Forest Ghost (11 page)

At last he opened his eyes and looked around. The woman gave him a tissue and he dabbed his face, and sniffed. He tried to say something, but he was too overwhelmed to speak, and all he could do was shake his head.

Jack’s first thought was that he was a plant. After all, nobody else in the audience had heard Thelma’s voice, even if Thelma really had been speaking to him.

One or two people started to murmur to each other, but Tamara Thorne called out, ‘Silence, please! Absolute silence! The spirits are not easy to hear at the best of times, and if you want to hear your own loved ones, like Bruce here, then you will have to be totally receptive!’

Again, she sat with her eyes closed, waving her arms. Jack was wondering how long he was going to have to sit here, listening to this charade, when a voice said, with cut-glass clarity, ‘Jack –
słyszysz mnie
?’

Jack felt the same cold shrinking sensation down his back that he had experienced when Tamara Thorne had asked him if he had come here to talk to Aggie. Inside his head he could hear this clearest of voices, and it was unmistakably Aggie’s.

‘
Jack, can you hear me
?’ That was what she had asked him, in Polish.

Like the bald man who had heard from his Thelma, Jack’s eyes immediately filled with tears, and his throat tightened up so much that he wouldn’t have been able to say anything out loud if he had wanted to. It was Aggie, his beautiful lost Aggie, there was no mistaking it. He looked across at Tamara Thorne, and his chest was physically hurting with grief and resentment, but Tamara Thorne still had her eyes closed, and was still waving her arms from side to side.

Aggie –
he thought
– Agnieszka, is that really you
?

There was a long moment of silence, but then he heard Aggie’s voice again, still quite clear, but much smaller this time, as if she were speaking to him from very far away.

‘Jack,
słyszysz mnie
?’

He had no tissue so he had to smear the tears away from his eyes with the back of his hand.
Yes, Aggie,
I can hear you. Where are you
?
Speak to me, Aggie!

Another long silence, and then Aggie said, ‘
S
ą
dwa kilometry na północ … a potem jeszcze trzysta metrów na zachód … od wsi Truskaw
.’

What?
He could hardly hear her, let alone understand what she was saying to him. She was trying to tell him that somebody was two kilometers to the north of Truskaw then three hundred meters to the west.

He recognized the name Truskaw immediately. Truskaw was the village in the Kampinos Forest to which Grzegorz Walach and Maria’s great-uncle Andrzej had been trying to escape during the war, but where they had finally been overwhelmed with terror.

‘
S
ą
pogrzebani tam, gdzie
ś
cie
ż
ka rozdziela si
ę
na trzy
,’
Aggie continued. She sounded as if she were reading from a script, or a diary, like Maria. ‘
Pod skałami w kształcie głowy wied
ź
my
.’

Jack understood that. ‘They are buried where the path divides into three … under the rocks that look like a witch’s head.’

Who is
? he asked her, but this time the silence went on and on and she didn’t say anything more.

‘Aggie!’ he managed to choke out, and everybody seated around him turned and stared. Even Tamara Thorne opened her eyes and looked at him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He stood up awkwardly and knocked over his folding chair.

‘You
heard
somebody, Jack?’ asked Tamara Thorne.

‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry I disturbed you. I – ah – I have to get back to my customers.’

He picked up his chair and then he made his way back between the bookshelves. Bindy came hurrying after him and caught up with him just as he reached the door.

‘Jack! Are you all right, Jack? Oh, God – you look so
pale
.’

‘I’m fine, Bindy. I knew I shouldn’t have come. The last few days … well, that Owasippe business probably disturbed me more than I realized.’

‘No, it’s me who should be sorry,’ said Bindy. ‘I should have seen that this wasn’t a good time for you.’

‘Never mind,’ Jack told her. ‘Give my apologies to Tamara. Tell her I may even get around to reading her book.’

As he stepped out of the door, Bindy said, ‘Jack?’

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. I just wanted to make sure that you were OK. I do care about you, you know.’

He kissed her on the forehead. She was slightly sweaty and her skin tasted of maca root moisturizer. ‘Thanks, Bindy. Take care of yourself.’

W
hen he returned to the restaurant, he found that Sparky was in the kitchen, wearing a white apron that almost reached the floor and a white chef’s cap. He was using his hands to mix ground pork and ground beef with onions and crushed Saltine crackers in a large brown bowl.

‘I teach him to make
schnitzla
,’ said Mikhail, proudly. ‘More useful than wait on table.’

‘That’s great, Mikhail,’ Jack told him. But when Mikhail had gone back to his range to fry up some more onions, Jack said to Sparky, with an intensity that was almost ferocious, ‘
How did you know?
’

‘How did I know what, Dad?’

‘How did you know that medium woman had a message for me?’

‘I told you, Dad. It was all in your star chart. “Somebody has a message for you, and it’s a woman.”’

‘Yes, you were right. A woman
did
have a message for me. I heard her speaking to me, right inside my head. But do you have any idea who it was?’

Sparky looked up at him, his hands still deep in the bowl of ground pork.

‘No,’ he said, in a little ghost of a voice.

‘It was your mom. At least I think it was. You know that I don’t believe in any of that life-after-death baloney. But it sounded exactly like her.’

Two tears suddenly rolled down Sparky’s cheeks. ‘It was
Mom
? You really heard her?’

Jack came around the table and put his arms around Sparky’s shoulders. ‘I don’t know how it was done, Sparks. Maybe I was tricked. Some of these mediums, they have ways to fool you into thinking that they’re putting you in touch with dead people, but it’s nothing but a scam. Like, they’ll find out little personal details about you before the séance starts, so you’ll really believe that it’s your dead Aunt Jemima talking to you.’

Sparky took his hands out of the bowl and carefully scraped the
schnitzla
mix from his fingers, using a spoon. Then he went to the sink and washed them.

‘Hey – you don’t finish yet, Sparky!’ called out Mikhail. ‘Now you have to squish into patty!’

‘I’m sorry, Mikhail,’ said Jack. ‘You’ll have to finish them off yourself. Sparky and me, we have a couple of important things to talk about.’

‘OK,’ said Mikhail. ‘But you come back, Sparky, for more lesson in cook! You have touch like good chef!’

Jack and Sparky went upstairs to their apartment. Jack went to the fridge and took out a beer for himself and a Dr Pepper for Sparky. They went into the living room and Sparky sat down on the end of the couch, looking up at Jack both expectantly and anxiously.

‘This is so hard, Sparks,’ said Jack. ‘At first I wasn’t going to tell you, but then I thought, I have to. After all, it was
you
who said that I was going to be given a message, and you were right, and so you deserve to know what it was and who gave it to me.’

‘Do you believe that Mom’s still here, someplace?’ asked Sparky. He looked around the room, almost if he thought she might be standing in the corner.

‘What?’ said Jack. ‘In heaven or something? I don’t know. It would be nice to believe it, wouldn’t it? But I don’t think I can.’

‘If she’s not in heaven, how did she speak to you?’

‘I have absolutely no idea. But the message she gave me was that somebody was buried in the Kampinos Forest, not too far from a village called Truskaw. Well, she said “they”, so I’m assuming that she was talking about more than one.’

‘Did she tell you who they were?’

‘No, she didn’t, but considering that this was a message from beyond, she was pretty specific about
where
they were. Two kilometers north of Truskaw and three hundred meters to the west, that’s what she said. Apparently they’re buried where the path splits up into three, under some rocks that look like the head of a witch.’

‘She said all that? What … what did she sound like?’

‘Really calm, like she always used to, when she was alive. Not upset in any way at all, but not much expression, if you know what I mean. It was almost like she was reading it. She started off sounding really clear, but then her voice got fainter and fainter.’

‘Did she say anything about Malcolm?’

‘No, she didn’t. Well – she might have done, but if she did I couldn’t hear it.’

Sparky looked thoughtful. ‘She must have had a reason for telling you about these buried people.’

‘I agree, Sparks. Like I said, she didn’t tell me who they were, but if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that they could well be your great-great-grandfather Grzegorz, and his friend Andrzej – you know, Mrs Koczerska’s great-uncle. I never even
heard
of Truskaw before last week. It seems like too much of a coincidence that this is the second time in five days that somebody has mentioned it to me.’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Sparky.

‘Well, you said, didn’t you, that some woman far away was going to confirm that this message was true? I’m going to call Maria Koczerska and see if her friend at Warsaw University can shed any light on it.’

‘She can,’ said Sparky, emphatically. ‘She
will
.’

‘You also said that I’m going to fall in love with her.’

‘That’s what your stars say.’

‘Don’t I have any choice in the matter?’

Sparky looked away. Jack was trying to be light-hearted about it, but he could tell that Sparky didn’t want to talk about it any more.

‘Do you have any homework?’ Jack asked him.

‘Not tonight. Well – some, but it’s only reading a chapter of
Moby Dick
, and I can do that when I go to bed.’

‘OK – why don’t you go back down to the kitchen and help Mikhail to finish off those
schnitzlas
? If I can manage to get through to Mrs Koczerska, I’ll come down and tell you.’

When he called Maria Koczerska, she told him that she was just about to go out for an evening of Polish dancing. He thought that there was no point in being anything but totally honest with her, so he told her all about the séance and what he had heard Aggie saying to him inside of his head.

Strangely, Maria didn’t sound at all surprised.

‘All right, Jack,’ she told him, when he had finished. ‘Tonight I will email my friend Krystyna at the Institute of History and see what
she
has to say about this.’

Jack said, ‘I just hope she’s not too skeptical about it, just because I got the message through a psychic. I know what these academic women are like. They always want empirical proof of everything – even what day of the week it is.’

‘I think you will find, Jack, that Krystyna has a very open mind. Anyhow, I promise you that I will contact her and let you know what she says as soon as I can.’

‘Just off the top of your head, Maria, do
you
think Aggie could have been talking about Grzegorz and Andrzej?’

‘Who knows, until we look for them?’ said Maria. ‘But like so many thousands of others, Grzegorz and Andrzej must be there somewhere in that forest. All of Kampinos is a cemetery, and almost every tree marks somebody’s last resting place.’

Jack was washing his teeth that evening, ready for bed, when he had a return call from Maria.

‘I have spoken to Krystyna,’ she said. ‘This weekend she will go to the forest and try to find the place you spoke about. If she does, she may make some preliminary excavation there.’

‘What did she say when you told her where the information came from?’

‘To be honest with you, Jack, I didn’t tell her that it had come from a medium. I said instead that after she had sent me my great-uncle Andrzej’s diary, I had managed to locate some old Polish immigrants in Chicago who had been eye-witnesses to the mass executions at Palmiry. I said that the details about the burial site had come from them.’

‘You lied to her, in other words? I thought you said that this Krystyna was very open-minded.’

‘Yes, of course, and she is. But there was no point in putting her open-mindedness to such a test. Not until she finds these rocks like a witch’s head, if they exist, and then digs down to find if there is anything there. If there are no rocks there, or nobody buried underneath them, we can simply blame senile old men with faulty memories.’

The following Tuesday morning, Sally came into the restaurant and sat herself up at the bar. Jack came up to her and said, ‘What’s it to be, ma’am?’

‘A Dead-End Special with a side order of Frustration, please. Undersheriff Porter just emailed me from Muskegon and we’ve had to agree that all of those scouts committed suicide of their own free will, without any apparent threat or coercion.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes. Oh. We’ve questioned everybody involved with the Thirty-ninth Scout Group and we could find no cult activity of any kind, religious or otherwise, no online suicide pacts, no systematic bullying, nor any evidence whatsoever of sexual abuse.

‘The Muskegon Sheriff’s Department searched a twenty-square-mile area of the forest surrounding the Owasippe Scout Reservation with dogs, metal detectors and infra-red heat-seeking equipment mounted on helicopters. Nothing was found that could have had any material relevance to the scouts’ suicides, nor to the deaths of Sandra Greene and Weldon Farmer, from Michigan Wildlife Conservancy, which does appear to have been a mutually agreed suicide.

‘Several of the scouts’ relatives and friends received letters and postcards from them, but none of them mentioned being frightened, like Malcolm. Undersheriff Porter is of the opinion that we shall never know why any of them committed suicide. Like, ever.’