The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

by Seanan McGuire

  There are lots of ways to accomplish a temporary resurrection. Halloween is one of them; technically, my cadging of coats and their associated flesh from the living is another. The lines between life and death have always been vague, blurry things, closer to guidelines than hard and fast rules. But there’s one rule we all learn hard and fast and early, because things get ugly when we don’t.

  To get a life, you have to take a life. To accomplish a true resurrection, something not bounded by the length of a task or the span of a holiday, someone has to die. Forever die, no-ghost-die, good-bye-forever die. It’s messy and complicated and brutal and difficult, which is why we don’t constantly have dictators and warlords popping out of the twilight for another shot at taking over the world. Even the ones who could find someone to bleed out for them don’t generally have the delicacy required to get all the steps right.

  But Bobby Cross . . . Bobby has resources. He has a pretty face and a silver tongue and a car that scares the hell out of every ghost in the twilight, which means he has everything he needs to get his questions answered, to put together the impossible one piece at a time. I’m alive. There’s nothing that’s going to change that, not right now, but if I sit here too long, something that is going to change that will come along.

  Bobby Cross is on his way. If anything, it’s a miracle he’s not already here.

  “This is what you’re going to do,” I say, and my voice is low and hard and steady. I want some kind of an award for keeping it from shaking. “You’re going to come over here and untie me, and then you’re going to turn your back while I run away. When Bobby gets here, you’re going to tell him I escaped. Technically, it’ll be true. He may not even kill you for that.”

  “Now why in the hell would I do any of those things?”

  “Because, you stupid cow, I was sent here by Apple, the Queen of the Routewitches, and she’s going to notice when I don’t come back. If I get to her, I can tell her you were misled. I can tell her Bobby had your daughter, that you didn’t have a choice. Maybe she’ll forgive you and maybe she won’t, but she’s a reasonable ruler. She won’t rain down fire and brimstone on your farm. She won’t cut you off from the roads.”

  “We are no subjects of hers,” Violet says. There’s no heat in her words. The color has left her cheeks, and she looks more the ghost than I do.

  Ambulomancers read the future in the roads. It blows off the blacktop and the gravel, right into their hands. The Barrowmans had probably never experienced a bad season or a ruined harvest, because they could always see what was coming and prepare. They aren’t the same as routewitches. They don’t have to obey the Ocean Lady, or listen to the queen.

  But Apple could seal the roads. Could stop the futures from trickling through, leave the ambulomancers with nothing but the ghosts attracted to their gifts, leave them haunted, harried, and hungry.

  “I wish you’d stayed away,” says Violet fiercely, and bends to untie me.

  “So do I,” I say, and do not fight her. The knots are tight, but she tied them: she knows how to tug and how to fumble, and in a matter of seconds, I’m free.

  My ankles and wrists are numb. My feet feel like lead weights tied to the ends of my legs. I grip the hay bales, pulling myself up, and pause as the motion disturbs the hay that I’d been sitting on. There are sigils on the floor where I’ve been sitting, symbols and runes that I recognize. They’re the same ones I saw in that routewitch’s kitchen, drawn in red paint instead of salt.

  He’s been planning this for a long time. Maybe since before I got my tattoo. I look up, my eyes meeting Violet’s one last time.

  “Don’t you dare tell him which way I went,” I say, and I turn, and I run.

  * * *

  My legs are weak and my feet are asleep and I’m almost dizzy with hunger. I was always hungry when I was dead, always cold, always yearning, but none of those things came with any real consequences. I could go months without eating, and the roar in my stomach wouldn’t change. I could spend days in the twilight, visiting old friends, not going anywhere near the borrowed warmth of the daylight, and I wouldn’t freeze. Now . . .

  I’m going to need food. And water. And someplace to crouch when my body finishes processing both those things, which is about the most disgusting thing I’ve ever considered. Being alive means having the usual assortment of internal organs, all of them doing their weird internal organ things. My lungs are pulling in air. My sweat glands are putting off stink.

  This body is a horror show of potential failures. I could break a bone, or breathe in the wrong microbe and get sick. I could die of a burst appendix, like one of the cheerleaders I went to school with back in Buckley. Humans are so frail. How can any of them live like this?

  Thinking about how horrifying my body is provides a nice distraction as I run from the barn to the apple orchard, and then past it, to the half-frozen marsh that Apple told me about. There are trails beat all through it, none of them wide enough to qualify as a road; Bobby won’t be able to get his car in here. That helps. I run harder, faster, until I start to feel like I’m going to throw up from the exertion.

  I look back. The farm is a smear in the distance. Nothing moves; nothing pursues.

  I know that can’t last.

  So I run again, feet pounding against the marshy ground, and the clothes that fit a bit awkwardly last night chafe and scratch my skin, exposing the tenderness I thought the road had worn away. This body, my body, should be impossible; I died so long ago, I’m not even dust anymore, not even ashes. But here I am, and everything about me sings Rose, Rose, Rose when I allow myself to listen. These are my hands, my limbs, my sorely unprepared lungs. I am the girl I was on the night when Bobby ran me off the road.

  Roads. Sweet Persephone, roads. For the first time in sixty years, I can’t hear the road humming at the back of my mind, phantom highway stretching here to Heaven, bidding me to walk a little farther and see what I can see. It’s like losing a limb, and I stumble at the sudden realization of how cut off I really am.

  I don’t know anyone among the living. The Last Dance doesn’t exist here. Neither does the Ocean Lady. Supposedly, I had the potential to be a routewitch once, the first time I was alive, but I don’t know what that means, and I don’t hear any road I know whispering my name. Maybe spending that long tithed to the ghostroads means the living ones won’t speak to me, see me as already marked by something greater than they are. The only ghost I know who comes when she’s called is Mary Dunlavy, and inviting her attention means inviting the attention of the crossroads.

  If there’s something out there that’s worse than Bobby Cross, it’s the crossroads. They made the bastard, after all. They’d probably be happy to do the same for me. Pull Gary up out of the twilight, make us into a darker mirror to reflect Bobby back on himself, Rose Marshall, the killer who races for more than just pink slips.

  For a moment, it’s tempting, and I’m going to have to live with that shame for the rest of my hopefully short life, and then forever after when I’m back on the ghostroads. There’s fighting a monster and then there’s becoming one. The first should never be enough of an excuse for the latter.

  I run. I run through the marsh to the fields on the other side, the fields that don’t belong to the Barrowman family, and I consider—oh so briefly—finding the farmhouse, spinning them a story of teenage woe, getting access to a warm kitchen and a telephone. But I have no one to call, and people tend to react to runaway teenagers with suspicion, or worse, with calls of their own to the local police. I’m still too close to where Bobby expects me to be. He’ll check the neighboring farmhouses first, concerned older brother looking for his runaway sister, she’s a little touched in the head you know, she’s not safe out there on her own, and then he’ll roll down to the station and pluck me from a holding cell like Persephone plucking a pomegranate from a branch. I’ll be lost. I’ll be his. And I’m pretty sure t
his pesky “alive” thing won’t last long once he gets his hands on me.

  No: the farmhouse isn’t safe. I keep running, plunging into the cornfield, doing my best to race along the thin lines of dirt between the rows to keep the rustling to a minimum. There’s enough wind that as long as I keep myself under control, it won’t be easy to tell what’s me and what’s the weather.

  Not so easy is keeping myself from getting turned around out here. I am racing through a sea of golden and green, and the greatest danger in open water is losing track of the shore. I can’t afford to burst into somebody’s backyard, fully visible and unable to vanish onto the ghostroads. I also can’t afford to run out into the road. The risk of being hit by a car aside, roads are where Bobby lives. If it’s wide enough for his car, Bobby can take advantage, and he won’t hesitate to run me down.

  A thin, cold worm of fear works its way along my spine, nearly making me stumble again. Bobby’s pride tells him to kill me: I’m the one who got away, the one who embarrassed him in a way he can’t forgive. The trouble with proud men is that sometimes balance isn’t enough. He’ll kill me if he can. There’s nothing saying he has to do it right away.

  I’ve been running from Bobby Cross for sixty years. I’ve never been this eager to stay away from him.

  Who do you know? I ask myself, unwilling to risk my suddenly precious breath on words. Who do you know?

  All those years of moving between the twilight and the daylight, all those lives saved, those drivers seen safely to whatever destination I could help them reach, and who do I know? Sweet Persephone, time is not my friend. Half the names I can come up with have died since I knew them among the living, and most of them have moved on to whatever rest waits for the innocent and the unwary. Even Tommy—

  I stagger to a stop in the middle of the cornfield, gulping in air and trying not to think what I’m already thinking. Because I know one person for sure who isn’t dead, who isn’t working with Bobby Cross, and who knows the sound of my voice well enough to believe me when I tell her who I am. I know one person whose number isn’t going to be unlisted, unlike my family in Portland. Kevin and Evelyn and the kids are great people, but they don’t like strangers knowing how to find them, and without access to the twilight, I’m effectively a stranger. Can’t call Mary, can’t reach the Prices.

  But I can reach Laura.

  Laura Moorhead, the world’s premier expert on the story of the Phantom Prom Date, a woman whose academic career has been narrow to the point of becoming single-minded, all her attention and all her ambition focused on the simple, terrible goal of finding me and making me pay for what she thinks I did to her boyfriend.

  Laura Moorhead, who works for a university. Who can be reached by calling the school. Who may not want to help me—who probably won’t want to help me—but who has no connection to Bobby Cross, and wouldn’t hand me over to him if she did. Letting Bobby have me would be a disaster, but it lacks the poetic justice she’s been seeking for all these years. I need her. I know where to find her.

  Now I just need a phone.

  I close my eyes and spin in a slow circle, trying to listen past the pounding of my heart and the rasping of my breath, looking for the distant sound of tires on pavement and engines roaring like the souls of captive dragons. I can’t feel the road the way I’m used to, but I am of the road more than anything else I might possibly claim to be, and I know what a road sounds like.

  Somewhere in the far distance, a horn honks. I open my eyes and start wading through the corn toward the sound.

  Fields are finite. It’s one of the nicer things about them. Sure, sometimes “finite” can span miles—even states, if Iowa is anything to go by—but they have borders. Edges. Every field is defined by its terminus, and if I walk long enough, I’ll get there.

  My knees ache. My feet hurt. There’s a foul taste in the back of my mouth, and I’m horrifyingly aware of the fact that it’s been sixty years and a big pancake breakfast since the last time I brushed my teeth. There is nothing about this situation that I don’t hate.

  I’m mulling over my hatred when I step out of the corn and onto the hard-packed earth of the shoulder. I immediately take a step backward, hiding myself. Bobby’s car is a demon sheathed in steel, and it can run silently when he wants it to, just like it can snarl down the heavens when he wants it to. He’ll be looking for me soon, if he isn’t looking for me already. I can’t afford to be exposed.

  But this is a road. Humans build roads—came up with the very idea of roads—because they need to stop being where they are and start being where they belong. Roads are one of the deepest, truest ideas the human race ever managed to hit upon, and that’s where they get their magic, and that’s why it’s so damn important that I don’t try to deny how much I need it. I’m looking for a road to take me out of this dead-end town, a road that I can ride all the way to glory. Fading back into the field would be easy, so easy. It wouldn’t save me.

  A car blazes by, small and sporty and modern, and nothing to do with Bobby Cross. I feel a pang of regret as I watch that potential ride to safety blaze onward, and I don’t move. Small, sporty cars aren’t good for me right now.

  Hitchhiking is dangerous. It always has been. For sixty years I’ve been getting into cars with strangers, and not all of them have been very nice people. Some of them were genuinely kind, hoping to help someone get a little closer to home, hoping to save me from the very dangers they could have represented. Others . . .

  Let’s just say I’ve met my share of monsters, and not all of them have been deceased.

  Before, there were no stakes for me, not really. I could get into a stranger’s car, and if they pulled a knife or pulled down their fly, whatever. I could disappear, or I could decide to ride it out and teach them a lesson about being better people. I couldn’t get hurt. I couldn’t die.

  Things are different now. People with new cars who stop for hitchhikers are sometimes lovely, kind, ready to extend the hand of community to someone who needs them . . . but maybe they’re not the majority. Maybe most of the knives that have been pulled on me, most of the guns, most of the half-erect dicks, have been pulled in new cars. Maybe.

  Pick-up trucks are a mixed bag. A place like this, farm country, everybody drives a pick-up. I’ve probably got sixty percent odds that whoever stops for a teenage girl by the side of the road means well. Trouble is, they’re also all locals, which means they’ll realize I’m not from around here, and take me for a runaway or a junkie or both. Since I’m trying to avoid the police station, that’s not a good plan.

  No. I know what I need. I need to be among my people. And that’s why, when I see the shadow of the big rig crest the line of the horizon, I saunter out onto the shoulder as easy as you please, my thumb already out, my hip cocked like I haven’t got a care in the world.

  Truckers know me. Even the ones who’ve never seen me, never picked me up, they know me. They know the story of the girl in the diner, the walking girl. The story of Graveyard Rose. They know part of their job is getting me home if they happen to come across me, because maybe they’re saving me, but maybe—more likely—I’m saving them. Ask any trucker in America if he believes in ghosts, and then ask him whether he believes in me. No matter what his answer to the first question is, he’ll always answer “yes” to the second.

  Sweet sixteen and pretty as a picture, with short brown hair and a smile like a month of Sundays. That’s what they say about me, and that’s what I am in this moment, standing under this icy blue Nebraska sky, on the edge of neutral ground between cornfield and asphalt, waiting to see whether I’ve made the right decision. I keep my expression steady, even a little cocky. I’m the phantom prom date. I can do this. I can do anything.

  The truck slows, stopping next to me with a rattle like bones in a cage shaking themselves to pieces. The trucker leans across the cab, pushes the passenger-side door open.

 
“You all right?” he asks.

  “Going my way?” I reply.

  There’s a flicker of wariness on his bearded face. Hitchhikers can be predators too. “What’s your name?”

  “Rose,” I say.

  He hears the truth in it. He relaxes. “Hop in.”

  I grin. “Got a coat I can borrow? It’s cold out there,” I say, seeking warmth in the other half of the ritual as I climb into the truck, and we’re away; we’re rolling, once again, for that horizon.

  Chapter 6

  Collect Calls from the Dead

  THE TRUCK STOP is like every other truck stop I’ve ever seen, neon and chrome and broken tile and rack upon rack of slightly stale potato chips, local candy brands no one ever sees anywhere else, and beef jerky. The walls are lined with coolers filled with soda and beer, and it hurts how much I want this to be my home, how much I want to drop below the surface of the world and into its twilight reflection.

  The trucker’s coat is too big for me; it hangs off my narrow shoulders like a superhero’s cape, billowing every time I take a step. I have a crumpled twenty-dollar bill shoved into the front pocket of my jeans, not enough to buy much, but enough to put something in my stomach and rinse the dust out of my mouth.

  Truck stops are one of the few places you can still find a pay phone in this day and age. This one has them tucked next to the bathrooms, two scarred-up silver rectangles holding the only real shot I have left at salvation. I reach into my pocket and finger the twenty. I know things cost more than they used to, but I realize I have no idea how much it costs to make a phone call.

  Shit.

  I could turn all my money into quarters and feed them to this hungry oracle and still not be able to make a call. Or I could take the easy way out. Lifting the receiver out of the cradle, I punch the “0.”