Strange Country (17 page)

She changed the tire, glad she had a regular spare in pretty good shape, and spent the afternoon making iron shot primed with her own blood—dead man’s blood—and sacrament. In case she needed them.

She hadn’t seen Maker for a couple of days, which wasn’t unusual. It was still a harbinger, still had obligations to Death, even if it seemed to go back and forth more or less as it pleased. She’d asked if it didn’t mean other things could go back and forth. Maker had unhelpfully told her, “Yes, but they don’t.”

She spent the evening pacing from the living room to the office through the dining room and back. She put on her jacket and lined leather work gloves and went outside and walked the entire perimeter of the hex ring. She felt trapped. Boyd was busy with a murder investigation that might have a supernatural element; there was certainly magic at Prue’s house in the shape of the stones they’d found. But what that meant and whether it had gotten Prue killed, wasn’t at all clear. She told herself that she wanted to help Beth—hell, she’d told Beth she wanted to help—but she wasn’t actually helping. Ghosts were no longer following her, or at least she hadn’t seen one in weeks. She was more or less okay in the daytime, or at least she told herself she was, but at night the walls of the world seemed to close in and she was sure that would be when Death would appear, in the dark, or in her dreams.

Something had changed for her after the events of the last few months and especially after she’d watched Boyd die. The idea that if she moved forward fast enough, if she fought hard enough, things would be okay, didn’t feel like enough anymore. Sure, Boyd was fine. Both of them were alive. That hadn’t changed. And yet, it felt to Hallie as if it could change at any time.

She didn’t sleep well that night, hardly slept at all, and in the morning she left the ranch as soon as she finished feeding and watering the horses, even though she wasn’t entirely certain where she was going. Hiding wasn’t the answer. Everyone who’d ever lived behind the hex ring had learned that sooner or later. The ring could keep you safe from reapers and black dogs and maybe even Death, but safety wasn’t enough, not for a lifetime, not even for a few months.

She’d just pulled onto the county road when three deer ran across in front of her, fast, with their white tails flying. Hallie scanned the fields, but she couldn’t see anything chasing them, nothing but a couple of distant trees and the dried brown grass that had snapped over as the deer passed.

She took the first turn onto the county road, away from West Prairie City, toward Old PC, but then turned onto a gravel road a quarter mile later. Thin clouds lay across the early morning sun, so the day looked flat, what little color there was in the landscape leached away.

Eventually, she came to the cemetery down past Thorsen and Bear Creek, where her sister, Dell, and her mother were buried. She’d been headed there the whole time, since she left the ranch, though she hadn’t admitted it. She pulled into the gravel parking lot, the whole world empty as far as she could see, except her truck, the grave markers, and three bare trees. There was no wind, the temperature around fifteen, everything still like a collective intake of breath.

Hallie pulled on gloves and a baseball cap, pulled the collar of her jacket close up around her neck, and got out of the truck. Gravel crunched under her boots as she walked. At the edge of the lot she stopped, as if she’d just bumped up against an invisible fence. There was no way she could actually visit her sister’s grave or her mother’s, had never even seen her sister’s grave marker. When she entered a cemetery, any cemetery, ghosts rose from their graves and surrounded her, leached the warmth from her bones until she could barely move. These graveyard ghosts were different from the ones that followed her, than Dell’s ghost or Lily’s or Eddie’s. Dell and Lily and Eddie had wanted something, some unfinished business in the world, something that needed to be fixed or said or uncovered. The graveyard ghosts were more like old memories attracted to her warmth, to her ability to see them, to whatever attracted the dead to her. They were cold and they made her cold, though they’d once saved her life and, by extension, the world.

“I don’t know what to do.”

She said it out loud as if saying it would provide the answer. It wasn’t strictly true. She did know what to do. All the world required was that she go forward. Not that she be right. Or do the right thing. Just move.

What she couldn’t say, at least not out loud, was what she actually meant: I don’t want to die. It didn’t seem all that controversial. Most people, she assumed, didn’t want to die. But it was new for her, unsettling. In the army, she hadn’t thought about it one way or another, hadn’t believed that it was possible for her, specifically, to die. She believed people died, of course. She’d seen people die. She just hadn’t believed she would be one of them. Even dying and coming back hadn’t changed anything, not really. She hadn’t remembered dying. She hadn’t remembered coming back.

Now it was like she kept dying over and over, kept reliving the moment when Hollowell had killed Boyd—the moment of death—though it had turned out fine, had been the
right
decision. She’d seen people die before that moment. People she liked. People who meant a lot to her. But not when she could help it. Not when she could have acted and didn’t. Hallie acted. That was how she knew herself.

She had acted in the end. She’d let it go as far as it did only so she could kill Hollowell. She’d done the right thing. Boyd agreed she’d done the right thing.

So why did it feel like betrayal and failure?

Because it did.

Without warning, ghosts flew up in front of her, ghosts from every gravestone. Ghost upon ghost upon ghost, like a rush of frightened birds. Hallie stepped back, thinking she’d misjudged the line and entered the cemetery without knowing it. But the ghosts continued to rise, like battering against walls, hurling themselves against invisible barriers. She took two more steps back. The fireplace poker was in the truck behind the seat, five steps away. Might as well be half a world.

The ghosts split apart suddenly, straining away from their gravestones, which was when she saw it, a black shadow moving straight toward her.

No.

Her right hand shook. She ignored it. She was tired of being afraid, tired of pretending that Death wasn’t coming, tired of wanting things to be different. If this was the time, right now, then it was. She stepped back anyway, involuntarily.

Blackness flowed over the ground like lava, thick and oily. Then it stopped at the edge of the cemetery, as if, like Hallie, it had encountered an invisible wall.

“Come on,” Hallie said. “Let’s do this.” One hand clenched tightly into a fist.

The shadow rose, like gathering itself, forming itself into—what? A person? It didn’t look like Death, but then it didn’t look like anything yet. Hallie’s heart thumped. She had a reckless urge to leap forward, to embrace it before it could embrace her, to just get whatever this was over and done.

But she still didn’t want to die.

The loud blast of a car horn shattered the nearly silent morning. The ghosts stopped. The shadow stopped. Hallie’s heart nearly stopped. Suddenly, everything was gone, all of it, the ghosts and the shadow both. It was a cemetery again, like any other cemetery, with grave markers both old and new, surrounded by fields of old grass and tangled multiflora rose.

Jesus.

Tires crunched on gravel as the car, an old Ford station wagon, parked at the edge of the lot. For a long moment the car sat there, engine idling, but no one got out. Hallie wondered if she’d traded one problem for another. But then, this one, at least, seemed human, and she figured after everything, she could handle people.

If her legs held her. If her heart stopped beating like a drum.

The hinges on the station wagon door shrieked in protest as it opened. To Hallie’s astonishment, Beth Hannah climbed out. She was wearing a hooded down parka with a tear in one elbow patched with duct tape. Her hair was caught up on her head in a messy bun, and she was wearing a dingy pair of fleece earmuffs that curved around the nape of her neck.

“I’ve been all over the Badlands,” she said with no preamble. “I’m pretty sure it’s there. I can feel it. But it’s a big place and it all looks kind of the same. And even if I’m within a couple of miles—I know I’m within a couple of miles, but still—it could take forever. And what does it look like, anyway—a door? A pile of rocks? At least you’ve seen a door. I figure you would know. I mean maybe I would know. But you would for sure. I think. You could … you should … you should do it. Okay?” She’d started out talking quick, but her voice fell off by the end, as if she didn’t know what she wanted to say, just that she’d wanted to find Hallie and say it.

“What are you doing here?” Hallie asked. “How did you find me?”

“I always know where you are,” Beth said, as if it ought to be obvious. “Well, within, like, a mile or two.”

“What do you mean?”

“I
know
.” She laughed. “I know how to find Boyd all the time too. You want to know where he is right now? It’s kind of annoying.”

“Really?”

“I think it’s because you’ve been there, in the under. Like you’ve been dead. That would make sense because I’ve only known since, you know, then.”

“Anyone else?” Yet another conversation she couldn’t quite believe she was having. She was thinking Beth might know where Laddie was. Or Maker. Beth said, “Yeah, somebody. I don’t know who it is. But they popped up here around the same time I did.”

“Here, like here?” Hallie pointed at the gravel parking lot, though she meant here in Taylor County.

“Yeah, here. I mean, I
think
.”

Hallie had to remember that no matter what Beth said about going to the under and living with her father—taking over the “family business,” as it were—this was all new to Beth too.

“So there’s someone else in Taylor County who’s been to the under?”

“That’s not really important right now.” Beth waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “What’s important is opening that door.”

“No,” Hallie said. “You have no idea what that means. You’d be dead, Beth. You might as well kill yourself.” Which she regretted as soon as she said it. She wasn’t going to encourage suicide.

“I don’t think that’s right,” Beth said.

“You don’t want to think it’s right.”

“Did you die when you went to the under?” she asked.

“I would die if I took Death’s place,” Hallie said. “When you’re Death, you’re not in this world anymore. Ever.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Hallie could see the ghosts in the cemetery rising again. “I have to go,” she said, and she didn’t like the sharp pitch of her voice as she said it. “Look, Beth, I will help you. Boyd will help you. You have a place here if you want it. But I’m not helping you die.”

She’d already turned away when Beth said, “Do you want to go in?”

“What?”

Beth pointed toward the cemetery. “In there.” She took Hallie’s hand. “Come on.”

Hallie could never remember being as dumbfounded as she was right then when Beth led her into the cemetery. The ghosts, those cold painful creatures, began to rise once more, then calmed as they passed, sinking slowly back into the ground.

“I could always do that, I
guess,
” Beth said. “I didn’t know it—well, I’d never been in a cemetery until a couple of months ago.”

“Not even when your mother died?” Hallie couldn’t help it; she looked from one side of the path to the other as ghost after ghost sank down and disappeared.

“She was cremated and we didn’t … No.”

They reached Dell’s grave, and it was the first time Hallie had seen it with the marker in place.
ADELLE TEMPLE MICHAELS.
LOVED, LOST, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
. There were dried flowers in a vase sheltered from the wind by the marker itself. Her father must have brought them, she thought. She touched the smooth cold stone. This wasn’t Dell, though her bones lay underneath. It was just a place, and Dell was gone from it.

She took Beth to the next row over, underneath the shade of the same tree Dell was also buried under, to visit her mother’s grave. It shouldn’t mean that much. Hallie of all people knew where the dead went, what happened to them. But it meant someone remembered, meant it had meant something that they were here. Her mother’s marker was smoother, colder, worn down from more than ten South Dakota winters. But there were flowers here too. And a plaque that Hallie hadn’t seen before, something her father must have added recently. She wondered if he’d saved for it, set aside wrinkled fives and singles until he had enough. It was copper she thought, already turning green, backed on something solider and riveted right to the stone.

BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH …

“Thank you,” she said to Beth back in the parking lot.

Beth shrugged. “I guess I have an affinity.”

“I guess you do.” Hallie’d thought she had an affinity, but maybe it was just an attraction. “I’m not going to open that door for you,” she said.

“I know,” Beth said. “It doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking.”

“Good luck,” Hallie said.

“Yeah.”

Yeah.

17

It was just after noon when Boyd drove out to Jasper, or to where Jasper had been before it was flattened by a tornado twenty years earlier. The sky had turned storm gray, and it was sleeting. The temperatures had been in the high twenties since before noon, and the old road he was on was slick, mostly frozen, with maybe a half inch of melt on top.

He parked on the old road, pulled a slicker, rain pants, and a waterproof baseball cap from the trunk. He donned the rain gear and walked the length of the former town—a hamlet, really, with twenty or thirty houses, a garage–post office–diner, a small church, an open area close to the road that had once been a small park with a freestanding metal pole barn (long gone), a wooden shelter (of which two broken poles and a stone fireplace remained), and a baseball diamond (which was little more than the suggestion of a baseball field in the way the vegetation had grown up over time).