Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (5 page)

“Regardless of who or what is behind it, is it going to happen again?” Maddie asked.

“Probably.” Illary’s fingers steepled together. “Something has been set in motion.”

Wayra brought the stone out of his pocket, set it on the table. “Nick, can you RV this?”

Sanchez stared at it, his handsome Latino face tight, closed. “No. I don’t work like that, Wayra. I’m not a psychometrist.”

“You’re able to read people when you touch them. You’re able to dowse maps. This is no different.”

“But it
is
different, Wayra,” said Maddie. “Sanchez works best with random numbers that Delaney or I give him, which represent a target. Sanchez never knows what the target is beforehand.”

It made sense, Wayra thought. Numbers vibrated at certain frequencies, which acted as a beacon for someone with Sanchez’s psychic ability.

“Okay. I’ll assign a number to the place where we found it.” Wayra vividly imagined the target—the genesis of the blanket of shadows, its source, who or what had created it. And for that, there was only one set of numbers. “Eleven-eleven, Nick.” A portal to higher consciousness.

“I’ll need paper and a pencil to sketch with,” Sanchez said.

“I’ve got a sketchpad in the kitchen,” Illary said.

Sanchez’s head bobbed. “Perfect.”

Illary hurried inside and returned moments later with a sketchpad and several pencils, which she set on the table in front of him. He sat back, shut his eyes, and began alternate-nostril breathing, a meditation breathing exercise that brought both hemispheres of the brain into synch. Sanchez’s relaxation became so absolute he looked as if he had melted into the chair, becoming one with it.

Maddie moved the paper and one of the pencils to the edge of the table in front of him. After a few moments, he began sketching quickly, madly. He didn’t speak, didn’t utter a sound, but suddenly pushed his sketches to the side. His eyes snapped open, and he reached for the stone.

He pressed it between his palms and held his hands close to his chest.

“Shit,” he breathed. “This is a kind of oracle, the stone of possibilities. I see … several paths, each one equally probable. There’s wind … sand, a kind of tornado that … It’s a sipapu.”

Sanchez’s shoulders jerked, he started shaking, and Jessie leaped up, barking, howling, dancing around Sanchez’s chair. At first, Wayra thought he’d been seized. But then Sanchez snapped back against his chair, spit ran from the corners of his mouth, his lids fluttered open, and his eyeballs rolled back in their sockets. Wayra understood that what was happening to him had nothing to do with
brujos
and everything to do with the stone.

Maddie grabbed Sanchez by the shoulders and shook him hard. “Sanchez, snap out of it. C’mon, you’re here now.”

He started convulsing, his entire body shaking violently, only the whites of his eyes showing. Maddie shrieked,
“It’s killing him, the stone is killing him!”

She frantically tried to pry the stone from his grasp, but his fingers had closed over it so tightly that when Wayra grabbed his hand, Sanchez’s fingers and knuckles turned bone white. Wayra sank his thumbs into the underside of his wrist, forcing his fingers to open. The stone fell to the floor.

Sanchez’s arms dropped over the sides of the chair, his head flopped to one side, his body went still.

Three

Lauren

1.

Lauren Livingston wandered through the OB nursery on the third floor of the Esperanza Hospital, pleased that she had been present for six of the twelve births today. Leo had delivered them, she had assisted, and with every new wail, every small, perfect face, she recalled her own joy when each of her daughters had been born.

Even though the delivery of her first daughter had been difficult and the labor long, she clearly remembered the moment when her OB had placed Ria on her stomach. The utter warmth and dampness and weight of her had seemed miraculous. Charlie, who had remained with her during the labor, proudly announced that Ria Livingston had ten perfect fingers and ten perfect toes and her mother’s mouth and her father’s eyes.

Tess’s birth several years later had been a breeze in comparison. Lauren had gone into labor a month early, in a grocery store, someone had called 911, and she’d delivered her youngest daughter in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, at precisely 5:55
P.M.

They were living in Miami then, where Charlie was a partner in a large law firm, working sixteen-hour days as a defense attorney. By the time he rushed into the maternity ward, mom and daughter were resting comfortably. He lamented the fact that he hadn’t been present, but nonetheless went through his spiel about ten perfect fingers and toes and how Tess had her mother’s eyes and her father’s mouth.

Lauren’s relationship with Ria had never been good. They had been estranged for years as Ria struggled with substance abuse and went through several marriages and divorces until religion became her addiction. Lauren had taken in Maddie, Ria’s oldest daughter, when Maddie was eighteen, a decade after Charlie’s death, and their relationship had always been tight. Lauren often wondered if the difficulty of her labor with Ria had portended their strained relationship.

Tess, born early and fast, had been the light of Lauren’s life since she rushed into the world. Eager and impatient to be born, she had followed her own agenda from day one. Charlie wanted her to go to law school, Lauren hoped she would become a doctor. Instead, she had graduated from college with honors and joined the FBI. Easy birth, easy daughter. Maybe that explanation was too facile, but there you had it.

Lauren stopped next to a double bassinet that held identical twin girls, Quechuas, robust beauties at just under eight pounds. The mother had had a C-section and they were due for feedings shortly. As Lauren adjusted the wool cap on twin A, the PA speaker in the hall crackled with the voice of the woman who headed the hospital nursing staff. Her message was in Spanish, Quechua, then English. “All available personnel please report immediately to ER.”

In a city where people enjoyed vigorous health and unprecedented longevity, a summons for all personnel to the emergency room generally meant a car wreck, fire, or domestic fight that had turned violent. She was the only nurse on duty in the nursery and debated whether she should head down to ER. Her cell suddenly jingled, a text message from Leo:
That means you, lovely prankster. EMTs say something weird happened at Café Taquina. We’ve got broken bones, a woman who went into early labor, trample victims.

On my way,
she texted back.

Trample victims meant ruptured organs, multiple bone fractures, the kinds of injuries that would require a team of trauma surgeons. Leo was undoubtedly summoning every physician in the city, but Lauren stopped by the nursing station to find out what Elsa, the OB nurse, knew about the specifics.

Elsa was on the phone, scribbling madly on a legal pad. She glanced at Lauren and mouthed,
Hold on, just hold on.
Then she rushed on in Quechua and Spanish, her voice growing more anxious by the second.

Lauren had never seen Elsa so rattled. The woman had lived through the dark years of
brujo
attacks, lost loved ones to them, and didn’t spook easily. Lauren guessed she was embroiled in personal bad news, and rapped her knuckles against the counter. “I’ll be in ER. The twins are due for feedings now.”

Lauren hurried off toward the elevator but before she reached it Elsa shouted,
“Espérame.”

Lauren turned and Elsa hurried over, one hand clutched dramatically to her chest. “Loreen.”

Low-reen.
She trilled the
r,
like some sixties stoner whose tongue didn’t work right. Elsa looked about fifty, but Lauren’s rule of thumb was to add at least twenty years to a local’s apparent age. That meant Elsa was probably seventy, not much older than Lauren herself.

“Bad news, Low-reen. That was my husband, he works with the chief of police. Something
muy mal
happened at Café Taquina. They’re saying the
brujos
are back, that the creeping blackness that killed and injured dozens is the work of
brujos.
”

“Slow down, Elsa. What creeping blackness?”

“I don’t know, like … a thick black tide, that’s how my husband described it.” From the pocket of her uniform, she brought out a rosary and slipped it around Lauren’s neck. “You wear this in ER. It will protect you as the patients from the café arrive. It carries a special blessing from the pope.”

The
pope
? Had
he
ever been to Esperanza, where the battle between good and evil had gone on for millennia? Did the pope know about chasers? Was he aware of the
brujo
tribe Dominica had led here? Did the pope know about
brujos,
about any of this? And even if he did, would it matter?

Lauren thanked Elsa for the rosary and touched the stones as she rushed to the elevator.
Rosary blessed by the pope:
did that fall into the same category in this culture as the Merry Pranksters and Owsley acid had in the sixties culture in the U.S.? Probably not. But it suddenly felt like one and the same thing, as if she were twenty again, on break from college and on the road with Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia and, later, with Terence McKenna, bouncing along in the Merry Pranksters bus, certain she was invincible as she tripped on acid that had melted on her tongue like a communion wafer.

It meant that whatever had happened at the Café Taquina was beyond weird, beyond
brujos
and chasers, something altogether different.

When she entered the ER, the mayhem instantly sucked her in. The place was mobbed. Every examining room was taken, patients on gurneys and in wheelchairs waited in hallways, children cried, a woman screamed, nurses, physician assistants, doctors, anesthesiologists, and aides hustled from one room and patient to another.

Lauren made her way toward the screaming woman in examining room 11. According to the patient info on Lauren’s iPad, the woman’s name was Amy Fuentes, twenty-four, and she had been dilated four centimeters when she was brought in. An aide, Serita, was with her and was visibly relieved when she saw Lauren.

“Her contractions are coming hard and fast now, Lauren. I keep telling her to push, but she’s in a lot of pain.”

“Any allergies?”

“None.”

“Get me a syringe of Demerol, Serita.” Lauren grasped Amy’s hand and she gripped it with surprising strength, her eyes wide, panicked. She panted, “Help me … the pain…”

“I’m going to give you a shot of Demerol for the pain, Amy. When the contractions start, push hard, okay?”

“My … son … he’s early…”

“He’s just impatient,” Lauren assured her, and Serita handed her the syringe.

Thirty seconds later, Amy’s body sank back against the mattress. Beads of sweat dotted her face, neck, arms, but for the moment her pain was a distant memory. Lauren examined her and found she was now dilated nearly ten centimeters. As the next contraction began, she gripped Amy’s hand. “Push hard, Amy. Your son is on his way into the world, but needs some help from you.”

Amy pushed and shrieked and Serita gripped Amy’s hand and Lauren moved to the foot of the bed. “He’s crowning, Amy,” she shouted. “Two more good pushes and he’ll be out.”

Minutes later, the boy was born. Lauren snipped the umbilical cord, and Serita quickly picked up the boy and carried him to a nearby table to weigh him, clean him up. Amy collapsed against the mattress. “Is he … okay? Is he breathing? Does he have all his fingers and toes?”

“He’s fine,” Serita said. “Big beautiful eyes. No jaundice.”

The boy let out a monstrous roar.

“Fantastic lungs.” Serita laughed. “And he weighs three point one kilos. That’s what in pounds, Lauren?”

“Seven pounds.” Exactly what Tess had weighed.

The delivery had left Amy badly torn. Lauren stripped off her gloves and moved around the examining room, gathering up the things she would need to stitch her up. Leo hurried into the room just then, a tall man with a square jaw and thick, white hair. Not quite as down-home as Marcus Welby, Lauren thought, and way better looking. He winked at Lauren, then turned his full attention on Amy. “Congratulations, Amy. Your son is just beautiful. I can take over from here, Lauren. You and Serita did a splendid job.”

Leo pulled over a stool, Lauren set the tray to his right, then she brought Amy a glass of water with a straw in it, and helped her lift her head to sip. She whispered, “People must be told about this blackness…”

Elsa had called it a thick black tide. “What did this blackness do?” Lauren asked.

“Swallowed … earth, trees, part of the back deck. People … panicked. Everyone thinks it’s the
brujos,
that they’re back.”

Lauren and Leo exchanged a glance. “Try not to worry about that now,” Leo told her.

“Where’s your son’s father?”

“In … Guayaquil. I wasn’t due for another month.”

“You want to give him a call?” Lauren asked.

“Yes, oh yes. My phone. It’s in my purse.”

Lauren handed her the phone, gave Leo’s shoulder a quick, reassuring squeeze, then leaned close to him and whispered, “Let’s go home and do it in front of a nice big fire.”

His neck turned the color of radishes, but he managed to sound professional when he replied: “Great suggestion, Lauren. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Lauren moved on to the next patient and then the next. And from each patient, she heard snippets of personal stories about what had happened at the café, what people had seen. One patient, Raúl Griego, was a reporter for
Esperanza Mundo,
the daily city paper that had been in existence, in some form, for about two hundred years. When the bone doc finished setting Raúl’s broken wrist, Raúl asked Lauren to turn on his video camera, so she could see it for herself, the awful darkness that had invaded part of the café and swallowed people.

She turned on the camera, and she, the bone doc, and Raúl watched the erratic ten-minute video. It began with Raúl’s camera focused on his companion, a pretty woman in her late twenties, who kept giggling like a schoolgirl and murmuring, “
No más,
Raúl. Cut it out.”