Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (6 page)

His voice: “But you’re so incredibly lovely.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and made a face at the camera. “
Eres un bobo con
 … What is
that
?” She stabbed a finger at something over Raúl’s shoulder.

The image danced and jumped as Raúl got to his feet and leaned over the balcony railing, his voice audible in the background. “
Dios mío,
look at that … that blackness.”

The girlfriend hissed, “
Carajo, son los brujos
. Has to be … C’mon, Raúl, we should leave.”

“Wait, wait. Look at it. Look at how fast it’s moving, how…”

The blackness sped toward them, spreading across the hillside like the shadow of some mammoth aircraft, closer and closer to the deck. Lauren heard panicked shouts and screams, the crash of chairs, the stampede of feet as people around Raúl fled the deck.

Raúl panned the deck once, a blurred image that revealed what looked like a man caught in the blackness, his legs mired in it, his arms and upper torso squirming, clinging to the deck as he shrieked. Several men tried to pull him free and Lauren paused the image there, certain one of the men was Ian.

“That man.” Lauren tapped the screen. “Do you know who he is?”

Raúl shook his head, took the camera and advanced the video slowly forward until she saw the man’s face.

It was Ian.

And if Ian had been there, Tess had, too.

Anxiety clawed across the pit of Lauren’s stomach. She quickly excused herself, hastened into the hall, and up the back stairs to the employee lounge. Privacy. She punched out Tess’s number and her daughter finally answered, her voice hushed, tight. “We’re okay, Mom.”

No words were sweeter to a mother’s ears. “Where are you?”

“At Wayra’s place. Maddie and Sanchez are here, too. But Sanchez … something happened to him.”

The story tumbled out and as soon as Lauren heard the word
convulsions,
every internal alarm in her body went off. “Is he conscious now?”

“He came to briefly, then fell asleep. Maddie and Illary are with him.”

“Leo and I will get out there as soon as we can. He should be checked out, Tess.”

“Mom, this blackness may be spreading, we’re not sure. But even without that, it’s too easy to get lost out here at night.”

Spreading? After what she’d heard and seen on the video, just the possibility disturbed her. “How long did his seizure last?”

“Just a few minutes.”

“Was he confused when he came to?”

“Maddie said he talked to her about what had happened, so no, I don’t think he was confused.”

“Did he have trouble breathing?”

“Illary reported that his breathing was normal. She’s got quite a bit of medical experience, Mom. She knows what to look for.”

Maybe, maybe not. Lauren hadn’t experienced Illary’s medical knowledge firsthand and didn’t have any idea what this knowledge might be. Herbs? Vitamins? Some sort of shifter concoction that might send Sanchez into arrhythmia? “We’ll be out there first thing in the morning to see how he is. But call me if his condition changes, if he has any more seizures.”

“I will. I promise.”

“Mariposa has an excellent hospital where you can take him if—”

“I know. Don’t worry.”

“And Tess … what the hell was this stone that Wayra handed Sanchez?”

“Wayra found it where this blackness originated.”

Tess explained Sanchez’s description when he was holding the stone. The words that struck Lauren as most peculiar were
sipapu
and
oracle.

Had this blackness touched the stone? Imbued it with something? “Did Wayra react to the stone when he took it out of his pocket?”

“No. I don’t think it was the act of holding it that sent Sanchez into convulsions. It was his
reading
of it that affected him.”

Lauren didn’t have a clue how Sanchez did what he did. In his consulting business, Sanchez, together with Delaney, one of the men Wayra had turned during Maddie’s rescue, used their remote-viewing experience to solve crimes, find missing people, predict the stock market, diagnose illness. It didn’t matter that she didn’t understand how he did this; she had experienced the results.

She and Leo had invested money in a stock that Sanchez had recommended, and within four days, they had walked away with half a million dollars. They had given a lot of it to various charities, bought a condo in the oldest section of town, and helped out Tess and Maddie. When a patient of Leo’s had had multiple miscarriages, he had consulted Sanchez, who recommended a particular diet and nutritional program that eventually enabled the woman to carry a baby to term. So yes, she was a believer in Sanchez’s talent.

“Honey, I saw video of this blackness. It looked like an oil spill.” Lauren told her about the reporter’s video.

“Would the reporter share his video with the
Expat
? We need to alert people to this, what it looks like, what it does. We didn’t get any pictures or videos. We’d just gone there for dinner.”

“I’ll ask. Tess, is it
brujos
?”

“I don’t know. If you see Dad, ask him, okay?”

“Hey, he drops by to see you more often than he does me.”

“Not recently,” Tess said, and told Lauren the rest of it. Ricardo. A message for Charlie. “Tell Dad all that.”

“I will.” The damn ghost tried to choke her daughter? “I definitely will. I’ll call you later.”

Everything her daughter had just said was precisely why people in Esperanza often ended up with partners who were also from the city. You simply couldn’t explain any of this to an outsider, couldn’t explain that Esperanza was somehow sentient, that she retained a residual power from when she had been nonphysical that conferred health, longevity, youth. You couldn’t explain that to someone who hadn’t experienced it. It was why all of them, locals and expats alike, stayed.

Lauren could just imagine trying to explain any of this on an Internet dating site, on Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Wordpress. Put the truth out there and up there and you would be forced to start your own social network just to make a few friends.

Lauren struggled to understand the implications.
If
the
brujos
were back,
if
the assaults began again, would she stay here? Esperanza was her home now, she had burned all her bridges to the U.S. But she knew her decision would depend on what her family did.

Tess and Ian, she suspected, wouldn’t leave. They had a life here, the newspaper, and Ian would be afraid that if he left, the heart condition that had killed him would return. She didn’t know for sure whether Maddie and Sanchez and his dad would leave. Probably not. They were happy in Esperanza, and Maddie and Sanchez were getting married next month. Sanchez’s father wouldn’t return to South Florida without them and, besides, his health problems had cleared up within a month of his arrival in Esperanza.

Then there was Leo. He had arrived in Esperanza from Argentina twenty-two years ago on the heels of an ugly divorce, a terrible custody battle that he’d lost, and a diagnosis of leukemia that had given him several months to live. Within six weeks of his arrival, his leukemia had gone into remission and had never returned.

Leo was so certain the city had cured him, that he hadn’t left the region since. He had never returned to his native Argentina, but had gotten his Ecuadorian medical license and gone to work at the hospital as the resident OB. His children, now adults, often visited him here.

So if they stayed, she would stay.

Lauren stepped out onto the balcony, the door whispered shut behind her, and she breathed in the chilly night air. Stars littered the black dome of the sky, many of them so bright that if she raised her arms, she might be able to scoop them out of the heavens. Among the Quechua, there was a saying that the altitude of Esperanza made it easier for its people to mingle with the gods.

She hadn’t seen any gods yet, but she had seen and conversed with her dead husband from time to time, had had brunch with shape shifters, and felt and looked better and younger than she had in years.

Even though Charlie’s proximity comforted her, she often wondered if he watched her and Leo, shadowed them without her knowledge, kept tabs on them, observed them as they made love in front of that wonderful fireplace in their condo. Charlie, voyeur. Yes, she could see him doing that.

After he had passed away, she’d spent a lot of years living by herself in the home they’d bought in Key Largo. They hadn’t lived there long when Charlie had died, not even six months, and that had made her transition easier. There was less of him in that house, less energy, fewer reminders. Yet, every time she’d climbed into her king-sized bed, the bed she had shared with Charlie, he had been there, in her head, holding her, making love to her, the two of them laughing.

When she’d started dating an ER doc during her last year in Key Largo, when he’d occupied that king-sized bed, her memories of Charlie and the bed had begun to fade. That bed, she thought, had burned with the rest of the house when Dominica had seized Tess’s former lover and partner in the bureau, and forced him to torch the place.

Just as well, she thought. Once the house was gone, she had known her time in Key Largo was done. Her travels with the Merry Pranksters in the sixties had taught her the importance of signs, and that fire had been a biggie. She had fled Key Largo with Tess and Maddie and come here.

Esperanza was close enough to the equator so that the seasons here didn’t change much. But because it sat on a plateau at thirteen thousand feet, the air turned cold as soon as the sun set. She smelled smoke from fireplaces all over the city. In the light of the moon, she could see tufts of smoke that burst erratically from the top of the Taquina volcano. In the past several months, she had noticed that the volcano emitted smoke more frequently. Could that somehow be connected to the creeping blackness?

In her four and a half years in this city, Lauren had seen her share of weirdness, the kind of stuff that challenged anyone’s worldview. She could accept avaricious ghosts, light chasers, shape shifters. She could accept that in Esperanza, the veil between the living and the dead was almost nonexistent. She could
not
accept a creeping blackness of unknown origin that devoured solid objects and people, that approached, as it did in the video, like some conscious extension of the darkness itself. She could not accept that a
brujo
had tried to choke her daughter.

“Hey, Prankster? You hungry?”

Leo slipped out onto the balcony with her, his voice hoarse with fatigue. He had stripped off his surgery greens and stood there in jeans and a T-shirt with the symbol for pi on it. Lauren touched her finger to the symbol. “Dr. Ordeño. Why that? Why pi?”

“Because it looks like a door. Because it’s infinite.” He touched her chin, lifting it, and kissed her.

He was only a bit taller than Lauren, maybe five ten, and didn’t really need to lift her chin to kiss her. But she liked it, the gentle sensation of his fingertips at her chin, the cool touch of his mouth, liked that he courted her, counted her in, was there for her—and yet gave her the space she needed.

“Are we done here?” she asked.

“Relieved by backup staff.” He fingered the rosary around her neck. “What’s with this?”

She told him what Elsa had said about Raúl’s video. He nodded. “Everyone in ER has now seen the video.”

“What do you think about it?”

Leo drew his fingers through his white hair and stood back against the wall. “It’s spooky and alarming.”

“I need to ask Raúl if he would send the video to—”

“I asked, he said of course, and has already e-mailed it to Ian.”

Leo, her personal genie. This tall, beautiful man anticipated her needs and desires, sought to make them happen, and she knew he would move mountains for her. She gave him the condensed version of her conversation with Tess and he frowned and asked her a bunch of questions about Sanchez, most of which she had asked Tess.

“Do you think we should drive out there?” she asked.

“It sounds like he’s fine for the night. We can drop by in the morning. If necessary, they can take him to the hospital in Mariposa.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told Tess.”

“Right now, I think dinner is a priority. It’s just past eleven.”

Eleven?
No wonder she was starving. “I need to change. Meet you downstairs in ten minutes?”

“Perfect.”

Minutes later, Lauren hurried into the women’s locker room in the hospital basement, stripped off her hospital clothes, wrapped a towel around her short salt-and-pepper hair, and took a quick shower. Then she put on clean jeans, a red print shirt, and traded her surgery shoes—Adidas—for comfortable Aerosole flats, slipped on a denim jacket, and slung her purse over her shoulder. Shit, she had it down to a science.

As she moved through the nearly empty basement corridor, Charlie materialized beside her. “Uh, can we slow the pace a little, Lore?”

The first time her dead husband had appeared to her, shock had rendered her mute. She couldn’t really say she was accustomed to it yet, but at least she didn’t freak out now when it happened. As usual, Charlie wore his customary white trousers, shirt, hat, and shoes, had a cigar tucked behind his right ear, and flicked his silver Zippo lighter constantly, nervously, just as he had when he was alive.

Lauren stopped. “I have a message for you. A ghost named Ricardo tried to choke Tess. He claims he’s Dominica’s brother and he said to please tell you that everyone wants the same thing, to live peacefully in Esperanza. If the chaser council and the people of Esperanza can’t accept that, then he’ll unleash his tribe of three million
brujos
—”

“Jesus,” Charlie breathed. “Nice to see you, too, Lore. How about starting at the beginning?”

“The creeping black crud at the Café Taquina? Tess and Ian were there. But before that happened, a
brujo
materialized in her car.”

Lauren told him the rest of it and, to Charlie’s credit, he didn’t interrupt.