Chapter XVI

Far from the broodings of Kit No. 174—and those who guarded its secrets—a woman sat at the breakfast nook in her little cottage outside Haynesville, in the southeast corner of Aroostook County. The windows in the house were too small, so the rooms were always dim, but she didn't mind. She had never courted sunlight and didn't entertain visitors. In fact, for more than a decade she had been a virtual recluse, rarely venturing farther than the boundaries of her own town, unless health or business requirements dictated otherwise. Her name was Sabine Drew, and it had once, for a time, been known to many.

Sabine Drew's kitchen looked out on the Haynesville Woods by Route 2A, long regarded as one of the most dangerous roads in the county. During icy weather, drivers unfamiliar with its reputation often took the hairpin turns too fast. If they were lucky, they ended up in a ditch; if they were unlucky, they ended up in a cemetery. Dick Curless, the Tumbleweed Kid—a son of Aroostook, and the state's most famous country singer—even sang a song about Route 2A, "A Tombstone Every Mile." Dick would have known the road, since he'd resorted to driving a lumber truck for a while when the music business wasn't paying so well. Dick had probably taken those corners gently, though, what with him having poor vision and all. They took out most of Dick's stomach in '75, a year after he stopped drinking and a year before he found Jesus, but the cancer got him anyway. Old Death was like that, Sabine had found. You could dodge him, even skip ahead for a while, and Death would never hold it against you. He knew he'd cross paths with you again, and it wasn't as though he didn't have enough custom to keep him occupied in the meantime.

All sorts of stories were told about Route 2A: tales of phantom girls walking the stretch of road where they'd died under the wheels of a truck, and dead women screaming for lost husbands, but they were nonsense. Sabine had lived in Haynesville all her life, and she'd never seen a single phantom girl or solitary dead woman on that road. Different ghosts, certainly, but not those.

Not that she spoke of specters to anyone these days. She'd left all that behind. Occasionally, folk still sought her out, either from curiosity or because they needed help, but she sent them off as politely as she could. It was always harder with the latter than the former, since she might have been able to assist them if she tried. But it was better not to; it would only bring trouble, and more knocks on the door.

So she lived with ghosts—her own, and those of others—while trying not to pay them too much notice. They were always seeking attention, and if they got it, like the callers at her door, they'd never go away. In that sense, they also resembled children, which was perhaps why Sabine had never wished for any kids of her own, not that anyone had ever seriously raised the possibility of making some with her. She'd never entertained any illusions about her attractiveness. Her mother had advised Sabine that she was "homely," the kindest word she could find, so even without her peculiarity, Sabine might have struggled to interest a man for the long haul, which was like saying that with a different head, she might have been enticing. Her strangeness was as much a part of her as her looks, so she figured she'd die unmarried, but not alone. If she ever wanted for company, she could just alter her gaze and a ghost would come.

But as had been established, it was better not to do that. She'd learned to excise them from her consciousness; or more correctly, to accommodate her consciousness to their presence, like an alarm that had been ringing for so long that it became part of the soundscape, and one ceased to be unduly bothered by it. Lately, though, something had changed. A child was crying, and wouldn't stop.

Which was why Sabine, for the first time in many years, was opening herself up to one of the dead. In silence, in shadow, she reached out and waited for the connection to be made. When it came, she listened and consoled as best she could, before getting in her car and driving toward the source of the cries.