Forest Ghost (25 page)

‘I promise. And you just let me know how you’re getting on, anyhow, even if you don’t have any news.’

He kissed her, and she kissed him back. They held each other for a moment, and then she gave him a little smile and said, ‘
Dobranoc
, Jack. Have a safe journey.’

He went outside with her and waited until the doorman hailed a taxi. Then he stood on the sidewalk and watched the taxi disappear into the traffic. Suddenly, he felt alone again.

T
hey had been flying for more than seven hours when he heard the first whisper. They had eaten lunch and then watched a new Johnny Depp movie and now the cabin lights had been lowered and most of the passengers had settled down to sleep or to read or to work on their laptops.

Sparky was resting his head against Jack’s shoulder and was fast asleep, breathing through his mouth. Jack had closed his eyes but his mind was jumbled with too many thoughts and images and contradictory feelings for him to sleep. He kept thinking about the forest, and the rustling of leaves, and the blinding white figure he had seen in the hotel bathroom, and then about Krystyna.

He put on his headset and listened to classic pop hits for a while – Bruce Springsteen and Dr Hook and Leon Russell. He had only been listening for a few minutes, however, when his headset abruptly went dead, and then started softly to crackle, like static.

He was about to call the flight attendant and ask for a new headset when an urgent voice whispered, ‘
Jack – słyszysz mnie?
’

Immediately, he plucked off his headset as if it had given him an electric shock. The gray-haired man sitting in the aisle seat opposite stared at him dubiously, and kept on staring at him.

It was that woman again, that woman who sounded just like Aggie. The same woman he had heard in his head at the Tamara Thorne’s séance, and both he and Sparky had heard on the telephone in their hotel bedroom. Or maybe it really was Aggie, trying to talk to him from God alone knew where. Can people really get in touch with you, from beyond? Can people really talk to you, from heaven? Aggie was lying in a casket in Saint Boniface Cemetery, two years dead. How could she speak to him now?

Cautiously, he picked up the headset again and held one speaker about an inch away from his ear. He could hear more static, and then that whisper again.

‘
Jack – słyszysz mnie? Jack – you have to find them – they’re buried
…’

He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to go on listening but then he didn’t want to stop listening, either. However surrealistic it was to hear Aggie speaking to him through an airplane headset, two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic and thirty-five thousand feet in the air, it was still Aggie, and he still loved her, even if she was dead. The sound of her voice tightened up his throat so much that if anybody had asked him right then if anything was wrong, he wouldn’t have been able to answer.

‘
Jack – can you hear me? They’re buried – they’re buried where the path divides three ways.
’

I’ve been there, sweetheart
, he thought.
I’ve seen them. But right now there’s nothing I can do. First of all I have to take Sparky to Owasippe, as much as I don’t want to. Maybe then I’ll know what I’m up against, and how to go back to the witch’s-head rocks without panicking.

‘
Jack – can you hear me?
Słyszysz mnie, Jack?
’

She kept on whispering to him, but her voice was rapidly becoming fainter, and the static was growing thicker and louder. He heard only one more word before she was swallowed up altogether.

‘–
dependant …
’

He pressed the headset hard against his ear, but she was gone, and almost immediately the music came back. Queen, singing ‘Somebody to Love’. The gray-haired man in the aisle seat opposite was still staring at him. Jack gave him a quick, reassuring smile, even though he thought the man looked like a lizard.

Sparky stirred, and opened his eyes, and looked up at him.

‘What’s wrong?’ he said, and sat up straight.

‘Nothing’s wrong. Why?’

‘You look like you’ve been crying.’

Jack wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘It’s this pressurized air. Always makes my eyes water.’

Sparky kept on looking at him as if he didn’t believe him, but then Jack checked his watch and said, ‘Don’t worry. Only three more hours to go, and we’ll be landing. What do you want to eat tonight?’

‘Pizza. Or kebab. Nothing Polish. I’ve had enough Polish.’

Although they had left Warsaw just after midday and flown for over ten hours, it was only a few minutes past four in the afternoon when they arrived back at Nostalgia. Tomasz was there to greet them, and Duane helped them to carry their suitcases inside.

‘So, good trip?’ he asked Jack. ‘You find out what you want to find out?’

‘Not really.’ He wasn’t ready yet to tell anybody about their grisly expedition into the Kampinos Forest. ‘To be honest with you, I wish we’d never gone.’

‘Everything here has run just like clockworks. No problems at all. Except next week we have public health inspection.’

‘That’s OK. We got that dishwasher fixed, didn’t we?’

‘Everything is fine. I even got Piotr to clean all grease from ventilator.’

‘Good for you, Tomasz. I’ll make sure you get a bonus for taking care of things while I was away. And I may have to go away again this weekend, but only for a day – maybe two at the most.’

‘That is fine, Boss. Don’t worry. Oh – before I forget …’

He went to his maitre d’ stand and came back with a page torn from one of the check pads. Tamara Thorne had scrawled her address on it:
1961 West Schiller Street, Wicker Park
,
as well as her telephone number and her cell number.
Underneath she had written:
Call me, another message has come through for you!!!

‘Thanks, Tomasz,’ he said, and gave him an approving clap on the back. Then he went through to the kitchen to see how Mikhail and Piotr and Duane were prepping for this evening’s service. Piotr and Duane were furiously chopping carrots and mushrooms and celeriac, while Mikhail was standing over the stove stirring a large saucepan.

‘Ah, Boss, you have come back just at the right moment!’ said Mikhail. ‘Taste this soup, tell me what you think.’

He handed Jack a ladle brimming with a brownish, spicy-smelling soup, with macaroni and beans and slices of frankfurter in it. Jack blew on it two or three times to cool it, and then tasted it. It was highly seasoned – peppery, garlicky and smoky – like Aggie’s cooking used to be.

‘You like that?’ asked Mikhail. ‘Uhlan bean soup. My aunt used to make it.’

‘It’s great. Put it on tonight, as a special. We may even include it as a regular. Jesus – one bowl of that and you wouldn’t have to eat anything else for a week!’

Mikhail gave a self-satisfied grin. But then, as Jack turned to leave, he said, ‘The stuffed cabbage, with the tomato?’

‘Yes, what of it?’

‘This week I have very many compliments. So, after all … maybe your Slovak recipe is not so bad. I withdraw my objection.’

Jack left the kitchen and went upstairs. Sparky was in his room, unpacking and hanging his jeans back in his closet. Jack stood by the door and watched him for a moment and thought how lonely he looked. Not only had he lost his mother; he was locked inside a mind that could only see the world literally, without any of its subtleties and slyness. He even took the stars and the planets at face value, and believed everything that they predicted.

He went through to the living room, picked up the phone and punched out Tamara Thorne’s home number. It rang and rang, and eventually a crackly message said, ‘This is Tamara Thorne … I am otherwise engaged at the moment, but if you wish me to contact your loved ones for you, or give you any other kind of spiritual service, please leave your name and number.’

Jack tried her cellphone, and this time she answered immediately, almost as if she had been waiting for him to call her.

‘It’s Jack Wallace. I’m back home now. You left me a message.’

‘I did, yes. It’s
most
extraordinary! Somebody has been trying to get in touch with you from the other side. They sounded quite desperate.’

‘Really? Do you know who it is?’

‘She gave me a name but I couldn’t hear it clearly.’

‘It was a woman? Did she say what she wanted to tell me?’

‘No. But she said that she needed to speak to you as a matter of urgency.’

Jack was tired out and he could feel a headache coming on. He was beginning to think that his mind was coming apart at the seams. In the past three days he had seen three people who had killed themselves, horribly. He had seen a dazzling figure who wasn’t even there, and heard whispers and voices from people who were either dead or non-existent. Now he had an urgent message from beyond.

‘Jack?’ said Tamara Thorne. ‘Are you still there, Jack?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m still here.’

‘Don’t you want to hear this message? It could be critical. Spirits hardly ever try to get in touch with the living. It’s almost always the other way around.’

‘Well, OK, Ms Thorne. When can we meet?’

‘Right now, if you like. I’m here with Bindy, at The Bookworm.’

Jack closed his eyes for a moment. All he wanted to do was take a Tylenol, share a pizza with Sparky and then go to bed and sleep for eight hours. But if Tamara Thorne was just around the corner, he supposed that he could manage to go and find out what it was that this spirit had to tell him, whoever she was. If he didn’t, he would probably lie awake all night.

‘Sparks,’ he said. ‘I’m just going out for a while. Not long. You want to order up that pizza? Any toppings you feel like, bar pineapple.’

Sparky said, ‘When are we going to Owasippe? Are we going tomorrow?’

‘I don’t know, Sparks. Let’s recover from this trip to Poland first. What do the stars say?’

‘I haven’t done them yet.’

‘Well, don’t. I think it’s about time we started making our own decisions.’

‘We never make our own decisions, Dad. Whatever we do, it’s down to the planets.’

Jack was beginning to believe him, but he didn’t say so. Right now he didn’t care what Mercury and Uranus were doing, whether they were rising or falling or square-dancing with the Sun; he was going to go see Tamara Thorne and then he was coming straight home to bed.

He left the restaurant and walked around the corner to The Bookworm. Bindy was in the storeroom, but as soon as she heard the doorbell ringing she came hurrying out, wearing a shapeless brown dress with a beige Peter Pan collar.

‘Jack! That was quick! Tamara’s in back, signing books for me. How was your trip?’

‘Not too happy, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, dear! I’m so sorry! What happened?’

‘I’ll tell you some other time, Bindy. Right now I’m bushed. I just came to see Tamara because she said it was urgent.’

‘I think it is,’ came Tamara’s voice from inside the storeroom. ‘In fact, I think it’s
dreadfully
urgent.’

Jack entered the storeroom. It smelled strongly of new books. Every shelf was crowded, and there were boxes of books stacked up on every side. Tamara Thorne was sitting at a small desk, with three stacks of her latest volume all around her, which she was halfway through signing. As before, her gray hair was braided into a crown, although today she was wearing a loose gray smock and a pair of baggy black linen pants, and silver sandals. Her fingernails and her toenails were all polished silver.

‘How are you, Jack?’ she said, lifting her hand to him so that her bangles and bracelets all slid down to her elbow. ‘Did I hear you say that your trip to Poland wasn’t a happy one?’

Bindy dragged over a molded plastic chair so that Jack could sit down. ‘Would you like a coffee, or a cup of tea? Or I have some wine left over from the other evening, if you feel like something stronger.’

‘No thanks, Bindy. I’m not staying. I just came to pick up this urgent message from beyond the grave.’

Tamara raised one immaculately plucked eyebrow. ‘I hope you’re not mocking me, Jack.’

‘No – honestly, I’m not,’ Jack told her. ‘I’ve had a difficult few days, that’s all. In fact I think I’m more inclined to believe you now than I was the first time.’

‘You’ve seen things? You’ve heard things?’

Jack nodded. ‘Don’t ask me to explain them, because I can’t.’

‘You don’t have to, Jack. I can feel the disturbance all around you. Your aura is in chaos. You’ve triggered some force of nature – some really extraordinary force. That’s why this spirit has been trying to get in touch with you – to warn you, possibly, of what you’ve set in motion.’

‘It’s not
dangerous
, is it?’ asked Bindy, biting her lip.

‘It’s beyond dangerous,’ said Tamara Thorne. ‘I’ve never felt anything quite like it. I have no idea what it actually is. It feels very
old
, but it also feels very strange. Perhaps your message will tell us more about it.’

‘OK, then,’ said Jack. ‘How do we go about hearing it?’

Tamara Thorne shifted the stacks of books aside. ‘Take hold of my hands, Jack, and close your eyes, and try to think of nothing at all. Think of emptiness. Think of a vacuum. Think of floating in space, but a space without stars.’

Jack reached across the desk and took hold of Tamara Thorne’s hands. They were surprisingly warm, and for some reason he found her grasp was both relaxing and comforting. It was like holding the hands of somebody of whom he was very fond – a mother or a sister or a friend or even a lover. He was beginning to see why Tamara Thorne was so good at empathizing with people’s emotional needs.

He closed his eyes and tried to think of nothing. To begin with, all he could think of was Mikhail’s bean soup, because he could still taste it.

‘Is your mind empty?’ Tamara Thorne asked him.

‘Not totally empty, no. I’m thinking of soup.’

‘Forget soup. Think of silence. Think of darkness. Think of floating.’

He thought of silence. He thought of darkness. He thought of floating. His mind was almost empty when Bindy coughed and shifted herself on the carton of books she was sitting on, and broke his concentration.