Forest Ghost (29 page)

He was telling himself to be rational, and calm; but in spite of that he could feel his mouth drying up and a slow crawling sensation up his back. He was starting to panic. He knew that he was starting to panic, even though he had seen nothing more than an indistinct white figure which had probably been nothing more dangerous than a startled white deer.

You are not going to panic. There is nothing here. And even if there
is
something here, don’t you remember what that headless girl told you
?

‘
It was frightened, Jack. It was
frightened.
It was even more frightened than we were.’

What if she was right? What if the panic he was feeling was only the spirit’s own fear, which he was picking up somehow, like the panic spreads in a nightclub when the stage catches fire, or those hundreds of panicking pilgrims who were crushed underfoot at Mecca?

But thinking it about it rationally didn’t seem to help. He began to sweat, and breathe more quickly, and he felt a pain around his chest, like a tight metal band. He began to think, too, that the forest wasn’t real, and that he was only imagining that he was here. He even began to think that
he
wasn’t real – classic symptoms of panic disorder.

I have to get out of here
, he thought.
But what about Sparky? Sparky’s in there someplace, amongst the trees. Supposing he’s feeling as panicky as I am? I have to control myself. I have to find him, no matter how scared I am.

He kept on walking forward, although he had no real idea of where he was going, and he found it difficult to keep his balance. It was like being drunk. He heard another sharp rustling amongst the bushes, but this time it was close behind him, not ahead of him. He twisted around, and this time he did lose his balance, and fell awkwardly on to his knees, as if he were praying in church. There was something there, he was sure of it. Something cruel beyond all imagination, which wanted to pull him apart. Something which was going to press its thumbs into his eye sockets until his eyeballs popped, and then split open his chest so that his lungs bulged out. It would plunge its hands into his intestines and heave them out of his pelvis and dump them on to the forest floor. And all the time that it was tearing him apart like this, he would still be conscious – still alive, but screaming in unbearable pain, and knowing, worst of all, that he was far beyond saving, that he was inevitably going to die.

He managed to climb back on to his feet and brush himself down.
You’re acting like a fool
, he told himself.
Go find Sparky and then get out of here. Even if there is something hiding itself behind those trees, it hasn’t had the nerve to come out and attack you yet, has it? Maybe she was right, that headless girl.

‘The howling angel. The thing that you call the Forest Ghost, the
nish-gite
. It was frightened
.
’

At that moment, though, he heard a rushing noise, and it was coming closer – fast. For a split-second, he couldn’t think what it was – but then a wind suddenly blew through the forest like a bomb blast. Leaves and dust and twigs and pine needles came whirling through the trees like a blizzard, and Jack had to close his eyes tightly to prevent himself from being blinded. The trees began to creak again, in a terrible off-key chorus, and the birds started screeching. He felt as if the entire forest was telling him to get out, and to run for his life.

He panicked, utterly, in exactly the same way that he had panicked in the Kampinos Forest. He started to run, not even knowing which way he was running. He could hear his sneakers crunching on the forest floor, and he could hear himself panting. He could even hear the blood rushing through his ears. But his sense of detachment was extraordinary. If he hadn’t left his clasp-knife at home, he would have stopped running and cut his throat here and now, just to get it all over with, and save himself the agony of being dismembered.

There were no cliffs here that he could throw himself from, and the nearest lake in which he could drown himself was still a good three-quarters of a mile away. All he could do was run, and run, and pray that the white thing didn’t catch up with him.

The wind was now blowing so hard against his back that he kept staggering forward and almost fell flat on his face. Three or four times he collided with tree trunks, and he began to wonder if he could beat his head against a tree hard enough to crack his skull, and kill himself. But how long would that take – and would the white thing have caught up with him before he could lose consciousness?

He had no idea which direction he was heading. For all he knew, he was running further and further into the forest, and he could get irrevocably lost, if the white thing didn’t tear him apart first. The wind was blowing too strongly for him to stop and try to get his bearings from the sun, and for all he knew the white thing was only a few meters behind him, breathing down his neck.

He collapsed on to his knees again, and crouched there for a moment, his heart thumping, gasping for air. If the white thing jumped on him now, there was nothing he could do about it. After a while, though, he managed to climb up on to his feet again, and continue running, although he was lurching from side to side like a man on the deck of a storm-tossed ship.

Oh God, it’s no good. Oh God, it’s going to get me. Oh God, please don’t let it get me.

He was close to the point at which he could no longer put one leg in front of the other when he suddenly saw the flag flying above the tree tops. The Stars and Stripes, idly curling and uncurling in the afternoon sunlight. It was the flag that flew over the scout headquarters and he knew that he had nearly reached sanctuary.

He hobbled and jogged alternately the rest of the way. As he approached the scout building, he could feel the wind dying down. A few last leaves flew around him, but as the wind dropped they pirouetted down to the ground, as if they were tired of chasing him. Now the forest was quiet again, except for Jack’s panting, and the crunch of his trainers on dry pine needles.

He reached the scout building and climbed the steps to the balcony. This time he didn’t use the handrail to steady himself, as he had when he was hurtling down the steps in pursuit of Sparky, but wearily to haul himself up. He opened the glass door and went back into the hallway. There was a row of chairs in a side alcove, and he sat down with his hands on his knees and his head bent, sweating and trembling and trying to get his breath back.

His panic was gradually subsiding. He was already beginning to think how absurd it had been, for him to run away like that. What was it that had terrified him so much he had considered bashing his own brains out against a tree?

Nothing
. And yet this
nothing
could create such panic that it was known almost everywhere, all around the world. Some people said it looked like a ghost. Others said it was an angel, or a cougar, or a white albino deer, or the great god Pan, with the body of a man and the legs of a goat. But Jack now believed beyond question that they were all manifestations of one and the same nothing. It was simply the panic people felt in isolated forests, no matter where they were. Here at Owasippe; or in the Kampinos Forest; or the Mato Grosso.

Although his chest was still rising and falling with effort, he stood up and went across to the scout leader’s office. He had almost reached it when the door opened and Undersheriff Porter came out, followed by Sally and the scout leader himself.

‘Hey, Jack!’ Sally smiled. ‘I was hoping you would still be here!’ But then she frowned at him and said, ‘Are you OK? You look terrible! What’s happened?’

‘It’s Sparky,’ said Jack. He told them quickly how Sparky had thrown a temper-tantrum and run off into the forest.

‘So you couldn’t find him? But my God, what have you been doing to
yourself
? You’re covered in dirt and pine needles and you look absolutely
bushed
!’

‘I had one of those panic attacks, Sal, like I did before. I couldn’t find Sparky. I called him and called him but he didn’t answer. Then I just lost it. I saw that white figure again, behind the trees, and the wind started to blow, and I panicked. I can’t describe it to you. You feel like you’d rather kill yourself than let that thing get you, and that’s what happened to all of those scouts, I’m sure of it.’

‘We’d better go look for Sparky,’ said Sally. ‘Dan – if we can’t find him directly, will you be able to call for some back-up?’

‘I’ll come outside with you and take a look-see,’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘If it seems like he’s genuinely lost I can get in touch with the forest rangers and rustle up a search party. We’ve done it here before, quite a few times. Don’t you worry, sir. We’ll find him. We never failed to find anybody yet, even when it took us a little time – and even when they didn’t
want
us to find them.’

‘I just hope that nothing’s happened to him,’ the scout leader put in. ‘I mean, if he’s been injured, the CAC are going to be held liable for it.
’

‘Let’s start worrying about the kid’s welfare before we start worrying about the insurance claim, shall we?’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘How long ago since he went missing?’

‘Thirty, thirty-five minutes,’ said Jack. ‘But I really think we need to be careful. I mean, I don’t think I panicked for nothing.’

‘You said you saw something before, the last time you were here. Something white, you said.’

‘I saw the same thing today.’

‘But you still don’t know what it was?’

‘No idea, Sheriff. A ghost, a deer, a spirit, a cougar. Jason Voorhees in his hockey mask, who knows? That’s what I’ve been trying to find out. That’s the whole reason that Sparky and I came here today.’

‘Oh, so that’s it!’ said the scout leader. ‘You didn’t come here to pay your respects after all!’

Undersheriff Porter turned to the scout leader and said, ‘It doesn’t matter two hoots
why
they came, Ambrose. All that matters is that we find this kid before it gets dark. Now, you know this forest better’n any of us. Do you want to make some suggestions as to which way he might have headed?’

‘I think he may have headed toward Lake Wolverine,’ said Jack. ‘That’s where his friend killed himself, and that’s where we had our first panic attack.’

‘OK, let’s drive there now and see if we can maybe head him off. You don’t have to come with us, sir, if you don’t feel up to it.’

‘No, I want to come,’ Jack told him. ‘If anybody can calm Sparky down, then it’s me. But I will say one thing. If any of the three of us start to feel panicky – even the slightest bit panicky – we need to do a U-turn and get the hell out of there. I really mean that. That panic is like a kind of madness. You lose all sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.’

Sally took hold of Jack’s hand and patted it. ‘We’ll be fine, Jack. I promise you. I never panicked in my life. I was kidnapped by three crack addicts once, and held hostage until their friend was sprung from jail. I never panicked once. What was the point? We ended up playing poker together, and I won eleven bucks.’

‘I don’t think you understand what this thing is like,’ said Jack. ‘Well – I hope you never do.’

They went around to the side of the building, where Undersheriff Porter’s Jeep was parked. The scout leader followed them, looking deeply unhappy.

‘It’s OK, Ambrose,’ Undersheriff Porter told him. ‘You know and I know that there’s no such thing as ghosts.’

The scout leader said nothing, but looked at Jack, and the expression on his face said it all.
You know and I know that there may not be ghosts in that forest, not even Chief Owasippe and his two dead sons. But there are spirits of some kind, because we’ve seen them, and they’re terrifying – more terrifying than words can describe
.

‘I’m going to have to call this in,’ he said, miserably.

‘You do that, Ambrose. But we’ll be back before you know it, and we’ll have this gentleman’s son with us, too.’

T
hey drove along the forest track toward Lake Wolverine. As he drove, Undersheriff Porter asked Jack to remind him what Sparky looked like, and tell him what he was wearing, and why he had run off into the forest.

Jack said, ‘He needs to understand why his best friend killed himself. He’s compulsive about it. They were bosom buddies, those two. Sparky’s a little off-center, if you know what I mean, and Malcolm was kind of a dweeb, God rest his soul, so both of them found it hard to make any other friends at school.’

‘Sure, I see,’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘Well – when we find him, I think I may be able to enlighten him. Our crime scene people re-examined the area where the bodies were discovered, and they came up with an explanation for what happened that so far seems the most plausible. That’s why I asked Detective Faulkner here to come back and take a look.

‘We know that there was no wacky quasi-religious cult thing going on in that particular scout group; and also that there was no sexual exploitation, nor bullying, neither. They were the normalest bunch of kids you could hope to meet, and their group leaders were all straight arrows, too.

‘But less than twenty feet away from where their bodies were found, there was a wide charred patch which we had originally assumed was the remains of their campfire. I mean – scouts, campfire, logical conclusion. But one of our deputies pointed out that it was pretty unusual for scouts to light a campfire that early in the day. They were supposed to be out orienteering, so they wouldn’t have lit a campfire and left it unattended.

‘When our forensics people took a closer look at this so-called campfire site, they found that there was no wood-ash, and that the ground-covering and surrounding vegetation had simply been subjected to intense heat. In fact it had all the characteristics of a major lightning strike.’

‘OK,’ said Jack, ‘they were nearly struck by lightning. But that wouldn’t have made them commit suicide, would it?’

‘It may well have,’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘Even though none of them were hit directly, they may all have received what they call a secondary strike through the ground. Now, I didn’t know this myself, but that secondary strike can travel up through the soles of your feet into your body and play all kinds of havoc with your brain function. In some cases your brain will forget to tell your body to go on breathing. In other cases you can get totally disoriented. You no longer know who you are, or even
what
you are, and what the hell you’re supposed to be doing.