“Please,” he moans. There’s no gunshot this time. Just the pleading, just the prayer that maybe if he asks me nicely enough, I’ll stop.
“No, Dmitri, no, because you have no right to take these people’s lives away from them.” I’m in front of him now, and so I reach out and take the gun. I reach out with my ghost fingers that shouldn’t be able to touch or take anything, but they wrap around the metal all the same, and when I tug, he lets go. Poor little strigoi. More gently, I say, “You’re dead, Dmitri. I’m sorry.”
His eyes fill with tears, and he looks past me to the huddled hostages clinging to each other in the shadows of this suddenly haunted diner. Two dead people for the price of one. Welcome to the ghostroads.
“How long?” he whispers.
“Twenty-one years.”
Those words seem to take all the strength out of him. He hits his knees as the smell of ashes and lilies fades into memory, replaced by the normal scents of a living diner, apple pie and bubble gum and scrambled eggs and coffee. I put the gun down on the nearest table, where it wisps into nothingness before any of the hostages can make a grab for it. That’s good. I don’t have time to worry about a hero right now; I’m too busy worrying about a dead man.
“No no no no,” Dmitri moans, rocking back and forth.
“Yes.” I crouch and grab his wrists, pulling him halfway back to upright. “Yes. It was a long time ago, and yes. It happened.”
“We were—we were pulling into the driveway. Then there was this flash, and the sun was going down, and Trina and the bike were gone.” He lifts his head, studying my face like he thinks he’ll find the answers he’s looking for in me. Best of luck to him. I’ve been looking for the answers for fifty years, and I haven’t found them yet. “I still . . . I had the gun, and I came in here, and it was all wrong, it was just so damn wrong, and it made me so damn mad . . .”
I want to be angry with him. I want to be furious. He shot me. He killed people.
He died here. Poor little strigoi, who didn’t know what he was doing, just that he was alone; who didn’t even know that he’d already left the daylight twenty-one years behind him. He died in fire. Maybe that’s punishment enough for what he’s done tonight. Maybe not. Either way, it’s not my place to judge. I tug him to his feet, keeping hold of his wrists, not letting him go.
“You’re coming with me,” I tell him. “But first, you’re going to wait here.”
A flash of arrogance in those eyes. “And what if I don’t?”
All I have to do is smile and the arrogance crumbles, replaced by confusion, fear . . . and relief. No one wants to haunt the living forever, not once they realize that they’re dead. At least I’m offering him another way. “You will,” I say, and let him go, turning my back.
He waits.
There have been five casualties all told, five lives ended by a dead man. Dinah comes the quickest, towing a mousy-looking girl by one wrist. The mouse wears a uniform just like Dinah’s. Her name is Josie, and she has a lovely smile. A teenage boy fades out of the woodwork as Josie and I finish making introductions. He has acne on his forehead, and the kind of hands that were meant for cupping a woman’s hips long into the night. He says his name is Michael. I say it’s nice to meet him, and he looks away, mumbles something about better circumstances. I can’t blame him for that one.
The college boy’s name is Anthony, and even when he comes to me, he stays so faded that I can see the walls right through him. The last one to emerge is an old man whose cane has crossed to the ghostroads with him, a sturdy piece of oak for him to lean on until he realizes that he doesn’t need it anymore. I gather them all to me, five little pieces of the twilight, and we turn and walk back to the doorway where Dmitri is waiting.
“It’s time to go,” I tell him, and he nods, resignation radiating from his face like sunlight. Poor little strigoi. Looking back over my shoulder, I meet the eyes of the fry cook, and say, “Don’t unlock the doors until we’re gone.”
“I won’t,” he says, in a voice that barely qualifies as a whisper. Poor everyone. Half these people will never leave the twilight. The other half may fight their way back into the daylight, but they’ll never dream without crying again. That’s the penalty for this sort of deathday party; that’s what happens when things overlap this completely.
I turn away, stepping through the glass of the door without opening it. The others follow me, phantom parade out into the parking lot, and the line dividing the daylight from the twilight fades with every step we take, until there’s only the dark, and still we walk on, out of the twilight, into the midnight, where the ghostroads are the only route to anywhere.
We walk on, going home.
“What happens now?”
“You all wait here. Someone will come along to get you soon enough.”
“But—”
“I don’t know who will come, and I don’t know where they’ll take you. You’re not road ghosts, and that means you’re outside my jurisdiction.” I look at the crowd, tattered little spirits, frightened and lost here in the midnight before their time. Even Dmitri isn’t really prepared, and he’s the only one who’s been dead for any time at all. Finally, I sigh, and say, “If you’re not sure—if you’re not ready to take the final exit off the highway and see what’s on the other side—ask whoever it is to drop you off at the Last Dance. They usually need staff.”
Dinah, Josie, and Michael can probably find work there; Anthony and the old man can at least get a good cup of coffee before they continue on.
Dmitri looks at me levelly, and asks, “Think they’d take me?”
I meet his eyes, and answer: “No. But I’ve been wrong before.”
He nods, and that’s the end. I turn and walk away, leaving the six of them standing beneath the bus stop sign at the edge of the ghostroad highway that runs between here and there. They’ll find their way soon enough; the dead always do. My prom dress dissolves into jeans and a white T-shirt that can’t keep out the cold, my hair shedding its careful curls in favor of the short-cropped bob I favor these days. Changing with the times is sometimes the best I can do.
Shoving my hands into the pockets of my jeans, I walk on, down the cold line of midnight, moving toward the distant glow of dawn.
2012
True Love Dies Like Everything Else
I SPENT MY FIRST YEAR on the ghostroads trying to find a way off them and back into the lands of the living. I walked the frontage roads that run closest to the surface of the twilight, scaring the living crap out of countless fraternity boys and high school seniors as I flagged them down, begged them to take me home, and then disappeared on them. The first stage of grief is denial, even among the dead.
I spent my second year trying to find someone I could argue with, someone who’d have the authority to take back what had happened to me. Angels, demons, rumors, I chased them all. I got luckier than I deserved to be: I didn’t catch any of them. Instead, I walked the sorrow off my shoes, and walked myself deeper down into the twilight, where I could start to learn the realities of my new existence. It took a lot of years and a lot of walking to work my way deep enough to come back into the light, and maybe that’s the biggest secret that the ghostside has to offer; that if you work long enough to reach the darkness, you’re almost inevitably going to find your way to the light. They’re the same thing, viewed from two different directions, and they can both get you lost, and they can both bring you home.
The danger in walking your way to freedom is the way things change depending on your point of view. What’s dark to me is light to you; what’s true to you is lies to me. I leave the philosophy to the umbramancers and the routewitches, and I try to keep myself focused on the things that matter in the here and now: following the whispers of the running road, following the signs that lead me between the layers of America, and learning to read the palimpsest etchings that dig deep as bruises and unchanging as scars into the flesh of the ghostside. I’ve been in the dark a lot longer t
han I was in the light, and while I still regret the way that I died, I’ve given up on trying to fight my way back. All I want to do now is find a way to stop the man who condemned me to this twilight wandering—the one who would have done a lot worse, if I’d given him the chance.
I guess you can call me an angel of vengeance, these days. That and a quarter used to be enough to buy a cup of coffee. Still is, at the Last Dance. Everywhere else . . . not so much.
The trouble with truth is that it’s subjective, depending entirely on where you were standing when you saw the accident happen. Maybe you saw the first car veer to avoid hitting a cat, and maybe you didn’t. Maybe you saw the second car try to hit the brakes, and maybe you only saw them go careening into the vehicle ahead of them, making no attempt to slow in the moments before impact. Maybe all you saw was the shadow of the cat as it darted through the underbrush, running away from a tearing roar that sounded like the end of the world. Every splinter of the broken glass of the moment is a genuine part of the whole, but none of them is the whole in and of itself. We carry our own truths tucked away inside us, bright bits of glass blunted by our living flesh, and when they come into the light, we bleed.
No one saw the accident that killed me. No one but me and Bobby Cross, and I’m sure the version he’d give you is very different from mine.
Honesty is in the eye of the beholder. It can be hard as hell to tell the truth from broken lies even when all the pieces of the puzzle happen in the daylight. When half the story is buried in shallow graves along the ghostroads, it can turn impossible to tell what’s real from what’s not . . . and sometimes, without that knowledge, there’s no way to move past grieving into acceptance. Sometimes, the dead aren’t the only casualties, especially here. Especially in the dark.
Jackson, Maine, 1992.
It’s a beautiful night, all big white moon and the distant gold-silver glitter of too many stars to count, scattered across this desert sky like dime store confetti. This is the middle of nowhere, one of those places that manages to exist half a mile outside of every jurisdiction, half an hour away from any sort of safety, real or not. The man—the boy, fuck, he’s barely twenty-two, he’s too young to be here—behind the wheel of this aging Toyota is practically vibrating as he gazes toward the stretch of road ahead of us. He’d be handsome, if he didn’t look so scared, if he wasn’t so damn close to tumbling into twilight, leaving this road and all the roads like it behind him forever. We’ve been parked here for ten minutes now, while he tried to talk himself into something irrevocable, and I tried to talk him out of it.
“That’s the raceway,” he says, and he means the empty expanse of nothing he can’t stop looking at, that little slice of nowhere-road that stretches smooth and deserted through the night. He’s breathing too fast, just this side of panting, tension filling the car like smoke. He doesn’t want to be here. He thinks he does, but he’s wrong. “You’ll be able to find another ride from here. There’s lots of guys here every night. One of them will be going your way.”
I seriously doubt that. This is pure daylight road, for all that the sun’s gone down, and the only piece that edges into the twilight is the driver himself, boy who thinks he’s a man, boy teasing things he should know enough to leave alone. I’ve been trying to steer him away from this place since I asked him for a ride two hours ago, and he didn’t listen then, and he isn’t listening now. The smell of ashes and lilies is gathering around him, accident preparing to happen, coming on stronger with every minute that ticks past.
“I don’t think this is a good idea, Tommy.” He isn’t listening. I still have to try. I always have to try, because that’s part of how this story goes: part of what keeps me on the edge I walk along. If I start walking away from the ones who might be saved, I’ll lose my grasp on the narrow line of the twilight, sink deeper down into the dark, and never find my way back to the levels where the living play spin-the-bottle with the dead. I’ve seen it happen. I have to try. “We should go back. We should—”
“My girl deserves better than some crackerjack ring from a grease monkey.” There’s a set to his jaw that I know. Gary used to look like that, late nights in the diner when he was telling me how we were going to get out of town someday, how we’d be together forever, and he wouldn’t be just a mechanic, and I wouldn’t be just the mechanic’s girl. I bite my knuckles. The pain helps, a little. Not enough, but it keeps the tears out of my eyes, and right here, right now, I’ll settle for what I can get. “You understand, don’t you, Rose?”
I understand the way poverty can turn solid in the middle of the night, pressing down on your chest until it steals your breath away, the way they used to say cats stole the breath from babies in their cradles. I understand watching your father work until all he can do when he gets home is drink to forget how much work’s still waiting, until the day he doesn’t come home at all, and watching your mother clip coupons and count her pennies, skirting a little closer to the edge every day. I understand hand-me-down skirts and triple-darned socks, cabbage soup and homemade shampoo. I understand better than he thinks I do.
Most of all, I understand that this is not the way.
“Turn back,” I whisper, and Tommy starts the engine, and we roll onward, toward the raceway, toward the future, toward the place where the road he’s on now comes to its inevitable end.
We roll on.
Jackson, Maine, 2012.
March has slammed down on the American coast with the force of a hurricane, washing out bridges and turning the roads into something closer to an obstacle course. Rides are always harder to get during March and April; it’s warm enough that you lose the wintertime “poor thing, come in out of the cold,” but it’s wet and nasty enough that no one wants to slow and stop for a stranger. Springtime is the worst time of year for hitching. I keep walking along the edge of the pavement, thumb thrust jauntily upward. Either I’ll find a ride or I’ll find a rest stop; that’s how this works. In the meanwhile, if I want to stay on this level of America, I’ll keep following the rules, and the rules say that hitchhiking ghosts, well, hitch.
The rules will change if I can get someone to give me a coat. Even the definition of “coat” is a generous one, since I’ve been able to accept jackets, sweaters, lab coats, smocks, even once—at a carnival in Alabama, where the ground was the color of dried blood and the rain came down so hard it seemed like the sky was falling—a yellow plastic rain slicker. Any of them is enough to shift me off the ghostroads and back into the light. I’m not quite the living and not quite the dead when I have a coat to steal substance from, and in that in-between state, a lot of rules don’t apply. They can’t catch hold for long enough to bind me.
Staying wet was one of the hardest things to learn about hitching in the rain. You can recognize young hitchers easily when it rains; they’re the ones walking in a downpour and staying completely dry, because the water doesn’t even know they’re there. Never open your doors to a dry stranger in a rainstorm, not unless you’re sure of your protection against possessions. Older hitchers understand that being able to change your clothing with a thought means being able to change dry clothes into wet clothes, even if it’s only ghost-water, even if it only dampens the ghostside. Most people don’t look closely enough to catch that little distinction, and once one of us has a coat in our hands, well, it’s like I said. All the rules change.
It won’t be the end of the world if I can’t catch a ride on this stretch of deserted Maine highway, hemmed in by the creeping undergrowth and ringed with ditches full of muddy runoff. I’ve gone without rides before, and with the way the rain keeps pounding down, I’d be cold even with a living person’s coat to loan me warmth. That’s the worst thing about being dead: the cold that never ends. Only way to beat it back is to join the living for a little while, but on a night like this, I’m not sure I want to be warm quite that badly.
There’s a truck stop ahead. I remember it from the last time I walked this way, and the road may be worn-down a
nd lonely, but it isn’t singing the songs of the completely abandoned. Even if the stop is limping on its last legs, the doors are open, the coffee is hot, and the neon is still sending out its lighthouse prayers to the sailors of the inland American sea. “Come to me, come to me, and I will grant you warmth, and I will be your home until the tide rolls out.”
Roads don’t sing the same when the stops close down. They turn lonely, and then they turn bitter, and then they turn dangerous. If you’re lucky, they die after that. If you’re not, a lot of people die before the road does. I helped to kill a highway once, one that tried to keep on going after the beán sidhe keened its termination and the ambulomancers read its future in the potholes on the blacktop and the pebbles on the median. That’s an experience I’d be happy never to have again.
The sky rolls white with lightning, and the rain starts falling harder, pounding straight through me like it wants to wash the world away. I keep my thumb out—follow the rules, always follow the rules, it’s breaking the rules that gets you in trouble—and walk a little faster, following the lighthouse song of safety through the night.
Too much focus can be a dangerous thing. The condition of the truck stop parking lot barely registers with me when I finally get there, head down, walking to escape the rain. Potholes and broken pavement are a consequence of use as much as neglect, and the truck stop is singing. That should be enough. I’m halfway across the parking lot when the song cuts off, abrupt as a razor blade in candyfloss, and I lift my eyes to the shattered shell of a sanctuary. The bones of the truck stop are standing almost naked in the night, the skeletal pumps, the broken shell of the garage, the crumbling diner with its neon sign, unlit, still almost intact on the edge of the roof. This is no lighthouse. This is a tomb.