Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan

by Seanan McGuire

  Salem's already a liability, too slow, too visible against the corn, little Snow White tattoo girl, like a naughty fairy tale running from the hand that holds the apple. But at least she's trying. Jimmy looks like this is all a joke, and I don't have a clue how I can get it through his head that this is anything but funny.

  We run until the corn gives way, our feet pounding against the hard-baked earth. The apple orchard looms ahead of us, trees groaning under the weight of the fruit that's waiting for the harvest. The Barrowmans always get a good crop; it's part of the same bargain that keeps them healthy and alive for as many years as human frailty allows. "This way," I snap, still hauling Salem in my wake.

  "I thought we wanted to stay under cover," says Jimmy, still too damn amused for anyone's good.

  "If you've got a better idea, you can just be my guest." I'm too annoyed by his attitude to stop the words from getting out. Halloween is serious business, and here he is, treating it like it's all just another game.

  "I think I will," he says. Putting two fingers in his mouth, he whistles shrilly. There's a click in the trees to the left, and then—almost before I hear the gunshot—Salem is wobbling, a comic look of surprise distorting her features. A bloody red rose is blooming on her chest, Snow White felled in the presence of a hundred unpicked apples. Her hand pulls free of mine as she falls, crumpling to the ground.

  "What did you do?!" I demand, dropping to my knees. It's too late, I know that even before I see Salem's open, glazed-over eyes; she's gone. For the second time, she's gone, and this time, she won't wake up in the dubious safety of the twilight, won't have any second chances. I stare at the red blood staining her borrowed clothes, realizing numbly that I don't even know what she was. Hitcher, phantom rider, yuki-onna, wraith...the choices are endless, and Salem wasn't.

  Salem ended.

  Salem ended, but I haven't. That thought gets me back to my feet, poised to run, run away from this little boy who brought the hunters down on a stupid little fairy tale princess. Let him face the rest of this long night alone. I'm done.

  Instead, I find myself looking at a man in hunter's green, with a shotgun pointed square at the middle of my chest. Jimmy is smiling like he's just won himself the world.

  "See, Anton?" he says. "I told you I could break some of them away from the rest of the herd."

  The man with the shotgun has Jimmy's eyes. This can't possibly be good.

  ***

  I raise my hands, trying to look innocent and young. Everyone who comes here to hunt knows they'll be shooting ghosts to ransom their own lives, but some of them still have trouble killing kids. "Please don't shoot, mister," I say. "I'll do anything you want."

  "Brave one," the man snorts. He walks to Salem, nudging her with his boot. "If they're all this accommodating, I should've let the goth chick be yours. Goth chicks'll do some freaky stuff if they think it'll get them somewhere."

  Hate uncurls hot and liquid in my belly. "Her name was Salem," I say, dropping the act as swiftly as I adopted it. It's clear that it won't work here. "I don't know how she died the first time. I never had the opportunity to ask."

  "Probably an overdose," says the man dismissively, and smiles at me. It's the coldest smile I've ever seen on a living man. "You tell my baby brother all about the holidays?"

  "What makes you think I know what's going on here? I'm just as confused by all of this as he is."

  "She's lying," says Jimmy, still easy, still treating all this like a game. "She explained the whole thing while we were running. All I have to do is kill her and I can be alive again."

  I never said that. I said something similar, sure, but I never said that. I'm opening my mouth to tell him so when I realize what he's planning, and shut it with a snap. The man—Anton—hands his gun to Jimmy, patting the smaller, deader boy on the shoulder as he does.

  "Sorry, Rose," says Jimmy, and pulls the trigger.

  ***

  I'm getting damn tired of being shot at. You'd think that, being dead, I wouldn't have to worry about this sort of thing anymore. A finger pokes me in the shoulder, and Emma's voice says, "Get up, or it's the eels again."

  I open my eyes.

  Emma is crouching next to me, a brown corduroy coat draped across her knees. The sun is down; it's dark, and her presence alone is enough to tell me that Halloween is over. Bean sidhe have their own rituals regarding the holiday, and she'd never leave them early, not even for me. I'm not sure that she can. Still: "What time is it?" I ask.

  "Midnight, on Martinmas. You've been out for eleven days."

  "Swell." I stand up, grimacing a little at the swish of the silk skirt against my ankles. Yup. Definitely back among the unliving. "Did anyone get a picture of that little punk's face when midnight came and he faded out with the rest?"

  "Not that I'm aware of."

  "Damn." I'll have to track him down and provide him with a little private tutoring in the ways of the road. Such as 'you don't betray your fellow dead to the living.' He's already learned one of the more important lessons—'always check the fine print.'

  On Halloween, if the living kill the dead, or the dead kill the living, they get a year in the daylight as their prize. But there's no prize for the dead killing the dead. Trick's on you, Jimmy, and there are bigger tricks to come, because news travels fast in the twilight, and the dead never forget.

  I take the coat from Emma, shrugging it on, and smile. "Malteds?"

  "I thought you'd never ask," she says, and offers me her arm. I take it, and we walk on together down the road, away from the shadow of the cornfield, and the smell of burnt pumpkin that still lingers, like a holiday's ghost, in the sweet November night.

  Faithfully

  A Sparrow Hill Road story

  by

  Seanan McGuire

  Highway run

  Into the midnight sun

  Wheels go round and round,

  You're on my mind.

  Restless hearts

  Sleep alone tonight

  Sending all my love

  Along the wire...

  They say that the road

  Ain't no place to start a family

  Right down the line

  It's been you and me

  And lovin' a music man

  Ain't always what it's supposed to be

  Oh, girl, you stand by me

  I'm forever yours...

  Faithfully.

  — "Faithfully," Jonathan Cain.

  Love—true love—never dies.

  Sometimes it just goes to sleep for a while.

  ***

  Her name was Rose. She sat in the second row in Ms. Buchanan's third grade class. She had hair the color of the cornfields in September, and big brown doe's eyes that made me want to grab her hand and promise her that everything was going to be okay forever—double-pinky-swear. I'd known her since kindergarten, but on the second day of third grade, when she and I got picked to hand out the mimeo sheets for the teacher, walking down the aisles shoulder to shoulder...that was when I realized that I loved her. That I was never going to want to be with anybody but her.

  I wasn't always nice to her the way I should have been. But I didn't join the other kids when they made fun of the patches on her sleeves or the way her skirts got shorter and shorter, eaten alive by their own mended hems. I didn't call her "Second Hand Rose" or "poor girl" like the other boys did, and if I never asked her to the school dances, I never asked anybody else, either. I was faithful to her before I knew what faithful really meant.

  If I've committed any real sin in my life, it's that it took me so long to ask her if she wanted to go out with me. I fell in love when I was nine, but she didn't wear my jacket until I was fifteen, didn't smile at me with that mouth, didn't look at me with those big doe eyes of hers. I let six years slip through my fingers when I could have grabbed tight hold of every single day, and the penance for my sin is knowing I committed it. Knowing what we lost.

  Her name was Rose. She was the only girl I ev
er loved—the only girl I guess I could have ever loved, the only one that I was designed for loving. She wasn't perfect. Nobody's perfect. But she was close enough for a small town boy who dreamed of one day touching something greater. I guess she felt the same way about me. She came back to me, after all, even if it was only once, even if I didn't know that she was gone.

  I've spent my whole life trying, but I never fell in love again—not the way I fell in love with her, when the world was young and innocent, and silly teenage boys believed their girlfriends were immortal.

  Her name was Rose.

  ***

  I'm making my way toward Ann Arbor when I feel the undeniable urge to turn south. It's like someone is tying strings around my wrists and ankles, trying to use them to pull me the way they think I ought to go. I stop where I am, feet sinking down into the dead dry grass by the side of the road, and try to tell myself that I'm not feeling what I'm feeling. I don't want this. I didn't want this the first time it happened, and I don't want it now.

  The teasing, tugging sensation doesn't stop. If anything, it gets worse, small tugs turning quickly into outright pulling, like the whole world has decided that it has nothing better to do than get me to turn around. I close my eyes, trying to feel my way across the twilight to the source of the feeling. Whoever it is, they don't know what they're doing. This is a summons without a "return to sender" attached, which can only mean one thing: Someone tied to the few short years that I spent among the living is getting ready to join me among the dead, and the universe wants me to play psychopomp for their departure.

  Thanks for that, universe. Thanks a lot.

  The calls don't come as often as they used to. There was a time when I was making my way back to Buckley almost every year to pull some poor ghost away from the bodies they'd abandoned and help them find their way to the ghostroads. Irony is a bitter mistress: the fact that these people had me called to lead them to their afterlives didn't make them road ghosts, and none of them showed any inclination to stay for longer than it took to process the fact of their own death. One by one, I helped them deal with reality, and one by one, they left me. I was allowed to invite them to the party, but I wasn't allowed to go with them.

  Sometimes death sucks. The parts of it that involve finding and losing the people I used to love all over again...those parts suck more than most.

  The pull to the south is still growing in strength and urgency. I know from past experience that if I try to hitch a ride in this state, no cars will stop for me unless they're going the right way. Even if I can get my hands on a coat, I won't fully incarnate; not unless I give in and obey the strange, malleable rules of the road.

  "It's not like I was doing anything with my night, right?" I mutter, and shove my hands into the pockets of my jeans, using the motion to shove myself down through reality's walls, moving smoothly from the daylight to the top of the twilight. The sky flickers, going bad-special-effect black, and the stars become frozen diamonds, not flickering, not doing anything but shining. There's no wind here to ruffle the corn. Just the fields, and the sky, and the black serpent highway sliding smoothly off into the distance.

  I step out of the grass, back onto the road, and start walking. Giving in to the tugging this easily feels a little like defeat. Frankly, I don't care. The sooner I can get this over with, the sooner I can get on with my death.

  Like it or not, I'm heading back to Buckley.

  ***

  The nurses don't think I hear them talking outside my room. They would, if they thought twice about it—everything else about this old body may be breaking down on me, and me without a manufacturer's warranty to my name—but my hearing's as good as ever. They don't think I'm going to make it to Christmas. That's a bit of a relief, if you ask me; I've been here without my Rose for long enough now. I'm tired. I'm ready to be done.

  There's just one more thing that needs to be done. I've observed the rituals as much as I can, here in this sterile place where old men go to wait out the last lonely hours of their existence. I've poured the glasses of wine, I've kept her picture close to me—I've even bribed a couple of the orderlies to burn incense outside the building, where the smell won't attract that busy-body of a nurse who keeps the ward. If I've missed a step, I don't know it. I guess I won't know it until I die.

  I've never in my life been a gambler, Rose, but I'm gambling now. I'm gambling on you remembering me, and you caring enough to come. Please, Rose. Please.

  Have mercy on a dying man. Remember that once, you loved me. Remember that once...

  Once, I got you home.

  ***

  Travel on the ghostroads is difficult to predict. Something that takes a day in the daylight can take a year in the twilight; something that takes a year in the daylight can be over in minutes in the twilight. It's all down to what the road thinks you need, and how capricious reality is feeling at any given moment.

  Either reality is trying to be helpful, or I've somehow pissed it off, and this is how it punishes me. I've barely been walking for an hour when the tugging becomes strong enough to yank me clean off the ghostroads, and I find myself standing on the wide green lawn in front of a blocky white building. It takes a moment for me to get my bearings. This part of Buckley didn't exist in the 1940s. It's part of the endless expansion of the township, the slow encroachment on the forest that used to keep us from the world. Sparrow Hill Senior Facility says the sign mounted near the small, businesslike front door. That explains the feel of the place, like the whole thing is holding its breath, waiting to see who'll win—life, death, or none of the above.

  I take a breath I don't really need, changing my clothes as I start walking toward the door. The basic nurses' uniform hasn't changed much since I died. Wear basic white and sensible shoes, and people will almost always assume you know what you're doing.

  There's no one to notice as I walk through the wood of the front door and into the entry hall. The place is practically deserted, nothing but the night shift skeleton crew and the inmates locked in their individual cells. I walk a little quicker, following the feeling of being pulled. I'm rarely glad to have died. I can't really say I miss the chance to get old enough for a place like this one.

  I don't really know who I've been called here to escort. All the relatives close enough to call me back died years ago, and I didn't have that many friends. I wasn't exactly a social butterfly; coming from the poor side of town was bad enough, but my unladylike ways and fascination with cars really put the nails in my reputation's coffin. Not many people cared enough to look past the judgments and make their own decisions about what kind of girl I was. That was fine, because for the most part, I didn't want them to.

  I had my dreams and my cars and my brothers. I had my shot at a better life. I had Gary.

  The tugging leads me to a specific door, in a specific hall. I hesitate for a moment, unable to shake the feeling that I'm missing something—something I'll be sorry about later. I can't figure out what it is, and so I step through the wood, just one more ghost in a building that should be dripping with them.

  The man in the bed in front of me is so old and worn that he's practically a ghost himself, barely anchored by the prison of his own skin. But his eyes are open, and his smile is warm as he watches me slip into the room. I should know him. He's the one who called me here, with his need and his dying, and I should know him.

  The framed picture on the nightstand next to his pillow is of me, junior year, lemon-bleached hair rendered gray by the black and white film, forever young, forever a shadow of a shade. There's only one man who'd still be displaying that picture like this. There's only one man who loved me enough to care.

  "Hello, Rose," says Gary. "It's been a long time."

  ***

  She came. Oh, God, she actually came. It wasn't just a story. I wasn't out of my mind. She still looks as young as she did the night she died. I've missed her so much. I wonder if she even remembers who I am.

  I can't believe she act
ually came.

  ***

  I freeze in place, too stunned to speak, too stunned to do anything but stare at this worn-out mockery of the only boy I ever fell in love with, the only boy I ever kissed with living lips. I've kissed a lot of boys since the summer that I turned sweet sixteen, but his was always and forever the only kiss that counted. Now that I'm looking, really looking, my eyes refuse to lie me; this is Gary Daniels, this is the boy who picked me up when I was newly dead and shivering by the side of the road on Sparrow Hill. This is the last man on earth with the power to call me back to Buckley. This is Gary.

  This is Gary, and he's dying.

  Even the smile on his face looks like it pains him, like the joy of seeing me again is too heavy for his aged shoulders to support. "You look...God, Rose, you look amazing." Confusion flickers in his eyes—his eyes. I should have known him the second I saw him, if only by his eyes. "What have you done to your hair?"

  The question is so completely, perfectly wrong that it crosses the line into completely, perfectly right. I laugh out loud, shaking my head. "That's the first thing you have to say to me, after sixty years? 'Hello, you look great, what have you done to your hair'? Gee, Gary, you'd think you might start out with 'it's nice to see you,' or even a 'how've you been'."

  "I've missed you so damn much, Rosie." Gary settles deeper into his nest of pillows, joy mellowing into something sweeter: pure contentment. "I was hoping you'd come for me, when the time got close, but I couldn't really be sure. It's gotten so you can't tell the real routewitches from the charlatans, and it's not like I could go comparison shopping."

  I blink, staying where I am for the moment, just inside the door, ready to run if I have to. "What do you know about the routewitches?"

  "Not nearly enough," he says, earnestly. "I was a ghost-chaser for a lot of years, Rosie. I'm not proud of it, but that's what I was, because I was hoping that if I chased long enough, I might catch up to you. I met this redhead little piece of a girl just across the Minnesota line—I suppose 'met' might be too generous a word. I got found by her, and she told me you were a road ghost, and I had to let you be." His smile turns wry before smoothing back into serenity. "She told me you were real. That the night we had was real. That was all I really needed to hear."