Chapter 1: Rubber Meets the Road, Angel of the Overpass

Chapter 1 Rubber Meets the Road

FUCK BOBBY CROSS.

“Hey, asshole!” I shout over my shoulder as I run down the side of the highway, only half-present, the coat that had been loaning me flesh and material substance long since fallen away on the side of the road, one more skin to be discarded. I’ve shrugged off two bodies and more outerwear than a hundred years of New York Fashion Week, and I’m getting tired of it.

Normally, this is when I’d be dropping down into the twilight, the land of the dead nearest to the world of the living, but there are two big things stopping me. One, ever since my honorary niece, Antimony Price, decided to screw around with the crossroads, the twilight has been a little unpredictable. That’s putting it nicely. The parts of the twilight that don’t see a lot of regular use have been doing their best to recreate one of those fucked-up surrealist horror movies from the 1970s, the ones that replaced my good, dependable giant creature features with acid-trip hallucination sequences and gimmicky serial killers. Not wanting to spend another three days finding my way out of a maze made of mirrors, chainsaws, and disemboweled farm animals is a great incentive for playing haunted house a couple miles more, at least until I get to familiar ground.

The second big thing is a little more ordinary, by my definition of the word: I hate Bobby Cross more than I hate anything else, living or dead, in the entire universe. If I disappear, he’ll turn around and go back to the restaurant where he found me, and there are people there I care about. I need him to follow me into the twilight, although even the chainsaw mirror mazes don’t deserve to spend any more time with him than absolutely necessary, and once he follows me down, I need him to stay there. If I drop down in hostile territory, he’ll just bounce straight back out again.

The third big thing that I don’t want to admit as a factor is that as soon as I leave the daylight, he’ll know he has me scared.

I’m tired of letting Bobby scare me. I’m tired of letting Bobby chase me. Really, I’m tired of Bobby, full stop.

My name is Rose Marshall. I’m both the first girl who dies in the horror movie and the one who refuses to stay buried once she’s dead. I’ve been sixteen for more than sixty years, and I think I have some pretty good reasons to be pissed.

“Hey, asshole,” I repeat, as I stop running and whip around to face the man who’s been making a night out of chasing one pretty little dead girl down a stretch of deserted Alabama highway. I’m not winded in the least. One of the perks of being dead. “You know, when I come from, we have a word for creepy old guys who have a weird obsession with teenage girls.”

I know he can hear me. That man never drives with the windows up if he can help it, and since he’s basically immune to the laws of physics, he can always help it.

But he doesn’t slow, and he doesn’t swerve, just keeps barreling down the road toward me like I’m the finish line and he’s running the Indy 500.

Motherfucker.

This seems like as good a time as any to get you caught up on the situation, since if we go much farther down this road, we won’t have anyplace left to turn around. Yes, road metaphors. You’re going to get a lot of them if you hang around here. Road metaphors are sort of where I exist—not where I live, because if the “sixteen going on seventy” line up there didn’t tip you off, I don’t live anywhere anymore. I haven’t lived anywhere since 1952, when a man named Bobby Cross decided to run me off the road on the way to my high school prom.

I was just a kid.

I was young and scared and not sure what was happening to me, just that I wanted it to stop; just that I had never done anything to deserve this. I stand by that feeling. I died in 1952, and after all these years of afterliving, I still say that the girl I was didn’t deserve what happened to her. She was innocent. She’d never done anything truly wrong in her life. Oh, she’d lied, and she’d stolen little things from her parents and brothers, and she’d cheated on a couple of math tests, but none of those were crimes worth dying for. She should have had the chance to grow up and figure out who she was actually going to be. She should have had a life.

Instead, she got a short, brutal fall from Sparrow Hill Road, and when she woke up, she was me. A dead girl who didn’t get to rest in peace, who had to keep on running for her life from a man named Bobby Cross, who thought other people only existed to make things easier for him. Rose Marshall died that night, and the Phantom Prom Date, the Walking Girl, the Angel of the Overpass, and the Girl in the Green Silk Gown all rose from her broken body, ready to carry on, ready to become the person she’d never been given the chance to be.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This is a story about the dead. A ghost story, if you will, because any story with me at its center is inherently going to be a ghost story: I define my reality by my very presence. If you don’t like ghost stories, if you don’t like spending time with dead people, if you’d rather pretend life goes on forever and nothing ever goes wrong, you can still put this down and walk away. I’m not going to haunt you just because you don’t feel like listening to the ramblings of an octogenarian teenager. There are always better reasons for a haunting.

But if you’re still here, here’s how it works: when people die with unfinished business weighing them down, sometimes they stick around for a while. Days or centuries, whatever it takes to accomplish what they’re hoping to achieve. I’ve known ghosts who flickered through the twilight and vanished in a single evening, moving on to the next stage of existence as soon as they knew their organs were being donated according to their wishes, or as soon as the other person who’d been in the car with them breathed their last and caught up. I’ve also known ghosts who lingered for centuries. I’m somewhere in the middle at this point, established enough to be impressive to the new ghosts, new enough to be treated like a child by the old ghosts.

It used to bother me. Then I figured out that most old ghosts are homebodies, more interested in haunting whatever battlefield or descendant has caught their eye, and I’m . . . well . . . not. I’m what’s called a road ghost: I died in an automobile accident, I died with no thoughts more prominent in my mind than “get away, get away, get away,” and so I became a spirit whose entire existence is tied up in motion. Nothing pins me down. Not for long.

I know, this is a lot, and you’re probably more interested in the man who’s trying to run me down right now. But time is a funny thing for the dead. We exist permanently in the present tense, not quite clear on what’s past or future, and everything I’m telling you now is something you need to understand if you want this story to make sense. I promise we’ll get back to asshole Bobby in a second. There’s nothing wrong with making a dick wait a little while.

Anyway, there are people who think it’s not fair that the circumstances of your death will determine what kind of ghost you become, but I don’t honestly see how it’s any different than existence among the living. So many of the things about you are decided by who your parents are and where you’re born, and if you can change some of your circumstances later, well, you can never change them all. Even if I haunt the twilight for another century, I’ll always be the ghost of a poor girl from the bad part of town, a girl whose mother both mourned her and was silently, secretly relieved to have one less mouth to feed.

Life is determined by the way you enter it. So is death.

Road ghosts haunt roads and house ghosts haunt houses and family ghosts haunt families. There are countless forms of haunting, some more common than others. Some ghosts spend a lot of time in the lands of the living, while others are content to stay in the twilight until it’s time to move on. For every ghost a living person sees, there are a hundred on the other side of the veil, dead haunting the dead, and most of them are incredibly talented when it comes to getting on my goddamn nerves.

But the twilight isn’t just ghosts. The twilight is a kind of skin around our reality, protecting it from the big bad emptiness of eternity, and if it’s the natural dwelling place of the dead, it’s also a comfortable home for all kinds of other things. The routewitches build their bolt holes in the twilight, scattering them along the length of the Old Atlantic Highway, which time and the alchemy of distance have elevated into something barely shy of divinity—or maybe not shy at all. The Ocean Lady is their patron goddess, and they heed her will above all else, even when what she wants isn’t precisely what they wanted to give her.

The world is full of witches and sorcerers and wanderers trying to find their way out of this daylight existence and into the twilight right next door. When physicists talk about the missing pieces of the universe, they’re actually talking about the twilight, even if they don’t know it. It’s the balance to the scales, the shadow that proves the object exists, and without it, everything would fall to pieces. The dead are the immune system of the living. Even if they never see us, we keep them safe, and for the most part, all we ask in return is to be left alone. No exorcisms, please. Let us rest. And if that resting takes the form of hitchhiking to a diner in the middle of nowhere to enjoy a slice of strawberry rhubarb pie, that’s our business.

But all that’s the twilight. Below the twilight comes the starlight, which is stranger and deeper and harder to explain; it’s where nonhuman intelligences tend to go when they die, seeking an afterlife that’s a little less accessible to the sort of people who might have tormented them when they were alive. I’ve met dragons in the starlight, whiling away the happy hours of their afterlives in caverns filled with the memory of gold and the laughter of the hunted who have found themselves finally, mercifully safe. I’ve seen unicorns. I don’t go there very often because it isn’t for me, but part of me will always be grateful to know it exists—that somewhere, everyone gets to rest.

Below the starlight is the midnight, which houses those spirits who may never have been alive at all. I don’t necessarily understand how that works, and I’m absolutely sure I don’t want to: that’s not my place, and trying to claim it wouldn’t just be colonialist, it would potentially be deadly. The midnight doesn’t care for intrusions. When I have to travel there—and I do have to, sometimes, to get to where I’m actually supposed to be—I always do it as quickly and as unobtrusively as I can. It doesn’t do to linger. Not when you’re so deep that even the memories of stars have burned out, leaving the sky as black as tar and twice as unforgiving.

And through them all, like a cold breeze working its way through the foundations of a manor house, run the ghostroads.

No one built them. They built themselves, coming together an inch at a time as people in the daylight carved roads into the body of the world. Distance is a kind of vitality, and gradually, those roads became living things. They followed the same cycle as everything that lives: they grew, strengthened, flourished, faded, and finally died.

But nothing that’s really loved is ever totally forgotten, and when they lost their hold on the daylight, those roads solidified in the deeper levels, connecting all the layers of the afterlife, crisscrossing the twilight like the strands of a spider’s web, keeping us tethered to the lands of the living. Every ride on the ghostroads is a katabasis of sorts, a journey from the land of the living to the lands of the dead, because the roads remember what it is to be alive and they know what it is to be dead and they keep us from forgetting where we come from.

I will never forget where I come from.

I know, I know, asshole with a muscle car trying to run me down back in the part of time that probably feels a lot more urgent to you, because you’re alive. I’m not. Urgency isn’t as big a deal for me, and these are all things you need to know if you want everything else to make sense. So be patient just a little longer, and you’ll get to see a fucker get what’s coming to him.

I’m originally from Buckley Township, Michigan, which isn’t the sort of community that wants to draw attention to itself. Just a little town surrounded by woods, water, and the occasional monster. I could have grown up and old and died there if not for a teenage girl named Mary Dunlavy. She was before my time, but people who knew her said she was sweet, and kind, and gentle, and didn’t deserve to disappear like she did, slipping out of sight shortly after her father passed away. He wasn’t murdered; Benjamin Dunlavy was tired, and sick, and he died in his sleep. It happens sometimes.

Mary wasn’t murdered either. She was just on the wrong road at the wrong time, and she met the business end of a Buick driven by someone who was going too fast and had maybe had a little too much to drink before climbing behind the wheel.

Here’s where I got off better than Mary: I know who killed me. She never found out who was driving that car. They hit her and they moved on, off to the rest of their lives, while Mary choked to death on her own blood in the corn out by the Old Parrish Place. She was just a kid. She didn’t want to die. She begged the universe not to let her die.

And something answered.

Up until real recently, the crossroads were the greatest danger in the twilight. They didn’t belong there. They didn’t belong to the midnight or the daylight, either. They didn’t belong anywhere spirits like us are intended to go or gather. They were a wound in the walls of the world, a ripped, rotten place where something ancient and toxic and unspeakable leaked through, changing the rules to suit itself, remaking reality in its own image. But Mary didn’t know any of that. Mary just knew she was scared and dying and leaving her father alone. So when the crossroads came to her and asked what she’d do if it meant she didn’t have to go, she said “anything.” That’s exactly what she said. “Anything.”

Never tell something you don’t understand that you’ll do anything if it means you get what you want. “Anything” is a blank check against the foundations of the universe. “Anything” lies.

The crossroads took Mary and made her their own, their little crossroads ghost, intended to lure innocent people into their devil’s deals, to convince girls like she’d been that the crossroads were playing fair, even though they weren’t. Even though they never could have been because they didn’t know the meaning of the word. The crossroads never met a bargain they didn’t want to bend in their favor or a loophole they didn’t want to exploit, and Mary was their perfect kind of patsy—young and scared and brilliantly naïve in the way that only sheltered daughters ever get to be. It’s a blessing and it’s a burden. Mary lived and died before my time, but I knew girls like her, shared classrooms and community centers with them, and they were always innocent and easy to take advantage of. So the crossroads took advantage.

Mary and I were both born in Buckley Township, and our bones will rest there until they finish the long, slow process of returning to dust, but that’s all we have in common. We’re different kinds of ghost, with different rules and desires to bind us, but our stories are inextricably tangled together all the same, because one of the first deals Mary helped the crossroads broker was with a man named Bobby Cross, who wanted to live forever.

And there’s the asshole with the road rage issues, finally joining the narrative for keeps.

Diamond Bobby, boy-king of the Silver Screen, a man so scared of getting old and fading away that he was willing to stage his own death and render himself irrelevant. He could have been one of the greats. Now he’s just a footnote for film buffs to obsess over, another James Dean figure who never had the chance to grow up and show the world what he could do. People think he crashed out in the desert. People think his body is rotting on the rocks of some canyon somewhere, waiting to be discovered by an unlucky hiker. People think a lot of things.

They couldn’t be further from the truth. Bobby Cross tricked the routewitches into telling him how to find the crossroads, and he scored himself an inexperienced crossroads ghost who couldn’t talk him out of making a deal, and he sold his soul to live forever . . . technically. As long as Bobby’s behind the wheel of the car the crossroads gave him, he won’t age, he won’t die, he won’t ever run out of time. But that car runs on ghosts instead of gasoline, and the best way to guarantee someone leaves a ghost when they die is to kill them. Violent deaths lead to unquiet spirits, and that’s where Mary and I slid onto the same track. She made Bobby; Bobby killed me. Ran me right off the road in my green silk prom gown, broke me at the bottom of the ravine.

I got away. I shouldn’t have. I was a scared teenager running through the night, leaving my body behind, still in that unformed liminal state most ghosts settle into for a little while, not sure what I was going to be, not sure who I was going to be when I got there. I was easy pickings for a man like Bobby Cross.

But my boyfriend came looking for me when I didn’t show up for prom. He saw me by the side of the road, and he wrapped his coat around my shoulders, and he made a hitchhiking ghost out of me. I guess I should be grateful—I like what I am; I’m good at it—but part of me will always wonder how I might have settled if not for Gary’s intervention. What would the twilight have made of me if it had been given nothing but my own wild desires to work from?

We’ll never know. I got away, thanks to luck and timing and Gary, and Bobby Cross has been on my ass ever since, determined to claim what he thinks of as his, regardless of my own ideas about the matter. I got away. I’m still running.

Spend as much time on the road as I have, and people will do their best to hang an urban legend around your shoulders like a borrowed coat. Like a borrowed coat, those stories never fit quite right. Unlike a borrowed coat, they may, given time, start making changes to the person you think you are. Am I still little Rosie Marshall, who wanted nothing more than to graduate from high school and watch Buckley dwindling in her rearview mirror? Or am I the walking girl of Route 42, the girl in the diner, the phantom prom date . . . the girl in the green silk gown.

When the line between story and history begins to blur, very little remains certain. But I’m certain of this much:

My friends still call me Rose.

So that’s a lot to bring you up to the present, where Bobby Cross is once more trying to run my sweet ass down with his crossroads-customized car. He still thinks all he has to do is get me to touch the paint or chrome and our decades-long game of cat and mouse is finally over; that thing drinks ghosts like sunburnt skin drinks lotion. Dude’s been driving around the twilight for a long time, but he’s not dead, and he doesn’t make many friends, so people don’t necessarily sit down to explain things to him the way they otherwise might.

See, I have a big-ass tattoo covering most of my back, given to me by Apple, the current Queen of the North American routewitches. It signifies that I walk under Persephone’s protection. The Lady of the Dead isn’t all-powerful, nor is she always kind, but what belongs to her, she keeps, and she protects. As long as I have that tattoo, Bobby can’t take me.

Doesn’t mean he stops being a pain in my unaging backside. I’m his white whale, the girl who got away, and he blames me for basically everything that’s gone wrong for him since the night he failed to kill me. Which is, to be honest, quite a lot. And things have to be even worse for him since the crossroads died. Whatever Annie did to them, it didn’t unmake the bargains they’d put into place—no sudden losses of fortune, no new lineages springing up because their ancestors hadn’t all died under mysterious circumstances—but it rendered them unable to do anything more. Bobby thrives on more. So he’s pretty pissed. Pissed enough to risk angering Persephone, the dick.

Being a hitchhiking ghost means I spend a lot of time in the land of the living, since that’s where the rides are. The rides, and the roadside dives. I’d started my night with a hankering for real white-gravy fried chicken, the kind you only get at Sunday church suppers or at run-down little holes in the wall off the Alabama highway, cooked by old men whose arteries have long since solidified into a solid mass of butterfat and flour. I’d hauled myself up into the daylight, flagged down a ride, and got my sweet ghost ass dropped off at one of my favorite fry shacks, borrowed coat on my shoulders and hunger burning in my belly.

Pretty sure the cooks here know I’m dead, given I’ve been coming to their place since it was their granddaddy’s joint and they weren’t even born yet, and here I am, still sixteen, while they’ve gone gray and wizened. But they can cook like a dream, and before their daddy gave them the deed, he told them what the rules were with me.

Told them I would never pay for a meal in their place, and that it didn’t matter, because one guest wasn’t going to break them. Told them I would never order or ask for anything, either, just say things sounded good or smelled delicious. Everything had to be given to me freely, without payment. And he told them that as long as I kept coming, they’d stay open, no matter how hard times got, which was sweet of him, if a little bit stretching the truth.

See, routewitches take note of the places where the hitchers like me tend to gather, and they follow us. So as long as I keep stopping by for a plate of cheesy grits and fried chicken, the routewitches will keep coming for the same, and as long as the routewitches keep coming, they’ll always have a guaranteed clientele. The road is an ecosystem.

It’s always nice to be back in familiar surroundings. The brothers who run the place these days have kids of their own, and I’ve been watching for years to see whether it was going to be Frank or Breanna who decided to take over when their fathers retire, and it’s been looking more and more like it’s going to be Breanna. She enjoys the cooking and the business side of things equally, and she loves Alabama in a way that makes me suspect she might be a routewitch.

People hear “routewitch” and assume they have to be nomadic. Even the Queen feels that way. The routewitches who serve her bring her offerings of distance, because her role in the community means she stays on the Ocean Lady and never gets to see the world with her own eyes. But that’s just one extreme. The other extreme is people who love their land so much they never want to leave it, the sort of folks who tend to become homesteads when they die, because they can’t imagine living or loving anyplace else. They get their distance from the stories people bring them, and they thrive on it.

Breanna’s pies have always had that little extra edge that whispers route magic to me, and if she takes over for her father, this place will last at least another generation. If she and Frank run the place together, it may never close its doors.

She smiled when I came in the door, and her call of, “Rose! It’s been an age,” was colored with genuine pleasure, even knowing that my presence didn’t mean so much as a tip for her. People are sometimes willing to slip a few small bills to a hitchhiker, but it’s not a reliable thing, and most nights all I have in this world is the coat on my back.

“Hi, Bre,” I responded, returning her smile with one of my own as I bellied up to the counter and claimed a stool. About half the tables were occupied, some by regulars I recognized from other visits, some by travelers who’d stopped for a quick bite and found themselves astonished by the quality of the food. You could tell the difference by looking at their faces. The ones who looked like kids on their first visit to Mr. Wonka’s factory, those were the newcomers.

“We have fried chicken legs in white flour gravy, baked cheese grits, and peach pie tonight,” said Bre. “That all right with you?”

“That’s just fine with me.” I flashed her a smile and settled in to wait for an excellent dinner. My death doesn’t have a lot of novelty in it, but I’m a regular in enough different sorts of places not to need it. I get fed, I get to see familiar faces, I get to feel like I’m not losing touch with the world of the living—important for someone in my line of “work.” Hitchhiking ghosts who fall too far out of touch have a hard time getting rides, and the consequences for that can be . . . bad.

I was still waiting when a new smell eeled its way through the air, sinuous and repulsive and clearly not present for anyone else in the room. Wormwood and ashes. Bobby Cross was coming.

Ashes usually mean someone’s going to die. Not always, unless they’re accompanied by a second scent that identifies the means of death—lilies for a death on the road, honeysuckle for a death of the road, and the two aren’t always the same thing. Red cherry syrup for a death at the carnival, empty rooms for a death by old age. Everyone’s death is unique and everyone’s death is the same, and only Bobby carries wormwood on his skin. The bastard.

He’s not as unique as he wants to be, of course. Ashes and wormwood are the smell of a crossroads death, and while he’s not dead yet, he set the means of his own end in motion when he sold his soul for the chance to live forever. He wears his death like a shroud, a foul perfume that seeps from his skin and won’t ever wash away. Makes it harder for him to sneak up on ghosts who know what that mixture means. Must be part of why he preys on the young and innocent the way he does.

I turned on my stool, fixing my eyes on the door, and waited. Breanna dropped off the plate of grits and cheese, and I barely remembered to thank her. I could have run then, I supposed, but I wanted to know what he wanted, and it wasn’t like he could do anything to hurt me.

Bobby wasn’t worth letting my food get cold. I turned back to my plate. Cheesy grits are proof that humanity is worth preserving, no matter what it may have done. They rolled hot and buttery down my throat, and—for a moment—they were enough to wipe away the smell.

Then the door swung open behind me, and the smell of wormwood became unbearably strong. I swallowed, reaching for the coffee Breanna had also dropped off, already doctored the way I liked it. Familiarity has its perks.

Footsteps approached my seat, echoing on the old linoleum. I sighed.

“Hello, Bobby,” I said and took a drink of coffee.