Forest Ghost (16 page)

‘We dug further down than this, and uncovered a few bones that are definitely human,’ said Krystyna. ‘However, we covered them over again since we didn’t want to get into trouble with the park authorities.

She folded back the plastic sheet and walked across to the rocks. ‘Robert dropped his theodolite right
here
, and then he shouted something, I don’t know what it was. He climbed up this slope very quickly and then went running off between those two tall pine trees up there, still shouting. I didn’t see which way he went after that, because I was running away myself, in the opposite direction. Look, you can still see the impression of my boots in the path.’

Jack listened, and looked around. Although there was so little wind today, the forest sounded as if it were softly speaking to itself – as if the trees were discussing the arrival of these new interlopers.
Who are they, and what do they want? These are not hikers or cyclists or joggers. These are people who want to know more about our secrets
.

Borys approached the sandy slope where Robert had started to run away.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘you can see his footprints clearly. Look how deep they are! He was climbing up here like a mountain goat!’

He slung his shotgun across his back, and then he said, ‘Come on, then, let’s see if we can follow his trail. Krystyna – you brought Robert’s scarf, yes?’

Krystyna took a dark-brown knitted scarf out of her purse and handed it to Borys, who held it in front of Diablik’s snout. Diablik breathed in deeply, three or four times, like somebody smoking a joint, and then immediately started to snuffle around the ground. It took him only a few seconds to pick up Robert’s scent, and then he barked, loudly, and started to drag Borys up the slope.

‘Steady, Diablik! Steady!’ said Borys. ‘You have four legs! I only have two!’

Once they had reached the top of the slope, the five of them spread out, so that they were just within sight of each other through the trees, with Borys in the center. Diablik was straining at his leash so hard that he was breathing in a strangulated whine, and his paws were scrabbling on the sand. He led them between the two tall pines, and then further into the forest. Now the only sounds were the shuffling of their footsteps, Diablik’s panting, and – every now and then – the harsh scraping cry of nutcrackers.

‘The scent is still strong!’ Borys called out after a while. ‘I can see also where Robert was running! Broken branches and footprints! He was still running fast!’

The deeper into the forest they penetrated, the thicker the bushes became. At times Jack had to wade thigh-deep through spiky shrubbery, and as he did so he kept his eye out for Sparky, to make sure that he was managing to keep up. But this afternoon Sparky seemed like a boy on a mission – as if he needed to prove that the predictions he had made with his star charts were really going to come true. Jack had noticed that when he talked to him, he was only half-listening, and his mind appeared to be someplace else. Now Sparky was forging ahead through the forest with a tall walking stick that he had made for himself out of a fallen branch, not looking right or left – not even glancing around from time to time to see where Jack was. Maybe he was thinking of Malcolm, and wondering if he could really find something here in the Kampinos Forest that would solve the mystery of Malcolm’s suicide. Maybe he was thinking of his mother, and why her voice had led them out here, to this wilderness.

After more than forty minutes, Jack was becoming tired and thirsty, as well as having been snagged and lacerated by brambles and bitten by midges. He was about to shout to Borys that maybe it was time for them to stop for a while and have a break, when he heard a quick, plunging rustle in the bushes only a few meters to his right, as if a large animal was pushing its way through them.

He stopped, and listened. For nearly thirty seconds he heard nothing at all, except for those wretched nutcrackers screeching at each other.
Arrrrrkkk!
Pause.
Arrrrkkk!
Pause.
Arrrrkkk!
Then, suddenly, there was more rustling in the bushes, and this time the bushes actually shook.

‘Borys!’ he shouted. ‘Borys!’

Borys pulled Diablik to a choking standstill. ‘What is it? What is wrong?’

‘There’s something in the bushes here! It sounds like an animal!’

‘OK, I will come take a look.’

‘Sparks!’ called Jack. ‘Wait up a moment! Krystyna! Lidia! Wait up!’

Borys came over and peered into the bushes. He also unreeled more of Diablik’s leash so that Diablik could take a sniff around.

‘If there is any animal there, Diablik will find it.’

‘It sounded pretty big,’ said Jack. ‘For a moment there, all of those bushes were going totally crazy.’

Now Krystyna came over to join them, with Lidia following closely behind.

‘Have you found anything?’ she asked.

Jack said, ‘I thought I heard some kind of animal in the bushes, but I guess it must have gone by now, whatever it was.’

‘No,’ said Borys. Just to make sure, he poked into the bushes with his shotgun. ‘No, there is nothing here now.’

He wound in Diablik’s leash, and then he said, ‘Maybe this is a good time anyhow for us to stop and take a rest. Like I say, your friend’s trail is still very clear. I am sure that we will find out where he went.’

They sat down on the ground in a small sunlit clearing and Krystyna passed around bottles of water and Grze
ś
ki chocolate wafer bars. Sparky still looked preoccupied and so after a while Jack said, ‘Penny for ’em, Sparks.’

‘What? Oh, nothing.’

‘Is there something you’ve seen in one of your star charts?’

A tiny red spider was crawling across Sparky’s bare knee. Sparky held his finger poised over it as if he were about to squash it, but then he pursed his lips and gently blew it away.

‘My star charts aren’t always one hundred per cent accurate,’ he said, solemnly.

‘Well, yes, I understand that,’ said Jack. ‘Astrology is not what you call an exact science, is it?’

‘I have to rely on stars and planets, Dad – that’s the trouble. The nearest star is Alpha Centauri which is four-point-three-six light years away, and the nearest planet is Venus which is twenty-five-point-five million miles away, so it’s not surprising if I sometimes get things wrong.’

‘Have you made some prediction that you
want
to be wrong?’

Sparky looked at Jack with an expression that said
you know me too well, don’t you
? In spite of the fact that he found it so hard to read other people’s expressions, he was never able to hide his own feelings. Not from Jack, anyhow.

‘He’s dead,’ he said. ‘That’s what my star chart told me.’

‘You mean Robert, this guy we’re looking for?’

Sparky nodded. ‘I don’t know how, or where, but I think he must be dead. The signs are all there.’

Jack said, ‘OK. But let’s keep this to ourselves for the moment, shall we? I don’t want to upset Krystyna and then find out that he’s
not
dead, after all.’

There was a long pause, and then, ‘You like Krystyna, don’t you, Dad?’

‘Yes, Sparks, I do. But don’t jump the gun. I haven’t fallen in love with her. Not yet – even if I ever do. When I fell in love with your mom, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. That hasn’t happened yet.’

‘I don’t
mind
, you know, if you do fall in love with her.’

Affectionately, Jack scruffed up Sparky’s hair. ‘Come on, we’d better get going. It’s a quarter of four already. But you won’t say a word, will you, about Robert? Not until we find him.
If
we find him.’

He stood up. As he did so, there was another rustling sound in the bushes about thirty meters off to his left. All of them heard it this time – Krystyna and Lidia and Borys, too. Diablik pricked up his ears and let out a short, sharp bark.

A nutcracker cried out
Arrrrkkkkk!
and
Arrrkkkk!
After that, there was a moment’s utter silence, not even the breeze stirring the tops of the trees. Then suddenly there was an explosive noise of branches breaking and leaves shaking, and the bushes shook violently from side to side as something ran through them. It must have been at least as large as a warthog – maybe even bigger.

‘Go get it, boy!’ said Borys, and reached down to unfasten Diablik’s leash. But Sparky yelled out, ‘
No!
’

‘What’s the matter,
chłopcze
?’ Borys asked him. ‘Diablik is a match for anything – even a lynx!’

‘
That isn’t a lynx!
’ Sparky screamed at him.

‘OK, OK! It isn’t a lynx! So what is it?’

‘I don’t know, but please – you mustn’t let Diablik go!’

Borys turned to Krystyna and shrugged. Krystyna said, ‘Keep him on the leash, Borys. Whatever it is, we don’t want him running off after it, do we? Let’s find Robert first.’

The bushes rustled again, a little further away, and even further to the left. All of them looked at each other apprehensively.

‘Lynx, I will bet you money,’ said Borys. ‘Lynx or an elk. They’re both very shy.’

The five of them spread out again, although not as widely as they had to begin with. Up above the trees the sky was still blue, but the sun was gradually beginning to sink, and the shafts of light that shone through the forest were now slanting diagonally. The air was becoming cooler, too, and different birds were starting to sing – warblers and thrushes.

Jack began to sense a strange atmosphere in the forest. Now that night was approaching, he felt that all of the undiscovered bodies buried beneath the forest floor were beginning to stir. Although so many bodies had been exhumed after the war, it was still believed that there were hundreds more whose graves had never been found. He could almost imagine a hand reaching up from out of the sandy soil and grabbing his ankle, in a desperate appeal for its owner to be dug up.

Diablik plowed on, his head down, sniffing and snorting as he followed Robert’s trail. The trees began to thin out, and eventually they reached an open clearing, about three hundred meters wide, with white sand dunes and wild grass. Krystyna came across to Jack and checked her enormous wristwatch. ‘Sixteen-twenty. We’ve covered almost six kilometers now. Borys says that Robert’s footprints in the sand are quite deep, so he was still running by the time he got here. But Robert wasn’t very fit, you know. He never played any sports and he liked his beer. I don’t know how long he could have kept it up.’

‘I guess it depends what was after him. Or what he
imagined
was after him.’

‘Your son is very quiet. Is he all right?’

‘Sparky? Yes, he’s OK. He’s always been kind of introspective.’

‘Why do you call him Sparky? Is there a reason?’

‘Oh, that started when he was about two years old. We took him out to stay with his cousins in the country, outside of a town called Dekalb. At night, of course, you can look up and the whole sky is filled with stars, not like the city, where it’s all light-pollution. He thought they were sparks, like sparks from a barbecue. “Sparks! Sparks!” I don’t know if that’s what started him off being so interested in astrology.’

They were still talking when they heard more rustling from the bushes up ahead of them, where the pines grew thicker again. This was a loud, frantic rustling, which sounded as if somebody had seized hold of the bushes in both hands and was violently shaking them.

‘I don’t believe
that
can be an animal,’ said Krystyna. ‘What kind of animal could do that?’

‘I think you’re probably right,’ Jack told her. ‘Borys! You want to bring Diablik? Let’s find out what the hell that is!’

‘Don’t let him off the leash, though!’ Krystyna cautioned him. ‘We don’t want to lose him!’

Jack and Borys started to clamber and slide over the steeply sloping dunes, heading toward the bushes at the fringe of the forest. When Sparky saw where they were going, he shouted out, ‘Dad!
No
, Dad! Dad – there’s nothing there!’

Jack turned around and waved to him. ‘It’s OK, Sparks! We’ll be fine!’

If there’s nothing there
,
he thought,
then there’s nothing for us to worry about. But if there
is
something there, and it’s aggressive, then Borys has his shotgun
.

A
s they approached the bushes, however, the shaking abruptly stopped, and the forest was silent again. Even the songbirds had stopped twittering. It was growing gloomier, too. Not only was the sun sinking, it had disappeared behind a dark bank of cumulus cloud which was rising up from the south-west with almost unnatural rapidity, like a speeded-up movie.

Jack and Borys turned to each other, wondering if they ought to continue, but Diablik kept on whining and straining at his leash and he was obviously pining to go after whatever it was that had been causing all of that commotion in the undergrowth.

‘What do you think?’ said Jack.

Borys shrugged. ‘Like your son says, it’s probably nothing. But … OK… . let’s take a quick look, anyhow, just to make sure.’

They followed Diablik through the tangle of bushes and into the trees. It was still silent here, and shadowy, too, and the forest was growing chilly. Jack stopped for a moment, and looked around, and Borys looked around, too, hefting up his shotgun.

‘I don’t see anything,’ said Jack. ‘If there
was
anything here, it’s either gone, or it’s hiding. I vote we go back and pick up Robert’s trail again before it gets too goddamned dark.’

As he turned around to go back, however, he thought he glimpsed a white shape, running between the trees. He turned around again, and peered into the forest, frowning, but it had vanished.

Borys said, ‘What? You saw something?’

‘I don’t know. It could have been an elk. But it was white. It reminded me of something we saw in the forest in Michigan.’

Borys stayed still for a few seconds, his head lifted, listening intently. After a while, he said, ‘No. If it had been an elk, or any other animal, I would have been able to hear it.’

‘What about a human?’