The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

by Seanan McGuire

  Must be nice to be able to focus like that. I can’t seem to focus on anything. There’s too much, and it’s all unfamiliar, and I want nothing to do with any of it. Every sound could be the floor getting ready to collapse or the ceiling getting ready to cave in and it feels like my heart is going to burst from the strain of worrying about it all. How does anyone survive being alive?

  The scanners beep and buzz and let us pass, detecting no weapons. The salt and paint are all in the checked luggage, concealed in a tea set Laura says has passed muster before. The brushes and candles look like the usual weird teenage affectations, nestled as they are amongst my brand-new underpants and a teddy bear snagged from Laura’s bed for verisimilitude. We are believable travelers. No one looks at us twice.

  Laura leads me to our gate, looks at my face, and starts laughing.

  “Yeah,” she says. “They’re pretty big up close.”

  The plane dominates the window, so large and imposing that I can’t believe I’m supposed to climb into it, to nestle myself in its belly and let it carry me into the clouds. This is terrifying. This is inconceivable.

  “I can’t do this,” I whisper.

  “You will,” says Laura.

  I do. Colorado drops away below us like a penny falling into a wishing well, and I’m grateful for my window seat, and I wish I didn’t have it, because everything is dwindling so fast, and the roads are barely charcoal sketches on a land so big it hurts, and we’re going, we’re going, we’re gone. We’re gone.

  Book Three

  Rituals

  Once and twice and thrice around,

  Put your heart into the ground.

  Four and five and six tears shed,

  Give your love unto the dead.

  Nine and on to ten and then

  Never make it home again,

  One’s for the gargoyle, one’s for the grave,

  And the last is for the one you’ll never save.

  —common clapping rhyme among the ever-lasters of the twilight

  According to many of his contemporaries, Hollywood had never seen anything like Robert “Diamond Bobby” Cross. An Ohio boy from humble beginnings, he came to California with nothing but a suitcase and a dream of making it big on the silver screen. The year was 1938. Hollywood was booming, the town where dreams were made and realized and sent around the world. It was a place for the young, a place for the hungry, and Bobby Cross was both.

  “He had this way of looking at you, like he was working out exactly what it would take to make you fall in love with him,” says Angie Mayhew. An accomplished actress, Ms. Mayhew had been limited to bit parts and chorus roles before Bobby made the scene. “The leading men we had back then, they thought I was too young to take seriously and too plain for audiences to fall for. But Bobby was beautiful enough for both of us. He asked for me. He saw me across a room, and he asked for me, and I guess he made my career.”

  It is a story heard over and over again during the writing of this book: Bobby Cross plucking some struggling actress or costume designer or makeup artist from the back of the room and making them a star with nothing beyond a shrug and a casual “I think they’d do.” His presence seemed to elevate the people he worked with, making them want to work harder to please him, making him work harder to remain at the front of the pack. There were those who said he was building himself an army, that Diamond Bobby wasn’t going to be happy until he’d taken over Hollywood, or possibly the world.

  Unfortunately for all of us, Bobby Cross was never going to have the opportunity to be happy. Bobby Cross was going to die in the desert, just twelve years after he arrived in Hollywood, leaving all the things he should have done and all the stories he should have told unfinished. Indeed, so many years after that fateful night, we, his fans, have only one question left to ask him:

  What happened?

  —Diamond Bobby: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon,

  Hannah Wells, Ghost Ship Press.

  Chapter 9

  Beware the Ocean Lady

  LAURA STEALS GLANCES AT ME as she drives, keeping most of her attention on the unfamiliar road. “You okay over there?”

  I nod, still silent, trying to digest everything that’s happened since this day began. Natural midnight presses in around us, thick as velvet, darkness spangled with glittering stars. I don’t want to look at the shoulder of the road if I can help it. This is a night for hitchers and homecomers, for ghosts looking for a little warmth, and I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to be reminded that existence in the twilight is going on like it always has while I’m still trapped out here.

  Laura is waiting for an answer. Finally, I lick my lips and say, “That was . . . something.”

  “Air travel is safer than driving. Faster, too.”

  Yes, I want to say; if anyone knows the dangers of driving, it’s me, who died of them. The plane went up, the plane came down, and not a single person carried in its belly died, or crashed themselves into anyone else, or anything of the sort. We spent hours crammed into seats that weren’t big enough, surrounded by the shifting, sniffling bodies of strangers, and at the end of it, we were ejected on the other side of the country, left to fend for ourselves as the airplane readied itself for another cargo, another crew. Everything about it smacked of practice, of safety, of understanding the risks inherent in the system. Everything.

  And I didn’t understand a bit of it. When the wheels lifted off the ground, I shoved the knuckles of my left hand so far into my mouth that I felt like I was choking, all in the vain hope I could keep myself from screaming. The air was stale, and the only thing that prevented me from ripping my own skin off was Laura, sitting in the aisle seat with the middle empty between us, providing me with a buffer from the rest of the world.

  I died a long time ago. I’ve always known the world was still moving, changing, doing what worlds have always done, and I’ve always said I was fine with it. Here, now, with the memory of the airplane still clinging to my skin like the surface of a soap bubble, I’m not fine with anything. My world is tarmac and tires, diners and drive-ins. My world isn’t in the sky. I don’t know what to do with a world that is.

  “A lot of people are afraid of flying, Rose. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  People should be afraid of flying, I want to scream. People should be scared of giving up control and being lifted into the air by the hand of some giant child playing with their toys before bedtime. The road may be dangerous—is dangerous, is absolutely dangerous—but it’s a good danger, a familiar danger, a danger that comes with choices. When I’m in the twilight and on the road, I can smell accidents coming, tease out their texture and their inevitability from the way they slot themselves together. They can’t always be avoided, but I know how to try.

  Once you’re on a plane, that’s it. You’re stuck, and if something goes wrong, you’re finished. The sky is probably swarming with ghosts, circling the common flight routes, their hands pressed to the wings, working to keep those big metal boxes in the air.

  “I didn’t like it,” I say softly.

  “That’s okay. If everything goes well, you’ll never need to do it again.” Laura sounds almost jovial. Me being upset is upsetting her. That’s interesting. Then again, I guess it’s hard to pretend to be someone’s aunt for a thousand strangers and not start to care about them at least a little.

  Maybe she could learn how not to hate me after all.

  As if she can hear my thoughts, Laura adds more harshly, “Now I need you to snap out of whatever this bullshit is, and tell me where we’re going. My GPS can only get us so far.”

  We’re almost to Calais; the last sign we passed said that we had less than ten miles to go. I straighten. “Calais used to be the anchor point for the Atlantic Highway. These days, it’s the juncture point for Highway 1 and Route 9. They’re both good roads, although neither of them has the
power the Ocean Lady did.” They never will, either. The Ocean Lady was allowed to amass more power than the people in charge wanted her to have, because there was a long time where she was the only option. If you needed to go somewhere, you took the Atlantic Highway. They broke her back and broke her power, and her descendants will always be less than she was, because they’re never going to be allowed to be more.

  Some things are too powerful to be controlled. Some people understand that, and would rather kill them in their cradles than allow them to rise and become a threat.

  “Nice civic history lesson, but that doesn’t tell me where we’re going.”

  “It does, though. Take Highway 1 when you see the junction, heading south. This is a pretty well-traveled stretch, but there’s going to be a side road at some point, a turn people don’t use anymore, something they’ve allowed to fall into disrepair. Something that’s been forgotten.” A vestige of the old Atlantic Highway, still clinging to the surface of the world.

  Odds are good that whatever road we find at midnight wouldn’t be visible at noon, because there are ways to drive off the map without entering the twilight, ways to blend the levels of reality. I don’t know how I know them, I just do, and always have. Maybe that’s another point of proof for the assertion that I should have been a routewitch. I don’t know.

  “Right: find the creepiest abandoned road I can, and turn off there. Then what?”

  “Shouldn’t you have asked me these questions before we left Colorado?”

  “No, because a creepy movie star who was supposed to have died before the invention of the three-point seatbelt was—and hopefully still is—trying to find my house, and I wanted out. This way, he’s on the other side of the country, and I can make you explain yourself without constantly worrying that he’s going to pop out of the closet.”

  “He doesn’t lurk in closets.”

  Laura shrugs. “My point stands. What do we do when we find the creepy road?”

  I look out the window. The night is blackness and the shadows cast by our headlights, and it’s beautiful. It looks like the twilight. “There will be a rest stop. If we’re lucky, we’ll find an abandoned diner. I wouldn’t count on that, but there’s a chance the Ocean Lady can see me coming, and if she can, she’ll probably want to help.” She likes me, doesn’t she? She’s always risen up to meet me when I walked out to meet her. From a road, that means affection, right?

  “Okay,” says Laura dubiously. “I would have been happier with a motel, but I can work with this.”

  “Remember the way you caught me?”

  Laura is silent, uncomfortable when confronted with the memory of her own past sins. I suppose I should feel smug about that. All I really manage to feel is tired, and hungry, and achy in ways I had forgotten could exist. There’s a pain in the small of my back that is at once novel and annoying, like an itch impossible to scratch.

  Laura saw me from a distance on the night I went riding with Tommy, the night Tommy died. She knew enough about what I looked like to find out what I was called, and from there, to confirm that I was the phantom prom date. She spent twenty years chasing down stories and legends that claimed to tell the truth about me, and once she had everything she needed, she went to an old, abandoned diner, and used the kind of magic that’s accessible to anyone with the time and patience to make it work to glamour that crumbling ruin into something that could fool even the road. Into something that could fool even me.

  In her own way, Laura Moorhead raised the dead that night, even if it was only for a little while. I need her to do it again. I need her to do it for me, instead of against me.

  “If you can make a dead rest stop seem alive again, the ripples will flow through the body of the Ocean Lady. There’s no way the routewitches won’t notice. They’ll send someone to find out what’s happening. They view any attack or action against the Ocean Lady as the same aimed at them. They have to investigate.”

  “I don’t know these people,” protests Laura. “I don’t want to attack them.”

  “They consider me an ally, and you’ve been happy to attack me.”

  Her expression turns mulish and uncomfortable. “That was different.”

  It wasn’t. I don’t want to fight with her. Not when I need her. I understand a lot about the way ritual magic works—I’ve been caught flat-footed by the stuff often enough that I’ve figured out the basics—but I’ve never practiced it. The dead do not get along well with the magic of the living. I could paint all the sigils in the world and never accomplish a thing. Which means there’s never been any point in practicing.

  I need Laura’s hand. I need Laura’s eye. I need Laura, or this isn’t going to work.

  “We’re going to raise the dead, and hopefully that’s going to attract the living, and then they can tell me how to go back to being a ghost.” I offer her a wan smile across the dimly lit cabin of the rental car. “No biggie.”

  “Oh my God,” mutters Laura, and drives on.

  * * *

  We almost miss the turn-off. It’s small and narrow and worst of all, unlabeled; no exit sign, no warning. I spot it at the last second, shout, “There!” and hold on for dear life as Laura swears and hauls on the wheel, peeling us off the highway and diving into the dark. I can see what made Tommy fall in love with her, once upon a lifetime ago. She’s been a safe driver for most of the time we’ve been together, but now . . .

  Now, she lets go, and when she lets go she drives like she’s afraid someone is going to snatch the wheel away from her at any second, aware of the road and not caring who might see her charging through the night, fearlessly accelerating.

  The paving changes once we’re off the main drag. Not that Highway 1 is the smoothest or best-maintained road in America, but at least it’s more pavement than pothole. This side road is broken and neglected, and we shake and jitter our way down the first fifty yards before it smooths out without any warning at all.

  Then we come around the curve and we see it, impossible, perfect, a gift from the Ocean Lady offered to those who would come to her with open hands and aching hearts. I punch the air, hissing, “Yes,” between my teeth. For a moment—faint and flickering, but there—I can feel the road humming around me, the body of a vast, predatory beast that stretches from shore to shining shore.

  The moment passes. The strange isolation that’s had me wrapped in a cotton cloud since my heart remembered how to beat returns. I don’t scream. I feel like I should be praised for that. Laura, though, is too busy staring at the ruined diner to notice that I’ve just won a small victory for my dignity.

  “Holy hell,” she says. “We found one.”

  “The Ocean Lady remembers, and she helps as much as she can.” She’s a goddess and a battery, powering the routewitches who come to perch on her back like tickbirds on a rhino. She can’t do much, day to day. What she can do, though . . .

  Sometimes what she can do means the world.

  “Come on,” I say, pointing to the strip of asphalt that was once the diner parking lot, before the grasses shoved through the cracks and started shattering it into a maze of holes and crevices. “Park, and tell me what to do.”

  “If I tell you to go to hell, will you?” But she’s driving, hands on the wheel, steering around the worst of the damage.

  I shake my head. “I’d really rather not. I’ve never been to heaven or hell, and from what I understand, those are both one-way trips. My goal is getting myself back onto the ghostroads, not leaving them forever. Remember, I can’t take you to meet Tommy when you die if I’m wrapped in the arms of my eternal reward, no matter what you think it is.”

  “Right,” mutters Laura. She parks on a patch of pavement that looks slightly less likely to dissolve at any moment than the rest, stopping the car and climbing out without another word. I follow her around to the back, where she opens the trunk and pulls out her bag. I do the sa
me, slinging the backpack I’ve borrowed from her over one shoulder.

  She hesitates, looking at me seriously. “You’re sure you want to do this right now?” she asks. “It’s late. We’re both tired. We might be better off coming back tomorrow and trying then.”

  “I can’t.” I hate the petulant whine in the back of my voice. I can’t prevent it. “I can’t . . . this is awful. Do you understand that? This is awful. I don’t understand my own body, and I don’t want to, and I’m constantly afraid something will happen that . . . that changes me in some way the road doesn’t want, some way that means that when I do get back to the ghostroads, I go back as something other than what I’m supposed to be. I know the rules of being a hitcher. I know my place, and I like it there. I help people. I have people I care about, who care about me, and I don’t want to lose that. I can’t stay here any longer than absolutely necessary. I can’t.”

  “Being alive isn’t that bad,” says Laura, cajoling. She’s really worried about doing this ritual. Maybe I’ve built up the power of the Atlantic Highway too much: maybe she doesn’t want to risk offending a goddess.

  Maybe I don’t care.

  “You’re young, you’re healthy,” she continues. “Wouldn’t it be nice to stay alive for a few years, look a little less like a runaway? I know it’s harder for teens to get away with roving unsupervised than it was when I was a kid. You could finally grow up.”

  How many times have I cursed my apparent age? How many times have I wished I could do something to change the body I died with—make it stronger, healthier, or at least grow out the damage I did to my hair trying to look pretty for my prom? There’s a line of temptation in Laura’s words.

  But humans don’t just age. Humans get sick. Humans die. And every minute I spend in the daylight is a minute that I’m not with Gary and Emma, that I’m vulnerable to the machinations of Bobby Cross. It doesn’t matter what I thought I wanted when I was never going to get it. This is the real world. This is my real life, both literally and figuratively. I shake my head.