Sparrow Hill Road

by Seanan McGuire

  EVERYONE IS BORN BASICALLY THE SAME WAY: bloody and screaming. We come out of our mothers, shriek with our first breath, and find ourselves lost in a world that we don’t understand. But we’re hungry for understanding, hungry for life, and so we learn. We grow. We wrap the world around our shoulders like a blanket or a coat, and we wear it proudly every day of our lives, for however long those lives may last. We are temporary creatures, and we know it—that’s why we fear the dark, after all, that’s why we build walls and light candles to keep it out.

  Even if everyone is born the same way, every death is different. Even two people who died in the same car crash will experience different deaths, one by crushing, one by short, sharp impact to the head; one as a driver, one as a passenger. Those final experiences shape them as much as anything they knew in life. Still, for most people, that sort of thing is a temporary concern. They’re born, they die, and they pass through the ghostroads like shooting stars, leaving only contrails and broken hearts behind them. For some, it’s not that simple. For some, death is a wound that will not heal, and it refuses to let them move on. So they build a new life for themselves, one distinct from the old in that, well . . . they’re not actually living anymore.

  The lands of the living have a thousand different mythologies and storytelling traditions. They keep them segregated, carefully split along whatever boundary lines are in vogue this year, and any story older than the country that it’s told in is pinned like a butterfly under glass, refused the capacity to grow or change. Urban legends can still warp themselves to fit the times, but everything else is expected to stay the same forever. Sleeping Beauty sleeps over and over again; Snow White never learns not to eat the apple, and her spiritual sister in fruit-based stupidity, Persephone, does the same with her new husband’s pomegranate tree. Over and over, again and again, forever and for always.

  I don’t know about you, but that sounds sort of like the definition of insanity to me.

  Things are less clear-cut in the lands of the dead, where no one has the authority to say which stories can be told in which places, or when. No one gets to say “You can’t be here” when one tradition bleeds over into another, and everything mixes and mingles and blends, until every death is a cocktail of a hundred different faiths, a thousand different stories. That’s how you get urban legends like hitchhiking ghosts sitting in diners managed by Irish beán sidhe, arguing about who owes who when the sky goes black as bruises. People like me are only possible when life’s blinders have been pulled aside, revealing the truth that hides behind them in the dark: that boundaries are what we make them, and that the only power they have is what we give them.

  Still, there are fairy tales of a kind in the lands of the dead, stories that have power over us because they’re ours, and because we want, so badly, for them to be the truth. We already know that there’s an afterlife, and so we whisper stories of redemption and reincarnation, rebirth and resurrection. They’re a lot like the stories told by the living, in at least one respect.

  They all begin with once upon a time.

  Madison, Wisconsin, 1956.

  I drop off the ghostroads to find myself standing in the middle of a blasted field, the skeletal remains of winter wheat jutting up from the ground like claws. Wisconsin doesn’t look kindly on the weeks that slip in between the death of cold and the birth of warmth; Persephone may have left her husband, but she isn’t home yet, and this is one state that’ll be damned before it lets anyone forget it. The air is cold enough that I feel it even through the endless chill of death. It works under the illusion of my skin, seeming to sink all the way down to the bones that I don’t technically have anymore.

  There are times when being dead sucks more than usual. Any time that involves going to Wisconsin when the weather’s bad counts as one of those times.

  This used to be a road, this place where I’m standing; carriages used to travel here, horse-drawn and loaded down with produce or baled hay. Time flowed on, and they were replaced by cars, but not for long, because the highway cut through these fields—but not through this spot—and this good old road was forgotten, turned back into open land and longing. That’s what dropped me here. The highway is a good one, but the cry of this old road was stronger, at least on the ghostroads, where anything that dies can live forever.

  It’s a little sad, and a little just plain the way things work in this world, and it’s a whole lot the reason I’m standing in this damn field, rather than safely tucked onto the highway shoulder, waiting for a ride to somewhere else. I mutter under my breath as I wrap my arms around myself, trying to hug some warmth back into my bones. It doesn’t work. It never works. The only thing that clears away the cold is a living human’s coat, freely given, and that’s not something I’m going to find out here.

  “I hate my afterlife,” I complain, and begin wading through the blasted winter wheat.

  The road isn’t as far as it seemed when I first appeared. I’ve barely walked a quarter of a mile when I start hearing cars in the distance, their hissing wheels and roaring engines sweeter than any song that Buddy Holly ever sang. I pick up the pace a little, not even pretending to hold my skirt away from the grasping ground. The habit of pretending to be alive is strong, partially because it’s always easier to catch a ride when the driver hasn’t seen me walking through solid objects just before flagging him down. At the moment, I care less about looking like the living than I do reaching that liminal holy land known only as the highway shoulder.

  I’m almost there when I hear a sound even more pressing than the siren song of the passing cars—maybe the only sound that could be more pressing in the here and now, with the wind blowing cold across the blasted fields. The sound of a little girl, crying.

  My feet make no sound as I walk. That bothers me sometimes, but not right now. Right now, I don’t want anything getting between me and that little girl, who’s sobbing like she thinks her heart’s been broken for good. She sounds . . . it’s hard to define the quality that I’m hearing in her voice, but she sounds alive. The dead can cry. The dead cry all the time. Only the living can cry like that.

  I find her huddled in a ditch near the edge of the field, dirty skirts hitched high around her scabby knees, her legs hugged tightly to her chest. She doesn’t look up at my approach, maybe because she can’t hear me. And she’s wearing a jacket and a sweater both.

  “Hey, kid,” I say. Her head jerks up like a startled jack-in-the-box, big blue eyes wide. Her cheeks are red from cold and crying. “You lost?”

  Words are too hard for her to manage, and so she doesn’t; she just nods, chest still hitching and fat tears still rolling down her face.

  “I’m sorry. I’m Rose. What’s your name?”

  It takes her a moment, but finally she manages to say, voice softer than her sobs had been, “A-Amy.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Amy. Do you live around here?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Well, if you don’t live around here, how did you get here?”

  “Do you live around here?” she asks, looking briefly too curious to be sad.

  It’s a valid question. “No,” I say, “but I’m not the one who’s lost.”

  She’s willing to accept that, thankfully. She sniffles, wiping her cheeks with the back of one grimy hand before she says, “We stopped for the rest stop. I just wanted . . . I was tired of being in the car, we’ve been driving for hours.”

  Ah. “You went for a little walk, and you couldn’t find your way back, am I right?”

  Amy nods solemnly.

  She can’t be more than seven years old, little girl lost in a field where distance doesn’t have much meaning. She could freeze to death out here. She’d probably be a road ghost, maybe a hitcher like me, maybe a homecomer, or even a little white lady, so sweet, so cold, so deadly. That’s what the night intends for her, I can taste it now, phantom breath of ashes and honeysuckle on the wind—honeysuckle, not lilies, because her death is of the road, n
ot on it.

  Fuck that. Honeysuckle is negotiable. I reach out with the part of me that knows the road the way a swallow knows the sky, feeling the heartbeat of the highway until it whispers rest stop, half a mile from where we’re standing. “I think I can get you back there, Amy,” I say, “but I need you to do something for me, first.”

  Her eyes go wide with sudden hope. “Anything you want,” she says. “I’ll do anything you want.”

  I feel like a heel for even thinking what I’m about to ask, but I have to do it. How much worse would it be if she tried to take my hand—a natural thing for a little girl to do—and found herself holding nothing but the air? “Can I borrow your coat?” She has a sweater. She won’t freeze. Not in half a mile.

  Amy looks at me like I’m insane, but she shrugs off her coat and hands it to me, the fabric carrying flesh and life and the sudden smell of the frost-shattered wheat that’s standing all around us. I tie it around my neck like a cape, and she giggles, somehow reassured by what has to look like an adult playing silly to make her feel better. She does take my hand, her fingers almost as cold as mine, and together we walk down to the edge of the highway, where the gravel makes the going a little easier. She holds my hand all the way back to the rest stop. Her parents are there, shouting her name, clearly frantic.

  “Mommy!” Amy’s hand is out of mine almost before I know she’s moving, and she’s running, running, running to fling herself into the arms of a woman with her wide blue eyes and dark chestnut-colored hair. I untie the coat from around my neck, letting it flutter to the ground as I step just deep enough into the ghostroads to shut myself from sight. Amy might be willing to accept my convenient presence in the field; her parents would be rather more suspicious.

  She looks startled when she turns and I’m not there. I watch as her parents bundle her into the car, ignoring her protests that her friend had been right there, she swears. Then I let go of the daylight entirely, tumbling back down into the twilight. It’s only in the instant before the rest stop falls away that I realize I’m not alone; a redheaded woman is watching me from the shadows of the weathered old brick building. And she’s smiling.

  Then Wisconsin, and the woman, are gone, and it’s just me and the twilight and the ghosts of winters past, alone again together.

  Madison, Wisconsin, 1958.

  There’s a county fair raging in this flat-mown field, carnival lights and carousel music turning the night into a fairy tale. I’m walking toward it almost before I register that I’ve crossed into the daylight levels—a name that shouldn’t apply this long after the sun goes down, but is accurate, all the same. It’s lighter here at night than it ever is in the twilight, come night or day or something in-between. The part of me that’s forever sweet sixteen says the carnival’s the place to be, especially on a night like this one, where the hay’s been cut but the winter hasn’t come yet, and we’re all prepared to bid farewell to the summer.

  Carnivals are good places for someone like me. A lot of the carnie-folk are routewitches, or know one. A few of them are even ambulomancers. They understand that sometimes a road ghost needs a little solid one-on-one time with a carousel pony, and they can almost always be counted on for a flannel coat and a funnel cake.

  I can’t smell the funnel cake, but I can almost taste it as I hurry to the carnival’s edge, where the light bleeds through into the darkened fields. Getting a coat is as easy as I hoped it was going to be. I don’t even have to ask—I just turn around and there’s a man with blacktop eyes and a half-quirked grin holding it out to me, like a boyfriend offering his best girl a corsage. He doesn’t wait around for me to thank him. He just hands it to me and disappears, and when I tuck my hands into the pockets, I find them full of tickets and vouchers for the concession stands.

  This is one of those nights where it’s good to be alive, even if you’re dead. Vouchers count as food freely given, even though money doesn’t, and I can taste everything the concession stands give me. I eat cotton candy and funnel cake and hot dogs dripping ketchup and mustard and fresh-chopped raw onion. I ride the Ferris wheel and the merry-go-round and the bumper cars, and just when the tickets are about to run out, my black-eyed carnie-boy appears again, shoving another strip into my hand and fading back into the crowd. It’s magical. It’s wonderful. It’s exactly what I needed.

  At least until I’m riding their rickety home-brew roller coaster around its looping track for the third time, and the sudden scent of ashes invades my nostrils. Not ashes and lilies; not a road death. This is ashes and red cherry syrup, death at the carnival, and I don’t even know what kind of ghost that death would make. I look around, searching for the source of the scent, which is getting stronger by the second. There; the little girl in the next car, the one with the dark wheat hair and the joyful scream rising from her throat. Her harness isn’t fastened right. She’s going to fall out on the next curve, and the impact with the ground will break her spine. I can see it, if I look at her the right way.

  I’m barely aware that I’m unfastening my own belt. Then we hit the curve, and she’s falling, and I’m leaping after her, dead girl arrowing after living girl, dead girl catching living girl around the waist as the first startled scream breaks from her lips. We hit the ground hard, with her landing hard on top of me, and I feel something essential as it snaps.

  Then she’s crying, staggering to her feet and screaming for help. It’s the sound of her scream that does it, sharp and terrified, like a child’s sobs by the side of a road. She must be twelve now, but I know her by her screams.

  “Hello, Amy,” I murmur, and close my eyes, and the land of the living falls away.

  I’m already on the ghostroads when I realize who was sitting next to me on the roller coaster, the redheaded woman with the green, green eyes, and the bright, bright smile. But she’s in the land of the living, with Amy, and I’m back among the dead. My night at the carnival was fun while it lasted.

  Madison, Wisconsin, 1965.

  “Wisconsin again?” I want to stamp my foot and scream. I settle for glaring at the street sign, like it’s somehow to blame for my situation. I was aiming for Minnesota, where the college boys will be driving into the Twin Cities in their shiny new roadsters, their eyes bright with dreams and their hair dripping with pomade. Lots of easy pickings for a girl like me on the Minnesota road on a night like tonight. But this isn’t Minnesota, and these streets are empty, twilight bleeding over the horizon like grenadine bleeding into a cocktail.

  There’s nothing to be done for it now. I could drop back down to the twilight, but I’m tired; it’s been too long since I put on a young girl’s skin and danced for a few hours among the living. Hitchers live on life the way some ghosts live on tears or terror. If we go without it for too long, we start to go fuzzy around the edges, drifting toward a total fade. The only difference between a truly old hitcher and a really young homecomer is sometimes intent: faded hitchers kill the same way homecomers do. We just don’t mean to do it. I need a coat. I need to touch the living.

  Madison has changed since the last time I was here. It’s still a Midwestern city, and the streets still sing their songs of winter snow and summer sweat, but the houses are closer together, and the buildings have started to get taller. The last time I was here, there was a county fair—I ate a funnel cake and saved a little girl and broke my spine. I got better. She wouldn’t have. The field where the carousel turned is a bank now, squat and solid and looking like it grew up out of the ground without any human aid. The times, they are a’changing.

  What hasn’t changed is the sound of a girl, somewhere close by, crying. I turn toward it, catching the barest scent of ashes on the wind, and sigh. Why does Wisconsin always seem to mean trying to avert the inevitable? “I think this state hates me,” I say, to no one in particular, and start walking.

  She’s sitting on the edge of a marble fountain that contains no water, her head in her hands, crying so hard that her ponytail bobs up and down with the force of h
er sobbing. She’s grown into the perfect little Miss Teenage USA, with her hair flipped just so and her patterned blouse and her calf-length trousers. Her hair is darker than it used to be, chestnut brown instead of winter wheat gold, but I still recognize her. How could I not recognize someone I’ve already saved twice?

  “Hello, Amy.” I sit down next to her—a gesture, mind you, that a younger, less experienced ghost would be incapable of making; a younger, less experienced ghost would plummet right through that marble fountain if they even tried: I am getting better at this—and smooth my skirt across my knees, watching her out of the corner of my eye. “It’s been a while.”

  Her head jerks up, same startled little girl motion as in that long-ago field, and she stares at me, no recognition in those wide blue eyes. “Do I know you?” she asks.

  I want to tell her no. I want to get up and walk away and let her go back to crying without me to make it any better, or any worse. But the scent of ashes still coils around her like a snake, twisting and twining and not giving me anything to grab onto. I can’t smell lilies, or honeysuckle, or anything to tell me what the danger is. There’s an accident coming for this girl, who may not be a medium and talks to ghosts anyway—talks to a ghost, at least. Once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is something that matters.

  “My name’s Rose,” I say, mildly. “I helped you find your parents once, when you wandered away in a field. It was pretty cold out there. You could have frozen to death. So I guess you’re lucky that I came along.”

  She keeps staring at me. Maybe I’m the only ghost she’s ever seen. Maybe she doesn’t know what to say. Maybe she thinks I’m crazy. I don’t know until she opens her mouth, and when she finally does, what comes out is, “I thought I dreamed you.”

  “I get that a lot,” I say. “I’m not a dream.”