Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  “Maybe,” it said.

  “But I still—I don’t understand,” Hallie said. “Are you saying that this fountain is—that it holds power in some way? Is it—”

  A gust of wind so fierce, it almost knocked her back a step whipped her jacket against her spine and blew a half-empty clay planter off a ledge so that it shattered on the concrete, scattering dirt and shards. The black dog disappeared and Hallie wasn’t sure she’d seen it go, though she’d been looking right at it the whole time.

  Something had changed with that rush of wind, but she couldn’t tell what. The way things smelled, the sunlight overhead, static electricity in the air. Something.

  Hallie walked back down the sidewalk, her senses on high alert, feeling like she was back in Afghanistan, in a place where anything could happen and probably would. Her fingers curled like she could will a gun into her hands. And a squad to watch her back. There was a shotgun in her pickup, which was clear across the parking lot. A pair of birds warbled back and forth to each other somewhere nearby. She could smell dry grass and wet leaves. It all seemed perfectly normal.

  She rounded the last pillar and thumped back hard against it, stopped cold.

  Across the parking lot in the waist-high prairie grass, dry as old straw and smashed flat, sat a late-model Ford Focus with rental-car plates and a tall, impossible Ponderosa pine. The car had rammed headlong into the tree, windshield shattered, engine shoved back a half foot, tires flat, and the front wheels splayed out like a spavined mule.

  Hallie swallowed hard against a sudden lump in her throat.

  This was Dell’s accident. This was how Dell had died. Hallie didn’t know what kind of car Dell had been driving, had never actually seen this, the wreckage. But she’d seen that tree, had gone to Seven Mile Creek and stood right in front of it, seen the savage and vivid scar sliced out of its bark. That tree.

  Jesus Christ.

  Hallie blinked and swallowed hard a second time. She scanned her immediate surroundings. Nothing moved in any direction. She crossed the parking lot on the diagonal, opened the driver’s door on the fly, grabbed her shotgun from behind the seat, shoved her hand into the shell box next to it, knocked the door shut with her hip, and edged along the truck, her back against the smooth cold metal as she loaded three rounds and shoved the two remaining shells into her jacket pocket. One more scan in all directions and she left the cover of the truck and walked out into the open prairie.

  * * *

  She stumbled as she approached the driver’s side of the car even though she was sure—pretty sure—there would be no one inside.

  “I can show you anyone’s death.”

  She jerked, like a twitch, though she’d been expecting him, and turned, leveling her shotgun. As soon as she saw the car and the tree, she’d known he would come.

  “I hear you died,” she said.

  Hollowell stood on the edge of the parking lot maybe fifteen feet away from her. He wore the same clothes he’d worn yesterday, like clothes weren’t that important to him, though it was obvious from the style and the cut of the cloth that they were. Hallie walked out from under the shadow of the Ponderosa pine. The stalk-dry dead prairie grass rustled like old paper. She stopped when she stood ten feet from him, her shotgun pointed steady at his chest. She didn’t know that a shotgun would do any good. In fact, she was reasonably sure it wouldn’t. She’d shot Martin in the chest—twice. It hadn’t stopped him. And this guy was already dead.

  Hollowell didn’t appear to be particularly worried about the shotgun in any case. He watched her, relaxed and apparently calm, the faint hint of a smile on his face.

  “Did he tell you?” he asked Hallie.

  “He told me you were dead,” Hallie said.

  “Did you ask about his wife?”

  “I didn’t fight with him, if that’s what you’re asking.” Hallie’s hands felt like they were shaking, but they couldn’t be, because the gun was rock steady in her hands.

  She could feel the accident behind her, even with her back turned, even though she couldn’t see it. Like an ocean wave that grew and grew until it was taller than houses, than old-growth forest, than towers. Until it had to break. Would break. Like she, standing there, was all that held it back. Hollowell had no business showing her this, showing her Dell’s death. The fact that he could do it was not half so infuriating as the fact that he thought doing it would stop her. Hell, that? That was an encouragement.

  Hollowell smiled. Not like he was amused, more like he thought it was something he ought to do. His light eyes looked hard as carbon steel.

  “I want what’s mine,” he said.

  “Leave Boyd alone,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” he replied. “He’s instrumental.” He tilted his head and looked at her sideways. “But … you are too. You have the stink of death on you, you know. I could smell it a thousand miles away.”

  “So?” she said.

  “I thought,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, “that it would be a problem. But now I think it will work out fine.”

  “It’s not going to work out at all,” Hallie said.

  Hollowell continued to smile.

  Hallie really wanted to shoot him. Instead, she said, “Martin Weber. Is he coming back too?”

  “Who?”

  “Martin Weber. He owned this building. He used magic. Like you do.”

  “No, not like I do.” Hollowell looked amused, which irritated Hallie.

  “He used magic,” Hallie persisted. “Now he’s dead. I want to know if he’s coming back.”

  Hollowell shrugged. “If he’s dead, he’s dead.”

  “And yet, here you are.”

  “I may be dead, but I don’t deserve to be dead, and I particularly don’t deserve—” He stopped, took a step back, his face dark where before he’d been smug, and looked at her with narrowed eyes as if things hadn’t gone as he expected.

  He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was relaxed and smug again.

  “Davies is going to get me what I want,” he said.

  “No, he’s not,” Hallie said. “If you think he is, you don’t actually know him very well.”

  “I think he will,” Hollowell said. “I think he’ll do it for you.” He moved impossibly fast, between one blink and the next, knocking the shotgun out of Hallie’s hands. He grabbed her by the front of her jacket and flung her back six feet, where she hit hard against the rear bumper of Dell’s car.

  Hallie scrambled to her feet. Hollowell did something with his hands, palms forward like he was pushing something. She felt a light thump in her chest, but that was all. Hollowell’s eyes widened slightly; then he laughed. Hallie closed the distance between them and punched him low, beneath the ribs, a hard, stabbing action that should have doubled him over.

  Hollowell didn’t seem to feel a thing. He grabbed her again, hands like Vise-Grips around her upper arms. “At the risk of being melodramatic,” he said, “you’re coming with me.” Like she was today’s prize. Hallie reached up to grab his arm, then stopped. Over Hollowell’s shoulder, the sky all along the horizon was black, not gradually turning from gray to black like storm clouds or approaching night, but instant one-minute-to-the-next black, black like India ink, like the end of time, like the shadow she’d seen at the crossroads this morning—black. And it was moving toward them, flowing over the prairie like a wave, like swallowing the world.

  “Holy shit.”

  Hollowell turned his head.

  Hallie took the opportunity to kick him square in the knee. She reached up with her left hand, grabbed his right arm above the wrist, and pushed down hard on the opposite elbow, breaking his grip on her before he actually realized what was happening. She flung herself wildly to her left and scrambled for her shotgun, hoping it would at least slow him down.

  Her arms where he’d held her protested as she swung to face Hollowell.

  She was too late. The black had arrived.

  It rolled over them like
a wave, casting day into night. The world spun. Branches whipped past her, followed by a large planter, a sign, a signpost, and a rabbit, looking strangely unconcerned. She could barely see Hollowell, and she felt as if she were straining to hold herself upright though she felt no rush of wind.

  A roar filled her ears, like a stadium or a freight train, the black surrounded everything—Hollowell and Hallie, the parking lot, and possibly the entire prairie.

  Hollowell “pushed,” palms forward, as he’d pushed at Hallie.

  Something—something Hallie couldn’t see—pushed back. Hollowell flew past Hallie, his body arced toward the ground, and he disappeared.

  The black lifted.

  Everything was gone—Hollowell, the car Dell had died in, the giant pine tree that had killed her—all of it. Hallie collapsed to the ground, knocked back by the rush of, well … nothing, surrounded by dead grass in a circle that went farther than she could see. She’d lost her grip on her shotgun again, and it took her a moment to find it, six feet away. She grabbed it and rose, stumbling as a wave of dizziness swept over her.

  The Uku-Weber building and everything else outside the hundred-yard circle of dead grass was untouched.

  11

  Hallie walked slowly out of the field. Her head ached and she was seeing flashes, like oil-slicked rainbows at the periphery of her vision.

  She leaned heavily against the passenger door of the pickup, then straightened. Her back was scraped and sore from hitting the car and the ground. Her right knee ached and she couldn’t see well enough to drive yet. She wasn’t sure what had happened to Hollowell, whether he’d banished the black or the black had banished him. She walked to the back of the truck, dropped the tailgate, and sat down before she fell down. She lay the shotgun on the truck bed beside her.

  “He’s bad.”

  The black dog sat on the pavement just in front of her.

  “You’re bad,” Hallie told it. “You’re a harbinger of fucking death.”

  The dog licked its tongue over its nose, but it didn’t say anything.

  “He’s a reaper, isn’t he?” Hallie said, feeling again that familiar spike of pain that she’d felt each time Hollowell touched her, that she felt each time she heard that word—“reaper.”

  The dog looked at her, like it was waiting.

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. “That’s what he is. So, he—what? Takes people’s souls?” She winced as she moved her left arm back and forth. “He kills people.” Not even a question because that’s what Laddie had told her. So why hadn’t he killed her? He’d grabbed her by the front of her jacket, grabbed her by the arms. But he’d never touched her, skin on skin. Was that the reason? It had to be. So, he didn’t want to kill her. At least not yet.

  The dog rose. It circled Hallie and then the truck, trotted over to the edge of the parking lot, sniffed the dead grass, and snorted, like it smelled something rotten. The sun drifted behind a cloud, and Hallie could see Lily’s ghost floating across the parking lot toward them.

  Her cell phone rang. It took her a minute to dig it out of her pocket.

  “Are you okay?” It was Boyd.

  “Yes,” she said, drawing the word out slow, like a question, like, Why are you calling me? Because he couldn’t know what had just happened. She looked at the time, just after ten, the sun still thin, not generating much warmth. “Where are you?”

  “I had a dream,” he said instead of answering her question. “I dreamed you drowned.”

  “In South Dakota?” She tried to make it a joke, but realized she couldn’t quite pull it off.

  “Something’s happened,” he said.

  “Well, I didn’t drown.” Not exactly.

  He waited. And Boyd could wait all day. Hallie would have to pace or scrub floors or go out to the barn and sling feed bags. But Boyd would wait.

  “It’s fine,” she finally said. “I’m fine.” She took a breath and slid off the tailgate; she could think better, talk better on her feet. “I saw Hollowell.”

  “What?” His voice held a steely undercurrent.

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. “I think he’s a reaper.”

  Another moment of silence. “I don’t know what that is,” Boyd said, like he should, like either of them had known anything about this side of existence—other than Boyd’s dreams—before September.

  “I don’t entirely know either,” she said.

  “Hallie,” he began, then stopped. “Can’t you—? I don’t know … is there somewhere you can be safe?”

  “I’ll be safe,” she said.

  “That’s not—” Silence again. “I know that you’re capable,” he finally said. “You’re smart, you’re practical, and though I think you rush into things, you also think on your feet, and that works for you. It does. I know it does. But, Hallie, it’s not that I want to keep you safe. I want you to be safe. If anything happens to you—I don’t want anything to happen to you. And—” He stopped.

  I want the same for you, Hallie thought, but didn’t say. She wanted him with her right now, in fact, wanted to reach out and just … just touch him, like a talisman. Or, more than that, because if she could put her hand on his face, if she could smell that—he always smelled clean and … like home, like things would work out, like—

  She rubbed her arm where Hollowell had grabbed her. “How are things going for you?” she asked him. “In Iowa?”

  “I can’t find where he’s buried.”

  “Hollowell?” Because hadn’t he gone there for Lily’s sister?

  “Yeah, I decided—things are weird here, Hallie.”

  “Things are always weird,” Hallie said. “Wouldn’t it have been in the papers?”

  “There are three local papers and I’ve searched all of them for the week after the accident. The accident’s in every single one of them—big news. So, I know I’m right about the date. Lily—” He paused so briefly, it was barely noticeable. “—Lily’s obituary is in two of the three papers. I put it in one.” Hallie blinked, because he’d been nineteen, nineteen and sending obituaries to the newspapers, which people did, she guessed, if they had to. She just hadn’t actually thought of him doing it. “I think her mother must have sent the other one. Both of them, though, they both name the funeral home and the service. It would be easy to know where she’s buried. But, there’s nothing—no obituary—for Hollowell.”

  “Wouldn’t the police know? Or the medical examiner? Someone would know, right?”

  “I’m trying to track someone down, but it’s been a few years. And I can’t find any family. It’s getting really complicated,” he said.

  “It wasn’t complicated before?”

  “Yeah.” She could imagine his expression, half rueful and half concentrated on the problem at hand. “The VIN numbers and the license plates from the accident? They were exactly the same as the numbers on the vehicles down here.”

  “The other accident?”

  “The one Lily’s sister called about, yes. The state police are interested. Cars with the same VIN number don’t happen.”

  They didn’t have to happen, Hallie thought. Because Hollowell had made them—somehow. And she wasn’t even sure the “somehow” mattered as much as that he could and that he did.

  “Did you find her? Lily’s sister?”

  “Beth?

  “Is that her name?”

  “Beth Hannah.” He paused. “She’s seen him too.”

  “Jesus. Hollowell?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. He gets around. What does he want?” Something from Boyd, Hallie knew. Or something Boyd could get. But what?

  “Let’s figure that out,” Boyd said, his voice flat with that implacable undertone he got when something was poking at him, at his idea of how the world should work.

  They talked another minute or so about logistics and general nothing. Boyd was taking Beth out to his parents’ farm, which apparently was only an hour or so from Cedar Rapids. He thought Hollowell wouldn’t look there for her,
and after he hung up, Hallie began to wonder how Hollowell had found her, Hallie, today. He’d said he could smell her—smell her from a thousand miles away.

  Because she’d died.

  She sat on the tailgate again. The dog jumped up beside her, startling her because she hadn’t heard it. For a minute, a long minute for Hallie, she sat there, studied the dog, turned her head and looked at the broad expanse of dead and flattened prairie grass. She shifted on the hard, cold tailgate. She’d talked to Boyd like things were still normal, as normal as things had been the last two months. But Hollowell had just jumped the stakes up a notch or two. If he came after her once, he’d come again. And she needed to figure out what to do about it.

  She felt as if her skin were stretched tight across her cheekbones, like wind had stripped her to wire and bone. She stood, started to walk back out onto the prairie, and stopped—reluctant, she realized, to leave the solid steel bulk of the pickup truck, which pissed her off. Hollowell had tried to grab her, to take her with him, to use her to get to Boyd. And she didn’t know what had stopped him.

  She turned. The dog was right behind her.

  “What happened?” she asked it.

  The dog sat. “You know,” it said. “Reaper.”

  “I couldn’t have stopped him,” she said, hating to admit it, but smart enough not to kid herself. “But something stopped him. What was it?”

  The dog looked around, like whatever it was might be lurking behind them. But the black was gone. Completely gone. The day was cold with a northwest wind that knifed straight through Hallie’s jacket, but the sky was clear, nothing more than a few thin clouds along the horizon.

  “Things change,” the dog finally said. Then it paused, panting. It swiped at its face with one front paw and said, “He doesn’t have the power to do what he wants. Not yet.”

  “What power?”

  But the dog was gone again, its departure so quick, between blinks, that it was as if it hadn’t been there at all.

  Hallie walked back to the Uku-Weber building, shotgun in hand, inspected the fountain, and circled the building itself. Not because she expected to find anything, but if there was something to find, she didn’t want to miss it.