Chapter 3
The Neon Lights of Home
TOMMY HITS THE EDGE OF THE PARKING LOT at eighty miles an hour, tires screeching on the pavement. Gary is parked right in front of the diner with Emma leaning against his hood, a cup of coffee in one hand, patting his fender soothingly as she talks to him. It’s a cute scene, made all the cuter by the fact that his windows are down. He’s playing radio roulette with her, communicating through song lyrics and musical motifs, and I’d appreciate it a lot more if the sight of them wasn’t enough to make me want to cry.
Emma looks up when she hears Tommy approaching, and her eyes widen at the sight of me in his passenger seat. The mug slips from her hand and smashes on the pavement. He barely has time to stop the car before I’m opening the door and flinging myself at her. She matches me move for move, and we come together in the center of the blacktop, her arms around my rib cage, mine around her neck, both of us holding on for dear death.
I don’t say good-bye to Tommy. I don’t have time. I hear his engine rev behind me and I know he’s gone, back to chasing the horizon, doing his best to set aside the call of what’s next until he can tuck Laura in beside him and drive her the whole way home. I could say something about how few people leave ghosts, how few of those ghosts are called to the road, but I’ve been a psychopomp for my own living loved ones often enough to believe that he’ll be able to find her when the time comes. Death can be cold. I don’t think it’s intentionally cruel.
A horn sounds, long and loud and insistent, like someone is slamming their hand down and refusing to let go. I pull away from Emma, not bothering to wipe the tears from my cheeks before I throw myself across Gary’s hood, arms spread wide, embracing him as best as I can. The horn stops, replaced by a mournful song about burying a lover.
Emma’s hand settles on my shoulder, not trying to cut short our reunion, but reminding me I have other people to attend to. “Rose, where have you been?” she asks. Her voice cracks. “It’s been . . . it’s been . . .”
“How long?” I push myself up, turn over, sit on Gary’s hood. His engine purrs beneath me, vibrating the metal.
“Three months,” she says.
I close my eyes. “Damn.”
Three months is nothing in the grand scheme of things: barely a blink in the eye of forever. I once spent three months looping around the same city so I could sneak into a theater that happened to have an umbramancer working the door. He let me sneak in to watch Star Wars more than a hundred times before the road demanded that I catch another ride. Three months is pocket change.
But those three months were mine. And instead of spending them with my friends, or figuring out my relationship with Gary, I had lost them to Bobby Cross.
“What happened?”
“What do you think happened?” I open my eyes, wave my hands to indicate my dress. “Bobby fucking Cross happened. He got some poor routewitch to summon me using a ritual I don’t know, and then she killed herself right in front of me. I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t do anything but watch her die.”
“Where?”
“I’m not sure. When I got out of the summoning circle and tried to head for the road, I fell into the twilight. I found a homestead.”
Her eyes widen. “It let you go?”
“She did, after I promised to see about bussing in some ever-lasters to keep her company. She’s just a kid, and she has a lot of room for them to run around.” I stroke Gary’s hood with one hand, trying to take comfort in the gesture. “My clothes keep changing back to this damn dress, and I can’t access the daylight, no matter how hard I try. Bobby did something. Something bad.”
“Locking you in the twilight can’t be his only goal,” she says slowly. “He can’t get at you here, and he wants you. So what’s his game?”
“I don’t know.” It burns, the not-knowing of it all. Bobby Cross is a creature of the daylight, for all that his cursed car can take him onto the ghostroads for short periods. That’s how I’ve been able to survive for as long as I have, if “survive” is the word for someone who’s already dead. When I move between the daylight and the twilight, I can run from him. I can get away.
Sealing me in the twilight takes away one of my greatest weapons—mobility—but it also locks me in the place where he has less power, where his attempts to grab me can be thwarted by everything from haunt to homestead. Most of the dead don’t care for the living interfering with our business.
A sudden sick certainty washes over me. I slide off Gary’s hood. “We need to go inside.”
Gary sounds his horn in protest. I pat his fender, trying to force myself to smile. It’s a harder task than it should be. Oh, I want so badly to be wrong. I need so badly to be wrong.
Emma frowns a little as she looks from me to the car I love, the questions she isn’t asking me written clearly in her eyes. “You need a malted?”
I do. I need a malted, and a cheeseburger, and a slice of pie with ice cream and whipped cream and every kind of cream the afterlife has to offer. I shake my head. “No. We need to get me out of this dress.” This would be so much easier if I were wearing a T-shirt.
Emma’s nod is small. I pause to plant a kiss on the curve of Gary’s windshield, and then we’re heading into the Last Dance, bathed in the sweet green neon glow, and I have never wanted so badly to be wrong in my entire life. Persephone, please.
Please let me be wrong.
Few ghosts need to use the restroom when they’re in the twilight. Turns out peeing isn’t one of the biological functions—unlike say, sex or cheeseburgers—that most people are super nostalgic about. But a diner wouldn’t be a diner without swinging doors leading into mirrored chambers filled with tiny, privacy-granting stalls. The Last Dance probably holds the record for quickies this side of the ghostroads. There’s nothing like a little swing on the jukebox and a little whipped cream on the lips to make the comfort of a stranger’s arms seem like a good idea.
Emma bustles me into the bathroom, checks the stalls for wayward spirits, and turns to face me, suddenly all practicality. “All right. Strip.”
“Why, Emma. I didn’t know you felt that way.” The zipper along the left side of my dress slides as smoothly as it did on the day I tried the damn thing on, back when I thought I was going to wear it while Gary and I danced out of our childhoods and into the rest of our lives. I slide the straps off my arms and let the whole thing puddle at my feet, leaving me standing in my bra and panties.
Emma’s seen me naked before. She’s seen me bruised and bloody from run-ins with some of the nastier occupants of the twilight; she’s also seen me covered in nacho cheese and throwing chips at the other patrons. I’ve never felt this exposed in front of her.
She takes a step toward me, eyes suddenly hollow, and when she speaks, her voice carries an echo of Ireland’s shores. It’s like the veneer of humanity she normally wears is melting away, leaving her revealed in all her beán sidhe glory. “Turn.”
I turn. Her fingers touch the skin above my spine a moment later, and I don’t know whether they’re cold because we’re both dead, or because I still can’t feel anything.
“Ah, Rose,” she breathes, sorrow and disappointment in her tone.
“What?” I crane my neck, trying to see. I can’t see. “What is it?”
“The tattoo’s still here, but it’s been . . . obscured, in places. The lines are broken.”
“Broken how?”
“If you asked me to guess, I’d say someone had spattered red paint across your back and somehow bonded it to the skin.”
Red . . . “It’s not paint,” I say grimly. “It’s the routewitch’s blood.”
“Ah.” She pulls her hand away. “That’s our answer, then, in two directions at the same time: why he did it, and why he did it this way.”
I’m silent. Most of the time, asking questions only distracts people from telling you things they already want to say. Silence gets the answers faster.
“The blood is . . . bonded to you. It’s almost like a second tattoo, and it doesn’t belong here. Bobby can’t lock you out of the twilight—it’s your home, he doesn’t have that kind of power—but the living can’t move between levels without something to help them. As soon as you got free, you went home, and now that you’re here, the blood you carry won’t let you leave.”
“Bobby can’t touch me here. I have too many allies. Bobby can’t touch me anywhere while I have my tattoo.”
“But you don’t have your tattoo, not entirely, not right now. The blood breaks the lines. It’s not enough to shatter Persephone’s promise or take away her protection. It’s certainly enough to weaken it.”
“How much?” Some questions matter.
“Not enough to take you. Enough to hurt you.”
“Can he do it again?” Goosebumps form on my skin, physiological response tied to a physiology I no longer technically possess. Sometimes being an echo of humanity really gets on my nerves.
“If he gets his hands on another routewitch who fits the specifications of the ritual he’s using, I don’t see why not.” Emma steps back, stoops to retrieve my dress from the bathroom floor. I turn to face her, and fight not to shy away from the grimness in her eyes. “If he gets enough blood on you, I’m guessing it will overwhelm the protection entirely.”
“And lock me in the twilight, and kill a lot of routewitches.” That woman—that girl—she hadn’t known what she was doing when she slit her throat for Bobby Cross. He’d used her, the same way he’d been using people since before he went down to the crossroads.
Someone has to stop him. I have to stop him.
“Yes,” says Emma.
“I need to go to the Ocean Lady and talk to Apple.” I tug my dress back on, zipping it up and smoothing it into place. I’d be happier in jeans, but if this is what I have, this is what I’ll work with. “I know I just got back. I’m sorry about that.”
“You do what you need to do, Rose. You know me. I’ll be fine.” There’s a shadow in her eyes that tells me she’s lying. I decide not to press. Some lies should be allowed to stand. The ones told out of kindness usually fall into that category.
“I know,” I say, and I smile for her, trying to look like I’ve got this, like I have no doubts in this or any other world. It’s harder than it ought to be. I’ve been dead long enough to know that doubt is an essential part of the universe. “You always are.”
Emma laughs, and if there’s a note in her voice that sounds closer to a sob, it wouldn’t be polite to point it out. So I don’t, and we leave the bathroom together.
The Last Dance is still bathed in green, neon holding steady at safe, instead of trying to issue us a warning. That’s nice. If I have a home in the twilight, it’s this chrome-and-vinyl tribute to the 1950s as they never existed outside of film and television and fantasy. Dreams can carry a lot of weight here, if enough people share them, and the collective subconscious of the living has dreamed me a doozy. As to how an Irish beán sidhe with no family left to cry for wound up in charge of the place, that’s a story I still haven’t unsnarled, and one that Emma’s never been particularly eager to share. But I’d bet my left shoe that it’s a good one.
Gary’s headlights blaze through the windows, a constant reminder that he’s trapped outside, he can’t hear what’s going on in here. A pang of guilt lances through me. Is this what it’s always going to be like for us? Me running off or getting kidnapped by Bobby, while Gary sits in a parking space and waits for me to find my way back to him?
That’s a panic attack for another time. Right now, we need to move.
The bell above the door is still jingling from the force of my shove when I reach Gary. The driver’s side door swings open at my approach, and this is good, this is right: this is how the world is supposed to be. I pause in the act of getting in, looking over my shoulder. Emma stands in the diner door, alone. The neon paints green highlights in her red hair, and she has never looked more beautiful, or more lost.
“I’ll be back,” I say. “I promise.”
Her smile is a small and wilted thing. “You’d best,” she says, and goes inside.
Gary’s radio is playing, some jazz number I don’t know about questions for a lover. I finish slipping into the cab, relaxing as my butt hits the warm leather seat, and run my hands along his wheel. Lovingly. Persephone, I love this man, this mad, glorious man who remade himself to stay with me. If things are hard or complicated, that just proves it’s real.
“We need to go to the Ocean Lady,” I say. “You’d better let me drive.”
His engine roars, and the wheel is easy in my hands, and we’re off.
The living have their monuments, their Disneylands and their biggest balls of twine and their roadside attractions dedicated to whatever happens to catch their fancy. The dead are no different. It’s just that our monuments have a tendency to last forever, gaining strength from the people who seek them out, hold them in their hearts, and worship them. So:
The Atlantic Highway was the first major transit artery in North America. She used to run from Calais, Maine to Key West, Florida, carrying dreams all the way along the coast. She ran hard and she ran clean and she ran for the rich and the poor alike; she ran for the sake of everyone who’d ever looked at the horizon and thought they’d seen the doorway into paradise. Because she was the first, there was a good long stretch of time where she was also the only. Anyone who wanted to cross the metaphysical boundaries between the north and south had to let her carry them there. They had to put their faith in the road.
One truism of all roads, whether they run through the lands of the living or the lands of the dead: distance is power. Ten people walking a mile each is the same as one person walking ten miles, and the Atlantic Highway, our sweet and revered Ocean Lady, pulled in a lot of miles in her ascendency. Her strength and reach were great enough, in fact, that some of the powers in the daylight got scared. How could this inanimate thing, this road, be strong enough to bedevil their magics and break their enchantments? How could the Ocean Lady dare to challenge them, when she was nothing but a public works project writ large?
They tell a lot of ghost stories in the daylight, and they write a lot of murder ballads, but you’d have to go far and listen hard to ever hear the song of the old Atlantic Highway, who was murdered by people who feared what she might become. First they snapped her into a dozen tributaries, rerouted and truncated and reduced her, handing her mile markers to a dozen lesser highways like that would make any kind of real difference. When that didn’t work, they destroyed great swaths of her altogether, until all that remained in the daylight was the dream of a memory of a ghost.
But see, that’s the thing. Ghosts exist, and whatever’s loved lives on, and the Ocean Lady sank into the twilight, throwing down roots and running, running, running ever on, like they had never tried to break her. That’s where the Queen of the Routewitches keeps her court, technically in the twilight, technically on the ghostroads, but protected by the loving heart of the first and greatest of the American highways.
Because she still loves the living, the Ocean Lady is not a safe place for the dead. She’s self-aware, or close enough to it as to make absolutely no difference, and she doesn’t care for being haunted, or for feeling like her people are being harassed by restless spirits. I’ve walked her before, but that doesn’t stop a thrill of nervousness from racing down my spine as Gary turns a corner, shifts gears, and suddenly drops from one level of the ghostroads down to the next, down to the place where the Atlantic Highway waits, eternally, for people foolish enough to go looking for her.
There’s a hitch as we descend, and for one terrible moment, I’m afraid I won’t be able to make the transition with him. Then it’s over, and we’re through, and we’re still rolling.
The Last Dance moves around, untethered to any specific geographic location. Not so the Ocean Lady. She always runs from Maine to Florida, and the fact we’ve reached her so fast means the diner must currently be located somewhere along her route. Most things in the twilight have their own agenda. The Last Dance has always been a lighthouse of sorts, for me and ghosts like me, providing us with a beacon when we need it, leading us through the darkness, leading us home.
For a long time, I thought the Last Dance was a myth, the kind of place people invent because they don’t want to live in a universe where nothing exists solely for the sake of being kind. Maybe it was, once. Maybe so many people like me dreamt of a safe haven that it called itself out of the ether, and called a beán sidhe whose earthly family was on the cusp of extinction to keep the lights on and wipe down the counters. Whatever its provenance, the diner always seems to know what I need.
“Thank you,” I whisper as Gary’s radio dial spins, settling on a cover of “Route 66.” Wrong highway, right sentiment: we may not get many kicks along this road, but I’ll be damned if I don’t drive it to the end.
Outside, the landscape is sketchy and strange, barely more than blotches of ill-defined color. I think I see pine trees; I think I see vast yellow eyes, like luminous jack-o’-lanterns, watching from a patch of septic green. I think I see a lot of things. Gary doesn’t roll his windows down, and I don’t try to make him. The Ocean Lady protects her own, and I have been here before, but neither of us belongs to her, and I don’t want to push it. I just want to make it safely to the other side.
The radio spins again, this time blasting 1980s synth into the cab. I roll my eyes.
“Honey, we’ve been in the danger zone for a long time.”
There’s a blast of static—the sound of Gary snickering—and the song continues.
I’m not used to driving in my prom dress; it binds my legs and snarls around my feet. I’m not entirely used to driving period: until Gary, it’s not like I had regular access to a vehicle that didn’t belong to someone else. Most of the cars you’ll find on the ghostroads either have their own ideas about who’s allowed behind their wheels, or are literally bonded to their drivers, as Tommy’s car is to him or as a coachman is to . . . well, to themself, really. And sure, I spend a lot of time in the daylight, but when I’m there, I’m looking for someone else to do the driving while I borrow a coat and shake the ice out of my bones, however temporarily.
Gary helps as much as he can. He handles the shifting while I steer, letting my vague familiarity guide us. The Ocean Lady is a straight shot from one side of the world to the next, and that should be enough, but it’s not. We both know it’s not. Not if she doesn’t want it to be.
We coast around a curve in the road, still surrounded by those strange and unforgiving shadows, and there it is, lighting up the night in neon and chrome. If the Last Dance is a candle, this is a bonfire, the mother of all truck stops, the truck stop next to which all others, however beloved, must be considered pale imitations and dollar store dreams. Its neon is bright enough to sear away the fog and blank out the stars, and there’s no way we didn’t see it a mile back, two miles back, all the way from the parking lot of the damn Last Dance, but we didn’t, because until we came around the curve, it wasn’t here to see.
Sometimes the metaphysics of the twilight make my head hurt, and I’ve been here so much longer than I belonged in the daylight. But I was human before I died. I still think like a human, and odds are good I always will. So I flex my hands on the wheel, and I keep on driving.
If an ordinary truck stop is a testament to mankind’s need for a burger and a shower no matter where it happens to roam—someday we’ll have truck stops on Mars—then this one is proof that the trucker’s heart beats as honest and open as any other. This is a church of the road, built one brick and piece of neon tubing at a time, calling the penitent to come and make themselves known. It calls for them to worship, and they do, oh, they do. We are neither in the lands of the living or the dead: we are on the Ocean Lady, and she sets her own rules.
I should probably have thought about that before we got here. I should probably have warned Gary that things here aren’t like they are in the rest of the twilight, that the first time I walked here I wound up in my death-day dress against my will, all green silk and borrowed innocence. Hindsight is a rearview mirror, and the view it gives will always make you second-guess your choices.
We round that curve as a girl and her car, and then the wheel is gone from beneath my hands, the seat is gone from beneath my thighs, and I’m tumbling head over heels along the length of the Ocean Lady, leaving layers of skin and silk and a not-inconsiderable amount of my pride behind. It hurts, one more fun side effect of the position she holds in the twilight. Here, there is no difference between a ghost and a girl, save perhaps for the fact that the ghost has already died once, and hence doesn’t need to worry about doing it again.
I roll to a stop, my dress torn, my hair hanging in my face in a mess of lemon-bleached curls, all of me disheveled. My palms sting when I push myself up, hissing through clenched teeth. Pain is such a rare thing these days, an undesired afterthought. It’s not bad—just some bruises and a few layers of skin—but that doesn’t mean I like it.
Then I see the body sprawled on the concrete, face down and motionless. It’s a boy, no more than eighteen, teenage explorer standing on the cusp of manhood, long and lanky and dressed in a suit I recognize from the prom night we never got to have. I spare a thought that it’s unfair that Gary apparently got to choose his own death-day clothes, since he was not wearing that when he died, but only a thought. I’m already scrambling to my feet, already running to drop to my knees beside him. What’s a little more skin in the service of the Ocean Lady?
“Gary!”
I roll him onto his back. You’re not supposed to do that with accident victims—something about spinal injuries or whatever—but he’s not an accident victim, he’s my dead boyfriend who is also my car. The rules we’re working from are a little different than the norm is what I’m saying here. And then I see his face, and I have to bite my lip to stop myself from gasping, because damn. Sometimes I forget how beautiful he was.
Gary Daniels was never the cutest boy in school, at least not according to the other girls, who would whisper and gossip about their prospects like they thought I wasn’t even in the room. Maybe to them, I never was. They were well-to-do, the children of parents who kept the refrigerator full and the house heated during the winter, while I was just another Marshall brat, destined to be no better than my mama, no matter how hard I tried. There was no social capital in including me, and no loss to incur by shunning me.
Gary was too tall and too lean, all without turning it into an athlete’s build. He walked through the world like he was trying to decide whether he wanted to be a mortician or skip straight to becoming a human spider, but he played football like a dream, and he loved me. Even back then, with both of us among the living, and him with his entire future ahead of him, he loved me. Enough to spend his whole life trying to find me, to make certain I was all right. Enough to cheat the rules that bind the living and the dead to stay with me on the ghostroads.
I look at him now, and he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. So I do like they do in fairy tales. I lean forward, and I kiss him, soft and slow and sweet. His lips taste like salt and, very distantly, motor oil. That’s a change. I was always the one who tasted like motor oil, greasy from my time in the shop, wrench held between my teeth and unspeakable fluids dripping into my hair.
I kiss him like it matters, and I kiss him like I mean it, and I’m still kissing him when his hands come up and wrap around my waist, pulling me closer. We’re a pair of teenagers making out in the middle of the highway, and nothing has ever been more perfect, or more correct.
A throat is cleared behind us. I keep kissing Gary. This is a rare opportunity. As soon as I let myself get distracted, I’m going to remember that we’re here for a reason, that I need to talk to Apple about a dead routewitch and the blood on my back. So I don’t let myself get distracted. The crisis of the moment can come later. Kissing needs to happen now.
“You know, a bucket of water generally makes the stray cats cut this shit out. Think it works for horny ghosts?” The voice is female, amused, more Irish-accented than Emma: unlike our friendly neighborhood beán sidhe, this woman hasn’t been away from home for more than a few years.
“I’ll get the bucket,” says another voice, this one male, and far more familiar. Regretfully, I break my lip-lock with Gary and glare over my shoulder at the pair of them.
The woman is old enough to be my mother, which means she wasn’t even born when I was buried, with hair dyed black and streaked with lilac and a T-shirt whose silver foil printing is too faded to tell me the name of the band it’s advertising. She virtually crackles with power, distance traveled and converted here, on the Ocean Lady, into visible strength, and I immediately mark her as the more dangerous of the two. Not “stuffing ghosts into spirit jars and selling them to museums” dangerous, but “maybe only fuck with her as a last resort” dangerous.
The other voice belongs to a boy a few years older than Gary looks, with acne scars on his cheeks and temples. His lips are wind-chapped, and there’s a shape to his sunburn like a helmet’s visor. A cyclist, then, which might explain why he’s looking at us with a sneer on his face and no forgiveness in his eyes. Bikes have a much lower margin of error than cars. It would be easy for him to forget that we’re dead, and hate us for surviving the accident that dropped us here.
Easy, that is, except for the part where he’s met me before. He knows me. Which means he knows I’m dead, and he knows any boy he’s going to catch me kissing on the ghostroads is almost certainly dead as well. It’s simple logic. Dallying with the living is for the daylight, where their love can give you things that might otherwise be unobtainable: warmth and breath and cheeseburgers. Down here in the twilight, the dead only dally with the dead.
“Rose?” Gary sounds so confused that I look back to him, just in time to see confusion blossom into purest joy. “Rose! I can talk! I can touch you.” He presses his hands to the sides of my face in demonstration.
I smile at him. I can’t help it. “You can,” I agree. “Right now, though, you need to let me get up, because I have to deal with some jerks who don’t know how to respect a moment.”
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days? Because see, I thought it was public indecency.”
The amusement in the Irish woman’s voice is sharp enough that I have to fight the urge to check that my tattered skirt is still falling past my knees. Gary lets me go regretfully, recognizing the urgency of our situation, and I stand, running my hands down the front of my dress to smooth it. The gesture wipes more than just wrinkles away: the dirt and snags from the road fall out of the fabric as I lower my hands. The Ocean Lady blurs the lines between the living and the dead. She can’t change my essential nature. I am Rose Marshall, the phantom prom date, and when I’m in a wreck, I’m the one who walks away without a scratch on me.
I turn to face the routewitches, jabbing a finger at the boy. “This is where you say ‘What is your name and business, traveler,’ and I say ‘My name is Rose Marshall and my companion is Gary Daniels, and we’ve driven the Ocean Lady down from Calais to visit the Queen, if she’ll see us. I have a question to ask her about a boon she granted to me.’ Your turn.”
The boy looks flustered. The woman laughs. “I believe the next line is ‘Be you of the living, or be you of the dead.’ Which is silly, as you’re both quite clearly deceased. What kind of ghost is your companion, little hitchhiker? I’ve never seen his like before.”
“Mine,” I say sharply. “He’s haunting me.”
“A ghost haunting a ghost? Every time I think I’ve seen everything the road has to offer, it goes and shows me something new. The last question, then, before we move along: the dead should be at peace and resting. Why are you not at peace, little ghost?”
Gary finally finds his feet and moves to stand beside me, slipping his hand into mine. I squeeze it tightly, glorying in this simple, so-human point of contact. Man or car, I love him, but there’s something to be said for having a hand to hold. “Right now, because I’m being harassed by Bobby Cross despite your queen’s best efforts to keep him away from me. I need to talk to her. I need to tell her what he’s done, and find out whether she can do anything to fix it. Also, I have answered all these questions before, and been here without answering them, so what the fuck?”
“I told you she was trouble,” mutters the boy.
There’s my answer. The first time I came to the Ocean Lady, I embarrassed this boy in front of his peers by following him and making my way to Apple without his help. Apparently, he can hold a grudge. I roll my eyes.
“Hello, I’m the dead teenager here! If anyone is going to be immature and unreasonable, it should be me.”
The woman laughs. “Your point is fairly taken, Rose Marshall of the hitchhiking kind. Follow us, and be not afraid, for none here will bring you willingly to harm.” She turns then, and starts toward the glowing palace of the truck stop. The boy goes with her, only stealing a few angry glances back at me.
Gary’s hand still clutched firmly in mine, I follow.
Sometimes I wonder what the road ghosts of Mexico or England or Russia use as way stations to guide them through the endless twilight, where the stars are always bright and there’s always another mile to go. They have to have their own symbolism, their own signs of faith to keep them going. We may all love Persephone, who went willingly, and Hades, who welcomed her with open arms, but the form of that love changes depending on the age and alignment of the dead.
Some ghosts look at this truck stop and see a saloon, or a speakeasy, or even a Starbucks. Whatever made them comfortable and complete when they were alive, that’s what the twilight will give them now. Me, I am a daughter of the American diner, which is why the Last Dance has become my home away from home, and the closer we get to the truck stop, the more that’s what I see. The perfect diner, the diner where the cooks work for free, just for the sweet satisfaction of burgers sizzling on the grill and whipped cream standing up proud and tall as a new-carved headstone. Where the waitresses are always smiling and their feet never hurt; where the patrons always tip and never slap an ass or cross a line. It’s too good to be true. I know that, but I drink it in all the same. How often does a body get to look at heaven?
Gary was young the same time as I was, but he lived a lot longer, and the awe in his eyes tells me he’s seeing something other than a diner. I’ve never met anyone who died past the age of twenty-five who could still look at a diner with the kind of awe I hold for them. I want to ask him what he sees. I don’t want to at the same time. Some things should be kept secret and sacred, between a body and the road.
The routewitches get to the door first, and when the woman touches it the diner flickers, replaced for the duration of a heartbeat by a gray stone mound crowned in the greenest grass I’ve ever seen. They slip inside, and the diner reasserts itself.
Gary stumbles to a stop, turning to look at me with wide, wild eyes. “Did you see that?”
“I think it was an Irish burial mound,” I say, which is the same as saying “yes,” just with more detail. “The Ocean Lady gives us what makes us most comfortable.”
He starts to say something, then catches himself and smirks at me. “You’re seeing that diner, aren’t you? The one where I used to take you on Friday nights.”
“I’m seeing the platonic ideal of that diner,” I say primly. “Why? What are you seeing?” He asked me first. I guess that means it’s fair game.
“The concession stand at the drive-in where I used to take you before we went to the diner.” His smirk deepens, curls around the edges, turns lustful. It occurs to me that before he died, he’d said I was the only woman he’d ever loved, and he’s been a car for most of the time we’ve been back together. His memories of the drive-in probably aren’t entirely pure ones.
They aren’t exactly impure, either. He didn’t get to see me naked until after I was already dead, and all my mother’s dire threats of teenage pregnancy seemed less important than the fact that I couldn’t feel anything but cold when I wasn’t wearing a coat. If he’d thought it was strange that the first—and only—time we’d had sex, we’d done it with his jacket wrapped around my shoulders, he’d been too busy staring at my breasts to say anything about it.
“Shut up,” I say, and punch him in the shoulder with my free hand. “Okay, look, I didn’t think you’d be able to come in with me. Speak when spoken to, answer any questions you’re asked honestly, and no matter what Apple says, don’t fight with her.”
“Meaning you’re absolutely going to fight with her, and you’re hoping if I look pathetic enough, she won’t smite you in front of me,” he says.
“Got it in one.” I start walking again, pulling him with me for the rest of our trek across the parking lot. I don’t want to have this meeting by the flickering light of some terrible old monster movie, no matter how appropriate that might be, and so I make sure I’m the first one to reach for the door handle, burnished steel that looks so new it might as well have been installed yesterday. The sound of the jukebox slithers through the crack under the door, some old, sad song about a boy’s dead girlfriend and broken heart. Gary stiffens a little, and I know he’s thinking of my funeral, of being that boy all the way to the core of him as he watches them lower me into the ground. I squeeze his hand.
He squeezes back, and together we step inside.
As happened the first time I came here, the diner melts away, taking my fears of a drive-in meeting with it, and we’re standing in a saloon that wouldn’t look out of place in a spaghetti Western thrown up on that same drive-in screen. It is to the real American West as my diner is to the real highway pit stop, perfected, refined, and idealized without becoming sterile. Our feet knock against the bare plank floors, sending sawdust scattering, and the routewitches turn to look at us, watching. Waiting.
There are at least two dozen of them here, which isn’t a surprise: this is their place, after all. Some of them are focused on their food, or on each other; judging by the amount of activity happening in one of the corners, there’s at least one pair seeing if they can’t make even more routewitches before someone orders them to go and get a room. But most of them have found their focus, and it’s us.
I snap my fingers and point to the boy. “Paul,” I say. “I knew your name would come to me if I just thought about it long enough. Paul, go get Apple for me, okay? Tell her it’s an emergency.”
The woman lifts her eyebrows. “Pushy for a dead girl, aren’t you?”
“Most of the dead people I know are pushy, and being around this many routewitches makes my skin crawl, so I’d rather be pushy and get it over with quickly, instead of hanging out here being polite and slowly itching myself out of my mind.” Routewitches carry the miles they travel with them, a physical manifestation of their power. With this many of them, this close together, the power has weight. It puddles in the shadows, stretching and distorting them.
I do not like it here.
“Do you swear, little ghost, on the coats you’ve yet to wear, that you intend our queen no harm?”
“I think Apple’s more of a danger to me than I am to her,” I say, and look around the room. There’s no Japanese-American teenager perched at any of the tables, which means she’s not here. “Please. Get her for me.”
“You’ve done your jobs,” says Apple’s voice. I turn, not making any effort to conceal my relief. She’s standing in a doorway behind the bar, a cup of coffee in one hand and what looks suspiciously like a chocolate-cherry malted in the other, two straws sticking out of the mountain of whipped cream. She smiles at the sight of me. “You can let her talk to me, if she remembers what to say.”
“I hate your little call-and-response games,” I say.
“Yet here we are again. Call and I’ll respond, or don’t, and this beautiful concoction”—she holds up the malted—“goes to waste.”
I sigh. “Naturally,” I say. “My name is Rose Marshall, once of Buckley Township in Michigan. I died on Sparrow Hill Road on a night of great importance, and have wandered the roads ever since. This is my companion and charge, Gary Daniels, also of Buckley Township, who died alone in his bed. We have driven the Ocean Lady down from Calais to visit the Queen, if she’ll see us. I have a problem I hope she can help me with.”
“Good form, nicely said, guess I’d better talk to you.” Apple’s smile stays as she walks across the saloon to me, holding out the malted as an offering. As she gets closer her smile flickers, fades, replaced by a bone-deep confusion. “Rose? What’s wrong?”
“Can we go somewhere?” I take the malted, raise it to my lips, and gulp hopefully. There’s a hint of chocolate and cherry beneath the sludgy ash that the world has become. Even here, even on the Ocean Lady, Bobby’s curse is binding. “I need to show you something.”
The Queen of the Routewitches nods.
Apple lives here, on the Ocean Lady, where time is an afterthought and mortality, with all its consequences, is somebody else’s problem. It’s the only way she can still look as young as she does, as young as I do, when I know she’s so much older than she appears—older, even, than I am. She ran away from Manzanar during World War II. While I was playing in the dirt in Buckley, she was bargaining with the Ocean Lady for her life, and for the freedom to live it.
I wonder, sometimes, whether she ever got that freedom, or whether she traded a cage of someone else’s choosing for one that she could decorate at will. As the Queen, she’s the one who must interpret for the Ocean Lady. In a community defined by roving, she’s the one who never gets the chance to go anywhere. She’s a routewitch. There was a time when the road said “Let me give you that horizon.” Somewhere along the way, she replied “No thank you,” and settled down in a double-wide trailer on the Ocean Lady, safe and sound and stationary.
Her trailer is decorated in tags and tatters, bits and pieces of a hundred roads, a thousand lifetimes heaped all around. It looks more like a thrift store or an amateur theater company’s dressing room than the home of royalty. I know better—I’ve been here before—but Gary doesn’t, and his eyes are wide with the effort of trying to look at everything at once.
“The Ocean Lady needs me here most of the time,” she says, pulling his attention onto her. “She can’t afford to let me go roving. That’s when accidents happen. So she makes it known that it pleases her when people bring me offerings. Things that have traveled far enough to be of interest. There’s not a thing in this room that’s traveled less than halfway across the world, when you add all the miles together, save perhaps for myself, and as no one’s anchoring their magic on me but me, I think that’s all right.” She smiles faintly at her own joke.
I don’t smile back. “Bobby snatched me out of the twilight and dragged me into the daylight,” I say, point blank, no preamble. “I was at the Last Dance. I was at a diner.” I make no effort to keep the shock and loathing from my voice. I am a road ghost, a child of the 1950s, a moment frozen in time and held there by the sheer force of the twilight’s desire to keep me. Nothing should be able to touch me in a diner, any diner, and especially not in the Last Dance. “He pulled me into the daylight, and he had a routewitch. She’d drawn him sigils, a circle of salt . . .”
Apple pales. “What did she look like?”
“Thin. Young. Hungry. Not like she needed to eat, but like she needed to . . . ” I flap my hands helplessly, finally settling for gesturing to myself, to Gary, to Apple. “Like she needed. Dark skin. Curly hair. A little dusty.” That’s normal, among routewitches. They carry the road on their skins, keeping its power close and its options closer.
Apple is the cleanest routewitch I’ve ever known. Every time I’ve seen her, she’s been wearing tidy, if mismatched, clothing, with clipped nails and perfectly brushed hair. It’s part of being queen, for her. She doesn’t swear her allegiance to any single route, any single road.
She nods, a sad frown twisting her lips downward. “Her name was Dana. She was one of mine, although she didn’t know it—we never had the chance to tell her. Every time we tried, she found another excuse to close the door in our faces. I think she was scared that if what the road had been saying to her for all these years was real, she had wasted her life. But she did little magics, things she powered with the drive to the grocery store or the post office, and we still thought we could bring her around. We thought we could save her. Until Bon found her body and came home to tell us we were less.”
“Bon?” I ask.
“The woman who met you at the boundary line. She doesn’t spend much time on the Ocean Lady. That means that when she’s here, she’s almost always stuck playing sentry.” Apple shrugs. “Everyone pays.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” I mutter, and unzip my dress.
If Apple finds it strange that I’ve started stripping, she doesn’t say anything about it. The silk puddles at my feet and I turn, presenting my back. She takes a sharp breath, air hissing between her teeth as she reaches out to cautiously run her fingers along my skin.
Her touch is like ice, so cold that it burns. It takes everything I have not to shy away.
“He didn’t kill her,” she says, voice wondering. “He convinced her to kill herself, willingly, after telling her you were somehow wicked and wanton and to blame for all his sins. Oh, clever boy.” Her voice grows softer, laden with regret. “He was always very clever.”
“What do you mean?” demands Gary. I jump a little. I’ve been focusing so much on Apple that I’d almost forgotten he’s here. “How is Rose to blame for anything that man did?”
“She’s not, unless you subscribe to the idea that the rabbit is responsible for the fox. But it doesn’t matter. A sacrifice can be consecrated on a falsehood, if it’s believed completely.” Apple traces the lines on my back again. “This tattoo is Persephone’s seal. With it, we blocked Rose from the reach of Bobby Cross. But Persephone demands faith of her followers, and this sacrifice has been used to mark Rose as faithless.”
“How the hell is that possible?” demands Gary, before I can even open my mouth. “Rose didn’t do anything.”
“The sacrifice carries the accusation,” says Apple. “Blood is enough. Dana’s death was used to send a message to Persephone, and without something bigger to counter it, we can’t cancel the signal. So to speak.”
“What’s bigger than a death?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she replies.
I want to grab my dress from the ground, wrap myself in it like the unwanted armor it has, over the years, become. I don’t. I stand my ground, shivering, and ask, “How did he even learn how to do that? Every routewitch I’ve ever met has hated him.”
“You can learn anything, if you’re patient enough. If you’re willing to pay.” Apple pulls her hand away from my back. “Someone broke faith with me and sold secrets to Bobby Cross. They’ll be punished, when I find them.”
Not in a way they were going to enjoy, if her tone was anything to go by. “Emma says the blood is heavy enough to keep me from moving between the twilight and the daylight. Why does everything taste like nothing? I can’t eat, I’m not even sure a coat would work for me—”
“Bobby has, in effect, separated you from your anchor, and you’re being punished accordingly.” I hear Apple take a step back. “I just don’t understand how he was able to pull you off the ghostroads in the first place. There aren’t many rituals that can do that.”
“He’s nothing if not clever,” I say, and bend to retrieve my dress from the floor. “What can we do? Tattoo me again?”
“No. That won’t work. We need to go big. We need a symbolic death—a sacrifice—to cancel this one out.”
My stomach sank. I suspected I knew where this was going. “Meaning?”
Apple’s face was grim. “Meaning Halloween.”