Forest Ghost (32 page)

‘Astrology, you mean? My son understands it.’

‘Of course he does. He was always ours, right from the moment he was conceived.’

‘Yours? What do you mean,
yours
? He’s not yours.’

‘We have to go now,’ said the figure, sounding even more weary.

‘Where’s Sparky?’ Jack insisted. He walked toward the figure but it just as quickly backed away. ‘If you don’t tell me where my son is—’

‘Your son is here, within me. For the time being, anyway. I will leave him behind when I go, and then … then you will find him somewhere in this forest, like so many others.’

‘Will you talk sense, for Christ’s sake? Where is he? I want him back,
now
!’

‘You will find him somewhere in this forest, when I am gone. Where do you think the human spirit goes, when a human dies?’

‘How the fuck should I know? Heaven? Hell? Who knows!’

Jack was walking faster now, but the figure was retreating even more quickly.

‘
The trees!
’ it screamed at him, with its dragged-down mouth, and it sounded just like Sparky when he was angry or frustrated. ‘That is why we had to protect your forests! That’s where you go, when you die! Into the trees!’

‘What?’

‘Every time you clear a forest – every time you start a forest fire – you sacrifice hundreds and thousands of human spirits! Why do you think the trees talk when you walk into a forest? They’re frightened of what you’re going to do, just like we are!
That’s
why we make you panic!’

‘
What?
’

Jack felt as if he were going mad. This couldn’t be real. This had to be a nightmare. But if this figure somehow had Sparky inside him, Jack was determined to get him back. He took three quick strides toward it, and made a lunge for it. The figure tilted away from him, so that he missed it, and then it turned and started to run. Jack went after it. He reached out and managed to grab its shoulder, and even though it seemed to be nothing but dazzling white light, it actually felt like a human shoulder – a cold, bare shoulder. He could even feel its shoulder blade moving.

The figure twisted itself free. Jack tried to grab it again, but it feinted to the left, and then to the right, and carried on running. All of the other figures were running, too, on either side of them, between the trees. They made a soft rustling sound as they ran, like the wind blowing through the leaves. It was a hushed, ghostly marathon – a dreamlike race to nowhere at all.

They ran up a long sloping hill, and then over the top. On the other side, however, the hill fell away steeply, and then even more steeply, until it was almost a vertical drop. The white figure was rushing down it without any difficulty, but it became so precipitous that Jack lost his balance, and careered down out of control, his arms windmilling to stop himself from falling over. He ran down so fast that he collided with the figure and they both hit the ground and rolled over and over in a tangle of arms and legs and blinding white light.

Although the figure was so bright, it felt like wrestling a naked human being, and Jack was repelled by the feeling of cold, bare skin. In spite of his repulsion, however, he was able to force it face-down on to the leaf mold and sit astride it, twisting its arms behind its back.

‘Where’s my son?’ he panted. ‘I want to know what you’ve done with my son.’

The figure said nothing, although Jack could feel it breathing hard.

‘Where’s my son?’ he shouted at it. ‘If you don’t tell me where my son is, I’m going to break your fucking arms! Both of them!’

Still the figure remained silent. Jack forced its arms further and further up between its shoulder blades until it made a strange whining sound, more like an animal in pain than a human.

‘Where’s my son? I’m not letting you go until you tell me!’

At that moment, though, he became aware that the forest around him was growing lighter. He looked up, and saw that twenty or thirty of the other figures were gathering around him. They, too, appeared to be made of nothing but light, as if they were ghosts, except that they were not transparent. They came closer and closer until they were standing all around him.

‘I want my son back, that’s all!’ he told them. He was sure that he could make out faces on them – fogged with light, like faces in an overexposed photograph, but faces all the same. They didn’t look angry or aggressive, as he might have expected them to. Instead, they all appeared to be resigned, and weary.

Two of them reached down and took hold of Jack’s arms. Although they seemed to be made out of light, their hands felt human. They were strong, too. Another two of them bent down and pried his fingers away from the wrists of the figure he was sitting on, and then between them they lifted him up, until he was standing. During all of this time, not one of them spoke, and the forest was silent. Jack didn’t try to struggle, or twist himself free. There were too many of them, and he didn’t know what they were capable of doing to him.

Next, five or six of them lifted him up, until they were holding him above their heads, lying on his back with his arms spread wide, as if he were being crucified. They carried him around the hill that he had just run down, and back through the forest. It was the most extraordinary sensation he had ever experienced in his life. It was like floating on his back on a sea of hands. He looked up and he could see the purplish early-evening sky through the branches of the pines, and even the moon.

At last they carried him back to the place where Sally and Undersheriff Porter were lying. They lowered him down, still without saying a word, until he was standing on his feet again. He turned around and looked at them, and they stood looking back at him.

‘I’m coming back for my son,’ he warned them, although he couldn’t stop his voice from shaking. ‘You don’t frighten me any more, whatever you are.’

‘We will be gone by the time you return, Jack,’ said one of them, in Aggie’s voice. It spoke quite gently, and sadly. ‘There is no point in us staying here any longer. You can never be saved from yourselves.’

‘What about Sparky? What about my son?’

‘A promise is a promise, Jack. All those souls who sleep in these trees will tell you that.’

‘Where is he?’ Jack shouted. But none of the figures replied. Instead, they all turned their backs and began walking away. There was nothing that Jack could do but watch them disappear through the pines, until the last of them had gone. He was left on his own, except for the bodies of Sally and Undersheriff Porter, in a forest that was rapidly growing darker and darker.

He was tempted for a moment to pick up Undersheriff Porter’s Sig automatic and go running back after those figures. But then he thought:
no – there are still a whole lot more of them than there is of me, and I don’t know how many rounds there are in that gun’s magazine. Certainly not enough to bring them all down, even if I manage to hit one of them with every single shot – and even supposing that bullets won’t just pass right through them. They may feel solid, but they shine like light.

He skirted around the two bodies and jogged his way out of the trees to Undersheriff Porter’s Jeep. As he climbed up into the driver’s seat, he looked back at the forest but saw no flickers of light. He started the engine, backed up to the edge of the lake, and then drove back toward the scout headquarters. The Jeep bounced and swayed and jolted into potholes, but he kept his foot down as hard as he could. This might be his last chance of saving Sparky from – what? He had no idea. Those figures could be anything. Ghosts, aliens or angels. Or something that nobody had ever heard of.

He reached the scout headquarters and slewed to a halt beside the steps. He ran up to the balcony but when he tried to get into the hallway he found that all the doors were locked, and inside, the hallway was in darkness. He hammered on the window with his fist. Nobody appeared. He hammered again, and shouted out, ‘Anybody there? Anybody there? I have an emergency!’

He was just about to give up and go back to the Jeep, to see if he could make radio contact with the sheriff’s department. Suddenly, though, a door opened on the left-hand side of the hallway and light streamed out. Ambrose, the bald-headed scout leader, appeared, and frowned in his direction. Jack knocked on the glass again.

The scout leader came over and unlocked the door. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘Where’s the undersheriff?’

‘He panicked. They both panicked. I was standing right next to them and they shot themselves.’

‘Holy cow. What about your boy? Did you manage to find him?’

Jack shook his head, but he said, ‘He’s in the forest someplace. Those white things have got him. Those spirits, or whatever you want to call them. I saw them. I chased one of them, and had a tussle with it, but the others pulled me off him. They were like ghosts, only … I don’t know … they were more like
people
than ghosts. Only they weren’t really people, either. They were
glowing
.’

He stopped. He realized that the scout leader was looking at him in a quizzical way, with his head tilted to one side and one eyebrow lifted.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ he said. ‘Well, OK –
don’t
believe me. But Detective Faulkner and Undersheriff Porter, they both shot themselves, and they’re lying out there right now. And my son’s still missing, and whether you believe it or not, those spirits have got him.’

The scout leader said, ‘I’ll call the Sheriff’s Department, and the forest ranger station, too. As soon as I’ve done that, you and me can go looking for your son. If the spirits have got him, I don’t think they’ll hurt him.’

‘You
do
believe me?’

The scout leader looked almost annoyed. ‘Of course I believe you. I’ve been taking care of this campsite for fourteen years and I’ve seen those things for myself. It’s not something that you can tell to anybody else, though – not without them thinking that you’ve gone doolally.’

‘They told me they’re leaving. The way they said it, it’s like they’re leaving right now.’

‘They’re leaving
now
? I always knew they were going to, one day soon. But you mean
now
– like, tonight?’ For the first time Jack noticed that the scout leader had one green eye and one brown eye.

‘That’s what they said. They used my son’s voice to tell me. And my late wife’s voice, too.’

The scout leader nodded and now he looked convinced. ‘They do that. They use voices that you’re going to recognize. People that you love – people that you trust. Listen – let me make those calls and then we’d better get going. Where did this happen? Out by Lake Wolverine?’

Jack waited at the scout leader’s office door while he called the Sheriff’s Department in Muskegon and then contacted the US Forest Service ranger station. When he had hung up the phone, the scout leader said, ‘OK. We should have some deputies here in a little over forty-five minutes, and rangers in maybe an hour. Meantime, let’s go look for your son. My name’s Ambrose, by the way. Ambrose Weld.’

The scout leader led Jack outside, and around to the parking lot, where they climbed into his tan-colored Chevy Avalanche. The back of the pick-up was stacked with folded-up tents and other camping equipment, like folding chairs and pressure lamps.

‘You’ve really seen these spirits?’ Jack asked as they drove out toward Lake Wolverine.

‘Sure, and I’ve heard them, too. Talking to me, and sounding just like my late friend Woody, who passed over more than seven years ago.’

‘What did they say to you?’

‘They cautioned me to keep my distance, that’s about all. I think they knew that I didn’t mean the forest any harm, so they didn’t make me panic. Just the same, though, they didn’t want me trespassing. This was – what – two or three years ago. I’ve known about them ever since I started working here, but that was the first time I saw them for real.’

‘You knew about them before you even saw them?’

The scout leader slowed down to avoid hitting a gray ruffed grouse that was sedately waddling across the track. The bird hopped, hopped again, and then burst into flight.

‘When I joined the staff here, I wanted to run this scout camp in a way that safeguarded its environment. I mean, look at it, Owasippe is just beautiful. So I thought I’d best find out everything I could about it. You know – become something of an Owasippe expert.

‘I talked to Jim Dunn, this real old forest ranger, and I talked to some of the elders in the Potawatomi tribe, and one or two naturalists, too. Doctor Claude Duval, he was one of them. They didn’t just tell me about the wildlife, and the plants. They also told me stories about these legendary spirits who had come here thousands of years ago from God alone knows where to protect the forest from the one thing that threatens it more than any other.’

‘Which is?’

‘
Homo sapiens
, what else? Or
homo
not-so
sapiens
.’

‘But if you knew about these spirits, why didn’t you warn those Scouts about them before they went off camping?’

‘Because they hadn’t made people panic like that for years. I don’t know why they suddenly started again now, but maybe it has something to do with them leaving.’

‘OK – but why didn’t you tell the police about them?’

For a long moment, the scout leader took his eyes off the track ahead, and looked at Jack with a complicated expression on his face – part guilty, part irritated. ‘What do you think they would have said to me if I had? They would have thought I was ready for the nuthouse. I probably would have lost my job, too.’

‘Oh, great,’ said Jack. ‘You kept your job. I’m real pleased about that. But maybe if you’d spoken out, two more people wouldn’t have killed themselves. One of them was a very good friend of mine. And maybe my son wouldn’t have gone missing.’

‘Nobody would have believed me, not for a minute, and you know that!’ the scout leader retorted. ‘In any case, even if they
had
believed me, what could they have done? You can’t catch these spirits – they’re
spirits
. Even the Potawatomi say that you can’t catch the Manito Sucsee Wabe, and even if you could, you couldn’t kill it.’