Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(52)
"Meaning what?"
She produces a button-up sweater from behind the counter, handing it to me. Coats are the traditional attire of the hitchhiking ghost, but any outerwear will do, providing it belongs to the living. Somehow, Emma manages to count. "Meaning Bobby Cross has no claim on your soul as long as Persephone is tasked with watching you. Not unless you do something monumentally stupid."
I shrug on the sweater before reaching for the pie. "Again, meaning what?"
"I'll be completely honest with you, Rose. I'm an Irish death omen and collector of the unquiet dead. I was born when the Roman calendar still looked like a fad that couldn't possibly last. And I haven't got the slightest idea." Emma shrugs. "You want a malted before you hit the road?"
"Why the hell not?" I pick up my fork. "Make it a double."
"On the house," says Emma, and smiles.
***
Time runs differently when you're in the twilight. Sometimes, hours there can be minutes in the daylight, or days, or weeks. Once, I spent what felt like a weekend at the Last Dance, bussing tables and bumming cigarettes off one of the cooks, and when I stepped back into the lands of the living, two years had gone slithering by like snakes vanishing into high grass. So it isn't really a surprise when I shrug off the last traces of the ghostroads and find myself standing on the long country highway that leads into Buckley Township, looking at a candy-colored poster stapled to a telephone pole. "BUY YOUR TICKETS TODAY FOR A WONDERFUL NIGHT!" it screams, in electric yellow letters. Underneath that, smaller, is the legend, "Buckley High School Senior Prom." There's a price—more per ticket than I paid for my dress, once upon a couple of decades ago—and a date.
It wouldn't matter if the date wasn't there, just like it doesn't matter that I don't have a calendar. The dead have their own holy days, their own ways of marking the time that passes after they've passed on, and for me, the holiest of holies is the Buckley High School Senior Prom. It's like Easter. It moves around the calendar, always within a small range, always subject to its own rules...but it always comes as the school year is drawing to a close. A formal dance for girls whose lives won't offer many opportunities for formal dancing; a night for spiking punch, losing virginities, and dreams. Such big dreams. Real life almost never lives up to the dreams of a senior prom. It tries. It just can't compare.
I've attended thirty senior proms in the years since I died. Five of them were right here in Buckley. They're...magnetic, I guess is the word. Once I get close, they draw me in, just like a moth being drawn to a bug zapper. Not the most flattering comparison. Too bad it's an accurate one.
I sigh, reaching out and brushing my fingertips through the paper. Just to test, I try to reach for the ghostroads, and find nothing but the shadows. I'm here until the last dance is over, the punch stains have been wiped off the gymnasium floor, and the drunken, giggling cheerleaders have been chased out of the janitor's closet.
"Bully for me," I mutter, before shoving my hands into the pockets of my jeans. It may be the day of the senior prom, but the dance itself is still far enough away that I can wear jeans if I want to, rather than being locked into a homecomer's endless, pointless struggle to get back to a place that isn't there anymore. One eye scanning the road for a ride, I turn and begin trudging my way down the sidewalk. No matter how inconvenient it might be, this is a holy night, and on holy nights, good girls—alive or dead—follow the rites of their religion.
I have one small advantage over the breathing girls of Buckley, the ones for whom tonight will be the first, last, and only senior prom. Unlike them, I don't have to worry about what I'm going to wear. I just have to worry about how many of them will be dead before morning.
On second thought, maybe they should be worrying about that, too.
***
Buckley Township: the more things change, the more they stay the same. The town has grown since I lived here, slowly spilling out into the surrounding fields and farmlands. The forest is still mostly intact, the trees standing sentry against intrusion. The lake and the swamp are exactly as they've always been, dangerous, foreboding, and deadly to the unprepared. I used to wonder how many bodies were buried there. Now that I've met a few of the ghosts who haunt the waters of Buckley, I can say with authority that I don't want to know. The land around Buckley has never been tamed, not really, and it doesn't suffer fools lightly, if it suffers them at all.
The storefronts have altered to fit the time, but they still seem to lag behind the outside world, the towns and cities that aren't struggling to survive in the hand of the forest, that aren't trapped under the shade of the nearby hills. It's a little strange to walk these streets and see signs offering computer repair and cellphone services where the record store and the five-and-dime used to be. Time stops for no one, I guess. There's another Buckley nestled deep down in the twilight, one where it's still 1945, one where all the little details still match the little details hidden in my heart. That's a dead town, a place that only exists because I do—there are no other Buckley ghosts from my generation still wandering the ghostroads. When I move on, if I move on, that dead little town will fade away. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, because this is the real Buckley, this changing, increasingly strange place, and it deserves to be fresher in my mind than its own time-locked reflection.