My waystation is a little diner that looks like it was built in the mid-forties, all chrome and cherry leather and the sound of the jukebox that never runs out of tunes. The music changes sometimes, updating itself to the tastes of the patrons, but the jukebox itself is always the same, sweet and clean and retro-futuristic in design, the sort of thing we used to pretend was all the rage on Mars. It would be a museum piece, in the daylight. For me, it's like a snapshot of home, in the days before I died. The Last Dance wasn't built for me, and I'm not the only psychopomp who uses it, but it might as well have been. If I have a home anymore, it's there.
The waystations exist for the dead, belong to the dead, but they aren't owned by the dead. Too many of us are only passing through, psychopomps because of circumstance, making a few runs along the road before we give in to the call of taking that last exit, riding that midnight train to whatever's waiting on the other side. The natives of the twilight tend to the waystations, using them to provide them with a purpose, something to keep them from sliding down into the midnight. They work for everyone, in a way.
When you die on the road, if you're lucky, a phantom rider or a hitchhiking ghost will be there, waiting, to offer you directions to the Last Dance Diner. Best malts this side of the 1950s, pie to die for, and best of all, a chance to rest, for just a little while, before moving on...and everyone moves on, in the end.
Everyone goes.
***
It's midnight in the Last Dance Diner. That's nothing strange; it's always midnight here, or close to it, the hands on the clock locked in perpetual embrace above the window that cuts through to the kitchen. Heating lights shine down on the clean surface of the counter there, warming stacks of pancakes and cheeseburgers with their accompanying heaps of fries. Nothing ever stays on the counter long--Emma's staff is too well-trained, the diner running like a well-oiled machine whenever someone actually comes through looking for a meal--but its presence is reassuring, granting glimpses of other people's meals as you wait for your own. Normally, anyway. That's how it's supposed to work.
Not tonight.
Tonight, the kitchen is dark, the cook and busboy and even the dishwasher gone to attend to some accident down the road, an accident bad enough that when it happened, they sat up like hunting dogs hearing their master call and were out the door almost before Emma gave them permission. I stayed behind. I didn't taste ashes, I didn't smell lilies...I wasn't involved. There's no point in rushing to an accident that I had no part in. It wouldn't have me if I tried, and those who died in its embrace will have other psychopomps to lead them home.
The shades I came here to shepherd are long gone, all of them passing through the doors with murmurs of "I'll be right back" that must inevitably come to nothing. Psychopomps lead the dead home. We don't go with them. For a little while--not long, but a little while--it was just me and Emma, her in her cotton candy-colored uniform and sensible shoes, me in the faded jeans and white tank top that are practically my uniform, these days. I change my clothes to suit the people who pick me up, but when I'm left to my own devices, I always seem to wind up back in the jeans I wasn't supposed to wear, in the shirt I borrowed from Gary, once upon a time and once upon a life ago.
Then tires crunched on the gravel of the parking lot, headlights shining briefly through the window. "Go toward the light," they tell the dead, but in my experience, the light has always been an oncoming car. Emma pushed herself away from the counter, offered me a small, apologetic smile, and said, "The Last Dance is open for business, even when the kitchen's closed," and went to greet her customers. That was an hour ago. They're still here. Busload of cheerleaders in school colors, red and gold, frilled skirts that would have been suitable only for porn stars and pin-up girls when I was their age--really their age, not just a shade who'll be sixteen until the stars blow out at last. The logo on their sweaters marks them as the Oxville Knights, and their laughter--loud and gleeful and ringing from the rafters--marks them as the living.
Maybe. Because they're here, in the Last Dance, and we get the living sometimes, but normally not for this long, and normally not this many of them at one time. It's possible that they just took the wrong series of exits from the highway, turned on the wrong frontage roads and followed the wrong signs, but...I don't know. Something's wrong. Emma brings them malteds and pie ala mode, things that don't require an understanding of the grill and the fryer, and something's wrong, and I just don't know what it is.
Outside the diner, thunder rolls, and rain begins to fall. It showers down lightly at first, but a sprinkle becomes a deluge in a matter of minutes, leaving us all looking out the windows at a world wiped away by water. Emma walks to the door, opens it, and sticks her head outside. Only for a few seconds; long enough to douse her hair, leaving her dripping when she steps back, letting the door swing shut again.