Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts)

by Trish J. MacGregor

  “Really? How do I normally eat?”

  “Usually, you’re picky. You sort of graze throughout the day.” He suddenly rocked forward and sniffed at her.

  Tess leaned back, away from him. “Jesus, Wayra.”

  “You’re pregnant,” he blurted.

  “That’s crazy. I can’t be pregnant.”

  “My sense of smell is rarely wrong, Tess.”

  “Well, it’s wrong this time.”

  But as soon as she said it, a memory exploded into her consciousness, of herself using an early-pregnancy test, setting the test strip aside. But she couldn’t recall anything beyond that—such as the results. Or where she’d been when she’d done the test.

  Kali suddenly emitted a shriek and soared around the kitchen, squawking, “Ya vienen, ya vienen.”

  They’re coming.

  Within seconds, glass shattered somewhere nearby, shouts rang out, and the pounding of feet thundered through the air, as though wild horses were loose outside. “Shit,” Wayra hissed. “Out the fire exit.”

  Tess grabbed a couple bottles of water and ran after Wayra, to the back of the kitchen. As they slammed through the fire exit, the alarm went off, a steady, deafening shriek that announced, We’re here, hey, we’re here …

  They raced after Kali and plunged into a wooded area behind the school. But it turned out to be just a narrow band of trees that grew parallel to the western edge of the disappeared area. Nowhere to run. Wayra stabbed his thumb at Kali, who circled the upper part of a monkey puzzle tree, then vanished into the leaves.

  “Can you climb a tree?” he asked.

  “Of course I can.” She tore off her sneakers, shoved them in her pack, and shrugged the pack onto her back. Then she climbed the tree fast, like a crab, hands here, feet there, up and up and up. It shocked her that she had meant what she said, that she knew how to climb a tree. But it used to be mango trees. This thought triggered a cascade of memories of a tremendous mango tree that had grown in her backyard when she was a kid in Miami.

  Like a ceiba tree she had seen somewhere, that childhood mango tree had had more branches than Shiva had arms, most of them thick and sturdy enough to hold an eight-year-old kid. She had climbed to the very top of the tree, where the plumpest, ripest mangoes hung, and plucked one. She had peeled it while sunlight streamed over her, and drank in its color and texture, a rich reddish gold, smooth and thick. Then she’d bitten into it and that sweet warmth had rushed into her mouth, squished between her teeth, slipped down her throat, and dribbled out the corners of her mouth and down onto her chin. She had felt deliriously happy.

  And now, as she clung to a Y juncture high in the branches, the monkey puzzle tree she had climbed physically transformed into that mango tree from her childhood. The branches thickened beneath her hands, the leaves proliferated until the tree was as full and green as the one in her memory. Plump, ripe mangoes hung from the branches.

  She didn’t know what version of the tree Wayra perceived as he climbed, but he appeared to be climbing the same tree that she saw. As he got closer to her, he said, “Mango trees don’t grow in this region, not outside of greenhouses. But this is a mango tree. And now every other tree here is a mango tree, too.”

  “This tree is in my head, Wayra. A vivid memory that has taken on … a physical reality.”

  Even in the muted twilight among the thick leaves, she could see his eyes widening with sudden comprehension. “The city is our ally, Tess. I think Esperanza is evening up the odds. What we imagine is manifesting fast. Imagine a fire.”

  “Fire?”

  “A wall of flames between us and the school.”

  He shimmied out on a thick branch next to hers, shut his eyes. Tess gripped the branches more tightly, pressed her forehead to the bark, tried to imagine a wall of flames. The fire alarm kept shrieking, the stink of smoke grew stronger, and down below she now saw moving torches, flashlights, the mob pouring through the fire exit door. Fear pumped through her hard and fast, fear that the mob would spot them, that they would set the tree on fire, that she and Wayra would die in this horrible place. She couldn’t move past her fear to visualize anything.

  The mob was closing in, she dug her fingernails into the bark. Fire, fire, fire, a dancing wall of flames.

  Suddenly, a wall of fire sprang up between the building and the trees where she and Wayra were hidden. Tongues of flames leaped twenty, thirty, forty feet in the air, and licked at the twilight, yet didn’t touch the trees. The flames actually leaned outward away from the trees, toward the building, as if blown that way by wind. But there wasn’t any wind, the air didn’t stir at all, and Tess realized the wall of flames was Wayra’s creation and he was pushing it out away from them.

  He shimmied toward her and pointed down. “The flames will hold long enough to screen us.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I feel it.” He gestured toward Kali, now circling high above the trees and the flames. “She’ll scope things out.”

  As they scrambled down from the tree, the wall of fire remained intact, the flames leaping, crackling, emitting a tremendous heat that she felt against her face and arms. Shouts and screams from the mob pierced the air. She and Wayra dashed northward through the high weeds, across ground so dry it was as hard as concrete. The barrier of flames moved swiftly parallel to them, keeping them hidden.

  Even when the trees gave way to low shrubs and bushes, the flames paced them, protecting them from being seen. It was as if once Wayra had imagined the wall of flames, Esperanza had drawn upon its own power to create and maintain them. She wondered if the mango trees were still intact, real.

  Now that nothing lay between them and the curved dome of twilight on their left, she thought she could see shadows and silhouettes on the other side of the twilight, as though it were a kind of translucent screen. Wayra apparently noticed this, too, and moved toward it. Tess followed him closely. Even Kali swept in for a look, and landed on Wayra’s shoulder.

  They stopped about three feet from the wall of twilight. It shimmered and danced, as if covered with sequins. She noticed how the light vanished into the ground and swept upward as far as she could see. The shadows on the other side were definitely shapes—rectangular, square, circular, and then shapes like swaying trees, maybe pines.

  “Those shapes appear to be from outside, Wayra. Is the whiteness becoming transparent?”

  “I think the city is trying to break free of whatever the chasers did. When you’re outside of El Bosque, it looks like the entire area has been erased. When I first got in here, it was twilight like it is now but the twilight didn’t shimmer and you couldn’t see anything on the other side of it.”

  “How can we bolster whatever the city is doing? I held a vision of a mango tree, you held an image of a wall of fire. Both materialized. Maybe we should try holding an image of the neighborhood as it once was.”

  Wayra thought about it, but not for long. “Can you remember what it was like before, Tess?”

  “No. But I can sure as hell hold an image of a blue sky or a sky strewn with stars.”

  Kali suddenly squawked and flew upward. Then the wall of fire winked out like a match, and when Tess glanced back, she saw they were on the west side of a street filled with houses and apartment buildings. A small group of men and women moved toward them, armed with baseball bats, shovels, pool sticks, stones, and behind them was a much larger crowd carrying torches and weapons. The man leading the small group yelled, “There they are!”

  “Shit, Wayra.”

  But Wayra was already walking toward them, patting the air with his hands, calling, “Javier. I spoke to you earlier at the church.”

  Tess stood rooted to the ground, her heart somersaulting in her chest. She desperately wished she had an army on horseback at her disposal, an army of mythological Olympians who would gallop into the road from the north and the south, the east and the west, and surround these mobs.

  “I remember you,” Javier shouted,
raising his hand, signaling the group behind him to stop. “From the church. From the funeral. You and the woman don’t belong here. You’re invaders, you mean us harm, you—”

  “This twilight is your enemy.” Wayra threw his arms out at his sides. “It has robbed your memories, made you violent and aggressive, messed up your—”

  “Liar,” Javier shrieked. “Get them, take them!”

  As the two groups rushed toward them, hurling rocks, swinging their shovels and bats and pitchforks, an army of giants on horseback poured into the road from every side, the deafening thunder of the horses’ hooves magnified by the dome of twilight that still gripped El Bosque. The giants swung long, thick clubs covered in spikes, wore chest armor and metal helmets that gave them a distinctive alien look. Some sort of white substance flew up around them—like snow or powder or pale beach sand—and it thickened and blew around as more and more of these giants on horseback appeared.

  That’s how I imagined them, Tess thought, then both groups of hostiles tore away from the road, Wayra leaped back, Tess grabbed his hand, and they raced for the nearest building, a humble one-story house sealed up like a tomb. They ran along the right side, following Kali as she swept toward a small greenhouse out back. Padlocked, the doors were padlocked.

  “Shit, Wayra…”

  “This way.”

  They tore around to the back of the structure, Wayra dropped to the ground, rolled back on his ass, and slammed his feet against the opaque glass.

  He broke open a hole close to the ground, wrapped his jacket around Kali. The parrot squawked and tried to bite him as she struggled to free herself. Wayra shoved his jacket through the opening, Tess pushed her pack through, and dropped onto her stomach. She propelled herself forward with the balls of her feet and grabbed on to whatever she could in front of her, pulling herself through the opening, her chin scraping against the ground.

  Once she was inside the greenhouse, she quickly freed Kali from Wayra’s jacket and the parrot flew high into the greenhouse, squawking, irate. Tess gripped Wayra’s forearms and pulled him through the opening. He shot to his feet. “Hurry, we’ve got to hurry, they’re really close.” He pushed a potted tree in front of the broken glass and they raced after Kali, through a corridor lined by citrus trees.

  “That army,” Wayra said softly. “Did you … imagine them?”

  “More like wishful thinking.”

  “Nice job.”

  “It didn’t get us far.”

  “It bought us time, Tess. Mango trees, fire, an army of giants. Now we need to visualize and create something—”

  The sound of breaking glass interrupted Wayra and he and Tess quickly ducked into the citrus trees. Stay here, he mouthed, and dropped to his hands and knees. Bones and muscles and tendons in his hands and face began to ripple beneath his skin, his arms and hands turned into legs and paws, his legs shortened, his clothing vanished, fur sprang from the pores in his skin. His face and head elongated, his human eyes and mouth and ears transformed into those of a dog. He grew a tail. Tess wondered if he would be fully human when he shifted again, or if his left paw would become even more pronounced. Or if he would even be able to shift into his human form again.

  And then he took off into the greenhouse and Tess just stood there in the citrus trees, in the grips of a complete memory of the first time she had seen Wayra shape-shift.

  It had happened when she was a transitional soul, in a tunnel beneath a greenhouse similar to this one, where she and Wayra, in his dog form, had been hiding during a brujo attack. At the time, she hadn’t known he was a shape shifter, she’d thought he was just a smart dog named Nomad. He had left her at one point and she had gone looking for him and seen a man in the greenhouse arguing with someone. That man had been Wayra. With this memory came fragments of another, of herself and a man she knew was Ian pursued by brujos as they fled into the countryside around Esperanza. They were transitional souls then and suddenly knew the only way they could be together was to find their way back to Esperanza in their physical bodies.

  They stole my memories, these bastards stole my memories.

  Which bastards? Chasers? Brujos? Both?

  A mark on the underside of her wrist now itched and burned like crazy and Tess dropped into a crouch and dug her fingers into moist soil and rubbed it over the mark, soothing it. Wayra had told her about the mark on her wrist, how it burned when brujos were nearby. She picked up several large stones, pulled her slingshot from her bag, and slipped away from the protection of the trees. She moved quickly and silently toward the sound of voices, a man and woman arguing.

  Then she saw them, a black man and a diminutive Ecuadorian woman, huddling close together, near the window they had broken to get into the greenhouse. The woman was nearly hysterical, frantically stabbing her finger at Wayra, still in his dog form. “I hate dogs, get that dog away from me. Look, it’s baring its teeth, it’s going to attack us. Hit it, Ricardo, hit it with your stick!”

  “It’s not a goddamn dog, it’s Wayra, a shifter, a shape shifter, Naomi, can’t you remember anything? Show yourself, Wayra.”

  Naomi grabbed the stick from his hand, and just as she swung it into the air, Tess shot the largest stone. It struck Naomi in the cheek and she dropped the stick and stumbled back, shrieking in pain, her hands flying to her face, blood streaming through her fingers. Ricardo spun around, saw Tess, and shouted, “We’re trapped in these forms, we can’t hurt you.”

  “Get away from Wayra or this next stone is going to pierce your fucking eye,” Tess snapped, moving toward him, the slingshot armed, ready.

  Wayra shifted into his human form, fur now extending past the elbow of his left arm, and leaped between her and Ricardo, waving his arms. “Back off, Tess, back off. They don’t mean us any harm. Ricardo and I have a truce.”

  “You made a truce with a brujo?” Tess burst out. “I thought you told me—”

  “You made a truce with him?” Naomi screamed. “With the shifter who turned me and my son?” She pressed her fists to her mouth. “I remember,” she said softly.

  Bits and pieces of Tess’s disconnected memories abruptly slammed together. Even though she now understood who Ricardo and Naomi were, she couldn’t fathom a truce. “Brujos lie, Wayra.”

  Ricardo finally hurried over to Naomi, now sitting on the ground, weeping. He slipped his arm around her, spoke softly to her, pulled a hanky from his pocket and pressed it against the gash on her cheek. His obvious affection for her, his solicitousness, shocked Tess. She tossed her stone into the trees, slipped the slingshot in her back pocket, and joined Wayra, who now was peering out the broken window.

  Torchlights flickered in the distance. “Nearly every greenhouse has access to the tunnels,” Wayra said. “We need to find the tunnel under this one.” He whistled shrilly for Kali, who swept in over their heads. “Find the tunnel, find the opening.”

  “I’m not following you into any tunnel,” spat Naomi.

  “It’s a way out,” Wayra shot back. “But suit yourself.”

  “We’re going,” Ricardo told her, taking Naomi by the arm.

  “So we get out and then what?” Naomi asked. “The dead and the living and shifters all live happily ever after?”

  “Of course not,” Wayra said.

  “I’m not asking you, Wayra,” Naomi said irritably.

  Wayra stabbed his thumb toward Ricardo. “He said he would fight for his tribe’s right to occupy Esperanza alongside the living.”

  Naomi glanced at Ricardo. “You actually said that?”

  “Yeah. Meant it, too.”

  The mob was nearly on them, their shouts so loud that Tess could distinguish individual words. Get them, kill them. She spun around and loped after Kali, now flying fast and low between the lines of citrus trees.

  2.

  When Lauren came to, it took her a moment to orient herself, to remember that she was in Further, in the old bus that had belonged to the Merry Pranksters. A whiteness surrounded the b
us and it was as thick as clam chowder.

  Fog? Was it brujo fog? She didn’t hear the brujo litany, but she couldn’t dismiss the possibility that it was brujo fog. Worse than the whiteness was the stillness, the utter lack of noise. She couldn’t hear anything, not even the sound of her own breathing.

  Lauren glanced over at Ken Kesey, slumped against the steering wheel, arms resting on top of it, forehead pressed into the crook of his elbow. Alarmed, she looked back and saw that Garcia was flung back against his seat, mouth open, his guitar resting across his thighs, and that McKenna lay on his side on the floor, curled up like an infant. Ian was folded like a rag doll over the back of Garcia’s seat. And the dozens of people who had been with them were now gone.

  “Shit, shit, what’s going on?” She shot to her feet and shook Kesey. “Ken, c’mon, wake up. You’re freaking me out.”

  He didn’t wake up. She pulled the upper part of his body away from the steering wheel, pushed him back against the seat, raised his eyelids. His pupils weren’t dilated, he was breathing, his color was good, his pulse was strong. Alive, but unconscious. Except that he wasn’t alive, he had died on November 1, 2001, she had read about it in the Miami Herald.

  Lauren hurried over to Garcia, carefully removed his guitar from his thighs and set it upright against the side of the bus, and checked him over just as she had Kesey. Same thing. Alive but unconscious. She knelt on the floor next to McKenna, rolled him onto his back. Eyes, breathing, pulse, color. Alive but unconscious.

  Terrified now that everything she’d experienced since ingesting Segunda Vista was nothing but hallucination, that she was actually still sitting in the hotel room with Leo and Pedro and Ian, Lauren moved quickly to Ian. If she touched him, would her hands slip through him? “Ian,” she said loudly. “Wake up.”

  He didn’t stir.