"The haunting of the forgotten road," Dyer murmured, staring about at the scattering of trees and mist.
Charlie did not hit him: partially because Dyer was a ghost made solid and because he knew far more than she did about actual ghosts. He tended to come up with tag-lines for missions CASPER directed them to — hauntings and apparitions that came across their desk — while she just thought up jokes like ‘a god-eater and a ghost-eater walk into a bar’.
"You’re saying this place is haunted."
He blinked. “Say, rather, that my feeling is that it is too empty to be haunted.”
"Uh huh. No cell phone reception out here. That could be considered a type of haunting." Charlie wrapped her coat tighter about herself; Dyer wasn’t bothered with the chill in the air, what with being dead. "And it’s not forgotten."
"Charlie, it didn’t appear on GPS or any conventional map."
"Yeah? Last road I ended up on like that was claimed by a unicorn." Dyer paused, as he often did when she casually mentioned such things, expecting a punchline that never came. "Look," she continued, "there are tracks. It was used, and that they haven’t entirely vanished means they remember being used. No place likes to be forgot, Dyer."
"So if we bulldozed the forest down it would be happy it was being used?"
"Call it my feeling then," she said, but leavened the words with a brief smile and turned back toward their RV. "We can reach the next assignment by dawn if we take turns driving."
Dyer was quiet until they were almost at the RV. “You know the road was haunting itself, don’t you?”
"Way I see it, we’re all doing that," she said, and he he just nodded slowly as they got back into the RV and left the road, knowing the file he would write up would mean it was not quite so forgotten.
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