Sparrow Hill Road

by Seanan McGuire

  This isn’t right. This can’t be right. The songs of this road are not the songs of a road in the process of dying, but they should be; this is the heart of the highway, and a heart that’s been broken keeps nothing alive.

  I take a step forward, frightened little ghost-girl in the rain, and that step is all it takes to tip the balance, because once I start, I can’t stop. I know I should turn back, that I’m acting like one of those stupid girls in the drive-in horror movies, but I can’t stop. My feet keep pulling me onward, through the parking lot, into the broken diner, where everything is darkness.

  Jackson, Maine, 1992.

  We’re the first ones at the raceway, Tommy too eager and too stupid to be anything but early, even with me in the seat beside him begging him to find another way. His heart is set. “I don’t know anyone who’s ever gotten out of here,” he said earlier, eyes wide and earnest and too young to understand what he was getting into. “People say they will, but they don’t. We all wind up working for our daddies, if our daddies are still alive. We drink in the bars where they drank, we sit on the porches where they sat, and we get old swearing we’re going to get out one day. Meanwhile, our sons grow up just like us, and the cycle never gets broken. I don’t want that. I want roads I’ve never seen before, and a house where the walls don’t always smell like grease and old butter, and I want my girl to be proud of me. I want her to say ‘that’s my man,’ and have it be pride speaking, not shame.”

  “You want more.” That’s what I said to him then, and if I could take those words back, I would, because he took them as permission to do what he’d been planning anyway. He took them as permission to drive out here to this empty road that sunset turned into a raceway, and all the while, the smell of ashes and lilies gathered deeper and deeper around him. I’d take them back if I could.

  The world doesn’t work that way.

  Tommy’s car is beautiful, a 1985 Toyota he’s rebuilt so many times that even the air inside the cabin feels custom. She trusts him, this blue-black beauty with her wheels set solid on the pavement. She believes in him. The love of a car for its owner may be the truest love there is, save maybe for the love of a dog for its person—and even there, there’s a divide, because the love of a car proves that the car has been loved. A dog loves because dogs exist to love man. A car loves because man exists to love the car.

  I touch her hood as I slide out of the passenger seat. My fingertips are only slightly warmer than her engine-heated metal, and I want to tell her that everything is going to be all right, and I can’t do it. Everything isn’t going to be all right. Everything will never be all right again.

  “Tommy, I got a bad feeling about this. Let’s just go. You can find the money some other way. I know people, people who maybe could help you. I—”

  “If you know people, why were you standing off the Interstate with your thumb up in the air, Rose?” Tommy’s face is challenging and cold. “You’re wearing my jacket, and you ate that grilled cheese like nobody’d fed you in a month of Sundays. If you can find the kind of money I need, what are you doing here?”

  There’s not an answer for that question in the whole world, because he’s standing in the daylight, and in the daylight, “I’m here because I’m dead” isn’t an answer, it’s a joke. I swallow, shift, look toward the horizon, and pray for a miracle, even though I don’t believe in miracles anymore, if I ever believed in them to begin with. The age of miracles has been over for a long time, and the final nail went into that coffin in February of 1959, when the world asked for a Valentine and got the death of Buddy Holly in its place.

  “Tommy—”

  “No, Rose. No. I don’t want to get old in this ten-cent town, and there’s no way I can marry my girl if that’s what I’m sentencing her to. She deserves better, and I’m going to get it for her.”

  “Or you’re going to die trying. Did you ever think of that, Tommy? How proud of you is she going to be when you’re six feet underground?”

  Tommy shakes his head and steps away, moving toward the rear of the car, where he can watch for the other racers. They’ll be coming soon. The road is singing so loudly of their arrival that even I can hear it, and I’m no routewitch. “You don’t understand.”

  He’s right; I don’t understand. I may understand poor, and I may understand frightened, but if someone had begged me to stay home the night I died, I would have listened. I know I would have listened. I would have locked the door and waited until Gary came to apologize, and if I’d missed the prom, so what? I would have so many other opportunities to dance. I would have listened.

  I hope.

  But he won’t listen to me, not here, not now, not with the race singing so close. The night has fallen, the stars are shining, and Tommy’s going to die tonight. And there’s not a damn thing I can do.

  Jackson, Maine, 2012.

  Stepping through the door of the diner is like sticking my entire body into a swarm of biting ants. The pain is brief and intense, and shocking enough that I finish my step, stumbling forward, hitting the ground on my knees. It doesn’t hurt as much as dying, or even as much as being shot in the chest by a crazy strigoi who doesn’t know he’s dead, but it hurts enough to make my vision go blurry. The broken linoleum covering the old diner floor cuts my knees through the denim of my jeans as I fall, and I have to catch myself on my hands to keep from scraping my face across the floor.

  With everything else that’s going on, I don’t notice that my heart has started beating until I’m pushing myself back to my feet. The scrapes on my hands and knees burn dully, a familiar childhood feeling that calls forth the memory of parental kisses and Mercurochrome. My hands leave trails of blood behind when I wipe them on the front of my shirt, and my breath plumes slightly in the chilly springtime air.

  “What the . . . ?”

  It’s breaking the rules that gets you in trouble, and whatever this is, it’s sure as shit breaking the rules. My heart hammers with almost-living fear as I turn and run for the door. I need to get out of here. Something about this place is breaking all the rules of the road, and that means I can’t stay any longer than I already have. I need to get out.

  The air turns solid and stops me almost a foot and a half from safety. The door is still open; I can see the outside, see the rain sheeting down, but I can’t get there. All I can do is bounce off the air. I back up, run for the invisible wall, and throw myself against it, to no avail; it’s too solid, and I can’t break through. Panting, I step back, and feel every drop of blood in my suddenly-living veins go cold as my gaze falls on the floor beneath the unseen barrier.

  “Shit,” I whisper, feeling very small, and very vulnerable. I’ve been careless. I let myself be led astray. I’m about to pay for it.

  The edges of the vast Seal of Solomon painted on the diner floor are clearly visible near the open door. It’s no wonder that I didn’t see it when I was coming in—I was walking away from the light, not into it—and the lines are done in red-and-black paint, detailed with what looks like silver Sharpie. Only the metallic parts would have been at all visible, and even if I’d seen them, I would have just dismissed them as broken bits of glass or metal. I sure as hell wasn’t expecting a trap. Not here, not now . . . and not for me. Traps are for the dangerous things, the strigoi and the goryo and the shadow people. They’re not for hitchers. We’re harmless.

  “Fine. So some genius ghost hunters caught me by mistake. Great. Okay.” I rake my fingers through my hair—dry still, since the rain is outside and I wasn’t solid until the trap made me that way—as I squint to follow the outline of the Seal in its path around the room. Whoever did this knew their demonology. It’s not the most intricate Seal I’ve ever seen, but intricacy doesn’t always equate to strength, and this one is made to be strong. There’s gold ink as well as silver in the pattern, marking the cardinal points, and there’s a second ring around the first, this one of pure salt. The salt ring is only open at the diner door, to allow the spirits foolish enoug
h to get caught to make their way inside. I rake my hair back again. This isn’t some teenage routewitch prank. This is serious hoodoo.

  After an hour of throwing myself against the Seal, I give up and sit down at the center of the circle, cross-legged, propping one elbow on my knee and resting my chin atop my knuckles. Whoever set this trap has to come along eventually to see what they might have caught. Part of me keeps screaming that it’s Bobby, it’s Bobby, he’s changed his ways and he’s coming for me, but I’m still calm enough to know that for the nonsense that it is. Bobby Cross could no more draw a Seal of Solomon than he could walk past Saint Peter and through the pearly gates of Heaven. This isn’t him. This is something else.

  The rain outside keeps falling as the hours trickle by, adding an element of psychological torture to a situation that really doesn’t need help scaring the crap out of me. I know what happens if I’m wearing a coat when the sun comes up: the coat loses its power and I fade back onto the ghostroads, dead as always. But what happens if the sun comes up while I’m trapped in a Seal of Solomon that’s somehow doing what only a coat’s supposed to do to me? Do I go free? Or do I get sucked into a bottle like some fairy-tale djinn, Barbara Eden with a bad attitude and better fashion sense?

  “I would kill for a routewitch about now,” I mutter, and go back to waiting.

  Enough time has passed by the time the door swings all the way open that I almost don’t notice; I’m staring off into space, thinking about how much I’d be willing to do for a cup of coffee. It’s the sound of footsteps on the linoleum that makes me realize I’m not alone anymore. I scramble to my feet, the scrapes on my hands and knees complaining at the rough treatment. I don’t care. I don’t want my captor to see me looking that defenseless.

  The woman who’s just stepped into the diner doesn’t even look at me as she pulls a canister of salt from her pocket and closes the break in the circle. This accomplished, she starts walking around the edges of the Seal, lighting candles I didn’t notice in the gloom. Each one beats back the darkness just a little; nowhere near enough. I turn, watching her, but I don’t say anything. I’m not going to be the first one to speak.

  I see her more and more clearly as the candles flicker to life. She’s in her late thirties, with long, straight hair that shade of dirty blonde that means she’s been blonde all her life, too proud to start dyeing when it started to darken. Her glasses glitter in the candlelight, making it impossible to tell the color of her eyes. She’s pretty, in the dark, in the candlelight, but it’s hard to focus on anything but the book she’s holding under one arm, the thick, leather-bound book with the Seal stamped on its cover.

  That sort of book never means anything good to twilighters like me, especially not in the hands of someone like her, someone who carries the twilight with her like a sour perfume. She was born a daylight girl, but she’s burrowed her way down, I can taste it. I just don’t know why. I just know that I’ve never seen her before in my life, or in my death. I’ve been trapped by a stranger, ghost rat in a ghost cage. That makes it all the worse when the last candle is lit and she closes the diner door, finally turning to study me. She runs her eyes over every inch of my body, measuring what she’s caught. Finally, horribly, she smiles.

  “Hello, Rose,” she says.

  Shit.

  Jackson, Maine, 1992.

  I could never have prevented this accident from happening. It was too late before Tommy met me. Maybe it was too late before I got within a hundred miles of this town. I don’t know. All I know is that I tried as hard as I could, and that it wasn’t enough.

  I’m glad I don’t need sleep anymore. After this, I’d be awake for a week at least.

  The racers came just like Tommy swore they would, rolling over the horizon in cars that were ten times more expensive and half as alive as Tommy’s. Some of them were good men, and some of them were bad men, but they were all of them hard men, because they’d chosen a hard aspect of the highway to receive their worship. A few of them tried to tell Tommy not to race, and those are the ones I’ll remember to the Atlantic Highway the next time that I venture near her borders. Some just laughed. The boy wanted to put down his pink slip and his pride on a race he couldn’t possibly win? Well, he’d learn a lesson from the losing. Only there are no more lessons for Tommy on this road, or on any other.

  The wheels of his car are still spinning as I run across the blacktop toward him, my breath harsh in my ears, my feet striking hard against the pavement. He’s still alive, and so I run to him. Once he dies, slips onto the ghostroads and leaves the daylight forever, the coat he gave me will lose its power to hold me to the laws of the living. That’s in the rules. Only live people have substance to share, and you can’t steal life from the dead.

  The men who raced against Tommy have realized that something is very wrong; that this isn’t the sort of accident someone laughs at and walks away from. Their cars have stopped, and the men are getting out, looking back toward where Tommy’s car lies shattered on the road. None of them are moving to help him—to help us, since every one of them thinks I’m his townie girlfriend, the one he’s doing this stupid, suicidal thing for. They just let me run, my throat raw with screaming, tears running down my cheeks as I reach for another soul I failed to save.

  They were going too fast and the road seemed smooth, but there are cracks in the cleanest pavement, slick spots, potholes, rocks. I may never know which one hit the wheels of the car ahead of Tommy, and it doesn’t really matter; the driver spun out, adjusted, caught himself and drove on. In the process, he clipped Tommy, and something about that collision was enough—just enough—to send the smaller, lighter Toyota into a spin she never pulled out of. Tommy’s car rolled three times before she stopped, twisted metal and smoking engine, a broken body on the road.

  Her death is faster than his: she’s already gone when I get there. All that’s left is cooling death, and a young man cut almost in half by his own steering column. There’s blood everywhere. I don’t let that stop me. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since the night I died, it’s that blood washes off, but no one—no one—deserves to die alone.

  “Tommy? Tommy, can you hear me?” I beat my fists against the glass of the passenger window, trying to catch his attention. I could take off the coat, slide through this door like it was smoke, but then I’d be on the ghostroads again, and I wouldn’t be able to hold his hand until the dying finished. He’s a fool, yes, and he still deserves to have someone holding his hand while the lights go out. “Tommy!”

  Three of the racers come running up, big men, muscling their way past me to wrench the door open. Then they stop, hands dangling uselessly, as they try to figure out what else they can do for him. Maybe someone’s called an ambulance, and maybe nobody will; this sort of race is illegal, after all, and they have to be measuring their own lives yet to come against the death of one boy barely out of his teens and too stupid to know when to find another way. They can’t take him out of the car, that much is clear; the way it’s wrapped around him is like a lover’s embrace, and there’s no way of breaking it without breaking him even further.

  If Tommy can’t come to us, I’ll go to him. It’s the only thing left that I can do. I squeeze my way between the racers (and if any of them notice the sudden give to my flesh, the way I seem to be losing substance by the second, they don’t say anything; the ones who’d notice are the ones who know the twilight well enough to know me) and kneel next to the driver’s-side door, gravel biting into my knees. My hands are bloody even before I realize that his blood is on the seat, and it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, blood can’t hurt me.

  “Tommy? Tommy, can you hear me?” My fingers almost pass through his cheek the first time I reach out to him. I pull back, concentrate, and try again. This time I can feel my fingers graze his skin, and I don’t know if that’s because I’m closer to living, or because he’s closer to dead. “Come on, Tommy, stay with me. Open your eyes, and stay with me.”

  I
t’s too late now. It’s all over except for the dying. But I’m still here, and he’s still here, and as long as that’s the case, I’m going to be here for him. I owe him that much. I owe all of them that much.

  Tommy swallows with obvious difficulty, and opens his eyes. They aren’t quite focusing anymore. He won’t really see the other racers, or the road, or the blood that’s dripping over everything, like the red flag signaling that it’s time to leave the starting line. But he’ll still see me. We’re in the same place right now, he and I. “R-Rose?”

  “I’m here. I’m right here, Tommy.”

  “I think I messed up, Rose.”

  It’s a beautiful night, big white moon and too many stars and the desert around us like an ocean of gold. It’s a beautiful night, and Tommy—a boy whose last name I never learned, a boy who did this for a girl I’ve never met, and maybe never will—is bleeding to death with my hand against his cheek. “Yeah,” I say, not looking away from him. “I think you’re right.”

  Jackson, Maine, 2012.

  “You don’t know how long it’s taken me to track you down.” She pulls a rusted chair with a ripped green vinyl cover from one of the nearby tables, moving it to the edge of the salt circle and sitting primly. Resting the book on her knees, she smiles at me. “I mean, at first I wasn’t even sure you were real. It took me years just to find someone who could really prove to me that you existed. I appreciated that day. It told me that I wasn’t crazy. I spent three years chasing truckers and visiting psychics and going into every diner I saw to ask if anyone in there knew who you were or had seen you or knew where I might find you.” She leans forward and smiles at me, smiles like a rattlesnake getting ready to strike. “You have a lot of friends, Rose. A lot of people looked me in the eye and lied for you. I was impressed by that.”