Nomad suddenly barked and dashed toward a house with six cars in the driveway and several bikes on the sidewalk. The windows were open, music drifted out into the cool air—John Lennon crooning to give peace a chance. She caught up with the dog and before she could knock, the door was flung open.
Manuel stood there in jeans, a dove-gray pullover sweater, black running shoes. His dark hair was combed away from his face, revealing an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear. His face collapsed with astonishment. “Dios mio.” He stepped out onto the porch, shut the door, scratched Nomad behind the ears, and glared at Tess. “You should not be here. It is much less safe than the city.”
“That’s why Nomad is with me. I need answers, Manuel. And I’d like to hire you to drive Ian and me to the nearest airport.”
He touched her elbow, urging her down the driveway, the dog trotting along behind them. “We’ll go someplace safe to talk. Where we won’t be interrupted.”
Or seen, she thought.
They walked in silence for half a mile. She sensed his unease, but couldn’t tell if it was due to her unexpected arrival or that he was afraid to be outside, here and now, with her. The road turned to gravel and dirt, houses thinned out, thickets of scrawny pines appeared. Except for a scudding of clouds to the west, the sky was a pure, unadulterated blue.
“Señorita Tess,” Manuel began.
“Please call me Tess. The ‘señorita’ stuff makes me feel old.”
For the first time since they’d left his house, he smiled. “You are many things, but old is not one of them.” Manuel gestured toward a large greenhouse. On either side of it was a fenced pasture where horses grazed. “We can speak freely in there.”
“Why can’t we speak freely right here? No one’s watching. No one can hear us.”
Manuel shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looked around nervously. “It is too easy to be surprised by brujos out here.”
“Let’s start with these brujos. What are they, Manuel?”
His frown forced his dark, bushy brows closer together, so they looked like feathery wings that might lift off his face. He slipped a Zippo lighter from his sweatshirt pocket, plucked the cigarette from behind his ear, lit it with a flourish. As he snapped the lid shut, Tess remembered that her dad had owned an identical silver Zippo lighter that he kept with him even after he’d quit smoking. Whenever he was preparing for a case, he used to snap the Zippo’s lid open and shut, just as Manuel had, but repeatedly, so that it clicked like castanets. She and her mother used to joke that without the lighter, Charlie would be a mess of nervous tics.
Manuel inhaled deeply, with obvious satisfaction. “I told you already.” He dropped his head back, blew smoke rings into the air, snapped the lighter open and shut. “They are lost souls.”
“That’s an expression. To me it means someone is screwed up.” She stabbed at her temple. “Loco. Crazy. Nuts. Is that what you mean?”
“They are . . . spirits. Fantasmas.”
“Ghosts?” She balked. “You people are terrified of ghosts?”
Manuel blew more smoke rings, kept snapping the lighter’s lid. Nomad sat between them, vigilant, tense. “Let me try again.” He switched to Spanish and proceeded to describe a worldview that was so far removed from her beliefs and experience that it sounded like fantasy. Hungry ghosts stuck in the dimension closest to physical life. Ghosts that could possess humans. Ghosts that assumed human form anywhere north of the Río Palo by drawing on the residual power of the area from when it was a nonphysical location. Whatever that meant.
It all sounded nuts. He sounded nuts. When you were dead you were dead, that was it, end of story. Except that she didn’t really believe that. In Quito, she had felt her dead father around, lights had come on by themselves, she’d even caught a whiff of the aftershave he often had used. But before she could say anything, Manuel’s eyes fixed on something over her right shoulder and Nomad emitted a low, throaty growl, the fur along his spine rising. Manuel dropped his cigarette, crushed it with his shoe, then touched her elbow, urging her forward, toward the greenhouse.
“We must go inside, Tess. Quickly.”
The urgency in his voice alarmed her. Nomad darted out in front of them, leading the way. Off to her left, through the trees, fog rolled toward them. They broke into a run.
Manuel pushed the door open and they darted into the warm, humid building. Tall mango and papaya trees brushed the skylights, branches sagged with ripe fruit—oranges, grapefruits, avocados. Colorful patches of lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, and cauliflower covered the ground. It smelled like high summer in Florida, when the rains came and heat and humidity hung so thickly in the air that you could almost taste the soil, salt, ripening fruit, fertile earth. Manuel quickly shut the heavy metal door, bolted it, pressed a green button on the keypad to the right of the door. Somewhere in town, a siren started shrieking. Another button activated the accordion shutters outside and they rumbled and clattered, closing off the greenhouse walls, the skylights.
As light inside the greenhouse diminished, emergency beacons winked on. Nomad barked and tore up a row lined with banana trees. He finally stopped and started digging frantically. Manuel dropped to his knees beside the dog, dug his fingers down into mulch and soil, pulled open a trapdoor. A hinged, wooden ramp unfolded, Nomad raced down it. Tess and Manuel hurried after him, footfalls echoing as they descended fifteen feet through twilight.
Above them, the assault began, a relentless pounding and battering muted by the mounds of earth that covered them. At the bottom of the ramp, Manuel punched a button on yet another keypad, the trapdoor shut, emergency lights flared. A flight of wooden stairs took them down even deeper and the assault now sounded distant, unreal.
She followed Manuel into a long corridor so narrow that she couldn’t extend her arms without knocking something off the dozens of wall shelves that held bags of rice, canned goods, thirty-gallon containers of water, tools, even propane tanks. The corridor emptied into a dimly lit but comfortable room where Nomad already lapped water from a bowl on the floor. Manuel hit a switch for the lights and the room lit up with floor lamps, coffee table lamps, recessed lighting. He locked the door, Tess looked around slowly.
What the fuck. “A panic room.” But far more comfortable. Couches, beds, a table, sink, faucets, TV. “My God, Manuel, who built this?”
“A rich colonel from Gigante provided the money for our few shelters like this one. We’re about forty feet underground. The fog cannot penetrate here. We have learned to defend ourselves.”
“Defend yourselves? Jesus, you’re like kids terrified of the bogeyman. You’re not defending yourselves. You have defenses. There’s a difference.”
Something dark and terrible entered his eyes. He spoke in a hoarse, choked voice. “Ten years ago, when the attacks started, my sister and I were riding horses in a field behind our house. A fog rose. It moved over us so swiftly that my sister didn’t escape. I felt it the moment she was seized. I heard her calling to me as she emerged from the fog. I saw her outstretched arms. And I ran. When the brujo used up her body, she started bleeding from her eyes and nose, her skin, from beneath her toenails, her fingernails. I saw it all, Tess. And so yes, I hide well and deeply.”
He had just described a bleed-out, like that of the man outside the bodega. Even though his description was vivid, she felt it had happened to someone else, not to Manuel personally. Why would he pretend these events had happened to him? But she couldn’t bring herself to disbelieve him, either. He felt too familiar and trustworthy.
“Where is Ian?” Manuel suddenly asked, as if just remembering him.
“At the inn, waiting for the doctor.” She told him what had happened at the inn earlier, about Granger and his men holding her and Ian at gunpoint, chasing brujos into the fog, about Nomad and the sock with the message pinned to it.
“I am so sorry, Tess.” Misery carved deep lines into his face. “Granger and his men were supposed to protect you and Ian, no
t harass and antagonize you. Nomad once ran with the brujos, with Dominica, who commands the largest tribe of them. He knows the brujos better than any of us. What did the message say?”
“I don’t know. I think it was written in Quechua. Manuel, I’d like to hire you to drive us to Quito.”
“Wait, is Ian in the cottage alone?”
The way he said it made her feel guilty that she hadn’t waited with Ian until the doctor had arrived. But Ian had been insistent that she go on without him and find a way out of the city as quickly as possible. “By now the doctor has gotten there.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
“Ed said he called the doctor. Why would he lie about it?”
“It’s not that he would lie, but that brujos might use the situation to their advantage, to harm Ian.”
“Why would they harm him? Why did they attack the cottage we’re staying in? What the hell’s going on, Manuel?”
He ignored her question, brought out his cell. “I need to call the inn, but the cell doesn’t work down here. I have to get closer to the surface. I’ll be right back. Nomad will stay with you.”
Manuel hurried out and as soon as the door shut behind him, Nomad ran over to it, whining and pawing at the wood. Then he leaped up, his powerful legs slammed against the door, paws pressing down against the latch, and it swung open.
Nomad tore out of the room, Tess’s stomach churned with anxiety. Why had everyone they’d met here ignored their questions? How could a dog run with ghosts?
Tess burst through the door, into the narrow corridor. The emergency light was still on, but in her haste to reach the greenhouse, she knocked canned goods and tools off the shelves, stumbled over them, nearly lost her balance. At the end of the corridor, she felt inexplicably winded, her heart hammered, and she had to pause to catch her breath. She peered up the flight of stairs to the ramp and, beyond it, the open trapdoor to the greenhouse. It suddenly seemed an impossible distance, even though she knew it wasn’t.
Move. As she started up the stairs, she suddenly felt on the verge of passing out. She sank to her knees on one of the steps, then doubled over, allowing the blood to rush into her head. For a moment, she thought she heard her mother calling to her—Tess, hon, we’re here—and the scar on her right thigh itched and throbbed terribly. Then the dizziness passed and she was able to move forward again, to the top of the stairs and then onto the ramp. She rubbed at her leg, alarmed by what had just happened. Was that a telepathic SOS? Was her mother in some sort of trouble?
Her leg muscles ached as she went up the steep ramp. The cacophony outside now sounded so loud, it was as if meteorites were crashing against the greenhouse shutters. And where was Manuel? He’d said he had to get closer to the surface, not that he needed to go into the greenhouse.
She hurried out into the echoing greenhouse, the soft glow of the emergency lights. At the end of a row of fruit trees, Manuel was arguing with a tall, thin man whose black hair brushed his shoulders. Brujo? Had to be. Nothing human could penetrate this fortress. But Manuel had said no brujo could get through it, either.
From where she was, she couldn’t tell if Manuel was scared, but he definitely looked pissed. She darted up another row, body shielded from their view by the trees and thick bushes. She couldn’t hear them over the echoing clamor, but now and then she caught sight of Manuel, then of the mystery man. He didn’t look any more ghostlike than the men in the field had. If anything, he looked Spanish, exotically handsome with a strong, square jaw, eyes set deeply into their sockets, mouth proud.
She slipped into the trees, moving quickly, and glimpsed them through the low-hanging branches. As the interloper grabbed hold of Manuel’s arm, Tess slammed her bag into the back of the man’s head. He lurched forward, hands to his head, and was just turning when Tess tackled him. They slammed to the ground, rolled once, Manuel dancing around them, waving his arms, shouting shit she couldn’t hear. Then, between one blink and another, Tess felt the man’s bones popping and rearranging themselves, his body shrinking, arms pulling back into his chest and reemerging as something bonier, covered with thick hair. She knew that something hideous and extraordinarily strange was happening and leaped away from him.
The clamor suddenly stopped, she heard the sharp, startled explosions of her own breath as she stared in horror. Her brain refused to translate what she saw. The thing on the floor in front of her was neither man nor animal, but some grotesque amalgam—the ears and rear legs of a dog or a wolf, the nose, mouth, and arms of a man; human skin on the arms, fur covering the rear legs; the shape of a human spine vanishing, a tail appearing. And then the abomination became a black dog with tea-colored eyes. Nomad.
“Sweet Christ.”
“Carajo,” Manuel spat, raking his fingers back through his hair.
Nomad’s ears twitched, his eyes bored holes through her.
“What . . . what do I call it, Manuel? What . . .”
“Wayra is a shape shifter. The last of his kind.”
Awe and revulsion rushed through her. This creature had been in the living room when she and Ian had made love, had been a part of their lives since they’d arrived four days ago, had heard everything they had whispered. They had befriended him outside of the bodega, he had ridden on the bus with them to Esperanza. She had sensed his unusual intelligence, but this? The stuff of legends and myths here in front of her? Friend, companion, sentry, shape-shifter. Uh-huh, right, lock me up.
“Look, I really need to know what’s going on, what Esperanza is, how—”
“Tess, I’ll answer all your questions, but not right now. We don’t have much time. I just spoke to Ed, who said that Ian fled the inn a while ago. We must find him. He’s in danger. He—”
“I’m not moving until you answer my questions.” She didn’t realize she shouted until she heard her voice echoing in the cavernous greenhouse. “Please,” she finished, her voice softer, controlled.
Manuel raised his hands, patting the air, trying to calm her. They both looked at Nomad, who sank to the floor, doing dog things—scratching at himself, sniffing, then moving off into the trees. Even shape-shifters have to take a piss. Manuel now spoke English clearly, without hesitation or accent, as though it were his native language. That was nearly as strange as what he said.
“Myth and folklore tell us that thousands of years ago, Esperanza was a nonphysical place, a kind of virtual world for the dead, the near dead, the comatose. It was where the soul could explore the afterlife and realize that death isn’t the end, that it’s just another state of consciousness. Here, the soul could choose to pass on or to return to physical life.”
“Excuse me, but this sounds a lot like fiction, Manuel.”
“Isn’t myth a kind of archetypal fiction?”
One point for Manuel. “Go on.”
“During this time, brujos permeated Esperanza. Their ultimate goal was to become physical, so they seized souls and lived out the physical lives of the transitionals who stood at the threshold between life and death. Five centuries ago, a group of more evolved souls fought the brujos—”
“Evolved souls. What’s that mean?”
“They were called cazadores de luz—light chasers. Their job was to help these brujos forward in their afterlife journey. A difficult task because most brujos were—and still are—stuck close to physical existence, held there because of emotions and beliefs they carried with them into death. Rage, hatred, racism, envy, intolerance, sadism, cruelty, revenge, terror.”
“So, we’re talking about angels and demons?”
“The terms vary from culture to culture, religion to religion. But forget labels. I’m speaking in the language of myth, archetypes, legends. And in this story, the chasers crushed the brujos in that battle five centuries ago. Some were so shocked and demoralized by the loss of the battle that they sought release from their lives as predators and the chasers were able to guide these brujos to other realms within the afterlife. But for most of them, the
ir defeat only increased their hatred of chasers and their hunger for physical life.”
“What happened after the defeat?”
“Esperanza was brought into the physical world and closed to transitional souls, which essentially cut off the source of the brujos’ endless feasting. After the defeat, most of the brujos left Ecuador and spread out across the world. They grouped into tribes, learned how to seize bodies for physical pleasure or to familiarize themselves with the world as it marched toward the twenty-first century. They evolved. Now the chasers are fewer in number. They can mitigate but not stop the incursion of brujos into Esperanza and the larger world.”
“That’s quite a mythology, Manuel. How does it fit with brujos now? Has the myth leaped to life?”
“The attacks have been happening here in Esperanza for the last ten years, sporadically, often on tourists, but also on locals. We can defend ourselves, but don’t know how to defeat them.”
“Why’re they after Ian and me?”
“I don’t know.”
She stabbed her thumb toward Nomad, who paced restlessly. “So where’s he fit in that mythology?”
“Other than what I told you, I have no idea. You’ll have to ask him. We need to get moving, to get out of here before the next wave of attacks.”
“And go where? I thought you said we’re safe here.”
“There’s a lull. They’re regrouping. We need to leave while we can. This place isn’t completely secure. There was a call from a café in Esperanza, where Ian is. He apparently took refuge there after the doctor was seized and threatened him. Juanito will pick him up, we’ll meet at another location.”
She felt used up, her head ached, she had more questions. But she trusted Manuel and his sense of urgency and nodded. Manuel snapped something in Quechua to Nomad and the dog bolted forward and raced up the corridor, through the immense silence. Tess and Manuel followed him, fast.
Esperanza Page 12
