Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  “But—?” she repeated, insistent. Because she’d had to do it and she’d live with it, but she wanted to know what it meant.

  “It’s complicated,” Death said.

  “Yeah.” Hallie sat back down. Goddamnit. “Yeah.”

  After a moment, she said, “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Two reasons,” he said. “A warning and an offer.”

  Hallie waited.

  After a moment, he said, “If you’re going to leave, you should leave.”

  Hallie’s anger flared. “How is that any of your business? I mean, who the hell asked you? Did I ask you to bring me here, wherever here is? Did I ask to sit in your chairs and talk about, well, whatever it is we’re talking about?”

  “What I’m saying,” Death went on as if Hallie hadn’t spoken, “is that if you don’t leave Boyd alone, you’ll ruin him, as I ruined Lily and Beth’s mother.”

  Hallie didn’t respond immediately. She hadn’t expected the conversation to end up here, with Boyd. “I won’t ruin him,” she said. “He won’t—he’s not destructive. Not self-destructive. Not even … not violent or … he’s just … I won’t ruin him,” she said, as if saying it firmly would make it a fact—and she couldn’t imagine ruining him, couldn’t imagine being that person or Boyd being the person that happened to. “He won’t care that much.”

  “Yes,” Death said. “He will.”

  “Is that the warning or the offer?” Hallie asked, like, We’re not discussing this.

  “I want to be human again. Really human,” he said. “I want to retire.”

  “Why are you telling me?” Her hands gripped the back of the chair hard enough to leave marks.

  “I want you to take my place.”

  * * *

  The second time Hallie woke, she was back in the world. She was in a hospital bed, which she should have expected, but she hadn’t. There was no transition between waking and sleeping, just—blink—and her eyes were open. Boyd stood by the window all trim and precise in his uniform, looking at something Hallie couldn’t see. She wondered immediately if he remembered her now, followed by the thought that she didn’t want to know. Because if he didn’t remember her, she wouldn’t be able to stand it.

  “Boyd.”

  He turned away from the window, and Hallie was sure she was right, was sure he didn’t remember her. She felt a sense of loss so stark and deep that it made her sit straight up in the bed, like an uncoiling spring. Because movement was better. Anything was better. If she kept moving, then it couldn’t matter if he didn’t remember. If she moved forward fast enough, the past would drop away.

  “Hallie,” he said. His expression relaxed. He looked familiar again, though there was still something, some distance that hadn’t been there before. “They told me you were sleeping,” he said. “That you were just … sleeping. But it’s been so long.”

  “How—?” Hallie had to stop and clear her throat. When she’d woken, in that one minute to the next, she took in—hospital, bed, Boyd. Now she could see three vases of flowers and half a dozen cards on a small table. The nearest vase of flowers, mostly daisies and miniature carnations, was already fading, petals dropped off like the end of a season. “How long,” Hallie tried again, “have I been here?”

  “Almost a week.”

  He stepped away from the window and sat in the chair next to her bed. Hallie put out a hand and touched his face. “I’m okay,” she said.

  Boyd reached up and put his hand over hers. “You almost died,” he said.

  Hallie leaned back. She pulled her hand away and he let her but kept hold of it, though lightly. “So did you,” she pointed out.

  His radio crackled quietly, like it was talking to itself. She wondered if he was on duty—but she thought, despite the uniform, probably not, because surely this was the Rapid City hospital. So probably he’d driven over after signing out. “We can’t keep doing this, Hallie,” he said.

  “But it worked,” she said. Because it must have worked because she was here and he was here.

  “What did we do?” he asked. “Exactly?”

  I stood by and watched you die. But she wasn’t going to say that. Though she should. Though it was probably an important thing to talk about. She couldn’t do it yet. “We destroyed the fountain, right?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was dry. “Ole’s been explaining to anyone who will listen that it was a gas leak that destroyed the fountain, most of the courtyard, and several of the two-story glass panes at Uku-Weber.”

  “Ole?” Because that didn’t sound like him.

  “I think Ole knows more than he says,” Boyd told her.

  Hallie was learning that most people knew more than they said, that that was how the world worked, how secrets were kept, how things moved on.

  “Are they back?” she asked.

  “The people who disappeared? No. They’re back. They don’t remember anything.” He paused. “I don’t remember much. Just dark and fire and—Iowa?”

  Hallie smiled. “Yeah, that’s about what there is to remember.” Except Lily. And the end. When Hollowell killed him. When she killed Hollowell. And if he remembered that, remembered her waiting, he would say something, wouldn’t he? He’d be different.

  She pulled her hand from his and got out of the bed. He reached a hand out—to steady her? To stop her? But then withdrew it. She looked through the single cupboard in the room until she found a bag containing her clothes. They were wrinkled and dirty and smelled like smoke and nitrogen fertilizer.

  “I can call your father,” Boyd said. “He can bring clothes over when he comes tonight.”

  “I want to get out of here,” Hallie said.

  “They won’t just release you.”

  “Yes, they will.”

  He laughed, and the flat seriousness that had characterized his expression since Hallie awakened fled. “They probably will,” he acknowledged. He rose, crossed to her, and put his arms around her even though she was holding her dirty, smoky shirt and jeans. His grip tightened. “Remember when I said I would never tell you to stay?” he said.

  “I remember,” she told him.

  “Please stay.”

  He kissed her.

  She dropped her clothes.

  * * *

  Later, driving back to Taylor County, he told her that Beth had disappeared.

  “And Lily?” Because the last thing Hallie remembered was Lily in the big truck heading for the fountain.

  “Lily? She’s—”

  “Yeah.” Lily was dead. Had been dead since long before this whole thing began. But where was she?

  “She was there, you know,” Hallie said.

  Boyd let out a breath. “I thought she was. I thought—but it didn’t seem possible.”

  “Beth really disappeared?” Hallie said, still catching up. “You can’t call? She’s not back home?”

  Boyd shook his head. She could see that it bothered him. Beth had asked for his protection, and where was she now? “I dreamt about her, the first night back. Beth and Lily, both. Or,” he amended, “the first night I got any sleep after we got back. They told me not to worry. That it was fine. But, well, I was tired and I was worried—”

  “And you don’t believe it was really them.”

  “I don’t,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Death had offered Hallie his place, offered to make her Death. And she wanted to believe that wasn’t really him, that it wasn’t really an offer, that she, like Boyd, had been tired and worried and—well, it hadn’t been wishful thinking, because she didn’t wish to be Death—but she wanted it to be a dream. Though she was pretty certain that it wasn’t.

  Hallie told him about the end—about Lily, the county truck, and the fountain.

  “But she was out, right?” he asked, painfully wanting it to be true.

  She didn’t jump. Hallie didn’t say it, but not saying it didn’t make it untrue.

  Boyd said he had put out a “Be on the Lookout” alert on Be
th. And maybe now he’d put one out on Lily. Which made sense to Hallie, though Boyd said if anyone ever connected the two, Boyd’s BOLO and a description of his wife, they’d probably send him for a psych eval.

  “Well, nobody’s going to do that,” Hallie said. Then, “Oh wait.” Because all the most unlikely things seemed to happen lately.

  “There’s something else,” Boyd said. His tone serious, official, like, Ma’am, I’m your local deputy sheriff and I’m come to give you some bad news.

  “Is it Pabby?” Hallie asked.

  Boyd’s head jerked slightly, like he thought she’d surprised him and then realized she hadn’t. “Yes,” he said.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Hallie said. And if Boyd had failed Beth, well, she had failed Pabby. “She left the circle. To help us. I hoped it wouldn’t—she helped us, Boyd, and she must have known she was going to die doing it.”

  Boyd reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out an envelope. He handed it to her. It was a cheap envelope, the kind you could see through. Inside was a folded square of notepaper and something else. “She left this. For you,” he said.

  Hallie turned the envelope over and over in her hands. She wanted to rip it to shreds or crush it in her hands and toss it out the window. She’d briefly—for about half a second—thought it might be the date of her own death. Or Boyd’s.

  No.

  She wasn’t going to be afraid of that. Not after everything. She tore open the envelope like ripping a bandage off a wound. Inside was an old color photograph curling at the edges and a brief note.

  She lied to me, the note said. Because she was my mother.

  “What?” Hallie said.

  “What?” Boyd echoed.

  “I don’t know.” Hallie picked up the photograph. It depicted a young woman who Hallie guessed might have been Pabby. She had Pabby’s nose and red gold hair that shone even in the photograph. She was standing in front of what looked like Pabby’s horse barn, only new or at least newly painted with another woman and a man. The man had the same nose as Pabby, and the woman—

  “Whoa,” Hallie said.

  “What?”

  “The white reaper,” Hallie said. “I think it was Pabby’s mother.”

  * * *

  Hallie figured that would be the last thing, but it wasn’t. Because there was never a last thing. She needed to stop expecting it.

  Her father was outside walking up the lane from the horse barn when they arrived at the ranch. He didn’t seem to hurry, but he was right there when they stopped. Without saying a word, he wrapped her in a hug so tight, it almost took Hallie’s breath. Then he stepped back, like he’d said everything that needed saying, more maybe than he’d meant to say—like, You scared the hell out of me and I’m glad you’re home and Jesus, Hallie, you’re all I got left.

  Things you never said out loud, or at least Vance Michaels never did, not out here, but Hallie knew them all the same.

  He coughed. “They say you were okay or did you just leave?” he asked.

  “I said I was going to leave and they said okay.”

  “Hmmph.”

  He didn’t ask her what had happened or how or why. Hallie didn’t know if it was because he believed what Ole had said about the gas leaks or if this was one of those things he’d decided not to know. Someday he’d ask, out of the blue—when no one, least of all himself, was expecting it, in the middle of a snowstorm herding cattle or standing in the barn watching rain pour down. At this point, with everything more or less over, it could wait.

  Two weeks later, Norman Henspaw, lawyer for half the ranchers in Taylor County including her father, called and asked her to come over to his office in Rapid City. “Why?” she asked him.

  “If you come over, let’s say ten o’clock tomorrow,” he replied, “I’ll tell you.”

  At which meeting, he told her that Pabby had left the ranch to her.

  “No, she didn’t,” Hallie said, caught between panic and wanting it so desperately, it surprised her.

  He showed her the will.

  “But when?” she asked.

  “She called the day—actually, the day she died. Told me I had to come out there and there wasn’t any time to fool around. It’s legal. There are witnesses and it’s been notarized. Maybe she just knew it was her time,” he said.

  “Well, goddamn,” Hallie said.

  He told her it might be several months before she actually got possession, but he was the executor and he’d arrange things so she could take care of the animals.

  After that, she called Kate Matousek three weeks later than she’d promised. “No shit,” Kate said.

  “Stuff happens how it happens,” Hallie told her, not entirely sure what she meant herself. She wouldn’t say there weren’t regrets, that she didn’t think how things would be if she hadn’t died, if she hadn’t come back, if she weren’t staying. But this would be all right. She could commit to this. And one thing Hallie was good at was committing to the path.

  She was at the ranch on a wintry day the first week in December, unloading hay off the back of her pickup for the horses. It was already snowing steadily and she wanted to get things done and get back down the drive before it became impassable. She’d tossed the last bale into the rack when she saw him, like a shadow sliding through the snow-covered stalks of grass. Hallie jumped out the back of the pickup and walked to the edge of the hex ring.

  “Maker,” she said, happy to see it and realizing how crazy that was—who would be happy to see a harbinger? “Don’t you have things to do? People to … uh, harbinge?”

  Maker laughed that silent dog laugh. “I have you,” it said.

  ALSO BY DEBORAH COATES

  Wide Open

  What Makes a River (e-original)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DEBORAH COATES lives in Ames, Iowa. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s and Strange Horizons, as well as Year’s Best Fantasy 6, Best Paranormal Romance, and Best American Fantasy.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  DEEP DOWN

  Copyright © 2013 by Deborah Coates

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by Stacy Hill

  Cover photographs by Trevillion Images

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-7653-2900-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9781429942843 (e-book)

  First Edition: March 2013