"And all you have to do is kill me," I say, bitterly. Maybe I didn't see that the prom was a decoy, but I was distracted, and I've never encountered anything like this before. "So what do the rest of them get out of the deal? Cash on the barrel? Bragging rights? What?"
"Your terminology sucks. I can't kill you. You've been dead since before my father was born. All I'm doing is handing you over to someone who has a purpose for you. As for what my friends get...there's not much for any of us in this podunk little town. We're getting out."
"By making deals with Bobby Cross?" There it is: there's the name, hanging out in air between us like roadkill, like something dead and rotten and stinking. "You should know better. Arthur should have taught you better."
"How? He never knew what happened to you. No one ever knew, not until the night the asphalt up on Sparrow Hill started talking to me, started telling me all about it. I think I was supposed to sympathize with you. But Bobby..." Her eyes go distant, star-struck. "He knew what he wanted, and he found a way to get it. I respect that in a man."
I stare at her, disgusted and aghast. "Please tell me you're not hot for Bobby Cross." When she doesn't answer, I gag, only exaggerating a little. "He's a monster! He sold his soul!"
"But he got what he wanted, didn't he?" She smiles again, brightly. "And so will I. Bobby's on his way here now. He's coming to collect his payment, and then he'll take us all to the crossroads, and show us how to make his bargain."
"You can't. You need..." Apple said the King of the Routewitches went with Bobby to make his first bargain. If I'm what they stuff into the gas tank, and Bethany is in the car—blood of my blood, a powerful charm on the ghostroads—they might just make it. "You can't. Your Queen gave me Persephone's blessing."
"I heard about that." She reaches into her pocket, produces a Swiss army knife. It looks very sharp when she clicks it open. "Funny thing: Persephone's blessing can only protect you against people who are sworn to the dead. Living routewitches, and high school students who haven't had a chance to make their bargains yet? We don't count."
She takes a step forward, raising the knife in her hand. The other students move to follow her. I'm sure they expect me to scream, to beg them to spare me. It's almost a shame to disappoint them. I can barely hold back my laughter as I say, "No, you don't count. And you can't count, either."
"What are you talking about?" she demands. She leans down to grab my shoulder, probably intending some small, ritual cut to begin the blood-letting. Her hand goes cleanly through what should have been solid flesh. She's still staring at me, surprise written large across her face, when I cast a glance toward the silk wrap—now lying on the floor, having fallen right through me--and offer her a smile.
"You needed to keep track of time, Bethany. It's midnight. That means you can't hold me here." And, still smiling, I vanish.
***
I don't go far, just from the little room where they had me tied—the old weight room, I realize now, the equipment put away, out of sight—to the hallway outside. I want to know what they'll do, how many of her companions will panic at the first sign of something that's truly unexplained. Talking about ghosts and selling souls is all well and good, but what do you do when the Devil actually comes to collect his dues?
Voices drift down the hall, some raised in panic, some in simple confusion. "—was right here, so where did she—" "—oh, God, you mean she was really a ghost? We really caught a ghost? I thought—" "—was the Phantom Prom Date, Bethany, I mean, that was the real thing. What if she comes back for us? What if—"
Bethany's voice cuts across the others, cold as ice and filled with commanding anger: "All of you, hush up. I can't hear myself think. She won't have gone far. Tom, Minda, you get the salt and seal the edges of the gym. Keep her here. Everybody else, stay alert. She's probably pissed."
"At least she's smart enough to get that far," I mutter, and vanish, moving through the space between me and the gym door faster than my niece's minions can hope to travel. Salt can bind a ghost, that's true, but it takes a special kind to catch a hitcher, and I doubt she has the skill to do it.
I almost have to respect her, in a way. Sure, she's probably insane, but I understand what it is to want out of Buckley so badly that you ache with it, so badly that you're willing to do just about anything if that's what gets you an exit. The night air is cool, and tastes like minutes wasted in doctor's waiting rooms, precious seconds that you'll never get back again. One more prom night, come and gone. It doesn't really matter that I spent it at a decoy prom, tied to a chair by my grand-niece. A prom night is a prom night, and this one is slipping into memory. The ghostroads will open soon, and then I can get the hell out of here.
"Leaving so soon, Auntie Rose?" asks Bethany behind me. I turn toward the sound of her voice, reflex as much as anything, and flinch back as the dried flower corsage she throws at me bounces off the center of my chest, long-dead flowers filling the air with sour-sweet perfume. Bethany's expression is triumphant. That worries me. Not as much as it worries me that the flowers actually made contact.
"Prom night's over, Bethany," I say, tried to keep the shock from showing on my face. How the hell did she hit me with that thing? I'm not wearing a coat. I don't have a body to be hit. "Give it up."
"Prom night's never over for you, Auntie Rose. That's why they call you the 'phantom prom date,' isn't it?" She smiles, pointing to the corsage that lies between us like a roadkilled squirrel. "Gary Daniels bought this for you on what should have been the night of your senior prom. 'Course, you were long dead by then, and they'd barely stopped blaming him for being the one who killed you, so you never got it. It's yours. And that means you're not going anywhere."
My breath catches in my throat; until that moment, I hadn't really realized that I was breathing. I've heard of things like this, ghost-catchers, tokens that the living have held onto for too long, imbued with too many memories, but I've never seen one. It just figures that if there was going to be a ghost-catcher tuned to me, it would be in the hands of my crazy grand-niece with the Bobby Cross fixation. I put my hands up, palms turned toward her.
"Come on, Bethany. Let's think about this, all right? You don't want to deal with Bobby Cross. He's..." A bastard, a madman, a murderer. "...he's not a nice man, and he's not going to play fair just because you hold up your end of the bargain. I'm family. Doesn't that mean something?"
"Family didn't mean anything to you when you decided to go off and get yourself turned into road kill. Grandpa's been mourning you as long as I've been alive. He even wanted to name me 'Rose.' Don't you think it's time to rest?" Bethany starts toward me, the bug-zappers that spark and flash around the edges of the school roof sending glints of blue light off the knife in her left hand. "It doesn't have to be this hard. You've had so many years, and I'm sorry, Auntie Rose, but I have to do what I have to do. You, of all people, should understand. You remember what it's like to be trapped here."
The corsage smells like lilies and ashes, or maybe the smell of lilies and ashes is rising from the parking lot around us, routewitch facing off with road-ghost fifteen minutes after midnight on prom night. This is the sort of thing that's rare enough to have power all its own, and in the far distance, I can hear the sound of an engine, screaming.
Bobby Cross is coming to collect what he's been promised.
I'm running out of time.
***
Bethany's friends—minions, whatever they are to her—are still inside the high school, probably sealing the exits with salt and watching through the windows, smart enough not to get involved now that the odds aren't in their favor. The ash-and-lily smell is getting choking, Bobby burning road between him and Buckley.
"Come on, Bethany," I urge. "The doors are closed. You haven't taken anything from him, you don't owe him anything. Go inside, and don't look back. This doesn't have to happen."
"This always had to happen," she says, and takes another step forward.
She's taller than I am,
more solidly built. She's probably on the track team, a sport where she doesn't have to count on anyone else to support her. Routewitches like things that let them cover distance. She looks utterly confident as she closes on me, and she should look confident, because I'm a slip of a girl in a confining silk dress, doe-eyed and breakable.
It's too bad she isn't really thinking this through. I'm a slip of a girl who's spent the last fifty years in and out of truck stops, riding with bikers and arguing with fry cooks on exactly how much they get to slap me around before I start slapping back. And I don't have to worry about getting hurt for keeps. She goes for my ribs, sharp stabbing motion, all her momentum behind it.
I go for her eyes, nails hooked into claws, and the fight is on.
There's nothing sexy about two girls really going at it, especially not when they're in a parking lot in the middle of a summer night. Bethany shrieks when I scratch her and starts swinging wildly; the knife misses, but her elbow doesn't, and sends me rocking back a few feet. The gravel underfoot makes it hard to keep my balance. I scramble to get upright and charge forward, burying my shoulder in the pit of her stomach. The air goes out of her in a hard gust, and she lands on the pavement on her ass, gasping.
"Stay down," I snap, already half-winded. Bethany snarls, sounding more animal than human, and scrabbles to her feet, lunging for me again. I'm not prepared. Her hand catches my hair, and then she's whipping me around, sending me flying away from her. I land hard on the pavement, skidding to a stop at least six feet away.
I'm barely back to my feet when I hear the sound of two hands, clapping slowly. For the first time, I realize that I'm tasting wormwood, and I turn toward the sound, already sure of what I'll see.
Bobby Cross meets my eyes, and smirks. "Nothing like a good chick fight to start a night off the right way, is there, Rosie-girl?" he drawls. Bethany is struggling to get her breath back, raking fingers through her hair, making herself presentable. The irony of Bobby Cross being her dream date hasn't escaped me. "You're a sight for sore eyes. Or maybe just a sight to make eyes sore. Tired of playing hard to get?"
"Come get me, and find out," I suggest. I'm not breathing hard. I look down, and see the shredded petals littering the pavement around me, like the leavings of a flower girl at a funeral. It would have bound me here, kept me flesh and blood, but Bethany left it on the ground when we started fighting. One or both of us must have stepped on it, shredding it and destroying its power over me. Amateur mistake for an amateur routewitch.
It's the last one she's going to make. Bobby takes a step forward, one hand half-raised in my direction. Then he stops, and snarls. "You were supposed to cut it off her," he says, finally turning toward Bethany. "I came here because you promised she'd be meat when I arrived. That you'd cut that warding off her body. You trying to welsh on me, girl?"
"No!" protests Bethany, eyes widening. For the first time, she seems to know that she's in danger...and it's too late for me to do a thing about it. "She fought back. I didn't expect she'd be able to fight back."
"Fifty years, you didn't think she'd have a trick or two?" His boot heels click as he closes the distance between them, fast, so fast it's like he barely moved at all. Bethany screams when he grabs her wrist, and screams again when he jerks her against him. "You're going to learn, girly. You can't break a deal with me."
"Aunt Rose!" She twists to look at me over Bobby's shoulder, and her eyes are the pleading eyes of a trapped animal. "Please, help me! Don't let him—"
"You're the one that said family didn't mean anything, Bethany," I say. Her eyes widen, hope draining out of them. I feel like I'm going to be sick. But I can't save her from Bobby, not here, not now, not when she made the bargain of her own free will. The only thing I can do is offer myself in her place...
And she's not worth it.
Bethany screams as I walk out of the parking lot, out of Buckley, down into the twilight, where the ghostroads hold no surprises anymore. Even as the daylight fades around me, taking the smell of ashes and lilies with it, I think that I can still hear Bethany, screaming. I'll be hearing her for a while, I suppose. And I walk on.
Dead Man's Curve
A Sparrow Hill Road story
by
Seanan McGuire
Well, the last thing I remember, Doc, I started to swerve,
And then I saw the Jag sliding into the curve.
I know I'll never forget that horrible sight.
I guess I found out for myself that everyone was right.
You won't come back from dead man's curve
Dead man's curve
Dead man's curve
Dead man's curve...
~"Dead Man's Curve," Jan Berry and Roger Christian.
The preachers that walk and talk and trade their snake oil sermons among the living talk about death like it's some sort of vacation. "Going to your eternal rest," that's a popular one. So's "laying down all worldly cares," or my personal favorite, "at peace in the fields of the Lord." I've seen more than a few fields since I went and joined the legions of the dead. Most of them didn't have any Lord to speak of, and the few that did were dark, twisted places, controlled by ghosts who'd gone mad and decided that they were gods.
If there's some peaceful paradise waiting on the other side of the twilight, no one has ever been able to prove its existence—not in any way that I'm willing to accept, and this is my afterlife, right? I get to make requests every once in a while. I know the daylight exists, and I know the twilight exists, and if there's anything beyond that, I'd like to see a road map and a tourism brochure before I agree to go. The ghostroads aren't Heaven. They aren't Hell, either. They just are, eternal and eternally changing, and I've been here a lot longer than I was ever anywhere else.
The preachers that sell their snake oil to the dead don't preach about paradise. They preach about the sins of the living, and the silence of the grave, and the unfairness of our exile. But they never say what we've been exiled from, and if you're fool enough to ask, you won't be welcome in that church for very long.
Alive or dead, the world turns on faith, and on the idea that someday, somehow, we're going to get the chance to rest. I didn't believe it when I was alive. These days, I'm just happy if I have time to finish a cheeseburger before the shit starts hitting the fan.
***
The air conditioning is turned just a little bit too high, raising goose bumps on the tourists who walk, unprepared, out of the muggy Ohio summer. Most of them turn right around and walk back out again, unwilling to deal with this two-bit diner where the music's too loud and the air's too cold. They won't be missed. The folks who stay seem to know the deal they're getting when they come through the door, because they all bring coats, and they all seat themselves. I fit right in.
This is definitely my kind of place.
Best of all, one of the busboys is a routewitch, probably clearing tables to get his bus fare to the next stop on his private pilgrimage. He pegged me the second I walked through the door. The jacket I'm wearing is his, Varsity prize from some high school I've never heard of, and every time he passes the counter, he slides another plate of fries my way. If I believed in Heaven, I'd be willing to write this dirty little diner down as a suburb.
The sound of the door opening doesn't even get my attention this time. I'm too busy sizing up the waitress on duty, trying to figure out how I can talk her into giving me a milkshake—of her own free will, of course, since it doesn't count otherwise. Someone takes the stool next to me.
"How's the pie?"
It's an innocent question, a way to strike up conversation with a stranger. I've heard it before. I still smile as I turn my head toward the man beside me. "I wouldn't know. I'm just passing through, and I haven't had the pie yet."
That look is enough to let me take his measure—I've got some experience in this situation. Mid-twenties, brown hair, eyes the color of hard-packed median dirt. He's cute enough to know it and be cocky, but not cute enough to be arrogant about it
. There's a difference. I like it.
His smile travels half the distance to a smirk as he asks, "Well, then, how would you feel about letting a stranger buy you a piece of pie?"
"Only if he's willing to stop being a stranger." I offer my hand. "Rose."
He takes it, shakes once, and lets go. "Jamie. So you're not from around here?"
"Nope. I just rolled in from Michigan, and I'll be heading out as soon as I find a car that's going my way." This is another familiar script; I could recite it in my sleep. "I'm taking some time to see the country, you know?"
"Yeah. That's cool." He pauses while he flags down the waitress and orders two slices of pie, one peach, one apple, both ala mode. She heads for the kitchen, and he looks to me, asking, "So is there any chance you have local friends? Relatives? Anything?"
"Sorry, but no. Why do you ask?"
"Oh—I'm in town with the rest of my crew, and this is the part where we all fan out to talk to the locals about, you know, local legends, hauntings, that sort of thing. We're from the University of Ohio." He leans closer, lowers his voice, and says, conspiratorially, "We're here to catch a ghost."
For a moment, I just stare at him. He stares back. And then, in unison, we start laughing.
Oh, this is gonna be too good to miss.
***
Jamie wasn't kidding; he's here to catch a ghost, along with four other students from the University of Ohio. Two are physics majors; one is in folklore; one, for no apparent reason, is in physical education. I'm not so sure what Jamie's major is. I'm just sure that he's in charge, and that his little squad of junior Ghostbusters isn't very happy that he came back from his scouting expedition with a date.
"You do understand that this is a serious scientific expedition?" asks one of the physicists, for the sixth time. Their dialog is practically interchangeable, a long checklist of questions that all boil down to "you are an intruder, you aren't supposed to be here, get out, get out." I'd probably be unable to tell them apart if it weren't for the fact that they look nothing alike, and one of them is a guy. Instead, I take a perverse pleasure in refusing to remember their names.
Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan Page 16
