Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (25 page)

“We’d like to find Tess,” Ian said. “We would like to know how to enter the whiteness so we can get her and the others out.”

“That sums it up perfectly,” Lauren added.

“Now say that directly to the spirit of the plant,” the priest said. “In your minds.”

Just as Pedro spoke, something happened to Lauren’s vision. Forty years ago, it had been called a
rush
; now it stunned her. The walls in the room started breathing, the concrete and wood rose and fell like a human chest. She heard its breath, the steady rhythm of its beating heart, saw blood rushing through its veins and arteries, a tsunami of life racing forward to embrace, expand, facilitate. Then the floor and the ceiling swelled, seeming to move toward each other. She heard the floor inhale and the ceiling exhale, and the walls breathing noisily in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

She pushed back hard against the foot of the bed and pressed her palms down against the floor to ground herself. But suddenly, the balcony doors rattled in a gust of wind, she could no longer feel the bed against her spine, the floor opened beneath her. Lauren plunged downward.

2.

Wayra came to on his side, in a bed of the softest substance he’d ever felt. Twilight clung to the air. It was that magical time in the evening when the edges of things possessed greater clarity—shadows, silhouettes, the sloping line of a roof. The gray sky roiled. It hurt his eyes to look at it.

Odors inundated his senses—sweet and sour, plant and animal, fresh and rotting,
brujo
and human. Another scent ran beneath it all, a psychic scent, that of chasers. Their imprint permeated everything.

As he pushed up, he saw a muscular black man sprawled on the ground to his right, legs splayed, arms flung out to the sides, forming perfect ninety-degree angles against the emerald grass.
Where’d he come from?

Here and there, dead birds lay on the grass around him. Off to his left loomed an empty lot, a playground, and houses on either side. Wayra had no idea where in El Bosque he was.

He didn’t trust himself to stand yet and crawled over to the black man. “Hey, you, wake up.” He shook the man’s shoulder. “C’mon.”

Wayra slapped his cheeks lightly and the man groaned, his eyelids fluttered open. In the moment their gazes connected, Wayra suddenly understood. “You fuck,” he snapped, and grabbed the front of the man’s shirt and jerked him forward. “You hung around to see if I could get in and then followed me.”

Ricardo knocked Wayra’s arms away and bolted upward, gasping for breath in the same way a host did within moments of being seized. “Members … of my tribe … got caught in here,” he stammered between gasps, then slammed his fists against his chest, as if to dislodge something and doubled forward at the waist and touched his toes. He sank to the ground, laughing hysterically, curled into a fetal position, pressed his hands between his knees and sobbed.

Wayra scrambled to his feet and walked around Ricardo, pissed off, bewildered, and alarmed. “Hey, Ricardo, talk to me.”

Ricardo rolled over on his stomach, face pressed into the grass, then sat up, legs crossed Indian style, and knuckled his eyes like a little kid. “I … I can’t shed this virtual form, Wayra. It’s behaving like … a host. I’m breathing with this man’s lungs, his heart beats for me, I control his brain.”

He’d seen
brujos
do strange and horrifying things, but couldn’t recall anything quite like this. “Isn’t that exactly what
brujos
want?”

“Well, yeah. But not with their
virtual
forms. Not like
this
. I have no choice about a host, Wayra. We
brujos
can always leap out of a host and either bleed them out or leave them intact. I … I seem to be … shit, I hate this, but I think I’m trapped in this body.”

Wayra’s alarm deepened. He couldn’t move through time, Sanchez couldn’t turn off his psychic switch, Ricardo was stuck in his virtual body, Charlie couldn’t get to where Wayra now was. So were these side effects something the council had known about or was this the result of something else, some other power? Or was it just collateral damage?

“Don’t you get it?” Ricardo burst out. “This is exactly what the chasers want. Once enough
brujos
are trapped in here, they’ll take El Bosque back into the nonphysical and we’ll be annihilated in the process.”

“And so will anyone who is alive.”

“Neighborhood by neighborhood. I’m telling you. That’s their plan. The dead, the living, everyone and everything.”

Wayra brushed off his jeans, slung his pack over his shoulders. “Whatever. Stay away from me,
pendejo.”
He started walking, fast, across the field, through the weird twilight.

“Hey, shifter, hold on,” Ricardo called.

Wayra kept walking. Ricardo caught up to him, fell into step beside him. “Stay. Away. From. Me.”

“Okay, I lied about everything, is that what you want to hear?”

“I don’t want to hear anything from you.”

“The only reason we haven’t been seizing people in Esperanza is because we didn’t want to be detected. All along, I planned to take over the city, to just sweep in with my tribe and be done with the lot of you, human, chaser, shifter.”

“Then why didn’t you?” Wayra stopped, glaring at him.

“Because … we couldn’t. Every time we tried to do it, we ran up against something so powerful it was like … like a force of nature, Wayra. And each time we tried, something was taken from us. Suddenly, we could no longer think ourselves long distances. So we had to find a portal. Then it became impossible to build our virtual towns and cities, our virtual homes, our thought constructs. We tried to build them outside of Ecuador, but that didn’t work, either. All we could do was seize the living outside of Ecuador. So we did, and I kept hoping that some path forward would be revealed.”

“If you hadn’t materialized in Tess’s car, your charade could have continued for decades, maybe centuries. Why did you do that?”

He shrugged his massive shoulders, untied the sweatshirt wrapped around his waist, and slipped it on over his head. “Because I knew the goddamn chaser council was planning something, I just didn’t know the specifics. And yeah, okay, I was gloating. Maybe deep down I hoped to start something, to bring all this bullshit to a head.”

“Well, you did that, all right.” Wayra threw out his arms. “Here we are in the fucking Twilight Zone, Ricardo.” With that, he moved forward quickly again, hoping Ricardo would just go away.

But he didn’t. He hurried alongside Wayra, panting like the family dog that knew it was too old to keep up but nonetheless tried valiantly. Wayra actually felt sorry for him, for this bastard who had stabbed him so many centuries ago, for this pathetic old ghost, barely a shadow of Dominica.

“Christ, Ricardo. What do you want from me?”

“Let me accompany you now, Wayra. I need to find Naomi and my other
brujos
who are trapped here. You need to find Tess and the living. We have a common goal.”

“You’ve already admitted that you’re a goddamn liar, Ricardo. Why should I believe you now?”

“Because the salvation of Esperanza, in some form, falls on us, its oldest inhabitants.”

“Sorry, that doesn’t convince me of shit. But you can walk with me until you piss me off.”

“Which will probably be within sixty seconds,” Ricardo said with a snicker.

“So talk fast.”

A familiar cry rang out and Kali flew in low over the playground, headed toward them. She landed on the grass in front of them, cocked her head from one side to the other.
“Hola, amigos. Bienvenidos.”

“How’d she get in here?” Ricardo asked.

“She apparently has freedoms we don’t.”

Kali flew up from the ground, landed on Ricardo’s shoulder, bit at a shiny button on his sleeve, and fussed at him. Then she flew upward, squawking noisily, and Wayra and Ricardo loped after her, through one empty street after another. Had the blackness that had covered El Bosque killed everyone who had been in the neighborhood at the time? Or had the blinding whiteness done that? Or was everyone in hiding?

On one street, the neighborhood simply ended with a chimney floating in midair, a numbing emptiness surrounding it. Ricardo tossed a handful of stones into the emptiness, just as Diego had done the other day outside the Café Taquina, and the emptiness crackled and popped, then the stones disappeared. “The same, but different,” Ricardo said. “From this side, we can’t see the whiteness. Everything just looks … erased.”

As they followed Kali along the erratic border between here and elsewhere, they encountered hundreds of dead birds scattered in the streets, in yards, on sidewalks. It disturbed Wayra. Even Ricardo found it troubling. “The birds, Wayra. This is the result of heightened electromagnetic activity in El Bosque. That’s what killed them. That’s how the chasers are doing this, by raising the electromagnetism in a particular area. It must make it easier for them to just slice away entire neighborhoods. The condors must have sensed it and fled.”

“Do you have any idea where in El Bosque we are?”

“None.”

Since the blackness had swallowed Tess at the market, Wayra thought his search for her should begin there. But first, he needed to orient himself so that he could locate the store and so far he hadn’t been able to do that.

They began to see other people, cars moving through the streets, kids on bikes, dogs, cats, all the signs of normal life. But it was normal
only if
you ignored the fact that the sky hadn’t changed, it was still twilight, and
only if
you could overlook the hundreds of dead birds and were blind to the places where the neighborhood simply ended and the emptiness began.

A church bell rang in the distance, long, plaintive notes that echoed through the streets. It seemed to beckon them. Kali led them directly to the church, where fifty or sixty people lined the sidewalk from the church steps to the hearse parked at the curb. Pallbearers emerged from the church carrying two coffins, one large, one small, and the people in attendance tossed roses on the coffins as they passed. The mourners didn’t utter a single sound. There was no noise at all. It unnerved Wayra. But even more troubling was that no one seemed to see the dead birds strewn across the church’s property.

How could you
not
see them? Their corpses blanketed the grounds of the church, their wings fully open, heads turned to one side, beaks slightly parted, as if they had taken one last, heaving breath before they died. They lay on their backs, their legs and claws straight up in the air. If Illary, in her hawk form, had been in here when El Bosque disappeared, would he have found her corpse among the thousands that no one seemed to see?

Just the thought of it horrified Wayra.

When the coffins were put inside the hearse, the crowd started to break up, people headed toward their cars, presumably to follow the hearse to the cemetery. Wayra spotted Javier, the baker whom Ian had tried to save that night at the Café Taquina. He loped across the street and came up behind him. “Javier?”

Javier turned around and looked at Wayra without any recognition whatsoever in his dark eyes. “Yes, I’m Javier,” he said in Spanish. “Do I know you?”

Uh, yeah, since you were in diapers.
“I’m Wayra. I drop by your bakery a couple of times a week for breakfast. My wife and I attended your son’s baptism. Your wife makes the best arepas in Ecuador.”

Javier smiled politely. “You must have me confused with someone else. I don’t have a son. I’m not married. And I don’t own a bakery. Excuse me. I need to get to the cemetery for the burial.”

Stunned, Wayra watched him hurry off to a scooter, hop on, and chug away. Wayra scanned the faces in the crowd, but didn’t see anyone else who looked familiar to him. He wished Pedro were with him. Pedro knew most of the priests in Esperanza and would likely know the priest in charge of this parish, who now stood on the church steps, talking to several mourners who lingered.

Wayra moved closer, noticed Kali circling silently above the church, and waited until he could speak to the priest alone. When the others had left to join the procession to the cemetery, Wayra approached the priest, a small man with gray hair, a dimpled chin, chipmunk cheeks. Wayra addressed him in Spanish.

“Excuse me, may I ask you a question, Father?”

“Of course. You are…?”

Wayra gave a phony name. “Esteban.”

“Thank you for attending the service, Esteban. It means a great deal to the families to see all the support they have.”

“Such a tragedy about the child,” Wayra said, referring to the smaller of the two coffins.

“Indeed. She was found wandering through the commercial district, blood pouring down her face. She didn’t know what had happened. She lasted for only three days in intensive care.”

Three days?
The black crud had swept over El Bosque only last night. Was there a connection between the priest’s sense of time and all the odd hours that appeared on every timekeeping device in El Bosque before its disappearance? “Why is the sky a perpetual twilight?” he asked.

The priest frowned and dropped his head back, peering upward, then crossed himself quickly, kissing his thumbnail as he finished. “No one remembers.” He spoke softly, with obvious puzzlement and regret. “Most of my parishioners choose to ignore it. The consensus, I think, is that the
brujos
are behind it. But since we seem to be protected from the
brujos
here, no one questions too closely. What do you know about it, Esteban?”

“Nothing definitive. I was hoping you had the answers. And why haven’t the dead birds been cleaned up?” He gestured toward the corpses to the right of where they stood.

“Dead birds?” The priest looked in the direction Wayra motioned. “I don’t see any dead birds, Esteban.”

This pronouncement told Wayra everything he needed to know about the extent of the perceptual delusion. It shocked him nonetheless. He walked over to the closest bird corpses, picked up a sparrow and an owl, and carried them over to the priest, holding them up by the feet. “Dead birds, Father. Can you see them?”