Chapter 22
Down Among the Dead Men
I STAND, AND MY BODY DROPS AWAY, dissolving back into the corn husks and wheat chaff that formed it so many days ago, so recently, in the dust of the Barrowman Family Farm. I stand, and the heavy skirt of my green silk gown swirls around my ankles, fabric brushing skin like a promise almost forgotten, always intended to be kept.
Persephone’s blessing burns on my back, and the phantom outlines of handprints burn on my shoulders, and when I lift my hand to brush my hair out of my eyes, a corsage of asphodel and rosebuds is clasped tight around my wrist, a reminder of who helped me, a reminder that I’ve been claimed for good. I may not have asked for the psychopomp’s role in this ghost story, but it’s mine, and the last chance I had to let it go died when I accepted the aid of the Lord of the Dead.
The world is wrapped in gray mist, scents dulled, flavors deadened. But the neon is bright, and the wind blowing into the Underworld is freezing cold, and I have never been happier to be home.
“You’re not allowed to touch me, Bobby,” I say, stepping out of the cave, stepping back into the land of the living. “Persephone says so.”
He takes a step back. “You little—”
“I don’t know that I’d use that kind of language if I were you,” I say. “It’s fallen out of favor, just like you’ve fallen out of favor. You can’t touch me. Persephone’s blessing has been restored. Get out of here, Bobby. You’ve lost.” I step forward, closing the distance between us, forcing him back. More importantly, putting me between him and Laura.
The look he gives me is pure spite. “I’m going to have you one day, little girl. And when I do, you’re going to wish I’d gone as easy on you as a trip to my tank. You’re going to yearn for the mercy of an extinction that will no longer be yours.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” I say. “Go away, Bobby. You needed help to catch me last time, and you’re not going to do it again. Not today. Not ever. Get gone.”
He snarls wordlessly before he leaps into his car and peels out, roaring out of the parking lot and off to ruin some other poor soul’s night. I say a silent prayer to anyone who’s listening that he doesn’t find a victim tonight. He will. He always does. I keep fighting because him taking me wouldn’t be the end of it, and I’m going to end him. One day, somehow, I’m going to end him.
Laura wheezes behind me, and I have more important things to worry about than Bobby Cross. I turn.
She hasn’t moved. She’s still sprawled, beaten and broken and bleeding, on the cold hard ground. Her face is turned toward the sky, but I’m not sure she can see it anymore; all her focus is on her breathing, which comes in small, hard hitches, like her lungs are giving up.
He hit her with his car hard enough to drive me into the wall, hard enough to snap my ribs from the impact with the stone. How much more damage must he have done to her? She’s older. Her bones are less flexible than mine, less ready to accommodate that sort of trauma. I was dying before she looked back at me.
She’s dying now.
“Laura.” I drop to my knees, my skirt spreading out around us. I don’t have a coat, I don’t have anything, and when I reach for her, my hands pass through her skin. Her eyes widen in understanding, and somehow, she finds the strength to smile.
“Kept . . . my word,” she wheezes. “Got you . . . home.”
“You did. You did, Laura, you did. I’m sorry. I can’t call for help. I could leave and see if I could find someone, but—”
“Take . . . too long,” she says. Her eyes are drooping, trying to close. Frowning petulantly, she says, “Hurts.”
“I know. I’m so sorry.”
“Stay?”
“Of course.” I put my phantom hands over her human ones, and I leave them there until she sighs, soft and sad, and her fingers tighten on mine. Holding fast, I stand, and I draw her up, out, away from her body.
The ghost of Laura Moorhead stares at me, looking surprised, and asks, “Was that it?”
“You mean, did you die?”
She nods. So do I. She turns to look behind herself, still holding my hands, and gasps at the sight of her own body, lying bloody and broken on the ground. Her eyes—its eyes, because she isn’t there anymore—are open, staring eternally upward at the sky.
“Oh, God,” she says. “I’m dead.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Welcome to the party.”
Laura frowns as she looks back to me. I wonder if she realizes she’s getting younger. Not as young as she was on the night Tommy died, but younger all the same, moving toward the age she’s always believed herself to be, deep down. Ghosts can appear as any age they reached in life. I’ll never look any older than sixteen, but Laura? She has decades available to her.
I’ll never look any older than sixteen. I’m back where I belong, back in my own insubstantial skin, and the only thing keeping me from screaming my victory to the sky is the dead woman clinging to my hand like it’s a lifeline.
“You might be a road ghost,” I say carefully. “You did die because Bobby Cross hit you with his car, and a lot of hit-and-runs become road ghosts. But if you are, and I let you go, you’re likely to shift into something unpleasant.”
Her nose wrinkles. “Like a hitchhiker?”
“I promise you, we’re one of the nicer things out here.” She could be a homecomer, trying to get back to Boulder, leaving a trail of dead bodies in her wake. But I don’t think so. She’s spent her entire life trying to avenge the boyfriend who never meant to leave her, feeling denied by circumstance, feeling thwarted. It’s too early to know for sure—most ghosts don’t settle into their final forms for days, if not weeks, after death—but if I had to lay money, I’d say Laura was going to become a white lady.
And I can’t let that happen.
“I told you I’d take you to Tommy when you died,” I say. “I was sort of hoping that would be a long way in the future, but I guess we can’t always get what we want. Would you like me to take you to him?”
Laura swallows, hard, and nods.
“Close your eyes,” I say, and when she does, I pull us down, out of the daylight, into the twilight, onto the ghostroads.
Home.
The sky is purple streaked with pumpkin orange and spangled with frozen, shining stars. The Target is gone, replaced by a rickety old house that must have stood there before it was bulldozed in the name of progress. Someday it will vanish here as well, replaced by the skeleton of the store where someone fell in love, someone had their heart broken, someone died, because that’s the way it works here, in this palimpsest twilight, where America overwrites America in an eternal dance of old becoming new becoming old again.
Laura looks around, eyes so wide that they rival the absent moon. She looks like she wants to see everything at once, to consume everything at once.
She looks like she is no more than twenty-five years old.
The ghostroads are firm beneath my feet, thrumming with all the stories the road has to whisper to the patient and the dead. I close my eyes for a moment and just breathe, still holding tightly to Laura’s hands, still doing my duty as a psychopomp. As long as I don’t let her go, as long as she’s trusting me to get her home, she won’t begin the process of becoming whatever the twilight wants her to be.
“You can’t let go until I tell you it’s safe,” I say. “Do you understand?”
Laura nods.
“Good.” Carefully, I transfer her left hand into mine, so I’m holding both her hands with just one, my fingers straining to contain her. She isn’t trying to pull away. That’s good. I’d lose her if she did, and then I’d have a whole new set of problems.
Breathing in the scent of cottonwood and lilies, empty rooms and broken windows—the clean, honest scent of the dead—I hold my right hand out and cock my thumb to the sky, a summoning sign so much older than I am that it dizzies the mind to think of it. It’s the best and truest ritual I know, the one sacred gesture that always works, and I feel the road pulse beneath my feet as the signal goes out. Hitchhiker on the road, it says. Hitchhiker in need of a ride.
I don’t always feel the road this cleanly. The sensation will fade, of that I have no doubt, as I settle back into my right and real existence. But I was a routewitch, for a little while. I was alive, for a little while. Everything is fresh and raw right now, even the feeling of the road beneath my feet, and I plan to enjoy it for as long as it lasts.
The sound of wheels roaring against the distant pavement reaches us before the flicker of headlights, and there it is: an old dragster racing toward us as fast as the road will allow. The road will allow a lot here in the twilight, especially when it’s a Phantom Rider asking for permission. Tommy takes the curves and corners like they’re nothing, whips around them at a speed that would kill any lesser man—or any man who wasn’t already dead.
I glance at Laura. She’s watching the car approach, but she doesn’t know yet. She can’t know, or she wouldn’t be standing here so calmly, wouldn’t still be holding onto my hand.
“Remember,” I say. “You promised me. You can’t let go until I say so.”
She shoots me a confused look, and then Tommy is pulling up in front of us, tires screeching as he bleeds off speed. She gasps and tries to yank away. I clamp my hand down on her fingers. Laura gives me an utterly betrayed look.
“Not yet,” I say.
Tommy kicks his door open and stands, one foot on the road, one foot still in the footwell of his car as he leans on the roof and stares. He looks so damn young. The exit I’ve been seeing in his eyes for the last few years is closer than it’s ever been, and my heart aches with the understanding that this may be the end of him and me: we’ve been good friends, but I have the thing he’s been waiting for, and it’s time he was moving on.
Time catches up with all of us. It even catches up with the dead.
“Laura?” he says, in a voice that’s as hopeful as it is confused. He doesn’t believe what he’s seeing. How could he? Then his gaze goes to me, and softens and hardens at the same time, relief and suspicion. “Rose. I heard you’d run into some trouble. But look at you. Dead as a doornail and back in that pretty dress of yours. Guess you must be doing all right for yourself.”
“I am, thanks to Laura,” I say, and nod my head toward the woman who holds my hand, her own expression a mix of hope and fear and disbelief. “She paid a pretty high price for helping me, though. You think you could give her a ride?”
“Shoot. I’ll give her a ride anywhere she wants to go.” Slowly, Tommy pulls away from his car and walks around the front to where we wait. I let go of Laura’s hands. She leaves them where they are, suspended in the air, like she doesn’t know what to do with them anymore. She doesn’t have to hold them up for long. Tommy takes them, wrapping his fingers through hers and holding fast.
“Hi, Tommy,” she whispers. Her voice is heartbreak given form, and I take a step back, giving them this space. It’s not much. In the twilight, you make do with what you have.
“Hi, Laura,” he answers. “You and Rose made your peace?”
Silent, she nods.
His smile is bright as all the neon in the world. “You look just like I remember you.”
And she does, she does. Somewhere between the thumb and the ride, her clothes have changed, slipping out of date, until they match the young woman she appears to be. She and Tommy are of an era, and it was nothing more than an unfair accident of mortality that he got here so far ahead of her.
They stare into each other’s eyes like there’s no one else in the world, and it’s a shame to interrupt them, it really is. Unfortunately, I’m not sure where in America we are, but I am sure that I’m not currently in Maine, not standing on the Ocean Lady, and that means the people I care about don’t know whether I’m alive or dead. Literally. I clear my throat.
Tommy turns to look at me, eyebrows raised in silent question. Laura glares. This was supposed to be their moment, and here I am, butting in.
Tough. She’s going to be dead for a long time, and now that she’s here, Tommy is finally ready to go past the last exit, to find out what comes next. He’s going to rest in peace, Laura by his side, and I’m . . . well, I’m not.
“I need a ride,” I say. “Hence the thumb.”
“Where are you heading, Rose?” He sounds almost amused.
“Calais. I need to get back to the Ocean Lady, tell Apple and the others what’s happened.”
“I can do that.” He glances to Laura, looks back to me, and asks sheepishly, “Do you mind riding in back?”
I don’t mind.
Tommy drives like what he is, beloved son of the ghostroads, died and reborn behind the wheel. He also drives like a man in love, taking his eyes off the road to run them over Laura like he doesn’t fully believe she’s real. It would be cute, if not for the part where I’m actively afraid he’s going to plow into a cornfield or take the wrong exit and dump us in one of the Bradburys, some deep slice of sweet Americana that wants to keep us there forever and ever and ever. I resist the urge to kick the back of his seat. Laura squeaks every time he takes a curve too fast, her fingers clenching against the dashboard. I lean forward.
“You’re dead,” I tell her, as kindly as I can. “You’re dead, and Tommy has you, and unless I’m missing my cue here, he’s not going to let you go. A little crash won’t hurt you. It won’t even knock you away from him.” Best of all, now that she’s here, in this car, with him, it doesn’t matter what the road might want to make of her. She’s safe in a Phantom Rider’s passenger seat, and there are some traditions even the twilight can respect.
“Dead,” Laura echoes, hands relaxing. “I’m dead.”
“Yes.”
“This is . . .”
“This is what we call the twilight. It’s one of the places where the ghosts go.”
“There are so many places where the ghosts go,” says Tommy. “Been waiting in this one. It’s where the roads are. It’s where I knew you’d be, when the time came.” There’s a hitch in his voice.
Laura puts her hand on his arm. I look away.
We drive, on and on, down smooth highways and twisting backroads, and it’s all the ghostroads, and it’s all home. The sky changes above us, a kaleidoscope sliding through a hundred types of twilight, now dark as velvet, now pale as silk, and the sun never rises, because the sun never truly sets, not here. We are the heroes of our own stories, riding into our eternal twilight, running on the memory of the people we were and the potential of the spirits we’ve become.
We drive past fields of corn and wheat, past orchards lush with apples. Occasionally we see farmers in the distance, ghosts whose lives and deaths have left them rooted to the land, and they might wave, and we might wave back, but they stay where they are, and we race on. Road ghosts never stay for long, no matter how much we want to, no matter how hard we try. We drive, and Tommy barely has to steer, because his car remembers the way. That’s good. More and more, his attention is going to Laura. They have so much to talk about. Once I’m gone, they’ll be able to begin.
As if the thought summoned the destination, Tommy pulls up at the mouth of a road that’s a little broader, a little older, than the one we’ve been racing down. “This is your stop,” he says, an apology in his tone, and I hear it for the good-bye it is, the one we’ve been working toward since the night he died.
That’s all right. Phantom Riders never stay forever. Someday, they’re always going to want a bigger road. So I lean forward, between the seats, and I plant a kiss on his cheek, chaste and sisterly and grateful. More grateful than I could ever say.
“I’m going to miss you, Tommy,” I say, and he blushes and ducks his head, like he’s already said the last words he had to say to me. All the words he has left are for Laura, and he doesn’t want to share them.
I turn to her. She’s watching me, a little warily, a little ill-at-ease. I guess decades of thinking someone is the enemy can’t go away as quickly as all that, and she did try to betray me.
But she didn’t do it. That’s what matters now. “Take care of him,” I say.
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do,” she says.
I smile, and Laura smiles, and I climb out of the car, green silk gown tangling around my ankles, and I stand by the side of the road as Tommy floors the gas and they roar away, dwindling as they race toward the horizon, until they’re nothing more than a glittering speck, as small as any of the shining stars above us, until they’re gone.
Until they’re gone.