Chapter 2
Diamond Bobby, King of the Silver Screen
BOBBY STANDS BEHIND THE FLEDGLING ROUTEWITCH, his long-fingered hands resting on her shoulders and digging in, just enough, to make sure she doesn’t forget who’s in charge here. As if there were any chance of that. She’s staring at me like I’m some kind of miracle, like I represent a sea-change in everything she’s ever known, and hell, maybe for her that’s what I am. Maybe seeing a ghost will make her rethink her life and run for that horizon before it’s too late.
It won’t matter for me either way. She’s served me up to Bobby on a salted silver platter, and I don’t even get the cold comfort of hating her for doing it. She didn’t know. Power and ignorance are a dangerous blend.
“See, and here I was starting to think you were avoiding me,” said Bobby, giving the poor girl’s shoulders another squeeze. “Don’t you think it’s important to keep up with old friends?”
The tattoo on my back—Persephone’s blessing, the thing that keeps Bobby from touching me, no matter how dearly he wants to—is burning like a brand. It’s a good pain, a necessary pain. As long as I’m hurting, I’ll have something to think about that isn’t the sick stone of fear forming in my gut, weighing me down, making me feel like a fragile mortal teenager again. Making me feel like a victim. Like his victim.
Bobby Cross smirks. He’s the man who murdered me, and I know he knows how scared I am.
But I’m not that girl anymore. That girl died on Sparrow Hill Road. I’m the ghost that rose from her ashes, I’m the Phantom Prom Date, and I’m better than he is, because I’ve never hurt anyone the way he has. I sit up a little straighter, paint a smirk across my lips like Persephone’s own lipstick, and drawl, “Why, Bobby, I didn’t know you were lonely.”
His eyes narrow, hands bearing down until the routewitch makes a soft squeaking sound, pained and prisoned. “I don’t think this is the time for games, do you?”
“Seems like you’re playing one with me.” I wave my hands, indicating the candles, the circle, everything. “You know you can’t touch me. Try, and you’ll burn your fingers. Go hunt somewhere else.”
Bobby says nothing. He just fumes, caught between tantrum and truth.
See, Bobby Cross went to the crossroads a long time ago, looking for what everyone afraid of dying looks for: he wanted to live forever. He called something dark and uncaring out of the night, out of the space where even good ghosts fear to tread, and he asked for what he wanted, and he said no price would be too much to pay.
Before that moment, he had been a star. Diamond Bobby, King of the Silver Screen, panty-dropping dragster who made half the world wild with wanting. He was ahead of his time, the man every boy in America was expected to look up to and every girl was expected to dream about. I know I did, after he disappeared and before I found him again on the high curve of Sparrow Hill Road. I used to fantasize about being the girl who stumbled over Bobby Cross, supposedly dead but actually living a quiet life somewhere out of the limelight, waiting for somebody like me to come along.
It’s a terrible thing when fantasies come true. Because see, I was right: Bobby didn’t die in the desert, no matter what the official reports said. Bobby went to the desert to make sure he wouldn’t die, and the thing from the crossroads took his car and changed it into an external vessel for his soul. As long as Bobby keeps driving, he won’t ever get older and he won’t ever die. But nothing comes without a cost, and that car of his?
It runs on the restless dead.
That’s where I came in. My death wasn’t an accident. My death was a man who loved himself so much that he’d kill the world if it meant he could stay exactly as he was. I’d been one more victim, one more drop of fuel for his infernal engine, and I should never have escaped.
I didn’t get away because I was special or because I was powerful or anything fancy like that. I got away because I was lucky, and because Bobby was still pretty new at being a living man with access to the ghostroads. He didn’t know all the shortcuts yet. I slipped through his fingers, and I’ve kept on slipping for more than sixty years. He wants me bad, does Bobby Cross, because I’m the girl who got away—and because out here, distance is power. I could fill his tank all by myself, keep him running for a year or more, and in his mind, that’s what I ought to be doing. He’s still alive, after all, and I’m just the restless dead.
“You shouldn’t be like that, Rose,” says Bobby, frost in his voice and anger in his eyes. “I might start to feel you don’t like me anymore.”
“I never liked you in the first place.” Fire is licking along my spine, fierce and hot and unforgiving.
What Bobby did was an abomination in the eyes of the road, and more, in the eyes of the routewitches who tend it. They’ll never forgive him for what he’s done. So when I went to them and said I needed help getting away from him, they were more than willing to do what they could for me. They gave me a tattoo. Not just any tattoo: a tattoo that contains an invocation to Persephone, Lady of the Dead, entreating her to keep me safe. As long as it’s etched across my skin, Bobby can’t touch me.
One nice thing about being dead: I don’t get a lot of sun, and I don’t get any older. My tattoo will never fade. I still need to find a way to stop Bobby from doing what he does, but as long as I’m canny, as long as I’m clever, I’m safe.
Or so I thought. It’s sort of hard to extend my definition of “safe” to include this dirty little kitchen, this meek and broken routewitch. Bobby can still hurt me. All I’ve done is make him work harder for the privilege.
“Last time I saw you, I offered you a charm that would have stripped the power out of that sigil you wear,” he says, and his voice is a dark lake filled with hidden teeth, monsters lurking deep below the surface. “I offered you a chance to make this easy, Rosie, and you refused it. I want you to remember that.”
“You kidnapped my friend and made me race you for the soul of my boyfriend on the road where you killed me,” I snarl. “If that’s what you call ‘easy,’ I never want to see your definition of ‘hard.’”
A smirk slithers across his face, and I realize I’ve walked right into his trap. Nobody knows how to get under my skin like Bobby Cross. It’s not that he has some amazing insight into what makes me tick: we’ve probably spent less than a full day’s time together, all told, and that spread out across the body of sixty years. But he killed me, and it turns out that sort of thing throws me off balance.
“Oh, you’re going to see hard, my sweet Rose. You’re going to see it, and know it, and understand it all the way down to those non-existent bones of yours. By the time I’m done with you, you’re going to be begging me to go back to playing easy.”
“Promises, promises.” I wave a hand, indicating the room again. “You’re going to have your new pet keep me here while you talk me into a ghostly stupor? Because I think Apple is eventually going to notice the part where you’re using one of her people without the blessing of the Ocean Lady.”
That’s a bluff. Apple may be the Queen of the Routewitches, but as far as I know, she can’t remotely sense what her subjects are doing. At the same time, I know Gary and Emma will be looking for me by now, and they won’t be alone. Sixty years in the twilight means I’ve made my share of allies. My niece, Bethany, and my quasi-friend, Mary, they’re both crossroads ghosts, sworn to the same entity that created Bobby Cross in the first place. If anyone can find him, they can, and neither of them is what I’d call a big fan of his. The crossroads don’t believe in loyalty. They believe in the deal. If Mary or Bethany wants to hunt him down, their bosses won’t stop them.
“I don’t need to keep you here forever,” he says, and he smiles, the sweet, boyish smile that made him such a star in his day. He was smart when he made his deal: he made sure it included eternal youth. He’s kept up with the times, because part of being young is fitting in and standing out at the same time, running just a little retro without becoming old-fashioned. It probably helps that dark jeans and white shirts never truly go out of style. His hair’s a few inches longer than it used to be, and he seems shorter, because the living keep getting taller around him, but he’s still a heartbreaker. Always was and always will be.
I just wish the heart he was out to break wasn’t mine.
“Let me go, Bobby.” I look at him flatly. “Let me go before all those people who told you to stay away from me come looking. This is your last warning.”
“I thought you were going to destroy me. Isn’t that what you promised to do? But here I am, outside the circle, and there you are, inside it. If I didn’t want you to pay for what you’ve done, I could have you snuffed out.” He takes one hand off the routewitch’s shoulders and reaches for the nearest candle, pinching its flame between thumb and forefinger in demonstration. It goes out with a hiss.
“So what’s your plan, then?”
“I’m going to make you suffer.” His smile is a rest stop where no one goes anymore, the site of unspeakable horrors. Despite myself, I shiver. “I’m going to grind that little legend of yours under my heels, and I’m going to make sure you learn what it is to cross me.”
“Now, Bobby?” asks the routewitch. Her accent is Oklahoma smooth, all plains and prairies, and her voice is filled with an aching hope. She wants to please him. She wants to make him smile for her the way he smiled for the girls in the movies, the ones who got him for their happy ever after.
Run away, little girl, I think, and she’s older than I ever lived to be, and she’s so damn young, and this isn’t fair. This has never been fair.
“Now,” says Bobby, and that little girl—that young woman with her whole life ahead of her, who deserved so much more than what she got, and Road curse you and yours, Apple, where the hell were the routewitches when this child needed you—pulls a razor from where it’s been hidden in the skirt of her pretty floral gown. It’s long and straight and silver, old-fashioned even to my old-fashioned eyes, and when she slashes it across her throat the flesh parts like a seam coming unraveled, allowing the hot red heart of her to spill forth.
The blood comes in a wave, spraying everywhere, coating everything. It doesn’t wash the circle of salt away, but it corrodes it, opening holes that I only vaguely notice. My eyes are consumed with the task of growing wider and wider, horror and shame building in my throat, trying to become a scream. Half the candles go out, doused by arterial spray. If there’s a mercy in this summons, it’s that the spell which drained the taste from the world also damps the scent of burning blood.
“She was willing,” says Bobby sweetly, taking his hands from the girl’s shoulders. Freed of their slight but constant pressure, she slumps sideways, landing well clear of the remaining salt. He planned everything about this, I realize: he placed her like a pawn on a chessboard, and when he sacrificed her—when she sacrificed herself at his command—she fell exactly where he wanted her. “You got that? Only thing I did to compel her was ask.”
“You bastard.”
“Now, Rosie, you know my parents were married. Call me a monster or call me your master, either of those things would be true. But don’t you ever tell me lies.” He smiles again. Somehow, this one is even worse. “Tick-tock. Clock’s running now, and it’s going to be hell when the time runs out. Good luck, pretty girl. By the time this is over, you’ll be begging me to take you for a ride.”
He dips his fingers in the dead routewitch’s blood and flicks it at me, eroding the circle of salt further. Then, with the kind of calm swagger that even the dead can envy, he turns and saunters out of the room.
The blood continues to spread, eating away at the salt, until, with a click I feel from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, the circle breaks. The frayed runes that constructed the summoning spell have no power left, and more footprints would only serve to muddy an already confusing scene; I step delicately over them as I leave the circle, pausing to look down at the routewitch unlucky enough to have fallen under Bobby’s sway.
Nothing about her is familiar. She’s not someone who gave me a ride once, not a distant relative or enemy. She’s just a girl. Just a girl who could have been anything, and wound up being little more than nothing, one more body to lay at the feet of a man too arrogant to die.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I say, and disappear.
I reappear in the middle of a cornfield that stretches from one end of the shadow-soaked horizon to the next, twilight sky dripping with stars overhead, green silk gown heavy around my ankles and tight around my hips. I usually have better control over my clothing than that, and for a moment I consider expending the effort to change it, to remake myself into the modern girl I’ve worked so hard to become. Then I think of Bobby, refusing to let himself look anything other than perfectly suited to his surroundings, and I change my mind. I can be an antique walking through a cornfield. I can be a shadow of the girl I was. Better that than to be like Bobby, holding on so tightly that I forget how to let go.
Speaking of letting go . . . I walk a few yards, enough distance that I should be at least a football field away from that rotten little house with its dead girl cooling in the kitchen, and I pull myself back into the daylight. Or I try to, anyway. The twilight holds me stubbornly down, twining around my ankles like so much kudzu, and pull as I might, I can’t return to the lands of the living.
This is new. Also new: the utter absence of anything resembling a road. I’m in the twilight, no question of that, not with the sky like a bruise and the corn whispering unforgivable secrets on every side, but the ghostroads aren’t here to meet me. I can’t go up. I try to drop down into the starlight or the midnight, and I can’t do that either.
That’s when I start to panic. If I can’t leave the twilight, that means I can’t get my heels on good, honest asphalt in either direction. Whatever Bobby did—and I don’t know what Bobby did; I never learned that kind of trick—it’s got me stuck but good.
“I hate corn,” I announce to the uncaring field, and start walking.
You’d think cornfields in the afterlife would be more pleasant than their living counterparts. That’s assuming you’re willing to accept their existence in the first place. But anything that’s loved can linger, and there are people out there who really love their farms, who really love cornfields in specific, with their sweet green air and their tendency to get cut into mazes by bored farmers at Halloween. That might not be so bad—there are worse places to be lost than in a truly well-loved field—if not for the fact that anything that’s loved can linger.
There are people in this world who really, really love bugs. I don’t mean they’re fond of bugs, or that they saw a bug they thought was pretty neat once. I mean they love bugs. They adore them. They spend their lives running around with delicate nets in one hand and glass jars in the other, catching bugs, studying bugs, loving bugs with a passionate devotion that would be sort of charming if not for the fact that their love is enough to supply every cornfield in the twilight with a healthy assortment of spectral insects. Also spiders. Ghost spiders are a real thing. They exist.
Walking into an unexpected spider web is no more pleasant for the dead than it is for the living.
Picking bits of cobweb out of my hair and swearing under my breath, I shove a sheaf of corn aside with one arm. The motion reveals a scarecrow, which regards me with button-eyed solemnity. Its mouth is a gash through the burlap of its face, stitched shut with rough twine, and it couldn’t have looked more like a Halloween prop if it had been trying.
I cross my arms. “Well?” I ask. “You going to tell me where I am, or what?”
It’s hard to shake the impression that the scarecrow is somehow sulking. Then a child drops out of the center of it, floating down to the husk-scattered earth. Seven or eight years old, wearing a lacy white dress. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything—dresses didn’t become a girls-only thing until a few hundred years ago, and when you’re dead, time ceases to be quite such a useful measuring device. But the kid has ribbons tied in her long, dark hair, which is usually a girl thing, and a pout I recognize from my own face. She looks like a killer.
“Hello,” I say.
“I didn’t invite you here,” she says.
Looks like we’re off to a good start. I shrug, spreading my hands so she can see that they’re empty, and say, “I didn’t exactly come willingly. You know a man named Bobby Cross?” It seems like a fair bet. Everyone in the twilight knows Bobby, or knows of him, anyway. He’s our personal bogeyman, the bastard with the car that runs on souls.
Her eyes narrow. “You’re his?”
“He thinks so. He’s wrong. If I’m anyone’s, I’m my own, although I suppose Persephone has a bit of a lien on me nowadays. If you can tell me how to reach the ghostroads from here, I’ll get out of your hair and be on my way.”
“Bobby Cross is a bad man.” She takes a step toward me, the edges of her pretty white dress beginning to tarnish and char. “I don’t help people who help him.”
“That’s good, because I don’t help him. I make his life as unpleasant as I possibly can, with an eye toward ending it.” That tarnishing dress has me worried. Ghosts come in too damn many flavors, and the only ones I can be absolutely confident of identifying on sight are the road ghosts. Kids make it harder. There are a lot of ghost types that are only ever children, but kids can still come in almost any flavor, from haunt to coachman. This little girl could be dangerous as all hell, and without the ability to move between the twilight and the daylight—or hell, even to drop further down—I’m basically defenseless.
The ghostroads equip hitchers to do plenty. They don’t exactly equip us to defend ourselves.
“You stink like death,” says the girl, her dress rotting further, beginning to turn the sickly gray of decaying flesh. “Why should I believe you?”
“Ah.” I sigh, understanding washing over me. “You’re a homestead.”
Homesteads come in all kinds, all ages, united by a single common thread: they love their homes. They love their land. When something happens that damages or destroys those homes and kills them at the same time, the ghost of home and homesteader can become . . . melded is probably the best word. This little girl wasn’t lurking in the scarecrow to frighten me. She was doing it because, for her, slipping back into the skin of her land was as natural as catching a ride is for me.
The rot pauses. It doesn’t reverse, but it seems to . . . hesitate, accompanied by a narrow-eyed look from the girl. “How do you know that?”
“Nobody else would have a cornfield this nice.” That’s a lie—the corn could have itself, and many cornfields do, here in the twilight—but she doesn’t need to know that. “My name’s Rose. I’m a hitcher. I got summoned by Bobby Cross, and when he let me go, this is where I wound up.” I tug on the skirt of my dress, smiling wryly. “Believe me, I’d get out of your field if I could. Or I’d at least put on better shoes.”
When I chose my prom dress all those years ago, I was thinking of the way it cupped my breasts and made my waist look like a Grecian column, tempting and forbidden at the same time. I was thinking of Gary, and the make-out spot on top of Dead Man’s Hill, and how far I might be willing to let him go if he asked nicely and looked at me through those long lashes of his. I was not thinking of whether I’d still like it sixty years later, or whether the matching shoes would be suitable for running around in haunted cornfields.
Still narrow-eyed and wary, the homestead studies me. “Rose what?” she asks.
Ah. “Marshall,” I say.
Her face transforms in an instant, wariness becoming cool delight. “Rose Marshall!” she says. “I’ve heard of you. Oh, Bobby doesn’t like you at all.”
“No, he does not. Which is part of why it’s so important for me to find a road. Do you border on one at all?” One dangerous thing about homesteads: since they literally can’t cross their own boundaries, they sometimes assume no one else ought to, either. They can hold a spirit captive for a long damn time.
Time is already negotiable in the twilight, capable of bending and being bent depending on what’s going on. I lost years when I was newly dead, flickering out of existence only to come back to myself on some street corner or lonely highway, already looking for my next ride. It’s better these days. My sense of who I am and where I belong has gotten stronger, and I barely ever flicker away so much as a week.
This homestead, though. She could slow time down, spend an hour talking to me and then drop me onto the ghostroads to find that years had gone by. Gary and Emma would lose their minds looking for me. I keep smiling, hoping she can’t see how nervous I am, or how much I want to get out of here.
“Bobby Cross didn’t kill me.”
“Well, no,” I say. “I don’t think he could kill someone in a way that would make a homestead. He’s not that kind of clever. But he’s the kind of clever who’s managed to upset my friends very badly. I need to get back to them. Is there a road?”
There’s a mulish cast to her jaw. She wants me to stay. Of course she does. She’s probably lonely out here, on her perfect farm, frozen in the moment right before something ruined it and ended her. The land still exists out in the living world, but this version of it, this bucolic farmhouse and perfect cornfield, it died a long time ago, if the old-fashioned cut of her dress is anything to go by.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Corletta,” she says, not losing that stubborn set, that expression that tells me she’s considering the merits of collecting and keeping me forever.
“Corletta. That’s a pretty name. You live here by yourself?”
She nods. “Ma died when I did, and she stayed until Pa died. Then she went off to be with him forever and ever. But that’s not fair. I’m her daughter. She should have stayed for me. They both should have stayed for me.”
My mother never set foot on the ghostroads. She lingered in the twilight for less than a minute while I showed her the way to move on; she wept at the sight of me. It’s hard not to tell this spoiled little girl with her pre-packaged afterlife that she’s the one who’s being unfair: that most people don’t even get as much time with their mothers as she did.
I keep smiling.
“I have some friends who might like to come see you,” I say. “You ever meet an ever-laster?”
“Don’t they only go to school?”
“They have summer vacation.” Ever-lasters are the spirits of children and teens—mostly children—who find the idea of an afterlife so overwhelming that they decide to keep going to class. They gather on the blacktop to play jump rope and clapping games, and the rhymes they use can tell the future, if you’re willing to stand there long enough, if you’re willing to hold the rope. Some ghosts like playing teacher for the little tykes, teaching them their numbers and alphabets, trying to ease them toward the moment of graduation. Not because we feel children shouldn’t be allowed to haunt—because they’re creepy as all hell, and we’d all feel better if they moved on.
Corletta frowns, looking for the catch. “You think they’d want to come and play with me?”
“I think we never know unless we ask. Look at this place.” I spread my arms, indicating the oppressive closeness of the corn. “Lots of room to run, play hide-and-seek, whatever. Kids need to run. I can talk to them, if you’ll just tell me how to find the road.”
She pauses then, and smiles—the slow, sly smile of a snake spotting its prey. Damn. “You’re scared of me, aren’t you?”
There’s no point in lying to her now. “A bit,” I say. “I have places I need to be and people I need to talk to, and I can’t do either of those things if you decide you want to keep me here. I really will talk to the ever-lasters for you, though. Which is better: one hitcher held against her will, or a whole bus of kids your own age, come to play because they want to?”
She wavers. I can see her running the math of one against the other, looking for the catch. There’s always a catch. Finally, she finds it, and in a suspicious voice, she asks, “Are you for certain going to talk to them?”
“It’s not like you can know for sure,” I say, sympathy in my tone. I don’t have to fake it. The rest of us are free to move about as we please, bound only by the rules of our respective afterlives. Homesteads, though, they’re stuck. Corletta won’t ever be able to come after me if I’m lying to her. “You have to take a risk if you want a reward.”
“I’ve heard of you. Not a lot, but I’ve heard of you.”
Stories travel, even in the afterlife. Maybe especially in the afterlife, where we don’t have much else to serve as currency. “Then you know I’m a moving ghost. If you kept me here, you wouldn’t have a willing playmate. You’d have a prisoner, and eventually, you’d have nothing at all, when the road stopped calling and I faded away. But if you let me leave, well. Worst case is I’m lying to you, and you’re alone. You haven’t lost much. Best case is I’m telling the truth, and you might get to make some friends. It’s up to you.”
She looks at me for a long moment, eyes glowing dully red. I doubt she even knows they do that. It was a fire, then, sweeping through the farm, wiping away everything she’d ever known. It’s still burning deep inside her, charring her bones. It always will be, until the day she lets it flash into existence here in the twilight, consuming the house that binds her, freeing her to move on.
“Go,” she says, turning her face away from me. The corn behind her ripples, shifting to the side as a path appears. It winds through the green, twisted as a snake, and I know that when I follow it, it will take me to the road. However far away that may be.
“Thank you,” I say softly.
She doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t even acknowledge me. She just stands there, hands clenched, as I walk past her, toward that portal through the green.
As I’m stepping into the corn, she says, “Remember. You promised.”
I don’t turn. “I’ll remember,” I say, and start down the path, leaving her behind.
The path through the corn twists and turns and doubles back on itself, a clear illustration of how conflicted Corletta is about letting me go. The kid must be lonelier than I thought if she’s this tempted to keep a road ghost in a cage. It wouldn’t be good for either of us, but still, she wants me. I walk faster, making it clear that I really need to go, refusing to look anywhere but straight ahead, even as the corn tugs at my skirt and the chirping creatures of the field hop around my feet.
Who the hell thought ghost spiders were necessary, anyway?
It’s starting to feel like the corn will never end, like she’s keeping me anyway, when I take a step and my foot lands, not on loamy soil, but on firm concrete. The contact is electric. It races through my entire body, and when I finish the step, both feet on blacktop, highway stretching out around me like a promise of better things ahead, my green silk gown is gone. In its place, I have jeans, a tank top, sneakers. My head feels lighter. I reach up and run a hand through my hair, now shorter than my mama ever let me keep it when I was alive.
Now I do turn, tossing a grin at the cornfield that borders the road. “Thank you, Corletta,” I say. “I won’t forget.”
The corn rustles, and all is silent. I return my attention to the road.
It stretches out from here until forever, black and smooth and perfect, and I have never seen anything more beautiful in my afterlife. I reach for the daylight, trying to pull myself up to a level where drivers will be more plentiful. If I want to get to the Last Dance, I’ll need the kindness of strangers to help me out.
The daylight isn’t there. Or, well, I suppose it is—Bobby Cross may be a pain in my ass, but that doesn’t mean he has the power to eliminate the world of the living from existence—it’s just that I can’t reach it, no matter how hard I strain. It wasn’t the cornfield. For the first time since I died, I can go neither up nor down. I’m bound to the twilight.
Shit.
Well, there are roads here, and where there are roads, there are always drivers. I walk along the shoulder, holding out my thumb in the universal gesture of “I need a ride.” The air is cool and crisp and smells of cornfield; the stars overhead don’t twinkle, but shine like diamonds fixed in the firmament, providing more than enough light for me to see where I’m going. I walk, and the corn rustles around me, and if it weren’t for the fact that absolutely everything about this is terrible, it might actually be sort of pleasant. It’s a beautiful night.
The sound of wheels on the road behind me is music to my ears. I turn, and behold a 1985 Toyota Corolla racing toward me, paint a deep blue-black only a few shades lighter than that diamond sky above me. The laughter breaks past my lips before I can swallow it down. Of course it would be Tommy who came for me. If there’s anyone on these roads I can count on to always find me, it’s him. Until he decides it’s time to stop fighting the pull to drive off the edge of the world and find out how far that engine of his can really carry him, that is.
He pulls up next to me, rolling the window down so I can see his face, and I can count the miles rolling onward in his eyes, empty highway and open rest stops and that shining, final destination. Phantom riders love the road and they love their cars: that’s what defines them, same as my outstretched thumb and constant shivering defines me. But even the most avid motorist gets tired eventually. Even the best driver starts dreaming of a motel bed and a place to stop.
“Rose,” he says, with a sharp upward jerk of his chin, acknowledging me and all the history we have stretched between us at the same time. “What are you doing out here?”
“I can’t seem to get out of the twilight,” I say, and shrug expansively. He’s as curt and constrained as I am verbose and open. I can’t honestly remember anymore whether I was like this when I was alive, or how much he talked during the few moments when I knew him among the living. The twilight changes us to fit the molds it casts us in, and no matter how much we fight, the fact remains that what we are was dictated by the moment and manner of our deaths. No take-backs. “Can I get a ride to the Last Dance?”
Something that looks almost like fear flickers across Tommy’s face. “I’ve been trying to stay clear of there,” he says.
“Why?”
“Laura isn’t dead yet.”
That, right there, is the reason he hasn’t stopped running the roads and given in to the urge to rest, because once a phantom rider stops, they can’t start up again. When Tommy gets off the road—really gets off the road, not just a pit stop for pie and conversation—he’s done. One less phantom rider on the ghostroads.
He was a mechanic and a racer and a lovelorn fool when he was alive, and he died in a race he should never have entered, trying to win the money that would have let him secure a future for his girl. The girl’s still alive, and a pain in my ass who blames me for Tommy’s death. She’s also one of the world’s premier scholars of hitchhiking ghost legends in general and the story of the Phantom Prom Date in specific. Laura really believes in understanding what she hates. I’d respect her for that, if she was willing to leave me alone.
The Last Dance is the mile marker for many road ghosts. Go past it, and there’s no guarantee you’ll turn back. “How close can you get me?”
Tommy sighs. “I’ll take you to the edge of the parking lot.”
That would leave him room to make a U-turn without getting too close to the boundary. “Deal,” I say, and walk around the car, where the door swings open to meet me.
Tommy’s car isn’t aware the way Gary is. Gary’s a person: this is a machine, well-loved and faithful as any dog, but still the ghost of something that was never alive. I try to hold on to those differences as I settle into the seat, fastening the belt snugly around myself. I’m not cheating on my boyfriend by riding in Tommy’s car.
This is what my unlife has come to; these are the questions I have to contend with. Sometimes I think the universe enjoys laughing at us all.
Tommy grips the wheel like an old friend and we’re off, racing along the ghostroads with a speed and smoothness that Gary can only envy. He never misses a curve. His wheels never slip against the asphalt, even in the broken places. Laura is his earthly love, and he’s content to wait long enough for her to catch up with him here, but she’s never going to love him the way his car does, the way the road does. He drives in an eternal embrace, and if there’s a reason other than Laura that he’s still here, it probably has something to do with the road not wanting to let him go.
He slants a glance at me across the cab, and frowns. “Something wrong?”
“So much. Why?”
“Just don’t see you dressed like that often, is all.”
I look down at myself. Then I close my eyes. “Well,” I say. “Fuck.”
My jeans and tank top are gone, replaced once more by the green silk gown I died in. I didn’t even feel the change. Whatever Bobby did to me, whatever he used that routewitch to do . . .
This is bad. I don’t know exactly how bad, but it’s bad, and I have no idea how to fix it.
Tommy drives on, and I’m just along for the ride. Like always.