Forest Ghost (28 page)

‘That’s a pretty gruesome story.’

‘My grandpa had a whole lot like that. Do you know what? He said that when he died his spirit was going to go live in a tree, and I should walk around knocking on all of the trees and asking if he was in there. Can you imagine that?’

‘Quite a character, your grandpa.’

They drove due north for the next twenty minutes on Russell Road, with scrubby trees and bushes on either side. Sparky start mumbling again and drawing patterns on the window with his fingertip, as if he were drawing an invisible star chart. Jack decided to say nothing. Sparky was obviously stressed and the last thing he wanted to do was upset him even more.

Eventually the taxi driver turned into the scout reservation entrance and pulled up outside the main buildings. Jack handed him fifty dollars in bills, and he licked his thumb and counted them.

‘I didn’t mean to put you off none, you and your boy. Owasippe is a great spot really, and I don’t suppose Manito Sucsee Wabe really exists.’

‘What?’

‘The white albino deer. Its Potawatomi name is Manito Sucsee Wabe, which means “white deer spirit”.’

‘Really?’ said Jack, looking pointedly at Sparky. ‘Manito Sucsee Wabe?’

‘That’s the one,’ said the taxi driver. ‘My grandpa used to say that if you shot at it, and missed, you’d get sick. But if you shot at it and you actually hit it, that would be instant death – for
you
, not the deer. But there are all kinds of different stories. Some say that if you even go looking for it, you will go mad and kill yourself. One of my cousins thinks that’s what happened to those boy scouts. But then my cousin is pretty fond of his firewater, so we never set much store by what
he
has to say.’

They went inside the scout headquarters. Unlike the last time they had been there, the hallway was deserted and quiet, although from one of the offices they could hear the sound of somebody rattling away on a computer keyboard. It smelled strongly of cedarwood and dust, and all the floors looked gritty, as if they needed sweeping.

‘Is that what you were saying, on the plane?’ Jack asked Sparky. ‘Manito Sucsee Wabe?’

Sparky was looking at the noticeboard, with dozens of photographs of scout troops and camping parties pinned on to it.

‘Manito Sucsee Wabe,’ Jack repeated, coming up behind him and laying his hands on his shoulders. ‘The white deer spirit. How did you know about that?’

‘I didn’t. I don’t. Look – Malcolm’s in that picture. That must have been taken on the day that they committed suicide.’

‘You distinctly said it, on the plane, just after we landed. Manito Sucsee Wabe.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

At that moment, an office door opened and out came the bald bespectacled scout leader that Jack had encountered on the day that they had come to identify Malcolm’s body.

‘Can I help you?’ He blinked. It was obvious that he didn’t recognize them. ‘I’m afraid that we’re shut down here for the rest of the season. There won’t be any activities until winter camping in November.’

‘We were here last week,’ Jack told him. ‘My son’s friend was one of the scouts who died here. We just came back to see where he died and pay our respects.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir. I can’t let you do that. Owasippe is off limits to members of the public on account of liability insurance. If you and your boy went out there and broke your legs or something, you could sue us from here to Tuesday and we wouldn’t be covered.’

‘But we have to,’ said Sparky.

The scout leader shook his head. ‘Sorry, son. There’s no chance. The Chicago Area Council owns Owasippe and they won’t be budged. No unauthorized hiking, biking, picnicking, cookouts or camping. Especially after what happened here last week.’

‘But we
have
to,’ Sparky insisted.

The scout leader continued to shake his head. ‘Come on, Sparks,’ said Jack, laying his hand on his shoulder. ‘If they won’t let us in, they won’t let us in. There’s nothing we can do about it.’

‘
We have to!
’ Sparky shouted. His fists were clenched in frustration and his face was emptied of color. ‘Don’t you understand how
important
this is? You said it yourself, didn’t you?’

‘Hey, calm down there, son,’ said the scout leader. ‘Exactly
what
did I say?’

‘You said that there were things in the woods,’ said Sparky, and his voice was still trembling with anger. ‘You said that there were things in the woods and the things in the woods would fight back.’

‘Yes, well I meant it,’ said the scout leader. ‘Folks don’t understand that the woods have their own personality. Their own spirits, if you like to call them that. Anybody who treats a forest badly is going to suffer the consequences. Same with anything else in Nature. Lakes, mountains, oceans.’

‘We have to go into the woods,’ said Sparky. ‘We have to go in the woods and find them.’

Again the scout leader shook his head. ‘I’m truly impressed that you believe in such things, son. Most people who don’t know the forests think I’m talking out of my ass, if you’ll pardon my language. But I’ve felt them for myself, those spirits, when I’ve been out alone amongst the trees, and that feeling’s been stronger this season than it’s ever been before. Well – we’ve seen the results of that, and they were tragic.’

‘So you’ll let us go find them?’ Sparky asked him.

‘No, son. I told you. I can’t do that.’

‘Supposing we sign a waiver, holding you blameless if we do have an accident?’ Jack suggested.

‘Sorry, sir. Any smart lawyer can talk his way around a waiver. You hurt yourselves, or you die, then the CAC are going to be held liable. All those suicides … they’re already a legal nightmare. They could put this reservation out of business altogether, and it’s already touch-and-go, financially.’

‘You have to let us in,’ said Sparky, very quietly.

‘No, son. I don’t, and I won’t.’

‘
You have to let us in!
’ Sparky screamed at him. ‘
You have to let us in!
’

‘Sparks, for Christ’s sake!’ said Jack, and tried to grab his arm. But Sparky stalked stiff-legged right up to the scout leader and shouted straight into his face. His voice was an ear-splitting combination of a shriek and a roar, as if two people were shouting at the same time.

‘
You have to let us in! You have to let us in! You will die, if you don’t!
’

‘Sparks! That’s enough!’ Jack snapped at him.

But Sparky was almost incoherent with rage. He pushed the scout leader so hard that the man lost his balance and fell back against the notice board, and a shower of photographs and news clippings and thumbtacks dropped off it. Then he ran to the doors at the end of the hallway which gave out on to the balcony. He rattled one door, but it was locked, and then he rattled the next one, but that was locked, too.

‘
Sparks!
’ Jack shouted at him, and went striding after him. But just as he had almost reached him, Sparky opened one of the doors and escaped outside.

Jack went after him, but Sparky was already jumping down the steps three and four at a time, and as soon as he reached the bottom step he started running toward the trees. Jack followed him, holding on to the handrail in case he stumbled.

‘Sparks! Come back here! Sparks!’

Now the scout leader was out on the balcony. ‘You can’t go into the woods!’ he called out, his hands cupped around his mouth as if he were making an announcement to a crowd. ‘You – cannot – go – into – the – woods!’

J
ack ignored the scout leader and went running after Sparky as fast as he could. After a hundred meters, however, he was already gasping for breath, and his chest hurt. He hadn’t realized that he was so unfit, but the restaurant took up so much of his time that he had been forced to give up swimming and squash, and even the occasional jog along Montrose Drive, by the lake.

It was a glaringly bright afternoon, with only a thin cloud covering, but Sparky was wearing a dark khaki T-shirt and lighter khaki shorts, and as soon as he reached the tree line he disappeared altogether. Jack glimpsed his blond hair for an instant, but then he was gone. He thought:
shit
. When Sparky threw a tantrum there was no telling what he would do or where he would go.

If he had been mentally normal, Jack would never have given Sparky half so much latitude. Jack’s own father had always considered that a sharp smack on the
dupa
was the best way to deal with a young boy’s wilful behavior. Either that, or being sent up to bed with no supper. But Sparky was obsessive, and whatever he set out to do, he simply couldn’t stop until he had done it. If he couldn’t, he was liable to go into a seizure, almost like an epileptic fit.

Jack stopped when he reached the tree line, panting.

‘Sparks!’ he shouted out. ‘Sparky, for Christ’s sake come back! I’ll fix it for us, so that we can take a look around, I promise!’

By now the scout leader had caught up with him. He must have been in much better shape than Jack, because he wasn’t panting at all, although his bald bronze head was beaded with perspiration.

‘You’d best get that son of yours out of these woods, sir, or else there’s going to be serious trouble. It’s going to be my head on the block, for letting you in here, so let’s hope and pray that he doesn’t run into any trouble.’

‘Trouble like what? One of your forest spirits? Or a white deer spirit?’

‘Oh, you know about
that
?’ said the scout leader. He sounded surprised – and strangely, a little annoyed, as if nobody else should know about the white deer spirit but him. ‘That white deer spirit, that’s a Native American superstition. According to them, these forests used to be jam-packed with spirits. Standing room only, that’s what you’d think, the way they tell it, and the white deer spirit was the one who took care of them all.’

Jack said, ‘Listen – my son is kind of different. He has a form of Asperger’s syndrome. I don’t want to get you into any trouble but please let me go look for him. As soon as I find him, I’ll make sure that we leave. I promise.’

The scout leader puffed out his cheeks and wiped the perspiration from his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I could lose my job over this.’

‘No, you won’t. I’ll go find him and then we’ll leave and nobody else needs to know that we were here.’

The scout leader checked his wristwatch. ‘OK … I’ll give you a half-hour. After that, I’ll have to put in a call that I’ve seen some unauthorized intruders.’

‘Thanks,’ said Jack, and immediately started walking off into the forest. After a few yards he turned around to give the scout leader a wave of appreciation, but he was already making his way back toward the main building.

The forest seemed unusually silent. No breeze was stirring the upper branches of the pines, no blue jays or finches were chirruping. Jack walked straight ahead until he could no longer see the scout building behind him, and then he stopped and listened. Nothing. Not even a raccoon running furtively through the undergrowth.

‘Sparks!’ he called out. ‘Sparks, can you hear me? Where are you, Sparks?’

Silence. In fact the forest was so noiseless he could have believed that he had gone stone deaf.

‘Sparks! You have to come out of there, wherever you are! Come on, Sparks, we can work something out with these scout people!’

There was still no response. Jack carried on walking, but the deeper into the forest he went, the more concerned he became about getting himself lost. He looked up through the trees to see where the sun was, and it was almost directly ahead of him. At this time of the afternoon, he reckoned, he must be heading south-westward.

‘Sparks!
Sparks!
For Christ’s sake, Sparky, I’m beginning to lose my patience here!’

Still nothing, and so he continued walking. The ground in front of him began to slope downward, quite steeply, with rocky outcroppings on his right-hand side. They reminded Jack of the rocks in the Kampinos Forest, the rocks that resembled a witch, except that these rocks had fibrous tree-roots growing out of them like tendrils. If anything, they looked like some giant squid-creature that was trying to force its way out from under the soil.

‘Sparks!’ he shouted, yet again. He recognized where he was now, and it wasn’t too far from the pool where he had found the headless woman and her drowned companion. It was hard to believe that Sparky couldn’t hear him. The forest was so silent, and even if Sparky had been running, he couldn’t have run so far that he was out of earshot.

Jack slid down the slope until he was almost at the bottom, and then tripped on a root and stumbled. As he did so, he heard the strange squeaky little laugh of a bald eagle calling, as if it were mocking him. But when he steadied himself, and looked around, and listened, he began to realize why the eagle was calling, and it wasn’t because of him. He could distinctly hear a rustling sound in the bushes, and the trees were beginning to creak and whisper. The eagle had been alarmed by the sudden arrival of something else.

Please don’t let me start panicking. There’s nothing there
.

But the rustling continued – about seventy-five feet up ahead of him, he guessed – and the upper branches of the pine trees began to sway.
Tree talk
.

Don’t panic. There’s nothing there. Sparky had said that there was nothing there. But what was “nothing”? “Nothing” could mean exactly that – no thing, no physical thing, but a spirit, or a ghost. A
Waldgeist
, or a
nish-gite
, or a white deer spirit.

‘Sparks!’ he shouted, although a warmish breeze was rising, and it swallowed his shout as soon as it came out of his mouth, as if it fed on shouts. ‘Sparks, where the hell are you?’

Off to his left, behind the trees, he thought he saw something white. It was running, or dancing, or maybe it was nothing more than sunlight, playing on the tree trunks. But then he saw it flickering again, farther away, and farther off to his left; and then again. He stood still, uncertain what he ought to do next. Should he go after it? Should he try and corner it, and try to see what it actually was?