THE TRUCKER’S NAME IS CARL. It’s a good name. Solid, unremarkable, efficient. Easy to yell if things go wrong. I like a man with a name that doesn’t mess around. His truck’s name is Jolene, after the Dolly Parton song, and I like that, too. Means he doesn’t take himself too seriously, that he isn’t ashamed to admit he enjoys a good country classic. The truck is old, a little road worn but well-maintained, and I like that best of all. A man with a brand-new truck is a man who can’t be read. Maybe he’s a monster and just hasn’t had the chance to show it yet. Maybe he’s a saint, and the world hasn’t had time to tarnish him. I don’t like riding in rusty deathtraps whether in the twilight or the daylight, but here, a well-loved truck with a woman’s name is just about as ideal as I can think of.
He watches me boost myself into the passenger seat, pushing a flurry of fast-food bags and paper maps aside, and shuts the door before he walks around and climbs in the driver’s seat, fitting perfectly into the space between the wheel and the cushions. It’s clearly shaped to his dimensions, molded into something comfortable and forgiving by years of use. “Which way?” he asks.
I don’t know the roads in this part of the twilight, but I can always find the Last Dance when I try, except on the rare occasions when it doesn’t exist. I focus, and it’s like a beacon clicks on in the far distance, calling to me across the miles.
“That way.” I point. “There should be roads. I mean, the twilight is malleable, and it probably won’t make it so we can’t get there from here.”
Carl laughs, a deep, rolling sound, and puts the truck into gear. More teens emerge as we roll out of the parking lot. They turn our way—the human eye is attracted by motion—and then go back to exploring their surroundings. We’re less important than their current predicament by a long shot.
Carl turns the way I indicated as he hits the gas, and we accelerate toward the horizon. I allow myself to relax into my seat, getting comfortable among the fast-food wrappers and the crumpled maps. None of them will do him any good here. They’re all drawn for the daylight, and they won’t guide him through this highway system—assuming he’s going to stick around. I still don’t have a handle on what kind of ghost he is. Too new, and too suppressed by the time he spent hiding inside that truck stop.
“Keep going until you see an offramp promising food at the next exit,” I say. “With me in the car, that should be the Last Dance.”
“I’ve heard of that diner,” says Carl.
“Not surprising.” No one living gets to walk the twilight or taste Emma’s pie, but enough road ghosts have interactions with the daylight that sometimes our stories spread, and people who haven’t quite died yet hear about the Last Dance Diner, the rest stop and restaurant that marks the last exit the dead can take before they drive off the edge of the world. The seat below me is getting warmer, which is funny, since I don’t have any body heat for it to borrow, and this isn’t the kind of truck that comes with built-in seat warmers. I glance at Carl, trying to assess his condition.
He’s smiling, teeth white against the tangle of his beard. “This road is amazing. It’s like I can feel the pavement clean through Jolene’s wheels.”
Ah. He’s going to be a road ghost after all. “That’s because you can.”
“What?”
“Remember I said every kind of ghost is different. You and I may run across one another a few more times before you get tired of haunting. You really loved your truck, didn’t you?”
“Jolene and I have been together for a long time.” He runs his hand across the dashboard, lovingly caressing the plastic. I’ve seen a lot of truckers who loved their vehicles. Some of them loved their trucks so much that, given a chance between crushing a car full of kids and scratching the paint on their rig, they’d kill the kids, because they thought of their truck as the most important thing in the world.
Love isn’t always a good thing. Love can be dangerous: toxic and corrosive and cruel. People act like love is one of the great positives of the universe, but those people usually haven’t seen love in the process of eating its prey alive. Love doesn’t let go, and love doesn’t forgive. Hate is worse, on the whole, but that doesn’t make love inherently kind. Nothing could.
Carl doesn’t seem like that kind of man. He clearly loves his truck because she’s been good to him, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to place her above the rest of the world. And that’s a good thing, because if I’m right about what I’m seeing, he’s going to swallow her whole as part of the process of his own becoming.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a coachman in the process of being made, and I wouldn’t have expected Carl and Jolene to fit the requirements. They died together, yes, victims of the same fire, but they died apart, her keys in his pocket, his body burning yards away from her engine. Normally, the two composite parts of a coachman die together, melting and melding into one entity.
As if there’s anything normal about a kind of ghost so archaic that I haven’t seen one outside of New Orleans in forty years. “Were you ever planning to retire?” I ask, as carefully as I can.
The smile he sends in my direction tells me that my care is appreciated but unnecessary. If I can see what’s happening to him, he can feel it. “Not really,” he says. “Me and Jolene, we were going to ride to the end of the world. I’ve paid to have her engine upgraded three times, when emissions standards would have benched us otherwise. Don’t have a house, don’t have a spouse, just have the open road and this good, good girl beneath me. I was never going to leave her. I used to lay awake at night and think about what would happen if she ever broke down too badly to be fixed. I figured if she died, I’d probably go pretty soon after.”
This all fits what I know about coachmen. He loved his truck more than he loved any of the people around him—possibly more than he had ever managed to love himself. He has more in common with the dinosaur-thing from before than he does with me, or most of the ghosts he’s going to meet over the course of his existence in the twilight. He’s going to be a composite. How much of Jolene will creep in and overwrite the man he was, I don’t know, and I can’t grieve for what he’s going to lose because it’s clear he isn’t grieving. For him, this is the best afterlife he could possibly have imagined. He’s going to have it all.
He laughs as he turns Jolene down the exit I told him to watch for, and the sound is deep and joyous, starting all the way from the base of his spine before working its way up. “This is a trip,” he says.
“What were you hauling?”
“Hmm?”
“When the . . . accident . . . happened, what were you hauling?” He and Jolene are one entity, but that’s not going to apply to their cargo. That’s free and clear and theirs now. No living corporation has come up with a bill of lading that allows them to reclaim damaged goods from the afterlife. I’m sure they’re working on it. Those people hate to lose anything they think of as their own, and I guarantee you they think of this cargo as their own.
“Oh! Um. Dry goods and shelf-stable pharmaceuticals for Walmart. Need yoga pants or Midol?” He laughs again, a big, booming sound that fills the cabin and bounces off the windows. It’s surprisingly soft for being as large as it is.
“Maybe,” I say. “If you don’t mind opening the back when we get to the diner, I’m sure Emma would be happy to root around in there. If you have any baking supplies, she’ll probably pay you for them. In pie. We don’t do money so much here in the twilight. Not enough of it gets destroyed, and people don’t tend to love it piece by piece. They love the idea of it. Even people who love being rich don’t have warm, fuzzy feelings about individual dollar bills, which means they don’t tend to manifest down here.”
“You keep saying ‘down,’” says Carl. “Should I be worried about little naked red imps with pitchforks?”
“How very Archie Comics of you,” I say. “This isn’t Hell. This isn’t even the most hellish of the accessible layers of the afterlife. But when you move between levels, it feels like falling, as much as it feels like anything you experienced when you were alive, so we tend to say ‘down’ when we’re talking about how to get here. Don’t worry. There’s no brimstone in your future. Or if there is, there’s not a lot of it.”
“Huh,” says Carl. “Lot more rules to being dead than I would have expected.”
“I guess so,” I say. “I’ve been dead for long enough that I don’t really pay attention anymore.”
“Is it rude to ask what happened?” Carl glances my way. “Only I’ve heard stories about you since before I got my license, and no one ever quite agrees on the story of how you died.”
I’m quiet for a moment. It’s not like the circumstances of my death have ever been secret, or private. I gave those up when I became a story kids told around the campfire. I am a matter of public record, an urban legend whose reach is far greater than my grasp could ever have been, and if he’d been really dedicated to finding my story when he was alive, he could have found it easily enough. Laura wrote a whole book about who I was and where I came from. On the Trail of the Phantom Prom Date. She never liked me much, thanks to the part where she blamed me for her boyfriend’s untimely death, but her scholastic ethics had been too strong to let her do a hatchet job on me. She’d written the truth as she understood it, documenting every scrap she could find about the life and death of a Michigan girl named Rose, and the pieces she’d left out had either been too unimportant to be remembered or buried too deeply for her to uncover.
I take a short breath that I don’t need, and say, “I was on my way to prom when I was run off the road.”
“Did they catch the guy who did it?” Carl sounds genuinely interested, which makes sense. In the twilight, “so how did you die?” basically replaces “so, what do you do?” as an icebreaker. He’s stuck with me as the closest thing he has to a guide. Of course he wants to know more about me.
“Not yet,” I say. “That’s actually what I was on my way to do when I found you. He’s a bit of a problem child.”
“He’s got to be dead by this point, right? Or at least so old that he doesn’t have a license anymore.” Carl looks briefly, thoughtfully pleased. “I guess I don’t have to worry about my eyes failing before I’m ready to give up my keys, huh? My whole mortal shell failed at the same time.”
“Fire will do that,” I agree, giving him a sidelong glance. It’s nice that one of us is finding the positive in this day’s terrible adventures. I wasn’t this calm while I was still learning the rules of the road. “Hysterical and angry” would be a better description. If I’d been a poltergeist, half of Buckley Township would have been leveled before I calmed down enough to be reasonable.
“He’s not dead, and he’s not old,” I say. “He’s just a man who made a bargain with a cosmic force of awful and got to stay behind the wheel as long as he kept on killing people. I wasn’t his first victim. I was far, far from his last. Now things have changed. He’s started threatening the people I care about, and I’m finally on my way to take him down. He’s going to stop hurting people. He’s going to stop forever.”
The cab is so quiet I can hear the wind whispering through the corn outside. Jolene’s engine has stopped rumbling. She isn’t really a machine anymore. She’s half of the ghost that speaks through Carl, and neither of them is what they were, and for this pair, that’s a blessing and a gift from the twilight. The ghostroads can be kind when they’re moved to be. It’s rare, but it happens.
Carl finally lets out a low, whistling breath, shaking his head as he says, “That’s a lot to put on those narrow little shoulders of yours. Is anybody helping you?”
“My shoulders may be narrow, but I’m old enough to be your mother,” I say. “I’ve traveled more distance than just about any other ghost you’re likely to meet. The road knows my name. The Goddess of the Dead gave me her blessing. The Ocean Lady welcomes me, and the Queen of the North American Routewitches calls me her friend. I don’t need anyone’s help to do what has to be done.”
I don’t quite manage to keep the offense from my voice. I wish I could manage it. I’ve never been a great actress, and most of what little skill I possess winds up getting directed toward convincing people that I’m a teenage runaway who just needs a coat and a cup of coffee, instead of a terrifying urban legend come to haunt them while they’re on a road trip to visit a friend from college or someone else who deserves to go without phantom interference.
Carl nods. “I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it. The twilight doesn’t much care whether we’re happy. It just cares that we keep following the rules and don’t tell too many secrets to the living. They’re better off not being able to say for sure whether or not there’s an afterlife.”
“I notice you haven’t mentioned God.”
“That’s part of why the living are better off not knowing for sure. That, and not everyone hangs out in the twilight after they die. Most people move on immediately. Tell the living that some of the dead linger, and you’ll have a queue of folks demanding to speak to departed parents and children who moved on years ago. No good comes of it.”
Carl nods again, thoughtfully. “This is all a lot more complicated than I ever thought it was going to be.”
“We may be dead, but we’re still human,” I say. “There’s nothing we can’t complicate.”
The sweet green light of the Last Dance appears to our right, shining through the corn, beckoning me home. I point. “That’s my stop,” I say. “If you can pull off into the lot, I’ll get out of your hair. I can even bring you a piece of pie if you want one.”
“I can get my own—” begins Carl, and catches himself, shifting slightly in his seat. His thighs never break contact with the cushion. “No, I guess I can’t get my own, can I? I’d be happy to have a piece of pie. Key lime is my favorite if it’s available.”
“It will be,” I say solemnly. Emma always has everyone’s favorite. She doesn’t spend all day baking, and she doesn’t keep a list, but—somehow—it works out that way. We once had a hitchhiker come in and say that his favorite was “unicorn pie,” and Emma perked up and said she’d just been experimenting with the recipe. It turned out to be sort of like an even sweeter form of cookie salad, topped with marshmallow crème and edible glitter, and eating it had been like trying to deep-throat Disneyland. Never again if you ask me. But he left happy, and as far as Emma was concerned, that was really what mattered.
Gary is the only car in the lot when Carl pulls up. His lights come on as soon as I climb out of the truck, and he rolls forward just enough to bump his fender ever-so-gently against my calf, engine purring and the sweet tones of Top 40 radio drifting out of his cab. I stroke his hood with one hand, aware of precisely how ridiculous this has to look to Carl and Jolene, and say, “In a minute, honey. I need to get the nice man some pie to pay for my ride home.”
Gary rolls back into his original position, engine revving. He flashes his headlights at Jolene. There’s a pause before she flashes her lights back, and then the two of them are chatting away through the wonders of halogen lights and Morse code. I wonder briefly whether the part of Jolene that is Carl can understand the conversation, and then I’m hitting the door of the diner.
The bell doesn’t ring, largely because I forgot to stay solid in my hurry to get to Emma; I walk right through the door, which is sort of embarrassing. That’s baby ghost nonsense, and it’s been a long time since I had to worry about that kind of thing. I should be able to handle a simple door. Emma, behind the counter as usual, gives me a startled look before rushing over to me, hands outstretched to grab my shoulders.
“Rose!” she says. “Where have you been? You stink of the starlight, my girl. What were you doing down there? You know the starlight isn’t safe for girls like us.”
Which is interesting. If the starlight is safe for Dullahan, I’d expect it to be safe for a beán sidhe like Emma. I let her grab my upper arms, leaning into her embrace and taking comfort from the contact. It’s good to be home, even if I know I’m not staying yet. It’s good to be back among people who understand.
“I went hitching,” I say. “Bobby came to pay a call, and I ran. Apple intercepted me on the other end.”
“The Queen of the Routewitches?” asks Emma. “Why’s she messing with an honest ghost trying to fulfill the terms of her existence? The nerve of some people.”
“Speaking of the terms of a ghost’s existence, can I get a slice of key lime pie for the baby coachman out in the parking lot?”
Emma straightens, eyes widening in surprise. “A baby coachman? Someone’s manifesting as a horse and carriage? I haven’t seen that happen in a long while.”
“A man and his truck, not a horse and carriage, but he’s showing the early signs,” I say. “He’s melting into the seat, he can feel the road through the truck’s tires, but he’s not being fully absorbed. He still looks like a man driving a truck, not a phantom truck roaring around doing whatever it wants. And he still wants a piece of key lime pie.”
“I have a fresh one,” she says, hurrying off to the pie case to start preparing a slice. “Did he want that a la mode?”
“He didn’t say so,” I say. “I’m assuming he would have said something if he wanted ice cream. If I were a coachman, I wouldn’t want to risk getting ice cream on my dashboard. That seems like it would be unpleasantly sticky.”
“Yes, probably,” says Emma, sliding the wedge of pie onto a plate. It looks perfect. Her pies always look perfect. They don’t taste as good as pies in the living world, so she has to focus twice as much on the aesthetic. It’s the only way she can feel like she’s making them correctly. “Poor lamb. He doesn’t understand yet, how limited he’s going to be, does he?”
“He’s outside talking to Gary now,” I say uncomfortably. “I bet Gary has a lot to say about being limited.”
“You’re almost certainly right about that,” agrees Emma, pursing her lips and giving me a thoughtful look, one filled with layers of conversation that we haven’t had yet and very much need to have. “You sticking around for long?”
“Not terribly. I still need to get some hitching in before my skin’s going to stop crawling. Bobby caught me right after my first ride, and Apple orchestrated my second, so it didn’t really count the way it should have. She’s nice and all, but she doesn’t know what it’s like for me. For any of us, really.” The relationship between routewitches and the dead is complicated. Most routewitches can see ghosts. Ghosts who can’t fully manifest in the lands of the living have a nasty tendency to swarm anyone who can see them, as if banging on the door and demanding help you haven’t earned has ever been the way to endear yourself. So many routewitches view us as occasionally useful pests, and they behave accordingly.
Apple has never been like that, maybe because the Ocean Lady is both ghost and goddess and has forced the first among her followers to come to terms with the fact that being alive is a temporary thing, not a gods-given permission to abuse what power you possess. She’s still alive so she can’t understand the painful craving that comes with needing to perform my steps in the great dance that is the afterlife. I’m being called to the stage, and I can’t refuse to answer forever. I can’t even refuse for long, unless I want to run the risk of glitching right through the floor of the twilight and winding up on some country road, back in my green silk gown, unable to access any of the better parts of my phantom nature until I get into someone’s car and do as the universe demands.
Emma gives me a dubious look and hands me the piece of pie. “Take this to your coachman,” she says. “Tell him we do takeout but not delivery, since we don’t currently have a driver, and that he’s sadly a bit too large for the position. Then get back in here and tell me why Apple’s interfering with you doing what you’re meant for.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say, a bit too smartly, and turn to trot back to the door, pie in hand. I realize she didn’t give me a fork and one pops into existence on the plate, shining silver with just a trace of tarnish, like it’s been here for years, and didn’t just get thought into being.
It’s colder outside than it was a few minutes ago. I shiver as I hurry across the parking lot to where Jolene and Gary are flashing their lights at one another. The passenger side door looks like it’s still unlocked, but I hesitate to open it. It seems rude, somehow, to just climb in when I know the truck is in the process of becoming part of Carl’s body, driver and vehicle united for eternity as they always wished that they could be.
The wishing is part of it, as far as I’m aware. Every coachman I’ve ever talked to has said they dreamt of staying with their vehicle forever, that they felt it was an extension of their own body even before that became the literal truth. Not of driving forever—that’s the sort of longing that makes Phantom Riders, not coachmen—but of staying with their vehicle. Of being safe and comfortable and home. I wouldn’t want someone grabbing my arm without permission. What makes opening the door any less of an invasion?
I’m still mulling this over when the door swings open in clear invitation. Carl glances over, apparently startled. He’s not used to his new proprioception yet. Jolene was never really a part of him before, no matter how much he may have felt like she was.
I can’t help him with this adjustment. But I can direct him toward the twilight around New Orleans, where he’s more likely to find ghosts of the same sort who can offer guidance to get him through the transition.
“I brought pie,” I say, and climb up into the cab of the truck, offering it to him. “I wasn’t sure about a la mode, so this seemed like the right thing. Emma says to tell you that they do takeout, and you’re welcome to come back any time you like. I see you’ve met Gary.”
“I understood what he was saying when he flashed his lights at me,” says Carl, taking the plate and using the fork to break off a perfect, glistening bite of key lime pie. “How can I understand him?”
“Gary’s a special case. He’s dead, but he’s not any of the formalized kinds of ghost. He’s sort of the first of his kind.” That’s putting it delicately. Tricking the twilight is not easily, or lightly, done.
“Special case meaning . . . ?”
“He was human when he was alive. He turned himself into a car when he died so that we could be together.” He didn’t think that one through as well as he probably should have, all things considered. “As you merge with Jolene, understanding other vehicles is going to become easier and easier for you. You already knew more than you probably thought you did. Good truckers always do.”
He grunts and takes his first bite of the pie. Then he squints at the fork, suspiciously. “Does everything taste so . . . washed out when you’re dead? The coffee at the truck stop was like this, too.”
“We don’t get to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh the same way we did when we were alive,” I say, trying to take the sting out of the discovery. Learning the rules of death after spending so many years dealing with the rules of life is never easy. At least for me, those rules had come with two arms, two legs, and freedom of movement, not merging permanently with my car and being expected to be totally okay with it. Dying never asks for consent. It makes the changes it’s going to make, and then it rolls on, off to twist its next target into something new.
“Huh.” He takes another bite of pie. “This is going to take some getting used to.”
“Most things do. You should go to New Orleans. Follow the signs along the highway even if you think you know the route; the roads are different here. But there are more coachmen in New Orleans than anywhere else that I know of. Most of them are horses and carriages, but they’re still the same sort of ghost. They’ll be able to help you like I can’t.”
“All right,” says Carl, with a nod. “Anything we can do to help you?”
“No.” I shake my head. “You got me back to the Last Dance, and that’s really what I needed. Do me a favor if you see any of those kids from the truck stop. Drive them wherever they tell you they want to go. And when you figure out how to drive into the daylight, don’t go looking for the people you knew when you were alive. Seeing them will only break your heart. It isn’t worth it.”
“If you say so,” he says. The passenger-side door swings open again, a clear invitation for me to get out.
I flash him the brightest smile I can muster. “I do,” I say, and slide out of the truck.
“Did you want to go through the cargo?” Carl asks. There’s a clicking, sliding sound from the rear, which I know will be the doors opening.
Maintaining my smile becomes a little easier. “I’d love to,” I say, and turn to wave my arms at the diner, signaling for Emma to come out and join me. There’s nothing like a scavenging trip to improve the day. We don’t get to do this all that often—most trucks that wind up in the twilight do so solo, destroyed by accidents that spared their drivers, and they can be fairly possessive of their last loads—and when we do, it’s almost always as part of a massive scrum. Having a full truck essentially deliver itself to us is an extravagance beyond measure.
Emma is happy to join me in rampaging through Jolene’s cargo. It was definitely a Walmart load, mixing textiles and dry goods. Emma exclaims in wordless delight and claims an entire case of canned chicken stock, along with all the salt in sight. I pick up a windbreaker and a pack of lighters. These are the ghosts of the actual items, but they’re better than nothing.
There are some new CDs back there. I’m not sure of Jolene’s radio reception, so I bring them up to Carl in the front seat, handing them over. “I don’t know what you like to listen to, other than Dolly Parton, but here’s something to keep you occupied while you get the hang of things.”
“Thanks,” he says, taking the CDs and flipping idly through them. “You ladies about done back there?”
“Pretty close,” I assure him.
“It’s weird. I can’t feel the boxes themselves, but I can feel you moving around, and I can feel it when you take a box away.”
“Your senses are getting used to the new limits of your body. Soon, you’ll be able to feel everything that happens to what used to be Jolene as clearly as you could feel what used to be Carl when you were alive.”
He snorts slightly. “I can tell you’re trying like hell to be reassuring, and I hope you realize that you’re fucking it up every time you open your mouth.”
“Hey, I’m a psychopomp in service to the Goddess of the Dead,” I say. “Reassuring isn’t in my tool kit.”
He grins. “No, but I’m still glad I met you, Rose.”
“It was nice to meet you, too,” I say. “Don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t,” says Carl, handing me his empty plate. “This place has good pie.”
I’m laughing as I step away from the truck and go back to rooting through the cargo with Emma. Gary honks his horn, the sound merry and bright in the gloaming, and everything feels like it’s getting back to normal, even though I know that isn’t so. We’re here, we’re together, and the crossroads have never had any business here, no matter how much they may have wanted to. Whatever’s coming next, we can face it the way we’ve faced everything else since the day I stumbled into the Last Dance, since the day I died.
We’ll face it together.