Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (6 page)

"SHUT UP!"

The bullet passes cleanly through the center of my chest. There's a yelp of
pain from behind me. I keep walking forward, toward Paul. "There may have been a
funeral, if they could find your next of kin, if there was enough of you left to
identify. Maybe they just cremated you, stuck your ashes in a box in the police
station for somebody to come claim, someday. Either way, you
died
here,
and you have no right--"

"Please," he moans. There's no gunshot this time. Just the pleading, just the
prayer that maybe I'll stop.

"--no, Paul,
no
, because you have
no right
to take these
people's lives away from them." I'm in front of him now, and so I reach out and
take the gun. I reach out with my ghost fingers that shouldn't be able to touch
or take anything, but they wrap around the metal all the same, and when I tug,
he lets go. Poor little strigoi. More gently now, I say, "You're dead, Paul. I'm
sorry."

His eyes fill with tears as he looks at me, and past me, to the huddled
hostages clinging to each other in the shadows of this suddenly-haunted diner.
Two ghosts for the price of one. Welcome to the ghostroads.

"How long?" he whispers.

"Twenty-one years."

That takes all the strength out of him, and he hits his knees as the smell of
ashes and lilies fades from the air, replaced by the normal array of diner
scents, apple pie and bubblegum and scrambled eggs and coffee. I put the gun on
the nearest table, where it wafts away into nothing before any of the hostages
can make a grab for it.

"No no no no," he moans, rocking back and forth.

"Yes." I crouch, grab his wrists, pull him halfway back to upright. "Yes. It
was a long time ago, and yes."

"We were--we were pulling into the driveway, and there was this flash, and
the sun was going down and Trina and the bike were gone." He lifts his head,
studying my face like he thinks he'll finds the answers there, somehow. Best of
luck to him. I've been looking for the answers for fifty years, and I haven't
found them yet. "I still...I had the gun, and I came in here, and it was all
wrong, it was just so damn
wrong
, and it made me so damn
mad
..."

I want to be angry with him. I want to be furious. He shot me. He killed
people.

He died here. Poor little strigoi, who didn't know what he was doing when he
woke up; who didn't even know that he'd left the daylight twenty years behind.
He died in fire. Maybe that's punishment enough for what he's done tonight.
Maybe not. Either way, it's not my place to judge. I tug him to his feet,
keeping hold of his wrists, not letting him go.

"You're coming with me," I tell him quietly. "But first, you're going to wait
here."

A flash of arrogance in those eyes. "And what if I don't?"

All I have to do is smile and the arrogance crumbles, replaced by confusion,
fear...and relief. No one wants to haunt the living forever. At least I'm
offering him another way. "You will," I say, and let him go, turning my back.

He waits.

***

There have been five casualties, all told. Dinah comes the quickest, towing a
mousy-looking girl in a uniform just like hers. The mouse is named Elisa. She
has a lovely smile. After the two of them have calmed down, a teenage boy fades
out of the woodwork, acne on his forehead, hands like an artist. He says his
name is Michael. I say it's nice to meet him, and he looks away, mumbles
something about better circumstances. I can't blame him for that one.

The college boy's name is Anthony, and even when he comes to me, he's so
faded I can see the walls right through him. The last to emerge is an old man
whose cane has crossed to the ghostroads with him, sturdy piece of oak for him
to lean on until he realizes that he doesn't need it anymore. I gather them all
to me, five little pieces of the twilight, and we turn and walk back to the
doorway where Paul is waiting.

"It's time to go," I tell him, and he nods, resignation radiating from his
face like sunlight. Poor little strigoi. Looking back over my shoulder, I meet
the eyes of the fry cook, and say, "Don't unlock the doors until we're gone."

"I won't," he says, voice barely a whisper. Poor everyone. Half these people
will never leave the twilight again. The other half may fight their way free,
but they'll never dream the daylight. That's the penalty for this sort of
deathday party; that's what happens when things overlap this cleanly.

I turn away, exit through the glass of the door. The others follow me,
phantom parade out into the parking lot, and the line dividing the daylight from
the twilight fades with every step we take, until there's only the dark, and
still we walk on, out of the twilight, into the midnight, where the ghostroads
are the only route to anywhere.

We walk on, going home.

***

"What happens now?"

"Wait here. Someone will come along and get you soon enough."

"But--"

"I don't know who will come, and I don't know where they'll take you." I look
at the crowd, tattered little spirits, frightened and lost here in the midnight
before their time. Even Paul isn't really prepared, and he's the only one who's
been dead for any time at all. Finally, I sigh, and say, "If you're not sure--if
you're not ready to take the exit--ask whoever it is to drop you off at the Last
Dance. They usually need staff." Dinah, Elisa, and Michael can probably find
work there; Anthony and the old man can at least get a good cup of coffee before
they continue on.

Paul looks at me levelly, and asks, "Think they'd take me?"

I meet his eyes, and answer, "No. But I've been wrong before."

He nods, and that's the end. I turn and walk away, leaving the six of them
standing beneath the bus stop sign at the edge of the ghostroad highway that
runs between here and there. They'll find their way soon enough; the dead always
do. My prom dress dissolves into jeans and a white T-shirt that can't keep out
the cold, my hair shedding its careful up-do in favor of the short-cropped bob I
favor these days. Changing with the times is sometimes the best that I can do.

Shoving my hands into the pockets of my jeans, I walk on, down the cold line
of midnight, moving toward the distant glow of dawn.

Tell Laura I Love Her
A
Sparrow Hill Road
story
by
Seanan McGuire

No one knows what happened that day, how his car overturned in flames,
But as they pulled him from the twisted wreck
With his dying breath they heard him say:
"Tell Laura I love her. Tell Laura I need her
Tell Laura not to cry, my love for her will never die..."
-- "Tell Laura I Love Her," Dicky Lee.

I spent my first year on the ghostroads in denial, walking the frontage roads
that run closest to the surface of the twilight, scaring the living crap out of
countless fraternity boys and high school seniors as I flagged them down, begged
them to take me home, and then disappeared on them. First stage of grief is
denial, even among the dead. I spent my second year trying to find someone I
could argue with, someone who'd have the authority to take back what had
happened to me. Angels, demons, rumors, I chased them all. I got luckier than I
deserved to be: I didn't catch any of them. Instead, I walked the sorrow off my
shoes, and walked myself deeper down into the twilight, where I could start to
learn the realities of my new existence. It took a lot of years and a lot of
walking to work my way deep enough to come back into the light, and maybe that's
the biggest secret that the ghostside has to offer; that if you work long enough
to reach the darkness, you're almost inevitably going to find your way to the
light. They're the same thing, viewed from two different directions, and they
can both get you lost, and they can both bring you home.

The danger in walking your way to freedom is the way things change depending
on your point of view. What's dark to me is light to you; what's true to you is
lies to me. Every story has a thousand truths behind it, because everything
looks different depending on where you were standing when you saw it happen. I
leave the philosophy to the umbramancers and the routewitches, and I try to keep
myself focused on the things that matter in the here and now: following the
whispers of the running road, following the signs that lead me between the
layers of America, and learning to read the palimpsest etchings that dig deep as
bruises and unchanging as scars into the flesh of the ghostside. I've been in
the dark a lot longer than I was in the light, and while I still regret the way
that I died, I've given up on trying to fight my way back. All I want to do now
is find a way to stop the man who condemned me to this twilight wandering--the
one who would have done a lot worse, if I'd given him the chance.

I guess you can call me an angel of vengeance, these days. That and a quarter
used to be enough to buy a cup of coffee. Still is, at the Last Dance.
Everywhere else...not so much.

The trouble with truth is that it's subjective, depending entirely on where
you were standing when you saw the accident happen. Maybe you saw the first car
veer to avoid hitting a cat, and maybe you didn't. Maybe you saw the second car
try to hit the brakes, and maybe you only saw them go careening into the vehicle
ahead of them, making no attempt to slow in the moments before impact. Maybe all
you saw was the shadow of the cat as it darted through the underbrush, running
away from a tearing roar that sounded like the end of the world. Every splinter
of the broken glass of the moment is a genuine part of the whole, but none of
them is the whole in and of itself. We carry our own truths tucked away inside
us, bright bits of glass blunted by our living flesh, and when they come into
the light, we bleed. Honesty is in the eye of the beholder.

It can be hard as hell to tell the truth from broken lies even when all the
pieces of the puzzle happen in the daylight. When half the story is buried in
shallow graves along the ghostroads, it can turn impossible to tell what's real
from what's not...and sometimes, without that knowledge, there's no way to move
past grieving into acceptance. Sometimes, the dead aren't the only casualties,
especially here. Especially in the dark.

***

It's a beautiful night, all big white moon and the distant
gold-silver-glitter of too many stars to count, scattered across this desert sky
like dimestore confetti. This is the middle of nowhere, one of those places that
manages to exist half a mile outside of every jurisdiction, half an hour away
from any sort of safety, real or not. The man--the boy, fuck, he's barely
twenty-two, he's too young to be here--behind the wheel of this aging Toyota is
practically vibrating as he looks toward the stretch of road ahead of us. He'd
be handsome, if he didn't look so scared, if he wasn't so damn close to tumbling
into twilight, leaving this road and all the roads like it behind him forever.

"That's the raceway," he says, and he means this empty expanse of
nothing, this little slice of nowhere-road that stretches smooth and deserted
through the night. He's breathing too fast, just this side of panting, tension
filling the car like smoke. He doesn't want to be here. He thinks he does, but
he's wrong. "You'll be able to find another ride from here. There's lots of guys
here every night. One of them will be going your way."

I seriously doubt that. This is pure daylight road, for all that the
sun's gone down, and the only place that edges into the twilight is the driver
himself, boy who thinks he's a man, boy teasing things he should know to leave
well enough alone. I've been trying to steer him away from this place since I
asked him for a ride two hours ago, and he didn't listen then, and he isn't
listening now. The smell of ashes and lilies is gathering around him, accident
waiting to happen, coming on stronger with every minute that ticks past.

"I don't think this is a good idea, Tommy." He isn't listening. I still
have to try. I always have to try, because that's part of how this story goes:
part of what keeps me on the edge I walk along. If I start walking away from the
ones who might be saved, I'll lose my grasp on the narrow line of the twilight,
sink deeper down into the dark, and never find my way back to the levels where
the living play spin-the-bottle with the dead. I have to try. "We should go
back. We should--"

"My girl deserves better than some crackerjack ring from a greasemonkey."
There's a set to his jaw that I know. Gary used to look like that, late nights
in the diner when he was telling me how we were going to get out of town
someday, how we'd be together forever, and he wouldn't be just a mechanic, and I
wouldn't be just the mechanic's girl. I bite my knuckles. The pain helps, a
little. Not enough, but it keeps the tears out of my eyes, and right here, right
now, I'll settle for what I can get. "You understand, don't you, Rose?"

I understand the way that poverty can turn solid in the middle of the
night, pressing down on your chest until it steals your breath away, the way
they used to say cats stole the breath from babies in their cradles. I
understand watching your father work until all he can do when he gets home is
drink to forget how much work's still waiting, and waiting your mother clip
coupons and count her pennies, skirting a little closer to the edge every day. I
understand hand-me-down skirts and triple-darned socks, cabbage soup and
homemade shampoo. I understand better than he thinks I do.

Most of all, I understand that this is not the way.

"Turn back," I whisper, and Tommy starts the engine, and we roll onward,
toward the raceway, toward the future, toward the place where the road he's on
now comes to its inevitable end.