Sparrow Hill Road

by Seanan McGuire

  In those places, there be monsters.

  You can learn to read the pattern of those cracks. There’s a secret language written across the length and breadth of North America, etched out in highways and embellished in side roads. It sweeps from the top of Canada all the way to the bottom of Mexico, telling a story too big and too old for any living soul who isn’t an ambulomancer to understand. There just isn’t room in a mortal lifetime. You’d need to ride those roads for fifty years or more, just listening, just learning, before you’d start to have a clue. Even then, you wouldn’t really know. You’d just be a little bit less ignorant. I’ve been running these roads since 1952, and I’m still not sure what some of the side roads and interchanges are trying to tell me.

  I do know enough to understand that every story starts in more than one place, driving anchors into the flesh of the world, digging in its claws and screaming for the right to live. My story started at a desert crossroads, and at the hairpin curve near the top of Sparrow Hill Road in Buckley Township, Michigan. The roads are still there, if you’d like to go and find them. They’ll tell you everything they know, and all you have to do is ask them the right way.

  Of course, you have to listen the right way, too, and for most people, that’s the hardest challenge of all. That’s what keeps the routewitches in business—they already know how to listen, and it’s usually easier to pay somebody else than it is to take the time to learn. I don’t have that problem. I’ve got nothing but time.

  It’s everyone else whose time keeps running out.

  The accident that’s coming is a bad one; bad enough that it’s been sending ripples through the ghostroads for days now, bruising the skies with the inky streaks of pain to come. There are a hundred accidents every hour, and most don’t announce themselves like this—if they did, no one would ever get any work done around here.

  I put down my malt on the smooth Formica counter of the Last Dance Diner, kicking the base of my stool to spin me around until I can look out at the blackened sky. “That’s going to be one pisser of a storm,” I say, shaking my head. “I pity anyone who has to go out there.”

  Emma’s silence from behind me is better than any comment could have been.

  “No.” I spin myself with more force this time, slapping my palms down on the counter before momentum can carry me into a full turn. This way looks tough and determined, like I should be listened to. If I kept spinning, I’d just wind up looking like a little kid. There are downsides to being a teenage girl for eternity. “I don’t care what’s going on out there. Whoever’s up the creek isn’t one of mine, and I’m not running toward an accident this bad if I don’t have to. I’m going to sit right here and drink my malt, like a sensible dead girl.”

  “There are a great many ways to belong to someone, Rosie,” says Emma calmly. The redheaded beán sidhe picks up my half-empty glass, pulling it out of my reach. “An accident bad enough to storm like this is no good for anyone. Do you really want to take the risk that the victim might belong to someone worse than the likes of you?”

  I glare at her. Emma smiles sympathetically back. Out of everyone I’ve met since I died, she’s the one who seems to understand how much I hate doing the psychopomp’s duty, which should never have been mine in the first place. I’m a hitcher, not a reaper or a gather-grim. I should have a carefree existence, all coffee and pie and anonymous sex with truckers who need to feel like they’re getting some value for the rides they give me. “I’m not the only hitcher in this state.”

  Now she raises an eyebrow, an amused smile appearing on her lips. “Is that so?” she asks. “And what state are we in then, Rosie-my-dear? Denial? Transition? Oh, could we be in a state of grace? I’m really quite fond of that one, grace.”

  I glare harder. It won’t do any good; Emma owns the Last Dance, inasmuch as anyone can own the Last Dance, and she’s right about my having no idea where we technically are. The diner moves around to suit its own wishes, and no one, not even Emma, seems to have any real say in its position from day to day. I can always find it when I need to. Sometimes I just need to travel a little farther before I get there.

  Emma doesn’t say anything. Emma doesn’t have to say anything. All she has to do is wait me out, and if I think a half a century in the grave has refined my glaring skills, that’s nothing compared to what several centuries in the twilight has done for her ability to wait. Beán sidhe are neither alive nor dead, but what they are, above all else, is patient.

  Finally, I throw my hands up in disgust. “Fine. Fine. You want me to check it out? Fine. But I’m going to need a ride.”

  “Oh, that shouldn’t be any trouble at all,” says Emma. She looks down the counter, suddenly all smiles, to the booth where a lanky phantom rider is busy eating cheese sandwiches and vegetable soup. “Tommy? Rose needs a ride. Think you can give her one?”

  He looks up, and smiles, and for a moment I see the boy he was before he died, headstrong and hopeful and not listening to a damn thing I said when I told him not to get behind the wheel. Tommy never did learn to listen to me. “I’d be happy to, Miss Emma.”

  I sigh, trying to make it clear just how put-upon I am. “Can I at least get a burger to go?”

  Tommy isn’t much for conversation. He drives like he’s making love to the road, hands gripping the wheel, eyes fixed on the black ribbon of the asphalt stretching out in front of us, reaching toward forever. In the ghostroads, you really can just drive and never turn back. As long as Tommy wants this road, it will be there for him, long and straight and eager for the kiss of his wheels against its surface. Everything leaves ghosts, even roads, and what could the ghost of a road want more than a man who drives like there is nothing else?

  Normally, I’m pretty chatty, but when I’m on my way to an accident I haven’t been personally called to, all I want to do is focus. With an accident that can’t be avoided that I’m intended to be at, there’s warning. I taste ashes and lilies, sometimes for days ahead of time, sometimes only for instants. I know the people I’m looking for, even if I’ve never seen them before. Here and now, with this fool’s errand of an accident, all I know is that someone’s about to die, and it’s going to be bad. So I focus, and I stretch myself as far as I can go, until I’m a wire vibrating across the twilight, and I search for the taste of ashes.

  I feel like I’m on the verge of snapping when I find it, a pale bloom of empty hallways and dust-covered bridal bouquets. “East,” I gasp, falling back down into myself. “Turn east.”

  Tommy gives me an appraising look before he hauls hard on the wheel, turning us. He doesn’t reduce speed at all, and the brief glimpse I have of the landscape tells me that there’s no road waiting for us—we’re about to drive into the badlands that surround every throughway in the twilight. I’m not too thrilled about that. There are . . . things . . . in the badlands, and not all of them are well-inclined toward human-form spirits.

  But the road reaches up to meet Tommy’s wheels, and we zoom on without so much as a shudder. The ghostroads love him like they’ve never loved me—like they’ve never loved any hitcher. All that, and his car, too. Phantom riders get all the luck.

  I huddle in my seat, wishing for the warm safety of a borrowed coat, to drape me in skin and bones and take me away from all of this, into a world where the sky never turns black with the bruises of an impending death, and pushy beán sidhe rarely send anyone off on a fool’s errand. The only comfort I have is that the air still tastes like, well, air. When I’m not struggling for the distant flavor of ashes and lilies, all I taste is the sterile nothingness of the dead. I’m not a big fan of the flavor, but it’s better than the alternatives. Wormwood and gasoline would signal Bobby Cross ahead of us on the road, and if there’s one thing I’m not ready to do yet, it’s go up against the man who killed me. Maybe I’ll never be ready.

  Look at me: dead for almost fifty years, and still a coward too interested in continuing to exist to get anything done. On the other hand, cowards have t
ime to change their minds. Heroes who decide to get heroic too soon wind up not having time for anything, ever again.

  I’m finally starting to relax, soothed by the familiar feeling of the car vibrating around me, when the sky goes black above us. Not bruised, but black from side to side, like someone had pulled a hood over the head of the world. I barely have time to consider what this might mean when the taste of ashes and lilies crashes down over me, a cold wave of accident-coming, accident-here that blocks out everything but the need to go, go, go, to see the twisted metal and the broken glass and the birth of a new ghost.

  “Here!” I shout, and Tommy, bless him, doesn’t hesitate. He grabs the stick and shifts gears, carrying us up out of the twilight, away from the ghostroads, and onto the cold, cruel daylight roads of the living.

  “Daylight” is a misnomer at the moment: we emerge from the twilight into the dead of night, suddenly racing down a highway I’ve never seen before. Road signs tell me that we’re thirty miles outside of Birmingham, Alabama. If I had a coat on, I’d be drowning in the humidity of the Southern summer. Without it, I’m just another dead girl, and the night is so cold.

  The smell of ashes and lilies is pulling me on toward the accident, but even without it, we’d have no trouble finding our destination. Flames have lit up the hills ahead of us like it’s the Fourth of July, painting them in orange striped with smoky shadows. Tommy hits the gas a little harder and his car eats up the last of the road, bringing the wreckage into view. The portents in the twilight were right: this was a bad one. A yellow school bus lies on its side, still smoking, and a tanker truck is off the road not far away, the cab crushed in from its collision with the cliff wall. A scattering of smaller vehicles surrounds the two behemoths. None of those drivers had a chance.

  There are ghosts who could look at a scene like that and tell you exactly what went wrong, painting you a picture of the accident so accurate that you’d almost believe they’d been there all along, watching as the cars collided. That’s not part of my skill set. What I can do, though, is spot the newly dead. And an accident like this was going to make ghosts.

  “Here,” I say. Tommy stops the car on a dime, and there’s no jerk as inertia kicks in, because we’re in the daylight now, and not even the for-your-convenience physics of the ghostroads can touch us here. I blow him a kiss and then I’m out of the car, running toward the accident.

  Broken glass and twisted metal litter the ground, but that doesn’t slow me down, because none of it can touch me. The pieces I step on pass right through my sneaker-clad feet, and I leave no footprints behind. If I look back, I know that Tommy will be gone, so I don’t look back. I just keep on running.

  I got here fast, thanks to Tommy, thanks to Emma and her not-so-subtle prodding; the first responders aren’t even here yet. For the moment, the only things that move are me and the flames. That will change soon. Waking up always takes time.

  The first bodies I find are a man and a woman in one of the smaller cars. He died when he was crushed against the steering wheel, and she wasn’t wearing a seat belt; she’s halfway through the windshield, a chunk of glass sticking out of her throat like a blade. I check them both, running my fingers through their shoulders without finding any resistance. They died painfully and without warning, but they didn’t leave ghosts behind. They’ve already moved on to whatever waits for the living on the other side of death.

  All the cars are like that, holding only slowly-cooling bodies whose residents have already vacated the premises. So is the tanker truck. I turn my eyes toward the thing I was hoping to avoid: the bus. Which came, according to the lettering on its side, from Centerville High School.

  God, I hate dealing with dead kids.

  There aren’t many hard and fast rules about who will or won’t leave a ghost behind when they go. You can game the system sometimes, die the right way to really get the universe’s attention, but for the most part, unless you’re a routewitch or an ambulomancer, you don’t get a say in whether or not you move on when you die. One of the ways to stack the deck in your favor, though, is to die violently, unexpectedly, and in your teens. Trust me. I’m practically the poster child for “die young, leave a hideously burnt corpse, wander the world forever as an unquiet spirit.” Maybe it’s because all teenagers consider themselves immortal. We just can’t accept the idea that we’ve actually died, and so we can’t move on.

  An entire bus full of dead high school students would definitely explain why the twilight was vibrating with the pre-echoes of this accident. Something like this could spawn twenty new road ghosts, easy, and not all—or even most—of them would be the friendly kind. Ghosts like me and Tommy are essentially the minority. It’s just that we all hang out together, because the alternative is a little horrifying.

  The remains of a homecoming banner wave gently in the breeze generated by the fire. I don’t know how it hasn’t burned yet, but I’m grateful for its survival, because it tells me that the school colors are purple and gray. I change my clothes as I approach the bus, keeping my jeans, turning my comfortable old mechanic’s shirt into layered tank tops in the school colors. I even streak my hair: the ultimate modern expression of school spirit. We wore ribbons in my day, but those would mark me as an outsider in the here and now.

  All this takes less time than it takes me to cross the short remaining distance. The dead are malleable. The only thing I can’t manipulate is the dress I died in, and I’m not wearing it now. That means things aren’t as bad as they could be.

  The smell of ashes and lilies is still lingering. The accident is over, but it hasn’t ended yet. I reach the bus, standing beside it and trying to decide what to do next. I could walk through it and see what I can see, but if there’s anyone inside awake enough to see me, all I’ll do is freak them out. Not a good way to make an introduction, especially since so few of the newly dead really understand what’s happened to them. Understanding takes time.

  I settle for the easy route. Cupping my hands around my mouth like a cheerleader at a pep rally, I shout, “Hey, is anyone awake in there? Johnny? Heather?” One thing that hasn’t changed in the last fifty years: give me a bus full of high schoolers, and I’ll show you at least one Johnny—probably more than one—and the corresponding Heather. The odds were in my favor.

  Minutes tick by. The police will be here any second, and with them, the crowd of living bodies that inevitably clogs an accident scene like this one. That’s good, because any survivors will be able to get the help they need. It’s also bad, because it will alert the dead that they’re not going to get better. The last thing I need right now is a newly dead teenage poltergeist kicking my ass because they’re going to miss prom. I try again: “Hello?”

  “Oh, God, I thought I was the only one. What happened?”

  The voice comes from behind me. That’s not a shock. The newly dead have a tendency to wander. I turn to see a pretty brunette in a purple-and-gray cheerleading uniform standing behind me, shivering uncontrollably. She hasn’t adjusted to the temperature change yet. The dead are always cold.

  “I didn’t see,” I say truthfully. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  She’s never seen me before, and in this moment, that doesn’t matter. I’m wearing school colors and standing next to their bus, and that’s all that matters. She may not even realize that I’m not injured. “Is anyone else . . . ?”

  “Not that I’ve seen.” Not yet. The others will rise soon, if they’re going to rise at all.

  Her eyes roll toward the bus, and she shudders, the sort of full-body shake that never presages anything good. For a moment, she seems to flicker, and her cheerleading uniform is replaced by jeans and a plain purple T-shirt. Then the uniform is back, like it had been there all along, but that doesn’t matter, because I know what she is, and I know why I’m here.

  She’s a homecomer. And I get the privilege of explaining to her why she can never, ever go home.

  Sometimes being dead really sucks.

>   There’s no hierarchy among the ghosts of the road. We all died in transit, one way or another, and we all kept going after our bodies let us down. Some of us are harmless, or close enough to harmless to be safe to deal with if you don’t have a choice. Hitchers, for example. My clan. All we need is a coat and a ride. Anything else you want to give us is extra, and we give as good as we get. One in three hitchhikers on the North American road died long before anyone offered them a ride, and for the most part, we’re pretty friendly.

  We’re not the only dead people who sometimes go looking for rides, and that’s where the homecomers come in. They die the same way hitchers do, but they die with just one thought in their minds: I can’t stay here. I have to get home. So when they rise, all they do, forever, is try to find the car that can get them where they’re going. It can take them years to realize that no living driver will ever be able to take them to the past—it can take them years to start killing. Their need to make it home is so strong that almost all of them inevitably do start to kill, and once they start, nothing stops them but an exorcism.

  Homecomers are like the dark mirror of the hitchers, even down to their appearance. We’re stuck, to some degree, in the clothes that we died in. We can change them, but if we’re not paying attention—or if the danger is too great—they’ll reassert themselves, returning like a rash. Homecomers discard the clothes they died in when they rise, dressing themselves instead in the clothes they wish they’d been wearing. They’re the girls by the side of the road in the pretty dresses and the Halloween costumes, the cheerleading outfits and the club wear. Hitchers never forget the accidents that killed us. Homecomers forget almost immediately, becoming convinced that they were on their way to homecoming, or to a costume party, or to anything but the grave. Once that forgetfulness sets in, they can’t be reasoned with anymore. All they want is to go home.