‘Was he OK?’ asked Jack. ‘He was in such a weird mood when he came out of the forest.’
‘That’s why I stayed,’ said Krystyna. ‘All the way back he was nervous and jumping and talking to himself. I kept asking him what was wrong but he didn’t seem to understand what I was saying to him. I didn’t want to leave him in case he had a fit or something like that, or did himself some injury, like Robert.’
She paused, and then she said, ‘Robert was dead, I expect, when you reached him?’
‘Yes. I don’t think he stood any chance of survival, anyhow.’
‘What did that detective say?’
‘He was very doubtful that Robert could have done that to himself. I mean, how can you cut your own feet off, for a start?’
‘There was that rock-climber who got stuck and cut his own arm off.’
‘Well, sure. But Robert wasn’t stuck, was he? And cutting his feet off would have made it much harder for him to get away, not easier.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Krystyna. ‘I don’t understand any of this, and I’m much too tired and upset to think about it any more.’
Jack checked his watch and saw that it was five after eleven. ‘We’d better get you home, Professor. Do you live far from here?’
‘Old Sadyba. It’s only fifteen minutes away by taxi.’
‘I’ll call reception and tell them to have one waiting for you.’
Krystyna tugged on her boots and laced them up. ‘We should meet again tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I expect that detective will want to talk to us again, in any case. I’ll come back here around twelve-thirty. That will give me plenty of time to get some sleep.’ She nodded toward the bedroom. ‘I just hope that Sparky is better in the morning. I think he was shocked and frightened more than anything else.’
‘You’re probably right. But thank you for being so thoughtful and staying with him. I really appreciate it.’
He stepped forward and kissed her on the right cheek, then the left, then the right again. For a moment he was holding her, and he felt the urge to kiss her on the lips, too, but he knew that this three-kiss goodbye was nothing more than everyday Polish politeness. In the old days, a Polish gentleman would have lifted her hand and kissed the back of her wrist.
‘I’ll see myself down to the lobby,’ she said, as he took her to the door. ‘You stay here and keep an eye on Sparky.’
‘Dobranoc, Professor. Sleep well … and thank you.’
Krystyna walked off toward the elevators, but when she reached the corner she turned her head and looked at him over her shoulder. Jack wasn’t at all sure what to read in her expression, but by the way she hesitated he wondered if she didn’t really want to go.
He was woken up while it was still dark by a whispering, secretive voice. He opened his eyes and lay there for a moment, listening. He couldn’t make out any words, but the whispering sounded very conspiratorial, like somebody planning a malicious practical joke, or a theft, or describing some forbidden activity that they had seen or done. Whisper-whisper-whisper hee-hee-hee.
He lifted his head up. The bedroom was still dark, except for the bedside clock, but a soft white light was flickering intermittently from underneath the bathroom door. Jack reached over to the far side of the bed and said, ‘Sparks? Are you awake?’ But there was no Sparky there, only the twisted sheets, which were damp with perspiration.
‘Sparks!’ he called out. ‘Everything OK in there?’
But the whispering continued, and the soft white lights continued to flicker, and Sparky didn’t answer.
Jack climbed out of bed and walked over to the bathroom door, but he hesitated before he opened it. He was torn between fatherly concern and the possibility that Sparky might be doing something that he didn’t want Jack to see, like masturbating with the aid of pornographic videos on his iPhone. He thought of the number of times he had heard his father’s footsteps coming along the corridor and he had hastily pushed his copy of Penthouse under the bed.
He stood there, undecided, for nearly a minute. But the whispering went on, and the light seemed to flash even more brightly – too brightly for an iPhone. It was more like an old-fashioned black-and-white TV, or a fluorescent light strip that was just about to give up the ghost.
‘Sparks?’ he said, leaning his head against the door. ‘Sparks – what are you doing in there? Are you OK?’
There was still no answer, so he tried knocking. ‘Sparks – what the hell’s going on in there?’
‘Don’t come in!’ Sparky called back. But his voice was very strange, almost like two or even three voices all shouting at once, all in different octaves.
The whispering abruptly stopped, although the lights continued to flicker. Jack waited a little while longer, and then he said, ‘Sparks – can you hear me?’
‘Don’t come in!’ Sparks repeated, in a much higher voice this time, almost a scream.
‘Sparks, I need to know what the hell you’re doing in there. What’s all this whispering? And you got some kind of light flashing – what’s that?’
‘Don’t come in! Don’t come in! Don’t come in!’
Jack pulled down the door handle and tried to open the door, but Sparky had bolted it. Jack knocked again, with his fist this time, and much louder.
‘Open this goddamned door, Sparks! I mean it! It’s the middle of the night and I want to know what you’re up to in there! What’s this whispering, for Christ’s sake? What’s with all these lights?’
‘Dad, please—’
‘Please, nothing! Either you open this goddamned door right now or else I’m going to kick it in! I mean it!’
‘No, Dad! No!’
But Jack stepped back two paces, and then kicked the bathroom door as hard as he could. The screws that were holding the bolt in place were torn out of the doorframe, and it took only one more kick for the door to judder wide open. Jack stepped into the bathroom and there was Sparky with his back to him, standing naked in front of the washbasin. His face was reflected in the mirror, but his eyes were closed.
‘Do you mind telling me just what in the hell you’re doing?’ Jack demanded. ‘It’s three-thirty in the goddamned morning and we’ve both had the worst day that anybody could possibly imagine, but here you are whispering and flashing the lights on and off. What’s wrong, Sparks? Are you sick or something?’
‘Dad, please leave me alone.’ Sparky was so tense that his buttocks were clenched and his shoulder-blades were protruding as sharp as two axes. He still didn’t open his eyes. His voice, too, still sounded as if two or three people were speaking at once, or as if it had been recorded and then re-recorded – fractions of a second out of synch.
‘Come back to bed, Sparks,’ Jack told him.
Sparky stayed where he was. Jack came right up to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. Sparky flinched, almost as if Jack had given him a mild electric shock. His skin felt very cold and clammy, even though he must have been very hot in bed to have sweated so much.
Jack said, ‘Sparks – you have to come back to bed, son. If you’re still feeling like this in the morning, we can call for a doctor.’ He paused, and then he said, ‘Where’s your mom’s pendant? I thought you wore it all the time.’
Sparky opened his eyes. For a fraction of a second Jack thought that Sparky had rolled them up inside of his head, because they were blind and white, without any irises. But then he blinked, and they looked normal again. He still didn’t seem to be his normal self, though. He could often be introspective and difficult to talk to, but ever since he had emerged from the forest he had given Jack the impression that he had discovered some secret he was determined to keep to himself. In a word, he not only looked introspective but sly.
‘My pendant?’ he said. ‘I must have lost it.’
‘You’re kidding me. Where?’
‘Someplace in the forest, I guess.’
‘You sound like you don’t even care.’
‘Of course I care. But if it’s lost, it�
�s lost. I’m never going to find it again, am I?’
Jack didn’t know what to say to that. It had been his impression that his mother’s pendant had been one of Sparky’s most precious possessions.
‘So what was all that whispering?’ he asked, as they went back into the bedroom. Sparky picked up his blue-and-orange Chicago Bears pajamas from the floor beside the bed and tugged them on. Jack couldn’t help noticing that his penis was erect. Maybe his first guess had been right, and Sparky had been masturbating, but somehow he didn’t think so. Something else had aroused him, although he couldn’t imagine what.
They climbed back into bed and Jack switched off the light.
‘You do know, don’t you, that you can tell me anything, and everything?’ he said. ‘I’m your dad, for God’s sake. You surely don’t think it’s going to go any further.’
Sparky twisted the bedcover around himself and turned over, with his back to Jack. ‘I don’t have anything to tell you.’
‘Not even what that whispering was about?’
‘It wasn’t whispering.’
‘It sure sounded like it.’
‘It was tree talk.’
‘Tree talk? What the hell is tree talk?’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Well, you could try me. I’m not that dumb.’
‘I’m too tired, Dad. I’m going to go to sleep.’
‘Come on, Sparks. You can’t just say it was tree talk and then not tell me what it is.’
‘I wish I’d never mentioned it.’
‘Jesus. I wish you hadn’t, either.’
Sparky didn’t respond to that. Jack waited for over a minute but Sparky said nothing more, and a few minutes later he began to breathe deeply and evenly, with a little catch at the end of each breath, and Jack knew that he had gone back to sleep.
Krystyna joined them for a late breakfast the next morning at the same table in the DownTown Café where they had sat only yesterday with Borys.
Outside it was a warm breezy day and Krystyna had arrived wearing a pale pink cardigan with embroidered flowers on it, and jeans. Her hair had been blown by the wind but Jack thought that only made her look fresher and more attractive.
‘Komisarz Pocztarek will be coming here at one,’ said Jack. ‘I told him that you would be here as well, so he can interview us all together.’
‘It was on the TV news this morning,’ said Krystyna. ‘It’s in the papers, too. “Massacre in Kampinos Forest”. I tried to call Borys’s wife, Kasia, last night, and again about an hour ago, but I there was no answer.’
She looked across the table at Sparky, who was listlessly pushing a slice of smoked sausage around his plate with his fork.
‘How are you today, Sparky?’ she asked him. ‘Feeling any better?’
Sparky shook his head but didn’t even raise his eyes to look at her.
‘Well, it was very traumatic for you,’ said Krystyna, laying her hand on his arm and smiling at him. ‘But I’m sure that you’ll get over it, given some time.’
Sparky pulled his arm away and said nothing. Jack said to him, ‘If you don’t want to eat that, why don’t you go back upstairs and watch TV?’
Still without saying anything, Sparky pushed back his chair, stood up and said, ‘I’m going out for a walk, if that’s OK with you.’
‘Of course it is. Try to get back here around one, though. That’s when Komisarz Pocztarek is coming to talk to us again.’
Krystyna said, ‘Why don’t you go across to the Patyk – the Palace of Culture? I believe they have a James Bond exhibition at the moment, with all the props from the movies, and his car.’
Sparky looked at her as if she had said something completely unintelligible. ‘I might,’ he said, and then he left them.
‘Hard work, bringing up young people,’ said Krystyna, when he had gone.
‘Tell me about it. His Asperger’s makes it even harder. And of course he’s old enough now to realize how different he is from the other kids at school. He has regular therapy sessions, and I’ve tried everything. Even herbal remedies, like St John’s Wort. But, you know – it’s not a condition you can really cure.’
‘It’s sad. He’s such a good-looking boy. Like his father.’
‘I think he looks more like his mother,’ said Jack. ‘But his mother was always very open, very sociable. Sparky keeps things bottled up. I’m worried about how that experience in the forest might have affected him.’
‘Yes. He was behaving very strangely on the way back to the city last night.’
‘He got out of bed in the middle of the night and locked himself in the bathroom, and started whispering, and switching the lights on and off. Even when he went back to sleep he was very restless. I asked him what he was whispering and he said it wasn’t whispering, it was “tree talk”, whatever that means.’
Krystyna put down her coffee-cup. ‘Tree talk – is that what he called it?’
‘That’s right. He wouldn’t tell me what he meant. He said I wouldn’t understand and he wished he’d never mentioned it.’
‘But tree talk, in Greek mythology, that’s the conversation that trees have when somebody intrudes into their forest. If you learn the language of the trees, apparently, you can hear them whispering and understand what they are saying to each other. Usually, it’s a warning. Haven’t you ever been into a forest on a day when there is no wind at all, but suddenly you hear this swishing of leaves? That is supposed to be the trees, telling each other that you are trespassing.’
‘You don’t seriously think that trees can talk to each other?’
‘I don’t know. It’s possible. They have found out that houseplants react to sound, like music, or human conversation, so that they are aware when somebody comes into the room. They can also make a clicking sound, with their roots, to warn each other that somebody is there.’
‘Now that is seriously creepy.’
‘Professor Guzik was telling me about it once,’ said Krystyna. ‘He teaches ancient culture at the university. He said that the Greeks believed the trees would alert each other whenever a human entered the forest, and that they would pass the message on to Pan, who of course was the god of the woods.’
‘Pan.’ Jack frowned. ‘That was what Robert said, isn’t it?’
Krystyna stared at him, but then she said, ‘No. He couldn’t have meant Pan. It’s ridiculous.’
‘It’s more than ridiculous. It’s insane. But it’s what he said, isn’t it? And with his very last breath, practically. Pan. Maybe he wasn’t saying “mister” at all.’
‘No. This isn’t possible. It’s all just mythology. It’s no more real than, say, Medusa and the Gorgons. Or Pegasus the flying horse. Or – I don’t know – Cerberus the three-headed dog, who guarded the gate to hell.’
‘I still think there might be something in this tree talk,’ said Jack. ‘When Sparky and I went into the woods at the scout camp in Michigan, we both heard this rustling sound. Pretty much the same thing happened here, in the Kampinos Forest. Both times, this strong wind started blowing, and both times we started to panic.’
‘Perhaps you should meet Professor Guzik,’ said Krystyna. ‘He’s a great expert on mythology, and what was probably real and what wasn’t. I remember him telling me that Polyphemus – the giant with one eye in the middle of his forehead – he probably existed. He was a shepherd on a Greek island who would catch stranded fishermen and kill them and eat their brains.’
Jack looked down at the pale yellow scrambled eggs on his plate. ‘Thanks, Krystyna. You sure know how to kill a man’s appetite.’
Komisarz Pocztarek was over thirty minutes late. He came up to Jack’s suite on the twenty-seventh floor, accompanied by a young female detective with a large mole on her upper lip and a dark gray suit that was two sizes too tight for her.
Sparky had returned from his walk, although he wouldn’t tell Jack or Krystyna where he had been. He sat at the desk in the corner of the living room, staring out
of the window and tapping out an irritating rhythm with a pencil.
Komisarz Pocztarek looked as if he hadn’t slept. He was wearing the same black leather jacket and the same shirt as yesterday, with his red necktie loosened. He smelled of cigarette smoke and Jack noticed that the fingers of his right hand were tinged amber with nicotine.
He sat down and flipped open his notebook. ‘First of all, I have to tell you that it appears as if Robert Wiśniewski did actually cut off his own feet. We found the blade of his camping knife and it was covered in his own blood, and the fingerprints on the handle were his. It also looks certain that he impaled himself on that tree stump. It was probably broken off beforehand, but before he severed his feet it appears that he used his knife to whittle the top of it so that it was even sharper, and would penetrate his body more easily. We found no traces that anybody else was involved.’
‘What about Borys and Lidia?’ asked Krystyna.
‘All the circumstantial evidence suggests that Borys Grabowski shot Lidia and then his dog and then reloaded his shotgun and shot himself. Murder-suicide, or possibly a suicide pact. We have no idea what the motive could have been, apart from what you have already told us about you all panicking. But unless some new evidence turns up, we are not actively looking for anybody else.’
‘So, does that mean that my son and I can go back to the States?’ Jack asked him.
‘Of course, although I will need to know how to get in touch with you, if it is necessary. And today I would appreciate it if each of you could give me again your account of what happened when you went looking for Mr Wiśniewski in the forest.’
‘Sure. The sooner we get this over with, the better.’
Komisarz Pocztarek interviewed each of them separately, while the other two waited downstairs in the bar. His questions were detailed and laborious. Where were you standing in relation to the others when you first began to feel panicky? Why do you think you became so frightened? When did you hear the shotgun blasts? How long do you think it was between each blast? How long was it before your son reappeared from the forest? Did he say anything to you? If so, what?
Forest Ghost: A Novel of Horror and Suicide in America and Poland Page 16
