Sparrow Hill Road

by Seanan McGuire

  My first impression of Chris turns out to be the right one. He’s the kind of man who picks up a hitchhiker not because he wants something, but because he doesn’t want to see a girl walking alone along the highways of America. He makes polite conversation and halfway funny jokes, the kind that get funnier the longer you think about them. I realize after we’ve been driving for about half an hour that I like him even though I didn’t meet him while I was among the living. That’s rare, these days, when hitchhikers are viewed as either predators or victims looking for a wolf to take them down.

  “So what brings you this way?” asks Chris—a question with no good answer, since “I’m trying to reach a diner that’s only accessible to the dead, so I can grill a beán sidhe friend of mine named Emma on what the hell is wrong with me” isn’t likely to go over well.

  “I was visiting friends,” I say, as vaguely as I can. The idea of calling the Queen of the North American Routewitches a friend is ludicrous, but it’s easier than telling the truth. “I’m just heading home.”

  “No car?”

  “I don’t have my license yet.” That’s a lie, although I’m sure my license technically expired when I did. Oh, I miss driving; miss the feeling of my own wheels burning down those miles, turning those roads into history and those horizons into possibilities . . . I shake myself out of it, saying, “I’ll be able to get one this fall.”

  “Hitchhiking isn’t exactly safe.”

  That’s a line I’ve heard before. I flash him a smile that’s more sincere than it might be, and ask, “What is, anymore?”

  He laughs. He’s still laughing when we go around a bend in the highway and I forget all humor; forget the sweet chill of the air conditioning, forget the itching in my back. All I can remember—all I can think about or know—is the taste of lilies and ashes, overwhelming the world of the living in a veil of mourning yet-to-be. It’s too thick to be coming on this fast, like a hurricane blowing out of nowhere and turning a blue sky black with bruises. But here it is, heavy and hard and thick enough that, for a moment, I can’t breathe.

  There’s only one thing in my world that can bring on the taste of inevitable tragedy like this, and it’s the thing I’m not prepared to deal with. Not now, not here, not with the ink still drying underneath my skin and a man I like enough to save sitting in the driver’s seat.

  “What’s wrong?” asks Chris, seeing the sudden tension in my face, the sudden whiteness of my complexion.

  “N-nothing,” I say, taking shallow breaths to filter out the cloying lily taste of the air. “Nothing at all.”

  The sky on the ghostroads is black with the shadow of an onrushing storm, and there’s nothing I can do to get out of its path.

  Bobby Cross is coming.

  The Ghostroads, 1955.

  I’ve been on the ghostroads for three years. I know how to take substance from a borrowed coat, how to beg a ride from a stranger, how to fall from the daylight into the twilight. I can’t control my movement from the twilight to the daylight—it happens or it doesn’t, according to some pattern of forces I don’t understand yet—but the older hitchers promise me I’ll learn, if I can keep to the roads long enough.

  That’s the big concern, the one shared by every hitcher I meet: the fear that I won’t last long enough to learn the things I need to know. I’m dead. I should be nineteen years old, I should be burning rubber out of Buckley, heading for a future too big and wide to even imagine. But I’m not. I’m sweet sixteen and cold in the ground, and the last thing I should be worried about is dying. And still . . . I’m still afraid.

  The man who ran me off the road is named Bobby Cross. He’s not dead, but he runs the ghostroads like we do. They say he can cross between levels with a thought, burn rubber from the midnight to the daylight without making any of the usual stops or payments. They say he doesn’t follow the rules of the living or the dead—and they say he eats ghosts, rips us out of the world and turns us into nothing but the scent of incense on the wind. That’s why he ran me off the road to begin with. He was hungry, and he looked into my living heart and saw a meal that just needed preparation.

  He has my scent, knows the shape of my soul and the nature of my death. I’m the ghost that got away, and he’ll take me if he can. That’s what the older hitchers tell me, and I believe them. I don’t know who listens to the prayers of the dead—Hades or Persephone or some other screwed-up ghost god I didn’t pay attention to in English class—but I pray a lot these days. O Lord who art probably not in Heaven, deliver me from men who’ve killed me once and would kill me again, if I gave them the chance. O Lady, hallowed be thy name, get me the hell out of here.

  Please. Deliver me from evil and deliver me from darkness, and leave me on the ghostroads for a thousand years if that’s what it takes to pay for my sins, but please. Deliver me from the arms of Bobby Cross.

  Georgia, 2013.

  The second shock of Bobby’s approach comes hard on the heels of the first one, the smell of wormwood and gasoline laying itself across the lilies and ashes until it almost washes them away. My teeth snap shut, my back arching in a shocked, involuntary motion that makes my tattoo burn like fire. Bobby isn’t just coming, he’s here, he’s here, he’s within a mile of us, and the power of his presence is enough to blur the lines of the accident ahead—I can’t see the shape of it, can’t see whether there’s a way for me to avoid it. He’s too big and too loud, and too damn strong. Right now, I can’t tell the victims from the bystanders, and the fact of my failure burns.

  Chris practically radiates concern as he tries to watch me and the road at the same time, only a lifetime of good driving habits keeping him from veering onto the shoulder. Poor bastard. He tries to do a favor for a pretty girl on the highway, and what does he get? Some chick having what looks like a seizure in his passenger seat.

  He can’t know that I’m fighting my own urge to flee, to drop down to the deepest levels of the twilight and let him handle what’s ahead of us alone. The coat I’m wearing gives me life until I choose to give that life away, and for his sake—because he was kind to me, because I have to stand and fight once in a while, or I’ll forget how to do anything but run—I won’t let go. Not until I know what Bobby’s here for.

  Not until I know whether Chris can be saved.

  “Rose?” It isn’t the first time Chris has said my name, but it’s the first time I’ve heard it, and hearing is enough to snap me back into my own head. The lure of the ghostroads fades, becoming less urgent. “Rose, are you okay? Do we need to stop?”

  We need to run, run so far and fast that Bobby Cross will never find us. But I can’t say that. Running might be what brings the accident on. So I swallow the words, force myself to settle in my seat, and answer, “No. I mean no, I’m not okay, and no, I don’t need you to stop. Not yet. Maybe next time there’s a rest area? I think I need some water.” Some water, an exorcism kit, and a priest or two would be more like it. Too bad they don’t sell those at the Gas-N-Go.

  “Deal,” says Chris—and he sounds like he means it, like he’ll go inside with me instead of promising to wait in the car and then blazing out of the parking lot the second my back is turned. He’s a nice guy. That just makes all this worse, and I find myself hoping, hoping hard, that Bobby is ahead because he, like any natural disaster, sometimes strikes without warning, and not because he’s on my trail again.

  The first shock is past; I’m beginning to feel my way into the accident ahead. It’s a big one; eight cars, at the very least, and death enough to keep the beán sidhe busy and the doom-crows satiated for years. That must be why Bobby’s here. An accident this large is like an all-you-can-eat buffet for him, and the menu will feature all the finest dishes. Not everyone who dies on the road leaves a ghost behind, but enough do . . . and enough of those ghosts are shaped by the road to make them his chosen fuel.

  I take a breath and hold it until my lungs ache before letting it slowly out again. The whole time, I’m digging deeper into t
he accident ahead, trying to feel where it ends and we begin. We’re five miles out, which is good. It’s between us and the next exit, which isn’t. If Chris were less of a nice guy, this is where I’d say something lewd, suggest he pull off and take me into the trees to pay for my passage—but I know his type well enough to know that sort of thing won’t work. If I try it, he might leave me by the side of the road, which solves the question of how we’re getting me away from Bobby, but leaves him undefended.

  Chris won’t stand a chance if he drives alone into what’s ahead. He’s a part of it, my nice guy; I can smell it now. The car is filled with the scent of lilies, too strong to be just a warning. They’re a premonition. Maybe I can stop Chris from dying, and maybe I can’t, but if I leave him here, nothing will protect him from Bobby. There won’t be any rest stop; the accident is too close, and the taste of ashes is too strong.

  “Could we maybe slow down a little?” I ask, doing my best to look sick but-not-that-sick, unsettled by the heat and the speed and the road, but not quite into the territory of serious illness. It’s a difficult masquerade, and not one I have much familiarity with.

  Maybe it helps that it’s not entirely a lie; I really am feeling sick to my stomach, and the pain in my back is bad enough that it feels like my tattoo is trying to burrow all the way down to my spine. Chris nods, easing back on the gas. “Sure, Rose,” he says. “Just let me know when you’re feeling better, okay? Are you sure that we don’t need to stop?”

  “Not yet,” I say, and smile wanly.

  It’s the smile that does it. Chris nods again, fully accepting what I’m telling him. I wish I didn’t have to lie to him like this. While he’s among the living, it’s not like I have a choice.

  He’s still looking at me when we come around the bend, moving slower than we were, but not slow enough, and the taste of ashes and lilies takes everything away even before Chris starts swearing, hauling hard on the steering wheel, tires finding no traction on asphalt slick with oil and rough with bits of broken glass and broken futures. He’s shouting, and the air stinks like burning rubber, and someone’s screaming, and I think it’s me—

  And he’s lost control of the car. He doesn’t know it yet, but the car does. She’s trying to help, tires straining for purchase, engine screaming with the effort of survival. She’s too young, the bond between them too fragile, and in the end, she’s just a machine, barely aware enough to know that she’s about to—

  And the smell of wormwood is heavy over everything, the stink of it, like a corpse unembalmed and left to rot by the side of the road, but that’s what he is, isn’t it? Just a corpse that won’t lie still, a corpse that makes more corpses, zombie dragster, bastard son of the silver screen. Bobby Cross is here, Bobby Cross is coming—

  And I’m wearing a coat, and I realize too late what that means, what the onrushing wall of twisted steel that used to be cars means if we hit it while I have this coat on—

  —and we slam, hard, into the segmented body of the great black beast called “accident,” and everything is blackness, and the smell of burning.

  The Ghostroads, 1965.

  I’ve been on the ghostroads for thirteen years. Long enough to see my classmates marry, start families of their own, put the yearbooks on the shelf and forget the girl who starred on her very own page in her Junior Year, the one titled “In Memoriam.” Long enough to see my boyfriend graduate. He saw me once, when I was young and careless, and it broke something deep inside him, in the space where mourning lives.

  Long enough to learn to slip between the twilight and the daylight like a bride slips between the sheets on her wedding night; long enough to learn what it means when I touch a trucker’s hand and taste ashes, when I flag down a ride and smell lilies on the wind. Hitchers aren’t death omens, but we’re psychopomps, if we want to be. “It can make you crazy,” says one of the older hitchers, a lanky man who goes by “Texas Bill,” whose eyes contain a million miles of desert road. “All those lives, all those deaths—leave them, Rose. Find another ride, and keep your sanity.”

  Emma at the Last Dance (which is the Last Chance sometimes, they tell me, and those are the times where you need to be wary and beware) says something different. “By the time they hear me singing, it’s too late,” she says, and she sounds sadder than any living soul should sound—but she’s not really a living soul, is she? The rules are different for the beán sidhe, and I don’t know quite how they apply to her. She can see me like she belongs in the twilight. She can loan her coat like she belongs in the daylight. She is what she is. “You get an early warning. You get a chance. That’s just this side of a miracle, Rose. You should treat it like one.”

  I listen to them both, but I’ve made up my mind, and not because of anything either of them said. No; what made up my mind was a white-haired old trucker who bought me a grilled cheese sandwich and showed me pictures of his sister, of her little house in Florida, the place he was going when he retired. Just four more cross-country runs, he said, and his skin smelled like lilies and ashes, and I knew, even if he didn’t, that he was never going to see his sister’s little house on the beach. And I didn’t help him. I didn’t even try. I told him I didn’t feel good, ran for the bathroom, and fell back down to the ghostroads, where the dead are the dead, and the living don’t look at us that way.

  His truck crashed on I-5, blind curve, bad driving conditions, a perfect storm of bad luck and bad decisions. Word in the truck stops is that his body wasn’t even recognizable when they pulled it from the cab. That doesn’t bother me as much as it would have once—being dead for eight years has given me a very different outlook on death—but what came after is another story. One of the trainspotters was near the place where the crash happened, riding the rails from San Diego to Vancouver, and he came looking for me as soon as he figured out what rail line I was closest to. That’s the trouble with trainspotters. They can see the future (sometimes, when they’re looking in the right direction), but they’re limited in more ways even than the hitchers.

  “He came in the stink of wormwood and soured gasoline,” said the trainspotter, grabbing my hands. I wasn’t wearing a coat. He caught them anyway. Damn wizards. “He came like the wind out of the west, like a crow to the battlefield. He came on black wings of burning rubber and shadow, and he drove his victim as a wolf drives a fawn. He has claimed another soul, Rose Marshall, and you might have stopped him, had you cared enough to rouse yourself to action. Shame, shame on you, shame and a thousand nights of wandering lonely. Shame, and all the sorrows of the road.”

  “You’re a little behind the curve on cursing me,” I snapped, and I yanked my hands out of his. The trainspotter looked at me sadly, a thousand miles of broken hearts etched into the lines on his face. I shook my head. “I already have all the things you’re wishing on me, and Bobby Cross is not my fault.”

  “No. He’s not. That blame belongs to others. But he is your responsibility.” And then he turned and walked away. His message had been delivered. I was no longer his concern.

  But Bobby Cross was mine—my concern, my responsibility. So let Emma and Texas Bill make their recommendations—it doesn’t matter. That man died because I wouldn’t help him, and while I might not have saved his life, having me there could have saved him from something worse than death. Maybe Texas Bill is right; maybe trying to change the fates of the living will make me crazy. Right now, I don’t care. Bobby Cross is not my fault. If anything, I’m his. That doesn’t mean I can sit back and let him rule these roads.

  Sometimes, all a dead girl can do is stand up and take responsibility for the things that gather in the shadows.

  Georgia, 2013.

  One nice thing about being dead: I bounce back a hell of a lot faster than the living do. I open my eyes to find myself sprawled on the asphalt, broken doll cast to the side of the road, with an aching head and skinned patches on my hands and knees. My tattoo is burning like a brand, the pain somehow focusing, rather than distracting me. I manag
e to lift my head, despite the ringing in my ears, and scan for Chris.

  He wasn’t as lucky as I was. He’s also sprawled on the pavement . . . but he isn’t moving. Maybe I’m not that lucky, either; maybe I’m only still moving because being dead makes me harder to kill. My legs won’t answer my command to move, and the ringing in my ears is getting worse. It’s with relief that I release my hold on flesh and bone, feel my borrowed coat drop through what had been the substance of my body only a moment before, and climb, finally, to my feet.

  Things are different here on the edge of the twilight. Black clouds streak the sky like spilled ink, and the broken cars glitter with firefly brilliance in the process of slowly—so slowly!—fading into darkness. People stand near the broken bodies of their cars. Not that many, not one for every driver who must have died in the collision but . . . enough. Only one stands out to my eyes; the one to whom I owe assistance. Chris is standing by his own fallen body, a look of deep confusion on his face, like he can’t quite understand. I’ve seen that look on too many faces, on too many roads. I should give him time to come to terms with what’s happened. At the very least, I should give him time to recover from his shock. But the air tastes of wormwood, and there are many things here, on this borderland highway, but what there isn’t is time.

  My skirt rustles against my ankles as I start toward him, the green silk as clean and crisp as it was on the night I wore it for the first—and last—time. The prom gown is no surprise, not here, not with Bobby close enough to taint the shape of the world. The length of my hair is no surprise either, lemon-bleached curls loose against the sides of my neck. The wind that blows around us doesn’t touch me. Nothing touches me but the consequences of my own motion. So it goes, when the dead come too close to the day.