Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan Read online

  One thing's for sure: I've been walking longer than the stretch of a single night, and the sky hasn't lightened in the least. It's always dark in the twilight, but there's normally a sort of gloaming when the sun rises and sets in the daylight—something to keep us in tune with the passage of time. This is just...darkness. Darkness that doesn't end, not until the old Atlantic Highway does.

  This is starting to seem like it might not have been such a good idea after all. I still can't think of anything better, and so I keep on walking, into the dark.

  ***

  I have never wanted to punch a highway in the face as badly as I do right now.

  ***

  I'm on the verge of abandoning this idiotic quest, clawing my way back to the daylight and flagging down the first car I see, when the Ocean Lady starts singing under my feet, and the song that she's singing is "truck stop ahead." That's a new one on me. I start to walk a little faster, forgetting how sore my feet are as I move toward this new mystery.

  Then I walk around a curve in the road, and there it is ahead of me: the mother of all truck stops, the truck stop on which all the pumps and service garages and five-dollar showers was modeled. Its neon burns the fog away like a searchlight, until the whole thing is illuminated and holy, the chapel on the hill remade in the image of America. I stop where I am, breath hitching in my chest, pain and cold and hunger all forgotten as I gape like a tourist on her first day in New York City. This is my destination, the heart of the Ocean Lady, the chapel of the routewitches...and if this whole adventure was a bad idea, it's officially too late to turn back now.

  A routewitch apprentice I vaguely recognize meets me at the truck stop turnoff, his sneakers crunching in the gravel that grits the asphalt just enough to reduce the danger of spin-outs. Acne scars dot his cheeks, and his lips are wind-chapped. He's cute enough, and he'd be handsome if he took the time to comb his hair, straighten his shirt, dig the oil from underneath his nails. "What is your name and your business, traveler?" he asks, words running together until they're almost like a song.

  I'm Rose Marshall out of Michigan. I'm the Girl in the Diner, I'm the Lady in Green, I'm the Phantom Prom Date, I'm the Shadow of Sparrow Hill Road. All those names—all those stories—flash through my mind as my mouth opens, and I answer, "My name's Rose. I've walked the Ocean Lady down from Calais to visit the Queen, if she'll see me. I have a question for her to ask the roads for me."

  He reaches up to scratch at the scabbed-over pimples at one temple, frowning. He probably doesn't even know he's doing it. "Be you of the living, or be you of the dead?" More ritual, and stupid ritual at that—he knows I'm dead. Routewitches always know.

  Or maybe not. This is the Ocean Lady, after all, and she makes her own rules. "I died on Sparrow Hill Road, in the fall of 1945. How about you?"

  Oh, he's young, this routewitch, and more, he's new to the twilight; he isn't used to dead girls talking back to him. He'll learn. Almost all the dead are a little mouthy. I think it comes from knowing that most of the things you'll run into simply don't have the equipment it would take to actually hurt you. He frowns for a moment, trying to remember the words of the ritual, and then continues, "The dead should be at peace, and resting. Why are you not at peace, little ghost?"

  I fold my arms across my chest and glare. "Maybe because I'm standing outside in the wind, being harassed by an apprentice who doesn't know his ass from an eight-foot hole in the ground with a body at the bottom. I have walked the goddamn Ocean Lady to visit the Queen, and you're rapidly burning off my pretty shallow reserves of patience. Are you going to let me in or not?"

  "I..." He stops, looking at me helplessly. "I don't know."

  Midnight preserve me from routewitches who don't know their own traditions. "How about I wait here while you run back to your trail guide and find out?

  His eyes light up. "You'd do that?"

  Of course I won't do that. There's no level, daylight on down, where I'd stand out here, alone, waiting for some idiot to figure out how to handle me. I don't say anything. I just watch him.

  "Wait here," he says, making a staying motion with his hands, and turns to run down across the truck stop parking lot, toward the diner. The neon seems to brighten as he approaches, like a loving wife welcoming her husband home from the war.

  The gravel crunches under my feet as I follow him. My skirt swirls around my legs, and I realize I'm back in my prom dress. Changing my clothes should take less than a second—having a wardrobe defined only by the limits of my imagination has been one of the few benefits of death—but no matter how hard I concentrate, the green silk remains. Suddenly, the reason for the apprentice's confusion makes a lot more sense. The Ocean Lady is somewhere between ghost and goddess, and on her ground, there is no difference between the living and the dead.

  I shake my head, and follow the apprentice routewitch inside.

  ***

  Every diner, roadhouse, and saloon is a tiny miracle, a peace of comfort and safety carved out of the wild frontier of the road. I died in the age of diners, when chrome and red leather and the sweet song of the jukebox were the trappings of the road's religion. From the outside, that's what this waystation on the Ocean Lady looked like to me. The perfect diner, a place where the malteds would be sweet and gritty on the back of the tongue, the fries would be crisp, and the coffee would be strong enough to wake the dead. As the apprentice reaches the door, some ten feet ahead of me, I catch a glimpse of what he sees; his hand ripples the facade, and for a moment, it's a roadhouse, tall and solid and hewn from barely-worked trees. Then he's inside, and the diner is back again.

  The diner remains as I finish my trek across the parking lot, and the burnished metal door handle is cool and solid as I curl my fingers around it. I can hear music from inside, Glenn Miller singing about that old black magic. That song got a lot of radio play in the weeks before I died, hit of the early summer, soundtrack of Gary's hands cupping the curve of my waist and his breath coming hot and sweet against my neck.

  I open the door, and step inside.

  The diner melts away—as I more than half-expected that it would, carnival illusion meant to call the faithful and the faithless alike—and I am standing in a saloon pulled straight from the American West, miles and centuries away from the time and place that I came walking from. There are easily two dozen routewitches here, talking, laughing, eating. One pair is making out in a corner, randy as teenagers. I've never seen this many routewitches in one place before. Their sheer power of the road distorts the fabric of the room, dragging it into a shape that I don't know.

  "Told you she wouldn't stay on the curb, Paul," calls one of the routewitches, a middle-aged Hispanic man with a bristling mustache. "You owe me a cup of coffee."

  The apprentice who met me at the gate scowls and kicks the bar, refusing to look at me. Every society has its hazing rituals. I'm not sure I like being part of this one. "Excuse me," I say, looking around the saloon, studying the routewitches. The oldest I see must be in his nineties; the youngest, no more than eight. The road isn't picky about who she calls. "I've walked the Ocean Lady to see the Queen. You think that could happen today, maybe?"

  "That depends," says the mustached routewitch. He stands, walking toward me. "What are you here about? This isn't a place for ghosts, little one, even those who've died on the road. You have your own cathedrals."

  "The Queen of the Routewitches doesn't visit our cathedrals." And neither do I. Hitchers are spirits of the running road, the diners and the dead ends. The cathedrals of the dead are built in frozen places, moments sealed in ice and locked away forever. Road-spirits can't last in places like that for long, not without curdling and going sour, turning into nothing but sickness and rage. I avoid the cathedrals of the dead whenever I can. Stay in them too long, and I wouldn't be Rose Marshall anymore. "My mama taught me that when you can't get the mountain to come to you, you'd better be prepared to go to the mountain."

  "So you hopped onto the Ocean Lady like sh
e was just another road, and thought our Queen would see you, is that it? Seems a bit arrogant for a long-dead thing like you."

  "Yeah, well, your attitude seems a bit asshole-ish for a guardian of the American road, but you don't see me judging, do you? Oh, wait. I just did." I cross my arms, glare, try to look like I'm not a reject from a 1940s prom night that ended more than half a century ago. "I'm here to see the Queen. A routewitch named Eloise told me how to get here, if I ever had the need."

  His mustache curls upward at the corners, his grin spilling out across his face like it's too big to be contained. "Shit, girl, why didn't you say? How is that old carretera bruja? She running hard?"

  "She's a phantom rider driving the length of California, giving rides, giving advice, and picking oranges, last time I saw her. She said it was more fun than the alternatives." I continue glaring. "Was this some sort of trick question to get me to prove that I didn't know her? Because math would be better if you wanted me to give you a wrong answer. I suck at math."

  "You're Rose Marshall, the Shadow of Sparrow Hill Road," says one of the other routewitches, as she stands and walks toward me, expression lively with undisguised curiosity. She's a tiny thing, a whisper somehow stretched into a slight sigh of a girl, Japanese by blood, American by accent, dressed in jeans and a road-worn wool sweater at least three sizes too big for her. "The Ocean Lady let you through?"

  "That, or this is the single most irritating hallucination I've ever had," I answer, watching her carefully. She's clean, this little routewitch with her close-clipped fingernails and her fountain-fall of black silk hair. Most routewitches don't bother with that sort of thing. The road dresses them in dust, and they wear it proudly, carrying the maps of where they've been in the creases of their skin. But a routewitch who doesn't swear allegiance to any single route, to any single road...she'd need to be clean. I quirk an eyebrow up, and take a guess: "Am I addressing the Queen?"

  "I guess that's up to you, isn't it?" she asks.

  Stupid routewitches and their stupid rituals. I take a breath, and say, as I said to the man at the gate, "My name is Rose Marshall, once of Buckley Township in Michigan. I died on Sparrow Hill Road on a night of great importance, and have wandered the roads ever since. I've walked the Ocean Lady down from Calais to visit the Queen, if she'll see me. I have a question for her to ask the roads for me."

  She raises her eyebows, looks at me thoughtfully, and asks, "Is that all?"

  My patience is anything but infinite. Scowling, I say, "Who does a girl gotta blow to get herself a beer in this place?"

  And the Queen of the North American Routewitches smiles.

  ***

  They have good beer here, these routewitches do, and their grill is properly aged, old grease caught in the corners, the drippings of a hundred thousand steaks and bacon breakfasts and cheeseburgers scraped from a can and used to slick it down before anything starts cooking. The plate they bring me groans under a triple-decker cheeseburger and a pile of golden fries that smell like summer nights and stolen kisses--and they smell, even before the platter hits the table. I look to the routewitch Queen, silent question in my eyes.

  "Eat up," she says, reaching for her own plate. "The Ocean Lady doesn't feel the need to withhold the simple joys from anyone who's brave enough to walk this far along her spine."

  "I may have to take back a few of the things I said while I was walking." The fries taste better than they smell, which may be a miracle all by itself. The Queen is already eating, ignoring me completely now that she has a meal in front of her. I don't know much about routewitch etiquette, but I've learned to go with the flow of things. If she wanted to eat before we talked, well, at least contact had been made.

  The other routewitches settle all over the room, some of them sitting at tables, some perching on the bar. A few even sit on the floor. They break out decks of cards and tattered paperbacks, fall into hushed conversations, down shots of whiskey, but they're watching us. Every eye in the place is on the Queen, and on the uninvited guest who's come to try her patience.

  The Queen looks up, sees me watching them watching us, and laughs. "Don't worry," she says, fingers grazing my wrist at the point where my resurrected pulse beats strong and steady. The half-life of the hitcher extends here, it seems, and I didn't even have to swipe a coat. "They get protective of me sometimes, and your reputation is a little...mixed."

  I bite back a groan, grinding it to silence between my teeth. When I'm sure it's gone, I say, "I thought you, of all people, would know that I'm not like that."

  "We know what the road tells us, Rose, and what the road tells us is that your story is still being written." She dips a fry in the smooth white surface of her vanilla milkshake and raises it, glistening, to her lips. "The Lady in Green is just as real as the Phantom Prom Date, on the right stretches of highway. They watch to be sure the right one has come to visit."

  This isn't a new concept—the idea that stories change things, rewrite the past and rewrite reality at the same time—but it's jarring all the same, hearing the routewitch-Queen suggest that I could be something other than what I am. I swallow a mouthful of fries that somehow fail to taste as good as they did a moment ago, and ask, "So am I the right one?"

  "I think so. I guess we'll know I was wrong if you try to kill me, now, won't we?" The Queen picks up another fry. "Eat. We'll talk when the meal is through."

  For the first time in fifty years, I don't want to eat, I don't want to put something off until the meal, however delicious, is finished. The Queen is ignoring me again, her own attention returning to her fries and shake and grilled cheese sandwich. It's clear that arguing won't do me a bit of good, and so I pick up my burger, and I eat.

  There's always someone eager to tell the living what the worst thing about being dead will be. Those speeches usually start with the lakes of fire and the eternal damnation, and get nasty from there. I used to believe them, when I cared enough to listen, which wasn't often. Then I died, and I learned that the worst thing about being dead has nothing whatsoever to do with fire.

  The worst thing about being dead is the cold. The way it creeps in through every remembered cell of your phantom body, wraps itself around you, and refuses to ever, ever let you go. The worst thing about being dead is the fog, the one that clings to everything, blocking out the taste of coffee, the smell of flowers, the joy in laughter and the terror in a scream. On the living levels, ghosts are shadows wrapped in cotton, held apart from everything around them. Hitchers like me are lucky, because we have a way to claw ourselves back out of the grave, filling the world with substance and with joy. We're also unlucky as hell, because it means we never forget how bright and vivid life is for the living. We don't get to move on. Not until we let someone drive us to the exit past the Last Chance Diner; not until we move on completely.

  All hitchers are addicts, and our drugs of choice are diner coffee, cheeseburgers, and the feeling of hands against our skin, the feeling of lips crushing down on ours and making us forget, even for a moment, that we've already paid the ferryman. The taste of the cheeseburger fried for me in the kitchen of the Ocean Lady's stronghold is all those things and more; it's life in a bun, and I could easily forget everything I came here for. All I'd have to do is keep on eating, keep on tasting life.

  I swallow that first bite, and I choke, and I shove the plate aside, sending it shattering to the floor.

  The room has gone silent. I look up, still gasping a little, the taste of life still harsh and heavy on my tongue. The Queen of the Routewitches is watching me, the fountain-fall of her hair covering one eye, the other filled with quiet thoughtfulness.

  "So you're not that easy to tempt," she says. "I like that. Devi, Matthew, you have the floor. Let anyone who arrives know that I'm in consultation, and not to be disturbed." She stands, leaving me behind as she starts across the floor toward a door at the back of the bar.

  I'm still trying to catch my breath when she stops, turns, looks back toward me. Looking
at her, I realize that we have at least one thing in common: we're both of a great deal older than we seem. "Well?" she asks.

  Just that, and nothing more. That's all she needs. I stand, forbidding myself to look at the bloodstain-splash of ketchup on the floor, and I follow the Queen of the Routewitches out of the main room, into the shadows of the unfamiliar.

  ***

  The door at the back of the bar opens onto a hallway, which opens, in turn, onto the back parking lot. The Queen doesn't look back once as she walks toward a double-wide trailer parked near the side of the building. No matter how fast I walk, she stays an easy six feet ahead, her steps eating ground with quiet, unflagging speed.

  She stops when she reaches the trailer, resting her hand on the latch as she says, "Once we're inside, Rose Marshall, daughter of Michigan, daughter of the road, once we're inside, then Court is called to order. Are you sure? Are you truly sure that this is the route the roads intend for you?"

  "Fuck, no," I say, before my brain can catch up with my tongue. "But I don't have a better map, so I guess it's gonna be you."

  "Good answer." I can hear the smile in her voice as she opens the latch. The trailer door swings open, and she says, with the calm cadence of ritual, "Now we begin the descent. Enter freely, Rose Marshall, daughter of Michigan."

  "Aren't you supposed to add 'and be not afraid' or something to that?" I ask, moving to enter the trailer.

  The Queen of the Routewitches gives me a small, faintly amused smile, and asks, "Why would I do something like that? I'm here to answer your questions. I'm not here to lie to you."

  Somehow, that fails to reassure me in the slightest. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound, as my grandmother always used to say, and I've come too far to turn back now. I shrug, green silk sleeves moving against my shoulders. "Okay, then. Let's rock."

  ***

  The trailer of the Queen of the Routewitches is decorated in Early Vagabond, with a few exciting traces of Thrift Store Chic. Not the sort of thing I'd expect to see from royalty, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Routewitches don't like to buy anything new when they have a choice in the matter. Things get stronger the further they've traveled, and the more hearts they've had calling them "mine." As the Queen, she had to have her choice of the best the country's flea markets and antique shops had to offer, and if that meant things never quite matched, well, I didn't think that was necessarily going to be a factor.