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

by Graham Masterton

  ‘It’s great. Put it on tonight, as a special. We may even include it as a regular. Jesus – one bowl of that and you wouldn’t have to eat anything else for a week!’

  Mikhail gave a self-satisfied grin. But then, as Jack turned to leave, he said, ‘The stuffed cabbage, with the tomato?’

  ‘Yes, what of it?’

  ‘This week I have very many compliments. So, after all … maybe your Slovak recipe is not so bad. I withdraw my objection.’

  Jack left the kitchen and went upstairs. Sparky was in his room, unpacking and hanging his jeans back in his closet. Jack stood by the door and watched him for a moment and thought how lonely he looked. Not only had he lost his mother; he was locked inside a mind that could only see the world literally, without any of its subtleties and slyness. He even took the stars and the planets at face value, and believed everything that they predicted.

  He went through to the living room, picked up the phone and punched out Tamara Thorne’s home number. It rang and rang, and eventually a crackly message said, ‘This is Tamara Thorne … I am otherwise engaged at the moment, but if you wish me to contact your loved ones for you, or give you any other kind of spiritual service, please leave your name and number.’

  Jack tried her cellphone, and this time she answered immediately, almost as if she had been waiting for him to call her.

  ‘It’s Jack Wallace. I’m back home now. You left me a message.’

  ‘I did, yes. It’s most extraordinary! Somebody has been trying to get in touch with you from the other side. They sounded quite desperate.’

  ‘Really? Do you know who it is?’

  ‘She gave me a name but I couldn’t hear it clearly.’

  ‘It was a woman? Did she say what she wanted to tell me?’

  ‘No. But she said that she needed to speak to you as a matter of urgency.’

  Jack was tired out and he could feel a headache coming on. He was beginning to think that his mind was coming apart at the seams. In the past three days he had seen three people who had killed themselves, horribly. He had seen a dazzling figure who wasn’t even there, and heard whispers and voices from people who were either dead or non-existent. Now he had an urgent message from beyond.

  ‘Jack?’ said Tamara Thorne. ‘Are you still there, Jack?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m still here.’

  ‘Don’t you want to hear this message? It could be critical. Spirits hardly ever try to get in touch with the living. It’s almost always the other way around.’

  ‘Well, OK, Ms Thorne. When can we meet?’

  ‘Right now, if you like. I’m here with Bindy, at The Bookworm.’

  Jack closed his eyes for a moment. All he wanted to do was take a Tylenol, share a pizza with Sparky and then go to bed and sleep for eight hours. But if Tamara Thorne was just around the corner, he supposed that he could manage to go and find out what it was that this spirit had to tell him, whoever she was. If he didn’t, he would probably lie awake all night.

  ‘Sparks,’ he said. ‘I’m just going out for a while. Not long. You want to order up that pizza? Any toppings you feel like, bar pineapple.’

  Sparky said, ‘When are we going to Owasippe? Are we going tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t know, Sparks. Let’s recover from this trip to Poland first. What do the stars say?’

  ‘I haven’t done them yet.’

  ‘Well, don’t. I think it’s about time we started making our own decisions.’

  ‘We never make our own decisions, Dad. Whatever we do, it’s down to the planets.’

  Jack was beginning to believe him, but he didn’t say so. Right now he didn’t care what Mercury and Uranus were doing, whether they were rising or falling or square-dancing with the Sun; he was going to go see Tamara Thorne and then he was coming straight home to bed.

  He left the restaurant and walked around the corner to The Bookworm. Bindy was in the storeroom, but as soon as she heard the doorbell ringing she came hurrying out, wearing a shapeless brown dress with a beige Peter Pan collar.

  ‘Jack! That was quick! Tamara’s in back, signing books for me. How was your trip?’

  ‘Not too happy, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, dear! I’m so sorry! What happened?’

  ‘I’ll tell you some other time, Bindy. Right now I’m bushed. I just came to see Tamara because she said it was urgent.’

  ‘I think it is,’ came Tamara’s voice from inside the storeroom. ‘In fact, I think it’s dreadfully urgent.’

  Jack entered the storeroom. It smelled strongly of new books. Every shelf was crowded, and there were boxes of books stacked up on every side. Tamara Thorne was sitting at a small desk, with three stacks of her latest volume all around her, which she was halfway through signing. As before, her gray hair was braided into a crown, although today she was wearing a loose gray smock and a pair of baggy black linen pants, and silver sandals. Her fingernails and her toenails were all polished silver.

  ‘How are you, Jack?’ she said, lifting her hand to him so that her bangles and bracelets all slid down to her elbow. ‘Did I hear you say that your trip to Poland wasn’t a happy one?’

  Bindy dragged over a molded plastic chair so that Jack could sit down. ‘Would you like a coffee, or a cup of tea? Or I have some wine left over from the other evening, if you feel like something stronger.’

  ‘No thanks, Bindy. I’m not staying. I just came to pick up this urgent message from beyond the grave.’

  Tamara raised one immaculately plucked eyebrow. ‘I hope you’re not mocking me, Jack.’

  ‘No – honestly, I’m not,’ Jack told her. ‘I’ve had a difficult few days, that’s all. In fact I think I’m more inclined to believe you now than I was the first time.’

  ‘You’ve seen things? You’ve heard things?’

  Jack nodded. ‘Don’t ask me to explain them, because I can’t.’

  ‘You don’t have to, Jack. I can feel the disturbance all around you. Your aura is in chaos. You’ve triggered some force of nature – some really extraordinary force. That’s why this spirit has been trying to get in touch with you – to warn you, possibly, of what you’ve set in motion.’

  ‘It’s not dangerous, is it?’ asked Bindy, biting her lip.

  ‘It’s beyond dangerous,’ said Tamara Thorne. ‘I’ve never felt anything quite like it. I have no idea what it actually is. It feels very old, but it also feels very strange. Perhaps your message will tell us more about it.’

  ‘OK, then,’ said Jack. ‘How do we go about hearing it?’

  Tamara Thorne shifted the stacks of books aside. ‘Take hold of my hands, Jack, and close your eyes, and try to think of nothing at all. Think of emptiness. Think of a vacuum. Think of floating in space, but a space without stars.’

  Jack reached across the desk and took hold of Tamara Thorne’s hands. They were surprisingly warm, and for some reason he found her grasp was both relaxing and comforting. It was like holding the hands of somebody of whom he was very fond – a mother or a sister or a friend or even a lover. He was beginning to see why Tamara Thorne was so good at empathizing with people’s emotional needs.

  He closed his eyes and tried to think of nothing. To begin with, all he could think of was Mikhail’s bean soup, because he could still taste it.

  ‘Is your mind empty?’ Tamara Thorne asked him.

  ‘Not totally empty, no. I’m thinking of soup.’

  ‘Forget soup. Think of silence. Think of darkness. Think of floating.’

  He thought of silence. He thought of darkness. He thought of floating. His mind was almost empty when Bindy coughed and shifted herself on the carton of books she was sitting on, and broke his concentration.

  ‘Keep trying,’ said Tamara Thorne. She began to stroke the back of his hands with her thumbs, around and around, and it reminded him of Professor Guzik stirring his latte around and around. Her stroking took him back, it took him out of himself, and at the same time he felt as if she were taking care of him, and that he co
uld safely let go.

  He almost felt as if he were dwindling into nothing, the tiniest speck in a limitless universe.

  ‘We saw what it was,’ said a young woman’s voice, so loudly and clearly that he thought she must have walked into the storeroom. Immediately, he opened his eyes. All he could see, though, was Tamara Thorne, sitting behind the desk with her eyes closed, still holding his hands, and Bindy sitting with her legs crossed on her carton of books, frowning at her bitten fingernails.

  ‘We were down by the gully, looking for scat,’ the young woman continued. She sounded so close to him that Jack could imagine that he felt her breath against his cheek. He looked around but there was no young woman there.

  ‘Weldon said he felt panicky. He thought that a cougar might be stalking us. We heard a rustling in the scrub and I began to feel panicky, too. We started to jog back the way we had come. Then the rustling grew louder, and it seemed to be coming closer, so we ran faster.’

  Every muscle in Jack’s body was locked up with tension and he felt an almost irresistible urge to jump up out of his chair. It was only the endless circling of Tamara Thorne’s thumbs that kept him sitting there. That, and his need to hear what the young woman was trying to tell him.

  ‘We hid. We hid in a hollow, amongst the bushes. But we both realized there was no escaping it. We didn’t even have to speak to each other to know what it would do to us. It kept prowling through the bushes, around and around, and I have never felt such terror in my life.

  ‘Weldon killed me. He cut my throat but I barely felt it. When I was unconscious, he cut off my head. Then he killed himself. It was a terrible thing to do, but at least we no longer felt frightened. We had ended our lives, but we were both at peace.’

  The young woman stopped talking. Jack waited, and looked around, but there was silence. Nonetheless, Tamara Thorne kept her eyes closed, and continued to stroke the back of his hands with her thumbs, over and over, as if she were expecting the young woman to say something more.

  Jack thought that maybe his own awareness had broken the connection. He closed his own eyes again, and tried to concentrate on nothing at all. Darkness. Emptiness. Floating in space.

  Almost half a minute went past, and then the young woman started to speak again, although now she sounded as if she were standing on the opposite side of the storeroom. She spoke much more quietly, too, so that Jack found it difficult to hear what she was saying.

  ‘My spirit left my body. I rose up, like I was floating. I never realized that your spirit actually does that. You hear people talk about it, but it really happens. I rose up, and Weldon rose up, too, and when we rose up the thing appeared. It came through the scrub and it stood and looked at our dead bodies. It was white, and it was so bright that it was like it was burning, except that there weren’t any flames, only light. I don’t know how to describe what it looked like. It was scary as all hell, and its mouth was turned down like it was howling. That’s what I thought of, when I saw it. It was dazzling white, like an angel, but it was howling. A howling angel.’

  There was another long pause, and again Jack thought that the young woman might have finished. But then she said, ‘We rose up, Weldon and me, the two of us together.’ She was speaking even more softly, and with infinite sadness in her voice.

  ‘We rose up like we were nothing more than smoke. We rose higher and higher, and I could see the whole forest stretched out below us. I could even see the sun going down, and I thought “this was my last day on Earth”.’

  Another pause, but when she spoke again she was clearer, and louder, almost vehement. ‘I looked down, and I could see that howling angel still standing there. But then I saw a ranger, coming through the trees with his dog. I heard that dog bark, and that howling angel must have heard it, too.

  ‘Straight off, no hesitation, its light went dim, and it disappeared into the scrub so fast that I began to think that I had never seen it at all. And you know what I thought, Jack? You know what I believe?’

  When she said his name, Jack couldn’t help opening his eyes. He knew who she was now – the girl he had discovered in the pool at Owasippe, with her head cut off. The girl who worked as a researcher for Michigan Wildlife Conservancy, collecting cougar scat. He couldn’t remember her name, but how did she know his? She had been long dead by the time he found her.

  ‘What?’ he said, out loud. ‘What do you believe?’

  ‘This is my message to you, Jack. I know what you’ve been doing because the dead always know. But we hardly ever get the chance to speak out. Only when we die unjustly, and a wrong has to be righted.’

  ‘So what’s the message?’

  Now – hearing Jack speak – Tamara Thorne had opened her eyes, too. She stopped stroking Jack’s hands, but she held them even tighter, as if she were silently trying to give him strength and moral support.

  ‘It was frightened, Jack. It was frightened. It was even more frightened than we were.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The howling angel. The thing that you call the Forest Ghost, the nish-gite. It was frightened.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Jack. ‘What kind of a message is that?’

  He waited, and waited, but the young woman didn’t answer. After a while, Tamara Thorne let go of Jack’s hands and said, ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘Can’t you get her back? I need to ask her what the hell she was talking about.’

  Tamara Thorne closed her eyes again for a few moments and then she said, ‘I think she’s told you everything she’s ever going to. She really has gone. People think that mediums like me can call on spirits to talk to us, but we have absolutely no power to do that at all. Not many psychics will admit it, but it’s true. The only time that we can talk to the dead is when they want to talk to us.’

  Bindy said, ‘I wanted to talk to my grandma once, to ask her where she’d left the key to her clock, but I couldn’t.’

  Jack sat there rubbing his neck. He felt stiff and exhausted, and now he felt baffled, too. He didn’t doubt now that Tamara Thorne was a genuine medium, and that he had actually heard the voice of the headless girl he had found at Owasippe. But what was the point of hearing a message from a spirit if the message made no sense?

  So it had appeared to be frightened, this Forest Ghost, or Pan, or whatever it was. He expected that cougars were frightened, when people wandered into their territory, but that didn’t stop them from attacking them, and killing them.

  He stood up, and held out his hand. ‘Thanks, Ms Thorne. That was one experience I won’t forget in a hurry. Like I say, I don’t exactly know what the message was, but thanks all the same.’

  Tamara Thorne shook his hand and gave him a strange, secretive smile. ‘It will come to you, Jack. Unlike Bindy’s grandma, she’s given you the key.’

  What the Stars Say

  As exhausted as he was, Jack slept only fitfully that night. At three-twenty in the morning he went into the kitchen for a glass of cold water, and then he went through to the living room to stand by the window and stare out at the street.

  The streetlights were too bright for him to be able to see the stars, but he was very aware that they were out there. He was aware of the planets, too, on their strange and complicated journeys around the Sun. Like Sparky, he was seriously beginning to accept that the stars and the planets were invisibly orchestrating his life, and that he had no real choice in what was going to happen to him. He had always been skeptical about astrology, but after the past few days he was beginning feel that his destiny was already charted for him, and that whatever he decided, it would make no difference.

  We arrogantly believe we have choices, he thought, but what choices do we really have, in the grand scheme of things? We are stuck to the Earth by gravity, as helpless as flies stuck to flypaper. The Sun rises and the Sun sets and it controls every day of our lives, from the time we wake up to the time we go to sleep. If the Sun and the Earth control us that much, who’s to say that the other stars and t
he other planets don’t affect us, too, in all kinds of different ways?

  He looked at his ghostly reflection in the window, and he admitted to himself that he now believed in spirits, too. He had heard Aggie’s voice, and he had heard the voice of the headless girl from the Owasippe Forest. A week ago, he would have shaken his head in cynical disbelief if anybody had told him that there really was life after death, and that he would ever hear Aggie again. But now he didn’t doubt it. How could he? ‘Jack,’ she had whispered to him. ‘Can you hear me?’

  Up until this week, his life had been nothing but practicalities. Every waking hour had been taken up with food purchasing, and menus, and staff wages, and laundry, and advertising, and accounts. He had never been as hard-headed as his chain-smoking father, or as relentlessly skeptical as his mother, but he had never considered himself to be spiritual.

  After what he had witnessed this week, though, he realized that he had been converted. You couldn’t see people who had blown their heads off or cut their own feet off, and you didn’t hear voices from people who weren’t even there – not without it changing you dramatically, and forever.

  It was growing light outside, and North Clark Street gradually began to appear in front of him like a developing black-and-white photograph. He went back to bed, twisted the covers around himself, and managed to doze for another three hours. When he woke up, it was seven-thirty. He could hear a blustery wind rattling the restaurant shingle which hung outside his bedroom window, but at least the sun was shining.

  He heard clinking noises in the kitchen, and the fridge door shut. He eased himself out of bed and went through to the kitchen to find Sparky sitting at the table with a bowl of Cheerios and a carton of orange juice.

  ‘Use a glass,’ he said, taking one out of the cupboard. ‘Other people have to drink out of that carton, namely me.’

  ‘I had a dream we were back in Poland,’ said Sparky.

  ‘Wasn’t a scary dream, was it?’

  ‘No,’ said Sparky, with his mouth full of cereal. ‘I dreamed that we were walking through the forest and we met Mom, and this man, and they were holding hands, and both of them were smiling, like they were really happy.’