Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts)

by Trish J. MacGregor

  They took the elevator to the third floor and when Leo unlocked the door to room 11, Lauren was pleasantly surprised. The spacious room boasted a small fridge, thick quilts on the king-sized bed, and a wide balcony that offered a view of the blinding whiteness. Lauren tossed her purse and purchases on the bed and made a beeline toward the balcony doors, opened them, and stepped outside.

  From here, a mile east of El Bosque, the whiteness looked like a vast, shimmering sheet of ice, a polar ice cap broken up here and there by trees and plants, parts of houses and buildings and cars, sidewalks and roads that hadn’t been affected. The extent of the whiteness shocked her. The erratic shape was horrifyingly huge, as flat as the world Columbus had envisioned, and she suddenly comprehended what immensely powerful forces they were up against. Panic gripped her, she clutched her arms to her chest, and struggled against a rising despair that a few flakes of hallucinogenic weed would make any difference at all in her ability to find her daughter.

  Leo came up beside her, slipped his arm around her shoulder. “Whoever is responsible for this, chaser or brujo or some other intelligence, doesn’t understand that love is a force of nature.”

  “I sometimes think, Leo, that love doesn’t have shit to do with any of it. My inner cynic laughs, okay? The odds against success seem … staggeringly high.”

  “We’ve fought great odds before, Lauren,” Ian said as he and Pedro joined them. “All of us have. And we’re still here.”

  “We’ll figure this out,” the priest said. “You should eat something first. It helps the substance move more quickly into your bloodstream.”

  They returned to the room, where Pedro had laid out paper plates of warm croissants with melted cheese and veggies inside, and had lined up tiny cups into which he now poured Ecuadorian espresso. “Lauren, where’s the canister?”

  She fished it out of her purse, passed it to Pedro, and he sprinkled flakes on two of the croissants. He passed these to her and Ian. “You each should take a pinch and put it under your tongue, too. It will hasten the effects.”

  Lauren suspected that Pedro had presided at some of these Quero spiritual rituals that had involved Segunda Vista, and realized she had never asked him about his beliefs concerning brujos, chasers, Esperanza. She sipped from her tiny cup of wickedly powerful coffee, then said, “Pedro, I need to know something. What are the chasers? Are they angels? Delusional souls? Saints? The other face of a brujo? The right hand of God? What?”

  “Are you asking me as a priest?”

  “I’m just asking because you’ve been involved in this battle for most of your life. I’m asking because I need answers.”

  He bit into his croissant, dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, sipped from his coffee. Everything about him just then was slow, measured, deliberate. His eyes looked as dark as walnuts. “I believe the chasers, for the most part, are despots in that they think it’s their job to determine Esperanza’s fate. They’re saints in that they have worked tirelessly against the brujos. They were once alive, so they’re flawed the way all humans are. They aren’t God’s right hand. As far as the church is concerned, no chaser has ever met with or consulted with God, any God. In all fairness, though, I don’t think any chaser has ever claimed to have met God.”

  “They seem to be able to tap the same power that brujos do,” Leo remarked, and related what had happened with the supernatural crows that had rescued him and Lauren from Ricardo and Naomi. “And Charlie himself appeared as a tremendous white crow. He picked me up from the road after Ricardo had seized me and … and I guess it was such a shock to Ricardo that he fled my body.”

  Interesting, Lauren thought. Leo hadn’t told her that he’d known the white crow was Charlie. She had suspected as much, but hadn’t known for sure until just now.

  “Charlie, Karina, Victor, and a couple of others are different from the rest of the council members,” Pedro said. “They’ve maintained a moral compass.”

  Lauren couldn’t argue with what the priest said about Charlie’s moral compass. When he was alive, that compass had directed everything he had done, every case he had taken, every legal argument he had made. And it had done the same in his personal life. Yes, he had been manipulative since he had died, but manipulative in the way of a trickster, a Loki disguised as some afterlife version of Jimmy Buffett.

  She wanted to ask Pedro about this chaser woman Charlie had been with, Karina, but felt it might be a bit tacky, all things considered. She hadn’t felt jealous when Karina had shown up with Charlie; after all, Charlie had been dead for years. But she had been intensely curious—and delighted that Charlie had met someone for whom he obviously had great affection.

  Yet, in the four and a half years Lauren had lived in Esperanza, with Charlie appearing to her from time to time, he’d never mentioned anything about a chaser woman. Did you date when you were dead? Did you have sex? Fall in love? She’d thought about these questions before, but never had they felt more pertinent or important, more pressing. She felt fairly sure that a Catholic priest was not the person who could answer her questions about love, sex, and rock and roll in the afterlife.

  “As a human being,” Pedro continued, “I believe that the chasers represent an archetype that is mostly good and the brujos represent an archetype that is mostly evil. But I also know that nothing in life is ever that simple.”

  Lauren polished off her croissant and knocked back the last sip of her coffee. “As the widow of a man who became a member of the chaser council and the mother of one of the first transitionals, I’m beginning to believe that chasers and brujos are just different faces of the same energy, Pedro. Contrasts. Yin, yang. Black, white. Male, female. Child, adult. Saint, demon. The living, the dead. The dark, the light. Knowledge, ignorance. But, like you, I don’t believe that anything is so simplistic, so I’m left with a lot of questions.”

  “And that, my lovely friend, is why the people of Esperanza indulge in Segunda Vista,” Pedro said. “They need to know. The weeds strip away the untruths, and leave you with the raw material. That’s what they’ve done for centuries.”

  While Leo and Pedro tested the recorders on their phones and found paper and pens, Lauren sat down on the floor, her spine against the foot of the bed. Kesey had had rituals, stuff to do before you imbibed anything. Garcia never gave a shit, just bring it on. McKenna had been more deliberate, yet also more explorative, daring. No wonder he’d been the one who had talked to mushrooms and discovered an entire universe of wisdom within plant life.

  Her rituals were simple: kick off shoes, settle in. Ian sat on the floor to her right, his back against a chair, his shoes off, toes wiggling around inside his dark socks. Simple on rituals, too, she thought, and liked him all the better for it.

  “Quechuan shamans say that it helps if you speak to the spirit of Segunda Vista,” Pedro said. “Explain your purpose.”

  “We’d like to find Tess,” Ian said. “We would like to know how to enter the whiteness so we can get her and the others out.”

  “That sums it up perfectly,” Lauren added.

  “Now say that directly to the spirit of the plant,” the priest said. “In your minds.”

  Just as Pedro spoke, something happened to Lauren’s vision. Forty years ago, it had been called a rush; now it stunned her. The walls in the room started breathing, the concrete and wood rose and fell like a human chest. She heard its breath, the steady rhythm of its beating heart, saw blood rushing through its veins and arteries, a tsunami of life racing forward to embrace, expand, facilitate. Then the floor and the ceiling swelled, seeming to move toward each other. She heard the floor inhale and the ceiling exhale, and the walls breathing noisily in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

  She pushed back hard against the foot of the bed and pressed her palms down against the floor to ground herself. But suddenly, the balcony doors rattled in a gust of wind, she could no longer feel the bed against her spine, the floor opened beneath her. Lauren plunged downward.


  2.

  Wayra came to on his side, in a bed of the softest substance he’d ever felt. Twilight clung to the air. It was that magical time in the evening when the edges of things possessed greater clarity—shadows, silhouettes, the sloping line of a roof. The gray sky roiled. It hurt his eyes to look at it.

  Odors inundated his senses—sweet and sour, plant and animal, fresh and rotting, brujo and human. Another scent ran beneath it all, a psychic scent, that of chasers. Their imprint permeated everything.

  As he pushed up, he saw a muscular black man sprawled on the ground to his right, legs splayed, arms flung out to the sides, forming perfect ninety-degree angles against the emerald grass. Where’d he come from?

  Here and there, dead birds lay on the grass around him. Off to his left loomed an empty lot, a playground, and houses on either side. Wayra had no idea where in El Bosque he was.

  He didn’t trust himself to stand yet and crawled over to the black man. “Hey, you, wake up.” He shook the man’s shoulder. “C’mon.”

  Wayra slapped his cheeks lightly and the man groaned, his eyelids fluttered open. In the moment their gazes connected, Wayra suddenly understood. “You fuck,” he snapped, and grabbed the front of the man’s shirt and jerked him forward. “You hung around to see if I could get in and then followed me.”

  Ricardo knocked Wayra’s arms away and bolted upward, gasping for breath in the same way a host did within moments of being seized. “Members … of my tribe … got caught in here,” he stammered between gasps, then slammed his fists against his chest, as if to dislodge something and doubled forward at the waist and touched his toes. He sank to the ground, laughing hysterically, curled into a fetal position, pressed his hands between his knees and sobbed.

  Wayra scrambled to his feet and walked around Ricardo, pissed off, bewildered, and alarmed. “Hey, Ricardo, talk to me.”

  Ricardo rolled over on his stomach, face pressed into the grass, then sat up, legs crossed Indian style, and knuckled his eyes like a little kid. “I … I can’t shed this virtual form, Wayra. It’s behaving like … a host. I’m breathing with this man’s lungs, his heart beats for me, I control his brain.”

  He’d seen brujos do strange and horrifying things, but couldn’t recall anything quite like this. “Isn’t that exactly what brujos want?”

  “Well, yeah. But not with their virtual forms. Not like this. I have no choice about a host, Wayra. We brujos can always leap out of a host and either bleed them out or leave them intact. I … I seem to be … shit, I hate this, but I think I’m trapped in this body.”

  Wayra’s alarm deepened. He couldn’t move through time, Sanchez couldn’t turn off his psychic switch, Ricardo was stuck in his virtual body, Charlie couldn’t get to where Wayra now was. So were these side effects something the council had known about or was this the result of something else, some other power? Or was it just collateral damage?

  “Don’t you get it?” Ricardo burst out. “This is exactly what the chasers want. Once enough brujos are trapped in here, they’ll take El Bosque back into the nonphysical and we’ll be annihilated in the process.”

  “And so will anyone who is alive.”

  “Neighborhood by neighborhood. I’m telling you. That’s their plan. The dead, the living, everyone and everything.”

  Wayra brushed off his jeans, slung his pack over his shoulders. “Whatever. Stay away from me, pendejo.” He started walking, fast, across the field, through the weird twilight.

  “Hey, shifter, hold on,” Ricardo called.

  Wayra kept walking. Ricardo caught up to him, fell into step beside him. “Stay. Away. From. Me.”

  “Okay, I lied about everything, is that what you want to hear?”

  “I don’t want to hear anything from you.”

  “The only reason we haven’t been seizing people in Esperanza is because we didn’t want to be detected. All along, I planned to take over the city, to just sweep in with my tribe and be done with the lot of you, human, chaser, shifter.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” Wayra stopped, glaring at him.

  “Because … we couldn’t. Every time we tried to do it, we ran up against something so powerful it was like … like a force of nature, Wayra. And each time we tried, something was taken from us. Suddenly, we could no longer think ourselves long distances. So we had to find a portal. Then it became impossible to build our virtual towns and cities, our virtual homes, our thought constructs. We tried to build them outside of Ecuador, but that didn’t work, either. All we could do was seize the living outside of Ecuador. So we did, and I kept hoping that some path forward would be revealed.”

  “If you hadn’t materialized in Tess’s car, your charade could have continued for decades, maybe centuries. Why did you do that?”

  He shrugged his massive shoulders, untied the sweatshirt wrapped around his waist, and slipped it on over his head. “Because I knew the goddamn chaser council was planning something, I just didn’t know the specifics. And yeah, okay, I was gloating. Maybe deep down I hoped to start something, to bring all this bullshit to a head.”

  “Well, you did that, all right.” Wayra threw out his arms. “Here we are in the fucking Twilight Zone, Ricardo.” With that, he moved forward quickly again, hoping Ricardo would just go away.

  But he didn’t. He hurried alongside Wayra, panting like the family dog that knew it was too old to keep up but nonetheless tried valiantly. Wayra actually felt sorry for him, for this bastard who had stabbed him so many centuries ago, for this pathetic old ghost, barely a shadow of Dominica.

  “Christ, Ricardo. What do you want from me?”

  “Let me accompany you now, Wayra. I need to find Naomi and my other brujos who are trapped here. You need to find Tess and the living. We have a common goal.”

  “You’ve already admitted that you’re a goddamn liar, Ricardo. Why should I believe you now?”

  “Because the salvation of Esperanza, in some form, falls on us, its oldest inhabitants.”

  “Sorry, that doesn’t convince me of shit. But you can walk with me until you piss me off.”

  “Which will probably be within sixty seconds,” Ricardo said with a snicker.

  “So talk fast.”

  A familiar cry rang out and Kali flew in low over the playground, headed toward them. She landed on the grass in front of them, cocked her head from one side to the other. “Hola, amigos. Bienvenidos.”

  “How’d she get in here?” Ricardo asked.

  “She apparently has freedoms we don’t.”

  Kali flew up from the ground, landed on Ricardo’s shoulder, bit at a shiny button on his sleeve, and fussed at him. Then she flew upward, squawking noisily, and Wayra and Ricardo loped after her, through one empty street after another. Had the blackness that had covered El Bosque killed everyone who had been in the neighborhood at the time? Or had the blinding whiteness done that? Or was everyone in hiding?

  On one street, the neighborhood simply ended with a chimney floating in midair, a numbing emptiness surrounding it. Ricardo tossed a handful of stones into the emptiness, just as Diego had done the other day outside the Café Taquina, and the emptiness crackled and popped, then the stones disappeared. “The same, but different,” Ricardo said. “From this side, we can’t see the whiteness. Everything just looks … erased.”

  As they followed Kali along the erratic border between here and elsewhere, they encountered hundreds of dead birds scattered in the streets, in yards, on sidewalks. It disturbed Wayra. Even Ricardo found it troubling. “The birds, Wayra. This is the result of heightened electromagnetic activity in El Bosque. That’s what killed them. That’s how the chasers are doing this, by raising the electromagnetism in a particular area. It must make it easier for them to just slice away entire neighborhoods. The condors must have sensed it and fled.”

  “Do you have any idea where in El Bosque we are?”

  “None.”

  Since the blackness had swallowed Tess at the market, Wayra thought his se
arch for her should begin there. But first, he needed to orient himself so that he could locate the store and so far he hadn’t been able to do that.

  They began to see other people, cars moving through the streets, kids on bikes, dogs, cats, all the signs of normal life. But it was normal only if you ignored the fact that the sky hadn’t changed, it was still twilight, and only if you could overlook the hundreds of dead birds and were blind to the places where the neighborhood simply ended and the emptiness began.

  A church bell rang in the distance, long, plaintive notes that echoed through the streets. It seemed to beckon them. Kali led them directly to the church, where fifty or sixty people lined the sidewalk from the church steps to the hearse parked at the curb. Pallbearers emerged from the church carrying two coffins, one large, one small, and the people in attendance tossed roses on the coffins as they passed. The mourners didn’t utter a single sound. There was no noise at all. It unnerved Wayra. But even more troubling was that no one seemed to see the dead birds strewn across the church’s property.

  How could you not see them? Their corpses blanketed the grounds of the church, their wings fully open, heads turned to one side, beaks slightly parted, as if they had taken one last, heaving breath before they died. They lay on their backs, their legs and claws straight up in the air. If Illary, in her hawk form, had been in here when El Bosque disappeared, would he have found her corpse among the thousands that no one seemed to see?

  Just the thought of it horrified Wayra.

  When the coffins were put inside the hearse, the crowd started to break up, people headed toward their cars, presumably to follow the hearse to the cemetery. Wayra spotted Javier, the baker whom Ian had tried to save that night at the Café Taquina. He loped across the street and came up behind him. “Javier?”