Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan Read online

  "Oh, I'm sorry, Rose, didn't you like that? Wasn't that fun for you?"

  I want to say something nasty, want to match the malicious joy in her tone with the acid in my own, but I can't seem to force my lips to form the words. Everything hurts too badly.

  "Well, I hope you're recovered enough to continue, because we're just getting started, and I'm not ready to put you back together again. I thought you'd be a pretty sturdy ghost. Don't disappoint me."

  She starts to read again. This time, somehow, I find the strength to scream.

  ***

  True to her word, Laura takes me to the very edge of truly gone before pulling me back again, changing her wasp-words for milk and honey and the soothing promise of peace. It's almost worse than the pain, because it means the pain can start all over again, flaying off the layers of my existence until I barely remember who I am. I'm not sure how long she can do this before I lose my mind. I'm even less sure that she cares.

  Once the restoration is complete, she stops, puts the book down on her chair, and begins to walk the edge of the Seal, re-lighting candles, checking her line of salt. "I bet you're wondering if I know how much this hurts you. If I've considered how cruel I'm being." She glances my way, smiles, rattlesnake again. "Believe me, I've considered it. I just wish I had a way of making it go on for longer."

  "Yeah, well, forgive me if you're alone in that," I whisper. "I didn't kill him."

  "He's still dead."

  There's nothing I can say to that. I sag into the floor, trying to gather what strength I can from this brief respite. There's still no route of escape presenting itself, no golden "Get Out of Jail Free" card suddenly appearing to tell me which way to run. The Seal is close enough to perfect that I can't worm out of it, the line of salt clean and unbroken, the candles lined up in triplicate so that even when one blows out, the light endures. I am well and truly fucked.

  "You know, I'll be sorry when the sun rises. I've been looking for you for so long, and I've worked so hard for this night...I suppose I'll have to find something else to do with myself after this. Maybe I'll go into the exorcism business. It's surprisingly satisfying, when you know what you're doing."

  "Go to hell."

  "No, Rose. That's where you're going." She walks back to the chair, collects her book, opens it. I take a breath, preparing for the pain to start.

  Instead, the sound of tires on broken blacktop, an engine drawing closer and stopping, a car door slammed. Laura tenses and looks up, light glinting off her glasses. I consider screaming, and decide against it. Most people won't believe me if I say that I'm a ghost; they'll think we're playing some sort of fucked-up sex game and leave me here, and then Laura will just be angrier. It's not worth the risk.

  The footsteps start a few seconds after the car door slams, drawing closer with every heartbeat. Laura puts down the book and reaches into the belt of her jeans, producing a Bowie knife which she holds loosely behind her back. I guess when you've decided to commit one murder, the second one gets easier, even if that first victim was already dead.

  The diner door swings open, and a dead man steps across the threshold, stopping just shy of the circle of salt. "You okay, Rose?" he asks, and his voice is young, but the tone is much older, voice of a man who's spent a decade running the roads in the midnight, where young is forever, and innocence is for an instant.

  "Not really," I say, pushing myself unsteadily back to my feet. The world is reeling. I feel like I'm going to throw up. "Hi, Tommy."

  Laura drops the knife.

  ***

  "You--you can't be here," she says, taking a step toward him. Her eyes are wide behind her glasses, shock and terror and amazement mingling in her expression. "You're dead. We buried you. I cried at your funeral. You're dead."

  "So's Rose, but that hasn't stopped you locking an innocent hitchhiking ghost in your little cage." He glances toward the salt line, lip curling in unconscious disgust. "I thought a lot better of you, Laura. I knew you were looking for her, but I never thought you'd do anything like this."

  "Wait," I say. "You knew she was looking for me?"

  I might as well have held my tongue. Laura only has eyes for Tommy, and he's just as focused on her. "Why didn't you come to me?" she demands. "I prayed every night for you to come. To haunt me. I needed you so badly."

  "Dead's dead, and living's living, and I'm not the kind of ghost Rose is; I don't move between the levels as easy. I'd have been haunting you like you were an empty house, and it wouldn't have been fair. You'd never have been willing to be filled if I were there."

  "I was never anyone's home without you," she whispers.

  Tommy looks at her calmly, an infinity of love and disappointment in his eyes, and says, "That's not my fault, and my death wasn't hers. Now open the circle, Laura. Let Rose go."

  Her eyes stay on him as she crosses back to the Seal, kicks a break in the salt, and bends to slash a Sharpie across the delicate lines of the outer ring. My substance goes the second the binding breaks, leaving me insubstantial. I have never in my life been so glad to be dead.

  "Rose?" says Tommy.

  "I'm okay." I step out of the circle without looking at Laura, and keep my shoulders steady as I walk out the door, to the parking lot, where the rain falls straight through me. Tommy's car flashes her lights at me as I approach, warm welcome. The passenger-side door swings open. I slip inside, leaning back into the warm seat, closing my eyes.

  The sky is turning light when Tommy comes to join me. The engine starts without him turning a key. "Where to?" he asks me.

  "Take me down, Tommy; take me all the way down." I shake my head. "The living are too damn dangerous for me."

  The rain starts to clear as he pulls out, and we drive down through the levels of the world, away from the living and their pains, back into the world where we belong. Back down to the ghostroads, and the dead.

  Building a Mystery

  A Sparrow Hill Road story

  by

  Seanan McGuire

  You live in a church where you sleep with voodoo dolls

  And you won't give up the search for the ghosts in the halls

  You wear sandals in the snow and a smile that won't wash away

  Can you look out the window without your shadow getting in the way?

  Oh you're so beautiful, with an edge and a charm,

  But so careful when I'm in your arms...

  -- "Building a Mystery," Sarah McLachlan.

  There are as many kinds of ghost as there are ways to die, but death always starts the same way for the wandering breeds. One moment they're alive, and the next, they're not. That simple. The blink of an eye, the final beat of a broken heart, and everything changes. Everything changes forever. The newly dead tumble out of the daylight and find themselves on the ghostroads, the narrow veins of dark asphalt that run through the body of the twilight like veins through an aging hooker's thighs.

  The trainspotters say that once, new arrivals found themselves standing in railway stations or next to remote stretches of track, and the routewitches say that before that, the new-dead wound up on dirt roads or narrow horse-trails. They're all the ghostroads, and they've all had one thing in common: they've all been physical evidence of the scars mankind leaves on the world. We created the ghostroads through our lives and through our deaths, and they provide a home and haven to our wandering souls...at least until the wandering is over. No one knows exactly where the terminus of the ghostroads can be found, although everyone knows that it exists. It has to. No one rides the ghostroads forever, after all; eventually, every journey comes to an end.

  It doesn't matter whether you're alive or dead; either way, the ghostroads are the best way to move through the twilight. They dependably exist, which gives them a definite advantage over the roads that sink down from the daylight or rise up from the midnight. They aren't safe, exactly, but nothing in the twilight really is, and the ghostroads generally don't go out of their way to kill people. They're content to
strew themselves with hidden dangers and wait, rather than going hunting like some of the routes that can get you through the midnight. They're less direct than the roads on most other levels, and that's part of what gives them their stability. As long as there's a hidden turn to take or an intersection yet uncrossed, the ghostroads still retain their reason to be.

  The important thing to remember about the ghostroads is this: every road that's ever existed is a part of them, and the twilight is just as stretched and painted-over as the daylight. If you want to find a road that isn't there anymore, all you have to do is close your eyes, plant your feet, and let go. Stop trying to be anchored; stop trying to convince yourself that anything ever ends. The ghostroads know the way, and they'll take you, if you'll let them. It's not the sort of thing people do without a reason—even the routewitches are careful when it comes to surfing the palimpsest atlas of the ghostroads' memory—but it can get you where you want to go, if you're willing to trust the path you're on.

  If there's one piece of advice I can give about the ghostroads, it's this: don't get lost. Maybe you won't always know where you are, and maybe that's for the best, but there's a big difference between knowing your location and being truly lost. Before you try to pull any fancy tricks or turn the road to your own advantage, learn to believe—to truly know—that you're never, not for a second, lost. Because people who get lost out there...those people are never found again, not by anyone, and what the ghostroads claim, they don't easily give back. Living or dead, the ghostroads don't care. We're all travelers when we're with them, and we all owe the roads a traveler's respect.

  Most of all, most importantly of all, when you tell the ghostroads that you want to go somewhere, be sure you really mean it. They don't take kindly to being toyed with, and they don't give second chances. Every trip you take in the twilight, you take for keeps.

  Happy trails.

  ***

  Tommy picked me up in one of Maine's unincorporated townships, a crumbling, dying little settlement that must have been alive and vibrant once, before the heart and the hope leaked out of it like water through a broken vase. From there, we drive the ghostroads to Calais, just on the edge of the Canadian border. This is the edge of his territory, and the closer we get to Canada, the slower he drives, until it's like we're moving through molasses. We're still three miles from where I need to be when he stops the car, shame-faced and sweating, and says, "This is as far as I go, Rose. I'm sorry."

  He's got nothing to be sorry for, and this is further than I really expected him to take me. I want to tell him that, I really do, but the words all slip away when I look into his eyes. There's something in them that speaks of exits, of road signs that lead to final destinations, and I can't bear the sight of it. I knew this night was coming--this night always comes. It still hits me like a blow. Tommy is coming close to realizing that the road isn't forever, and the knowledge burns.

  How many will that make? How many racers and riders and hitchers and ferrymen who've fallen onto the ghostroads, and then found their own way off them, while I'm still here? Too many. And Tommy—sweet, stupid Tommy—isn't going to be the last of them.

  "I'm good," I say, and slip out of his car, back into the cool, sweet air of the everlasting twilight. The feel of asphalt beneath my feet is centering, a benediction directed only toward the road. "I can walk from here. You can find your own way back?"

  It's a fool's question, and I want to take it back almost before I finish asking it. Tommy's a racer, a man who died behind the wheel and carried his car into the twilight with him. He's tied to the stretch of road where he crashed. His presence makes the road safer than it would have been without him, makes the drunks think twice before they stagger out of the bars, makes the teenage hotheads lighten up on the gas and take the turns a little more slowly. Phantom racers have their place in the way of things, and they do more than just make good ghost stories.

  I envy the shit out of them; always have, always will. They have something no hitcher gets to have. They have homes.

  Tommy frowns a little, confusion blocking out the exits in his eyes. "Yeah, Rose, I can find my way." The car's engine growls, a little roar from a captive lion. She doesn't like me messing with her driver.

  I step back, ceding the point. "Good. Now get out of here." That doesn't seem like enough, not with the exits so close, and so I add, "Thanks again. You got me out of a bad spot."

  "It wasn't anything," says Tommy, and shrugs, awkwardly. "She shouldn't have done that to you, and I'm sorry. Goodnight, Rose."

  "Goodnight, Tommy," I say, and then he's gone, roaring down the road at the sort of speed that's only safe on the ghostroads, and even here, only barely. He'll be back on his own stretch before morning, wheels gripping familiar asphalt, phantom racer riding hard where he belongs.

  I have another road ahead of me. Tucking my hands into my pockets to show that I'm not looking for a ride, I turn and start walking toward the border, and the beginning of the old Atlantic Highway. I'm a long way from home. I'll go a lot further before this night is done.

  ***

  The first routewitch I ever met was named Eloise. She had sun-chapped skin the color of old pennies, curly brown hair, and the sharpest eyes I've ever seen. I was hitching my way toward Michigan when she picked me up; she drove a rattling old pick-up truck in those days, the bed fenced in with wooden slats and piled high with potatoes. "Get in," she said. That was all. None of the pleasantries, none of the pretenses. "Get in," and that was all.

  Once I was in the truck, even before I could start my usual routine, she handed me a heavy wool sweater and a paper bag. "I made the sandwiches myself," she said. "The cookies are crap, and the coffee in the thermos ain't much better, but I figure it'll do you well enough, considering your circumstances. What's your name, girl?"

  "Rose," I said, shrugging into the sweater. The wool settled across my shoulders, and my heart began to beat, steady internal drumbeat keeping me anchored to the world that I was once more a part of. I took a breath, and saw that she was watching me, a small smile on her lips.

  "Rose, huh? White Rose, out of Tennessee, or Rose Marshall out of Michigan?"

  I almost stripped the sweater off and ran. But the way she was looking at me didn't seem hostile, just curious, and so I stayed where I was, and we started talking. I'd heard of routewitches before—everyone hears about the routewitches, if they stay in the twilight long enough—but I'd never seen one. She wasn't what I'd been expecting, more Dorothy than Glinda, and when I told her that, she laughed so hard she nearly ran us off the road.

  "Now you listen to me, Rose Marshall out of Michigan, and you listen close, because there's not much in this world going to help you more than what I've got to say. The routewitches, and the trainspotters—hell, even the ambulomancers, 'though you don't ever want to tell one of them I said this—we're just folks, just like anybody else. It's only that we listen different than most people do. The road talks to us, and we know how to talk back. Thing is, the road knows a secret or two. Like how to spot a hitcher when it comes strolling along, looking for a life to share."

  Eloise died years ago; her ghost rides the California coast in a battered old pick-up truck a decade younger than the one she was driving on the night she picked me up. I see her, from time to time—I've even ridden with her. She's a good person. Most routewitches are, even the dead ones.

  She's also the one who taught me about the Atlantic Highway. "The daylight was afraid of the power in that road, so they banished Her to the deeper levels as soon as they could. Route 1 claimed to be the old Atlantic, but they folded it further inland than the Ocean Lady, pulled it away from Her places of power. Even that wasn't enough for them. They broke the back of Route 1, carved it into a dozen tributaries and threw it away. Guess no one ever told them that you can't kill something that's written that deeply into the land. You ever need to see the Queen, Rose Marshall out of Michigan, you follow the Ocean Lady. She'll take you where you need to go."
r />   The Atlantic Highway isn't a safe place for the dead. There are too many ghosts packed onto its slow-spooling miles, and once you start, it can be all but impossible to stop. The Ocean Lady runs from Calais, Maine to Key West down in Florida, and somewhere in her asphalt embrace, the Queen of the Routewitches keeps her court. That's where I need to go. If anyone can tell me what to do from here—what I have to do, what I've been putting off for too damn long—it's her.

  I take a breath that I don't need, close my eyes, and step from the ghostroads onto the old Atlantic Highway. The Ocean Lady stretches out beneath my feet, and there's nothing to do from here but walk on, and pray.

  ***

  I don't know how long I've been walking. Long enough, that's for sure. My feet ache, which strikes me as singularly unfair. I'm not among the living here, walking the spine of the Ocean Lady from Maine to God-knows-where; I'm freezing through, which is my normal state of being, and I'd kill for a cheeseburger. All the normal trials and tribulations of my death are weighing on me, and normally, the one good thing about being dead is knowing that I can walk forever without getting tired.

  "This sucks," I mutter, and keep walking.

  I haven't seen another soul, living or dead, since I started down the old Atlantic Highway. The scenery on either side is blurred and indistinct, world viewed through a veil of cotton candy fog. I can feel the ghostroads running through the levels nearby, but I don't know that I could reach them if I tried. The Ocean Lady has her own ideas about shortcuts like that, and she isn't always a fan of the dead.