The footsteps start a few seconds after the car door slams, drawing closer with every heartbeat. Laura puts down the book and reaches into the belt of her jeans, producing a Bowie knife which she holds loosely behind her back. I guess when you've decided to commit one murder, the second one gets easier, even if that first victim was already dead.
The diner door swings open, and a dead man steps across the threshold, stopping just shy of the circle of salt. "You okay, Rose?" he asks, and his voice is young, but the tone is much older, voice of a man who's spent a decade running the roads in the midnight, where young is forever, and innocence is for an instant.
"Not really," I say, pushing myself unsteadily back to my feet. The world is reeling. I feel like I'm going to throw up. "Hi, Tommy."
Laura drops the knife.
***
"You--you can't be here," she says, taking a step toward him. Her eyes are wide behind her glasses, shock and terror and amazement mingling in her expression. "You're dead. We buried you. I cried at your funeral. You're dead."
"So's Rose, but that hasn't stopped you locking an innocent hitchhiking ghost in your little cage." He glances toward the salt line, lip curling in unconscious disgust. "I thought a lot better of you, Laura. I knew you were looking for her, but I never thought you'd do anything like this."
"Wait," I say. "You knew she was looking for me?"
I might as well have held my tongue. Laura only has eyes for Tommy, and he's just as focused on her. "Why didn't you come to me?" she demands. "I prayed every night for you to come. To haunt me. I needed you so badly."
"Dead's dead, and living's living, and I'm not the kind of ghost Rose is; I don't move between the levels as easy. I'd have been haunting you like you were an empty house, and it wouldn't have been fair. You'd never have been willing to be filled if I were there."
"I was never anyone's home without you," she whispers.
Tommy looks at her calmly, an infinity of love and disappointment in his eyes, and says, "That's not my fault, and my death wasn't hers. Now open the circle, Laura. Let Rose go."
Her eyes stay on him as she crosses back to the Seal, kicks a break in the salt, and bends to slash a Sharpie across the delicate lines of the outer ring. My substance goes the second the binding breaks, leaving me insubstantial. I have never in my life been so glad to be dead.
"Rose?" says Tommy.
"I'm okay." I step out of the circle without looking at Laura, and keep my shoulders steady as I walk out the door, to the parking lot, where the rain falls straight through me. Tommy's car flashes her lights at me as I approach, warm welcome. The passenger-side door swings open. I slip inside, leaning back into the warm seat, closing my eyes.
The sky is turning light when Tommy comes to join me. The engine starts without him turning a key. "Where to?" he asks me.
"Take me down, Tommy; take me all the way down." I shake my head. "The living are too damn dangerous for me."
The rain starts to clear as he pulls out, and we drive down through the levels of the world, away from the living and their pains, back into the world where we belong. Back down to the ghostroads, and the dead.
Building a Mystery
A Sparrow Hill Road story
by
Seanan McGuire
You live in a church where you sleep with voodoo dolls
And you won't give up the search for the ghosts in the halls
You wear sandals in the snow and a smile that won't wash away
Can you look out the window without your shadow getting in the way?
Oh you're so beautiful, with an edge and a charm,
But so careful when I'm in your arms...
-- "Building a Mystery," Sarah McLachlan.
There are as many kinds of ghost as there are ways to die, but death always starts the same way for the wandering breeds. One moment they're alive, and the next, they're not. That simple. The blink of an eye, the final beat of a broken heart, and everything changes. Everything changes forever. The newly dead tumble out of the daylight and find themselves on the ghostroads, the narrow veins of dark asphalt that run through the body of the twilight like veins through an aging hooker's thighs.
The trainspotters say that once, new arrivals found themselves standing in railway stations or next to remote stretches of track, and the routewitches say that before that, the new-dead wound up on dirt roads or narrow horse-trails. They're all the ghostroads, and they've all had one thing in common: they've all been physical evidence of the scars mankind leaves on the world. We created the ghostroads through our lives and through our deaths, and they provide a home and haven to our wandering souls...at least until the wandering is over. No one knows exactly where the terminus of the ghostroads can be found, although everyone knows that it exists. It has to. No one rides the ghostroads forever, after all; eventually, every journey comes to an end.