Ann Aguirre - Hell Fire

Well, that sounded familiar. I didn’t interrupt; I already knew she was Gifted. I wanted to know why the town thought she was crazy. We all sat quiet, offering our most attentive expressions.

“I was around thirteen when it started.” She refused to look at any of us, staring fiercely at a worn spot on the floor. “I started reading sad poetry. I guess that’s pretty common.” She shrugged. “Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.”

“The death girls,” I put in with a nod.

She chanced a look at me. “You read them too?”

“Not anymore,” I said quietly.

Shannon accepted that without requesting clarification, but my answer prompted the first smile we’d seen from her, a soft little flutter that dissolved almost at once as she resumed her story. “I started thinking about death a lot. I researched the Holocaust. And I got curious about Kilmer.” Jesse started to speak, but she anticipated his question. “How people died here. How often. I spent a lot of time in the library archives.”

A morbid curiosity, to be sure, but adolescence took some kids like that. I had a feeling I wouldn’t like what was coming, but I asked, anyway. “What did you find out?”

“Bad things happen on December 21,” she said simply. “People die.”

The date chilled me.

“So it’s been more than just my family?” I spoke almost to myself. “There must be a pattern to it.”

Shannon nodded. “From what me and Mr. McGee could figure out—”

“You knew Mr. McGee?” That captured my attention.

“Kinda.” She scowled at me. Some of the edge had come off her fear. Maybe she sensed she sat inside a well-warded house, or maybe Chance and Jesse reassured her. “We got friendly, I guess, while I was poking around. The librarian didn’t like me much, but Mr. McGee was nice, and he let me look in the paper files downstairs.”

“Us too,” I said. Well, he used to. “He was about to answer some questions for us when he . . .” Had a fit and died, frothing at the mouth like a mad badger. That didn’t seem suitable, so I said aloud, “Passed on unexpectedly this afternoon.”

Fear clouded her eyes again as she gazed at the three of us. “I heard. And . . . I don’t think that was right. I mean,” she hastened to add, “I don’t believe you had anything to do with it. But somebody did.”

Our sound track suddenly switched from “Fools Rush In,” which had been looping seamlessly, to “Bye Bye Love.” We’d ignored the phenomenon long enough. I got up and went over to my bag, digging for the old radio I’d stolen off John McGee’s worktable. By her look, Shannon recognized it, but I couldn’t interpret her expression.

I tried to reassure her. “He was telling us about it when he died. He said—”

“Folks could hear ghosts in the snow between channels, if they’re close to death themselves.” I heard an echo of old McGee in the words she’d obviously heard from the man more than once. “It’s true,” she added, not meeting my gaze. “ I can.”

“Is that what you were working on with Mr. McGee?” Chance asked.

Shannon nodded. “Yeah, that and our research. He got interested in all the people dying too. It used to only happen on December 21—and not all the time, either. Sometimes years would pass, and nothing went bad. But lately . . . something’s different. I can’t explain it.” She shrugged helplessly. “I can just feel it.”

I knew exactly what she meant. I’d sensed it in the forest, but tendrils of it wove throughout the town as well, dank and terrible. I didn’t want say so, but Shannon’s own mother had scared the crap out of me, as had the librarian, Edna.

Jesse smiled at her, pure warmth and reassurance. “Did you try to warn anybody?”

“Sure. Nobody would listen. I’m a weird kid, and McGee was a crazy old coot. It couldn’t have been worse for our credibility if we’d planned it.”

As if in response to her words, the song changed to “Ain’t That a Shame.”

Chance cocked a brow. “You get the feeling somebody’s trying to tell us something?”

“That’s Mr. McGee’s kind of music,” Shannon told us.

“You said before, you can talk to dead people on the radio,” I prompted gently.

She scowled, checking our faces to see if we were messing with her. “Don’t be stupid—I have no mic. I can hear them, not talk to them. Just have to find their frequency.”

I couldn’t imagine how that would work, but she’d fallen among the right crowd to display her talent. She wouldn’t find skepticism here. We needed to talk to her about being Gifted, but first things first.

“Here.” I handed her the radio. “Knock yourself out.” Shannon studied my face with a half frown that melted away when she realized I wasn’t joking. “You believe me?”

“Absolutely.” I flashed my left palm, the one with the inexplicable brand. “We’re all weird here, Shannon. In one way or another. You came to the right place.”

“Okay.” She bent her spiky blue and black head to the task, fiddling with the knobs. Once she touched the device, the unnatural music ceased, and I heard only snow, full of echoes and ghostly whispers, too many to distinguish. But Shannon had the power to give one voice dominion over the rest. We all froze as the “station” came into focus in her hands.

“They killed me,” John McGee said tonelessly. “The rotten sons of bitches killed me.” The ancient speakers crackled, tinny and strange. McGee repeated the words again and again, until they reached a thunderous crescendo, and then fell into a whispered moan. With that much rage, he had a fair start toward turning into a poltergeist, I thought. It hurt me just to listen to it.

I wasn’t sure what good this would do, however, if we couldn’t ask questions. Interesting though it was, a one-way feed provided limited usefulness. If McGee was out in the ether somewhere, broadcasting his pain and anger, then he wouldn’t hear our questions. If we could summon him, somehow—

Well, Shannon had known him best. What could it hurt to try? We might learn something about her gift, as I’d certainly never heard of anything like it. Kilmer did birth some weird ones, and yes, I meant myself too.

“Try calling him,” I suggested. “If we can get him in the room with us—”

“The wards,” Jesse cut in. “He can’t come in. We blocked anything that means us harm, and confused as he is right now, he might not know friend from foe.”

“Ideas?” I glanced at Chance, hoping he wasn’t still mad.

He was. I saw it in the set of his jaw and the tilt of his eyes. That didn’t stop him from saying, “If you’re determined to do this, we could go out on the porch. That way, if things go bad, we can run back inside.”

The notion sent a cold chill through me, and I wanted to immediately reject it. It didn’t seem wise to step outside our protective walls after dark, but I waited to see what everyone else would say. Saldana considered.

“We’d need to prop the door open with something heavy,” Jesse said finally. “If we get locked out, we’re sitting ducks out there, and my gun isn’t going to help.” At Shannon’s worried look, he added, “Don’t worry. I’m a cop.”

Evidently she didn’t like the police any better than I did. If Robinson set the standard in Kilmer, I could see why she shared my bias. But Sheriff Pasco, who had the job when I lived here, had been worse.

I raised a brow. “So y’all want to go outside in the dark—in sight of those scary woods—and call up an angry dead man to see what he has to say?”

The looks I received in answer to my question registered as the facial equivalent of a shrug. Shannon seemed least concerned, but she either figured she could run faster than us, or she hadn’t seen as much trouble. Either way, I had a bad feeling.