Chapter 9
Beware the Ocean Lady
LAURA STEALS GLANCES AT ME as she drives, keeping most of her attention on the unfamiliar road. “You okay over there?”
I nod, still silent, trying to digest everything that’s happened since this day began. Natural midnight presses in around us, thick as velvet, darkness spangled with glittering stars. I don’t want to look at the shoulder of the road if I can help it. This is a night for hitchers and homecomers, for ghosts looking for a little warmth, and I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to be reminded that existence in the twilight is going on like it always has while I’m still trapped out here.
Laura is waiting for an answer. Finally, I lick my lips and say, “That was . . . something.”
“Air travel is safer than driving. Faster, too.”
Yes, I want to say; if anyone knows the dangers of driving, it’s me, who died of them. The plane went up, the plane came down, and not a single person carried in its belly died, or crashed themselves into anyone else, or anything of the sort. We spent hours crammed into seats that weren’t big enough, surrounded by the shifting, sniffling bodies of strangers, and at the end of it, we were ejected on the other side of the country, left to fend for ourselves as the airplane readied itself for another cargo, another crew. Everything about it smacked of practice, of safety, of understanding the risks inherent in the system. Everything.
And I didn’t understand a bit of it. When the wheels lifted off the ground, I shoved the knuckles of my left hand so far into my mouth that I felt like I was choking, all in the vain hope I could keep myself from screaming. The air was stale, and the only thing that prevented me from ripping my own skin off was Laura, sitting in the aisle seat with the middle empty between us, providing me with a buffer from the rest of the world.
I died a long time ago. I’ve always known the world was still moving, changing, doing what worlds have always done, and I’ve always said I was fine with it. Here, now, with the memory of the airplane still clinging to my skin like the surface of a soap bubble, I’m not fine with anything. My world is tarmac and tires, diners and drive-ins. My world isn’t in the sky. I don’t know what to do with a world that is.
“A lot of people are afraid of flying, Rose. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
People should be afraid of flying, I want to scream. People should be scared of giving up control and being lifted into the air by the hand of some giant child playing with their toys before bedtime. The road may be dangerous—is dangerous, is absolutely dangerous—but it’s a good danger, a familiar danger, a danger that comes with choices. When I’m in the twilight and on the road, I can smell accidents coming, tease out their texture and their inevitability from the way they slot themselves together. They can’t always be avoided, but I know how to try.
Once you’re on a plane, that’s it. You’re stuck, and if something goes wrong, you’re finished. The sky is probably swarming with ghosts, circling the common flight routes, their hands pressed to the wings, working to keep those big metal boxes in the air.
“I didn’t like it,” I say softly.
“That’s okay. If everything goes well, you’ll never need to do it again.” Laura sounds almost jovial. Me being upset is upsetting her. That’s interesting. Then again, I guess it’s hard to pretend to be someone’s aunt for a thousand strangers and not start to care about them at least a little.
Maybe she could learn how not to hate me after all.
As if she can hear my thoughts, Laura adds more harshly, “Now I need you to snap out of whatever this bullshit is, and tell me where we’re going. My GPS can only get us so far.”
We’re almost to Calais; the last sign we passed said that we had less than ten miles to go. I straighten. “Calais used to be the anchor point for the Atlantic Highway. These days, it’s the juncture point for Highway 1 and Route 9. They’re both good roads, although neither of them has the power the Ocean Lady did.” They never will, either. The Ocean Lady was allowed to amass more power than the people in charge wanted her to have, because there was a long time where she was the only option. If you needed to go somewhere, you took the Atlantic Highway. They broke her back and broke her power, and her descendants will always be less than she was, because they’re never going to be allowed to be more.
Some things are too powerful to be controlled. Some people understand that, and would rather kill them in their cradles than allow them to rise and become a threat.
“Nice civic history lesson, but that doesn’t tell me where we’re going.”
“It does, though. Take Highway 1 when you see the junction, heading south. This is a pretty well-traveled stretch, but there’s going to be a side road at some point, a turn people don’t use anymore, something they’ve allowed to fall into disrepair. Something that’s been forgotten.” A vestige of the old Atlantic Highway, still clinging to the surface of the world.
Odds are good that whatever road we find at midnight wouldn’t be visible at noon, because there are ways to drive off the map without entering the twilight, ways to blend the levels of reality. I don’t know how I know them, I just do, and always have. Maybe that’s another point of proof for the assertion that I should have been a routewitch. I don’t know.
“Right: find the creepiest abandoned road I can, and turn off there. Then what?”
“Shouldn’t you have asked me these questions before we left Colorado?”
“No, because a creepy movie star who was supposed to have died before the invention of the three-point seatbelt was—and hopefully still is—trying to find my house, and I wanted out. This way, he’s on the other side of the country, and I can make you explain yourself without constantly worrying that he’s going to pop out of the closet.”
“He doesn’t lurk in closets.”
Laura shrugs. “My point stands. What do we do when we find the creepy road?”
I look out the window. The night is blackness and the shadows cast by our headlights, and it’s beautiful. It looks like the twilight. “There will be a rest stop. If we’re lucky, we’ll find an abandoned diner. I wouldn’t count on that, but there’s a chance the Ocean Lady can see me coming, and if she can, she’ll probably want to help.” She likes me, doesn’t she? She’s always risen up to meet me when I walked out to meet her. From a road, that means affection, right?
“Okay,” says Laura dubiously. “I would have been happier with a motel, but I can work with this.”
“Remember the way you caught me?”
Laura is silent, uncomfortable when confronted with the memory of her own past sins. I suppose I should feel smug about that. All I really manage to feel is tired, and hungry, and achy in ways I had forgotten could exist. There’s a pain in the small of my back that is at once novel and annoying, like an itch impossible to scratch.
Laura saw me from a distance on the night I went riding with Tommy, the night Tommy died. She knew enough about what I looked like to find out what I was called, and from there, to confirm that I was the phantom prom date. She spent twenty years chasing down stories and legends that claimed to tell the truth about me, and once she had everything she needed, she went to an old, abandoned diner, and used the kind of magic that’s accessible to anyone with the time and patience to make it work to glamour that crumbling ruin into something that could fool even the road. Into something that could fool even me.
In her own way, Laura Moorhead raised the dead that night, even if it was only for a little while. I need her to do it again. I need her to do it for me, instead of against me.
“If you can make a dead rest stop seem alive again, the ripples will flow through the body of the Ocean Lady. There’s no way the routewitches won’t notice. They’ll send someone to find out what’s happening. They view any attack or action against the Ocean Lady as the same aimed at them. They have to investigate.”
“I don’t know these people,” protests Laura. “I don’t want to attack them.”
“They consider me an ally, and you’ve been happy to attack me.”
Her expression turns mulish and uncomfortable. “That was different.”
It wasn’t. I don’t want to fight with her. Not when I need her. I understand a lot about the way ritual magic works—I’ve been caught flat-footed by the stuff often enough that I’ve figured out the basics—but I’ve never practiced it. The dead do not get along well with the magic of the living. I could paint all the sigils in the world and never accomplish a thing. Which means there’s never been any point in practicing.
I need Laura’s hand. I need Laura’s eye. I need Laura, or this isn’t going to work.
“We’re going to raise the dead, and hopefully that’s going to attract the living, and then they can tell me how to go back to being a ghost.” I offer her a wan smile across the dimly lit cabin of the rental car. “No biggie.”
“Oh my God,” mutters Laura, and drives on.
We almost miss the turn-off. It’s small and narrow and worst of all, unlabeled; no exit sign, no warning. I spot it at the last second, shout, “There!” and hold on for dear life as Laura swears and hauls on the wheel, peeling us off the highway and diving into the dark. I can see what made Tommy fall in love with her, once upon a lifetime ago. She’s been a safe driver for most of the time we’ve been together, but now . . .
Now, she lets go, and when she lets go she drives like she’s afraid someone is going to snatch the wheel away from her at any second, aware of the road and not caring who might see her charging through the night, fearlessly accelerating.
The paving changes once we’re off the main drag. Not that Highway 1 is the smoothest or best-maintained road in America, but at least it’s more pavement than pothole. This side road is broken and neglected, and we shake and jitter our way down the first fifty yards before it smooths out without any warning at all.
Then we come around the curve and we see it, impossible, perfect, a gift from the Ocean Lady offered to those who would come to her with open hands and aching hearts. I punch the air, hissing, “Yes,” between my teeth. For a moment—faint and flickering, but there—I can feel the road humming around me, the body of a vast, predatory beast that stretches from shore to shining shore.
The moment passes. The strange isolation that’s had me wrapped in a cotton cloud since my heart remembered how to beat returns. I don’t scream. I feel like I should be praised for that. Laura, though, is too busy staring at the ruined diner to notice that I’ve just won a small victory for my dignity.
“Holy hell,” she says. “We found one.”
“The Ocean Lady remembers, and she helps as much as she can.” She’s a goddess and a battery, powering the routewitches who come to perch on her back like tickbirds on a rhino. She can’t do much, day to day. What she can do, though . . .
Sometimes what she can do means the world.
“Come on,” I say, pointing to the strip of asphalt that was once the diner parking lot, before the grasses shoved through the cracks and started shattering it into a maze of holes and crevices. “Park, and tell me what to do.”
“If I tell you to go to hell, will you?” But she’s driving, hands on the wheel, steering around the worst of the damage.
I shake my head. “I’d really rather not. I’ve never been to heaven or hell, and from what I understand, those are both one-way trips. My goal is getting myself back onto the ghostroads, not leaving them forever. Remember, I can’t take you to meet Tommy when you die if I’m wrapped in the arms of my eternal reward, no matter what you think it is.”
“Right,” mutters Laura. She parks on a patch of pavement that looks slightly less likely to dissolve at any moment than the rest, stopping the car and climbing out without another word. I follow her around to the back, where she opens the trunk and pulls out her bag. I do the same, slinging the backpack I’ve borrowed from her over one shoulder.
She hesitates, looking at me seriously. “You’re sure you want to do this right now?” she asks. “It’s late. We’re both tired. We might be better off coming back tomorrow and trying then.”
“I can’t.” I hate the petulant whine in the back of my voice. I can’t prevent it. “I can’t . . . this is awful. Do you understand that? This is awful. I don’t understand my own body, and I don’t want to, and I’m constantly afraid something will happen that . . . that changes me in some way the road doesn’t want, some way that means that when I do get back to the ghostroads, I go back as something other than what I’m supposed to be. I know the rules of being a hitcher. I know my place, and I like it there. I help people. I have people I care about, who care about me, and I don’t want to lose that. I can’t stay here any longer than absolutely necessary. I can’t.”
“Being alive isn’t that bad,” says Laura, cajoling. She’s really worried about doing this ritual. Maybe I’ve built up the power of the Atlantic Highway too much: maybe she doesn’t want to risk offending a goddess.
Maybe I don’t care.
“You’re young, you’re healthy,” she continues. “Wouldn’t it be nice to stay alive for a few years, look a little less like a runaway? I know it’s harder for teens to get away with roving unsupervised than it was when I was a kid. You could finally grow up.”
How many times have I cursed my apparent age? How many times have I wished I could do something to change the body I died with—make it stronger, healthier, or at least grow out the damage I did to my hair trying to look pretty for my prom? There’s a line of temptation in Laura’s words.
But humans don’t just age. Humans get sick. Humans die. And every minute I spend in the daylight is a minute that I’m not with Gary and Emma, that I’m vulnerable to the machinations of Bobby Cross. It doesn’t matter what I thought I wanted when I was never going to get it. This is the real world. This is my real life, both literally and figuratively. I shake my head.
“No,” I say. “Please. I know you’re trying to help, but the way you help is figuring out how to get me out of this body. I can’t do this. I can’t rejoin the land of the living. I’m sixty years out of time and completely out of place. My ‘life’ is in the land of the dead. And where would I go if I tried to stay here? You really want to be my aunt full-time? Because that’s what it would mean. I don’t have anyone else.”
Laura takes a deep breath. “All right,” she says. “Let’s do this.”
We walk together across the shattered parking lot to the body of the diner. It’s a dead thing as surely as I am, grim and gutted by time and the ravages of the weather. The front window is entirely smashed, rendering the ground treacherous with shards of broken glass. This was part of a chain once, although I couldn’t say which one; the construction is too squat, too cookie-cutter to have been anything else. That’s a good thing. Say what you like about the Denny’s and Big Boys of the world, they have strong bones.
Laura produces a flashlight from her purse and sets it on the counter, beam blazing white through the muck and grime. She hoists her suitcase up next to it, opens it, and pulls out the makeup kit I know is full of far more ritual supplies than eyeshadows.
“I wish we had a broom,” she mutters. “Rose, look around and see if you can find something that looks like it might be a broom.”
It’s busywork and we both know it: none of the things she’s going to do need to have a perfectly clean floor. Some of them might actually work better if she does them on top of the grime of years, letting new magic mask old neglect. But she doesn’t want me underfoot, fussing about the curve of every line, questioning the meaning of every sigil, and if I’m being perfectly honest, I don’t want to be there. I wouldn’t even want to be here, in this decrepit relic of a diner, if I didn’t have to be.
The night is dark and full of dangers, and for the first time in a long time, I’m aware of what they could mean for me. So I pick my way deeper into the body of the diner, Laura and her tempting light behind me, trying to let all those years I’ve spent in places like this one guide me.
There are lots of things that can kill a diner. Fire is the big one, followed by people killing each other—no one wants to drink coffee and eat a burger in a place that’s made the papers any way other than hosting an eating competition. But time and money are gaining ground. The world has moved away from sitting in cramped booths, feeling the vinyl stick to the side of bare thighs, listening to whatever the collective tastes of a building full of strangers has put on the jukebox. These days, it’s drive-throughs and convenience stores, hurry, hurry, keep on the road, never stop never slow never look back. I never feel older than I do when I think about the American relationship with the diner, which is changing, slowly but surely, and not changing back.
This diner was killed by time. There are no scorch marks on the walls, no bloodstains on the floor; just torn vinyl and missing ceiling tiles, places where the paint has been patched in something different, something cheaper. This place was buried alive, one overdue electric bill and mortgage payment at a time, and I want to be sorry for its loss—for the road’s loss—and all I can manage to be is grateful for our gain. A building this intact should be easier to gimmick up.
The smell by the bathrooms is deep and swampy and somehow cleaner than what I encountered in the truck stop. This is nature taking back the night soil it’s been given and using it to feed new growth, the reclamation of what was always its to begin with.
I feel around until I find a doorknob, and it’s only as I’m opening the door that I think about the things that could be inside this closed-up closet, the dangers the living world has to offer a girl like me, who is so suddenly, terribly mortal. There could be a raccoon in here, rabid and angry. Or spiders, or worse. I freeze, door half open, doorknob cold in my hand, and try to tamp down the raging panic that threatens to rise up and completely overwhelm me.
I can’t do this. I can’t. I’m supposed to be fearless, reckless, the one who charges in despite everything, because nothing can hurt me. Only right now, everything can hurt me. I’m an untried teenage girl in a body that feels too young and too old and too solid, all at the same time, and nothing about this is good, or right, or fair.
Laura is rattling around behind me, making small sounds of contentment and frustration as she gets her sigils in order. I may need her help, but she needs me too. If someone from the twilight shows up here to find her fumbling around with things she should really leave alone, she’ll have problems. She needs me to stand between her and the world of the dead.
She needs me. I need me. I can’t stand back and wait to be saved. I yank the door the rest of the way open and shove my hand inside, relaxing a little when it hits the handle of what is definitely some kind of cleaning device. I pull it out. It’s a mop. Not quite right, but at least it tells me I’m on the right track.
My second attempt nets me the broom I was looking for. It’s dusty, which seems a little comic given its function, but the head is intact, its spines ready for sweeping. I turn and trot back to Laura, broom brandished proudly in one hand, like it means something. Like it matters.
She’s in the process of sketching out a complicated rune on a piece of binder paper, a stick of charcoal held between thumb and forefinger, slowly coating her in a grayish film. She looks up at my approach, blinking in evident surprise. “You found one.”
“I did,” I say, holding up the broom for inspection. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Sweep as much of the broken glass into the kitchen as you can. It won’t be a danger there, and I’d rather not slice my hands open trying to reset this floor.”
It makes sense when she puts it like that. Blood often goes into runic castings of this sort, but it’s best when the blood is chosen, controlled, and not getting everywhere due to a misplaced shard of window. I bob my head, agreeing to the task, and begin to sweep with more enthusiasm than skill, shoving dirt and glass alike toward the dark maw of the kitchen.
The enthusiasm fades as I continue to work, replaced first by concentration, and then, slowly, so slowly that I barely notice it happening, by habit. It’s been decades since I stood on this side of a broom, but there are things the body never forgets, not in life and not in death. I may be the girl in the green silk gown now—and sweet Persephone, I miss that dress, I miss it like I never thought I would or could, like it’s the answer to a question I never realized I was asking; I, the Cinderella girl from the wrong side of town, trapping herself a minute to midnight for sixty years, so the clock could never chime and the spell would never end—but I was little Rosie Marshall once. My mother was trash and so was I, at least if you asked the kids I grew up with, the ones whose awareness of the social structure was even more set in stone than that of their parents. The adults in Buckley might have been willing to see me as a child, worthy of protection, worthy of a chance, at least until puberty brought me the breasts that meant I was going to be exactly like my mother, and no better than I should have been. Their offspring were never that generous.
I’ve been sweeping floors since I was old enough to hold a broom, splinters in my fingers and my mother’s voice in the back of my head, reminding me that she was working hard to put food on the table with my daddy gone and my two big brothers trying to finish school, telling me I had to do my fair share around the house if I wanted us to have a chance to get ahead. Add one more good thing to the growing tally of the benefits of being dead. Maybe I never got a chance to grow up, but hell, at least I didn’t grow up to be the girl they thought I was going to be.
I’m so focused on sweeping that I stop paying attention to the diner. In a way, it isn’t even there anymore. I’m long ago and far away, in a shitty little house in Michigan, sweeping the floor that’s going to be mine until I find a man of my own to hit me the way my father used to hit my mother, or until I snap and burn the place down in the middle of the night. Gary was one potential escape, but I never really believed he was going to get me out of there. Girls like me don’t get happy endings. Not even when we were never what they thought we were. Maybe especially when we had the gall to not be what they thought we were.
Something catches in the bristles of my broom. I bend to pull it out, and the sharp shock of glass slicing flesh wakes me from the unwanted dream of my past. I hiss, pulling air through my teeth, and shake the glass away. It goes flying, lost to the dark, taking some of me with it. Blood, running down my hand. I’m bleeding. Not the first time since I’ve died—when I walk among the living, blood is always a risk—but the first time where it counts, the first time it could scar.
My stomach rolls. I drop the broom and run for the door, unwilling to step into the dark recesses of the bathroom, equally reluctant to vomit on the floor I’ve been working so hard to clean, the floor Laura will need to transform into a living liminal space if we’re going to catch the Ocean Lady’s attention. I run, and my hand bleeds, and I make it to the parking lot before what feels like everything I’ve eaten since my resurrection comes boiling past my lips and onto the pavement. My hand hurts worse than I could have imagined. The pain is enough to make me vomit again, this time bringing up nothing but stringy acid and more pain. So much pain.
I bend forward, hands on my knees, blood leaking onto my jeans and staining them with the evidence of living, and try to catch my breath. The back of my throat burns. My nose is clogged with vomit and snot, making it difficult to smell anything else. I breathe out as hard as I can, and send a hot jet of mucus to join the rest of the mess.
This is me. All this is me, it came from me, and there’s no way to put it back where it belongs. I could return to the ghostroads right now, fading out of the human world like the phantom I am, and this would still remain, changing the world in tiny, inconsequential ways. It’s a dizzying, upsetting thought, and I don’t want to have it anymore, so I straighten up, wipe my mouth on my sleeve, and stagger back toward the diner.
I step over the threshold. The world snaps into light and color and the smell of apple pie around me, suddenly fresh and bright and new. I can hear the clatter of spoons against coffee cups, the scrape of forks against plates. I can hear it, but when I look, there’s no one there.
Something moves at the corner of my vision. I turn, and the world splits into two parallel realities, running on top of and alongside one another, contradictory and self-contained. In one of them, the diner is bright and new, a palace of the road. In the other, it’s dead, dark and broken. Laura is bent over a particularly intricate swirl of her runes, a paintbrush in her hand, lit by her flashlight and by the candles she has set up and lit on every available surface around her.
I don’t know whether she’s the fastest ritual magician I’ve ever seen or whether I was sweeping for a lot longer than I thought, but either way, she’s done it. She’s cast her spell and called this diner up out of the grave, making it look as new as the day it was constructed. It is a corpse shambling out of the shadows and into the light; the broken places are still here, concealed under the thinnest of veneers. It doesn’t matter. The shock of its resurrection will be echoing through the twilight, spilling out across the Ocean Lady, drawing attention.
Hopefully drawing the right kind of attention. There are predators in the shadows, things that would think nothing of swallowing two living women and an impossible diner whole. I look at Laura, putting the finishing touches on a rune drawn in gold paint and what looks like sparkly black eyeliner, and I feel a pang of guilt. I should probably have told her more about the risks, instead of just demanding that she do this for me, that she make this possible for me. I should have made sure she understood that she was risking her life in the interests of canceling mine.
I don’t open my mouth. I don’t say a word. The runes are set, the die is cast, and much as I do not want to be the reason this woman, who has been my enemy and is helping me anyway, dies, I want to be here even less. I want to go home.
“Now what?” asks Laura.
“Now we wait,” I reply, and hold up my injured hand. “Do you have any Mercurochrome?”