Forest Ghost (35 page)

Jack walked back through the forest. He was beginning to feel very chilly now, and he was in shock. He reached the edge of Lake Wolverine and stood there for a while, breathing slowly and deeply and feeling the breeze that was blowing off the water. On the other side of the lake, he could see more headlights approaching, and he guessed the forest rangers had arrived. He couldn’t even begin to think what he was going to say to them.

He was still standing there when he heard a voice in his ear.

‘Jack? Can you hear me?’

It was such a soft whisper that it could have been nothing but the breeze, rustling in the trees behind him.

‘Jack,
słyszysz mnie
?’

‘Aggie,’ he said, but so quietly that nobody else could have heard him, even if they had been standing close.

‘You will find him where you left him, Jack.’

‘What do you mean, “where I left him”? Where did I leave him?’

‘He doesn’t blame you, Jack. He always saw it coming, in his stars. He knew what his destiny was.’

‘Aggie, I don’t know what you mean. Tell me.’

But now the forest rangers’ Jeeps were coming around the edge of the lake, and he could no longer hear her. And as they approached, there was an immense bang high in the sky directly above him – more like a sonic boom than a burst of thunder. He looked up just in time to see an intense flash of white light.

He was still staring up at the sky when one of the forest rangers walked up to him, a thin, wiry-looking man in flappy shorts and with a Frank Zappa moustache. The forest ranger looked up, too, and said, ‘What in the name of all that’s holy was
that
?’

A
nd then, two weeks later, at 6.07 in the morning, Krystyna called Jack from Warsaw. He reached out from under the bedcovers and dropped the phone on the floor. After he had leaned over and retrieved it he frowned at his bedside clock and said, ‘Krystyna? What time is it?’

‘I’m really sorry. It’s one p.m. here. I know it’s early for you.’

‘Well, I’m usually up by now but I had a late night. I’ve just re-opened the restaurant after closing for a week.’

‘I’m sorry. But I have found out something very important concerning your great-grandfather and I thought you would like to know about it as soon as possible.’

‘Did you get your permission to dig?’

‘Yes, I did. The Kampinos National Park authorities gave me the go-ahead on Friday, so a colleague and I have been excavating the site all weekend.’

‘OK. Good. So what did you find?’

‘I found the bones of Mrs Koczerska’s great-uncle Andrzej.’

‘Go on.’

‘Nobody else’s bones. Only great-uncle Andrzej
.
It does look, from the damage to his skull, though, that he may well have committed suicide.’

‘But what about all that stuff in his diary about them both committing suicide together, him and my great-grandfather?’

‘That’s why I’m calling. There was a message, left with the bones, in a tobacco pouch. Most of it is still legible. Do you want me to read it to you?’

Jack sat on the end of the bed while she read him the message. It took her only a few minutes, but when she had finished, he sat in silence for a very long time.

‘Do you want me to read it again?’ she asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you can do it face-to-face. I’m catching the first plane I can get to Warsaw.’

Jack left Tomasz in charge of the restaurant again, and promised him an even bigger bonus this time. Tomasz said, ‘You don’t have to pay more, Boss. I know grief, too. I lose baby girl by woman who is not my wife. My heart is broken, but who can I tell?’

Jack said nothing, but gave Tomasz a hug, and slapped his back.

That evening, he took a cab out to O’Hare and caught the direct 9.50 p.m. flight to Warsaw. He tried to sleep on the plane but the message that Krystyna had read to him was rolling over and over in his mind. It was the first hope that he had been given since Sparky had disappeared into the Owasippe forest that he might be able to find out what had happened to him, and not spend the rest of his life wondering if he was still alive – or, if he had died,
how
he had died, and where. At the very least, he might be able to give him a grave.

It was warm and sunny when he arrived at Chopin airport the following afternoon, and Krystyna was there to meet him – wearing the same librarian spectacles that she had worn when she first picked him up. He kissed her and she still smelled as fragrant, too.

As she drove them into the city center, she said, ‘Do you believe what your great-grandfather wrote? You don’t think it was just an excuse? Maybe he and Andrzej were caught by the Germans before they could commit suicide, and the Germans made him do it, and took him prisoner. He was a very famous person, after all, your great-grandfather. Maybe they just never had the chance to boast that they had caught him – the world-famous violinist who had fought with the Home Army.’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I’m sure he was telling the truth.’

He paused, because he found it hard to tell Krystyna what had happened to Sparky without developing a painful catch in his throat. But slowly, and with as little drama as he could, he explained how they had gone back to Owasippe. He told her about Sally and Undersheriff Porter shooting themselves; and how the Forest Ghosts had torn all those sheriff’s deputies to pieces; and how they had gathered together and risen into the clouds, like some ascension from the Bible.

Krystyna listened without interrupting him. After all, she had seen for herself what panic could do to people in a forest. When he had finished, she said, ‘What did your police say, when they found all of this massacre?’

‘They questioned me for twenty-three hours straight, but it was obvious that I hadn’t done it. They found Undersheriff Porter and my friend Detective Faulkner in a shallow grave, covered with pine needles and leaves. That was the Forest Ghosts for you … I think they loved us, and cared for us. Well, they must have done to stay here for so many thousands of years. But I think they were just like parents when their teenage kids go bad. There comes a time when they wash their hands of them, and say, like, you made your bed, you damn well lie in it.’

‘So how did they explain all of those officers being torn to pieces?’

‘Cougars.’

‘
Cougars?
’

‘Yes, we still have a few big wild cats in our forests, just like you have lynxes in Poland. I don’t think the medical examiners really believed it, not for a moment. Even the most dexterous cougar couldn’t twist a man’s arms and legs off like that. But the media were satisfied, and that was all that mattered.’

Krystyna drove Jack to her apartment in Sadyba. It was on the fifth floor of a quiet brown-brick block in a gated community, surrounded by trees. The apartment itself was furnished in a modern, minimalist style, with a white leather couch and a large abstract mural in gray and white, and a tall rough-textured sculpture of a sad-looking nude.

‘Beer?’ asked Krystyna.

‘You read my mind.’

She poured him a beer and a glass of chilled white wine for herself, and sat down on the couch next to him with her legs tucked up under her. On the glass-topped table in front of them lay a red folder, and two or three books, and a worn, dark-brown pouch made of oilskin, of the kind used by sailors and soldiers to keep their tobacco dry.

She opened the pouch and took out two folded sheets of paper. One had been torn from a notepad, and was crowded with scrawly writing in green ink. It was stained and faded, but most of it looked legible. The other was a music score, with five or six lines of crotchets and quavers.

She held up the sheet from the notepad and said, ‘This was signed by “Grzegorz Walach” and dated April 17, 1946, so it must have been buried with Maria Koczerska’s great-uncle Andrzej’s remains after the war was over. Whoever put it there must have known exactly where his remains were located, and there was only one person who could have known that.’

‘My late wife Aggie knew,’ said Jack. ‘Otherwise
we
never would have found them, would we?’

‘Come on, Jack. It was somebody who
sounded
like her. But you told me yourself that the spirits always talk to you in the voices of people you care for. I suppose that’s how they get your attention, and your trust.’

‘So read me this letter again,’ Jack asked her.

Krystyna took off her spectacles. ‘“To any of my descendants whom I have hurt and betrayed, I address this message, and pray that the time never comes when any of them read it. I beg your forgiveness with all of my heart. On November twenty-ninth, 1940, Andrzej buried his diary and his notes for safekeeping, and then we walked deeper into the forest to take our own lives.

‘“Once we had found a quiet place, poor Andrzej shot himself. I then knelt down to follow his example, praying to the Lord to receive my soul. As I knelt there, however, I heard the voice of my dead sister Danuta speaking to me, so close that I could have believed that she was standing next to me. She said that if I made a solemn promise to the Forest Ghost, it would not harm me, and that I would no longer feel that the only way to stop feeling such terror was to take my own life.

‘“I opened my eyes but there was nobody visible. I continued to listen, though, because I had loved Danuta dearly. She died of pneumonia when she was only nine years old, and after all those years I still missed her sorely. She said that it was possible that, many years in the future, the Forest Ghost would have to leave this forest and journey to another forest in another part of the world. There were spirits in every forest, and they had been here for thousands of years, but the time might come when they had to leave this Earth, which they could only do from the first place where they had arrived.

‘“In order to accomplish this journey, said Danuta, the Forest Ghost would need to possess the shape of a living human being. It would spare my life and relieve me of my panic if I promised that one day in the future it could take the shape of one of my descendants. She said that this would probably never happen, and that even if it did, it would be many hundreds of years from now. It was, however, a binding promise, and one day it was possible that a descendant of mine, not yet born, perhaps, would pay the price for it.

‘“I agreed to make such a promise. It was cruel and it was craven of me to do so, but it is hard to describe to you the abject terror that I was feeling, and quite simply I wanted to live, and not to die. I do not know if any of my descendants will ever pay the price for it, but if they do, I can only tell you that I will be ashamed of my promise for the rest of my life.

‘“I am now working as a teacher and accountant in Wrocław, under the name of Feliks Wasilewski. I have picked up a violin only once since I made my promise, and that was to compose these few lines of music, which I have written as a requiem for whichever descendant of mine might have paid the price for my cowardice.”’

‘It’s signed Grzegorz Walach,’ she said finally.

Jack sat for a long time in silence once Krystyna had finished reading. She reached across to him and held his hand.

‘Well,’ he said at last, looking at her. ‘I think we know where Sparky is now, don’t we?’

Along with Komisarz Pocztarek, three police officers with a Labrador tracker dog and two forest rangers, they returned to the part of the Kampinos Forest where they had searched for Krystyna’s colleague Robert.

They started by finding the place where Jack and Krystyna had stopped to consider killing themselves and Sparky had run away from them. Jack gave the tracker dog one of Sparky’s T-shirts to sniff. It had rained several times since they were here, but the overhanging trees had protected the scent from being totally washed away. The tracker dog hesitated and wuffled two or three times, but it managed to follow the trail deeper and deeper into the forest.

Before long, they reached a long downhill slope where the pine trees grew so close together that it was difficult for them to shoulder their way through. The forest was utterly silent, and dark, and claustrophobic, and Jack began to feel that they would never be able to find their way out of it.

‘If your son is here, this dog will find him,’ said Komisarz Pocztarek, trying to be reassuring. ‘The nose of this breed is so sensitive, they can even smell cadavers under running water.’

Jack said nothing. He wanted to find Sparky, but not like this.

After about ten minutes of struggling through the trees, however, the Labrador let out three sharp barks and began to scuffle with its paws at the brown matted pine needles. Its handler pulled it away, and the other two officers pulled on blue latex gloves before they hunkered down and started to brush aside the vegetation with their hands.

Jack stayed well back, and Krystyna held his hand. Neither of them spoke.

After a few minutes, the officers exposed the pale blotchy flank of a body. Komisarz Pocztarek walked over and took off his cap. ‘I’m sorry for this, sir, but it looks like your son. Could you please identify him for us?’

Jack let go of Krystyna’s hand and went up to the edge of the shallow grave. At least the Forest Ghost had respected Sparky enough to bury him, so that he hadn’t been lying here naked on the forest floor, prey to any passing animal. The body’s face was so puffy that he didn’t look like Sparky at all, but Jack instantly recognized his blond hair, and the metal pendant that he was wearing around his neck – the pendant that used to belong to his mother.

‘–
dependant
…’ That’s what Jack thought she had whispered to him on the plane. But in reality she had been telling him where he was, and how he could identify him when he found him.

‘–
the pendant …
’

Komisarz Pocztarek said, ‘I am very sorry for your loss, sir. But I still do not understand. I saw your son leave the forest and I presume that he flew back to America with you. How did he return here?’

Jack turned away from the grave. ‘I’m just beginning to find out how little any of us understand about anything, Komisarz. And now we never will.’