Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (3 page)

"But--"

"Please."

Maybe it's my tone, maybe it's his own fear, or maybe it's just the
ghostside, already starting to dig its claws into him, already getting under his
skin. Finally, slowly, Larry nods. "All right, Rose. We'll keep going."

"Thank you." The dashboard is cool when I touch it again. I wonder when he'll
notice that. "Let me tell you my version of the woman at the diner."

***

"She wasn't a cheerleader, although she was in high school. She liked to
drive. She liked to watch other people drive. And she liked her boyfriend, who
worked in the auto-shop, and fixed her car so that it ran like a fairy tale. The
cheerleaders would never have let her get anywhere near them. She might have
gotten them dirty.

"She was walking down the side of the road when the trucker pulled up next to
her and asked if she needed a ride anywhere. She said yes, and that she'd really
like to go somewhere to get something to eat. So he drove her to the truck stop
diner. Only when they got there, she thanked him for the ride, and she went and
sat with someone else. Another trucker. And after she ate her burger, she asked
him for a ride."

Larry is watching me more than he's watching the road, now; he's watching
with the sort of terrified understanding that only comes on by inches, only
comes when you're not looking for it. He's starting to realize that
something--that everything--is wrong.

"So he let her into his cab, and then they drove off together. But there was
a crash. A terrible crash. He was killed, and she...she was never found."

"Rose..."

"Only a year later, a year to the
day
, that first trucker saw her
walking down the road again. Same place, same stretch of road. He pulled over,
and said he'd been afraid she died. She just smiled. Asked for a ride. And when
he asked her if she'd stay in his truck this time, she said no; said she had
another ride. Same thing happened. Accident, dead trucker, missing girl. And
again, two years later, she shows up. By now the first trucker is starting to
realize there's something wrong. So he pulls off the road when he sees her, and
he demands to know: are you killing these boys? Are you doing this to them?"

"Rose--"

"And she looks at him and says, so sadly it about breaks his heart, 'No. I've
never killed anyone. I just want to make sure that somebody's there to see that
they get home.'"

This time his voice is just a whisper; this time, he understands. "Rose."

I offer him a smile as sad as Sunday in September. "I came to you for a
reason, Larry. I'm just here to make sure that you can find the right roads. I'm
only here to get you home."

***

Driving through the ghostside is easy, and Larry's rig knows the way. She
travels light and faster than she ever did in life, finally free to corner on
her own, to compensate for her driver when he can't focus through his tears. He
only cries a while. Not as long as some, longer than others. That's fine.
There's nothing wrong with crying when someone dies, not even when it's you.  If
you can't weep at your own funeral, when can you?

The ghostroad gets simpler, turns and curves fading into straight lines and
dark exits. Finally, like an oasis, the bright neon of the Last Dance Diner
appears up ahead and to the right. I reach over, squeeze Larry's wrist.

"This is my stop."

"Rose..."

"Yours is up ahead." The danger is past. Once they reach the Last Dance, they
can find the rest of the way on their own, and I don't dare go any further--for
me, the Last Dance is where the danger really begins. I don't know where that
road ends, and until I'm finished with everything that needs doing, I don't want
to find out. Besides, the Last Dance makes damn good malteds.

He pulls off the road, letting the engine idle as he looks at me. He looks
younger than he did when we met. The ghostside is easing the years away. "Why
me?"

"Because the crash was coming whether I was here or not, and sometimes people
get lost on the road. Sometimes they just need someone to tell them what exits
to take." I lean over, kiss his forehead--cool lips brushing cool skin--and open
my door. "Good luck, Larry."

Larry looks at me in silence for a long while before he nods, and starts the
engine up again. I slam my door, and the truck pulls away, driving down that
long, straight stretch of road. And then it's gone, like a piece of tissue
whipped away by the wind, and overhead, the stars start blinking back on. The
wind picks up, and I'm cold again, falling out of the midnight and back into the
twilight, where the air still tastes like apples.

Hunching my shoulders under the thin fabric of my jacket, I turn and start
for the Last Dance Diner. Maybe Emma will be working tonight. She's usually
willing to buy me a malt when the boss isn't looking.

And in all the Americas, from midnight to noon and in-between, the truckers
roll out, and the diners stand like cathedrals of the road, and the beat...the
beat goes on.

Dead Man's Party
A
Sparrow Hill Road
story
by
Seanan McGuire

Got my best suit and my tie
Shiny silver dollar on either eye
I hear the chauffeur comin' to the door
Says there's room for maybe just one more...

-- "Dead Man's Party," Danny Elfman.

Walk the ghostroads long enough, you start to learn things. There are no formal
schools; the schoolyard chant of "no more pencils, no more books, no more
teachers' dirty looks" applies more completely than most people can ever imagine
before they slip between the cracks. Things look different in the twilight.
Things are different in the twilight. The rules aren't the same here. The old
patterns won't protect you. The twilight is another country, an America where
the sun never rises, and the people who wind up here have two choices: adapt or
die. (Some pursue a third choice--some spend their lives trying to claw their
way back up into the light--and I think sometimes that they're the saddest ones
of all, because they never let themselves accept the reality of their situation.
There's no way to go from full twilight back into the light. Get out while
you're in the shallows, or you never get out at all. That's just the way the
ghostroads run.)

Everyone who walks the twilight has something else they're looking to learn.
The routewitches, they're seeking the stories of the highways and the byways,
the hidden riddles worked into frontage roads and ghost towns where the
tumbleweeds hold dominion over all. They practice their little magics, they
speak to strangers, they give rides to hitchhikers both living and long since
dead.

Even they have their divisions, their strange allegiances, their legends and
their laws. The Queen of the Routewitches keeps her court on the old Atlantic
Highway, the oldest major artery in North America. Most of it's gone in the
daylight levels, replaced first by Route 1, and later by Interstate 95, but the
twilight has a longer memory than the light does, and the old Atlantic is the
strongest and the cleanest of the ghostroads. If you cross her palm with silver,
she can tell you things not even the highway commission remembers, like why
Route 1 cut so far inland when the Atlantic Highway ran through Savannah,
Georgia, and what really funded the construction of the Waldo-Hancock Bridge.
They're just stories, in the light, but down here, they're the things that can
keep you breathing.

If you were breathing when you arrived, that is.

I didn't find the ghostroads; the ghostroads found me, looming up out of the
dark like the iceberg that felled the
Titanic
. Everyone in the twilight
is looking for something, and I'm no different; I went looking for ghosts, a
phantom chasing phantoms through the night that never quite begins or ends. I
had to find them. It was the only way to know for sure what I'd become. They
were tangled in a thousand half-stitched seams across the fabric of reality,
waiting to be found, and I found them. The ghosts of the twilight taught me what
I am--a hitcher, a ghost tied not to a physical place or a specific person, but
to an unfinished task. We have our rules, just like every other kind of ghost,
but we run closer to the skin than most, closer to the daylight, because we got
lost by mistake. We were never meant to be here.

We're not the only ghosts of the twilight, not the only ones too well-lit for
the midnight Americas, but too dark for the daylight levels. There are other
types of ghost that walk here, and some of them follow different rules. Some of
them don't understand. When that happens, somebody has to teach them what
they're doing wrong. And sometimes, when I'm less than lucky, somebody winds up
being me.

***

The air outside the rust-colored Chevy tastes like diesel fuel and shadows,
bitter when I breathe in, burning the back of my throat. The urge to get back in
the car and tell the driver--I think his name is Kyle; he told me who he was
when he picked me up, but he was just a short-time driver, and it didn't matter
enough to stick--borders on unbearable. Every inch of me wants to be out of
here, wants to be
miles
from here. To be anywhere but this narrow strip
of asphalt outside yet another roadside dive. Something's wrong.

"Rose? This is where you wanted to be dropped off, right?" Kyle leans across
the passenger seat, the glow of the diner's neon marquee glinting off his
glasses. He's in his early thirties. I've been sixteen for fifty years, and it's
hard to think of anything except how goddamn young he looks. This is the deepest
he's ever dipped into the twilight. He's here because of me. "I can take you
somewhere else if you'd prefer."

So damn
young
. "It's fine. This is where I want to be." His
sweatshirt is too big for me, generic red department store cotton washed and
worn feather-soft. I wrap my arms around myself, trying to stay warm, trying to
look pathetic enough that he won't ask for the sweatshirt back. I've had a lot
of time to practice that particular expression. "Don't you need to get on the
road?"

"I'm ahead of schedule, thanks to your little shortcuts." His smile is
sincere. I hope mine looks as real as his. We took those shortcuts, even though
they meant dipping down into the twilight, because if we hadn't, we would have
been on the highway when a group of drunk college kids lost control of their car
and flipped it over the center divider. They'd been in the parking lot where I
first found him, and they smelled like ashes and lilies. They were already over
the edge, too far gone to save. But Kyle...Kyle could drive away clean, if he
could hit the gas and floor it out of the twilight before the ghostroads claimed
their own.

"Get out of here." I nod toward the road. "Highway's calling. I'll be fine."

He's in too deep, and part of him knows that, because he nods, says, "Take
care of yourself, Rose," and then he's gone, peeling out into the night, leaving
me in the parking lot with the taste of diesel fuel and shadows filling my mouth
like cheap wine. I wish I could go with him. I wish I had a way out of the
twilight.

I wish I knew where I was.

***

I turn toward the taste of diesel fuel and shadows, toward the rainbow gleam
of neon struggling to paint the night in something more than darkness. I know
this sign. The Starbright Diner, one more little piece of Americana struggling
to stay alive in the evolving maze of the highways. I've been here a thousand
times. It's never looked like this before. It isn't normally this dark; it isn't
normally this deep into the twilight. Something is very wrong, and whatever it
is, it's not something I'm familiar with. Ash and lilies means an accident ahead
that can't be avoided. Rosemary and my grandmother's sugary perfume means the
chance to turn a different way. Kyle smelled like rosemary and perfume when I
found him. That's how I knew he wasn't too far gone to save. But this...

This is something new. I don't like new. I haven't liked new since the days
when I was sixteen for real, frightened little phantom running rabbit down the
ghostroads.

Half the moths that flutter in the glow of the streetlights are translucent,
ghost insects overlaying the living ones for a second at a time. That's not
right, either. That sort of melding only happens when the ghostroads are
bleeding through, and I haven't been here long enough for that to start
happening. I watch them as I walk toward the diner, trying to count the ghosts,
trying to figure out how bad the bleed is. They move too fast for me to get an
exact number, but what I get is enough to tell me that there's trouble. The kind
of trouble that makes me glad you can't die twice--not under normal
circumstances, anyway.

Death doesn't smell like anything, not like an accident does. Death is more
of a feeling, fingernails being dragged slow and sharp down the skin just above
your spine. It's hard to feel until you're right on top of it. That's why I
don't realize what's really wrong until it's too late, until the diner door
swings open at the touch of my hand and sets the bell above it ringing wildly.
There are a dozen people here, all of them clustered around the counter, eyes
wide and terrified. The night waitress is wearing a pink and white uniform. The
left side of her blouse is stained Chuck Berry red with her own blood. I freeze
just inside the door, feeling the nails along my spine, realizing why I tasted
diesel fuel and shadows, understanding, too late, what the ghostroads were
trying to tell me. It was a warning.

"Looks like we have another guest at the party," says a voice behind me,
whiskey-rough and a little shaky, like even the speaker isn't sure how things
are going to end. The gun barrel is cold where it digs into the skin on the back
of my neck. I can't stop myself from cringing. Maybe that's the right response,
because the speaker sounds pleased when he says, "Well, little party crasher? Go
on and join the others."