Deep Down (Hallie Michaels)

by Deborah Coates

  “Okay.” Hallie shifted in the seat, pulled the phone away from her ear to check the time. “But did she tell you anything?”

  “It’s like riddles,” he said, “the stuff she tells you. Like she can pretend she’s helpful and not taking sides, both at the same time. So, yeah,” he continued. “She says the moment of death? She says that’s right. But it has to matter.”

  “Okay, first, that doesn’t work. And, second, what does that mean? It has to matter?” Hallie tried not to let impatience creep into her voice, because Laddie was helping and he wasn’t getting all that much for it, even if he said it was worth it. But she was out of time.

  “She said,” Laddie continued, an edge in his voice that hadn’t been there before “to tell you that if you’re equipped to handle whatever it is that you’re trying to handle, that you’ll know what it means.”

  “Well, that’s helpful.” Which it wasn’t. It wasn’t helpful at all. She’d tried it already. Even though Hollowell couldn’t kill her with a reaper’s touch, he had tried to kill her. And she’d tried to kill him, right then, right in the moment. It hadn’t worked. And “it had to matter”? What the hell did that mean?

  “I could take a look at the cards,” Laddie offered.

  Which might or might not tell them something, Hallie thought. “Thanks, anyway,” Hallie said. “You’ve been a help.”

  She could hear Laddie pull in a deep breath. “If Prue knows something more—” He paused. “—I got some stuff I know, I might be able to pressure her.”

  “I’ll work with what I’ve got. Thanks,” she said again.

  “No,” Laddie said. He sounded more energetic than any of the other times Hallie had talked to him. “It’s good. This matters.”

  “You don’t even know what this is.” Because she’d never explained it, not entirely.

  “No,” he said. “And I don’t even want to. You know too much, it’s always trouble. Always. But from the questions you’re asking … yeah, I bet it matters.”

  “Yeah,” Hallie said. “It does.”

  She was halfway down the road back to Pabby’s when the black dog jumped into the truck through the closed passenger-side window. Hallie swerved slightly to the left, then recovered.

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  “Turn around,” the dog said, settling itself on the seat. It sat upright this time, looking forward out the windshield.

  “What?”

  “You’re going the wrong way.”

  “I’m going to Pabby’s.”

  “Go to—” The dog paused. “—the storm,” it finally said.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The center of the storm.”

  Hallie pulled to the side of the road. The sun was fully up now, just above the eastern horizon, but muted by thin gray clouds so it looked red and diffuse behind them. “There’s no storm,” she said.

  “The thunder building,” the dog said. “Lightning in the floor.”

  “Uku-Weber?” Because the building had a lightning mosaic in the floor of the large central atrium.

  The dog didn’t respond, just looked at her with bright eyes.

  “Jesus,” Hallie said. She made a quick three-point turn and headed down the road in the opposite direction. The sky in this direction, west, was several shades darker, clouds still thin but black, reminding Hallie uneasily of Death’s shadow.

  “So Uku-Weber, what?” she asked, trying not to hunch her shoulders, like the dark was weighing her down. And it looked like that was what they were doing, driving down, going under. “It’s got an entrance to the underworld?”

  “Yes.”

  “It just happens to be there?”

  The dog didn’t respond.

  “Are there other entrances?”

  “Sixty-two.”

  “Sixty-two? Why? Don’t you just come and go?”

  The dog looked at her. “Everything has entrances and exits. Sometimes you need escape routes.”

  “Really?”

  “Sometimes,” the dog said.

  “All right,” Hallie said after a minute. They bounced over a bump where the road had cracked and settled. “And there’s one at Uku-Weber. Did Martin know that? Is that why he came here? Built here?”

  “They move,” the dog said. “Where things are thinnest.”

  “But there are sixty-two.”

  “Today.”

  Jesus.

  Hallie had just turned onto the county road when a mid-sized cattle truck with one headlight out came toward them. Hallie lifted two fingers from the wheel and the driver lifted two fingers back. She could smell the faint odor of cattle as the truck passed. She looked over at the black dog. “This place,” she said, “how exactly … big is it?”

  The dog sat very straight and looked at her. Its eyes might have blinked. “I don’t know what you mean,” it said.

  Hallie frowned. “You don’t know what I mean? I mean how big is it? As big as West Prairie City? As South Dakota? As the world?”

  The dog huffed out a breath. “No,” it said. It didn’t say anything for a long moment and Hallie hoped it wasn’t finished, because she might have to swear. “It just is,” the dog said.

  “How do I find Boyd?” Hallie persisted. “I mean is he going to be right where we go in? Is he going to be six thousand miles away?”

  “Bring something that belongs to him,” the dog said.

  “I don’t—” But then Hallie remembered the journal she’d taken from Boyd’s bedroom. When everything had happened, she forgot she had it, and when she’d finally remembered, she just stuffed it in the glove box and planned to give it back later. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “I have something.”

  “Okay,” the dog said.

  Less than a mile from Uku-Weber, the dark clouds grew thicker and low, like the sky itself had lowered. Though it was past eight o’clock in the morning by now, Hallie kept her headlights on, like driving into midnight.

  At the building, the parking lot proved empty, which wasn’t surprising.

  “Inside?” she asked the dog. “The entrance is inside this building?”

  “Down,” the dog said, which she took to mean yes.

  The sun was now completely blocked overhead, but Hallie could look down the road toward West Prairie City and see shafts of sunlight slanting onto the road. So, dark here, but not everywhere. Here. Like this was the center of something and Hallie wasn’t sure she wanted to know of what.

  She hopped into the pickup bed and opened the saddle box. Her father had at least one set of bolt cutters back at the ranch, which would have been handy, but it was too late now to go back and get them. She grabbed a small hammer and the prybar she’d retrieved as she was leaving Pabby’s, because they would be handy and fit in her backpack both. She started to close the saddlebox, looked up at the building, then reached back inside and grabbed two flashlights, a big one like a torch and a smaller one that she could strap to the barrel of her shotgun if she needed to.

  She jumped back onto the ground, grabbed her backpack from the front, and slung it over her shoulder. She took the shotgun from behind the seat, loaded it with five of the iron shot shells, and started across the parking lot. It still surprised her how empty the place looked, because it had been only a couple of months. But it looked as if no one had been there for years. Cracks in the concrete, yellow parking stall lines already fading. Someone had scored jagged lines along one of the pillars lining the main sidewalk, and there were chunks knocked out of the curbs, like kids had come to skateboard—which actually wouldn’t have surprised her. There was no skate park or even much concrete in Taylor County. Whether there were any kids with skateboards … one thing Hallie’d been learning lately, if it didn’t seem likely, then it probably was.

  There was a scent in the air that she hadn’t noticed when she visited the building earlier, pungent, like acid with an underlying hint of something rotten.

  She came around the first set
of pillars and stopped. The stone fountain, the one she’d examined the other day, the one Martin had clearly had plans for, was nearly invisible. Black clouds rolled out of its base, like polluted dry ice or a perverse fog machine. The black drifted over the rim of the fountain, then rose like heavy oily smoke, rising above the building like a black roiling shaft of anti-light until it hit the low clouds and spread, the layer of heavy black widening across the sky. Something was clearly happening here, but Hallie had no time, not right now, to figure out what it was. She gave the fountain a wide berth, not sure what would happen if she touched the stuff, but sure she didn’t want to find out.

  She circled the building quickly, in case a door had been left unlocked. She assumed the building had a security system, assumed that when she entered, someone somewhere would know it. Once she was inside, she needed to move quickly.

  She walked back to the front, looked at the black dog, who had been pacing silently behind her, took a long breath, and blew a hole in the bottom half of the main door with her shotgun. The sound of shattering glass was loud and brittle in the morning air. Afterwards, everything seemed extra quiet—as if sounds she hadn’t even noticed suddenly ceased.

  She used the prybar from her backpack to clear the jagged glass, ducked low, and stepped inside. She paused. Light filtered through the two-story windows. The space was cold, colder than outside. Breath puffed out of Hallie’s mouth like smoke. When Martin was alive, there had been a barrier just inside the door that kept ghosts from entering the building, dropping grit from the ceiling—she guessed now it was salt—like a fine powder curtain. With the power off, that barrier no longer existed and the black dog trotted in beside her.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Down,” the dog said again.

  The elevator wouldn’t be working, but there had to be stairs. Hallie headed to the back, flipping on the big yellow flashlight. The shadows deepened as they got farther from the big front windows.

  Hallie could hear her own feet, boots sounding loud in the quiet, no hum of air handlers or buzz of lights overhead. The place smelled clean and cold. Halfway down the back hall, she found a door marked STAIRS. She opened it, shone her flashlight into the dark well, and saw bare concrete steps leading down.

  “Down here?” she asked.

  The dog nodded.

  One flight down, they were confronted with a door marked UTILITY and a second door at right angles to the first. The second door glowed all along the edges, like something cut from fluorescing paper, but when she shone the light directly on it, the door disappeared. Hallie looked at the dog.

  “Yeah,” it said.

  “All right,” Hallie said. “Okay.” Because they were going to hell. Or purgatory. Somewhere there were dead people walking around and reapers and black dogs, all those things in a place they belonged. Hallie would be the outsider.

  And Boyd. Who was already there.

  She switched off the flashlight, put it in the backpack, checked the shotgun and that she still had the knife strapped to her belt that she’d been carrying ever since Hollowell’s first attack. She could hear the dog panting.

  She reached for the door, then stopped.

  “Do you have a name?” she asked.

  The dog huffed. “Maker.”

  “As in ‘I Am The Maker’?”

  “Widow Maker.”

  “Hmm…,” said Hallie.

  She put her hand on the door handle; it was ice cold in a way that made the muscles spasm all the way up her arm, ghost cold.

  “Wait,” Maker said. Its panting was loud, harsh in the tomblike silence of the stairwell.

  “This is the door, right?” Hallie said.

  “There are rules,” Maker said. It sounded reluctant. It had backed away from her, though there wasn’t much room in the narrow space, jammed tight into the corner behind the ghost door.

  “What rules?” Hallie said, because she was all about knowing the rules. She liked to know the lines she was crossing when she crossed them.

  “Outsider rules,” Maker said. “Three rules.”

  “Okay.” Hallie took her hand off the door handle as the cold began to spread up her arm and into her neck. She thought the temperature had dropped since they reached the bottom of the stairs, but she couldn’t see her breath anymore, so she wasn’t sure.

  “Three rules,” Maker repeated. “For outsiders. Remember why you came. Think about why you came. Because if it can make you forget, it will.”

  “It?”

  “The under.”

  “The place?”

  “The place,” Maker agreed.

  “Okay,” Hallie said.

  “Two,” Maker continued. “He has to agree to leave.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s not going to want to stay,” Hallie said.

  “Three,” Maker went on. “You have to go out the way you came in.”

  “Okay,” Hallie said. “All right. I can handle that.” Because she wasn’t likely to forget what she’d come for and she didn’t know any other way out than this. “Anything else?” She put her hand on the door handle and pushed it down.

  “Reapers have—” Maker stopped, coughed harshly, then tried again. “Reapers have one weakness.”

  “Jesus,” Hallie said. “Really? What is it?”

  Maker shook its head rapidly, like it had something in its ear. “You know.”

  “I don’t—,” Hallie began.

  Before she could finish, Maker said, “Watch out for monsters.” And disappeared.

  She hesitated. It was unlike her, but she hadn’t realized until Maker disappeared how much she’d been relying on it coming through the door with her.

  But … Maker had never lied to her. So far as she knew. And it wasn’t as if she had a choice. She pushed the handle down, shoved the door open, and stepped through.

  * * *

  She stopped, blinking. From the near total darkness of the stairwell, she’d stepped straight into a scene lit bright as noonday sun. She looked behind her. The door was gone.

  Hell.

  Where the door would have been if there were still a door, open prairie stretched to the horizon. The thigh-high grass was heading out, and the sun, or what would be the sun if she were back in the world, which she was pretty sure she wasn’t, was high overhead. It looked like late summer. It smelled like grass and cedar needles and goldenrod in flower but underneath was another, more acrid, smell, like unwashed jeans. Or old blood.

  To her right was a forest, like a wall, heavy dark evergreens with old elm trees around the edges. One huge tree, the roots pulled out of the ground and taller than Hallie’s head, had toppled straight into the forest, bending the other trees and snapping several of them so that they were nothing more than jagged spars spiking into the stark blue sky. In front of her, the landscape was all rough rock and shale, sloping sharply upward. A breeze hot and damp blew down the slope toward her.

  Something resembling a road, smooth and graveled, ran thirty yards to her left, carving right through the rock and shale as if it had been specially engineered. It seemed like a trap, probably was a trap, for her or for someone else, didn’t matter. Hallie preferred the prairie to the forest or the rock and shale slope. Less protection, but she could see what was coming.

  First things first, though: Which of all the possible ways laid out here was Boyd?

  “Run!”

  The sound came from everywhere and nowhere and before she even thought about it or who had said it, Hallie ran, across the rock-strewn flat in a heartbeat and up the slope toward a group of large boulders. She vaulted over the shortest into a small protected space, boulders in front of her and granite rock wall behind. The sun—or whatever—still bright in the sky. She slid slowly upward and peered over the protective rock.

  Below her, sniffing in the shale, were two of the biggest creatures she’d ever seen. They looked more like dogs than anything, and they didn’t look anything like dogs. They had prick ears, black eyes, p
owerful rear legs, and large broad snouts. Short hair like bristles and long incisors. One of them raised a head, sniffed the air, and the two of them, as though they’d communicated with each other, started slowly up the slope together.

  Hallie sank down with her back against the rock.

  Maker had told her there were monsters.

  Jesus.

  There was a strong smell in the air like filthy wet dogs and old carpet. Loose gravel trickled quietly down the steep slope beyond the boulders. Clouds blotted out the fake sun and suddenly it felt winter-blizzard cold, like being surrounded by ghosts. Hallie could hear the creatures scraping their way up the slope, slow, like making certain there were no mistakes. She thumbed off the safety on her shotgun, put her hand back, and unsnapped the belt sheath for her knife. She raised herself up, set her shotgun to her shoulder, and fired at the closest one, the sound like an explosion, like the only real thing in the place. The creature howled and tumbled backwards. She hit it a second time and it disappeared with a pop.

  The second creature, which had been carefully sniffing the ground as it moved, snapped its head up and came straight at her at a dead run. Hallie didn’t have time to bring the shotgun to bear, barely had time to brace herself before the massive creature barreled into her and knocked her flat. She rolled out from underneath before it could swipe her with its long front claws. It lunged. Hallie scrambled up a rock; the claws swished as they passed the tip of her nose.

  She grabbed the knife from her belt and launched herself. Despite its size, it was incredibly fast, sidestepped her easily, and hit her with a backhanded swing of its claws. Hallie managed to stay on her feet—barely—and stumbled backwards to regain her balance. Her ears rang and sparks flickered across her vision. She could hear the creature breathing, loud like it echoed off the rocks. Its breath smelled like rotten bananas and abandoned buildings.

  It sat back on its haunches and looked at her.

  “Out,” it said. Its voice rumbled deep in Hallie’s chest and made her think of dead cats on roadways, collapsing bridges, and serial killers.

  “Listen,” Hallie said. “I’m just—”