Sparrow Hill Road

by Seanan McGuire

  My heart aches for her, for this poor cheerleader the age that I seem to be. But that doesn’t matter—that can’t matter—because I can’t let her leave here. I can’t let her start to walk. That’s why I still taste lilies and ashes, even though the accident itself is over. This girl is an accident walking, and as long as she’s on the loose, others will die.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  She looks at me like I’ve just said something crazy—and if she’s still dazed enough to think that I go to her school, I probably have. Everyone knows the cheerleaders, especially the ones as pretty as she is. She’ll have no trouble finding rides if I let her walk away from here.

  Sirens are ringing in the distance, still far off, but getting closer. Any one of the people who shows up here could be—will be—a target.

  “Mackenzie,” she says.

  “Huh.” I give the bus another look. No one is stirring, not even a mouse. Could be none of them will rise. Could be they’re all going to rise as soon as my back is turned. Better to focus on the problem at hand. I turn back to her, and offer, “I’m Rose.”

  Her expression changes, turning suspicious as she studies me. “You don’t go to our school, do you?”

  “Nope. I just thought the school colors would make you feel a little better about talking to me.” I stop focusing on my clothes, and am unsurprised when jeans and tank top melt and flow into the ankle-length green silk gown that I’ve been wearing off and on for the last fifty years. It’s welcome for once, because it means she’s really the reason that I’m here: she’s really what made Emma send me.

  Mackenzie’s eyes go wide and round. “What . . . what are you?”

  “Ever hear the story of the phantom prom date?” I ask.

  Apparently, that’s the wrong question, because her eyes get even wider and rounder, and she practically trips over her own feet backing away from me. “That—that’s just a story! There’s no such person!”

  How right she is. The phantom prom date is just one of the many urban legends I’ve played accidental midwife to: Gary and I never made it to the prom, and I sure as hell didn’t kill him. He was the first boy I ever loved. There are many people who could have moved me to murder, but Gary wasn’t one of them. “You’re right. It’s just a story. But it’s a story with a grain of truth at the middle of it, because it’s about a ghost. It’s a ghost story. I’m a ghost story, Mackenzie, and now so are you. I’m sorry.”

  I hate this part, I hate this part, telling the newly dead that they’re no longer among the living. It’s so easy not to notice. Death is a trauma, and so we block it out, trying to convince ourselves that it didn’t happen, until someone—some busybody in a green silk gown that went out of style decades ago—shows up and starts saying otherwise.

  “You can’t be serious,” she whispers.

  “Mackenzie—” I take a step forward.

  “Get away from me!” she howls, and the wind howls with her, lashing out at me like a fist. I’m not braced—this isn’t something I was expecting when I started trying to talk to a newly dead homecomer—and so it sends me flying backward, through the bus. I’m treated to the unpleasant sight of several dead teenagers as I pass through them, and then I’m hitting the pavement on the other side, rolling to a stop half-in and half-out of one of the smoking cars.

  “Oh, great,” I mutter. “All this, and a fucking poltergeist, too. Great.”

  I pick myself up, a little more slowly than I would if I actually wanted to deal with this, dust myself off, and go running back toward where I left Mackenzie. It’s just become a lot more important that I handle her fast . . . and it’s just become even clearer that I have no idea how I’m going to do it.

  There may be no hierarchy among road ghosts, but we’re not the only ghosts out there, and some traits can show up regardless of what else you may be. Poltergeists, for example. Throwing shit around in the real world and beating the crap out of your fellow dead people isn’t what I’d call a common trait among the ghosts of the road—it’s more common in lost children, and they’re strictly house-haunters—but that doesn’t mean we don’t get poltergeists. And since poltergeists pretty much require violent, horrible, traumatic deaths, the ones we do get are just as unhinged as the normal kind.

  A homecomer poltergeist is just about the worst scenario I can think of. She’d be able to crash the cars that refused to pick her up, and that sort of death could very well create more ghosts, stranding innocent people who had no business on the ghostroads until a reaper or a gather-grim could come and sweep them up. Not to mention all the damage a normal homecomer does. Mackenzie might be confused, but she was also the spiritual equivalent of a nuclear bomb, and I did not want her on my roads.

  Luckily for me, she’s still a teenage girl in mind as well as in appearance. I walk back through the bus to find her standing there with her hands clutched under her chin, obviously praying. I don’t have the heart to tell her that no one’s listening.

  “Mackenzie . . .”

  “Stay away from me,” she says dully. “I need to be here when Kyle wakes up. I need him to see that I’m okay.”

  Kyle’s not going to wake up. He might rise, or he might not, but waking up is no longer on the table for anyone in that bus. The glimpse I had as I went flying through has made that very clear. “Mackenzie, you need to come with me, or more people are going to get hurt. I’m sorry I don’t have time to do this nicely. I don’t have a choice.”

  “People are going to get hurt?” She turns to face me, the poltergeist fire kindling in her eyes again. It’s all I can do not to take a big step backward. “You’re telling me that I’m dead, and you expect me to worry about people getting hurt?”

  “Well, yeah, I kind of do. You and me, we’re dead. There’s not much left that can hurt us. But people like them,” I wave a hand toward the distant sound of sirens, “they’re still alive, and they deserve to stay that way. Accidents happen, Mackenzie. I’m so sorry, and believe me, I know what you’re going through right now. That doesn’t mean we get to take our anger out on the living.”

  Mackenzie hesitates. “You went through the bus just now.”

  I consider the value of telling her that she threw me through the bus, and decide that for once, I should keep my stupid mouth shut. “Yeah, I did. I’m a ghost. I do that sort of thing.”

  “You’re a ghost.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So am I.” The change in her expression is abrupt, confusion and misery becoming determination. I don’t have time to shout or tell her not to do what she’s about to do, and I’m not sure it would have done me any good; she’s too far away. Before I can react, Mackenzie turns and dives, vanishing into the metal undercarriage of the bus.

  Her screams begin an instant later, ringing across the night with a volume she shouldn’t be able to reach, much less sustain.

  “Oh, you owe me so many malts, Emma,” I mutter, and run toward the bus, diving in after my wayward homecomer. What’s she going to do? Kill me?

  I’m reflecting on the fact that the joke I just made was in poor taste, even if I only made it inside my own head, and then I’m through the undercarriage into the bus itself, where Mackenzie is trying frantically to wrap her arms around a dead boy. She doesn’t understand yet what her limitations are; that as a poltergeist, she can smash things, and as a homecomer, she can borrow flesh and bone from the living, but that either way, she’s still a ghost, and no corpse has anything to give her. She doesn’t seem to have noticed her own broken body, lying half-folded over the back of a nearby seat. Small mercy. She’ll notice soon enough, and with my luck, that’s when all hell is going to break loose.

  “Kyle-Kyle-Kyle,” she’s saying, almost like it’s a chant, a benediction meant to be spoken in the church formed by their bodies. My heart breaks for her a little bit more.

  Heartbreak never woke the dead. “He’s gone, Mackenzie. You’re gone, and so you need to come with me, before things get any worse.”<
br />
  “No,” she says, as sullen as only sweet sixteen can be. “He’s taking me to prom. He promised. I bought my dress—”

  The mention of prom brings inappropriate laughter bubbling to my lips, where I have to swallow, hard, to keep it from breaking loose. Wasn’t a teenage poltergeist upset about missing prom exactly what I’d been hoping to avoid? “I didn’t get to go to prom either. Sometimes the world’s not fair. And we have to go now.”

  “What if I won’t?” She shoots me a venomous glare over Kyle’s shoulder. “What if I want to stay here with him?”

  “You won’t stay,” I say, quietly. “You’ll get distracted when the firemen get here. The living will draw you, because that’s what the living do, and then you’ll ask one of them for a ride home. That’s where it will start. With one ride. You’ll forget that you’re dead; you’ll forget about Kyle; you’ll think that all you have to do is get home and everything will be perfect. Only eventually, the truth will come back to you, and you’ll start killing the people who pick you up. You’ll fill a graveyard before you’re done, and no one will remember the sweet little cheerleader who died too young. They’ll remember some horrible thing, some monster out of a campfire story.” I allow myself to smile, small and bitter and honest. “They forgot Rose Marshall, but they’ll remember the phantom prom date forever. Do you want that to be you?”

  “How can you be so calm?” Her voice is a betrayed whisper.

  I shrug. “I’ve been dead for a long, long time, Mackenzie. Now come on. Let me take you away from here, before someone else gets hurt. Please.”

  She looks down at Kyle’s face, still handsome, despite the blood streaking his cheek. Then she nods. Just once, as sharp and short as the bell for the end of class.

  When she kisses his forehead, her lips dip down below the surface of the skin. I don’t say anything. I’m not sure she even noticed.

  Mackenzie’s cheerleading uniform is perfect when she straightens up and turns toward me. She’s still a homecomer; her death dictated that for her. She’s just a homecomer who found somewhere else to go. “Okay,” she says.

  “Okay,” I echo, and offer her my hands. She steps forward, and as she takes them, I smile, and ask, “How do you feel about milkshakes?”

  A poltergeist wind follows us down into the ghostroads. The emergency personnel will be confused when they find the school bus back on its wheels, each student in their proper seat, but they won’t question it too much; no one who works on the road questions anything like that too much. They might not like the answers. And none of them will notice the football player and the cheerleader, both of them out of uniform, with their fingers twined together as they wait for the end of eternity.

  Book Two

  Ghost Stories

  I drove her to the limits of a town not far away,

  And she vanished like a fable at the breaking of the day.

  As she slipped away, she kissed my cheek and said, “We’ll meet again,”

  And I find that I’m not worried ’bout the how, or ’bout the when.

  For there’s beauty on the open road a man can learn to find;

  Flowers blossom on the median, and fate is sometimes kind.

  When it’s time to make the final drive, I won’t be scared at all,

  Rose will be right here beside me, all along that final haul.

  And she’s never been a good ghost, not for one day in her death;

  She stopped playing by the rules the day that she gave up on breath.

  She’s the angel of the truck stops; it’s the afterlife she chose.

  She’s the flower of the graveyard, she’s our ageless roadside Rose.

  She’s the blossom of the median; she’s the place a lost man goes.

  She’s the flower of the graveyard, she’s our ageless roadside Rose.

  —excerpt from “Graveyard Rose,” as performed by William Davis and the Billy Davis Band.

  ...“The first time I saw her, I was nineteen.” So begins the eyewitness account of sixty-three-year–old Patrick Swenson of Billings, Montana. Mr. Swenson has been the head librarian of the Downtown Billings Library for the past twenty years. In that time, the library’s selection of local history and American ghost stories has swelled to become one of the premiere public collections in the nation. “I was driving home from a concert one weekend. It was late, and I was tired, and I was probably more than a little drunk, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. I was just thinking about how nice it was going to be to get home and sleep in my own bed.”

  He pauses, expression distant. It’s difficult to look at him like this and not see a man who truly believes every word he says. “I pulled off at this sleazy little diner to get a cup of coffee, and she was there. Standing in the parking lot, like some kind of angel. ‘You don’t want to go in there,’ she said. ‘The coffee’s terrible, and besides, the fry cook just shot somebody.’ That’s when I heard the screaming coming from inside. She didn’t have any blood on her, and she looked so young—younger than me, anyway—that I told her that she shouldn’t be out alone. She asked if I could give her a ride home. I said sure.” He looks toward me, hope and anxiety in his eyes. “That was the right thing to say, wasn’t it? That I could get her home?”

  I allow that it was the gentlemanly thing to say. Right and wrong don’t come into it.

  Relieved, Mr. Swenson resumes his account. “She got into the car. Told me her name was Rose. And then she told me she knew a shortcut. We talked all the way back to Billings, and then—right about when I crossed the city limits—she stopped talking. I looked over at her side of the car, and she was gone. Just gone.

  “I went home, and got into my own bed. Woke up the next day with a killer hangover. It got worse when I saw the front page of the newspaper. ‘Ten car pile-up at the city limits,’ that’s what it said. If it hadn’t been for Rose and her shortcut, I would’ve driven straight into that accident. With my reflexes dulled, and as tired as I was, there’s no way I would have lived.” He chuckles a little, half-wry, half-sad. “So now I look for her on every road I can find. I just want the chance to say thank you to her face, you know? Maybe that means that I’ll find her the day I die, but I’m all right with that. I’ve never had a better driving companion than Rose.”

  —from American Ghosts, Michael Hayes, Ghost Ship Press.

  2010

  Bullets and Bad Coffee

  THERE ARE AS MANY KINDS OF GHOST as there are ways to die, but death starts the same way for everyone. One moment we’re alive, and the next, we’re not. It’s that simple. The blink of an eye, the final beat of a broken heart, and everything changes.

  Everything changes forever.

  There are a thousand types of the newly dead, each with their own destinations in the twilight or the midnight. Those who died running tumble out of the daylight and find themselves on the ghostroads, the narrow veins of dark asphalt that run through the body of the twilight like veins through the thighs of an aging hooker. The trainspotters say new arrivals used to find themselves standing in railway stations or next to remote stretches of track, and the routewitches say that before that, the new-dead wound up on dirt roads or narrow horse-trails. They’re all the ghostroads, and they’ve all got one thing in common: they’re all physical evidence of the scars mankind leaves on the world.

  We created the ghostroads through our lives and through our deaths, and they provide a home and haven to our wandering souls . . . at least until the wandering is over. No one knows exactly where the terminus of the ghostroads can be found, although everyone knows that it exists. It has to. No one can ride the ghostroads forever, after all; eventually, every journey comes to an end, and those of us who serve as psychopomps have seen more than our fair share of wandering souls to their rest. But while the journey is still going on . . .

  It doesn’t matter whether you’re alive or dead—either way, the ghostroads are the best way to move through the twilight. They dependably exist, which gives th
em a definite advantage over the roads that sink down from the daylight or rise up from the midnight. They aren’t exactly safe, but nothing in the twilight really is, and the ghostroads generally don’t go out of their way to kill people. They’re content to strew themselves with hidden dangers and wait, instead of going hunting like some of the routes that can get you through the midnight.

  The ghostroads are less direct than the roads on most other levels, and that’s part of what gives them their stability. As long as there’s a hidden turn to take or an intersection yet uncrossed, the ghostroads will retain their reason to exist.

  The most important thing to remember about the ghostroads is this: every road that’s ever been is a part of them, and the twilight is just as stretched and painted-over as the daylight. If you want to find a road that isn’t there anymore, all you have to do is close your eyes, plant your feet, and let go. Stop trying to be anchored; stop trying to convince yourself that anything ever ends. The ghostroads know the way, and they’ll take you if you’ll let them. It’s not the sort of thing people do without good reason—even the routewitches are careful when it comes to surfing the palimpsest atlas of the ghostroads’ memory—but it can get you where you want to go, if you’re willing to trust the path you’re on.

  I only have one piece of advice to give about the ghostroads: don’t get lost. Maybe you won’t always know where you are. Maybe that’s for the best, but there’s a big difference between not knowing where you are and truly being lost. Before you try to pull any fancy tricks or turn the road to your own advantage, learn to believe—to truly know—that you’re never, not for a second, lost. Because people who get lost out there . . . those people are never found again, not by anyone, and what the ghostroads claim, they don’t give up easily. Living or dead, the ghostroads don’t care. We’re all travelers when we’re with them, and we all owe the roads a traveler’s respect.