Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  Hallie’d always thought Don Pabahar was a bore and more than a little self-righteous. It didn’t surprise her at all that he wanted to order Pabby’s life the same way he ordered everything else. It did surprise her that he thought it would work.

  “He send you out here to check on me, did he?”

  Hallie grinned. “You think he’s waiting for me to come back and tell him you’re crazy?”

  “You know, he would hate it if I actually lived with him. He never thinks ahead about things like that.”

  Hallie took a long swallow of the scalding hot coffee. It was bitter and strong, like it had been brewing for days. A muscle twitched along her jawline when she swallowed. She stood and stepped off the porch.

  “You want the rifle?” Pabby asked.

  Hallie shook her head. They didn’t act like feral dogs, out to grab a few chickens. They didn’t crowd the house and hadn’t come toward Hallie when she stepped out of the pickup. They acted like they were waiting for something.

  The dogs didn’t move as she approached, though she spotted a third one slinking around the corner of the old horse barn. Grass rustled in its wake. That meant it was solid, right? That it wasn’t a ghost. But if it were a real dog—a feral dog, say—why couldn’t Don see them? Why could she and Pabby?

  2

  When Hallie was within ten yards of the two black dogs, she stopped. The third dog crept across the farthest edge of the yard. Hallie took a step back and watched. It didn’t try to circle behind her, though she was completely in the open. As it fetched up beside the other two, a fourth dog came out of the grass to her right and lay down with its head on the ground, watching her. A few inches in front of its nose, a strip of faded plaid cloth tied to a few strands of prairie grass fluttered in the breeze.

  “What do you want?” Hallie asked. Not because she thought the dogs would answer, more that she didn’t know what else to do.

  “So.”

  Sibilant, like a snake, the word startled her so much—not least because it was directly inside her head—that she stumbled backwards a couple of steps. Stopped herself and raised a hand quick before Pabby came off the porch with her rifle.

  “You see us.” Again, in her head, soft and the s’s hissing, like a sharp blade through butter.

  “Well … yeah,” Hallie said. Its voice was like an itch she couldn’t scratch. Not scary, really, more mildly unpleasant. “What are you?”

  “Harbingers.” The word dragged out like a midnight breath of wind.

  “Harbingers of what?”

  “Death.”

  Hallie backed up a step. Death. It was all about death these days, had been since that single moment on that mountain in Afghanistan. Sometimes it hit her like this, like all death since then, even Dell—even—was her fault. That she was alive and other people paid.

  She cleared her throat. “Seriously?” she said. She guessed that would be why she could see them, like ghosts. “So you, what? You came to kill Pabby? She looks plenty healthy to me.”

  The dogs were silent. Or maybe they were talking to one another, because the one she thought had been talking to her turned to the dog next to it and cocked its head, ears pricked, like it was listening to something. It turned back to Hallie.

  “Can’t,” it finally said. It pawed the ground. “Can’t get past.”

  “This isn’t how we die,” she said. She should know.

  The dog rose to its feet and stretched, head low and back arched. It stretched one back leg and then the other; then it sank to the ground once more. “We’re not for everyone,” it said. “We’re sent for.” It drew out the world “sent” like a caress.

  The dogs were a combination of eerie stillness and movement, one of them always in motion, the others like statues. Sometimes only their eyes moved. And their eyes … they flashed red when they caught the sunlight just right. Mostly they were a gray blue, like winter skies.

  “How do I make you go away?” Hallie asked.

  The dog made a sound that she finally decided was a laugh, echoing, like all of them joined in. “We never go away,” it said. “We become more.”

  “If it’s not her time, then you can’t take her,” Hallie said.

  “Who says?”

  “I do.”

  More huffing laughter.

  Okay, it was true she had no idea how to do it. She hadn’t even known they existed until ten minutes ago. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t try.

  She watched them as they slipped into the prairie grass. The one who’d been talking to her turned at the last moment and looked at her, like it was studying her. Because she could see them. Because she was going to stop them.

  She turned away and walked back up to the porch, sat down heavily at the patio table, and took a gulp of cold coffee.

  “Well?” Pabby demanded.

  “Huh,” Hallie said. “Have you talked to them?”

  “Talked to them? No. They’re dogs.”

  Hallie leaned back in her chair. “I think you know they’re not.”

  A long silence. Pabby laid her rifle up against the side of the house, gathered the mugs, and went inside. Hallie waited. Five minutes passed. Finally Pabby reemerged, set a fresh cup of coffee in front of Hallie, and sat down again.

  “Someone told me you died. Over there.”

  “What?” That wasn’t what Hallie’d been expecting at all.

  “Yup. They said you died and came back and you see things now. Things other people don’t see.”

  “Who said?” Because it wasn’t like she told anyone. Ever. Except Boyd. And maybe Brett.

  Pabby made a vague gesture. The sleeves on her denim shirt were rolled up, and there was a gauze bandage on her left arm just above the wrist. “I hear things,” she said.

  “You don’t just hear things like that. My whole life I never heard something like that. About anyone. Ever.”

  “I been around a bit longer than you have.”

  Which was hard to argue with, seeing how Pabby was seventy-five or so and Hallie was twenty-three, but still … “Do you say shit like that to Don? Because it’s no wonder he thinks you’re crazy.”

  Pabby burst out laughing, coughed harshly into her hand, then sobered. “I was sorry about your sister,” she said, which was so out of nowhere, Hallie startled like a horse at a dropped tree limb. Pabby laid a hand on hers. “People used to talk about the two of you in town. Did you know that? Because you were always a little different. Not,” she added, “like what we’re talking about here, like those dogs or like dying and coming back. Not like that. Like girls without a mother. Like you were a little wild. Like they wished they could be you, but they weren’t.”

  After a moment, she went on. “Dell was the brightest thing I ever saw,” she said. “Not bright like smart. Like the sun.”

  “Yeah.” Hallie wasn’t really surprised at how much talking about Dell still hurt, but not being surprised didn’t make it hurt less.

  “Because you were always the smart one.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to help me with this problem, aren’t you?” Pabby asked, like that had been the subject all along.

  “What exactly is the problem?”

  Pabby scratched a thoughtful hand across her chin. She put both hands on her coffee mug and looked across the yard past the old barn, across the prairie toward the far horizon.

  “My mother had the sight. Or said she did. Said it was pretty worthless except for one thing. She knew when anyone was going to die.” She looked intently at Hallie, like she was gauging what Hallie thought of that. Hallie just looked back. It wasn’t like she hadn’t heard weirder things recently. “She used to write things down on cards and then seal them in envelopes and put them on the top shelf in the kitchen. Then sometimes, when we got the paper, or a letter from a relative, she’d get down one of those envelopes and open it up and show me the card inside.”

  She paused, took a sip from her coffee. She set the mug down carefully before cont
inuing. “I always thought it was the other kind of magic. Like magicians. Like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. That somehow she’d changed that card in that envelope when I wasn’t looking. ’Cept she never laughed. Never acted like it was any kind of funny at all.”

  “She told you when you were going to die?” Whose mother would do that?

  “I asked her.”

  “Jesus. You did?”

  Pabby smiled, a quick grin that Hallie remembered from when she was a kid. She’d been a little afraid of Pabby when she was five or six, and she’d felt funny about it, because Hallie hadn’t been a kid who was afraid of things. She’d climbed trees and launched herself out of haylofts and tried to ride the biggest horse in the corral. But she never wanted to be around Pabby, though Pabby hadn’t done anything except give her peppermint candies and lemonade.

  “She put it in an envelope. Told me it was up to me what I did with it, but she’d recommend I burn it. I forgot about it for a long time. But then, I turned sixty-five. Addie’d died ten years before. I’d lost Don—oh hell, I’d lost Don when he was ten years old and took off down the drive with his suitcase because he wanted to go live in Chicago with the Bears. I figured I didn’t have anything to lose. And I could make plans.”

  “And what?” Hallie asked. One of the black dogs had reemerged from the tall grass. It sat, head up, staring at the house. Hallie felt its gaze like an itch along her jawline.

  Pabby shrugged, like she was embarrassed. “Ninety,” she said.

  Hallie looked at her for a minute because sometimes she couldn’t believe the conversations she’d had in the last couple of months. “And she was always right? Your mother?”

  Pabby fiddled with the handle of her coffee mug. “Sometimes magic works,” she said. She shrugged. “And sometimes it don’t. Magic is small. I don’t think you understand how small it is. When it affects people like my mother, it’s one thing—one small thing—and it’s easy to say, well, that’s just weird. That’s not magic. People shrug and move on.”

  Hallie didn’t think Pabby had any idea about magic. About how big it could be if someone was willing to cross the line, willing to spill blood. Magic was not to be messed with. The supernatural, though, like ghosts and, she guessed, black dogs, the supernatural came whether you wanted it to or not. At least that was Hallie’s experience.

  “Okay,” Hallie said, not because she was agreeing with anything, especially not that she had to learn this stuff, but more to say that she understood what Pabby was saying. “But then why are the dogs here?”

  “I believe they have been misinformed.” Pabby looked straight ahead when she said it, like she was speaking directly to the dogs.

  “Seriously? Who do you think they want instead of you?” Because it better not be her father or—

  “They don’t kill,” Pabby said unexpectedly. “They’re—”

  “Yeah, I know, harbingers.”

  Pabby rose abruptly and went into the house again. Hallie put her head in her hand because this whole thing wasn’t anything she’d expected. Seeing ghosts—she’d mostly gotten used to that. She could figure out their unfinished business, send them on their way. But if she was going to be seeing harbingers of death … And what did that mean, anyway? Because they didn’t come for everyone. If they did, she’d have seen them. Too bad too. It sure would have been handy in September. She’d have worried a lot less about Martin if there’d been black dogs following him around.

  She didn’t raise her head when Pabby came back out on the porch, when she refilled her mug with another round of steaming dark coffee. The smell, thick and pungent, tickled at Hallie’s nose. Finally, she rubbed an eye and picked up the mug again.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked.

  “I want you to make them go away. They can’t touch me right now, but I can’t leave either. And there’s another one every couple of days. It’s only a matter of time.”

  Hallie grabbed on to one statement, like if that made sense, everything else would too. “Why can’t they touch you?” The dog had said it too, Can’t get past.

  “I told you my mother was a little … ‘off ’ in her last years. After Daddy died—and she knew when, you understand—well, after that she got convinced she’d be able to cheat death herself.”

  “But that’s not—” Hallie was going to say it wasn’t possible, but wasn’t she proof you could?

  “Addie and I were living in Sioux City back then. Only been married about a year. My mother was just fifty or so at the time, but like I said, she’d gotten … strange.”

  Hallie raised an eyebrow. “Is there a point to this?” she asked, because Pabby and this story could take all day.

  Pabby stared at her. “Did the army make you rude?”

  “Sorry.” Which she wasn’t. “But I’ve always been rude.” Hallie stood, walked to the edge of the porch, and scanned the fields. Only one dog still watched the house, but she knew the others were out there.

  Pabby made a sound that might have been a laugh. “I tried to convince Momma to live with us or move to town. Instead she sold all the cattle and used the money to bury an iron hex all around the yard, the close-in corral, the house, and the barn.”

  “What?” Now Hallie was interested.

  “She was all excited that year when we came home for Thanksgiving. Didn’t tell us why, but she said she’d figured it all out and everything was going to be fine.” Pabby leaned forward. “She thought she could cheat death, you see. Because they won’t cross iron. Never knew who ‘they’ were, back then, thought it was just crazy. But—” She gestured at the spot where the dogs had been a few minutes before. “—you can see.” She took a long swallow of coffee. “She hired folks—we found this out later, you understand—to weld iron rails and bury them. There’s a great big hex circle under the whole yard, the near corral, and a bit of the pasture out back. Those dogs can’t cross it.”

  Hallie resumed her seat at the table. “But she’s dead, right?” she asked. “Your mother’s been dead for years.” Because Hallie didn’t even remember her, so she must have died before Hallie’s mother, before they used to come and visit—buy eggs and sit on the wide front porch.

  Pabby scraped her thumbnail across the curve of her mug’s handle. “We didn’t know about the hex—Addie and I. And I’m not sure we’d have believed it if we had. Your daddy, of course, was young at the time, but he got in on the deal—she hired seven people to cut and weld and bury all that iron. And she thought she’d done it—cheated death. Her day—the day she’d seen herself die, clear and true as any of them—that day came and went and she was still alive.

  “Of course, she couldn’t go into town or come visit us in Sioux City or anything. It wore on her.”

  “What happened?”

  “Near as I can tell, one day she just walked outside the lines.”

  Hallie rubbed a hand across her face. She wasn’t confused. The story was clear and she’d seen enough that she could believe it. Or believe it was possible. Still …

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking.” Though she was. Knew exactly what she was asking: Solve this for me.

  “Solve this for me.” Because Pabby wasn’t any better than Hallie at beating around the bush.

  “What makes you think I’ll be any better at it than you?”

  Pabby looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Because I care about staying alive and getting those dogs away from me. You care about stopping bad things.”

  “I could be leaving at any time,” Hallie pointed out. Because she had plans. She had a job offer.

  Pabby made that sound that wasn’t quite a laugh again. “All right,” she said. “But as you’re still around right now, how about it?”

  Hallie frowned. She had a life to figure out. And yet, she did want to stop bad things—in this case, to stop Pabby from dying before she should. Because it wasn’t fair. She knew too many people who’d died too early. And, anyway, who wouldn’t? If a bad thing crossed your path
, shouldn’t you stop it? If you could? It wasn’t like she went looking for trouble.

  “I have no idea where to start,” she finally said.

  “You will,” Pabby told her.

  3

  Back in her pickup, Hallie pulled out her cell phone and dialed from the history; Kate answered on the second ring. “How long?” she asked, didn’t bother with hello.

  “Before I need an answer?” Kate asked, not even faintly confused about who was calling or what she was asking. “Sooner, the better,” she said. “Here’s the deal: I won’t offer it to anyone else for a week. After that … well, it’s a business, not charity for ex-soldiers.”

  “Thanks,” Hallie said, and disconnected. She could see herself in that job, climbing water towers in Colorado or Minnesota or southern Missouri, gauging wind and weather. It would fit her. But she’d take the week. Fix this thing for Pabby. Get out clean. Or get out, anyway. It might already be too late to get out clean.

  She was halfway down the drive, thinking at least black dogs were better than ghosts, when something dark and fast hurtled toward the truck from her right. She slammed on the brakes. The truck slewed sideways. She twisted, arms raised, and braced for impact.

  A sudden flurry, sound like a sharp rush of wind, hot breath on her face, and a dog sat on the seat next to her.

  What the hell?

  Because it had just jumped into her truck through the window. The closed window.

  The dog looked at her, panting a little, like it was just an ordinary dog, like it was just enjoying the ride.

  “Don’t you have to be invited in or something?” Hallie asked, ignoring the painful thump of her heart against her breastbone, the taste of adrenaline on her tongue.

  The dog laughed, like a breathy whisper. “Want to watch,” it said. Then it circled three times and lay down on the seat, curled up with its nose touching its tail.