Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (8 page)

“You a shifter?” he called. “Is that what this is about?”

The parrot circled down toward him and landed on his nonexistent shoulder, cooing softly. No shifter, he thought. He realized this bird was Kali, the parrot that had lived so many years in the lobby of the Posada de Esperanza, the inn where Tess and Ian first stayed as transitional souls. Back then, Kali occupied a perch in the large front bay window in the lobby and he always had thought she was a spirit, not an actual living parrot. Now he suspected she was both, one of those birds, like an owl, a raven, or a crow, that traversed dimensions.

As Charlie approached Wayra and Illary’s place in Mariposa, Kali flew off and settled on the fence. Charlie thought himself through the front door and into the spacious living room. Tastefully decorated in browns and soft pastels, the room boasted an amazing collection of original art—Picasso, van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, O’Keeffe, and the Ecuadorian artist Oswaldo Guayasamín.

The living room was deserted. Wayra, Tess, and Ian sat at a table on the screened porch, and before Charlie joined them, he assumed his virtual form as Manuel Ortega, a Quechua—short, slender stature, dark hair and eyes, a
c
olorful blanket wrapped around his shoulders, jeans and a sweater and boots. He slid the door open and walked out onto the deck.

“Sorry to intrude,” he said. “I’m glad all of you are okay. How’s Sanchez doing?”

“The guy with the answers,” Wayra said. “Good to see you, Charlie. And Sanchez is sleeping comfortably.”

“We were just talking about you,” Tess said, and got up and hugged him hello.

In Charlie’s virtual form, physical contact felt real and always made him miss his actual former life as Charlie Livingston.

“You haven’t been around for months,” Ian remarked.

“Months? Really? It’s been that long?” Charlie pulled out a chair and sat down. “I apologize. I guess I’ve been preoccupied. So is it true? Dominica has a brother?”

Wayra nodded and explained the specifics. “I don’t have any idea where he has been all these centuries, but he’s definitely here now.”

“And he had a message for you, Dad” Tess said.

“Yeah, I heard. I talked to Lauren earlier. Wayra, may I see this stone that sent Sanchez into convulsions?”

“Sure.” He slipped it from his jacket pocket, set it in the middle of the table, and got up and turned on a floor lamp. “Illary spotted it near a vanished area at the bottom of the hill where the café sits. It was glowing, so I picked it up.”

Oracle. Sipapu. A Hopi word, meaning “an opening in the earth.” What the hell did that even mean? Charlie wondered, and picked up the stone.

It was smooth and dark, about three inches long and half as wide. As he pressed it between his hands, the smoothness abruptly changed. He could feel grooves, bumps, protrusions, and its texture was like sandpaper. He held it up to the light and was surprised to see that the surface was now inscribed with symbols.

“Do any of you recognize these symbols?” he asked, and held out his hand, the stone in the center of it.

The others leaned forward for a look. “It was smooth before,” Tess exclaimed.

“It’s as if the heat of your hands released those marks,” Ian said.

Wayra nodded. “Interesting. The stone was found by a shape shifter and a chaser’s virtual hands released the stone’s secrets.”

“May I have a look?”

They all glanced back at Sanchez, who stood in the open doorway in a pair of jogging pants and a T-shirt, his feet bare, his dark hair messed up, his jaw unshaven. Illary and Maddie were right behind him and Jessie the retriever hugged his side protectively.

After everyone chorused how good it was to see him up and around, Ian offered Sanchez his chair. But he just laughed. “Hey, people, I’m all right, okay?” He stabbed a thumb at Illary and Maddie. “I had to practically threaten them before they gave me permission to get up.” He gestured at the stone. “Those etchings. That’s what I saw. That’s the oracle part of it.”

“But how do we interpret it?” Wayra asked.

Sanchez picked up the stone. His eyes shut, and Charlie knew he went away, he dreamed, he did whatever psychics did when they were tuned in. When he set the stone down, he said, “Can you touch it again, Charlie?”

“Sure.”

Charlie pressed the stone between his hands for a few moments, felt the texture changing again, shifting, moving like a living thing. When he set the stone on the table once more, symbols were clearly visible on the surface of the stone, six of them.

“Sanchez’s sketches show these symbols,” Maddie said.

Wayra quickly snapped a photo of the stone with his cell.

“So what are they?” Charlie addressed his question to Illary, the oldest among them.

“Well, if the stone came from a sipapu, as Sanchez saw, if it popped out of the opening in the earth, then my sense is that the stone comes from the nonphysical world, the place where Esperanza was born thousands of years ago. I’ve only seen two of these symbols before, in the stone forest where Wayra and I took the other shifters after we rescued Maddie and left Cedar Key.”

With her left hand, she touched one of Sanchez’s drawings, then picked up a pencil with her right hand and used the tip of it to indicate the same symbol on the stone. It looked, Charlie thought, like a square with the upper left-hand corner open, and within the square was a tree.

“This one, with the tree in it, and this one.” She touched another drawing and its corresponding likeness on the stone. “I think the tree is the tree of life, the ceiba tree. The square is symbolic of the foundation of all things. Perhaps the opening of the square represents the sipapu.”

“But what do the symbols mean?” Charlie asked.

Illary shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Charlie was liking this less and less. Chasers—not
brujos
—had always been in charge of the city: its location, its physicality, its present and its future. “But ceiba trees grow in the tropics, so why would such a tree appear in this symbol?”

“When Esperanza was nonphysical,” Wayra said, “ceiba trees grew everywhere. Once the city was brought into the physical world, at this altitude, they couldn’t survive. Except for that old ceiba in Parque del Cielo.”

“And no one can explain why it flourishes,” Charlie remarked.

“What’s the other symbol mean, Illary?” Sanchez asked. “It looks like a circle with Shiva inside of it.”

“That we are many,” Illary said. “And that there is momentum and power in the many. We, the people, must have a say in what happens to this city.”

Kali’s screech announced her arrival at the porch screen. She squawked,
“Hola, amigos. Hola.”

Wayra laughed and opened the door for her and she swept in noisily. Jessie barked and Kali swooped down over the dog’s head, plucked a piece of cheese from the platter on the table, then landed on the back of Charlie’s chair and transferred the cheese from her beak to the claws of her right foot. She nibbled at it for a moment, then flung it toward Jessie, who gobbled it up.

“Kali?” Tess exclaimed. “From the posada? But how? I thought she was a spirit, like that cat, Whiskers, who followed us everywhere.”

“She lives in many worlds,” Wayra remarked. “Right, Charlie?”

“Apparently,” Charlie replied. “She’s there whether I’m in this form or in my natural form as a chaser.”

“Awesome,” Maddie said softly. “I only saw her once, at the posada, before I heard she’d flown off. Can I pet her?”

“Sure,” Charlie said.

“Awesome,” Kali repeated as Maddie moved closer to her. “
Hola,
Maddie.”

Maddie drew her fingers over Kali’s back, and the parrot made soft, trilling sounds of contentment. “You are one cool bird.”

“I really need to shove off, folks,” said Charlie. “Please keep me in the loop about the symbols. And I’ll let you know what I find out from the council.”

Hugs all around, then Tess walked outside with Charlie and Kali. They stood for a moment in the magnificent backyard that overlooked Esperanza, lit up now like some magical city in a fairy tale. “You need to find out what the deal is with Ricardo’s tribe. And can you meet us tomorrow morning out at the café? Diego is going to get us into the area that disappeared.”

“I’ll be there,” Charlie said.

Tess hugged him for the third time that night. “Love you, Dad,” she whispered.

“Do you realize that’s the first time you’ve called me Dad in, oh, more than four years?” He leaned back from her. “Why’s that?”

“I guess I’ve forgiven you.”

“For what?”

“Dying.”

“Love you, Slim,” he said, his voice soft and choked, then he shed his virtual form and he and Kali moved rapidly back across the city.

2.

Once Charlie reached old town Esperanza, he faded into view as Manuel Ortega again. Kali was still with him. “Okay, I get it. You’re really a messenger between the living and the dead, right? Well, I don’t have any message yet. But stick around, Kali. Come to the meeting with me.”

As she touched down on his shoulder, Charlie turned into an alley, passed a bodega, a takeout place, a hole-in-the-wall used bookstore. Then he ducked into La Última, a café created from collective chaser thought. It boasted the best coffee in Ecuador, the fastest Internet connection in South America, and had a spread of delectable goodies in the display case.

Charlie headed toward the counter, Kali riding on his shoulder, and ordered a
cortadito
—espresso with milk; a slice of spinach quiche; and a cheese pastry topped with coconut. He had to admit that one of the most pleasant aspects of the afterlife was that you could eat what you wanted. No worry about cholesterol, fats, high blood pressure, diabetes, or any of the rest of it.

He made his way to the reserved table next to the window, Kali now pecking at the pastry. A parrot with a sweet tooth. “Hey, I can get you one of your own, you know.”

She made that sound again, like a laugh. Charlie broke off a piece of the pastry and handed it to her. She wrapped the claws of her right foot around it and nibbled away.

Outside the window, it was twilight. Long, thin shadows fell across the alley and sidewalk and everything had a beautiful patina to it. But the twilight, like everything else around him, was an illusion. He knew it had been around three
A.M.
mortal time when he’d left Wayra’s place. It was often twilight when the council met.

As usual, he was early. When he was alive, he used to be early in court, too. Some habits stayed with you life to life. He slipped out his iPad, checked his e-mail to see if any of the chasers had dropped him a note about being late. The iPad, like everything else in his world, was a mental construct, one more illusion, and hadn’t really come into being for him until shortly before Steve Jobs’s death, when Maddie had convinced him to conjure one of them.

After Jobs’s death, Maddie wanted to know if Jobs was among the chasers and Charlie had actually checked. This was the genius, after all, whose last mortal words were, “Oh wow, oh wow.” He reported back that, yes, Jobs was a chaser, working in a province in China and improving the lot of the workers who assembled the Apple products. Charlie suspected that Jobs might be reborn among those very workers at some point quite soon and no telling what might develop from that.

Victor had sent him an e-mail twelve minutes ago.
On the way.

Sounded good, Charlie thought. But Victor moved according to his own time, at his own pace, and
on the way
could mean that he would might show up four hours, days, or months from now. Charlie wasn’t supposed to give a shit about time in his chaser form. It was an artificial construct, after all, something the living used to order their lives. But more and more frequently, he found that time was all he could think about.

How much time had elapsed, for instance, between the last physical life of the older council members and now? Centuries? Millennia? For the really ancient chasers, it was millennia. He was the oddball on the council, with loved ones still in the physical world. And because of his intimate connections to the living, to this century, he was able to teach other council members about technology: the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, iTunes, iPhone, the iPad, all of Apple’s nifty inventions.

Granted, it was rare that he or any of the chasers could impact the physical world in terms of the actual Internet. Now and then, though, their collective desire enabled them to add something to their
physical, three-dimensional
blog and Web site. Most of the time, chasers communicated through their mental constructs—not unlike the
brujo
net through which Dominica and her tribe used to communicate. Another disturbing similarity.

Some of the other chasers trickled in. Karina saw him, waved, and made her way over to his table, a cup of coffee in hand. “Hey, Charlie, may I join you and your parrot?”

He always felt sort of tongue-tied around her. She was the loveliest female council member—alabaster skin that invited a caress, shockingly blue eyes, a thick, dark braid that curved like a question mark over her right shoulder.

“I’d be delighted,” he said, and quickly got up and pulled a chair out for her.

“
Hola,
Karina,” Kali said, fluttering her wings and tightening her grip on Charlie’s shoulder.

Karina laughed. “Kali. I thought you looked familiar. I haven’t seen her for a while.”

“She just started following me around.”

“Any idea what this meeting is about, Charlie?”

“Maybe about what happened at the Taquina. I was hoping you might know.”

She shook her head. “I’m out of the loop lately. I’ve been over in Africa, helping some of these kids with AIDS pass over.”

“Any sign of
brujos
over there?”

“In Africa? Ha.
Brujos
have no interest in seizing people who are starving and sick. Seizures in other countries are increasing, though.” She stabbed her thumb toward the door. “Here comes Victor.”

Charlie glanced around. Victor, nearly bald and wearing a silly white toga, looked like a throwback to ancient Rome. He quickly thought away the toga and replaced it with modern attire—khaki pants, a black shirt, a jacket. He ordered his usual whipped-cream latte sprinkled with cinnamon, with a huge sugar stick inside of it, and headed over to the table.