Table of Contents
Cover
Recent Titles by Graham Masterton available from Severn House
Title Page
Copyright
Owasippe Scout Reservation, Michigan
Nostalgia Restaurant, 5307 North Clark Street, Chicago
Von Steuben High School, 5039 North Kimball Avenue, Chicago
Corinne Calls
Fears of the Forest
A Grim Discovery
Ghost Story
Premonition
Box of Memories
Forensics of Fear
Message from Beyond
Under the Witch’s Head
Where the Bones Are
Apparition
Cry for Help
The Face of Fear
Into the Trees
Forest Fever
Unhappy Ending
InterContinental Hotel, Ulica Emilii Plater 49, Warsaw
White Vision
Bad Moon Rising
A Promise
Whispers in the Air
What the Stars Say
Return to Owasippe
White Deer Spirit
Dead Voices Speak
Forest Ghost
The Promise
Requiem
Recent Titles by Graham Masterton available from Severn House
The Sissy Sawyer Series
TOUCHY AND FEELY
THE PAINTED MAN
THE RED HOTEL
The Jim Rook Series
ROOK
THE TERROR
TOOTH AND CLAW
SNOWMAN
SWIMMER
DARKROOM
DEMON’S DOOR
GARDEN OF EVIL
Anthologies
FACES OF FEAR
FEELINGS OF FEAR
FORTNIGHT OF FEAR
FLIGHTS OF FEAR
FESTIVAL OF FEAR
Novels
BASILISK
BLIND PANIC
CHAOS THEORY
COMMUNITY
DESCENDANT
DOORKEEPERS
EDGEWISE
FIRE SPIRIT
FOREST GHOST
GENIUS
GHOST MUSIC
THE HIDDEN WORLD
HOLY TERROR
HOUSE OF BONES
MANITOU BLOOD
THE NINTH NIGHTMARE
PETRIFIED
UNSPEAKABLE
FOREST GHOST
Graham Masterton
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First published in Great Britain 2013 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
First published in the USA 2014 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS of
110 East 59th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022
eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2013 by Graham Masterton.
The right of Graham Masterton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Masterton, Graham author.
Forest Ghost: a novel of horror and suicide in America and Poland.
1. Boy Scouts–Suicidal behavior–United States–
Fiction. 2. Scout leaders–Suicidal behavior–United
States–Fiction. 3. Soldiers–Suicidal behavior–
Poland–Fiction. 4. Forests and forestry–Fiction.
5. World War, 1939-1945–Poland–Fiction. 6. Horror tales.
I. Title
823.9'2-dc23
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8344-5 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-485-0 (ePub)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland
Owasippe Scout Reservation, Michigan
Bill’s black Labrador, Mack, found the first one as he was snuffling around in the thick brown layers of last fall’s leaves. He barked, twice, and then circled around and around, excitedly thrashing his tail.
‘What you got there, boy? Not another goddamn quill pig. You remember what happened the last time you chased after one of those? You had a sore snout for days.’
Bill carried on walking through the trees. It was shady here, but up ahead of him Lake Wolverine was sparkling blue in the sunshine. He could see the jetty from which the Scouts dived into the lake, and where they tied up their boats. Unusually, though, he could see no Scouts, only their red-bottomed boats bobbing in the water.
He could hear no shouting or laughter, either. He stopped for a moment, and listened, but all he could hear was the soft subversive rustling of the beech trees and the piercing cries of two blue jays, calling to each other.
Mack barked again. Bill turned to see that he was still circling around the same heap of leaves, and still wagging his tail as if he were trying to wag it right off.
‘Come on, Mack! Whatever it is, leave it! We’re going to be late, else!’
But Mack wouldn’t come. Instead, he buried his nose into the layers of leaves and furiously started digging.
Bill stalked back and seized him by his collar. ‘You know what happens to dogs who don’t do what they’re told? They don’t get no bully sticks! Now, leave that, whatever it is, and let’s get going!’
As he dragged Mack away, however, he saw a pale hand lying amongst the leaves. It looked like a child’s hand, with three or four friendship bracelets knotted around the wrist.
‘Oh my Lord,’ Bill said. He kept hold of Mack’s collar with one hand, but he knelt down and started to clear away the leaves with the other. It didn’t take him long, because they were only a superficial covering, just enough to have hidden the body from anybody passing by.
It was a young boy, of about twelve or thirteen years old. He was coppery-haired, with a snub nose and freckles. He was wearing a Camp Wolverine T-shirt and blue shorts, but his feet were bare. Resting in the palm of his right hand was a scouting knife, with a blade that was rusty-colored with blood.
Mack barked again, but Bill said, ‘Hush up, will you? Have some respect,’ because there was no question that the boy was dead. His throat had been cut from one side to the other, so that it was gaping wide open like a second mouth, with scores of shiny green female blowflies crawling in and out of it.
Bill took his cellphone out of his shirt pocket, but there was no signal out here in the woods. However, he knew that there was a phone in the Camp Wolverine dining hall, so he stood up and pulled Mack away from the boy’s body and started to walk as fast as he could toward the lake.
He was still a hundred yards away from the water’s edge when Mack started to pull sideways at his leash and bark again.
‘For Christ’s sake, Mack! What’s eati
ng you now?’
Mack began to pull harder and harder, until he was wheezing. In the end, Bill let him have his head. Mack had never been a disobedient dog, and if he sensed that something was wrong, then Bill reckoned he had better let Mack show him what it was.
There was a small clearing in the trees close to the edge of the lake, where the scouts would light fires when it grew dark and toast marshmallows and sing ‘Great Green Gobs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts’ and tell each other horror stories.
This was eleven o’clock in the morning. The sun was shining, and a fresh breeze was blowing off the surface of the lake, but what Bill found there was worse than any horror story that he had ever heard. All around him, at least fifteen boys and seven adult men were lying on the dirt, some of them wearing scout uniforms, some of them wearing T-shirts and shorts, several of them naked. They were all dead. Some of them had their throats cut, in the same way as the coppery-haired boy. Others had their wrists cut – not crosswise, but all the way down the length of their radial arteries so that they would have bled out faster and it would have been almost impossible to save them, even if they had been found while they were still alive. At least three of them had scout knife handles sticking out of their chests. One of the men was lying on his side with his stomach cut open so that his intestines had spilled out on to the leaf-mold beside him. He was still wearing his thick-rimmed glasses.
Even Mack stayed still, and didn’t bark. He looked up at Bill and there was something in his expression that Bill had never seen in a dog before, and he had owned dogs all his life. It was fear. Whatever had happened here, Mack was afraid of it. He was actually trembling, and he was pawing the ground as if he couldn’t run off fast enough.
Bill had to turn away. He could feel bile rising in his throat and the last thing he wanted to do was puke. He said, ‘Come on, boy,’ and tugged at Mack’s leash, and he began to walk stiff-legged around the perimeter of the lake toward the wooden camp buildings.
When he reached the dining hall he said, ‘Stay,’ to Mack, and climbed the steps. Inside, the corridor was warm and stuffy and smelled strongly of cedar wood. Before he could reach the phone, Bill had to gallop to the restroom at the end of the corridor, throw open the door, and vomit an acrid orange slush into the washbasin and halfway up the splashback.
Afterward, he raised his head and stared at himself in the mirror. A sweaty, gray-haired man with a beard, and a face that was leathery from years spent in the outdoors. He couldn’t understand what he had just witnessed, but he knew that it was probably the worst thing that he would ever see in his entire life.
For the first time in a very long time, he crossed himself.
Nostalgia Restaurant, 5307 North Clark Street, Chicago
Jack was arguing with Mikhail about the sauce for his stuffed cabbage when Sally came into the kitchen.
‘You didn’t add any tomato catsup, for Christ’s sake! You didn’t add any crushed tomatoes! You didn’t add any paprika for that matter! No wonder it tasted so goddamned bland.’
‘My mother always cook with just beef stock,’ Mikhail protested. ‘Salt, pepper, beef stock. That is Polish. With tomato, that is Slovak.’
‘I don’t give a toot how your mother cooked it. My mother cooked it with tomato sauce and crushed tomatoes and that’s how we’re going to cook it here.’
‘I hate Slovaks.’
‘I’m not too crazy about the French but that doesn’t stop me cooking with cheese.’
Sally said, ‘Sorry to interrupt you, Jack. I need a word.’
‘Sure. Be right with you.’ He pointed a finger at Mikhail and said, ‘You got it? Tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes, and plenty of paprika.’
Mikhail shrugged and pulled a face. ‘OK. You want to me to cook like Slovak, I cook like Slovak. Slovaks cook like shit. That’s because they don’t know shit from food. A Slovak, he will pick up dog turd and eat it because it looks like wiener.’
‘Mikhail …’ Jack warned him.
Mikhail raised both hands in surrender, and started taking down saucepans and ladles and colanders from the hooks above his head with as much clatter as he could, like a one-man percussion band.
Jack followed Sally back into the restaurant. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon, and the lunchtime session was over. His two waitresses, Jean and Saskia, were clearing up the tables and relaying them with red-and-white checkered cloths, ready for the evening. It was sunny outside, but inside the restaurant it was quite gloomy. It had dark wood paneling on the walls and an old-fashioned mahogany bar, with scores of bottles of exotic spirits on the shelves behind it. On the walls hung large dark oil paintings of Polish cities like Kraków and Wrocław, with castles and churches under thunderous skies.
‘What’s the problem, Sal?’ Jack asked Sally. ‘You want a beer, or are you on duty? How about a soda?’
‘No, I don’t want a drink, thanks,’ said Sally. ‘Something terrible’s happened.’ She paused, and took a deep breath, and then she said, ‘Two days ago the local scout troop sent off a party on a camping trip to Michigan. They were supposed to be going for a week.’
‘Yes, sure, I knew about that. One of the kids – Malcolm – he’s really good friends with Sparky. My God – they haven’t had an accident, have they?’
Jack suddenly realized that Sally had tears in her eyes. ‘They’re all dead, Jack. All of them. Sixteen scouts between the ages of eleven and eighteen and seven adult leaders.’
‘Dead? What? All of them? How?’
‘I’ve just been talking to one of the deputies from the Muskegon County Sheriff’s Department. They still can’t work out exactly what happened, or if anybody else was involved, but one thing is absolutely beyond question. They all killed themselves, every one of them. It was a mass suicide.’
‘I can’t believe it. What did they do? Take poison or something?’
Sally shook her head. ‘Some of them cut their own throats, apparently, and some of them slashed their wrists. One of the leaders cut his own stomach open – you know, like hara-kiri.’
‘Jesus. When did this happen? I haven’t seen anything on the news. Not that I ever watch it. Too goddamned busy running this madhouse.’
‘One of the reservation forestry workers found them around eleven this morning, when he was out walking his dog. But the CPD didn’t want to release any details to the media until the parents had all been informed.’
‘All of them dead? So Malcolm must have killed himself, too? Malcolm Cusack?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Sally. ‘They sent us a complete list of names, so that we could tell the scout troop and the next of kin.’
‘Malcolm was only twelve years old, for Christ’s sake. Skinny little kid; wouldn’t have stepped on an ant. I don’t know how the hell I’m going to break it to Sparky. He’s going to be devastated.’
Jack suddenly felt light-headed. He pulled out a chair and sat down at the nearest table. Sally pulled out another chair and sat beside him. She laid her hand on his wrist and said, ‘Malcolm is the reason I’m here.’
Jack frowned, not understanding what she meant.
‘We’re flying all of the victims’ families to Muskegon first thing tomorrow morning to identify the bodies and visit the location where they died. We thought that it would help to bring them closure. There’s also a possibility that one or two of them might be able to give us some clue as to why they killed themselves. Maybe they all got themselves involved in some kind of online suicide cult.’
‘So where do I fit in?’
‘Corinne Cusack is a single mother, as you probably know.’
‘That’s right. Her husband died about a year ago, didn’t he?’
Sally nodded. ‘Jeff Cusack. Very sudden. Very sad. But they had only just moved here to Edgewater before he passed away, so Corinne doesn’t have any family close by. She hasn’t really had the chance to make many friends yet, either. Well – grieving widows are not exactly the best company. The thing is, Jack, I asked
her if there was anybody she would like to go with her to Muskegon – you know, to give her moral support. Of course I’m going there myself, but I won’t have time to give her any one-to-one care. She nominated you, and Sparky.’
‘Corinne Cusack wants me to fly with her to Michigan?’
‘You and Sparky, both. According to her, Sparky was the only friend that Malcolm had. He used to get bullied at school and Sparky was the only one who ever stood up for him.’
Jack said, ‘I would have to take him anyway, if I went. You know that.’
‘Of course,’ said Sally. She waited for a moment, and then she said, ‘So? Do you think you could do it? The CPD will be picking up all of your expenses. You know – flight, and any accommodation if you have to stay overnight. I doubt if it will come to that, though.’
‘I don’t know, Sally. I’m just trying to think what effect it could have on Sparky.’
‘It might be just what he needs, to visit the place where his friend died. It might help him to come to terms with it.’
‘Oh, sure. And on the other hand, it might give him screaming nightmares. It took him nearly six months to get over seeing that dog being run over.’
Sally waited a moment longer and then she stood up. ‘OK, Jack. I can give you some time to think about it. But you would be doing me such a tremendous favor, believe me. Call me later this afternoon, if you can.’
Jack looked at her. In many ways, she reminded him of Agnieszka. A little shorter, a little bigger-breasted. But she had a similar blonde crop and similar high cheekbones, although her mouth was wider and her lipstick was always redder. He wondered if – in another life – they might have been more than just friends. She was a police detective, however, the most hard-boiled woman he had ever met, and he ran a restaurant and liked to paint watercolors in what little spare time he ever had. Their attitude to life was so different that he couldn’t imagine any relationship between them could have lasted.
He checked the antique Polish clock on the opposite wall, with its wearily swinging pendulum. It was twenty minutes of five now, and he had to collect Sparky from school. He didn’t know how he was going to break it to him that Malcolm was dead. He went through to his small office at the back of the restaurant to collect his car keys. In the same drawer there were three Oh Henry chocolate bars which were Sparky’s favorite. It was a ritual that Jack gave him one every day when he came out of school. What was he going to do today? Say, ‘Here’s your candy bar and by the way Malcolm’s killed himself’?
Forest Ghost: A Novel of Horror and Suicide in America and Poland Page 1
