Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (32 page)

"Drop down to the ghostroads, and say hello," says Carl. "It was nice meeting
you."

"Nice meeting you, too," I say, still not sure whether I mean it, and let go
of the daylight, falling down into the sweet dim dark of the twilight, and the
ghostroads. The shadow of the junkyard remains, the parts of it that are old
enough and enduring enough to have spirits of their own.

And parked in front of me, in the same place it sat when I saw it for the
first time, is a cherry 1946 Ford Super De Luxe. Waiting.

***

I approach the car with something between curiosity and awe. I don't have a
heartbeat, but it still feels like my heart is frozen in my chest. The paint job
has changed colors, going from the green of my dress to a soft, misty gray, like
a ghost seen from the corner of your eye and gone before it quite takes form.

"Gary?" I whisper.

The car doesn't answer, exactly—not with words, anyway. But the door is
unlocked when I try the handle, and the upholstery is warm when I slide into the
driver's seat. I rest my hands against the wheel, still trying to make sense of
what I'm seeing, what Gary and Carl have somehow managed to do. Here, on the
ghostroads, this car is as solid a thing as I am, a ghost among ghosts.

My hand is shaking as I let go of the wheel and slide the key into the
ignition. The engine rumbles to life, all but purring as it wakes, and the
radio, unsurprisingly at this point, turns itself on. The sound of Bing Crosby's
voice flows into the cabin, sweet and strong and perfect, singing a song I
haven't heard almost since the year I died. "You'll never know how many dreams
I've dreamed about you, or just how empty they all seemed without you," he
sings, and there are tears in my eyes, and I don't bother wiping them away. "So
kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again. It's been a long,
long time..."

"Oh, my God, you crazy bastard." I lean my head back against the seat and
laugh, and laugh, and wonder how many years he spent planning this: how many
days he spent with the car, just sitting in the driver's seat, letting himself
sink into it. Letting himself imbue it. Cars can leave ghosts behind, when
they're loved enough, but that wasn't what he was doing; he was trying something
much stranger, and much more difficult.

And somehow, through some insane bend in the rules, it worked.

"I missed you so much," I whisper, and lean forward, resting my head against
the wheel. This isn't an embrace, not really, not as such, but then, when you're
dead, you learn the art of the compromise. You learn that sometimes "almost" is
the best option of them all. And maybe, if you're very lucky, you get the chance
to learn that nothing is forever—not even saying goodbye.

The radio station changes, abandoning the year I died for something a lot
more recent: Journey, singing about how loving a music man ain't always what
it's supposed to be. I'm laughing through my tears, and somehow, that's exactly
right.

I sit up, wipe my eyes, and put my hands back on the wheel. Gary's engine is
still purring, a sweet bass line beneath the radio's crooning. "All right, you
crazy bastard," I say. "Let's drive."

***

"Can I talk to you for a minute?"

She turns around, all suspicion and wariness, those big doe eyes of hers
shadowed with the fear that I'm here to make fun of her, to join the list of
boys who've thought that "poor" means the same thing as "easy." "Sure," she
says, and clutches her books a little tighter.

"Do you have...I mean, I was wondering...would you like to go to the
Spring Hop with me?"

She studies my face like it's an exam question, fear fading in the face
of pure amazement. When she realizes I mean it...I think I'd do almost anything
to make her give me that look again. How did I let this wait so long?

"I would love to," she says, and it's 1944, and we're going to live
forever, and I'm going to marry her someday.

Just you wait and see.

***

A wise man told me once that love—true love—never dies. It's just that
sometimes, we can't see it clearly. As Gary and I blaze down the ghostroads, a
gray streak in the twilight that never ends...for the first time, I think I can
believe that he was right.

Thunder Road
A
Sparrow Hill Road
story
by
Seanan McGuire

Well, now, I'm no hero, that's understood;
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow...
Hey what else can we do now
Except roll down the window
And let the wind blow back your hair
Well the night's busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere

We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back
Heaven's waiting on down the tracks
Oh oh come take my hand
Riding out tonight to case the promised land
Oh oh Thunder Road...

— "Thunder Road," Bruce Springsteen.

There's one thing every journey—and every story—has in common. Then again,
stories and journeys are the same thing, aren't they? Every one of them begins
somewhere, trembling and frightened, like a green-clad ghost-girl who doesn't
even realize yet that she's left her body in the burning wreck behind her. Every
one of them moves onward from that point, little ghosts growing up to become
full-fledged urban legends, letting their legs and their longings carry them
from one side of the American ghostroads to the other. Every one of them gets
more complicated as it goes, harder to predict, harder to understand unless
you've been there since the very beginning.

Every one of them eventually ends. Whether you want them to or not.

Sometimes we're excited, eager, yammering "Are we there yet?" and demanding
the driver to hit the gas a little harder, begging the storyteller to feed us
the hints and tastes of what's to come a little faster. Sometimes we're
reluctant, like children on the way to see an adult they already know they don't
like visiting; we drag our feet, we whimper and cajole, we do everything we can
to stretch things out a little farther. Whichever way we go, we know there's no
real point to it; we know that we can't change anything. Journeys end. Stories
end. Everything ends.

The only thing you can do when the ending looms is roll down the windows, let
the wind blow back your hair, and drive your hell-bent, hell-bound ass to where
it needs to go. Everything ends. So suck it up and face it with a little dignity
already.

***

Gary's engine hums contentedly as we blast down the ghostroads, his radio
playing a succession of Top 40 Billboard Hits from the year that I died. Maybe
we're in the honeymoon period right now, both of us trying to be worthy of the
other, but I honestly don't give a crap. I spent seventy years dead without him,
and he spent just as much time living without me. If we want to be sappy and
stupidly in love for a little while, that's our business.

I do have to wonder whether Gary really understands what he's managed to get
himself into. Having a car is wonderful, but it doesn't change my nature. I'm
still a hitcher, still have that need for flesh and contact worked deep into the
ghosts of my bones. Eventually, I'll have to drop from the twilight into the
daylight, find someone who smells like ashes and empty rooms, and convince him
to give me a ride to where he thinks I need to go. I can skip the joyrides, the
embodiments just for the sake of cadging a cheeseburger or kissing a stranger,
but there are always going to be times when the living world calls me and I have
to go. It's what I am. I can't change it, and I don't think I would even if I
knew how. The girl who was willing to change everything about herself for love
died a long time ago. I still look like her, sweet sixteen forever, but let's
face it: I grew up.

Then again, maybe Gary did some growing up, too. He did get old, after all,
which usually requires a certain measure of maturity, and he did figure out how
to get his soul re-smelted into something that could stay with me. I don't know
whether turning yourself into your first girlfriend's car is romantic or creepy,
but since we're both dead, I also don't know whether the distinction between
those things actually matters.

"Just call me Morticia," I say, hitting the gas a little harder. The radio
dial spins without any help from me, and as the theme from
The Addams Family
blasts through the cabin, I swear it's undercut by the sound of my first, last,
and only boyfriend, laughing.

***

We pull into the parking lot of the Last Dance as the eternally twilit sky is
fading into another false gloaming, eternally taunting the dead with the thought
that someday, the sun might actually rise. There are whole cults devoted to
measuring the gloamings, like every little scrap of light has meaning.
Personally, I think it just happens because whoever or whatever is in charge of
the ghostroads likes fucking with us.

"I'm going to go talk to Emma," I say, getting out of the car and tucking the
keys into my pocket. They feel solid there, almost as real as a coat. I've
already experimented with changing my clothes, remolding myself to suit my
environment. No matter what I do or how I change, the keys travel with me,
sometimes in a pocket, sometimes on an elastic band strapped to my wrist,
sometimes tucked into the front of my bra. Again, romantic, and marginally
creepy.

Gary flashes his headlights once, which I interpret as a gesture of
understanding. I mean, I have to interpret it as
something
, and "Sure,
Rose, go take care of your business" is as good an interpretation as any. He
doesn't turn himself back on or go all Christine in order to stop me, and so I
walk across the parking lot, hearing the gravel crunch beneath my feet. The Last
Dance is pretty damn real, no matter what level you're standing on.

I'm almost to the door when the sign flickers, neon shadows shifting from
green and gold to a bloody sunrise red. I stop where I am, feeling like the
world stops with me. For a moment, everything is frozen in the gloaming, silent
except for the soft, insectile buzzing of the neon sign illuminating our night
that never ends. I take a step back, tilting my head upward, and look.

Last Chance Diner
, says the sign, in that familiar looping cursive.
The letters blaze crimson, almost violent in the way they split the darkness.
Last chance. Everybody out. The tattoo on my back is abruptly burning like a
brand, until it feels like it should set my clothes on fire, burn them right off
me, spontaneous after-death combustion.

I don't know what the fuck is going on here, but I do know one thing:
Whatever this is, there's not a chance in hell that it's good.

***

"Emma?" There's no one visible in the dining room, which is subtly changed,
shifted ever so slightly away from the place where I've spent so many hours over
the last sixty years. I couldn't tell you what the changes were if you held a
gun to my head—which would probably be a waste of time anyway—but I can tell you
that the upholstery is ripped in the wrong places, and the scuffs on the counter
spell out a new set of unreadable runes. The jukebox in the corner croons softly
to itself, some generic love song from the 1970s. It doesn't matter which one.
"Are you here?"

She doesn't answer me. I didn't really expect her to.

My steps are cautious as I make my way across the unfamiliar floor, watching
all the while for signs of a trap. I've always known about the Last Chance.
Hell, Emma sells postcards with pictures of the place, and the tacky legend "I
made the right call at the Last Chance!" That doesn't mean I've ever been
here...or that I ever wanted to visit.

The Last Chance is the place you go when everything goes wrong.

Once again, I'm almost to the door, this time the swinging door between the
dining room and the kitchen, when something changes. The air suddenly tastes
like ashes and empty rooms, like lilies and the sour tears of a hundred weeping
parents who can't understand how something like this could happen to their
precious little high school star. I stagger, catching myself on the edge of the
counter before my knees can quite finish buckling under me, and fight the almost
irresistible urge to puke.

That's another thing I never thought would happen in the afterlife. If there
was any real justice in the world, being dead would mean freedom from tossing
your goddamn cookies.

It's while I'm hanging there, keeping myself on my feet solely by clinging to
the counter, that I realize what's so terribly wrong. Because Emma's apron is
lying on the floor, where I never would have seen it if I hadn't been
overwhelmed by the taste of someone close to me preparing to die...and there's
blood on the white lace edging. I'm pretty sure she didn't decide to play with
raw hamburger for fun. I'm not normally called to the death of cows.

The taste of ashes keeps getting stronger as I force myself to straighten up,
using the counter's edge to all but pull myself along. The kitchen door swings
open under my hand.

What feels like only seconds later, I'm running across the parking lot with
Emma's bloody apron in one hand and a half-torn note in the other, shouting,
"Gary! Start your engine! We gotta go!"

The driver's door is open by the time I reach it, and I fling myself into
Gary's seat, grabbing his wheel in both hands. He slams the door behind me, and
I hit the gas, sending us roaring off in a spray of gravel.

Oh Lord, who art probably not in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Oh Lady,
deliver me from darkness, deliver me from evil, and please, please, let us not
be too late.

Please.

***

"Emma's the redhead you met in Minnesota," I say, tightly, as Gary roars down
the ghostroad, letting me guide us toward the distant taste of ashes. It's
getting stronger; we're going the right way. "She's a
bean sidhe
. Not
quite living, not quite dead. I mean, to be entirely honest, I've never been
sure what she was. Not really."