Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts)

by Trish J. MacGregor

  It sounded absurd when she said it aloud. Yeah, lock us up.

  “But … that is what shamans do,” Quintana exclaimed. “The fact that you are here, Lauren, walking around, functional, means that you now have the gift of second sight.”

  “I’m a nurse,” Lauren said. “That’s all I am.”

  A whistle pierced the silence, and they all heard it, all one hundred and eleven people inside the depot. The squeal of brakes brought them, en masse, to the picture window and minutes later, Esperanza 14 coasted into the station.

  People crowded through the depot’s front door and spilled out onto the platform. Fourteen cars total, Tess counted them, and the doors whispered open simultaneously. A conductor hopped down from the second car and made his announcement in three languages—Quechua, Spanish, English. “All aboard, please don’t push. There’s plenty of room for everyone and we aren’t pulling out until all of you are on the train.”

  Tess groped for Ian’s hand on her right, her mother’s hand on the left, and behind them were Quintana, Hugo, Wayra, and Javier. The door to the first car slid open and there wasn’t enough light for Tess to see the woman’s face. But she recognized that wild hair and that stance, arms thrown open, hands pressed against the sides of the door, as if her presence alone were powerful enough to keep the door open. Maddie.

  “Tesso,” Maddie shouted. “You out there?”

  Behind her, another figure appeared, a woman wearing some sort of strange headdress. She brought her hands to the sides of her mouth and called for Wayra. Tess realized that what she mistook for a headdress was Illary’s equivalent to Wayra’s paw, an incomplete shift. Then Tess saw Leo, Sanchez, the priest, and she and her group surged forward, toward the enchanted train, the ghost train, Esperanza 14.

  Twenty-two

  The Voice of Esperanza

  1.

  Lauren stumbled into Leo’s open arms and they fell back into the car, his arms clasped so tightly around her she didn’t want him to ever let go. His fingers combed through her hair, his breath exploded against the side of her neck, his mouth sought hers.

  “I—” they stammered simultaneously, and then laughed hysterically, laughed through their panic and uncertainty, laughed because the alternative was to break down completely and sob with terror. They fell back against the seats, both of them talking at once.

  “They—”

  “We—”

  “How—”

  “Where—”

  “When—”

  He touched two fingers to her mouth. “Prankster, Charlie got stabbed. I gave him the last of the morphine and did what I could for him, but he … didn’t make it.”

  He spoke so softly, with such pain, that it took a moment for the words to sink in. “Charlie stabbed? By who? How can he die again?” But of course she knew the answer to that one. The realm of the impossible was now their reality.

  “He’s back here,” Leo said, and led her to the rear of the car, where Tess and Ian, Maddie and Sanchez and Karina already were.

  Charlie lay across three seats, a leather jacket covering his chest, his face so strangely peaceful he didn’t resemble the Charlie she had known or even the chaser who had appeared to her during her time in Esperanza. Lauren leaned over and brushed her mouth across Charlie‘s cool cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered. “For everything.”

  As she rose, her eyes met Karina’s. The chaser looked devastated, tears coursed down her face. Lauren gave her arm a quick squeeze. “I’m glad you two found each other.”

  “Found and lost way too quickly,” she said softly.

  Lauren didn’t know what to say to that. She looked at the three chasers who stood closely together, guarding a fourth chaser who was tied to one of the seats, blood oozing from his swollen nose, bruises like dark smudges beneath his eyes. “Chaser council?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m Newton. That’s Liana and Victor.”

  “Who’s he?” She gestured at the man who was tied up and bleeding.

  “Franco.”

  “Why did you stab Charlie?” she asked, staring at Franco.

  He just grinned at her, a grotesque rictus of broken teeth and blood. “’Cause h’deserved it,” he muttered.

  “Oh, Franco, Franco,” said a soft-spoken woman who came up the aisle.

  Lauren was shocked to see the woman who had spoken to her when she was dead. “You,” she burst out. “You’re the engineer?”

  “So good to see you again, Lauren.” She turned her attention back to Franco. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to join Maria in the afterlife version of the deep freeze until conditions are right for your rebirth.”

  “Who’re y’o?”

  “The voice of Esperanza,” Lauren said.

  “Kali,” the woman said.

  Franco snickered. “S’re, s’ure, and I’m—”

  Kali flicked her arm toward Franco and his body shrank until he was a wailing infant swaddled in blankets. Then he simply faded away, and as she moved her hand through the air an image appeared of a fading structure somewhere, its yard overgrown with weeds.

  “That’s Maria’s place,” Newton exclaimed.

  “Was Maria’s place,” Kali corrected. “Now it’s a nursery.”

  There, through the translucent wall, Lauren could see two wailing infants on blankets, beating their little feet and fists against the air. Even as they stood there staring at this strange sight, four more wailing infants appeared. “José, Simon, Rita, and Alan,” explained Kali. “Those chasers were the most corrupt.”

  Victor, Newton, and Liana moved away from her. “You can’t…” Newton stammered. “You can’t just…”

  “Don’t worry,” Kali told him. “You’re not going to the nursery. That’s reserved for them.” She motioned toward the wailing infants. “For all of you, though, it’s time you returned to the afterlife and made your own decisions about your next lives.”

  Victor held up his hands, patting the air. “I helped Wayra and Charlie rescue Maddie. I was always on the right side of decisions for Esperanza.”

  “This isn’t a punishment, Victor. I’m simply releasing all of you from any commitment to Esperanza, that’s all.” Then she blew three kisses at the chasers and they faded away.

  “Release me, too,” Karina said quietly.

  Kali leaned toward Karina, whispered something, and Karina drew back, her eyes wide with wonderment. “Really?”

  “I believe so.”

  Kali drew the back of her hand over Karina’s cheek and she faded slowly away.

  Jesus. Lauren groped for Leo’s hand and he slipped his arm around her, holding her tightly against him as Kali touched Charlie’s forehead. Her caress lingered lovingly, Lauren thought, then Charlie’s body simply dissolved.

  Lauren and Tess stood there for a moment, staring at the spot where he had lain. Then Tess flung one arm around Ian and her other arm around Lauren and Leo, and drew Maddie and Sanchez and Wayra and Illary into the circle, too, hugging them all. “We’ll remember,” she whispered. “We’ll remember because we must.”

  “Kali,” called the conductor. “Everyone’s aboard. And the river is rising fast.”

  “Get us out of here, Esteban.”

  The conductor slipped into the engine compartment and shut the door. Moments later, the train started moving and they all took seats. Through the windows, Lauren watched as the train pulled away from the depot, its snow-covered roof briefly visible in the crackling blue lightning. Just beyond it, a rising river moved steadily toward the tracks. The train’s whistle blew twice, paused, then blew three times and sped through the neon-blue light.

  Kali came back up the aisle and touched each of them on the head or shoulder. Lauren didn’t have any idea what, if anything, the touch meant, but the spot on her head that Kali had touched tingled with a comforting warmth.

  When she reached Wayra and Illary, she said, “What is your preference? Animal or human?”

  “Human,” they said s
imultaneously.

  She drew her hands back over Illary’s feathers and they fell away and her lustrous hair appeared. Wayra held up his paw and Kali kissed it. As the fur vanished, it was replaced by skin, fingers, nails, knuckles, a perfect hand and forearm. Then she leaned forward, hugged him, and said something in Quechua that Lauren didn’t understand. She pressed her hands together, bowed her head slightly. “Namaste, Wayra. May you remember what you need to know.”

  Kali now stood at the front of the car, flipped a switch on the wall, and when she spoke, her voice boomed through the train, back through all fourteen cars.

  “In the days ahead, I hope that all of you who have chosen to stay behind can form a strong community based on mutual trust and cooperation. Thanks to Ricardo, one brujo who evolved into goodness, I’m adjusting my original intentions, but your lives will still be quite different than before.

  “Communication between the living and the dead, the existence of chasers and brujos, and the profound healing properties of Esperanza will be relegated to the realm of legend and myth. Evil will always exist in the world, but never again will it gain the foothold that it did in Esperanza. It is my deepest hope that you will take what you have learned from the magnificence of Esperanza and use it for the benefit of the greater whole. You can leave the city, but unless you hold on to Memory, you won’t be able to return.”

  What does that mean? Lauren wondered.

  Then Kali raised her arms so that they covered her face, bowed her head, and faded away.

  The train raced through the crackling blue light, through darkness and sunlight, water and snow and jungle. Then there was only blackness, a blackness so deep and profound that Lauren couldn’t even see the sky. And suddenly, she couldn’t pull air into her lungs, couldn’t breathe. Her fingers turned to claws against her seat. Her peripheral vision shut down. She squeezed Leo’s hand twice. Love you bigger than Google. He squeezed back once: Ditto.

  Lauren sank into the blackness.

  2.

  The contraction drove Tess forward, screaming. Leo, ever calm, said, “Good, good, c’mon, one more push, Tess. The first one’s crowning.”

  Her mother and Ian gripped her hands, and she gave one great heaving push and felt the baby slide out. “A boy, it’s a boy,” her mother squealed with excitement, and Leo cut the umbilical cord and Lauren whisked her grandson away.

  Tess thought she passed out after that, but perhaps she only dozed and went away into Demerol land again. Suddenly, she heard Leo, the cheerleader positioned between her legs—forget he was her stepfather, forget all that—urging her to push again. “C’mon, one more push, Tess, you can do it. His sister’s coming.”

  As Tess pushed, her eyes fixed on the ceiling of the delivery room in the Esperanza Hospital. She had no idea how she’d gotten here, when she had arrived, what the date was, what time it was. She felt as if she were the newborn, clueless and unaware.

  So she pushed and pushed and her daughter popped out into the world and Lauren took her away, too. Then Lauren brought them both back, a boy and a girl, five pounds five ounces and five pounds six ounces respectively, and set them in the crooks of Tess’s arms. She felt the flickering reminder of a memory, of being on a train, in a jungle, crossing a terrible rope bridge. Had to be the Demerol injection her mother had given her.

  “The times,” Tess said. “I need their times of birth. Maddie said that’s important.”

  “Eleven–oh-one for your son,” Lauren said. “And let’s call it eleven-eleven for your daughter.”

  Eleven-oh-one, eleven-eleven. As soon as those words were out of her mother’s mouth, Tess felt something profound shifting inside of her, something she knew she should remember, but which refused to surface.

  She saw the look that her mother and Leo exchanged, though, and wondered what it meant.

  3.

  Wayra and Sanchez bounced along in the old pickup, headed out of old town Esperanza. Wayra had the sensation, as he often did these days, that something was missing in the city or markedly different about it, or both. But he couldn’t pinpoint it. The railroad tracks where a slow-moving trolley now moved seemed all wrong to him, but he didn’t know why. He kept seeing the city covered in white sand, but didn’t know why. When he looked at certain landmarks—Parque del Cielo, La Pincoya, the Posada de Esperanza—he felt that he wasn’t remembering the truth. Weird. He didn’t know what it meant.

  Once they were in the countryside, on an unpaved road, Sanchez picked up speed, driving so fast that the tires kicked up dust that settled on the windshield and drifted through the windows. A CD blasted from the player—Esperanza Spalding singing “I Know You Know.”

  Wayra lowered the volume. “And that’s the thing, Sanchez. I know that I know. I just can’t pull it out, identify it.”

  “We all know that we know.”

  “Do Tess and Ian know?”

  “I don’t think so. They’re too busy with the twins and their online magazine, I guess. What about Pedro?”

  “Pedro is too sick these days to talk about what he does or doesn’t remember.”

  “You, me, Maddie, Illary, we’re the only ones who have had the dream, Wayra. How can four people dream the same dream? And not just once, but repeatedly for more than two years?”

  The dream always took place on a train. “What about Lauren and Leo?” Wayra asked. “Have you talked to them about it?”

  “Maddie has. They’re already at the house. They’re going to join us for this excursion.”

  “Then we need to get Tess and Ian to the house as well.”

  “They left for Punta yesterday, drove down with the twins for a long weekend. There’s a great place down there where the kids can swim in a lake…”

  Wayra didn’t hear the rest of what Sanchez said. He suddenly had a very bad feeling about Tess and Ian leaving Esperanza and felt a kind of desperate urgency to call them. But why? What the hell would he say to them? “It worries me, that they left.”

  Sanchez nodded. “Me, too. But I don’t have any idea why. Maddie and I were talking the other night about how we haven’t left Esperanza since we got here in 2009, more than five years ago.”

  “Illary and I haven’t left, either.”

  The two men looked at each other. “So … is that random or is it important?” Sanchez asked.

  “I don’t know. What about Leo and Lauren? Have they left at all?”

  “No.”

  A pattern. But what did it mean?

  “Maddie says the Segunda Vista will fill us in on everything we need to know. Apparently the shamans she’s been working with call Segunda Vista the DNA of Esperanza, but claim the distillation has to be just right. She thinks she’s got the perfect essence this time.”

  Sanchez turned abruptly onto a narrow dirt road that ran between fields of Segunda Vista, a blanket of green crowned with delicate flowers that looked as if they’d been spattered with paint by some mischievous abstract artists. Blues, violets, reds and pinks, yellows and gold, a rainbow spectrum of colors. A light breeze rippled across the fields so the flowers seemed to sway and dance.

  “Why does Maddie think we can enter the dream by taking Segunda Vista?” Wayra asked.

  “The Quechuas do it all the time, in a ceremony called Memory.”

  Sanchez pulled into the driveway of the bed-and-breakfast he and Maddie owned, and parked in between Leo’s VW and Illary’s smart car. The four of them were sitting on the front steps, a small cooler at their feet, Jessie snoozing nearby in a pool of warm light. As Wayra got out, he noticed a blue and green feather on the ground and picked it up. In the light, the colors shimmered.

  “Look at this beauty,” he said, showing it to Sanchez.

  “Gorgeous. It looks like a parrot feather.” Sanchez elbowed him and smiled. “Powerful medicine, Wayra. That’s what a shaman would say.”

  Wayra tucked the feather in his hair.

  “Hey, mi amor,” Illary called. “What took you guys so long?”
<
br />   “We had to stop for gas,” Wayra replied, and hugged her hello. In the light, the hawk tattoo that ran from her shoulder and up her neck seemed to move. She couldn’t recall when or where she’d gotten the tattoo. Always, they experienced these gaps in their memories.

  She plucked the feather from his hair and ran her fingers over it. “Awesome. Where’d you find this?”

  “In the driveway.”

  She slipped it back in his hair. “A good omen, Wayra.”

  “Are we ready for this, people?” Lauren asked, and flipped open the lid of a small cooler.

  “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Leo said, and reached into the cooler and brought out one tiny glass canister after another and passed them around.

  “Drink up,” Maddie said. “We’ll be deep in Memory when we reach the field. Then we’ll drink a bit more and swim inside of Memory.”

  “Salud,” Leo said, and clicked his canister against Lauren’s and drank it down.

  Wayra and Illary, and Maddie and Sanchez did the same. It tasted strange—not unpleasant, just strange. Thick, like nectar, it was an avocado green, held the sweetness of a mango, the tartness of a fresh radish, and some other quality Wayra couldn’t identify.

  “Hey, Maddie,” Wayra said as they started toward the fields, Jessie trotting alongside them. “I heard this stuff was taken as flakes.”

  She flashed him a quick smile and hooked her arm through her husband’s. “It depends on what you’re using it for. This shit will knock your socks off, Wayra. That’s the only way into Memory.”

  Within minutes, they reached the field of Segunda Vista behind the house, and each of them dropped to the ground, gathered in a small, tight circle, and held hands. Suddenly, Wayra felt as if the top of his skull and the center of his chest blew open simultaneously and then a great, rushing warmth flowed down through his head and into his heart and visions swept across his eyes.

  “It’s Memory,” he whispered.

  And Memory streamed through him, vivid, bright, utterly clear. He saw himself as he had once been, a shape shifter whose destiny had been tethered to Esperanza. He saw it all, the strange and magnificent canvas of his life before the city’s magic had been stripped away, before Kali and those moments on the ghost train. He saw himself turning three humans on Cedar Key, to save their lives, and wondered what had happened to them. He saw himself discovering that the hawk one of those humans had nurtured back to health was Illary, a shape shifter more ancient than he was. He saw Dominica and her brujos and the chasers and heard Kali’s final words on that train: “You can leave the city, but unless you hold on to Memory, you won’t be able to return.”