Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts)

by Trish J. MacGregor

  He had stayed up for hours, monitoring the news and talking with Pedro and some of the other church refugees. He had called Tess repeatedly after his phone had charged, called from the landing on the stairs thirty feet up, but she hadn’t answered. That worried him. Hell, everything worried him.

  Since the dorm lay forty feet underground and there weren’t any windows, he didn’t know if the sun had risen yet. When he glanced at his watch, it read 9:28, but he quickly realized his watch had stopped. Ian sat up, his long legs hanging over the side of the bunk, and slid his hand under the pillow, patting around for his iPhone. It was fully charged, but didn’t have a signal and, oddly, the time on the phone also read 9:28.

  Weird. And because this was Esperanza, the weirdness probably was significant.

  He climbed down the ladder, into the glow of the night-lights that kept the dorm softly lit. Most of the bunks were occupied. That meant it was probably still early.

  He found his shoes lined up with other shoes along the baseboard, and every pair held a toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste. A cart against the opposite wall held stacks of towels and small bars of soap. The church took care of its refugees, he thought, and wondered what little elf had delivered these essentials.

  Ian pocketed the toothbrush and toothpaste, slipped on his shoes, helped himself to a towel, and walked down the narrow corridor to one of the five restrooms. Most of the church sanctuaries in the city and surrounding suburbs were built to accommodate hundreds of refugees and were usually larger than the churches built on top of them. This church was no exception. The sanctuary beneath the church was cavernous.

  He smelled coffee and food and suspected that in the common room he would find a full buffet breakfast, computers with Internet access, televisions with the latest news, a list of the injured and the dead. Even though the city hadn’t been attacked in more than four years, the emergency procedures apparently had snapped into place when it counted.

  In the restroom, thirty sinks lined one wall, thirty stalls lined the opposite wall, and thirty showers lined the third wall. Except for two other men, Ian had the place to himself. As he brushed his teeth, he thought that the face staring back at him from the mirror over the sink looked haggard, older, eyes pinched with anxiety. Or, as Tess might say, George Clooney with a thick five o’clock shadow and circles under his eyes.

  He dropped his towel in a bin, then returned to the dorm for his pack and hurried off for the common room. The church employees were still bringing food out to the buffet table, a feast that featured eggs cooked every which way, fresh fruits, cereals, black beans, rice, and plantains, both baked and fried. There were juices, bacon, sausages, a variety of breads and jams. As Ian got in line with a handful of other people, he noticed the time on the wall clock: 9:28. He then overhead a man and a woman talking about how the time on their cell phones appeared to be stuck at 9:28.

  He sat at a table by himself, where he could watch one of the three TVs in the common room. Tuned to the local station, all three TVs showed scenes from last night’s attack—the mobs pouring through the park and into the street in front of his apartment building, the swarms of locusts and the hovering field of flames, the aftermath of ruin and destruction. A ticker tape beneath these scenes kept a running tab on casualties: 103 injuries, 72 dead. Ian was grateful and surprised that the toll wasn’t higher.

  But why wasn’t the news also covering this strange anomaly with the time?

  More people arrived in the common room, Pedro among them. The priest came over with a plate of food and a mug of coffee. “I’m so glad you haven’t left yet.” He set everything down and pulled out the other chair. “Can you believe this?” He gestured toward the television screen. “They attacked in retaliation for what we did at the Pincoya, Ian. I’m sure of it. What a tragic mess.”

  “Like we talked about last night, Pedro, we did the right thing. We sealed their portal and cut them off from millions of other brujos. This battle was going to happen regardless. Have you heard from Wayra?”

  The priest shook his head. “No. Not from anyone. You?”

  Ian shook his head. “I don’t have a signal down here. Is the Internet working?”

  “Sporadically. From what we can determine, the fire drove them out and things in the city are now quiet. The sun came up a while ago and we were able to use the webcam to survey the damage. The park across the street from your building is still cordoned off.”

  “What’s with this time anomaly, Pedro?”

  “I don’t know. There was just a brief mention of it on the news. It’s being attributed to electromagnetic fluctuations in and around Esperanza.”

  “I suppose that theory came from the physics professors who’ve been studying this whole thing.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  Physics. Electromagnetic fluctuations. He really didn’t like the sound of this. Then he snapped his fingers. “Remember how I told you that Sanchez said eleven-eleven is a portal to higher consciousness?”

  The priest nodded. “So?”

  “Nine twenty-eight adds up to an eleven. Do you think eleven might be some sort of portal, too?”

  Pedro looked troubled. “We should ask Sanchez. If it is some sort of portal, are these time anomalies a warning or a promise?”

  “Maybe both.”

  For a moment, neither of them spoke. Ian knew they were thinking the same thing, what a warning might mean for the city, what a promise might mean. For him, warning and promise amounted to the same thing: threat.

  “I can give you a ride back to your brother’s place,” Ian said. “But first I need to get back to the apartment and check in with Tess, update the website, change clothes.”

  “I’ll meet you at your apartment within the hour.”

  “Great.”

  As soon as Ian started up the stairs from the basement to the church foyer, his phone rang and sang. Icons lit up. He scrolled quickly through the text messages and e-mails, saw messages from Wayra, Lauren, Leo, Juanito, Illary, Diego, Maddie, Sanchez, nearly everyone in his universe except Tess. He called her cell, but didn’t even reach her voice mail.

  She was probably asleep. It sounded reasonable, but his body thought otherwise and he raced up the last flight of stairs, into the foyer, and exploded through the front doors of the church and out into the crisp morning air. The slant of the light, the way the shadows fell, told him it was probably around eight A.M. On a normal day, nothing in Esperanza really got going until nine or ten. No telling what effect last night’s attack would have.

  He loped the six long blocks to the apartment and the closer he got to his street, the worse the destruction—store windows shattered, trash cans overturned and garbage apparently set on fire, the hulks of two cars that had been torched, the blackened remnants of trees that had caught fire. It was as if he moved through the vestiges of a massive riot, a collective madness that had been hell-bent on annihilation. But who had done this? Brujo hosts? The mobs of panicked citizens? Both?

  The park came into view and it was cordoned off, just as Pedro had said. Many of the trees had caught fire, beds of flowers had burned, benches had been overturned. Cops moved through the area with a strange stealth, some of them consulting handheld objects that he guessed were EMF detectors, others videotaping or snapping photos. The entire park was surrounded by city vehicles and several cops directed traffic at the two intersections he could see.

  In between those two intersections lay his building. As he rounded the corner, he was relieved to see that the shutters on the Expat’s front window had been lowered, which had probably saved it from being shattered. He glanced up at the windows of his and Tess’s apartment on the third floor; no shutters, but the glass looked to be intact.

  Ian raced up the stairs to the third floor. Even before he stepped into the apartment, he knew Tess wasn’t here, that she hadn’t been for some time. He felt the utter emptiness of the rooms, caught the faint scent of whatever she had cooked, probably the trout,
and sensed the silence wrapping around him, mocking him.

  He dropped his bag on the couch and sped through the rooms, taking inventory. The bed hadn’t been slept in, her clothes were in the washing machine, her dirty dishes were in the kitchen sink, her car keys hung from a hook on the wall, two chargers were still plugged into the kitchen wall. Her iPhone and iPad were gone. She hadn’t been here since last night.

  Ian called Lauren first, but she hadn’t seen Tess since yesterday afternoon when she had visited Diego. “She called my cell a bunch of times, but I … Leo and I were attacked by brujos last night. Charlie and a bunch of crows intervened. We’re okay,” she added quickly. “And right now, I need to get into surgery. We’ve been inundated with casualties from last night, Ian. Keep me posted about Tess.”

  He had a thousand questions to ask her, but simply replied, “I will. You do the same.”

  Since Tess’s keys were here, she hadn’t driven anywhere. His guess was that she had joined the mob at some point before the locusts descended. And then what? Had she fled into the tunnels? Been trampled in the chaos? Or had she been seized? But she couldn’t be seized … unless all the rules were changing.

  Shower, change clothes, then get the hell out of here and start looking for her.

  He showered in the bathroom off the master bedroom, realized Tess’s shampoo and conditioner weren’t in here. He wondered if the spare bathroom might tell him something. He changed into clean clothes and headed toward the spare bathroom at the back of the apartment.

  But when he walked into it, everything except the counter went dark. It was as if a spotlight illuminated a box labeled EARLY PREGNANCY TEST and the strip that rested on one end of the box. The strip that read positive.

  “My God,” he whispered.

  Pregnant, Tess was pregnant. The idea of becoming a father filled him with an uncontainable joy, then nearly overwhelmed him. He would be forty-seven on his next birthday, had a grown son from a first marriage who lived in Minneapolis, and hadn’t even thought of this possibility. The heart condition that had caused his massive coronary and resulted in the near-death experience that had brought him to Esperanza had been cured by the city. He was equally convinced that if he left Esperanza, if he and Tess were forced out, his heart condition would return and his next heart attack would kill him. And this time, he wouldn’t come to in Esperanza. Whether he left the city or disappeared with it, he and Tess would be robbed of a chance to have a family.

  For Ian, the stakes suddenly had spiked much higher.

  He heard the front door creak open, then the priest called, “Ian?”

  He was early. “Back here, Pedro.”

  The priest appeared in the bathroom doorway wearing clean clothes, his thinning hair still damp from a shower. “The…” Pedro’s eyes darted to the box and the test strip on the counter, then flickered back to Ian. “Tess?”

  “Well, it’s not me.”

  Pedro exploded with laughter and threw his arms around Ian, hugging him. “This is fantastic, amigo. Congratulations. So, where’s the expectant mother?” Pedro stepped back, still grinning, marveling at the good news.

  “She’s not here. And I don’t think she knows yet. My guess is that she got distracted by something while she was waiting for the results.”

  “What could distract her from something like this?”

  “Something huge.”

  “There isn’t much bigger than this, Ian.”

  “Yeah, there is. If the chasers remove Esperanza from the physical world, this baby will never have a chance to be born, much less live.”

  Pedro’s exuberance seeped from him like helium from a balloon. Before he could reply, Ian’s phone rang and Wayra’s number appeared in the ID window. “Wayra, is Tess with you?”

  “No. That’s, uh, part of the reason I’m calling. The blackness ate most of the El Bosque neighborhood last night. And Tess was seen out there. She saved a woman and her son.”

  Ian could barely speak around the hard, throbbing pulse in his throat. “I’m leaving now,” he said hoarsely.

  2.

  Charlie sat at the edge of a hot tub, his legs dangling in the 101-degree water, and watched Karina drifting naked in the long swimming pool they had created. The jungle of trees around the pool, in the backyard, were home to dozens of species of birds, and Kali felt right at home here. She had settled in the upper branches of a mango tree, which didn’t grow naturally in the mountains. The mango and papaya trees had been his additions to the creative collage, and Kali happened to love both types of fruit.

  The jungle cast thick shadows against the water and Karina swam into and out of them again. He wondered if her agility and grace as a swimmer had been perfected in that life they had shared as dolphins. This memory was recent and invariably snapped his lawyer brain into action. He imagined a celestial prosecutor grilling him about a life as—snicker, snort, gag—a dolphin.

  So tell us, Charlie, what did you learn in that life as a dolphin?

  And he usually saw himself shocking the jury by saying, I learned that sex is supposed to be fun.

  With that, he stripped off his swimming trunks, slipped into the water, dived deep into the pool, and swam beneath her. Charlie turned onto his back so he faced her and reached up and touched her beautiful breasts. Karina pressed her hands over his and sank into the water, her legs scissoring around his waist, her mouth pressed to his. They made love beneath the water, honoring that weird life they had shared as dolphins, and this extraordinary magnificence they shared now, as chasers. When they surfaced finally for a breath of air, he asked, “What were we to each other in that dolphin life, anyway?”

  “Part of the same pod.” She held on to his shoulders, her hair drifting on the surface of the water. “We weren’t physically related but you were my mentor and became my lover. We were so monogamous we got tossed out of the pod.”

  Charlie cupped her face in his hands and kissed her, marveling at how real and soft her mouth felt, how real and beautiful their creation was. At no other time in his existence as a chaser had the afterlife been this peaceful, this magnificent.

  “So how come I didn’t have issues about monogamy in my life as Charlie? I mean, c’mon, if you’re tossed outta the pod for monogamy, then isn’t monogamy something you would avoid in your next life?”

  Karina dropped her head back into the water, shut her eyes. She flung her arms out to her sides and floated like that for what seemed a long time but probably wasn’t. He had no idea how long, in real-world time, they had been here. It felt like forever.

  “Not necessarily. I don’t think there are a lot of hard-and-fast rules, Charlie.”

  He started to say something, touched her shoulders to pull her toward him again. But a crippling pain exploded in the center of his chest and caused him to wrench away from Karina. The dead weren’t supposed to feel pain, not like this. He stumbled clumsily to the steps at the shallow end of the pool and doubled over at the waist, his body burning up one moment then encased in a numbing chill, then burning up again. And he knew, in that place within himself where he always knew what he needed to know, that something had happened to Lauren or Tess or Maddie.

  Or to all of them. Charlie squeezed his eyes shut and willed himself into the sensation. “Tess,” he whispered. “Something has happened to Tess.”

  “Bastards. It’s the council, Charlie. They’re doing their shit again. I think we need to get to El Bosque. I feel that’s where something has happened.”

  Before he even heaved himself from the water, she was out and drying herself off. She snapped her fingers and was instantly clothed in jeans, a pullover sweater and denim jacket, boots and a pack over her shoulder. Charlie did the same and inadvertently duplicated the way she was dressed. “We look like the Bobbsey twins, Charlie. Remember them?”

  “Clearly. Tess found a copy of one of the books in her school library, tossed it in the pool, and informed us it was a stupid story, that she wanted something captivating.
So Lauren bought her Catch-22. She loved it.”

  “How old was she?”

  Charlie thought a moment. “Maybe seven.”

  “No way.”

  “She’s wired differently, Karina.” He paused, focusing on that feeling again. “I think this is bad.”

  Karina whistled for Kali, who flew over and landed on her shoulder. Then she grasped Charlie’s hand and they instantly materialized in El Bosque, a couple of ghosts on an unpaved sidewalk outside the police barricade with hundreds of locals shouting at the police, women sobbing, terrified children clinging to their parents.

  Kali now circled high above them.

  Charlie and Karina thought themselves forward through the crowd until they could see beyond the barricade. Where the neighborhood had once stood now loomed a big fat zero of nothingness that reflected the light. It looked like a sheet of ice, blindingly white, uniformly smooth, strangely lovely. And yet, like the café, the area wasn’t completely gone. Here and there, spots had survived—a patch of flowers, a kitchen table, part of a greenhouse, a wall, half of a barn where goats bleated, hens clucked, cows mooed. A mirror stood in the midst of the nothingness, as if hovering in the reflected light like some sort of alien craft.

  WTF. Charlie moved along the lengthy edge of the nothingness. Half a mile, a mile, two miles. Then the nothingness curved sharply west and continued for another few miles before it turned north, cutting an erratic path through the wooded area after which the neighborhood was named. Charlie thought himself into the nothingness—and came up against an impenetrable barrier. Impossible. Chasers could move anywhere. He tried again, but the same thing happened.

  Karina appeared beside him. We can’t get through, Charlie. I’ve tried it at a dozen different spots along the nothingness.

  Charlie thought himself into his virtual form as Manuel Ortega and Karina assumed a virtual form as a Quechua woman. They extended their arms and patted their hands along the barrier. He could feel its solidness, its reality. He and Karina moved quickly back along the south end of the vanished area. Kali squawked and circled above them, higher and higher, several hundred feet up, so that she was well above the blinding whiteness, then began to spiral downward, faster, faster, until she blurred with speed.