“You’re pretty high-strung, aren’t you?” Mary picks up a piece of rock from the shoulder, bouncing it thoughtfully in her hand before skipping it across the highway like she was skipping it across a pond. It doesn’t sink. For the rock, the road is solid. “You should really think about switching to the undead equivalent of decaf.”
“Gosh, you’re funny. You’re so funny I could just die.” I wipe some more of the tar off my arm. I’m considering taking off my jacket and letting the tar fall through me when a new sound catches my attention—the sound of an engine in the distance, the steady burn of gasoline, the friction between rubber and road. I shouldn’t be able to hear all those things from this far away, but I do, just like I shouldn’t be able to smell the sudden mixture of rosemary and sugary perfume hanging in the air. My voice is a whisper: “Someone’s coming.”
Whoever it is, they’re in danger. The road wants a sacrifice. And whoever it is, they can still be saved, if I can just figure out how.
The Last Dance Diner, 2014
“Bobby has weaknesses,” says Mary. “Vanity. Pride.”
“Tell me something I didn’t know,” I mumble. I can’t meet her eyes. They all say that she has crossroads eyes. I thought that the first time that I saw her. How could I have been so stupid? How did I not see what she was?
“He’s bound by the crossroads, same as the rest of us,” says Mary. “He can chase you to the ends of the earth, because he raced you once, on Sparrow Hill Road, and you lost. He took the pink slip on your soul.”
“What?” I stare at her. “I never agreed—”
“You didn’t have to. You were alive and you were on the road. That meant you were in the race. That’s part of the rules for him: he has to find an in. He can challenge drivers, and he can demand that routewitches race him, but he can’t interfere with pedestrians. It’s against the rules.”
“So all I have to do is get people out of their cars and they’re safe?” That can’t be the answer. For one thing, I’ve seen him go after people on foot before. Amy, back in Wisconsin. She was on foot when Bobby Cross came for her. There has to be more to this than how you’re traveling.
“Not quite,” says Mary. “He’ll cheat if he thinks he can—if there’s no crossroads ghost or crossroads guardian nearby to remind him that he’s not allowed to play dirty. And that’s another thing. He has no power at the crossroads. Get there, and he can’t touch you.”
“But I might have to make a bargain if I want to stay, right?”
Mary looks away. Gotcha.
“All right, Mary. You’re telling me stuff, but you’re not telling me the one thing I really need to know. How do I stop him? How do I kill Bobby Cross?”
She sighs. In that moment, she sounds very small, and very sad, and very much like a lost girl from Buckley. “You don’t,” she says. “He can’t be killed. But he can be weakened.”
“All right,” I say. “That’s going to have to do. How do I weaken him?”
Mary looks back to me, eyes wide. Then, slowly, she smiles. “It’s the car,” she says. “Bobby has no power. It’s all in his car. Go for the tires, the windshield, anything to weaken him—to slow him down. If you can get him off the road, he’s stuck until the car repairs itself.”
“The car runs on ghosts, right?”
“Right, but it’s the miles that keep Bobby young. Ghosts go into the gas tank, the car keeps moving, Bobby Cross remains the man who never grows old. If he stops long enough, all those years will catch up with him.”
“Good to know.” It is good to know. I just don’t know how much good it’s going to do me. I can throw rocks. That’s about the extent of my car-destroying powers.
“It’s not much, I know. Still . . .”
“Every piece helps, Mary.” I’m surprised to realize that I mean it. “Someday, we’ll get that bastard off the ghostroads. At least now I understand why he’s so set on catching up to me. Every time I slow him down, I hurt him.” Maybe someday all those little delays will be enough to take him out for good. A girl can dream, can’t she?
Mary smiles like the sun coming over the Buckley hills, and flags down Emma. “I think this calls for burgers,” she says.
Daly, Maine, 1981
The surface of the road remains still and calm, but I can hear that car getting closer in the distance. Mary doesn’t seem to hear it yet. Mary’s not a road ghost.
“Okay,” I say, mostly to myself. “There has to be an answer, there has to be . . .” Every ghost has its weaknesses. So do the undead. Their biggest weakness is usually the body, which is crumbling around the spirit it contains.
The body . . .
“Oh, I am going to regret this,” I say, and back up until my shoulders are against the slope of the hill. Mary turns to me, eyes wide.
“Rose, what are you—”
She doesn’t get to finish her question before I break into a run, sprinting as hard as I can toward that highway. When I hit the edge, I leap, and I dive, headfirst, into the smooth black pavement.
I’m still wearing the jacket. I should fetch up against the concrete, getting at minimum a bloody nose for my trouble. Instead, I break through the black like a swimmer breaks the surface of the water, and the hands rise out of the tarry dark, grabbing me and dragging me down.
This time, I don’t fight them. If anything, I help, swimming farther and farther into the black. The hands have to be taking me somewhere; they have to be feeding something, or the road wouldn’t bother with this blatant a display of power. It must think it’s going to get a reward.
My lungs are burning, but I force myself to keep my jacket on as the hands yank me ever downward. This has to end soon. This has to stop. There has to be a bottom, because there’s always a bottom, somewhere past the point of no return.
When my head slams into something solid, I know that I’ve reached it. The hands let go, but the tar remains, thick and black and cloying, pushing its way into my nostrils, my ears, every beaten, battered inch of me. I start feeling around blindly in the dark, searching the road bottom for anything that feels out of place, anything that would have been bad enough to kill this road and leave it living at the same time.
Just tar, and smooth stone, and blackness . . . and a skull. A human skull, old and frail and worn down smooth by the hot tar pouring over it. But he wasn’t old, was he? He was young when they found him walking by the roadside, sun in his hair and a pack over his shoulder, heading from nowhere to no place at an easy amble. He never saw the danger in their eyes, never saw the way they eyed his meager belongings. He was too comfortable on the road, and when they came for him—
The memories in the bone are overwhelming. I clutch it close to my chest and perform the last parlor trick that I have in me, allowing my borrowed coat to fall away from my suddenly incorporeal body. The tar goes with it. I’m still underground, but what surrounds me is the normal earth that goes beneath poured pavement. The actual skull of the long-dead hitchhiker is somewhere in the dirt. I hold its ghost in my hands, and together, the ghost and I rise through Route 14, up into the light.
Mary is still standing there when I emerge, resplendent in the green dress I never got to wear to my prom. The ghostly skull comes with me as far as the road’s surface, and then it’s gone, replaced by the young man I saw walking in the long-buried past. He’s squinting in the sun. He looks confused.
“Rose!” shouts Mary.
I turn just in time for the car I heard coming earlier to slam into us. I catch a glimpse of the terrified man behind the wheel, and then the car is gone, driving through us like we were nothing more than smoke. The taillights vanish around a bend in the road, leaving Route 14 to the dead.
“What happened?” asks the man.
“What’s your name?” I counter.
“Dennis.”
“Well, Dennis, you were brutally murdered, and then this highway”—I kick uselessly at the road; my toe passes through it—“used your unquiet spirit to fuel a murdero
us rampage. The road’s dead now. You’re free. You’re welcome.”
“You did it.” Mary walks out onto the road—which is just a road now, and will be just a road for the rest of time—and moves to join us. “I didn’t think . . .”
“I’ll add ‘highway killer’ to my list of accomplishments.” Route 14 is dead for real, now. It was already dying, and only Dennis was keeping it staggering along, like a battery shoved into a slot too small for it. The drivers who still remembered this road existed will forget it, one by one, until the forest takes it back. As for Dennis . . .
He was always meant to be a hitcher. I can see it in his eyes. Maybe now he’ll get the chance.
“What do we do now?” he asks.
I smile. “There’s a gas station near here. Let’s go put our thumbs out, and see what we catch.”
It’s no real surprise that when we turn, Mary is gone. She didn’t seem like the sort to stick around. I’m sure I’ll see her again, and maybe it’s the memory of tar filling my ears and nose, but I’m in no hurry for that to happen.
The Last Dance Diner, 2014
“Do you forgive me?” she asks.
We’re standing outside, the glare of neon from the diner’s sign casting strange lights on our hair. I can see Emma through the window, clearing away our dishes. I force myself to focus on Mary, as much as I can. “You didn’t know that what you were doing would get me killed.”
“No. But I knew it would get somebody killed. I think Bobby went back to Buckley because he knew it was my hometown. He wanted me to pay for refusing to sign the contract until the crossroads guardian wrote out the rules in full.”
“Sucks to be you,” I said. “Also sucks to be me. Sucks to be pretty much everyone, once shit like this starts going down.”
“But do you forgive me?”
I think of Dennis, smiling shyly as his first ride slowed to pick him up. He’s mostly in Canada these days, exploring all the places he never got to go when he was alive. I guess seventy years fueling an unquiet highway leaves a guy with a certain longing to see the world. He’d still be down there if not for Mary. People would still be dying there, and no one would know why.
“As much as I ever can,” I say. Mary smiles sadly. Here and now, in the shadow of the Last Dance, it seems like that will have to be enough.
Book Four
True Stories
So when sunset shuts the doors of day, I start my car,
She’s a coffin and a crypt away, and that’s too far.
When I pull up beside her and say, “Wanna ride?”
Well, I know it doesn’t matter that my baby died.
Here’s a bit of advice, boy, take it as you will:
You just might find you’ve met the love of your life at night on Dead Man’s Hill.
I don’t put much stock in sunlight or in what folks say,
It doesn’t matter if my ghost-girl’s just a myth by day.
My baby’s never gone to Heaven, wouldn’t if she could,
She likes to mix her nice with naughty, likes to shake it good.
Here’s a bit of advice, boy, take it as you will:
You just might find you’ve met the love of your life at night on Dead Man’s Hill.
She was a little too bad for Heaven, she was a little too good for Hell.
They wouldn’t light the “Vacancy” sign for any of the things that were hers to sell.
Well, if the afterlife won’t have her, she can still be an angel to me,
She’ll be my after-midnight graveyard girl for all eternity.
—excerpt from “Dead Man’s Hill,” by Johnny Sutton and the Sanders.
There is a tendency when looking at stories to ask, “What does this story mean? What does this story symbolize?” Endless arguments have centered on the symbolism of the Phantom Prom Date’s hair color and the style of her dress. Others ask whether her legend might be two ghost stories blended into one—the girl in the green silk gown, whose stories are usually negative, filled with blood and vengeance, and the girl begging for a ride by the side of the road, whose very presence allows the drivers who pick her up to avoid fatal accidents.
Several real figures have been proposed as the origins of the Phantom Prom Date. Three girls of the right approximate age and coloration died in Buckley Township, Michigan, over a twenty-year period. Their deaths were all ruled as misadventures, although some scholars have put forth the idea that the story of the Phantom Prom Date may have arisen to hide a darker tale, one of human sacrifice and attempts to raise the Devil. Whatever the case, and whatever the story’s origin, it has spread, until her pleas for a ride may be heard anywhere in North America. The Phantom Prom Date may never make it home, but she has certainly managed to make it everywhere else . . .
—On the Trail of the Phantom Prom Date, Professor Laura Moorhead, University of Colorado.
2015
Crossroads Bargains
THERE’S ONE THING every haunt, spirit, and shade on the twilight side of the ghostroads learns early and well, and it’s this: your word is sometimes the only currency you have, and those are the times when breaking it can leave you vulnerable to the kind of consequences that you don’t recover from. The Kindly Ones watch for oathbreakers. Certain types of shadow only manifest in the path of liars, and they can cling and catch like tar dredged up from the bottom of a vengeful highway. If you want to survive in the twilight, you tell the truth—at least on the ghostroads. Lying to the living that don’t belong in the twilight spaces doesn’t come with any consequences. The living don’t count. Lying to your fellow dead, on the other hand, or, God forbid, lying to the routewitches or the ambulomancers . . .
That’s playing the sort of roulette that the house always, always wins. Never make a promise that you don’t intend to keep. Never incur a debt that you don’t intend to pay. Never double-cross a routewitch. We may not have much of a life here among the dead, but what we do have is too precious to gamble on a hand that can’t possibly be won. Exorcism would be kinder than some of the tools the routewitches have at their disposal.
I was pretty honest before I died. A good girl. I’m not as good as I used to be, but I’m a lot more honest, because the stakes are a lot higher than getting grounded or missing a school dance. The stakes are death and worse-than-death, and I like my current state of being.
But that’s just me. Some people still make bargains they can’t keep; some people still make promises that they don’t intend to honor. Some people still let the bills get higher than they ever meant to pay. And some of them, Persephone give me strength . . .
Some of them are my own flesh and blood. Such as it is.
This particular stretch of Indiana highway is familiar. I’ve walked it before, and I’ll probably walk it again, the world being what it is, and people being a little reluctant to stop in the middle of a cornfield to pick up an unfamiliar teenage girl. Thanks for that one, Stephen King. You and your goddamn children of the corn can go piss up a rope for all the walking that you’ve made me do over the course of the last twenty years.
Still, it’s a beautiful evening, with that sort of purple-bruised sky that only the American Midwest ever manages to conjure. It’s almost the sort of sky we had when I was alive, before pollution gilded the world’s sunsets in all the pretty shades of poison. There are even fireflies dancing above the corn like tiny falling stars, and the whole world smells like green and good growing things. A night like this, I almost don’t mind walking. Besides, my last ride was recent enough that I still have a coat to keep me warm, anchoring me in this world for as long as I choose to stay or until that setting sun comes up again tomorrow morning, whichever comes first.
I’m so busy walking through the growing dark that I don’t hear the engine behind me, the crunch of wheels on roadside gravel, the rattle of the truck’s back gate, a battered old thing held up by rope and bailing wire as much as by the memory of what it used to be. I’m lost in my own little world, right up until strong
arms grab me around the chest, hoisting me up and off the ground almost before I can squeak. Then I’m in the hay-and-corn-husk–filled bed of the truck, and we’re accelerating away from the place where I was grabbed, and all I can think is that we’re about eight seconds away from someone getting slapped.
Common sense wins out for once, and I decide to forgo slapping in favor of the more sensible option: letting go and dropping back down into the twilight. So I release my hold on the coat that binds me to the mortal world, and it falls through the memory of my flesh to land with a rustle in the chaff surrounding us. Then I let go, and I fall . . .
... right into the bed of a clapped-out old junker of a pickup truck, the bed filled with hay and corn husks. The man who grabbed me is watching with obvious amusement, not making an effort to hide it. Slapping still sounds like a good option, but if these people can drive straight from the daylight to the twilight that might not be the best idea.
I straighten, trying to look like I’m not scared enough to bolt for the deepest, darkest hole I can find. These people could probably follow me there. “Okay, you fuckers, I’m warning you, I’m a bad person to abduct. I have friends.”
My abductor laughs at that—actually laughs, like I just said something unbelievably funny. There’s an answering chuckle from behind me, and I glance over my shoulder to see the first man’s virtual twin. They’re both sturdy blond Minnesota-looking farm boys, so clichéd that they could have walked out of the pages of a L’il Abner funnybook adventure forty years ago. “Miss Rose, I think you don’t quite understand what’s going on here,” he says, accent confirming my guess as to his heritage.