Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan

by Seanan McGuire

  "I do." The road is unspinning all around us, and the air tastes like lilies and ashes and miles that burn out like candles. Not long now. We're almost there. "I just...I'd been hitching a ride, and the guy I was driving with decided he wanted to go in a different direction. So I thought I'd stop in and see if I could find anybody who was going my way."

  I don't need to see his frown. I can hear it. "You never asked which way I was going."

  "You told me Detroit."

  "Yes, but..."

  "I left home when I was sixteen. I didn't have a choice." I let the sentence sit there to be examined, let him fill in all the spaces between the words, letting him realize that I still look sixteen, even if he doesn't understand that I always will. The story he tells himself will be terrible, because the stories we tell ourselves always are, but it won't come anywhere close to the truth. It never does. Until they finish falling into the ghostside America, they never start their stories with "how did you die?"

  "Oh." His voice is soft. Silence closes in around us, for a while. Not long enough. "Don't you have any family you could go to?"

  Family. There's an interesting thought. Show up on the doorstep of some woman twice my age with my older brother's eyes, and try to explain who I am, where I've been, why I went away...I shake my head. "Not really. We were never a very close family, and there's no one I could go to."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Don't worry about me." I offer a smile across the darkened cabin. Something flickers in his expression, something old and sad and scared. We're getting close to the border; close to the final fall. He's starting to feel the wind from the onrushing ending, and he still can't see it clear enough to do a damn thing about it. They never can. "I've been on the road a long time. I can take care of myself." The truck rattles on beneath us, eating the road, turning distance into dreams.

  I have to try. I always have to try. It might hurt less if I stopped. That's why I do it.

  "Have you ever heard the story of the woman at the diner?" Such an innocent question. Such a guilty answer.

  Larry laughs. "Now we're telling ghost stories? I suppose that's one way to get me to stop asking personal questions. I've heard of her."

  "How does the story go? The way you heard it, I mean. It's different everywhere you go."

  "Road stories always are." He clears his throat. "Uh, the story goes that she was a cheerleader."

  That's a variation I haven't heard before. "A cheerleader?"

  "Yeah. Went to some middle-of-nowhere school and wanted to get to Hollywood. So she and her boyfriend saved their pennies, and they hit the road. Only his car rolled less than three hours out of town, and he was killed. She managed to pull herself out of the wreck, and went staggering off, looking for help. She found a truck stop. The truckers, they said they'd help her, put her in the diner with a cup of coffee while they went down the road to find her boyfriend. See if maybe she was wrong, and he was still breathing."

  "He wasn't, was he." He never is. In the versions where I have a boyfriend in the car, he's always dead on impact. Guess it would screw up the story if their little wandering lady wasn't doing her wandering alone.

  "No. So they covered his face, said they were sorry, and one of them stayed to wait for the police while the others went back to the diner. But by the time they got there, the girl was already dead. Her throat had been slit, and the cook was gone. Left a note saying their meals were all free, and thanking them for the tip."

  I shudder.

  Larry doesn't see, or maybe Larry just thinks it's that delicious fear that comes with a good ghost story, but either way, he keeps going. "The one trucker they'd left back on the road, see, he doesn't know she's dead. So when she comes walking down the road a few minutes after the police take her boy away, he just thinks she got tired of waiting. Tells her that her boyfriend's dead, and she cries so hard. Cries like her heart's been broken. The trucker, he's a good guy, and he asks if there's anything he can do."

  "So she asks him to take her home," I say, in a whisper.

  "Yeah." Larry nods. "She's cold, so he gives her his coat, and he drives her all the way back to where she started from. Lets her off in front of her very own house. It's not until the next day he realizes that he left his coat, and so next time he's driving that route, he stops by. Figures he'll see how she's been doing. Only the police are waiting. The police have been waiting ever since her body was found, tucked into her own bed, with her throat cut ear to ear, wearing a stranger's coat."

  "God." The ways the story twists and changes never fail to surprise me. People are nothing if not inventive in their lies.

  "He tried to say he was innocent, but nobody believed him. He was executed, and when they buried him, this pretty little girl came up to wife right next to the grave, and said she was sorry; said she didn't mean for that to happen. She just wanted to go home. Then she walked away. The wife realized who she was, and ran after, but she was already gone, like she'd never been there...except for the coat. The trucker's coat, hanging on a tombstone."

  "That's a new version," I say, if only to break the silence that the story leaves behind. "I haven't heard that one before."

  "Really? There are others?"

  "Hundreds." The weariness in voice could be used to veil every star on the ghostside. The smell of lilies is strong now. Not much longer.

  "I guess that little ghost-girl gets around."

  "You have no idea."

  ***

  The road signs flicker and blur in the dark outside the cab, headlights cutting a bright road through the night. Larry chatters about inconsequential things, all of them mingling and blurring like the signs, until they're nothing but the final solo in the symphony of a man's life. Would it have gone differently if I weren't here distracting him? I don't think so. He's tired--it comes off him in waves, under the lilies and the ashes and the growing scent of empty rooms--and without me to talk to, he would just have dozed at the wheel. I don't condemn them. I don't save them, either. All I do is get them home.

  The other truck looms out of the darkness like a dragon, whipping around a blind curve at the sort of speed that's never safe, not even when the sun is up. Larry swears and grabs the wheel, hauls it hard to the side, fights to dodge and then fights even harder to keep control of his truck. There's a crash from behind us, the sound of metal tearing into metal, and all the stars go out overhead.

  Larry doesn't notice. Larry is too busy clinging white-knuckled to the steering wheel, eyes wide and terrified, breath coming in panting hitches. "That was...oh, Jesus. Rose, are you all right? Are you hurt?"

  "I'm fine, Larry. I'm not hurt." Truth. I'm not the one he should be asking.

  "That was--that was way too close. We have to go back. Did you hear that crash? He may have tipped. We have to go back."

  I lean over, put a hand on his arm. The ghostroad is smoother than the real one, the street signs crisper, brands against the starless night. "We have to keep going," I say. "We have to get you home."

  "But--"

  "Please."

  Maybe it's my tone, maybe it's his own fear, or maybe it's just the ghostside, already starting to dig its claws into him, already getting under his skin. Finally, slowly, Larry nods. "All right, Rose. We'll keep going."

  "Thank you." The dashboard is cool when I touch it again. I wonder when he'll notice that. "Let me tell you my version of the woman at the diner."

  ***

  "She wasn't a cheerleader, although she was in high school. She liked to drive. She liked to watch other people drive. And she liked her boyfriend, who worked in the auto-shop, and fixed her car so that it ran like a fairy tale. The cheerleaders would never have let her get anywhere near them. She might have gotten them dirty.

  "She was walking down the side of the road when the trucker pulled up next to her and asked if she needed a ride anywhere. She said yes, and that she'd really like to go somewhere to get something to eat. So he drove her to the truck stop diner. Only when they got
there, she thanked him for the ride, and she went and sat with someone else. Another trucker. And after she ate her burger, she asked him for a ride."

  Larry is watching me more than he's watching the road, now; he's watching with the sort of terrified understanding that only comes on by inches, only comes when you're not looking for it. He's starting to realize that something--that everything--is wrong.

  "So he let her into his cab, and then they drove off together. But there was a crash. A terrible crash. He was killed, and she...she was never found."

  "Rose..."

  "Only a year later, a year to the day, that first trucker saw her walking down the road again. Same place, same stretch of road. He pulled over, and said he'd been afraid she died. She just smiled. Asked for a ride. And when he asked her if she'd stay in his truck this time, she said no; said she had another ride. Same thing happened. Accident, dead trucker, missing girl. And again, two years later, she shows up. By now the first trucker is starting to realize there's something wrong. So he pulls off the road when he sees her, and he demands to know: are you killing these boys? Are you doing this to them?"

  "Rose--"

  "And she looks at him and says, so sadly it about breaks his heart, 'No. I've never killed anyone. I just want to make sure that somebody's there to see that they get home.'"

  This time his voice is just a whisper; this time, he understands. "Rose."

  I offer him a smile as sad as Sunday in September. "I came to you for a reason, Larry. I'm just here to make sure that you can find the right roads. I'm only here to get you home."

  ***

  Driving through the ghostside is easy, and Larry's rig knows the way. She travels light and faster than she ever did in life, finally free to corner on her own, to compensate for her driver when he can't focus through his tears. He only cries a while. Not as long as some, longer than others. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with crying when someone dies, not even when it's you. If you can't weep at your own funeral, when can you?

  The ghostroad gets simpler, turns and curves fading into straight lines and dark exits. Finally, like an oasis, the bright neon of the Last Dance Diner appears up ahead and to the right. I reach over, squeeze Larry's wrist.

  "This is my stop."

  "Rose..."

  "Yours is up ahead." The danger is past. Once they reach the Last Dance, they can find the rest of the way on their own, and I don't dare go any further--for me, the Last Dance is where the danger really begins. I don't know where that road ends, and until I'm finished with everything that needs doing, I don't want to find out. Besides, the Last Dance makes damn good malteds.

  He pulls off the road, letting the engine idle as he looks at me. He looks younger than he did when we met. The ghostside is easing the years away. "Why me?"

  "Because the crash was coming whether I was here or not, and sometimes people get lost on the road. Sometimes they just need someone to tell them what exits to take." I lean over, kiss his forehead--cool lips brushing cool skin--and open my door. "Good luck, Larry."

  Larry looks at me in silence for a long while before he nods, and starts the engine up again. I slam my door, and the truck pulls away, driving down that long, straight stretch of road. And then it's gone, like a piece of tissue whipped away by the wind, and overhead, the stars start blinking back on. The wind picks up, and I'm cold again, falling out of the midnight and back into the twilight, where the air still tastes like apples.

  Hunching my shoulders under the thin fabric of my jacket, I turn and start for the Last Dance Diner. Maybe Emma will be working tonight. She's usually willing to buy me a malt when the boss isn't looking.

  And in all the Americas, from midnight to noon and in-between, the truckers roll out, and the diners stand like cathedrals of the road, and the beat...the beat goes on.

  Dead Man's Party

  A Sparrow Hill Road story

  by

  Seanan McGuire

  Got my best suit and my tie

  Shiny silver dollar on either eye

  I hear the chauffeur comin' to the door

  Says there's room for maybe just one more...

  -- "Dead Man's Party," Danny Elfman.

  Walk the ghostroads long enough, you start to learn things. There are no formal schools; the schoolyard chant of "no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks" applies more completely than most people can ever imagine before they slip between the cracks. Things look different in the twilight. Things are different in the twilight. The rules aren't the same here. The old patterns won't protect you. The twilight is another country, an America where the sun never rises, and the people who wind up here have two choices: adapt or die. (Some pursue a third choice--some spend their lives trying to claw their way back up into the light--and I think sometimes that they're the saddest ones of all, because they never let themselves accept the reality of their situation. There's no way to go from full twilight back into the light. Get out while you're in the shallows, or you never get out at all. That's just the way the ghostroads run.)

  Everyone who walks the twilight has something else they're looking to learn. The routewitches, they're seeking the stories of the highways and the byways, the hidden riddles worked into frontage roads and ghost towns where the tumbleweeds hold dominion over all. They practice their little magics, they speak to strangers, they give rides to hitchhikers both living and long since dead.

  Even they have their divisions, their strange allegiances, their legends and their laws. The Queen of the Routewitches keeps her court on the old Atlantic Highway, the oldest major artery in North America. Most of it's gone in the daylight levels, replaced first by Route 1, and later by Interstate 95, but the twilight has a longer memory than the light does, and the old Atlantic is the strongest and the cleanest of the ghostroads. If you cross her palm with silver, she can tell you things not even the highway commission remembers, like why Route 1 cut so far inland when the Atlantic Highway ran through Savannah, Georgia, and what really funded the construction of the Waldo-Hancock Bridge. They're just stories, in the light, but down here, they're the things that can keep you breathing.

  If you were breathing when you arrived, that is.

  I didn't find the ghostroads; the ghostroads found me, looming up out of the dark like the iceberg that felled the Titanic. Everyone in the twilight is looking for something, and I'm no different; I went looking for ghosts, a phantom chasing phantoms through the night that never quite begins or ends. I had to find them. It was the only way to know for sure what I'd become. They were tangled in a thousand half-stitched seams across the fabric of reality, waiting to be found, and I found them. The ghosts of the twilight taught me what I am--a hitcher, a ghost tied not to a physical place or a specific person, but to an unfinished task. We have our rules, just like every other kind of ghost, but we run closer to the skin than most, closer to the daylight, because we got lost by mistake. We were never meant to be here.

  We're not the only ghosts of the twilight, not the only ones too well-lit for the midnight Americas, but too dark for the daylight levels. There are other types of ghost that walk here, and some of them follow different rules. Some of them don't understand. When that happens, somebody has to teach them what they're doing wrong. And sometimes, when I'm less than lucky, somebody winds up being me.

  ***

  The air outside the rust-colored Chevy tastes like diesel fuel and shadows, 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 Kyle; 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? This is where you wanted to be dropped off, right?" Kyle leans across the passenger seat, the glow of the diner's neon marquee glinting off his glasses. 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. This is the deepest he's ever dipped into the twilight. He's here 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 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 time to practice that particular expression. "Don't you need to get on the road?"

  "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 Kyle...Kyle 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 had a way out of the twilight.

  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. I know this sign. The Starbright Diner, one more little piece of Americana struggling to stay alive in the evolving maze of the highways. I've been here a thousand times. It's never looked like this before. It isn't normally this dark; it isn't normally this deep into the twilight. Something is very wrong, and whatever it is, it's not something I'm familiar with. Ash and lilies means an accident ahead that can't be avoided. Rosemary and my grandmother's sugary perfume means the chance to turn a different way. Kyle smelled like rosemary and perfume when I found him. That's how I knew he wasn't too far gone to save. But this...