Page 49

The headlights swept across the gravel, the weeds, the leaning fence. The gate was coming.

The ghost couldn’t leave the property. He felt that in his nonexistent bones. There was a line out there in the dark, and he ended at it.

He braced.

The mailbox slid past the window.

Then the fence post. Then the crooked oak that marked the corner of the land, and then the truck was on the road, and the ghost was still inside it.

Oh.

He twisted around as much as the belt allowed. Through the rear window the manor stood black against the sky. It looked different from out here.

“You okay?” Nate asked.

“Fine.”

“You’re quiet.”

“I’m fine.”

Nate let it go. The truck picked up speed, and the dark started moving past the windows faster than the ghost had seen anything move in a very long time. He faced forward and watched the road come at him through the headlights.

A car passed them going the other way, lights first, then a shape. The shape was wrong. Smooth and rounded, like someone had taken a real car and sanded all the corners off. Then another one, also wrong.

“Cars used to have corners,” the ghost said.

“They did.”

“I liked the corners.”

“Me too,” Nate said.

They drove. Fields went by, then houses, spread out and then closer together, their windows like specks of orange in the dark. A gas station came up on the left, and the ghost read the sign. Then he read it again.

“Damn,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Gas got expensive.” He wasn’t sure exactly how much gas was supposed to cost, but he knew it couldn’t be this much.

“That was actually one of the cheaper places to fill up.”

“That’s robbery.”

“Take it up with the president.”

“Who’s president now?”

Nate opened his mouth. Then he closed it. “Let’s not get into politics.”

They came into the town, and the ghost stopped talking. There was so much to look at. The main street was lit end to end. Storefronts glowed. People walked in and out of the light with their heads bent over little devices. A whole line of the wrong-shaped cars sat under the streetlights. Outside a store, a dog waited at the end of its leash, wearing a small coat.

The ghost had always known that the world had not stopped moving, growing, and changing the way he had, but to see it like this…

Every house on this street housed someone who had been born, or grown up, or grown old, while he’d sat on a porch arguing with a fox who could never hear him.

He stared mutely out the window.