Hope's End

by Mark Lukens

  “Our future?”

  She shook her head no. “The far future. I saw what looked like these metal carriages that drove by themselves.”

  Jed had heard rumors of inventors trying to put engines onto carriages and on bicycles, but he felt that kind of technology wouldn’t happen in his lifetime, maybe not even for another hundred years.

  “And I saw flying machines,” Esmerelda said. “Metal machines. Like big metal pie plates in the sky.”

  Jed just nodded, not knowing what to say.

  “The dream was just bits and pieces,” she said. “None of it really made any sense. It moved from image to image. I saw a woman and a man. I think the man may have been some kind of outlaw. He had a gun, but his gun looked different.”

  Jed didn’t interrupt her—she seemed like she was leading up to something.

  “David was there.”

  “In your dream?”

  “Yes. He was with the man and the woman.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “They were scared. They were in a log cabin. And then the man and woman were in a small house in the jungle without David. The house was near the ocean. But even though David wasn’t there anymore, it wasn’t like he was dead.” She paused for just a second, staring at Jed. “You remember those names we saw written in blood in the dining hall?”

  Jed nodded. He remembered.

  “Cole and Stella,” Esmerelda said. “I think the man and woman I saw in the dream were Cole and Stella. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it felt so real in the dream. It still feels so real.”

  “So you think those names on the wall are two people from the future?” Jed asked.

  Esmerelda shook her head slightly, growing frustrated. “I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t make any sense. There were these feelings I had in the dream, feelings of darkness. I can’t remember exactly, but I think I saw a glimpse into a different world, a world so strange that if I stared at it too long I would go mad. That’s when I woke up.”

  Esmerelda was trembling now.

  Jed moved closer to her. He put his arm around her and it seemed to calm her down a little. “It was just a dream,” he told her, not knowing what else to say.

  She nodded.

  “How about that cup of coffee now?” he asked her.

  Again, she nodded.

  Jed got up and walked to the stove. He grabbed a ceramic cup and poured some coffee for her. He brought it back and set it down in front of her.

  “Thank you,” she whispered and took a sip.

  Jed sat back down in his chair, the wood creaking a little from his weight. “Who’s Purvis?”

  Esmerelda smiled. “Oh, that was a few years ago.”

  Jed waited—all they had right now was time.

  “I grew up in Philadelphia,” she told him.

  “I figured you were from back east.”

  She nodded. “My mother died when I was very young. I barely remember her. According to my father, my mother was a medium and she could contact the spirits. He saw that same ability in me when I was a child, and he decided to profit off of it like he had done with my mother. We went from town to town, up and down the east coast. My father charged a pretty hefty fee for my services.”

  Esmerelda paused for a moment like the rest of her story was difficult to tell. “I couldn’t always just summon my powers at will. After a few embarrassing séances, my father beat me. He never touched my face or hands, only places where the ‘rubes,’ as he liked to call them, couldn’t see my bruises. He told me that if I couldn’t see the rubes’ dead relatives, then I needed to learn how to make things up. Over the next few years I became adept at questioning the rubes and deciphering the clues they unknowingly gave me. Most times, if the questions were just right, the rubes would tell me everything I needed to know. I would ask a leading question and they would give me the answers that I needed.”

  “But sometimes you could really contact the dead,” Jed said.

  Esmerelda shrugged. “Sometimes. Not as often as my father would’ve liked or as much as he professed to people.”

  “When you do contact the dead,” Jed started, and then his throat closed up a little. “What do they say to you?”

  Esmerelda stared at him. “Clara.”

  He nodded. “My wife. She died five years ago. She got sick for a few weeks. It got harder and harder for her to breathe. I . . . I tried everything I could think of. The doc tried everything. I was ready to haul her in the wagon up to Denver or down to Santa Fe if I needed to, anywhere where someone might know how to save her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Esmerelda whispered.

  “We never had any children. We always wanted children, especially Clara, but we just never did.” He took another sip of his coffee. “I used to be a god-fearing man. Used to believe. After Clara died . . .” He let his words hang in the cold air. “But now. After the things I’ve seen these last few days, there must be something.”

  “There is,” she told him. She touched his hand, laying her small hand over his big one, her smooth skin touching his rough skin, her pale flesh contrasting his tanned flesh.

  The touch from her felt good, and Jed was quiet again. He found it difficult to articulate what he wanted to say, that he had turned his back on God, on any supernatural things in the world. He realized now that he had been traveling through the world blind these last five years, blinded from reality by his grief and anger.

  “The dead come to me from the light,” Esmerelda said as she pulled her hand away from his.

  Jed stared at her.

  “They’re in a good place,” she told him with a smile. There were unshed tears forming in her eyes. “There’s this feeling around them of warmth and safety. Of happiness. They want to see their families again, their loved ones, but they know that they will be with them soon enough.”

  Jed was tempted to ask Esmerelda to contact Clara, but she just said that her powers were blocked right now. It made him feel good that the spirits she contacted were in a happy and safe place; it gave him an odd sense of hope that he might see Clara again in that place.

  “Was Purvis your father?” Jed asked.

  “No. I left my father when I was eighteen years old. He was getting more and more abusive. Drinking more—among his many other bad habits. He threatened to kill me if I ever left him, but I went far enough away so that he could never find me. My father controlled all of the money we made, but I managed to save up some over the years, hiding my stash until I had enough to leave. I’m sure it angered him that his source of income had abandoned him. I’m sure it also scared him, and I relished that fact. I could imagine him riding from place to place, asking everyone about me, his mind frantic as he wondered where the money was going to come from now, the money that he’d never bothered to save, the money that he had squandered on card games and prostitutes and drinking. Nothing left to show for it.”

  Esmerelda took a sip of her coffee, thinking for a moment. “No,” she finally said. “Purvis came later. I made it as far as Ohio on the money I had saved. I started doing the only thing I knew how to do, giving readings and séances. After a few months I got the itch to move farther west, afraid that somehow my father would track me down. I met a man named Purvis at one of my readings. He was amazed at my ability, and he seemed fascinated with me. He was at least fifteen years older than I was, but he was handsome and dashing in his own way. He ran a traveling carnival and invited me to go with him. They were working their way to California. That sounded good to me—California seemed to be just about as far as I could get from Philadelphia. But as soon as we reached the next town, I realized that Purvis was not the man he pretended to be. I had joined a traveling carnival with a man just like my father. Worse than my father. He beat me. Abused me. Raped me. He kept all of the money that I made while I did as many showings as possible as we moved from town to town. Purvis went a few steps beyond my father. He rigged the table to shake and ectoplasm to form in the air around me. It became
a theater show then, not spiritual contact anymore. Again, like history was repeating itself, I saved any tips I got until I had enough to leave. On the night I left, I stole more money from Purvis—money that was rightfully mine—and then I rode a horse into town. A woman at a hotel helped me get a stagecoach the next day. The stagecoach was headed for Denver, but I wouldn’t have cared where it was heading as long as it wasn’t east again. I had still planned to go to California from Denver even though Purvis’ traveling show was heading to California.”

  “But you didn’t make it there,” Jed said.

  “No,” Esmerelda sighed. “I ran out of money and ended up here. I started working with Moody, helping him with his saloon and hotel, mostly cooking and cleaning the rooms. I even started doing readings again, but I wasn’t going to part with all of my money this time. I only gave Moody his fair share.”

  She stopped like she’d seen a reaction on Jed’s face that she didn’t like.

  “Moody was nothing like Purvis or my father. He took his share and never treated me with anything but respect. That madman you saw, that wasn’t Moody. I just wanted you to know that.”

  Jed nodded.

  “This town had been thriving when I first got here, before the mines dried up. There were rumors of the railroad laying tracks through here, but those rumors died along with the mines.”

  “Do you still want to go to California?” Jed asked.

  Esmerelda nodded. “Yes, I would. I would love to see Los Angeles and San Francisco. Travel up the coast all the way to Canada. I’ve been saving the money I made here, waiting for the right time to leave.”

  “Maybe you’ll still get your chance to see California,” Jed told her.

  But Esmerelda didn’t look so sure about that.

  CHAPTER 36

  Jed snapped awake. He was still sitting at the table, leaning to the side in his chair, his chin on his fist. He had fallen asleep sitting at the table. It wasn’t morning yet, still dark. Very dark. Only the lantern at the bar was still lit, but the flame was low and it looked ready to wink out at any moment. Jed could barely make out the sleeping forms of David, Esmerelda, and Sanchez on the blankets.

  Esmerelda must have gone back to sleep, but Jed couldn’t remember exactly when she had left the table. Had he fallen asleep in front of her? The last thing he could remember was that they were drinking coffee and talking. She had been telling him about her childhood, and then the traveling carnival with Purvis. And then . . .

  He couldn’t remember anything after that. Maybe he had fallen asleep, drifted off right in this chair.

  Something had roused him from sleep, but he wasn’t sure what it had been. Maybe a noise. A noise from outside. He felt jittery, his skin crawling, a nervous pit of nausea in his stomach, his mouth dry.

  He was afraid of something in the darkness, he was sure of that. He looked over at the stairs, barely making out the sharp incline of the railing in the dark.

  A noise outside the saloon startled him—it was like something had scraped against one of the windows, like tree branches scratching at the glass. His hand flew to the butt of his pistol as he turned around in his chair, staring at the saloon doors.

  Footsteps out on the walkway, just beyond those doors. But those couldn’t be someone’s footsteps, they were too heavy. It sounded like a horse was walking around out there, but a horse on two legs—something massive with hooves. The footsteps were slow and deliberate, the sound thundering in through the glass of the windows and the doors.

  The scratching noise was at the windows again, and then there was a scratching sound at the wood, like gigantic claws were pawing at the wood siding.

  Jed looked back at the blankets again. None of them had moved in their sleep.

  He got up and hurried to the bar, grabbing the only lantern left that was still lit. He brought it with him as he walked towards the saloon doors that swam out of the darkness the closer he got to them with the light.

  When he was a few feet away from the saloon doors, the noises were louder, more frenzied. The locked doorknobs jiggled slightly, like someone was testing them.

  It wasn’t supposed to come for us until sunup, Jed thought. It told us we had until sunup.

  He went towards the window instead of the door, about to peek out and see what was out there, but Billy popped up in front of him, his face blank, his eyes cold, his breath warm and rotten. “Do not look out there,” Billy told him.

  Jed froze in mid-step.

  For just a moment Jed thought Billy was dead. He thought Billy had been killed in the night and now that thing was inside of him, controlling him. Jed’s fingers twitched, and he was ready to draw his pistol.

  “If you look at it,” Billy continued in his low, monotone voice, “if you see what it truly looks like, you will go crazy.”

  Jed took a step back from Billy. He heard a noise from the saloon doors and then saw a movement underneath them. Something long, thin, and black was wriggling underneath the door, squeezing in through the cracks like a flattened snake. The snakelike thing squirmed farther inside, thrashing from side to side on the floor for a moment and then rising up like a cobra. But it wasn’t a snake—there were no eyes, nose, or mouth, just a black shape that seemed to change form as soon as it was inside the saloon, growing bigger and rounder now.

  “What is that?” Jed whispered to Billy. “Is that what the Ancient Enemy really looks like?”

  “Only a small part of it,” Billy answered. “It is always changing.”

  Both of them stepped back. Billy had his lantern in his hand, but the flame had been out for a while now. The wick in Jed’s lamp was very low. They needed to get the lamps lit again.

  Jed heard sounds in the darkness behind them.

  “What is it?” Esmerelda asked.

  Jed turned and looked at her. He handed Esmerelda his lantern while keeping his right hand on the butt of his Colt, ready to draw at any moment if he needed to. “We need to get these lit.”

  Esmerelda took Jed’s lantern, but her eyes had shifted to the tentacle flailing around underneath the doors. Another thinner tentacle had joined the first one, both of them whipping around blindly. The heavy footsteps still thudded from outside, stomping around on the walkway out there with no discernable pattern. The scraping at the wood walls and the windows was getting faster and louder.

  “That’s . . . that’s what it looks like?” Esmerelda asked as she stared at the tentacles, but it sounded more like a statement than a question.

  “Go,” Jed told her.

  Sanchez hurried up to them, his body tense. He was ready to draw his guns, his eyes sharp even though he’d just woken up. “Is it dawn already?”

  Jed shrugged. “Sun might be coming up now.”

  Esmerelda stopped at the table on her way to the bar to check Moody’s pocket watch they had left there. She picked up the watch and brought it up close to the lantern so she could see it. “It’s dawn,” she told them. “Close enough anyway.”

  “We need to have some more light,” Jed told Esmerelda, trying not to shout at her. The lamp was almost out now and she stood in the little circle of light now, almost everything else in the saloon had faded away into darkness the farther she moved away with the dim light. Jed didn’t want to be trapped in this saloon in the dark, not with those tentacles thrashing around, pushing their way in more and more, whipping themselves against the bottom of the door where Billy had carefully painted his symbols.

  David went with Esmerelda to the bar as she lit the two lanterns. She also lighted the ones on the wall behind the bar.

  Now that it was brighter in the saloon, Jed looked back at the saloon doors. The two thin tentacles were still flailing around, and now they glistened in the light like they were coated with some kind of mucus—the film on the tentacles reminded Jed of the mucus Karl had thrown up with all of the tarantulas in it.

  “The symbols,” Sanchez said as he stared at the saloon doors. The doors and the floor in front of it w
ere covered in ancient writing that Billy had painted there.

  “Those symbols aren’t working,” Jed said, glancing at Billy.

  “Maybe they keep it from coming all the way in,” Billy said, defending his ceremony.

  All of the noises outside stopped. The tentacles pulled back, disappearing underneath the door, back outside again. Everything was quiet for a moment.

  “The boy,” a voice called from right outside the saloon doors. “Kill the boy!” It was Moody’s voice.

  Sanchez drew his guns, lightning-quick.

  “Wait,” Billy told Sanchez.

  Sanchez cocked both pistols.

  A loud crash came from upstairs. It sounded like the intertwined bodies of Rose and the cowboy had just torn free from the ropes and fallen out of the bed.

  They all looked up at the ceiling.

  Footsteps stomped across the hotel room floor above them.

  “It’s coming,” Jed told them.

  “Quick,” Esmerelda said as she reached for Jed. “We need to hold hands. We need to make a circle with David in the middle.”

  The crashing from upstairs was louder now. The thing was busting through the door they had barricaded with the slats of wood.

  Jed took Esmerelda’s hand and then he held Billy’s hand. Billy grabbed Sanchez’s hand after he had holstered his pistols. Sanchez grabbed Esmerelda’s hand, and now they formed a complete circle. It was like they were playing some kind of children’s game with David in the middle.

  “We pray now,” Esmerelda told them, yelling over the sounds of the thumps and crashes coming from upstairs and outside.

  “Kill the boy!” Moody’s voice screamed at them from outside.

  Other voices were joining in with Moody as he chanted, only a few of the dead townspeople at first.

  “Kill the boy!”

  “Kill the boy!” More voices were joining in now outside the saloon doors.

  “Kill the boy!” The whole town was yelling now, chanting the same three words over and over again.