More Short Stories by: Dr. Dennis L. Siluk, Ed.D. (2007-2016)

From one of the top 100-reviewers, at Amazon Books, International (the largest book seller in the world), by Robert C. Ross, the list author says (reference to the book, “Peruvian Poems”): "Dennis L. Siluk is enormously prolific and very well travelled…." The poems are based on places and experiences in Peru, written in both English and Spanish, and provide a fascinating backdrop in preparation for a trip to Peru." (1-1-2009)

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Night Ride to Huancayo


(The Apparition) “I know you,” I stared deeper in the direction of the voice, went for my gun at the same time (along side my bed, on the lower part of a table I keep my pen and paper on, in case I have to write in the middle of the night, everything in arms reach). I hesitated, focused more, then saw a form within a light mist—my mind saying it was reflective of something I had seen before, and the voice said, confirming my mind’s conjecture,
“I'm the New Arrival, I’m a little lost, and I'm being chased by a few unfamiliar spirits (he meant demonic beings).”
Its voice was almost sincere, even had a tinge of anxiety in it, I thought: what can I do. He was of another sphere, of a light vortex form. Then my wife Rosa woke up, exclaimed:
“Is something wrong?” (At that, the apparition disappeared.)
“No,” I said plainly to my wife Rosa, adding, and “I'm still living a part of my nightmare I think.”
I then got up out of bed, asked why she wasn't swimming, and she said Margot (a lady friend) didn't show up, had to take her boy someplace I guess).
“Oh,” I said, and she got up and made coffee for me, and this day went on as usual, lunch in the afternoon on our rooftop under a large umbrella, with pork and some other kind of Chinese dish.

(The Car Ride) It was shortly after that event, I was driving our Volkswagen out of Lima (Peru), to Huancayo, I usually do, when summer is over in Lima, summer in the Andes in the Mantaro Valley of Peru, is just beginning then, opposite of each other. It's about a seven-hour car ride, towards the east. At night the mountains along the slim roads, can be very dangerous, I have to drive up some 16,500-feet and come down to the valley which is 10,500-above sea level. There are no street lights through the Andes, a few small towns in between (far-off the main road, and there is only one road), a miner's area lit up called La Oroya, but for the most part it is a long dark ride, unless there is a moon, and bright stars, in the sky overhead, otherwise you get only your headlights.
In the mountains, the higher you go, the thinner the air, and clearer the sky often times, the farther away from the Lima’s ocean you head that is (from the Pacific ocean to be more exact), and it gets cold. And this day, the first week of July of 2008, I was driving through the Andes, with my wife, and Goddaughter, Ximena, she was in the back seat of the car (16-years old), taking movies with my camera.
As Ximena was taking a movie, Rosa was talking to her, and me at the same time, saying something to the effect: why not put the camera down, but I was enjoying the attention she was giving taking the pictures, and it was breaking the boredom of the long ride, and so Rosa left it alone, and she caught Rosa's face on the camera a few times, along with our headlights showing some of the side views of the mountains as we drove along (to be shown at a later date of course) and past them, then we saw a figure, a lady walking, a blond haired woman, so it looked, she didn't have the traditional dress of the Peruvian people in this area on, rather dressed in western style garb.
Accordingly, my headlights had shown a thin figure. I stopped the car, put it in reverse, and drove backwards to give her a lift, we were close to the high part of the Andes, 16,500-feet, and Ximena opened up the door, and she got in slowly, smiled (the camera taking her picture along with ours), and the young lady, perhaps in her middle twenties, thanked us for picking her up. We then drove off.
A few seconds went by, perhaps twenty-seconds, the camera still going capturing her and Rosa and the back of my head, and hands on the steering wheel, and I asked,
“Do you speak English?” she looked Caucasian and either American or European. She remarked,
“I'm European, German, from Augsburg, and yes I do speak broken English!”
I had spent a year in Augsburg, in 1970, so I thought we had something in common, but I said nothing of it, instead, I asked a question,
“Why are you out in this dark in the middle of the night?”
“I hope to see my husband; I have had a feeling I may tonight.”
I hesitated; it didn't make sense, “Out here...?” I said, bewildered.
“Where does an infant go...” she asked “if it dies?”
“Hum,” I moaned, then replied, “Right to heaven,” I said, surprised at the question (the camera still going), “it does not have formal reasoning and therefore, is innocent, plus King David in the Bible has indicated that.” She seemed relieved. Normally I would not get into such statements, but often times, I was asked that very same question from girls in prison, when I was a counselor, and they wanted to know where their infants went, when they had an abortion. So I was kind of waiting to hear where the connection was.
We drove a little further, she pointed to a bend, I was about to take, she said,
“There, right there, that is where I died!”
And we all looked at her and the car crashed (and the camera was still going), and when I awoke, she was gone, and Ximena and Rosa had been thrown halfway out of the car, as I had been, with one foot left in the car. I pulled them from the automobile, and tried to wake them, and they did awake to a fogy here and now, not quite all together. I lost a shoe someplace and started looking for it. My headlights were still on. When we all got our composure back, we headed back to Huancayo, the car was running rough, the fenders were bent inward, and that pushed the headlights inward, and the hood was pushed inward and upward, and the front glass windshield was cracked, but the car run, the muffler was separated slightly from a pipe or two under the car, so it made a clamoring sound when I drove off.
When we had gotten to Huancayo, I went to the Newspaper (‘Primicia’) to find out if there had been accidents in and around that area anytime in the past few years and there was, right there at that bend, a German girl was killed, along with her child and husband.
But somehow I seemed to have related this with the “New Arrival,” in my so called nightmare, not sure why, sometimes I just get that kind of intuition, a sudden, sense, as if you won it and now own it, and now it belongs to you, even if you cannot make heads or tails out of it.
And so I looked a little closer into this happening, and found out there had been a child that died in the accident and a man, the woman's husband I presume, and I reason she was coming back to see what might have taken place (she was perhaps unsettled with all of this), or perhaps she needed to feel the essence of the child, and perchance I was suppose to have let her know what I did tell her, that her child was in heaven. However, I kept thinking of her husband, was he the apparition and did he got to meet his dead wife, and did they both get a chance to put a closure on this? Maybe they were both one in both, I don't know. I'll never know the whole of this, but somehow it is all linked together, and I’d like to believe they did.

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