The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

by Seanan McGuire

  “Someone who escorts the souls of the dead to their destinations, I’m aware,” she says. “Although I’ll admit, I’d never heard that term used in connection with you before.”

  “It’s why so many people think I’m a killer, or that the girl in the diner is, since that’s the story with the most dead truckers,” I say. “When someone is heading for an accident they can’t avoid, I’ll ride with them if I can. I’ll make sure they get where they’re supposed to go. I can’t save their lives, but I can save their souls from people like Bobby.”

  “Bobby. You say he targets people who will leave ghosts. Why?”

  “His life and his youth are tied to his car. As long as the tank is full and the wheels are on the road, he can’t die and he doesn’t age. He can’t be killed. And his car runs on souls.”

  Laura is quiet for a long moment before she says, “You understand how ridiculous this all sounds.”

  “I do.” I open my eyes, twisting to look at her. “I mean, I also understand that I’ve been dead for sixty years, and now here I am, trapped in a rotting meat hotel with no check-out date and no room service. I can feel myself aging. I can feel my teeth rotting in my mouth and my skin drying out by fractions of fractions of fractions of degrees. I’m a teenage girl who’s older than most grandparents, and I’ve never been this old before, and I’ll never be as young as I am right now. This hurts. Everything about this hurts. So I don’t care if it sounds ridiculous, and the only reason I care about you believing me is that I need your help.”

  “Why me?”

  “I don’t have anyone else to call!” I realize how pathetic I sound as soon as the words are out. I can’t take them back, and so I soldier on. “My mortal family is dead, except for some distant cousins and great-nieces and nephews, and they’ve never met me, so it’s not like I can show up saying ‘Hi, I’m your dead aunt, help me get back to the underworld, okay?’ Most of my friends and allies are in the twilight, and I can’t get there, because I’m not dead, even though I’m damn well supposed to be. The people I know in this world are the sort of folks who think hanging out with dead women is perfectly normal, and they don’t, by and large, go in for having listed numbers. I’m stuck, do you understand? I knew how to find you, I found you, and I’m hoping that the fact that you’ve been studying me for years will mean you can figure this shit out, because otherwise, I’m screwed.”

  “And you say you can’t just kill yourself, even though that would make you dead again.”

  “No.” I shake my head. “Death isn’t . . . it isn’t that easy.”

  “So make it that easy. Explain it to me.” Laura’s tone is patient, like she’s asking for something simple. Like she isn’t asking me to take one of the building blocks of the twilight and break it down into something the living mind can understand.

  There are probably a million rules against doing this. I can think of at least a couple dozen. I take another deep breath, cough, and say, “When two humans have a baby together, the baby will always be a human. It won’t be an exact mirror of the parents, but it will take traits from both, and be its own person. Right?”

  “Biology would tend to agree with you,” says Laura, sounding bewildered and slightly amused.

  “Well, when somebody dies, it’s sort of like they’re having a baby—they’re creating a new person—with the manner of their death. Which is really oversimplified and probably insulting to parents but whatever, I’m tired, I don’t even know how to handle half the things I’m feeling, I’m going with the easy metaphor. Every person who has enough unfinished business to leave behind a ghost has the potential to become a whole bunch of different things.”

  “Huh,” says Laura. “I knew you came in flavors. I always assumed it was like, I don’t know. Picking a career.”

  “Not quite,” I reply. Secretly, I’m relieved that she’s still listening. “Say you die like I did, in a wreck. If you come back, you’ll probably come back one of three ways: hitchhiker, homecomer, or phantom rider. There used to be a fourth, coachman, but that almost never happens anymore. The kind of ghost you are will determine the rules that bind you, your powers and limitations, everything.”

  “So why can’t you walk into traffic? Traumatizing the drivers aside.”

  “People who commit suicide never come back as hitchhiking ghosts.” I look down at my hands. “They can be homecomers, which is close, but it’s not the same, and I don’t want to be a homecomer. They . . . they lose themselves. In a very real way, they lose themselves. They’re trapped, forever, in this cycle of trying and failing to get home, and even if they’re nice people when they’re on the high end of their cycle, they do bad things when they’re on the low end. Really bad things. Things they can’t take back.”

  “I see,” says Laura. “You would be what some of the stories already take you for if you were a homecomer.”

  “Yes, exactly,” I say. “So I can’t get in a wreck on purpose, because then I wouldn’t be me when I rose. And I can’t wait to see if I’ll get in a wreck naturally.”

  “Why not?”

  “This body.” I gesture at myself, unable to keep the disgust out of my voice. “It’s awful. It’s sticky and smelly and doing things. I was fine with it when I was supposed to be alive, and I’m fine with it when I’m borrowing flesh on purpose, but this? This is disgusting. I don’t want it. I can’t live like this.”

  Laura’s laughter is like a slap. “Seems to me you are living like this, Rose. That’s the problem.”

  “I mean it. For you, this is normal, because you’ve never been dead. And being dead’s no picnic. You’re cold all the time. If you’re a ghost like me, meant to occupy the liminal space between the living and the dead, you want so hard that it can hurt.”

  “Want?” asks Laura blankly.

  “For me it’s usually cheeseburgers and milkshakes. But I know hitchers who want cigarettes, or pie, or sex. Things that the mortal world has and we need to pursue. I don’t know why we work that way; I just know that we do. Right after I died, I used to say I’d do anything to be warm, to have a full stomach, to be alive. That was sixty years ago. These days, cold and hungry I can handle. Needing to sneeze is awful and I hate it.”

  “So you can’t die and you don’t want to live. What does that leave?”

  “It leaves you.” I turn to look at her, hopeful and hungry and hating my own weakness. “You’re a folklorist. I’m a former ghost with sixty years of experience at running through the twilight. If we can find some of my allies, they can probably point us toward whatever you say we need.”

  “Need for what?”

  “Need to make me dead again.” I sit up straighter, trying to draw courage from my own words. It isn’t working, but she doesn’t have to know that. “Laura Moorhead, I am asking you to put me back into the twilight without killing me or allowing Bobby Cross to catch me. Will you do it?”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  It’s a simple question, and I can’t blame her for asking. She’s a folklorist, but that isn’t the same as being a fiction writer. Most of the things she can learn from me would put her straight into the “people who claim they can talk to ghosts, and other sideshow oddities” section of the bookstore, and definitely won’t help her academic standing.

  “Tommy’s waiting for you,” I say.

  Her gasp is so soft that I would miss it if this were a normal car, with normal noises. In the silence of the Prius, it might as well be a shout.

  “He’s not a psychopomp, though, so there’s every chance you’ll be gone by the time he gets to you. You’re not likely to leave a road ghost; the roads have only ever been a means to an end for you. They don’t call you, and your unfinished business doesn’t weigh as much as it used to. But he’s waiting for you, refusing to let himself do what phantom riders do and drive off the edge of the known world, into whatever reward is waiting for him
. I’ve been able to see the exits in his eyes for, oh, years now. He wants to rest. He won’t do it. Not until you’re back in his passenger seat where you belong, and he’s driving to his next adventure with you beside him.”

  Laura is silent. The light shining through the windshield reflects off the tears on her cheeks. I don’t comment on them. It’s not my place.

  “If you help me, when your death approaches, so will I. I’ll come to you the way I’ve come to so many of the people I knew when I was alive, and I’ll hold your hand and pull you into the dark. I’ll anchor you, whether your spirit wants to stay or not, until Tommy reaches us. He can drive you the rest of the way, and you’ll be together.”

  “Do you promise?” Her voice, like her gasp, is so small as to be barely more than nothing.

  “I do.”

  “I didn’t know you while you were alive.”

  “Loopholes. You know me now.”

  She laughs, brief and bitter. “I still hate you. Even if you didn’t kill Tommy, I’ve hated you too long to give up the habit now.”

  “I don’t care if you hate me. I just need you to help me.”

  “How can you trust me?”

  “I have what you want more than anything else in the world: I have a guarantee you’ll be reunited with the man you love. He’s been waiting for you for so long. How could you deny him that?” They’re a dark mirror of me and Gary, the ghost waiting, the living trying and failing to move on. I could have been her, if things had played out differently.

  I’m glad they didn’t. That doesn’t mean I can deny what might have been.

  “I have some time off coming,” says Laura. “I can claim a personal emergency and take it now. The beauty of tenure.”

  “So you’ll help me?”

  Laura glances at me, tears still shining on her cheeks. “I’ll help you,” she confirms.

  I inhale deeply, letting my shoulders unlock. For the first time since Bobby pulled me out of the twilight, I’m starting to feel like this could work. I could make it home.

  Relief is a drug. First the high, and then the crash. I barely feel my head come to a rest against the window, cool glass on my temple, holding me up, holding me away from the road I still can’t feel, the road that’s rushing by outside. I close my eyes. Bruce Springsteen is playing on the radio, and the wind is blowing under the sound of his song, and for a little while, everything is perfectly fine, and there’s nothing to be afraid of.

  * * *

  “Rose.” Someone is shaking my shoulder. I bat ineffectively at the hand, burrowing deeper into my borrowed jacket—stolen now, I guess, or given, since the man I got it from is hundreds of miles away. It smells of grease and sweat and old leather, and I don’t think I’m ever going to take it off.

  “Rose.” It’s the hint of irritation in that voice that renders it familiar: Laura, trying to wake me up. “Rose, please. We have a problem.”

  “Huh?” I sit up, rubbing at my eyes, and start to stretch. Then my eyes catch on the rearview mirror, and I freeze.

  Bobby Cross drives a car that never rolled off any assembly line, that no human mechanic has ever touched or ever will. It was a gift from the crossroads, replacing the roadster he drove into the desert when he went to meet his fate. It’s sleek and black and classic in that “muscle cars of the American highway” sort of way, stealing elements from a dozen designs, making them all both more and less than they ought to be. It’s not a Chevy or a Camaro or anything else that belongs in the daylight. It’s wrong, like the man who drives it.

  And it’s behind us on the road.

  I suck in a sharp breath, coughing as it burns my throat, and say, “Oh sweet Hades.”

  “That’s him, then? That’s Bobby Cross?”

  He’s just a blur behind the windscreen, eyes hidden by dark glasses and mouth set in a sneer, but there’s no mistaking the face of Bobby Cross. Not with as long as I’ve been running from him. I can’t seem to find my voice. It’s like I spent it all on that expletive and now it’s gone, running somewhere I can’t follow. Running for safety.

  I manage to nod. That’s all I can do.

  Laura’s expression hardens into a mask of grim satisfaction. “Good,” she says, and taps a button on her dash, pulling up a menu of phone options. She taps again, this time a button labeled “voice,” and says, “Call highway patrol.”

  “Dialing,” says a patient, electronic voice. In a decade, will all the cars in the twilight be able to speak for themselves? If I could get Gary one of these systems somehow, he’d be able to talk to me all the time, not just when the Ocean Lady forced him into a human shape. Wouldn’t that be something?

  I’m spiraling, I’m looking for distractions, because I can’t reach the ghostroads and I can’t shuck this body like a corn husk and I can’t run and I can’t hide and Bobby’s going to follow us until it’s safe to run us off the road, and then he’s going to feed and feed and FEED—

  “Colorado Highway Patrol, how may I direct your call?”

  “Hi, this is Professor Laura Moorhead of Colorado University,” says Laura easily. “I’m driving my niece home from a Halloween party, and well. I know this may sound a little paranoid of me, but I think someone is following us.”

  I turn to stare at her, hope and amazement in my eyes. She’s using the human police. She’s using the rules.

  Bobby is a killer. He has nothing against breaking the rules, nothing against rear-ending a motorist and sending them to plummet to their deaths. But when he moves in the mortal world, he’s subject to certain physical laws. He needs time and clear roads to be certain of causing an accident bad enough to kill somebody, and even after six decades of doing what he does, he’s never left a witness behind. Witnesses mean rumors, and rumors mean gossip, and gossip means people start paying attention. Bobby went from King of the Silver Screen to half-whispered rumor through his own actions. He doesn’t want people to pay attention.

  If this were a deserted country road, washed in moonlight and bordered by the endless corn, he wouldn’t have hesitated. But this is a major highway, and the sun is in the sky. He wants me so badly that he can’t help himself. He wants to know that this time, at last, I’m his.

  I will never be his.

  “Can you describe the car, Professor Moorhead?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not much for makes and models. It’s black, looks old-fashioned, like something from Grease. The license plate is—” And she rattles off letters and numbers, a unique identifier I doubt is in their system, or anyone’s. Bobby isn’t the sort to pay much attention to keeping his registration up to date. She adds a description of her own car before she says, “I tried getting off and back on again, I tried changing lanes, slowing down, none of it helped. He’s just there. My niece is afraid it might be someone connected to her ex-boyfriend. He could be . . . rough.”

  “All right. We’re going to dispatch a highway patrol car to your location. Keep obeying posted traffic signs, unless he attempts to close on you. If that happens, speed up, drive as fast as you feel safe.”

  It’s good logic. We might get pulled over, but then we’ll be in the company of a state patrolman, which sort of cancels out Bobby’s influence over us. The calm, practiced way that it’s delivered makes my unwanted blood run cold. How often does this sort of thing happen in the daylight? How many people don’t think to call the police, let themselves be run off the road like lambs intended for the slaughter?

  Down in the twilight, we can be brutal to one another—hell, we can be more than brutal. We take each other captive in sealed jars and in haunted houses, we deny each other the things we want most in all the world, we treat eternity like a game that can be won. But this sort of casual, inescapable cruelty is beyond us. Death is no longer on the table for us, and while the stakes of our feuds can be high, we almost never corner each other like this, like it matters. I don’t
like it. I want it to end.

  “Thank you very much,” says Laura. “Would you like me to stay on the line?”

  “Please.”

  They chat then, two humans discussing human things, the small points of commonality and culture that keep the daylight functional. I tune them out, watching in the rearview mirror as Bobby creeps ever closer, pacing us even as Laura presses her foot down on the gas, accelerates away from the threat he represents.

  There are still cars around us, but not as many as there were, and not as many as I want there to be. The farther we drive, the more of them are exiting, not committed to riding all the way to Boulder. It won’t be long before Bobby has a clear shot.

  Deliver me from fear, and deliver me from evil, and deliver me from the arms of Bobby Cross, I think . . . and that’s when the patrol car appears in the rearview mirror.

  First it moves up alongside Bobby’s car, the officer inside presumably running the plates, making sure everything is all right. Whatever they find, it doesn’t please them, because the cruiser’s running lights come on, flashing red-blue-red, the universal symbol to pull the hell over.

  Bobby hits the gas.

  He comes tearing up on us, so fast Laura barely has time to swerve hard to the right and avoid a collision. For a second, I think he’s going to turn around and come back for another pass. But the patrol car is close behind him, and he doesn’t have the room to make the turn without risking his own vehicle. Bobby’s car is self-healing—I doubt there’s an ordinary accident bad enough to take it off the road. That doesn’t mean he wants to deal with the damage. In order to heal, it needs souls, and tracking those down takes time.

  Bobby drives faster. The patrol car does the same. Laura clears her throat.

  “Well,” she says. “I suppose we weren’t wrong.”

  “Thank you for your call, Professor Moorhead,” says the dispatcher. “We’ll contact you if we have any questions.” With Bobby on the run and the two of us safe, at least for the moment, there’s no further need for a police presence in the car. They need to focus on the man who was following an innocent academic and her teenage niece down the highway, who clearly meant them harm from the way he fled as soon as the police arrived.