Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts)

by Trish J. MacGregor

  I feel like I’ve just run a marathon, Charlie.

  I feel like I did in the days before I died.

  An urgency kept needling him, prodding him to move, to home in on Lauren.

  The door to the hotel opened, and Diego Garcia, chief of police, hurried into the lobby with three cops and a short, plump, self-important man whom Charlie recognized as Martin Torres, the mayor of Esperanza. Decked out in fatigues and combat boots, he was dressed like Fidel Castro during the revolution in the 1950s, a man ready for battle. He didn’t carry a weapon, but Diego and the other cops did. Charlie suddenly had a bad feeling about this.

  The mayor, obviously angry, rattled away in Spanish. “What’s wrong with these goddamn gringos, anyway? They inserted themselves into the affairs of Esperanza, pissed off the chasers and the brujos, and just how did your father get into that whiteness, Diego?”

  “We don’t know for sure that Wayra is—”

  “Witnesses saw him and a tall black man vanish into the whiteness. The black man may be a brujo,” the mayor snapped. “As chief of the Guardia, you need to seize control of the situation and arrest these gringos, Wayra, the priest, and anyone else suspected in the explosions at the Pincoya. I shouldn’t have to step in here, Diego.”

  “We can’t just arrest the Americans for—”

  “What floor are they on?” Torres interrupted.

  Diego shook his head and called out to the clerk, “¿Señora, en que piso quedan los americanos?”

  The woman behind the desk held up three fingers. “Piso tres, habitación once.”

  Third floor, room 11.

  Shit, we need to get up there, warn them, Karina.

  We’re stronger as one. Karina merged her essence with his.

  He disliked merging. It made him feel soiled, corrupted. It was too close to what brujos did when they seized human hosts. But Karina was right. Merged, they were so much stronger they propelled themselves quickly through the ceiling, up to the third floor, and through the door of room 11. Then they separated.

  Lauren and Ian sat on the floor, helping themselves to flakes of Segunda Vista. Father Jacinto sat nearby, Leo paced back and forth in front of the sliding glass balcony doors. The air felt tight, tense, strange, urgent. “So Tess has amnesia?” the priest asked.

  “That’s sure how it seemed,” Ian replied.

  “And she was filthy,” Lauren added. “As if she’d been in there for days and had no idea what had happened or where she was. That’s not like her. She’s always been so fastidious.”

  Charlie separated from Karina and shouted, The cops are on their way up here. Get out of here now, all of you.

  Lauren’s head snapped up and she glanced quickly around, frowning, her eyes so large and bright that Charlie knew she had taken some of the magic weed already and was now about to depart for the purple haze once again.

  “Did you guys hear that?” Lauren asked.

  “Hear what?” Leo asked, pausing in his relentless pacing. “Why’s it so cold in here?”

  “It sounded like … Charlie.”

  Leo looked irritated and rubbed his hands over his arms. “He wouldn’t dare come here. Not now. What’s wrong with the heat in this room, anyway?”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Ian said.

  “Nor I,” the priest said, then added: “But Leo’s right. It’s freezing in here now.” He blew out and his breath formed a visible cloud.

  Lauren shrugged on her jacket, got to her feet. “Charlie, you here?”

  Show her you’re here, Karina said.

  How? How the hell do I do that?

  Move something.

  Now he felt like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, struggling to interact with the three-dimensional world. He tried to knock a glass off the table, but his hand passed right through it. He attempted to slap the canister of flakes from the coffee table to the floor, and again his hand sliced right through it.

  Karina moved toward him, into him, and once they were merged, they stood at the glass balcony doors. The air in the room was now cold enough so that Lauren and the others were visibly uncomfortable, their breath visible. A light frost formed on the glass. Charlie and Karina focused their collective energy, raised their nonexistent arm, pressed their index finger to the glass and scrawled a message in the frost.

  Fifteen

  The Pranksters

  The room breathed, its heart hammered, and Ian’s senses went berserk. He saw shadows coiled within shadows, heard sounds within sounds, smelled odors within odors, everything layered, complex, unbearably beautiful and horribly strange. Alien, all of it.

  The temperature in the room kept dropping and it was now so cold his teeth chattered. The others felt it, too, so it wasn’t due to the Segunda Vista. The priest moved around the room, blowing into his hands to warm them, and finally stopped in front of the TV, where a broadcaster reported the latest news on El Bosque and the wildly fluctuating electromagnetic readings around the area.

  “I think there’s something wrong with the thermostat,” Leo said, fiddling with it. “It’s now reading thirty-eight degrees in here and the temp is still dropping.”

  “It’s Charlie,” Lauren said. “Charlie’s here.”

  “Then why the hell doesn’t he show himself?” Leo replied. “He’s never been shy before.”

  “Look,” Pedro said in a hushed voice, pointing at the balcony doors. “Frost is forming on the glass.”

  Ian, sitting on the floor, his back against the foot of the bed, zipped up his jacket and tucked his hands in the pockets. He didn’t trust himself to stand. His legs felt as if they were made of rubber and his feet were growing like weeds, the toes elongating, the heels now the size of small tree stumps. The sides of his shoes split open, the tops peeled away like sheets of tin in a high wind, and the skin on his feet flaked off in layers, exposing bone. Ian wrenched his gaze away from his feet and rubbed his hands over his face, fast and hard.

  Focus, focus.

  Great. But what should he focus on?

  He had never done more than smoke an occasional joint and hadn’t expected what had happened earlier, when his vision had exploded open, his consciousness had separated from his body, and he found himself in front of a grocery cart in Mercado del León. These sensations were much different. Now he felt as though his entire body might separate from physical existence.

  Everything was visual and disorienting. He felt nauseated. When his arms dropped to his sides, everyone was staring at the balcony doors, at the letters scrawled in the frost that covered the glass: Cops on way here get out now take everything w/u

  Was it real or was it another visual effect like that of his feet growing? “Is that real?” he managed to say, pointing at the door.

  The priest ran his finger through the frost on the door. “Real, it’s real. ¡Carajo!”

  “It’s Charlie,” Lauren breathed. “I knew Charlie was here.”

  “You two, get out of here now,” Leo said urgently. “Pedro and I will deal with the cops.”

  Lauren stood in front of Leo with her hands on her hips, her face tight with determination. “I’m not leaving you here.”

  In the moments before Leo spoke, Ian recognized that Livingston iron will—and witnessed the words and gestures that turned it to liquid. Leo slipped his arms around Lauren and said, “Prankster, I can’t go where you two are going. But we’ve got your backs. Just get the hell out now.”

  Then he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her with such passion that Ian felt a kind of shock that Lauren and Leo weren’t quite the old farts he and Tess sometimes kidded about, that their sex life was probably as good as or better than his and Tess’s. Maybe when the possibility of pregnancy was no longer a factor, the libido opened up like some greedy beast and sex became a conduit to something else.

  He realized the Segunda Vista had him flying, that he could barely stand, that even when he grabbed his pack and Lauren’s, his body felt as malleable as hot glass. He moved rapidly to t
he door. The floor rippled and trembled beneath him, the walls kept moving in and out, he heard water rushing through the pipes in the building. He and Lauren somehow made it out into the hall and headed for the exit sign at the end.

  “You okay?” Lauren asked, her voice soft.

  “Other than the fact that your face looks like melting wax, yeah, I think so. You?”

  “I’ll feel better once we’re outside.”

  Just as he opened the door to the stairs, he heard a ding from the elevator and knew the cops had arrived. He had to grip the railing to keep from tripping over his own feet and couldn’t look down at the steps; they vibrated, moved, slipped and slid like seaweed on the surface of water.

  When they reached the lobby, his head throbbed, the inside of his mouth tasted dry, hot, as though he were burning up with fever. His hearing suddenly magnified again, as if he were inside a tunnel where voices echoed. He heard the whispered conversation between the clerk behind the counter and a man who had emerged from a back office. He told her the latest emergency news bulletin was urging everyone within a three-mile radius of El Bosque to leave. Evacuation orders were going to become mandatory within the next thirty minutes because of the wildly fluctuating electromagnetic levels.

  “But what about … the guests?” the clerk asked. “The Americans and the Germans on the second floor.”

  “The police will take care of the Americans. Go notify the Germans. And then get yourself out of here.”

  Shit. As he and Lauren exited the hotel, Ian told Lauren what he’d heard. “They’ll forcibly remove Leo and Pedro, Lauren.”

  “They can take care of themselves. They both know the mayor. Leo delivered his grandson.” She hooked her arm through his. “My sense of smell just went bonkers. That woman…” She jerked her thumb toward a woman who hurried past them with bulging bags of food and supplies hanging over her shoulders. She got into a truck that pulled up to the curb. “She uses Dove soap. Her shampoo is made mostly of passion flowers. She’s fleeing with her boyfriend. They just had sex and she faked her orgasm.”

  “What’s my odor tell you, Lauren?

  “That you could use a hot shower.”

  Undoubtedly true. “That bad, huh?”

  “Just kidding. What you really smell like, is, Jesus, Ian. You smell like a prospective father. Is Tess pregnant?”

  With everything that had been going on, his discovery of the pregnancy test had gotten pushed to the back of his mind and now seemed like it had happened weeks ago. He worried aloud that the baby might have been harmed. Or that Tess had miscarried. Or that the baby might have been disappeared along with El Bosque.

  Lauren squeezed his arm. “Think more positively, Ian. Maybe this baby is marked for something special because of what’s happened.”

  Suddenly overwhelmed by emotion, Ian didn’t trust himself to speak without his entire being collapsing like some profoundly stressed ecosystem.

  They walked fast, north along the sidewalk, following the flow of traffic headed toward the autopista, the fastest route away from El Bosque. Long, narrow shadows fell across the sidewalk, suggesting it was late afternoon. That had to be wrong. It couldn’t be late afternoon already. He glanced at his watch, at his phone.

  “Shit, the hands on my watch are spinning, and the time on my phone reads one-eleven. What time do you have?”

  Lauren plucked her iPad from her bag, flipped open the cover, frowned. “It just stays on eleven-eleven. Quintana said this same thing happened in El Bosque before the blackness invaded the market. You heard her say that, you were there.”

  Ian felt as if the mother of all ghosts had just strolled over his grave. His heart hammered wildly, he grew short of breath, beads of sweat rolled down the sides of his face. Earlier this year, Tess had written a column on the Expat’s website titled “Is 12/21/12 Doomsday?” It had gotten nearly three thousand comments, ten thousand hits, more than any other article they had published since the paper’s inception. Ian had read it with great interest, and ever since, he had noticed the proliferation of Web sites and books about the end date. They ranged from the bizarre to the fantastic.

  On a mountain in France, for instance, a hundred thousand true believers were gathering and preparing for the end day, when they believed UFOs would beam them up and fly them away to safety. Other websites, geared to urban survivalists, urged people to hoard food and supplies, build bunkers, arm themselves. With the enormous upheavals occurring on a planetary scale—from natural disasters to uprisings in the Arab countries to destruction of the environment through vast oil spills, rising ocean levels, and political chaos—Ian felt certain an evolution in consciousness was underway. He didn’t have any trouble believing that. But the end of the planet? Space brothers sweeping in to save the faithful?

  Two days from now. He suddenly felt overwhelmed. He stumbled and Lauren caught his arm before he pitched forward onto the pavement. “Hey, take it easy, Ian. We’ll get through this.”

  He started to say something, but his tongue felt swollen, clumsy, like an intruder in his mouth. Regardless of whether it was early or late afternoon, he figured Tess had been trapped inside the twilight for at least thirteen or fourteen hours, maybe as long as eighteen hours.

  He always had believed that he would know, at some deep level, where she was, that love was a kind of GPS system. But at the moment, he felt nothing. Nothing at all. And it terrified him. If she was dead, then what had the last four years been about?

  As they approached the area cordoned off by the authorities, Illika Huicho, the leader of the Quechua, fell into step with them. To Ian, she looked like an elf with hunched shoulders, her wild gray hair falling to the middle of her back. “Follow me,” she said, and led them along the outside of the orange cones and yellow police tape that kept the crowd of the curious well away from the blinding whiteness. She paused and pointed a long, bony finger at a place where the whiteness pulsed and throbbed like a stressed heart. “Here.”

  “Here, what?” Ian asked sharply.

  “Mercado del León lies on the other side of this barrier,” she said. “A bus or a train will take you in. Remember what the oracle said. ‘We, the people…’” Then she faded away.

  “Uh-oh,” Lauren murmured, her voice tight, hoarse. “She wasn’t real.”

  Or she was vividly real, Ian thought. “A bus or a train? What’s that mean?”

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  Ian glanced around for landmarks so that he and Lauren would be able to find this spot when the hallucinogenic magic had worn off. Directly across the street, at 137 Valle Boulevard, stood a bookstore where he and Tess browsed whenever they were in the neighborhood. A fire hydrant stood on the curb in front of it.

  “We need to remember those landmarks,” Ian said, pointing them out.

  Lauren nodded, activated the recorder on her phone, and made note of the landmarks. “I’d like to text Leo and let him know where we are.”

  “Better not do it yet. The police probably took his phone. Wait until he texts you.”

  Moments later, her phone sang “Me and Bobby McGee.” “Text message.” She glanced at it. “Bastards.”

  Lauren passed the phone to him. The text message from Leo was brief: Being removed from area, mandatory evac under way, they r looking 4 u and Ian. Stay safe. Meet u @home. Luv u, Leo.

  He handed the phone back to Lauren. “So we can’t return to the hotel.”

  “We can’t be seen out here, Ian. I’m not going to be hauled into the city in the back of some cop car while I’m this high. Fuck that.” She turned rapidly into an alley, Ian at her heels, and for a few minutes, they stood there, peering out at the traffic and the pedestrians who swept past.

  The visual effects of Segunda Vista came at him more strongly now, powerful undulations that made him feel as if he were on the deck of a small boat in wind-tossed seas. He felt like puking. He dug a bottle of water out of his pack and sipped at it.

  Maddie and her friends took Se
gunda Vista fairly frequently and, according to Sanchez’s father, she had joined a shamanic circle with some Quechuas in old town. Ian had never thought to ask what sorts of experiences she had on this stuff, but he knew that she’d learned to cultivate the weed from one of the locals, and grew it right alongside tomatoes and lettuce and broccoli, in a small greenhouse behind the home where she and Sanchez lived. He also knew, through Tess, that Sanchez didn’t partake and that it annoyed the shit out of him that Maddie did.

  And because he had thought of her just then, Ian texted Maddie.

  She replied within fifteen seconds. Just heard from Leo. He’s asking Diego to bring them here to Wayra and Illary’s. Segunda can be a trickster. Ask Lauren why Leo calls her Prankster. B careful. Question everything.

  “I’m supposed to ask you why Leo calls you Prankster,” he said.

  Lauren rolled her eyes. “I never shoulda told Maddie that story.”

  “So tell it to me.”

  She looked over at Ian, her pale blue eyes still ringed by navy, Lauren’s trippy eyes. “You know how weird it is that you and I are out here, Ian, high on Esperanza’s sacred psychotropic, trying to break through some sort of supernatural barrier?”

  Weird? He had better adjectives than that.

  “In the sixties, I was a hippie in the truest sense of the word. Tess has always been more traditional than me.”

  “Straighter,” he said.

  Lauren gave a small, clipped laugh. “Exactly. I sometimes forget you’re actually from the sixties.”

  “I never did more than smoke a joint now and then. I was a married professor with a kid,” he said. “I demonstrated against Vietnam, marched with King and Jesse Jackson, voted for Kennedy, but drugs just weren’t my thing.”

  “Well, you won’t find this kind of stuff anywhere else in the world. Even McKenna would tell you that.”