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

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Yes, you were right. A woman did have a message for me. I heard her speaking to me, right inside my head. But do you have any idea who it was?’

  Sparky looked up at him, his hands still deep in the bowl of ground pork.

  ‘No,’ he said, in a little ghost of a voice.

  ‘It was your mom. At least I think it was. You know that I don’t believe in any of that life-after-death baloney. But it sounded exactly like her.’

  Two tears suddenly rolled down Sparky’s cheeks. ‘It was Mom? You really heard her?’

  Jack came around the table and put his arms around Sparky’s shoulders. ‘I don’t know how it was done, Sparks. Maybe I was tricked. Some of these mediums, they have ways to fool you into thinking that they’re putting you in touch with dead people, but it’s nothing but a scam. Like, they’ll find out little personal details about you before the séance starts, so you’ll really believe that it’s your dead Aunt Jemima talking to you.’

  Sparky took his hands out of the bowl and carefully scraped the schnitzla mix from his fingers, using a spoon. Then he went to the sink and washed them.

  ‘Hey – you don’t finish yet, Sparky!’ called out Mikhail. ‘Now you have to squish into patty!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mikhail,’ said Jack. ‘You’ll have to finish them off yourself. Sparky and me, we have a couple of important things to talk about.’

  ‘OK,’ said Mikhail. ‘But you come back, Sparky, for more lesson in cook! You have touch like good chef!’

  Jack and Sparky went upstairs to their apartment. Jack went to the fridge and took out a beer for himself and a Dr Pepper for Sparky. They went into the living room and Sparky sat down on the end of the couch, looking up at Jack both expectantly and anxiously.

  ‘This is so hard, Sparks,’ said Jack. ‘At first I wasn’t going to tell you, but then I thought, I have to. After all, it was you who said that I was going to be given a message, and you were right, and so you deserve to know what it was and who gave it to me.’

  ‘Do you believe that Mom’s still here, someplace?’ asked Sparky. He looked around the room, almost if he thought she might be standing in the corner.

  ‘What?’ said Jack. ‘In heaven or something? I don’t know. It would be nice to believe it, wouldn’t it? But I don’t think I can.’

  ‘If she’s not in heaven, how did she speak to you?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea. But the message she gave me was that somebody was buried in the Kampinos Forest, not too far from a village called Truskaw. Well, she said “they”, so I’m assuming that she was talking about more than one.’

  ‘Did she tell you who they were?’

  ‘No, she didn’t, but considering that this was a message from beyond, she was pretty specific about where they were. Two kilometers north of Truskaw and three hundred meters to the west, that’s what she said. Apparently they’re buried where the path splits up into three, under some rocks that look like the head of a witch.’

  ‘She said all that? What … what did she sound like?’

  ‘Really calm, like she always used to, when she was alive. Not upset in any way at all, but not much expression, if you know what I mean. It was almost like she was reading it. She started off sounding really clear, but then her voice got fainter and fainter.’

  ‘Did she say anything about Malcolm?’

  ‘No, she didn’t. Well – she might have done, but if she did I couldn’t hear it.’

  Sparky looked thoughtful. ‘She must have had a reason for telling you about these buried people.’

  ‘I agree, Sparks. Like I said, she didn’t tell me who they were, but if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that they could well be your great-great-grandfather Grzegorz, and his friend Andrzej – you know, Mrs Koczerska’s great-uncle. I never even heard of Truskaw before last week. It seems like too much of a coincidence that this is the second time in five days that somebody has mentioned it to me.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Sparky.

  ‘Well, you said, didn’t you, that some woman far away was going to confirm that this message was true? I’m going to call Maria Koczerska and see if her friend at Warsaw University can shed any light on it.’

  ‘She can,’ said Sparky, emphatically. ‘She will.’

  ‘You also said that I’m going to fall in love with her.’

  ‘That’s what your stars say.’

  ‘Don’t I have any choice in the matter?’

  Sparky looked away. Jack was trying to be light-hearted about it, but he could tell that Sparky didn’t want to talk about it any more.

  ‘Do you have any homework?’ Jack asked him.

  ‘Not tonight. Well – some, but it’s only reading a chapter of Moby Dick, and I can do that when I go to bed.’

  ‘OK – why don’t you go back down to the kitchen and help Mikhail to finish off those schnitzlas? If I can manage to get through to Mrs Koczerska, I’ll come down and tell you.’

  When he called Maria Koczerska, she told him that she was just about to go out for an evening of Polish dancing. He thought that there was no point in being anything but totally honest with her, so he told her all about the séance and what he had heard Aggie saying to him inside of his head.

  Strangely, Maria didn’t sound at all surprised.

  ‘All right, Jack,’ she told him, when he had finished. ‘Tonight I will email my friend Krystyna at the Institute of History and see what she has to say about this.’

  Jack said, ‘I just hope she’s not too skeptical about it, just because I got the message through a psychic. I know what these academic women are like. They always want empirical proof of everything – even what day of the week it is.’

  ‘I think you will find, Jack, that Krystyna has a very open mind. Anyhow, I promise you that I will contact her and let you know what she says as soon as I can.’

  ‘Just off the top of your head, Maria, do you think Aggie could have been talking about Grzegorz and Andrzej?’

  ‘Who knows, until we look for them?’ said Maria. ‘But like so many thousands of others, Grzegorz and Andrzej must be there somewhere in that forest. All of Kampinos is a cemetery, and almost every tree marks somebody’s last resting place.’

  Jack was washing his teeth that evening, ready for bed, when he had a return call from Maria.

  ‘I have spoken to Krystyna,’ she said. ‘This weekend she will go to the forest and try to find the place you spoke about. If she does, she may make some preliminary excavation there.’

  ‘What did she say when you told her where the information came from?’

  ‘To be honest with you, Jack, I didn’t tell her that it had come from a medium. I said instead that after she had sent me my great-uncle Andrzej’s diary, I had managed to locate some old Polish immigrants in Chicago who had been eye-witnesses to the mass executions at Palmiry. I said that the details about the burial site had come from them.’

  ‘You lied to her, in other words? I thought you said that this Krystyna was very open-minded.’

  ‘Yes, of course, and she is. But there was no point in putting her open-mindedness to such a test. Not until she finds these rocks like a witch’s head, if they exist, and then digs down to find if there is anything there. If there are no rocks there, or nobody buried underneath them, we can simply blame senile old men with faulty memories.’

  The following Tuesday morning, Sally came into the restaurant and sat herself up at the bar. Jack came up to her and said, ‘What’s it to be, ma’am?’

  ‘A Dead-End Special with a side order of Frustration, please. Undersheriff Porter just emailed me from Muskegon and we’ve had to agree that all of those scouts committed suicide of their own free will, without any apparent threat or coercion.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes. Oh. We’ve questioned everybody involved with the Thirty-ninth Scout Group and we could find no cult activity of any kind, religious or otherwise, no online suicide pacts, no systematic bullying, nor any evidence whatsoever
of sexual abuse.

  ‘The Muskegon Sheriff’s Department searched a twenty-square-mile area of the forest surrounding the Owasippe Scout Reservation with dogs, metal detectors and infra-red heat-seeking equipment mounted on helicopters. Nothing was found that could have had any material relevance to the scouts’ suicides, nor to the deaths of Sandra Greene and Weldon Farmer, from Michigan Wildlife Conservancy, which does appear to have been a mutually agreed suicide.

  ‘Several of the scouts’ relatives and friends received letters and postcards from them, but none of them mentioned being frightened, like Malcolm. Undersheriff Porter is of the opinion that we shall never know why any of them committed suicide. Like, ever.’

  ‘So what does that mean? Case closed?’

  ‘No … but unless I receive any further evidence from Muskegon, or some scout comes forward and tells me that they all agreed to commit suicide so that they could go to a better life on another planet, there’s no place else for me to take it.’

  Jack wondered if he ought to tell Sally about Tamara Thorne’s séance, and the message he had received from Aggie, but he decided against it. It wouldn’t help her to solve the mystery of what had happened at Owasippe, and it could make things much more complicated. Nearly three quarters of a century had elapsed between Grzegorz Walach and his friend Andrzej killing themselves in the Kampinos Forest and the scouts killing themselves at Owasippe, and even if Sparky was convinced that there was a connection between them, how could they prove it, and even if they could – how would it help?

  ‘You want a real drink?’ he asked Sally.

  ‘Love to,’ she said, ‘but no. I have to go interview a husband and wife whose daughter has been found dead with a plastic bag stuffed in her mouth. Muslims. It seems like their daughter was fond of short skirts and dating American boys and they wanted her to go to Pakistan and go through with some arranged marriage.’

  ‘Tragedy stops for nobody, does it?’ said Jack.

  ‘You said it, buster.’

  Jack had just finished phoning through his orders for fresh vegetables when his phone rang. It was Maria Koczerska.

  ‘I have heard from my friend Krystyna in Warsaw. On Saturday she and her friend from the historical institute went to the Kampinos Forest, to the location that you told me.’

  She paused, and said, ‘Please – hold on for a second, Jack. My cleaner is just leaving and I have to pay her.’

  She put down the phone. Jack waited for over a minute, and then he heard her pick it up again.

  ‘And?’ he said. ‘What did they find? Please – don’t tell me they didn’t find anything at all.’

  ‘They measured exactly two kilometers north from Truskaw and then three hundred meters to the west and they found the rocks. Krystyna said they were not sure at first that this was the right place because the rocks look like a witch only from a certain angle. She has sent me a photograph of them and I can email it to you, too.’

  ‘What about excavation? Did they do any digging?’

  ‘Yes, they did. Not very deep, only a few centimeters, but almost at once they found a human shoulder bone. That is when they stopped, because they have to obtain special authority to exhume human remains from the forest. It is a national park now, after all.’

  ‘So she’s going to do that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maria, ‘she filled out an application today and she has sent it to the park authorities. She is also seeking assistance from the historical institute to help finance the exhumation. It has to be done very carefully, with everything being properly photographed and recorded.’

  ‘Well, that’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?’ said Jack. ‘My late wife tells me that there’s somebody buried in a forest in Poland, and where they’re buried, and they’re actually there, for real. I can hardly believe it.’

  ‘I told Krystyna this,’ said Maria.

  ‘You told her I went to a séance?’

  ‘Yes. Well, I had to. She wanted to talk to my Polish immigrants about what they had seen when these people were buried, and who they thought they were, and who did it – so of course I had to admit that my immigrants were all invented. Apart from that, Jack, it is so extraordinary. I thought it was very important for her to know how you came by such information.’

  ‘So – when you told her the truth – what did she say?’

  ‘She said she would like to speak with you on the phone.’

  ‘Yes – well, of course. I’d be glad to, although I don’t know what else I can tell her. My late wife spoke to me inside of my head and told me this stuff. I don’t know how, or why.’

  ‘Maybe you need to try to get in touch with your wife again.’

  Jack said, ‘No, Maria. No way. She’s gone. She’s dead. I don’t want to have to go through all of that grief a second time.’

  ‘I understand. But I will give you Krystyna’s number in Warsaw, her number at the university and also at home, and you can call her whenever you are able to.’

  ‘Thanks, Maria.’

  ‘There is one more thing, Jack. I just wanted to tell you how much this all disturbs me. On the one hand I am deeply curious to know what happened, and Krystyna is, too, but at the same time I wonder if it is wiser not to know. I have a feeling that if we find out, we will regret it. Andrzej and Grzegorz killed themselves for a reason, and maybe it is safer for us if we never discover what that reason was.’

  Apparition

  Although there was a lull in the restaurant around seven forty-five p.m. before the eight o’clock customers came crowding in, Jack didn’t call Krystyna that evening. In Warsaw it would have been two forty-five the following morning, and he was sure that she wouldn’t take too kindly to being phoned at that time.

  By the time he had closed the door on his last customers at one-thirty a.m. he was too tired to think about phoning anybody. He went upstairs to his apartment, took a short hot shower, and climbed into bed to watch Highway Patrol on This-TV. After fifteen minutes, unable to keep his eyes open any longer, he switched off the bedside light and went to sleep.

  He dreamed that it was dark. He dreamed that it was silent. Then he heard people talking. He couldn’t hear distinctly what they were saying, but it sounded like a woman and a boy. Their conversation continued for what seemed like twenty minutes or even longer, although there were several lengthy pauses in between their sentences, like the conversation of two people who are both preoccupied with doing something else, like reading or sewing or playing a video game.

  After a while, Jack opened his eyes, or dreamed that he was opening his eyes. His bedroom was totally dark, like his dream, or maybe this was part of his dream, because he could still hear the voices, the woman and the boy, having their desultory, long-drawn-out conversation. They sounded as if they were in the living room.

  He lay there for a while, straining his ears, trying to make out what they were saying, but his bedroom door was closed, and all he could hear was the cadence of their voices, and not their words.

  He sat up. Am I dreaming this, or am I awake? But then he looked at the digital clock on his nightstand and saw that it was 2:47 am and he knew that he was awake. If he was awake, though, who was that talking in the living room at this time of the morning?

  He climbed out of bed, crossed the bedroom floor and opened the door. The living-room door was two doors off to the right, on the opposite side of the corridor, and there was a light shining underneath it. Hanging on the wall in between was a large framed black-and-white etching of angels, gathered around Mary and the infant Jesus. The angel Gabriel was staring directly at Jack as if he wanted to know what he was doing there. At night, he seemed to be saying, this is our domain.

  Jack made his way stealthily down the corridor and stopped outside the living-room door. For the first minute or so, there was silence, as if the woman and the boy knew that he was there, and had deliberately stopped talking, waiting for him to betray himself by making a noise, or sneezing, or losing his patience and opening up th
e door.

  He took hold of the door handle and he was about to open the door when he heard the boy say, ‘I told them they would lose. I even told them what the score would be – three–five. Of course when they lost and it was three–five, they blamed me. They said I was a jinx.’

  ‘That was so mean of them,’ said the woman. ‘Supposing you had told them they were going to win, and they had won? They wouldn’t have blamed you then, would they?’

  Jack held on to the door handle but he didn’t open it. If he had heard only the boy’s voice, he would have gone in, because it was Sparky’s voice, and Sparky did have a tendency to walk and talk in his sleep. But it was the woman’s voice that made him hesitate. It was the woman’s voice that gave him a freezing, prickling feeling. It was the same voice that he had heard inside his head at Tamara Thorne’s séance. Aggie. His dead wife, Agnieszka.

  Again, there was silence. Then the woman said, ‘It’s going to happen again, unless you can do something to stop it.’

  Another long pause.

  ‘I know. But what can I do? Nobody’s going to believe me, are they? And I don’t even know what it is myself.’

  ‘You have to find out. That’s the point.’

  More silence. The clock in the hallway suddenly struck three and Jack’s heart almost stopped.

  ‘Dad’s going to talk to some woman in Poland,’ said Sparky.

  ‘Oh. You mean the one he’s going to fall in love with?’

  Silence.

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you that.’

  ‘Why not? I still love him, but I can’t expect him to live alone for the rest of his life.’

  At that point, Jack opened the door. The first thing he saw was Sparky sitting cross-legged on the couch, with his eyes closed. He was wearing his pale-green pajamas and his hair was sticking up on the crown of his head, as if he had just climbed out of bed. The only light in the living room came from a standard lamp with a parchment shade which stood right behind him.

  Jack looked across at the far end of the room, and froze. Sitting in a wing chair by the window, in a long white nightdress, her face pale, was Aggie. Her blonde hair was shining in bright filaments in the lamplight, but her eyes were only shadowy smudges. Her thin-wristed hands were clasped in her lap and her feet were bare. She looked almost exactly as she had looked on the day that he had last seen her, on the day she had died. He could even see the blue veins in her ankles.