Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day

by Seanan McGuire

  “Getting old doesn’t help them either.”

  “Getting old is natural. It’s what we didn’t get. Every time I take a call, I am fighting to help someone else get old. This is sick. It’s wrong, and you need to let me out of here.”

  “That’s not going to happen. I could maybe convince Teresa not to sell you right away. If you wanted to stay. We could talk more about why this is okay. Why this is how things ought to be. If you wanted.”

  I’m so tired. “Go to hell, Danny,” I say, and he looks surprised for a moment before he puts the mirror down and disappears.

  I start to pace. I’m trapped in glass. I’m going to be exploited and held prisoner forever, like an unwilling genie in a breakable bottle. The old stories said you needed to cover all the mirrors after someone died so that they wouldn’t prison your ghosts. They also said the first person who looked at their reflection after a ghost did get caught would drop dead on the spot, frightened out of themselves, but Teresa looked at me, and she lived. Is it because she’s a witch? Are witches immune to that sort of terror? Is it because she’s the one who prisoned me there? Or is there something else I ought to know, something I’m missing because this has never happened to me before?

  One ghost to a mirror. Can’t share your prison. And people who look in mirrors containing the dead sometimes die for no apparent reason, like they weren’t able to stand what they saw. Ghosts can move time. What if that’s not all that we can do?

  Trouble with being a teenage runaway is no one tells you anything. Most people grow out of it, though; start making connections, start making allies, start making friends. Forty years I’ve been running, and I can count the friends I’ve made on the fingers of one hand. They’re bright, precious things, every one of them, but they’re not enough. They didn’t tell me the things I needed to know. Forty years in the ground, and I’m still lost when it comes to the realities of what I am.

  In a world of anchors and moorings, I am a nail in someone else’s coffin, and no one can tell who’s been buried beneath me.

  I stop, take a breath I don’t need, and try to center myself. It’s not as easy as it would be if I had eyelids I could close or hands I could see, but I’ve had a long time to grow accustomed to the troubles of this world. Sometimes my body is solid and seems alive. Sometimes it passes through walls. Right now, it might as well be missing altogether. It’s all the same. I endure. I last. I am Jenna Pace, I am no longer Jenna-who-runs, and I will find my way out of this.

  I don’t know how long I wait, a snake poised to strike, for my mirror to be uncovered. The world shifts subtly around me. I don’t know what that means, whether the mirror is being moved or whether mirror-landscapes just move sometimes, but I keep my place and my peace, and I wait as patiently as I can. Anything else would mean giving up, and that’s the one thing I can’t do. Patty wouldn’t want things to end this way.

  I’ve been fighting to earn my way back to my sister for so long. I refuse to let this be what stops me.

  When the mirror is finally uncovered, the shift is sudden enough to be jarring. One moment, the world is gilded silver, unbroken and unyielding, and the next, one entire wall of my existence has been replaced with a face I’ve never seen before, a man with wrinkles in the skin around his hope-filled eyes and a tight, miserly set to his sunken mouth. There are calculations scored into his skin like hooks, numbers I can almost see in the way he is assessing me. This man can see me.

  “A ghost under glass?” he says. “That’s your miracle solution? How did you—”

  If I am to do this, I must do it. I’ve never killed anyone before. I’ve saved so many lives, but I’ve never killed. Maybe the scales will balance. Maybe there’s a cosmic score sheet somewhere, and it will show that I am still a good girl. Maybe I don’t care. I will not end my existence under someone else’s glass.

  Without thinking, without feeling, I move. I flow out of the silver and into the dusty blue of this stranger’s eyes, the mirrors he uses to see the world. I don’t see him as he stiffens, but I feel it, feel his heart start and stutter in his chest, feel it fall out of synch with itself. If I was going to let him go, this would be the moment to do it. I can’t, I can’t. I still feel the mirror pulling on me, trying to drag me back into its borders. If I let go of the man who has become my anchor to the real world, I’ll be pulled back into the silver in an instant, and I don’t think I can do this again. It hurts. The silver clings to the outline of what should be my skin, burning and blistering me.

  The first one who looks will die, I think, and that’s what the stories always said: that the mirror had to be covered until the ghosts had gone, or the first person who looked would feel their heart stop in their chest, would feel the world ripped away and shredded into nothingness. Not the second, not the last; only the first. Witches don’t count, or I wouldn’t be able to move, but still. This is not something I can do again.

  The world has always had rules. The trick is finding them.

  I am not possessing him, this cruel-lipped man who picked up my mirror and looked at me like I was the answer to a question he’d almost given up on asking. I am . . . inhabiting him, shoving myself into the space between the intake of breath and the beating of the heart. His breath hitches in his chest one more time before he collapses, crumpling to the floor like so much discarded meat. The silver tether snaps as the mirror drops from his hand and shatters, smooth glass becoming powder on the concrete floor of the alley behind the theater.

  I am free.

  Substance comes back to me in an instant, my feet hitting the ground a split second after the mirror, standing over the fallen body of the old man who would have used me to make himself young again. I turn, and there she is, the new witch with Brenda’s eyes. Teresa. That’s what Danny called her.

  She stares at me, eyes wide and frightened. Then they narrow, fear giving way to rage.

  “You little poltergeist,” she spits. “Do you know what you’ve done? That was Jack Bandy. He was the oldest water witch this side of the Mississippi. He has allies you can’t even imagine, and you’ve killed him. They’ll end you.”

  “First person looks in a mirror, their heart will stop. If he was a witch, guess you didn’t count because you put me there.” I step away from the body, cooling meat that I made, corpse that I put into the world. My eyes remain on Teresa. I can’t trust her not to have another mirror ready and waiting. Woman like this, when she goes to war against the world, she does it with all the tools she thinks she’s going to need. “Where’s your mama? She probably has a few things to say about this whole thing. Don’t think she’s going to be too happy with your part in it.”

  My accent is coming back, stronger than it’s been in decades. I sound like the Hollow, and not like the washed-out memory of the South I’ve been since I left. I’m glad of that much. If this is where I end—if this alley is where I get locked in glass forever—I may as well go knowing that I sound like home.

  Some of the fear comes back into Teresa’s eyes. “She’s not here.”

  “She was in the theater with me when you took me. You a corn witch like she is? I know your daddy was, so I guess if those things run in families, it would make sense for you to carry the same seeds in your soul. Corn witches big on prisoning ghosts in glass? I thought your people would have raised you better.”

  She takes a step toward me, hand raised to the level of her shoulder, and the world shifts around us. She’s a corn witch like her parents: I can hear the rustle of leaves in the distance as the field responds to her anger. Corn can break concrete, if it grows fast enough. I’m not sure corn can hurt me, but if anyone can teach me otherwise, it’s probably her.

  “Don’t you talk about my people, dead girl,” she spits. “You think you have some sort of rights here? You just killed a man. Dead things shouldn’t be killers. That’s not how the world works.”

  “I died because the world isn’t always nice; doesn’t make me any less of a person,” I say, and m
y words are as true today as they were forty years ago, when I ran out into a storm and the sky fell down on my head. “You locked me up. I let me out. What were you thinking?”

  “That nothing happens by mistake,” she says. We’re both stalling. She’s trying to call the corn; I’m trying to figure out what comes next. As long as we’re in this holding pattern, I can wait to see what happens. “Ghosts can grant life. You think God did that by accident? You’re tools for the living, and you’re selfish. You don’t let go. You don’t give what you’ve got.”

  “We’re not tools,” I say. “We’re as human as you are. Witches can do things too, but I don’t see many of you standing up and offering to serve the whole of humanity.”

  “They’d use us.”

  “You’d use me.”

  Silence falls, uncomfortable and tight, heavy with the weight of everything that hasn’t yet been said.

  Then the corn bursts through the ground.

  It’s growing faster than summer kudzu, grabbing for my ankles like rustling hands. Teresa’s eyes are filled with fury, her hand spread wide as she beckons the spreading field onward. I don’t think, don’t pause, just move: I leap for the nearest wall, letting go of solidity in the moment before impact. I pass through the brick, and the alley falls away, leaving me temporarily alone, with no idea what’s coming next.

  13: Mama, Mama, Make My Bed

  I need to find Brenda. She must know by now that it’s her daughter we’re up against: two corn witches can’t possibly be this close together without noticing each other. I know she said witches don’t feel each other the way that ghosts do, but they’re using the same thing as a focus for their magic. Surely the corn will tell them, if nothing else does.

  Ghosts always know when there’s another ghost around. We change the way the air feels. It’s the change I notice first, before Danny reaches through the wall on the other side of me, grabs my hair, and drags me into the dark of the auditorium beyond.

  He’s insubstantial, but so am I; there are no barriers to his hands finding what little substance I have, no rules that forbid his fingers to close around my throat. He can’t strangle me—I don’t need air under the best of circumstances, and certainly not when I’m essentially air myself—but old habits die hard, and so he squeezes and I flail, until I manage to break his grip and shove myself away.

  He glares at me, and when he opens his mouth, there is no sound, but I understand him all the same. Ghosts can always speak to ghosts, even when the rest of the world would dismiss us as nothing but wind and shadows.

  Why couldn’t you stay in New York? he demands. Why couldn’t you stay away, and let me have this?

  You’re hurting people, I reply. You’re helping a witch against your own kind.

  Danny says nothing, because there’s nothing for Danny to say. He sold us out for the promise of peace and being left alone. I wish I could say I don’t understand. There have been times when I’d have given anything if it meant I could keep up my little masquerade of life, keep haunting my own routines and not bothering anyone who didn’t need to know what I really am. But I never hurt anyone. Not like this.

  Where is she keeping the mirrors, Danny?

  He doesn’t answer me. I drift to where he hangs in the air, reaching out and resting the memory of my hand against the memory of his shoulder. Contact is funny when you have no skin to touch.

  She’s done. Brenda’s not going to let her walk away from this. I hope. I pray. Can Brenda really side with the dead over her own daughter? The living are a mystery to me. I didn’t spend enough time as one of them. Show me where the mirrors are, and maybe I won’t tell Brenda where to find you.

  He turns his face away. I wait.

  Finally, soundlessly, he says, The old supply room. She keeps them there. What are you going to do?

  I don’t answer. I pull my hand away and float through the next wall, away from the man who betrayed us all, away from the distant sound of corn ripping through the alley floor. I have other things to do.

  The supply room is small and dark and filled with cloth-swaddled bundles, like someone’s good china. I have to solidify to begin picking them up. As the cloth falls away to reveal the mirrored surfaces beneath, the whispers of the dead begin to fill the air, soft susurrations demanding their release. I don’t have to wait for them to ask me twice.

  The mirrors shatter when I drop them, scattering silver glitter across the floor. As each glass explodes, the ghost it contains bursts free and takes solid form, until the room is so packed that it’s a good thing I don’t need to breathe; there is no air here. Only bodies from wall to wall, angry, agitated, snarling bodies. They want revenge. I don’t need to talk to them to know that, or to know that the only way I can keep control of this situation is to act fast. Right now, I am their savior, the one who got them out of the glass where they’d been prisoned. Give them time to realize that things have changed—that action is possible—and I’ll lose them.

  I grab one of the empty frames from the pile of broken mirrors and slam it against the nearest wall. The sound is big enough, sudden enough, that most of them turn to look at me. The others follow half a beat behind, unwilling to be left out of whatever’s about to happen.

  “This everyone?” I demand.

  Muttering and whispers answer me.

  “Delia’s back in Manhattan playing coffin nail, and Danny’s not on our side anymore, but there’s more than those two in our city. So is this everyone? Count your heads, or your hands, or whatever suits you, but tell me if the breaking’s done.”

  This time the muttering is louder, before one of the gang-girls says, “This is all of us. Where’s the witch who brought us here?”

  “Outside. In the corn.” I glance to the wall, then back to the woman who spoke. She looks the same as she always has. Not so all of them. Some of the ghosts are older than they should be, faces seamed with new lines, hair streaked with new runnels of gray. “How much time did she have you bleed?”

  The mutters contain numbers this time. Years: she bled off years, some her own, some belonging to other people. This was the use she saw for us, prisoned under glass and giving youth back to those who don’t deserve it, all while forbidding us to move on. My heart hardens a little more. That’s good. It’ll need to be hard for what’s to come.

  Some things are anathema to softness.

  “She’s a corn witch,” I say. “The soil listens when she speaks. Her ma’s here, and Mill Hollow answers best to family. We need to keep her distracted long enough for Brenda to come and bring things to a finish. Then we can go home. Back to Manhattan. Back to our dailies.” Because we don’t have lives, not really; we’re the long-dead, the cold, and the lost. But we still have our daily routines, the steps we go through, the things we choose to do. Those are the things we all want to return to.

  “How?” asks a hollow-eyed man in a grocer’s apron.

  I smile. I shrug, spreading my empty hands wide.

  “I have no idea,” I say. “But we start by going through that wall.”

  I point. They follow my hand, and when I let go of solidity and drift through the brick, they follow me.

  We flow through the wall like a river of ectoplasm and rage, surrounding Teresa, sliding through the corn, even as the leaves slash at the substance of our skins. She shrieks, furious and impotent, and we swirl around her, untouched and untouchable. She would kill us, if we weren’t already dead. She would prison us back under glass, if all her mirrors weren’t broken, ground down to dust and rendered useless by our escape. The same mirror can’t catch two ghosts, and with all the fragments mixed and mingled on the floor, all mirrors are the same mirror. Her only weapon is her life, which is so precious, and so temporary.

  Her shrieks turn pained when the first ghost brushes against her skin and forces the years she gave them back into her body. She smacks them away, hair lightening and skin loosening as I watch. There are too many of us and only one of her. We could weaken her an i
nch at a time, a death of a thousand cuts and a million stolen moments. What happens to a living body aged past its natural dying day by the dead? Will she collapse, or will we turn her aged and immortal, unable to let go, unable to move on?

  I don’t know. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. “Stop!” I yell, and my voice is wind and agony, and there is nothing I can do, nothing I can do to stop them, nothing I can do to save her.

  “Stop,” says another voice, softer than mine, older than mine, wearier than mine. I turn, and there’s Brenda, her guitar over her back as it always is, her eyes hidden in the shadow. The ghosts stop moving. So does the corn. Teresa’s struggles no longer stir it; it hangs, frozen as a knife on the verge of dropping, as the world waits to see what will follow.

  “Terry, girl, I thought we taught you better,” says Brenda. The weariness deepens as she wades into the green, brushing ghosts aside like we were cobwebs. We were drawn into a fight bigger and wilder than we are, and I find I can’t even be angry that the end of it isn’t mine. We’ll survive. That’s all the victory I need.

  “Corn’s not enough anymore,” says Teresa. There’s a little fire in her words. Of course the corn isn’t enough. It never could have been.

  “It’ll have to be,” says Brenda. She takes her daughter’s chin between her thumb and forefinger, studying the younger woman’s eyes before she leans in and presses a kiss against her forehead. “From now on, it’ll have to be.”

  The change is so swift and so inevitable that for a moment, I don’t see what’s happening. Their skin roughens, ripples; their clothes grow green with husks. Still together, still touching, they burst into cornstalks and continue to rush upward, until they tower over us, until the field is spreading out to claim the theater, pulling it down one brick at a time. Brenda’s guitar falls. I rush to catch it, becoming substantial and grabbing it by the neck before it can hit the ground.