Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(6)

And in all the Americas, from midnight to noon and in-between, the truckers roll out, and the diners stand like cathedrals of the road, and the beat...the beat goes on.





Dead Man's Party

A Sparrow Hill Road story

by

Seanan McGuire



Got my best suit and my tie

Shiny silver dollar on either eye

I hear the chauffeur comin' to the door

Says there's room for maybe just one more...

-- "Dead Man's Party," Danny Elfman.



Walk the ghostroads long enough, you start to learn things. There are no formal schools; the schoolyard chant of "no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks" applies more completely than most people can ever imagine before they slip between the cracks. Things look different in the twilight. Things are different in the twilight. The rules aren't the same here. The old patterns won't protect you. The twilight is another country, an America where the sun never rises, and the people who wind up here have two choices: adapt or die. (Some pursue a third choice--some spend their lives trying to claw their way back up into the light--and I think sometimes that they're the saddest ones of all, because they never let themselves accept the reality of their situation. There's no way to go from full twilight back into the light. Get out while you're in the shallows, or you never get out at all. That's just the way the ghostroads run.)

Everyone who walks the twilight has something else they're looking to learn. The routewitches, they're seeking the stories of the highways and the byways, the hidden riddles worked into frontage roads and ghost towns where the tumbleweeds hold dominion over all. They practice their little magics, they speak to strangers, they give rides to hitchhikers both living and long since dead.

Even they have their divisions, their strange allegiances, their legends and their laws. The Queen of the Routewitches keeps her court on the old Atlantic Highway, the oldest major artery in North America. Most of it's gone in the daylight levels, replaced first by Route 1, and later by Interstate 95, but the twilight has a longer memory than the light does, and the old Atlantic is the strongest and the cleanest of the ghostroads. If you cross her palm with silver, she can tell you things not even the highway commission remembers, like why Route 1 cut so far inland when the Atlantic Highway ran through Savannah, Georgia, and what really funded the construction of the Waldo-Hancock Bridge. They're just stories, in the light, but down here, they're the things that can keep you breathing.

If you were breathing when you arrived, that is.

I didn't find the ghostroads; the ghostroads found me, looming up out of the dark like the iceberg that felled the Titanic. Everyone in the twilight is looking for something, and I'm no different; I went looking for ghosts, a phantom chasing phantoms through the night that never quite begins or ends. I had to find them. It was the only way to know for sure what I'd become. They were tangled in a thousand half-stitched seams across the fabric of reality, waiting to be found, and I found them. The ghosts of the twilight taught me what I am--a hitcher, a ghost tied not to a physical place or a specific person, but to an unfinished task. We have our rules, just like every other kind of ghost, but we run closer to the skin than most, closer to the daylight, because we got lost by mistake. We were never meant to be here.

We're not the only ghosts of the twilight, not the only ones too well-lit for the midnight Americas, but too dark for the daylight levels. There are other types of ghost that walk here, and some of them follow different rules. Some of them don't understand. When that happens, somebody has to teach them what they're doing wrong. And sometimes, when I'm less than lucky, somebody winds up being me.

***

The air outside the rust-colored Chevy tastes like diesel fuel and shadows, bitter when I breathe in, burning the back of my throat. The urge to get back in the car and tell the driver--I think his name is Kyle; he told me who he was when he picked me up, but he was just a short-time driver, and it didn't matter enough to stick--borders on unbearable. Every inch of me wants to be out of here, wants to be miles from here. To be anywhere but this narrow strip of asphalt outside yet another roadside dive. Something's wrong.

"Rose? This is where you wanted to be dropped off, right?" Kyle leans across the passenger seat, the glow of the diner's neon marquee glinting off his glasses. He's in his early thirties. I've been sixteen for fifty years, and it's hard to think of anything except how goddamn young he looks. This is the deepest he's ever dipped into the twilight. He's here because of me. "I can take you somewhere else if you'd prefer."

So damn young. "It's fine. This is where I want to be." His sweatshirt is too big for me, generic red department store cotton washed and worn feather-soft. I wrap my arms around myself, trying to stay warm, trying to look pathetic enough that he won't ask for the sweatshirt back. I've had a lot of time to practice that particular expression. "Don't you need to get on the road?"