Sparrow Hill Road

by Seanan McGuire

  “It wasn’t a stray dog.”

  Tom’s announcement comes as a surprise to everyone but me. They turn to look at him. He’s leaning on Katherine, still pale and shaky from blood loss. He’ll live. That’s all I promised him.

  “What, you saw the owner?” asks Jamie.

  “No,” Tom says. “It wasn’t a dog at all. It was some sort of warning, okay? We need to leave the dead alone. They don’t like it when we mess with them, and we got lucky tonight. That thing could have killed us all. Maybe there’s a reason nobody’s ever caught a ghost. Maybe there’s a reason Professor Moorhead wasn’t willing to do this herself. You can keep messing around if you want, but I’m out, and so is Katherine.”

  “And so am I,” says Marla. “I don’t know if it was a . . . ghost dog . . . or what, but this is so not the sort of thing I want to get myself killed doing.”

  “What about the Girl in the Diner?” asks Jamie, almost frantically. “What about all the things she’s done? Now that we know we can do this, don’t we owe it to the world to—”

  “To what?” I demand, my already frayed temper finally giving way. “To go messing with some poor, innocent ghost who’s just trying to keep herself busy? If she was some kind of mass murderer, don’t you think that would be in every version of the story, not just the ones you can trace back to some slumber party or other? I mean, jeez, people, do a little more research than ‘oh, the professor says she’s bad, let’s go catch her, she’s eeeeeevil.’”

  Now they’re all staring at me. Tom and Katherine don’t look surprised; that’s to their credit. Jamie and Marla still look confused as hell. And Angela . . .

  Gold star to Angela, because she looks like she’s just seen a ghost.

  “You were here all along,” she whispers. Jamie shoots her a startled look. Marla takes a step backward. Natural reactions, both of them, although I admit, I’d been hoping for better. At least a little scream or something.

  “Yeah, well. I get bored sometimes.” I look at Jamie. He’s the leader of this little group. They’ll listen to him. I hope. “Leave me alone, Jamie. Don’t follow me, don’t lay traps for me, don’t try to track me down. Not because I’ll hurt you—I’m not that kind of a girl—but because you have no idea how many things could have killed you tonight, and next time, I won’t be here to make nice with them on your behalf. Do I make myself clear?”

  He laughs nervously. “Rose? What are you talking about? I know it’s been a kind of a weird night, but don’t you think you’re taking things a little bit too far?”

  I sigh. “God save me from smart people and college students. You’re all such fucking idiots.” It only takes a second to shrug out of my coat, the cold rushing back into my bones like the tide flowing in to fill the harbor. I’m still solid, still alive . . . until I let go of the sleeve, and the coat falls to the pavement.

  “Leave the dead alone,” I say. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m see-through and glowing, but this time, they listen; this time, the only sound is Angela hitting the ground in a dead faint. I’m pretty sure she landed on some of the broken glass we scattered earlier. “You’re going to want to put some Bactine on that,” I add, and disappear. Not the most memorable last words ever, but hey, infection is nothing to fuck around with.

  The ghostroads flow back into place around me. I sigh, shake my head, and start walking. I want to put some miles between me and Ohio before I venture back into the daylight.

  Wouldn’t want a group of familiar faces offering me a ride.

  2014

  The Killing of Route 14

  EVERYTHING THAT LIVES CAN DIE, and there are a lot of definitions of the word “life.” Humans, and things that look like humans, tend to assume that our life is the only kind that counts: fast, hot, animal life, life that begins screaming and all-too-often ends the same way. We’re very set in our ways, and that carries over even onto the ghostroads, where you’d think that we’d know better. You’d think that dying and waking up in a whole new kind of life would be enough to shake most of us out of those tired old patterns. You’d be wrong.

  Before I died I believed humanity alone ruled the Earth, and that no other creature could ever hope to challenge our dominion. I learned pretty quickly that I was wrong, but it still took years and years and a lot of hard lessons for me to accept that sometimes, houses and cars and well-loved toys can have a life of their own, one capable of carrying over into the twilight. There are ghost planes in the sky, and ghost gold mines in the mountains. Ghost skyscrapers stand on the horizon, unyielding, even as the rest of the twilight changes around them. Ghost stories tell themselves over and over again, like secrets on the wind.

  And then there are the highways. Those great arteries of travel, down which a million cars and a million souls will pass year by year. They live, just like people, or cars, or stories.

  And everything that lives can die.

  The Last Dance Diner, 2014

  It takes longer than I would have preferred for me to hitch my way back to the Last Dance after dealing with those college idiots back in Ohio. The thing about the ghostroads is that nothing stays static for long—everything moves around and changes according to its own unknowable whims. The Last Dance is usually anchored somewhere near Michigan for me, but it can move, and when it does, I have to move with it. This time, the road leads me all the way to upstate New York before the feel of it changes. I smile at the man behind the wheel, and say, “This is as far as I go. Do you think you could let me off here?”

  He blinks, confusion and honest desire warring in his expression. It’s clear what he thought my payment for the ride would be. I chose well with this one: despite his expectations, he’s gentleman enough to pull off to the side of the road and hit the button that unlocks my door. “You sure?” he asks. “We’re only about thirty miles outside of Albany.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, and slide out of the car. The air around him is clean, smelling of nothing more unusual than exhaust fumes and unwashed human skin. He’ll make it home safely, assuming he doesn’t stop for any more hitchhikers. I flash him a smile. “Be safe.”

  “You, too, Rose,” he says, and he’s gone, one more pair of taillights receding into the distance, one more life I didn’t need to save. I shrug off the coat he gave me, feeling a sting of regret at giving up my borrowed life so easily, and drop down into the twilight. The glass-speckled ground of the highway shoulder changes under my feet, becoming the smooth tarmac of the Last Dance parking lot as the late afternoon sunlight mellows into early evening. The neon sign is lit, beating back the natural darkness that the twilight is heir to. I smile and start for the doors, glad to be back in what passes for home these days.

  The bell over the door rings when I push it open—Emma prefers that even her less corporeal clientele not walk through the glass, as it tends to remind the ghost crows that sometimes gather in the parking lot that there’s nothing actually keeping them outside. Emma herself is behind the counter, sliding a vanilla ice cream soda to the only other customer in the place. It’s a woman, and I can’t see anything of her but her hair. Her hair is enough. It’s silver-white, the color of moonlight shining through corn silk. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a woman with hair that color. I’ll never forget it.

  I stop in the doorway. The bell rings again as the door swings shut behind me.

  Emma looks up and smiles, but there’s an apology there, sitting uneasy in the space behind her eyes. The woman in front of her picks up her ice cream soda, takes a sip through the straw, and turns, directing a smile of her own at me.

  “Hi, Rose,” she says. “It’s been a long time.”

  The longer you’re dead, the more people you’ll meet. It’s simple mathematics, really. I was never very good at math when I was in school, and “simple” doesn’t mean “fun.” “Hello, Mary,” I say, walking to the counter and taking a stool some distance away from hers. “What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted an ice cream soda, and th
is is the best place in the twilight to get one,” says Mary. She’s still smiling. That’s not helping matters any. “Also, I wanted to talk to you, and everyone knows that if you hang around the Last Dance long enough, you’ll run into Rose Marshall.”

  “Maybe I need to start hanging out somewhere new,” I say. Emma sets a faded denim jacket on the counter in front of me. I take it, shrugging it on, and feel the flesh settling over my phantom bones. This is the only place in the twilight where I can be among the technically living, and it’s worth it for the malted that follows the coat, the glass cool and smooth against my fingertips. “What do you want?”

  Mary frowns a little. “That’s no way to greet an old friend.”

  “In case you forgot, we’re dead,” I say, and push my straw aside as I lift the glass and take a gulp of sweet vanilla shake.

  “What does dead have to do with it?”

  I put down the glass. “Dead men tell no tales, and dead girls make no friends. I don’t want to talk to you, Mary. Please leave me alone.”

  She sighs. “I was afraid it was going to be something like this.” There’s a soft hiss of vinyl springing back into shape as she slides off her stool and walks over to me, feet scuffing against the linoleum floor. They’re small sounds, living sounds, and they have as little business here as she does. Mary Dunlavy is dead: that much is true. But she’s not a ghost of the road, and only road ghosts belong in the Last Dance.

  I don’t want to look at her. I don’t want to see her, with her crossroads eyes and her hair like the moon reflecting off the silvery corn in the fields beside the highway. Mary Dunlavy and I go way, way back. We were both born in Buckley; we both died there. That’s where the similarities end.

  “Rose.”

  “Go away, Mary.”

  “Rose, I need you to look at me. Please.” There’s a note of raw pleading in her voice, as out of place as a penguin in the desert. “I know what you’ve been doing. I know that you’ve been taking the first steps toward finally stopping Bobby Cross. Dammit, Rose, I know you walked the Ocean Lady. Now please, for my sake, for the sake of Route 14, look at me.”

  Damn her anyway, for making me care. Slowly, I turn on my stool, the malt glass still cool in my hand. “What do you want, Mary?”

  She looks at me, young and earnest with her eyes like a mile of empty road, and she says the last thing I would ever have expected: “I want to help you.”

  Daly, Maine, 1981

  It’s been a long, hot summer, and I’ve been lucky enough to bake my way through most of it, going from car to car and coast to coast while the days unspooled around me. I hooked up with a trucker in San Antonio who got me all the way to California, although only barely—the sun was coming up as we rolled across the state line. From there, I ran all the way up to Washington, into Vancouver, and hitched my way all the way back across the country. I didn’t count the rides I got, or the drivers I smiled at. All that mattered was the road, and the need to keep on moving.

  Only now I’m standing outside a gas station outside a little town called Daly in upstate Maine, and I have to wonder what I’m doing with my death. There hasn’t been a car through here in hours, not since the harried mother of two who’d picked me up outside Bangor said she was very sorry, but this was as far as she could take me. My thumb is ready. There’s no one here to show it to, and I don’t like the way the station attendant keeps looking at me. He’s either planning to call the cops or bury my body in the woods behind the building, and I honestly don’t know which it’s going to be.

  “Fuck this,” I mutter. Every hitcher knows that when you can’t get a ride, there’s only one option left, short of dropping down into the ghostroads and trying again later. I shove my hands down into the pockets of my jeans and start walking away. I hear a door slam behind me, presumably as the station attendant finally comes outside. I flipped him off over my shoulder and kept walking. That’s one of the first rules you learn when you exist only on the roads: Never look back if you don’t have to. Whichever way you’re going, that’s the right one.

  The gas station parking lot yields to the paved road, which yields in turn to a gravel frontage road that may need to be downgraded to “hiking trail” if it gets much narrower. The need to keep moving is still with me, and so I scowl at the woods and walk on.

  It’s not until I turn off the frontage road and onto a deer trail that I realize I’m being led.

  It’s a subtle feeling, a soft tugging at the back of my mind, like a fishhook made of feathers, but it’s there, and now that I’ve recognized it for what it is, I can’t stop feeling it. I try to let go of the flesh and drop down into the twilight, but the compulsion won’t let me. It wants me to keep going the way that I’m going. Maybe if I’d caught it earlier . . .

  I didn’t catch it earlier. That means there’s nothing for it but to keep going. I mutter profanities to the trees, and I pull my hands out of my pockets long enough to draw my borrowed jacket a little tighter around me. If I’m not being allowed to descend into the twilight, I’m going to hold onto the semblance of humanity for as long as I possibly can. Maybe whoever rigged this idiotic compulsion will let it go when they see that I’m alive. There’s virtually nothing in the world of the living or the worlds beyond that can recognize a hitcher as a ghost when we’re wearing a human form.

  Virtually nothing. I walk around a bend in the trail and there she is, white-haired and gray-eyed and still wearing her Buckley High School letter jacket, like that matters anymore, like that ever mattered in the first place. She’s sitting on a fallen log, and she’s clearly waiting for someone. She’s clearly waiting for me, and I don’t know what she is, I don’t, and that isn’t important, because everything about her screams run now, run and don’t look back. She can’t be more than seventeen on the outside, but on the inside . . .

  Age among the dead has nothing to do with the shape of your skin, and everything to do with how many years your body has spent moldering in its grave. This girl, this slowly smiling girl, died before I did. I know it just as surely as I know her name, because there’s only one other ghost who runs the East Coast roads in a Buckley High School jacket, and no one knows what she is, and no one ever gets close enough to ask her.

  “Hi, Rose,” says Mary Dunlavy, who died on Sparrow Hill Road in 1939, thirteen years before I would follow in her fatal footsteps. She stands, smiling easily, and offers me her hand. “I figured it was time we met.”

  I stare at her, mouth as dry as the dust beneath my feet, and I have no idea what to say.

  The Last Dance Diner, 2014

  Mary and I sit at opposite sides of the private booth at the back of the diner, me eyeing her mistrustfully, she sipping her ice cream soda with exquisite patience. She hasn’t said a word since we sat down. It’s clear that she’s ready to wait all night, if that’s what I need her to do. I want to outlast her, to bite my tongue and glare until she goes away, but being dead hasn’t done a thing to make me patient. It’s probably a miracle I’ve lasted this long. Her straw hits the bottom of her glass, making a slurping noise, and I finally snap.

  “What do you mean, help me?” I demand. “What are you trying to do? We’re not friends, Mary. We’ve never been friends.”

  “Only because you didn’t want us to be.” She shakes her head, pushing her empty glass aside. “I really hoped we could find some common ground between us. We’re both Buckley girls. Shouldn’t that count for something?”

  “All I wanted when I was alive was to get the hell out of Buckley. Why would I be looking to make friends with someone from town now that I’m dead?”

  “Because I understand where you come from in a way that nobody else is going to, that’s why. I remember climbing Sparrow Hill and trying to see past the woods to the big city. I remember running past the old Healy place because maybe it was haunted. We have the same roots.”

  “Roots don’t mean a damn thing after the tree’s been cut down.” I shake my head. “You have nothing to of
fer me, and I’m not going to kill anything else for you, so you can stop making nice. It isn’t going to work.”

  “Rose . . . what kind of ghost do you think I am?”

  “To be honest? I never spared you a moment’s thought after we buried Route 14. So you tell me. Gather-grim? Reaper? Really specialized reaper? I didn’t know you people got assigned to highways, but hell, you’re a little out of my wheelhouse. I’m willing to believe just about anything.”

  “I’m not a psychopomp. If I were, I wouldn’t have needed you.”

  I frown. “If you’re not a psychopomp, then what the hell are you, and why are you here?”

  Mary takes a deep breath, and it says something about how confused she has me that I don’t know whether she needs it or not. Is this theater, the way that most ghosts will walk on floors rather than floating above them, even when they’re not solid? Or is this a function of her nature, the way that I can bleed when I’m wearing a living person’s jacket?

  “Look, Rose . . .” Mary hesitates. “I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a really long time, believe it or not. And I know you’re going to want to freak out on me, because that’s the kind of person you are. Can you please just try to reserve judgment until I can finish explaining myself to you?”

  I scowl at her for a moment before I yield, curiosity winning out over common sense, again. It’s the story of my death. “I’ll try,” I say.

  “Okay. Have you ever run into a group of ever-lasters?”

  “Ugh.” There’s nothing false about my shudder. The ever-lasters are the ghosts of children who, for whatever reason, decided to keep going to school after they died. Most dead kids haunt their houses, or the places where they died, or find another group of the dead to belong to. Not the ever-lasters. They haunt schoolyards and playgrounds, playing four-square and double-dutch and watching over their alma maters. Some people say their jump rope songs and clapping games hold the wisdom of the twilight, if you stick around long enough to figure it out. I’ve never felt the urge. They’re dead kids, and that’s creepy as hell, if you ask me.