No—if selflessness was what was required then it would be a difficult task indeed. This required consulting with the cookies. After Allie had gone to her quarters, the McGill once more pushed his hand into the spittoon and withdrew a fortune cookie, crushed it, and pulled out the slip of paper. This time it read:

The answer comes when the question is forgotten.

Annoyed, the McGill threw the cookie crumbs over the side, rather than giving them to his crew.

The McGill wasn’t the only one annoyed by this turn of events. Allie silently cursed herself for not being more clever. Did she actually think the McGill would be tricked into releasing her friends? True, the challenge of this “third step” bought her time, but if the McGill was truly incapable of selflessness, it would only serve to make him angrier and angrier.

She now had freedom on the ship—more than any of the McGill’s actual crew—but something was happening to her. Each time she looked in a mirror, her reflection looked a little off. Did one ear look larger than the other? Was this bottom tooth always crooked? She wondered how long it would be until she became no better than the rest of his crew. Allie pondered all this as she stood on deck one afternoon, looking toward shore—only she couldn’t find it. The sky was clear, but all she could see was ocean. It seemed to her that the Sulphur Queen always hugged the coastline, but now they were out in the open sea. It was unsettling, for although she knew she could no longer be a part of the living world, seeing it gave her some connection to the life she once had. By her calculation, they should have been off the coast of New Jersey—the southern part of the state, where her family lived—but the shore was nowhere in sight.

As she stared out at the horizon, the McGill approached her, lumbering in that awful way of his.

“Why are we all the way out here,” Allie asked him, “if you’re supposed to be checking your traps?”

“I have no traps in New Jersey,” was his only answer.

“But what’s the point of coming all the way out to sea?”

“I didn’t come here to answer stupid questions,” he said.

“Then why did you come?”

“I was on the bridge,” the McGill said, “and I saw you staring over the side. I came down to see if you were all right.”

Allie found this show of concern even more disturbing than the slime that so freely oozed from the McGill’s various bodily openings. The McGill brought his flaking three-fingered claw to her face and lifted her chin. Allie took one look at that swollen, turgid finger, purple and pale like a dead fish three days in the sun, and she pulled away from him, revolted.

“I disgust you,” the McGill said.

“Isn’t that what you want?” Allie answered. From the start she knew he took great pride in his high gross-out factor. He never passed up an opportunity to be repulsive, and was skilled at thinking up new disgusting things to do. At that moment, however, he didn’t seem pleased with himself at all.