Forest Ghost (12 page)

‘So what does that mean? Case closed?’

‘No … but unless I receive any further evidence from Muskegon, or some scout comes forward and tells me that they all agreed to commit suicide so that they could go to a better life on another planet, there’s no place else for me to take it.’

Jack wondered if he ought to tell Sally about Tamara Thorne’s séance, and the message he had received from Aggie, but he decided against it. It wouldn’t help her to solve the mystery of what had happened at Owasippe, and it could make things much more complicated. Nearly three quarters of a century had elapsed between Grzegorz Walach and his friend Andrzej killing themselves in the Kampinos Forest and the scouts killing themselves at Owasippe, and even if Sparky was convinced that there was a connection between them, how could they prove it, and even if they could – how would it help?

‘You want a real drink?’ he asked Sally.

‘Love to,’ she said, ‘but no. I have to go interview a husband and wife whose daughter has been found dead with a plastic bag stuffed in her mouth. Muslims. It seems like their daughter was fond of short skirts and dating American boys and they wanted her to go to Pakistan and go through with some arranged marriage.’

‘Tragedy stops for nobody, does it?’ said Jack.

‘You said it, buster.’

Jack had just finished phoning through his orders for fresh vegetables when his phone rang. It was Maria Koczerska.

‘I have heard from my friend Krystyna in Warsaw. On Saturday she and her friend from the historical institute went to the Kampinos Forest, to the location that you told me.’

She paused, and said, ‘Please – hold on for a second, Jack. My cleaner is just leaving and I have to pay her.’

She put down the phone. Jack waited for over a minute, and then he heard her pick it up again.

‘And?’ he said. ‘What did they find? Please – don’t tell me they didn’t find anything at all.’

‘They measured exactly two kilometers north from Truskaw and then three hundred meters to the west and they found the rocks. Krystyna said they were not sure at first that this was the right place because the rocks look like a witch only from a certain angle. She has sent me a photograph of them and I can email it to you, too.’

‘What about excavation? Did they do any digging?’

‘Yes, they did. Not very deep, only a few centimeters, but almost at once they found a human shoulder bone. That is when they stopped, because they have to obtain special authority to exhume human remains from the forest. It is a national park now, after all.’

‘So she’s going to do that?’

‘Yes,’ said Maria, ‘she filled out an application today and she has sent it to the park authorities. She is also seeking assistance from the historical institute to help finance the exhumation. It has to be done very carefully, with everything being properly photographed and recorded.’

‘Well, that’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?’ said Jack. ‘My late wife tells me that there’s somebody buried in a forest in Poland, and where they’re buried, and they’re actually there, for real. I can hardly believe it.’

‘I told Krystyna this,’ said Maria.

‘You told her I went to a séance?’

‘Yes. Well, I had to. She wanted to talk to my Polish immigrants about what they had seen when these people were buried, and who they thought they were, and who did it – so of course I had to admit that my immigrants were all invented. Apart from that, Jack, it is so extraordinary. I thought it was very important for her to know how you came by such information.’

‘So – when you told her the truth – what did she say?’

‘She said she would like to speak with you on the phone.’

‘Yes – well, of course. I’d be glad to, although I don’t know what else I can tell her. My late wife spoke to me inside of my head and told me this stuff. I don’t know how, or why.’

‘Maybe you need to try to get in touch with your wife again.’

Jack said, ‘No, Maria. No way. She’s gone. She’s dead. I don’t want to have to go through all of that grief a second time.’

‘I understand. But I will give you Krystyna’s number in Warsaw, her number at the university and also at home, and you can call her whenever you are able to.’

‘Thanks, Maria.’

‘There is one more thing, Jack. I just wanted to tell you how much this all disturbs me. On the one hand I am deeply curious to know what happened, and Krystyna is, too, but at the same time I wonder if it is wiser not to know. I have a feeling that if we find out, we will regret it. Andrzej and Grzegorz killed themselves for a reason, and maybe it is safer for us if we never discover what that reason was.’

A
lthough there was a lull in the restaurant around seven forty-five p.m. before the eight o’clock customers came crowding in, Jack didn’t call Krystyna that evening. In Warsaw it would have been two forty-five the following morning, and he was sure that she wouldn’t take too kindly to being phoned at that time.

By the time he had closed the door on his last customers at one-thirty a.m. he was too tired to think about phoning anybody. He went upstairs to his apartment, took a short hot shower, and climbed into bed to watch
Highway Patrol
on This-TV. After fifteen minutes, unable to keep his eyes open any longer, he switched off the bedside light and went to sleep.

He dreamed that it was dark. He dreamed that it was silent. Then he heard people talking. He couldn’t hear distinctly what they were saying, but it sounded like a woman and a boy. Their conversation continued for what seemed like twenty minutes or even longer, although there were several lengthy pauses in between their sentences, like the conversation of two people who are both preoccupied with doing something else, like reading or sewing or playing a video game.

After a while, Jack opened his eyes, or dreamed that he was opening his eyes. His bedroom was totally dark, like his dream, or maybe this was part of his dream, because he could still hear the voices, the woman and the boy, having their desultory, long-drawn-out conversation. They sounded as if they were in the living room.

He lay there for a while, straining his ears, trying to make out what they were saying, but his bedroom door was closed, and all he could hear was the cadence of their voices, and not their words.

He sat up.
Am I dreaming this, or am I awake?
But then he looked at the digital clock on his nightstand and saw that it was 2:47 am and he knew that he was awake. If he was awake, though, who was that talking in the living room at this time of the morning?

He climbed out of bed, crossed the bedroom floor and opened the door. The living-room door was two doors off to the right, on the opposite side of the corridor, and there was a light shining underneath it. Hanging on the wall in between was a large framed black-and-white etching of angels, gathered around Mary and the infant Jesus. The angel Gabriel was staring directly at Jack as if he wanted to know what he was doing there.
At night
,
he seemed to be saying,
this is
our
domain
.

Jack made his way stealthily down the corridor and stopped outside the living-room door. For the first minute or so, there was silence, as if the woman and the boy knew that he was there, and had deliberately stopped talking, waiting for him to betray himself by making a noise, or sneezing, or losing his patience and opening up the door.

He took hold of the door handle and he was about to open the door when he heard the boy say, ‘I told them they would lose. I even told them what the score would be – three–five. Of course when they lost and it was three–five, they blamed me. They said I was a jinx.’

‘That was so mean of them,’ said the woman. ‘Supposing you had told them they were going to win, and they
had
won? They wouldn’t have blamed you
then
, would they?’

Jack held on to the door handle but he didn’t open it. If he had heard only the boy’s voice, he would have gone in, because it was Sparky’s voice, and Sparky did have a tendency to walk and talk in his sleep. But it was the woman’s voice that made him hesitate. It was the woman’s voice that gave him a freezing, prickling feeling. It was the same voice that he had heard inside his head at Tamara Thorne’s séance. Aggie. His dead wife, Agnieszka.

Again, there was silence. Then the woman said, ‘It’s going to happen again, unless you can do something to stop it.’

Another long pause.

‘I know. But what can
I
do? Nobody’s going to believe me, are they? And I don’t even know what it is myself.’

‘You have to find out. That’s the point.’

More silence. The clock in the hallway suddenly struck three and Jack’s heart almost stopped.

‘Dad’s going to talk to some woman in Poland,’ said Sparky.

‘Oh. You mean the one he’s going to fall in love with?’

Silence.

‘I shouldn’t have told you that.’

‘Why not? I still love him, but I can’t expect him to live alone for the rest of his life.’

At that point, Jack opened the door. The first thing he saw was Sparky sitting cross-legged on the couch, with his eyes closed. He was wearing his pale-green pajamas and his hair was sticking up on the crown of his head, as if he had just climbed out of bed. The only light in the living room came from a standard lamp with a parchment shade which stood right behind him.

Jack looked across at the far end of the room, and froze. Sitting in a wing chair by the window, in a long white nightdress, her face pale, was Aggie. Her blonde hair was shining in bright filaments in the lamplight, but her eyes were only shadowy smudges. Her thin-wristed hands were clasped in her lap and her feet were bare. She looked almost exactly as she had looked on the day that he had last seen her, on the day she had died. He could even see the blue veins in her ankles.

Jack opened and closed his mouth, but he couldn’t speak. He knew that Aggie couldn’t be real, and that she must be some kind of mirage. She didn’t even
look
real – or at least she didn’t look solid. He could see right through her, to the back of the wing chair she was sitting in, with its tapestry cushion.

Five long seconds passed, and then he took an unsteady step toward her, and then another. Because her eyes were so shadowy, it was difficult for him to tell if she could see him or not. She didn’t move as he came closer – didn’t raise her hands or try to stand up or change her expression.

‘Aggie,’ he said, hoarsely; but as soon as he spoke her name she vanished, leaving nothing but the empty chair and the crumpled cushion.

Jack closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again, in case she had reappeared, but she had totally gone.

You were dreaming, Jack,
he told himself.
You were hallucinating. What you saw was nothing but wishful thinking. You’re overtired, that’s the trouble, and still grieving. Not only that – all of this weirdness with the scouts committing suicide at Owasippe and the stories about Grzegorz Walach killing himself in the Kampinos Forest, it’s really thrown you off balance.

All the same, he was sure that he had heard Sparky talking to her, and he was equally sure that he had heard her talking back to him.

He turned around. Sparky was still sitting cross-legged on the couch, his eyes still closed. Jack went over and sat down next to him.

‘Sparks?’ he said. ‘Sparky?’

Sparky still didn’t respond, so Jack took hold of his forearm and gently shook him. ‘Sparky? Wake up! It’s Dad!’

Sparky abruptly opened his eyes and looked around the living room.

‘Mom?’ he said, in a voice that was thick with sleep.

‘Hey, dude, it’s me. You’ve been somnambulating again.’

Sparky stared at him in bewilderment.

‘Where’s Mom? She was here. I saw her. She was right there, sitting in that chair.’

‘Your mom’s gone, Sparky, you know that. She’s never coming back. You were dreaming, that’s all.’

‘But I …’ Sparky began, but then he realized that Jack must be right, and that he must have been asleep all the time.

‘OK,’ he said, and stood up, and furiously scratched his head.

‘Get yourself back to bed,’ said Jack. ‘It’s school tomorrow and we can’t have you nodding off in the middle of algebra.’

Sparky looked up at him and Jack could see such pain in his eyes.

‘She was here, Dad. I’m sure she was here. I was talking to her, and she was talking back to me. I can even remember what she said. She said, “You have to stop it, or else it’s going to happen again.”’

‘What do you think she meant by that?’

‘She meant the scouts committing suicide. She meant the white thing that we saw in the woods. I mean, that’s what we were talking about.’

Jack put his arm around Sparky’s shoulders and guided him back to his bedroom. ‘I think this whole thing has been too darn traumatic for both of us, don’t you? Let’s both get some sleep and try to make a fresh start tomorrow. Maybe we could go boating on the lake this weekend. That would blow some of the cobwebs away.’

As he climbed into bed, Sparky said, ‘Dad?’

‘What is it?’

‘Mom said one more thing. She said, “Tell your father I still love him.”’

Jack was about to say, ‘I know,’ but instead he simply said, ‘Sleep well, Sparks,’ and closed the bedroom door.

H
e went back to bed but he found it impossible to get back to sleep. He could hear garbage trucks in the street outside and police sirens and somebody playing dance music. Not only that, he was arguing with himself. Did I really see Aggie? Did I really hear her voice? He knew that it was impossible, but then he also knew that, under stress, the human mind can imagine all kinds of strange things. His old college friend Joe had suffered from alcoholic hallucinosis when he had given up drinking, and he had been convinced that he could hear Chinese policemen gambling in the corridor outside his hospital room.

Jack was still awake as it began to grow light outside, and he was beginning to think about getting out of bed and perking himself a strong cup of coffee and maybe making a start on his accounts. He threw back the bedspread and swung his legs out of bed and it was then that his phone warbled.