Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts)

by Trish J. MacGregor

  Then the waiter began to twitch—the muscles in his face and mouth and just beneath his eyes throbbed spasmodically. The twitching expanded into his shoulders and arms, but not violently enough to cause him to lose his grip on the tray. Not violently enough to draw attention from anyone else.

  His eyes went completely dark, an oily dark that poured across even the whites of his eyes. She knew he’d been seized and was now possessed by a brujo, that the ghost’s essence had entered him and was fully in control of the waiter’s body. Then Ricardo spoke in the waiter’s voice.

  “Tess, Tess,” Ricardo murmured. “You can’t escape me so easily. Please tell your father that we all want the same thing, to live peacefully in Esperanza. If the chaser council and the people of this city can’t accept that, then my tribe of three million will attack Esperanza so savagely that not a single person in this city will be spared. We’ll make the dark years of Dominica’s tribe look like kindergarten. And do give Wayra my regards.”

  With that, a bit of mist, Ricardo’s essence, drifted out of the top of the waiter’s skull and the young man blinked hard, nearly lost his grip on the tray, glanced around uneasily, then looked at Tess. “How many … in your group, señora?”

  “None,” she whispered hoarsely, and spun around and raced away from the waiter, out toward her car.

  2.

  With traffic now moving again on the autopista, Tess drove like a maniac, whipping from one lane to another, her heart still hammering. She exited near the airport and took a shortcut through El Bosque—the Woods—a sprawling residential neighborhood. Tall, thick trees blanketed the area, many of them grown first in greenhouses in Esperanza, then transplanted here. Trees, at an altitude where trees weren’t supposed to grow.

  She felt safe in this neighborhood, it smacked of normalcy. Familiar streets. Homes decorated with Christmas lights. Small yards where children played. Schools and sidewalks where teens on bikes sped through the puddles of light the color of melted butter.

  She approached Mercado del León, a bodega where she and Ian shopped when they were in the mood for exotic foods imported from all over South America. She pulled into one of the parking spaces between the market and a small church and waited, watching cars that passed. It unsettled her that Ricardo might have seized any of those drivers, that he might be following her even now.

  She pressed her fists against her eyes. She could still taste and smell the brujo’s breath, his presence, could still feel his essence moving around inside of her, reading her like a comic book. Three million in his tribe? Three fucking million of these suckers?

  The defeat of Dominica’s tribe, supposedly the largest tribe of brujos at the time, had required help from churches, light chasers like her father, and from twenty thousand individuals from all over South America who had lost loved ones to the brujos. Defeating her had demanded a revolution against tyranny. But what defense would Esperanza’s thirty thousand inhabitants have against three million hungry ghosts that were invisible to most people and could seize the living, possess them, and use their bodies as their own?

  We’ll lose. Even chasers, evolved souls who had overseen the evolution of Esperanza since they had brought it into the physical world, couldn’t take on three million brujos. Tess wasn’t exactly sure how many chasers there were worldwide, but suspected their numbers were in the low five digits. Hardly a large enough army to defeat three million brujos.

  Her arms dropped to her sides, she glanced around again. None of the cars stopped, no pedestrian suddenly started jerking like that waiter had. Still, she had to know for sure.

  She drove over to the church, Iglesia del Bosque, and parked in the shade of a tree. As far as she knew, brujos generally didn’t enter churches and were terrified of cemeteries. She supposed they had individual fears, too, just like the living did. Dominica had been afraid of water because she had never learned to swim. What fears did this Ricardo have?

  The church, like every other building in this neighborhood, was decorated for Christmas. Blue, green, and red lights festooned the windows and strings of blinking gold lights spiraled up a tremendous pine tree out front. As Tess stepped into the church, she removed the top of her lipstick tube and dipped it into the bowl of holy water. Just in case. She had no idea if holy water had any effect on brujos. But if it did and if Ricardo had followed her in here, she would be ready.

  Then again, maybe she had seen too many bad horror movies as a kid. She cupped the lipstick cap in her hand, thumb pressed over the top of it.

  Except for an elderly couple lighting candles near the altar, the church was empty. She slipped into a pew and felt strangely comforted by the quiet. A young man emerged from a confessional, then the door opened and a priest walked out, his shoulders so hunched he could barely raise his head. He looked deliberately at Tess and moved toward her. “Are you waiting to confess?” he asked.

  “No. I’m…”

  The oily dark poured across his eyes and he grinned and aimed his finger at her as though it were a gun. “You can’t escape so easily, Tess,” he said softly. “We are everywhere. Be sure to give your father my message.”

  Tess hurled the holy water and it struck the priest in the face. But his skin didn’t burst into flame, he didn’t dissolve or turn to dust. Ricardo just laughed, the sound of it echoing strangely through the church, surrounding her as though it were amplified somehow. “You’re kidding, right? You, the legendary Tess Livingston, really believed holy water would turn me to dust or something?”

  Tess fled the church, leaped into her car, and sped out of El Bosque.

  Two blocks from the Café Taquina, where she was supposed to meet Ian, she nosed Snoopy into the first parking spot she saw and sank back against the seat, into the silence. She slipped her iPhone out of her jacket pocket and texted Wayra. Who’s Ricardo? She had no idea whether he and his wife, Illary, were even in the city this weekend, but eventually he would pick up his voice mail, e-mail, text messages. Even a shape shifter understood the value of technology and rapid communication.

  She got out of the car, zipped up her leather jacket, slung her bag over her shoulder and hurried up the street, anxious to be around people, in a crowd. Before she reached the café, Wayra replied to her text message:

  Can u b more specific?

  Brujo. Ricardo. He sends u his regards. Says his tribe numbers three million.

  What else did he say?

  2 much 2 text.

  Where r u?

  @ Café Taquina. Meeting Ian 4 dinner.

  Will b there shortly. Time 2 talk.

  Tess slid her iPhone back into her jacket pocket, speculations churning through her. A brujo who supposedly commanded a tribe of three million ghosts had tapped her to deliver messages to her father and to Wayra, a shape shifter who knew more about hungry ghosts than anyone. But first he had tasted her, plundered her memories, moved around inside of her like a lover. Yet he hadn’t tried to seize her and hadn’t bled out the waiter and the priest he’d seized. Ricardo had used both men as messengers.

  Since brujos rarely told the truth about anything, she wanted to believe that Ricardo’s tribe was vastly smaller than what he’d claimed, thirty or three hundred tired old ghosts instead of three million chafing at the bit to seize the living. In this way, brujos were similar to politicians, bovine blowhards who sought to intimidate in any way available to them. It bothered her, though, that when she mentioned Ricardo’s name to Wayra, he replied that they needed to talk.

  When she was confronted with a potential horror show, her former FBI training always kicked in. Pick it apart. Detail by detail. Piece by piece. First detail: the shifter wasn’t a talker. When he shared information and insights, it was only because he felt you absolutely needed to know or because he’d been backed into a corner and had no other choice.

  More than three years ago, when Dominica had seized Tess’s niece, Maddie, as her human host and fled Esperanza, Wayra had pursued her without telling Tess, her mother, or I
an. He had cut them out of the search as cleanly as a surgeon excised a tumor. Tess now understood he’d done it for fear they would screw things up because of their emotional connection to Maddie. But when it had been happening, she had grown to resent Wayra for excluding them. Tess’s mother had refused to speak to him for months. Only Ian had maintained contact, doing what he did best, building bridges in spite of differences.

  Esperanza versus the brujos. The battle in 2008 hadn’t ended anything. It had only delayed what suddenly seemed inevitable.

  The thought was so depressing, she paused on a corner near the café and shouted, “Hey, Dad, you there? I could use some help.”

  A breeze carried her voice through the street and out across the lake to the volcano. Charlie never answered.

  Two

  Dark Matter

  1.

  Until tonight, Ian had been to the Café Taquina only once, an embarrassing admission for someone who had lived in Esperanza for more than four years. Known for its cuisine, music, and magnificent view, it was the most famous restaurant in the city. It seemed like a fitting place for him and Tess to celebrate the news that would turn things around for them and the newspaper.

  The café, perched at the edge of a hill, overlooked Lago Taquina and the volcano of the same name that rose beyond it. Moonlight turned the volcanic lake into a lustrous mirror that reflected the star-studded sky. From where Ian stood, waiting to enter the back deck, the Milky Way looked close enough to taste. Lean forward slightly, extend tongue, and lick. No wonder people flocked here. When you drank in the view, it was as if you peered back in time more than five hundred years, to the first few moments after the chasers had brought Esperanza into the physical world. Until that moment, the city had been nonphysical, a place where transitional souls came to decide whether they would return to their bodies or move on into the afterlife. For centuries, brujos had preyed on those souls. The chasers had brought the city into the physical world and closed it to transitional souls to end the brujo feasting. The brujos simply evolved to the point where they learned to seize the living.

  He spotted Tess at a table at the rear of the wide back deck, loose dollar bills tucked under a candle. Steeped in shadows that the soft, delicate lighting along the floor didn’t penetrate, the table was private. The small heaters mounted above the tables kept the air comfortable. She sat alone, a tall, lovely blonde fiddling with her phone.

  From the moment he’d first seen her in that bus depot outside Esperanza, when they were both transitional souls, their physical bodies in comas, near death, and separated by forty years in time, she had reminded him of Lauren Bacall in Dark Passage. Bacall’s nickname in the movie was Slim, and it was what he’d called Tess since the beginning, only to later discover it had been her father’s nickname for her, too.

  “Can I buy you a drink, Slim?” he asked in his best Bogie voice.

  She laughed, glanced up from her phone, crossed her legs at the knees, and in her best Bacall voice, said, “You bet, handsome. Have a seat. Snacks and munchies are on the way.” She nudged a glass of wine toward him and raised her own glass. “Salud, Clooney. To the Expat News.” They clicked glasses. “I heard from Maddie. She and Sanchez are going to meet us for coffee in town when we finish dinner. They were planning on leaving for Quito today, but have postponed the trip for a few days.”

  Ian was relieved to hear they would be in town a while longer. It meant they could probably get the next edition of the Expat out on time and Sanchez could help with the Spanish translation for the paper’s website. Ian disliked leaning too heavily on Sanchez. He and his partner owned a remote-viewing consulting firm, and with his partner out of town, everything would fall on Sanchez. In a pinch, he could hire Wayra or Illary to do the translations. They had helped out in the past and were always delighted to be involved. But again, he hated to ask.

  He noticed that Tess seemed distracted, not quite present. “You okay?”

  “Something happened on my way over here.” She dropped her voice. “A brujo materialized in my car and tried to choke me.”

  Ian nearly gagged on his sip of wine. For the first time in more than four years, a brujo had shown itself in Esperanza. In Tess’s car. “Does this brujo have a name?”

  “Ricardo.” The rest of it spilled out, Ricardo’s message, his threats. “My sense is that he’s one of the ancient ghosts, Ian. It means they’re here, that the city has been invaded and none of us knew it.” She knocked her knuckles against the table. “Not you, me, not even Wayra or Illary. And my dad apparently didn’t know, either.”

  The waiter came over just then with a platter of tapas—baked plantains, avocado salad, and two bowls of fresh fish soup. As soon as the waiter left, Ian leaned toward her, his voice quiet. “It doesn’t make sense. If they’ve invaded, why haven’t they seized anyone?”

  Tess tucked her hair behind her ears, fidgeted in her chair. “When … he licked my neck…”

  Christ.

  “… and sucked my scream into himself, he … read me inside out. And when that happened, I realized I could read him, too. Not like he read me, just bits and pieces. I don’t think he’s lying about the size of his tribe. He knew my dad’s a chaser. He mentioned Wayra. And Wayra is on his way over here.” She passed Ian her iPhone, so he could read the text exchange between her and Wayra.

  When Wayra had rescued Maddie three years ago and taken Dominica back to the edge of time, Ian had hoped there would never be a threat from brujos in Esperanza again. Now here it was.

  The band started playing, four Quechuan men and a woman, all on string instruments and flutes. Andean music. The beauty of it wrapped around them, but the music was too loud for him and Tess to speak without shouting, so they got up to dance.

  He pressed in close to her, his mouth at her ear. “What were you thinking about before he appeared?”

  “I was thinking about doing a column on the NDE that brought me—us—to Esperanza.”

  He tightened his arm around her and breathed in the scent of her skin, her hair, read the nobs of bones in her shoulders and along her spine, and shut his eyes. What he really wanted to do just then was drive home, start a fire, and make love.

  When his eyes opened again, he saw something odd over Tess’s shoulder, something that didn’t look right, a thick, expanding shadow the moonlight didn’t penetrate. He whispered: “Don’t whip around or anything, but there’s something strange happening to the air just past the railing, where the hill’s slope begins. It could just be a trick of the light, but given what you just told me, maybe it’s something else. Let’s head back to the table and you take a look.”

  Tess drew back. “Shit, Clooney, you’re freaking me out.”

  He gripped her hand and they made their way through the crowd, back toward their table. “See it?” He gestured beyond the railing and Tess leaned against it.

  “I see light and shadows, Ian. That’s physics, not brujos.” Then the massive blanket of shadows against the slope of the hill darkened and moved, undulating like a giant wave, and crept steadily uphill, toward the café’s deck. She hissed, “What is it?”

  “Nothing good. Move back, Slim.”

  But even as he said it, the monstrous shadow swallowed everything it touched, like some special effect in a movie, digital magic. The closer it got to the deck, the colder and stranger he felt. A kind of primal terror scrambled around inside of him, as though he were locked in an empty room with a deadly gas pouring through the air vents.

  “We need to warn people and get the hell outta here,” he said.

  “Without creating panic.” She stepped away from the railing, plucked her bag from the back of the chair.

  Ian spun around and hurried over to where the band was playing. He whispered to the guy on the flute, who immediately glanced over his shoulder, passed the mike to Ian, and whispered something to the female in the band. The musicians fell silent and Ian’s voice boomed across the deck in Spanish, then English: “This is not a
drill. Please proceed in an orderly fashion off the deck. Take your personal belongings with you.”

  Murmurs rippled through the crowd, people looked around uneasily and started getting up from their tables. Then a woman somewhere on the deck shrieked, “Brujos, son los brujos … In the darkness, see? See the blackness moving toward us?”

  Brujos. For the locals who had lived through the dark years and lost loved ones, no word was more powerful. They shot to their feet and frantically grabbed their stuff. Tourists who probably didn’t have a clue what was going on were nonetheless swept up in the bedlam. Chairs crashed to the floor, panicked diners tore toward the stairs, shrieks and screams ripped through the air. The chaos seemed to cause the blanket of shadows to widen, deepen, and move lightning quick, as though the collective panic of the crowd fueled it. It swallowed up earth, brush, trees, then the corner of the deck.

  Ian glanced around wildly for Tess, but didn’t see her. He watched in horror as a man he recognized—Javier, who owned the bakery in town where he and Tess went most mornings for coffee—tripped and sprawled on the floor. The blackness, now thick as syrup, consumed him to the waist and he clawed frantically at the floor, shrieking, “Help, someone help me, oh God, please…”

  Ian shoved his way through the panicked crowd, dived for the floor, hooked his feet around the legs of the closest table, and grabbed Javier’s forearms. “Hold on, Javier,” he shouted. “Hold on, c’mon, good, that’s right, hold on tight.”

  Javier’s handsome face contorted in agony. He kept sobbing, struggling. Some people behind Ian held the table in place, and men on either side of Ian grabbed Javier’s shoulders and attempted to pull him out of the maw of the abyss. But the force that held Javier’s legs was so powerful the table tipped forward and one of the men catapulted headfirst into the darkness, his screams echoing.

  Ian’s hands, slippery with sweat, began to lose their grip on Javier’s forearms, and he yelled, “Hold on, Javier, c’mon, I can get you out, please, hold on…”