Strange Country

by Deborah Coates

  “It will.”

  Hallie turned to Maker.

  “It didn’t open, right? It’s not going to open.” Hoped more than believed. But if it were a door and it were going to open, wouldn’t it just do it?

  “You have to be able to see it.” Which she could. “And you have to know what it is,” Maker said.

  “So, it’s a door,” she said skeptically. “Not a skeleton?”

  “Both,” Maker said. “It’s the kind of skeleton that makes it a door.”

  “What kind of skeleton?”

  Maker looked at her in that way that usually meant it wasn’t going to answer, but finally it said, “Unmaker.”

  Well, of course.

  “Let’s get back out of the wind,” she said. She was chill to the bone, and the wind, though not strong, was penetrating. It was a long way back to her truck and she had a feeling this was going to take a while.

  They moved into the lee side of a rock outcropping that rose at a steep angle to a point at least twenty feet above their heads. Neither of the ghosts—Laddie or the one Hallie didn’t know—were around, and for that Hallie was grateful. She shoved her hands as deep into her coat pockets as they would go, hunched her shoulders down, and said, “Beth, what do you see?”

  “Me?” Beth asked. “Well, there’s you. And that skeleton out there, if that’s what you’re asking. And the ghosts. And your dog.”

  “It’s not my dog,” Hallie said. But okay.

  “You have to open it,” Beth said.

  “What makes you think I can?” Hallie asked.

  “You can.” Both Beth and Maker said it at the same time, one out loud and one in her head.

  “You’ve been invited,” Maker added.

  Jesus.

  “Okay, look,” Hallie said. “Can I—?”

  She heard a noise, that low hum again. In fact, she wasn’t sure it was a noise at all; maybe it was something she could feel in her bones. She looked around, but she didn’t see anything other than rocks and grass. And the skeleton.

  “If I can open it, can I just go in, talk to Death, and come back out?”

  Maker seemed to think.

  “You don’t need to go in,” Beth said. “I’ll go in.”

  “It sounds like you haven’t been invited,” Hallie said.

  Beth bit her bottom lip. “I know where all the openings are. I can find people who’ve been touched by Death. I can see ghosts and reapers and that dog over there. If it takes me a while to figure out how to open a door on my own or to find someone else who can open one, I’ll do it. I don’t care. I won’t quit.” She paused again. “I thought you would understand.”

  “Why?” Hallie never wanted to go in there again. She turned to Maker. “If Beth goes in with me, can she come out again?”

  “I don’t want to come out,” Beth insisted. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “No, you don’t,” Hallie said. “You don’t know anything.” She looked at Maker. “Can she?”

  “Maybe,” Maker said.

  Which Hallie took to mean it didn’t know.

  “Look,” Beth said, close now, her dark-rimmed eyes burning with intensity. “If it were you, would you want someone telling you what you meant and what you wanted?”

  No. She wouldn’t let anyone tell her. But this was— “You don’t know,” she said.

  “I—I know I don’t,” Beth admitted. “But we don’t belong here. Lily didn’t and she always knew it. She died to save Boyd’s life, but I don’t think it was that hard, because it always feels like you’re going to slip away, like you’re holding on as tight as you can and you don’t even know why or even that you’re holding on because it’s all you’ve got, it’s all you’ve ever had and all you’ve ever felt. I never got that. I never understood. I thought it was just the way everyone felt, like the world was just this place you stayed a little while. And you stayed because that was how it worked. Not because you wanted to, but because you had to.

  “But I don’t belong here. Maybe I don’t belong there either. I don’t know. I don’t know.” She repeated it as if the entirety of what she didn’t know demanded it. “It’s not just about my father. I have an affinity for death.” Which Hallie knew was true, had seen it herself in the cemetery with the ghosts. “Maybe I would have had a mostly normal life if Travis Hollowell hadn’t come back, if I hadn’t seen my father, if I’d never gone looking for answers. But all that happened and I’m not going back to who I was. That person doesn’t exist anymore.”

  And Hallie knew about that too, about being someone you became and not someone you chose. She’d died once. She saw ghosts. She’d been to the underworld and returned. All of that was her. She couldn’t give it back. She’d almost reached a point where she didn’t want to.

  With Laddie’s ghost drifting against her back, it was all Hallie could do to keep her teeth from chattering. She appreciated what Beth was saying. But— “It’s a sacrifice, Beth. I can’t.”

  She wanted to. She wanted to stay here, on the ground in South Dakota, in Taylor County for a long, long time, wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything. But she couldn’t take it through someone else’s sacrifice.

  “Look,” Beth said. “The problem for you is that Death asked you to take his place because you owe him, right? And you don’t want to do it, but you do kind of owe him.”

  “Right,” Hallie said, because she was right and it was hard to argue with it.

  “On the other hand, I want to take his place, but he hasn’t asked me. And you don’t want me to take his place, because it lets you off the hook and feels like a cheat.”

  “Also right. And one more thing,” Hallie added. “As long as this goes unresolved, there’s a crack between the under and the world and the unmakers are coming through into this world, which is bad news and, I’m guessing, can only get worse.”

  Beth frowned. “I don’t know what that means. The unmakers.”

  “They unmake things,” Hallie said.

  “Like the world?”

  “Like reapers and harbingers. Dead things. But if they’re in the world—our world—they kill everything. Just by being here. Maker says they’re abominations.” The word made her wince. She was an abomination too, like the inverse of an unmaker, which was something she didn’t want to think too much about.

  “Whoa.” Beth considered. “So, okay, given that. And the whole Death invitation. Yeah. So, you’re thinking you’ll go in and do what? Say yes, so the world gets saved and the crack is fixed and no more unmakers and bad things?”

  “Well, yes,” Hallie said. It wasn’t what she wanted to do. It was what she had to do.

  “Well, that does seem like it might work.” Beth gave a dry laugh. “If you had told me six months ago that any of this—any of this—existed, I’d have said you were nuts. But now … Hallie, I want to do this. You get to do what you want. I mean this is what you want. You know? It is. You don’t want to lose the things you have, the people you have, the life you have. But you want to do this, go into the under again, talk to Death, take his place if you have to, because you think it’s all obligation and duty and the right thing to do. And it is. I get that.

  “But if you can do that, make that kind of decision, then so can I.” She paused, rubbed her hands across her face, like she was trying to wipe things clean. “Look, look, let me go in. Let me talk to him. Just talk to him. You went in and came out. Boyd went in and came out. I can do it. I can. If he tells me no, I’ll come out and it’ll be between you and him again. But I want to ask. I want the chance.”

  “If you go in there, you’ll forget. You won’t be able to get back out. Boyd forgot everything.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Because I died.”

  “Well, I’m Death’s daughter.” And she sounded different when she said it, older and more confident, as if saying it, claiming it, especially here, made the difference. “And I got you through the ghosts, didn’t I? I can do this.”

&nbs
p; “It’s a big risk. I don’t think you know how big.”

  “It’s my risk. Mine. Don’t take that away from me.”

  Shit.

  “Look,” Hallie said, not at all sure that what she was going to say was right or would work and was probably stupid anyway. “There’s this guy I know. He’s on the other side. Should be on the other side. Someone killed him last night and his ghost is still hanging around, so that means he hasn’t passed on. This guy, I think he’ll help you. I think he can help you. He knows more than you do and he won’t forget as quickly. I mean he will forget. I think. But not as quick?” Though she had to phrase the last as a question because one trip into the under didn’t mean she knew all that much, though it was possible it made her the leading expert in the field. “Laddie Kennedy. His name is Laddie Kennedy.”

  Beth’s face lit, looking young and eager. “Really? You’ll open it?”

  “I think it’s a mistake,” Hallie said. “I think it’s a big mistake. But it’s your mistake.” Which wasn’t entirely true; if she opened it, it would be her mistake too. She’d be the one who made it possible. But she also believed Beth when she said she wouldn’t stop, that she would eventually find a way and at least here, right now, there was a chance she’d have some help.

  Maker touched her hand with its nose. She looked down. It didn’t say anything, just sat and looked at her. “Can you help?” Hallie asked.

  “I can watch,” Maker said. “Maybe get her out.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Maker turned around once and disappeared.

  “Look,” Hallie said to Beth, desperate now to say the one important thing that would make a difference. “You still might forget things when you go in. And when you come out, it has to be here where you went in. It has to be this way. I don’t think the unmakers will bother you, because you’re not dead and you’re Death’s daughter, which, frankly ought to count for something, but be careful. Okay?”

  “Yes. Yes! Thank you.” She seemed actually happy about the whole thing and it almost made Hallie change her mind about opening the door, because Beth really did have no idea.

  Sometimes, though, you had to do something, and sometimes a stupid thing was the thing you had to do.

  “Jesus,” Hallie said. “Come on.”

  They walked between the rocks and over the rough ground, stopping only when they were standing between a large set of outcroppings just outside the open area where the skeleton lay. And it was a skeleton, still looked exactly like a skeleton.

  It didn’t look anything like a door.

  Hallie crossed to the bones once more, studied them as closely as she could without touching them. There was something—she didn’t want to say they looked too real, because that wasn’t quite right—even now, even in the gray cloud-dimmed afternoon, there was something luminous about them, like a science-fictional hologram, except, of course, they were solid to the touch and, according to Maker, the actual bones of an unmaker.

  Without thinking more about it, she reached out, grabbed hold of the skeleton, and pulled.

  Pain, sharp and unrelenting, that was the same, but it was daytime, sun beating down and hot, so hot, too hot for people, for anyone, and there was no shade, nothing anywhere. It was sand, all sand, rising with the wind and so thick, it was impossible to see through. She was on her feet, she was sure she was on her feet, but she couldn’t see anything, stumbled and fell and something was hitting her, pushing at her. Go. Move. Get up now. She struggled up; something pushed her again. She could see shadows beside her, more than one. Stumbled, rose, stumbled again. And now it was cold and it was dirt, grinding against her skin, in her mouth, the cold taste of it.

  Hallie crawled, the rough ground scraping her hands. When she reached a space that offered some protection from the wind and the grinding sand, it was like falling over a wall, so abrupt that it took her a minute to understand what had happened. The dust storm howled behind her, louder than thought, like the roar of jet engines. She tried to get up, couldn’t do it, settled for breathing, leaned hard against a rock face, wanted to feel it against her back, something solid, something real. She tried to lift her arms, to rub her eyes, but she couldn’t even feel her hands, wasn’t sure they were attached to her anymore. Too hard, hard enough just to sit, to press her back against the rock, to be sure—she was sure—that she was in the world and not caught somewhere in the under.

  She wasn’t certain how much time passed or even if time did pass, but the next time she looked or was aware that she looked, it was dark and snow sifted across her jeans. Her hands were tucked tight in her pockets, jammed deep enough to wrap her coat hard against her ribs. She blinked, blinked again. No dust storm, everything completely silent, could almost hear her heart beat.

  No Beth. No Maker. No Laddie.

  It was a clear night; the low clouds from earlier had given way to a biting cold with bright white pinpricks of stars overhead. She shoved herself to her feet. Where the skeleton had been, a good twenty yards from where she now stood tucked in tight against the rocks, was a shallow basin. Light snow drifted along the edge and maybe in the center, though Hallie couldn’t see it. The only light came from the moon and the stars overhead. Just enough to make out the shape of the basin, to confirm that the skeleton was gone. Hallie turned completely around. Dark everywhere, and she had to get from where she was back to the parking lot and her truck.

  It couldn’t have been much past noon when she’d grabbed the skeleton the second time, and it had to be nearly six now. She’d lost six hours. She was lucky she hadn’t frozen to death. That she might not have been in the world for a good part of that time, she chose not to think about.

  She figured she should be able to navigate by the stars and her compass, but she’d followed coordinates here, her phone was dead, she had only a vague sense of the direction she’d come in, complicated by skirting one rock formation after another. It was a mile and a half to two miles back to the truck. Great. But she wasn’t going to spend the night here—she couldn’t, it was too cold—she might as well start. She had hiked generally west, so she used the North Star to get her bearings and struck out east.

  It was quiet, the only sound her boots crunching on the spiky vegetation.

  If she kept walking, if she kept her bearings, if nothing jumped out of the shadows at her, she’d get there.

  Eventually.

  29

  It was a good four and a half hours before Boyd and Gerson were able to leave Tel’s ranch and head back to West Prairie City. Ole had asked the deputy on second shift to come in early despite overtime the night before and post a watch on Tel. He called the Sioux Falls police and asked them to drive by the house where Pat Sigurdson was staying. Tel was talking about leaving town for a while, which Ole encouraged, until Gerson said she still had questions and he couldn’t leave unless he wanted to sit down right now and tell them what they wanted to know. Tel told her to go to hell.

  Before Boyd and Gerson left, Boyd walked Tel back to the house. “Look,” he said, “we need to know if you were in town the night Prue was shot and why.”

  “I didn’t shoot her,” Tel said.

  “She called here the night she died,” Boyd pointed out.

  “Hell, I don’t know. I hadn’t really talked to her, except at Cleary’s for a long time.”

  “Please,” Boyd said. Then, “Laddie Kennedy was a friend of mine.”

  They were standing on the concrete patio outside Tel’s back door. An automatic light on the corner of the house had come on as they’d passed it, though it wasn’t dark yet, and it threw long shadows out behind them. Tel let out a long breath, like the slow leak of an old tire.

  “Laddie never had many friends,” he said. “Even before. He always wanted them. Always talked about things he’d do with his friends—though, you know, he never actually did them, didn’t have anyone to do them with. And then, later, his brother moved away and he really didn’t have anyone.


  “So, thank you. For being a friend to him. He would have appreciated that.” He didn’t say anything else, but Boyd waited, didn’t ask his questions again. He sensed, not that Tel was thinking about whether to tell him, but just thinking about events and what they meant.

  Then, “I intended to be gone the whole week—that’s how long we’d said we’d be in Pierre. But I got a phone call. Someone—didn’t recognize the voice—told me one of my hands was in trouble. In West Prairie City. On Cemetery Street. Normally wouldn’t be something I’d come all the way back here for—I’d just call my foreman, but he’s been on vacation up in Fargo. Tried to call the hand in question, but she wasn’t answering her phone.

  “Turns out”—he rubbed a hand across the bridge of his nose—“she was at her boyfriend’s house. Turned her phone off. Not any kind of trouble, though.”

  “You came back here to check on her? Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?” Boyd asked.

  “Two reasons,” Tel said. “Someone wanted me back in West PC that night. Apparently, so you would come asking me questions like these, and I don’t like to let someone like that win. And also,” his voice dropped half a register, “Katy Kolchak—that’s the hand I’m talking about—well, it’s kind of her new boyfriend she’s with and she’s still got an old boyfriend and I know you start asking her and the foreman and her boyfriend whether they can back me up, well, it all gets real messy.”

  “And last night?” Boyd asked.

  “I’d just gotten back to town again,” Tel said. “Saw the fire trucks. I was a volunteer myself until last August when I had knee surgery. It’s a habit.”

  “Meg Otis says you knocked on my door earlier.”

  Tel stared at him, then he looked away, and when he spoke he was studying the light off the glass on his back door. “Jesus,” he said. “Yeah, I did. Look, it wasn’t just the one phone call. I’ve been getting phone calls all week. Usually there’s no one there. Not even someone breathing. Just … nothing. Then once, this voice—still can’t tell you if it was a man or a woman—said, ‘How much are you to blame?’