Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (7 page)

We roll on.

***

March has slammed down on the American road with the force of a hurricane,
washing out bridges and turning the roads into something closer to an obstacle
course. Rides are always harder to get during March and April; it's warm enough
that you lose the wintertime "poor thing, come in out of the cold," but it's wet
and nasty enough that no one wants to slow and stop for a stranger. Springtime
is the worst time of year for hitching. I keep walking along the edge of the
pavement, thumb thrust jauntily upward. Either I'll find a ride or I'll find a
rest stop; that's how this works. In the meanwhile, if I want to stay on this
level of America, I'll keep following the rules, and the rules say that
hitchhiking ghosts, well, hitch.

(The rules will change if I can get someone to give me a coat. Even the
definition of "coat" is a generous one, since I've been able to accept jackets,
sweaters, lab coats, smocks, even--once, at a carnival in Alabama, where the
ground was the color of dried blood and the rain came down so hard it seemed
like the sky was falling--yellow plastic rain slickers. Any of them is enough to
shift me off the ghostroads and back into the light. I'm not quite the living
and not quite the dead when I have a coat to steal substance from, and in that
in-between state, a lot of rules don't apply. They can't catch hold for long
enough to bind me.)

Staying wet was one of the hardest things to learn about hitching in the
rain. You can recognize young hitchers easily when it rains; they're the ones
walking in a downpour and staying completely dry, because the water doesn't even
know they're there. Never open your doors to a dry stranger in a rainstorm, not
unless you're sure of your protection against possessions. Older hitchers
understand that being able to change your clothing with a thought means being
able to change dry clothes into wet clothes, even if it's only ghost-water, even
if it only dampens the ghostside. Most people don't look closely enough to catch
that little distinction, and once one of us has a coat in our hands, well, it's
like I said. All the rules change.

It won't be the end of the world if I can't catch a ride on this stretch of
deserted Maine highway, hemmed in by the creeping undergrowth and ringed with
ditches full of muddy run-off. I've gone without rides before, and with the way
the rain keeps pounding down, I'd be cold even with a living person's coat to
loan me warmth. That's the worst thing about being dead: the cold that never
ends. Only way to beat it back is to join the living for a little while, but on
a night like this, I'm not sure I want to be warm quite that badly. There's a
truck stop ahead. I remember it vaguely from the last time I walked this way,
and the road may be worn-down and lonely, but it isn't singing the songs of the
completely abandoned. Even if the stop is limping on its last legs, the doors
are open, the coffee is hot, and the neon is still sending out its lighthouse
prayers to the sailors of the inland American sea. "Come to me, come to me, and
I will grant you warmth, and I will be your home until the tide rolls out."

Roads don't sing the same when the stops close down. They turn lonely, and
then they turn bitter, and then they turn dangerous. If you're lucky, they die
after that. If you're not, a lot of people die before the road does. I helped to
kill a highway once, one that tried to keep on going after the bean sidhes
keened its termination and the ambulomancers read its future in the potholes on
the blacktop and the pebbles on the median. That's an experience I'd be happy if
I never had again.

The sky rolls white with lightning, and the rain starts falling harder than
before, pounding straight through me like it wants to wash the world away. I
keep my thumb out--follow the rules, always follow the rules, it's breaking the
rules that gets you in trouble--and walk a little faster, following the
lighthouse song of safety through the night.

I'm moving fast enough, focused enough on my goal, that when I reach the
driveway and turn off the road, the condition of the parking lot barely
registers with me. Potholes and broken pavement are a consequence of use as much
as neglect, and the truck stop is singing. That should be enough. I'm halfway
across the parking lot when the song cuts off, abrupt as a razor blade in candy
floss, and I lift my eyes to the shattered shell of a sanctuary. This is no
lighthouse. This is a tomb.

The bones of the truck stop are standing almost naked in the night, the
skeletal pumps, the broken shell of the garage, the crumbling diner with its
neon sign, unlit, still almost intact on the edge of the roof. This isn't right.
This can't be right. The songs of this road are not the signs of a road in the
process of dying, but they should be; this is the heart of the highway, and a
heart that's been broken keeps nothing alive.

I take a step forward, frightened little ghost girl in the rain, and that
step is all it takes to tip the balance, because once I start, I can't stop. I
know I should turn back, that I'm acting like one of those stupid girls in the
drive-in horror movies, but I can't stop. My feet keep pulling me onward,
through the parking lot, into the broken diner, where everything is darkness.

***

We're the first ones at the raceway, Tommy too eager and too stupid to be
anything but early, even with me in the seat beside him still begging him to
find another way. His heart is set. "I don't know anyone who's ever gotten out
of here," he said earlier, eyes wide and earnest and too young to understand
what he was getting into. "People say they will, but they don't. We all wind up
working for our daddies, if our daddies are still alive. We drink in the bars
where they drank, we sit on the porches where they sat, and we get old swearing
we're going to get out one day. Meanwhile, our sons grow up just like us, and
the cycle never gets broken. I don't want that. I want roads I've never seen
before, and a house where the walls don't always smell like grease and old
butter, and I want my girl to be proud of me. I want her to say 'that's my man,'
and have it be pride speaking, not shame."

"You want more." That's what I said to him then, and if I could take
those words back, I would, because he took them as permission to do what he'd
been planning anyway. He took them as permission to drive out here to this empty
road that sunset turned into a raceway, and all the while, the smell of ashes
and lilies gathered deeper and deeper around him. I'd take them back if I could.

The world doesn't work that way.

Tommy's car is beautiful, a 1985 Toyota that he's rebuilt so many times
that even the air inside the cabin feels custom. She trusts him, this blue-back
beauty with her wheels set solid on the pavement. She
believes
in him.
The love of a car may be the truest love there is, save maybe for the love of a
dog for its person--and even there, there's a divide, because the love of a car
proves that the car has been loved. A dog loves because dogs exist to love man.
A car loves because man exists to love the car. I touch her hood, fingertips
only slightly warmer than the engine-heated metal, and I want to tell her that
everything will be all right, and I can't do it. Everything isn't going to be
all right. Everything will never be all right again.

"Tommy, I got a bad feeling about this. Let's just go. You can find the
money some other way. I know people, people who maybe could help you. I--"

"If you know people, why were you standing off the Interstate with your
thumb up in the air, Rose?" The look Tommy gives me is challenging and cold.
"You're wearing my jacket, and you ate that grilled cheese like nobody'd fed you
in a month of Sundays. If you can find that kind of money, what are you doing
here?"

There's not an answer for that question in the whole world, because he's
standing in the daylight, and in the daylight, "I'm here because I'm dead" isn't
an answer, it's a joke. I swallow, shift, look toward the horizon, and pray for
a miracle, even though I don't believe in miracles anymore, if I ever believed
in them to begin with. The age of miracles has been over for a long time, and
the final nail went into that coffin in February of 1959, when the world asked
for a Valentine and got the death of Buddy Holly in its place. "Tommy--"

"No, Rose. No. I don't want to get old in this ten-cent town, and there's
no way I'm gonna marry my girl knowing what I'm sentencing her to. She deserves
better, and I'm going to get it for her."

"Or you're going to die trying. Did you ever think of that, Tommy? How
proud of you is she going to be when you're six feet underground?"

Tommy shakes his head and steps away, moving toward the rear of the car,
where he can watch for the other racers. They'll be coming soon. The road is
singing so loudly of their arrival that even I can hear it, and I'm no
routewitch. "You don't understand."

He's right; I don't. I may understand poor, and I may understand
frightened, but if someone had begged me to stay home the night I died, I would
have listened. I know I would. I would have locked the door and waited until
Gary came to apologize, and if I'd missed the prom, so what? I would have so
many other opportunities to dance. I would have listened.

I hope.

But he won't. The night has fallen, the stars are shining, and Tommy's
going to die tonight. And there's not a damn thing I can do.

***

Stepping through the door of the diner is like sticking my entire body into a
swarm of biting ants. The pain is brief and intense, and shocking enough that I
finish my step, stumbling forward, hitting the ground on my knees. It doesn't
hurt as much as dying did, or even as much as being shot in the chest by a crazy
strigoi who doesn't know he's dead, but it hurts enough to make my vision go
blurry. The broken linoleum covering the old diner floor cuts my knees through
the denim of my jeans as I fall, and I have to catch myself on my hands to keep
from scraping my face across the floor.

With everything that's going on, I don't notice that my heart has started
beating until I'm pushing myself back to my feet. The scrapes on my hands and
knees burn dully, a familiar childhood feeling that calls forth the memory of
parental kisses and Mercurochrome. When I wipe my hands on the tail of my shirt,
they leave trails of blood behind, and my breath plumes slightly in the chilly
springtime air.

"What the...?"

It's breaking the rules that gets you in trouble, and whatever this is, it's
sure as shit breaking the rules. My heart hammers with almost-living fear as I
turn and run for the door. I need to get out of here. Something about this place
is breaking all the rules of the road, and that means I can't stay here.

The air turns solid and stops me almost a foot and a half from safety. The
door is still open; I can see the outside, see the rain sheeting down, but I
can't get there. All I can do is bounce off the air. I back up, run for the
invisible wall, and throw myself against it, to no avail; it's too solid, and I
can't break through. Panting, I step back, and feel every drop of blood in my
suddenly-living veins go cold as my gaze falls on the floor beneath the unseen
barrier. "Shit," I whisper, feeling very small, and very vulnerable. I was
careless. I'm about to pay for it.

The edges of the vast Seal of Solomon painted on the diner floor are clearly
visible near the open door. It's no wonder that I didn't see it when I was
coming in--I was walking away from the light, not into it--and the lines are
done in red and black paint, detailed with what looks like silver Sharpie. Only
the metallic parts would have been at all visible, and even if I saw them, I
just dismissed them as broken bits of glass or metal. I sure as hell wasn't
expecting a trap. Not here, not now...and not for me. Traps are for the
dangerous things, the strigoi and the goryo and the shadow people. They're not
for hitchers. We're harmless.

"Fine. So they caught me by mistake. Great. Okay." I rake my fingers through
my hair--dry still, since the rain is outside and I wasn't solid until the trap
made me that way--as I squint to follow the outline of the Seal in its path
around the room. Whoever did this knew their demonology well. It's not the most
intricate Seal I've ever seen, but intricacy doesn't always equate to strength,
and this one is made to be strong. There's gold ink in the pattern, as well as
the silver, marking the cardinal points, and there's a second ring around the
first, this one of pure salt. The salt ring is only open at the diner door, to
allow the spirits foolish enough to get caught to make their way inside. I rake
my hair back again. This isn't some teenage routewitch prank. This is serious
hoodoo.

After an hour of throwing myself against the seal, I give up and sit down at
the center of the circle, cross-legged, propping one elbow on my knee and
resting my chin atop my knuckles. Whoever set this trap has to come along
eventually to see what they might have caught. Part of me keeps screaming that
it's Bobby, it's Bobby, he's changed his ways and he's coming for me, but I'm
still calm enough to know that for the nonsense that it is. Bobby Cross could no
more draw a Seal of Solomon than he could walk past Saint Peter and through the
pearly gates of Heaven. This isn't him. This is something else.

The rain outside keeps falling as the hours trickle by, adding an element of
psychological torture to a situation that really doesn't need help scaring the
crap out of me. I know what happens if I'm wearing a coat when the sun comes up:
the coat loses its power and I fade back onto the ghostroads, dead as always.
But what happens if the sun comes up while I'm trapped in a Seal of Solomon
that's somehow doing what only a coat's supposed to do to me? Do I get free? Or
do I get sucked into a bottle like some fairy tale djinn, Barbara Eden with a
bad attitude and better fashion sense?