Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day

by Seanan McGuire

  “All right,” says Brenda. “Let’s go.”

  The first auditorium is empty of everything but ripped red velvet seats, now stained with patchwork swirls of mold, and the blind eye of the old movie screen, which stares in eternal, silent judgement over the room. A rat squeaks, startled by our presence, and runs by at the back of the stage that supports the screen. I wrinkle my nose.

  “Ew.”

  “They’re not here,” says Brenda, and we move on.

  The second auditorium is in worse shape than the first. Someone—vandals, or a hopeful salvage company—ripped half the chairs from the floor before abandoning them in the corner where they remain, filthy and strewn with cobwebs. Naked, rotting hardwood slats sit where the chairs used to be bolted to the floor. I can see through into the tarry blackness of the basement below, and I am all too aware of the weight of our steps on the rotten wood. Sure, I’m already dead, but that doesn’t mean I’d enjoy the fall. I’d need to turn insubstantial halfway down or risk making a racket that could bring this whole house of cards tumbling down.

  There’s a sleeping bag on the corner of the stage, incongruous in its modern nylon brightness. A camp lantern sits next to it, bulb dim. Brenda lifts the handle with one finger. When she lets it go, it clinks back down against the lid with a dull, tinny sound, like a fork being hit against the side of a can of peaches.

  “Someone here’s alive,” she says. “There’s no food. Either they’re out scavenging, or this is just a way station and they’re not staying here full-time.”

  It feels like there should be a third option, like I’m missing something. I inhale, and the room carries the faint, distant smell of swamp, just like the bathrooms always have. There’s something beneath the dank slime-scent of rot and mud and loam, something that belongs here and shouldn’t be here at the same time. I breathe in again, and frown. It smells green. It smells like Brenda, and the corn.

  “The mirrors aren’t here,” I say. Something is wrong. I don’t want to be here. “I’m going to check the manager’s office.”

  “Be careful,” says Brenda.

  “I will.” I need to be: there’s a witch somewhere near here who enjoys prisoning ghosts in glass, and I’m in Mill Hollow. Every mirror in this town is a danger to me. I also don’t need to be careful, because all the mirrors in this theater are already being used. Can’t cram more than one ghost into the same glass without cracking it. That’s why mirrors can be uncovered after a little time has passed between the funeral and the taking down. If a ghost was going to wander by, they’re already in there.

  It’s dark in the lobby without Brenda, but I know this building like I know my own hand, and I’m dead: I’m not afraid of the dark. I walk, quick and sure, to the manager’s office, and pause before reaching for the doorknob, taking a moment to close my eyes and sniff the air. It still smells of the green. Brenda isn’t in this room, and yet it still smells of the green, of the cornfield, roots in the earth and ears in the sky. Something isn’t right.

  The door isn’t locked. I twist the knob until it clicks, the latch letting go and allowing me to step through. It’s no surprise, somehow, to find that the back wall is gone, leaving a gaping hole that looks out on the vast stretch of tangled grass and incipient swampland behind the theater. There were big development plans for all this, once. The people who owned the theater were going to sit on the land until Mill Hollow became the booming coal town it was always meant to be, and then they were going to sell big and profitable, retire on the proceeds to someplace fancy and far away, like Ann Arbor.

  I always knew that was a lie. Even if they could have sold—even if the price of coal had continued to rise and the mine had suddenly become twice as successful as it had ever been, even when it was bright and new and the environmental groups hadn’t started sniffing around—they would never have been able to leave Mill Hollow. Only the young ever really left, and half of them still came creeping back, tails between their legs, unable to put the shadow of the mountain and the memory of ghosts in glass aside.

  That’s what I always expected Patty to do. That’s why I was sad but not afraid when she left me behind. And now here I am, forty years gone, and the field’s still here, because the boom never came; the boom is never coming, not here.

  There’s something wrong with the grass. I take a step outside, and another, and another, until I’m standing in what should be kudzu and brush, and somehow it towers around me, taller than I am, blocking out the sky. Corn. I’m standing in a sea of corn, stalks rustling as far as the eye can see, and everything is green, blocking out even the smell of the Hollow itself. No no no. This isn’t right. This isn’t real. This isn’t—

  “I thought I told you to stay in Manhattan, Jenna.” Danny’s voice is soft and apologetic. I turn and there he is, standing behind me with his hands jammed into his pockets and an apologetic look on his face, like he can’t believe he has to do this. “You weren’t supposed to be here. You were never supposed to be here.”

  “Danny.” There’s no surprise in my voice, no relief, only dull acknowledgement. I’ve known he was in Mill Hollow since he called my apartment. It only makes sense that he would be here now. “What’s going on? Where are all the other ghosts?”

  “You’re about to find out.” The voice is unfamiliar, but when I look toward it, the face is one I almost know. Her chin is rounder than Brenda’s, her forehead higher and her ears smaller, but she has her mother’s eyes, and her mother’s tight, thin-lipped mouth. There’s a mirror in her hand. I recognize it from Patty’s vanity, many years and not so many miles from here.

  Then she holds it up, and the glass is big enough to swallow the world, and everything is gone. Even the corn.

  12: By the Birchwood Bed

  Piece by piece and sliver by sliver, I come back to myself, piecing mind and memory together one shard at a time. It feels like I’m trying to do a jigsaw made entirely of broken glass, all without opening my eyes, but I’m managing it. With every piece that slides into place, a bit more of who I am comes back into the light, until finally, I find the piece that is my eyes, and I open them on a world gone silver.

  It’s not the monochrome of being insubstantial; it’s gilded, covered in a layer of gleaming metallic light, like the world has been dipped in glitter. I raise my hand, holding it in front of my face. It isn’t there. There isn’t even a glow. It’s like I’ve been wiped from reality, even though I’m still here, still thinking, still feeling, still aware of my surroundings. Everything is silent, motionless. With my deletion from the world, even when I move, nothing else does.

  With dim horror, I realize what’s happened.

  I’ve been prisoned in glass.

  As if the realization has triggered something, light floods my cage, bathing everything in brilliant white. I throw up an arm I can’t see to shield my eyes. It doesn’t do any good. Invisible flesh is not a good thing to hide behind.

  A woman’s face appears, as huge as one of the stars on the old theater’s screen. She’s smirking. I hate her. “Hello, little ghost. You know, you’re the only one who’s tracked me down. Where’s the sense in that, huh? You must really hate yourself. Is this how ghosts commit suicide?”

  “Go to hell.”

  She raises an eyebrow. She can hear me, then; the glass goes both ways. That’s a relief. I may be toothless in here, but at least she hasn’t gagged me. “Feisty, aren’t you? I’d peg you at what, mid-twenties right now? That’s fine. You’re good for at least another seventy years.”

  “What are you talking about? How did you get my sister’s mirror? Let me out of here!”

  My porthole shifts as the mirror is moved, and I find myself looking out at a sheepish Danny. “Sorry, Jenna,” he says, refusing to meet my eyes. “You could have stayed in New York. I mean, you didn’t have to do this.”

  “Let me out of here. Danny—Danny! Look at me. You know this isn’t right. You know that ghosts don’t belong in glass. Danny! Let me out!” Maybe h
e can see me, even if I can’t see myself. I wave my arms, trying to get his attention, trying to make him look at me.

  He doesn’t. Instead, he looks to the unnamed witch with Brenda’s eyes, and says, “Jenna was the coffin nail for this town. We can’t stick around here if you’ve got her in that mirror.”

  To my surprise, she laughs. “Oh, no, that’s where you’re wrong. People think so linearly. She’s not the one keeping Mill Hollow moored. There’s an old oak’s ghost in the deepest part of the hollow, two hundred years old and still haunting. She’s extraneous. Humans are not always the most important thing in the world. We’re staying, and we’re having our market, and that’s that.” She tilts my mirror back toward her face, frowning as she touches the skin near her eye. “Think I could do with a little less age on me before the auctions begin?”

  “You’ve bled twenty years in the last two weeks,” says Danny. “None of your clothes fit right anymore.”

  “I know, isn’t it wonderful?” She laughs. “All right, little ghost. Dazzle me.”

  I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this, and I have no choice: she has me prisoned in glass. Her fingers touch the mirror’s surface and I bleed the time off of her, leaving her fresh-faced and gasping with pleasure. I manage to stop myself shy of my dying day, but barely. This woman, this witch, has forced me to take the rest of the time I had coming to me. It shouldn’t hurt. It does.

  If I get out of the mirror now, I can’t move on. Not without giving her time away.

  “There,” she says, smiling as she takes her hand away from her face. “I’ll be able to afford to go shopping very soon. Anything I want can be mine. You have no idea how lucrative this sort of thing can be.”

  “You’re selling us?” I can’t keep the revulsion out of my voice. I don’t even want to try. I still ache all the way down to my insubstantial bones from the force of her violation. “You can’t do that! We’re people!”

  “You were people,” she says. “Now you’re just shadows on the wall. Show me where the Constitution says ghosts have rights. Show me the politicians who swear to support their phantom contingent. You die, we bury you, we put the muslin over the mirrors to keep you from getting caught and frightening Grandma to death, and we move on. But you can’t. You’re just shadows. Shadows don’t get to choose their fate like that. If I’m smart enough to figure out how to catch you, if I’m quick enough to come up and get you to look in my glass, why shouldn’t I claim you? Shadows need a light to cast them. I can be that light.”

  “We may not be alive, but we have lives,” I snap. “There are people who will miss me.”

  “I’m sure there are. You’re the one who works at the suicide hotline, aren’t you? You know, I never could figure out whether that was noble or petty of you. Keep people from killing themselves too young, keep the ghost population down, stay special.” She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. Busybodies who think answering a phone can change the world are a dime a dozen. They’ll replace you with someone who has a pulse, and everyone will be better off.”

  The world outside my prison shifts again, dizzyingly fast, until it goes away and is replaced by more of the silvery nothingness. She’s put my mirror facedown on some surface. I stay frozen where I am, unsure how to walk when I can’t see my feet, staring, furious, into the nothingness.

  Glass. She’s prisoned me in glass, and she’s going . . . going to sell me? Going to sell all of us. I don’t need to ask myself why: the motives are clear without thinking about them too deeply. Ghosts take time. Ghosts can reach into a mortal life and make it longer, just by pulling away the time that has already passed. She said I was good for another seventy years, but that’s just an estimate, because a ghost prisoned in glass can’t move on to whatever comes next. Until the mirror is broken, we’re trapped. Whoever buys me—whoever buys us—will be able to use us to stay young and beautiful in a world that’s become increasingly obsessed with youth and beauty.

  It shouldn’t be a surprise that this is happening. The surprise should be that it’s taken this long.

  “All right, Jenna, pull yourself together,” I say. There is no echo here, but there are surfaces, gilded in silver, beckoning me with the illusion of a world. I can’t see myself. Do I exist? Closing my eyes changes nothing, so I tilt the idea of my head back until I’m looking upward, then reach out in front of myself and tell my hands to find each other. It’s harder than it should be. I’ve touched my body in the dark a million times since I was born, and even more often since I’ve died, but I wasn’t thinking about it then. It was something that just happened. Now I have to feel around, trying to guess where my hands are in a world that has no points of reference—

  —until fingers find fingers and interlace, coming together the way hands are meant to. I look back down. I still can’t see myself, but now I know, for sure, that I exist; I’m not just a disembodied voice floating in a silver sea. If I exist, I can find a way out of here. I’m sure of that.

  The witch is Brenda’s daughter. I’m sure of that, too, just like I’m sure Brenda doesn’t know. Brenda could be the greatest actress of her age—and there’s no real telling what that age is, not with her being a witch, not with ghosts in the world—and she still wouldn’t have been able to fool Sophie’s rats like that. Sophie wouldn’t lie to me. She didn’t tell me she was a witch, but that was because she hadn’t needed to, and she likes me. Sophie would have told me if Brenda was a danger. Brenda doesn’t know her daughter is doing this. That means Brenda might also be in danger.

  I’ve known her a long time. I wouldn’t call us old friends, but it’s been long enough that I feel like I owe her some sort of help, if I can just figure out how to get the hell out of here.

  Being prisoned in glass is the thing every ghost I know fears more than anything. Even exorcism is a small threat compared to that. An exorcised ghost is scattered for a little while, becoming a whisper on the wind and a chilly place in still air. Depending on how strong they are, they’ll come back together in a week, a month, a year. The longest exorcism I’ve ever heard of lasted eighteen months, and half of that was because the ghost in question was so surprised that his meek little wife had been willing to light the candles and chant the words. I’ve never been exorcised, but the people I know who have say it’s like taking a long, restorative nap. Some older ghosts even do it on purpose, just to break up the monotony.

  Glass is different. Glass catches and keeps, until someone decides to let you out or the mirror is broken. Glass takes your choices away. If the witch who has me wanted me to take another year off her, or two, or twenty, I wouldn’t have a choice. I don’t know what happens to a ghost who ages themselves past their dying day, but I’ve never met anyone who had passed that age and stayed corporeal.

  I have to get out of here.

  If I have hands, I have feet. I may be walking blind, but the ground seems smooth, and presumably I’ll know if I fall. I start walking. When nothing bad happens, I start running.

  Dead people don’t get tired. There have been a couple of Olympic records set by ghosts, running right alongside the living. I run, and I run, and I run until time doesn’t mean anything anymore, time is something for people who exist outside of mirrors, in a world where there are walls, and borders, and consequences.

  There’s no warning before the silver world in front of me disappears, replaced by Danny’s face. I can see the theater behind him, tattered wallpaper and all. There’s no sign of the corn. He glances nervously over his shoulder before looking back to the glass and whispering, “Jenna?”

  I stop running. There isn’t any point. “Let me out of here.”

  Relief washes over his face. For just that moment, I can remember that he was my friend before this started happening, before he joined forces with a witch and ran for my hometown. Then the relief fades, replaced by regret, and he says, “I can’t do that. Teresa would put me in a mirror if I did that.”

  “And your freedom matters mo
re than mine; is that it?”

  He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. The answer is in the situation, in the fact that he would help a witch harm his own kind rather than risk himself sounding the alarm. That’s almost being charitable. It assumes she approached him and not the other way around; that he’s just a coward and not a traitor.

  “Why?” My question is soft, almost gentle; I want him to think he can make me understand.

  “It only takes one ghost to anchor a city,” says Danny. “I knew Delia would never leave. I managed to make Teresa understand. Nobody who was haunting Manhattan was actually buried there, so we couldn’t count on bones; it had to be her. I had her convinced that you were anchoring Mill Hollow. She would have left you alone. She would never have gone looking for a replacement ghost.”

  “Does everybody know about anchors but me?” I demand, throwing my hands up. Then I pause. Something about the way he said that . . . “What do you mean, a replacement ghost?”

  Danny looks uncomfortable. “Forget it.”

  “No, I won’t. What do you mean?”

  “Ghosts don’t just happen. Someone has to make them. That’s why we all died so early, and why so many of us had freak accidents. People like Delia, who came back because she wanted to, they’re the rare ones.”

  The storm that killed me was unseasonable and strange. I don’t want to think about it right now. If I think about it, when I’m already prisoned in glass with no way out, I may just start screaming. “So?”

  “So I tried to protect you by making her think you were the anchor, so she wouldn’t make a replacement. You’re the one who’s always saying we have an obligation to other people. To help them.”

  I stare at him. I don’t know if he can see me; I hope he can. I hope he understands the hate and dismay I’m directing at his face. “She knew I wasn’t the anchor; she said as much to me. I was trying to convince you to volunteer at the suicide hotline, not giving you permission to lock other ghosts in mirrors so rich assholes can use us as the fountain of youth. This isn’t helping people.”