Sparrow Hill Road

by Seanan McGuire

  Most of all and most importantly, when you tell the ghostroads that you want to go somewhere, be sure you really mean it. They don’t take kindly to being toyed with, and they don’t give second chances. Every trip you take in the twilight, you take for keeps.

  Happy trails.

  The air outside the rust-colored Chevy tastes like diesel fuel and shadows. It’s 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 Josh; 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? Are you sure this is where you wanted to be dropped off?” The glow of the diner’s neon marquee glints off Josh’s glasses as he leans across the passenger seat to look out at me. 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. He’s dipped deeper into the twilight than he ever had before during this drive, and he did it 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 pale 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 practice with that particular expression. “Don’t you need to get on the road? I don’t want to make you late.”

  “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 Josh . . . Josh 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 could leave the twilight like he can.

  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. Then I stop, frowning, because I know this place—I’ve seen this sign. The Starbright Diner, one more little piece of Americana struggling to stay alive in the evolving maze of the highways, old enough to echo into the twilight . . . but never this deep. I’ve been here a thousand times. It’s never looked like this before. Something is very wrong, and whatever it is, it’s not something I’m familiar with.

  That smell that lingers in the air is starting to worry me. A lot is done by smell in the twilight, maybe because it’s one of the few senses that ghosts reliably retain. For me, ash and lilies means an accident ahead that can’t be avoided, while rosemary and my grandmother’s sugary perfume means the chance to turn things a different way. Josh smelled like rosemary and perfume when I found him. That’s how I knew he wasn’t too far gone to save. But this mix of diesel fuel and shadows . . .

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

  Half the moths fluttering in the glow of the streetlights are translucent, and as dead as I am. The ghost insects overlay the living ones for a second at a time, and 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 and figure out how bad the bleed is. They move too fast for me to get an exact number, but what I do 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, like a woman’s razor-sharp fingernails being dragged slowly along the skin just above your spine. It’s hard to feel death until you’re right on top of it. That’s why I don’t realize what’s wrong until it’s too late, when the diner door swings open at the touch of my hand and sets the bell above it ringing wildly.

  There are a dozen people clustered around the counter. They all have wide, terrified eyes. The left side of the night waitress’ pink-and-white uniform is stained a deep berry-red by her own spreading blood. I freeze just inside the door, feeling the nails along my spine, and realize 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 for our little party,” says a voice behind me. It’s whiskey-rough and a little shaky, like even the speaker isn’t sure how things are going to end. The gun barrel he digs into the back of my neck is a lot surer of itself. It’s cold, and it’s solid, and 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 ahead and join the others.”

  He plants a hand between my shoulder blades and shoves me forward. I’m almost glad to go staggering away from him, away from the gun in his hand. One of the people at the counter catches my arm before I can fall. “You shouldn’t have come,” he whispers harshly, a middle-aged man in a white apron and a fry cook’s paper hat.

  There’s no recognition in his eyes; he doesn’t know me. He’s a daylighter, plain and simple, and I start hoping that maybe this is a daylight problem; maybe the smell of death is just the natural result of what’s happening here. The blood on the waitress’ uniform isn’t enough to account for the blood on the floor. Someone has already died in this room—maybe more than one someone—and that happens in every America. Death is not the exclusive province of the darker levels.

  “Hey. Look at me.”

  The man guarding the door sounds completely at ease. That’s enough to slice through my fear and turn it into anger. Anger that he’s managed to scare me. Me. I’ve been dead longer than anyone in this room has been alive, and here I am, held captive with the rest of them. I turn, ready to give the man with the gun a piece of my mind, and I see him for the first time.

  He’s in his early twenties, older than I look, but still so damn young. He’s dressed like a thousand other roadside runaways, in ripped jeans and combat boots, with a beat-up old leather jacket over his stained red flannel shirt. It’s the jacket that gives him away. It should have been the eyes, but it’s the jacket, because after fifty years of following the rules that bind the hitchers to the road, I know my outerwear. I can only take jackets from the living. And the man in the doorway, the man with the gun, the man holding this entire diner of terrified, living human beings hostage?

  Yeah. He’s real damn dead.

  His eyes skip up and down the length of me with forced hunger, a leer twisting one corner of his mouth into an angle that’s more pathetic than predatory. He’s trying to make me uncomfortable. He’s succeeding, but not because I’m afraid he’ll take advantage of the fact that I’m female, smaller than him, unarmed. No; it’s the gun in his hand that’s making me uncomfortable, because it looks as solid as I do. It’s clearly solid enough to wound the living—the bleeding waitress and the body or bodies I haven’t seen are proof enough of that—and I don’t know what a gun l
ike that could do to me. I’ve never encountered anything like this before.

  “Aren’t you a pretty one?” he asks, rhetorical question with a sneer underneath it. There’s a quaver in his voice that all his painted-on confidence can’t quite conceal. “So, you here for a cup of coffee, or for a cup of cock?”

  The people behind me are silent, all the fire frightened out of them. The waitress in the bloody uniform is close enough that I can feel her shaking. Terror is coming off her skin in waves. None of them will raise a hand to save me. That realization cuts through my own fear, turning it into fury. How dare he? This is the daylight. He has no business here.

  “Coffee,” I say, canting my chin up so that he can see the challenge in my eyes. “You the fry cook on duty?”

  His snort of derision is too quick, too tight with his own terror. I’m not the only frightened ghost in the Starbright Diner tonight. “Do I look like a fry cook, lady? Maybe you should think about being nice to me. I have enough bullets for everybody.”

  At least he knows how to share. I’m running down the encyclopedia of the dead in the back of my mind, trying to find the round hole that connects to this square peg. He’s not a hitcher; that coat’s his own, and has no heat to loan, no solid skin to clothe a shadow in. He’s not a pelesit, either; if he had a master, they’d know me, and they wouldn’t be letting us talk. They don’t like letting their slaves get too close to the free dead.

  Too bad that leaves a couple of hundred options open for what he might be, how he might have died, how he can be laid to rest and get the fuck out of my face.

  Hitchers like me aren’t the only ghosts of the twilight, too well-lit for the midnight Americas, but too dark for the daylight levels. There are other types of ghost that walk here, and every one of them follows different rules. Some of them don’t understand that they’re not in charge anymore. When that happens, somebody has to teach them what they’re doing wrong. And sometimes, when I’m less than lucky, on nights like this one, somebody winds up being me.

  “No, you don’t look like a fry cook.” I cross my arms, cock my hip, and level a flat stare at him. “You look like an idiot. Is this any way to take a diner hostage? I mean, really. The door isn’t even locked. I just waltzed in here like it was no big deal, situation normal. Do you have enough bullets for the entire highway? Because that’s what it’s going to take if you keep on this way.”

  Disquiet flashes across his face, there and gone like a cloud sliding past the moon. “You really think it’s a good idea to sass me?”

  “You really think it’s a good idea to leave those doors unlocked?”

  One of the hostages grabs me—a white-faced college boy with eyes the color of day-old coffee. There’s blood splattered across the front of his University of Michigan sweatshirt. None of it’s his. “Shut up,” he hisses. “You’re making it worse.”

  “Really? I wasn’t aware that there was anything worse than this.” I pull my arm away, still watching the man with the gun, still running silently through the lists of the dead. He’s not a bela da meia-noite; they only come in one flavor, female, and they don’t take hostages. He’s not a toyol; they’re always the ghosts of children, and they never seem this solid. Most of them can’t even be seen by the living. “So what do you say? Can we lock the doors?”

  I’m not needling him for nothing, no matter what this looks like. He postures like a living man, but he’s not one, and I need to know how far his mimicry of the human condition goes. A pissed-off ghost won’t care how many people stumble into this diner; whatever grudge he has will spread to cover as many of the living as he can catch. A confused one, on the other hand, a ghost who doesn’t know what’s going on . . .

  “Yeah.” He licks his lips before jutting out his jaw in a display of exaggerated machismo. “I think this is all the guests we’re gonna need if we want to have a real kick-ass party, huh? A major blast.”

  The other hostages look to me as he turns to lock the door. Some of them are glaring, while others just look lost. The air is heavy and cloying with the taste of diesel fuel and shadows, joined now by the funereal scent of lilies and the sharp-spice smell of rosemary. There’s an accident ahead, one that could go either way, lilies or rosemary. For the sake of these people—for the sake of this place—I have to hope that it’s an accident I can find a way to steer us clear of.

  The clock on the wall says it’s just past ten. The night is young. So are these people, and they deserve to live longer than this night. “So,” I say, a little too loudly. “How about that coffee?”

  The waitress with the bloody uniform is named Dinah. He shot her about ten minutes before I walked through the door. She was trying to sneak out through the back door. She’s lucky he only shot her in the shoulder. Two other members of the staff—the other waitress and the busboy, a teenage kid who only took the job to pay for repairs on his death trap of a pickup truck—were already dead when she tried to make a break for it.

  I learn this while she walks me through the process of making coffee on a machine so old I could probably operate it in my sleep. That’s fine. I’m happy to let our rogue gunman think I’m a few sandwiches short of a picnic, especially if it gets Dinah off her feet for a little while. If she faints, I think he’ll shoot her again—and this time, he won’t be shooting to wound.

  “He came in here a few minutes after sunset,” she says dully. That’s the shock speaking, the timeless voice of a witness at the scene of an accident. “Josie went to take his order. He put a bullet right between her eyes. Right . . . right between her eyes.” A wondering note overcomes the shock. She sounds almost childlike as she finishes: “Bang.”

  “That’s charming.” The coffee is thick and hot and doesn’t smell like anything as I pour it into an industrial white diner mug. I made it, I poured it; nobody gave it to me, and that means I have no right to it. Coffee is reserved for the living. “Where do you keep the cream and sugar?”

  “Counter,” says Dinah, voice still soft and sweetly childish. I can’t be angry with her, although I try to be. I could have been her, if my own life had gone just a little differently.

  “Thanks. I’ll try to get him to let us take a look at your shoulder.” I offer her a thin sliver of a smile. It’s not as encouraging as I’d like it to be. It’s still better than nothing. I pour a second mug of coffee, place them both on a tray, and then I’m gone, heading for the door by way of the counter.

  The dead man with the gun is standing next to the closed door, one eye trained on the room while the other keeps watch through the front window. He stiffens at my approach, but tries to look relaxed as he turns to face me. He’s thinking now. He sees how big a risk he’s taken by taking this diner—and I still don’t know why he’s done it, or what he’s hoping to achieve.

  “Coffee’s ready.” I hold up the tray, showing him. “I didn’t know how you take it, so I brought cream and sugar.”

  He eyes the second cup and sneers. “So what, you think you get whatever I get? Is that how this works in your empty little head?”

  “No. I just thought you’d want to make sure it wasn’t poisoned before you drank any.” I shrug a little, trying to look unconcerned. If he were alive, I wouldn’t be worried at all. No living man has scared me since the night I died. Dead men, on the other hand . . . “If you want to drink them both, that’s fine, too.”

  “. . . right.” Another flicker of disquiet crosses his face. Maybe he doesn’t know why he’s doing this. “Fix them both, bitch. Three sugars, two creams.”

  “Got it.” I put the tray on the nearest table, start doctoring the coffee, keep running through lists of the dead in my head. He’s not einherjar; they like to fight, but they don’t take hostages, and they don’t abuse the innocent. He’s not deogen. They can turn visible when they want to make their presence known, but they can’t touch the living, and they don’t like to interact when they can just watch. He could be working for the deogen . . . but it’s a clear night. There would be
a heavy fog blanketing everything if there was a deogen near here, and there’s nothing.

  “Hurry up.”

  “I’m done.” I lift the tray, tilting it slightly toward him. “You get first pick.”

  His jaw juts out with pride that barely masks his fear. “You’re damn right I do.” He grabs a mug, jerking his chin toward the other. “Better enjoy that, bitch. It could be your last cup.”

  Enjoy it? Not likely. I put down the tray and wrap my hands around the second mug, stealing what little heat it’s willing to give me. The liquid inside tastes like nothing but ashes. It doesn’t even burn my lips or tongue. It isn’t mine.

  The man with the gun watches me, eyes narrowed, until I finish my third sip. Then he thrusts his untouched mug toward me, commanding, “Trade.”

  “What do you mean?” I make doe’s-eyes at him, looking as confused as I can.

  “What are you, stupid? Gimme your coffee. I know that one’s clean.”

  No, you don’t. All you know is that I’m willing to drink poison if it takes you out. The thought barely has time to finish forming before I realize something a lot more important. I hold out my mug, asking slowly, “Does that mean you’re giving me yours?”

  “Damn right.” Coffee slops over the side of the cup and onto my hand as he jerks my mug away, replacing it with his. The scalding sting is almost sweet, because it comes with the smell of sugared coffee and the knowledge that when I take my next sip, I’ll taste it. “You got a problem with that?”