The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

by Seanan McGuire

  “I hate your little call-and-response games,” I say.

  “Yet here we are again. Call and I’ll respond, or don’t, and this beautiful concoction”—she holds up the malted—“goes to waste.”

  I sigh. “Naturally,” I say. “My name is Rose Marshall, once of Buckley Township in Michigan. I died on Sparrow Hill Road on a night of great importance, and have wandered the roads ever since. This is my companion and charge, Gary Daniels, also of Buckley Township, who died alone in his bed. We have driven the Ocean Lady down from Calais to visit the Queen, if she’ll see us. I have a problem I hope she can help me with.”

  “Good form, nicely said, guess I’d better talk to you.” Apple’s smile stays as she walks across the saloon to me, holding out the malted as an offering. As she gets closer her smile flickers, fades, replaced by a bone-deep confusion. “Rose? What’s wrong?”

  “Can we go somewhere?” I take the malted, raise it to my lips, and gulp hopefully. There’s a hint of chocolate and cherry beneath the sludgy ash that the world has become. Even here, even on the Ocean Lady, Bobby’s curse is binding. “I need to show you something.”

  The Queen of the Routewitches nods.

  * * *

  Apple lives here, on the Ocean Lady, where time is an afterthought and mortality, with all its consequences, is somebody else’s problem. It’s the only way she can still look as young as she does, as young as I do, when I know she’s so much older than she appears—older, even, than I am. She ran away from Manzanar during World War II. While I was playing in the dirt in Buckley, she was bargaining with the Ocean Lady for her life, and for the freedom to live it.

  I wonder, sometimes, whether she ever got that freedom, or whether she traded a cage of someone else’s choosing for one that she could decorate at will. As the Queen, she’s the one who must interpret for the Ocean Lady. In a community defined by roving, she’s the one who never gets the chance to go anywhere. She’s a routewitch. There was a time when the road said “Let me give you that horizon.” Somewhere along the way, she replied “No thank you,” and settled down in a double-wide trailer on the Ocean Lady, safe and sound and stationary.

  Her trailer is decorated in tags and tatters, bits and pieces of a hundred roads, a thousand lifetimes heaped all around. It looks more like a thrift store or an amateur theater company’s dressing room than the home of royalty. I know better—I’ve been here before—but Gary doesn’t, and his eyes are wide with the effort of trying to look at everything at once.

  “The Ocean Lady needs me here most of the time,” she says, pulling his attention onto her. “She can’t afford to let me go roving. That’s when accidents happen. So she makes it known that it pleases her when people bring me offerings. Things that have traveled far enough to be of interest. There’s not a thing in this room that’s traveled less than halfway across the world, when you add all the miles together, save perhaps for myself, and as no one’s anchoring their magic on me but me, I think that’s all right.” She smiles faintly at her own joke.

  I don’t smile back. “Bobby snatched me out of the twilight and dragged me into the daylight,” I say, point blank, no preamble. “I was at the Last Dance. I was at a diner.” I make no effort to keep the shock and loathing from my voice. I am a road ghost, a child of the 1950s, a moment frozen in time and held there by the sheer force of the twilight’s desire to keep me. Nothing should be able to touch me in a diner, any diner, and especially not in the Last Dance. “He pulled me into the daylight, and he had a routewitch. She’d drawn him sigils, a circle of salt . . .”

  Apple pales. “What did she look like?”

  “Thin. Young. Hungry. Not like she needed to eat, but like she needed to . . . ” I flap my hands helplessly, finally settling for gesturing to myself, to Gary, to Apple. “Like she needed. Dark skin. Curly hair. A little dusty.” That’s normal, among routewitches. They carry the road on their skins, keeping its power close and its options closer.

  Apple is the cleanest routewitch I’ve ever known. Every time I’ve seen her, she’s been wearing tidy, if mismatched, clothing, with clipped nails and perfectly brushed hair. It’s part of being queen, for her. She doesn’t swear her allegiance to any single route, any single road.

  She nods, a sad frown twisting her lips downward. “Her name was Dana. She was one of mine, although she didn’t know it—we never had the chance to tell her. Every time we tried, she found another excuse to close the door in our faces. I think she was scared that if what the road had been saying to her for all these years was real, she had wasted her life. But she did little magics, things she powered with the drive to the grocery store or the post office, and we still thought we could bring her around. We thought we could save her. Until Bon found her body and came home to tell us we were less.”

  “Bon?” I ask.

  “The woman who met you at the boundary line. She doesn’t spend much time on the Ocean Lady. That means that when she’s here, she’s almost always stuck playing sentry.” Apple shrugs. “Everyone pays.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” I mutter, and unzip my dress.

  If Apple finds it strange that I’ve started stripping, she doesn’t say anything about it. The silk puddles at my feet and I turn, presenting my back. She takes a sharp breath, air hissing between her teeth as she reaches out to cautiously run her fingers along my skin.

  Her touch is like ice, so cold that it burns. It takes everything I have not to shy away.

  “He didn’t kill her,” she says, voice wondering. “He convinced her to kill herself, willingly, after telling her you were somehow wicked and wanton and to blame for all his sins. Oh, clever boy.” Her voice grows softer, laden with regret. “He was always very clever.”

  “What do you mean?” demands Gary. I jump a little. I’ve been focusing so much on Apple that I’d almost forgotten he’s here. “How is Rose to blame for anything that man did?”

  “She’s not, unless you subscribe to the idea that the rabbit is responsible for the fox. But it doesn’t matter. A sacrifice can be consecrated on a falsehood, if it’s believed completely.” Apple traces the lines on my back again. “This tattoo is Persephone’s seal. With it, we blocked Rose from the reach of Bobby Cross. But Persephone demands faith of her followers, and this sacrifice has been used to mark Rose as faithless.”

  “How the hell is that possible?” demands Gary, before I can even open my mouth. “Rose didn’t do anything.”

  “The sacrifice carries the accusation,” says Apple. “Blood is enough. Dana’s death was used to send a message to Persephone, and without something bigger to counter it, we can’t cancel the signal. So to speak.”

  “What’s bigger than a death?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” she replies.

  I want to grab my dress from the ground, wrap myself in it like the unwanted armor it has, over the years, become. I don’t. I stand my ground, shivering, and ask, “How did he even learn how to do that? Every routewitch I’ve ever met has hated him.”

  “You can learn anything, if you’re patient enough. If you’re willing to pay.” Apple pulls her hand away from my back. “Someone broke faith with me and sold secrets to Bobby Cross. They’ll be punished, when I find them.”

  Not in a way they were going to enjoy, if her tone was anything to go by. “Emma says the blood is heavy enough to keep me from moving between the twilight and the daylight. Why does everything taste like nothing? I can’t eat, I’m not even sure a coat would work for me—”

  “Bobby has, in effect, separated you from your anchor, and you’re being punished accordingly.” I hear Apple take a step back. “I just don’t understand how he was able to pull you off the ghostroads in the first place. There aren’t many rituals that can do that.”

  “He’s nothing if not clever,” I say, and bend to retrieve my dress from the floor. “What can we do? Tattoo me again?”

  “No.
That won’t work. We need to go big. We need a symbolic death—a sacrifice—to cancel this one out.”

  My stomach sank. I suspected I knew where this was going. “Meaning?”

  Apple’s face was grim. “Meaning Halloween.”

  Book Two

  Sacrifices

  Take me to the graveside, thrust your fists against the post,

  Take me to the crypt, I’ll show you how to see the ghost.

  Take me to the slaughterhouse, take me to the tomb,

  Take me to the greenhouse where the lilies are in bloom.

  Count me out a eulogy in ones and twos and threes,

  Count me out an afterlife—four five six and freeze!

  Halloween! Halloween! You’re back in flesh and bone!

  Halloween! Halloween! You’ll never make it home!

  —common clapping rhyme among the ever-lasters of the twilight

  June Harty is a force of nature. Born and raised in Buckley Township, Michigan, she first heard the story of the Phantom Prom Date—known locally as “the Green Girl of Sparrow Hill Road”—when she was six years old.

  “Telling stories about the Green Girl was very big with the second grade set, and I was fortunate enough to have a brother among their number,” she recalls fondly. “The way they told it, she wanted to go home, but her house had been bulldozed sometime in the Seventies to make way for one of the new housing developments, like the one we lived in. She would follow little kids home to see whether they lived in the house that had been built over the bones of her own, and if she ever found the right house, she would kill everyone who dared to live there. We were supposed to carry salt in our pockets and apologize to any black cats we saw, to throw her off our trail.”

  (Author’s note: This variation—or at least, its association with the Phantom Prom Date—is currently unique to Buckley Township, although stories of ghosts taking a special interest in children can be found all over the world.)

  “I stopped worrying she’d follow me home by the time I was nine, but I was still curious about her. I started asking everyone I could find whether they knew the story of the Green Girl, and then I’d write down what they said, all of it, and read it later, looking for the differences. I thought if I could see them clearly, if I could find the places where the story changed around her, I could figure out who she’d been when she was alive. I knew she’d been alive, that she was real, because she was . . . she was like this friend everybody had but no one ever saw. She was like the murders at the Old Parrish Place, or the lake monster, or the family of retired explorers that used to live in the woods. Everybody knew her. No one knew who she really was.”

  She’s clearly waiting for a question. So I ask it: Do you know?

  Ms. Harty smiles and opens the photo album she’s had resting on her lap since this conversation began. There, looking up at me, is a school picture of a young woman with an old-fashioned haircut and melancholy eyes. The picture is black and white, but looking at her, it’s hard not to believe that she would look lovely in green.

  “Her name was Rose Marshall,” says Ms. Harty. “She was killed in a car crash on Sparrow Hill Road, right here in Buckley Township. She was on her way to the prom. I tracked down the shop where she bought her dress. It took some doing, but I had time, and I wanted to know. They still had the ledger in the basement, with the bill of sale.”

  Her smile is smug.

  “Rose Marshall died wearing a green silk gown,” she says. “I found her. After all this time, I finally got her to follow me home.”

  —from American Ghosts, Michael Hayes, Ghost Ship Press

  Chapter 4

  Bad Moon Rising

  THE DEAD KEEP OUR OWN HOLIDAYS. I guess that sounds trite, but it’s true, and I’ll say it until the stars go dark, because it’s hard to make the living understand. We walk in a world of shared culture before we die. In America, that means Christmas trees in every department store, chocolate eggs on sale by the dozen at every drug store. Turkeys on the tables, fireworks in the sky, and even if those aren’t your holidays, even if your holidays are less mainstreamed in the modern world, those others are still everywhere. Every kid recognizes a Christmas stocking or a Thanksgiving pie. How many can say the same about Saint Celia’s bloody handprint or the torn toll stub of Danny, God of Highways?

  Would you know Persephone’s Cross if someone decided to etch it on your skin, bitter and bleeding as a pomegranate kiss? I didn’t, and odds are good I’ve been dead a lot longer than you have.

  But all this is by way of making a point, and the point is that there’s no unified calendar in the twilight, no standard set of symbols to mark the march of days and seasons. There can’t be, not when so many of us have a—let’s call it “casual”—relationship to time. The Feast of Saint Celia is celebrated on a hundred different days, and every celebrant will tell you theirs is the only one that’s properly holy. They’re all right, and they’re all wrong. Saint Celia herself will tell you that, if you ever meet her—if you ever realize who she is.

  Some of us can’t even agree on the days of the week. And yet all of us agree, without argument, on one thing.

  All of us agree on Halloween.

  Halloween, when the veil is thin; Halloween, when the rules are different. Halloween, when the clamor of the living seeps through into the twilight, hanging heavy in the ancient air. I’ve never been a fan. The worlds of the living and the dead were never meant to mingle the way they do on Halloween. Traditionally, I’ve spent that holiest of nights hiding as deep in the twilight as I can, staying away from the surface. I don’t like the consequences of being in the mortal world when the clock strikes Halloween.

  But when the Queen of the Routewitches says something is the only way, it’s not like there’s much choice. I want Bobby’s fingerprints off me. I want my protection back. So it’s time to go to church.

  Can I get a Hallelujah?

  * * *

  The sun rises slow and cautious over fields of pumpkins and harvest corn, and the world smells of bonfires, falling leaves, and secrets. Halloween morning, two thousand sixteen. My eyes flutter open, consciousness triggered by some subtle change in the light, and I take my first breath of clean, sweet autumn air. I start coughing immediately after, falling off the hayrick as I try to stop the burning in my lungs. Hitting the ground makes my butt hurt almost as much as my lungs do, which is a distraction if nothing else. I stagger to my feet, using the edge of the hayrick to brace myself.

  There are other dead folks rising in the hay, most of them coughing as hard or harder than I am, and still more are rising from the ground all around us, using fat orange pumpkins to pull themselves up.

  Someone in the hayrick—one of the newer dead, one whose lungs are more accustomed to modern pollution than mine—starts laughing. It’s a delighted sound, little kid at Christmas, teenager turned loose at their very first parent-free county fair. And why shouldn’t that unseen not-quite-ghost be laughing? We’re back. For one beautiful day and one glorious night, we’re back, walking in the world of the living without so much as a borrowed coat or stolen breath.

  Never mind that not all of us are here voluntarily. Never mind that I would so much rather be safe in the twilight, as far away from this nightmare of flesh as possible. No one can tell by looking at me. To them, I’m just another risen dead girl, enjoying a beautiful Halloween morning.

  I force myself to join in the laughter, pausing only to cough a few times as my lungs adjust to the modern air. When I’m a hitcher, I can borrow a coat and start breathing no problem. I can even smoke, if I want to. The weird afterlife loophole that allows me to take substance from the living also grants me the ability to breathe their air. If the Martians came tomorrow, I could follow them home as long as I was wearing one of their jackets. Only now it’s Halloween, and the only substance I’m borrowing is my own.

  Hell if I know how it w
orks. Call it the dead girl equivalent of a Christmas miracle and leave it alone. Halloween has its share of the bad things—does it ever—but even as much as I don’t want to be here, I can’t deny that there’s something amazing at feeling my own flesh, my own heartbeat, and not something taken from someone else. I’m alive. Me, Rose Marshall, the risen girl.

  The coughing has mostly stopped and the dead are starting to congregate, all of us assembling around the hayrick like the world’s weirdest nudist convention. That’s another thing. There are at least fifteen of us here, and there’s not a stitch of clothing in evidence. I guess we come into the world naked every time.

  The thought strikes me as funny, maybe because I’m tired and scared and being bombarded with the chemical soup that living people have in their bodies, like, all the time. I’m laughing again when a farmer clad in jeans and a heavy flannel jacket comes striding through the pumpkin patch, a pile of shirts held to his chest. Two lanky teenagers struggle to keep up with him. Behind them, a woman and two smaller children pick their way through the harvest. All of them are carrying clothes. As I realize that, my reawakened nerves start informing me, urgently, that it’s colder than a witch’s tit out here, and when you’re alive, frostbite hurts.

  I’ve never experienced this before, but I’ve heard about it, talking to the Halloween junkies who spend all year waiting for their next fix. This is part of the normal experience, one of the tricks that comes with all the treating. It helps me recognize which of these people are new dead and which are old hands. The new dead are the ones who go running to the farmer and his family, running on legs that barely remember what legs are meant to do, and snatch the clothing from his arms. They’re babbling by the time I and the other long dead finish strolling over. We’re just as cold as they are, but we’re too jaded to show it.