Sparrow Hill Road 2010 By Seanan(67)

There's one thing every haunt, spirit, and shade on the twilight side of the ghostroads learns early and well, and that's this: your word is sometimes the only currency you have, and those are the times when breaking it can leave you vulnerable to the kind of consequences that you don't recover from. The Kindly Ones watch for oathbreakers. Certain types of shadow only manifest in the path of liars, and they can cling and catch as surely as tar. If you want to survive in the twilight, you tell the truth--at least on the ghostroads. Lying to the living that don't belong in the twilight spaces doesn't come with any consequences. The living don't count.

Lying to your fellow dead, on the other hand, or, God forbid, lying to the routewitches or the ambulomancers...that's playing the sort of roulette that the house always, always wins. Never make a promise you don't intend to keep. Never incur a debt you don't intend to pay. Never double-cross a routewitch. We may not have much of a life here, among the dead, but what we do have is too precious to gamble on a hand that can't possibly be won. Exorcism would be kinder than some of the tools the routewitches have at their disposal.

I was pretty honest before I died. A good girl. I'm not as good as I used to be, but I'm a lot more honest, because the stakes are a lot higher than getting grounded or missing a school dance. The stakes are death and worse-than-death, and I like my current state of being.

That's me. Some people still make bargains they can't keep; some people still make promises that they don't intend to honor. Some people still let the bills get higher than they ever meant to pay. And some of them, Persephone give me strength...

Some of them are my own flesh and blood. Such as it is.

***

This particular stretch of Indiana highway is familiar; I've walked it before, and I'll probably walk it again, the world being what it is, and people being a little reluctant to stop in the middle of a corn field to pick up an unfamiliar teenage girl. Thanks for that one, Stephen King. You and your goddamn children of the corn can go piss up a rope for all the walking that you've made me do over the course of the last twenty years.

Still. It's a beautiful evening, with that sort of purple-bruised sky that only the American Midwest ever manages to conjure. It's almost the sort of sky we had when I was alive, before pollution gilded the world's sunsets in all the pretty shades of poison. There are even fireflies, dancing above the corn, and the whole world smells like green and good growing things. A night like this, I almost don't mind walking. Besides, my last ride was recent enough that I still have a coat to keep me warm, anchoring me in this world for as long as I choose to stay...or until that setting sun comes up. Whichever comes first.

I'm so busy walking through the growing dark that I don't hear the engine behind me, the crunch of wheels on roadside gravel, the rattle of the truck's back gate, held up by rope and bailing wire as much as by the memory of what it used to be. I'm lost in my own little world, right up until strong arms grab me around the chest, hoisting me up and off the ground almost before I can squeak. Then I'm in the hay and corn husk-filled bed of the truck, and we're accelerating away from the place where I was grabbed, and all I can think is that we're about eight seconds away from someone getting slapped.

***

Common sense wins out for once, and I decide to forego slapping in favor of the more sensible option: letting go and dropping back down into the twilight. So I release my hold on the coat that binds me to the mortal world, and it falls through the memory of my flesh to land with a rustle in the chaff surrounding us. Then I let go, and I fall...

...right into the bed of a clapped-out old junker of a pickup truck, the bed filled with hay and corn husks. The man who grabbed me is watching with obvious amusement. Slapping still sounds like a good option, but if these people can drive straight from the daylight to the twilight, that might not be the best idea.

I straighten, trying to look like I'm not scared enough to bolt for the deepest, darkest hole I can find. "Okay, does somebody want to tell me exactly what the fuck is going on here?"

My abductor laughs at that—actually laughs, like I just said something unbelievably funny. There's an answering chuckle from behind me, and I glance over my shoulder to see the first man's virtual twin. They're both sturdy blond Minnesota-looking farmboys, so cliche that they could have walked out of the pages of a L'il Abner adventure forty years ago. "Miss Rose, I think you don't quite understand what's going on here."

"Yeah, well, I'm dead, not psychic, so when you want me to know something, you need to tell me." It's getting easier to suppress fear in favor of anger. There's not much I hate more than I hate to be laughed at. "Why did you grab me? Where are we going? How are we going?"