Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan

by Seanan McGuire

  The danger in walking your way to freedom is the way things change depending on your point of view. What's dark to me is light to you; what's true to you is lies to me. Every story has a thousand truths behind it, because everything looks different depending on where you were standing when you saw it happen. I leave the philosophy to the umbramancers and the routewitches, and I try to keep myself focused on the things that matter in the here and now: following the whispers of the running road, following the signs that lead me between the layers of America, and learning to read the palimpsest etchings that dig deep as bruises and unchanging as scars into the flesh of the ghostside. I've been in the dark a lot longer than I was in the light, and while I still regret the way that I died, I've given up on trying to fight my way back. All I want to do now is find a way to stop the man who condemned me to this twilight wandering--the one who would have done a lot worse, if I'd given him the chance.

  I guess you can call me an angel of vengeance, these days. That and a quarter used to be enough to buy a cup of coffee. Still is, at the Last Dance. Everywhere else...not so much.

  The trouble with truth is that it's subjective, depending entirely on where you were standing when you saw the accident happen. Maybe you saw the first car veer to avoid hitting a cat, and maybe you didn't. Maybe you saw the second car try to hit the brakes, and maybe you only saw them go careening into the vehicle ahead of them, making no attempt to slow in the moments before impact. Maybe all you saw was the shadow of the cat as it darted through the underbrush, running away from a tearing roar that sounded like the end of the world. Every splinter of the broken glass of the moment is a genuine part of the whole, but none of them is the whole in and of itself. We carry our own truths tucked away inside us, bright bits of glass blunted by our living flesh, and when they come into the light, we bleed. Honesty is in the eye of the beholder.

  It can be hard as hell to tell the truth from broken lies even when all the pieces of the puzzle happen in the daylight. When half the story is buried in shallow graves along the ghostroads, it can turn impossible to tell what's real from what's not...and sometimes, without that knowledge, there's no way to move past grieving into acceptance. Sometimes, the dead aren't the only casualties, especially here. Especially in the dark.

  ***

  It's a beautiful night, all big white moon and the distant gold-silver-glitter of too many stars to count, scattered across this desert sky like dimestore confetti. This is the middle of nowhere, one of those places that manages to exist half a mile outside of every jurisdiction, half an hour away from any sort of safety, real or not. The man--the boy, fuck, he's barely twenty-two, he's too young to be here--behind the wheel of this aging Toyota is practically vibrating as he looks toward the stretch of road ahead of us. He'd be handsome, if he didn't look so scared, if he wasn't so damn close to tumbling into twilight, leaving this road and all the roads like it behind him forever.

  "That's the raceway," he says, and he means this empty expanse of nothing, this little slice of nowhere-road that stretches smooth and deserted through the night. He's breathing too fast, just this side of panting, tension filling the car like smoke. He doesn't want to be here. He thinks he does, but he's wrong. "You'll be able to find another ride from here. There's lots of guys here every night. One of them will be going your way."

  I seriously doubt that. This is pure daylight road, for all that the sun's gone down, and the only place that edges into the twilight is the driver himself, boy who thinks he's a man, boy teasing things he should know to leave well enough alone. I've been trying to steer him away from this place since I asked him for a ride two hours ago, and he didn't listen then, and he isn't listening now. The smell of ashes and lilies is gathering around him, accident waiting to happen, coming on stronger with every minute that ticks past.

  "I don't think this is a good idea, Tommy." He isn't listening. I still have to try. I always have to try, because that's part of how this story goes: part of what keeps me on the edge I walk along. If I start walking away from the ones who might be saved, I'll lose my grasp on the narrow line of the twilight, sink deeper down into the dark, and never find my way back to the levels where the living play spin-the-bottle with the dead. I have to try. "We should go back. We should--"

  "My girl deserves better than some crackerjack ring from a greasemonkey." There's a set to his jaw that I know. Gary used to look like that, late nights in the diner when he was telling me how we were going to get out of town someday, how we'd be together forever, and he wouldn't be just a mechanic, and I wouldn't be just the mechanic's girl. I bite my knuckles. The pain helps, a little. Not enough, but it keeps the tears out of my eyes, and right here, right now, I'll settle for what I can get. "You understand, don't you, Rose?"

  I understand the way that poverty can turn solid in the middle of the night, pressing down on your chest until it steals your breath away, the way they used to say cats stole the breath from babies in their cradles. I understand watching your father work until all he can do when he gets home is drink to forget how much work's still waiting, and waiting your mother clip coupons and count her pennies, skirting a little closer to the edge every day. I understand hand-me-down skirts and triple-darned socks, cabbage soup and homemade shampoo. I understand better than he thinks I do.

  Most of all, I understand that this is not the way.

  "Turn back," I whisper, and Tommy starts the engine, and we roll onward, toward the raceway, toward the future, toward the place where the road he's on now comes to its inevitable end.

  We roll on.

  ***

  March has slammed down on the American road with the force of a hurricane, washing out bridges and turning the roads into something closer to an obstacle course. Rides are always harder to get during March and April; it's warm enough that you lose the wintertime "poor thing, come in out of the cold," but it's wet and nasty enough that no one wants to slow and stop for a stranger. Springtime is the worst time of year for hitching. I keep walking along the edge of the pavement, thumb thrust jauntily upward. Either I'll find a ride or I'll find a rest stop; that's how this works. In the meanwhile, if I want to stay on this level of America, I'll keep following the rules, and the rules say that hitchhiking ghosts, well, hitch.

  (The rules will change if I can get someone to give me a coat. Even the definition of "coat" is a generous one, since I've been able to accept jackets, sweaters, lab coats, smocks, even--once, at a carnival in Alabama, where the ground was the color of dried blood and the rain came down so hard it seemed like the sky was falling--yellow plastic rain slickers. Any of them is enough to shift me off the ghostroads and back into the light. I'm not quite the living and not quite the dead when I have a coat to steal substance from, and in that in-between state, a lot of rules don't apply. They can't catch hold for long enough to bind me.)

  Staying wet was one of the hardest things to learn about hitching in the rain. You can recognize young hitchers easily when it rains; they're the ones walking in a downpour and staying completely dry, because the water doesn't even know they're there. Never open your doors to a dry stranger in a rainstorm, not unless you're sure of your protection against possessions. Older hitchers understand that being able to change your clothing with a thought means being able to change dry clothes into wet clothes, even if it's only ghost-water, even if it only dampens the ghostside. Most people don't look closely enough to catch that little distinction, and once one of us has a coat in our hands, well, it's like I said. All the rules change.

  It won't be the end of the world if I can't catch a ride on this stretch of deserted Maine highway, hemmed in by the creeping undergrowth and ringed with ditches full of muddy run-off. I've gone without rides before, and with the way the rain keeps pounding down, I'd be cold even with a living person's coat to loan me warmth. That's the worst thing about being dead: the cold that never ends. Only way to beat it back is to join the living for a little while, but on a night like this, I'm not sure I want to be warm qui
te that badly. There's a truck stop ahead. I remember it vaguely from the last time I walked this way, and the road may be worn-down and lonely, but it isn't singing the songs of the completely abandoned. Even if the stop is limping on its last legs, the doors are open, the coffee is hot, and the neon is still sending out its lighthouse prayers to the sailors of the inland American sea. "Come to me, come to me, and I will grant you warmth, and I will be your home until the tide rolls out."

  Roads don't sing the same when the stops close down. They turn lonely, and then they turn bitter, and then they turn dangerous. If you're lucky, they die after that. If you're not, a lot of people die before the road does. I helped to kill a highway once, one that tried to keep on going after the bean sidhes keened its termination and the ambulomancers read its future in the potholes on the blacktop and the pebbles on the median. That's an experience I'd be happy if I never had again.

  The sky rolls white with lightning, and the rain starts falling harder than before, pounding straight through me like it wants to wash the world away. I keep my thumb out--follow the rules, always follow the rules, it's breaking the rules that gets you in trouble--and walk a little faster, following the lighthouse song of safety through the night.

  I'm moving fast enough, focused enough on my goal, that when I reach the driveway and turn off the road, the condition of the parking lot barely registers with me. Potholes and broken pavement are a consequence of use as much as neglect, and the truck stop is singing. That should be enough. I'm halfway across the parking lot when the song cuts off, abrupt as a razor blade in candy floss, and I lift my eyes to the shattered shell of a sanctuary. This is no lighthouse. This is a tomb.

  The bones of the truck stop are standing almost naked in the night, the skeletal pumps, the broken shell of the garage, the crumbling diner with its neon sign, unlit, still almost intact on the edge of the roof. This isn't right. This can't be right. The songs of this road are not the signs 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.

  ***

  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 still 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 that he's rebuilt so many times that even the air inside the cabin feels custom. She trusts him, this blue-back beauty with her wheels set solid on the pavement. She believes in him. The love of a car 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, fingertips only slightly warmer than the engine-heated metal, and I want to tell her that everything will 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?" The look Tommy gives me 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 that kind of money, 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'm gonna marry my girl knowing 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. 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. 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. 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.

  ***

  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 did, 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 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. When I wipe my hands on the tail of my shirt, they leave trails of blood behind, 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 here.

  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 sudde
nly-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 was careless. 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 saw them, I 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 they 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 well. 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 in the pattern, as well as the silver, 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 enough 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.