THE STARLIGHT ISN’T MY HOME, but it’s a realm inhabited by the spirits of the dead, and like all such realms, it has a few manufactured physical properties, maintained by the consensus of its occupants for everyone’s comfort. Up is up and down is down; there’s gravity, even if not everyone chooses to respect it. People drift along the sidewalks of the bucolic village where Pippa has taken me, their feet easily eight inches above the ground, but their bags stay safely in their arms. Compromise. It’s all about the compromise.
This place would fit right into the twilight, as long as no one who came to shop here looked too closely. Everything is subtly wrong when I try to look at it too closely. The angles of the architecture hurt my eyes; the bones of the people going about their business are too long, or too short, or too close to the surface of the skin. I feel, for the first time in a long time, like I’m walking through a haunted house.
It doesn’t help that my dress is in tatters below my knees, marked with great streaks of rail grease and grime. Normally, it shrugs off damage almost as quickly as that damage can be dealt. Here and now, it doesn’t know the rules any more than I do, and so is defaulting to acting like it still exists, like it’s not long since decayed in a pine box in Michigan.
I wonder if there are tailors here in the starlight, or whether this damage is permanent. That would suck. I wasn’t the biggest fan of spending eternity in this dress when it didn’t look like I’d just been in a bar fight. It smells, too. I wrinkle my nose as I catch a whiff of myself. How am I supposed to convince people to give me rides when I reek of the gunk that collects along subway rails?
Pippa leads me to a quaint little outdoor café, where two of the three tables are already occupied, one by an honest-to-God cobra and a woman with snakes for hair, the other by two men and a woman who all look enough alike to be siblings. They’re pale and black-haired and blue-eyed, and when they turn to look in my direction, I want to claw my own skin off to keep them from noticing me. So that’s fun.
“I’ll be right back,” says Pippa, indicating a seat at the one open table. “Try not to talk to anyone. You twilighters don’t belong here.”
“You got that right,” I mutter and sit, folding my hands in my lap, looking at the surface of the table like it holds all the secrets of the universe. It’s safer than looking at the locals. Dead humans go to the twilight and dead monsters go to the midnight and dead everything else winds up here. A lot of the people that fall under “everything else” were predators when they were alive, and humans were their preferred prey. I can’t stop myself from thinking about the cats and pigeons again, and the way they keep playing out predator and prey even long after death.
I don’t have time to be hunted right now. I barely have time for this conversation. I can feel the starlight bubbling against my skin, vast, curious predator that it is, sniffing around for signs that I’m something it can digest. The whole place might as well be a single organism. I’m like a protozoon swimming into the open maw of the ameba. The fact that it’s a monocellular organism that would never be able to work up the coordination to go hunting won’t make me any less dead if it decides to clamp down and get to the business of digestion. I don’t want to be digested.
Pippa comes out of the café with a tray in her hands, walking over to place it in front of me. “I didn’t know what you like to drink, so I made some guesses,” she says. There’s a tall glass filled with layers and layers of coffee, cream, and sugared syrup: whatever fancy-ass drink that is, it must taste like a milkshake mixed with a cotton candy machine, sweet enough to cause tooth decay even in the dead. The other drink is your basic white ceramic diner mug, filled with black coffee hot enough to still be lazily bubbling. I start to reach for the mug, then stop, pulling my hands back before I can touch it.
“Is it safe for me to drink here?” I ask. “I’m not looking for a goblin market scenario.”
“Who knows upon what soil they fed their hungry, thirsty roots?” Pippa asks, with a mocking note in her voice. She sits down across from me, claiming the overly sweetened drink for her own. “No. The starlight isn’t fairyland. You won’t be trapped here if you have a cup of coffee, any more than I would be trapped in the twilight.”
But the twilight doesn’t feel like this, like a predator getting ready to pounce, like it considers every intrusion an offense. Is that because I belong in the twilight? Am I reading everything I’ve experienced there through the lens of not being a natural part of the environment?
Is this what Gary, who was never supposed to linger the way he has, feels like all the time? The thought is revolting. I reach for the mug again. This time I let myself wrap my fingers around it, feeling the heat radiate through the ceramic, insulating me from the burn of the coffee. And it would burn, it would, I can tell that just like I can tell that Pippa never expected me to reach for her caffeinated parfait of a beverage. She looks way too pleased with herself as she sips its frothy edge, and while I enjoy a good milkshake as much as the next girl, no one who takes their coffee hummingbird-style also likes it black. It’s too much bitterness.
Pippa takes another sip and smacks her lips in a distinctly unladylike fashion as she sets her glass aside and levels her graveyard eyes on me. She looks like Death’s maiden aunt getting ready to pass judgment on the last fifty years of my existence, and I realize with a sudden start that I have absolutely no idea how old she is, how many years she’s spent collecting the souls of the dead and escorting lost ghosts along their katabasis to the Underworld. Dullahan don’t exist outside the afterlife, but unlike beán sidhe, they don’t have mortal families to anchor themselves to. I don’t know how they come into existence, whether they’re born or hatched or somehow made, the products of afterlife artisans who should probably get a different hobby. She could be centuries older than I am. She could have been made five minutes before the first time we met.
“Respect your elders” is practically a commandment in the afterlife because your elders are frequently capable of blasting you through the walls of reality and leaving you a damp smear on the pavement of the ghostroads. Have I been disrespectful? Should I be? The rules here aren’t the ones I know, and that puts my teeth on edge.
“The Lady speaks well of you,” says Pippa, tapping a finger against the glass rim of her cup. It makes a small ringing sound, like the tiniest bell in the starlight. The woman with the hair of snakes looks over at us, not making any effort to hide her curiosity. “She doesn’t see many of your kind, for all that you’re among the most common ghosts in the human afterlife. She says you’re usually too wrapped up in trying to go home to do anything else.”
“It takes time for most hitchers to figure out that we have other choices.” Hitchers—hitchhiking ghosts—are almost identical to homecomers. They also solicit strangers for rides. They also spend their early afterlives trying frantically to get back to where they were before they died. The difference is in the severity of their focus. Hitchers eventually figure out that we’re dead. We stop trying quite so hard, and we don’t have a strong reputation for killing people just because they can’t drive us back in time. Homecomers, though . . . all they want is to open the door of the places where they used to live and find their families waiting inside, as if nothing has changed. Most of them are in denial about being dead. How can they be dead when they’re still lost and scared and confused? That isn’t what religion promised them. The ghostroads aren’t Heaven or Hell. They’re just existence, as mundane and as magical as existence has always been.
Homecomers kill a lot of people. They’re the ones who flip cars or stop hearts. A surprising number are also poltergeists, which isn’t a kind of ghost so much as it’s a high-octane add-on that some ghosts get, letting them manipulate the world of the living even when they’re not a part of it. When I have a borrowed coat, I can pick up a rock and throw it at somebody. When a poltergeist decides they want to fuck with shit, they can move mountains. Sometimes literally. I’m occasionally jealous of ghosts who have that kind of power, but mostly, I’m glad to have the limits I do. If I’d been able to make personal earthquakes from the moment I died, I would probably have done a lot of damage in the first furious days after my death, before I’d learned the way the twilight worked, before I’d come to accept that I was never going to grow up or grow old or grow into the woman I’d expected to eventually become.
“Even so,” says Pippa. She looks at me thoughtfully, with a degree of interest she didn’t have before she realized Persephone actually does care about me, at least enough to remember what kind of ghost I am, and presumably remember that I carry her blessing both etched into my skin and tied around my wrist. Collect the full set of benedictions and maybe I, too, can avoid being stuffed into a bastard’s gas tank and rendered down for fuel.
“I’m glad she likes me,” I say.
“I didn’t say that,” says Pippa, sounding almost offended. “I said she speaks well of you. Don’t presume to know what pleases the Lady. No one gets to know that. Not me, and certainly not a little human ghost who rolled in with the rest of the trash. Having powerful friends doesn’t mean the rules don’t apply to you.”
I suppose I do have powerful friends. Emma’s one of the nastiest beán sidhe in North America. We don’t have many of them here, and since she no longer has a human family to worry about, she’s been able to devote herself to gathering and locking down power in the twilight. I think she could go up against Apple and stand a decent chance of winning, and that would be terrifying if she weren’t my friend, because Apple is Queen for a reason. Apple is terrifying in her own right. Apple can unravel roads with a snap of her fingers, can rewrite memories, and remake realities on a personal level. She’s one of the scariest things out there.
And then there’s Mary, assuming she’s managed to sustain her power through the destruction of the crossroads. Pretty Mary Dunlavy, with her highway eyes and her bone-bleached hair and her living family, any of whom would be happy to lock a ghost in a silver-backed mirror for the crime of bothering their favorite dead girl. I like the Prices, but they don’t play nicely when they don’t see the need for it.
I square my shoulders and look Pippa in the eye, refusing to allow the growing sensation of being slowly digested to cow me. “If I don’t get to presume to know the Lady, neither do you,” I say, and hold up my left hand again, showing her the white asphodel corsage tied tight around my wrist. “So you went to see her after all? What did she say?”
Pippa’s lips twist as she pushes her glass roughly away. “She says you belong to her, and she doesn’t like to see her possessions thrown away for petty reasons.”
I want to argue with her description of stopping Bobby Cross’ reign of terror as “petty.” He’s been wreaking havoc across the twilight since before I died. Stopping him is anything but petty. It’s a public service to the afterlife, like eliminating smallpox or making seat belts mandatory in passenger vehicles. I also want to argue with me being classified as a “possession.” I don’t do either. Persephone is a goddess. A literal, worship-in-her-name, owns her own personal level of reality, predates what I think of as modern civilization, goddess. I may never see her again. I’ll be able to see her image branded on the inside of my eyelids for as long as I continue to exist. She’s a goddess. One doesn’t walk into the presence of a goddess and walk away unchanged. There’s always a price to pay. If Persephone wants to think of Bobby Cross as a petty problem, I guess she’s allowed. She’s earned it if anyone has.
“Does that mean I’m not allowed to go looking for Bobby?” My voice wobbles more than I like, as if the question itself is a betrayal, somehow.
Pippa winces and looks away, refusing to meet my eyes.
“She wouldn’t allow this if it were anyone else. In this one instance, this one regard, you can think of yourself as special because she’s willing to make an exception for you. Given what he did to you and given the damage he’s done to other of her followers in his efforts to capture you, she could even say you have a duty to be the one to bring him to heel. He’s not a monster of your making, but he’s the monster who made you. If he belongs to anyone, he’s yours.”
I don’t want ownership of Bobby Cross. I don’t want him to exist for anyone to own. I take another sip of my coffee—still hot and black and bitter as anything, like I’m drinking the blood of the earth itself, pulled up from unspeakable depths, dried and ground, and reconstituted with ordinary water—and swallow, watching Pippa speak.
“He’s yours, and so she’s willing to let you go hunting for him. She’ll hang out the warnings and the wayposts, to make sure anyone who crosses your path knows you move under Persephone’s blessing. That you aren’t to be harmed or hunted until your task is done.”
“Does the Lady require payment for this great gift?” I ask and take another sip of coffee. It’s surprisingly smooth for being so bitter. It rolls down my throat like a whisper rolling off a liar’s tongue.
Pippa shakes her head. “She asks that you find proof the crossroads are truly gone and buried, never to return, and to come back to the starlight to tell me, so I can carry the truth down into the Underworld. She’d prefer if you didn’t undertake a second katabasis just for the sake of seeing her since you’re dead again, and when dead people travel to the Underworld, there’s always a chance they won’t come out.”
“But that’s not a problem for you?” I ask.
Pippa looks smug. “I’m not dead,” she says. “I’m undead. You should know that, with as long as you’ve been haunting places you don’t belong, little ghost.”
“I’ve been too busy to sit down and work on my naturalist’s guide to the starlight.” I take one more sip of coffee. It hasn’t cooled at all. “This has been fun, and I appreciate you getting Persephone’s permission for me, but I gotta get going if I’m going to hit the road before my niece gets digested, or dismantled, or whatever it is that’s happening to the crossroads ghosts now that their patron is gone. I want to save her if I can.”
“Because you owe her some favor?”
“Because she’s family. She’s my brother’s granddaughter, and I never even got to meet his kids, what with my being dead before he was old enough to go running around with girls. I don’t have a lot of family left. The Marshalls aren’t inclined toward unfinished business. Most of us have died and then immediately moved on.” I have a few distant cousins haunting a trailer park in Oklahoma, but they aren’t road ghosts, and they aren’t inclined toward family reunions.
“Are you sure this is about your niece, and not about the white-haired girl who got you killed in the first place?”
I mostly try not to focus on the fact that Mary was the one to negotiate Bobby’s deal with the crossroads. Sometimes I can’t help it. If not for her, Gary and I would have been able to get married right out of high school. We would have grown up together, teenage disasters becoming adult, well, disasters, knowing us. I would have come into my powers as a routewitch. He would have been able to move past his dreams of a dead teenage girl walking by the side of the road. We could have been happy.
Or maybe we could have been miserable. People can’t exist in “maybe.” It’s a cruel and nebulous country that slips away as soon as you try to grab hold of it. It never lasts. It never learns how to love, or to forgive. It isn’t always kinder than the world that actually exists; it only seems that way because you don’t have to live with it, don’t have to endure it through the bad moments and the heartbreaks. “Maybe” is an illusion. If I’d lived, if Mary hadn’t made Bobby’s bargain possible, Gary and I might still have broken up. His family hadn’t liked me. I was too poor, too loud, too opinionated to make a good wife for their precious little boy. He might have left me in the wreckage of our high school careers, striding into the future with an unburdened heart and a hand that was just waiting for some pretty young thing from a good family to reach out and claim it. “Maybe” was never going to be enough to save me. “Maybe” was only another road for me to crash and burn on.
Mary did what she did because she didn’t have a choice, and she did it without malice, never intending for me—or anyone else—to get hurt. She died in an accident, just like I did, and she did what she had to do in order to keep on existing. Maybe that’s why I forgave her after we’d finally had the chance to sit down and talk things through. We never intended to be set against each other. Nothing she’s ever done has been meant to harm me.
“Mary is older and stronger than Bethany,” I say, feeling my way into the words, like they might turn and bite me if I took my eyes off them for even a moment. “If any of the crossroads ghosts can survive this transition, it’s going to be her. I’m not worried about her.” Yet. I will be, I know, assuming she doesn’t come and find me and tell me all about how frustrating this whole situation is. She was there when it happened. She has to be feeling the effects by now. Doesn’t she?
Mary will be fine. It’s Bethany I’m worried about. I put my coffee down and push it away, smiling at Pippa as I try to shrug off the feeling of digestion. Pippa takes another sip of her hummingbird milkshake, watching me. I feel small and grubby and human; feeling human hasn’t been a bad thing in a long time, but it is right now. Here in the starlight, it could prove fatal, and I say that as someone who’s already dead. “I’m going to get started now,” I say.
“You do that,” Pippa agrees. “And Rose?”
“Yes?”
“After you fulfill the Lady’s request, don’t come back here. Not even to talk to me. Those powerful friends I mentioned earlier?” She bares her teeth in a parody of a smile. “I’m not one of them.”
I get to my feet with as much decorum as I can manage in a torn, grease-stained dress that’s started sticking to my skin. It feels like I’ve been rolling in a tar pit. Gross. “I would never presume that you were,” I say. “You’re Persephone’s courier. I respect you. I sometimes need to ask you for help. I know we’re not friends, and I’m not trying to force you to be what you don’t have any interest in being. You have my apologies if I gave any other impression.”
Pippa grumbles as she leans back in her chair, shoulders stiff, neck tight enough that the tendons stand out against her corpse-white skin. “You didn’t,” she says. “But stay out of the starlight. The Lady will be furious if you get ripped apart by something larger than me.”
I find the focus to nod, and say, “I’ll stay in the twilight or above if I can. I know this place isn’t for me.”
“You’re dead, but you’re still human, little ghost,” she says. “Try to remember that.”
I release my hold on the starlight and allow myself to rise, up toward the twilight, where the ghosts are more familiar and the air doesn’t resent me for intruding. The feeling of slow digestion drops away, although the feeling of being watched by something infinitely larger than myself doesn’t: the starlight is watching me go.
My rise is more metaphorical than literal. I can feel the café patio under my feet until I can’t because it isn’t there anymore. I don’t drift into the sky. I don’t drift at all. Floating has never been a part of my phantom tool kit. The way I died anchored me too firmly in the idea of my body’s limitations, and the hauntings I’ve been part of since then have been too dependent on borrowed blood and bone to leave me with that kind of flexible approach to physics. Sometimes I envy the ghosts who figured out how to shed the surly bonds of gravity and soar through their afterlives like the angels none of us have actually turned out to be.
There must be angels somewhere. Former humans with big fluffy chicken wings, hanging out on clouds and preening themselves. Too many cultures tell stories about them; too many people claim to have seen them or spoken to them or been touched by them. I don’t know that I believe in a single coherent creator god—not after everything I’ve experienced in the afterlife, and not after meeting multiple smaller gods, more limited, maybe, but still terrifying when they want to be. But there must be angels. I don’t know whether people ascend or are transformed or somehow earn their halos and wings. I don’t much care. It’s not like it’s ever going to be my problem.
I’m no angel. I would make a terrible messenger for the forces of light, assuming the forces of light actually exist. Most of the genuinely good people I’ve known would be better described as “complicated and sort of gray” than either “black” or “white.” That kind of uncomplicated cosmology only functions on paper. It doesn’t survive encountering the actual complexities of the way people think, behave, and sometimes betray. We build and break religions by being the way we are.
So I don’t float out of the starlight. I just fade until the ground under my feet is precisely that: it’s ground, rough and unpaved and smelling strongly of petrichor and loam. There’s a rock under my right foot, digging into the pad of my heel hard enough that it feels like it’s going to leave a bruise. I refuse to let that distract me. I belong in the twilight, but transitioning between layers is never easy, no matter how much one place feels like home compared to another. If I stop focusing on the transition in order to focus on the rock, I’ll wind up stuck in-between, and I have no idea what might happen to me then. I’ve never been stuck.
I’ve met a few ghosts who had dire tales of what would happen if I ever got careless or panicked enough to mire myself on the membrane between levels. According to them, I’d slow down until I was barely moving, until working myself free might seem to take a few minutes, but would actually take years, if not decades. Years of being suspended in infinite space, unable to react.
Unable to defend myself. Utterly vulnerable, utterly exposed. With Bobby out there feeling thwarted and seeking revenge. So yeah, I’m not interested in finding out firsthand how unpleasant it is to get stuck. I’m a lot more interested in making the transition the way I’ve always done it before: safely, cleanly, and without hurting myself.
When the rock under my foot becomes fully solid and the last shreds of starlight peel away from my skin, I take a step back and kick off my shoe, the plain satin slipper I’ve been wearing in my default form since the night I died. It lands in a clump of crabgrass, as pristine as it was when I picked it up from the shop. It’s the kind of cheap shoe that splits a seam doing basic dances at the prom, and yet nothing I’ve done to it in the last fifty years has left the slightest sign of wear.
I catch my breath and look down at my dress, relaxing slightly when I see it unstained and intact, swirling around my calves and ankles the same way it always has. The damage it took in the starlight didn’t last through the transition home. The corsage is still tied around my wrist, fresh as the day Persephone put it there, scenting the air around me with the sweet perfume of blooming asphodel.
I’m in a field next to a burnt-out gas station that looks like it was destroyed in a refueling incident—not as uncommon as most people like to think, not so common that every tank of gas is likely to end in fiery devastation. Most of what’s around me is thistle and briar and pricker-weed, the kind that send their seeds off as little balls of painful punishment for children who dare to go barefoot when they’re not supposed to. I limp to my discarded shoe, balancing carefully on the toes of my feet to avoid stickers, and flip it over with a gentle kick. There’s an anthill directly under where it landed—because of course there is. Welcome back to the twilight, where everything that’s ever been loved gets to be preserved for eternity.
I am not a big fan of entomologists, let’s just leave things at that.
Ghost ants are no friendlier than their living counterparts. I manage to nudge my shoe away from the anthill with my toe and slip my foot cautiously back into it. Nothing bites me. I relax. Not even death can stop ants from being assholes when they feel like they’re being encroached upon. I brush my hands against my restored skirt, feeling a wash of surprising affection for the garment. I guess you can’t wear the same thing for more than fifty years without developing a certain degree of fondness for it. Or maybe I’m projecting my relief at getting out of the starlight without being swallowed whole. Whichever it is, I’m here now, home in the twilight. I can feel the rightness of my surroundings vibrating through me, as sharp and reassuring as the hum of the telephone wires by the highway or the crackle of a neon sign.
I turn and make my way to the edge of the field, pausing to check the hem of my dress for brambles when I get there. A few of the little sticker balls have attached themselves to the fabric, doing their best to blend. I mean that quite literally: they’re actually in the process of changing colors, shading from their usual dusty brown to a delicate seafoam green. That’s something sticker weeds don’t do in the world of the living, for which every living person should be grateful. I peel them delicately off the fabric, careful not to let them draw blood as I flick them back into the field. I don’t want to give this place a taste for me. Not when it already looks like a dumping ground for the dead.
I can’t tell if it’s from the distortion caused by the death of the crossroads, or if this is one of the stretches of the twilight that’s always sucked. It doesn’t really matter. Places like this are predatory in their own way, and it’s best not to linger in them.
Finally content that I’m clean and undamaged, I take my first step out of the field, onto the cracked pavement of the gas station. Broken glass glitters in the dim moonlight like fistfuls of discarded diamond, sparkly and precious and valuable. I mostly value the sparkle. It lets me walk around the worst of the mess, which keeps me from getting a chunk of glass in my foot.
Being dead means I don’t really get injured, but if I hurt myself in the twilight, the injury is likely to stick around until the next time I head into the daylight and back down again. And given that I haven’t been home since I went off to get myself some white-gravy chicken, Gary and Emma are both going to be wondering where I’ve been. They need to know that I’m okay. More importantly, they need to know about Bobby’s threats, and what I’ve been asked to do. This isn’t the kind of adventure I should head for without a word.
Not that either of them is going to be coming with me. Emma doesn’t tinker that directly with the affairs of the living world, not since the last of her mortal family died, and Gary can’t really leave the twilight. Once again, I’m on my own.
“It’s a party, Buckley-style,” I mutter, and kick a chunk of glass out of my path. It rattles across the broken pavement, coming to rest at the base of the old pumping island, where the empty gas tanks wait with hoses still attached to fuel up the ghosts of cars. I keep walking.
The reptilian horror unspooling from the island stops me in my tracks.
It has feathers and claws, like the largest, meanest chicken the world has ever seen fit to summon forth. It looks like it personally resents every McNugget sold by every fast-food establishment ever as it fixes me with one enormous, half-formed yellow eye and makes a distressed churring sound in the back of its dreadful throat. I freeze. I heard somewhere that dinosaurs only hunt motion, and if I don’t move, maybe it won’t be able to see me.
It continues emerging from the broken gas tanks, a thick black-and-yellow vapor that turns progressively more solid as it pulls itself together, and it turns its head to fully look at me, lips drawing back from heavy jaws to show its sea of jagged teeth and make its rumbling growl more audible, and I know whoever said dinosaurs hunted based on motion had never met a dinosaur in their life—or death—and was just making stuff up, content in the knowledge that there aren’t many dinosaurs around to check in with anymore.
And there aren’t many dinosaurs around. They’ve had millennia to deal with whatever unfinished business they may have had, and they’ve moved on. The youngest dinosaur ghost would be millions of years old, and that’s too old, really, to be a comfortable part of any of the levels of the afterlife that currently exist.
This one looks . . . odd. It has the teeth and the jagged claws and the long, pendulous tail, but it doesn’t look like any kind of dinosaur I’ve ever seen in a museum or on the flickering screen of the local drive-in movie theater. Its neck is too long to make a good predator. Its chest is too narrow to make a good herbivore. It’s like looking at something spliced together by a child with a hot glue gun and a hacksaw, and, still, it keeps wafting from the shattered gas tanks, and that’s the piece I was missing. That’s the piece that makes me feel foolish and out-of-touch, like I haven’t been paying proper attention.
This isn’t the ghost of a dinosaur. This is the aggregate ghost of however many dinosaurs went to sleep and found themselves slowly, alchemically transformed from terrifying predators and kings of the world into thick black liquid running through the veins of the Earth, precious and peaceful, until men with machines drove their giant drinking straws deep into sleeping stone and pulled them up again.
Humans act as if desecrating a corpse is somehow the greatest crime possible. Living or dead, we don’t like people messing with bodies, because bodies can’t give consent. They’re unoccupied houses, and the worst thing many among the living can imagine is someone moving in without asking for permission or breaking a window and looting what isn’t being used. Well, what are those underground oil fields if not dinosaur graveyards, filled with the mortal remains of an entire genus, all of them mingling together under geologic pressures my too-human brain can’t wrap itself around? The dinosaurs went into the earth, as all flesh must eventually do.
And then we dug them out and put them under even more pressure, until even they forgot which pieces of the communal graveyard originally belonged to which spirits. I’m not facing the ghost of a dinosaur. I’m facing the ghost of every dinosaur who died in the geographic vicinity of whichever oil field or fields this oil was initially pumped up from. I’m probably also facing the ghosts of a bunch of prehistoric plants and bugs, but they don’t have the fetishistic adoration of generations of human children to lend them strength in the twilight. It’s just dinosaurs with the strength to manifest. So many dinosaurs, all of them rolled together into a single ball of unthinkable terror.
I take another step back. I don’t want to run. This thing looks like it can’t decide whether it wants to have forearms or wings, but whichever it chooses, it’s already coming down firmly on the side of feathers, which I suspect means it’s going to be able to fly. It looks too heavy to take to the air with any success, but dinosaurs don’t know a lot about physics. Maybe they’re where I should have been looking for those absent angels.
The mist stops flowing from the tanks. The patchwork dinosaur takes a thudding step toward me. It isn’t sure about its balance, or about the way it’s supposed to use its tail to keep from toppling forward. This is a very ancient, very new entity, a baby hatched from the eggshell of millennia, and it’s hard not to be fascinated, even as I wait for it to rip my face off. I’m in the twilight. I’m on as close as I can come to my own home ground, in a place where I’m as close to belonging as I am anywhere. We don’t usually have dinosaurs here. Maybe it can’t hurt me.
It makes a sound, a deep, grumbling growl that starts at the base of its chest and vibrates all the way up, large and loud and primeval. Something in the marrow of my nonexistent bones recognizes that sound. It’s the reason the deep jungle and the wild places aren’t for me, it’s the sound of a predator so big and so terrible that no one ever comes back to the firelight to tell the rest of us it’s out there, it’s death from before my first ancestors came to realize that time existed.
It swings its head around to look at me, opens its mouth, and bellows again. Not being a total fool, I spin on my heel and run.