Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (11 page)

Tess wondered, not for the first time, if they were still transitionals, their bodies long dead, their individual consciousness spinning illusions. Her gasps and soft moans, his rapid breath against her neck, the delicious sensations of his mouth and hands, the electricity that shot through her: how could this
not
be real?

She reached behind her and laced her fingers across the back of his neck, drawing his mouth closer to the curve of her shoulder. He slipped more deeply inside of her and began to move, slowly and deliberately, his hands slipping over her soapy breasts, her soapy stomach, between her thighs. She turned her head and his mouth found hers. Their tongues dueled, the water pounded over them, and it went on so long that the heat inside of her built to almost unbearable levels, until she was a nuclear reactor in meltdown.

Afterward, they clung to each other. She knew he felt as disturbed about recent events as she did. “Clooney, do you ever wonder if we’re actually dead?”

Ian drew his fingers through her wet hair and she tilted her head back and looked up at him, into the dark pools of his eyes. “I hope you’re kidding, Slim.”

“Only half.”

He kissed her, then turned off the shower. Beads of water rolled over his eyelids, out onto the tips of his eyelashes and perched there for an instant like high divers, then dropped onto his cheeks. “So we’ve lived the last four plus years in, what,
The Matrix
?”

Even
The Matrix,
she thought, couldn’t accommodate the fact that Ian had actually been born in 1924 and that when he’d had a massive heart attack and died at the age of forty-four, in 1968, his soul had moved forward to 2008 and they had met and fallen for each other. When they began to emerge from their comas, their souls were snapped back into their bodies, in their respective times. Ian had remembered nearly everything; Tess had remembered nothing. But as she had slowly recovered her memories of what had happened while she was dead and comatose, as he had started to heal and put his life there in order, they had both known they needed to return to Esperanza in order to find each other.

If it hadn’t been for Wayra, that never would have happened. The shifter, capable of moving through time, had brought Ian forward to 2008.

Now here they were, more than four years later, two people who would never have found each other if they hadn’t died and ended up in Esperanza. She understood now that her father’s death some years before that had been necessary in the greater scheme of things; he had paved the way. But even before Charlie had passed on, there had been forces at work in the background, connections she still didn’t fully understand and probably never would.

“The Esperanza Matrix,” she said with a quick laugh, just to show him she had been joking, that she knew the difference between illusion and reality.

The irony was that a man born in 1924 had so fully adapted to life in the twenty-first century that he could reference
The Matrix.
But what shocked her was that Ian understood as well as she did that until they had died, they each had been living in a kind of cultural matrix, blinded by their limited perceptions of what was possible.

“Here’s how I figure it.” He opened the stall door, grabbed a pair of towels off the rack, tossed one to her. “If we’re dead and are having such great sex and are faced with perplexing and strange mysteries, then death isn’t a problem for me. The world’s norm is not
my
norm.”

With that, he snapped his towel at her ankles, a small biting sting, and darted out of the shower and into the bedroom before she could retaliate.

Did other couples in this city have these weird conversations? She toweled herself dry, wrapped a second towel around her wet hair, and glanced at herself in the full-length mirror. “Hey, Ian?”

He popped his head through the doorway. “Yeah?”

“Do I look fat?”

His eyes slipped up and down her reflection, then turned to her actual body, exploring her as intimately as his hands had moments ago. “Oh, sure, horrendously fat.”

“Seriously. I bought enough food for both of us, but I was so hungry I ate everything.”

“I seem to recall that you’ve always eaten like that. Your metabolism burns it up. At least you didn’t drink my coffee,” he teased. “We should grab a cab in about twenty minutes to get to the café on time. Bring your car keys so we can pick up our cars.”

Tess stood in front of the mirror a while longer, toweling her hair dry and turning from one side to another, examining herself in the mirror. Okay, so she wasn’t fat. But she
felt
fat. Then again, she’d just stuffed her face, so of course she felt fat.

“Forget it, get moving,” she muttered.

2.

In the morning light, the grounds around the Café Taquina looked like a war zone, Tess thought.
Stuff
littered the ground—handbags, shoes, cans, bottles, loose change, jackets, sweaters, plates, and glasses. No corpses: the dead had been removed.

Half a dozen cop cars were parked inside the area that had been cordoned off last night. She also saw a van from the science department at the University of Quito and another from the local forensics lab. Journalists, many of them from neighboring towns, and camera crews congregated just beyond the forbidden area. A few stray cats and dogs skulked about.

“Amigos,” someone shouted behind them, and Tess and Ian both turned around.

Diego Garcia strode toward them, a handsome, energetic young man with a bounce to his walk, a quick smile, and dark eyes like those of a child, wide, curious, vibrant. He threw his arms around them both, hugging them hello. “They’re about to run the plates on cars left here last night. If you give me the keys, I’ll have the cars moved out of here before that happens.”

Tess and Ian turned their keys over to Diego, he excused himself and went over to one of the other cops, and returned a few minutes later. He handed them each an ID badge. “Clip these to your jackets. You’re now experts from the University of Quito.”

They put on the badges and followed Diego around the yellow crime tape toward the steps to the café’s rear deck. Choppers kept circling, Diego’s radio crackled with voices, a crisp wind blew across the empty parking lot.

As they neared the steps, Diego said, “Engineers are conducting tests to find out if the deck is safe to walk on. Until we know for sure, we can’t go any farther than the top step. But you’ll be able to get plenty of photos from there.”

Tess didn’t have to climb to the top step to see the ruin—overturned tables and chairs, a blanket of shattered glass, silverware, shoes, jackets, scraps of papers and napkins fluttering across the debris. Midway across the deck, everything simply dropped away into nothingness. Floor gone, railing gone, roof gone, wooden planks gone, heaters, lights, tables, chairs, everything
gone.
It looked just as Illary had described it, as if a mammoth eraser had rubbed it all away. But instead of the blackness, the erased area was now a blinding white that reflected sunlight like a mirror, like smooth glass, like the surface of a still lake. It flowed erratically downhill, as if some weaving drunk had splashed luminous white paint from side to side as he stumbled around. Here and there stood a lonely pine tree or a bush or a flower bed that hadn’t been swallowed up.

“Jesus,” Ian whispered, and started taking videos of the area.

Tess snapped several dozen photos. “Why hasn’t this part of the deck just crumbled away?” she asked. “How can it still be standing? It’s not connected to anything.”

“That’s what the engineers are trying to determine,” Diego said. “But they can’t get too close to the erased area. Watch.”

Diego moved to the outside of the railing, onto a strip of trampled grass, scooped up a handful of pebbles and tossed them out into the glistening whiteness where the hill had once stood. As the pebbles hit the bright surface, it crackled and popped, then the pebbles disappeared. “Where’d those stones go? Huh?” Diego moved quickly back to the steps.

“The same place Javier went,” Ian said.

“And where’s that, Ian?” Diego asked.

“I don’t know. But when the blackness swallowed his legs, he said they were
gone,
that he couldn’t feel them.”

“But what the
fuck
does that mean?” Diego’s voice turned hoarse, scared, and he rocked toward Ian, almost in his face. “Why’s this happening? Is it going to happen elsewhere, too?” Then he shook his head and thrust his hands in his jacket pockets. “Sorry. Lots of questions, no answers.”

“What’s the official explanation for what happened here, Diego?” asked Tess.

Diego’s expression tightened. “Mayor Torres instructed the department to say nothing until the science
muchachos
have done their thing. They’re getting high electromagnetic readings around that.” He gestured toward the disappeared area. “All that whiteness is like an … apparition.”

“They can’t keep this under wraps,” Ian said. “There were at least a hundred people here last night, witnesses. And you can multiply that many times with cell photos and videos, Diego. No surprise that the rumor mill about
brujos
has jammed into overdrive.”

Diego nodded. “I know, my friend. I know. One of my cousins was here last night. And now my wife is taking our two kids and her parents out of the city for a few days. Down to Quito. I told her she’s overreacting, that there’s no proof
brujos
are behind what happened here.”

Tess moved along the outside of the railing, just as Diego had done moments ago, and got to within a few feet of where the erasure began. She felt strangely disoriented by the spatial void the reflected light created, so she wrapped one arm around a vertical post to anchor herself before she snapped more photos.

An odd, cloying odor seemed to emanate from the erasure, a smell like ripe fruit that had been too long in the sun and heat. And she thought she could feel the post straining, trembling beneath what she sensed was a tremendous stress. She quickly moved back along the strip of grass.

“Are the photos going into tomorrow’s edition?” Diego asked.

“That’s the plan,” Tess replied.

Ian added, “We’ve got the online edition up already. But we’ll update it later today.”

“Then the shit’s probably hitting the fan right now.” Just as Diego said that, his cell rang. He glanced at the number. “What’d I tell you? It’s Mayor Torres. I’d better take this.”

As he walked away from them, the cell pressed to his ear, Tess whispered, “Ian, take a look at this.” She held out the camera and clicked through the photos she’d taken. “You see it?”

“Just sunlight glinting off the erased area, trees on the right … holy shit. What
is
that? Shadows?”

“I don’t know. It’s like a phantom image within the erasure.” Tess clicked through the rest of the photos, and the image was present in most of them, but didn’t get any clearer. “Let’s drive down to the bottom of the hill and get some pictures from there.”

“Sounds good,” Ian agreed.

But as they approached Diego, his body suddenly lurched, he dropped his cell, his fists flew to his eyes, and a hoarse, terrible sound issued from him. Then he fell to his knees and gripped his thighs and rocked back and forth, back and forth, his shoulders jerking right, left, backward, forward. He looked as if he were having a seizure. Tess and Ian glanced at each other; they both knew what was happening. By the time Diego’s head snapped up again, an oily blackness covered even the whites of his eyes.

When Diego stood without twitching, without any facial tics, Tess understood that a
brujo
fully controlled him.

“Ricardo here. Sorry to intrude like this,” he said in Diego’s voice, then thrust out his hand. “Mr. Ritter, it’s a pleasure.”

“First Dominica and now her brother? You gotta be kidding me. Why don’t you spooks just admit you’re dead and move on to hell or wherever.”

“We know we’re dead, Ian. You don’t mind if I call you by your first name, do you?”

“Not at all, Richie. Hey, Slim, that’s a pretty close interp of Ricardo, isn’t it?”

“Only if you add
asshole
at the end of it,” she said.

“She’s pissed off at me,” Ricardo said. “For scaring her like I did. For licking her neck. She tastes mighty good, Ian.”

“Get to your point, Richie,” Ian snapped.

“My point is quite simple, actually. We want the same things that you do. An Esperanza just as lovely and whole as it is now. We’re on the same side. No one in my tribe has seized any resident or tourist in this city since my sister’s defeat.”

“Except for right now,” Tess said. “And that waiter and the priest.”

“That was just to give you a message. We take our physical pleasures from hosts in other cities and countries now.”

Ian laughed. “And that’s supposed to make it okay?”

Diego’s face turned hard, his eyes flashed with anger. “It means that as far as Esperanza is concerned,
brujos
want the same things you do.”

“Only because you’re empowered by the city,” Tess said.

“As are you. And the chasers.”

“If we want the same thing,” Tess said, “then why did you erase most of the hillside and the deck and injure and kill dozens?” Accuse to clarify: a good FBI tactic.

“We didn’t. Talk to your father, Tess.”

The cries of a hawk caused him to drop his head back and shade his eyes as he peered upward. An instant later, a dark form shot onto the steps and landed in front of Diego. Teeth bared, the black Lab instantly shifted into its human form and Wayra said something in Quechua. The only word Tess understood was “Ricardo.”

Ricardo said, “Let’s say what we have to say in English, Wayra, so our gringo friends understand it all.”

Wayra sniffed noisily at the air, turning his head right, left, then leaned into Diego’s face. “You smell the same, Ricardo. Like roadkill. The centuries haven’t changed you.”

Tess had her hands in the pockets of her jacket and felt something she was sure hadn’t been there last night, when she’d been wearing the jacket, or even earlier this morning when she’d put it on before leaving Wayra’s place. She ran her thumb around the edges of it, felt the cool aluminum, and knew that somewhere on the front of it were her dad’s initials. Yes, right there, her thumb found the grooves of the initials: C.L. Her dad’s Zippo lighter. Or a duplicate of it.
Thanks, Dad, what the hell am I supposed to do with this?
Had he slipped this in her jacket pocket last night at Wayra’s? If so, why hadn’t she felt it then?