Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. “Strange.”

  So all she said now was, “He’s going to do some research for me.”

  Her father nodded. He went back to his notebook and pencil and measurements.

  Hallie had to admire it, the stubborn insistence that the world worked as Vance Michaels expected it to work. And it worked, not despite evidence to the contrary, but with—in his mind—no evidence to the contrary at all. Any actual evidence, particularly right before his eyes, was dismissed as inconclusive or not actually there.

  She reached out impulsively and touched his arm. He stopped measuring, straightened, and looked at her. “If I take this job,” she said, “how’s that going to work for you?”

  He tapped his pencil against the back of his wrist and looked past the unbuilt equipment shed, across the open field, maybe all the way to the far horizon. “People leave here all the time,” he said. “That’s just the kind of place this is.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “I know.” She’d already been gone for four years in the army. “But stuff changes. People—things happen.”

  “When Dell came home,” her father said, his voice rough, “that was good. That was fine. But I don’t expect it, for you to come back or to stay. You gotta have something more than a ranch that can’t support you or a part-time job with lousy pay and worse hours. You don’t stay because you don’t have anything better. You stay because it’s where you want to be.”

  “Why do you stay?” Hallie asked.

  “Because it’s open,” he replied without hesitating. “All laid out so you can see it. And everything I need, or needed, or want to remember, it’s all right here. I belong right here.”

  He laughed, one quick hard ha. “Can you see me in Chicago or Los Angeles?” He pronounced the latter with a long e on the end. “Wearing flip-flops?”

  “Shorts?” Hallie’d never seen him in anything but blue jeans and the occasional dress pants.

  He smiled. “Before you were born, or Dell either, your mom and I went to Florida for a couple of weeks. We did all the things you’re supposed to do—snorkeling, parasailing, took a boat ride through the Everglades. And it was fun—different as hell—but that was part of it. We flew back into Rapid City at night and it was starting to snow as we headed back here. Snowed harder and the wind came up and it was pretty much a whiteout by the time we hit the end of the drive. We made it up to the house, practically sideways the whole way. We didn’t have boots, coats, nothing. Snow over our shoes and we’re bent against the wind crossing the yard.

  “Then it stopped. Snow still falling, but straight down and the moon came out. Your mom and me, we stood there in the cold like idiots looking out across the fields all clean and still and home. That’s the thing, we knew we were home.”

  He looked at her finally. “It’s not prettier or better than other places and it sure as hell isn’t an easy place, but I know how to live here. And that counts.” He laughed again, that low almost not-sound. “You move away, you can come back whenever you want. I’ll come see you once in a while. And that’ll be fine.

  “But I ain’t wearing any damn flip-flops.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Hallie said, her smile quick and sharp. “And thanks for letting Laddie run his cattle here.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a soft touch,” her father said, turning back to his measurements and calculations. “But he better not bring that bad luck with him.”

  Hallie called Laddie before heading into town.

  “Here’s another question,” she said after she’d told him he could bring his cattle out whenever he wanted. “What can kill everything in a thirty-yard radius?”

  “Like people?”

  “Like everything. I don’t know about people, because there weren’t any people.”

  “Could be herbicide,” Laddie pointed out.

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. “It’s not. I’m asking you and not the chemical rep because I’m pretty sure it has to do with—” She paused because what was she pretty sure of? That Hollowell was a dead man. That Laddie talked to the dead. “Well, with what I asked you last night. Can the dead come back?” she asked.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re stirring up here?” Laddie asked.

  “No,” Hallie said. “I don’t. If I did, I wouldn’t be asking. Do you?”

  Hallie could picture Laddie shuffling cards and laying them out. “Not … exactly,” he admitted. “But I bet it ain’t anything good.”

  “Will you ask?”

  “Yeah.” Laddie drew the word out, like a sigh.

  “Thanks,” Hallie said. “I appreciate it.”

  It was just after eight o’clock when she crossed SR54, turned right, and continued on old West Prairie Road. A mile farther on, where a gravel road crossed the old asphalt, she saw the shadow—or a shadow, because she had no idea if it was the same one she’d seen before or another one—right in the middle of the intersection.

  Hallie slowed.

  Should she drive through it? She remembered that feeling when she’d touched the grass where the shadow had passed—pain fierce enough to knock her back. She pulled to the side of the road and left the truck running.

  The shadow was irregularly shaped, six feet or so in diameter. It was inky black and looked like it would absorb light, though the day was cloudy and cold so it was impossible to tell for sure. It had no thickness, in that respect like a real shadow, though it was darker than a shadow, more like a black hole, like if you stepped on it, you’d disappear forever. It had no smell. Hallie couldn’t feel anything emanating from it, not cold or heat. She put out her hand, hovered inches above it. She wanted to touch it even though it was probably dangerous, wanted to know what it was and what it was doing.

  She heard a car a long way off and stood. She couldn’t figure out afterwards if she hadn’t been watching where she stood or if the shadow moved, but when she stood back up, her right foot came down on top of it.

  Flash flash flash.

  Image after image. A thousand images in a second, a minute, forever.

  Sky as black as velvet, cold pinpoints for stars, desert camo—a leg, an arm, strapped-on packs, stark sunlight on bright mountain snow, dusty Humvee tires, new-planted wheat, old hay, Earth from space, shattered windows, soft wood exploded like shrapnel, cell phones, airplanes, mile-high storm clouds, lightning bright as phosphorous, mountain lions with twitching tails, and timber wolves.

  She came back to herself, the shadow was gone, and she was on her ass on the ground. She felt like she’d run a mile, was breathing hard and fast.

  She heard an engine, high-pitched, like an angry bee, and scrambled to her feet, dusting off the seat of her jeans with her hands. She was out of the intersection and back at her truck when a late-model cream and tan pickup entered the intersection from the crossroad. The driver slowed when he saw Hallie. There was a smooth hum as the passenger-side window powered down.

  “Everything all right, there?” Tel Sigurdson leaned toward the window. He had to raise his voice because he was a good thirty feet away from her, but Tel had a voice that carried even with the brisk north wind.

  “It’s good,” Hallie called, resisting the urge to put a hand above her eyes to block the suddenly too-bright sun. “Thought I had a tire going soft, but it’s fine.”

  “You sure? I could follow you into town,” Tel said.

  Hallie waved her hand. “It’s all good,” she said.

  Tel powered his window back up and drove on. As he crossed the asphalt back onto gravel, dust kicked up along the wheel wells of his truck. Hallie could see him looking back at her as if he was still wondering if he should turn and come back.

  Her hands were shaking when she got back in the truck, which pissed her off. Even when she’d first gone to Afghanistan, even when she’d first been under fire, even when her heart beat like a locomotive, she hadn’t been the kind of person whose hands shook. She wasn’t going to be that person now.

  She put the truc
k in gear and got back on the road. She resolutely put the shadow, what it was, and what it wanted to the back of her mind. She had more immediate concerns. In another fifteen minutes, she’d reached her destination.

  The building still looked brand-new when Hallie pulled into the empty parking lot. A few weeds along the edge of the asphalt, the narrow strip of lawn between the building and the prairie a bit ragged, but those were the only signs that this wasn’t any other corporate building on a lazy weekend. Hallie sat in her truck for a minute before switching off the ignition.

  Uku-Weber.

  This was the place. The place her sister had worked before she’d been killed. The place that had killed her sister. Hallie’d never talked to Dell after she came back to South Dakota, after she started working with Martin, so she didn’t know—would never know—what Dell had thought Uku-Weber was, whether she’d genuinely thought it was about alternative energy sources. Which, in a way, it had been, except Martin’s ability to control the weather had come from blood sacrifice and magic. Not from high-efficiency wind turbines or solar power.

  But Martin was dead now, she thought as she got out of the pickup and shut the door, the distinctive sound of metal against frame loud and thin in the empty lot. And this was the only place Hallie knew where there was magic. Or had been magic. And what Hollowell had done—as she’d told Boyd—was more powerful than anything Martin had been able to do. And Martin had been able to do a lot. Maybe there was something here that could tell her more about what Hollowell was, how he could do what he’d done, and how she could stop him.

  She assumed there was security, because why not? Then again, who would pay for it? Martin had owned the land and the building outright. No bank. He had no living relatives—at least none anyone could find. He hadn’t left a will. The power’d been turned off, all that. But the building was just sitting, might sit there forever for all anyone knew. Because that happened all the time with buildings on the prairie. They stayed until the weather took them down.

  Lily’s ghost was beside her as she crossed the parking lot, cold like February when it had been winter too long to believe in spring. She was tucked in close to Hallie like they were walking arm in arm. Hallie stepped sideways, but Lily stuck like glue. So she gritted her teeth to keep them from chattering and kept walking. The black dog was nowhere in sight.

  The double glass doors into the two-story atrium were locked and chained. Hallie stepped back, planning to circle around to the side entrance, but then stopped to study the fountain where she’d once seen Sarah Hale’s ghost. The fountain was dry, but she ran her fingers along the barely visible symbols etched into the stone basin—lightning bolts and hammers, mythic dogs, deer, and ravens.

  Lily drifted past her, hovering in the spot where Hallie had first seen the ghost in the fountain.

  “She’s buried here,” Hallie said. “Sarah Hale. Can you tell?” Not that she expected an answer. Ghosts never answered.

  Hallie had wanted the authorities to dig up Sarah Hale’s body, though she was the only one certain that Sarah was buried under the fountain. She’d been persistent enough that they’d agreed to look. But every time they brought equipment in to break up the concrete and stone and dig underneath, something happened—equipment wouldn’t run, a generator broke, a hail storm moved in unexpectedly. There was still magic here, something that didn’t want the fountain or the ground around it or anything on the property, maybe, to be touched. Hallie hoped that meant she would find something here that would help her figure out what was happening with the black dogs or with Hollowell, something that would tell her why and what to do about it.

  In the center of the fountain was a stone and steel pillar with twisting branches carved all along its length. Hallie hadn’t really noticed it before because there’d been water coming from holes all up and down the pillar so the pillar itself had been blurred, and besides, there’d been a dead girl’s ghost in the fountain, which had taken most of her attention at the time. But now, with the water turned off, she could see that it had been carved all along its length, impossible to tell more than that from where she stood. She stepped into the empty fountain, careful of her footing because the stone comprising the basin was smooth as glass beneath her boots. She felt an odd snap when she stepped over the low edge, like the jab of a needle, or a spark of static electricity.

  Lily drifted back, past Hallie then away, clear over to the front of the building where she stared at the blank glass as if it held important secrets. Hallie examined the pillar, but she had no idea what she was looking for. She ran a hand along the carved stone. Something was definitely etched there, but so thinly that it was impossible to make out what.

  It was a cloudy day, though the air was dry. A bitter wind, like the thin edge of a razor, blew out of the west and Hallie shrugged up the collar of her jacket. She traced a finger along the etched stone, but still couldn’t tell what the carvings were. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe this was all a waste of time. Maybe she should have gone to Iowa with Boyd despite his reservations or waited for Laddie to talk to his dead friends who might or might not know what he was asking or give him answers that were useful.

  She walked back out of the fountain and realized only when she’d crossed the rim again that the static electricity feeling, like the hairs on the back of her neck were standing up, had been persistent while she was in the fountain, gone now that she was outside again. She looked back at the fountain. It looked innocent enough.

  But she was pretty sure nothing Martin Weber had touched was ever innocent.

  She returned to the truck and dug in the glove box for a small spiral notebook and a pencil that had been sharpened almost to a nub. Back at the fountain, she laid one of the notebook pages on the stone and rubbed it lightly with the pencil.

  It took a moment to realize that the thin lines formed letters. She moved the paper slightly, took another rubbing, moved it again.

  The sun emerged briefly from the broken clouds overhead. She looked at the paper.

  DEATH

  She stepped back.

  Martin’s magic had had a lot to do with death. And maybe death was always part of magic, despite what she’d been told. Martin had told her that people called what he did perversion magic, a perversion of small cultural magics that, he told her, could be practiced without blood, without death. But maybe that was denial, the idea that any magic could be practiced without involving sacrifice and blood. Maybe everything was death. Maybe it always had been.

  She flipped to another page and moved down the pillar.

  Rook. Owl. Raven. Crow. Dog. Banshee. Reaper. Ghost. Hell. Devil. Angel. Death.

  Death.

  Harbingers and afterlives and taking up souls. Death. All of it.

  Near the bottom of the pillar a pair of words were carved, just three-quarters of an inch high but deep and thick and infused with black and gold. Set so low, they would have been obscured by water when the fountain was turned on. Visible now only because she was squatting and had tilted her head at an awkward angle. They weren’t meant to be seen, but it must have been important for them to be there.

  EMBRACE DEATH

  Hallie touched her hand to the carved words. Her arm jerked like she’d grabbed a live electric wire. Every muscle spasmed. She tried to jerk her hand away, but it was as if she’d been welded to the stone. She tried harder, used all the will she had, like she had to instruct each specific nerve between her brain and the fingers on her right hand. Let. Go. Her hand finally released and the momentum knocked her on her ass with a thump.

  Okay. That was something. Definitely magic, though what kind and what it actually was supposed to do, she didn’t know. Not yet.

  She wanted to touch the words again. Wanted to see if the same thing happened or if it had been a weird combination of wind and temperature and the way she’d been standing. Even after everything that had happened in September, she found it hard to believe that this … this … whatever had just happened, that there was
still power here even after Martin had died. Then she thought, Hollowell came back from the dead. Somehow. Would Martin? Could he?

  10

  “Souls.”

  The voice, in her head and instantly recognizable, was so unexpected that Hallie leaped back and knocked her elbow hard into the fountain’s central pillar, numbing her forearm. The black dog sat on the sidewalk next to a large pot filled with dried stalks of something unidentifiable.

  “What?” Hallie said, though what she wanted to say was, Don’t sneak up on me.

  “Wanted to steal souls from reapers,” the dog said after a pause so long, Hallie had decided it wasn’t going to answer. As she’d come to expect, on the word “reaper,” a flash of pain erupted in her right temple, piercing and hot and gone so quick, she might have thought she’d imagined it.

  Reaper.

  Even thinking the word gave her a twinge, like a muscle spasm. So she repeated it like a mantra until it almost didn’t actually bother her anymore.

  It seemed like reapers—or at least talk of them—were coming up all over.

  “What does that mean?” she finally said. “Stealing souls from reapers. How would he do it? Why?”

  The dog rose and paced around the fountain, one slow deliberate circle. “Power,” it said.

  “More power than blood magic?” Hallie didn’t like that the dog went out of sight on the back side of the fountain. She walked carefully across the base and stepped over the low edge.

  “Different.”

  “But you can do it? Steal souls from reapers?” Which wasn’t even the right question because what were reapers? Why did they exist? What did they do with a soul and what did it mean if Martin were able to steal it?

  The wind had shifted to the north, almost northeast, and Hallie smelled salt and big water, like they were no longer on the prairie, but somewhere on the coast. The dog walked up to the base of the fountain and sniffed. There was a snap, like static electricity; the dog jumped back.