Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  But the more she tried to humanize and empathize with him, the more Pao realized that the man wasn’t just obnoxious—he was familiar. Pao couldn’t put her finger on what it was at first. His stringy dark hair? Or was it the wide charismatic eyes, just visible under the floppy, dingy white brim of his Santa hat, that made a few people nod and hand over hard-earned cash or food from their lunch containers?

  Within half a minute of observing him, Pao was sure she had seen him before—but there was no way that could be. She’d never been this far away from home—how could she have met a traveling, panhandling Spanish-speaking Santa?

  Pao watched him closely as they crossed the border into Oregon, her hackles rising more and more as he peddled his jokes to a less and less enthusiastic crowd. She didn’t understand his words, but his gestures—especially toward the women on board—didn’t need translating. She wondered where his stop was and hoped it would be soon.

  Then she realized he hadn’t approached her and Naomi once.

  “Are you getting, like, a seriously weird—”

  “Vibe from this guy?” Naomi finished for her. “Yeah. Stay sharp. Keep one hand on that tricky trinket of yours.”

  “I know I’ve seen him somewhere before,” Pao said, almost to herself as she pulled out the magnifying glass, but Naomi’s eyes snapped to her.

  “Where?” she asked.

  Pao didn’t answer right away, because she was distracted. The man had steered close to their seats on his way to do a funny dance in front of some twin toddlers, winking at their mom when they laughed, and Pao could have sworn his eyes locked onto her Arma del Alma as he passed.

  “I don’t know,” Pao said. “The memory is too hazy. I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Could it have been a dream?” Naomi asked as they passed through a town called Medford.

  “I don’t think so,” Pao said.

  “There are fantasmas that mess with your memory,” Naomi said, almost offhand. “But I think they’re pretty rare. . . .”

  Pao was barely listening, because the next sign they passed said, plain as day: PINE GLADE—22 MILES.

  “We’re getting close,” Pao said. “Pine Glade—that’s our stop.”

  “Good thing,” Naomi muttered, reaching into her jeans jacket to pat something Pao assumed was her knife. “Because this guy is seriously pissing me off.”

  “Of course he’s not bothering any of the men,” Pao said through gritted teeth.

  “Right?” Naomi said. “Basura . . .”

  Pao tightened her grip on the magnifying glass, willing it not to transform right then and there even though she could feel its hum against her skin, which told her it could. Anytime she wanted.

  She didn’t know if this guy was a fantasma or just your run-of-the-mill aggressive “nice guy” who seemed to exist to make all spaces less comfortable for women, but either way she was ready to knock the wind out of him at least.

  He continued to avoid Pao and Naomi, but his pestering of the other obviously female passengers had increased to full-on heckling now.

  “What’s he saying?” Pao asked under her breath.

  “He’s asking why they don’t like nice men,” Naomi replied, confirming Pao’s earlier bias, disgust evident in her tone. “He’s telling them though he may not have money, he’ll make them laugh if they give him a chance.”

  “Ugh,” Pao said.

  “Por favor, querida,” the man said to the woman in the seat right in front of them, tipping his hat to her and shaking it so the few coins inside jingled. “Monedas o besos, no me importa.”

  The bubbling, fizzing, reckless feeling that always got Pao into big trouble had returned with a vengeance. Even she, a level-one Duolingo user, knew what besos meant.

  “Lo siento, señor,” said the woman, fearful rather than scowling now. “Soy casada.” She held up her hands to show him her ring, or the fact that she had nothing to offer, or both.

  “¿Quién es su esposo?” the man asked, his chest puffed out. “¿Dónde está?” He looked around exaggeratedly, his fists raised like in a caricature of a fighting leprechaun. The woman shrank into her seat and shook her head, her hands still raised, palms up.

  Pao had had enough, and apparently, so had Naomi. They got to their feet as one.

  “Why don’t you leave her alone?” Pao asked, not sure if he understood English, not sure of much besides the fact that she wanted to save the scowly woman from one more second of harassment.

  The man turned to Pao at last, his eyes flitting (definitely this time) to the magnifying glass in her hand. As they returned to Pao’s face, she noticed that his deep brown irises—which she’d noticed specifically when he got on the bus—had changed to a deep forest green.

  “Who’s going to make me, little girl?” he asked, switching effortlessly to English, his voice now double-layered and menacing.

  “He’s a fantasma,” Pao said under her breath to Naomi, barely believing it. “His eyes . . .”

  “I know,” Naomi said, “I saw them, too.”

  “Okay, so . . . ?” Pao was panicking in earnest now. The other ghosts they’d seen on this trip had been more zombie than human, and none of them had been smarter than your typical ahogados or monsters.

  But this one was obviously different. He could speak at least two languages, hold a human form, and trick a bus full of people into believing that he was one of them.

  This was definitely not the run-of-the-mill kind that had attacked her in the hospital, nor even like the massive, mindless specter that had killed Dante’s dad.

  The only fantasma Pao had ever encountered with this kind of power was La Llorona herself—and fighting her, even with the help of Ondina and Bruto and the power of the pearl, had almost killed Pao.

  “What do we do?” she asked Naomi, knowing panic was evident in her voice, but not caring about looking tough for once.

  “What do you mean, what do we do? We’re ghost hunters! We kick his freaky butt back to the void, like, now!”

  Pao knew Naomi was right. This wasn’t the time for a well-thought-out plan. There was a fantasma in front of them, and there was a bus full of innocent people all around. They had a job to do, no matter how superpowerful he seemed to be.

  “Cover me. I’m gonna . . .” Pao gestured to the row behind them, indicating that she needed space to transform her magnifying glass into a staff. Santa lunged as she climbed over the seat. His grin was rabid now. He looked less and less human with every second that passed.

  Naomi took the full brunt of the attack, swiping at Santa with her knife and forcing him back. Several people screamed. Even more screamed when Pao stepped into the aisle from behind the seat with a six-foot-long bladed staff she definitely hadn’t possessed a minute ago.

  “¡No se permiten armas!” the bus driver screeched through the intercom.

  “Funny,” Naomi said to Pao as they switched places. “She doesn’t allow weapons, but she doesn’t seem to have a problem letting in vengeful spirits of the dead!”

  “They never do,” Pao said, thinking back to the hospital before she jabbed the butt end of her staff right into Santa’s red patchwork gut.

  A cold crunching sound rang out through the bus. Two toddlers near the front had started to cry. Everyone had either squished themselves against a window or crouched near the floor.

  The man was still doubled over from the blow. At first, Pao thought he was crying—or wheezing, at least, but when he straightened up, he was laughing instead.

  With the back of his hand, he lashed at Pao’s face, cracking her hard in the cheekbone and sending her flying into Naomi. They both stumbled backward.

  Naomi recovered first. “Oh no, you did not just backhand my friend. What kind of man hits a kid?”

  “But I’m not a man,” he said, his head doing a full 360 that made Pao dizzy and nauseous. By the time his face was in front again, Pao was in attack mode, and the old joker was gone. He’d been replaced by a beautiful woman in
a long red dress, with dark hair and piercing green eyes.

  Eyes that had once been brown.

  Eyes that had mesmerized Pao in the mirror of a taquería bathroom all the way back in Rock Creek.

  “You!” Pao said, realizing at last.

  The bus sped up drastically on the narrow highway as the driver gave up hope of enforcing the rules and instead looked for a safe place to pull over as her passengers screamed and crowded toward the front.

  But Pao didn’t care about the commotion right now. She was too busy recalling the woman and her photo on the altar at the front of the tienda.

  Querida Elenita . . .

  “Meee,” the fantasma replied in a singsong voice.

  Pao flipped her staff so the blade was up. She’d been trying to avoid traumatizing the little kids on board, but this situation obviously called for extreme measures.

  “I know her,” Pao said to Naomi as they braced for another attack. “She tried to get a ride from me in the bathroom in Rock Creek. Before Johnny’s.”

  “When you got all spacey and couldn’t answer my question?” Naomi asked with gradually dawning horror. She jabbed her long knife at whichever part of Elenita’s body she could reach, but barely scratched the ghost’s elbow.

  “Yep,” Pao said, thrusting her spear past Naomi to catch Elenita in the neck. She’d expected it to feel like entering flesh, but the blade glanced aside like she’d hit rock instead. “I finally remembered.”

  “But do you remember . . . me?” Elenita asked, her head starting to swivel just like Santa’s had. When she turned back, she had become an older man with long hair in a ponytail. His brown eyes, which had mesmerized Pao before, now had a sinister gleam to them.

  “The guy from the side of the road,” Pao said, grunting as the man shoved Naomi into her again. But not before Naomi’s knife caught his wrist, leaving a gash that bled green ooze.

  So we can hurt it, then, Pao thought with satisfaction as the green stuff splattered the bus floor. It just takes a heck of a hit.

  The driver was tearing down the darkening road now, the small lane too curvy for such high speed. The bus tipped, then settled, then tipped the other way. Pao had learned the physics of tipping force in sixth grade from an online video, but there was nothing like the real thing. She barely kept her balance, yet the man stood steady in the middle of the aisle, waiting.

  Why isn’t he attacking? Pao wondered.

  “What guy are you talking about?” Naomi was shouting at Pao as the bus took another hairpin turn.

  “He had his thumb out!” Pao said. “Before the rest stop with the cadejos!”

  Querido Alán, Pao remembered suddenly, picturing the name on the roadside cross.

  “He had his what?” Naomi asked. “Oh no . . .”

  Whatever Pao had said, it had spooked Naomi. She retreated instead of striking again, and when Pao looked at her closely, her face was ashen.

  “What is it?” Pao asked, but Naomi shook her head.

  “We need to get everyone off this bus, now!”

  Luckily, the driver seemed to have had the same thought. On a barely-there strip of grass bordering the densest forest Pao had ever seen, she finally screeched to a halt, throwing the doors open.

  “Mission accomplished?” Pao said to Naomi as everyone but them tried to stream out of the bus en masse. The driver seemed content to run all the way to the nearest town, leaving her passengers behind to mill about in confusion.

  Alán kept his gaze fixed on Pao.

  “¿Qué pasa con las niñas?” shouted the last passenger to disembark, trying to get the attention of the others.

  “No se preocupe, señora,” Naomi called to her, leaping forward to bury her knife in Alán’s thigh. “¡Estaremos bien!”

  Whatever Naomi had said, it seemed to satisfy the woman—or maybe she was just looking for an excuse to bolt.

  “You planning to tell me what’s going on?” Pao asked Naomi when she’d pulled out her knife. Green goop now stained Alán’s bright-red slacks, but he didn’t seem fazed. He hissed at them threateningly, blocking their exit.

  “Haven’t you figured it out yet?” Naomi asked Pao impatiently as they pressed forward, gaining ground, their deadly dance moving toward the open door of the bus.

  “I wish people would stop asking me that!” Pao growled, swinging her staff a little wildly in her frustration. She sheared off the top of Alán’s dark hair, which fluttered to the ground. “I’m a self-taught seventh-grade scientist, not a white lady with a podcast about true crimes!”

  But even as she said it, Alán’s head began to spin again, and Pao knew who she would see a split second before he materialized.

  The boy in the bright-red pajamas who’d been on I-5, holding the cardboard sign that just said North.

  Four people, all dressed in red, all interested in the same thing.

  A ride.

  And then, suddenly, Pao did know, and the realization made her feel freezing cold all over—or maybe that was the misty Oregon air coming in through the open door.

  “The Hitchhiker?” she asked, incredulous, and Naomi’s silence was all the answer she needed.

  “That’s right,” said the little boy, his voice too high-pitched to be natural, his teeth too small and strangely spaced in his mouth when he smiled. “Please, just a ride, that’s all I need!”

  The two girls pressed forward together, both more hesitant to strike now, though they shouldn’t have been. The child in the pajamas was just a costume, and hadn’t Pao and Naomi each killed dozens of ahogados who were wearing braces and rubber-band bracelets last summer?

  But this felt different somehow.

  How had the Hitchhiker been killed in the story? Pao couldn’t remember.

  She racked her brain as she swung her staff again, frustrated by the minimal damage even its supposedly epic blade could do to this fantasma.

  The story hadn’t been one of her mother’s favorites—Maria usually focused on the ones about the dangers that befell troublesome children. But Señora Mata had told it to Pao and Dante a few years before, when scary stories were all the rage at school and Dante had wanted one to impress their classmates.

  In every version, the Hitchhiker was a beautiful woman who’d been picked up by a lovestruck man. She would ask him to drop her off at her house, and he would drive away. Then, unable to stop thinking of her, the man would invariably go back to the house the next day and ask after her.

  He’d be notified that the woman he was inquiring about had died years earlier. Bewildered, he would leave, scratching his head.

  But before the day was over, the man would always be found dead.

  When she’d heard the story, Pao had, of course, used reason and logic to talk her way out of being scared. But now, with the evidence right in front of her, it was hard to remember what she’d told herself, or even how the story had resolved.

  Think, she commanded herself, but the boy’s cold stare was scattering her thoughts, and there was no scientific explanation that could make sense of the rotation of the fantasma’s head—especially to the person watching it in real time.

  “You can’t believe everything you hear in the stories,” the boy said in that awful high-pitched voice. “We’re not always beautiful women. We take the shape of whoever we think has the best chance of being picked up. It’s not our fault most people are so easy to manipulate.”

  “How did you—” Pao began, then shut her mouth and jabbed with her staff, tearing the sleeve of the boy’s pajamas as he danced nimbly out of reach. How had the fantasma heard her thoughts?

  Haven’t you ever wondered why you have those dreams, Pao? Why you’re connected to the head of every monster in the flipping world? Dante had asked her. Of course she had. But she’d never thought the monsters were in her head, too. . . .

  “You were a tough customer,” the boy said, still not striking back. “We were so thrilled when you got on the bus at last. Much easier to be picked up this way. Of
course, the others will have to die now, too. . . . Such a shame.” He looked out the window at the confused passengers, who were now walking up the narrow shoulder in a line. The rabid gleam in the fantasma’s eye told Pao he didn’t think it was a shame at all.

  But Pao wasn’t going to let all those innocent people die. She would stop this. She just needed to figure out how. . . .

  “Why me?” Pao asked, stepping forward again, striking, and missing. Naomi tried again, too, but the boy was too quick, and now he was the one moving toward the door.

  If he escapes, Pao thought, we’ll never be able to save the passengers.

  “Orders are orders,” the boy said, shrugging. “Though I have no idea what he wants with someone so boring.”

  “Who’s he?” Pao asked, matching his steps, keeping the distance between them fixed, trying to shadow without spooking.

  The boy yawned, but when he spoke again, his mouth opened too wide and his eyes multiplied like Pao was seeing him through a fly’s lenses.

  “It doesn’t matter, Paola Santiago,” he said with the voices of four people layered over one another. “In the end, you’ll be dead like all the rest.”

  And then the Hitchhiker bolted out the door and into the forest.

  Pao and Naomi wasted no time, but still, when they had exited the tilted bus to stand on the side of the road, they were alone.

  Frustrated, afraid for the bus passengers, Pao scanned the tree line until she spotted a flash of pale skin—the fantasma’s bare arm, contrasting sharply with the deep green of the forest around it.

  “Wait,” Naomi said, holding back Pao before she could charge into the trees with her staff outstretched. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

  Pao felt it, too—a strange vibration in the air, almost like a sound at the wrong frequency for their ears to hear.

  “Ignore it,” Pao said, shaking off the sensation. “The passengers are still out here. We have to find the Hitchhiker before he hurts someone else.”

  Naomi didn’t seem to be able to fault her logic even though her expression said she was still conflicted.