Esperanza

by Trish J. MacGregor

  Besides the cat and the dog, Kali the parrot dropped by, squawking happily, always grateful for a treat—a grape, a strawberry, or her favorite, a cherry. Wildlife was often visible from the cottage windows—condors, hummingbirds, rabbits the color of the fog, silver chinchillas, deer the size of large dogs. Little wild guinea pigs sometimes scurried to the front door, then reared up on their miniature legs and made squeaking sounds, as if asking to be let in.

  On the third evening, Tess and Ian rummaged through the pantry and fridge, taking stock of their diminished supplies to find something suitable for dinner. “Okay, it’s official,” Ian said. “Dinner’s going to be simple. Ravioli with a red sauce. I think we’ve got enough fruit for a salad. But we need to go shopping tomorrow, Slim.”

  “I’ll be ready to venture out tomorrow.”

  “I realized that other than opening the front door to step outside for a closer look at those condors, I haven’t moved more than five yards from these rooms in the last three days.”

  “The farthest I’ve gone is the back porch to refill the hummingbird feeder. This is the first time since we got here that I’ve felt almost normal.” On an upper pantry shelf, Tess found a bottle of Chilean red wine. “Hey, look at this.” She held it up. “Grab us some glasses, Ian.”

  Moments later, she clicked her glass against his. “Salud,”

  “Salud!” he echoed, and began to prepare dinner.

  Tess settled on a stool and watched. Throughout much of her childhood, her dad had cooked evening meals and he had been the kind of cook Ian was—a dash of this, a pinch of that, toss in herbs, sauces, mix it all together, and voilà, a gourmet meal. Ian, like her dad, used flavors in unusual ways, as if his intention were to awaken the palate by shocking it. Even the desserts Ian concocted were like this and usually involved chocolate, for which he confessed a weakness.

  “Where’d you learn to cook?” she asked.

  “After my dad’s suicide, my mother was so depressed she didn’t get out of bed for weeks. So my choices were to get takeout, starve, or start cooking. Then in college I worked part-time as a cook. Since Louise hated to cook, it just continued after we got married.” He shrugged and flashed one of those complicated George Clooney smiles. “Nothing glamorous like a French cooking school. Where do you want to eat?”

  “By the fire.”

  “It’ll be ready in a jiffy.” Ian handed her the bowls of fruit salad to take into the living room.

  Tess set the bowls on the coffee table, pulled the table closer to the fire, and dropped two cushions on the floor. While Ian finished his culinary magic, she used the cottage phone to call her mother and Maddie. But like every other time either she or Ian had tried to place a call from the cottage, the operator said the circuits were busy and to try again later. Since she had lost her cell and Ian didn’t seem to own one, the cottage phone was the only option.

  “Circuits still busy?” he asked as she walked into the kitchen.

  “It’s ridiculous. No phone system can be that incompetent.”

  “We’ll get through.” He passed her a bowl of steaming ravioli and a basket of hot bread, then picked up the bottle of wine, his glass and bowl, and they went into the living room. As they settled on the pillows by the fire, logs crackling at their backs, Nomad trotted over and sat down, waiting for handouts. “I fed you, big guy,” Ian said.

  The dog barked twice. Tess laughed and tossed him a square of ravioli, which he caught in midair. The meal was delicious, surpassing anything her dad had ever cooked. She left a couple of bites for Nomad, set her plate on the floor next to Ian’s, and the dog lapped it up.

  Ian refilled their wine glasses. “You know, the more I think about it, the stranger this all seems. I’ve been in other high-altitude cities, but I’ve never felt so out of it. Maybe something in that tea Juanito made didn’t agree with us.”

  “Or there was something in those empanadas. Write about that in your column. The Empanada Altitude Strangeness.”

  They laughed hysterically, just as they had that night on the bus. She knew the silliness was exacerbated by their mutual anxiety that something eerie was happening to them, even if they didn’t know what it was, but she couldn’t stop laughing. She finally rolled onto her back, her hands creating a billboard in the air. “ ‘If you eat the empanadas at the Bodega del Cielo . . .’ That’s your lead, Ian. I can see it.”

  She looked over at him, but his eyes were fixed on her already, staring in a way that made her heart somersault. He flashed a quick, complicated smile, then rolled once and hovered above her, his fingers sliding through her hair, his face dangerously close to hers. The fire snapped and hissed, his eyes undressed her. He lowered his mouth to hers and for long moments, the only thing that existed was the texture of his tongue, the heat of his breath, the reality of his hands slipping under her sweater, cool against her skin.

  She felt, suddenly, like a teenage girl seized and betrayed by her own hormones. They were crossing the threshold, she didn’t care. It felt good to be touched and caressed by this man. Their clothes melted away, they rolled onto their sides, and everywhere he touched her, her skin exploded with heat and desire.

  His tongue slipped from her throat to her breasts, circling them, teasing. They rolled again, so that Tess was on her back, and his mouth moved lower, tongue inscribing her hips and belly with a secret language, and then sliding lower. Tess gasped and her hips lifted from the rug, her pleasure so intense she thought she might implode. He slipped inside of her and repeatedly brought her to the edge, then took her over it, a free fall.

  Ian drew an alpaca throw over them and the fabric felt sensuous against her skin. He stretched out on his side and raised up, head resting in the palm of his hand. The fire’s ambient light cast the room in a surreal glow and threw half of his face into shadow.

  “Ever since I saw you in the bodega, Slim, I’ve wanted this to happen.”

  “I thought you’d lost interest.”

  “No way.” He smiled, the corners of his eyes wrinkling like crepe paper. “Until this evening, I barely had the energy to keep my eyes open long enough to eat and shower.”

  Her fingertips traced those lines at his eyes, each one the groove of a story. There, his father’s suicide. Here, Luke’s birth and childhood. There, Ian’s divorce, his columns for the Minneapolis Tribune, stories he hadn’t shared yet, the good and bad, the ugly and the glorious. “Maybe it’s not the altitude, but something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” But day three was gone and they still hadn’t left the cottage. Bizarre. She wanted to blame it on the cold rain and the sludge that moved at a snail’s pace through her veins. Yet, she sensed something deeper was at work, knew it fell into the same realm as the hiccups in her memories. She should examine it more closely, but it was easier to ignore it. That bothered her, too. “I feel like people are listening to us.” She pulled the throw over their heads, creating a little cocoon. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes.” He brought his mouth so close to hers she could feel the warmth of his breath against her lips, the tip of her nose. He whispered now. “That first day, after Juanito had left and we’d finished drinking that tea he’d made, I didn’t think I was even going to be able to make it to the bedroom to crash. And I woke only once in—what? fourteen hours? I’ve never slept that long in my life.”

  “Same here. And I don’t think I woke at all.”

  Still whispering, he went on. “What woke me was a . . . I’m not even sure how to describe it. It felt . . . like something was slamming against me. Trying to get inside of me.” He laughed nervously. “Did you experience anything like that?”

  Tess started to say no, but a vivid memory surfaced. A sharp pain in her chest, heart racing, fear so intense that it paralyzed her. She blurted all this, then added: “I was so paralyzed I couldn’t even wiggle my fingers or toes. I must’ve fallen back to sleep. A brujo?”

  “Not with Nomad inside,” he
said.

  “He left with Juanito after we drank that tea.”

  “I forgot about that. So it could’ve been a brujo.”

  “Maybe. But here’s something else that’s weird. I’ve never gone to a foreign country and just hung around my hotel room for days, without venturing out at all. Even when the weather was shitty. Have you?”

  “No. Never.” He put his arms around her, holding her close, their legs intertwined, his hands cool against her spine. “We’ll figure this out.” Then he began to touch her again. “But not right now.”

  Ian bolted upright, heart drumming furiously against the tight, uneasy silence. His eyes darted nervously around the room, through the fading firelight. Nothing moved. Shadows pooled in the corners, blackness pressed up against the windows. Tess sighed in her sleep and pulled the blanket up higher around her shoulders. Hours ago, they had moved from the rug to the pull-out couch and Nomad had curled up in front of the fire. Now Nomad was gone. But that wasn’t what had awakened him.

  Ian swung his legs over the side of the bed, listening. Suddenly, he heard it, a high-pitched whining, a distant noise, like that of a high-speed drill. Then silence. Then the whining again, but closer. He swept his jeans and sweatshirt off a nearby chair, pulled them on, and hurried across the cold stone floor to the window. It was so chilly in the cottage he could see his breath when he exhaled.

  He pressed his face to the glass, hands cupped at the sides. No starlight, no moonlight, too dark to see anything. The whining stopped, a sixty-second pause. When it started once more, he realized the noise he heard wasn’t the whine of a drill, but the shrill cries of voices out in the courtyard, hundreds of them, a strange, almost melodic sound, like the keening of dolphins.

  “What the hell.” He hurried to the front door.

  Before he removed the chain, ribbons of fog slipped through the crack under the door, eddying, shifting, then whipping back and forth, snakelike, across the floor. Ian leaped back, the keening got louder, a kind of atavistic fear seized him. He spun and ran over to the couch, shaking Tess awake. “They found us,” he hissed.

  She sprang out of bed, swept up her clothes, jerked them on. Ian snapped a blanket off the bed and ran back to the door.

  The fog wrapped around his ankles, a cold that bit to the marrow. He fully expected campesinos to materialize, for that insidious whispering and chanting to begin, like what had happened in the field the day they arrived. He quickly stuffed the blanket into the crack and the bands of fog around his ankles abruptly loosened, dropped away from him, then writhed and twisted against the floor as if in agony. Ian grabbed the fire poker, slammed it down through the snakelike streamers, and he and Tess backed away, staring in horror as the streamers split in half and struggled to merge with other streamers. It was like watching beheaded chickens flailing around, wings flapping until their bodies keeled over. In moments, the stuff dissipated.

  “Jesus, Ian, look.” Tess pointed at the windows to their right.

  Fog twisted up and across the glass like rapidly growing vines, each shoot thickening, spreading, until it covered the windows. He glanced quickly up at the skylight. Fog blanketed it. He grabbed Tess’s hand, and they raced toward the back of the cottage.

  The whispering grew louder, the brujo voices rasping like wind through trees. They flew into the bedroom, slammed the door, tore sheets and quilts off the bed. But the fog had found these windows already, wisps slithering through crevices, into the room.

  “The bathroom, Slim. Fast. No windows in there.”

  “Tape, we need electrical tape. Or duct tape.” She jerked open a nightstand drawer. “I saw a roll of something in here.”

  Ian ran into the bathroom, hit the wall switch, dropped the quilts and sheets on the floor. As he snapped towels off the rack, Tess barreled in, waving a roll of tape and a pair of scissors. She dropped her linens, kicked the door shut, and they stuffed a sheet into the crack, sealed it with strips of tape, then pressed towels and quilts over the sheet, and scooted back, eyeing the door.

  Stupid, totally stupid, he thought, that towels and quilts and tape could keep sentient fog from reaching them. But it was equally insane to think the fog was sentient. Yet, he knew it was.

  The keening grew louder, abrasive, almost unbearable. He clenched his teeth, slapped his hands over his ears. In moments, wisps of fog slipped through the vertical crack just above and below the hinges and along the top edge of the door. Ian shot to his feet, Tess struggled to cut long strips of tape from the roll, and he pressed them into place, sealing the door completely. The keening escalated until it felt as if long, hot needles were being thrust through his ears, tearing away cartilage, tissue, penetrating bone. It drove him, wailing, to his knees. Even with his hands squeezed over his ears, he could hear it, feel it in his teeth, and knew he was minutes from passing out.

  Suddenly, Tess started shrieking, a sound so primal and savage that it hardly sounded human. She kept it up, her shrieks battering against the keening, driving it back, and lurched to the towel rack. She grabbed several, tossed one to Ian, and he wrapped it around his head, turban style, so that it covered his ears. It helped to muffle the intensity of the noise so that he didn’t think he would pass out now.

  While Tess wrapped a towel around her own head and kept on shrieking, Ian flipped over the metal clothes hamper and beat his fists against it, playing it like a drum. She kept shrieking and turned the shower on full blast, adding the pounding of water to the cacophony. He didn’t know how long it went on, but when the keening abruptly ceased, the silence felt tight, eerie. She turned off the shower, whispered, “Is it over?”

  “Maybe it’s a trick,” he whispered back.

  A great clanking and clattering erupted in the bedroom and spread quickly to the rest of the cottage, echoing, vibrating against the walls. Then this, too, stopped, and a silence so profound and strange gripped the building that he and Tess strained to hear anything at all.

  They finally tore away the tape, Ian picked up the poker, opened the door slightly. He didn’t hear or sense anything and opened the door all the way. As he and Tess stepped into the bedroom, she flicked the wall switch to her left, turning on a floor lamp.

  The room was empty, but something now covered the window—and it wasn’t fog. It seemed to be some kind of metal shutter. “It’s like an aluminum hurricane shutter,” Tess said, coming up behind him. “Electrically controlled. And since it probably didn’t shut on its own, it must be remotely controlled.”

  “So Granger or someone else knew the cottage was under attack.”

  “It looks that way. This is what they do in prisons. At night. Or when someone has escaped. Lockdown. Fuck this. They can’t lock us in here.”

  She made a beeline for the bedroom door. Ian turned the lock, raised the window, ran his hand along the bottom edge. Airtight. No sign of fog. He couldn’t even feel the chill of the night air. Impressive. And undoubtedly expensive. Was every building on the grounds equipped with shutters like this?

  When he emerged from the bedroom, the kitchen and living room blazed with lights, and Tess was pounding her fists against the shutter across the front door. “Hey, we’re trapped in here, I didn’t sign up for this shit!”

  Ian realized these shutters had also closed off the skylights, every window, the rear door to the back porch, even the pet door Whiskers and Nomad used. They apparently were prisoners. He marched over to the fridge, threw open the door and determined, in a quick glance, what might make a good breakfast. Mushroom omelets with cheese. A side dish of sliced mangos. Mugs of rich Ecuadorian coffee. He found celery and tomatoes and chopped with a kind of vengeance. He whipped four eggs with a frantic rhythm, a drumbeat for war. Slammed the knife through a brick of cheese, chop chop, chop chop. The preparation of food became his weapon, his defense.

  Tess ran into the kitchen. “What’re you doing? We need to get the hell out of here.”

  “Out of here? Where the hell is here? We don’t have any idea whe
re we are with respect to any other point in this country.”

  Then an assault began and it sounded as if the hounds of hell had been turned loose. The rooms echoed with the clamor, a battering storm like hail or rocks pounding the shutters as something fought to get in. Paralyzed, he and Tess stared at each other, then Ian forced himself to turn back to the counter, to finish the omelets.

  “Are you nuts?” Tess burst out. “You’re cooking while we’re under attack? Jesus, Ian, we need weapons.” She jerked open one of the drawers, grabbed a long, sharp knife. “We’ve got to be able to defend ourselves.”

  He looked at her, spatula in hand. “Against what? Brujos? What the fuck are they? We don’t know. How’d we get here? We don’t know. What’s happening? We don’t know. What’s really going on, Tess? We. Don’t. Know.”

  Her eyes widened. “You’re deaf? You can’t hear this attack?” She threw her arms out at her sides. “Something is attacking this cottage and if . . . if it breaks through, if . . .”

  “We don’t know shit.” He poured the whipped eggs into the frying pan, grabbed the spatula, folded celery, tomatoes, and mushrooms into the eggs. “And I’m hungry. I’m going to eat.”

  Just like that, the assault stopped. Silence suffused the cottage. Tess’s arms fell to her sides, she stared at the shuttered windows, the door, and dropped her head back and looked up into the dark belly of the skylight. Then she spun around with the knife clutched in her hand and vanished into the living room. Ian turned back to the stove, the frying pan, the omelets, to what he understood and could control.

  With the abrupt cessation of the assault, Tess’s desperation for light and visibility propelled her straight to the front door. If these shutters were anything like the ones at home, then they would have an inside lock, something simple that could be turned quickly.