She opened the door to the fourth and final hold, expecting to find more piles of the McGill’s treasure. This room was different, however.

As she peered in, her mind did not entirely comprehend what she saw. Her first impression was that of a giant hanging mobile, like something she once saw in the Museum of Modern Art. Large, lumpy objects hung from chains, all at different heights, all glowing dimly like low-wattage light-bulbs.

Then one of the objects spoke.

“What time is it?” the glowing lump said.

Allie let out a yelp, stepped back, and hit the steel bulkhead behind her. The wall rang out with a dull, hollow thud.

“What time is it?” the lump said again. It was a boy, maybe a year or two younger than her, wearing gray flannel pajamas, hanging upside down from his ankles around five feet from the ground. His pjs had a dorsal fin on the back, and a cartoon of a shark on the front.

“I … I don’t know …,” Allie answered.

“Oh. Okay.” The boy didn’t seem disappointed. He just seemed resigned.

“Careful,” said a girl hanging next to him. “He’s a biter.”

The pajama-boy smiled, showing a set of razor sharp, sharklike teeth, like the picture on his pajamas. “It’s in a sea predator’s nature,” he said.

Only now did the truth begin to dawn on her as she took in the larger scene around her. The hanging lumps were Afterlights. Every single one of them. There had to be hundreds of kids, all hanging upside down.

The act of chiming was invented by the McGill and he was proud to claim responsibility for the idea. Since it was impossible to hurt someone in Everlost, and since the McGill so wanted to inflict distress, he came up with a whole new form of torture, functional in several different ways: first, because it provided an efficient way of storing those Afterlights he had no immediate use for, and second, because he created a hopeless sense of abject boredom in his victims.

Simply stated, the act of chiming was to hang someone upside down from their ankles by a long chain, or rope. It didn’t actually hurt the spirit being chimed, but it was a pretty dull way to spend one’s days, and if boredom was the closest thing to suffering that the McGill could inflict, he would have to live with that. In any case it was entertaining for him, because he would often go down to the hold and begin swinging people. They would collide into one another, grunting and oofing as they bumped, like human wind chimes, and hence it became known as “being chimed.”

When Nick was first chimed, he wasn’t sure whether it was better or worse than being in the pickle barrel. The rotten-egg smell was certainly worse than the garlic and dill of the pickle brine, but then, at least here, he did not feel so alone. Lief, who had reached a state of nirvana in his barrel, took it in stride, smiling all the while, and Nick eventually decided being alone would be better than hanging upside down next to a happy camper—but then, it was better than being next to the screamer, or that kid who was trying to turn himself into a shark.