Forest Ghost (14 page)

The other woman only came up to her shoulder. She had messy chopped-about blonde hair, and heavy black-rimmed spectacles that only just managed to perch on the end of her short, snubby nose. She was wearing a black-and-scarlet gypsy-style dress and red wedge-shaped sandals. She was holding up a home-made cardboard sign that had MR JACK WALACE scrawled across it in felt-tip.

‘OK,’ Jack said to Sparky out of the corner of his mouth, as they trundled their suitcases toward them across the marble flooring. ‘Which one is Krystyna?’

‘Search me.’

‘Come on, you’re the astrologer. I’m supposed to fall in love with one of these women. Which one is it?’

Sparky hissed, as they came closer, ‘I don’t
know
, Dad; I don’t have your star chart with me right now!’

They walked up to the women and smiled. ‘Hi,’ said Jack. ‘I’m Jack Wallace and this is Alexis, but he usually goes by the name of Sparky.’

The tall woman with the gingerbread hair held out her hand. ‘So pleased that you could come, both of you. Welcome to Warsaw! I am Lidia Ku
ś
, one of the junior researchers at the Institute of History, and this is Doctor Krystyna Zawadka.’

Well, I sure got that wrong
, thought Jack, as the short bespectacled woman gave him a toothy smile and held out her hand, too.
I thought Krystyna was the tall one. And I’m afraid that Sparky’s slipped up here, astrologically speaking. I can’t see myself falling in love with
either
of these young ladies, even if they can boast more degrees between them than a meat thermometer
.

‘Good to meet you,’ said Jack, shaking her hand. ‘I just hope we can be of some assistance, although to tell you the God’s honest truth I’m still not sure how we can.’

They walked together out of the airport terminal. The morning was glaringly bright, and as they crossed the parking lot a strong warm wind was whipping from the west, which made the pennants on top of the airport building flap like applause.

‘Did your friend show up?’ Jack asked Krystyna.

‘Robert? No. This is one of the first things I want to do now that you are here, is go to the Kampinos Forest and look for him. We will settle you in your hotel, have an early lunch, and then go, if that’s all right with you. It’s about thirty kilometers, that’s all. It will take us less than an hour to get there.’

‘Haven’t you reported him missing yet?’

‘Robert is a grown man,’ said Krystyna. ‘He has not been missing for long enough for me to call the police.’

She led them across to a silver Toyota hybrid with the dark blue letters
Uniwersytet Warszawski
printed on the doors. She unlocked the car with her remote control, and then she added, ‘I have of course told the forest rangers and they are keeping their eyes open for him – but as I said to you on the phone, Jack, the Kampinos Forest is immense. Whole battalions of the Home Army hid there during the war and the Germans could never find them.’

Once everybody had climbed into the car, she sat in the driver’s seat and started the engine. ‘You are not frightened of woman drivers, Jack?’

‘It depends how they drive.’

‘I will drive especially carefully for you. My foot is a brush!’

They drove out of the airport and headed along the straight divided highway toward the city center. As she drove, Krystyna said, ‘Actually, I am very worried about Robert. Why has he not tried to get in touch with me? Why did he suddenly run away like that? I couldn’t see anything chasing him. There are several lynx in the forest, but a lynx will usually only attack you if you corner it or if you appear to be threatening its young. Running away – that is not a great idea. Sometimes the lynx will become excited and come after you. But Robert knew that.’

She reached a red stop light and turned to look at Jack. He had to admit that even though her blonde hair was choppily cut, it was attractive in a boyish way, and she smelled of some soft peachy perfume.

‘However, I don’t think that Robert was being chased by a lynx,’ she added. She spoke with the same serious emphasis as Sparky.

‘So what do you think it was?’ Jack asked her. ‘A Forest Ghost? A
nish-gite
?’

‘I don’t know. That is why I have asked you here, so that we can find out.’

‘But what if it is a
nish-gite
? What do we do then?’

Krystyna crossed herself, but didn’t answer him. The lights changed to green and she released the parking brake and set off again.

They stopped outside the shining green tower block of the forty-four-story InterContinental Hotel on Ulica Emilii Plater, in the very center of Warsaw. Krystyna led them across the lobby to the reception desk and said, ‘Jack – we have booked a suite for you here, for as long as you need to stay. All your expenses will be met by the university, so you don’t have to worry. There is a fitness center right at the very top of the hotel, if you are interested – also swimming pool!’

Sparky looked around the high, gleaming lobby, wide-eyed. He didn’t say anything but Jack could see how impressed he was. The best hotel they had ever stayed in before was the Holiday Inn at Pewaukee, Wisconsin, when they had visited his cousins.

Krystyna took their registration cards from the receptionist, and as she did so she took off her heavy-rimmed spectacles. Jack almost laughed. It was like one of those
True Romance
comics where the boss goes up to his secretary and says ‘Why, Miss Jones, without your glasses … you’re beautiful!’

Krystyna without her spectacles was very pretty, with high Polish cheekbones and wide gray eyes. She had a little upturned nose, which had been overwhelmed by those thick black spectacle-frames, and pouting pink lips that looked as if she was permanently on the verge of blowing a kiss.

Jack was particularly taken with the little cinnamon dusting of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.

She handed across the registration cards for Jack to sign and date. As she did so, she narrowed her eyes and said, ‘Jack? Everything is OK? You do not have too much jet lag?’

‘No, no, Krystyna. I’m fine. Let’s just sign ourselves in here and then we can find ourselves something to eat. I don’t know about you, Sparks, but I’m as hungry as a horse.’

Sparky nodded, still hypnotized by his surroundings.

They went up to their hotel room on the 27th floor. They had a large bedroom with twin beds and a living room with a desk and a couch and two armchairs, all decorated in neutral colors, and coldly air-conditioned. Sparky went straight to the window and looked out. Across the street from their hotel stood an immense gray building with a spire on top, over two hundred meters tall, built in the wedding-cake style of the Soviet era.

‘That is the Palace of Culture and Science,’ said Krystyna. ‘Supposedly it was a gift from Joseph Stalin to the Polish people, but it was the Soviet way of dominating our city center. My father says that he would demolish it – himself, on his own, if necessary, with a pickax, but I always say to him that history is history. We should learn lessons from it, not pretend that it didn’t happen.’

‘Some building,’ said Jack. ‘Looks more like the palace of Ming the Merciless.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Ming the Merciless in
Flash Gordon
. No? Never mind … forget it.’

Still looking out of the window, Sparky mumbled, ‘We mustn’t get lost.’

‘Oh, I don’t think you will get lost in the city center,’ smiled Krystyna. ‘In any case, you can always ask somebody to direct you.’

‘
No
… in the forest, I mean. We mustn’t get lost in the forest.’

‘You mustn’t worry, Sparky. We will all stay together and we are taking Borys with us who knows the Kampinos Nature Reserve better than anybody.’

Sparky turned around, still looking anxious. ‘I need to draw another chart. I tried to draw one on the plane but it didn’t make any sense. It kept on saying that nothing was going to happen to us.’

‘Well, that must be a good prediction,’ said Krystyna. ‘If nothing is going to happen to us, we will all stay safe, yes?’

‘
No
. You don’t understand. Nothing is going to happen to us. That’s what it said. Nothing good. Nothing bad.
Nothing
.’

‘You mean like The Nothing in
The Never-Ending Story
?’ asked Jack. Sparky had watched that movie again and again until Jack could almost repeat the lines by heart. ‘The Nothing that tries to swallow up the whole world?’

‘
No
– because that was just a story. This is
real
nothing.’

Krystyna glanced at Jack and said, ‘Are you quite sure that you couldn’t use some rest, Jack? It was a long way from Chicago. You must both be feeling very tired.’

‘I’m not tired,’ Sparky insisted. ‘I just have to work out what’s going to happen to us in the forest.’

‘OK, Sparks,’ Jack told him. ‘Why don’t you stay up here in the room and rest and have something to eat on room service? I’ll go downstairs to the restaurant with Krystyna and Lidia.’

Sparky nodded, and went over to his purple carry-on bag to find his paper and his pencils. Jack picked up the room-service menu and said, ‘What do you want to eat, sport? They have cream-cheese
pierogi
, if you fancy them.’

Sparky was busy laying out his drawing materials on the desk. ‘Waffles, please,’ he said. ‘Waffles and maple syrup and bacon.’

‘You must find it very hard, Jack, running a restaurant and also being a single father to Sparky,’ said Krystyna, as they sat over brunch in the DownTown Café on the second floor.

‘Let’s put it this way, it isn’t easy,’ Jack told her. ‘He misses his mom so much, even though he doesn’t talk about her very often. It doesn’t help that he has Asperger’s, and finds it so difficult to get along with other people. He’ll look at your face, but he can’t read your expression, so he’s never quite sure if you’re joking or serious or what.’

‘He seems very dedicated to his astrology.’

‘It’s his obsession. The strange thing is, though, that his predictions pretty often turn out to be right – or nearly right, anyhow. If Sparky hadn’t insisted on it, I never would have gone to that séance and I never would have heard Aggie’s voice telling me where those bones were buried.’

Krystyna poured brown sugar into her coffee and stirred it. ‘I can’t imagine what we’re going to find in the forest – well, that’s if we find anything at all. I can still feel that terror. It was like falling into deep, cold quicksand. It was worse than that. When you are sinking in quicksand you wave your arms and you kick your legs and you struggle desperately to survive. But in the forest I felt as if it would be better if I simply gave in, and killed myself. At least I would no longer be so terrified.’

‘Believe me – I know exactly what you’re saying,’ Jack told her. ‘That sounds so much like the feeling that Sparky and I had at the Owasippe scout camp. But I’m sure we
heard
something, too, and felt it. It was like a wind blowing.’

He paused, and then he said, ‘I don’t know. I still don’t see how
nothing
can make us feel so frightened. Maybe it’s something to do with the cougars and the lynxes after all. Maybe when they’re threatened they’ve developed some kind of smell that really scares us. Skunks and muskrats do it, don’t they?’

At that moment, a short stocky man in a brown canvas jacket came up to them. Although he couldn’t have been more than forty years old, he was bald-headed, with a broad, amiable face that looked as if it had been knocked around a bit during his lifetime. He had a V-shaped scar on his chin and no front teeth at the top.

‘Ah, Borys!’ Krystyna greeted him. ‘Jack, this is Borys who is going to be our guide. Borys is a forester. He helped us so much when we were preparing a history of the fighting in the Kampinos Forest at the beginning of the war, when the Germans invaded. I think he knows every single tree by name.’

‘
Znam ten las lepiej ni
ź
tyłek mojej
ź
ony
.’ Borys grinned. ‘I know the forest like the backside of my wife.’

‘Have you told Borys what happened when you and Robert went into the woods?’ Jack asked Krystyna. ‘He knows why you went there, and what you were doing?’

Krystyna nodded. ‘I’ve told him everything. He knows all about your great-grandfather, and Maria’s great-uncle, and the diary. He knows about your séance, and the message.’

‘Has he ever come across anything like this before? Anybody else getting frightened the way that you two did?’

‘He has heard of the Forest Ghosts, or the
nish-gite
.’

Jack saw Borys pull a pretend-scary face.

‘Ever see one yourself, Borys?’ he asked him.

Borys shook his head. In Polish, he said, ‘Sometimes you can hear something rustling in the bushes. Sometimes, behind the birch trees, you can see something moving. Something white. But that could be anything – just an elk, maybe, with the sun shining on its fur, running away. Or just the sun itself. Who knows?’

‘Ever felt frightened, the same way that Krystyna and Robert did?’

‘I don’t believe in ghosts. People who believe in ghosts make them come to life.’

‘But have you ever felt uneasy, in the woods? Like, there’s somebody watching you?’

Borys shrugged and lifted his rough-hewn hands. His skin was so cracked and leathery it looked almost as if he were wearing gloves made of tree bark. ‘Of course! Everybody does. It’s a well-known feeling. It’s self-preservation, I suppose, like birds immediately flying away when you come close, even though you are no threat to them at all, because you have absolutely no chance of catching them.’

‘So what do we do, when we get to the forest?’

‘We search, systematically. I will bring my dog. We look to see if Robert has left any kind of trail behind him as he ran away, which he must have done. There’s no way you can run through the undergrowth without breaking branches and scuffing up the ground and leaving a scent. But also we look for anything unusual that could explain why Robert and Krystyna got the wind up so badly!

‘When we get there, I will tell you more. It will be easier to explain once you can see the terrain for yourself.’