Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(26)

"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 was 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 grits the asphalt just enough to reduce the danger of spin-outs. 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, 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's Rose. 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 1945. 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 actually 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."

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, waiting for some idiot to figure out how to handle me. I don't say anything. 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.