Sparrow Hill Road

by Seanan McGuire

  Bethany swears and sputters as she stumbles after me. For all that she grew up in Michigan, same as I did, she doesn’t seem to have done much walking in cornfields. Or maybe it’s just her abruptly advanced age. It must be hard to grow old gracefully when you do it overnight. “Slow down!”

  “Speed up!” I shout back. “We’re on a pretty tight schedule here.”

  “Why?” She’s panting as she staggers to my side. I take pity and slow down slightly. My debt to the Queen probably won’t count as paid if Bethany drops dead before I can get her to the crossroads. Too bad. “I want this taken care of more than you do, but doesn’t midnight happen every night? If we miss it tonight, can’t we just try again tomorrow?”

  “Nope.” I can see from her expression that she doesn’t understand. This seems to be my night for taking pity. I sigh, and explain, “Once you start looking for the crossroads, you’re on one of the crossing roads. It’s some sort of symbolic metaphysical thing, since you still need to find the roads in a physical sense, and I don’t really understand it, but them’s the rules. My friend Mary could probably explain it. Anyway, she’s not here, and we have until midnight.”

  “Or what?”

  “We wait a year.”

  Bethany’s eyes widen in undisguised alarm. “What? I can’t spend a year like this!”

  “That’s true. You may not have a year like this.” I’m being nasty—Bethany doesn’t look that old—but it’s difficult to really care. This isn’t how I planned to spend my evening. Or any evening. Ever. “So you’d better keep up.”

  “Bitch,” Bethany mutters, picking up her pace a little more in order to draw a step ahead of me.

  “Guess it runs in the family,” I say, and keep on walking.

  The cornfield extends for what feels like miles. We eventually come out on a wide dirt semi-road beaten into the corn, worn by years of farmers’ footsteps as they checked their harvests. I know the road as soon as I step onto it, feel the electric tingle in the soles of my feet; I’ve never been here before, and I’ve been here dozens and dozens of times, because this is the initial spoke on the crossroads wheel. If it isn’t the first road, it’s the road that will lead us to the first road. The first road will lead to the second road—they have to cross, after all—and then Bethany can make her bargain. Whatever that bargain might be.

  Bethany steps onto the road behind me, and stops, letting out a deep sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God. This is the right road.”

  “This is part of the right road. Don’t get too excited.”

  She shoots me a glare that reminds me that of the two of us, I’m the one who looks like a teenager, but she’s the one who actually is a teenager. “Why are you like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “A spoiler. Spoiling things. This is the right road. Why won’t you just let it be the right road?”

  “Because maybe it’s the wrong road. Maybe it’s the road that leads to the road that leads to the right road, which doesn’t mean this is the right road. Maybe I’m walking through a cornfield in the middle of the night with the niece who tried to hand me to my personal devil, and maybe that’s not the sort of thing that puts me in a good mood. Maybe being dead for the better part of a century has made me a realist. Or maybe I just don’t like you. Did you consider that?” I look steadfastly ahead, and keep on walking. “Next time, try asking one of the other routewitches.”

  “I did. They all turned me down.” There’s a wistful edge to Bethany’s voice that makes me stop and turn to look at her. “They said . . . they said I got what I deserved. That I shouldn’t have been messing around with things that I didn’t understand. That I shouldn’t have been messing around with you.”

  “Routewitches and road ghosts have an arrangement. You don’t mess with us, we don’t mess with you.” I start walking again. Bethany follows. “Most routewitches wind up road ghosts when they die. I guess they view treating us with respect as an investment in their own afterlife.”

  “Were you a routewitch?”

  The question silences me for a moment. I think about it as I walk, and finally answer, “I think I might have been. Maybe. But I never had the opportunity to travel, and it’s supposed to be travel that makes a routewitch understand what the roads are saying.” I’d wanted to travel. Gary and I used to talk about it all the time. It never happened, and then I was dead, and travel became a fact of—for lack of a better word—life.

  “You could ask for that. At the crossroads.”

  “Ask for what?”

  “The chance to be a routewitch.”

  I wheel around to face her, stopping in my tracks. “You mean the chance to be alive again? Is that it? I could go to the crossroads and ask whatever . . . whatever fucked-up horror movie version of a fairy godmother it is that makes bargains there to bring me back from the dead?” I can tell from her face that she means exactly that. She’s trying to make me want to go to the crossroads, like that will somehow transform this from a chore into the world’s most bizarre family outing. “I should leave you, I should leave you right here and let you find your way without me.”

  Bethany’s eyes widen in alarm. “Don’t do that! I just . . . I just thought . . .”

  “You thought I’d want to be alive again. Right. See, there was a time when I wanted to be alive again. There was a time when I would have sold my soul for the chance to be alive again. But that time passed. My world got old and moved on, and I kept on being sixteen years old. The phantom prom date, the girl who never grew up, Wendy without a Peter Pan. My mother died, my brothers got married, my classmates graduated and got lives, and I was still sixteen, and I was still on the road. If you’d explained the crossroads to me when I was a year, five years, even ten years dead, I would have jumped at the chance to get my world back. My world isn’t there anymore, Bethany. It’s never going to be there again. So asking me if I want to be alive again isn’t just insulting, isn’t just superficial, it’s mean. Now shut the fuck up and just keep walking.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bethany whispers.

  “Yeah. So am I.” I turn and started to walk again. The cornfields and the smell of the green surround us on all sides. And we just keep going.

  The cornfield road gives way to a slightly larger road. This one comes with bonus haystacks, and the unending magnetic pull of the crossroads somewhere in the distance ahead. It knows we’re coming. It’s waiting for us. I just hope it understands that only one of us is actually coming to deal.

  Bethany’s having trouble keeping up. The walk is taking its toll on her, but I don’t dare slow down. There’s only so much distance between here and midnight at the crossroads, and if we miss the deadline . . . Bethany’s going to have a lot more nights of achy joints and trouble breathing ahead of her. She’s stupid. She’s stupid, and shortsighted, and stubborn, and most of all, she’s young. She’s the kind of young I never had the chance to be. And yet a part of me understands her. She got into this mess because she wanted to get out of Buckley so badly she was willing to ransom someone else’s soul in order to do it. There was a time when I wanted out of Buckley just as bad. Admittedly, I was going to do it by marrying Gary and moving someplace big and exotic, like Ann Arbor, but hell. Who understands kids these days?

  “Are we almost there?” she asks, wheezing.

  “Maybe. Probably not. I have no idea. It’s a beautiful night. Enjoy it.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re never going to get old.”

  “I’m also never going to get married, have children, or go to Europe. Think of this as a preview.”

  “Oh, wow. Great pep talk, Aunt Rose.”

  “Cheering you up isn’t my job. Getting you there is. So shut up and keep on walking.”

  Bethany mutters and keeps on walking. That’s all I want at this point. The road is humming more and more strongly under my feet, and the distant taste of copper is beginning to cling to the back of my throat. We’re getting closer. If we just keep moving, we’ve got a g
ood chance of making it.

  The road curves, bending back into the cornfield. Then it splits, the wider, smoother avenue continuing in one direction, while a narrow dirt trail branches off to the right. The ground is pitted and broken, making the first dirt road we walked down seem like a boulevard. Of course, that’s the way we have to go. I actually slow down a little to let Bethany catch up. The increasing pull of the crossroads tells me that this is probably the first road—a conviction that only grows when I set foot on it. If the previous two roads were electric, this is like grabbing hold of a live wire. Bethany feels it, too, even more than I do. She gasps when she steps onto the broken ground. Then she starts walking faster, rapidly outpacing me. I let her. This is her journey, not mine.

  She walks faster and faster, the corn closing around us like a series of green and growing curtains. I feel the second road almost before I can see it up ahead of us, a clean slash through the cornfield. This must be why the Queen wanted me taken from a place with corn. The spot where I left the daylight would determine where I’d tumble back into it, and if she knew the crossroads was going to be in a cornfield, doing it this way saved us a lot of time.

  “We’re here!” Bethany almost shouts, and breaks into a run, old woman racing through the corn. I’m half-afraid she’s going to fall and break her neck. I still don’t try to stop her. The crossroads has her now. If she dies in the process of getting to her goal, my part of the deal is still done.

  Then Bethany steps from one road onto the other, standing at the point where the two roads cross. Too late to turn back now. She’s committed.

  “I am come to the crossroads with empty hands and a hopeful heart,” chants Bethany, with the faintly desperate singsong of a schoolgirl reciting a lesson she’s memorized but hasn’t really learned. “I am come to the crossroads to bargain with all I have and all I am. I am come to the crossroads with nothing to refuse. Please, please, please, hear me, heed me, and give me the chance to pay for what I need.”

  Silence falls around her, blocking out all sound from the crossroads. I don’t see anyone come to join her, but there is a sudden increase in the shadows clinging to the corn. Whatever happens between Bethany and the crossroads is going to be a private thing. No voyeurs allowed, living or dead.

  Someone steps up next to me. I didn’t hear him coming; I don’t think he was there to hear. He feels like an absence in the cornfield next to me, a space that happens to be shaped like a man. A man who, when I look at him from the corner of my eye, seems vaguely familiar, like he could have been one of the younger teachers at my high school, but who, when I look at him directly, isn’t there to see. I keep my eyes turned resolutely forward, watching Bethany talking to the open air.

  The crossroads have to be guarded. Crossroads ghosts, like Mary, were alive once, like Bethany, like me. They’re still a little human, deep down. Crossroads guardians . . . aren’t. They never lived. All they care about is the deal.

  “Hello, Rose,” says the crossroads guardian. His voice is plummy and warm, and I forget what it sounds like almost as quickly as I hear it. “It’s been a while.”

  “True,” I say. “I wish it had been longer. I haven’t had cause to come.”

  “Everyone has cause to come.”

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “Oh, Rose, Rose, Rose. You know that’s not true. You needed help just recently, didn’t you? You went to the routewitches. You could have come to us.”

  “To help me against Bobby Cross? Isn’t it your fault that he’s on the loose to begin with?”

  There’s a momentary silence, made deeper by the absolute still of the cornfield around us. Even the wind seems to have gone into hiding. Finally, chidingly, he says, “That isn’t fair. He asked, we gave. That’s the nature of commerce.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If he should have been limited further, the crossroads ghost who argued for the twilight should have put those limits down.”

  “Sure.”

  “We would have been glad to grant you aid.”

  “And charge me what, exactly?” Bethany is still waving her hands at the air, a look of naked desperation on her face. Whatever they’re asking, whatever she’s offering, I can’t shake the feeling that she’s fighting for her life right in front of me. This is all her fault. I shouldn’t feel sorry for her. But I do. I guess Marshall girls just have a way of getting themselves into trouble.

  “Ah. Now that’s the question. Your bill would have been . . . exotic.”

  “Kinda figured.” I shake my head, the man-shaped hole in the world flickering around the edges every time he comes almost into view. “I know it’s your job to sell. Well, sorry. I’m not buying.”

  “That will change,” he says, and he’s gone, taking the feeling of gnawing, alien absence with him.

  “Hope not,” I reply to the empty air, and stand alone in the silence, waiting for Bethany to finish making her deal with the crossroads, and whatever angel, demon, or worse waits there for people like us. If I’m lucky, and the ghostroads are kind, I’ll never have a reason to find out which one it is.

  Midnight comes and midnight goes; that’s what midnight does. Bethany stops gesturing, her hands falling to her sides as she slumps, defeated. She nods, just once. Sound returns to the cornfield, crickets chirping, an owl hooting in the middle distance, a train whistle sounding somewhere further out. The crossroads time is ending. I can even, for just a moment, hear Bethany breathing.

  And then she falls, facedown on that old dirt road, and doesn’t move.

  “Bethany?” I ask, just once, before I start running toward the crossroads. “Bethany, are you—” But the question dies, because she’s not okay, she’s not, she can’t be okay, because as I run, I feel my solidity drop away, and her coat, powerless now, slips through me and drifts to the ground. Only the living can grant life to the dead. If Bethany’s coat has stopped working, that means . . . that means . . .

  “Behind you, Aunt Rose.” Her voice is young as springtime, young as a bell ringing on the first day of the school year. I stop running, my eyes still on the body she’s discarded like I discarded my coat. Then I look away, and I turn, and I look into the eyes of my no-longer-living niece.

  Bethany is herself again, all teenage cockiness, ribbons in her hair now natural, and not decades out of place. But oh, her eyes. Her eyes are a cold mile of road in the desert, and the crossroads that beckons. She used to have my brother’s eyes. Now she has Mary’s eyes, crossroads eyes, and she’ll never be a human girl again.

  She smiles a little, shame and cockiness and joy all mixed together in her expression, and says, “They couldn’t give me back my life, so they gave me back my death, instead.”

  She had life, and she threw it away. A shorter life than she might have had, sure, but it was still life, and it was still hers. I want to shake her. I want to slap her. Now that she’s on my side of the ghostroads, I could do it. Instead, I swallow, and ask her, “Why?”

  “Because it was good enough for you.”

  I never said that, I never said that, but if that’s what she chose to hear, it’s too late now. For either of us. “You’re not a road ghost. What are you?” Do you know what you are?

  Now she looks uncomfortable, if only for a moment. “Crossroads ghost,” she says. “I’m going to watch the bargains that get made here to make sure they stay fair.”

  I have to laugh. “You know they won’t be.”

  “I know. But someone has to try. Even if I fail almost every time, it’s still better than nothing.”

  No, Bethany, no; life was better than nothing. “If you say so.” I look around the dark cornfield, listen to the train whistle blowing in the distance. “I should go.”

  She looks relieved as she nods. “Yes, you probably should. Midnight’s over, and you didn’t come to make a deal.”

  “Be sure you send someone to tell the Queen that I did my job.”

  “She already knows,” Bethany says, and smi
les, just a little, an expression of joy poisoned with grief. “The Lady makes sure that she knows whenever a routewitch dies.”

  The words hang between us for a moment, heavier than they should be. I take a step back. “Great,” I say. “Enjoy your afterlife, Bethany.”

  “Be careful, Aunt Rose,” she replies.

  I drop deeper down into the twilight and she’s gone, taking the crossroads and the cornfield and the train whistle with her. All that remains is the road, stretching out forever, with a thousand crossings and dangers waiting for an unwary haunt. This was the last favor I’m going to do for her; Bethany will have to find the dangers on her own.

  I hope she learns faster than I did.

  2015

  True Love Never Dies

  LOVE—TRUE LOVE—never dies.

  Sometimes it just goes to sleep for a while.

  Her name was Rose. She sat in the second row in Ms. Buchanan’s third grade class. She had hair the color of the cornfields in September, and big brown doe’s eyes that made me want to grab her hand and promise her that everything was going to be okay forever—double-pinky-swear. I’d known her since kindergarten, but on the second day of third grade, when she and I got picked to hand out the mimeo sheets for the teacher, walking down the aisles shoulder to shoulder . . . that was when I realized that I loved her. That I was never going to want to be with anybody but her.

  I wasn’t always nice to her the way I should have been. But I didn’t join the other kids when they made fun of the patches on her sleeves or the way her skirts got shorter and shorter, eaten alive by their own mended hems. I didn’t call her “Second Hand Rose” or “poor girl” like the other boys did, and if I never asked her to the school dances, I never asked anybody else, either. I was faithful to her before I knew what faithful really meant.

  If I’ve committed any real sin in my life, it’s that it took me so long to ask her if she wanted to go out with me. I fell in love when I was nine, but she didn’t wear my jacket until I was fifteen, didn’t smile at me with that mouth, didn’t look at me with those big doe eyes of hers. I let six years slip through my fingers when I could have grabbed tight hold of every single day, and the penance for my sin is knowing I committed it. Knowing what we lost.