Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (23 page)

Charlie knew that many people in and around Esperanza—including Maddie—cultivated Segunda Vista, Second Sight, in their greenhouses. But the Queros were the first humans to discover it and they found that each of the different-colored buds blew open a particular chakra and conferred a distinct ability. The way Charlie understood it, the leaves could cure almost anything. The stems took you deep into the collective mind. The roots connected you to the divine. When all of the elements were mixed together, there were no barriers between the living and the dead. Reality shifted immediately, according to your deepest beliefs and desires, and you became the manifestation of who you really were.

For some people, the cultivation was a business; they sold the weed to the company that resold it as a remedy for altitude sickness. But for most people, Segunda Vista was for personal use. The psychic components of the weed were well documented—far-seeing, precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance.

At one time, the council had talked about destroying all the Segunda Vista fields and greenhouses in Esperanza. Some council members—probably the same idiots who were trying to remove Esperanza from the physical world—thought the weed enabled the people to see too much. But in those days, they’d had
brujos
to worry about and the discussion never went anywhere. So Maddie, he thought, might be on to something.

“Can you get the stuff around here?” Charlie asked. “Or do you have to go to your greenhouse, Maddie?”

“It was sold in the Mercado del León,” Maddie replied.

“There might be another place around here that sells it,” Wayra said.

“Then see if you can find some. Karina and I will do what we can from our end.”

Leo nodded. “There’re hotels a mile from here. We can get rooms and start looking for some place that sells Segunda Vista.”

“I’ve got to pass,” Sanchez said. “I need to get away from here. Too much stuff’s hitting me all at once.”

“Illary’s going to drive Quintana and Hugo to our place,” Wayra said. “Go with her.”

“Our dog’s still at your place,” Maddie said. “So we’d have to stop there first, anyway.”

Sanchez looked at Maddie, and Charlie sensed the context of the unspoken exchange between them. Maddie, he knew, was conflicted. Go with Sanchez or stay behind and try to search for Tess through the lens of a magical weed? She finally said, “I’ll go back to your place, Wayra, with the others.” She pointed at Lauren, Ian, Leo. “But if you guys need any info about Segunda Vista, text me. And oh, someone should act as a monitor, to record your perceptions.” She gave Charlie a quick hug. “Tell the council to go pound sand, Charlie.”

She and Sanchez walked off toward Illary and Quintana, who were still down by the water. Leo, Ian, Lauren, and the priest headed for their car. When Charlie and Karina were alone with Wayra, the shifter looked as miserable as Charlie had ever seen him.

“You and Karina need to know something,” Wayra said. “Pedro, Ian, and I blew up the Pincoya. More than thirteen thousand
brujos
were freed, their portal was sealed off. Ricardo and some of his followers surrounded me in a field and he promised to seize an equal number of Esperanza residents. Diego said that some of the men in the police department were seized and they blocked off an entire area around the Pincoya so that hundreds of motorists, including Tess, were trapped. She got out and some of the others did, too.”

“Wow,” Karina breathed. “You three really threw a wrench into the
brujo
scheme of things, Wayra.”

“But until that happened, Ricardo’s tribe hadn’t seized anyone in Esperanza to use as hosts,” Wayra said. “Now that they’re seizing people, it may fuel the belief of your opponents on the council that they are right about taking Esperanza back into the nonphysical.”

It was the closest thing to an apology that Charlie had ever heard from the shifter. But why apologize? The three of them had done what was necessary, had done what he and Victor had tried to do, cut off a potential
brujo
army of millions. They simply hadn’t taken into account the possible repercussions.

“We need to move quickly, Wayra. We’re not only up against
brujos,
but the chaser council.”

“And we may lose on all fronts, Charlie.”

Eleven

11:11

Alone again and determined to find a way into the disappeared area, Wayra hurried into a thicket of trees near the lake and shifted. As a dog, he had greater latitude to move among the police, scientists, and other authorities without being noticed. He made his way along the edge of the diminishing crowd outside the vanished area, sniffing the air to read the general mood of things.

Terror. Frustration. Grief. Uncertainty. Just like the dark years of the
brujo
assaults. Unfortunately, Diego spotted him and hurried alongside Wayra, talking incessantly.

“Wayra, please don’t interfere in this. Mayor Torres is on his way over here. If he sees you or Illary, you’ll be arrested. You, Ian, and the priest were caught on a security camera, entering the tunnel with packs and duffel bags. You’re suspects in the explosion at the Pincoya, okay? And you can’t get into El Bosque; it’s sealed in some way. We have yet to detect any human life in that area. We’ve been working with physicists from the university who say the electromagnetic elevation in this area is substantial.”

Wayra moved into a cluster of pines and Diego followed him. He appeared to be healed of whatever damage
brujo
possession had inflicted, so why was he talking like this? Since Wayra couldn’t ask him in his canine form, he quickly shifted.

“A suspect? Good. I’ll be glad to tell him why the explosion and fire were necessary. And don’t worry, I won’t mention that you supplied most of the explosives.”

Diego looked so miserable that Wayra felt like hugging him, reassuring him it would all work out, somehow. “Nothing is the way it’s supposed to be, Wayra.”

“And how is that different from what Esperanza has always been?”

“We’re fully aware of what’s happening now. We’re no longer functioning on automatic. Maybe this disappearance is supposed to happen. Maybe it’s part of some greater plan; that’s what I’m hearing from people.”

“Really? Which people? Mayor Torres is in denial, so it can’t be what you’re hearing from him. Maybe you heard from some of the people who will be killed if the city is taken back into the nonphysical? You just told me no one has been able to detect life inside that area.” He paused and leaned toward Diego. “Tess was
swallowed
by that blackness, Diego, and so were several hundred others. Maybe they’re all dead, but if they aren’t, how’re they going to get out? Kali got in. If she did, then so can I.”

Diego’s fingers tightened around Wayra’s wrist. “The parrot is different, Wayra.”

Wayra pulled his arm free. “We need to know what the hell we’re up against. Please keep your team away from me, Diego.” With that, he shifted and raced along the edge of the whiteness.

El Bosque—the Woods—lay just a mile south of the airport and covered about five hundred acres. At one time, it had been completely forested with pines, monkey puzzle trees, and a hybrid species of tree grown in greenhouses outside the city and eventually transplanted in El Bosque. In the last four years, the population west of the city had exploded and this neighborhood had become one of Esperanza’s emerging middle-class areas, a mixture of Ecuadorian professionals, young families, Quechuan elders, and expats.

The neighborhood still maintained vast areas of woods that had been converted into parks and nature preserves. The majority of residents didn’t want concrete sidewalks or paved streets, so many sidewalks and streets were packed earth or cobblestones. Some of those cobblestones, he knew, bore a name and a date, important personages and milestones in Esperanza’s history. Even Dominica had a cobblestone, one she had created for herself, as though she had thought it was Esperanza’s equivalent of a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

The neighborhood supermarket, Mercado del León, stood smack in the middle of El Bosque. It was long and narrow rather than fat and wide, and its merchandise was jammed from the floor to its twelve-foot ceiling. Even though it was a long drive for him and Illary, they sometimes had shopped at the mercado because it carried merchandise from all over South America that was often difficult to find anywhere else in Ecuador.

Merchandise like Segunda Vista. And like the liqueur from the Chilean island of Chiloé that facilitated insight into the myths and legends of wherever you happened to be. A stone from the famous waterfall in Argentina could cure vertigo and insomnia and induce profound dreams if you slept with it under your pillow. Aisle to aisle, shelf to shelf, it was like this, one treasure after another buried within the usual, mundane merchandise. His vivid remembrance of the market, his personal association with it, his connection with Dominica and the city’s history, convinced him he could get through whatever this barrier was and into the disappeared neighborhood.

Arrogant, perhaps, or simply delusional, but he had to try. He refused to surrender to the chasers’ manipulation of events. He had lived too long and fought too hard to free Esperanza from despots.

Wayra ran until he reached the western edge of the whiteness, and darted into a thicket of pines. Some of the trees lay inside the whiteness, so there were no cops back here. They undoubtedly feared that a misstep would suck them into the void, the brilliant whiteness, the disappeared area.

According to Quintana, all the clocks, watches, and digital devices in El Bosque had stopped at 1:00, 11:00, 1:11, or 11:11. If he moved back in time to around eight o’clock last night, perhaps he could make sure Tess left before the blackness began and could warn enough people to get out. Movement in time didn’t come with guarantees, but twice in the recent past his ability to move through time had made a significant difference—when he brought Ian forward from 1968 and when he had disappeared Dominica to the dawn of the universe.

Wayra drew the air deeply into his shifter lungs and
reached
for last night, for the sidewalk outside the market. He felt himself straining, his head pounded, his heart hammered. Nothing happened.

Nothing.

He tried again, his focus greater, his concentration more profound, but the strain drove him to the ground and, for long, painful moments, he simply lay there, panting hard, struggling to understand why it wasn’t working. In all the centuries of his existence, this had never happened before.

Sanchez couldn’t turn off his psychic switch; Wayra couldn’t move back in time.
The rules are in flux,
he’d told Charlie, but the truth was that the rules by which he’d lived for centuries were no longer valid. It meant he would have to uncover the new rules, that their survival depended on it.

He got up, shifted into his human form, and moved quickly along the wall of whiteness, searching for that transparent patch, Charlie’s little window. He nearly missed it; the sun was at a different angle. The patch had also shrunk and wasn’t quite as transparent as before.

He tried to widen it with his fingers, as though it were his iPhone screen, but nothing happened. Wayra pressed his palms against it, as he’d seen Charlie do. It was like glass, cool like glass, but it wasn’t glass. He rapped his knuckles against it. The surface didn’t just resound, it trembled, it sang, like a vibrating drum. He brought out his car keys, flicked open the blade on his pocketknife, and tried to work the tip of the blade through the white surface.

The blade snapped in half.

Wayra leaned forward and breathed on the surface. It fogged over. On impulse, he brought his finger to the surface and drew “11:11.” The window suddenly expanded. He leaned closer, hands cupped at the sides of his head as he peered through it and into the disappeared El Bosque.

And suddenly, his face seemed to be caught in the surface of the window, in the whiteness. It felt less solid, less real, less intractable. The surface sank like foam to accommodate the shape and weight of his face. Wayra leaned his entire body into it, his feet left the ground, and his body surrendered to it completely.

But suddenly he couldn’t see, his face was stuck to the surface like iron to a magnet. He struggled to hurl himself back, his arms flailed, his feet moved, he sucked and sucked for air, but nothing flowed into his lungs.

Wayra screamed silently for Illary, hoping that her shifter senses would hear him, would be able to follow his shriek for help. Then he sank into blackness.

Twelve

High Strangeness

1.

Lauren stood outside La Mística, a small hotel made of wood and stone located about a mile east of El Bosque. Leo and Ian had gone inside to inquire about vacancies and Pedro had ducked into a café to buy some breakfast for the four of them. She was anxious to find some Segunda Vista and get this hallucinogenic show on the road, so she started walking south.

She worried that there wouldn’t be any vacancies at La Mística or anywhere else and they would be forced to retreat to their apartment. With Tess trapped inside that whiteness, she didn’t want to leave the area. It wasn’t as if she could do anything regardless of where she was, but she felt better being in proximity to El Bosque. If they couldn’t find hotel rooms, perhaps Pedro would know of a nearby church where they could stay.

This small commercial district reminded her of Key Largo—close enough to the night life on the keys, but far enough away so you didn’t hear music blasting from bars throughout the night. Small shops and boutiques and B and Bs lined the narrow road, and most of the properties backed up to a wooded area or to a long volcanic lake shaped like a finger. The commercial area acted as a buffer between El Bosque and a blue-collar neighborhood several streets over.

Customers jammed the places she passed, but it looked like panic buying, the kind of thing that happened in the keys when a hurricane threatened. It occurred to her that in addition to finding some Segunda Vista, she needed a change of clothes and some basic toiletries. Leo was accustomed to carrying extra clothes and toiletries in his pack because he was so often detained at the hospital or called in at odd hours. But her pack was pitifully lacking in essentials, and as far as she knew, Ian and the priest didn’t even have toothbrushes with them.