The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

by Seanan McGuire

  To be clear, I’m still not sorry he did it. I do sort of wish we had a chance to talk about it first. There are some things that shouldn’t be a surprise, like a puppy, or a ghost boyfriend.

  “He’s new, isn’t he?” asks Laura. We both turn to look at her. She shrugs. “I’ve been collecting stories about Rose for decades. There’s never been a boyfriend before.”

  “There was, once,” I say. “Back at the beginning.” Then I wait.

  It doesn’t take long. Laura’s eyes widen. “That’s—that’s the boy you didn’t go to prom with? The one who drove you home for the first time?”

  She’s come closer to the true story of what happened that night on Sparrow Hill Road than anyone else who wasn’t there. She’s still missing pieces, but the fact that she could have dug up my bones, soaked them in salt, and drowned them in the sea is unnerving. There’s more than one way to get rid of a ghost. Lucky for me, Laura always wanted her revenge to be as hands-on as possible.

  “That’s him,” I say. “He lived a long, happy life, and when he died, he came here to be my car. He only has thumbs right now because we’re on the Ocean Lady, and she doesn’t stand with people pretending to be things that they’re not.” The road is honest and the road is true, and as long as that’s the case, the Ocean Lady will be both those things as well. She doesn’t have a choice. Divinity is a limitation in its own way.

  “Damn,” says Laura. She looks at me with a new understanding in her eyes. “The two of you are like the inverse of me and Tommy.”

  I jolt. It’s a natural comparison, but I don’t like thinking of it that way, and I like her making the connection even less. Laura’s obsession with Tommy is unhealthy. It’s driven her to do things that came very close to unforgiveable.

  Gary never hurt anyone to get back to me. But he would have. I know that as surely as I know that my temporary return to the lands of the living has complicated everything.

  Laura sees my confusion and discomfort and—another surprise in a day that’s been absolutely full of them—takes pity. She stands, dusts her hands against her thighs, and smiles. It’s the bright, disingenuous smile of a teacher about to jolly her students into doing something they don’t want to do, and I can admire its effectiveness even as I hate it a little.

  “Well,” she says. “Let’s go find out where we’re going, shall we?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” I say. “We’re going a long, long way from home.”

  Book Four

  Consequences

  Down in the graveyard, down by the tomb,

  Down by the river where the roses bloom,

  Down among the silence, down among the dead,

  Down by the gallows where the lost souls bled,

  Best you be careful, dear, best you beware,

  Best when they look for you, you not be there.

  Best you be wary, dear, best you be wise,

  Best that you remember even dead things die.

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

  Hitchhiking ghosts are by no means an American phenomenon. The dead who seek to use the living to return themselves to their rightful place have been reported since the dawn of human civilization. Even some early vampire stories can be filed under this category, as the pallid bodies of women who had died in childbirth returned to sit beside the cradles of their living infants, which they had never had the opportunity to hold.

  The hitchhiking ghost in its current, most popular form, on the other hand, is absolutely an American construct. The young girl—never more than twenty-five, never less than fifteen—in old-fashioned clothing, standing by the side of the road with her thumb out, or trudging along the median, forms an image any motorist will recognize.

  “Everybody knows what a hitcher looks like,” said Katherine Lewis, a waitress at the Hurry Up and Dine in Medford, New Jersey. “Smart folks don’t give them a ride. Smart folks don’t pick up living hitchhikers either, though, and they seem to get around just fine.”

  One road at a time, one ride at a time, America’s hitchhiking ghost stories travel, and the Phantom Prom Date travels with them.

  —On the Trail of the Phantom Prom Date,

  Professor Laura Moorhead, University of Colorado.

  Chapter 15

  All Ideas Are, to Someone, Terrible Ideas

  APPLE DROPS THE ATLAS on the picnic table with enough force to send a puff of dust billowing from its pages. Laura winces.

  “I know you’re the queen and the absolute authority here and everything, but can you please try to be nicer to the books?” she asks. “Please. For me. As a favor.”

  “You’re neither routewitch nor road ghost,” says Apple. “I owe you no favors. But yes, I will try to be nicer to the books. For you. Because otherwise you’ll sulk, and that would be distracting in the extreme.”

  I do my best to ignore them—they’ve been bickering for hours, and it seems to keep them calm, so I’m not going to try to make them stop—as I crane my neck to peer at the open page. It looks like Europe, or what I vaguely remember Europe looking like. It’s been a long time since my high school geography classes. There are no countries, only land, and the brightly colored, tangled threads of the major roads. They’re beautiful. They almost seem to move, flickering and shining as they race along their predetermined courses—

  Apple waves her hand in front of my face. I look up, and blink as I realize that everyone is staring at me. Gary is pale, his hands clenched in his lap. Laura looks puzzled. Emma just looks resigned.

  “Don’t look at the map,” says Apple.

  I blink again. “What?”

  “You’re a routewitch right now, and you’re not trained. The map isn’t safe for you.”

  I want to object—the idea of a map being safe for one person and not another is ridiculous. I don’t. The idea of a dead teenager becoming an urban legend because she’s too stubborn to rest in peace is ridiculous. So is the idea of a dead man becoming a car, or a runaway being elevated to the position of queen by a highway that thinks for itself. We live in the ridiculous. If I start to object to it now, it might all come crashing down.

  “Right,” I say, and turn my eyes away.

  “New York,” says Laura. “We should go to New York.”

  There’s a soft shushing sound as Apple runs her fingertip along the paper. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan does have the largest collection of Grecian artifacts in North America. If there’s a way to reach the Underworld here in the United States, it’s at the Met. Problem is, they’re better known for their Egyptian wing, which means the narrative weight of the museum doesn’t tie to the pantheon we need. Trying to enter via the museum grounds might result in things getting . . . confused.”

  “Meaning?” I ask.

  “Meaning you could find yourself having your heart weighed against a feather, instead of asking Persephone for her mercy.” Apple’s voice is grim. “Anubis is nicer than his reputation would imply, but there’s a reason we didn’t call on him when we were trying to protect you. He doesn’t much care for ghosts who refuse to move on to their punishment or reward.”

  “Isn’t he the one with the giant croco-hippo who eats the people who fail?”

  “Technically Ammit is a crocodile-hippo-lion hybrid, but yes, she eats the hearts he judges unworthy, and with them, devours the ghosts they might have become.”

  “Yeah, let’s go with not taking me to the Met to be devoured by something ridiculous and wrong.” I shake my head. The map is a tempting tingle at the edge of my vision, luring me, whispering horrible things in its effort to get my attention. I don’t want to look. I need to look.

  I don’t look.

  “If not the Met, what are we talking?” I ask. “Are we going to Greece after all?”

  “No, England,” says Emma. “The British have always had stic
ky, sticky fingers. They picked up enough pieces of the mysteries to shift certain doorways out of true. If you want to walk the path Orpheus walked, you’ll start in London, and you’ll descend from there.”

  England . . . even with my lousy grasp of world geography, I know what that’s close to. I turn to Emma. “Will you come?”

  “No, Rosie, I won’t.” She shakes her head. There’s regret there, yes, but more, there’s resignation. “I crossed the Atlantic in the shadow of the family who belonged to me. If I go back without anyone to keen for, I’m likely to find myself called back into service. I don’t want that, not yet. I’m not through enough with mourning to want a whole new brood to bury. I’ll stay here, among the dead, where such things can’t trouble me, and I’ll be glad of it.”

  Which means it’s just me and Laura after all. She’s watching me, making no real effort to conceal her scrutiny. It sort of makes me want to scream. I’m not used to being treated like a zoo exhibit, and I don’t like it. “How do we get there?”

  “Plane,” says Apple. “The boats would take too long, and there are good reasons to avoid the water.”

  “The drowned men,” says Emma knowingly, and Apple nods.

  “Can I get a little remedial ‘what the hell’ education?” I ask.

  “There are road ghosts,” says Apple. “What makes you think there wouldn’t be sail ghosts?”

  It seems like an awkward way to put it, but it also fits. Anything that lives can leave a ghost, but the ghost wolves that prowl New England aren’t road ghosts, any more than the ghosts of trainspotters—which we call “rail ghosts,” and I wish to hell “rail” and “sail” didn’t rhyme—are. Death is an ecosystem, and everything has its niche. “Are there seafaring routewitches, too?” I ask.

  Apple nods. “Sea and air alike, although we outnumber them. We have truces with the people of the air. They run their flying machines along runways—along roads—before they take to the wind, after all, and they want my good regard. When the routewitches and the skyfolk don’t get along, a great many planes crash on takeoff and landing.”

  She says it so casually, like she’s not talking about accidents where the body count is in the hundreds. I look at her and I wonder if she realizes she’s as inhuman as everyone else at this table, save perhaps for Laura, who never carried on a conversation with a highway or sang a dead woman to her rest. Laura may have spent most of her life in obsessive pursuit of a ghost, but at least she still knows what it is to be human.

  “I don’t have a passport.”

  Apple waves a hand. “I can get you onto any plane departing from North American soil, and my counterpart will send someone to meet you on the other end, to get you around any complications that might arise. Sending a ghost to visit the Grecian Underworld is a unique enough circumstance that I’m sure he’ll be interested. After that . . . if you need to take a plane to get back here, we have bigger problems.”

  “Like the part where I’m going to be alive until I die,” I say grimly.

  Apple nods. “Yes. There may be another way, but if there is, I don’t know it. This is your best shot. Don’t screw it up.”

  “Inspirational,” I say. “When do we leave?”

  “Bon is going to go and get your tickets.”

  I wonder if Bon knows that. I wonder whether it would make a difference either way. Here, among these people, Apple’s word is law. “Great.” I stand, looking to Gary. “Walk with me?”

  He rises and follows me to the door, and neither of us says anything as we leave the living—or in Emma’s case, the undecided—behind.

  * * *

  Night has fallen on the Ocean Lady, painting her in shades of purple and blue. She’s beautiful like this, under the shine of a hundred million stars, painted across the horizon like glitter across the curve of a closed eyelid. I tuck my hands into my pockets to keep myself from reaching for Gary. He walks cautiously close, not reaching for me either. Good. He’s learning. If we can’t help hurting each other, we can at least be a little more aware of the rules.

  “I guess now I understand why you never came for me when I was alive,” he says.

  The rules are different for me. When I have a coat, I’m indistinguishable from a living woman. I could have spent every night of Gary’s life holding his hand without revolting him the way his touch currently revolts me. I don’t say that. He’s trying, and I don’t need to rub his nose in what a raw deal he arranged for himself when he decided to find a way to stay on a road that didn’t want him. “The living and the dead aren’t supposed to touch,” I say instead, and that’s completely true, even as it has virtually nothing to do with our current situation.

  “I hate this. We’re supposed to be getting our second chance, together. We’re supposed to be a team. Not . . . I don’t even know the word for what we are right now.”

  “Lost.” I shrug. “Scared. Confused. I’ve been all those things before. I’m sure I’m going to be all those things again. We’ll get through this, Gary, and we’ll have time to figure out what we are.”

  He gives me a sidelong look, brown eyes sad behind those long damn lashes. Why do boys always get the best eyelashes? It’s not fair. “I thought I knew what we were.”

  Laughter claws at my throat like a raccoon caught in a chimney, trying frantically to break free before it suffocates. “You were my high school boyfriend,” I say. “If we were both still alive, you’d be the guy I see at the reunion, the one whose wife doesn’t like me because I remember you from a time before there was her.”

  “Or you’d be the wife, and we’d still be making jokes about the dress you wore to prom.” His jaw sets stubbornly, and oh, he’s beautiful, and oh, this is the worst possible time for us to be having this conversation. I’m a living girl, with a living girl’s hormones and desires, and the last time I was like this, he was the most beautiful thing in the world.

  If I touch him, it’ll be like sticking my hands into a decaying corpse, all cold flesh and rot. Part of me thinks it would be worth it. I shrug instead, ramming my hands down harder into the pockets of my jeans, and say, “There’s no way to say, because that didn’t happen. We never went to that reunion. I died, you lived. We both changed. We don’t know each other anymore, Gary. You’re still in love with the idea of a teenage girl who died literally decades ago. I love you, but I think it’s mostly because you made this grand, romantic, stupid gesture and I didn’t know what else to do with it.”

  “Rose—”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be easy for us to figure each other out. Not when you’re a car and everything. But we’re supposed to have time. We’re supposed to be able to do it, because we’re not supposed to be in a hurry. So I’m going to London with Laura, and then I’m going to the Underworld, and I’m going to grovel in front of a goddess until she agrees to let me be dead again, the way I was intended to be in the first place.”

  “I wish I could come with you.”

  “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” I shake my head. “I need you to stay here and try not to piss Apple off. I don’t want to come back and find out she’s sold you to some ghost chop shop.” They exist. They dismantle coachmen and the cars belonging to phantom riders. The dead don’t die easily. If they took Gary apart, he’d find himself screaming in pieces for however many years it took me to find and put them all back together. Not a good time.

  Gary looks at me full on for a long moment before he sighs. “I don’t like this.”

  “Neither do I,” I reply, and we stand together, silently waiting for the next shoe to drop.

  * * *

  The next shoe comes in the form of a dainty Japanese-American teenager picking her way across the parking lot. The sound of her shoes crunching on the gravel is enough to make me turn around and face her. Apple smiles, sad and a little wry.

  “Normally, you wouldn’t be allowed to leave the
Ocean Lady without making the proper sacrifices and renewing your vows to me,” she says. “We don’t allow unaligned routewitches in North America. Too much of a risk that one of them might get the bright idea to challenge me for my throne, and we all know how that ends.”

  “With a revolution?” suggests Gary.

  Apple’s smile is more like a baring of her teeth. “With a public execution,” she says. Her attention swings back to me. “Like I was saying, we normally wouldn’t let you go without swearing proper fealty, but there are some concerns—frustratingly valid ones—that if you swore to me, Persephone might see that as a closer claim than hers.”

  “Wait,” says Gary. “What do you mean, her claim? Persephone doesn’t have a claim on Rose.”

  “She’s a goddess,” I say. “I’m pretty sure she has a claim over whoever she wants.”

  “Rose bears Persephone’s cross on her back,” says Apple, tone patient, like she’s trying to explain something important to a particularly stupid child. To her, that’s probably what Gary looks like. They’re almost the same age, but while he was running around trying to find a way to reconnect with his dead girlfriend, she was ruling a twilight nation larger than any daylight country. Apple hasn’t been young in a long, long time. “That means she’s accepted Persephone as her patron, even if she didn’t realize she was doing so at the time.”

  I didn’t. I had gone to the routewitches looking for protection from Bobby, and they had sworn me to Persephone without so much as a by-your-leave. I didn’t blame them for that—I would have agreed, if they had bothered to ask—but I hadn’t had any idea until it had already been done.