Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day

by Seanan McGuire

  “I’ve never been to Disney World,” I say. I can’t think of anything else.

  Brenda laughs. “Too late now, I’m afraid. So many dead people were making their pilgrimages to the Happiest Place on Earth that it was throwing the numbers off. Disney started taking fingerprints, and when that didn’t work, they went to this new system where they tag all their guests like migrating cattle. No little electronic gadget on your wrist, no amusement park for you. Not too late for Disneyland, though, if you wanted to head for California. Just do it soon. Disney’s done letting ghosts ride for free.”

  I’m not sure which is more disturbing: the idea that ghosts would flock to Disney World in such numbers that it would become a problem, or the thought of Disney knowing enough about the dead to do something about it. I shake my head, trying to clear the thought away. “What does me being an old ghost have to do with anything?”

  “Delia stayed in Manhattan so that it wouldn’t become unmoored. She wouldn’t have needed to do that if her family hadn’t buried her out in Babylon—a town in Connecticut. Far enough away from New York that she can’t go back to her grave without losing her grasp on her chosen home. You’re too young to be an anchor for a place the size of Manhattan. But Mill Hollow? You can anchor Mill Hollow just fine.”

  “How can I anchor Mill Hollow? I haven’t been here in forty years.”

  “You’ve never left, remember? Your bones have been here this whole time. Your bones could have been keeping the town anchored to the world while your spirit’s been haunting other halls. If there were no other human ghosts here, you would have been the nail around which everything revolves. A small-town ghost, known to be haunting a big city? Oh, darling. You painted the target on your own map.”

  I stare at her. “You’re not making any sense.”

  Brenda’s headlights illuminate a stop sign, red and white and gray with dust from the mines. She could probably blow right through it at this hour of the night, but she stops anyway, twisting in her seat to face me. Her expression is grave.

  “There are two ways a ghost can anchor a place to the world. The active way, that’s what Delia is doing in Manhattan. At the same time, as long as she’s a haunt and in the world of the living, she’s also a passive anchor for Babylon, where she’s buried. That’s why witches and ghosts don’t fight more than we do. If we needed you to stay where you were buried, there’d be a lot more ‘Sorry, but I have to bind you into this oak tree for the sake of everyone I love.’ Nimue did Merlin, just like the legends say. What they miss is that Merlin was dead at the time, and if he’d gone chasing dishware across Europe, he’d have been leaving Camelot without an anchor. His bones were long gone, you see, and he allowed no other ghosts to haunt his hallowed halls. So you’ve been haunting New York, and all this time your bones have been here, comfortable in the soil, part of what’s anchoring Mill Hollow.”

  “Why does that explain Danny being here?”

  “Because a town this small is highly unlikely to have more than one human ghost. As long as you were in Manhattan, Mill Hollow was the safest place for him to go. Already anchored, but with no one to ask why he was in town. Him, and whoever he’s working for.”

  “You mean the witch.” That is the long and the short of it. Danny is a ghost, and ghosts can’t do much to their own kind. We can’t prison ourselves in glass, can’t trade time between us. For those things, you need a witch. And the ghosts of Manhattan are missing.

  “I do.” Brenda looks at me seriously. “This is your town, Jenna. This is your holy ground.”

  “No,” I say, without thinking. “It’s not. I’m not the anchor here.” Because I can sort of see what she’s trying to say—the shape of it, at least—and what she’s saying is wrong. Maybe I’m the oldest human ghost in Mill Hollow, but that doesn’t make me the anchor. There’s something else holding this place to the world. Something other than me.

  “Maybe so and maybe not, but it’s still your town. If there was a witch here, where would she be hiding? Where would we find her?”

  There will be time to argue about anchors later. I close my eyes, breathing in the taste of Kentucky, the sweet dampness that coats my lungs and stays behind even when the air rushes out again, unchanged by its time in the phantom prison of my lungs.

  As I breathe, I start to see the Hollow sketched across the inside of my eyes, a pale, monochrome map of a place. There’s the graveyard, where my bones lie next to Patty’s, whiling away eternity in a pine box. There’s the church, where we went on special Sundays, promising to honor and obey a God we didn’t quite understand and didn’t quite believe in. There’s home, and the school, and the narrow strip of shops that was our main street, and the old theater, and—

  Stop. Back up. The theater I remember was the jewel of the town, small and bright and always open, with cheap matinees for the kids and long engagements of the hits for the adults. Patty and I went there about once a week when we were growing up, trading our pocket money for the chance at escape, even if it was only for a little while. I’m pretty sure that’s where she fell in love with the idea of New York, turning it into the fairy-tale ending that could save her from the monsters in her mind. That’s where I fell in love with the idea of running. Running so far, so fast, that the sunset could never catch me and the movie would never have to end.

  But the theater on the inside of my eyelids is shabby and shuttered, with boards across the windows and nothing written on the marquee. I know the reasons why even without thinking about them. Cheap cable, home video, a dwindling population, and better places for the money to go as the ticket prices soared. It makes sense that the Mill Hollow Cinema would be closed down. I still never expected to see it, not in my lifetime, and not in what came after.

  “The theater,” I say, opening my eyes. “That’s where they’ll be.” I can’t put words to why I’m so sure. I just know. The Mill Hollow Cinema is dark, and shuttered, and filled with shadows. It’s also right at the center of town, with multiple rooms far from the street. Someone who could get inside there could hide for weeks, if they stayed out of the lobby and away from the windows.

  “You’re sure?”

  I shake my head. “I’m not sure of anything anymore. But it feels . . . it feels right. I guess that matters, under the circumstances.”

  “I guess it does,” Brenda agrees. “Which way?”

  I tell her, the directions coming as quick and easy as a breeze that’s been waiting years to blow. As I speak, I crank down my window, letting the smell of Mill Hollow fill the cab from top to bottom. Brenda looks at me thoughtfully for a moment before mimicking the gesture, until the wind blows clear through, carrying everything the Hollow has to offer us. I can even smell corn. Small patches, not sprawling, endless acres, but that seems to be enough to put some soldier in her spine; she’s sitting straighter when she hauls on the wheel and sends us rolling toward town, her eyes fixed on the windshield and the distant fight to come.

  “Danny usually did a good job of hiding that he was dead,” I say. “How did he get mixed up in this?”

  “He’s working with a witch,” says Brenda. “Thing about witches is we can always spot the dead when we find them up and walking around. It’s how I found you. Whoever it is wouldn’t have to have been looking for a corporeal haunt. They could have just been walking past the comic book store and spotted him out of the corner of their eye, and the rest is horrible history.”

  “How come you can see us and we can’t see you?” The question has frustrated me for years. I don’t make any effort to hide that as I fire it at Brenda, eyes narrowed and lip pushed outward in the beginning of a pout. “It’s not fair.”

  “You say that like somebody put this system together on purpose,” says Brenda. There’s no rancor in her tone. “We don’t have checks and balances, Jenna. We don’t have a system of countermeasures to avoid abuse of power. Witches can see ghosts, ghosts can’t see witches. Witches can’t see each other, either. We’re shadows on the wal
l of the world, and we find each other through abuses of power, half the time. Trees start dying, or lambs are born with two heads . . .”

  “Or all the ghosts go missing,” I say softly.

  “That, too,” Brenda agrees. “It’s not fair, all right? If it were, you wouldn’t have witches like Sophie, who can barely keep herself together on the good days. You wouldn’t have corn witches born in cities and steel witches born in small towns with nothing taller than the church spire. It happens because it happens. The universe isn’t fair.”

  “Ugh.” I drop my head into my hands. I can’t see much of anything, anyway; it’s too dark out there, and maybe that’s a mercy. The Hollow still smells like home, but I’m smart enough to know that time changes a place. It won’t look like home when the sun comes up. It’ll look like someplace else, someplace almost familiar, someplace impossibly strange.

  I should never have come here. That’s the long and the short of it. I should have stayed in New York with Delia, walled up in my apartment, taking care of my cats, and not putting myself into the line of fire. I’m Jenna-who-runs. I don’t belong here.

  But I’m not Jenna-who-runs anymore. I’ve put her aside, and some of the ghosts who’ve gone missing are my friends. I would want them to look for me, even if it meant going back to their personal versions of Mill Hollow, the towns and cities they’ve left behind as they roved out from their graves. I would want them to care. That means I have to. And besides . . .

  “We don’t know that Danny is here voluntarily,” I say, raising my head. “Any ghost who’s been around more than a few years knows not to fight with witches if you don’t want to wind up prisoned in glass. This witch could be forcing him to do this.”

  “Yes, they could,” says Brenda. “They might not be, though. Danny could be doing this of his own free will.”

  The thought is chilling. “I don’t know why he would.”

  “Why does anyone do anything?” asks Brenda. “That’s one thing the living, the dead, and the witching have in common: the mind is a mystery to all of us. Maybe he resents the fact that he died. Maybe the witch made him promises they don’t intend to keep. Maybe it’s something else altogether. I knew one witch from Arizona who worked with his own great-grandmother to defraud people. Held séances that always bore fruit, because she was happy to appear when he called her name. People are strange.”

  “You can say that again,” I say. The air carries a faint, sweet scent, like cinnamon. It shouldn’t be here, just like we shouldn’t be here. I stiffen. “We’re almost there.”

  The town’s main street—which seemed so important once upon a time, and now seems little better than an afterthought—is lit up like daylight compared to everything around it. There are streetlights here, six of them, two in front of the gas station and the other four scattered the length of the two-block stretch that constitutes the shopping district. There are a few cars. Most of the shop owners live above their livelihoods. The vet’s still here, and so is the doctor, although the names on the signs have changed; it’s good to see that the Hollow is still doing well enough to keep those simple luxuries. I hate to think about the people who might have been my neighbors having to drive hours just to have their dogs vaccinated or their appendixes prodded.

  The theater is dark, nestled in the stretch between two streetlights, so the shadows can take everything but the box-and-angle shape of it. It squats like a spider, like a predator considering the rest of the street, and I shudder. It seems like it must have always been like this, like the theater can’t have changed this much while I was gone, and yet it doesn’t fit my memories of the place. I was happy here. I know that much. I was happy.

  “Are you ready?” asks Brenda.

  We have no plan. We have no preparation. She’s a corn witch with no field and I’m a ghost in a place where every piece of glass might be resonant enough to hold me, and we have no chance if Danny has joined forces with someone stronger than we are.

  “I guess I have to be,” I say.

  Brenda pulls up to the sidewalk and stops the truck. She retrieves her guitar from the back as she walks toward the theater, and I follow, a ghost in blue jeans and sneakers, into whatever happens next.

  11: Popcorn Dreams on a Silver Screen

  The theater door is locked. I glance to Brenda, who nods. I take a breath, and let go. The color rushes out of the world like the tide rushing back out to sea, and I don’t need to look at myself to know that I’m insubstantial, half-there, like the memory I’ve been since the day I died.

  Passing through the door is like moving through cobwebs. It has more resistance but less pull than the corn: while it may resent my intrusion, it does not strive to keep me here. In short order I am inside the lobby, surrounded by the shadows of the monochrome reality I’ve cast myself into. It’s dark here. I can still see: ghost eyes are well suited to the dark. Let Brenda wait a moment more. She’ll understand once I open the door.

  Old posters cling to the lobby walls, pinned like butterflies behind dusty glass. Their preservative prisons haven’t protected them completely. They’re tattered and peeling at the edges, and none of them is more recent than the late nineties. That’s when this place closed its doors. I can’t smell anything, but I’m sure the air is thick with decay, and I know that some of the dark patches on the walls are mold, eating through the wallpaper, which must have been infused with butter after so many years sharing the lobby with the popcorn machine. The stairs to the projectionist’s booth are still roped off, and I see no clean spots on the fake brass hooks to indicate that anyone has moved the rope in decades. Danny and his witch are on this floor.

  There’s nothing more to see here, and I don’t want to risk wisping around the theater; if the witch spotted me without Brenda to intervene, it would be a quick one-two-three from there to the inside of a mirror. My feet hit the ground as I solidify, and the room goes dark, giving me a moment of absolute terror as I wait for the noise to trigger some attack from one of the silent doors around me.

  Nothing comes. I force myself to relax, step forward, and unlock the theater door, opening it so Brenda can slip inside. She brings light with her, pale gold, like corn silk. It doesn’t emanate from her body or anything like that; it doesn’t seem to have a source at all. It’s just there, buttery and warm as morning sunlight, slowly growing to illuminate everything around us.

  Now that there’s color in the world, I can see that the patches on the walls are definitely mold, and that mushrooms are growing through the floor in the corners, making this cavern of cinematic wonders more like something from a horror show. Brenda looks around, and her eyes are sad.

  “Must’ve been nice when it was new” is all she says. She doesn’t keep her voice down. I shoot her a startled look, and she smiles, holding up a hand to indicate the cloud of light around us. I can see specks of dust dancing in it, like chaff coming off the fields. “Light costs. I’m trading sound. You can hear me, but no one outside the glow can.”

  “That sounds less like a payment and more like another advantage.”

  “The laws of magic, like the laws of nature, are not always as balanced as they might seem.”

  I don’t say anything. I just stare. I’ve been dead for forty years. I’ve met dozens of witches, even if I’ve chosen to hide from most of them rather than risking them grabbing me and stuffing me into a mirror. This—this glow, this cornfield shine that fills the room—is the most real magic I’ve ever seen. Even Sophie’s rats can’t compare.

  Brenda looks around again. “This is your place, not mine,” she says. “Where would they be?”

  “They’re not in the projection booth; no one’s touched that rope in years,” I say. Even if Danny could pass through it, his witch couldn’t. I don’t think. Maybe some witches can fly, or turn into smoke, or burst into flocks of birds. All those things feel impossible, things out of fairy tales, but the room is bright when it should be dark. Magic is real. Once magic is real, nothing is entirely out
of the question.

  “If he was working with a weather witch or any sort of bird witch that involved flight, they’d have gone for the highest available point,” says Brenda, and I realize she’s been running down a list this whole time, checking off the things that don’t fit our situation. You don’t find subway witches at street level, and you don’t find sky witches on the ground. Everything we find eliminates another hundred possibilities. Maybe that won’t be enough to get us to the truth before it’s right in front of us, but it’s enough to make the choices narrower, and that can equip us both better for what’s to come. “Where do the doors go?”

  “Um. There are two auditoriums, assuming there was never any renovation.” I point to the appropriate doors. “That’s the manager’s office, and that’s the supply closet. They keep, you know, the popcorn and butter and stuff in there.” Or they did, back when this was a theater and not a crypt. If I drifted through that door now, I’d find a monochrome horror of either rotting food or empty shelves. Nothing I’d want to see or remember. It’s a relief knowing they probably won’t be in there. The space is too small to be comfortable, and while Danny might be fine with a standing coffin of a hideaway, I doubt his witch would be.

  Brenda’s thoughts follow the same trail as mine. She dismisses the pantry and focuses on the other three doors. “Are there bathrooms?”

  “Back of the theater. Not big. They always smelled sort of like swamp water, even in the middle of the summer, when you’d figure that they’d dry out all the way.”

  “So that’s not a good hideout. Is there a back door?”

  “There’s the service door on the other side of the pantry. It feeds into the alley next to the building. That’s probably how they’ve been getting in and out without attracting attention from the rest of the town.” Danny can float through walls, but I’ve never heard of a witch with that particular power, and if that were a risk, Brenda would have said something by now. I hope.