Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (24 page)

Her phone jingled, a text from Maddie:
Did you find any yet?

Looking right now.

She remembered seeing Maddie’s Segunda Vista when she first started growing the beautiful, feathery weeds in her greenhouse. The red buds, Lauren recalled, triggered precognitive visions, the yellow buds facilitated telepathy, the blue variety enabled clairvoyance. She couldn’t remember what the other colors did, but when the buds were mixed together with the leaves, stems, and roots, you experienced a shamanic journey regardless of whether this was your intention.

Check drugstores.

Am doing. Where’re u?

Nearly at Illary’s. Sanchez is a wreck.

Stay safe.

Odd and worrisome about Sanchez, she thought. He was one of the most focused young men she’d ever met, and usually controlled his extraordinary talent. Now, that talent apparently controlled
him
. Why?

Three blocks south, Lauren went into a small, crowded everything shop. She selected a couple of T-shirts, a pair of jeans, underwear, razor, several toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste, mascara, lipstick, bottled water, peanuts and other snacks. She scoured the shelves for Second Sight, but didn’t find anything. She glanced around for someone to ask, but the only two clerks were at registers and the lines in front of both were long. Resigned to a lengthy wait, Lauren got in line.

Mostly women filled the shop, all of them visibly upset. From what Lauren could understand of their rapid-fire Spanish, some of them were headed out of the city—to Quito, Guayaquil, Punta, wherever they could get to first. Others refused to leave—either because their loved ones were trapped in El Bosque or because they didn’t believe it was the work of
brujos,
and, therefore, the situation was temporary and order would be restored.

The young, blond woman in front of her, a European, Lauren guessed, gestured at the items in Lauren’s basket. “Did your house vanish in there?”

“No. My daughter did.”

Her eyes widened with horror. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”

The emotions Lauren had struggled to contain broke loose, tears flooded her eyes. “I’ll … get to her.” She swallowed hard before she continued. “How many people are trapped in there? Have you heard?”

“At least several hundred. Apparently a lot of people left town when the weirdness went down at the Café Taquina, otherwise the number would’ve been much higher. An information center has been set up on the next block. They can tell you what’s going on.”

“That’s good to know, thanks. Did you lose someone in there?”

“I nearly did.” She combed her long fingers back through her honey-colored hair. “My boyfriend used to work at the Mercado del León. He quit the day before yesterday, thank God. We’ve had it with this city. We’re leaving. Things have just gotten too weird and dangerous. I’m getting some stuff for the trip outta here.” She picked up one of a dozen blue boxes in her basket. “I’m stocking up on these. The mercado used to stock it and now this shop is the only place around here that sells it.”

The label read
SEGUNDA VISTA.

Wayra would call this synchronicity, Lauren thought. Ken Kesey used to call it Acid Speaking. For her, it was a
holy shit
moment, right time, right place, right search, in the groove.

“Do you know what it is?” the woman asked.

Lauren feigned ignorance. The words translated as Second Sight, so she said: “An eye solution?”

The young woman laughed. “Not exactly. It’s an extract from a hallucinogenic weed grown here in Esperanza. It enables clairvoyance, telepathy, different kinds of abilities. You don’t get sick from it.”

Forty years ago, hallucinogens had been as familiar to Lauren as her own name. It was the territory she had traveled with Kesey, Garcia, McKenna. Her life was coming full circle. “Psychic abilities, in other words.”

“Yup. Three days before that weirdness at the Café Taquina my boyfriend and I took some and … and both of us had the same vision. We
saw
the blackness covering that hillside behind the café and seeping from the walls of the market. We didn’t have any idea what it meant. But when it actually happened at the café … we freaked out. We realized it was a vision of the future and that if parts of the café had vanished, then the market might, too. So he quit his job and that saved his life and now we’re not sticking around. You want to find your daughter? Maybe even find a way into that whiteness? This might help you do it. I took the last of it.” She dropped three boxes of Segunda Vista into Lauren’s cart. “Take these.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“A pinch is all you need. Let it melt under your tongue. It takes four or five minutes to come on and lasts a couple of hours.”

“How do these shops get away with selling this?”

“It’s sold as a remedy for altitude sickness.”

“Any side effects I should know about?”

“Yeah, everything I just mentioned.” She flashed a quick smile that dimpled the corners of her mouth. “But nothing dire that I know of.” She reached the register and, before she set her stuff on the counter, added, “I hope you find her.”

Lauren anxiously awaited her turn, marveling at her good fortune. When she reached the register, she set her basket on the counter and the clerk began ringing up her purchases. Lauren slid her debit card through the slot of the machine and was ridiculously grateful when it worked, that whatever was going on here hadn’t destroyed the banking system, too.

Once she was outside, she opened one of the boxes and removed a film canister identical to those California now used to dispense legal pot. She popped off the lid, scooped some of the rainbow-hued flakes out with her fingernail, onto her palm. In the sunlight, they looked luminous, alive, lit from within.

She returned the flakes to the canister, capped it, and hurried on up the street. Leo, Ian, and Pedro were standing outside the Mística. “Any rooms?” she asked.

“We’ve practically got the place to ourselves,” Leo replied. “Looks like a lot of people around here bailed.”

Lauren held up one of the blue boxes. “We’re in luck.”

“You and Ian have the closest emotional ties to Tess,” Leo said to her. “You two should be the ones to take this stuff and Pedro and I can be the monitors. How’s that sound?”

“That’s fine.” She just wanted to get moving with this.

“Ian?” Leo asked.

“Let’s do it.”

The small, cozy hotel lobby featured a comfortable area with chairs and a roaring fireplace. A man and a woman were the only people sitting in there, both of them typing away on laptops. Colorful indigenous throw rugs dotted the stone floor, local art hung on the walls. The dining room off to Lauren’s right also had a fireplace, and employees were clearing away the remnants of breakfast. She was tempted to make a quick detour for a bite to eat, then remembered that Pedro was carrying a bag of breakfast goodies. Besides, she didn’t want to waste time in a dining room. She wasn’t even sure she should waste time eating. Tess had been inside that whiteness since last night.

They took the elevator to the third floor and when Leo unlocked the door to room 11, Lauren was pleasantly surprised. The spacious room boasted a small fridge, thick quilts on the king-sized bed, and a wide balcony that offered a view of the blinding whiteness. Lauren tossed her purse and purchases on the bed and made a beeline toward the balcony doors, opened them, and stepped outside.

From here, a mile east of El Bosque, the whiteness looked like a vast, shimmering sheet of ice, a polar ice cap broken up here and there by trees and plants, parts of houses and buildings and cars, sidewalks and roads that hadn’t been affected. The extent of the whiteness shocked her. The erratic shape was horrifyingly huge, as flat as the world Columbus had envisioned, and she suddenly comprehended what immensely powerful forces they were up against. Panic gripped her, she clutched her arms to her chest, and struggled against a rising despair that a few flakes of hallucinogenic weed would make any difference at all in her ability to find her daughter.

Leo came up beside her, slipped his arm around her shoulder. “Whoever is responsible for this, chaser or
brujo
or some other intelligence, doesn’t understand that love is a force of nature.”

“I sometimes think, Leo, that love doesn’t have shit to do with any of it. My inner cynic laughs, okay? The odds against success seem … staggeringly high.”

“We’ve fought great odds before, Lauren,” Ian said as he and Pedro joined them. “All of us have. And we’re still here.”

“We’ll figure this out,” the priest said. “You should eat something first. It helps the substance move more quickly into your bloodstream.”

They returned to the room, where Pedro had laid out paper plates of warm croissants with melted cheese and veggies inside, and had lined up tiny cups into which he now poured Ecuadorian espresso. “Lauren, where’s the canister?”

She fished it out of her purse, passed it to Pedro, and he sprinkled flakes on two of the croissants. He passed these to her and Ian. “You each should take a pinch and put it under your tongue, too. It will hasten the effects.”

Lauren suspected that Pedro had presided at some of these Quero spiritual rituals that had involved Segunda Vista, and realized she had never asked him about his beliefs concerning
brujos,
chasers, Esperanza. She sipped from her tiny cup of wickedly powerful coffee, then said, “Pedro, I need to know something. What are the chasers? Are they angels? Delusional souls? Saints? The other face of a
brujo
? The right hand of God? What?”

“Are you asking me as a priest?”

“I’m just asking because you’ve been involved in this battle for most of your life. I’m asking because I need answers.”

He bit into his croissant, dabbed at his mouth with a napkin, sipped from his coffee. Everything about him just then was slow, measured, deliberate. His eyes looked as dark as walnuts. “I believe the chasers, for the most part, are despots in that they think it’s their job to determine Esperanza’s fate. They’re saints in that they have worked tirelessly against the
brujos.
They were once alive, so they’re flawed the way all humans are. They aren’t God’s right hand. As far as the church is concerned, no chaser has ever met with or consulted with God, any God. In all fairness, though, I don’t think any chaser has ever claimed to have met God.”

“They seem to be able to tap the same power that
brujos
do,” Leo remarked, and related what had happened with the supernatural crows that had rescued him and Lauren from Ricardo and Naomi. “And Charlie himself appeared as a tremendous white crow. He picked me up from the road after Ricardo had seized me and … and I guess it was such a shock to Ricardo that he fled my body.”

Interesting, Lauren thought. Leo hadn’t told her that he’d known the white crow was Charlie. She had suspected as much, but hadn’t known for sure until just now.

“Charlie, Karina, Victor, and a couple of others are different from the rest of the council members,” Pedro said. “They’ve maintained a moral compass.”

Lauren couldn’t argue with what the priest said about Charlie’s moral compass. When he was alive, that compass had directed everything he had done, every case he had taken, every legal argument he had made. And it had done the same in his personal life. Yes, he had been manipulative since he had died, but manipulative in the way of a trickster, a Loki disguised as some afterlife version of Jimmy Buffett.

She wanted to ask Pedro about this chaser woman Charlie had been with, Karina, but felt it might be a bit tacky, all things considered. She hadn’t felt jealous when Karina had shown up with Charlie; after all, Charlie had been dead for years. But she had been intensely curious—and delighted that Charlie had met someone for whom he obviously had great affection.

Yet, in the four and a half years Lauren had lived in Esperanza, with Charlie appearing to her from time to time, he’d never mentioned anything about a chaser woman. Did you date when you were dead? Did you have sex? Fall in love? She’d thought about these questions before, but never had they felt more pertinent or important, more pressing. She felt fairly sure that a Catholic priest was not the person who could answer her questions about love, sex, and rock and roll in the afterlife.

“As a human being,” Pedro continued, “I believe that the chasers represent an archetype that is mostly good and the
brujos
represent an archetype that is mostly evil. But I also know that nothing in life is ever that simple.”

Lauren polished off her croissant and knocked back the last sip of her coffee. “As the widow of a man who became a member of the chaser council and the mother of one of the first transitionals, I’m beginning to believe that chasers and
brujos
are just different faces of the same energy, Pedro. Contrasts. Yin, yang. Black, white. Male, female. Child, adult. Saint, demon. The living, the dead. The dark, the light. Knowledge, ignorance. But, like you, I don’t believe that anything is so simplistic, so I’m left with a lot of questions.”

“And that, my lovely friend, is why the people of Esperanza indulge in Segunda Vista,” Pedro said. “They need to know. The weeds strip away the untruths, and leave you with the raw material. That’s what they’ve done for centuries.”

While Leo and Pedro tested the recorders on their phones and found paper and pens, Lauren sat down on the floor, her spine against the foot of the bed. Kesey had had rituals, stuff to do before you imbibed anything. Garcia never gave a shit, just bring it on. McKenna had been more deliberate, yet also more explorative, daring. No wonder he’d been the one who had talked to mushrooms and discovered an entire universe of wisdom within plant life.

Her rituals were simple: kick off shoes, settle in. Ian sat on the floor to her right, his back against a chair, his shoes off, toes wiggling around inside his dark socks. Simple on rituals, too, she thought, and liked him all the better for it.

“Quechuan shamans say that it helps if you speak to the spirit of Segunda Vista,” Pedro said. “Explain your purpose.”