Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (28 page)

I drop into the twilight and she's gone, taking the crossroad and the
cornfield and the train whistle with her. All that remains is the road,
stretching out forever, with a thousand crossings and dangers waiting for an
unwary haunt. This was the last favor I'm going to do for her; Bethany will have
to find the dangers on her own.

I hope she learns faster than I did.

Bad Moon Rising
A
Sparrow Hill Road
story
by
Seanan McGuire

Hope you got your things together
Hope you are quite prepared to die
Looks like we're in for nasty weather
One eye is taken for an eye

Don't go 'round tonight
For it's bound to take your life
There's a bad moon on the rise

— "Bad Moon Rising," John Fogerty.

The dead keep their own holidays.

I've said that before, and I'll probably say it again, because it's hard to
really make the point to the living. We walk in a world of shared culture before
we die, Christmas trees in every department store, chocolate eggs at every soda
counter. Turkeys on the tables, fireworks in the sky, and even if those aren't
your holidays, even if your holidays are less mainstreamed in the modern world,
they're still everywhere. Every kid recognizes a Christmas stocking, or a
Thanksgiving pie. How many can say the same about Saint Celia's bloody
handprint, or the torn toll stub of Danny, God of Highways?

Would you know Persephone's Cross if someone decided to etch it on your skin,
bitter and bleeding as a pomegranate kiss? I didn't, and odds are that I've been
dead a lot longer than you have.

But all this is by way of making a point, and the point is that there's no
unified calendar in the twilight, no standard set of symbols to mark the march
of days and seasons. We make our own calendars, and we live by them according to
our own laws. The Feast of Saint Celia is celebrated on a hundred different
days, and every celebrant will tell you that theirs is the only one that's right
and proper. They're all right, and they're all wrong. Saint Celia herself will
tell you that, if you ever meet her—if you ever realize who she is. Some of us
can't even agree on the days of the week.

And yet all of us agree, without argument, on one thing. All of us agree on
Halloween.

When we feel the veil growing thin and hear the clamor of the living hanging
in the twilight air, some of us sink deeper, digging as close to the midnight as
they can get while still remembering their names. Others rise to the surface,
scum seeking the top, and wait for the clock to strike on the one holiday shared
by all the dead, the one truth that we can all believe in.

Can I get a Hallelujah?

***

It's Halloween morning, 2010. I've been dead for more than sixty years,
little more than a memory to fuel the cautionary tales of grandparents telling
their teenage descendants to drive carefully and always wear their seatbelts.
That, and the story of the Girl in the Diner. There are worse forms of
immortality, I suppose. The sun rises sweet and cautious over the fields of
pumpkins and harvest corn, and all the world smells of bonfires, falling leaves,
and secrets.

It's in the middle of all this, on a small farm in Huntsville, Alabama, that
my eyes flutter slowly open, and I take my first breath of good, sweet, autumn
air. I start to cough almost immediately, falling off the back of the hayrick as
I try to make my lungs stop burning. Hitting the ground makes my butt hurt
almost as much as my lungs do, which is a distraction, if nothing else. I
stagger to my feet, using the edge of the hayrick to brace myself upright. There
are other dead folks rising in the hay, most of them coughing as hard or harder
than I am, and still more rising up from the ground all around us, using fat
orange pumpkins to pull themselves to their feet.

Someone in the hayrick—one of the newer dead, one whose lungs aren't quite as
clean as mine—starts to laugh. It's a delighted sound, little kid at Christmas,
teenager turned loose at their very first parent-free county fair. And why
shouldn't that unseen not-quite-ghost be laughing? We're
back
, with no
rules or restrictions on our passage. For just one beautiful day and one twice
as beautiful night, we're
back
.

I join in the laughter, pausing only to cough a few times while my lungs
finish adjusting to the air around me. When I'm a hitcher, I can borrow a coat
and start breathing no problem. I can even smoke. The magic that somehow lets me
take substance from the living also grants me the ability to breathe their air.
If the Martians came tomorrow, I could follow them home as long as I had a space
suit. Only now it's Halloween, and the only substance I'm borrowing is my own.

Hell if I know how it works. Call it the dead girl equivalent of a Christmas
miracle, and just leave it alone. Halloween has its share of the bad—does it
ever—but I try not to question the good things. They're rare enough as it is.

The coughing has mostly stopped, and the dead are starting to congregate, all
assembling around the hayrick like the world's weirdest nudist convention.
That's another thing. There are at least fifteen of us here, and there's not a
stitch of clothing in evidence. I guess we come into the world naked every time.

That thought strikes me as funny, and I'm laughing again when a farmer clad
in jeans and a heavy flannel shirt comes striding through the pumpkin patch, a
pile of shirts held to his chest. Two lanky teenagers are struggling to keep up
with him, and behind them, a woman and two smaller children pick their way
through the harvest. All of them are carrying clothes, and with that
realization, my re-awakened nerves start informing me, urgently, that it's
colder than a witch's tit out here, and that when you're alive, frostbite
hurts
.

This happens every year. It's part of the normal Halloween experience, one of
the tricks that comes with all the treating, and it helps me tell the new dead
from the long dead. The new dead are the ones who go running to the farmer and
his family, running on legs that barely remember what legs are meant to do, and
snatch the clothing from his arms. They're babbling by the time I, and the other
long dead, finish strolling over. They all want news—what's the date, what's the
year, do you know my sister, my husband, my mother? Do you know me, do you know
how I died, am I really dead? Was it all just a dream?

It wasn't a dream. The clothes the farmer carries are the most threadbare,
the least warm, and that, too, is a part of the normal Halloween experience. I
walk past him with a nod, and stop when I reach the youngest of the children,
crouching down as I ask, "Can I have something to wear, please?"

The missing teeth in her smile makes her look a little like a jack-o-lantern
herself as she hands me the jeans, underpants, and flannel shirt that is the
proper reward for that question. Her siblings are doing the same all around me,
while her father stands at the center of his swarm of new and needy risen dead.

"Welcome back, Rose," says her mother, between handing out pairs of socks and
button-down shirts to the dead.

"Thanks, Violet." The jeans are snug against my skin, blue denim benediction
welcoming me back into the world. "Happy Halloween."

The pumpkin patch yields up its harvest of the dead under the watchful eye of
the rising sun. So many of them are new this year; so many of them don't
understand, just yet, what's at stake. They'll learn. Because that, too, is a
part of Halloween.

***

The Barrowmans are good people. I've been coming to their farm every
Halloween for forty years, part of their annual harvest of the dead. They're old
ambulomancer blood, older than the routewitches, even, and they regard our
presence as a blessing on their farm. That's a good thing for us, because it
encourages them to treat us well. The clothes are a requirement, as is the
breakfast spread out on picnic tables erected in the old cattle barn, but
there's nothing that says they have to dress us warmly or feed us well. The
platters of pancakes, casserole dishes of scrambled eggs, and sizzling plates of
bacon all serve to remind me how well they treat us...and how much is at stake.
How much is always at stake, when the jack-o-lanterns burn away the dark, and
the dead go walking with the living.

Violet takes a seat next to me on the bench, her youngest sticking close to
her like a solid shadow. "How's the road been treating you?" she asks, and piles
more bacon on my plate.

I don't object. This is the one day of the year when I can eat what I want,
without worrying about ritual or rules. "I can't complain," I reply—the right
answer, even if it's not entirely the truth. I could complain all day long, but
there isn't time for that. Instead, I turn a smile on the little girl, waving a
strip of bacon in what I hope is an amiable manner. "Hi, Holly. Aren't you
getting big? How old are you now, four?"

The little girl holds up five fingers, expression solemn.

"Wow, five? Really?" I feign astonishment...but it isn't entirely a false.
Five, already? How time does fly when you're dead and having fun.

"You going to fight this year, Rose?" asks Violet, as she tousles Holly's
hair with one hand. "Looks like a good batch this time, but you could take half
of them."

"No." My answer is simple, because that's all it's ever needed to be. Will I
fight, here, on Halloween, when the dead wear flesh and the living seek to steal
it? No. Not this year, not next year, not ever. "I'm running."

"You always run."

"That's true. I always get away."

"What happens when you don't?" Violet's tone is neither approving nor
condemning; it's just curious, and that's the worst part of all. She grew up on
this farm—I watched her grow up here, jumping forward year after year, like a
strange sort of time-delay picture. Baby, little girl, teenager with a face like
heartbreak waiting to happen, wife, mother. I remember the Halloween after she
buried her own mother, the first—and only—time that Willow Barrowman woke with
the dead out in the field. Her husband is a johnny-come-lately who took her name
when he took her family's calling, but Violet's a Barrowman to the bone, and she
knows what she's asking me.

"The year I don't get away is the year I die the death you don't come back
from." I shrug, and pull a plate of pancakes closer to me. Around the barn, the
chatter of the new dead is quieting, dying down to a murmur as the long dead
tell them what's really going on. What price we have to pay for a day of wearing
farm hand-me-downs and eating pancakes in a barn.

Trucks are driving up the gravel driveway, their tires grinding like the
teeth of some unspeakable beast. Halloween is upon us. The treats have been
delivered. Now comes the time for the biggest trick of them all.

***

My initial count was off by two, stragglers who took their time stumbling out
of the hayrick. Seventeen living dead people stand in a ragged line behind the
Barrowmans' barn. Of the six long dead, I'm the youngest; of the eleven new
dead, one died only a week ago, a fresh-faced teenage football star who still
doesn't understand that this is something more important than the games his
funeral forced him to miss. Violet is around the front, wrangling the hunters,
keeping them from crossing the line before the time is right. Matthew Barrowman
is attending to us dead folk, his teenage sons behind him, like we're the ones
they need protecting from.

Silly boys. We're not the ones with the guns.

"Some of you know how this goes, so I ask for your patience while I explain.
Everyone has to have the same chances when the candle's lit." He casts an
apologetic glance my way. Violet must have told him that I'm the only one of the
long dead appearing here who's never chosen to stand and fight. "For the rest of
you...this is Halloween. You've probably noticed that you're all breathing."

Laughter from the crowd. One of the new dead shouts, "Best trick or treat
prize I've ever gotten!"

"We'll see if you still feel that way in a minute," says Matthew. His tone is
grim—grim enough to stop the laughter. "Around the front of the barn are twenty
men and women with guns in their hands. They'll be coming around the barn soon,
and they're not here to shake hands and say hello. They want to kill you again,
and if you die here, today, on Halloween, you don't come back. Not here, not in
the twilight, not anywhere."

"But...but why?" gasps a new dead woman with her glossy black hair in pretty
funeral parlor curls. She has stars tattooed down her neck, practically begging
people to make wishes on her skin. "What did we do to them?"

"We're alive," says one of the long dead. When we're in the twilight, he's a
phantom rider, and the only thing fast enough to catch him is the wind. Here and
now, he's flesh and bone, just like everybody else. "That's enough."

The new dead gape at him, contestants in a game they never volunteered to
play. We're all contestants here. It's just that some of us have been playing
long enough to learn the rules. "Those twenty people are either dead or dying,"
someone says—I say. Dammit, when did I become the one who's always taking pity?
"Probably half of them came back on this field once before. The other half,
they've got something broken in them, they've heard the bean sidhe's song, and
they're trying to stick to skin a little longer. So they signed up for the
Halloween game."

From the way Matthew looks at me, I can't tell whether he's amused or annoyed
by my interjection. "If they kill you tonight, they win a year of life," he
says, stepping back into the narration, smooth as anything. "One year, from
candle to candle. If you can keep away until the candle goes out, you'll go back
to the ghostroads, and nobody will be able to touch you until next Halloween."