The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

by Seanan McGuire

  “Have a nice day, and thank you again,” says Laura, before tapping her dash to cut the connection. The call drops. She clutches the wheel like a drowning man clutches a rope. Her hands are shaking. She looks terrified, and I suppose everything about the day has been terrifying, one way or another.

  “Do you really have a niece?” I ask her.

  “Of course I do, and she’s safe at home with her parents if she knows what’s good for her, not getting chased down the road by Bobby Cross.” She spits his name like it’s half prayer and half curse and oh, Laura. Did she have his picture on her wall when she was younger, drowning in the power of those eyes? Did she go to festivals of his movies, mourning the fact that he’d died so far before his time, before he could grow into the man he should have been?

  He’s never going to grow into the man he should have been. He played younger on film than he actually was, was in his early thirties when he died, and he’s still never going to grow into that man, because Bobby Cross does not grow, does not change, does not ever admit that who he is, right now, is anything less than flawless. Bobby bought the kind of immortality that requires absolute conviction in himself as he is, and if he ever lets it go, sixty years and more will slam into him like a brick wall. His survival now depends on continuing to believe that what he did then was justified.

  “I don’t believe . . .” Laura shakes her head, steals a glance at me. “He’s really the man who killed you? You’re sure? It’s not like . . . not like it was with you and Tommy?”

  Where I had appeared to Tommy before his death to try and talk him out of it, she means. Where I had been an innocent bystander and psychopomp mistaken for a murderess. It would make her feel better if she could think the same of Bobby; I can see it in the tense line of her jaw, the way she holds herself stiff and miserable.

  “I’m sure,” I say. “He ran me off the road. He wasn’t . . . he hadn’t been doing what he does for very long, and he got cocky, and I got away. That doesn’t happen anymore. What he kills now, he keeps.”

  “Oh,” says Laura, voice hushed.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Oh.”

  There was a time when Bobby Cross was the most beloved man in the world, James Dean before James Dean existed. Sometimes I’ve wondered whether James Dean and his meteoric rise to fame, culminating in that fatal wreck, was something the routewitches had arranged, one more way to try to punish Bobby for doing what he did. See, it says, see. You’re nothing special. You left no marks another man can’t leave bigger and better than you ever did. See.

  If he’d stayed in the daylight, stayed away from bad bargains and price tags bigger than they look, he would have been one of the all-time greats. As it is, he’s a monster, and every time someone like Laura sees that, his legend dies a little bit more. Awful as it may be, I can’t find it in myself to be sorry about that. Bobby Cross deserves what he gets.

  “We have to stop him,” says Laura.

  “Yes,” I agree. “But not until I’m dead again. I’m no good like this.”

  “Fuck,” says Laura. “Where do we even start?”

  “Have you ever heard of the routewitches?”

  Laura hesitates before she says, “Nothing conclusive. I’ve heard of . . . of people who say they can talk to the road, and that it talks back. Who use it to do some sort of magic. It all sounds like parlor tricks to me.”

  “They’re not as flashy as sorcerers or true witches, but they’re good people to have in your corner, and their queen knows me,” I say. “If we can reach the Ocean Lady, she’ll have some idea of what we should be doing next.”

  “Their queen is named the Ocean Lady?”

  “No. The Ocean Lady is . . . more like their goddess incarnate. Their big, dead, inanimate goddess incarnate. Have you ever heard of the old Atlantic Highway?”

  “No. I assume it’s a road.”

  “She was, and she is, and she always will be, no matter how deeply she sinks into the twilight. She was the first of the major American arteries. So many people drove her that she became aware, and she became divine, and now her broken body serves as refuge for the routewitches who don’t, for whatever reason, feel like stepping up into the daylight.”

  “All right,” says Laura slowly. “Where do we have to go?”

  “Calais, Maine.”

  Her laughter is disbelieving. “Of course we do. Of course.” Then she looks at me assessingly, and asks, “Have you ever been on an airplane?”

  Chapter 8

  Small Rooms Filled With Memories

  IF LAURA’S CAR IS NEAT AND NEW AND PRACTICAL, her apartment is what happens when a used bookstore and a grandmother’s bedroom love each other very, very much. If a space can be repurposed for book storage, it has been; there are even bookshelves in the bathroom, which I have to visit again, to my immense displeasure. At least she puts her money into decent toilet paper, and I don’t come away feeling like I’ve just sandpapered my vulva.

  I do come away wondering why anyone would think their demonology collection belongs above the toilet, a question that only lasts until I track the sound of Laura’s voice to her bedroom, where an entire wall is given over to demonology texts. The bathroom is the overflow. The terrifying, unwelcome, likely-to-summon-something overflow.

  Laura is sitting on the edge of her bed, a laptop on a TV tray in front of her, typing with one hand while the other holds her phone. I stop in the doorway and gape.

  There is a bed, yes: Laura is still mortal, she needs to sleep. It’s even a big bed, although its size is somewhat lessened by the piles of books heaped around the edge, transforming it from a spacious place to dream away the hours to a claustrophobic slice of library shelf. The walls are lined entirely in bookcases, volumes stacked double and even triple deep, and that isn’t enough to contain the books. They dominate the floor in unsteady piles, with only the narrowest of paths through. I’m not staying where I am out of respect for her privacy. I’m doing it because if I take one step into that room, I’m going to knock everything over, and she’s going to kill me.

  There’s probably a kind of ghost that only arises when someone gets murdered by an outraged bibliophile, and I have no desire to experience that kind of afterlife firsthand.

  “I don’t need a full-sized pizza, I just need a personal pie that can be eaten while I’m on the road,” says Laura, sounding annoyed. “Yes, by tomorrow. No, I don’t see why it being a rush job means you should charge me for things I’m not going to use.”

  She spots me in the doorway, and waves me in. I shake my head, pointing to the stacks of books on the floor. She blinks, first at me, and then at them. It’s like she didn’t even realize they were there.

  Grief is a monster. Laura got so wrapped up in grieving for Tommy, grieving for the idea of Tommy, and needing to avenge what she perceived as his murder, that she fed her whole life into grief’s maw. Whoever she would have been, whatever she might have done with that brilliant and flexible mind of hers, grief swallowed it all whole and left her with this. There’s nothing wrong with research. Books and cleverness can move the world in the right hands, and I’ve seen it happen enough times to respect it. But there should be balance. There should always be balance. Laura lost her balance a long time ago, and she’s been falling ever since, tumbling head over heels down a rabbit hole of research that won’t ever let her go.

  She lets out a loud, put-upon sigh. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I will pay. Yes, I will send a suitable picture, so you know who to deliver the pizza to.” She drops her phone next to the laptop, typing a few aggravated lines before she pushes the tray away—narrowly missing several stacks of books in the process, which is probably more unnerving for me than it is for her—and grabs the phone again, standing.

  “Come on,” she says. “There’s a clean white wall in the hallway. I need a picture.”

  “Of the wall?” I ask blankly.

&nb
sp; “Of you,” she replies.

  Automatically, I touch my hair. It’s too long for my tastes, the length it was on that long-ago prom night, streaked with lemon juice highlights and snarled around bits of hay. Laura snorts, clearly seeing the vanity and confusion in my face.

  “I’ll loan you a hairbrush,” she says. “And maybe a T-shirt. It’ll be a little more believable if you’re wearing something with the University logo on it. We have similar coloring. Put you in the same brands and nobody will question whether you’re really my niece.”

  “Uh,” I say. “Why are we doing this? Not that I’d object to a hairbrush.” I remember brushing my hair. I remember it being soothing and even pleasant, which puts it well ahead of most of the other things I remember about having a physical body.

  Laura looks down the length of her nose at me and says, very patiently, “We are in Colorado. Do you know how far it is from Colorado to Maine?”

  “Uh.” I’ve been all over North America. I’ve visited every American state except for Hawaii, every Canadian province, every Mexican state. I’ve been on car trips that lasted for hours, until the sunrise forced me to abandon my borrowed coats and unwitting drivers. There’s nothing about this continent that I haven’t seen, haven’t known, haven’t gloried in.

  But I’ve done it all while dead, and I realize I have absolutely no sense of how big it really is. Enormous, yeah, I got that part; too much for anyone to see in a lifetime, which is why I’m glad not to be bound that way. But mileage? That’s always been somebody else’s problem.

  “It’s about twenty-three hundred miles, or about five, maybe six days on the road,” says Laura. “Even if I wanted to make that kind of drive, which I don’t, and even if I believed Bobby Cross wasn’t going to find us on some backroad somewhere and kill us both, which again, I don’t, I don’t have that much time off coming, and I don’t think you want to spend that much time incarnate.”

  “I really, really don’t,” I say earnestly. The sweat from my earlier panic attack has dried on my skin in a sticky shell that feels like it cracks every time I move, yet never falls away. I’m disgusting. Thinking too hard about the body I occupy makes me want to scream.

  “That means we’re flying, and flying means getting you a legal ID.” Laura starts for the door, clearly expecting me to get out of the way. “Nothing fancy. Just enough to get you on the plane.”

  “What does that have to do with pizza?”

  “Maybe it’s paranoid to assume the government would care about little old me, but I’ve always preferred safety to sorrow,” says Laura. I step aside and she walks past me, heading for the bathroom while I trail along behind. “Saying ‘I need a false ID’ is a great way to find out whether my phone is tapped. That doesn’t even start to go into what would happen if the NSA showed up here and found me hanging out with a woman who died sixty years ago.” She paused. “Girl. A teenage girl. They’d probably assume I bought you from an underage sex slavery ring, and that is the kind of knock my professional reputation simply can’t survive.”

  “The NSA knows about ghosts,” I assure her. “Some of their recording equipment is sensitive enough to pick us up. They just ignore us and hope we’ll go away.”

  Laura stops for a moment. “That . . . doesn’t help,” she finally says, and ducks into the bathroom, emerging with a hairbrush in her hand. She lobs it gently to me. “Here. Make yourself presentable while I find you a shirt.” She vanishes again, back into her bedroom.

  I drift to the living room, with its book-lined walls and dusty floor, and perch on the edge of the couch, trying to work the knots out of my hair. This isn’t the pleasant process of my memories. This is torture. My hair still remembers the indignity of lemon treatments performed the night before I died, leaving it brittle and inclined to snarling. What’s more, it’s filled with what seems like half the Barrowman farm. Hay and corn husks and bits of apple branch catch and snarl as I tug them free, and by the time I’m done, I’m tempted to grab the nearest pair of scissors and start hacking. Only the fact that I don’t know what that would do to my second death is enough to stop me.

  “Here.” Laura returns with a gray shirt clutched in one hand, and pauses to assess my hair before she tosses it to me. “Take off that dreadful jacket and change your shirt. I’m going to take your picture in the hall and send it to my contact.”

  “So he knows I’m the one picking up the pizza.”

  “Exactly,” Laura agrees.

  “This is all complicated. Dead was easier.” I tug off the filthy shirt I got from the youngest Barrowman daughter and pull the shirt Laura gave me on in its place. When I look up again, she has her eyes turned toward the ceiling.

  “We need to get you a bra,” she says. “Do not take your shirt off in front of people without one.”

  “Sorry,” I say. It’s not that the dead don’t do modesty. The dead are not a monolithic entity, and when you have a community made up of people who remember what it is to be warm alongside people who died before the founding of any country still extant in the living world, you’ll naturally have a lot of opinions about a lot of things. But my personal sense of modesty got burned out of me a long time ago, and I hadn’t even considered that Laura might be unhappy about seeing my breasts.

  “I’m serious, Rose. You need to avoid drawing attention to yourself. That sort of thing draws attention.”

  “There’s no one here but us, and you told me to change my shirt,” I protest.

  “Well, if I say something like that in public and you think it might lead to nudity, refuse.” Laura walks to the apartment door and looks back at me, brows raised. “Well?”

  I roll my eyes and follow her.

  All of this is unreasonable. All of this is stupid. It’s like Laura has decided to test my claims of being stuck this way by being as fiddly and precise as possible, in the hopes that I’ll get bored and disappear. I wish I could. Only “bored to death” is probably another thing that creates some sort of ghost I’ve never encountered before, and I don’t want to get trapped haunting this apartment building for the rest of eternity. I have shit to do.

  She makes me stand against the hallway wall with a blank expression on my face while she snaps half a dozen photographs and sends them to her contact. Then she ushers me back inside and boils a box of macaroni on the stove, mixing it with cheese powder, milk, and margarine until she has something she says is Kraft dinner. Nothing about it tastes like the Kraft dinner I remember. The cheese is too sweet and the macaroni is too starchy. But it’s food, and it fills my stomach, and by the time we finish, she has a note from the “pizza delivery service,” telling her she can pick up my new ID in front of the library tomorrow morning at eight.

  “I’ll book us flights to Portland before bed, while you shower,” she says. “From there, I can rent a car and we can drive to Calais. You’re my niece from now until we get where we’re going. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I say, and tug on the bottom of my borrowed shirt. “Can I keep this for now? The other one is sort of gross.”

  She makes a face that isn’t quite a scowl, but is more like an effort to stop herself from speaking. Then, in a clipped voice, she says, “We’ll go to Target tomorrow after we pick up your ID, and get you a few changes of clothing. Nothing fancy, but it’s best to avoid attracting attention, and you smelling like I never allow you to bathe is going to attract attention.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t know how I’m going to pay you back for all this.” I don’t know how much things cost, but I know plane tickets and new clothes aren’t the cheapest things in the world.

  “Don’t worry about it.” Laura dismisses my concerns with a wave of her hand. “I work hard and I don’t have much to spend money on. The kind of books I collect are expensive, but they don’t come around every day, and I don’t have any other big extravagances. I can afford this. Let me afford this.”


  “But why?”

  “Because I’m going to hold you to your word,” she says simply. “When my time comes, you’re going to take me to Tommy. That means I need to put you back where you belong. Don’t mistake this for me liking you: I don’t. I doubt I ever will. But a smart woman takes care of her tools, and as of now, you’re one of mine.”

  There’s something chillingly possessive in the way she says that. It makes me want to get the trucker’s coat from the couch where I left it, to wrap myself in the memory of the warmth it held when he handed it to me. I don’t even know the man’s name, but I have his jacket, and that means I’m still a hitcher. I’m still Rose Marshall.

  I am.

  While I’m in the shower Laura makes a bed for me on the couch, clean sheets stretched over hard cushions, a pillow from the linen closet that smells of stale detergent and dust. It’s nicer than the bed I had when I was a child. Settling into it is no problem at all. I lie there with my eyes closed, listening as she brushes her teeth and showers, and I’m asleep by the time she walks past me to her bedroom.

  When I open my eyes, the door to her room is closed, and there’s a pain in my abdomen that makes me sure—absolutely certain—that I’m about to die. I stagger to my feet, shoving Laura’s afghan aside, and feel the pain shift downward, from my lower back into my—

  Oh, no.

  The less said about what happens next, the better. Urination is not the worst thing the human body is capable of. This is disgusting. Everything about life is disgusting. The good parts—the cheeseburgers, the milkshakes, the laughter, the sunlight—just lead to more of the bad parts. Cause and effect and why are humans afraid of going to hell? They already live there. They already rot there.