Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan

by Seanan McGuire

  Hell if I know how it works. Call it the dead girl equivalent of a Christmas miracle, and just leave it alone. Halloween has its share of the bad—does it ever—but I try not to question the good things. They're rare enough as it is.

  The coughing has mostly stopped, and the dead are starting to congregate, all assembling around the hayrick like the world's weirdest nudist convention. That's another thing. There are at least fifteen of us here, and there's not a stitch of clothing in evidence. I guess we come into the world naked every time.

  That thought strikes me as funny, and I'm laughing again when a farmer clad in jeans and a heavy flannel shirt comes striding through the pumpkin patch, a pile of shirts held to his chest. Two lanky teenagers are struggling to keep up with him, and behind them, a woman and two smaller children pick their way through the harvest. All of them are carrying clothes, and with that realization, my re-awakened nerves start informing me, urgently, that it's colder than a witch's tit out here, and that when you're alive, frostbite hurts.

  This happens every year. It's part of the normal Halloween experience, one of the tricks that comes with all the treating, and it helps me tell the new dead from the long dead. The new dead are the ones who go running to the farmer and his family, running on legs that barely remember what legs are meant to do, and snatch the clothing from his arms. They're babbling by the time I, and the other long dead, finish strolling over. They all want news—what's the date, what's the year, do you know my sister, my husband, my mother? Do you know me, do you know how I died, am I really dead? Was it all just a dream?

  It wasn't a dream. The clothes the farmer carries are the most threadbare, the least warm, and that, too, is a part of the normal Halloween experience. I walk past him with a nod, and stop when I reach the youngest of the children, crouching down as I ask, "Can I have something to wear, please?"

  The missing teeth in her smile makes her look a little like a jack-o-lantern herself as she hands me the jeans, underpants, and flannel shirt that is the proper reward for that question. Her siblings are doing the same all around me, while her father stands at the center of his swarm of new and needy risen dead.

  "Welcome back, Rose," says her mother, between handing out pairs of socks and button-down shirts to the dead.

  "Thanks, Violet." The jeans are snug against my skin, blue denim benediction welcoming me back into the world. "Happy Halloween."

  The pumpkin patch yields up its harvest of the dead under the watchful eye of the rising sun. So many of them are new this year; so many of them don't understand, just yet, what's at stake. They'll learn. Because that, too, is a part of Halloween.

  ***

  The Barrowmans are good people. I've been coming to their farm every Halloween for forty years, part of their annual harvest of the dead. They're old ambulomancer blood, older than the routewitches, even, and they regard our presence as a blessing on their farm. That's a good thing for us, because it encourages them to treat us well. The clothes are a requirement, as is the breakfast spread out on picnic tables erected in the old cattle barn, but there's nothing that says they have to dress us warmly or feed us well. The platters of pancakes, casserole dishes of scrambled eggs, and sizzling plates of bacon all serve to remind me how well they treat us...and how much is at stake. How much is always at stake, when the jack-o-lanterns burn away the dark, and the dead go walking with the living.

  Violet takes a seat next to me on the bench, her youngest sticking close to her like a solid shadow. "How's the road been treating you?" she asks, and piles more bacon on my plate.

  I don't object. This is the one day of the year when I can eat what I want, without worrying about ritual or rules. "I can't complain," I reply—the right answer, even if it's not entirely the truth. I could complain all day long, but there isn't time for that. Instead, I turn a smile on the little girl, waving a strip of bacon in what I hope is an amiable manner. "Hi, Holly. Aren't you getting big? How old are you now, four?"

  The little girl holds up five fingers, expression solemn.

  "Wow, five? Really?" I feign astonishment...but it isn't entirely a false. Five, already? How time does fly when you're dead and having fun.

  "You going to fight this year, Rose?" asks Violet, as she tousles Holly's hair with one hand. "Looks like a good batch this time, but you could take half of them."

  "No." My answer is simple, because that's all it's ever needed to be. Will I fight, here, on Halloween, when the dead wear flesh and the living seek to steal it? No. Not this year, not next year, not ever. "I'm running."

  "You always run."

  "That's true. I always get away."

  "What happens when you don't?" Violet's tone is neither approving nor condemning; it's just curious, and that's the worst part of all. She grew up on this farm—I watched her grow up here, jumping forward year after year, like a strange sort of time-delay picture. Baby, little girl, teenager with a face like heartbreak waiting to happen, wife, mother. I remember the Halloween after she buried her own mother, the first—and only—time that Willow Barrowman woke with the dead out in the field. Her husband is a johnny-come-lately who took her name when he took her family's calling, but Violet's a Barrowman to the bone, and she knows what she's asking me.

  "The year I don't get away is the year I die the death you don't come back from." I shrug, and pull a plate of pancakes closer to me. Around the barn, the chatter of the new dead is quieting, dying down to a murmur as the long dead tell them what's really going on. What price we have to pay for a day of wearing farm hand-me-downs and eating pancakes in a barn.

  Trucks are driving up the gravel driveway, their tires grinding like the teeth of some unspeakable beast. Halloween is upon us. The treats have been delivered. Now comes the time for the biggest trick of them all.

  ***

  My initial count was off by two, stragglers who took their time stumbling out of the hayrick. Seventeen living dead people stand in a ragged line behind the Barrowmans' barn. Of the six long dead, I'm the youngest; of the eleven new dead, one died only a week ago, a fresh-faced teenage football star who still doesn't understand that this is something more important than the games his funeral forced him to miss. Violet is around the front, wrangling the hunters, keeping them from crossing the line before the time is right. Matthew Barrowman is attending to us dead folk, his teenage sons behind him, like we're the ones they need protecting from.

  Silly boys. We're not the ones with the guns.

  "Some of you know how this goes, so I ask for your patience while I explain. Everyone has to have the same chances when the candle's lit." He casts an apologetic glance my way. Violet must have told him that I'm the only one of the long dead appearing here who's never chosen to stand and fight. "For the rest of you...this is Halloween. You've probably noticed that you're all breathing."

  Laughter from the crowd. One of the new dead shouts, "Best trick or treat prize I've ever gotten!"

  "We'll see if you still feel that way in a minute," says Matthew. His tone is grim—grim enough to stop the laughter. "Around the front of the barn are twenty men and women with guns in their hands. They'll be coming around the barn soon, and they're not here to shake hands and say hello. They want to kill you again, and if you die here, today, on Halloween, you don't come back. Not here, not in the twilight, not anywhere."

  "But...but why?" gasps a new dead woman with her glossy black hair in pretty funeral parlor curls. She has stars tattooed down her neck, practically begging people to make wishes on her skin. "What did we do to them?"

  "We're alive," says one of the long dead. When we're in the twilight, he's a phantom rider, and the only thing fast enough to catch him is the wind. Here and now, he's flesh and bone, just like everybody else. "That's enough."

  The new dead gape at him, contestants in a game they never volunteered to play. We're all contestants here. It's just that some of us have been playing long enough to learn the rules. "Those twenty people are either dead or dying," someone says—I sa
y. Dammit, when did I become the one who's always taking pity? "Probably half of them came back on this field once before. The other half, they've got something broken in them, they've heard the bean sidhe's song, and they're trying to stick to skin a little longer. So they signed up for the Halloween game."

  From the way Matthew looks at me, I can't tell whether he's amused or annoyed by my interjection. "If they kill you tonight, they win a year of life," he says, stepping back into the narration, smooth as anything. "One year, from candle to candle. If you can keep away until the candle goes out, you'll go back to the ghostroads, and nobody will be able to touch you until next Halloween."

  "Why us?" asks the star-necked woman. She sounds distraught, like nothing about this makes any sense at all. Smart lady. "I didn't do anything!"

  "Because you're road ghosts," says Matthew, not unkindly. He's trying to be gentle with them, trying to get them ready to run. The hunters are here for a hunt; they tell themselves that shooting a man who runs is somehow more honorable than shooting one who stands his ground. Maybe they're right. How the hell would I know? I've never felt the need to shoot anyone. "This is how you earn the right to stay on the road, instead of moving on."

  Heaven, Hell, or Halloween: those are the choices, when you get right down to it. Move on to whatever waits for you where the road runs out, or show up in this field once a year—this field, or another like it, tended by a family like the Barrowmans, who know their duty, and do it, year after unending year—and run for the right to stay the thing that you are. Every road has tolls. Willow Barrowman knew that as well as anybody. That's why she only lingered for one Halloween before she moved on to the unknown.

  "Tell them about the other option," says a voice, and it's mine again. I keep speaking up when I have no business speaking.

  It's really been one hell of a year.

  "There are weapons hidden around the farm," says Matthew. "No guns, but...other things. If you find them, you can choose to stand and fight the hunters. Kill one, and you get a year among the living."

  "What's the catch?" asks our new dead football star, with a look on his face that says this is just too good to be true. "I kill some homicidal asshole and I get my life back?"

  "If you kill on Halloween, you give up your place on the ghostroads," says Matthew, earnestly. "You'll get a year, and then you'll have to come back here, and kill again, or else you'll end."

  "We'll die?" asks the girl with the stars on her skin.

  "No," says Matthew, "you'll end. Dying implies that you'll go on to something, back to the ghostroads or on to the other side, and that won't happen for you. Not if you take a life on Halloween. You'll just end."

  She looks at him, big doe-eyes wide and solemn, and nods like she understands. I have to fight the sudden urge to slap the stars off her skin. "You don't get your life back if you do this," I say, sharply. Maybe a little too sharply. Every head turns in my direction, and only the long dead look like they know what I'm trying to say. "Your family buried you. Or they cremated you, or they donated your body to science, but whatever. You've been recycled, you're gone. If you fight, if you do this, you're buying your way back into the world of the living, but you're not buying your way back into your life. That's over."

  "Rose always runs," says the phantom rider, a small smirk on his lips. Like it's something shameful. Like I should play Russian roulette with, for lack of a better word, my soul.

  "Shove it up your ass, Alan," I snap.

  Around the front of the barn, the hunters are cheering. One of the Barrowman kids—one of the ones in the middle, the ones that change so fast that I can't keep them straight anymore—comes quick-stepping around the corner, a candle in one hand, the fingers of the other hand curled protectively around the flame. "Mama says it's time," he says, breathlessly, as he hurries to his father's side.

  "That's the bell, folks," says Matthew, and takes the candle from his son's hand (his son, who should have died in his cradle, three days old and already lost, but death wouldn't have him; that's what families like the Barrowmans get out of this arrangement, long life and health and every death a peaceful one). "Good luck out there."

  I don't stick around to see him place the candle in the mouth of the waiting jack-o-lantern. I'm already turning, borrowed shoes pinching at my feet, and diving into the corn like a mermaid fleeing back into the sea. Halloween is here again, and all I have to do to stay dead is make it through the night alive.

  ***

  My first Halloween, I was disoriented and upset as only the truly new dead can be. I ran because I was too scared to do anything else, and I escaped thanks to nothing more admirable than luck. It was luck that made me trip over the buried well cover, and fear that made me crawl inside the well, where none of the hunters thought to look for me. If I stay on the ghostroads for another hundred years, I'll never forget the sound of my heart slamming against my ribs on that first terrifying Halloween night. Sometimes I think I still have the bruises.

  Two sets of footsteps fall in beside mine, and I know almost before I look who it's going to be: the football player and the star-necked girl, both of them doing their best to keep up. He's doing it easily, she's stumbling, but they're giving it the old college try. "What are you doing?" I hiss.

  "Please," whispers the star-necked girl, gasping a little, already running out of wind. "Please, don't leave me."

  Halloween is no time to feel sympathy; it's a time to run, and to hide, and to shove anyone who gets in your way into the line of fire, because at the end of the night, only so many of you are going to walk away. Every hunter who makes a kill is one more hunter who isn't gunning for me. There's no Halloween bonus for bringing in the greatest haul. So there's no good reason for me to slow down, to step into the shadow of a tall row of corn, and ask, "What are your names?" No reason at all. I do it anyway.

  "S-Salem," says the star-necked girl, hair not quite so perfect anymore, pulse jumping in her pale-skinned throat.

  "Jimmy," says the football star. He smiles at me, confident and cocky, and I realize he thinks I stopped because of him, because he's always been the kind of boy who's catnip for the kind of girl I used to be. He doesn't understand how much too young for me he is. "It's Rose, right? You've done this before?"

  For more years than your parents have been alive, I think, and nod, and say, "Yeah, once or twice. I'm running, and I'm hiding. If you've got other ideas, this is where you get the hell out of my way."

  "So you must know where they hide the weapons, right?" Jimmy's smile gets wider, little boy playing at being a predator. "We could win this thing."

  "There's no winner on Halloween," I snap. "You want to 'win this thing,' you can go and do it without me. If you want to keep yourself safe, come with me. If not, stay here, and find your own damn weapons." I turn and start walking again, building up to a slow jog. We're in the corn. That's a start. I hear footsteps behind me, both Salem and Jimmy following, and speed up a little. They'll keep up, or they won't. Either way, I don't intend to die tonight.

  I come back to the Barrowman farm year after year because it's familiar—more so to me than to any of the hunters, unless old Oscar's out there. He ran this ground as quarry before he became a killer, almost by accident, cornered and striking back because he didn't know what else he was supposed to do. Every year, I wake up in the pumpkin patch, sometimes in the hayrick, sometimes on the ground. Every year, they take us to the barn, clothe us, feed us, and set us to run like rabbits through the fields. They change things every year, because that, too, is a part of the rules...but there's only so much you can change, when geography and climate combine to limit your options. The orchards will always be in the same place; the marsh is sometimes frozen and sometimes not, but it's always on the other side of the irrigation ditch. These are the things that help. These are the things that keep me alive, year after year after year.

  Once I'm in the corn, I can get to the corn maze. Not the interior, where the shape of the harvest labyrinth
changes every year, but the channel around the back that the Barrowmans use for maintenance. The short-cut. From there, it's a straight shot to the apple orchard, and to the old barn beyond, where there are places a canny ghost could hide for a hundred years. I don't need that kind of time. I just need a single Halloween. Signaling Salem and Jimmy to stay quiet, I point right, and break back into a run.

  ***

  Gunshots in the distance mark the progress of the hunters. They aren't constant—not yet. This early in the game, only the truly desperate will be seriously working to make their kills. Everyone else will be enjoying the day, looking for their prey amongst the panicked throng of the dead. And there are always a few who won't hunt the unarmed, men and women who wait for the dead to arm themselves before closing in. Never mind that they have guns, and the best we have is old farm tools and rusty knives. It's the principle that matters to them, not the actual potential to be defeated. They want to be hunters, not killers.

  Fuck them and their fragile justifications. If it were up to me, no one would go armed at all. You'd have to beat your victims to death with your fists, feel their blood on your fingers, feel their teeth breaking your skin, and truly understand that your life was coming at the expense of someone's eternity. So it's probably a good thing for everyone that I'm not the one in charge.

  We run through the corn in silence, Jimmy hanging back to pace me, Salem pushing herself harder than she ever did in life. As long as those gunshots stay distant, I'm not worried. It's a rare year that anyone comes out this far, this fast. The mouth of the rear channel is almost a surprise, looming out of the gray-and-green stalks like a mirage. Grabbing Salem by the elbow, I turn, and keep on running. She yelps, managing not to stumble as I haul her along.

  "So where are we going?" asks Jimmy, pulling up alongside me again. He's not even breathing hard.

  "Out of the corn," I snap, using as little air as possible. God, I wish this shit counted. With as much time as I've spent incarnate and running for my life in the last year, you'd think I'd be able to work my way into slightly better shape. "Apple orchard. Old barn." And the marsh behind it, but I don't want to tell him that, not yet. There's too much of a chance that he'll be a liability, and I'll need a route he doesn't know about.