Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (8 page)

"I would kill for a routewitch about now," I mutter, and go back to waiting.

Enough time has passed by the time the door swings all the way open that I
almost don't notice; I'm staring off into space, thinking about how much I'd be
willing to do for a cup of coffee. It's the sound of footsteps on the linoleum
that makes me realize I'm not alone anymore. I scramble to my feet, the scrapes
on my hands and knees complaining at the rough treatment. I don't care. I don't
my captor to see me looking that defenseless.

The woman who's just stepped into the diner doesn't even look at me as she
pulls a canister of salt from her pocket and closes the break in the circle.
This accomplished, she starts walking around the edges of the Seal, lighting
candles I didn't even notice in the gloom. Each one beats back the darkness just
a little; nowhere near enough. I turn, watching her, but I don't say anything.
I'm not going to be the first one to speak.

I see her more and more clearly as the candles flicker to life. She's in her
late thirties, with long, straight hair that shade of dirty blonde that means
she's been blonde all her life, too proud to start dyeing when it started to
darken. Her glasses glitter in the candlelight, making it impossible to tell the
color of her eyes. She's pretty, in the dark, in the candlelight, but it's hard
to focus on anything but the book she's holding under one arm, the thick,
leather-bound book with the Seal stamped on its cover. That sort of book never
means anything good to midnighters like me, especially not in the hands of
someone like her, someone who carries the twilight with her like a sour perfume.
She was born a daylight girl, but she's burrowed her way down, I can taste it. I
just don't know why.

I just know that I've never seen her before in my life, or in my death. I've
been trapped by a stranger, ghost rat in a ghost cage. That makes it all the
worse when the last candle is lit and she closes the diner door, finally turning
to study me. She runs her eyes over every inch of my body, measuring what she's
caught. Finally, horribly, she smiles.

"Hello, Rose," she says.

Shit.

***

I could never have prevented this accident from happening. It was too
late before Tommy met me. Maybe it was too late before I got within a hundred
miles of this town. I don't know. All I know is that I tried as hard as I could,
and that it wasn't enough.

I'm glad I don't need sleep anymore. After this, I'd be awake for a week
at least.

The racers came just like Tommy swore they would, rolling over the
horizon in their cars that were ten times more expensive and half as alive as
Tommy's. Some of them were good men, and some of them were bad men, but they
were all of them hard men, because they'd chosen a hard aspect of the highway to
receive their worship. A few of them tried to tell Tommy not to race, and those
are the ones I'll remember to the Atlantic Highway the next time that I walk her
borders. Some just laughed. The boy wanted to put down his pink slip and his
pride on a race he couldn't possibly win, well, he'd learn a lesson from the
losing. Only there are no more lessons for Tommy on this road, or on any other.

The wheels of his car are still spinning as I run across the blacktop
toward him, my breath harsh in my ears, my feet striking hard against the
pavement. He's still alive, and so I run to him. Once he dies, slips onto the
ghostroads and leaves the daylight forever, the coat he gave me will lose its
power to hold me to the laws of the living. That's in the rules. Only live
people have substance to share, and you can't steal life from the dead.

The men who raced against Tommy have realized that something is very
wrong; that this isn't the sort of accident someone laughs at and walks away
from. Their cars have stopped, and the men are getting out, looking back toward
where Tommy's car lies shattered on the road. None of them are moving to help
him--to help us, since every one of them thinks I'm his townie girlfriend, the
one he's doing this stupid, suicidal thing for. They just let me run, my throat
raw with screaming, tears running down my cheeks as I reach for another soul I
failed to save.

They were going too fast and the road seemed smooth, but there are cracks
in the cleanest pavement, slick spots, potholes, rocks. I may never know which
one hit the wheels of the car ahead of Tommy, and it doesn't really matter; he
spun out, adjusted, caught himself and drove on. In the process, he clipped
Tommy, and something about that collision was enough--just enough--to send the
smaller, lighter Toyota into a spin it never pulled out of. Tommy's car rolled
three times before it stopped, twisted metal and smoking engine, a broken body
on the road.

She's already gone when I get there. All that's left is cooling death,
and a young man cut almost in half by his own steering column. There's blood
everywhere. I don't let that stop me. If there's one thing I've learned since
the night I died, it's that blood washes off, but no one--no one--deserves to
die alone.

"Tommy? Tommy, can you hear me?" I beat my fists against the glass of the
passenger window, trying to catch his attention. I could take off the coat,
slide through this door like it was smoke, but then I'd be on the ghostroads
again, and I wouldn't be able to hold his hand until the dying finished. He's a
fool, yes, and he still deserves to have someone holding his hand while the
lights go out. "Tommy!"

Three of the racers come running up, big men, muscling their way past me
to wrench the door open. Then they stop, hands dangling uselessly, as they try
to figure out what else they can do for him. Maybe someone's called an
ambulance, and maybe nobody will; this sort of race is illegal, after all, and
they have to be measuring their own lives yet to come against the death of one
boy barely out of his teens and too stupid to know when to find another way.
They can't take him out of the car, that much is clear; the way it's wrapped
around him is like a lover's embrace, and there's no way of breaking it without
breaking him even further.

If Tommy can't come to us, I'll go to him. It's the only thing left that
I can do. I squeeze my way between the racers (and if any of them notice the
sudden give to my flesh, the way I seem to be losing substance by the second,
they don't say anything; the ones who'd notice are the ones who know the
twilight well enough to know me) and kneel next to the driver's-side door,
gravel biting into my knees. My hands are blood even before I realize that his
blood is on the seat, and it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, blood can't hurt
me.

"Tommy? Tommy, can you hear me?" My fingers almost pass through his cheek
the first time I reach out to him. I pull back, concentrate, and try again. This
time I can feel my fingers graze his skin, and I don't know if that's because
I'm closer to living, or because he's closer to dead. "Come on, Tommy, stay with
me. Open your eyes, and stay with me."

It's too late now. It's all over except for the dying. But I'm still
here, and he's still here, and as long as that's the case, I'm going to be here
for him. I owe him that much. I owe all of them that much.

Tommy swallows with obvious difficulty, and opens his eyes. They aren't
quite focusing anymore. He won't really see the other racers, or the road, or
the blood that's dripping over everything, like the red flag signaling that it's
time to leave the finish line. But he'll still see me. We're in the same place
right now, he and I. "R-Rose?"

"I'm here. I'm right here, Tommy."

"I think I messed up, Rose."

It's a beautiful night, big white moon and too many stars and the desert
around us like an ocean of gold. It's a beautiful night, and Tommy--a boy whose
last name I never learned, a boy who did this for a girl I've never met--is
bleeding to death with my hand against his cheek. "Yeah," I say, not looking
away from him. "I think you did."

***

"You don't know how long it's taken me to track you down." She pulls a rusted
chair with a ripped green vinyl cover from one of the nearby tables, moving it
to the edge of the salt circle and sitting primly down. Resting the book on her
knees, she smiles at me. "I mean, at first I wasn't even sure that you were
real. It took me years just to find someone who could really prove to me that
you existed. I appreciated that day. It told me that I wasn't crazy. I mean, I
spent three years chasing truckers and visiting psychics and going into every
diner I saw to ask if anyone in there knew who you were or had seen you or knew
where I might find you." She leans forward and smiles at me, smiles like a
rattlesnake getting ready to strike. "You have a lot of friends, Rose. A lot of
people looked me in the eye and lied for you. I was impressed by that."

"Who the hell
are
you?" I step toward her, as far as the Seal will
let me go. She doesn't flinch back, just keeps smiling that rattlesnake smile.
She knows she has me pinned. "I don't know why you want me, lady, but I'm not a
good housepet."

"Oh, I'm not going to
keep
you. Don't be silly." She looks genuinely
amused as she settles in her seat. "Keep you. What a ridiculous idea."

"Then what--"

"I'm going to exorcise you. I'm going to read aloud the words of a thousand
ancients, and I'm going to rip you from this world one thin thread at a time,
until you're nothing but a thin scream clinging to the memory of pain. And then
I'm going to call you back into this world, and I'm going to do it again. And
again. And again. Until, when the sun rises, I finish the exorcism and send you
to the hell you deserve, you murdering little slut."

Her expression doesn't change as she speaks, not once. That may be the most
terrifying thing of all. She's talking about murder, about killing me for the
second time in my existence, and she isn't batting an eye. I'm not a person to
her. I'm a thing to be exterminated.

"What-what...what are you talking about?" My heart is hammering and my mouth
is dry as cotton. That's the worst thing about this damn Seal--all the downsides
of being alive, and none of the benefits, no sex or coffee or cheeseburgers.
Just raw terror and every nerve in my body sounding the alarm. "I don't know who
you are, or who you think I am, but I assure you, I am not your girl."

"Your name is Rose Marshall. You were born in Buckley Township, Michigan, in
1929--that was a hard one to confirm, by the way. There was no birth certificate
on file for you at any of the local hospitals. There was an announcement in the
paper, though. I suppose it was a slow news week."

"I was born at home," I whisper.

"Ah! Well, that explains it, then. You made the news again in 1945 when you
decided to drive yourself to the senior prom and confront your boyfriend, who
had failed to pick you up. It's not really surprising. You were only a
sophomore. He probably didn't want to be seen with you." This time, her smile is
cruel as well as venomous, human snake that knows exactly what she's doing.
"Poor little Rose. I suppose you didn't know he'd broken down on the way to your
house--and by the time he got back on the road, you were so much cooling meat."

"Lady, why are you doing this? What do you want from me?"

She keeps going like she hasn't heard me--and maybe she hasn't, not in any
meaningful way. You don't learn to draw a Seal like this on a whim, or in a
weekend. You don't track down the dead for nothing. Whatever strange engine
drove her here, she's not letting it go that easily. "Only you couldn't stay
dead, could you, Rose? You couldn't rest in peace. That would have been too easy
for a spoiled bitch like you."

I've been called a lot of things, and some of them I even deserved, but
"spoiled" has never been one of them. My eyes narrow, and I speak before I
think, spitting out my words: "You don't know anything about me."

"I know you killed the only man I ever loved." The accusation is casual,
almost off-handed; there's no heat behind it. She's just reciting a fact. I
still freeze, rooted to the spot as she continues, "For a while, I thought I was
chasing a myth, looking for you, but once I had a name, you got a lot easier to
follow. Legends and ghost stories scattered across a country--you've been a busy
little girl, Rose. How many innocent men have you killed? How many have died for
your vanity, all because you couldn't bear to be the one left standing home
alone?"

I've heard this accusation before. It doesn't get any easier. "I've never
killed anyone. You have the wrong girl."

Candlelight glints off her glasses as she lifts her head and looks at me,
smile fading into memory, replaced by terrifying emptiness. "His name was
Tommy," she says, in a voice like a crypt door slamming shut. "His name was
Tommy, and he was going to marry me, and you killed him. And now I'm going to
kill you."

***

Tommy is bleeding out fast, red blood mingling with the black oil that
drips from the car's shattered engine. At least they're not both suffering. She
loved him enough to wait for him on the ghostroads, and that's better than many
men will have. Still, I keep my hand against his cheek, feeling my solidity
waver a little more with every breath he struggles to take, and I wonder when,
if ever, the moments like this will stop hurting so damn bad.

"I can't see."

"It's all right, Tommy. Just keep on breathing. Help's on the way."
That's a lie, that's a goddamn lie--help isn't coming, help won't get here for
hours, not until the raceway is a road again and there's nothing left of Tommy
but an empty shell cradled in a steel and chrome coffin. I don't regret lying to
him. Sometimes lies are the only thing I have to give them.