‘There was only me in the bathroom, Dad.’
‘The lights were flashing on and off. And you were whispering, just like you did last night.’
‘No, Dad.’
‘Don’t tell me “no”, Sparks. I heard you, and I saw that thing with my own eyes. Why do you think I ran out of the room?’
‘Maybe you were hallucinating,’ Sparky suggested. ‘I read in Psychology Today that stress can do that to you sometimes.’
Jack was about to snap back at him, but from experience he knew that it was pointless. Sparky would go on repeating the same thing, over and over. ‘Maybe you were hallucinating. I read in Psychology Today that stress can do that to you sometimes.’ What the hell was a twelve-year-old doing, reading Psychology Today?
‘So why aren’t you wearing your pajamas?’ he demanded.
‘I was hot.’
‘You were hot? This goddamn air-conditioning is set to “igloo”.’
‘In bed I was hot. I took off my pajamas and then I went for a leak.’
Jack went back into the bathroom and took a look around. There was no evidence that anything unusual had happened here, although the mirror over the basin was faintly fogged over, and he was sure he could detect some faintly herbal odor, as if somebody had been burning sprigs of thyme. He sniffed, and closed his eyes for a moment to help him concentrate. If anything, the bathroom smelled like the forest, but it was probably just the hotel soap.
‘OK, buddy,’ he told Sparky. ‘Put your pajamas on and get back into bed. I’m just going to take a quick shower. We can talk about this in the morning.’
‘There was nothing there, Dad,’ Sparky repeated.
‘All right, buddy, whatever you say. There was nothing there.’
After a short, hot shower Jack put on a T-shirt and a clean pair of shorts. He had just lifted up the covers to get into bed when the doorbell chimed in the living room.
When he went to answer it, he found two broad-shouldered security men in olive-green uniforms standing outside in the corridor. One looked exactly like Lech Wałęsa, with a gray moustache like a yard broom.
‘Sorry to trouble you, sir, but we have had complaint.’
‘Complaint? What kind of complaint?’
‘In the room below, they say that you are throwing furniture. Crashing, banging. All kinds of noise.’
Jack shook his head. ‘Throwing furniture? Are you kidding? Not unless we’ve been doing it in our sleep.’
One of the security men craned his neck sideways so that he could look past Jack into the living room. ‘So – nothing?’
‘That’s right. Nothing.’
For the rest of the night, Jack found it impossible to close his eyes. If Sparky hadn’t been sleeping so soundly, he would have gone down to reception and asked them to change their rooms. But when he thought about it rationally, it was hard to believe that the white figure from the forest had followed them here, to the twenty-seventh floor of a brand-new hotel in the center of Warsaw. If the white figure was nothing more than a figment of his own imagination, it would make no difference, would it, whatever rooms they slept in?
He was convinced that he had heard that chorus of whispering, and he was sure that he had seen that blinding white figure in the bathroom, if only for a split-second. But it was more than likely that Sparky was right, and that he had either been dreaming or hallucinating. He had heard of people having recurrent nightmares after they had been through deeply traumatic experiences, and what he had seen in the Kampinos Forest had been enough to push the sanest person over the edge.
By creating that frightening white figure, his brain might simply have been trying to give his panic some shape that he could understand, in the same way that children believed there were bogeymen underneath their beds, or witches hiding in closets.
Next morning it was gloomy and it was raining hard. When Jack opened the drapes, he saw that Warsaw was veiled in gray. He stood there for a while, watching the traffic and the pedestrians hurrying along Emilii Plater with multicolored umbrellas. Sparky was still asleep, his head buried under the bedcovers.
While Jack was dressing, the phone warbled. He picked it up and it was Krystyna.
‘Jack? How are you this morning?’
‘I’ve been better. What time am I going to see you today?’
‘Around twelve would be good. I have called Professor Guzik and he is going to meet us at the Batida Café near the University.’
‘What have you told him?’
‘Not much, except that you are interested in tree talk, and that you think you may have actually heard some trees communicate.’
‘Great. He probably thinks that I’m a head case already.’
Sparky was still asleep at eleven-thirty, when it was time for Jack to think of leaving. Jack gently shook his shoulder and asked him if he wanted to come with him.
‘No. I don’t feel good. I’ll just stay here and play some games.’
‘Make sure you order yourself something to eat, OK?’
‘I’m not hungry. I don’t feel good.’
‘Well, make sure you stay here. I shouldn’t be too long. Call me if you need to.’
Sparky buried himself under the covers and said, ‘I’m OK. I don’t feel good, that’s all.’
Jack left him, hanging a Do Not Disturb tag on the outside door-handle. He wasn’t at all sure that he was doing the right thing. Maybe it would have been wiser to take the first flight back to Chicago, and try to forget about white things that haunted the woods. But he knew that Sparky would never let it go, and he also had a feeling that if he didn’t discover what they were, and why they had panicked him to the point of killing himself, they would follow him doggedly for the rest of his days.
He pushed his way in through the doors of the Batida Café and immediately saw Krystyna sitting at a table on the left-hand side. She was talking to a mousy-haired young man in a crumpled green linen suit. There was a strong sweet smell of coffee and cakes in the café, and the wide glass display counter was crowded with doughnuts and pastries, white and pink and chocolate and covered in sprinkles.
Jack walked up to the table and said, ‘Krystyna. Hi.’
The mousy-haired young man had been eating a caramel-frosted doughnut. He immediately jumped up, wiping the frosting off his fingers with a paper napkin.
‘Aleksander Guzik,’ he announced, and held out his hand. ‘Krystyna has already told me much about you. I gather that you are the great-grandson of Grzegorz Walach, the great violinist. Amazing! It is an honor to meet you, sir.’
Professor Guzik had a round, well-fed face and huge round spectacles with amber plastic frames. He wore a wispy moustache, the same mousy color as his hair, which he had obviously grown to make himself appear more mature, although it actually made him look more like a third-year student than a full professor.
‘Coffee, Jack?’ asked Krystyna. ‘Maybe a cake, or a sandwich? Did you eat breakfast yet?’ She had pinned up her hair with barrettes today, which gave her a more sophisticated air, and she was wearing a smart gray jacket with a pink crystal butterfly pinned to her lapel.
‘Coffee will do me, thanks,’ Jack told her. ‘Double espresso, no cream.’ He pulled up a chair next to Professor Guzik and said, ‘I guess Krystyna has already told you what happened in the forest.’
‘It was all over the TV news, so I could hardly avoid knowing about it,’ said Professor Guzik. He spoke very precise English, although it was a little sing-song, as if he were reciting poetry. ‘I was so shocked when I saw that Krystyna was involved. What a terrible tragedy! I knew Robert very well. He and I went once on a vacation together, to Greece, to visit the locations of some famous mythological events.’
He paused, and then he said, ‘Your son is not joining us?’
‘No … he’s trying to catch up on his sleep.’
‘But it was your son who mentioned tree talk, yes?’
‘That’s right, he did. To tell you the truth I didn’t really
understand what the hell he was saying.’
‘Oh … there is considerable scientific and anecdotal evidence that trees and plants have the ability to communicate with each other, in many different ways.’
‘Well, we heard the trees rustling their leaves,’ said Jack. ‘Sometimes it got pretty frantic, even when there was scarcely any wind. But is that actually talking? I mean, if a woodsman walks into the forest with a chainsaw, do the trees warn each other that they’re going to get felled, or have their branches cut off?’
Professor Guzik smiled. ‘Oh, yes. And some of the ways in which plants spread the alarm to each other is even more effective than just talking.’
‘Krystyna mentioned something about plants giving off chemicals.’
‘That’s right. Recently at Washington State University there was a fascinating study in what we call biocommunication. Edward Farmer and Clarence Ryan showed that when certain plants such as sagebrush and cabbages are attacked by herbivorous insects, they give off a chemical called methyl jasmonate. This chemical immediately sends out a message to all surrounding plants to start producing defensive substances. If the insects then eat these plants, they become very sick, and so they are discouraged from eating that same type of plant ever again.
‘The same chemical will trigger lodgepole pine trees into traumatic production of resin. This acts as a vaccine against destructive insects, and protects the trees from further harm.’
‘OK,’ Jack acknowledged. ‘So plants and trees can communicate by sending off chemicals. But that’s still not actually talking, is it? I mean, humans can’t hear it, can they? Not like those trees in the forest.’
‘Well, here we begin to enter the realm of mythology,’ said Professor Guzik. He picked up his coffee spoon and started to stir his latte, around and around, as if he were trying to hypnotize Jack into believing what he had to say. ‘Mythology, however, often has a basis in fact, as I have proved many times in the past. I have even published a book on the subject: The Gods Were Real. I don’t suppose you’ve ever read it? It was published in English, as well as Polish.’
‘I own a very busy restaurant,’ said Jack. ‘I’m afraid I never get the time to read too much. When I do, it’s mostly cook books, or the sports pages.’
‘Of course. But if you give me your address I will send you a copy and maybe you will find a few moments to look at it. It contains some information about tree talk. Tree talk is almost always associated with the forest god Pan.’
Jack had a vivid mental flash of Robert, impaled on that tree stump, croaking out the word ‘Pan’, and he glanced over at Krystyna. She had her eyes on him already, as if she were watching his reactions to everything that Aleksander Guzik was telling him – or maybe she was just watching him.
Professor Guzik said, ‘It was the ancient Greeks who first put a name to that causeless feeling of fear which we sometimes experience when we find ourselves isolated in a forest. The Greeks believed that the trees would rustle their leaves in order to alert Pan that people had entered the forest. Pan himself would then shake the trees and the bushes in order to frighten those people away – especially those who were intent on clearing the forest by felling trees or starting forest fires.
‘This feeling of fear the Greeks called “panic” – after Pan. By instilling panic, Pan does everything he can to protect the forests and the creatures that live in them.’
‘But we didn’t only have that feeling here, in Poland, in the Kampinos Forest,’ said Jack. ‘We had it in the Owasippe Forest in Michigan, too. How does that figure? Those two forests are at least four thousand miles apart, easy.’
‘Aha!’ said Professor Guzik. ‘According to the Greeks, there was not simply one Pan, but a swarm of Pans, each of them guarding a different forest. Nonnus wrote that Dionysus had twelve sons of Pan who helped him in his war against the Indians, all of them with different names, such as Phobos and Xanthos and Argos and Omester. But there were even more manifestations of Pan, such as Aegipan, who was all goat, rather than half-man and half-goat; and Sybaris, who was an Italian Pan. He was conceived when a shepherd boy copulated with a she-goat.’
Jack said, ‘I saw something in the Owasippe Forest, and I saw it here, too. Did Krystyna tell you? It was difficult to see exactly what it was, behind the trees, but it didn’t look much like a goat. To be absolutely honest, it was more like somebody running around wearing a white sheet.’
Professor Guzik finally finished stirring his latte. He took out the spoon and sucked it. ‘Yes, Krystyna did tell me this. It is very, very interesting. Of course the Greeks described Pan as having a physical appearance, as they did with all of their gods, and since he was the god of the fields and the woods, and in particular the god of shepherds and goatherds, they imagined that he would look like half a man and half a goat.
‘Because of this, we find it easy to dismiss the idea of Pan as nothing but a myth. But as I say in my book, many of the gods really exist, even though they look nothing like the pictures that the Greeks or the Romans used to paint of them. Pan makes his appearance again and again in history, and in many different locations and cultures.
‘There was incredible panic when the Romans fought the German tribes in the Teutoburger Forest in the year nine AD, with many of the Romans committing suicide by falling on their own swords. There was panic again in several battles in the American Civil War, such as Chickamauga and the Battle of the Wilderness, which were both fought in forests. There was panic in the Kampinos Forest when the Germans invaded in 1939. There was panic in the Hürtgen Forest near Aachen at the end of World War Two. Again and again, there are instances of panic in forests – suicidal panic – and not just because of the fighting that was going on there. The armies were damaging the forests, and the gods or the spirits or whatever you like to call them were trying to protect them.
‘The same kind of panic was reported in the 1960s in the rainforests of the Mato Grosso in Brazil when agricultural companies tried to clear the land to grow soybeans. Workers were panicking so much that they were throwing themselves under their bulldozers. In the end the state government had to create the Xingu National Park – ostensibly to protect the forest and the wildlife and the ethnic tribes who lived there. But in reality it was to stop any more suicides.’
‘And you think this was all down to Pan? Or Pans, plural?’
Professor Guzik looked serious. ‘Almost every living creature on this Earth has a mechanism to protect itself. Spines, or venom, or stings, or simply camouflage. Our forests are the same. They have a spirit, an essence, whatever you like to call it. It is not a man with horns and the legs of a goat, playing a set of pipes. But it is real, and you have seen it for yourself. After the battle of the Teutoburger Forest, the Romans called it Saltus Spiritum, the Forest Ghost. The European Jews called it the nish-gite. You can look it up – not just in my book, but in many books.’
Jack’s espresso arrived. He didn’t know if he ought to tell Professor Guzik about his experience last night, or not. Sitting in this busy café, with the clinking of coffee cups and people talking and laughing all around them, and the rain running down the windows, his vision of a blinding white figure in the bathroom seemed even more illusory.
‘Jack?’ Krystyna asked him. ‘You were going to say something?’
‘Yes. No. It doesn’t matter.’
‘So I have told you all that you wanted to know?’ asked Professor Guzik.
‘I guess so. Except how do we get rid of it?’
‘I don’t understand. What do you mean, “get rid of it”?’
‘My great-grandfather and his closest friend both killed themselves because this Forest Ghost made them panic so much. My son’s best buddy cut his own throat, and he was only thirteen years old. These are the reasons why he and I came here, to find out who was responsible, or what.’
‘But, Jack – if you don’t mind me calling you Jack – the Forest Ghost is Nature. You can’t punish Nature for protecting itself from h
uman depredation. We are here on this planet as guests, and it is our duty to take care of it. If you are attacked by a shark, you cannot blame the shark, especially when you consider how badly we pollute the oceans. If a lion mauls you, or a cobra bites you, or a wasp stings you, they are only defending themselves.’
‘So this Forest Ghost, this nish-gite, or whatever it is, we just let it go?’
‘I fail to see what else you can do. It’s an elemental spirit. You can’t catch it and put it in prison, or kill it.’
‘You can exorcize spirits, can’t you?’
‘You would have to ask a priest about that,’ said Professor Guzik. ‘But even if you could, would it be morally right to do so? In the last ten years, the Amazon basin has been deforested by two-thirds more than the entire area of Poland. What other way of defending themselves do our forests have?’
Jack didn’t know how to answer that. He had never been particularly interested in climate change, or recycling, or saving energy, except for making sure that the lights and the ovens in the restaurant were always switched off, to save money. But he couldn’t help thinking about Malcolm and all of his brother scouts, cutting their own throats; and of great-grandfather Grzegorz and his friend Andrzej; and Robert, and Borys, and Lidia. All of them valuable human lives; all of them needlessly lost. And for what? The sake of some trees?
Whatever Professor Guzik said, sharks that killed people were then hunted down and killed too. Dogs that attacked children were destroyed. As far as Jack was concerned, humans had an equal right to protect themselves against Nature. Nature had taken his Agnieszka away from him, and if there was any way that Jack could get his revenge on cancer, he would.
He felt the same about Pan, or the Forest Ghost, or whatever it was.
‘I sense that you don’t agree with me,’ said Professor Guzik. Behind those enormous glasses, his eyes looked like the eyes of a goldfish, staring out of its bowl.
‘Well, you’re very perceptive,’ Jack told him. ‘But let me tell you this …’ He held up his thumb and his index finger so that they were less than an inch apart, and then he said, ‘I was panicking so much in that forest that I was that much away from cutting Krystyna’s throat, and then my own. Then I saw Borys and Lidia with their heads blown off. Whether it’s Nature or not, anything that does that to you needs to be exterminated. We exterminate rats, don’t we?’
Forest Ghost: A Novel of Horror and Suicide in America and Poland Page 18
