Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (19 page)

Inside, the foyer was deserted and the elevator wasn’t working. She started up the dimly lit stairwell and wished the landlord used brighter bulbs and would fix the elevator. She felt uneasy in the stairwell, confined. The entire building seemed too quiet, a disturbing quiet, as though it held its breath in dreadful anticipation of something.

On the second floor, she heard the comforting drone of a TV and caught the scent of something cooking. So people were home, she thought, and wondered if she should start knocking on doors and warning everyone that
brujos
had seized police. But that might create unnecessary panic. She needed to get in touch with Diego and tell him what had happened so that he could inform the mayor, who would sound the sirens.

Tess unlocked the door, and as it swung open, the dark silence told her Ian wasn’t there. She nonetheless called his name and flipped on light switches.

No answer.

Light from the street spilled through the picture window in the living room. The tall cuckoo clock in the corner, a beauty hand-carved by a Swiss expat here in Esperanza, said it was 9:28. It couldn’t be that late. She knew that when she’d left the grocery store it was still light outside. Esperanza was so close to the equator that year-round, darkness fell around six
P.M.
, with just minute fluctuations for the seasons. At the most, she had spent two hours in traffic, so it had to be closer to eight
P.M.

She walked quickly into the kitchen, set her seriously depleted grocery bag on the table with her purse, kicked off her shoes. A quick look around the kitchen told her that Ian had been about to start dinner—a pot half filled with water on a burner, two ears of corn on the counter, the table set. And then…?

Something urgent had come up.

Tess zipped into the bedroom, stripped off her clothes, dumped them in the washing machine, and changed into clean jeans and a T-shirt. Back in the kitchen, she hurried around—frying pan on burner, olive oil and trout into pan. Plug in iPad, charge up phone. As soon as she did that all the iPhone’s icons lit up, text messages from Ian, Wayra, her mother, Diego, Illary, Juanito.

Ian and Pedro Jacinto were holed up in a church not far from the Pincoya, Iglesia Santa Rosa. That was all his text said—not why he was there or why he was with the priest. Illary asked if Tess had seen Wayra, who asked if she had seen Ian. Her mother said to call her ASAP, then later left a message that she and Leo were headed to the posada for a meeting and please, please call.

A meeting at the posada? With whom? Juanito? Was that why he had texted her? Tess suddenly sensed dots she couldn’t connect, stuff happening beneath the surface that no one had let her in on. Did anyone else know that some cops had been seized?

She scrolled back through the text messages, noting the times they had been sent. Except for her mother’s text message, which had been sent before six
P.M.
, they all read 9:28. How was that possible?

Anything is possible here
.

She called Diego. He answered on the fourth ring, his voice tight, urgent. “Tess, I’ll have to call you back. The—”

“Diego, they’re seizing people already. A bunch of your cops are hosts now, guys on horseback. They’ve blocked off some side roads around the park near the Pincoya, trapping people so they’re accessible as hosts. The sirens need to be sounded, people have to be warned.”

“I convinced Mayor Torres to call out the reserves and they’re headed into that area right now. How—”

The shrill wail of the sirens cut him short, a sound that hadn’t been heard in this city for more than four years. Tess turned toward the large picture window that overlooked the park across the street. In the park, on the sidewalk below, people stopped, and then within moments, pedestrians poured across the plaza, toward the tunnels.

The sirens paused and a man’s voice boomed from the closest loudspeaker and issued directions in four languages: Spanish, Quechua, French, and English.
“Please proceed into the tunnels or into the basements of the nearest building and remain there until you are told it is safe to do otherwise. No fog has been sighted, but
brujo
attacks have been reported in old town, in the area around the Pincoya Hotel and Parque del Cielo.”

“Tess,” Diego said. “I need to get off.”

He disconnected before she could say anything.

Tess quickly lowered the blinds and went over to the stove to flip the trout. The sirens started up again and the high pitch stabbed at her, dug into her eyes, bored through her skull. She detested the sound and was terrified what it might mean for her and Ian and everyone else she loved.

When the trout was done, she squeezed some lemon juice on it, picked out the bones, dropped some lettuce and tomato on the plate, and gobbled it as she paced back and forth in front of the window, plate in one hand, phone tucked between her cheek and shoulder. She called Ian, but the call went straight to voice mail.

“Clooney, it’s me. I’m at the apartment. Call.”

She noticed that the time on her iPhone was 9:28. She glanced around at the cuckoo clock, but the hands remained at 9:28. She picked up her iPad, flipped open the cover. It read 9:28. “Shit.” Tess headed into the bedroom to check the digital clock on her nightstand: 9:28.

Alarmed, Tess went into the office and woke up her iMac. The screen came into view and there, in the upper right-hand corner, the time read 9:28.

“Okay, this is freaking me out,” she whispered.

Was it happening only to her or was it happening everywhere in the city? If it was happening only to her, then maybe she’d finally gone round the bend. Or maybe she was actually dead. But if it was happening all over Esperanza, then something much larger was going on.

Tess turned on the TV, tuned it to the local news. The emergency broadcast was on, directing residents to seek refuge.

Frustrated, she felt she should be doing something other than stuffing her face and waiting for news. But what? The sirens still screeched, people were panicked, pandemonium would ensue just as it had at the café.

To keep herself from going nuts, Tess started putting away what remained of her groceries. When she’d struck the cop with her shopping bag, she’d lost half of what she’d bought. But at the bottom of the bag she found the item she’d purchased after walking up and down the grocery store aisle several times, arguing with herself. She set the box on the table, finished putting her purchases away, then picked up the box and read the directions on the back.
Yes or no?

“Let’s do it.” Tess plucked a paper cup from the dispenser next to the counter, and headed for the bathroom.

Pee in cup, hold test strip in urine for at least seven seconds
. Done. Now she had to wait five minutes. She set the strip on top of the box, poured the urine into the toilet, flushed it, dropped the cup in the wastebasket. She stared at the strip, willing it to indicate that she wasn’t pregnant.

She and Ian used protection, she couldn’t be pregnant. Her ridiculous hunger these past few weeks had to be caused by something else. A chemical imbalance, a thyroid problem, diabetes.

Her iPhone sang out “Piece of My Heart,” and she rushed back into the living room and snatched the phone off the table.
“
Clooney, are you okay? What happened? Why’re you with Pedro in a church?”

“Long story short, Pedro, Wayra, and I blew up the Pincoya and started the fire. We sealed off a
brujo
portal. Now the cops are apparently looking for us, as suspects. A security camera caught us in the park. Are you all right?”

“You blew up … shit, Ian. Are you still in the church?”

“Yeah, in the basement with several hundred other people. I’ll be back when the coast is clear. I left you a note on the
Expat
door, didn’t you see it?”

“No. I parked in the garage, not on the street.”

She told him what had happened on her way back to the apartment. A moment of stunned silence followed, then Ian whispered, “Christ, it’s happening again, isn’t it. The past is repeating itself.”

“I’ll drive over to the church and pick you up,” she said.

“No way, Slim. Stay put. I’m safe here. And you’re safe in the apartment. But if you see fog, lower the damn shutters. Look, my cell is nearly out of power. I’ll call you in a bit. Love you.”

“Wait, are the church’s clocks—”

His cell went dead, the connection was lost. The sirens had paused again, the booming voice returned, and Tess hurried over to the blinds, parted the slats with her fingers, and peered outside. Hundreds of people now swarmed through the street and across the park, waving torches, chanting something. She raised the blinds, opened the window, and heard, “
Nunca más, nunca más.”
Never again, never again.

She was hiding up here, hiding from these
brujo
bastards who couldn’t seize her, and hundreds of locals who
could
be seized were risking their lives out there, daring the
brujos
to attack so they could be annihilated by the torches they carried.

“Fuck this shit.” Tess grabbed her jacket off the back of the chair, snapped open the electrical box that controlled the metal shutters for the
Expat
office, and hit the switch to lower them. She unplugged her iPhone, slipped on her comfortable running shoes, and went in search of a broom, rags, a lighter. The broom handle was wood, so she grabbed the mop with a metal handle, wrapped rags around it, and soaked them in lighter fluid. She pocketed the can of lighter fluid and a lighter, shoved rags down into her bag, and tore downstairs. She burst into the street and joined the mob.

Within minutes, hundreds more poured in from the park and people spilled out onto the sidewalks. Before she’d gone more than a couple of blocks, she heard a loud, whirring sound that quickly grew so shrill and deafening that it drowned out every other noise. A thick, dark swarm of locusts swept low over the mob, then settled across it like some preposterously huge quilt made of Velcro.

Locusts flitted across her face, got tangled in her hair, and even though she sensed they were supernatural constructs conjured by
brujos,
they felt
real,
the noise their wings made was
real.
And there were so damn many of them, hundreds, thousands. They landed on her legs, arms, neck, fluttered down inside her clothes, covered her face, and dug into the corners of her mouth. They crawled into her nostrils, ears, eyes, and she dropped her torch and clawed at her face, raking enough of them away from her eyes so she could see that the panicked mob had splintered, people racing away in every direction. Tess tore off her jacket, pulled it over her head, and ran into the park, locusts still clinging to her clothing, writhing inside her shirt.

The wave of locusts suddenly lifted, as if on a current of wind, and struck a hovering field of flames fifty feet in the air, a fire as supernatural as the locusts themselves. Had the chasers conjured the field of flames? As with the locusts, the supernatural flames were real enough so that she smelled the locusts as they burned, heard their bodies snap and crackle in the flames like bacon on a grill. Some of the trees in the park caught fire and Tess swept a burning branch off the ground and ran over to people pressed against the ground—two, three, four, she couldn’t tell. Locusts covered them so completely they looked like alien creatures.

She swept the burning branch through the air just above them and most of the locusts flitted away, some of them on fire, others untouched. Two men and two women leaped up and raced for the tunnels. Another swarm of locusts turned toward Tess and she thrust the burning branch at them, incinerating some of them, buying herself a few seconds. Then a larger swarm swept into the plaza and she dropped the flaming branch and flew toward the closest tunnel entrance with a panicked crowd of several hundred people.

The mob poured down the steps to the entrance, then squeezed through the tunnel doors and into the maze of interconnected tunnels. Every sound echoed loudly—the pounding of feet, the shouts and sobs. Tess ran with the others, distancing herself from the entrance, and finally ducked into a culvert to get her bearings.

A statue of Santa Rosa, the patron saint of Esperanza, stood next to her. It was laden with flowers, candies, photos, prayers scribbled on pieces of paper. She glanced around for a sign that would tell her where, exactly, she was, but didn’t see anything.

She stepped out of the culvert, into the rushing tide of humanity that continued to pour into the tunnels from other entrances.
“Ayuda viene, por allá, mira!”
someone shouted.

Horns beeped and honked and the crowds moved to the sides of the tunnel to allow a long line of electric carts to get through. Tess knew there were storage rooms throughout the tunnels where carts were kept for people to use while they were here. But she had never seen so many of them in one place before. They were large enough to seat ten, with wide running boards on either side and at the rear that could accommodate another ten or fifteen people.

The crowd surged forward, but one of the drivers, wearing a city worker uniform, shouted, “There’s room for everyone, take your time, don’t push. More carts are on the way.”

Tess hesitated. It struck her as too convenient. Yet, in the past,
brujos
always had avoided the underground tunnels just as they had avoided cemeteries. And since the mark on her arm didn’t burn or itch, she finally hopped onto a side running board of the nearest cart.

The long line of carts started moving and then gathered speed so quickly that the tunnel walls blurred past, grottoes and culverts melted together, her eyes teared from the wind. She suddenly realized the carts were chaser manifestations.

Tess tightened her grip on the overhead bar and glanced at the faces around her, looking for her dad in one of his virtual forms. She didn’t see him. The people in her cart looked startled, murmured among themselves, but no one tried to leap off.