Pao watched her work, a little in awe of how effortlessly she bossed them around. Pao was great at lying to parents, or crafting plans to get them into or out of places they shouldn’t be, but Emma had this way of walking into any room with a calm authority. Like anyone inside would be lucky to hear what she had to say.
Maybe that was because everyone had always treated Emma that way, Pao thought, remembering what had happened at the police station after Emma had gone missing. The cops had immediately pegged Pao and Dante as criminals, even though they were just two scared kids.
Emma would never have been treated that way.
In fact, at this very moment, the doctors were giving her an official-sounding report while Dante watched, looking totally bewildered.
“She’s obviously unconscious, but her vitals are stable,” said the Brain. “She doesn’t seem to need assistance with her heart or lungs.”
There was a hesitancy in his voice, Pao thought, one that indicated a medical mystery.
“But?” Pao asked, drawing their attention to her as she stood in the doorway.
Emma looked at her, too, but Dante kept his gaze fixed on the paperwork in his lap.
“We’re having trouble getting a reading on her brain activity,” the doctor admitted. “It’s like she’s here”—he gestured kind of pathetically at Señora Mata’s form in the bed—“but not here. We need to run more tests. It’s probably just that our machines aren’t picking up the signal correctly. . . .”
The look on his face told Pao he didn’t really believe that. They were just as baffled by Señora Mata’s condition as Dante was.
She wondered what they’d say if she told them that Señora Mata had recalled a conversation they’d had in Pao’s dream. And that just before they’d brought the old woman in here, she’d been surrounded by otherworldly figures made of green light.
From across the room, Pao caught Emma’s eye. It wasn’t a haunted bingo bonnet, but it definitely didn’t seem to be a normal human malady, either. Emma nodded infinitesimally at Pao and then turned back to the doctors.
“Now, I’m sure, as professionals in your field, you’re both aware of the statistics facing feminine-presenting Latinx people in a health care setting, correct?”
Pinky and the Brain just stared at her.
“Namely, the research that indicates Latinas receive the poorest quality health care in the nation after Black women? That they’re less likely to be believed, advocated for, or treated properly during their first hospital visit than their white counterparts, and that care sharply declines in subsequent visits?”
Still no answer, not that the lack of response slowed Emma in the slightest.
“Señora Mata is a human being, vital to her community and beloved by her family. We expect you to treat her as such continuously throughout her stay here unless you want my dad to sue you both for discrimination and neglect. Got it?”
“Of course your grandmother will be given the best care we can provide,” said Pinky smoothly, while the Brain nodded vigorously.
“Good,” Emma said. “Now, Pao, why don’t you take Dante to get a pen for all that paperwork, while the good doctors and I talk strategy.”
Pinky and the Brain looked like they might prefer that hypothetical discrimination suit to being trapped in a room with Emma for another minute, but Pao knew her friend’s plotting face better than anyone, so she took Dante’s elbow and steered him toward the door.
“I don’t want to leave her,” he said when they reached the threshold. “What if . . . ?”
“Emma has it so handled,” Pao said as convincingly as she could. “We’ll get snacks and a pen, and we’ll be right back, okay?”
Dante nodded at this and finally followed Pao into the hallway.
She was going to give him more background, but before she got a chance, Dante turned to face her in the same alcove where Pao had filled in Emma.
“You know something,” he said, his tone accusatory even through his mask of exhaustion and grief. “Something you haven’t told the doctors, or me. What is it?”
Pao hesitated. She knew she had to come clean, but there was every chance that once he heard what she had to say, he would never talk to her again.
“I . . .” Pao began, and then two things happened in quick succession.
One, her phone rang, her mom’s face flashing on the screen.
And two, several people screamed from the hallway around the corner.
It wasn’t hard to decide which one to handle. Pao would choose random screaming people over her mom’s wrath any day. The problem was Dante, who was staring at Pao, still waiting for an answer.
“I’ll tell you everything,” she promised. “But we should probably figure out what’s going on with . . . that, first.”
Luckily—okay, extremely unluckily—for Pao, the situation didn’t wait for them to find it. Before she could even finish her sentence, it was barreling down the hallway right toward them.
At first, it looked like a rogue old lady patient galloping down the hall. She was really moving, Pao thought, and instead of chasing her, the nurses seemed to be running from her—and that’s what all the screaming was about.
But it wasn’t just the old woman. There was a man beside her, too—younger and dressed in a suit and trench coat instead of a hospital gown. He wasn’t running, exactly—he was lurching in their direction, Pao realized. In fact, they both were. And that wasn’t the only strange thing about these runaways.
While the nurses had normal, solid bodies—evidenced by one of them bumping into Pao as she ran past in terror—the patients were mostly translucent. Through them, if the fluorescent lights hit just right, Pao could see the blinking lights of the coffee maker at the nurses’ station as they passed it.
Pao looked at Dante, sure he would immediately comprehend what was happening and what needed to be done, but his eyes were fixed on the two very out-of-place spectral figures, his features frozen in horror.
“We have to help!” Pao said, grabbing his shoulder and trying to shake him out of his trance.
Dante nodded once, and when he finally looked her in the eye, something passed between them. Some kind of unspoken truce.
Though she hated to admit it, the adrenaline coursing through Pao’s veins felt good. The fact that she and Dante were the only two people in this hallway who understood what had to be done also felt good.
The muffled, anxious feeling that Pao had been carrying around with her since her return from the rift was gone for the first time, and she was flying, Dante beside her, both of them knowing exactly . . .
Pao looked at Dante’s empty hands with concern. “You have the chancla, right?”
Dante grew exasperated. “You know I don’t!” he said. “Abuela took it from me when we got back! She said I was too young to have such a powerful weapon.”
With a horrible sinking feeling, Pao remembered.
“Wait,” she said. “I think she was wearing her slippers when we got in the ambulance! Do you—”
Dante was already heading for the door.
“I’ll keep them distracted,” Pao said, jerking her head toward the fantasmas. “But hurry, okay? I can’t hold them off for long without the club.”
Dante nodded and ducked inside. Pao closed the door behind him and stepped forward, silently wishing him luck. They’d be toast without his weapon.
Pao was handy with the knife she now always carried wrapped in a bandanna in her sock, but there was nothing like an Arma del Alma if you wanted to defeat a creature of the void, and Dante (well, Señora Mata, really) possessed one of the only two Pao had ever seen.
The last time she’d fought void creatures outside of La Llorona’s palace, Pao had been wielding a magical flashlight that could repel them, but it had eventually shattered. Her adversaries then had been ahogados—the ghosts of kids who had been abducted by La Llorona and used in a sinister experiment to resurrect her own children, whom she had drowned with her own two
hands.
Pao had freed the ahogados when she defeated La Llorona. She’d released their trapped spirits and allowed them to move on to the place where souls go to rest. But the void was vast, as large as her own world, if not larger. Just because she’d dispatched one ghost overlord didn’t mean there weren’t more around.
And these fantasmas were all the proof Pao needed. The two figures’ eyes burned green in their wasted faces, their jaws hanging slack like zombies from that movie Pao wasn’t officially allowed to watch yet. By the way they mindlessly staggered forward, Pao could tell they were soldiers. Someone had sent them here, just like La Llorona had sent the ahogados.
There was a new general in town. But who could it be?
Did they have something to do with Pao’s dad? Or whatever was wrong with Señora Mata?
She had no time to find out. The fantasmas had rounded the corner at the nurses’ station and were trashing everything in their path as, side by side, they moved toward Pao.
“Come on, Dante,” she said under her breath. “Hurry up.”
Pao was itching to run down the hallway, confront the fantasmas, and fight them with nothing but her knife and her wits, but she knew the smarter course of action would be to wait for backup.
Unfortunately, she didn’t get the chance to be smart.
The old woman ghost, just twenty yards away, stuck her nose in the air and, like a hound catching the scent of a wild animal, locked her venomous eyes on Pao. A feral snarl erupted from the specter’s throat.
“Oh crud,” Pao said, her mom’s edict about mild swearing holding even here. The man ghost reacted to the sound, and both of them abandoned their destruction of property to head straight for her. Pao beat on the door behind her, even as she reached into her sock for the knife. “We’ve got trouble out here!” she yelled.
There were only two living, breathing people left in the hallway—the nurse who answered the phones and a custodian with a bucket and mop.
The nurse made for Pao like she was going to rescue her, but Pao waved her away. “Run!” she told the woman. “I’ve got this!”
“I can’t just leave you, you’re a—”
But before she could say more, another snarl echoed through the trashed hallway, and Pao saw the nurse’s determination waver.
“I know what I’m doing,” Pao said. “Just go.”
And whether it was Pao’s confidence or the woman’s cowardice, the nurse finally scampered off.
The custodian, on the other hand, didn’t seem nervous at all. He was just a little taller than Pao, though she was sure he was at least her mom’s age. He wore a black bandanna tied around his head, and his skin was a little darker than Pao’s—the first nonwhite person she’d seen since she’d walked through the doors of the hospital, in fact.
For some reason, that made her feel a little calmer.
Instead of running away, he unscrewed the mop head and stepped into the center of the corridor holding the handle like a staff. “If you’re gonna pull that knife, you better do it, little girl,” he said. “They’re not slowing down.”
He was right. The door behind Pao remained stubbornly closed, and as much as she wanted to, there was no time to check on Dante, Emma, and Señora Mata.
Only to protect them.
Pao drew the knife, unwrapping it from her bandanna with steady hands, freeing it just as the first fantasma reached her. Pao lunged, blade-first, feeling a little guilty about stabbing a grandma, half expecting her to offer cookies or a lecture for not calling more often.
But of course, she didn’t. This fantasma wasn’t a real grandma any more than the ahogados had been Pao’s middle school classmates.
The knife connected with the ghost’s shoulder, and with another snarl, the woman leaped backward, missing a chunk of her arm but still alive—well, sentient anyway—and very angry.
Pao used the space between them to set her stance, and then she struck again, this time taking a piece of the grandma’s leg. That slowed the fantasma down.
Pao had almost forgotten the way it felt when a knife bit into fantasma flesh. It was nothing like shattering them with Dante’s Arma del Alma, but it was still one of the strangest sensations Pao had ever experienced, like cutting into frozen slime that was somehow both gel and solid at the same time.
It made her whole arm feel numb, but there was no time to stop. Just as she created some space between herself and the first ghost, the custodian shouted, “Watch out behind you!”
Pao whirled to face the second fantasma, trying to back away enough to see them both, not wanting either of them out of her sight while they were still growling and swiping and killing indiscriminately.
The man ghost was much quicker than the old woman, who Pao now saw had engaged the custodian behind the nurses’ station. Pao focused her attention on the male fantasma now. In his long brown trench coat with a suit underneath, he looked like a banker from fifty years ago.
But his expression said he’d much rather rip Pao to pieces than offer her a high interest rate on a new checking account, and she didn’t intend to give him the satisfaction.
“Eat metal!” she said, feeling very cool as she stepped forward and jabbed her knife right into the man’s face, taking a chunk of his cheekbone with her.
Unfortunately, her strike had left her exposed, and before she could regroup, the fantasma had both his ghostly arms around her.
“No!” Pao screamed as the shock of his cold grip went right through her, freezing her to the bone. “Help! Dante! Um . . . Janitor Guy!” Pao’s arms were pinned uselessly against her sides. She tried to kick the fantasma as he lifted her feet off the ground, but her sneaker toes just bounced off his ghostly shins.
Still, no one came to help. And his grip was only getting tighter.
“I’m sorry I called you Janitor Guy!” Pao called out, her face so tightly pressed into the ghost man’s musty trench coat that she could only see the wall beside her. “I didn’t mean to offend. . . . I just don’t know your . . . name. . . . Ow!”
The ghost’s grip had become nearly unbearable. What was he going to do, squish her to death? He didn’t seem to have a weapon, so it probably wasn’t out of the question.
Obviously, sheer physical prowess wasn’t going to get her out of this, so Pao turned her energy inward, commanding her brain to come up with a solution.
Dragging Pao’s toes along the ground, the fantasma headed toward the exit.
“Think!” Pao yelled aloud, knowing she must sound crazy, but no one was around to hear her, and she was totally blanking on ideas. Ahogados and void beasts always had just one objective—to drag their victim into the rift. Except with Ondina it had been different. Ondina had wanted Pao to come willingly.
But the rift is closed, Pao thought, picturing the giant mouth shutting as she’d escaped by the skin of her teeth last summer. There was nowhere for these fantasmas to drag her to. Yet, as soon as they’d seen Pao, they had definitely stopped searching and instead focused their energy on attacking.
Why?
“What do you want?” she asked her abductor in desperation. “Where are you taking me?”
The fantasma didn’t answer, of course. He was almost at the stairwell, and Pao was running out of options.
She kicked out again, more in frustration than anything else, and this time her foot got tangled in the ugly trench coat. The fantasma stumbled as the material tightened around his legs, and his grip loosened for a moment.
It was enough. Pao wiggled out of his grasp and hit the ground running, her breath short from being squeezed too tightly. Otherwise, she was mercifully intact.
She had to get to Dante. They needed his Arma del Alma to vaporize these things, and they needed to do it fast. The random appearance of fantasmas wasn’t the only problem awaiting them now. Other people had seen the ghosts. This place was about to become a crime scene and a news bonanza.
“Dante!” she screamed. She was nearly at the door of Señora Mata’s
room, when dancing green lights appeared at her feet. “No!” she cried for the second time. “Not again!”
The paper dolls unfolded and formed a circle, just like they had in her dream and in Dante’s kitchen. Pao tried to pass through them, or to cut them with the knife, but they wouldn’t budge. They held her in place as they began to spin.
Outside the circle, the two fantasmas abandoned their fight with the custodian and headed right toward her as if the green glow was guiding them in for a landing. But before they could reach her, the door to room 201 flew open and Dante skidded into view, a blue corduroy slipper in his hand. Pao watched with fascination as it magically transformed into a club that glistened under the fluorescent ceiling lights. Seeing that never got old.
“Stay inside, Emma!” he shouted over his shoulder before leaping toward Pao.
The fantasmas got to her first.
Pao nearly screamed when the old woman materialized right in front of her, walking through the green circle like it was no denser than smoke. The fantasma’s jaw was still hanging loose, her eyes burning with green light.
With two clawlike hands, she latched onto Pao’s throat and bent close—too close. She smelled like mothballs and mildew and something much more sinister all at once.
“Come to me, Paola,” she said, her mouth never moving, like the voice was being projected from somewhere else. The horrible hissing, grinding sound made Pao want to cover her ears. “Come to me and I will tell you. . . .”
But before Pao could find out what the fantasma wanted to tell her, its head exploded in a shower of glittering dust.
The green figures once again dissipated the moment Dante stepped through them to get to Pao.
Around them, the hallway was utterly destroyed. Paperwork from the nurses’ station was strewn all over the floor, and the machines that had been beeping and whirring productively just minutes before were now nothing more than rubble.
One of the fluorescent lights overhead had been smashed, and it flickered and sparked ominously where it was still attached to its casing.
Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares Page 5