Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan

by Seanan McGuire

  "That's true. You may not have a year like this." I'm being nasty—Bethany doesn't look that old—but it's difficult to really care. This isn't how I planned to spend my evening. "So you'd better keep up."

  "Bitch," Bethany mutters, picking up her pace a little more in order to draw a step ahead of me.

  "Guess it runs in the family," I say, and keep on walking.

  ***

  The cornfield extends for what feels like miles. We eventually come out on a wide dirt semi-road beaten into the corn, worn by years of farmers' footsteps as they checked their harvests. I know the road as soon as I step onto it, feel the electric tingle in the soles of my feet; I've never been here before, and I've been here dozens and dozens of times, because this is the first spoke on the crossroad wheel. If it isn't the first road, it's the road that will lead us to the first road. The first road will lead to the second road—they have to cross, after all—and then Bethany can make her bargain. Whatever that bargain might be.

  Bethany steps onto the road behind me, and stops, letting out a deep sigh of relief. "Oh, thank God. This is the right road."

  "This is part of the right road. Don't get too excited."

  She shoots me a glare that reminds me that of the two of us, I'm the one who looks like a teenager, but she's the one who actually is a teenager. "Why are you like that?"

  "Like what?"

  "A spoiler. Spoiling things. This is the right road. Why won't you just let it be the right road?"

  "Because maybe it's the wrong road. Maybe it's the road that leads to the road that leads to the right road, which doesn't mean this is the right road. Maybe I'm walking through a cornfield in the middle of the night with the niece who tried to hand me to my personal devil, and maybe that's not the sort of thing that puts me in a good mood. Maybe being dead for the better part of a century has made me a realist. Or maybe I just don't like you. Did you consider that?" I look steadfastly ahead, and keep on walking. "Next time, try asking one of the other routewitches."

  "I did. They all turned me down." There's a wistful edge to Bethany's voice that makes me stop and turn to look at her. "They said...they said I got what I deserved. That I shouldn't have been messing around with things I didn't understand. That I shouldn't have been messing around with you."

  "Routewitches and road ghosts have an arrangement. You don't mess with us, we don't mess with you." I start walking again. Bethany follows. "Most routewitches wind up road ghosts when they die. I guess they view treating us with respect as an investment in their own afterlife."

  "Were you a routewitch?"

  The question floors me for a moment. I think about it as I walk, and finally answer, "I think I might have been. Maybe. But I never had the opportunity to travel, and it's supposed to be travel that makes a routewitch understand what the roads are saying." I'd wanted to travel. Gary and I used to talk about it all the time. That didn't mean it ever happened, and then I was dead, and travel became a fact of--for lack of a better word—life.

  "You could ask for that. At the crossroad."

  "Ask for what?"

  "The chance to be a routewitch."

  I wheel around, walking backward as I demand, "You mean the chance to be alive again? Is that it? I could go to the crossroad and ask whatever...whatever fucked-up horror movie version of a fairy godmother it is that makes bargains there to bring me back from the dead?" I can tell from her face that she means exactly that. She's trying to make me want to go to the crossroad, like that will somehow transform this from a chore into the world's most bizarre family outing. "I should leave you. I should leave you right here and let you find your way without me."

  Bethany's eyes widen in alarm. "Don't do that! I just...I just thought..."

  "You thought I'd want to be alive again. Right. See, there was a time when I wanted to be alive again. There was a time when I would have sold my soul for the chance to be alive again. But that time passed. My world got old and moved on, and I kept on being sixteen years old. The phantom prom date. The girl who never grew up. My parents died. My brothers got married. My classmates graduated and got lives, and I was still sixteen, and I was still on the road. If you'd explained the crossroad to me when I was a year, five years, even ten years dead, I would have jumped at the chance to get my world back. My world isn't there anymore. It's never going to be there again. So asking me if I want to be alive again isn't just insulting. Isn't just superficial. It's mean. Now shut the fuck up and just keep walking."

  "I'm sorry," Bethany whispers.

  "Yeah. So am I."

  The cornfields and the smell of the green surround us on all sides. And we just keep on walking.

  ***

  The cornfield road gives way to a slightly larger road. This one comes with bonus haystacks, and the unending magnetic pull of the crossroad somewhere in the distance ahead. It knows we're coming. It's waiting for us. I just hope it understands that only one of us is actually coming to deal.

  Bethany's having trouble keeping up. The walk is taking its toll on her, but I don't dare slow down. There's only so much distance between here and midnight at the crossroad, and if we miss the deadline...Bethany's going to have a lot more nights of achy joints and trouble breathing ahead of her. She's stupid. She's stupid, and short-sighted, and stubborn, and most of all, she's young. She's the kind of young I never had the chance to be. And yet a part of me understands her. She got into this mess because she wanted to get out of Buckley so badly she was willing to ransom her soul in order to do it. There was a time when I wanted out of Buckley just as bad. Admittedly, I was going to do it by marrying Gary and moving someplace big and exotic, like Ann Arbor, but hell. Who understands kids these days?

  "Are we almost there?" she asks, wheezing.

  "Maybe. Probably not. I have no idea. It's a beautiful night. Enjoy it."

  "Easy for you to say. You're never going to get old."

  "I'm also never going to get married, have children, or go to Europe. Think of this as a preview."

  "Oh, wow. Great pep talk, Aunt Rose."

  "Cheering you up isn't my job. Getting you there is. So keep on walking."

  Bethany mutters and keeps on walking. That's all I want at this point. The road is humming more and more strongly under my feet, and the distant taste of copper is beginning to cling to the back of my throat. We're getting closer. If we just keep moving, we've got a good chance of making it.

  The road curves, bending back into the cornfield. Then it splits, the wider, smoother avenue continuing in one direction, while a narrow dirt trail branches off to the right. The ground is pitted and broken, making the first dirt road we walked down seem like a boulevard. Of course, that's the way we have to go. I actually slow down a little to let Bethany catch up. The increasing pull of the crossroad tells me that this is probably the first road—a conviction that only grows when I set foot on it. If the previous two roads were electric, this is like grabbing hold of a live wire. Bethany feels it, too, even more than I do. She gasps when she steps onto the broken ground. Then she starts walking faster, rapidly outpacing me. I let her. This is her journey, not mine.

  She walks faster and faster, the corn closing around us like a series of green and growing curtains. I feel the second road almost before I can see it up ahead of us, a clean slash through the cornfield. This must be why the Queen wanted me taken from a place with corn. The spot where I left the daylight would determine where I'd tumble back into it, and if she knew the crossroad was going to be in a cornfield, doing it this way saved us a lot of time.

  "We're here!" Bethany almost shouts, and breaks into a run, old woman racing through the corn. I'm half-afraid she's going to fall and break her neck. I still don't try to stop her. The crossroad has her now. If she dies in the process of getting to her goal, my part of the deal is still done.

  Then Bethany steps from one road onto the other, standing at the point where the two roads cross. Too late to turn back now. She's committed.

  ***

>   "I am come to the crossroad with empty hands and a hopeful heart," chants Bethany, with the faintly desperate sing-song of a schoolgirl reciting a lesson she hasn't really learned. "I am come to the crossroad to bargain with all I have and all I am. I am come to the crossroad with nothing to refuse. Please, please, please, hear me, heed me, and give me the chance to pay for what I need."

  Silence falls around her, blocking out all sound from the crossroad. I don't see anyone come to join her, but there is a sudden increase in the shadows clinging to the corn. Whatever happens between Bethany and the crossroad is going to be a private thing. No voyeurs allowed, living or dead.

  Someone steps up next to me. I didn't hear him coming; I don't think he was there to hear. He feels like an absence in the cornfield next to me, a space that happens to be shaped like a man. A man who, when I look at him from the corner of my eye, could have been one of the younger teachers at my high school, but who, when I look at him directly, isn't there to see. I keep my eyes turned resolutely forward, watching Bethany talking to the open air.

  "Hello, Rose," says the man. His voice is plummy and warm, and I forget what it sounds like almost as quickly as I hear it. "It's been a while."

  "True," I say. "I haven't had cause to come."

  "Everyone has cause to come."

  "That's a matter of opinion."

  "Oh, Rose, Rose, Rose. You went to the routewitches. You could have come to us."

  "To help me against Bobby Cross? Isn't it your fault he's on the loose to begin with?"

  There's a momentary silence, made deeper by the absolute still of the cornfield around us. Finally, chidingly, he says, "That isn't fair. He asked, we gave. That's the nature of commerce."

  "Uh-huh."

  "We would have been glad to grant you aid."

  "And charge me what, exactly?" Bethany is still waving her hands at the air, a look of naked desperation on her face. Whatever they're asking, whatever she's offering, I can't shake the feeling that she's fighting for her life right in front of me. This is all her fault. I shouldn't feel sorry for her. But I do. I guess Marshall girls just have a way of getting themselves into trouble.

  "Ah. Now that's the question."

  "Kinda figured." I shake my head, the man-shaped hole in the world flickering around the edges every time he comes almost into view. "I know it's your job to sell. I'm not buying."

  "That will change," he says, and he's gone, taking the feeling of gnawing, alien absence with him.

  "Hope not," I reply, and stand alone in the silence, waiting for Bethany to finish making her deal with the crossroad, and whatever angel, demon, or worse waits there for people like us. If I'm lucky, and the ghostroads are kind, I'll never have a reason to find out which one it is.

  ***

  Midnight comes and midnight goes; that's what midnight does. Bethany stops gesturing, her hands falling to her sides as she slumps, defeated. She nods, just once. Sound returns to the cornfield, crickets chirping, an owl hooting in the middle distance, a train whistle sounding somewhere further out. The crossroad time is ending. I can even, for just a moment, hear Bethany breathing.

  And then she falls, face down on that old dirt road, and doesn't move.

  "Bethany?" I ask, just once, before I start running toward the crossroad. "Bethany, are you—" But she's not okay, she's not, she can't be okay, because as I run, I feel my solidity drop away, and her coat, powerless now, slips through me and drifts to the ground. Only the living can grant life to the dead. If Bethany's coat has stopped working, that means...

  "Behind you, Aunt Rose." Her voice is young as springtime, young as a bell ringing on the first day of the school year. I stop running, eyes still on the body she's discarded like I discarded my coat, and I turn, and I look into the eyes of my no-longer-living niece.

  Bethany is herself again, all teenage cockiness, ribbons in her hair now natural, and not decades out of place. She smiles a little, shame and cockiness and joy all mixed together in her expression, and says, "They couldn't give me back my life, so they gave me back my death, instead."

  She had life, and she threw it away. A shorter life than she might have had, sure, but it was still life, and it was still hers. I want to shake her. I want to slap her. Now that she's on my side of the ghostroads, I could do it. Instead, I swallow, and ask her, "Why?"

  "Because it was good enough for you."

  I never said that, I never said that, but if that's what she chose to hear, it's too late now. For either of us. "What are you?"

  Now she looks uncomfortable, if only for a moment. "Crossroad guardian," she says.

  "What? You'll be the one making bargains?"

  "No. I'll be the one making sure that only the right people get here to make them."

  "Sounds like a cushy job."

  "It's better than nothing."

  No, Bethany, no; life was better than nothing. "If you say so." I look around the dark cornfield; listen to the train whistle blowing in the distance. "I should go."

  She looks relieved as she nods. "Yes, you probably should. Midnight's over, and you didn't come to make a deal."

  "Be sure you send someone to tell the Queen that I did my job."

  "She already knows," Bethany says, and smiles, just a little, an expression of joy poisoned with grief. "She knows whenever a routewitch dies."

  The words hang between us for a moment, heavier than they should be. I take a step back. "Great," I say. "Enjoy your afterlife, Bethany."

  "Be careful, Aunt Rose," she replies.

  I drop into the twilight and she's gone, taking the crossroad and the cornfield and the train whistle with her. All that remains is the road, stretching out forever, with a thousand crossings and dangers waiting for an unwary haunt. This was the last favor I'm going to do for her; Bethany will have to find the dangers on her own.

  I hope she learns faster than I did.

  Bad Moon Rising

  A Sparrow Hill Road story

  by

  Seanan McGuire

  Hope you got your things together

  Hope you are quite prepared to die

  Looks like we're in for nasty weather

  One eye is taken for an eye

  Don't go 'round tonight

  For it's bound to take your life

  There's a bad moon on the rise

  — "Bad Moon Rising," John Fogerty.

  The dead keep their own holidays.

  I've said that before, and I'll probably say it again, because it's hard to really make the point to the living. We walk in a world of shared culture before we die, Christmas trees in every department store, chocolate eggs at every soda counter. Turkeys on the tables, fireworks in the sky, and even if those aren't your holidays, even if your holidays are less mainstreamed in the modern world, they're still everywhere. Every kid recognizes a Christmas stocking, or a Thanksgiving pie. How many can say the same about Saint Celia's bloody handprint, or the torn toll stub of Danny, God of Highways?

  Would you know Persephone's Cross if someone decided to etch it on your skin, bitter and bleeding as a pomegranate kiss? I didn't, and odds are that I've been dead a lot longer than you have.

  But all this is by way of making a point, and the point is that there's no unified calendar in the twilight, no standard set of symbols to mark the march of days and seasons. We make our own calendars, and we live by them according to our own laws. The Feast of Saint Celia is celebrated on a hundred different days, and every celebrant will tell you that theirs is the only one that's right and proper. They're all right, and they're all wrong. Saint Celia herself will tell you that, if you ever meet her—if you ever realize who she is. Some of us can't even agree on the days of the week.

  And yet all of us agree, without argument, on one thing. All of us agree on Halloween.

  When we feel the veil growing thin and hear the clamor of the living hanging in the twilight air, some of us sink deeper, digging as close to the midnight as they can get while still remembering their na
mes. Others rise to the surface, scum seeking the top, and wait for the clock to strike on the one holiday shared by all the dead, the one truth that we can all believe in.

  Can I get a Hallelujah?

  ***

  It's Halloween morning, 2010. I've been dead for more than sixty years, little more than a memory to fuel the cautionary tales of grandparents telling their teenage descendants to drive carefully and always wear their seatbelts. That, and the story of the Girl in the Diner. There are worse forms of immortality, I suppose. The sun rises sweet and cautious over the fields of pumpkins and harvest corn, and all the world smells of bonfires, falling leaves, and secrets.

  It's in the middle of all this, on a small farm in Huntsville, Alabama, that my eyes flutter slowly open, and I take my first breath of good, sweet, autumn air. I start to cough almost immediately, falling off the back of the hayrick as I try to make my lungs stop burning. Hitting the ground makes my butt hurt almost as much as my lungs do, which is a distraction, if nothing else. I stagger to my feet, using the edge of the hayrick to brace myself upright. There are other dead folks rising in the hay, most of them coughing as hard or harder than I am, and still more rising up from the ground all around us, using fat orange pumpkins to pull themselves to their feet.

  Someone in the hayrick—one of the newer dead, one whose lungs aren't quite as clean as mine—starts to laugh. It's a delighted sound, little kid at Christmas, teenager turned loose at their very first parent-free county fair. And why shouldn't that unseen not-quite-ghost be laughing? We're back, with no rules or restrictions on our passage. For just one beautiful day and one twice as beautiful night, we're back.

  I join in the laughter, pausing only to cough a few times while my lungs finish adjusting to the air around me. When I'm a hitcher, I can borrow a coat and start breathing no problem. I can even smoke. The magic that somehow lets me take substance from the living also grants me the ability to breathe their air. If the Martians came tomorrow, I could follow them home as long as I had a space suit. Only now it's Halloween, and the only substance I'm borrowing is my own.