Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

  Several days had passed before Tess’s suspicions had taken hold, and by then, Dominica had a significant head start. Tess, her lover, and her mother planned to team up with Wayra to search for Maddie, but they were so involved emotionally he felt they would only slow him down. So he’d decided to do it on his own. He’d left suddenly the second week in October and had been on the move ever since.

  He reached the edge of the trees, mostly pines and oaks. A cool breeze strummed the branches, his shadow companion melted into the shade. He could hear the tractors now, growling beasts that churned through the landfill, stirring up dust, old smells. Vultures circled overhead, smaller birds cried out.

  “You’ll have to get right into where they’re digging, Wayra.” Charlie Livingston materialized beside him, decked out as usual in his white shirt, slacks, hat, and white shoes. His Ben Franklin glasses stuck up from his shirt pocket, a fat Cuban cigar was tucked behind his right ear, and he snapped his silver Zippo lighter constantly. “And you’ll have to shift to really get a sense of it.”

  “I’d appreciate it, Charlie, if you would save me a whole bunch of time and just tell me where Dominica is.”

  “I don’t know where she is. Just because I’m dead, it doesn’t mean I know everything. Besides, even if I did know, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. The chasers are threatening to kick me off the council. I’m on probation and now they’re monitoring me.”

  “On probation?” Wayra laughed. “What’s that mean?”

  “Nothing good, I can tell you that.”

  Charlie, dead more than ten years, looked as solid and real as the trees. They’d traveled together intermittently since he’d left Esperanza, and Charlie often provided hints and clues about where to go, new insights into Dominica’s agenda. As Maddie’s grandfather, he had a vested interest in Wayra’s search. But he was also a member of the light chasers, the consortium of evolved souls who had been fighting brujos for millennia. Charlie and the other chasers knew that unless Dominica was annihilated once and for all, she would surface elsewhere. She would organize hapless ghosts into a formidable force and the struggle between good and evil would continue ad nauseam.

  Wayra often wondered what was more important to Charlie—finding his granddaughter or finding Dominica. “Why’re you on probation?”

  Charlie made an impatient gesture, slipped out the cigar, lit it with a flourish, and puffed. The smoke was real enough so that Wayra could smell it. “For meddling, that’s what they called it. But honestly, Wayra, if I hadn’t meddled, if the chasers hadn’t opened Esperanza to transitional souls, where would we be?”

  Maybe in a better place, Wayra thought, but didn’t say it. For centuries, Esperanza had been a nonphysical location for transitionals, the souls of people at the brink of death. There, they decided if they wanted to return to their bodies or move on into the afterlife. Brujos, the ancient ones like Dominica and her former tribe, had preyed on these souls, seized them, and lived out their mortal lives. Five hundred years ago, the chasers had brought Esperanza into the physical world in the hopes this would end brujo domination. It had, for a while.

  But in those intervening centuries, Dominica and the ancient ones had evolved, learned to seize humans, control them, had used them in despicable ways. They had built a virtual city outside of Esperanza, gained numbers and power, and a decade ago had begun preying on the people of Esperanza again. And last year, the chasers had opened the city to two transitional souls—Tess and the man who became her lover, both of whom were in comas. And that was the beginning of the end for Dominica’s tribe.

  “Don’t the chasers want Dominica found?” Wayra asked.

  “Of course they do. But the council has all these incredibly arcane rules about how things should be done. And, well, I’m sorry, but a lot of the council members haven’t been physical for centuries. They don’t understand what the physical world is now. I do.”

  True enough. But even ten years outside of physical existence was a long time in today’s rapidly changing world. “Do you tweet, Charlie?”

  “Shit, no. I don’t see the point of a hundred-and-forty-character limit. But I taught them about the Internet, Wayra. I told them they’d better learn the technology if they wanted to keep pace with the twenty-first century. I educated these council members on what social networking is.” He threw his arms out to his sides. “And I learned what I know from my granddaughter after I died. Most of them lack curiosity, Wayra. It’s their greatest failing. I mean, please, if you want to be in charge, you’ve got to be curious, right?”

  “I hear you, Charlie. You’re preaching to the choir.”

  “I’m the most recently dead on the chaser council and the only one who still has physical ties to the living. Ten years is a blink in the cosmic scheme of things. It’s probably why they haven’t already kicked me out.”

  They were now deep in the trees. The tractors sounded louder, more invasive. Beyond where he stood, Wayra could see a sparrow hawk circling the landfill. “So tell me, Charlie. How badly are chasers outnumbered by brujos?”

  Charlie puffed deeply on his cigar, then lifted his foot, stubbed it out on the bottom of his shoe, and stuck it behind his ear again. “It’s not like anyone has taken a census, okay? But the way I see it, the ones we call brujos, like Dominica, are either so ancient or so aware that they know how to manipulate energy in the afterworld, they use the energy to their own advantage. Since Dominica’s tribe in Esperanza was annihilated, their numbers are far fewer than they used to be, but still formidable.”

  Wayra should have known that asking Charlie what seemed like a simple question would not render a simple answer. But this was the first time any chaser had attempted to explain the nuances to him. “Give me a number, Charlie.”

  “Call it eight to ten thousand of the truly ancient, evil ones, the hungry ghosts, the brujos.” He whispered now, as though he thought one of the other chasers might be eavesdropping. “There are tens of millions of ghosts in the lower astrals who would just love to hook up with an ancient one like Dominica and join a tribe where they could learn what she knows. They hang around close to physical existence because of guilt, confusion, anger, hatred, revenge, lust. Here you find criminals, some suicides, religious, social, and political wackos who propagated hatred and intolerance when they were alive. Brujos recruit easily from this group and teach them what they know and turn them into hungry ghosts. But among the astrals you also find souls who are just lost. They might not have had any kind of spiritual beliefs when they were alive, so when they died, they had no idea what was supposed to happen. Some in this group have tremendous fears and issues to overcome. We’ve recruited among them. They usually need rehab, but turn out to be quite proficient.”

  Eight to ten thousand Dominicas running around in the afterlife was eight to ten thousand too many. And that other figure, tens of millions of ghosts from which brujos could recruit, whom they could convert, staggered the imagination. The odds against success suddenly seemed impossibly huge to Wayra and that terrified him. “No offense, but your descriptions resemble personality types in physical life.”

  Charlie looked disgusted. “There’s not much difference. One group is alive, the other group is dead. Do you have any idea how many people live their lives without any thought whatsoever about their own mortality? Death is the shadow that drives physical life. Eventually, you all die. Even you, Wayra.”

  Maybe, Wayra thought. For centuries, he had wondered if his battle with Dominica was what kept him alive. Following this line of thinking, what would happen if he finally caught her and annihilated her so she was free to move on in the afterlife? Maybe, in the deepest recesses of his heart, he didn’t want to find her for fear it would mean the end of his own life. He and Charlie had discussed this in depth before. He didn’t feel any need to go into it again.

  “It sounds like some of the dead can’t move beyond a certain point in the afterlife anymore, Charlie.”

  “More and more of them
are getting stuck and we’re not sure why.”

  The implications of stuck souls troubled Wayra. It meant the brujos would have even more ghosts to recruit. “Any other groups of ghosts I should know about?”

  “Hundreds of small, independent groups and unorganized loners. They often act as guides and helpers for the living. They aren’t involved in the battle against brujos. Only the chasers do that. But the largest category of ghosts consists of mothers and fathers, children, sisters and brothers, lovers, friends, even animals who hang around close to physical life because of their love for the people they left. This category holds our best candidates for recruitment.”

  “You’re avoiding my question, Charlie. What’s the present number of chasers?”

  He looked utterly miserable. “About four thousand.”

  “Christ. We’re outnumbered two to one.”

  “Yeah, it sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “It means we’ve got to work that much harder.”

  It also meant they couldn’t afford any snafus, Wayra thought, and dropped to his hands and knees on a bed of pine needles and leaves, and started to shift. His spine crackled and popped, bones shifting, strengthening, rearranging themselves. The first few dozen times this had happened, after he had been transformed at the tail end of the twelfth century, the agony had nearly driven him, howling, into death. Now that his threshold was higher, the pain didn’t register. His human skin went next, rapidly replaced by fur. This part had never hurt, but it should have. The skin was the largest human organ and kept dermatologists and plastic surgeons rich even in tough economic times. He much preferred his animal fur, the color of coal and softer than an infant’s skin.

  Then his limbs transformed and this part was just strange, not painful except when his thumbs were absorbed into his paws. But at that very moment, his animal and shifter senses kicked in, as if to compensate for the loss of physical dexterity. And those senses could follow anything anywhere, backward and forward in time, and do it in such amazing detail that he never mourned the loss of his thumbs.

  The most painful part of his transformation, even after all these centuries, was when his face, organs, blood, and consciousness changed all at once. It didn’t always happen that way, sometimes these areas changed separately. But when he was in a hurry, as he was now, the pain briefly stole all his senses, human and animal, and he stood there blind, deaf, dumb, beyond redemption, a boy born in 1162 and turned into a shifter eighteen years later. Then, somehow, his transformation all came together and he was a dog/wolf hybrid, the last of his kind.

  Wayra trotted through the trees, snout raised into the air, reading it, following Dominica’s putrid stench straight into the landfill. He was aware of Charlie moving alongside him, and of the sparrow hawk he’d seen earlier now circling overhead, spiraling lower and lower. A tractor lumbered toward him and Wayra dashed left to get out of the way. The driver saw him, stopped, bolted upright and waved his arms, shouting, “Hey, someone get this goddamn dog outta here.”

  He kept moving toward the source of the stench, up a steep hill blanketed with birds—crows, gulls, blackbirds, vultures. As he neared them, the birds cried out, shrieked, and fluttered upward, a dark mass. At the top of the hill, he started digging, fast, wildly, down through layers of garbage, through a profusion of odors. Some odors held stories, others contained an entire history, all of them whispered, Follow me, learn who and what I am. But the overpowering stink of Dominica kept him focused.

  Wayra dug deeper, deeper, Dominica’s smell now mixed in with the fetid stink of decaying flesh. Some of the crows and blackbirds returned, settling around him and pecking at the garbage he’d uncovered. Charlie, crouched beside him, kept muttering, “Hurry up, Wayra, hurry up. A couple of tractor drivers are on their way up here.”

  Then he found it, about two feet down, a rotting hand protruding from a filthy, bloodstained sleeve. It smelled male, young, early twenties. Wayra grabbed hold of the sleeve and tried to pull the body out, but the weight of the dirt was too great. He moved to the left and dug fast to uncover the rest of the body.

  “Scat!” shouted one of the men who appeared in front of him, waving his arms. “You can’t go digging around up— Holy shit. Clem, take a look. The dog found a body.”

  Wayra uncovered the front of the young man’s chest, his bloodied shirt. Maggots slithered out from between the buttons, emerged from his pocket, crawled from the dirt around the man’s neck. Wayra knew he had bled out. Dominica’s stink nearly overwhelmed him.

  He leaned in closer, inhaling the man’s scent, following it, trying to find the thread of his personal story. But too many smells were mixed in with it. Then Clem and Hank, his companion, dropped down next to the body and Wayra smelled them, too. But their scents were radically different; they smelled alive and Wayra was able to filter out their odors and concentrate on the young man.

  “Shit, just like the other two,” Hank muttered.

  A cop reached the top of the hill, obviously winded from the exertion. “What’ve we got?”

  “Another body,” Clem replied, and he and Hank moved aside so the cop could see.

  The cop pulled the edge of his jacket over his nose and mouth and peered down. “Jesus. Another bleed-out. I’m supposed to call this in to the feds. Did either of you touch the body?”

  “Fuck, no,” said Clem.

  “Did the dog?”

  “He just dug it up,” Hank replied.

  “You sure?”

  “What difference does it make?” Clem asked.

  “Because they don’t yet know if the virus is host specific.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Hank kept his arm across his nose and mouth, breathing into his elbow, muffling his voice. “Speak English.”

  The cop looked irritated. “It means they don’t know if the virus is sticking just to humans. If it can leap between species, then the dog could be contaminated. Does he have a collar or anything you can grab?”

  “No collar,” said Hank. “And I’m not grabbing for the dog, Sergeant. I’m not getting bit. You want him, you grab for him.”

  Wayra started backing away from the body, the men. The cop said, “Nice doggie, nice doggie.” He came toward Wayra, snapping his fingers, speaking softly, and Wayra kept backing away from him, growling, baring his teeth.

  “C’mon now, doggie. I don’t want to shoot you.”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Hank snapped. “Just let him go. You said yourself they don’t know shit about this virus.”

  “Got my orders, Hank.”

  “This is such bullshit,” Clem said angrily. “The point is the body, not the dog.”

  Wayra whirled around and raced down the other side of the mound, the men still shouting at each other. The hawk shrieked nearby, and when Wayra glanced back, he saw it diving toward the cop, who stumbled back, lost his balance, and tumbled out of sight, down the other side of the hill of garbage. Wayra raced on into the trees, Dominica’s smell still so thick in his nostrils he continued to follow it through time.

  She had seized the young man while he was snorkeling in the gulf with his girlfriend. It seemed that Dominica was instructing another brujo on how to seize and control humans. Once she had shown her new recruit how to do it, she’d leaped out of the man and into the girlfriend, and the other brujo had taken the young man. Neither human realized it until they were on one of the deserted islands and brujo lust had overpowered them. Both of them bled out within minutes. Later, the rising tide washed their bodies out into the gulf.

  Even though Wayra’s sense of smell provided an abundance of information, it didn’t give him everything. Huge gaps existed in his knowledge. How did the man’s body get to the landfill? What had happened to his girlfriend’s body? Where had Dominica left Maddie’s body while she’d been teaching her recruit how to seize humans? He needed to look at a map and find the quickest way to the gulf.

  As he neared the end of the woods, he shifted into his human form again, grateful th
at the man who had transformed him so many centuries ago had done so while Wayra was clothed. It meant that whenever he moved back to his human form, he would still be dressed in whatever he was wearing when he had shifted. It meant that anything he was carrying in his pockets would still be there. He didn’t know why this was so; it simply was. As he slapped his hands against his dusty jeans, he heard the squeal of a siren—distant, but headed this way.

  “They’ll be looking for a black dog, Wayra,” said Charlie.

  “Idiots. What’d you make of that hawk?”

  “You owe her. She probably saved your ass from being shot.”

  “Have you ever seen a hawk do anything like that?”

  “No. But hey, you’re a hell of a lot older than I am. Have you ever seen a hawk do something like that?”

  “Never.”

  Wayra emerged from the trees, slipped inside the truck, dug out his keys. He sat there, studying a map. Two cop cars raced past the shopping center, sirens wailing. No black dog around here, boys.

  “So where to next?” Charlie asked, now occupying the passenger seat.

  “Cedar Key. It’s the closest island in the gulf.”

  “Onward, amigo.”

  Four

  Dominica pedaled her bike through the dusk, the most magical time of day for her. As it settled across the island, it transformed the old buildings in downtown Cedar Key into a city of gold. She felt as if she were riding her bike through a land of legends and myths, of dragons and knights, kings and queens and princesses trapped in towers. She conjured just enough fog to create an atmosphere of mystery and danger, and imagined herself on horseback, racing toward Wayra in the days centuries ago when they had still loved each other.

  But the memories of those days were open wounds. She shook them away and tried to find her way into a better story, one in which Wayra had joined her and they had taken over Esperanza and turned it into a city of brujos. That story fit the fantasy of myths and legends, but it wasn’t how it had happened. That blow still plagued her and, in her darkest moments, brought back the bitterness and despair of everything that had gone so horribly wrong.