Forest Ghost: A Novel of Horror and Suicide in America and Poland

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Oh, but you must come! Tamara is absolutely ur-mazing! She put my friend Caitlin in touch with her twin sister, and her twin sister died over seven years ago! Caitlin just couldn’t believe it … they talked and talked and Tamara couldn’t have been faking it because she knew so many secrets that only Caitlin and her sister had ever shared. Like, when they were little they had a pet snail they called Silver.’

  ‘A pet snail called Silver? They didn’t have a pet cat called Tonto, too?’

  Bindy climbed up on to one of the barstools and noisily rearranged all of her flounces. ‘You must come, Jack! Supposing she gets in touch with Aggie for you?’

  ‘Bindy, to tell you the truth, I don’t really believe in any of this psychic stuff. Aggie’s gone and that’s that. There’s nothing I can do to bring her back.’

  ‘There’s no harm in trying, though, is there? And who knows? Tamara may surprise you. Besides, if you come along this evening, you might meet somebody you like.’

  ‘Just at this moment in time, Bindy, I’m not looking for anybody. I’m just running this restaurant seven days a week and taking care of Sparky and that takes up all of my time, and more.’

  Bindy took off her spectacles and blinked at him short-sightedly. ‘People get together by accident, Jack. Sometimes your future partner is right in front of your nose and you never realize. Then, one day, for no particular reason – shazam!’

  Jack said, ‘I’ll try, Bindy. If I get time, I’ll see if I can drop by.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Bindy climbed off the barstool and looked around. ‘It must be so hard, running this place on your own.’

  ‘I have a really great team.’

  ‘Yes, but what do you do at the end of the day, after everybody’s gone home, and you’ve closed up, and Sparky’s in bed asleep?’

  ‘I open a beer and I sit and watch TV and then I usually fall asleep, too.’

  Bindy was about to say something else, but then she obviously decided against it. She gave Jack a forced smile and said, ‘See you this evening then, hopefully?’

  As they passed Jimmy John’s gourmet sub shop on their way back from school, Jack handed Sparky his ritual Oh Henry bar.

  ‘Malcolm’s mom called me this afternoon,’ said Jack. ‘They’re holding Malcolm’s funeral next Friday.’

  ‘OK,’ said Sparky. He didn’t unwrap his candy bar right away, as he usually did, but sat staring out of the window.

  ‘You OK?’ Jack asked him. ‘You didn’t have any problems at school today?’

  ‘No … everything was fine. I got a grade A in algebra.’

  ‘Hey … that’s fantastic! I was always terrible at algebra. In fact I was terrible at every subject except woodwork. I probably would have been a carpenter if Grandpa and Grandma hadn’t needed me to help them in the restaurant.’

  Sparky said, ‘You should go tonight.’

  ‘What? Go where?’

  ‘To Bindy’s bookstore. You really should go.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the séance thing. I don’t think so, Sparks. What if this woman pretends that she can put me in touch with your mom? You and I both know that simply isn’t possible. It would be an insult to her memory, to say the least.’

  But Sparky said, ‘I finished your star chart for this month during recess. You really should go and talk to this woman. She’s the one with the message that I was telling you about.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sparks. I really don’t believe that we can talk to dead people, no matter how much we may want to. Don’t you think that I would give anything just to hear your mom’s voice again?’

  ‘But this woman is the one with the message,’ Sparky insisted. ‘And the message will tell us what happened to Malcolm. Why he killed himself. And why all of those other scouts killed themselves, too. It says so, in your stars. Mercury is rising, and Mercury is the messenger, and also the Lord of Wednesday.’

  ‘Sparks – I’m going to be up to my ears in it tonight. We have seventy-three covers booked already and we always have a whole lot of walk-ins midweek.’

  Sparky said, ‘Please, Dad. I have to know why Malcolm committed suicide, and this is the only way.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think it was a Forest Ghost, or a nish-gite, or whatever Grandma called it, do you?’

  Sparky said nothing, but still didn’t unwrap his Oh Henry bar.

  Jack said, ‘The police are investigating this very thoroughly, you know that, don’t you? Sally keeps me up to date on all of their progress.’

  ‘You will go tonight, though, won’t you? I can help in the restaurant while you’re away.’

  ‘Don’t you start getting involved in the restaurant business. I want you to be an atom physicist when you grow up, not a goddamned pierogi-slinger.’

  All the same, when eight o’clock came, he went up to Tomasz and said, ‘I have to go out for a while. Not long.’

  The restaurant was not completely full, although Saskia was just seating a party of seven.

  ‘Fine, no problem,’ said Tomasz. ‘Take so long as you like.’

  Jack turned around and saw that Sparky was standing at the top of the stairs. He gave him a wave, but Sparky didn’t wave back. He walked out of the front door of the restaurant on to North Clark Street and then turned left into West Berwyn Avenue. Most of West Berwyn was residential, but there were a few upscale little stores and cafés clustered at the intersection with North Clark, of which The Bookworm was one. Over its front door there was a bright yellow awning with a picture of a worm in spectacles reading a large leather-bound volume. Its double frontage was filled with books on nature and conservation and women’s health and feng-shui – and of course a special display of Tamara Thorne’s book How to Talk to the Loved Ones You’ve Lost.

  Jack pushed open the door with some difficulty because the store was already crowded. Earnest-looking men and women in chunky hand-knitted sweaters were holding glasses of yellowy white wine or cranberry juice and waving cheese straws and having loud and earnest conversations. It was very hot in there, in spite of the air-conditioning, and it smelled of hessian and lavender and marijuana. Jack almost turned around and walked back out again, but from the rear of the store Bindy caught sight of him and called out, ‘Jack! Jack! Come and meet Tamara!’

  Jack had to use his elbows to force his way through the crowds who were gathered between the bookshelves because none of them seemed to be prepared to step aside for him. From the snatches of conversation he picked up as he passed, they were too involved in discussing macrobiotic diets and invisible art and the best type of birthing pool.

  About fifty folding chairs had been arranged in a semi-circle at the rear of the store, with a large throne-like antique armchair in the center. On either side of the throne were two tall candelabras with six white candles burning in each. Behind it, the back wall of the store had been hung with purple velvet drapes, fastened with thumbtacks.

  Tamara Thorne was a very tall woman, almost as tall as Jack and at least six inches taller than Bindy. She was also very thin, and severe, with long gray hair that had been braided tightly around her head like a medieval queen. Her eyes were the palest turquoise; while her cheekbones were sharp, and her chin was sharper. She was wearing a shapeless gray gown that reached almost to the floor, and several elaborate silver necklaces.

  ‘Tamara, I’d like you to meet Jack,’ Bindy enthused.

  Tamara Thorne held out one limp, long-fingered hand as if she expected Jack to kiss her wrist. Jack shook it, and said, ‘Pleased to meet you. I have your book.’

  ‘You have it,’ drawled Tamara Thorne, ‘but have you read it?’

  ‘Well – I have to confess, not too much of it. In fact none of it. I run a restaurant around the corner so I’m a little too busy to read. But I’ll take it with me when I go on vacation.’

  ‘Let me sign it for you.’

  ‘Ah. Sorry. I forgot to bring it with me.’

  ‘Then why
did you come here?’

  Jack shrugged and smiled. ‘Bindy invited me. What else can I tell you? She seemed pretty keen for me to come along, so here I am.’

  ‘You didn’t come here to speak to your wife?’

  Jack felt a cold crawling sensation all the way down his back. He looked into Tamara Thorne’s stone-gray eyes but she was giving nothing away. Then he looked at Bindy and said, ‘You told her about Aggie, then?’ He didn’t add ‘thanks a bunch, Bindy,’ but he felt like it.

  Bindy said, ‘Jack – I swear to you – I haven’t said a word.’

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ said Tamara Thorne. ‘Don’t you realize how obvious it is? I knew that you were a recent widower as soon as I saw you coming toward me. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. The pain on your face is a measure of how much you loved her.’

  ‘Well, good guess,’ said Jack. ‘Now – if you’ll excuse me – I have a very crowded restaurant to run.’

  ‘You didn’t come here to speak to your wife, did you?’ said Tamara Thorne.

  ‘No, as matter of fact, I didn’t.’

  ‘Are you not going to stay to hear what you did come here for?’

  ‘OK,’ Jack challenged her. ‘What did I come here for?’

  ‘Enlightenment. That is why most people come to me.’

  ‘Go on, then. Enlighten me.’

  Tamara Thorne turned to Bindy. ‘Shall we have everybody sitting down now? Then I can give Jack his message properly.’ She turned back to Jack and said, ‘It takes concentration, you see. I can’t just pluck it out of the air in mid-conversation. Especially not with all of this hubbub in the background.’

  Jack had rarely felt so much like telling somebody to take their enlightenment and shove it; but then he thought what he would have to say to Sparky when he returned home. Sparky took all this so seriously, and he would probably sulk for about a week – or what, with Sparky, amounted to sulking: turning his face away whenever Jack spoke to him, and answering every question with a monosyllable.

  ‘All right,’ Jack agreed, checking his watch. ‘But I can’t be too long. We have a party of Kiwanis coming in at nine.’

  ‘I can’t make you any promises,’ said Tamara Thorne. ‘It depends on the spirits, not on me. It depends how strongly they feel the need to contact you.’

  ‘I see. OK. Let’s do it, then, shall we?’

  Bindy and one of her assistants clapped their hands and called all of the guests in the bookstore to come and take a seat. They did so with a great deal of shuffling and chair-scraping and chatter, but eventually they were all settled in their semi-circle with Tamara Thorne sitting on her throne in the middle.

  ‘Please – absolute quiet,’ said Tamara Thorne, spreading her arms wide and closing her eyes. ‘Please, everybody, absolute quiet. The spirits need to hear the thoughts inside your heads. They need to hear your longings and your desires. They need to hear your grief that they are gone.’

  Chattering was replaced by coughing, and throat-clearing, and then at last by silence.

  Tamara Thorne, with her eyes still closed, said, ‘You will all have read in my book that it is not necessary for you to summon any particular spirit. Well, nearly all of you will have read that in my book. In other words it is not necessary to call on the one you love, or the one to whom you wish to speak.

  ‘All you have to do is empty your mind of noise and clutter and petty arguments and day-to-day concerns. Turn the inside of your head into an echo-chamber, totally dark and totally silent, in which the voice of your loved ones may resonate. They will speak to you, the spirits, if you listen. Not always – and not always the spirits of your choice. But the spirit world is like a social network, it’s like a celestial Twitter, and if you converse with one spirit, it is almost certain that your words will be conveyed to the spirit with whom you originally wanted to talk.’

  She paused for a very long moment, her eyes still closed, her arms swaying from side to side, as if she were floating on a shallow tide. After a while, she said, ‘Thelma says that it wasn’t your fault, Bruce. She’s very faint, but can you hear her?’

  A bald middle-aged man in the audience said, ‘Thelma?’

  ‘Can you hear her, Bruce? I know she sounds very far away, but that’s because she is.’

  ‘I can hear her! I can hear her! Thelma?’

  ‘Stay calm, Bruce,’ said Tamara Thorne, in a flat, soothing voice. ‘Stay calm and listen to what she has to say.’

  Jack turned to look at the man. His face was scrunched up in concentration and his fists were clenched. Tears were running freely down his cheeks, and the woman sitting next to him had put her arm around his shoulders to comfort him. Every now and then he nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ and ‘yes,’ and ‘oh, Thelma, I miss you, sweetheart!’

  At last he opened his eyes and looked around. The woman gave him a tissue and he dabbed his face, and sniffed. He tried to say something, but he was too overwhelmed to speak, and all he could do was shake his head.

  Jack’s first thought was that he was a plant. After all, nobody else in the audience had heard Thelma’s voice, even if Thelma really had been speaking to him.

  One or two people started to murmur to each other, but Tamara Thorne called out, ‘Silence, please! Absolute silence! The spirits are not easy to hear at the best of times, and if you want to hear your own loved ones, like Bruce here, then you will have to be totally receptive!’

  Again, she sat with her eyes closed, waving her arms. Jack was wondering how long he was going to have to sit here, listening to this charade, when a voice said, with cut-glass clarity, ‘Jack – słyszysz mnie?’

  Jack felt the same cold shrinking sensation down his back that he had experienced when Tamara Thorne had asked him if he had come here to talk to Aggie. Inside his head he could hear this clearest of voices, and it was unmistakably Aggie’s.

  ‘Jack, can you hear me?’ That was what she had asked him, in Polish.

  Like the bald man who had heard from his Thelma, Jack’s eyes immediately filled with tears, and his throat tightened up so much that he wouldn’t have been able to say anything out loud if he had wanted to. It was Aggie, his beautiful lost Aggie, there was no mistaking it. He looked across at Tamara Thorne, and his chest was physically hurting with grief and resentment, but Tamara Thorne still had her eyes closed, and was still waving her arms from side to side.

  Aggie – he thought – Agnieszka, is that really you?

  There was a long moment of silence, but then he heard Aggie’s voice again, still quite clear, but much smaller this time, as if she were speaking to him from very far away.

  ‘Jack, słyszysz mnie?’

  He had no tissue so he had to smear the tears away from his eyes with the back of his hand. Yes, Aggie, I can hear you. Where are you? Speak to me, Aggie!

  Another long silence, and then Aggie said, ‘Są dwa kilometry na północ … a potem jeszcze trzysta metrów na zachód … od wsi Truskaw.’

  What? He could hardly hear her, let alone understand what she was saying to him. She was trying to tell him that somebody was two kilometers to the north of Truskaw then three hundred meters to the west.

  He recognized the name Truskaw immediately. Truskaw was the village in the Kampinos Forest to which Grzegorz Walach and Maria’s great-uncle Andrzej had been trying to escape during the war, but where they had finally been overwhelmed with terror.

  ‘Są pogrzebani tam, gdzie ścieżka rozdziela się na trzy,’ Aggie continued. She sounded as if she were reading from a script, or a diary, like Maria. ‘Pod skałami w kształcie głowy wiedźmy.’

  Jack understood that. ‘They are buried where the path divides into three … under the rocks that look like a witch’s head.’

  Who is? he asked her, but this time the silence went on and on and she didn’t say anything more.

  ‘Aggie!’ he managed to choke out, and everybody seated around him turned and stared. Even Tamara Thorne opened her eyes and looked at him.

  ‘I’m
sorry,’ he said. He stood up awkwardly and knocked over his folding chair.

  ‘You heard somebody, Jack?’ asked Tamara Thorne.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry I disturbed you. I – ah – I have to get back to my customers.’

  He picked up his chair and then he made his way back between the bookshelves. Bindy came hurrying after him and caught up with him just as he reached the door.

  ‘Jack! Are you all right, Jack? Oh, God – you look so pale.’

  ‘I’m fine, Bindy. I knew I shouldn’t have come. The last few days … well, that Owasippe business probably disturbed me more than I realized.’

  ‘No, it’s me who should be sorry,’ said Bindy. ‘I should have seen that this wasn’t a good time for you.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Jack told her. ‘Give my apologies to Tamara. Tell her I may even get around to reading her book.’

  As he stepped out of the door, Bindy said, ‘Jack?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. I just wanted to make sure that you were OK. I do care about you, you know.’

  He kissed her on the forehead. She was slightly sweaty and her skin tasted of maca root moisturizer. ‘Thanks, Bindy. Take care of yourself.’

  Where the Bones Are

  When he returned to the restaurant, he found that Sparky was in the kitchen, wearing a white apron that almost reached the floor and a white chef’s cap. He was using his hands to mix ground pork and ground beef with onions and crushed Saltine crackers in a large brown bowl.

  ‘I teach him to make schnitzla,’ said Mikhail, proudly. ‘More useful than wait on table.’

  ‘That’s great, Mikhail,’ Jack told him. But when Mikhail had gone back to his range to fry up some more onions, Jack said to Sparky, with an intensity that was almost ferocious, ‘How did you know?’

  ‘How did I know what, Dad?’

  ‘How did you know that medium woman had a message for me?’

  ‘I told you, Dad. It was all in your star chart. “Somebody has a message for you, and it’s a woman.”’