Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (11 page)

"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 she 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."