“Now tell me about the Afterlights in your ship.”

“No.”

“You promised.”

“I lied.”

“Then I won’t teach you what I know.”

“Then I’ll throw your friends over the side.”

“Get … Owwwwwwt!!!!”

Allie clenched her fists and let off an angry growl that only made the McGill laugh. She might have held some of the cards, but the McGill would not let her forget that he held all the aces.

“We will come back each morning,” the McGill said, “until we have a bright sunrise. Then we will go on to step two.”

Allie had no choice but to agree. She rode the lifeboat in furious silence back to the Sulphur Queen, even more determined than ever to outsmart the McGill.

As for the woman Allie had possessed, once she regained control of her body, she took one look at the words scrawled on the wall, and concluded that all the stories about this house were true. She immediately contacted her Realtor, and put the house up for sale, determined that she and her husband would move as far away from Amityville as possible.

“Beware of fortune cookies that cross into Everlost,” Mary Hightower writes in her book Caution, This Means You! “They are instruments of evil, and the proper way to deal with them is to stay far away. AVOID TEMPTATION! Don’t even go near Chinese restaurants! Those wicked cookies will rot off the hand of anyone who touches them.”

CHAPTER 19
Evil Chinese Pastry of Death

The McGill followed Allie’s lead, letting her direct him through the first three steps of human possession. He supposedly now had “soul-sight,” allowing him to see which humans were possessible and which were not, however when he looked at the living, he saw no difference between them. He wouldn’t tell Allie this, though. Soul-sight would come, he convinced himself. Once he worked his way through the remaining steps it would come. It had better.

The second step was to follow the actions of a living person for twenty-four hours. “The point,” Allie explained, “is to become in tune with the things living people do.” It was a deceptively difficult chore, because the living could travel through the world in ways that the McGill could not. Every single time the McGill chose someone to follow, they would eventually get into a car, or a train, or, in one strange instance, a helicopter, and be carried away too quickly for the McGill to follow on foot.

It took several days until he finally settled on someone who wasn’t going anywhere; an inmate at a local jail. He spent twenty-four hours observing the prisoner’s various limited activities, and the McGill returned to the Sulphur Queen triumphant.

The third step, however, was much more difficult. According to Allie, he was required to commit an act of selflessness. The McGill didn’t think it was possible.

“You could release one or two kids from the chiming chamber,” Allie suggested.

But the McGill flatly refused. “It wouldn’t be selfless,” he told her, “because I’d be doing it to gain something.”