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?”
Ther
e’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.
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.