Jack opened and closed his mouth, but he couldn’t speak. He knew that Aggie couldn’t be real, and that she must be some kind of mirage. She didn’t even look real – or at least she didn’t look solid. He could see right through her, to the back of the wing chair she was sitting in, with its tapestry cushion.
Five long seconds passed, and then he took an unsteady step toward her, and then another. Because her eyes were so shadowy, it was difficult for him to tell if she could see him or not. She didn’t move as he came closer – didn’t raise her hands or try to stand up or change her expression.
‘Aggie,’ he said, hoarsely; but as soon as he spoke her name she vanished, leaving nothing but the empty chair and the crumpled cushion.
Jack closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again, in case she had reappeared, but she had totally gone.
You were dreaming, Jack, he told himself. You were hallucinating. What you saw was nothing but wishful thinking. You’re overtired, that’s the trouble, and still grieving. Not only that – all of this weirdness with the scouts committing suicide at Owasippe and the stories about Grzegorz Walach killing himself in the Kampinos Forest, it’s really thrown you off balance.
All the same, he was sure that he had heard Sparky talking to her, and he was equally sure that he had heard her talking back to him.
He turned around. Sparky was still sitting cross-legged on the couch, his eyes still closed. Jack went over and sat down next to him.
‘Sparks?’ he said. ‘Sparky?’
Sparky still didn’t respond, so Jack took hold of his forearm and gently shook him. ‘Sparky? Wake up! It’s Dad!’
Sparky abruptly opened his eyes and looked around the living room.
‘Mom?’ he said, in a voice that was thick with sleep.
‘Hey, dude, it’s me. You’ve been somnambulating again.’
Sparky stared at him in bewilderment.
‘Where’s Mom? She was here. I saw her. She was right there, sitting in that chair.’
‘Your mom’s gone, Sparky, you know that. She’s never coming back. You were dreaming, that’s all.’
‘But I …’ Sparky began, but then he realized that Jack must be right, and that he must have been asleep all the time.
‘OK,’ he said, and stood up, and furiously scratched his head.
‘Get yourself back to bed,’ said Jack. ‘It’s school tomorrow and we can’t have you nodding off in the middle of algebra.’
Sparky looked up at him and Jack could see such pain in his eyes.
‘She was here, Dad. I’m sure she was here. I was talking to her, and she was talking back to me. I can even remember what she said. She said, “You have to stop it, or else it’s going to happen again.”’
‘What do you think she meant by that?’
‘She meant the scouts committing suicide. She meant the white thing that we saw in the woods. I mean, that’s what we were talking about.’
Jack put his arm around Sparky’s shoulders and guided him back to his bedroom. ‘I think this whole thing has been too darn traumatic for both of us, don’t you? Let’s both get some sleep and try to make a fresh start tomorrow. Maybe we could go boating on the lake this weekend. That would blow some of the cobwebs away.’
As he climbed into bed, Sparky said, ‘Dad?’
‘What is it?’
‘Mom said one more thing. She said, “Tell your father I still love him.”’
Jack was about to say, ‘I know,’ but instead he simply said, ‘Sleep well, Sparks,’ and closed the bedroom door.
Cry for Help
He went back to bed but he found it impossible to get back to sleep. He could hear garbage trucks in the street outside and police sirens and somebody playing dance music. Not only that, he was arguing with himself. Did I really see Aggie? Did I really hear her voice? He knew that it was impossible, but then he also knew that, under stress, the human mind can imagine all kinds of strange things. His old college friend Joe had suffered from alcoholic hallucinosis when he had given up drinking, and he had been convinced that he could hear Chinese policemen gambling in the corridor outside his hospital room.
Jack was still awake as it began to grow light outside, and he was beginning to think about getting out of bed and perking himself a strong cup of coffee and maybe making a start on his accounts. He threw back the bedspread and swung his legs out of bed and it was then that his phone warbled.
He looked at the time – 5:37 a.m. Who the hell was calling him at 5:37 a.m? He picked up the phone and squinted at the caller ID screen. Out of area.
Usually he didn’t answer calls unless he knew who was ringing him. But this time he lifted the receiver to his ear and said, ‘Nostalgia.’
A woman’s voice with a Polish accent said, ‘Is this Mr Wallace?’
‘Who wants to know?’
‘I am sorry to disturb you, Mr Wallace. I know that with you the time is very early. This is Krystyna Zawadka from Institute of History at Warsaw University. Maria Koczerska’s friend.’
‘Oh – oh, yes. I was planning on calling you later today.’
‘Mr Wallace, I am calling you from Truskaw, in Kampinos Forest.’
She hesitated. Her voice had sounded very strained and shaky, and it wasn’t just the distance between them – the line was as clear as if she had been calling him from across the street.
‘Are you OK?’ Jack asked her.
‘No, not OK. My colleague Robert and I, we came out to the forest this morning to visit again the place that you told Maria about – the place by the rocks like the head of a witch. We have not yet received permission to excavate the bones there, but we wanted to take photographs and draw preliminary maps.’
She hesitated again. Jack could hear that she was breathing in quick, suppressed gasps, as if she had been running.
‘So what’s happened?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t know. Something happened and nothing happened. But we had been there for only fifteen minutes, taking photographs, when we both began to feel as if we were being watched. It made us both very anxious, and we kept looking around to see if we could see anybody spying on us, but we could see nobody.
‘We took more photographs, and Robert began to make measurements with his theodolite to draw his map, but all the time we became more and more frightened, although neither of us could understand why.’
‘But you still didn’t see anybody?’
‘No … although we could hear branches breaking and a rustling sound behind the trees. Oh God, I began to feel so scared, my heart was beating so hard and I kept turning around and around to make sure that nothing terrible was coming up behind me.’
‘Nothing terrible like … what?’
‘I don’t know, Mr Wallace. That was what made it all the more frightening. I didn’t know what I was frightened of, and yet I was so terrified I thought I might literally drop dead on the spot. Robert must have felt the same, because he kept turning around, too, and making noises like huh! huh! huh!
‘What was so strange was that neither of us tried to run away. I felt there was no point in trying to run away. Whatever it was that was frightening me so much would never let me escape. The thought came into my mind that the only way to stop myself feeling so scared would be to kill myself – to take my knife and cut my own throat.’
Jack said nothing, but he couldn’t help thinking that a very similar feeling may have overwhelmed Malcolm and the rest of the scouts, and those two wildlife researchers he had found in the pool.
Krystyna was panting more quickly and sounding more and more distressed, but then she took a deep breath and managed to recover herself. ‘Robert – it was Robert who saved me, I think. He let out a great shout, and dropped his theodolite on to the rocks, which he would never do, because it costs so much, maybe twelve thousand zlotys. Then he ran off into the woods, still shouting.
‘For some reason I felt then that I could get away, and so I ran in the opposite direction, back along t
he path to Truskaw. I am here now, calling you from the BP gas station. I thought of calling the forest rangers, but what could I say to them? That Robert and I became so frightened of nothing at all that we both ran away? But now I do not know what to do next. I should go to look for Robert, I suppose, but I am very scared to go back there.’
Jack said, ‘I’m sorry, Krystyna, I’m not too sure what I can do to help you.’
‘It was you who heard the message from your late wife, telling you where to find these buried bones. Perhaps you think that I am being stupid, but surely there must be some psychic connection between you and this place in the forest.’
‘I don’t really believe in psychic connections, Krystyna, to tell you the truth,’ said Jack. At the same time, however, he was thinking how clearly he had heard Aggie’s voice inside his head, and how he had heard Sparky talking to her in the living room, and how he had actually seen her sitting there, if only for a few moments, before she had melted away.
‘But how could you know exactly where this place was?’ Krystyna asked him. ‘How could you describe it down to the very last meter?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Jack. ‘I simply told Maria what my late wife told me, during that séance. I don’t know how she could have known, either.’
‘There must be some connection, Mr Wallace, even if it isn’t psychic. We don’t yet know who the bones that are buried here belong to. But if they are the bones of Maria’s great-uncle Andrzej and your great-grandfather, the feeling of absolute terror that Andrzej wrote about in his diary is exactly the same as Robert and I experienced.’
Krystyna paused again, and then she said, ‘There is one distinct possibility – inherited memory, or what we call past life experience.’
‘Inherited memory? You mean remembering something that happened to your great-grandfather, even though you weren’t even born yet?’
‘Exactly. I myself have made several studies for the Institute of History of people who have seem to have inherited memories from their ancestors, sometimes going back hundreds of years. It is a well-recorded phenomenon. After all, if you can inherit the physical appearance of your forebears, their eyes, their nose, their hair color, who is to say that you cannot inherit what is inside their brain, as well?’
‘Krystyna – even if that’s possible – I still don’t really see how I can help you.’
‘Please … I beg you to come here, and to visit the place for yourself. Maybe then we can learn why we felt such terror there. If we can understand what causes it, then I am sure that we can find out how we can overcome it. They felt it in the forest during the war … we can still feel it now. But what can it be?’
‘Krystyna, I run a Polish restaurant here in Chicago – an extremely busy Polish restaurant. I can’t just up and leave it.’
‘Don’t you have anyone who could take care of it for you, just for a few days? The university will pay for all of your travel and all of your accommodation and other expenses.’
‘I don’t know. I feel like I’m getting myself involved in something that has nothing to do with me at all.’
Krystyna said, ‘The last thing I would want to do is put any emotional pressure on you, Mr Wallace, but if you thought you heard the voice of your late wife telling you about this location, don’t you think that there was some reason for this?’
Jack was silent for a while, although his mind was churning over like a washing machine. ‘I’ll have to think about it,’ he said, at last. ‘I would have to bring my son as well. He has Asperger’s and he needs special care.’
‘I understand. But I can arrange for the university to pay for your son, too.’
‘Let me think about it and get back to you, OK? I promise I’ll call you later today. Meanwhile – what are you going to do about finding your friend?’
‘I’m not sure, Mr Wallace. The only thing I can do is go back to where we left our Land Rover and see if he has managed to return there, too. If he hasn’t, I will have to talk to the forest rangers. But Robert is not a fool. He is a qualified surveyor. I am sure he will find his way back somehow. Right now he is probably more worried about me than I am about him.’
‘I’ll talk to you later, Krystyna,’ said Jack. ‘And by the way, please call me Jack. Only the tax inspectors call me “Mr Wallace”.’
‘Jack – yes,’ she said, very softly, as if she were being reminded of somebody whose name she had known a long time ago. And then she hung up.
The Face of Fear
When Sparky appeared in the kitchen, Jack was already beating eggs to make them an omelet for breakfast. Sparky looked puffy-eyed, as if he too had slept badly.
He sat down at the table and dry-washed his face with his hands. ‘So what time are we leaving?’ he asked.
Jack was about to pour the beaten eggs into the skillet, but he hesitated. ‘Ex-squeeze me? What do you mean, “what time are we leaving?”’
‘It says in your star chart that we’re going away this afternoon. We are going away, aren’t we?’
‘Jesus, that’s some star chart you’ve drawn up there. It doesn’t tell you what time I’m going for a crap, does it?’
‘I guess it might do. But we are going away, aren’t we?’
‘I know how you know. You overheard me on the phone this morning, didn’t you?’
Sparky emphatically shook his head. ‘It says in your star chart that we’re going away for at least three days. Beyond the eastern horizon, that’s what it says. It doesn’t say exactly where. It’s somewhere out of the line of sight of your present array of planets, beyond the curvature of the Earth.’
‘I see.’ Jack started gently cooking the eggs, folding them back as they began to set so that he could tilt more runny egg mixture around the skillet. When they were almost ready, he tipped grated mozzarella cheese and slices of smoked ham on top of them.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I had a call from Maria’s friend from Warsaw, Krystyna. She and a friend of hers went to that place in the forest by the witch’s-head rocks to take some pictures. The trouble is, they got so scared that they both ran away, in opposite directions.’
‘They got scared? What of?’
‘Nothing! Nothing that they could see, anyhow. Just scared. I guess they must have felt the same way that we did, at Owasippe. In fact Krystyna said she was so scared that she thought the only thing she could do was to cut her own throat, the same way Malcolm did.’
‘Oh, no. That’s terrible. What about her friend?’
‘She still doesn’t know what happened to him. He ran off shouting and that was the last she saw of him. She promised to call me once she had found him, but I haven’t heard anything from her yet. She wants me to fly to Warsaw to check this place out, and see why it frightened them so much – although, seriously, what the hell do I know? I’m a restaurateur, not a ghost-buster.’
He cut the omelet into two and slid each half on to separate plates. Then he poured himself a mug of black Java coffee and sat down.
‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ said Sparky, unblinkingly.
‘What – when are we leaving? Sometime later today I guess, if I decide to go. There’s a direct flight with Polish Airlines around five and another one around nine. It’s a nine-hour haul, so we wouldn’t get there till ten tomorrow morning.’
‘Are you going to call the school and tell them I’m taking some time off?’
‘Hey, whoa, hold your horses! I haven’t even made up my mind if we’re going yet.’
‘You will, Dad. You have to. Mercury is rising and Mercury is the planet of travel and communication. It’s also the planet of the nervous system, so we’ll be finding out more about fear, and other feelings.’
‘So that’s it? Some planet says we have to go?’
Sparky shook his head. ‘We were always going to go, whatever. That’s our destiny. The stars and the planets don’t make us do things. All they do is tell us in advance what we’re going to do before we do them.’
Jack cut a forkful of omelet and thoughtfully chewed it. ‘I’m not sure I like the idea of destiny. I’d prefer to believe that we can change our lives, if we want to.’
‘We can,’ said Sparky. ‘The only thing is that – even when we change them – we end up doing what we were destined to do anyway.’
‘So there’s no escape?’
‘No, Dad. There’s no escape.’
Krystyna called Jack at 12.17 that afternoon to tell him that Robert had still failed to reappear. She had returned to their Land Rover, which they had parked in a clearing about 150 meters away from the witch’s-head rocks, but she had found that it was still locked and Robert had the keys.
‘I was lucky and two forest rangers came driving past. I told them that Robert had disappeared, and not come back, so they gave me a ride back to their ranger station.’
‘You didn’t tell them why he ran off?’
‘What could I say to them? How could I say that we were so frightened that we thought of killing ourselves? They would have thought that I was mad.’
‘So what are they going to do if he doesn’t show? Send out a search party?’
‘They will look for him tomorrow, if there is still no sign of him. But it is late now, and there is no chance of finding him in the dark. The forest is over four hundred square kilometers, and it is not only trees – it is swamps and sand-dunes and rivers, too. Very primeval.’
Jack said, ‘I’ll be with you by tomorrow morning. I’m still not exactly sure what I can do to help, but my son seems to think that we don’t have any choice. He says it’s our destiny.’
‘Your son sounds very wise. How old is he?’
‘Twelve, going on thirteen. But I’m not sure if I’d call him wise. More like mystical.’
Forest Ghost: A Novel of Horror and Suicide in America and Poland Page 10
