Pao remembered Dante’s meeting with the shadow-wreathed figure in the forest of her nightmares.
I did what you asked, he’d said. The ghost has been released.
Was this the ghost he meant? The Hitchhiker? A shape-shifter that could become whatever it thought Pao would respond to? And had been stalking her since Rock Creek?
If she chased the fantasma now, would she be walking right into the trap he had laid for her?
It didn’t matter, Pao told herself, shutting down the line of questioning by reminding herself again of the innocent passengers. Whether or not it was part of some grand design, she and Naomi had a responsibility to make sure those people were safe.
“We’ll follow him,” Pao said. “We’ll dispatch him, and then we’ll find the Niños and figure out what to do next, okay?”
“It’s not that easy,” Naomi said, her mouth a grim line. “El Autostopisto is one of las leyendas. The legends, like La Llorona. You don’t just dispatch one like any run-of-the-mill ahogado or fantasma. They’re different—imbued with the void’s power, with a mainline directly to the minds of the ghosts and monsters inside. If you’ve been seeing him this whole time, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the one sending all these fantasmas after you.”
“But he said he was taking orders, too . . .” Pao said nervously.
“Exactly. Even together, and armed with an Arma del Alma, it’ll be almost impossible for us to stop El Autostopisto on our own. And even if we do . . . anyone who can send a leyenda after us?” Naomi shuddered. “I don’t even want to know.”
Pao understood what Naomi was saying. But she felt urgency pounding inside her like a pulse. All she could think about was the passengers. And the driver, whose only crime had been letting a poor man in a Santa hat ride for free.
“We have to try,” Pao said simply. “Maybe we won’t succeed, but we have no choice. We owe it to all those people. I jeopardized them just by stepping onto that bus. I can’t let them die for it.”
Naomi gave Pao an appraising look. “Old what’s-his-name sure was wrong about you, pipsqueak,” she said, shaking her head.
“What do you mean?” Pao asked, bristling at the thought of Dante.
“You’re a hero through and through.”
Pao wasn’t sure Naomi had meant it as a compliment, but it made her stand up a little straighter anyway.
“All right, hero girl,” Naomi said. “Let’s go track down a ridiculously overpowered fantasma all by ourselves. Why do you savior types have such bad planning skills?”
“I guess that’s what we need you snarky, reluctant adventurer types for,” Pao said with a grin. “Now come on—he’s already got a huge head start.”
Naomi shook her head. “If El Autostopisto has chosen you, finding him will be the least of our problems.”
They walked together for at least a half mile, any noise from the road muffled by the dense press of trees all around them.
The Hitchhiker was nowhere to be seen, but Pao could feel its presence—a sinister, strange thing lurking just out of sight. She tried to keep their bearings as best she could, knowing they’d have to find their way out of this enormous forest the moment the fantasma had been dealt with.
Pao had been counting on disembarking at a well-lit bus stop somewhere close to town, maybe visiting the post office where her dad had his box and asking for directions.
But when did her plans ever work out like they were supposed to?
From the sound of it, the rain had started to fall again, but they were protected by the canopy of green needles stretching endlessly above them.
Before they had set off into the trees, evening had just started to gather at the edges, yet in here it was nearly as dark as night. Pao knew they were less than five miles from Pine Glade, but that didn’t help much when the only landmarks you had were a series of identical trees.
And she didn’t even need to check her phone to know there was no cell service in here.
“There!” Naomi called, and Pao saw it. A flash of silver white, like a fish’s belly. They followed its occasional flicker, correcting their course, tripping over roots and rocks and fallen branches. There was no path here—neither the wide one that stretched through the forest in Pao’s dreams, nor even a skinny one clear of brambles.
The fight to get through the woods was arguably as difficult as the first battle with the Hitchhiker had been. While the desert was always a backdrop, this forest seemed almost sentient, and Pao couldn’t decide if it was a friend or an enemy.
Pao’s fingers started going numb from the cold after about ten minutes. Apparently, winter in Oregon was a whole different beast than the temperate winters she was used to in Arizona. The cold here had a texture, a smell, and a taste.
Pao wasn’t at all sure she liked it.
Still they walked, their feet turning to ice cubes in their sneakers. Once or twice they spotted a flash of hair or limbs, and they redirected, running toward where they’d seen proof that they weren’t alone out there. They always arrived too late.
The cold was getting more insidious, reaching its wet way into every exposed crack in their clothing. Their breath became visible in puffs in front of them as the light continued to fade.
But the feeling—goose-bump-causing, prickly-back-of-the-neck feeling that they were being watched—grew stronger the farther in they pressed.
At this point, Pao thought she was moving forward less because she expected to find the Hitchhiker, and more because she didn’t know if they could find their way back out.
“So, now that I have you here,” Naomi said, as yet another flash of pale skin yielded nothing but a fifty-eighth direction change. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re not telling me?”
Pao looked away guiltily and was rewarded by tripping over a root and sprawling on the ground. She got up with all the dignity she could muster and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’ve been thinking, and it doesn’t add up. What’s-his-name’s grandma collapses, and you’re attacked by fantasmas at the hospital, and because of a dream about some trees you’re suddenly knocking down my figurative door ready to head to Oregon?”
“Yeah, and . . . ?” Pao asked, doing her best tough-girl impression.
Naomi huffed. “There’s a piece missing,” she said. “A big piece. And if I’m gonna follow you in here, a leyenda tracking us, my fate and the fate of a bunch of other innocent people at stake, I think I deserve to be as prepared as I can be, don’t you?”
Pao knew she was right. When Pao had started out, she’d had Dante. Naomi had just been a reluctant tagalong. But since then, Naomi had proven herself to be ten times the friend Dante was, and Pao no longer feared being teased by her.
It was time to be honest.
“It’s about my dad,” Pao said as the temperature somehow dropped even further. “The dreams I’ve been having about the forest? He’s been in them, telling me to come to him before it’s too late.”
Naomi nodded slowly, digesting this information. “And what do we know about Pops?”
“Not much,” Pao admitted, spinning her staff absentmindedly. “He left when I was really little, like three. My mom never talks about him. But he gave me my flashlight. The one that ended up being, you know . . .”
“The key to opening the rift?” Naomi said, eyebrows raised. “And you never thought that maybe he was involved in something supernatural?”
“Señora Mata was the one who gave it to me!” Pao said defensively. “I just figured she’d done something freaky to it beforehand. But I never got the chance to ask her about it, because Dante was always preventing me from—”
“Was that . . . ?” Naomi interrupted, her eyes darting to the left, her knife at the ready.
“What?” Pao swung her staff to attention, blade end pointing forward.
“Careful,” Naomi said, taking slow steps toward a bush that rustled before them.
Pao’s heart was in her throat. Was th
is it?
The rustling intensified, and Naomi shifted to the balls of her feet, prepared to attack. Pao, seeing how cool she looked, did the same, overbalanced, and almost fell.
“Really?” Naomi hissed.
“Shut up.”
The bush began to part, exposing a dark cavern inside. Pao, her nerves ringing like an alarm clock, stepped forward, all set to stab the business end of her staff into the first living (or dead) thing she saw.
There was a flash of white. Naomi screamed first, and Pao followed suit, telling herself they were battle cries as they both jumped forward, ready for anything. . . .
Well, anything except the fluffy little bunny that hopped out of the bush, looking up at them wide-eyed, frozen save for a little nose twitch.
After a long minute of the three of them staring at one another, the bunny hopped away in alarm, disappearing into the trees.
Naomi sheathed her knife.
Pao loosened her grip on the staff.
“I think we can agree that never happened,” Naomi said.
“What never happened?”
“Right.”
It took them a while to recover from the rabbit incident. Once, they heard a laugh echoing through the trees that sounded eerily like Santa’s. Another time, it was a woman’s voice, calling out for help.
On each occasion, they changed direction, heading toward the sound. Pao felt like they were following a trail of spooky fantasma-flavored bread crumbs through the magical woods of a European fairy tale.
The only question was, who was laying the trail, and why?
“So, your dad gave you a toy flashlight that ended up being the key to entering the ghost-infested void and defeating La Llorona,” Naomi prompted. “Then he randomly starts showing up in your dreams. That doesn’t really explain the rest.”
“Right,” Pao said, the quiet of the forest starting to get to her. Earlier, there had been the odd bird and, of course, the demon bunny that could never be spoken of again. But here, it was deadly still.
“So?”
“Right,” Pao said again. “So, in one of these dreams I saw Dante’s abuela.” Pao described Señora Mata’s strange behavior, the way she’d called her Maria, and her warnings about Beto.
“Wait, Beto?” Naomi asked. “She specifically said Beto?”
“Yeah . . .” Pao said. “Why?”
“I mean, it’s nothing,” Naomi said, looking away. “There are probably lots of people with that name. It’s just . . . Beto was the name of La Llorona’s second son.”
Beto, Pao thought, with that aha! feeling she loved so much. She recalled thinking, back in Señora Mata’s kitchen, that the name sounded familiar, but she hadn’t remembered where she’d heard it until now.
It was last summer, in the glass palace. In Ondina’s final argument with her mother, she had mentioned her two brothers, both of whom had been drowned along with her in real life. Luis, who had died a second time in one of La Llorona’s regeneration experiments, and Beto, who hadn’t wanted to live if it meant someone else had to die for it. “Ungrateful Beto,” as La Llorona had called him, had paved the way for Ondina’s sacrifice.
Pao had tried to repress the memories of what she’d seen while under the influence of the pearl—the void’s power source, which she’d held in her own two hands for a short time. But now she allowed herself to remember the faces of La Llorona’s children. The middle son, almost a man, had looked a little familiar. . . .
Could Beto have survived his mother’s twisted test run?
But even if he had, there was no way he could be the same Beto Señora Mata had warned Pao’s mother against, could it? The troublesome boy Maria had known before she met Pao’s father . . . ?
“Earth to Pao!” Naomi said sharply, like this wasn’t the first time she’d tried it. It made Pao think of Dante and their junk food picnics on the banks of the Gila with Emma. Simpler times.
“Sorry,” Pao said. “It’s just . . . I’ve heard of Beto. La Llorona mentioned him in the end. But I don’t know what he could have to do with my mom. . . . Do you know if he made it out of the void?”
Naomi shrugged. “If he did, we never came across him. Like I said, I’m sure it’s not the same guy. Probably just a coincidence, right?”
“Right,” Pao said, her mind still a million miles away. Last year, she would have agreed with Naomi. Any good scientist knows that coincidences happen all the time, that there isn’t necessarily any meaning between correlations in data.
But Pao had changed since then. She now knew that logic wasn’t the only force at play in their world. Sometimes coincidences were simple correlation, but sometimes they were more.
“What are we doing?” Pao asked aloud. “We’ve been walking for miles. If the Hitchhiker is really going to attack those people, what’s he doing leading us on a wild-goose chase through this freezing-cold forest?”
Naomi shook her head like she was coming out of a trance. “It’s been over an hour,” she said. “We were less than five miles from town. They must be somewhere safe by now.”
“He was baiting us,” Pao said, shaking her head. “Trying to lure us in here, distract us, and we fell for it. Look, long story short, Señora Mata said some things that make me think my dad has the answers about whatever is going on with her. That, combined with the magic anomaly being in this same area? Too great a coincidence to ignore.”
“So we go back? Find your dad?”
“I think so,” Pao said. “Are you in?”
“Anything to get out of these cold, wet woods,” Naomi said, shivering. “I told you humidity is a silent killer.”
Pao laughed, feeling as relieved as Naomi sounded. They would turn back, head for the highway. They would find Pine Glade and the post office, and they’d track down Pao’s dad. Once they were reunited with the other Niños, they could come back for the Hitchhiker. An evidence-based, common-sense plan always made Pao feel better.
Seized by momentary inspiration, Pao carved a giant PS in the closest tree trunk.
Naomi, nodding, followed suit with her own initials.
“We were here,” Pao said, turning back toward where she thought the highway was, her feet light as air despite the numbness in her toes.
They walked faster than before, eager to escape the oppressive denseness of the trees and return to the road. To a plan not dictated by the words of an evil little boy with a head that spun in a full circle.
Pao looked for the landmarks she’d noted on the way in—a stump that resembled an elephant, a large cluster of mushrooms, the bush where she and Naomi had definitely not screamed like preschoolers in the presence of a fluffy little bunny . . .
She saw none of them. Raindrops glistened on every leaf and needle, casting an odd shimmering quality to the area. Was the light different going this direction? Pao wondered. She hadn’t remembered the foliage glistening quite so much before.
And then she saw it. The one landmark she hadn’t expected. One that made her heart sink in the direction of her left knee.
On the two trees up ahead were four initials.
PS and NC.
The forest had spit them out right back where they’d started.
“No,” Pao said, her voice sounding hollow even to her own ears as she sank onto the damp mulch that covered the forest floor. “Not again! This can’t be happening again.”
Naomi was still on her feet, tracing her own initials in the bark with her knife—but she looked curious, not despondent.
“It’s just like our force field,” she said with wonder. “But how? Without a rift, what’s generating it?”
“Who cares how?” Pao asked, her face in her hands. “We’re stuck in here!”
“Really?” Naomi said, raising an eyebrow. “I thought you were supposed to be the hero type. Never known one of you to give up so easily . . .”
“I’m not giving up,” Pao said. “But the last time I had to get through one of these things, I had a magic flashlight that
was magnetized to the void’s entrance—that’s just a theory, but I think it’s a pretty sound—”
Naomi cleared her throat.
“Sorry,” Pao said. “It’s just, we tried to get through a force field before, and without the flashlight, it was impossible. How are we going to find my dad if we can’t ever get out of these stupid woods?”
“You’re asking the wrong question,” Naomi said. “We’re not just trying to find your dad—we’re trying to find an anomaly he may be at the center of. Now, I told you Franco’s maps show no entrance between home and Vancouver, BC, so what’s creating this force field, science girl?”
“Magic,” Pao said automatically, her brain already halfway done with the hypothesis even though she’d never consciously considered any of this. “Enough magic to trick the forest into thinking it’s a liminal space.”
“Nerdier than I would have phrased it, but bingo.”
Pao got to her feet. “Okay,” she said, that on the verge of a discovery feeling taking over for the first time in ages. “So we must be close to the anomaly. But that doesn’t explain how we’re going to get through the force field to find it.”
She was pacing now, a sure sign that a breakthrough was imminent.
“Did you guys have a special way of getting through the force field?” Pao asked Naomi, feeling really dumb for not asking sooner. “Some way of sensing the way through . . . ?”
“Yeah,” Naomi said without hesitation. “We used echolocation. Check it out.”
Pao found a stump and perched on its edge, sure she was about to learn an incredible secret, the key to getting them out of this mess.
Eyes locked on Pao’s, Naomi made a chirping sound, like a terrible imitation of a bat.
The dense forest didn’t produce an echo.
Pao peered around, like maybe the way ahead would illuminate at the sound or something, but nothing was happening. Was Pao the problem? Could she not see it because she wasn’t officially a Niña?
Naomi started laughing. Hard. Like clutch-your-stomach-and-roll-around-on-the-ground laughter. “You should have seen your face!” she howled. “You looked like this was science class and some particle-physics geek was coming to teach you about telekinesis or something.” She dissolved into chortles again.
Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares Page 20