Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan (16 page)

He snarls again, and spits, "This isn't over." Turning on his heel, he stalks
away--away from the accident, away from the shade of Chris, away from me.

Seconds trickle by like sentences of execution, and Bobby Cross--the man who
killed me once, and would do it again, given half a chance--is gone.

***

"Deliver me from Bobby Cross," I whisper, and turn to face Chris, who is
staring at me with confusion bordering on terror.

"I'm dead," he says.

"Yes," I agree. It seems like the safest option, just now.

"I'm
dead
."

"Yes." I gesture toward the wreckage of his car. "Bobby caused an accident,
and you were in his way. I'm sorry."

"Is this your fault? Could you have stopped this?"

For once, I'm grateful to know the answer. "No," I say, and offer my hands.
"I couldn't have stopped it. All I could do was be here when the crash happened,
so that I could be the one to get you home."

"Home? But I'm dead."

"There are a lot of kinds of home, Chris." I slip my hands into his. His skin
is cool--the dead are always cool--but he lacks the chilling, killing cold of
Bobby Cross. I suppose that gift is reserved for the men who've sold their
souls. "Now come on. You ever hot-wired a car?"

"What? No."

"Good. Then we can begin your death with a little education."

***

Only one car in the crash was loved enough to leave a ghost behind, a
battered pick-up truck that seems to be healing by the second, the years wiping
away like so much dust. Six more ghosts come out of the wreckage, all confused
and shaken and uncertain of the rules that bind them now. I scan their faces,
labeling them without really thinking about it--hitcher, homecomer, phantom
lady. Emma can sort them out, help them decide who needs to move on and who
wants to find a place in the endless arms of the midnight America.

I twist the wires until the truck gives a purring roar of acceptance, ready
to drive us wherever we need to go. I give the crowd one last scan, and say,
"I'm Rose Marshall. Some of you may have heard of me--they call me the Lady in
the Diner." Murmurs, and shocked expressions. Sometimes it's good to have a
reputation. "Now, you can come with me, or you can stay here. I have to warn you
that the man who caused this accident may come back, and if you stay, you're on
your own."

"Where are you taking us?" shouts one brave shade, somewhere in the crowd.

I allow a smile, feeling the tattoo burn my skin. Chris stands by the
passenger side door, ready to let me drive this time. "I'm taking you home," I
answer, and that's the truth, that's all the truth they'll ever need. I'm taking
them home.

They climb in one and two at a time, these new ghosts of the road. I slide
behind the wheel, pat the dashboard for luck, and whisper, "Oh Lord, who art
probably not in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Oh Lady, deliver me from darkness,
deliver me from evil, and deliver me from Bobby Cross."

"What?" asks Chris.

I shoot him a smile. "Nothing," I say. "Nothing at all." The wheel fits easy
in my hands, and we roll forward, out of the daylight, down into the dark.

Last Dance with Mary Jane
A
Sparrow Hill Road
story
by
Seanan McGuire

Well, I don't know but I've been told
You never slow down, you never grow old
I'm tired of screwin' up, tired of goin' down
Tired of myself, tired of this town

Oh my my, oh hell yes
Honey, put on that party dress.
Buy me a drink, sing me a song
Take me as I come 'cause I can't stay long...

Last dance with Mary Jane
One more time to kill the pain
I feel summer creepin' in
And I'm tired of this town again...
-- "Last Dance with Mary Jane," Tom Petty.

There have always been waystations on the roads of the dead, places where the
spirits and psychopomps can stop and rest a little while before continuing to
their final destinations. They're necessary, especially given that so many
psychopomps are dead themselves. Follow that road too far, and they lose the
ability to turn back. So taverns and temples spring up along the most common
routes into whatever lies beyond the ghostroads; boarding houses and hotels,
cathedrals and cloisters...and in this modern age, truck stops, diners, and
seedy little bars with sawdust on their floors. They teeter on the edges of here
and there, and even the living can find their way into those in-between places,
if they get lost enough, if they need it badly enough.

Everyone's waystation is different, determined by what they were in life.
Most of the souls I shepherd along were drivers, with a spattering of vagabonds,
hitchhikers, and people who were just walking home--people, in other words, who
were traveling under their own power. I only get passengers when they come with
a driver. I guess that's because, as a hitcher, I don't relate well to people
who let someone else make the decisions about where they'd be when the journey
was finished. It may not seem like hitchers have much agency, but we do, really;
we decide which cars to get into, we decide which destinations to name. It's not
the same degree of agency that goes to the drivers, but it's enough for us.

My waystation is a little diner that looks like it was built in the
mid-forties, all chrome and cherry leather and the sound of the jukebox that
never runs out of tunes. The music changes sometimes, updating itself to the
tastes of the patrons, but the jukebox itself is always the same, sweet and
clean and retro-futuristic in design, the sort of thing we used to pretend was
all the rage on Mars. It would be a museum piece, in the daylight. For me, it's
like a snapshot of home, in the days before I died. The Last Dance wasn't built
for me, and I'm not the only psychopomp who uses it, but it might as well have
been. If I have a home anymore, it's there.

The waystations exist for the dead, belong to the dead, but they aren't owned
by the dead. Too many of us are only passing through, psychopomps because of
circumstance, making a few runs along the road before we give in to the call of
taking that last exit, riding that midnight train to whatever's waiting on the
other side. The natives of the twilight tend to the waystations, using them to
provide them with a purpose, something to keep them from sliding down into the
midnight. They work for everyone, in a way.

When you die on the road, if you're lucky, a phantom rider or a hitchhiking
ghost will be there, waiting, to offer you directions to the Last Dance Diner.
Best malts this side of the 1950s, pie to die for, and best of all, a chance to
rest, for just a little while, before moving on...and everyone moves on, in the
end.

Everyone goes.

***

It's midnight in the Last Dance Diner. That's nothing strange; it's always
midnight here, or close to it, the hands on the clock locked in perpetual
embrace above the window that cuts through to the kitchen. Heating lights shine
down on the clean surface of the counter there, warming stacks of pancakes and
cheeseburgers with their accompanying heaps of fries. Nothing ever stays on the
counter long--Emma's staff is too well-trained, the diner running like a
well-oiled machine whenever someone actually comes through looking for a
meal--but its presence is reassuring, granting glimpses of other people's meals
as you wait for your own. Normally, anyway. That's how it's supposed to work.

Not tonight.

Tonight, the kitchen is dark, the cook and busboy and even the dishwasher
gone to attend to some accident down the road, an accident bad enough that when
it happened, they sat up like hunting dogs hearing their master call and were
out the door almost before Emma gave them permission. I stayed behind. I didn't
taste ashes, I didn't smell lilies...I wasn't involved. There's no point in
rushing to an accident that I had no part in. It wouldn't have me if I tried,
and those who died in its embrace will have other psychopomps to lead them home.

The shades I came here to shepherd are long gone, all of them passing through
the doors with murmurs of "I'll be right back" that must inevitably come to
nothing. Psychopomps lead the dead home. We don't go with them. For a little
while--not long, but a little while--it was just me and Emma, her in her cotton
candy-colored uniform and sensible shoes, me in the faded jeans and white tank
top that are practically my uniform, these days. I change my clothes to suit the
people who pick me up, but when I'm left to my own devices, I always seem to
wind up back in the jeans I wasn't supposed to wear, in the shirt I borrowed
from Gary, once upon a time and once upon a life ago.

Then tires crunched on the gravel of the parking lot, headlights shining
briefly through the window. "Go toward the light," they tell the dead, but in my
experience, the light has always been an oncoming car. Emma pushed herself away
from the counter, offered me a small, apologetic smile, and said, "The Last
Dance is open for business, even when the kitchen's closed," and went to greet
her customers. That was an hour ago. They're still here. Busload of cheerleaders
in school colors, red and gold, frilled skirts that would have been suitable
only for porn stars and pin-up girls when I was their age--really their age, not
just a shade who'll be sixteen until the stars blow out at last. The logo on
their sweaters marks them as the Oxville Knights, and their laughter--loud and
gleeful and ringing from the rafters--marks them as the living.

Maybe. Because they're here, in the Last Dance, and we get the living
sometimes, but normally not for this long, and normally not this many of them at
one time. It's possible that they just took the wrong series of exits from the
highway, turned on the wrong frontage roads and followed the wrong signs,
but...I don't know. Something's wrong. Emma brings them malteds and pie ala
mode, things that don't require an understanding of the grill and the fryer, and
something's wrong, and I just don't know what it is.

Outside the diner, thunder rolls, and rain begins to fall. It showers down
lightly at first, but a sprinkle becomes a deluge in a matter of minutes,
leaving us all looking out the windows at a world wiped away by water. Emma
walks to the door, opens it, and sticks her head outside. Only for a few
seconds; long enough to douse her hair, leaving her dripping when she steps
back, letting the door swing shut again.

"Looks like we're going to be here for a while, ladies," she says, drawing
theatrical groans punctuated with giggling from the cheerleaders, who seem
incapable of taking anything seriously for more than a few minutes. I can barely
remember ever being that young. "Since the kitchen's closed and the rain's
likely to knock out the power any minute now, I'm going to go grab some
candles--and the ice cream. No sense letting it all melt."

This earns her a round of applause from the cheerleaders. Everyone likes free
ice cream, even girls who probably spend half their lives on diets. Emma winks
my way as she walks toward the kitchen. "Rose, you're in charge until I get
back," she says, and then she's gone, leaving me with a dozen cheerleaders
staring at me like wolves staring at a wounded deer.

This is going to be a long night. I can already tell.

***

The hours tick by like seasons, endlessly long and strange. The cheerleaders
fell on the ice cream with terrifying enthusiasm, leaving nothing but smears at
the bottom of their bowls and smug smiles on their faces, like they'd somehow
managed to get away with something. Emma and I had barely finished clearing away
the dishes when lightning illuminated the sky, turning the world brilliantly
white for a few seconds before fading away and leaving us in darkness.

"Right on cue," said Emma cheerfully, and struck a match. The tiny flame was
a signal flare in the darkness, one that spread from candle to candle as she
made her way around the room. "Chuck will get the generator on when he comes
back from his errands. Until then, who's up for ghost stories?"

I hate ghost stories. Too many of them are autobiographical. That's why I'm
still sitting at the counter, nursing a glass of flat, warm Coke, watching as
the circle of stories goes around and around the room. The call comes from
inside the house, the hook is left on the door handle, the roommate was dead all
along. The beautiful dress in the thrift store came from the funeral home, the
husband who stole the golden arm is punished for his sins...the girl in the
white prom dress is just looking for someone to drive her home.

She only ever wanted to go home.

I stare off into space, trying not to listen, trying to focus on the rain.
Then Emma's voice cuts through my self-imposed haze, saying, "Your turn,
Rosie-my-girl. It's time to pay off a few of those milkshakes and tell us a
ghost story."

"What?" I snap back into the present, blinking at her. Emma only smiles,
cat-green eyes reflecting the dim light the way that human eyes just never do.
Bean sidhe
bitch. "I don't know any ghost stories."

"Oh, I think you do," she says. "Come on, Rose. Tell us a story."

The cheerleaders pick up the request, cat-calling it across the room like I
would be somehow susceptible to peer pressure; like the opinion of a bunch of
teenage girls I've never seen before and never will again somehow matters. But
the candlelight turns their red and gold uniforms black and yellow, blurs the
outlines of their mascot until the Oxville Knights become the Buckley
Buccaneers. The tattoo at the small of my back is itching again, making it
impossible not to move.

So I move. I slide down from my stool and walk over to the circle of
cheerleaders and Emma, taking a seat in the space that opens up for me. The air
seems too thick, smells like candlewax and ice cream...feels like summer in
Michigan, when the sky presses down like a blanket, and the trees are almost too
green to believe in. I take a breath. It rasps against the back of my throat, so
I take another one, close my eyes, and begin. "This is a true story, and it
happened in the summer of 1945, in a place called Buckley Township, in the state
of Michigan. Rose Marshall was sixteen years old that summer..."