Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (9 page)

"Will you find my girl?" His voice is fading, losing strength. He'll find
it again on the other side, when he doesn't have to fight against failing lungs
and a broken spine. Somehow, that's cold comfort, even to me.

"Yeah, Tommy, yeah. I'll find her." More lies, but they're the lies he
needs to hear. How could I find her, dead man's living lover? I'd have no way to
even start the search. "What do you want me to tell her?"

The question seems to puzzle him for a moment, leave him fumbling for
words. Only the fact that the gravel still digs into my knees tells me that he's
still holding onto life; I'm slipping, but I haven't slipped, not all the way,
not yet. Finally, he says, "Tell her I love her. Tell her I did this because I
love her." A smile twists his lips upward, heartbreaking snapshot of a lover on
his way out the door. "I was going to marry her."

"I know."

"Just tell Laura..." His voice falters and fades in the middle of the
sentence, leaving him silent. One more hitching breath, two, three, and then no
more; his chest is still, his struggling heart finally finishing its fight.

His blood falls through my fingers, leaving them clean and pale as I
rise. His jacket likewise falls, hitting the concrete with a soft,
anti-climactic rustle. I turn to face the racers still standing clustered behind
me. The ones who let me through before--the ones who've touched the twilight, or
been touched by it--take a step backward, faces going pale. They know what
they're seeing, they know what the fall of the jacket has to mean. The rest only
look at me, puzzled and afraid, boys mixed with men in almost equal numbers.

"This race is over," I say, my tone leaving no room for argument. "If you
must race, do it somewhere else. No more stupid kids who don't know the risks.
Understand? If you let this happen again, I'll know, and I'll find you." Empty
threat. But they don't know that.

"Yeah?" asks one of the ones who doesn't look frightened enough to
understand who I am, what I am, what he's seen. "Who the fuck are you?"

The living are difficult to convince and easy to impress. I fix him with
a stare, smile, and say, "I'm Rose." Then I release my hold on the daylight, and
the racers are gone, left in another America, while I step onto the ghostroads
where I belong.

Tommy is there, unbroken, unbloodied, standing next to his car and
staring blankly up into a sky the color of ink. There are no stars. Not here;
not in the midnight. We're on the deepest level now, the one where ghosts are
the natives, and the living are the strange invasions. He looks toward the sound
of my feet scuffling on the surface of the road, eyes wide in his young man's
face. "Rose? What's going on?"

"You died, Tommy." I step forward, offer him my hand, offer him a smile
that almost balances the sorrow in my eyes. I could never have saved him. I have
to keep telling myself that until I start believing. "Now come
on.""Where?""That's up to you." I cast a glance toward his car, which has never
looked this good, and never could have, not in the daylight, where metal is
constrained by the limits of construction, and not the limits of love. "But I
can make a few suggestions."

***

"Oh, fuck." I never saw a picture of Laura, and Tommy never called her
anything but beautiful. Still, she's the right age to be the girlfriend of the
boy I helped through the painful process of dying, and I wasn't exactly subtle
when I told those racers to shut their death-trap down. "You're Laura."

"Finally." She shakes her head, stands, moves to re-light a candle that's
blown out. "I thought you'd be smarter than this. You've been at it for a long
time. I suppose I didn't think dumb luck could carry you this far." She rakes
another look along my body, and adds, "I also thought you'd be better-looking,
or at least have bigger breasts. I suppose that pretty isn't required in a dead
whore."

"I didn't kill him! God, what is it going to take to make you believe me? I
tried to keep him away from that stupid race!" I stayed with him while he bled
to death, I guided him down the ghostroads like he was an old friend, and not
just some kid too dumb to listen when I told him to be careful. "I did
everything I could to save him."

"Well you didn't do enough." She blows out her match and drops it to the
diner floor, grinding it into dust with the toe of one foot. "I hope you're
happy with all the lives you've ruined."

"Laura--"

"You won't be ruining any more." She opens the book, standing outlined in the
candlelight like some avenging angel, and she begins to read.

Her words are ice and fire and acid and the bitter needles of pounding rain
turned into a weapon by the driving wind. Her words are the bite of locusts and
the sting of wasps, rust consuming steel, poison corroding silver. They blister
my skin and rip the screams from my lips, writhing like living things as they
flay me open and display my inadequacy to the universe. I don't know how long
she reads; I don't care how long she reads, because every word is murder, and I
die a thousand times before she quiets. There is only the sound of rain and the
harsh rasp of my breathing as I pitch forward, sprawling on the diner floor.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Rose, didn't you like that? Wasn't that
fun
for
you?"

I want to say something nasty, want to match the malicious joy in her tone
with the acid in my own, but I can't seem to force my lips to form the words.
Everything hurts too badly.

"Well, I hope you're recovered enough to continue, because we're just getting
started, and I'm not ready to put you back together again. I thought you'd be a
pretty sturdy ghost. Don't disappoint me."

She starts to read again. This time, somehow, I find the strength to scream.

***

True to her word, Laura takes me to the very edge of truly gone before
pulling me back again, changing her wasp-words for milk and honey and the
soothing promise of peace. It's almost worse than the pain, because it means the
pain can start all over again, flaying off the layers of my existence until I
barely remember who I am. I'm not sure how long she can do this before I lose my
mind. I'm even less sure that she cares.

Once the restoration is complete, she stops, puts the book down on her chair,
and begins to walk the edge of the Seal, re-lighting candles, checking her line
of salt. "I bet you're wondering if I know how much this hurts you. If I've
considered how cruel I'm being." She glances my way, smiles, rattlesnake again.
"Believe me, I've considered it. I just wish I had a way of making it go on for
longer."

"Yeah, well, forgive me if you're alone in that," I whisper. "I didn't kill
him."

"He's still dead."

There's nothing I can say to that. I sag into the floor, trying to gather
what strength I can from this brief respite. There's still no route of escape
presenting itself, no golden "Get Out of Jail Free" card suddenly appearing to
tell me which way to run. The Seal is close enough to perfect that I can't worm
out of it, the line of salt clean and unbroken, the candles lined up in
triplicate so that even when one blows out, the light endures. I am well and
truly fucked.

"You know, I'll be sorry when the sun rises. I've been looking for you for so
long, and I've worked so hard for this night...I suppose I'll have to find
something else to do with myself after this. Maybe I'll go into the exorcism
business. It's surprisingly satisfying, when you know what you're doing."

"Go to hell."

"No, Rose. That's where you're going." She walks back to the chair, collects
her book, opens it. I take a breath, preparing for the pain to start.

Instead, the sound of tires on broken blacktop, an engine drawing closer and
stopping, a car door slammed. Laura tenses and looks up, light glinting off her
glasses. I consider screaming, and decide against it. Most people won't believe
me if I say that I'm a ghost; they'll think we're playing some sort of fucked-up
sex game and leave me here, and then Laura will just be angrier. It's not worth
the risk.

The footsteps start a few seconds after the car door slams, drawing closer
with every heartbeat. Laura puts down the book and reaches into the belt of her
jeans, producing a Bowie knife which she holds loosely behind her back. I guess
when you've decided to commit one murder, the second one gets easier, even if
that first victim was already dead.

The diner door swings open, and a dead man steps across the threshold,
stopping just shy of the circle of salt. "You okay, Rose?" he asks, and his
voice is young, but the tone is much older, voice of a man who's spent a decade
running the roads in the midnight, where young is forever, and innocence is for
an instant.

"Not really," I say, pushing myself unsteadily back to my feet. The world is
reeling. I feel like I'm going to throw up. "Hi, Tommy."

Laura drops the knife.

***

"You--you can't be here," she says, taking a step toward him. Her eyes are
wide behind her glasses, shock and terror and amazement mingling in her
expression. "You're dead. We buried you. I cried at your funeral. You're dead."

"So's Rose, but that hasn't stopped you locking an innocent hitchhiking ghost
in your little cage." He glances toward the salt line, lip curling in
unconscious disgust. "I thought a lot better of you, Laura. I knew you were
looking for her, but I never thought you'd do anything like this."

"Wait," I say. "You knew she was looking for me?"

I might as well have held my tongue. Laura only has eyes for Tommy, and he's
just as focused on her. "Why didn't you come to me?" she demands. "I prayed
every night for you to come. To haunt me. I needed you so badly."

"Dead's dead, and living's living, and I'm not the kind of ghost Rose is; I
don't move between the levels as easy. I'd have been haunting you like you were
an empty house, and it wouldn't have been fair. You'd never have been willing to
be filled if I were there."

"I was never anyone's home without you," she whispers.

Tommy looks at her calmly, an infinity of love and disappointment in his
eyes, and says, "That's not my fault, and my death wasn't hers. Now open the
circle, Laura. Let Rose go."

Her eyes stay on him as she crosses back to the Seal, kicks a break in the
salt, and bends to slash a Sharpie across the delicate lines of the outer ring.
My substance goes the second the binding breaks, leaving me insubstantial. I
have never in my life been so glad to be dead.

"Rose?" says Tommy.

"I'm okay." I step out of the circle without looking at Laura, and keep my
shoulders steady as I walk out the door, to the parking lot, where the rain
falls straight through me. Tommy's car flashes her lights at me as I approach,
warm welcome. The passenger-side door swings open. I slip inside, leaning back
into the warm seat, closing my eyes.

The sky is turning light when Tommy comes to join me. The engine starts
without him turning a key. "Where to?" he asks me.

"Take me down, Tommy; take me all the way down." I shake my head. "The living
are too damn dangerous for me."

The rain starts to clear as he pulls out, and we drive down through the
levels of the world, away from the living and their pains, back into the world
where we belong. Back down to the ghostroads, and the dead.

Building a Mystery
A
Sparrow Hill Road
story
by
Seanan McGuire

You live in a church where you sleep with voodoo dolls
And you won't give up the search for the ghosts in the halls
You wear sandals in the snow and a smile that won't wash away
Can you look out the window without your shadow getting in the way?
Oh you're so beautiful, with an edge and a charm,
But so careful when I'm in your arms...
-- "Building a Mystery," Sarah McLachlan.

There are as many kinds of ghost as there are ways to die, but death always
starts the same way for the wandering breeds. One moment they're alive, and the
next, they're not. That simple. The blink of an eye, the final beat of a broken
heart, and everything changes. Everything changes forever. The newly dead tumble
out of the daylight and find themselves on the ghostroads, the narrow veins of
dark asphalt that run through the body of the twilight like veins through an
aging hooker's thighs.

The trainspotters say that once, new arrivals found themselves standing in
railway stations or next to remote stretches of track, and the routewitches say
that before that, the new-dead wound up on dirt roads or narrow horse-trails.
They're all the ghostroads, and they've all had one thing in common: they've all
been physical evidence of the scars mankind leaves on the world. We created the
ghostroads through our lives and through our deaths, and they provide a home and
haven to our wandering souls...at least until the wandering is over. No one
knows exactly where the terminus of the ghostroads can be found, although
everyone knows that it exists. It has to. No one rides the ghostroads forever,
after all; eventually, every journey comes to an end.

It doesn't matter whether you're alive or dead; either way, the ghostroads
are the best way to move through the twilight. They dependably exist, which
gives them a definite advantage over the roads that sink down from the daylight
or rise up from the midnight. They aren't safe, exactly, but nothing in the
twilight really is, and the ghostroads generally don't go out of their way to
kill people. They're content to strew themselves with hidden dangers and wait,
rather than going hunting like some of the routes that can get you through the
midnight. They're less direct than the roads on most other levels, and that's
part of what gives them their stability. As long as there's a hidden turn to
take or an intersection yet uncrossed, the ghostroads still retain their reason
to be.