Forest Ghost (34 page)

‘See what I mean, Jim?’ said the scout leader. ‘
Shiny!
’

‘OK, men!’ Sergeant Truscott snapped. ‘Let’s go get them! But remember they may have a hostage – so if it comes to a firefight, make sure you’re clear what you’re aiming at!’

He unclipped his holster and hauled out his gun, and all of his deputies did the same. They advanced into the forest with their flashlights pointing in front of them and their weapons held high. Jack and the scout leader followed them, but staying well back. If there was going to be shooting, Jack didn’t want to get caught in any crossfire, even if it was friendly.

For the first few hundred feet, the forest was in total darkness, although with every step they took the noise seemed to grow even more deafening. The howling, too, grew louder. Then, directly up ahead of them, Jack saw three or four fluorescent white figures, flickering like neon strip lights. Then more of them, and more.

Here they were: the Forest Ghosts, the white deer spirits, the howling angels. The white things that had caused hundreds of people to kill themselves out of panic. Yet now Jack realized that he wasn’t panicking at all. He was desperately anxious about Sparky, but he felt none of that dread that had gripped him before, and it didn’t look as if Sergeant Truscott or any of his deputies were panicking, either. Understandably, they all looked tense, but they were showing no signs of the madness that had led Sally and Undersheriff Porter to blow their own heads off.

Cautiously, the deputies stepped out of the trees and into the clearing where the white figures were gathered. Jack and the scout leader followed them. Here, the light was bright but gray, like an overcast day, and the howling was so loud that Jack could hardly hear himself think. They could see now that the figures were standing in a circle, each with their arms intertwined. Their heads were bowed, and their mouths were stretched downward as if they were moaning with grief.

They all seemed to be concentrating hard, like a circle of people holding a séance, or trying to summon up Satan. They didn’t appear to have noticed the arrival of Jack and the scout leader and the deputies – or, if they had, they were ignoring them.
So much for them being frightened of us
, Jack thought.

Sergeant Truscott crossed over to Jack and the scout leader with one hand lifted to shield his eyes. ‘What the hell are they?’ he shouted, over the howling.

‘Spirits, I guess you could call them!’ the scout leader shouted back at him.

Sergeant Truscott shook his head in disbelief. ‘
Spirits?
’

‘Forest Ghosts, that’s what they’re generally known as.’

‘Never heard of them. Think they understand English?’

‘Oh, yes. They can use the voices of people you know to talk to you.’

‘Can’t even believe what I’m looking at,’ said Sergeant Truscott. Then he turned to Jack and said, ‘Do you see your son around here, sir?’

‘No,’ Jack told him. ‘Nowhere. I don’t know what they could have done with him.’

‘In that case, whatever these people are, I’m going to be breaking up this little gathering. But keep an eye open for your son and shout out if you see him.’

‘OK, sure.’

Sergeant Truscott beckoned to his men and they positioned themselves around one side of the circle of white figures, all with their weapons raised high.

‘Now listen up!’ Sergeant Truscott shouted, trying to make himself heard over the howling. ‘This here is unlawful assembly as defined under paragraph seven-five-two subsection five-four-three of the Michigan State penal code! You are trespassing here on private property and I require you to cease this activity as of right now!’

‘My God, he has to be joking,’ said the scout leader.

The howling continued, and the figures began to flicker even more rapidly. Sergeant Truscott waited for a few seconds, and then he bellowed, ‘Break it up! You hear me? Cut out that goddamned racket and lay down flat on the ground! Now!’

Still the white figures took no notice of him, and now they were flashing almost like stroboscopic lights. Jack could sense a tightening in the air all around them, as if some huge electrical charge were beginning to build up.

‘
Assume the position!
’ roared Sergeant Truscott.

Jack thought he could hear a deep humming, too, underneath the howling. The trees all around them were swaying and rustling, and the birds were literally screaming. He looked at the scout leader and shouted, ‘
What?
What’s happening?’

‘I don’t know!’ the scout leader shouted back. ‘But I think we need to get out of here!’

‘I can’t leave Sparky!’

‘You don’t even know that he’s here!’

‘I saw him! He spoke to me!’

‘It’s all an illusion! These spirits – I think I got them all completely wrong! I don’t think they’re benign at all!’

At that moment, Sergeant Truscott screamed, ‘
Shut the fuck up!
’ at the circle of luminous white people, and fired his gun into the air.

The response was instantaneous. The howling didn’t stop, but the circle suddenly broke apart, and the white figures went for Sergeant Truscott and his deputies as ferociously as two-legged wolves. Two of them seized Sergeant Truscott’s arms, while a third one plunged its hands straight through his uniform shirt and into his stomach. It ripped him open with a thick tearing noise that sounded like burlap being torn apart, right up to his ribcage. Jack could see him staring down in shock as his bloody pale intestines tumbled out of his abdomen and dropped down on to the forest floor. He didn’t scream as he watched this happen. He could see it, and he must have been able to feel it, and yet by the expression on his face Jack could tell that he couldn’t really believe it.
This can’t be me, being torn open like this, and all my insides falling out. How can this be me?

Then, however, one of the white figures twisted his right arm around in its socket, all the way around, so that the sinews crackled. It twisted it around again and then again, and this time Sergeant Truscott let out a shrill, agonized whoop that was almost girlish. His arm was wrenched right off, and tossed away into the underbrush, and then the second figure twisted off his left arm, too.

At the same time, more white figures were swarming all over the other deputies, and were pulling them apart, too. Jack saw blood flying across the clearing, and dismembered arms and legs, and even though the figures kept up their howling, the screams of the deputies were even more penetrating.

He backed away, between the pines, and Ambrose the scout leader came after him. The scout leader kept crossing himself and mumbling, ‘Holy Mary Mother of God, Holy Mary Mother of God.’

Jack thought that they had managed to escape from the clearing unnoticed by the white figures. He was just about to turn around and start running when five of them caught sight of them and immediately came rushing toward them.

‘No!’ screamed the scout leader. ‘No! I always took care of you! I always protected the forest! No! I never hurt you! I never told anyone about you! No!’

But four of the white figures took hold of him, and forced him on to his back on the ground. The fifth figure came after Jack.

Jack ran as hard as he could into the darkness, dodging and jinking like a football player as he tried to avoid hitting the trees. But he could hear the white figure catching up with him, its footsteps close behind his back and its pale light shining on the trees up ahead of him.

He bounded down into a hollow, and as he did so the figure leapt on top of him, bringing him crashing down into the bushes. The figure was cold, and strong, and Jack was exhausted. He lay there, with his cheek against the dirt and the leaf mold, gasping for breath and resigned to die. Only two or three hundred yards behind him, he could hear the scout leader screeching as he was torn to pieces.

Jack closed his eyes.
Think of nothing
, he told himself,
and it will soon be over
. The white figure remained sitting on top of him, keeping him pressed down against the ground, but seconds went by and it made no attempt to pull off his arms or to turn him over and disembowel him. He heard the scout leader screaming, ‘Jesus! Oh, Jesus!’ He was almost singing it, like a hymn.

After that, the forest fell silent, except for an occasional blue jay screeching. Even the howling had died away.

‘You should go now, Dad,’ said the white figure, in Sparky’s voice.

‘Sparks? Is that you?’

‘It
was
me, Dad. Not any more.’

‘Where’s Sparky? What have you done with him?’

‘We needed him. We needed many. Sparky was just one of them. We had to bring them all here, from wherever they were scattered. This is the place where we first arrived, and this is the only place from which we can leave.’

‘I said, where’s Sparky? I want to know what the hell you’ve done with him.’

There was a lengthy pause. A cool breeze was blowing through the forest, and for some reason Jack detected a note of sadness in the white figure’s voice.

‘Sparky was promised as so many were promised. We had no way of knowing then when one of your family would be needed. For all we knew at that time, it could have been many hundreds of years before we had to leave. But you could not be stopped from wantonly destroying all the beauty and the riches that were given to you, with greater and greater destructiveness, and we have no wish to witness you doing it, or to try to stop you any longer.’

‘Is Sparky dead?’

‘It depends what you mean by dead. It depends if you understand what happens when you pass from one level of existence to the next. Some of your cultures almost grasped it. But none of you have ever understood it enough to protect it.’

The white figure climbed off Jack’s back and stood up. Jack sat up, wiping the dirt from his face with the back of his hand. The white figure was only faintly phosphorescent now, but he could just make out the features of a face, which looked like Sparky, only older.

‘So – aren’t you going to rip my arms off and tear my guts out, like everybody else? Or make me panic and kill myself?’

The white figure not only sounded sad; it looked sad, too. ‘No, Dad. It’s too late for that now, and you’ve given us enough. You should go now. Forget about Sparky. Forget that you ever saw us. You will have to live a new life now. A very different kind of life.’

With that, the figure turned around and began to walk back toward the clearing where the rest of the figures were gathered.

‘
Sparks!
’ Jack called after it. The white figure hesitated, but didn’t look back at him.

‘Sparks, I love you!’

Three long seconds went by, and then the white figure continued walking. Jack could have done what it had told him to do, and leave the forest, but he needed to see where Sparky was going, and what all of those figures were going to do next. How could he ever forget him, or forget what had happened here?

He followed the white figure, keeping his distance. As he approached the clearing, however, he looked up into the trees and saw the remains of the scout leader, and for a few moments he had to stop and press his hand over his mouth to stop himself from retching. The scout leader’s arms and legs had all been wrenched off, and then his trunk had been split open and suspended from an overhanging branch by loops of intestines. The scout leader was swaying from side to side, and staring down at him with a slightly mystified expression, as if he were thinking,
this wasn’t the way I was supposed to die, was it? I was supposed to die in bed, when I was old, with a priest to give me the last rites.

He stayed well back amongst the trees while the white figure rejoined the rest of the figures, and crouched down behind the bushes. He didn’t want to go too close in case the other figures couldn’t be trusted to spare his life, and also because he didn’t want to see too much of the bloody litter of human bodies that was scattered around.

The figures gathered in their circle again, with their arms linked together, and began to howl. They howled higher and louder, and they flickered faster and faster, until it was like watching the last blank frames of a movie film flapping through a projector.

As their howling reached a crescendo, it sounded as if every bird and animal in the Owasippe forest was joining in. The circle of white figures started to rotate, very slowly at first, but gradually they spun around faster and faster until they were only a blur of light. The light rose up in the air, up to treetop height. It hesitated there, as if the spirits were reluctant to leave the forest which they had guarded for so long.

Beneath them, the matted vegetation on the forest floor began to smolder, and turn black. Acrid smoke drifted across the clearing and through the trees, as gray and silent as ghosts. Jack now saw what had caused the patch of scorched earth beside the lake – not a campfire, not a lightning strike, but the heat created by the first of the white figures rising up into the air, and returning to wherever it was they originally came from.

He walked out into the clearing, with burning pine needles sparkling all around him like the lights of a miniature city. He stood looking up at the white figures and he had never felt such radiant power in his life, such a palpable sense of inspiration, and it moved him to tears that they were going. He had felt desperately lonely ever since Aggie had died, but to see these spirits leaving the world gave him an even deeper feeling of loneliness, as if the whole of mankind was now being abandoned to the cold, dark emptiness of space. Nobody to watch over us any more, nobody to save us from our own ignorance and our own greed and our own blind destructiveness.

Standing beneath that light, as it gradually rose higher and higher, he could understand what angels were; and he could almost understand what God was.

The light kept on rising until it looked as small as a paper lantern. It passed through a high skein of cirrus clouds, and after that, Jack could see only the faintest spot of white light, and then nothing at all. Whatever the Forest Ghosts had been, the white deer spirits, the
nish-gites
, had gone forever.