All around her, living folk spoke of meals and sales, inconsiderate husbands and unsatisfied wives. Small talk now seemed so small from her perspective, she wondered how people could engage in it altogether. Such pettiness filled the lives of the living. She could begin to see why Mary would have nothing to do with it.

Mary. Almost reflexively, she turned to look back at the city. Through the falling snow, the buildings of the city were just a faded shadow, but the Twin Towers of Mary’s domain were bright and bold, as if painted on the skyline, standing in proud defiance of everything Allie once thought she knew about the nature of the world. Someday, thought Allie, I will write a book too. It wouldn’t be a book of rules and etiquette, but one of experience, because each day in Everlost brought a fresh experience. How Mary could think she knew so much, without ever leaving the comfort of her tower, was one of the greatest mysteries of Everlost.

But now there were other things to deal with, like the ghost ship looming closer before her. In her excitement Allie tried to lean against the ferry’s rail, only to lean right through it. She spun her arms, trying to catch her balance, and nearly fell off the ferry into the bay. She saved herself by letting her knees buckle, and falling backward, but that didn’t turn out to be a good thing either. Her rear hit the deck, and passed through it. She reached out her hands, but they went straight through the wood and the steel beneath that. She could feel the warmer air of the lower deck on her fingertips and felt herself sinking even farther.

As she tried to right herself, her body kept falling, and she dropped right through a row of benches on the lower deck, not as much as ruffling the pages of a man’s newspaper as she fell through him. She didn’t stop there. The force of her fall left her embedded in the floor of that deck. Frantically she tried to pull herself up, but again, only succeeded in sinking farther.

She fell through the lower passenger deck, right into the auto deck, where cars sat, their engines off as they crossed the bay. Even the steel of cars didn’t stop her, and now she began to panic.

“Help!” she screamed, “Somebody help me!”

But of course there was no one to hear her cries, and she cursed herself for not thinking to make herself a pair of road-shoes before attempting this crossing.

She fell through the floor of the auto deck into the engine room. Gears grinded, pistons pounded, echoing all around her, and as she tried to stand up, her feet passed through the hull of the boat.

She could feel the icy bay water around her ankles, and then her shins, and she knew that if she didn’t think of something fast, she would sink straight through the bottom of this boat and, as Mary wrote, “that would be that.”