Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

  Yeah, all of that was good. But in that other universe, she wouldn’t be a prisoner in her own body, either, her sanity hanging by a thread so fragile that one more incident like this might break her.

  Even now, as she soared through the gathering light, she considered not returning to her body, letting Dominica have it. Who cared? So what if she died? She wouldn’t get stuck as Charlie and the chasers, Dominica and her ghosts, had. She would take up yoga in the afterlife, become a vegan again, find a mentor who would help her wade through all the mistakes she’d made in her short life, a mentor who would help her choose her next life, the right parents, the right circumstances that would enable her to achieve her spiritual and creative potential. Or something.

  She felt a sharp, insistent tug at her left and followed it to a neglected building behind a barbed-wire fence. Several waterfront acres spread out around the building and as she drifted in for a closer look, she saw animals in cages, birds in a huge aviary. A zoo? Not on the island. This appeared to be the animal sanctuary she’d heard about—but had never seen before now. She dropped to the ground on virtual feet, in her virtual body, surprised that she didn’t have to do anything to create this body, to maintain it. Was this how her grandfather Charlie did it? Think yourself into being.

  Far above her, a bird cried out, and when she looked up, a sparrow hawk was spiraling toward her. It touched down on the roof of the building, staring at her as though it could really see her. Was that possible? Why not? She lived in a world of impossibilities.

  Maddie stuck her nonexistent fingers in her nonexistent mouth and let out a shrill, sharp whistle. The hawk flew upward, circled her, then landed right at her feet. It sees me, hears me.

  The bird keened and suddenly the door of the building slammed open and a tall, handsome kid barreled out. Rocky, Kate’s son. And the hawk, of course, was Liberty. She had seen them several times at the hotel, and Dominica, she remembered, was afraid of the hawk for some reason. Rocky was obviously hiding out.

  “Liberty,” he whispered, and the bird flew over to him and landed on his outstretched arm. “I knew you’d come back. I knew it. I’ve … got a little food, sandwiches and stuff the employees left in the fridge, and bottled water. I started to … to leave last night, but heard all the sirens and shit and … and…” Then his face collapsed in on itself and his eyes filled up and he started to cry. The hawk keened and inched its way up his arm to his shoulder and then ran its beak gently through his hair, a caress.

  It was a strange and heartbreaking sight. Maddie quickly lifted up, away from the kid and the hawk, and thought of Sanchez, Wayra, Sanchez, Wayra, either one, an ally, please. She ended up near one of the uninhabited islands off Cedar Key, and swirled down through the mangroves to a houseboat. Wayra was sitting on the back deck, a laptop balanced on his thighs, his bare feet pressed against the railing. An empty plate and a mug of coffee were on the table. He seemed very intent on what he was reading.

  Maddie touched down next to him and shouted his name. He flinched, that was all. He didn’t look around, didn’t really hear her. He merely felt something. She stood in front of him and leaned into him, shouting his name again. This time he looked up, blinked his large, dark eyes. “Maddie?”

  Yes, yes, right here, it’s me.

  But he couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear her. Not like Sanchez could. With Sanchez, it was like having a conversation. With Wayra, it was a game of charades.

  “Wayra?”

  Kate padded out onto the porch in jeans, a pullover sweater, and bare feet. She held a wrench in one hand, pliers in the other. “Can you give me a hand here? I’m trying to soup up the engine so we can get across the water fast as soon as it’s dark.”

  “That won’t be for another eleven or twelve hours, Kate.”

  She shrugged. “I know. I just feel the need to do something productive.”

  “Then let’s fit a couple of those electric engines to canoes. You’ve got three of them in your storage area. No noise. Less cumbersome than moving the houseboat.”

  Her arms dropped to her sides. “Good idea. But I’d still like to ramp up the houseboat’s engine. Be prepared for … well, whatever.”

  “Sure thing.” Wayra pushed up from the chair. “We could try going over while it’s still light out, working our way from island to island, but there would still be vast stretches of open gulf where we’d be exposed.”

  “I’m resigned to waiting until dark,” Kate said.

  Kate, can you hear me? Maddie stood between her and Wayra, frantically waving her nonexistent arms at Kate. Hey, I’m here.

  Nothing. Not even a flinch. Maddie moved into the doorway, but Kate walked right through her.

  As soon as Wayra went inside the houseboat, Maddie soared away, frightened now that even Sanchez wouldn’t be able to hear her. She sought the luminous thread that had led her to him before, but something interfered with her ability to locate him, a low humming, a buzzing, that disoriented her. For a while, she drifted aimlessly, struggling to focus on his energy. She needed to connect with him, with someone who could hear her. She finally narrowed her search to a densely wooded area on the far side of the island.

  In there, you’re somewhere in there.

  As Maddie descended through the trees, the buzzing noise ebbed. She slipped through branches, deeper into shadows, and landed as lightly as a leaf on the ground. She smelled smoke, then food, and wondered how she could smell anything at all. She followed the scents to a clearing deep in the woods. Tents and old rusted trailers encircled a campfire, barefoot kids and dogs ran around, several men and women cooked over large aluminum pots and pans, and two other adults were setting the food on a long table. Here and there in the trees, Maddie caught sight of heavily armed guards.

  It looked like a gypsy encampment and she sensed that none of these people had been seized yet. She would have to shield this memory from Dominica. With the quarantine in place, these people and any others who hadn’t been seized would need to be extremely careful.

  Sanchez, Sanchez, she thought, turning slowly, waiting for a tug in one direction or another. She finally felt it, coming from straight in front of her. She moved past the campfires, the long table set with platters of fish, grits, home fries, coffee. Two dogs barked at her, but neither of them followed her. She couldn’t tell if they actually saw her or just sensed her. The hawk had definitely seen her. Why could the hawk see her but not the dogs? What about other animals?

  She paused in front of one of the guards, a Rambo type with tattooed arms the size of tree trunks, and clapped her virtual hands inches from his face. No reaction. She noticed his weapon. She was no gun expert, but she’d watched enough movies to recognize the sucker as an AK-47. So despite the nomadic appearance of this camp, these people were apparently well-armed. She wondered how much they knew about brujos.

  Maddie moved on, following the tug, and entered a thicker part of the woods. She found Sanchez fishing from a shallow bank with a skinny guy with a gray ponytail. Except for the AK-47 next to the old man, they looked like a couple of Huck Finns. Fortunately, they were fishing in an inlet and the trees shrouded them. She walked over and sat on the ground next to Sanchez. Jessie whined and Sanchez immediately glanced to his left, where she was sitting. Red?

  Right next to you, Sanchez. A search is under way. Her minions are going house to house. You should probably tell these folks to put out the fires. Brujos have an excellent sense of smell.

  “Hey, Zee,” he said aloud. “Maybe the cooking should be done indoors from now on. Just in case these suckers have organized a search party.”

  “Sounds smart to me.” He whipped out a cell phone, looked at it, snapped it shut. “No signal. Shit. You think the quarantine jammed the cell signals?”

  “Probably.”

  Zee tapped his temple with the heel of his hand. “I’m getting sloppy in my old age, Nick. I shoulda thought of that cooking thing. I’ll walk back and tell them to kill the fires.”


  “How fast can you move camp if you have to?”

  The old man eyed Sanchez warily. “Why? You picking up something, son?”

  Would he believe you if you told him I was sitting next to you? Maddie asked.

  He might. He knows Dominica is inside your body.

  She and pervert Whit are covering the runway with body parts and debris from the café. It’s going to take them a while. The safest place for Zee’s people is the cemetery. Brujos hate cemeteries.

  “Just curious, Zee.”

  “Well, most of them trailers can be driven outta here like any vehicle. If we were in a hurry, we’d leave the ones on hitches behind.”

  “Is there another wooded area like this one?”

  “There’re several. But we’ve got an ELF field around this one that makes it tough for Satan’s army to get in.”

  “An extremely low frequency field? What’s generating it? Why does that work?”

  “Don’t have a clue why it works. But we’ve got high-voltage power lines around this woods, and that’s what generates the field. Early on, one of the demons tried to get in and couldn’t do it.”

  “You could see it?”

  “Heard its wails of frustration and then its death wails. Watch my pole. I’ll be right back.”

  Zee picked up his weapon and bolted to his feet with the spryness of a much younger man. Is he right about the ELF field, Red?

  Yeah. No one else around here has figured it out, though. Dominica first encountered it in Otavalo. It’s how she keeps a brujo captive who has broken one of her rules.

  “How do you find me?”

  I think of you and wait for a tug in a particular direction.

  “Yesterday, with the guy named Wayra … what happened?”

  She took me again. When it gets really bad, I leap out of my body. You’re the only one who can hear me. Even Wayra can’t seem to. He’s on a houseboat with Kate, who worked at the hotel as a bartender. Her son is hiding out at this animal rescue center on Cedar Key. Shit, I’m babbling, you don’t know them. How’d you end up here?

  “Did Kate also work at Annie’s Café?”

  I think so.

  “Then I met her last night.” As he talked out loud, describing what had happened after he’d fled the fire at the café, the sound of his voice moved through her like cool water. It made her temporarily forget her actual circumstances and assuaged the agony Dominica had inflicted on her. Listening to him, she could almost believe there was some way out for her, a route to freedom she hadn’t thought of.

  Did you hear from Delaney after you texted him? she asked.

  His head bobbed, just as it might do in a regular conversation. “Yeah. He said to stay put for now. At some point before I arrived on Cedar Key, some fed had come out here and installed a security video in the café. It transmitted images to a remote computer. That’s what they’re studying now.”

  What’s there to study? It’s obvious there was something wrong with the people on the right side of the café.

  “I know. They’ve got the video I took, too. But trying to explain a concept like hungry ghosts to most of these guys is like trying to convince moon-walk doubters that we actually went to the moon. I doubt that Delaney is even trying to explain it that way.”

  She felt Dominica’s attention shifting back to her, probing, searching for her. Got to go, she’s wondering what happened to me.

  “Wait. How can I come to you, Maddie?”

  You can’t as long as she’s inside me. If she knows about you, she’ll kill us both. She already grilled me about the guy who resuscitated me. She saw you kissing me.

  “Jesus, Red. What can I do to help you?”

  Right now, nothing. She touched his shoulder—and her hand moved right through him.

  “I felt that,” he said.

  How about this? She moved in front of him, bent over, and touched her hands ever so lightly to the sides of his face so they didn’t sink through him. Then she kissed him just as lightly. Did you feel it?

  Smiling, Sanchez touched his fingers to his mouth and whispered, “I did. Like the soft threads of a spiderweb.”

  Then the old man loped back over, breaking the spellbound moment. “Got that taken care of. You looked like you were talking to yourself, Nick.”

  Maddie laughed and ran along the banks, her heart singing. She flapped her arms like the wings of a bird and thought, Up, up, and away.

  She snapped back into her body so abruptly that it jerked forward and then back in the cart’s seat, alerting Dominica that something unusual had just occurred. “What is it?” Whit asked.

  Dominica rubbed the back of her neck. “It felt like whiplash.”

  “I’m only going ten miles an hour, Nica.”

  “I think Maddie has learned to travel out of body. Isn’t that so, Maddie?”

  Maddie scurried back into her virtual room with its small, pathetic virtual comforts, anxiety eating away at her. Could the bitch prevent her from traveling outside her body? From escaping in that way?

  It was one thing to go along for months as a prisoner in her body, plotting and planning ways to reclaim her power and her freedom, never aware that she might have other options. But now that she’d learned to slip out of her body so easily and had found someone who could hear her, now that she wasn’t so horribly alone, she knew that to be denied contact with Sanchez would kill her.

  Twelve

  Kate wore black—black jeans, black long-sleeved shirt, black windbreaker. She even tied a dark kerchief around her hair. Her weapon and an extra clip were in the pockets of her jacket. Wayra was at least six foot three, much too tall to wear Rocky’s jeans, but she found a dark shirt and jacket that fit him, and with his black hair, she thought he wouldn’t be visible out there on the water.

  They climbed into the canoes, both equipped with electric motors that they couldn’t use until they were out of the mangroves, in open water. Wayra led the way, paddling through the dense mangroves. Despite the chill in the air, insects hummed, mosquitoes dive-bombed them, and here and there fish splashed.

  The news about the quarantine had hit the Web and, thanks to her wireless Internet card, her communications hadn’t gone down. Official information was sketchy, but the parameters of the quarantine and the reason for it were spelled out. Wayra had explained that what the CDC believed was a virus was actually a substance that brujos prompted a host body to make so that physical life would be more comfortable for them. As if physical life, she thought, were a hostile environment like the moon or Mars. Maddie and all the others who had been seized would have the substance in their bodies for years, perhaps for their entire lives.

  She now realized, of course, that Rich had already been seized the night they had sex and she wondered if she now had the substance within her own body. The CDC was theorizing that the virus was transmitted through bodily fluids. But if it wasn’t really a virus, could it be transmitted through sex? The question disturbed her and begged for an answer.

  They paused at the edge of the mangrove. No fog yet. And the moon wouldn’t rise for another forty minutes. “I don’t see any boat lights, do you?” she whispered.

  “No.”

  “If we follow the current, we’ll get there that much faster.”

  “You lead,” he said.

  “Hey, Wayra, you have any of those grenades? Just in case?”

  “Four.”

  “About this substance that the ghosts cause their hosts to produce. If a brujo host has sex with someone who isn’t a host, can this substance be transmitted that way?”

  He didn’t answer immediately and that worried her. “I honestly don’t know, Kate. My inclination is to say no. But over the centuries, these ghosts have evolved in ways that have shocked me, the chasers, and anyone who knows anything about the ancient brujos of Esperanza. It was never an issue in Esperanza because no one was doing autopsies. When someone bled out, the rest of us knew what had caused it. It’s entirely possible that Dominica
has figured out how to make this substance transmissible that way. It might be why she has allowed this tribe to be so blatantly promiscuous. Maybe every brujo host who has sex with an uncompromised person is creating the inner conditions that facilitate that person’s seizure. It could explain why her tribe has been able to seize so many with so little resistance.”

  “That’s troubling.”

  “You’re worried that you had sex with Rich when he was hosting a brujo, so you might have the substance in your body, too, right?”

  “How … I didn’t tell you about Rich.”

  “In my other form, my sense of smell is extraordinary. That night you fled the hotel, I started following you because I smelled that you had been with a man who hosted a brujo.”

  “That’s weirdly intrusive, Wayra.”

  There in the little cave of mangrove branches, in the thick, almost oppressive odor of salt water and swamp, he gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. “Look, we don’t know anything for sure. Even if it’s true, any brujo would find you utterly distasteful regardless of how conducive this substance made your body.”

  She actually managed a small, stifled laugh. “And why’s that, Wayra?”

  “Brujos like compliant hosts, people who tend to be passive, laid-back. It’s why Cedar Key is perfect for her new tribe. But you and Maddie, in your hearts, are revolutionaries.”

  “Then why was Dominica able to take her?”

  “Because she’s the niece of one of the people who helped destroy Dominica’s tribe in Esperanza. Vengeance is pivotal to her existence.”

  Kate didn’t feel like any revolutionary. At the moment, she was just a distraught mother terrified for her son. “Let’s go, Wayra.” She pushed her paddle against a branch and the canoe whispered out of the mangrove, into the open water between Sea Horse Key and Cedar Key. She paused briefly to lower the motor into the water and turned it on.

  The sky looked as if stars had been flung out against the blackness by some Olympian. The thin necklaces of clouds didn’t do much to mitigate the light and she suddenly wished for black thunderheads and a horrendous downpour.