I have another road ahead of me. Tucking my hands into my pockets to show that I’m not looking for a ride, I turn and start walking toward the border, and the beginning of the old Atlantic Highway. I’m a long way from home. I’ll go a lot farther before this night is done.
The first routewitch I ever met was named Eloise. She had sun-chapped skin the color of old pennies, curly brown hair, and the sharpest eyes I’ve ever seen. I was hitching my way toward Michigan when she picked me up; she drove a rattling old pickup truck in those days, the bed fenced in with wooden slats and piled high with potatoes. “Get in,” she said. That was all. None of the pleasantries, none of the pretenses. “Get in,” and that was all.
She handed me a heavy wool sweater and a paper bag once I was in the truck, not even waiting for me to start my usual routine. “I made the sandwiches myself,” she said. “The cookies are crap, and the coffee in the thermos ain’t much better, but I figure it’ll do you well enough, considering your circumstances. What’s your name, girl?”
“Rose,” I said, shrugging into the sweater. The wool settled across my shoulders, and my heart began to beat, steady internal drumbeat keeping me anchored to the world that I was once more a part of. I took a breath, and saw that she was watching me, a small smile on her lips.
“Rose, huh? Would that be White Rose out of Tennessee, or Rose Marshall out of Michigan?”
I almost stripped the sweater off and ran. But the way she was looking at me didn’t seem hostile, just curious, and so I stayed where I was, and we started talking. I’d heard of routewitches before—everyone hears about the routewitches, if they stay in the twilight long enough—but I’d never seen one. She wasn’t what I’d been expecting, more Dorothy Gale than Glinda the Good Witch, and when I told her that, she laughed so hard she nearly ran us off the road.
“Now you listen to me, Rose Marshall out of Michigan, and you listen close, because there’s not much in this world going to help you more than what I’ve got to say. The routewitches, and the trainspotters—hell, even the ambulomancers, a’though you don’t ever want to tell one of them I said this—we’re just folks like anybody else. It’s only that we listen different than most people do. The road talks to us, and we know how to talk back. Thing is, the road knows a secret or two. Like how to spot a hitcher when it comes strolling along, looking for a life to share.”
Eloise died years ago; her ghost rides the California coast in a battered old pickup truck a decade younger than the one she was driving on the night she picked me up. I see her, from time to time—I’ve even ridden with her. She’s a good person. Most routewitches are, even the dead ones.
She’s also the one who taught me about the Atlantic Highway. “The daylight was afraid of the power in that road, so they banished Her to the deeper levels as soon as they could. Route 1 claimed to be the old Atlantic, but they folded it farther inland than the Ocean Lady, pulled it away from Her places of power. Even that wasn’t enough for them. They broke the back of Route 1, carved it into a dozen tributaries and threw it away. Guess no one ever told them that you can’t kill something that’s written that deeply into the land. You ever need to see the Queen, Rose Marshall out of Michigan, you follow the Ocean Lady. She’ll take you where it is you need to go.”
The Atlantic Highway isn’t a safe place for the dead. There are too many ghosts packed onto its slow-spooling miles, and once you start, it can be all but impossible to stop. The Ocean Lady runs from Calais, Maine to Key West down in Florida, and the Queen of the Routewitches keeps her court somewhere in the Lady’s asphalt embrace. That’s where I need to go. If anyone can tell me what to do from here—what I have to do, what I’ve been putting off for too damn long—it’s the routewitch Queen.
I take a breath I don’t need, close my eyes, and step from the ghostroads onto the old Atlantic Highway. The Ocean Lady stretches out beneath my feet, and there’s nothing to do from here but walk on, and pray.
I don’t know how long I’ve been walking. Long enough, that’s for sure. My feet ache, which strikes me as singularly unfair. I’m not among the living here, walking the spine of the Ocean Lady from Maine to God-knows-where; I’m freezing through, which is my normal state of being, and I’d kill for a cheeseburger. All the normal trials and tribulations of my death are weighing on me, and normally, the one good thing about being dead is knowing that I can walk forever without getting tired.
“This sucks,” I mutter, and keep walking.
I haven’t seen another soul, living or dead, since I started down the old Atlantic Highway. The scenery on either side is blurred and indistinct, world viewed through a veil of cotton candy fog. I can feel the ghostroads running through the levels nearby, but I don’t know that I could reach them if I tried. The Ocean Lady has her own ideas about shortcuts like that, and she isn’t always a fan of the dead.
One thing’s for sure: I’ve been walking longer than the stretch of a single night, and the sky hasn’t lightened in the least. It’s always dark in the twilight, but there’s normally a sort of gloaming when the sun rises and sets in the daylight—something to keep us in tune with the passage of time. This is just . . . darkness. Darkness that doesn’t end, not until the old Atlantic Highway does.
This is starting to seem like it might not have been such a good idea after all. I still can’t think of anything better, and so I keep on walking, into the dark.
I have never wanted to punch a highway in the face as badly as I do right now.
I’m on the verge of abandoning this idiotic quest, clawing my way back to the daylight and flagging down the first car I see, when the Ocean Lady starts singing under my feet, and the song that she’s singing is “truck stop ahead.” That’s a new one on me. I start to walk a little faster, forgetting how sore my feet are as I move toward this new mystery.
Then I walk around a curve in the road, and there it is ahead of me: the mother of all truck stops, the truck stop on which all the pumps and service garages and five-dollar showers were modeled. Its neon burns the fog away like a searchlight, until the whole thing is illuminated and holy, the chapel on the hill remade in the image of America. I stop where I am, breath hitching in my chest, pain and cold and hunger all forgotten as I gape like a tourist on her first day in New York City. This is my destination, the heart of the Ocean Lady, the chapel of the routewitches . . . and if this whole adventure was a bad idea, it’s officially too late to turn back now.
A routewitch apprentice I vaguely recognize meets me at the truck stop turnoff, his sneakers crunching in the gravel that encroaches from the shoulder, looking to betray careless drivers. Acne scars dot his cheeks, and his lips are wind-chapped. He’s cute enough, and he’d be handsome if he took the time to comb his hair, straighten his shirt, and dig the oil from underneath his nails. “What is your name and your business, traveler?” he asks, words running together until they’re almost like a song.
I’m Rose Marshall out of Michigan. I’m the Girl in the Diner, I’m the Lady in Green, I’m the Phantom Prom Date, I’m the Shadow of Sparrow Hill Road. All those names—all those stories—flash through my mind as my mouth opens, and I answer, “My name is Rose Marshall. I’ve walked the Ocean Lady down from Calais to visit the Queen, if she’ll see me. I have a question for her to ask the roads for me.”
He reaches up to scratch at the scabbed-over pimples at one temple, frowning. He probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it. “Be you of the living, or be you of the dead?” More ritual, and stupid ritual at that—he knows I’m dead. Routewitches always know.
Or maybe not. This is the Ocean Lady, after all, and she makes her own rules. “I died on Sparrow Hill Road, in the fall of 1952. How about you?”
Oh, he’s young, this routewitch, and more, he’s new to the twilight; he isn’t used to dead girls talking back to him. He’ll learn. Almost all the dead are a little mouthy. I think it comes from knowing that most of the things you’ll run into simply don’t have the equipment it would take to actuall
y hurt you. He frowns for a moment, trying to remember the words of the ritual, and then continues, “The dead should be at peace, and resting. Why are you not at peace, little ghost?”
I fold my arms across my chest and glare. “Maybe because I’m standing outside in the wind, being harassed by an apprentice who doesn’t know his ass from an eight-foot hole in the ground with a body at the bottom. I have walked the goddamn Ocean Lady to visit the Queen, and you’re rapidly burning off my pretty shallow reserves of patience. Are you going to let me in or not?”
“I—” He stops, looking at me helplessly. “I don’t know.”
Lady Persephone and her sacred midnight preserve me from routewitches who don’t know their own traditions. “How about I wait here while you run back to your trail guide and find out?”
His eyes light up. “You’d do that?”
Of course I won’t do that. There’s no level, daylight on down, where I’d stand out here alone while I waited for some idiot to figure out how to handle me. I don’t say anything one way or the other. I just watch him.
“Wait here,” he says, making a staying motion with his hands, and turns to run down across the truck stop parking lot, toward the diner. The neon seems to brighten as he approaches, like a loving wife welcoming her husband home from the war.
I follow him, the gravel crunching under my feet. My skirt swirls around my legs, and I realize I’m back in my prom dress. Changing my clothes should take less than a second—having a wardrobe defined only by the limits of my imagination has been one of the few benefits of death—but no matter how hard I concentrate, the green silk remains. Suddenly, the reason for the apprentice’s confusion makes a lot more sense. The Ocean Lady is somewhere between ghost and goddess, and on her ground, there is no difference between the living and the dead.
I shake my head, and follow the apprentice routewitch inside.
Every diner, roadhouse, and saloon is a tiny miracle, a piece of comfort and safety carved out of the wild frontier of the road. I died in the age of diners, when chrome and red leather and the sweet song of the jukebox were the trappings of the road’s religion. From the outside, that’s what this stop on the Ocean Lady looks like to me. The perfect diner, a place where the malteds would be sweet and gritty on the tongue, the fries would be crisp, and the coffee would be strong enough to wake the dead. As the apprentice reaches the door, some ten feet ahead of me, I catch a glimpse of what he sees; his hand ripples the facade, and for a moment, it’s a roadhouse, tall and solid and hewn from barely-worked trees. Then he’s inside, and the diner is back again.
The diner remains as I finish my trek across the parking lot, and the burnished metal door handle is cool and solid as I curl my fingers around it. I can hear music from inside, Johnnie Ray singing about walking his baby back home. That song got a lot of radio play in the weeks before I died, hit of the early summer, soundtrack of Gary’s hands cupping the curve of my waist and his breath coming hot and sweet against my neck.
I open the door, and step inside.
The diner melts away—as I more than half-expected that it would, carnival illusion meant to call the faithful and the faithless alike—and I am standing in a saloon pulled straight from the American West, miles and centuries away from the time and place that I came walking from. There are easily two dozen routewitches here, talking, laughing, eating. One pair is making out in a corner, randy as teenagers. I’ve never seen this many routewitches in one place before, and the miles they carry have an almost physical presence. The sheer weight of all that mapped-out road distorts the fabric of the room, dragging it into a shape that I don’t know.
“Told you she wouldn’t stay on the curb, Paul,” calls one of the routewitches, a middle-aged Hispanic man with a bristling mustache. “You owe me a cup of coffee.”
The apprentice who met me at the gate scowls and kicks the bar, refusing to look at me. Every society has its hazing rituals. I’m not sure I like being part of this one. “Excuse me,” I say, looking around the saloon, studying the routewitches. The oldest I see must be in his nineties; the youngest, no more than eight. The road isn’t picky about who she calls, or when she calls them. “I’ve walked the Ocean Lady to see the Queen. You think that could happen today, maybe?”
“That depends,” says the mustached routewitch. He stands, walking toward me. “What are you here about? This isn’t a place for ghosts, little one, not even those who’ve died on the road. You have your own cathedrals.”
“The Queen of the Routewitches doesn’t visit our cathedrals.” And neither do I. Hitchers are spirits of the running road, the diners and the dead ends. The cathedrals of the dead are built in frozen places, moments sealed in ice and locked away forever. Road-spirits can’t last in places like that for long, not without curdling and going sour, turning into nothing but sickness and rage. I avoid the cathedrals of the dead whenever I can. Stay in them too long, and I wouldn’t be Rose Marshall anymore. I’d be what the stories make me out to be. “My mama taught me that when you can’t get the mountain to come to you, you’d better be prepared to go to the mountain.”
“So you hopped onto the Ocean Lady like She was just another road, and thought our Queen would see you, is that it? Seems a bit arrogant for a long-dead thing like you.”
“Yeah, well, your attitude seems a bit asshole-ish for a guardian of the American road, but you don’t see me judging, do you? Oh, wait. I just did. Sorry.” I cross my arms, glare, try to look like I’m not a reject from a 1950s prom night that ended more than half a century ago. “I’m here to see the Queen. A routewitch named Eloise told me how to get here, if I ever had the need.”
His mustache curls upward at the corners, his grin spilling out across his face like it’s too big to be contained. “Shit, girl, why didn’t you say? How is that old carretera bruja? She running hard?”
“She’s a phantom rider driving the length of California, giving rides, giving advice, and picking oranges, last time I saw her. She said it was more fun than the alternatives.” I continue glaring. “Was this some sort of trick question to get me to prove that I didn’t know her? Because math would be better if you wanted me to give you a wrong answer. I suck at math.”
“You’re Rose Marshall, the Shadow of Sparrow Hill Road,” says one of the other routewitches. She puts down her sandwich and stands, stretching languidly before she walks toward me. Her expression is lively with undisguised curiosity. She’s a tiny thing, a whisper somehow stretched into a slight sigh of a girl, Japanese by blood, American by accent, dressed in jeans and a road-worn wool sweater at least three sizes too big for her. “The Ocean Lady let you through?”
“That, or this is the single most irritating hallucination I’ve ever had,” I answer, watching her carefully. She’s clean, this little routewitch with her close-clipped fingernails and her fountain-fall of black silk hair. Most routewitches don’t bother with that sort of thing. The road dresses them in dust, and they wear it proudly, carrying the maps of where they’ve been in the creases of their skin. But a routewitch who doesn’t swear allegiance to any single route, to any single road . . . she’d need to be clean. I quirk an eyebrow up, and take a guess: “Am I addressing the Queen?”
“I guess that’s up to you, isn’t it?” she asks.
Stupid routewitches and their stupid rituals. I take a breath, and say, as I said to the man at the gate, “My name is Rose Marshall, once of Buckley Township in Michigan. I died on Sparrow Hill Road on a night of great importance, and have wandered the roads ever since. I’ve walked the Ocean Lady down from Calais to visit the Queen, if she’ll see me. I have a question for her to ask the roads for me.”
She raises her eyebrows, looks at me thoughtfully, and asks, “Is that all?”
My patience is anything but infinite. Scowling, I say, “Who does a girl gotta blow to get herself a beer in this place?”
And the Queen of the North American Routewitches smiles.
They have good beer here, these routewitches
do, and their grill is properly aged, old grease caught in the corners, the drippings of a hundred thousand steaks and bacon breakfasts and cheeseburgers scraped from a can and used to slick it down before anything starts cooking. The plate they bring me groans under a triple-decker cheeseburger and a pile of golden fries that smell like summer nights and stolen kisses—and they smell, even before the platter hits the table. I look to the routewitch Queen, silent question in my eyes.
“Eat up,” she says, reaching for her own plate. “The Ocean Lady doesn’t feel the need to withhold the simple joys from anyone who’s brave enough to walk this far along Her spine.”
“I may have to take back a few of the things I said while I was walking.” The fries taste better than they smell, which may be a miracle all by itself. The Queen is already eating, ignoring me completely now that she has a meal in front of her. I don’t know much about routewitch etiquette, but I’ve learned to go with the flow of things. If she wanted to eat before we talked, well, at least contact had been made.
The other routewitches settle all over the room, some of them sitting at tables, some perching on the bar. A few even sit on the floor. They break out decks of cards and tattered paperbacks, fall into hushed conversations, down shots of whiskey, but they’re watching us. Every eye in the place is on the Queen, and on the uninvited guest who’s come to try her patience.
The Queen looks up, sees me watching them watching us, and laughs. “Don’t worry,” she says, fingers grazing my wrist at the point where my resurrected pulse beats strong and steady. The half-life of the hitcher extends here, it seems, and I didn’t even have to swipe a coat. “They get protective of me sometimes, and your reputation is a little . . . mixed.”