Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day

by Seanan McGuire

  But those people, those people who lived . . . they wouldn’t have been us. We needed Kentucky. It was in our blood and in our bones. Patty had sadness in her bones too, and she needed more than we knew how to give. When the world got to be too much, she left, and I don’t see how a change of scene could have saved her. New York didn’t save her. We needed Mill Hollow like Mill Hollow needed us, and every member of my family is buried there, going back to the land that loved us.

  “You know things will have changed since you left,” says Brenda. Her voice is soft, but when I glance her way, her eyes are fixed on the horizon, as cold and inhuman as the rippling corn that calls her. “It’s still your home, but it won’t be the same.”

  “That’s all right,” I say. “I’m not the same either.” When I left I was Jenna who runs, Jenna who buried her sister in the dark Kentucky soil, Jenna who knew hunger and weariness and fear, but who had never known how bad those things could get, even as she saw the sadness growing in her sister’s heart. That sadness swallowed Patty like a snake swallows a mouse, and that Jenna fled Kentucky on incorporeal feet, looking for a place where she’d be safe. She never quite managed to find it, and I buried her in the streets of New York, where I learned to be someone new. Someone stronger. Someone who doesn’t need to run.

  Brenda nods, and we drive in silence for a while, the fields stretching out around us, and the black smudges of the mountains drawing themselves in charcoal and dream across the sky.

  Eventually, I sleep. Even dead, that’s something I can’t help. And maybe it’s how close we’re coming to Kentucky—how close I am to home—but for the first time in years, my dreams are clear as crystal and so close that it feels like I can touch them. I dream about my apartment, about my cats, warm and soft and slipping away in comfort. I dream about Delia and Sophie sitting at Delia’s kitchen table, the shy rat witch holding a mug of tea, jewel-bright eyes twinkling through the tangles of her hair. Most of all, I dream of Patty walking just ahead of me, hands outstretched, beckoning me home.

  When I wake, the car is parked on the soft shoulder of the road, and everything through the windshield is green, green spreading out as far as the eye can see. The sky is dark, but the green shows through. That shouldn’t be possible—and as I form the thought, I realize I’m still insubstantial from sleep, still wrapped in my winding shroud. The green is bleeding into the black-and-white world where the dead exist when we don’t walk among the living.

  Opening the car door would require me to become solid. Passing through it requires nothing at all, and so I drift out into the night, where the air smells of loam and growing things, and the wind whistles softly across that star-studded sky.

  Drifting through the corn is odd. It feels like it grabs and snatches at my substance, adding resistance where there should be none. I press onward, listening for signs that I’m not alone. I’m dead. I’ve been dead for decades. I shouldn’t be unnerved by this sort of thing anymore. The part of me in charge of making such decisions is willing to acknowledge the logic of that thought, but it’s not willing to stop drawing the skin on my arms into goosebumps, or stop making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I don’t have a body anymore. Having physiological responses seems unfair.

  Then I drift between the rows, and there’s Brenda, a black-and-white sketch of a woman sitting cross-legged in the green, her guitar in her lap, her fingers making silent chords. She looks up and smiles.

  “Good,” she says. “I was wondering when you were going to wake up.”

  I drift forward, until the last of the cornstalks leaves my body, and let my feet drop to the earth, weighted down by my sudden solidity. The sky takes on the faintest edge of midnight purple; Brenda becomes more difficult to see, washed out by the starlight, still virtually monochrome. The corn is the biggest surprise. The green vanishes, becoming gray in the moonlight, suddenly awash in shadows. The smell of it remains all around us.

  “Where are we?”

  “About ten miles from Mill Hollow. I wanted you to be awake when we crossed the county line. I’ve never driven a ghost all the way home before, and there’s no telling what sort of thing could happen when we get there.”

  “Really?”

  Brenda shrugs, fingers still moving on her guitar. “Stranger things have happened.” The corn rustles. Stranger things are happening right now.

  I glance around. “Whose field is this?”

  “All cornfields belong to themselves. Farmers are just their temporary caretakers, until the time comes for the harvest to turn everything around.” Brenda looks down at her guitar, at her fingers, like she’s never seen them before. “I haven’t been in a proper field since Bill died. I hadn’t realized how much of myself I’d left behind, in silk and stalk and kernel.”

  “You’re sort of freaking me out here.”

  Brenda’s laugh is a bell ringing in a church at midnight. “Aren’t you the dead one, while I’m the widow in the weeds? You’re supposed to be the monster in the back of the closet, not me.”

  “When I was a little girl, we knew all about witches, and that you couldn’t keep them out of your house if they wanted to come in and steal you away,” I say. “We didn’t believe in them so much, but it was always fun to pretend. Fear’s nice, when it’s on purpose. Ghosts, though. We knew ghosts couldn’t hurt us if we covered the mirrors when somebody’d gone, and went to visit our dead in the graveyard proper every Easter Sunday.”

  “Were you a church family?”

  “Not exactly.” There was always so much to be done, with the four of us on our little farm, and me being the sort of kid who never found a mud puddle she didn’t want to be neck-deep in. If there’d been sons, maybe. It was more seemly to work boys to the bone. Patty and I did our share of chores, but we still had time to play and gossip and sit with our parents, Patty reading, me conducting elaborate imaginary scenarios with my dolls. “We made it on the big days, like Christmas, but for the most part, there wasn’t time for that sort of thing.”

  “I see.” Brenda keeps looking at her guitar. “Bill and I, we were churchgoers, even with both of us being corn witches. A Jack and a Jenny and our pastor was never any the wiser. I don’t think Father Paul would have minded, really. He was as tied to the land as any of us, just in a different way. We raised three children in that parish. Buried one. And then I buried Bill, and my children were grown, and it was time to leave the corn behind.”

  “Why are you . . .”

  “I’m tired, kiddo. I’m older than you, remember? I’m tired, and I haven’t gone into the corn for a long time, and I thought this would make me stronger, but all it’s done is make me realize how much I want to rest.” She finally looks at me. Her eyes are bleak. “I’m tired.”

  There’s earning and there’s earned; there’s working for a thing because you feel like you have to pay your dues, and then there’s realizing the work itself pays the bill. I offer her my hands before I can think better of it, and when she lets go of her guitar and takes them, I pull her to her feet, my skin touching hers.

  Her eyes widen as she realizes what I’ve done, but it’s too late. I can feel the year I’ve taken settling over me, thickening my bones, freckling my skin, extending my hair a few inches past my shoulders. I’m not twenty-six and change anymore. I’m twenty-seven, on the downward stretch toward thirty, and when Brenda drops my hands and starts to scold me, I don’t really hear her, because I can see it, I can see it, my dying day, shimmering in the distance like a promise, like a prayer, like my mother’s hands easing me into bed at the end of a long day.

  “Four years, eleven months, three weeks, four days,” I say, and my voice is thick with wonder and dismay, until there’s no picking the two apart.

  Brenda stops, staring at me. Finally, she asks, “Are you seeing your due date?”

  “My dying day. Yes. Yes, I can see it. I can see it.” I turn back to her, beaming bright. “I’m almost there. I keep working hard, I’ll be there before I know it.
”

  “You going to keep that year you took?” Brenda holds up her hand, studying it like she could see a difference. At my age, a year changes everything. At her age, a year is just one more page in the back half of a novel, blending seamlessly into the whole.

  “Unless you want it back.”

  “I thought you had to earn everything you took.”

  “I talked to two witches and hosted a house party, and I’m going back to the Hollow,” I say. “That’s earning enough for me. Besides, I’m going to need you at your best, and I know having time taken helps.”

  “Sometimes I wish witches left ghosts, just so there’d be some of you who understood how damn tempting you are,” says Brenda. She balls her hands into fists for a moment before she stands. It was only a year, but she’s moving more easily than she did before, smooth and confident, like she knows the ground will be there when she moves her feet. With a year gone and the preternatural thrill of its removal thrumming in her veins, she looks like queen of the corn. She looks like she could take on the world.

  I look at her, and I don’t shy away. I am not Jenna-who-runs anymore. I can’t afford to be. That means I can’t be Jenna-who-refuses, either. Taking the year strengthened both of us. I have to keep it. “I have a bit of an understanding,” I say. “You done here?”

  “No,” says Brenda. “But I’m close enough that I can come with you. I’ll be back soon enough, I think. My bones have had enough of steel and concrete. It’s time I went out into the green.”

  “Then we’re both going home,” I say, and turn and walk away. A second passes before Brenda follows, and we move together through the corn, the ghost and the witch, and I can hear Mill Hollow calling me, and oh, Patty, Patty, I am almost there.

  After all these years and all these miles, I am finally coming home.

  10: Do What I Tell You To

  It takes surprisingly little time to cover the last ten miles between me and Mill Hollow. It feels like it should take eternity, like this is the sort of grand quest that must be undertaken only with the greatest solemnity and care, not by a witch in an ancient pickup and a dead girl who feels like she’s going to be sick.

  Then we come around a curve in the road and there it is, beckoning me home:

  MILL HOLLOW, KY POPULATION 220 · ELEVATION 1,170 FEET WE’RE HAPPY THAT YOU’RE HERE

  Brenda pulls off on the shoulder of the highway, killing the engine and twisting in her seat to look at me expectantly. “Well?” she asks. “Get out of the car.”

  The hesitation is writ in every line of my body, in the stillness of my hands and my reluctance to meet her eyes. “Do I have to?”

  “Yes. We don’t know what’s going to happen when you cross the line, and I’d rather it didn’t happen in my car.”

  I sigh, but there’s nothing yielding in her: she looks at me calmly, and waits, until I reach for the door handle and let myself out, into the pitch-black night. Then I stop, steadying myself against the body of the truck. The cornfield was overwhelming: it was green and growth and hers, even if those stalks had grown in good Kentucky soil. But this . . .

  This is Mill Hollow. This is the sound of insects in the trees, the hoot of owls, the distant whisper of the creek as it runs between the roots of trees so much older than I am that they probably never noticed I was here, much less mourned when I was gone. This is home. This is where I lived; this is where I died. This is everything I ever had, and everything I gave away.

  The skin of my palm is tingling, and it’s somehow no surprise when I glance over and see that it has slipped below the surface of the truck. I’m insubstantial in this moment, a memory pretending to be a girl. I can’t breathe. It’s a good thing that I don’t need to. All I can do is stand, frozen, and let the night roll over me, washing me away.

  I am finally, finally, home.

  I step away from the truck and walk under my own power over the borderline, into Mill Hollow. I stop there, waiting for Brenda to start the truck up again and come to meet me. Nothing catches fire. Brenda finally drives those few precious feet, looking out the window, and asks, “You okay, Jenna?”

  “It’s still here,” I say. “I never really believed . . . I went away. I always thought it went away too.”

  “The past has a way of hanging on, even when we think it’s dead and buried,” says Brenda. “Looks like you’re not going to explode. Get back in the truck. We need to find Danny. Any chance you can track him from here?”

  “No,” I say, climbing back into my seat. “I knew he was here because this is the Hollow; this is mine. But that doesn’t mean I have a map of the place tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.”

  “It was worth a try,” she says philosophically. The truck rumbles around us, and we roll onward, into Mill Hollow.

  Manhattan may not be the biggest city in the world, but it feels like it is: the city that never sleeps, the “Big Apple,” all those fancy names people slap on it as they struggle to put the feeling of vastness, of restlessness, of potential into something they can hold onto. It’s possible to stand at the corner of Fourteenth and Broadway and believe that when humanity is over, this city, or the ghost of this city, will be all that remains.

  Mill Hollow . . . Mill Hollow is the other side of that coin. It’s silence. It’s stillness. It’s the feeling of eyes watching from the empty trees, knowing that frogs and owls and creeping night-things have their full attention fixed on you. If Manhattan is the light, Mill Hollow is the shadow, and it’s never been possible for one to exist without the other. Kentucky is a long way from New York, but distance, like time, is as much a convenience as anything else. This is my home. This has always been my home. The only reason I was able to stay away so long is that I was living in the other half of it, living in the light, but I never forgot the shadow. I never could.

  Brenda keeps her eyes mostly on the road as she drives, following the black, winding path through the trees. There are no streetlights here, and the branches are tight-knit above us, blocking out starlight and moonlight alike. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I’m lying. I don’t have the words to tell the truth. How do you put something like this into words? You don’t, that’s how. But every breath I take pulls Mill Hollow deeper into my lungs, and even if my body no longer strips the oxygen from the air, it still appreciates the reminder. I feel like I can do anything. I feel like I can fly.

  “Any thoughts on where Danny would be? I’ve never been here before.”

  “I haven’t been here in twenty years.”

  Brenda’s laugh is swift and mocking. “What, you’re expecting me to believe this is a place that changes quickly? I’m from a small town. I know how they work. Whatever you’re thinking was here twenty years ago will probably still be here today.”

  “Not everything.” Patty is gone. My parents are gone. The things that matter most about the Hollow are underground and resting peacefully . . . but in a way, that means Brenda’s right, because they’re still here. They’re never going to leave. I’m still here too. I never left, not in body, not in bone. Dusk or dark or dawn or day, I’ve been here the whole time.

  Silence falls between us, too heavy with things unsaid to be companionable, stretched too thinly to be comfortable. I look out the window on the blackness, and say, slowly, “Danny never liked to go where ghosts would be. He said being dead was a clerical error, and he didn’t approve one bit. So he wouldn’t be in the graveyard. There might be a comic book store in town. There wasn’t one twenty years ago.”

  “I doubt it,” says Brenda. “Town with less than three hundred people, you can’t keep the doors open on a specialty store like that. He’ll be somewhere else.”

  “I know.” I want to say he’s at my family home; I want to give myself an excuse to go there, to peer through the windows and search for some sign of what my family has become. I can’t. Danny wouldn’t go there.

  Why would Danny come here? He’s from California; he crossed the country to hide from
the circumstances of his death. He ran away from who he’d been when he was alive, and most people don’t run to places like Mill Hollow. Even some of our neighbors don’t know we exist. We’re a footnote in the history of the state, one more tiny tick of a town clinging to the ridge of the mountains for as long as we can before the Appalachians shake us off, roll over, and go back into their dog-dreaming slumber. I’ve never mentioned the Hollow to Danny, not when we spoke in public, not when we spoke in private, not ever. Delia knows where I’m from, but she wouldn’t have told him. She wouldn’t have had a reason to. Ghosts don’t tell tales out of school where other ghosts are concerned. There are too few of us for that, and the dead hold grudges.

  “He’s not alone.” The words make so much sense, spoken aloud, that it’s difficult to understand how I didn’t see it before now. But then, this isn’t the sort of thing I do; this isn’t the sort of story I belong in. I glance toward Brenda. She’s nodding. “Someone had to bring him here,” I say, and hate the words. “But why Mill Hollow? Why my hometown?”

  “You’re an old ghost, as human ghosts go.” My surprise must show, because Brenda takes her eyes off the road long enough to offer me an apologetic grimace. “Sorry, kiddo, but it’s true. Most people are greedy when it comes to moving on. They grab all the time they need, give their weeping relatives a little youth as a going-away present, and head into whatever comes next. You’ll always have ghosts like Delia—she’s going to outlast us all—and the few who stick around for centuries, but most ghosts? Nah. They realize what they are, they haunt the living for a few years, and then they’re done. They want to know what comes next. Hanging out here is like spending all your time in the parking lot at Disney World, and then deciding never to go inside.”