Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts)

by Trish J. MacGregor

  A man stood alone by the tree, his body a thin silhouette. “There’s Pedro,” Wayra said, pulling up to the curb at the south end. “He’s gone through the tunnels under the Pincoya, I haven’t. He’ll take us in.”

  They grabbed their bags out of the backseat and got out. The priest greeted them both with a Latino abrazo, a kind of group hug. Pedro Jacinto was considerably shorter than either Ian or Wayra, and was thinner and grayer than Ian remembered. He wore jeans, a sweater, a leather jacket, and his clerical collar.

  “Great to see you again, Pedro,” Ian said.

  “The pleasure is all mine, my friend. I need to show you both a few things before we head into the tunnels. Let’s get to where there’s more light.”

  They moved over to the fountain, where a street lamp illuminated the fountain’s ancient stones, the statue of the Virgin Mary at the top of it, her hands outstretched, palms turned upward. Water bubbled up from her hands and cascaded down her body.

  Beneath her feet, engraved into the stones, was the date the park had been brought into the physical world: January 3, 1500. Under this was a second date, something new: December 21, 2012, 11:00 UTC.

  “What the hell.” Ian pointed. “That’s six days from now.”

  “That was the first thing I wanted to show you,” Pedro said. “And it wasn’t here yesterday.”

  Wayra leaned forward and ran his fingers over the engraving, sniffed at the stones, shook his head. “All I smell here is bird shit. But this engraving looks as old as the other one, so it was done by supernatural means. Brujo, chaser, other.”

  “But why a date six days from now?” Ian asked.

  Pedro shrugged. “As a warning?”

  “Or a promise,” Ian murmured.

  “We can’t worry about it now.” Pedro brought a folded sheet of paper from his pack, smoothed it open. “A floor plan of the building. Drawn from memory.”

  It looked precise and detailed to Ian, the rooms on the first and second floors labeled. “I’m pretty sure the portal is in the ballroom,” Pedro said. “Inside a wall of mirrors.”

  “If your drawing is accurate,” Ian said, “then the ballroom shares a wall with a storage closet and a bathroom. That looks like an ideal spot for explosives.”

  “Might be a bit too close to the portal,” Wayra said. “I think it would be safer for us here.” He indicated a garage. “We set the explosives, get back behind the steel door and into the tunnel, then detonate them.”

  Pedro said, “You realize that even if we’re successful with the explosives, we don’t have any guarantee that it will shut down a supernatural construct like this.”

  “Nothing is guaranteed,” Wayra said. “But since fire will annihilate brujos, I suspect it will shut down the portal, too.”

  “Is this a stairwell?” Ian asked, tapping a tall, rectangular area that Pedro hadn’t labeled.

  Pedro nodded. “The building actually has two staircases—the main stairs you see as you walk in the front door of the hotel, then an employee staircase in the kitchen. That’s my first choice for explosives. We can get into the kitchen easily from the tunnel, then into the stairwell.”

  “I’ll set the explosives,” Wayra said. “You two create the distraction by starting a fire in the kitchen, then toss grenades through the windows to keep them away from the building. They won’t come anywhere near fire or explosions. While you’re doing that, I’ll get into the stairwell.”

  “The police will be all over the place in five minutes,” Ian remarked.

  “I can do this in under five minutes,” Wayra said.

  “How many grenades do you have?” Pedro asked.

  “Fifteen. And we’ve got three flares apiece.” Wayra unzipped his pack, removed the smaller pack inside that held the grenades, rags, Drano, and matches, and handed it to Ian.

  Pedro gave them both LED flashlights. “The green light is best once we’re inside the building. In their natural forms, brujos can’t see color.”

  Ian didn’t want to be here, but he didn’t feel like he could turn back now. He slung the bag over his shoulder. “Let’s move.”

  Since the defeat of Dominica’s tribe, the tunnels were no longer used as sanctuaries from brujos. But when inclement weather clamped down over the city, especially cold, driving rain, people tended to seek shelter and moved from one place to another through the tunnels. Electric carts were available—sometimes for free, sometimes for a nominal fee. Though it was cold tonight, the weather was pristine, the sky burning with stars. Ian figured the tunnels would be deserted.

  2.

  The air felt ten degrees cooler in the tunnels. Ian zipped up his jacket, turned on his flashlight. Small glowing lights ran down the center of the ceiling and on either side of the concrete walls, offering enough illumination to see the graffiti—a hastily scrawled record of brujo attacks, with dates, names of victims, pleas and prayers. Their footsteps punctuated the tight, eerie silence. The beams of their flashlights darted like mice along the earthen floor.

  Here and there, Ian saw signs that directed pedestrians to various bus stops, plazas, or streets. Curves and forks in the tunnel were marked by religious statues and most of them held small offerings—bouquets of dried flowers, photographs, trinkets, coins, pieces of paper with names and prayers written on them. They were the only people down here.

  The statue of the Virgin Mary they now approached was surrounded by flowers, wreaths, coins. The priest paused in front of her, withdrew a rosary from his pocket, and threaded it around the statue’s fingers. Then he genuflected briefly and blessed himself. “She’s the guardian of the tunnels. She remembers everything about the dark years.”

  Every three to five yards, they passed crumbling concrete steps that led up to steel doors. All the doors lacked handles and boasted round, gold-colored locks. “How’re we going to get through a locked door?” Ian asked.

  Pedro patted his pack. “We have options. You know where we are now?”

  “No idea,” Ian said.

  “Forty feet below Calle de Milagros, the street where the Pincoya is located.”

  Street of Miracles. How appropriate, Ian thought. They would need a miracle to pull this off.

  They turned down another tunnel, stopped in front of one of the steel doors. Like the others, it didn’t have a handle, just a lock. Pedro unzipped his pack and brought out a small, thin tool that he handed to Wayra. “Amigo, your fingers are far more nimble than mine.”

  Ian shone the beam of his flashlight on the lock, Wayra inserted the tip of the tool, and within fifteen seconds, the door swung open. The air smelled strange. It vaguely reminded Ian of how old basements in Minnesota smelled in the midst of a humid summer, of mold, fecund earth. But beneath it lay another, thicker odor so foul he nearly gagged.

  “The brujo stench,” Wayra whispered. “It’s everywhere. Flares out, ready. Turn off your flashlights, I’ll keep mine on green, pointed at the floor.”

  Wayra went through the door first, moving slowly, cautiously, sniffing the air. Ian moved along behind him, the skin at the back of his neck prickling with apprehension. The priest shut the door, it clicked softly, and darkness closed over them, a coffin. As they climbed the stone steps, twenty-two of them, Ian counted, he kept his eyes on the soft green dot of light from Wayra’s flashlight so he wouldn’t trip over his own feet.

  The stairs ended at a ramp that took them up another twenty feet. They stopped, Ian heard Wayra sniffing the air once more, then they moved forward again, into a narrow, windowless foyer. The green light exposed clumps of dust, dirt, and mold snuggled like mice in the corners of the walls. Wayra turned off the flashlight and they stood for a moment in the darkness, letting their eyes adjust.

  Ian could see a soft, dim source of light through the foyer door and guessed it came from the Pincoya’s kitchen windows. If he remembered correctly, the building was set back far enough from the road so that the illumination from the streetlights wouldn’t be streaming through the glass. />
  “Give me a sixty-second head start,” Wayra whispered. “Then move into the kitchen and start your fires.”

  He dashed out of the foyer and across the kitchen and vanished through the doorway on the other side, where the stairwell was. Ian and Pedro soaked rags with Drano and tossed them to the left and right of the doorway. Ian checked his watch.

  “Okay, amigo,” he whispered to Pedro.

  The priest peered out, flashed Ian a thumbs-up. More hand gestures followed, then Pedro moved swiftly into the kitchen, lighting the saturated rags, splashing Drano everywhere. Ian peered around the doorjamb—and saw thin cotton curtains drawn across the kitchen windows. They billowed like sails in a breeze and suggested that one or all of the windows were either open or broken. Curtains would burn fast, the breeze would fan the flames. Ian darted forward.

  The billowing curtains reminded him of something you might see in some old vampire film in the moments before the vampires appeared, a prop that set the scene, ramped up the fear factor, and had you gnawing on your knuckles before the eerie music kicked in. He’d seen plenty of those movies. In fact, movies were his best friends. Movies helped him, a man from 1968, acclimate to a world forty years in his future. Tess often marveled that he had adapted so quickly to twenty-first-century life, but he never would have been able to do it without movies. That visual input, he thought, was key. Just as it was now.

  He set the curtains on fire and the flames consumed the fabric with shocking swiftness. He hurled one of the grenades through the burning curtains, the broken windows, and it exploded out in the driveway and set fire to the overgrown weeds. Ian spun around.

  Flames now licked at the walls where Pedro had lit the saturated rags. The priest hurried across the kitchen, squirting Drano everywhere, and Ian raced to the gas stove and turned on all four burners. “Wayra, we’re outta here!” he shouted.

  Two bright orbs of light emerged from a section of wall that hadn’t caught fire yet and dived straight for him. Ian didn’t have a chance to pull out a flare, so he threw himself to the floor, a stupid move. But it bought him five or ten seconds—long enough for the priest to fire two flares. They struck the orbs and blew them apart.

  More orbs appeared in the kitchen. Two, four, eight, twelve, twenty, a mathematical axiom, a growing army. Ian backpedaled toward the foyer, through the intense heat. “Wayra,” Ian shouted again. “This place is going to blow!”

  A swarm of orbs dropped out of the ceiling and the familiar brujo chant suffused the room. Find the body, fuel the body, fill the body, be the body … Ian fired two flares that incinerated half of them. The rest vanished through the ceiling again.

  He and Pedro tore into the foyer, Ian pushed open the door and they fled down the ramp, then the steps, and burst through the steel door and into the tunnel. Less than a minute later, the percussive roar of an explosion ripped through the air. It sounded as if the tunnel were collapsing, caving in behind them. Ian and the priest sprinted forward, up and down the labyrinth of tunnels, retracing their steps. Dust filled the air.

  The lights suddenly winked out, forcing them to stop and dig out their flashlights. Ian’s heart pounded furiously, Pedro gasped for breath. “You okay?” Ian whispered.

  “Ye … yes.”

  Flashlights on, they moved fast. Now and then, Pedro seemed to be on the verge of dropping from exhaustion and Ian took hold of his arm, supporting him. He knew they neared the park now, he smelled smoke, heard the wail of sirens and panicked shouts. Behind him, the collapsing cascade in the tunnel continued with thunderous roars and gathering dust.

  When they stumbled out of the tunnel into the park, coughing, their eyes tearing, total chaos surrounded them, hundreds of people stampeding toward the Pincoya, not away from it, shouting that the place was on fire, there had been an explosion. “Shit,” Ian said.

  A cop moved quickly toward them, waving his arms. “¡Epa, hombres, vete de allí!” he shouted. “El túnel está cerrado.”

  The tunnel is closed. “Let’s get the hell outta here,” Ian whispered.

  “Nos vamos.” Pedro raised his hands, patting the air.

  Ian grasped Pedro’s arm and moved from the entrance to the closest bench. The cop tapped his club against his palm, following them, eyeing them for a long moment, then finally turned away. Maybe he had noticed Pedro’s clerical collar and wasn’t willing to threaten a priest. He called to some other cops, and they proceeded to block off the tunnel with orange cones and yellow crime tape and large red signs with white letters that read, PELIGRO. Danger.

  “I think we better leave,” Ian said quietly. “It won’t be long before the police take down license-plate numbers for the cars around the park. And if they stop people and search their possessions…” Ian patted the bag over his shoulder. It still held grenades, and no telling what all was in the priest’s bag.

  “Café across the street,” Pedro said, and they slowly made their way along the periphery of the crowd, behind the benches the priest used for support, and gradually made it to the curb.

  Traffic on the one-way street had come to a complete standstill. Some drivers had gotten out of their cars to see what was going on, others were honking, and others had abandoned their cars and were moving into the park. Ian and Pedro threaded their way between the cars and took one of the many vacant tables on the deck. From the looks of it, people had abandoned their dinner and drinks and fled inside the building. Dozens of customers stood at the front windows inside the dining room, watching the chaos in the park.

  Badly shaken, Ian quickly texted Wayra, but fifteen minutes later, he still hadn’t replied, no one had taken their order, traffic hadn’t moved, and more and more cops on foot and on horseback poured into the park, along the sidewalks, headed toward the Pincoya. He worried about their bags being searched. “Isn’t there a church nearby?”

  “South a few blocks.”

  “Let’s head there. You rested enough to move on?”

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  They rose simultaneously from their chairs, left the deck, and walked briskly toward the corner. Traffic on the side street was also stalled, horns blared, drivers shouted, cops on horseback moved among cars and people, trying to maintain some semblance of order. But at least the shadows here were thicker, darker, and no one stopped them, questioned them, or demanded to see what was inside their packs.

  Seven

  Wayra

  The explosion in the kitchen took out half the staircase wall and hurled Wayra back. He slammed into the opposite wall and lost consciousness. When he came to, flames leaped everywhere, rolling clouds of smoke surrounded him, he couldn’t see anything, could barely breathe. He grabbed on to the staircase railing, pulled himself upright, and raced up two flights of stairs, his arm pressed over his nose and mouth.

  He ran into the first room on the third floor. Through the window, he saw thousands of bright, pulsating orbs darting toward the hotel. A dense bank of brujo fog spread out across the front of the property, close enough so that he could hear the brujo litany: Find the body, fuel the body … Wayra tore out of the room and up the hall, his pack slamming against his hip, and dashed into a room at the end of the corridor.

  He turned on the flashlight and hurried over to a window that looked out over the adjacent field. The metal pegs in the window jamb prevented him from opening it. Wayra slammed his bag against the glass, shattering it, then climbed out onto a narrow ledge and ticked through his rapidly shrinking options.

  He could take a few brujos into himself and survive. But any more than that would cause him to choke and probably die before his shifter immune system could kick in. He could slip back in time, but that option held no guarantees, never had, never would, and too much could go wrong. So he tightened the strap of his pack, securing it on his shoulder, and slipped over the lip of the ledge to a wider protrusion several feet below.

  The brujo litany had grown much louder, they were dangerously close. He shone his flashlight below, back
and forth, up and out, exploring. Panic tightened like massive hands around his throat. The drop, he guessed, was about forty feet. He would prefer to make this jump in his shifter form, where he had more agility, greater accuracy, but there wasn’t enough room on the ledge for him to shift. In his human form, he would survive the jump, but might break a few bones.

  Then the beam of the flashlight struck a pile of garbage, some of it in plastic bags, some of it just loose. A tall pile.

  Find the body, fuel the body …

  Wayra clasped his fingers around the strap of his bag, sidled to the far right of the ledge, and leaped.

  He landed hard on his feet in the pile of garbage, fell forward onto his hands and knees, and sank into the stink. The fetid odor rushed into his nose, an acrid something in the air burned his eyes. But nothing snapped, nothing broke. He hauled himself up, climbed out of the pile, and raced for cover in the adjacent field of tall weeds. As he ran, he pressed the remote-control device for the explosives he had set in the stairwell—and dived for cover.

  He struck the ground hard, rolled, curled into a fetal position, arms covering his head. In the instant the explosives blew, he heard the screams of annihilated brujos, their torturous shrieks for forgiveness, salvation, redemption, resurrection. Then there was just a weird, blissful silence. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of hungry ghosts had just been freed to move on through the afterlife.

  Wayra felt their collective essence drifting in the air around him like bits of dust in sunlight. Some were confused, others were pissed off, and some understood precisely what had happened and moved quickly forward in the afterlife. He supposed there were helpers every step of the way, but who were they? Chasers? Something else?