The ghost I’ve come for waits beside the infinity pool of a sprawling hilltop villa, its back to me, a cigarette burning between its fingers. I see it as a flicker of the things it remembers itself as: a child in rags, a king in robes, a blood-soaked god of death and conquest, Kalashnikov across its shoulder, machete dangling from its hand.
The dead road I’ll lead this ghost down snakes away through the hills like a streak of rainbow gasoline on a dark ocean, invisible to all but guides like me. Below us, the city glows in the stinking heat of a summer night—ever-lit office towers, wavering streaks of police sirens, oil-drum fires in the crooked masses of homeless camps. Beyond the highway the hills are burning.
I draw the snake-scaled guide’s mask over my face, the feathered cloak around my shoulders. Crow feathers, for Crow is my guide name; I have another, ordinary name for ordinary life, but it’s years since I’ve had much use for it. Stepping into the courtyard, my old-woman’s bones beg me to hunch and hobble, but I’ll not abide such a show of weakness. First impressions count, and such ghosts as these respect nothing but strength. I draw myself up straight and march crunching steps across the jet-black gravel that rings the pool.
From that dark water stare the shadow shapes of those this ghost has had killed in the years it’s lingered. Tattooed members of rival cartels, soldiers, police and bystanders, throats slit, bullet-ridden, worse.
They are things from the ghost’s own memories and thoughts, the voice of a conscience it has till now ignored. For a time, every ghost haunts itself this way. It’s during these mid-afterlife crises they’re at their most persuadable, most likely to take our deal.
I announce myself with a shake of my head, setting the mask’s scales rattling.
“I’d fuck off back to whatever rancid tenement you crawled out of,” the ghost says without turning to look at me. Something about its voice makes my heart fumble its rhythm. It flicks its cigarette into the pool; another appears immediately between its fingers. “The last bruja tried to exorcise me—buried in a dozen places in the hills there.”
It wouldn’t surprise me. Such ghosts as we’re sent for are beyond the bumbling of wise women and priests’ pompous theatrics. These ghosts were warlords and dictators. They don’t haunt us because of injustices unabsolved or feelings left unspoken. They cling to this world because of the hellfire that awaits them in the next, because they cannot bear to relinquish the empires they’ve spent their lives hacking from flesh and blood. There’s no banishing nor destroying them. Without us, they’d haunt their palaces forever, whispering secrets and threats in the ears of the living, manipulating them into doing their murderous bidding.
“I’m no bruja, ghost,” I say, the mouthpiece of my mask making a rattle of my voice. “I serve neither this world, nor the Keepers of the Gates of Heaven, nor Those Below. Those I serve neither judge nor punish but offer you a way to leave this world for something better, something only they can give.”
In truth I cannot say with any clarity who it is I serve; their instructions come only in dreams and visions. But we are lucky that something in the world beyond cares about us mortals. The Keepers of the Gates regard the brutalities we face as trivialities; their concern is the purity of the souls that come to live within their garden. They don’t care that most lives are too hard for the saintliness they require as the price of admission.
I pluck a feather from my robe and toss it into the air. It quivers, and the ghost shadow of the bird it once was flickers into being around it. It swoops low over the pool and alights on the ghost’s shoulder, cocks its head as if listening, and then returns, its form evaporating half way between us, the feather spiraling down to touch on the dark water. The shiver of ripples transforms the dark figures in the pool into something else: a village of mean huts, palm-thatch roofs and lashed-pallet walls. It’s the very definition of dirt poor, yet draped in a golden evening sunlight that gives it the majesty of some renaissance painting of Eden, the horizon a wavering brushstroke, grass and trees green from rain. And there, in a hammock, that boy in rags this ghost once was. A woman sits on the ground beside him, rocking the hammock gently.
This is the paradise this ghost harbors in its heart, not Lamborghinis, caviar and supermodels on their knees, but some long-lost moment of tenderness. It’s not unusual; I’ve guided many wretched ghosts to such quaint resting places. Nor does this shade of decency make me revile them any less, nor think they deserve this deal. But this world of ours has no use for words like ‘deserve’.
“This is what I offer you then, ghost. I know you’re tired of this world, and we both know the Keepers of the Gates will see you punished should you try to leave it. But this…” I gesture towards the pool, “this asylum I can offer you. A bespoke heaven just for you, hidden between this world and the next. Leave this place in peace and peace will be your reward. Or stay here and see that all earthly dreams and empires end in dust. Stay here and haunt their ruins.”
The ghost laughs, scornful and sharp, waves its cigarette and speaks in a mocking imitation of my voice. “Dreams and empires end in dust. Jesus. This fucking… whatever it is, poetry-slam bullshit doesn’t do it for me, so save it. I used to be one of you, a guide, long, long time ago, so take it as read; we both know what you’re doing is more marshal’s service than fucking… Dante, or whatever you’re imagining.”
The words send a shiver through me. A guide. I’ve known many who’ve vanished in the decades I’ve plied this trade, lost in the desert or killed by forces worldly or otherwise. I try to imagine if there was one I’d known who could have become this— a ghost so vile it must be offered the deal we bring.
“Anyway,” he says. “I’m not interested in your deal.”
This is expected. They always want you to plead and bargain, but it’s just another way for them to cling to the world. I’ve played this game before.
“Look into the water. You know it’s where you want to be. Peace, for eternity.”
The ghost spits into the pool. “Sure. Real fucking nirvana. You know I shot my dad right behind that house there when I was seven years old? He used to beat my mother to an inch of her fucking life, and no one did a thing because he was district sheriff. Shot him with his own gun and buried it by the river. But, fuck do you care about that, huh?”
The way his voice breaks and then steadies has an unsettling familiarity. But maybe it’s only the familiarity of the story, for it’s woefully close to mine, except I never killed, just ran. Ran and ran through all the cruelty of this world, until this life found me and gave me a way to change things.
“I’m not interested in your deal,” the ghost goes on. “I got you here because of what I have to offer you. I need to know if you have the stomach for it.”
The ghost turns, and as it does, its form becomes the shape it died in, an old man, full of hate and stab wounds. Old, but still, I know that face. The shock hits like a bullet. Rook. At least, that was the name he had when I knew him, decades ago in the wild years of youth. His code name, just as mine is Crow. The name he gave me when he found me —homeless and half-mad— and taught me this trade.
True names are too dangerous to speak for they would bring the Keepers upon us, furious that we would dare impinge on their moral monopoly. Even code names are too dangerous to speak when we are working, despite the concealment the mask and robe and the dead road provide. Yet I have his name in the faded smear of a homemade tattoo around my wrist. A name I once called out in passion and, later, through fits of weeping after he vanished with neither word nor trace.
I think of the last time I saw him, driving a stolen car through dunes and mangroves. A night on the beach, fucking in firelight and starlight, and the light that burned in him, anger and passion and joy. And then our parting in the morning, watching him rowing a boat out towards a waiting ship that would take him to another job in some distant place he never came back from. That young man’s face I knew then, wry and wild around the eyes, now aged and hardened into spite. I remember his hands on me, and think of the violence those hands have done since. My stomach churns.
If he recognizes the shape of me beneath the mask and cloak, he shows no sign of it. I feel the urge to pull them free, reveal myself, demand he tell me what happened to him, where he went, how he became this… But to do so would invite the eye of the Keepers upon me, and they’ve a special place in hell for us guides. To do so would be to forget my duty, and I am a guide. I have a job to do. Whatever history we had is long-passed, the man this ghost once was long dead. Whatever ‘deal’ he’s offering is just another game ghosts play, another way to cling to the world.
“That isn’t how this works, R—”I nearly slip and say his name, stutter the first syllable to a stop “—ghost. And this deal I’m offering doesn’t stand for long.”
I gesture, and the feather floating in the pool twitches. The ghost bird reforms, flutters to my hand and unforms once more. I take the feather between my finger and thumb, rubbing it and feeling in the residue of Rook’s… of the ghost’s thoughts for something I can use to persuade it. Truthfully, shamefully, a part of me hoped to see something deeper, something from the time I knew him. Something that would explain that village there in the pool, for he’d always said he came from money, a country club, private school upbringing he had nothing but disdain for. But instead, I sense something more recent, and altogether more useful.
“You meant to leave this empire to your sons,” I say. “But they don’t want it, do they? They want legitimacy, hospital wings named after them, private schools for their children, business lunches with the other parents. What’ll you do then? Hang around the house, helping the grandkids with their algebra homework?
Rook shrugs. “True. That was the plan, but they don’t want a part of it? Fuck ‘em.”
Always was a favorite phrase of his. I remember then a moment: Back when we first met and he was teaching me the trade, I asked him why he did this work with all its thankless danger. I wanted to reach beneath the fiery, seething shell of this person I was falling in… something with, hear if he, like I, had something in his past that made him burn to change this world. The very thing he’s just told me, his village, his father, all of it a lifetime too late. Back then he shared nothing, just looked up into the sky, his body hardening with anger, said: “Keepers ain’t earned the right to set the rules, so… fuck ‘em.” That was Rook, or part of him at least, a thick sump of pain right down in the foundations, too deep to reach with words, an anger that couldn’t be satisfied by sticking a middle finger up at this world, so he had to find a way of doing it to the next world, too.
“Fuck ‘em,” he says again. “Saw my sons weren’t interested, realized a guide would be a better partner anyway. Made a plan: let the one who sends the dreams think I was ready to take their deal, have them send one of you, offer you my deal: partnership. Think of it, a ghost to whisper in the ears of the living, a guide to whisper in the minds of ghosts. Team like that could take the world on.”
A spasm of anger makes me forget myself. “Why would I want this? Lamborghinis, big house, being feared? Didn’t being a guide show you how worthless all this is?”
“This?” he sneers. “This is just means to an end. You’re thinking too small– reason you guides will never make a difference. How many ghosts you walked down a dead road, thinking you’d put an end to their terror, then find whatever cartel, warband, statelet they’d had their grip on just fell into the hands of the next murdering fuck with an appetite for it? How many times you left a power vacuum behind, seen it suck in more lives than whatever the ghosts we chaperoned ever did. This? Money, status, this is power. Peace needs power.”
“This is peace?” I stab my finger at the pool where the shadows of the murdered have reformed, anger simmering in my breath.
He shrugs. “Know how many cartels and mob families ran this city before I came? And everyone one of them fighting and killing each other, squeezing every penny they could out of the innocent people in their territory to pay for their endless little turf wars. Know how many there are now? Just me. Order. Takes ruthlessness to take power from ruthless people. But I chose not to just walk away once I’d got rid of them; I replaced them with something better. I hadn’t killed those people, someone else would have, and more, and more and more. I made peace. And this is only the beginning. Think what we could be, what we could make. Think of all the ghosts out there, their little fiefdoms. That could all be part of this. Our lieutenants.”
I shiver— the delusion of it, the megalomania, the possibility of such a project being realized. Yet…the temptation is there; I can’t deny it. He’s not wrong about the power vacuums we’ve left behind, the turf wars and failed states our deals have created. Not a perfect solution, but what choice is there?
Tempted, but then I look into the pool at the shadows of the killed. I’ve imagined many lives and deaths Rook might have had in those years after he vanished, but never this. Something shifts deep down inside me—a dark, tectonic tremor of sorrow. I push it down. That was long ago, and this is business. I’m a guide, we have a code, we don’t take sides.
“They make a wasteland, and they call it peace,” I mutter, a quotation I read once in some library basement, sheltering from the winter in those years of homeless drifting between the group home and Rook finding me, cleaning me up, teaching me that the visions weren’t madness, but a gift.
I remember I quoted that line once before to him, and how he’d laughed at my pretentiousness, because he’d grown up rich enough to afford a disdain for education. Or at least, that’s what I’d always thought. His laughter hurt me then, back when I couldn’t bear for him to think less of me, even for a moment. It seems that hurt is still down there somewhere because I look up at him, afraid to see if he overheard me. And he has, and I can see by the look on his face that he’s remembered that moment too.
“Cro….?” He doesn’t quite let my name slip, but it’s enough. We both sense it. The shadows in the water blur and converge into a vast, dark eye that stares up into the night then begins to slowly turn in our direction. The Keepers have heard us; they won’t be far behind. There’s only one place to hide – I sprint across the landscaped grounds onto the shimmering path of the dead road. Rook must follow me, for the road is visible only to guides.
We’re safe, I think, so long as we keep moving, safe in the familiar routine of leading ghosts somewhere we can forget about them. The dead road doesn’t follow the languorous turns of the street. It winds through the undergrowth at the backs of oligarchs’ gated citadels and movie producers’ mansions, all posing above the city in a million-dollar glow of designer uplighting.
I struggle between branches in the dark of the canyon, Rook drifting behind me. Beyond the compounds’ walls comes the bickering of loveless marriages and the dirty work-pleasure amalgam of society parties. I tut. They should turf these people out and turn their fucking ballrooms into rehab wards— God knows the city could use it. But why should we expect any better from this world, when the worlds beyond are much the same. The Keepers turning souls away from their garden, sending them Below for having stolen to feed themselves, when every chance at decency has been robbed from them before they left the womb.
“Still as angry at all of this as you’ve ever been.” Rook says. I realize I’ve been muttering under my breath.
“Shut up.”
“Then why not join me? Change this?”
Why not? The question tightens in my gut.
“Shut up. You’re going to your sanctuary and that’s it, over. Just another ghost with an underserved reprieve. This pax cartel delusion of yours is done.”
He stops, eyes me with something like suspicion. “Oh, this is personal? You’re angry at me? Because I vanished? Come on, that’s a lifetime ago… And anyway, you think if I’d stayed you and me would still be…? Think I’d even still be alive?”
I turn from him, struggling for the words. “Your fucking vanity. This isn’t some jilted-on-prom-night tantrum. I hate you for what you’ve become, no more and no less than all the other deluded murderers I’ve taken down these roads.”
“It had to be done—”
“That’s what they all say, now shut the fuck up, or I’ll leave you in the desert and you can haunt a stretch of sand forever.”
I’ve been tempted to leave ghosts behind like that before, but our work relies on our reputation. If these ghosts should hear that they might not actually get the paradise we offer, why would they take our deal? Still, the threat is enough to make him shut his mouth.
A dumped TV set flickers to life in the weeds, an eye filling its screen in a hiss of static and scanning slowly from left to right. We shrink down into the dead road’s cover and hurry past, hoping its concealment is enough.
The city thins. We climb down into the scrub and dust of the hills at the desert’s edge, the heat of the night sticky with eucalyptus and wisps of oozed exhausts. Cicada song shivers in the dark. The low moan of a distant siren stretches and bends as it nears and retreats from us along an unseen switchback road. The coyotes make their own howling roll call. Those servants of the Keepers can smell the presence of a misplaced spirit.
We march on, the bones of my knees scraping on one another, worn through by a lifetime of walking ghosts across these bleak lands. It’s all I’ve done, all I’ve been all these years since Rook vanished, granting mercy to ghosts that deserved none for the sake of a world that never seems to get any better.
We move through oil fields of moaning pumpjacks and beyond into the cold of the desert. There’s something I don’t want to see here. The ghost of a guide the Keepers caught. Hawk, bound and ravaged by the beaks of ghost birds until the end of time. A warning to us, a monument to the Keepers’ power and cruelty and our helplessness before it. She’s not the only one of us who’s ended this way.
We pass without a word.
“You think we’re heading for the border?” I say, after hours of silence. It’s something to consider. Would be disappointing to dodge the wrath of the Keepers only to be shot by some minimum-wage border patrol agent at the end of a double shift.
He shrugs. “Seems likely. Road is made of my dreams, and my taste in symbolism never was very subtle.”
“That village then, your sanctuary we’re heading to? That’s a symbol for something too? That story about… about what happened there, all a metaphor?” I meant not to ask, but the question has been gnawing at me for hours. That he never said anything about that in the years we were together… even though he knew my story, must have known it would be some consolation to hear his was so similar.
“No, it’s a real place, or was at least. Had to run away after what I did. Got picked up crossing the border. Incarceration, group home, adopted by Ted and Jill, and then… well the rest you know.”
The rest I know. Ahead of us the red white glow of the highway hisses with the rushing of trucks. The border.
The dead road leads us down the hillside to a dried-out riverbed and a culvert that runs beneath the highway, the grill across it crowbarred open. But instead of darkness at its end, there is daylight, a bullet hole in the night, the end of the road.
We stumble in the dark through the detritus left by vanished water and out into the basin of a dried-out lake. The ghost of water ripples at our knees. We climb the bank and find the sanctuary standing there in a blaze of sunshine, shimmering like a heat haze over the earthly darkness. A huddle of huts, no more than pallets and corrugated iron, trees and lush grasses floating over the dark earth of the living world. A woman in a makeshift rocking chair looks up from the shade of a house and smiles.
But something is strange. Among the shadows are the ruins of the village that was. The concrete ring of the well lies in broken slabs beneath its own, intact ghost form. The ghosts of saplings at the riverbank stand beneath the trunks of trees long grown and died. This is a first: A sanctuary superimposed upon the real place it’s made to resemble. Well, Rook always was full of surprises. It doesn’t matter now. Here, hidden in the sanctuary’s depths, it’s safe for me to remove my mask and cloak, fold the first inside the second and hide them deep in my pack so that I might walk out of this place and go back to my life, such as it is, without revealing my identity to the Keepers.
“Crow…” he looks at me, some feeling on his face that he quickly shakes. “You got old,” he says, burying whatever had surfaced under his mocking tone.
I shrug. “You got dead, and murderous.” I turn to leave.
“Wait. You don’t understand. Getting you here was just part of the plan. I couldn’t tell you before, in case the Keepers heard and found a way to stop me, but we’re safe here. Come, come.” He walks away towards a stand of trees beside the river’s ghost.
“I don’t care about your plans, Rook. Enjoy eternity.”
“Please. Just one last thing. I need you to dig here. Please, for old times’ sake?”
Old times. What a thing to evoke.
I dig with a broken piece of fence post, eighteen inches into the dirt till the wood scrapes against metal. I brush the dust away and find a steel case that shimmers with the sheen of the ghost world, ghost form and real woven into each other. I lay my hand against it. Some darkness moves inside, a vicious witchcraft that chills the bones.
I slide the box from the earth, snap back its clasps. A revolver wrapped in rags. Boxes of shells. The gun growls like a dog’s last warning before it lunges. It flickers with the muzzle-flash memory of every time it’s been fired in anger. I snap open the cylinder and spin it. One cartridge spent—the bullet Rook shot through his father’s chest.
“Rare thing you have there,” he says. “Overlaps the living world and the dead, so it kills in both, men and ghosts alike. And then they’re dead the way this world has come to think death works. Just nothing. Gone. You understand what that means? What you could do with it?”
I feel a spark of something in my chest, that thrill Rook lit in me when we first met, the feeling of worlds unknown revealing themselves. I look up, expecting his form to have become the one I remember from those old times, wild and wry around the eyes. But he’s only that old ghost, head bowed, blood pouring from the wounds that killed him. “You understand then, why I had to do all this? To get us here, get the attention of whoever sends us guides, make my case worth their while. Had to shape my dreams and desires just so, so they’d build this sanctuary right on top of the real place it imitates. Something only someone who’s been a guide could know how to do.”
I coil my fingers around the grip. “All the ghosts we gave sanctuary to…” I whisper.
“And all those to come. Even the Keepers aren’t safe from this. You got leverage now, like you always wanted. Make them let ordinary people through those fucking gates of theirs.”
“This was really your plan? And all that about us building your empire? Being a team?”
“Best test I could think of. Had to be sure I could trust whoever it was they sent, be sure they were someone who would do the right thing with this. Glad it turned out to be you.”
“What happens to you in this plan? Asking me to go force a way into heaven for you at gun point?”
He shakes his head. “Nah, I haven’t earned that. When I was alive… yeah, I believed all that shit I told you at the villa. Thought I could do what the powers that be are too soft and corrupt to manage. Make peace at any cost. Ends justify the means. But… Nothing justifies what I did to those people. I still have to pay. That’s the world you have to make now. Everyone pays.”
“No, not heaven, but not Below, not for ever. There should be some allowance…” I don’t know what I’m intending to say. I don’t even know if I believe him, or if this plan is just an impulse he had somewhere along the dead road.
He nods towards the gun. “I doubt I deserve such mercy, but would you? For old time’s sake?”
I doubt he deserves such mercy either, the nothingness the gun offers, the final wiping of the slate, but the gun will change world, and God knows the world could do with more mercy in it. This is who I am now, not a guide, for there will be no more walking ghosts down dead roads, but still a servant of sorts, still a bringer of endings to stories that have dragged on too long.
He turns his back to me, looking across the clearing to the woman in the rocking chair. She waves at him and smiles. He raises his hand, lowers it and bows his head. The gunshot rings across the desert and echoes ghostly in the hills. I feel spirits hush and turn their heads to hear it: the sound of new world beginning.
Will is physiotherapy student living in Vienna, Austria. His fiction has appeared in Analog, Metaphorosis and the very fine publication, The Colored Lens.