s input.
That didn’t stop him from spending as much time as he could with her, though.
Mary was not routine. Each day was different for her-the kids she spent time with, the things she did. It eased Nick’s mind to know that endless repetition was not an irresistible force. A person had choice in the matter, if they were strong enough.
It was a constant irritation to Nick that he and Mary could never have time alone. Wherever Mary ‘was, Vari was there, too, like her own personal valet. Or like a lap dog. Clinging to Mary kept the boy’s life from becoming repetitive, like the others-although Nick wished Vari would just lock himself in a room, and play endless Beethoven to the walls for a few hundred years.
“Do you always have to hang around her?” Nick asked him. “Don’t you ever want to do anything else?”
Vari shrugged. “I like what I do.” Then he studied Nick with a certain coldness in his eyes. “You’ve been spending lots of time with Mary,” he said. “Maybe it’s time for you to do something else.”
Nick couldn’t quite read Vari’s emotions, only that they were unpleasant ones.
“It’s a free spirit world – I can do what I want,” Nick said.
“She’ll grow tired of you,” said Vari. “She likes you because you’re new, but you won’t be new forever. Soon you’ll be just another Afterlight, and she won’t even remember your name. But I’ll still be here.”
Nick huffed at the suggestion. “She won’t forget my name.”
“Yes she will. Even you will.”
“What are you talking about? “
“Your clothes, and your chocolate-face might cross over with you, but your name doesn’t. Not really. It fades just like any other memory. Soon everyone’ll just call you Chocolate. Or Hershey.” Vari grinned, but it wasn’t a pleasant grin.
“Yeah, that’s it. You’ll be Hershey.”
“No I won’t. And I won’t forget my name.”
“Really,” said Vari. “Then what is your name?”
He was about to answer, when suddenly he drew a blank. It only lasted for a second, but a second was way too long to not remember your own name. It was a profoundly frightening moment. “Uh…Uh…Nick. My name is Nick.”
“Okay,” said Vari. And then he asked: “What’s your last name?”
Nick opened his mouth, but then closed it again and said nothing. Because he couldn’t remember.
When Mary arrived, she noticed the distressed look on Nick’s face immediately.
“Vari, have you been teasing our new friend?”
“We were just talking. If he thinks that’s teasing, that’s his problem.”
Mary just shook her head, and gave Vari a kiss on his curly blond hair. Vari threw Nick a gloating grin when she did.
“Will you escort me to the lobby? There’s a Finder waiting for me, and I suspect he has some interesting things to sell.”
Vari stepped forward.
“No, not you, Vari. You’ve seen Finders before, but I thought Nick might like to learn how to barter with them.”
Now it was Nick’s turn to gloat.
Once the elevator door closed, and Vari was out of sight, Nick put him out of mind, dismissing what he had said-not just about his name, but his certainty that Mary would tire of Nick. Vari, after all, was only nine years old. He was a little kid, feeling little-kid jealousy. Nothing more.
What Nick didn’t realize was that Vari had been nine for 146 years. Little-kid emotions do not sit well after a century and a half. If Nick had realized that, things might have gone differently.
Lief stood in the arcade, staring at the video-game screen, and didn’t dare blink. Move the stick right. Up. Left. Eat the big white ball. The little hairy things turn blue. Eat the hairy things until they start to blink. Then run away from them.
Lief had become a Pac-Man junkie.
There was no telling what caused the old Pac-Man game to cross over all those years ago. Mary had bought it from a Finder who specialized in tracking down electronics that had crossed. Electronics did not cross very often. True, over the years people loved their gramophones, or Victrolas, or 8-track players, or iPods, but in the end, no one “loved” those things with the kind of soulful devotion that would cause the device to cross into Everlost. No love was ever lost on a CD player that broke. It was simply replaced and the old one forgotten. For that reason, Everlost electronics were mostly the result of sunspot activity.
Mary prided herself on keeping current on technology, so that arriving Greensouls would feel somewhat at home. It had taken patience, and work, but over the years, Mary had gotten herself quite a collection of video games, and had turned the sixty-fourth floor into an arcade. There were also countless black vinyl record albums that had crossed, because people did truly love their music, but she had yet to track down a record player on which to play them.
Up. Left. Eat the big white ball. The hairy things turn blue. Eat the hairy things until they start to blink. Run away.
Over and over. The repetition wasn’t so much soothing to Lief as it was compulsive. He couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop. Ever.
In the forest he had surely been a creature of habit. He had swung from the trees, playing his games alone-the same games day after day-but that was somehow different. There was no urgency to it. But the endless stimulation from this new-fangled machine demanded his focus in a way the forest never did. Other kids told him it was an old machine-but he didn’t care. The games were all new to him.
Up. Down. Left. Right. Eat. Run.
“Lief, what are you doing? How long have you been here?”
He was barely aware of Allie s voice. He didn’t even turn to look at her. “A while,” he told her. Up. Left. Down.
“I think you’ve been at that machine for five days straight.”
“So?”
“This is wrong. I’ve got to get you out of here! We’ve all got to get out of here!”
But Lief wasn’t listening anymore, because the funny little hairy things had turned blue.
It had been a long time since Greensouls had had such an effect on Mary. Lief was not a problem. He simply brought out in Mary the maternal feelings she had for all the children in her care, but Allie, with her incessant questions and her neurosis of hope, brought up feelings in Mary she would much rather have forgotten, and thought she had. Feelings of doubt, frustration, and a sense of remorse as deep as her towers were tall.
And then there was Nick. The feelings he brought out in her were of a different nature, but just as troubling. He was so very much alive. Everything from his anxieties to the flush of his face in her presence. His bodily memory of life was so charming, so enticing, Mary could spend every minute with him. That was dangerous. It was almost as dangerous as being envious of the living. There were whispered tales of Afterlights whose envy of the living had turned them into incubuses -souls helplessly, hopelessly attached to a living host. This was different, but still, it was a weakness, and she was not in a position to be weak. Too many Afterlights relied on her for strength. With all this on her mind, she found herself distracted, and uncharacteristically moody. And so, when no one was watching, not even Vari, she descended to the fifty-eighth floor, the place she went when she needed silence and solitude.
The fifty-eighth floor had no tenants on the day the towers crossed into eternity. For that reason there were no walls or partitions subdividing it, and so, with the exception of the elevator core, the entire floor was nearly an acre of hollow space.
And still Nick found her.
“One of the little kids said you might be here,” he said as he approached.
It surprised her that anyone knew where she went. But then, perhaps everyone did, but respected her enough not to disturb her. She watched as he drew nearer, his gentle glow visible in the daylight because the floor was so vast it was mostly in shadows, even with windows on all sides. He was clearly not comfortable with the space. “Why would you come here? It’s so… empty.”
“You see emptiness,” she said. “I see possibility.”
“Do you think you’ll ever need all these floors?”
“There are more Afterlights out there, and more crossing everyday,” she told him. “It may take a thousand years until we need the space, but it’s nice to know I have it.”
Mary looked out at the faded world of the living, hoping Nick would go away, hoping he would stay, and cursing herself for not being able to keep her distance.
“Is something wrong?”
Mary considered how she’d answer, then decided that she wouldn’t. “Allies leaving, isn’t she?”
“That doesn’t mean I’m leaving.”
“She’s a danger to herself,” Mary said. “Which means she’s also a danger to you.”
Nick wasn’t concerned. “She just wants to go home and see if her father survived the accident. Why is that so bad?”
“I know something about going home,” Mary told him, and she found that just saying it brought the memory closer, along with all the pain it held.
Nick must have read her emotions, because he said, “If you don’t want to talk about it you don’t have to.” And because he was kind enough not to ask, Mary found herself telling him everything, with the honesty she would have had before a priest. It was a memory Mary had tried desperately to forget, but like the chocolate stains on Nick’s face, the harder she tried to forget, the more indelible the memory became.
“I died on a Wednesday, but I didn’t die alone,” Mary told him. “Like you, I had a companion.”
“We weren’t exactly companions,” Nick told her. “Allie and I were total strangers-until the car accident.”
“I had an accident, too, but my companion wasn’t a stranger. He was my brother.
The accident was entirely our fault. Mikey and I were walking home from school.
It was a cool spring day, but sunny. The hills were already turning green. I can still remember the smell of the wild-flowers that filled the fields-it’s one of the only smells I can still remember from the living world. Isn’t that odd?”
“So it happened in a field?” Nick asked.
“No. There were two train tracks side by side that crossed the dirt path that led home. Those tracks were mostly for freight trains. Every once in a while, for no good reason, a freight train would stop on the tracks and sit there for hours on end. It was a terrible nuisance-going around the train sometimes meant a half-mile walk in either direction.”
“Oh no,” said Nick. “You went under the train?”
“No, we weren’t stupid enough to do that, but quite often there was an empty boxcar open on both sides, so we could climb through the train. There was one on that day. Mikey and I had been fighting, I don’t remember what about, but it must have seemed important at the time because I was just furious and was chasing him. He was laughing and running ahead of me, and there was that boxcar, right in the middle of the dirt path, the doors on both sides pulled open, like a doorway to the other side. Mikey climbed up and into the boxcar. I climbed up right behind him, reaching for the back of his shirt as he ran across. I just missed him. He was still laughing and it just made me even more angry. He leaped out of the boxcar on the opposite side, and turned back to me.”
Mary closed her eyes, the image so strong she could just about see it playing on the inside of her eyelids like a cinema show. A movie, as the living now called it.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Nick said gently, but Mary had come too far to stop.
“If I hadn’t been so angry, I might have seen the sudden terror in Mikey’s eyes, but I didn’t see that; I was too dead set on catching him. I jumped down from the box car and slugged him in the arm-but instead of fighting back, he grabbed me and that’s when I realized something I had forgotten. There were two railroad tracks side by side. One track held the freight car that hadn’t moved for hours, and on the second track was another train traveling at full speed. We had both just jumped right into the path of a speeding train that we hadn’t been able to see from the other side of the boxcar. When I finally saw it, it was too late. I never felt it hit me. Instead there was the sudden darkness of a tunnel and a light far, far away but moving closer. I was flying down that tunnel, but I wasn’t flying alone.”
“I remember that tunnel,” Nick said.
“Before I got to the light I felt Mikey tugging on me. ‘No, no!’ he was yelling, and he pulled me and spun me around and I was still so mad at him I started fighting. I hit him and he hit me, he tugged my hair, I pushed him, and before I knew it, I felt myself crashing through the walls of that tunnel and losing consciousness even before I hit the ground.”
“That’s just like what happened with Allie and me!” Nick said. “We slept for nine months!”
“Nine months,” Mary repeated. “Mikey and I woke up in the middle of winter. The trees were bare, the tracks were covered with snow, and of course like so many Greensouls, we couldn’t understand what happened. We didn’t realize that we were dead, but we knew something was terribly wrong. Not knowing what else to do, we did the worst thing that an Afterlight can do. We went home.”
“But didn’t you notice yourselves sinking into the ground as you walked?”
“The ground was covered with snow,” Mary said. “We simply thought our feet were sinking into the snow. I suppose if we turned around we would have noticed that we left no footprints, but I didn’t think to look. It wasn’t until we got home that I realized how wrong things were. First of all, the house had been painted, not the light blue it had always been, but a dark shade of green. All our lives, we had lived with our father and our housekeeper since our mom had died giving birth to Mikey. Father never found himself another bride, but all that had changed. Father was there, yes, but with some woman I didn’t know and her two kids. They were in my house, sitting at my table, with my father. Mikey and I just stood there, and that’s when we first noticed our feet sinking into the ground, and it hit us both at once what had happened. Dad was talking to this woman, she gave him a kiss on the cheek, and Mikey started yelling at them.
‘Father, what are you doing? Can’t you hear me? I’m right here!’ But he heard nothing-saw nothing. And then gravity-the gravity of the Earth, the gravity of the situation-it all wrapped up into one single force pulling us down. You see, Nick, when you go home, the very weight of your own absence is so unbearably heavy that you start to sink like a stone in water. Nothing can stop you then.
Mikey went first. One second he was there, the next second he was up to his neck, and then, the next, he was gone. Gone completely. He sank right through the floor.”
“But you didn’t?”
“I would have,” said Mary, “but I got to the bed. You see, when I started to sink, my reflex was just like anyone else’s; to grab on to something. I was already at the doorway to my parents’ room. I stumbled in, already up to my waist. Everything I tried to reach for, my hand just passed through and then I grabbed the post of my parents’ bed. Solid brass. Everlost solid. I held on to it and pulled myself up until I climbed onto the bed and tumbled into it, curled up and began to cry.”
“But how – “
“My mother,” Mary answered without even letting Nick finish the question.
“Remember, she had died giving birth. She died in that bed.”
“A dead-spot!”
Mary nodded. “I stayed there for a long time until my father, not even knowing I was there, climbed into the bed with his new wife. I couldn’t bear to see them together, so I left. By then I had recovered enough so that the weight of being home wasn’t so overwhelming anymore. I raced out of the house and although I sank quickly, I didn’t sink entirely, and the farther away from home I got the easier it was to walk.”
“What about your brother?” Nick gently asked.
“I never saw him again,” Mary answered. “He sank to the center of the Earth.”
Mary didn’t say anything for a very long time. There was an unpleasant heaviness where her stomach had once been, but everywhere else there was a strange, ethereal sense of weightlessness. Everlost spirits did not float through the air as the living imagined, but right then, she felt like she might. “I’ve never told anyone that before, not even Vari.”
Nick put his hand gently on her shoulder. “I know it must be horrible to lose your brother like that,” he said, “but maybe, maybe, I could be like a brother to you.” Then he moved a little closer. “Or…well…what I mean to say is, maybe not like a brother but something else.” Then he leaned toward her, and he kissed her.
Mary did not know how to deal with this. In the many years that she had been in Everlost there were boys who would try to force kisses on her. She wasn’t interested in those boys, and she always had more than enough strength to fight them off. But here was a boy whose kiss she didn’t want to fight off. On the other hand, neither did she want to have her judgment clouded by unfamiliar emotions. So she didn’t respond to him at all.
“I’m sorry,” he said sheepishly, taking her lack of response as disinterest.
“Don’t be,” was all Mary said, but kept all of her feelings wrapped up tightly inside, just as she was wrapped up inside her lacy velvet dress.
Rejection was every bit as humiliating in death as it was in life.
It’s because of the chocolate, Nick thought. No, it’s because I’m a year younger than her. No, I’m a hundred years younger than her. Nick didn’t wait for an elevator, he climbed up the stairs two steps at a time, and returned to his apartment, closing the door. Sure, Nick had been lovesick before. There was that girl in science-or was it history-he wasn’t sure anymore-but the point was it had passed. Here in Everlost, though, it would never pass, and he wondered if he tried hard enough if he would be able to simply disappear, because how could he ever face Mary again, much less face her for eternity.
Mary, Mary, Mary. Her face and name were locked in his mind…And suddenly he realized that there was no room for the name that truly should have been in his mind. The name that that brat Vari was so sure he would forget. Hershey is what the other kids called him now, but that wasn’t his name, was it? His name started with an N. Nate. Noel. Norman. He was certain that it started with an N!
Mary found her moods were always soothed by Vari’s masterful playing. He could coax the sweetest sounds from the Stradivarius violin – the same violin from which Vari had taken his Everlost name. Today he played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, one of Mary’s favorites. It was supposed to be played by a string quartet, but Vari was the only string player among the 320 kids in her care. They had plenty of instruments though. People loved their instruments, so quite a few crossed over. A trumpet that had been run over by a bus, a piano that had fallen sixteen stories. Once in a while Mary tried to put together an orchestra, but not enough kids arrived in Everlost with the talent, or the desire to play.
“What would you like me to play next?”
Mary’s mind had been drifting, so she hadn’t even realized Vari had stopped playing.
“Whatever pleases you, Vari.”
He began to play something mournful and pleading. Mary couldn’t identify the composer. She preferred happier music.
“I should bring Nick up,” Mary said. “I’m sure he’d enjoy hearing you play, too.”
The passion of Vari’s playing seemed to fade. “Hershey’s a toad.”
“You should learn to like him,” Mary said.
“He’s got a dirty face, and I don’t like his eyes.”
“He’s half-Japanese. You mustn’t be prejudiced just because he has an Asian look about his eyes.”
Vari said nothing to that. He played a few more brooding stanzas of music, then said, “Why do you always want him around? He can’t really do anything. Not like some other kids. Not like me.”
Mary had to admit that it was true-Nick was not a standout spirit. But then, why did it matter what he could do? Why couldn’t he just be?
She stood, and went to one of the western windows. It was a clear afternoon, and she could see across the Hudson River to New Jersey, but a faint haze hid the horizon from her.
The world had become so small for the living. Airplanes took people across the country in a matter of hours. You could talk with people around the world just by pressing buttons on a telephone, and now those phones weren’t even connected to wires. Everlost wasn’t like that. It was still an unexplored wilderness of wild children, and gaping unknowns. Mary knew very little of children beyond her sphere of influence. Even after all her years here, her explorations were limited, because safety and security required digging in, and traveling as little as possible. Moving from the Everlost apartment building she had occupied for so many years to the towers had expanded her realm, and drawn many more children to her than she had sheltered before -yet even still, the only information she got from the world beyond her towers came from Finders passing through. Mostly they spoke of rumors. Sometimes she liked what she heard, and sometimes she didn’t.
Then a thought occurred to her; a marvelous thought that would give Nick a purpose and a reason to be something more than just one among many in her world.
“Finders have told me they’re reading my books as far west as Chicago now,” Mary told Vari. “Which means there must be children in other cities in need of care and guidance, don’t you think?”
Vari stopped playing. “You’re thinking of leaving here?”
Mary shook her head. “No. But that doesn’t mean I can’t send someone out there.
Someone I can train, and teach everything I know. That person can set up an outpost in an unexplored city. Chicago, perhaps.”
“Who would you send?”
“I was thinking about Nick. Of course it will take years to train him properly-ten, maybe twenty-but there’s no great hurry.”
Vari came up beside her, looked toward the hazy horizon, then turned to her.
“I can do it,” he said. “And it won’t take years to train me, either.”
She turned to him and smiled. “That’s sweet of you to offer.”
“But I can do it,” he insisted. “I might be little, but the kids respect me, don’t they? Even the older ones.”
Again she smiled warmly. “Vari, what would this place be without you and your violin? I’d always want you here, playing for us.”
“‘Us,’” Vari echoed. “I see.”
She kissed him on top of the head. “Now, why don’t you play something else.
Something cheerful.”
Vari began to play an upbeat tune, but somehow there seemed to be an edge to the music that was dark and undefinable.
There was no question in Allie’s mind that she was getting out. She had no desire to spend eternity caught in an endless loop, no matter how pleasant it might be. But she was also smart enough to know not to leave until she got what she had come for in the first place.
Information.
Not “Miss Mary” information, but the real deal.
“I want to know about all the things Mary won’t talk about!”
Allie said it loudly and fearlessly on what was commonly called the “teen floor,” since that’s where the older kids in Mary’s domain liked to congregate.
No one seemed to react, but a kid playing Ping-Pong lost his concentration, and sent the ball flying across the room.
“Don’t act like you didn’t hear me, and don’t think that by ignoring me you can make me go away.”
Like the younger kids, these kids were also caught in repetition, but it didn’t take as much to jostle them out of their stupor. There seemed to be a few fourteen-year-olds here, some thirteen, maybe some twelve-year-olds who eternally wanted to be older. All told, there were maybe thirty of these older kids in Mary’s domain – which was only about one-tenth of the population. She wondered if there were simply fewer older kids who got lost on their way to the light, or if most older kids simply didn’t stay here with Mary for very long.
Nick had said Mary was writing a book on the subject. Allie wondered if there was a subject Mary wasn’t writing a book on.
“If Mary doesn’t talk about something, there’s a reason,” said the Ping-Pong boy.
But Allie already had her argument well rehearsed. “Mary says there are things we shouldn’t think about, and shouldn’t do-but she doesn’t flatly forbid anything, does she?”
“Because we always have a choice.”
“That’s right. And Mary respects our choices, right?”
No one said anything.
“Right?” insisted Allie.
The kids halfheartedly agreed.
“Well, I choose to talk about those things we shouldn’t. And by her own rules, Mary has to respect my choice.”
Several of the kids were suitably confused. That was okay. Shake them up a little, get them to see things in a new way. This was a good thing.
One girl stepped forward. It was Meadow- the girl they had met on their very first day here. “So, like, what do you want to know?”
“I want to know about haunting-and how we can communicate with the living world.
I want to know if there’s a way back to life-because no matter what Mary says, we’re not entirely dead, or we wouldn’t be here. I want to know about the McGill. Is it real, or is it just something made up to scare little kids?”
By now all action had stopped in the room. The routine had been broken. She knew the moment she left, everyone would get right back to it, but for now she had their attention. One kid left a game of pool and approached her-but he still held on to his cue, as if worried he’d need to use it to defend himself.
“No one knows if the McGill is real,” he said. “But I think it is, because Mary won’t talk about it. If it wasn’t real, she’d just tell us so, right?”
A few of the other kids mumbled in agreement.
“How about leaving Everlost? Is it possible to live again?”
Meadow spoke up, blunt, and unsympathetic. “Your body is in a grave, or worse, it’s in ashes. I don’t think you want it back.”
“Yeah, but there are other ways to be alive…,” said a kid quietly from the corner. When Allie turned to him, he looked away.
“What do you mean, other ways?” asked Allie.
When he didn’t answer, Meadow spoke up. “He doesn’t know what he means.”
“But you do.”
Meadow crossed her arms. “There are…talents…that some people have, and some people don’t. They’re not nice talents-and they will bring you a world of bad karma. Mary calls them ‘The Criminal Arts.’”
By now everyone had begun to gravitate around Allie and Meadow. By the looks on their faces, some kids seemed to know what she was talking about, but most seemed clueless.
“What kind of talents?” asked Allie. “How would I know if I have them?”
“You’d be luckier not to know.”
“Excuse me,” said a voice from the back. Everyone turned to see Vari standing there. There was no way to know how much he had heard. Meadow instantly put distance between herself and Allie, going back to the game she had been playing.
The rest of the kids moved away from Allie as well, as if she was poison.
“Good news,” Vari said. “Miss Mary just traded with a Finder for a bucket of fried chicken. She says everyone can have a single bite.”
The rush to the elevators nearly swept Allie off her feet. As much as Allie wanted a bite of that chicken as well, she resisted. The fact wasn’t lost on Vari, who patiently waited for the last elevator with her.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Were you a vegetarian when you were alive?”
Allie couldn’t tell whether he was being sarcastic or sincere.
In her book, You’re Dead-So Now What?, Mary Hightower offers the following warning for the restless soul: “Wanderlust is a dangerous thing. In Everlost there’s safety in staying put. Afterlights who are cursed with a desire to travel don’t last for long. They either succumb to Gravity Fatigue, or they are captured by feral packs of unsavory children. The few that escape these fates become Finders, but the existence of a Finder is full of peril. Better to seek a safe haven, and stay there. And if you haven’t found a safe haven, by all means, come see me.”