Forest Ghost (22 page)

‘What did he say to you?’ asked Sparky.

‘He thinks that you’re hiding something.’

‘Hiding something? Like, what?’

‘How should I know, if you’re hiding it? But if you must know, I agree with him.
I
think you’re hiding something, too.’

Sparky slumped down in his chair and sucked at his straw. Jack waited for him to respond to him, but he didn’t. Jack glanced across at Krystyna but all Krystyna could do was make a face that meant: ‘
Kids, what can you do?
’

‘You’re not flying back to the States tonight, are you?’ she asked him.

‘No … and in any case, there are no more direct flights out today. I’m hoping to get a decent night’s rest tonight, God willing. We’ll have to make an early start tomorrow, though. There’s a Lot flight around seven-fifty in the morning.’

‘Why don’t you stay one more day?’ Krystyna suggested. ‘Can you do that, or is it impossible? I would like so much to talk to you some more about what happened in the forest. In fact, I think I need to. It was so disturbing. Also, I could arrange for us to meet Professor Guzik.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jack. ‘I’ve left my manager in charge of my restaurant and this is one of the busiest times of the year.’

‘
Please
,’ Krystyna pleaded with him. He looked at her and he thought that her eyes were exactly the same gray as Lake Michigan on a rainy afternoon.

‘OK, I’ll try,’ Jack told her. ‘I’ll have to make a few phone calls, but I’ll try. You don’t mind staying one more day, do you, Sparks?’

Sparky took his straw out of his mouth and said, suspiciously, ‘Who’s Professor Guzik when he’s at home?’

He called Tomasz at six twenty-five that evening. In Chicago it was eleven twenty-five in the morning, just before Nostalgia opened for lunch.

‘Tomasz, how are things going?’

‘Fine, Boss, fine! No problems! When you come back?’

‘I was hoping to stay one more day, if that’s OK with you.’

‘Sure, fine. Stay so long as you like. Everything going good. I have usual argument with Bobak’s about sausage delivery, short again on
kiełbasa
, but otherwise everything good.’

‘Great. I’ll see you Saturday, then.’

‘Before you go, you have visitor this morning. I was going to text you.’

‘A visitor? Who was it?’

‘Very tall skinny woman. Gray hair like twisty bread. She leave her number for you. Wait up, and I will find it.’

‘No, don’t worry, Tomasz. I think I know who it was. Tamara Thorne.’

‘That is correct. Tamara What-you-say. Yes. She say she need to speak with you.’

‘Did she say what about?’

‘All she say was, she have important message for you.’

‘She didn’t say who the message was from?’

‘No. Just important message.’

‘OK, Tomasz. Thanks.’

Jack hung up. Sparky was sitting on the couch in front of the TV, playing
Aliens:
Colonial Marines
. The last time Jack had been given a message through Tamara Thorne, it had come from Aggie – or, at least, it was supposed to have come from Aggie – and it had led him and Sparky here, to Poland, and into the Kampinos Forest. He didn’t like the sound of this at all. He supposed that he could have asked Tomasz to give him Tamara Thorne’s number, and called her, but he would rather delay hearing what her message was until he got back to Chicago. Usually, he only felt comfortable if he was in charge of things, but here in Warsaw he felt that he had lost his oars and was being carried along by the current.

‘Early night, tonight, buddy,’ he told Sparky.

Sparky didn’t answer, but kept on shooting his smartgun at aliens.

‘And none of that whispering tonight, if you don’t mind. I badly need my sleep.’

Sparky frowned at him irritably, as if he had no right to ask him that, and then went back to his game.

J
ack slept, and dreamed about Aggie. It was a windy afternoon in early fall, and they were walking through the woods, with red and yellow leaves whirling all around them. At the moment the woods were sunny, but in the distance the sky was almost black and threatened an electric storm. Aggie was wearing a long white dress of billowing chiffon with a bow at the back, and she was walking very fast so that Jack was having difficulty keeping up with her.

Aggie!
But she wouldn’t turn around, and kept on walking faster and faster.
Aggie! Agnieszka!

The wind was rising and the leaves were rustling louder and louder. He shouted again and again at Aggie to slow down so that he could catch up with her, but she didn’t seem to be able to hear him.
Aggie! Agnieszka!
But she walked so fast that within a very short time she had disappeared, and all he could see was a blizzard of leaves.

He slowed down, and then stopped. He couldn’t imagine why she had walked away from like that. He knew that they hadn’t argued. Why had she left him?

The leaves continued to rustle, like interfering busybodies,
rustle, rustle, rustle
. But then he realized that it wasn’t the rustling of leaves that he could hear, but somebody whispering. Whoever it was, they were speaking too quickly and too softly for Jack to be able to make out what they were saying, although they sounded very urgent, and very secretive.

He opened his eyes. The bedroom was dark, but white light was dancing underneath the bathroom door, and he could see at once that Sparky was no longer lying next to him. He was in the goddamned bathroom again, god damn it, whispering and playing with the lights.

Jack heaved himself wearily out of bed and went up to the bathroom door. He listened for a while, but he still couldn’t understand what Sparky was saying. Like last night, his voice sounded very strange, as if two or three or even more of him were all whispering in chorus.

Jack wondered if he ought to knock and confront him again, or if he ought to leave him to whisper until he grew tired of it and came back to bed of his own accord. It had always worried him that Sparky’s difficulties in communicating with other people might lead him one day to explode with frustration and hurt somebody – or himself. Because of that, he always took care when Sparky had done something wrong to explain why he was disappointed with him, and not simply yell at him, although he often felt like it.

This time, he didn’t knock. He didn’t have to. He had replaced the bolt on the bathroom door where he had kicked it open last night, but only by pushing the screws loosely back into their holes, so that the chambermaid wouldn’t notice the damage.

He was about to go back to bed when the whispering suddenly began to grow louder, and even more urgent, and it began to sound malicious, too, with guttural noises that came from the back of the throat. Jack thought:
No, I can’t put up with any more of this. If I let Sparky go on whispering, who knows how long he’s going to go on for. It could be hours, and I might not get any sleep at all.

He pushed open the door, and as he did so the screws dropped out of the bolt-keeper and it fell to the floor with a clatter. ‘
Sparks!
’ he cried, but instantly the bathroom was flooded with dazzling white light, as if an A-bomb had detonated in total silence, and Jack had to hold his hand up in front of his eyes to stop himself from being blinded.

For a fraction of a second, he thought he saw a white figure standing in front of the basin, like some grotesque angel, although it was so bright that it was impossible to see it clearly. It seemed to have a face, which was turned toward him, with eye sockets that were nothing but shadows, and a dragged-down mouth, but that may have been nothing but an optical illusion. Jack was already seeing one after-image after another, amoebic green shapes that swam in front of his eyes, and which blotted out the figure altogether.

He was seized with such fear that he wet his pajamas. Warm piss, all the way down to his ankles. He lurched back, jarring his left shoulder on the door frame. Then he staggered back into the bedroom, rolled across the bed and headed for the sliding door that led through to the living room. In a series of frantic jerks, he managed to tug the door open, but he was panicking too much to think of sliding it shut behind him. All he could think of was getting away.

He stumbled to the windows. It was still dark outside, but twenty-seven floors below him the city was glittering with lights. Opposite, the Palace of Culture and Science was floodlit in green, like a huge rocket ship designed by a maker of wedding cakes, all ready on the launch pad. It made the night look even more surrealistic, and Jack felt completely dislocated from reality, as if he had woken up in a different world altogether, a science-fiction world of unrelenting terror, from which it was impossible for him to escape.

He tried to find a catch to open one of the windows, but they were all sealed. He would have jumped out, if he could. He thumped the glass with both of his fists, but it was toughened, and it didn’t even crack. Panting, he looked back toward the bedroom door and saw that the white light was flickering even more brightly, although it was more spasmodic than it had been before. The white figure was coming after him. God alone knew what it had done to Sparky.

He grasped the arms of the heavy black leather chair behind the desk, and lifted it up. He nearly lost his balance, but he managed to swing the chair around and hurl it at the windows, grunting with effort as he did so. It simply bounced off the glass with a loud bang and tumbled on to the floor.

Desperate, he looked around. He could go for the door that led out to the corridor, and then take the stairs or an elevator down to the lobby, if the white thing wasn’t following too close behind. But then he realized with a feeling that was right on the edge of madness that he didn’t want to. He had completely lost the instinct to save himself. It was the same utter hopelessness that had engulfed him in the woods at Owasippe, and in the Kampinos Forest. If anything it was even more overwhelming than that. He was terrified that the white thing was going to catch up with him, because he was sure that it would rip him apart while he was still alive, twisting his arms and legs right out of their sockets. At the same time he knew that trying to escape was futile. Even if it didn’t catch him tonight, it would catch him one day.

In a terrible flash of insight, he understood now why Robert had cut off his own feet.
He had done it to
prevent himself from running away
. Robert had understood that suicide was the only possible way out. If he killed himself, he would never be gripped by that panic again, ever. He would find peace, even if he didn’t find absolution.

Jack quickly went across to the coffee table in the middle of the living room, where there was a complimentary plate of fruit – apples and oranges and plums and pears. He picked up the fruit knife. It wasn’t very sharp, but it had a serrated edge. If he locked himself in the living-room toilet, he should be able to saw through his wrists, and then his throat, and open up enough arteries to bleed to death before the white figure could get to him.

He had already opened the toilet door and switched on the light when Sparky appeared in the bedroom doorway, naked again.

‘
Dad?
’ he said. His voice was soft and hoarse, as if he had a head cold.

Jack hesitated, and then took a step back. ‘What is it? Where’s that thing gone?’

‘There’s nothing here, Dad. Only me.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Sparks. I
saw
it. I saw it with my own eyes.’

Even as he said those words, though, he realized that his panic was already subsiding. There was a very long moment when neither of them said anything, but just stood and stared at each other. Gradually Jack began to get his breath back, and his heart stopped pounding. He looked down at the fruit knife he was holding and the idea of rasping his way through his wrists with it suddenly seemed ludicrous.

He switched off the toilet light and closed the door. Sparky was standing there, hugging himself and shivering. Even though Jack had tried to turn the temperature up, the air-conditioning was still unpleasantly chilly, and he was suddenly aware how wet and clinging his pajama pants were.

He walked past Sparky without saying a word and cautiously put his head around the bedroom door. There was no white thing in sight, and the only light was coming from the strip-light over the bathroom basin. He crossed over to the closet, hesitated for a moment, and then flung both doors open. No white thing in there, either.

‘I told you, Dad,’ said Sparky. ‘There’s nothing there.’

‘I saw it, Sparks! I saw it clear as day! It was like … I don’t know what the hell it was like. It was so goddamned bright I could hardly even look at it.’

‘There was only me in the bathroom, Dad.’

‘The lights were flashing on and off. And you were whispering, just like you did last night.’

‘No, Dad.’

‘Don’t tell me “no”, Sparks. I heard you, and I saw that thing with my own eyes. Why do you think I ran out of the room?’

‘Maybe you were hallucinating,’ Sparky suggested. ‘I read in
Psychology Today
that stress can do that to you sometimes.’

Jack was about to snap back at him, but from experience he knew that it was pointless. Sparky would go on repeating the same thing, over and over. ‘Maybe you were hallucinating. I read in
Psychology Today
that stress can do that to you sometimes.’ What the hell was a twelve-year-old doing, reading
Psychology Today
?

‘So why aren’t you wearing your pajamas?’ he demanded.

‘I was hot.’

‘You were
hot
? This goddamn air-conditioning is set to “igloo”.’

‘In bed I was hot. I took off my pajamas and then I went for a leak.’

Jack went back into the bathroom and took a look around. There was no evidence that anything unusual had happened here, although the mirror over the basin was faintly fogged over, and he was sure he could detect some faintly herbal odor, as if somebody had been burning sprigs of thyme. He sniffed, and closed his eyes for a moment to help him concentrate. If anything, the bathroom smelled like the forest, but it was probably just the hotel soap.