Esperanza

by Trish J. MacGregor

  “I . . . think something happened to me when I died.” And that’s why I can see and talk to ghosts. “But I . . . can’t remember what it was.”

  “It’s possible. There’s been considerable research done on near-death experiences. You might want to pick up Dr. Raymond Moody’s book, Life After Life. He was one of the early pioneers into NDEs . . .”

  The pounding in her head now roared, drowning the doctor’s voice. The room turned a vivid blue, she didn’t have any idea what she said. She only wanted to get back to her mother’s place and crawl into bed. Whatever her response, it was functional enough for Dr. Yates to complete their interview because now Tess was outside, on the front porch, crouched in front of Whiskers, clutching the scrap of paper on which she had recorded the dream. “I remember you,” she whispered, petting him. “I remember you curled up on the front desk of a hotel and that you tagged after me, a man, and a dog. I just don’t understand what the hell any of it means.”

  He meowed, as if concurring, rubbed up against her legs once more, then bounded off into the lengthening shadows, chasing a lizard.

  As Tess drove out of Coral Gables, she smoothed the scrap of paper against the steering wheel. Ian, Nomad, Esperanza, brujos, mountains, hummingbirds. She would start with those six words, like a storyboard she might put together for an investigation.

  Ian. Nothing. She didn’t know anyone by that name, had never known anyone by that name. She had read all of Ian Fleming’s books, but that probably didn’t count. Could this Ian be the man with whom she, a dog, and a tuxedo cat were walking?

  Nomad. Zero. But she designated him as the dog.

  Esperanza. Other than the fact that the word translated as hope, she was clueless. But it felt familiar somehow, like the name of a childhood friend.

  Brujos. Witches. So?

  Mountains. What kind of mountains? Like the Catskills? Rockies? Alps? An image popped into her head of a snow-capped volcano. Hawaii? No snow on those volcanoes.

  Hummingbirds. Given her recent thoughts about hummingbirds, this word seemed important.

  Tess turned into a shopping center where one of the cafés had Wi-Fi and went inside with her laptop. She ordered broccoli cheese soup, a cappuccino, and found a vacant table at the window. She brought a notepad and pen out of her purse, Googled Esperanza.

  The links ranged from a resort in Cabo San Lucas to an organization that promoted Hispanic education to an organic clothing company. She clicked around randomly, but none of the articles seemed relevant. She finally clicked a link from an academic journal on world mythology:

  In Esperanza, Ecuador, it’s impossible to separate the mythology about the brujos from the mythology about the town itself. Among the Quechua Indians, the largest indigenous population in Ecuador, it’s believed the town was once a nonphysical place, a kind of virtual construct where souls in transition went to explore the afterlife. Here, these transitional souls could decide whether to release their hold on physical life or return to their bodies.

  Go to paypal to read the rest

  Excited, Tess returned to Google and typed in Esperanza, Ecuador. Dozens of links came up. From a bird-watcher’s site, she learned that the hummingbirds of Esperanza were among the most beautiful and rare in the world, capable of living at such a high altitude—13,200 feet—because of the profusion of flowers in and around Esperanza. Another Web site, for an Ecuadorian tour company in Quito, offered guided tours of Esperanza, but it was booked three years in advance. Photographs of the city filled another site—ancient stone buildings, labyrinthine streets, a park shaded by monkey-puzzle trees, rolling pastures where alpacas and llamas grazed.

  Something about the alpacas and llamas struck a visceral cord, but she couldn’t summon the particulars. She ran her fingers over the laptop’s screen, as if to feel the texture of the stones, the cool shade of those buildings, the softness of an alpaca’s fur. I’ve been there. I’ve walked those streets. Either that or she really had lost her mind and become a functioning crazy, capable of fooling most of the people most of the time. And now I talk to ghosts, too.

  But suppose the first possibility was true? Suppose she actually had gone to this place when she’d died or been in a coma and something profound had happened to her? The best argument against that possibility was that she would have been just consciousness without a physical body. Yet, she clearly remembered walking through a courtyard with a man and a dog, a cat trotting along with them, a bird—parrot?—sweeping along beside them. They all had been physical. Besides, if that had been the afterlife, wouldn’t her dad have been there? Dead ten years, Charlie Livingston would have been her tour guide.

  But maybe not. Josh, his mother, and their beautiful dog probably had been dead when she had spoken to them. No one had been there for them—except her, a stranger who through some fluke had been able to interact with them. They didn’t have any idea what to do or where to go until she had suggested they head into the trees and ask for help from someone they knew who had passed on. Had Josh’s father shown up?

  Her head ached with questions she couldn’t answer. She’d been to Ecuador twice, had traveled extensively around the country, but had never heard of Esperanza. It supposedly was a real place, a real location. She would check it out on her next trip to Ecuador which, given her medical bills, might happen in twenty years.

  In the immediate future, she decided to stop by the local video store on her way home and rent a couple of movies. She had no idea what was new, so she Googled Netflix new movies. One of the first to appear was the new George Clooney film, Michael Clayton.

  You look like George Clooney.

  Who?

  Tears flooded her eyes. She stared at Clooney, fists clenched against her thighs. I know you. Maybe not Clooney, but a man who could be his twin. Tess clearly recalled this conversation, but was it some dream snippet from the hospital, a drug-induced fantasy? It had come down, finally, to a fantasy world.

  Disgusted, she packed up her laptop and headed back out to the car. She turned on her iPhone, which immediately jingled, a text message from Maddie. A friend was giving her a ride, the focus group loved the new software, she wouldn’t be home for dinner. Tess sent her a recorded message, much easier than texting: “Hope the friend is male.”

  Ordinary life pinched the vein of Tess’s theories, cutting off its blood supply. She had died, been resuscitated, survived, and could now interact with ghosts. End of story.

  Palms loomed against the sky, their silhouettes in the dusk larger and more magnificent than they actually were. Everything she looked at seemed excessive in the day’s last light—the tomatoes and broccoli plants growing in the garden at the side of her mother’s house, the lush bushes of night-blooming jasmine, the acacia trees blazing with reddish-orange flowers.

  As she pulled into the empty driveway, the outside security lights blinked on. She retrieved her laptop and the Michael Clayton DVD from the passenger seat and slung her purse over her shoulder. The underside of her wrist itched and burned fiercely. She scratched at it, wondering what had bitten her. She hoped she could find Benadryl somewhere in her mother’s bathroom cabinet.

  Tess inserted her key into the lock but the door swung open before she turned the knob. No one in this household ever forgot to lock the door. She set the laptop down, reached into her bag, slipped out her weapon, a Glock model 26, palm-sized, that weighed 21.75 ounces. It held eleven rounds of nine-millimeter parabellum bullets, and was unencumbered by any safety latch. The safety features were built in; the gun wouldn’t fire unless you pulled the trigger. Draw, aim, fire: simple and clean.

  With her pulse throbbing in her throat, Tess slipped into the shadowed room, the security light’s glow spilling through the open door. Her mother’s living room had been trashed—furniture overturned, a floor lamp smashed, pictures and art torn from the walls, couch pillows sliced open, stuffing strewn around the room. A bookcase lay on its side, books littered the floor. Tess stepped over and around the fallen
objects.

  The skin on the underside of her wrist burned fiercely now, as if she had held a hot iron against it. She strained, listening for unusual noises, but heard only the hum of the fridge, the ice maker churning, the ticking of the clock on the kitchen wall. Tess moved forward slowly, cautiously, into her mother’s bedroom—and heard something behind her, a whisper of air, and spun around. A figure darted for the open door. “FBI!” she shouted. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  The person didn’t stop. She fired low, aiming for the leg.

  A man shrieked, crashed forward, and rolled, clutching his leg. Tess hit the nearest wall switch and ran over to the intruder. A thin Hispanic, bearded, wearing jeans, a work shirt. He breathed through clenched teeth, hands already slick with his own blood, words spilling out in Spanish. “My calf . . . you . . . shot away . . . my calf.”

  Tess answered in Spanish. “I’ll be glad to call nine-one-one as soon as you tell me what the hell you’re doing in my house.”

  The tendons in his neck strained, threatening to pop through the skin. “I . . . help me,” he pleaded, his voice soft, desperate. “. . . It is inside me, forcing me . . .” Then his head jerked from one side to the other, his body bucked, he gasped—and spoke in English, his voice hard, tight, distinctly different. “It appears that I cannot seize you, Tess Livingston, that you are shielded. But I can seize your mother, niece, and partner just as I have seized this man. And I will seize them, one after another, if you try to find Esperanza.”

  What the fuck. “Sit up. Back against the wall. C’mon, do it, fast.”

  He laughed, slapped his bloody hands against the floor, pushed up. “I will show you what your loved ones will suffer if you defy me.”

  The man’s head suddenly snapped back and he screeched and crashed back to the floor, thrashing as if with convulsions, his agonized screams echoing. Then he began to bleed from his eyes and ears, nostrils and mouth, the pores of his skin. Blood seeped from under his fingernails, ran down his chin, and he started to choke, to gag. Blood rapidly pooled around his body and streamed across the floor, into the cracks of the tile, so much blood that the stink nauseated her.

  Horrified, unable to wrench her eyes away from him, Tess scrambled back toward the counter, groping blindly behind her for the phone. Something emerged from his head and nostrils, a dark mist, and drifted upward, forming what appeared to be a small, dark cloud of smoke. It hovered for a moment in the circles of light, then moved swiftly toward a window and passed right through the glass. The man went still, silent. Tess whipped around, hands shaking violently as she punched out 911.

  “What’s the nature of your emergency?” asked the operator.

  “There’s . . . a dead man. On my living room floor.” She spat out her name, address, and the operator assured her someone would be there shortly.

  Tess dropped the receiver into the cradle and backed out of the room, eyes flicking here, there, seeking the dark mist, the cloud of smoke, whatever the hell she had seen. She backed through the door, then pounded down the ramp, the man’s final words ringing in her skull. I will show you what your loved ones will suffer if you defy me.

  Sixteen

  Dominica soared through the window of the house on stilts, stunned that Tess had been able to see her, even more shocked that she didn’t seem to have any idea what was going on. Was it possible that she’d returned from the dead with no memory about what had happened to her? If so, then the joke was on the chasers, now wasn’t it? Ian apparently returned with his memories mostly intact, had somehow retained them while he was in the nuthouse—and the other transitional had returned with amnesia. Ian would head for Ecuador forty years in Tess’s past and Tess would stay right here. Payback.

  She thought herself back to Esperanza and immediately noticed how many locals were compromised. Apparently Ben had implemented their defense plans, which included seizing locals so that weapons could be gathered and stored, fuel trucks could be moved, so they would be prepared for any incursion into the city by this liberation group.

  Dominica dipped into the posada looking for Nomad, but didn’t sense the dog’s presence. Business at the inn appeared to be slow—the lobby with the inviting fireplace was practically deserted, the front desk was empty, tables in the restaurant were set, but only one couple dined. A quick circuit of the cottages revealed that only one was occupied. One.

  Apparently word had gotten around through the Internet that Esperanza was dangerous for tourists. While bulletins were issued for other South American cities because of political situations, drug runners, terrorist groups, Esperanza was deemed risky because of its homicide rate. Good. Maybe that would be enough to keep this liberation group away.

  Dominica moved quickly out of the city, toward Gigante. Windmills covered the countryside, supplementing the power of the hydroelectric plants along the rivers that kept the cities and towns in these mountains lit, the Internet functioning, that maintained a quality of life despite anything the brujos did. Kill the source of the power, she thought, and Esperanza and every miserable hovel north of Río Palo would be isolated and vulnerable, unable to communicate. Everything was being put into place so that when an attack was imminent, the power grid could be brought down within minutes. That was how they would ultimately triumph and create a city of brujos.

  On the street where Manuel Ortega lived, she assumed the form of a simple Quechua woman. She had used this humble, nonthreatening form many times to move through Ecuadorian cities. She hoped she would find Nomad with Manuel. She’d last seen them together the day that the dog and Tess, as a transitional, had traveled to Gigante to find Manuel.

  But the driveway was empty, the windows dark, and the door swung open into utter emptiness. Everything was gone. Everything. No furniture, nothing on the walls, nothing anywhere. The hollow shell seemed to laugh at her, mock her. She left the house and moved quickly into the woods, shouting, “Wayra, I know you can hear me. Show yourself.”

  But he didn’t appear in either of his forms. She shed her human form and thought of him, of the shape-shifter she had loved, and willed herself to find him. It took a while to locate his unique frequency, but when she homed in on it, she ended up in the bar of an inn in Otavalo.

  Wayra was playing pool with a European tourist. He sensed her presence the moment she appeared—his shoulders tensed, his eyes darted around the room. “You’ve got it,” he said to his opponent, and laid down the pool stick and went over to the bar to settle his bill.

  Wayra, barfly. It would be funny if it weren’t so out of character. Dominica looked quickly around for a suitable host, and slipped into one of the waitresses. No fight from her. Dominica told her to follow the tall, handsome man and she did so, right outside to his truck. When he turned, she said, “Pool? In a bar? Oh, Wayra, you really have descended into mud.”

  He leaned against the truck, arms folded across his chest, and laughed. “Hey, I’ve gotten really good at pool. What do you want, Nica?”

  “The truth.”

  “Right. Which truth? The one you hope to hear or the one you refuse to hear?”

  “In 1968, I couldn’t seize anyone. I had to melt into them, gently, and the only time that restriction could be overcome was with a legion of my people.”

  “That’s not a question, Nica.”

  “What kind of war is this?” she demanded. “What are the rules? Who is this Manuel Ortega? Who is Charlie?”

  “Your real question is why are you having trouble meeting your agenda? Why should I help you answer that?”

  She wished she could hate him. “Because you have to.”

  “Really? Who says I do, Nica? You? Your arrogance is stunning.”

  “I learned it from you.”

  He burst out laughing. “I’m afraid I can’t take credit for that.”

  “Why’re you in Otavalo?”

  “It’s where I choose to be.”

  “You’re waiting for Ian. Or Tess.”

  “I’m waiting for God
ot, for garlic and sapphires, Seth, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Jerry Garcia. Leave me alone. Go play with Ben.”

  “You’ll regret this. I promise you. I don’t know what you and the chasers think you’re going to accomplish with just two transitionals, but I’ll make sure they never get to Esperanza.”

  “Do what you must.” With that, he got into his truck and sped off into the darkness.

  Dominica ran after the truck, hollering, “Coward, you’re a coward.” Her voice echoed, rising and falling in the stillness. He didn’t return.

  Enraged that he had shunned her like this, she slipped out of the waitress and thought herself back to her town house. Ben paced the living room, a cell phone pressed to his ear. He sounded agitated and signaled he would be off the call shortly.

  She realized the retriever pup hadn’t bounded into the room to greet her. He wasn’t on the porch, either, where the animals usually sunned themselves. The Persian looked up at her with those sad amber eyes and meowed. The conure, perched on the railing, whistled and said, “Pup, pup.” Shit. The retriever had left.

  “I didn’t expect you back so soon.” Ben stepped out onto the porch. “The pup left during the night,” he added, reading her thoughts. “The cat and bird have been sitting out here for hours, like they’re waiting for the pup to show up again.”

  She drew her phony fingers through the cat’s phony fur. Soft, but not like in the physical world. “Where did it go, Ben?”

  He shrugged. “No one knows.”

  “We need to know. We need to find the answers to those kinds of questions.”

  “Yes, but not right this second. That was Pearl. Rafael has been cleared by the counselor and they’re helping the group that’s readying the defensive perimeter. As of right now, three thousand locals have been seized and are being used to implement our defensive measures.”