The Girl in the Green Silk Gown

by Seanan McGuire

  They probably have different gods here, gods of ferry and coach and ancient roads, but I still say my silent prayers to Danny and Celia and Persephone, hoping the landing will be kind, that the next stage in our journey will be forgiving. We’re almost there, and that’s a blessing, because I can’t feel myself aging anymore. It’s still happening, I know; everything that lives ages. I just can’t feel it, because I’m getting used to it. I’m growing accustomed to being alive.

  After accustomed comes addicted, and after addicted comes unwilling to let go. Most people are addicted to living. Trouble is, I’m not most people. I know too much. I know about the crossroads, and the Ocean Lady; I know Apple, I know Bobby Cross, and I know that if I want to, I can find a way to live forever. No matter how much damage it does. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to become the version of myself who thinks my life matters more than anyone else’s. I need to get out of this skin before it gets too comfortable.

  The flight attendants come around to collect the little cards we filled out during the flight, the ones that state our business and our innocence and our intent to be good little tourists. Mine feels like a falsehood given details, and Laura’s isn’t much better. At least I know all the information they have a way to check will show up as true. Thank Persephone for Apple, and for Carl. I hope she’ll let him come home.

  England grows closer and closer outside the window, the houses going from familiar squares to something new, something familiar and foreign at the same time. I don’t recognize the trees or the shapes of the windows. The cars drive on the wrong side of the highways, inverting the usual flow of things, and I wonder whether that’s part of why American routewitches don’t usually make this journey. The distance is the same, but does it translate?

  No way to know except to ask, and then the wheels are slamming onto the runway, the plane bouncing once, twice, three times before it settles into a smooth glide. There’s a voice on the intercom welcoming us to London. A few people applaud. Someone cheers. I close my eyes.

  We’re almost there.

  * * *

  Customs is a nightmare. Laura flirts and preens, flipping her hair and smiling brightly at the man who checks our passports and our papers. She tells him I’m exhausted from our flight and overwhelmed by the reality of international travel, having never been outside the country before. She’s not lying, exactly, but she’s not telling him the full truth. That seems to help. He’s trained to listen for lies, so she’s just choosing to leave pieces out.

  The picture on my passport matches my face; my mumbled answers match the man’s expectations of both a teenage girl and someone experiencing jetlag for the first time. He stamps my form and we’re through, passing the last checkpoint between us and England.

  Every step I take seems to wake me up a bit more. I can’t feel the roads, but I can feel something. The tattoo on my back is burning for the first time since I woke in flesh and bone. It’s a hot tingle stretched across my skin, like it knows where we are, where we’re going, what I’m going to do. Whether it’s real or just my imagination, I stand up straighter, the heat in my skin sliding into my veins and filling me from top to bottom with hope.

  We follow the signs to the exit, and from there we follow the signs to the Underground, which is the local subway system, all marked with red and white signs that make me think “hospital” more than “public transit.” We stop at the top of the stairs, digging for the fare cards that Carl gave us, and an arm locks around my neck, jerking me backward, through the wall.

  The feeling of my body passing through concrete like mist is familiar enough not to become alarming until I elbow my attacker and they let go, dropping me into the dark crevice behind the wall. My breath is loud, the loudest sound in this enclosed space. Only then do I realize there’s no possible way for me to be here. We’re still in the daylight—if I’d been yanked into the twilight, it would have killed me—but people, living people, aren’t supposed to walk through walls. When we try, we die.

  It’s dark and my assailant isn’t breathing. There’s no way I’m going to find them, and if I start swinging wildly, I’m just going to bruise my fists on the walls. So I don’t. I stay where I am, folding my arms, and glare at the darkness.

  “Nice try,” I say. “Maybe next time you can just stab me from behind, if you’re going to be a cowardly fucker about things.”

  “What’s your name, girlie?” The voice is female, with a strong English accent. That shouldn’t be as much of a surprise as it is. I’m in England. Of course the supernatural assholes will have English accents.

  “I feel like James Bond,” I reply. “Is your name a terrible sex pun? I bet it’s a terrible sex pun. That’s why you went with an attack instead of an introduction. You’re embarrassed. Well, you shouldn’t be. None of us can help what our parents do.”

  “What. Is. Your. Name.” There’s no question there, just growled frustration. I get the feeling this woman, whoever she is, would love to shove me into another wall—not through it this time, into it, all for the satisfaction of hearing my skull crack on the concrete.

  I’m tired and I’m hungry and I’m very far from home. I glare at the darkness and say, “Rose Marshall of Buckley Township, Michigan, better known as the spirit of Sparrow Hill Road. I’m the girl in the diner and the phantom prom date, and I’m getting a little tired of whatever the hell this is.”

  “Good,” hisses the voice, and I’m being shoved again, back through the wall, back into the light. Laura is there, looking like she’s on the verge of panic. Her eyes widen when she sees me, and she flings her arms around me. Good thing, too: I might have toppled over otherwise.

  None of the people passing by us seem to have noticed either my disappearance into the wall or my reappearance on the concourse. That’s a little unnerving. The figure that follows me through the wall is sufficiently more unnerving to make me forget about the strange disregard, and start worrying about getting out of this in one piece.

  She’s short, curvy and corseted and dressed in black, save for the shockingly pink choker around her throat. Matching streaks radiate through her jet-black hair, which is cut in a style that would have looked more natural in the halls of my high school than it does here, in the modern day. Her makeup is either overdone for the morning or underdone for a night at the club, a mix of black and pink and glittery silver that catches every speck of the light and tosses it back like a gambler rolling a fistful of dice. She looks like the world’s angriest goth, and I don’t know what to do with this. I just stare.

  “Rose?” manages Laura. “What are you looking at?”

  I start to answer. Then I pause, and point at the angry goth. “Is there someone there?”

  Laura shakes her head. The panic in her eyes isn’t fading. I guess I can’t blame her for that. “No. Rose, you went through the wall.”

  At least she saw that. I turn to the goth. “She can’t see you,” I say. “Can you fix that?”

  “She’s no witch nor hedgemage nor anything else the road lays claim upon,” says the woman, with a sneer. “Why should I show myself to the likes of her, if she’s not equipped to see me on her own? She’s not meant for the likes of me, not as yet.”

  “The likes of you meaning . . . ?”

  There’s a vicious gleam in the woman’s eye as she reaches up and taps the choker. “Would you like to see?”

  That’s answer enough. “Dullahan,” I say, and note the way the gleam in her eye fades, replaced by surprise and disappointment. She wanted to be strange and mysterious for me, to shock me with her existence. Too bad for her that I’ve had a long time to meet most of the strange, mysterious denizens of the twilight. “Apple send you?”

  “Rose? Who are you talking to?”

  “No one, Laura.” I keep my eyes on the stranger as I speak, challenging her to contradict me. “Just one of the local ghosts who doesn’t seem to want
to be helpful, but does seem pretty set on throwing me through walls. She’s not important.”

  “You insolent little American,” snarls the Dullahan. “I’m your guide, and you’d do ill to ignore me.”

  “Can’t guide us if only one of us can see you,” I counter. “Appear or we leave you here, and I tell Apple and anyone else who’s willing to listen that you were having too much fun being creepy to play fair. Maybe I’ll tell Persephone. She probably cares about that sort of thing, right?”

  The Dullahan glares. Laura gasps, and I know she can see the stranger now, standing here on the concourse like she’s been here all along.

  “I thought London was full of cameras,” I say. “Why are you willing to appear and disappear like that?”

  “London is full of cameras, but it’s even more full of ghosts,” says the Dullahan. “People have learned not to see us, out of self-defense. That’s why you need a guide. American ghosts are only welcome here when they have someone to hold their hand and vouch for them. You should be grateful to have me, little hitcher in a stolen skin. I’m paying off a debt that’s older than you are, and the one who called it in could have asked so much more of me.”

  She’s not telling the full truth, but that’s not important right now. Dullahan are like beán sidhe, predators that are neither alive nor dead, but exist in the strange hinterland between the two. Whatever Emma had done for this small, angry woman, it had clearly happened in that liminal space where the living couldn’t go and the dead weren’t invited.

  The thought warms me. My friends are still looking out for me, even here. Even now. “I’ll be sure to tell Emma thanks when I get home,” I say. “Although it’d be easier if I knew your name.”

  “Pippa,” says the Dullahan, and it’s so incongruous—a preppy, peppy name for a goth specter of death and destruction—that it’s all I can do not to laugh. She eyes me sullenly. “It’s short for Philippa. It’s a fine, traditional name, a name with weight behind it. Better than being named for some hedge flower that anyone can grow.”

  “Right,” I say. I indicate Laura. “This is Laura Moorhead. She’s going to descend with me.”

  “And lead you out again, from what I understand.” Pippa looks Laura deliberately up and down. “I don’t believe she has it in her, but I suppose we’ll see, won’t we?”

  Laura sputters. Literally sputters. It would be funny, if we weren’t standing in the middle of an Underground station stairway. But we are. Whatever effect keeps the people of England from noticing Pippa’s phantasmal actions doesn’t extend to Laura, and people are starting to give her funny looks. We’ll attract attention soon, if we haven’t done so already.

  I don’t want to attract attention. No matter how good the paperwork Apple arranged for me really is, there’s no way it can stand up to being arrested. The idea of someone figuring out that I don’t legally exist is even more terrifying when I’m thinking about it happening in a foreign country.

  “Can we stop being assholes here and go be assholes on the train?” I blurt. Laura and Pippa both turn to look at me, surprised out of their increasing animosity. “I want to get this over and done with. Don’t you? Laura, I know you’re going to run out of vacation time soon. Pippa, I know basically nothing about you, but I bet you’re the kind of person who gets shit done and then gloats about it. You don’t get to gloat until you get me to the British Museum.”

  Pippa’s eyebrows climb toward her hairline. “You’ve flown across an ocean,” she says. “You’re in a place where none of the rules are what you’re likely to think they are. The roads here won’t listen to you, no matter how much you beg them, until you’ve walked far enough to tell them your intent. Don’t you at least want a shower before you bait the gods?”

  “I want a gown made of green silk that hits my ankles when I walk,” I say. “I want matching flats, and a corsage around my wrist, and the taste of ashes in my mouth. I want to be dust and glitter on the wind. This is how I get those things. This is how I go home. So no. I do not want a shower. I do not want a sandwich. I do not want to waste any more time in this place, in this flesh, in this parody of my own skin. Take me to the British Museum. End this.”

  Pippa looks, for a moment, almost impressed. Then she smirks.

  “All right, new girl,” she says. “Follow me.”

  We descend into the Underground. People brush by us on all sides, intent on their own destinations, writing us off as another clot of strange tourists. We make an eccentric group, Laura with her college professor’s calm ease in her own skin, me jumpy and uncomfortable with everything around me, Pippa in her tall boots and her lacy skirt, with that eye-catching ribbon at her throat. I’ve never seen a Dullahan who drew that much attention to their neck.

  “Is she really . . . ?” whispers Laura, when Pippa draws far enough ahead that she feels safe risking it.

  I shrug. “I don’t know,” I reply, in a more conversational tone. Never let a predator think that you’re trying to sneak up on them. That way lies claws and teeth and bleeding. “You could ask her to take off the choker, but she might do it. You probably wouldn’t like that much.”

  Laura shudders, face pale. I guess a life spent tracking down one relatively harmless ghost—as ghosts go—didn’t prepare her for the depth and danger of the supernatural world. Every ghost is different, but most hitchers aren’t malicious. We just want to see the sights before we move on to whatever comes next. As ghosts go, you can do a lot worse.

  And then there are the ones who aren’t ghosts at all.

  Like I said, Dullahan straddle the line between life and death. So far as I am aware, they reproduce like anything else living: no one becomes a Dullahan when they die. They’re cousins of the reapers, harbingers of doom, foretellers of mortality. They’re also a composite, a living, parasitic head controlling and operating what is technically someone’s stolen, modified corpse. If Pippa removes the ribbon from her neck, her head will pop off and keep talking, which is extremely disconcerting the first time you see it. And the fifth. And the five hundredth. Dullahan are disconcerting in general. There aren’t many of them in America, and on some level, we’re all glad.

  We reach the fare gates. Laura and I press our cards to the sensor, and they open for us. Pippa simply walks through, her body passing through metal as if it weren’t there. I have to resist the urge to roll my eyes. She’s showing off. It’s working on Laura, who looks less comfortable every time Pippa does something so blatant without attracting attention. I think she’s starting to realize why Dullahan are so terrifying. When they don’t want to be seen, they’re not. When they don’t want to be noticed, they won’t be. I didn’t realize before that they could extend the effect to others. Maybe she’s right about it being a London thing, or maybe she’s just trying to seem more impressive than she actually is. It doesn’t matter one way or the other.

  “You’re in luck: there’s no need to take any trains that don’t actually exist today,” says Pippa, after a quick glance at a sign covered in lines so complex that they might as well be summoning sigils for a demon. “The Piccadilly line is running clear, and it’ll get us to Holborn Station. From there, it’s an easy walk to the museum. We’ll have you committing the greatest mistake of your life in no time.”

  “If it’s so easy, why are you here?” There’s an undercurrent of venom in Laura’s voice. She doesn’t like being frightened. Pippa frightens her. It makes sense for her to be lashing out, although I wish she wouldn’t. This isn’t wise.

  Pippa apparently shares my sentiment. She gives Laura a flat, cold-eyed look, and says, “Because it’s not going to stay easy, and when it becomes complicated, you’ll be glad as glass of someone who understands the way things work here. Your America is stolen land, paved over with the materials of a hundred immigrant lands, but England? Conquer us, cover us, we always found our way back to true. The rules are not as you understand them.”


  “Can we not antagonize our guide? Please?” I slide between them, the hot air blowing out of the train tunnel ruffling my hair and caressing the back of my neck like the breath of some great and terrible beast. Signs telling me to “Mind the Gap” seem to be everywhere. I wonder whether these people understand that this is how you craft a god. I wonder if they listen when the absence speaks. “We’re so close, Laura. We’re almost there. You’re going to get your life back. I’m going to get my death back. Let it go.”

  Laura narrows her eyes, still watching Pippa. “I don’t trust her.”

  “I don’t care,” I counter. “I trust Emma. Emma says she’ll help us, and Emma has never done anything to hurt me.”

  “She’s a good one, as the keeners go,” says Pippa casually. Too casually, really. I look over my shoulder at the Dullahan. She’s watching the mouth of the tunnel, studiously not looking at either of us. “They go where their families go.”

  Meaning when the family Emma used to be attached to had decided to move to America, Emma had followed, and Pippa had been, for whatever reason, left behind.

  “She runs a diner called the Last Dance, these days,” I say. “Her pie is amazing. I bet she’d love to see you.”

  Pippa looks speculative at that. The expression hasn’t faded when the train pulls in and the doors open, and the three of us are hustled inside by the crowd.

  The London Underground has this much in common with every other public transit system I have ever seen: it’s too small for the number of people who think they can cram themselves into a single train, and there are never enough seats. There’s only one open I can see, a narrow slice of fabric visible between two businessmen with their legs spread wide enough to tell me more than I need to know about their genitals. Pippa’s smile is feral. She wedges herself into that opening without concern for how much flesh she pinches in the process, her elbows hitting their thighs.