“You and Karina need to know something,” Wayra said. “Pedro, Ian, and I blew up the Pincoya. More than thirteen thousand brujos were freed, their portal was sealed off. Ricardo and some of his followers surrounded me in a field and he promised to seize an equal number of Esperanza residents. Diego said that some of the men in the police department were seized and they blocked off an entire area around the Pincoya so that hundreds of motorists, including Tess, were trapped. She got out and some of the others did, too.”
“Wow,” Karina breathed. “You three really threw a wrench into the brujo scheme of things, Wayra.”
“But until that happened, Ricardo’s tribe hadn’t seized anyone in Esperanza to use as hosts,” Wayra said. “Now that they’re seizing people, it may fuel the belief of your opponents on the council that they are right about taking Esperanza back into the nonphysical.”
It was the closest thing to an apology that Charlie had ever heard from the shifter. But why apologize? The three of them had done what was necessary, had done what he and Victor had tried to do, cut off a potential brujo army of millions. They simply hadn’t taken into account the possible repercussions.
“We need to move quickly, Wayra. We’re not only up against brujos, but the chaser council.”
“And we may lose on all fronts, Charlie.”
Eleven
11:11
Alone again and determined to find a way into the disappeared area, Wayra hurried into a thicket of trees near the lake and shifted. As a dog, he had greater latitude to move among the police, scientists, and other authorities without being noticed. He made his way along the edge of the diminishing crowd outside the vanished area, sniffing the air to read the general mood of things.
Terror. Frustration. Grief. Uncertainty. Just like the dark years of the brujo assaults. Unfortunately, Diego spotted him and hurried alongside Wayra, talking incessantly.
“Wayra, please don’t interfere in this. Mayor Torres is on his way over here. If he sees you or Illary, you’ll be arrested. You, Ian, and the priest were caught on a security camera, entering the tunnel with packs and duffel bags. You’re suspects in the explosion at the Pincoya, okay? And you can’t get into El Bosque; it’s sealed in some way. We have yet to detect any human life in that area. We’ve been working with physicists from the university who say the electromagnetic elevation in this area is substantial.”
Wayra moved into a cluster of pines and Diego followed him. He appeared to be healed of whatever damage brujo possession had inflicted, so why was he talking like this? Since Wayra couldn’t ask him in his canine form, he quickly shifted.
“A suspect? Good. I’ll be glad to tell him why the explosion and fire were necessary. And don’t worry, I won’t mention that you supplied most of the explosives.”
Diego looked so miserable that Wayra felt like hugging him, reassuring him it would all work out, somehow. “Nothing is the way it’s supposed to be, Wayra.”
“And how is that different from what Esperanza has always been?”
“We’re fully aware of what’s happening now. We’re no longer functioning on automatic. Maybe this disappearance is supposed to happen. Maybe it’s part of some greater plan; that’s what I’m hearing from people.”
“Really? Which people? Mayor Torres is in denial, so it can’t be what you’re hearing from him. Maybe you heard from some of the people who will be killed if the city is taken back into the nonphysical? You just told me no one has been able to detect life inside that area.” He paused and leaned toward Diego. “Tess was swallowed by that blackness, Diego, and so were several hundred others. Maybe they’re all dead, but if they aren’t, how’re they going to get out? Kali got in. If she did, then so can I.”
Diego’s fingers tightened around Wayra’s wrist. “The parrot is different, Wayra.”
Wayra pulled his arm free. “We need to know what the hell we’re up against. Please keep your team away from me, Diego.” With that, he shifted and raced along the edge of the whiteness.
El Bosque—the Woods—lay just a mile south of the airport and covered about five hundred acres. At one time, it had been completely forested with pines, monkey puzzle trees, and a hybrid species of tree grown in greenhouses outside the city and eventually transplanted in El Bosque. In the last four years, the population west of the city had exploded and this neighborhood had become one of Esperanza’s emerging middle-class areas, a mixture of Ecuadorian professionals, young families, Quechuan elders, and expats.
The neighborhood still maintained vast areas of woods that had been converted into parks and nature preserves. The majority of residents didn’t want concrete sidewalks or paved streets, so many sidewalks and streets were packed earth or cobblestones. Some of those cobblestones, he knew, bore a name and a date, important personages and milestones in Esperanza’s history. Even Dominica had a cobblestone, one she had created for herself, as though she had thought it was Esperanza’s equivalent of a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
The neighborhood supermarket, Mercado del León, stood smack in the middle of El Bosque. It was long and narrow rather than fat and wide, and its merchandise was jammed from the floor to its twelve-foot ceiling. Even though it was a long drive for him and Illary, they sometimes had shopped at the mercado because it carried merchandise from all over South America that was often difficult to find anywhere else in Ecuador.
Merchandise like Segunda Vista. And like the liqueur from the Chilean island of Chiloé that facilitated insight into the myths and legends of wherever you happened to be. A stone from the famous waterfall in Argentina could cure vertigo and insomnia and induce profound dreams if you slept with it under your pillow. Aisle to aisle, shelf to shelf, it was like this, one treasure after another buried within the usual, mundane merchandise. His vivid remembrance of the market, his personal association with it, his connection with Dominica and the city’s history, convinced him he could get through whatever this barrier was and into the disappeared neighborhood.
Arrogant, perhaps, or simply delusional, but he had to try. He refused to surrender to the chasers’ manipulation of events. He had lived too long and fought too hard to free Esperanza from despots.
Wayra ran until he reached the western edge of the whiteness, and darted into a thicket of pines. Some of the trees lay inside the whiteness, so there were no cops back here. They undoubtedly feared that a misstep would suck them into the void, the brilliant whiteness, the disappeared area.
According to Quintana, all the clocks, watches, and digital devices in El Bosque had stopped at 1:00, 11:00, 1:11, or 11:11. If he moved back in time to around eight o’clock last night, perhaps he could make sure Tess left before the blackness began and could warn enough people to get out. Movement in time didn’t come with guarantees, but twice in the recent past his ability to move through time had made a significant difference—when he brought Ian forward from 1968 and when he had disappeared Dominica to the dawn of the universe.
Wayra drew the air deeply into his shifter lungs and reached for last night, for the sidewalk outside the market. He felt himself straining, his head pounded, his heart hammered. Nothing happened.
Nothing.
He tried again, his focus greater, his concentration more profound, but the strain drove him to the ground and, for long, painful moments, he simply lay there, panting hard, struggling to understand why it wasn’t working. In all the centuries of his existence, this had never happened before.
Sanchez couldn’t turn off his psychic switch; Wayra couldn’t move back in time. The rules are in flux, he’d told Charlie, but the truth was that the rules by which he’d lived for centuries were no longer valid. It meant he would have to uncover the new rules, that their survival depended on it.
He got up, shifted into his human form, and moved quickly along the wall of whiteness, searching for that transparent patch, Charlie’s little window. He nearly missed it; the sun was at a different angle. The patch had also shrunk and wasn’t quite as transparen
t as before.
He tried to widen it with his fingers, as though it were his iPhone screen, but nothing happened. Wayra pressed his palms against it, as he’d seen Charlie do. It was like glass, cool like glass, but it wasn’t glass. He rapped his knuckles against it. The surface didn’t just resound, it trembled, it sang, like a vibrating drum. He brought out his car keys, flicked open the blade on his pocketknife, and tried to work the tip of the blade through the white surface.
The blade snapped in half.
Wayra leaned forward and breathed on the surface. It fogged over. On impulse, he brought his finger to the surface and drew “11:11.” The window suddenly expanded. He leaned closer, hands cupped at the sides of his head as he peered through it and into the disappeared El Bosque.
And suddenly, his face seemed to be caught in the surface of the window, in the whiteness. It felt less solid, less real, less intractable. The surface sank like foam to accommodate the shape and weight of his face. Wayra leaned his entire body into it, his feet left the ground, and his body surrendered to it completely.
But suddenly he couldn’t see, his face was stuck to the surface like iron to a magnet. He struggled to hurl himself back, his arms flailed, his feet moved, he sucked and sucked for air, but nothing flowed into his lungs.
Wayra screamed silently for Illary, hoping that her shifter senses would hear him, would be able to follow his shriek for help. Then he sank into blackness.
Twelve
High Strangeness
1.
Lauren stood outside La Mística, a small hotel made of wood and stone located about a mile east of El Bosque. Leo and Ian had gone inside to inquire about vacancies and Pedro had ducked into a café to buy some breakfast for the four of them. She was anxious to find some Segunda Vista and get this hallucinogenic show on the road, so she started walking south.
She worried that there wouldn’t be any vacancies at La Mística or anywhere else and they would be forced to retreat to their apartment. With Tess trapped inside that whiteness, she didn’t want to leave the area. It wasn’t as if she could do anything regardless of where she was, but she felt better being in proximity to El Bosque. If they couldn’t find hotel rooms, perhaps Pedro would know of a nearby church where they could stay.
This small commercial district reminded her of Key Largo—close enough to the night life on the keys, but far enough away so you didn’t hear music blasting from bars throughout the night. Small shops and boutiques and B and Bs lined the narrow road, and most of the properties backed up to a wooded area or to a long volcanic lake shaped like a finger. The commercial area acted as a buffer between El Bosque and a blue-collar neighborhood several streets over.
Customers jammed the places she passed, but it looked like panic buying, the kind of thing that happened in the keys when a hurricane threatened. It occurred to her that in addition to finding some Segunda Vista, she needed a change of clothes and some basic toiletries. Leo was accustomed to carrying extra clothes and toiletries in his pack because he was so often detained at the hospital or called in at odd hours. But her pack was pitifully lacking in essentials, and as far as she knew, Ian and the priest didn’t even have toothbrushes with them.
Her phone jingled, a text from Maddie: Did you find any yet?
Looking right now.
She remembered seeing Maddie’s Segunda Vista when she first started growing the beautiful, feathery weeds in her greenhouse. The red buds, Lauren recalled, triggered precognitive visions, the yellow buds facilitated telepathy, the blue variety enabled clairvoyance. She couldn’t remember what the other colors did, but when the buds were mixed together with the leaves, stems, and roots, you experienced a shamanic journey regardless of whether this was your intention.
Check drugstores.
Am doing. Where’re u?
Nearly at Illary’s. Sanchez is a wreck.
Stay safe.
Odd and worrisome about Sanchez, she thought. He was one of the most focused young men she’d ever met, and usually controlled his extraordinary talent. Now, that talent apparently controlled him. Why?
Three blocks south, Lauren went into a small, crowded everything shop. She selected a couple of T-shirts, a pair of jeans, underwear, razor, several toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste, mascara, lipstick, bottled water, peanuts and other snacks. She scoured the shelves for Second Sight, but didn’t find anything. She glanced around for someone to ask, but the only two clerks were at registers and the lines in front of both were long. Resigned to a lengthy wait, Lauren got in line.
Mostly women filled the shop, all of them visibly upset. From what Lauren could understand of their rapid-fire Spanish, some of them were headed out of the city—to Quito, Guayaquil, Punta, wherever they could get to first. Others refused to leave—either because their loved ones were trapped in El Bosque or because they didn’t believe it was the work of brujos, and, therefore, the situation was temporary and order would be restored.
The young, blond woman in front of her, a European, Lauren guessed, gestured at the items in Lauren’s basket. “Did your house vanish in there?”
“No. My daughter did.”
Her eyes widened with horror. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”
The emotions Lauren had struggled to contain broke loose, tears flooded her eyes. “I’ll … get to her.” She swallowed hard before she continued. “How many people are trapped in there? Have you heard?”
“At least several hundred. Apparently a lot of people left town when the weirdness went down at the Café Taquina, otherwise the number would’ve been much higher. An information center has been set up on the next block. They can tell you what’s going on.”
“That’s good to know, thanks. Did you lose someone in there?”
“I nearly did.” She combed her long fingers back through her honey-colored hair. “My boyfriend used to work at the Mercado del León. He quit the day before yesterday, thank God. We’ve had it with this city. We’re leaving. Things have just gotten too weird and dangerous. I’m getting some stuff for the trip outta here.” She picked up one of a dozen blue boxes in her basket. “I’m stocking up on these. The mercado used to stock it and now this shop is the only place around here that sells it.”
The label read SEGUNDA VISTA.
Wayra would call this synchronicity, Lauren thought. Ken Kesey used to call it Acid Speaking. For her, it was a holy shit moment, right time, right place, right search, in the groove.
“Do you know what it is?” the woman asked.
Lauren feigned ignorance. The words translated as Second Sight, so she said: “An eye solution?”
The young woman laughed. “Not exactly. It’s an extract from a hallucinogenic weed grown here in Esperanza. It enables clairvoyance, telepathy, different kinds of abilities. You don’t get sick from it.”
Forty years ago, hallucinogens had been as familiar to Lauren as her own name. It was the territory she had traveled with Kesey, Garcia, McKenna. Her life was coming full circle. “Psychic abilities, in other words.”
“Yup. Three days before that weirdness at the Café Taquina my boyfriend and I took some and … and both of us had the same vision. We saw the blackness covering that hillside behind the café and seeping from the walls of the market. We didn’t have any idea what it meant. But when it actually happened at the café … we freaked out. We realized it was a vision of the future and that if parts of the café had vanished, then the market might, too. So he quit his job and that saved his life and now we’re not sticking around. You want to find your daughter? Maybe even find a way into that whiteness? This might help you do it. I took the last of it.” She dropped three boxes of Segunda Vista into Lauren’s cart. “Take these.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“A pinch is all you need. Let it melt under your tongue. It takes four or five minutes to come on and lasts a couple of hours.”
“How do these shops get away with selling this?”
“It’s sold as a remedy fo
r altitude sickness.”
“Any side effects I should know about?”
“Yeah, everything I just mentioned.” She flashed a quick smile that dimpled the corners of her mouth. “But nothing dire that I know of.” She reached the register and, before she set her stuff on the counter, added, “I hope you find her.”
Lauren anxiously awaited her turn, marveling at her good fortune. When she reached the register, she set her basket on the counter and the clerk began ringing up her purchases. Lauren slid her debit card through the slot of the machine and was ridiculously grateful when it worked, that whatever was going on here hadn’t destroyed the banking system, too.
Once she was outside, she opened one of the boxes and removed a film canister identical to those California now used to dispense legal pot. She popped off the lid, scooped some of the rainbow-hued flakes out with her fingernail, onto her palm. In the sunlight, they looked luminous, alive, lit from within.
She returned the flakes to the canister, capped it, and hurried on up the street. Leo, Ian, and Pedro were standing outside the Mística. “Any rooms?” she asked.
“We’ve practically got the place to ourselves,” Leo replied. “Looks like a lot of people around here bailed.”
Lauren held up one of the blue boxes. “We’re in luck.”
“You and Ian have the closest emotional ties to Tess,” Leo said to her. “You two should be the ones to take this stuff and Pedro and I can be the monitors. How’s that sound?”
“That’s fine.” She just wanted to get moving with this.
“Ian?” Leo asked.
“Let’s do it.”
The small, cozy hotel lobby featured a comfortable area with chairs and a roaring fireplace. A man and a woman were the only people sitting in there, both of them typing away on laptops. Colorful indigenous throw rugs dotted the stone floor, local art hung on the walls. The dining room off to Lauren’s right also had a fireplace, and employees were clearing away the remnants of breakfast. She was tempted to make a quick detour for a bite to eat, then remembered that Pedro was carrying a bag of breakfast goodies. Besides, she didn’t want to waste time in a dining room. She wasn’t even sure she should waste time eating. Tess had been inside that whiteness since last night.
Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) Page 18
