He waits.
***
There have been five casualties, all told. Dinah comes the quickest, towing a mousy-looking girl in a uniform just like hers. The mouse is named Elisa. She has a lovely smile. After the two of them have calmed down, a teenage boy fades out of the woodwork, acne on his forehead, hands like an artist. 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's so faded I can see the walls right through him. The last to emerge is an old man whose cane has crossed to the ghostroads with him, 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 Paul 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, voice barely a whisper. Poor everyone. Half these people will never leave the twilight again. The other half may fight their way free, but they'll never dream the daylight. That's the penalty for this sort of deathday party; that's what happens when things overlap this cleanly.
I turn away, exit through the glass of the door. 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?"
"Wait here. Someone will come along and get you soon enough."
"But--"
"I don't know who will come, and I don't know where they'll take you." I look at the crowd, tattered little spirits, frightened and lost here in the midnight before their time. Even Paul 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 exit--ask whoever it is to drop you off at the Last Dance. They usually need staff." Dinah, Elisa, 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.
Paul 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 up-do in favor of the short-cropped bob I favor these days. Changing with the times is sometimes the best that 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.
Tell Laura I Love Her
A Sparrow Hill Road story
by
Seanan McGuire
No one knows what happened that day, how his car overturned in flames,
But as they pulled him from the twisted wreck
With his dying breath they heard him say:
"Tell Laura I love her. Tell Laura I need her
Tell Laura not to cry, my love for her will never die..."
-- "Tell Laura I Love Her," Dicky Lee.
I spent my first year on the ghostroads in denial, walking 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. 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. Every story has a thousand truths behind it, because everything looks different depending on where you were standing when you saw it happen. 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 than 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.