Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (10 page)

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."

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.

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.