Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts)

by Trish J. MacGregor

  “You’re trying to blackmail me,” she yelled. “Leave! Just get the fuck out!”

  Gladly. They headed down the sidewalk, not talking.

  Before they reached the dirt road, a bright red Porsche roared toward them, a cloud of dust rising up behind it. The car squealed to a stop and Franco hopped out. Except for his clothing—khaki pants, a pullover sweater, and shiny brown loafers—he looked more like da Vinci than he ever had.

  “Karina, Charlie, Newt,” he said, striding over to them.

  He looked Newton over from head to toe and Charlie suddenly saw Newton through Franco’s eyes—a disheveled old man in a soiled shirt and wrinkled pants who looked half mad. “What the hell happened to you, Newt?” Franco blurted out.

  Newton looked down at himself, at his soiled, wrinkled clothes, and jerked his thumb toward Maria’s place. “She happened.”

  “Maria’s signaling so much distress every chaser within miles could hear it,” Franco remarked. “What’s going on?”

  “Why did you and Victor take Tess to El Bosque?” Charlie demanded. “What possessed you to do that?”

  Franco threw up his hands. “Hold on, Charlie. Hold on. We didn’t take her there; she went on her own, when she sought refuge in the tunnels during the brujo attacks in the plaza. We followed her to keep her safe.”

  “You sure did a lousy job,” he spat. “And why didn’t either of you contact me about it?”

  “Where the hell were you?” Franco fired back. “I tried to get in touch with you. To tell you about El Bosque.”

  “He was with me,” Karina said. “And I don’t remember hearing any Franco voice summoning any of us.”

  “He said, she said.” Franco rolled his eyes.

  “You need to talk some sense into Maria,” Newton told him, gazing off at her rapidly fading house. “She, José, and Simon disappeared El Bosque, with several hundred people inside.”

  “Including my daughter,” Charlie said. “But you already know that, knew it within minutes of it happening since you and Victor were standing outside the market when Tess went in.”

  Franco frowned, and for a second Charlie thought he was going to say, How do you know that? Instead, something came into his eyes that Charlie found deeply disturbing, a spiral of shadows, each one a bit darker than the one before it. Then Franco emitted a small, clipped laugh and the spiral of shadows vanished, and Charlie thought he probably had imagined it.

  “Are you accusing me of something, Charlie?”

  “Yeah, of poor judgment.”

  Newton, agitated now, threw up his arms. “Please. No one is making accusations. We’re just trying to find out what happened, Franco.”

  “Tess went into the market to find out if the clocks in El Bosque were all stuck at nine twenty-eight. She was in there so long that Victor and I decided to go inside and look for her, and that’s when the screaming and panic ensued. Then … we saw the blackness creeping … covering the walls, and it started spilling toward us. Once this black shit is set in motion, that’s it. The disappearance has to run its course.”

  Charlie glanced at Maria’s house, fading one moment, flaring with color and definition in the next. “Unless the chasers who created it pull it back,” he said.

  “No chasers can get into the disappeared area,” Karina added.

  Franco rubbed his beard and nodded. “We’re all having trouble maintaining or doing anything we’ve always taken for granted.”

  “Franco, if you have any pull at all with Maria, then you need to convince her the situation has to be reversed,” Newton said. “Like you said in the meeting, people need a choice.”

  “What makes you think she’ll listen to me?” Franco snapped. “She hasn’t spoken to me since I sided with Charlie and Karina and the others. And come to think of it, Newt, you were the one who voted with her, so why am I suddenly the scapegoat here?”

  “You’re not a scapegoat,” Newton said quickly. “Maria’s crazy. And I regret the day I lobbied to get her on the council. Just talk to her, okay? And if you happen to run into Victor and Liana, let them know what’s going on.”

  Franco looked at the house, still fading in and out of view, and nodded reluctantly. “All right, I’ll talk to her. But I’m not expecting much.” He turned toward the Porsche, clapped his hands twice, and the car dissolved away. “At least we can still do stuff like that, right?”

  Yeah, Charlie thought, but for how long?

  He watched Franco trot up the sidewalk and walk through the fading walls.

  “Franco will keep her occupied for a while,” Newton said. “But just in case she’s thinking about following us, let’s take a drive to put some distance between her and us.” He clapped his hands three times and a sleek, shiny blue Prius appeared. “Let’s enjoy it while we can still do this. Hop in, my friends.”

  Newton slipped behind the wheel, Karina got into the passenger seat, Charlie took the backseat and leaned forward between them as Newton drove. “One of the rules that has been in effect since the beginning is that what one chaser creates can’t be undone by any other chaser,” Newton said.

  “But a chaser can undo what he or she has done,” Karina said.

  “That’s been true in the past,” Newton said. “But circumstances are so extraordinary now, who knows if that’s even true anymore? Even if it is, Maria did this with the help of her cronies, so they would have to agree to undo it.”

  “That’s not likely to happen,” Charlie remarked.

  “Exactly. But I thought of a way to bypass that stupid rule.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Charlie said.

  “The ghost train.”

  “I didn’t even think of that,” Karina exclaimed.

  “You know the story, Charlie?” Newton asked.

  As with most urban legends in the city, everyone knew the basics. The train tracks that crossed the city from north to south and east to west, then branched out into the surrounding hills, had once been home to Esperanza 14. It had actually been two trains—one that ran between Quito and Esperanza and another that had been local.

  More than a century ago, in the late 1800s, Roberto Baptista, the Ecuadorian equivalent of Henry Flagler, had built a railroad between Quito and Esperanza. It had taken decades. The altitude had been his primary challenge—from just over nine thousand feet in Quito to thirteen thousand in Esperanza. His employees had been stricken with altitude sickness, the needed supplies arrived late or not at all, and landslides had sometimes halted work for months.

  The tracks through the city had actually been completed first, then the route had been expanded into the surrounding areas. By 1929, the track between Quito and Esperanza was laid and the train was operational and available only to the wealthy who could afford it. But the train across the city had already been hauling thousands of locals from Esperanza to the numerous Indian villages and settlements around it.

  In 1930, Esperanza 14 crashed en route from Quito to Esperanza. A dozen cars had plunged down the precipice at around eleven thousand feet, crashed into a village, and hundreds were killed. The track was shut down. The local Esperanza 14 train had endured for another nine years, until an earthquake had ruptured many of the tracks, hurled eight cars down a hillside, and killed more than three hundred adults and dozens of children.

  Baptista refused to be defeated by a quake, so he and his men spent several years laying new tracks across the city. But Baptista died before a new train could be brought in, and when the company subsequently went bankrupt, the entire project halted.

  Year after year, usually around the anniversary of the crash of Esperanza 14 or around the anniversary of the quake, the ghost train appeared somewhere on the tracks and was fully visible to anyone in the area. Charlie had yet to see it.

  “We’re in the right time frame,” Karina said.

  Newton nodded. “The train that traveled between Esperanza and Quito crashed on June twenty-first, 1930, and exactly seventy-eight years later, Dominica’s tribe wa
s annihilated. Interesting coincidence, isn’t it? The quake that hurled eight cars from the local Fourteen down the mountain and into the village below happened on the twentieth of December, 1939. Today is December nineteenth. Another interesting coincidence. In the past, the train has been sighted shortly after midnight on the nineteenth, pulling out of the building where the depot used to be. I think if we’re there, we have a good chance of hopping the train and getting into El Bosque that way to bring everyone out.”

  “It’d be simpler if we could just restore the neighborhood, Newt,” said Karina.

  “Of course it would.” He sounded irritable now. “But that’s just not going to happen unless Maria and her gang restore it. So we have to find a way around them and I think the ghost train is our best bet.”

  “Too bad you didn’t vote with us to begin with,” Charlie said. “We could have saved ourselves a lot of time and energy.”

  “I regret that and I apologize. I was … well, completely taken in by Maria’s arguments. She can be quite—”

  “Seductive,” Karina said.

  Newton looked embarrassed. “Uh yeah. I’ve known for years that she and I needed to work out some issues from a life way back, and I was willing to explore our options. But she’s a manipulative bitch and I’m postponing any lifetime that includes her. I’ve decided that if I reincarnate, it’s going to be into circumstances where I can develop creatively.”

  “Victor says he’s going to wait around until the next century,” Charlie remarked. “When the global and political turmoil have evened out.”

  “See, that’s part of the big problem with the chaser council. Except for you and Karina, Charlie, the rest of us have been nonphysical too long. We’ve distanced ourselves from humanity. We don’t have any business making these kinds of life-and-death decisions for the people who live in this city.”

  “What about the brujos?” Charlie asked. “I thought the whole purpose of removing the city from physical reality was to get rid of brujos once and for all.”

  Newton shrugged and pulled up to the curb of a park in the old city. “Maybe we’re delusional. Even if Esperanza no longer exists, brujos will, somewhere. It’s the nature of evil to persist. And there will still be confused souls, lost souls, souls who join tribes like Ricardo’s.” He turned off the car and sat there with his hands gripping the steering wheel. “Everything is in flux, changing, and I don’t know what the answer is to any of it.”

  Charlie heard the misery in his voice and gave his shoulder an affectionate pat. “Let’s focus on the ghost train right now and then worry about the rest of it later. We’ll meet you before midnight at the old train depot.”

  Charlie and Karina got out of the car, and after a moment, Newton joined them on the sidewalk. He looked down at himself, just as he had earlier when Franco had given him the once-over, and thought himself into fresher attire, clean, short hair that was a rich brown instead of a drab gray. “I’m going to find Victor and Liana.”

  The plaintive cries of a hawk prompted them all to glance upward. Illary flew in wide, sweeping spirals against the blue sky, then touched down on the ground in front of them and shifted. “Do any of you know where Wayra is?”

  “We haven’t seen him,” Charlie said.

  The hawk tattoo that climbed from her shoulder and up her neck shimmered in the light, as if it were coming alive. “He isn’t answering his phone and I haven’t heard anything from him since I left El Bosque last night with Maddie and Sanchez.”

  “I think it’s safe to assume Wayra got into El Bosque,” Charlie told her.

  “So he’s stuck in there with everyone else,” Illary said sharply, and looked at Newton. “What’s the plan for getting them out, Newt?”

  Her glare caused Newton to visibly wither. “The ghost train.”

  She thought about it and nodded slowly. “It might work. But in the meantime, please explain to me why I can’t move back in time, why Sanchez can’t flip off his psychic switch, and why none of us can get into El Bosque under our own volition.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Newton sounded exasperated. “Nothing works the way it’s supposed to anymore.”

  “And how do we rectify that?” she shot back.

  “We don’t,” Newton replied. “We try to work around it, like with the train.”

  “Christ,” she spat, and instantly shifted and took to the sky, the echo of her lonely cries underscoring their collective hopelessness.

  “The ghost train better be the answer, Newt,” Charlie said, then he and Karina shed their virtual forms and thought themselves away, fast.

  2.

  They ended up at the edge of El Bosque. The glaring white area was still cordoned off, cops were still present—on foot, horseback, patrolling in cars. But the mob of spectators and mourners had thinned considerably, traffic was moving in one direction only—out of El Bosque—and the commercial area a mile south was jammed with people. Charlie guessed that panic buying would soon wipe out all the food and supplies in this area and shops and markets would close. By tonight, the commercial district and the neighborhoods around it would resemble a ghost town.

  He and Karina drifted into an alley in the commercial district to think themselves into their virtual forms. But as Charlie’s Quechua form began to appear, it was riddled with tears and holes, like a piece of old fabric that moths had feasted on. His right arm and hand didn’t materialize at all. Horrified, Charlie looked helplessly at Karina. Her chin and neck faded in and out of sight, her legs were missing from the knees down, and she fell to the ground. “My God, Charlie.” Her voice spilled out of her. “Now it’s hitting us big-time.”

  “Shed your form, Karina. Fast.”

  Charlie shed his form and tried again, but this time only his left hand materialized, and it hung in midair like some bizarre special effect in a horror movie, fingers moving, curling, as if seeking something substantial to grab on to. Completely freaked out, he thought himself toward Karina, who couldn’t shed her legless form and just huddled in a patch of sunlight, sobbing.

  Charlie thought himself to the ground next to her and put his nonexistent arms around her and screamed at her in his head: You can do it, c’mon, shed it. You’ve been doing it for centuries, you’re stronger than whatever this is.

  Charlie, it’s … it’s a force, I … I can feel it, clutching at me, holding me back …

  Desperate, Charlie merged his essence with hers, something he’d never done before, something he didn’t realize he could do. He felt the force, felt it clutching at her, at them, fighting to hold them in a twilight state between their natural chaser forms and their virtual forms. He flung his chaser arms upward, forcing Karina’s virtual arms to rise as well, and called upon every resource available to him.

  Within moments the alley filled with hundreds of the giant crows, their caws and cries a deafening cacophony. Their wildly flapping wings created a tornadic wind that swirled madly through the alley, whipped upward toward the sky, and broke the grip of whatever force held Karina in her virtual form. With their essences still merged, the wind picked them up and hurled them out of the alley, down the block.

  Deeply shaken, they thought themselves to the sidewalk and Charlie separated his essence from Karina’s. He felt disoriented, strange, as if he were suffering from vertigo. He recalled this sensation from when he was a young father, riding on one of those Tilt-A-Whirls with Tess in an amusement park. When the ride had ended, he had stumbled off, dropped to his knees and vomited.

  But how could he, a dead man, feel such sensations now?

  Charlie, what was that? What kind of … power?

  Maybe it’s a preview of what it will be like for chasers if Esperanza is removed from the physical world and something else takes its place.

  So we’ll be, like, what? In betweeners? Nowhere people?

  He didn’t know. He didn’t seem to know much of anything at the moment. It was almost as if the power that had held Karina in her incomplete form, th
at had prevented him from assuming a virtual form, had emanated from the city itself. Was Esperanza, after all these centuries, finally seizing her own destiny? Illary had said something to that effect. Was this why Illary—and presumably Wayra—could no longer move back in time? Was this why he hadn’t been able to get into the disappeared area? But if the city was reclaiming her power, then why had she allowed Maria and her chaser allies to lock up El Bosque in a twilight zone?

  Maybe that had been the turning point, the event that had prompted Esperanza to fight back.

  Charlie, can you get a fix on Lauren? Ian? Any of the others?

  He focused and felt a slight tug several blocks north. Lauren. It felt like Lauren. He and Karina thought themselves forward, but it seemed as if he were moving through honey or molasses. It alarmed him.

  Perhaps this was what had happened to the brujos, why they needed a portal in the Pincoya. If chasers lost their ability to think themselves to where they wanted to go, what the hell would happen then? What would happen to him? A Dostoevsky moment when he would come to in his coffin twelve years ago? Or would he even be conscious at all?

  Terrified that he—like the brujos—might face annihilation, he struggled to move forward more quickly and felt Karina doing the same. Shadows that spilled across the road grew longer, wider, thicker, and he understood that in clock time, in real time, it was taking them way too long to move a single short block.

  Just ahead, Karina, on the next block, not much farther. I think they’re at the Mística.

  We’re useless. We can’t help them when we’re like this.

  Maybe it’s about them helping us.

  When they reached the front steps of the hotel, exhaustion spread through Charlie. It wasn’t possible that he, a dead man, could feel such profound fatigue. Yet, he barely made it into the hotel lobby before he had to stop.

  What’s happening to us, Charlie? Karina’s voice was the barest whisper in his mind.

  Nothing good. Let’s rest a second. Right here. Next to the fireplace. If he’d had eyes to shut, he would have shut them. If he’d had a body, he would have lain on the floor right in front of the fire, curled up in a ball, and fallen fast asleep. He struggled to think himself to the nearest chair and drop into it. A cat, curled up next to the fireplace, lifted its head, stared directly at him, then shut its eyes again. Karina thought herself to the floor at his feet.