Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts)

by Trish J. MacGregor

  “McKenna,” he repeated. “As in Terence?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tess had told him about her mother’s adventures in the sixties with the Merry Pranksters, the Acid Summer of the late sixties, when Leonard Cohen had sung about San Francisco and Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia had taken off across the country in their psychedelic bus, Further. But from what he knew of that time, neither Garcia nor McKenna had been regular passengers.

  “I read McKenna,” he said. “Pretty wild stuff.”

  “While doing psychotropics, McKenna recognized that the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching are archetypes, patterns of energy, and that they explain certain universal forces. While tripping his brains out, Ken Kesey met his future self, the famous cult hero. While doing mescaline, Jerry Garcia composed some of his best music ever. I tripped with all these guys, loved them, and am diminished in some essential way because all of them are gone. I outlived them, for Chrissake, that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  Ian, momentarily rendered speechless, finally blurted, “Well, ask for their help.”

  Lauren looked surprised, then delighted, and threw up her arms and yelled, “Ken, hey Ken, I could really use some help here. Get Jerry and Terry to come with you, okay?”

  Her voice echoed through the alley, drawing the attention of a man and a boy who hurried by on the sidewalk. “Locos,” the man said to the kid, and touched the boy’s back, urging him to pick up his pace.

  Crazies. Ian exploded with laughter, slapped his hands over his mouth to stifle it, and stood there snorting and snickering. Crazies, yeah. He’d definitely gone round the bend. What sane man would attempt to find the woman he loved by taking hallucinogenic weeds to get into an area that had been supernaturally displaced?

  “¿Epa, qué está pasando aquí?”

  Ian spun around, Lauren stopped laughing, and the two of them stared at a pair of cops who stood at the mouth of the alley with rifles slung over their shoulders. Behind them was a third cop, on horseback and, in Spanish, he said, “Gringos. This area is under mandatory evacuation. If you do not have transportation, there are vans and buses just up the street that will take you into Esperanza.”

  Rarely did a cop in Esperanza refer to an American as a gringo. Before Ian could say anything, Lauren whispered, “Ian, look at their eyes.”

  Slick and oily dark. “Do you have the time?” Ian asked in English, tapping the face of his watch. “My watch has stopped.”

  Brujos tended to be somewhat unimaginative and, as he hoped, the unexpected question threw them. As the cops glanced at each other in confusion, Ian grabbed Lauren’s hand and they tore up the alley, knocking over garbage cans that clattered across the cobblestones, bags of trash spilling from them. The brujo on horseback galloped after them, the horse’s hooves clobbering across the cobblestones. When Ian glanced back, the horse was deftly dodging the bags of trash and the rolling cans. The other two cops raced on foot, slightly behind the horse, shouting and threatening to open fire.

  Faster, dodge, faster, zigzag, faster …

  The end of the alley loomed in front of them, an erratic rectangle of light through which Ian saw pedestrians rushing to evacuate, some with packs and suitcases, others clutching small children. He saw people on bicycles and scooters, and a line of cars stuck in traffic. Ian assumed more brujos were out there somewhere, perhaps hosted by other cops or even by some of the fleeing residents.

  “Let’s split up, Ian.”

  “No way.”

  Then the cops started shooting and Ian and Lauren dived behind a huge Dumpster on wheels. Bullets pinged off the front of it, tore through bags of trash. The gunfire echoed loudly, was heard out in the street, and people rushing past on the sidewalks suddenly started running, shouting about gunshots.

  Ian and Lauren leaped up and leaned into the Dumpster, struggling to push it out away from the wall and into the middle of the alley. Protection for the people on the street, and for them. It creaked and moaned and finally started to move. The Dumpster swung into place, taking up most of the alley, and Ian and Lauren dashed out into the street and joined the burgeoning mob of people trying to get out, away.

  A cop’s horse whinnied and snorted, then tore past them, riderless, its hooves thundering over the cobblestones. Men and women and kids abandoned their cars now and took off up the road in droves, hauling their stuff—packs, bags, pet carriers—and pulling dogs on leashes. Cops on horseback swarmed into the road—brujos, more goddamn brujos, a trap. Ian sensed hundreds of brujos in their natural forms traveling with the cops, seeking hosts. People started twitching, jerking, stumbling as they were seized.

  Someone screamed, “¡Brujos, los brujos están aquí!” and the crowd broke apart, people stampeding in every direction, up and down sidewalks, into the side roads, over the abandoned cars. Ian and Lauren dashed through the crowd, around and over cars to the other side of the street, where tables and chairs and potted plants in front of restaurants and cafés had been overturned. They ducked into one of the empty cafés, dozens of people crowding in behind them. Someone slammed the door.

  “Tables,” Ian yelled. “Push tables up against the door.”

  He and several other men pushed three tables against the door, piled chairs on top of them, and Lauren herded everyone else toward the exit at the rear of the café. When the door was barricaded, Ian joined Lauren.

  She threw her weight against a fire exit door and it swung open. He recalled that when he was attempting to return to Esperanza, he had fled a brujo fog in San Francisco in the same way, through the rear exit of a restaurant. But that time, he was able to make it back to his hotel. This time, if he returned to the hotel, he would be arrested.

  Sure enough, a thick brujo fog rolled into the alley entrance to the right, and the air filled with that familiar chant, Find the body … He and Lauren abruptly turned and raced left, to the south. Screams tore through the air as people were seized, as others stumbled and fell and were either trampled or killed. The fog moved swiftly, swelling like a giant tick, and closed in on Ian and Lauren.

  A cloud of dust suddenly rose at the end of the alley, something you might see in an old John Wayne movie, a swirling maelstrom sweeping across the empty plains. Except they weren’t on the plains and this dust glowed from within. Maybe it was what a UFO would look like to the true believers, Ian thought.

  Then something exploded out of the dust storm, an old bus painted in psychedelic colors. A large, metallic peace symbol hung from the front grille and the roof rack was loaded with stuff—suitcases, bundles, bags of clothing and fruit. It barreled toward them, horn blaring, two long-haired men hanging out the side windows, waving their arms and shouting, “Lore, we heard you!”

  “Holy shit,” Ian whispered.

  He recognized the Merry Prankster bus, Further, with Ken Kesey behind the wheel and Jerry Garcia and Terence McKenna hanging out the windows. Ian and Lauren and the others leaped to the sides of the alley, the old bus kept trundling toward them, that cloud of dust gathering speed and momentum, swallowing Further, coughing it out again. When it screeched to a stop in the middle of the alley, the dust cloud covered it completely.

  “My God,” Lauren squealed. “It’s them, Ian, it’s the Pranksters!” And she raced toward the psychedelic bus, her bag banging against her hip.

  Kesey himself swung off the bus and threw his arms open. “Lore!” he shouted.

  Lauren flew into his arms and he hugged her so tightly that Ian was sure she would disappear into him. McKenna and Garcia got out and greeted her like long-lost lovers. Maybe she was. Maybe she had been a lover to all three of them.

  She had traveled on this bus with them when she was twenty years old, had dropped acid with these guys, seen the sixties in a way that he had not because he was too old then to have been a hippie. He just stood there, staring, aware that the dust cloud provided partial cover for a reunion that was clearly impossible. After all, Kesey, Garcia, and McKenna were dead. People around him murmured,
whispered, pointed, hung back. Lauren turned toward them and motioned for them to get on the bus.

  “C’mon, we’ll take you out of here,” she said. “Anyone who wants to head into the whiteness to find loved ones is welcome. If you just want out of here, we’ll drop you off in a safe area.”

  For a moment, no one moved. Kesey said, “Hey, did any of you people see the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Jack Nicholson was the main dude. I wrote that book.”

  This elicited a few nods.

  “You people done magic mushrooms?” McKenna called out. “I’m the guy who talked to them. McKenna’s the name, Terence McKenna.”

  A few more nods.

  Garcia ducked back into the bus and emerged a moment later with a guitar. And then he started to play “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” a Bob Dylan song that was performed by Dylan and the Grateful Dead on a joint tour in 1987. Mesmerized, Ian knew he had fallen down the rabbit hole and that from this point onward, he couldn’t go back. There was nothing to go back to. He moved forward—and so did everyone else around him.

  While Garcia continued to play, Kesey and McKenna shook hands with everyone who came aboard. As Ian climbed into the bus, Kesey gripped his hand tightly. “Dude, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

  “Likewise. I used to cite your books when I taught journalism. Tell a story just like Kesey did. And I’d get these looks and some student would invariably inform me that Kesey wrote fiction. That student usually didn’t pass my class.”

  Kesey’s bellowing laugh was as large as he was, like a force of nature. “No shit, man. Doesn’t matter what it is, truth or not, if you tell it like a story with heroes and villains and all the soap opera stuff in between, it speaks to the heart every time. Our lives are soap operas—and so are our deaths.” He threw out his arms. “We’re proof of that.”

  Then Ian stepped into the bus and was shocked by its spaciousness. It was the interior of a large commercial bus, with seats along either side painted in luminous reds and yellows and blues that sported large, hand-painted silver peace signs. A dozen vertical poles marched down the middle, so that when the seats were taken, the overflow of passengers could be accommodated.

  “Ian,” Lauren called.

  He spotted her at the front of the bus and moved through the crush of other passengers until he reached the seat she’d saved for him, right behind the passenger seat.

  “We need to stick together, Ian.”

  “Was Further actually this big?”

  “Nope,” she said, then swung around in her seat, lifted her legs, and pressed her shoes against the dashboard like a little kid who had just been told that Santa Claus was right outside the front window.

  Garcia was the last on board, the door whispered shut, Kesey dropped into the driver’s seat, and picked up a mike. “Amigos, we have choices to make.” His voice boomed through the bus. “Up ahead, we’ve got brujo fog that hopes to swallow us.” He revved the engine. “Inside the whiteness, you have loved ones who need to be taken out.” Another rev of the engine. “Around us, we have chaser council members who are disappearing bits and pieces of Esperanza. And then we have the city herself. She’s starting to fight back. Otherwise, how could the three of us and our bus even be here?” Kesey laughed. “So what’s it going to be, folks? Who wants to be let off? Raise your hands.”

  Not a single hand went up.

  “All right, it’s unanimous, then. We’re headed for the fog filled with fucker brujos and then into the whiteness.”

  “Adentro, adentro, adentro,” everyone chanted. Inside, inside, inside.

  Kesey revved the engine once again, then released the hand brake and Further leaped forward like a young stallion, charging toward the brujo fog, speeding toward what was unknown and hidden. And then the bus tore into the fog.

  For seconds, the brujo litany echoed in the fog, its collective voice rising and falling and rising again, a kind of national anthem, the one thing to which they clung above all else, that which united them. Then the hungry ghosts hammered the old bus like gigantic hail pellets on a roof. The light outside the windows turned soft, strange, muted, like descending twilight. Moments later, Further appeared to be airborne, soaring like a 777 through the upper stratosphere.

  Despite the effects of Segunda Vista, Ian knew what he was seeing and where the bus was headed and why. He had an approximate time and date for his experience. But as a journalist, he struggled with the rest of it, all the finer details, like how he could be in a bus that had died with its owners, who were nonetheless alive, well, and apparently flourishing.

  He concluded that he just didn’t have the answers and probably never would.

  They emerged on the other side of the brujo fog, the bus slammed over the cobblestones, gathering speed. It headed toward the barricade of orange cones and yellow crime tape and cops on foot, on horseback, in their cars, and Kesey aimed it at the glittering whiteness.

  Ian knew the bus was visible to others. Pedestrians outside gawked, pointed, shouted. The police horses reared up, throwing off their riders, and galloped up the sidewalk. The cops on foot opened fire on the bus and bullets pinged off its sides, cracked the windshield, and probably flattened all the tires.

  But the bus didn’t stop, didn’t slow down, and the cops took off, racing for safety. Now the police vehicles peeled away from the barricade so fast that two of them crashed into a third car and then Further was beyond them, beyond all of them, beyond everything, and plunged into the whiteness.

  Everything went still, soundless.

  Sixteen

  The Hostiles

  1.

  Tess and Wayra took refuge in an empty school on the western edge of El Bosque. They had gotten in through an unlocked side door and were now crouched at either side of a dirty window, searching the eerie, twilit street for movement, for the source of the shouts they’d been hearing for the last thirty minutes.

  “See anything yet?” he whispered.

  “Nothing. But I smell smoke. Why would these people be burning their own neighborhood? What’s wrong with them?”

  “Like you, they can’t remember anything. They can’t remember who they are, what they’re doing here, why they’re here. I think they see strangers as a threat, as invaders.”

  Tess glanced around at the parrot, perched on the back of a chair, barely visible in the twilight that penetrated the window. She could hear Kali’s soft trilling, a sound she apparently made when she preened. Now and then, Tess felt the stirring of memories about the parrot and about Wayra, but so far, no specific memories had surfaced. She felt incomplete, like half a person. The contact list on her iPhone and iPad remained mostly a mystery.

  “Is Kali your pet?” Tess asked.

  “Nope.” Wayra sounded amused. “For years, she occupied a window perch at the inn where you and Ian stayed when you first arrived as transitionals. Back then, I thought she was a spirit. For a while, I entertained the possibility that she was a shifter. But she seems to be one of those magical birds, like an owl or quetzal, that traverses dimensions. It’s why she could get into El Bosque when none of the rest of us could.”

  Wayra had told her how they’d met when she and Ian were transitional souls who didn’t realize they were in comas in their respective states, separated by forty years in time. At first, she and Ian had known Wayra as a dog, his shifter form. Tess had seen his left paw, so she didn’t laugh. In fact, this explanation felt right, which she took to be a positive sign. Even if she couldn’t consciously remember squat, her intuition seemed to be remembering some things for her.

  Wayra had filled her in on brujos and chasers and told her how, after the battle that had annihilated Dominica’s tribe more than four years ago, Dominica had seized Tess’s niece, Maddie, and fled Ecuador. He told her about the Expat News, the newspaper she and Ian had started. He had told her enough so that if her memories began to surface, she would be able to connect some of the dots. But every time she looked within, strugglin
g to find something—anything—about her past, it was like tuning into a band of white noise on a radio.

  “I need to find something to eat,” Tess whispered. “Maybe there’s food in the school cafeteria.”

  “I’m starving, too. I’ll go with you.”

  Wayra whistled softly for Kali and the parrot flew over to him and touched down on his shoulder, her wings fluttering. He turned on a flashlight and they moved through the classroom and out into the hall, past rows of lockers, open doors to other classrooms, and into the cafeteria at the back of the school.

  The large cafeteria had a wall of windows on the left that revealed the perpetual twilight. It made her deeply uneasy. Anyone could peer in through those windows and see her, Wayra, and the parrot. Too exposed here, she thought.

  They threaded their way between dozens of rectangular and circular tables, toward the back of the cafeteria. Here was the self-serve area, where dishes, bowls, and glasses were stacked ever so neatly to one side of the empty aluminum bins. To the far right of the serving area, the door to the kitchen stood open. Tess headed straight toward it, Kali flying along ahead of her, Wayra behind her.

  The kitchen, long and narrow and meticulously tidy, was lined with pots and pans that hung within easy reach from hooks along the ceiling. Stacked neatly in the cabinets were plates and bowls. At the very end of the kitchen stood a fire exit door. In between were stoves, microwaves, and an industrial-sized fridge. Tess opened it and was relieved to discover that the electricity was still on and that the fridge was crammed with food.

  She pulled out a six-pack of bottled water, a loaf of rye bread, a package of Swiss cheese, wilted lettuce, a couple of tomatoes, mustard, part of a turkey, and apples. As she proceeded to make sandwiches, Wayra located paper plates, sliced up the apples, and scooped some slices onto a plate for Kali. The parrot waddled across the counter to the plate, picked up a slice with her beak, then held it between her claws and happily nibbled away as Tess made four sandwiches.

  She and Wayra wolfed down the food while standing at the counter, two sandwiches apiece. But even when she finished the last of hers, she was still hungry, so she helped herself to several slices of turkey and gobbled them down, too. Wayra said, “I’ve never seen you eat so much at one time.”