Page 34 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“I didn’t call her,” I said, shutting the door before I returned to the couch and retrieved my dinner. “I swear.”

“If you were going to call one of the family ghosts, it wouldn’t be this one,” said Thomas, eyes on the kitchen doorway. “Rose is pleasant, but she’s never been as useful as your sitter.”

We were both avoiding her name. With Mary, naming her could be construed as calling for her, and if Rose had managed to pick up on our arrival, odds were good Mary had done the same and was just giving us a chance to catch our breath. She’s always been the politer of the family ghosts.

Sally leaned over to prod me in the shoulder. “Hey,” she hissed. “You tell me what’s going on and you tell me right now.”

“Rose is a hitchhiking ghost,” I said. “She doesn’t technically haunt the family, but we were in high school together, and she took enough of a shine to me that she stuck around. At this point, she likes us, and she has a thing about keeping ties to the land of the living whenever possible.”

“Good footnote,” said Rose, emerging from the kitchen to offer me her plate. It was mostly rib, with some beans, and a piece of cornbread she had apparently managed to snatch back from the tailypo. “About as close to accurate as could be expected after everything you’ve missed, really. Hi. I’m Rose. I was originally what we call a road ghost—the ghost of someone who died on or around the road, and wound up bound to it in the afterlife. That’s changed a bit since the crossroads died, but there’s no point in getting into it now.”

“Oh,” said Sally. “You’re really a ghost?”

“Yup,” said Rose. “Also nope, anymore. Scoot over.” That was all the warning she gave before she dropped herself to the couch between me and Sally, forcing Sally to scoot or have a lapful of Rose. Thomas watched this with bland amusement, like he couldn’t think of any better way to spend his evening. “It is the very definition of long stories, but I’ll try to be brief about it, because everybody’s got shit to be doing right now. Antimony made a deal with the crossroads to save the life of her boyfriend, which seems to be a bit of a family tradition at this point, and when they came to collect, she didn’t want to do what they asked, so she went for ‘murder’ as the next best thing to obedience. She is so your granddaughter, Alice.”

“What did the crossroads ask her to do?” asked Thomas.

Rose smiled at him. “It’s good to see you again, Tommy. You always did cut right to the chase. The crossroads wanted Annie to play killer for hire. Take out this snotty little sorcerer in a town called New Gravesend, in Maine.”

“That’s where I’m from,” said Sally.

“Huh, funny coincidence.” Rose shot me a glance, making it clear that she didn’t think it was a coincidence at all. “Annie went to New Gravesend, met the sorcerer, decided she didn’t want to kill him, picked a fight with the crossroads instead. Like you do. Somehow, she found a way to bend time and stop them from ever existing, and I don’t understand it, it gives me a headache, so please don’t ask me to explain. If you really want to comprehend a massive metaphysical ‘fuck off and die,’ you can ask her yourself the next time you see her. My involvement has been more in the aftermath. Turns out the crossroads did a lot of passive regulation in the twilight, and when they went away, everything got all topsy-turvy and screwed-up for a while.”

“The twilight?” asked Sally, blankly.

“The place human ghosts go when they haven’t moved on but aren’t currently haunting anything,” said Rose. “It’s where we are most of the time. Only with the crossroads gone, being there was sort of like being in a low-budget horror movie from hell, and it took a while for the aftershocks to settle.”

Thomas frowned. “That sounds unsettling.”

“It was miserable. But we got through it, and I got to see Bobby go down for good.” Rose smiled a feral smile and seemed to remember her dinner in the same moment, turning to me and making a little ‘gimme’ gesture with her hands.

“I, the living, give this food to you, the dead, freely and without constraint,” I said, handing the plate to her.

“You always make that sound so dire,” said Rose. She picked up a rib, gesturing with it. “Asshole chased me for fifty years, and I saw him dragged to hell. Maybe not literally, but close enough for me. Guess it’s a season for people getting the things they’ve been wanting for fifty years.”

“Bobby?” asked Sally.

“The man who killed her,” said Thomas. “He’d made a much less altruistic bargain with the crossroads than either of us. Why do I feel like that isn’t the end of your ‘long story,’ Rose?”

“Because you’re smarter than your wife?” Rose suggested. I wrinkled my nose, and she grinned at me. “See, in the process of getting all this shit sorted out, I kinda attracted the attention of a few gods.”

“Gods?” asked Sally. Her voice was getting increasingly blank as she asked her questions, like we were trending deeper and deeper into ridiculousness.

“Yup,” said Rose. “Persephone, the Ocean Lady, and the anima mundi, to be specific.”

“I’ve only heard of one of those,” said Sally. “Persephone’s the Greek goddess of the dead, right?”

“Sort of,” said Rose. “She’s our Lady of the Dead, she’s consort to Hades, and she loves us. I’ve been under her protection for a while. The Ocean Lady is the twilight manifestation of the Old Atlantic Highway. She’s aware and intelligent—and very, very divine—but she doesn’t talk much, unless she does it through her routewitches. I would have been one of hers, if I’d lived. And the anima mundi is the living soul of the Earth. They’re what the crossroads displaced when everything first went wrong, and as soon as it became so that the crossroads had never existed, the anima mundi reasserted themselves.”

Thomas nodded, clearly following this better than the rest of us. “Divine intervention is never without its costs.”

“Yeah, well, it would have been nice if someone could have pointed that out while I was racking up what turned out to be a pretty hefty bill,” said Rose. “I’m a Fury now. I serve my triad, and they send me where things need to be set right.”

“Do we need ‘setting right,’ Rose?” asked Thomas.

“Only in that the anima mundi feels sorrow for all the people who were betrayed by crossroads bargains, and would see you settled and safe now that you’ve returned home, but would very much prefer you not go gallivanting for a while,” she said. “They’re still recovering from centuries of nonexistence. They’re weak. And having travelers punching holes in them all the time isn’t going to help them get stronger. So on that level, I guess I’m here on business, to ask you nicely not to hurt my boss. And on another level, I felt Alice come home, and it’s been a while, so I figured I should make sure she knows what’s what. And on a third level, it really felt like she wasn’t alone.”

“Yes, I’m home,” said Thomas. “You can tell your employers I have no intention of leaving again anytime soon; I left only because the crossroads gave me no choice in the matter, and now that I’m here, I feel that traveling again would be to invoke the wrath of my lovely wife. It’s been some time since we were together, but I remember her wrath as considerable.”