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

by Graham Masterton

  He collapsed on to his knees again, and crouched there for a moment, his heart thumping, gasping for air. If the white thing jumped on him now, there was nothing he could do about it. After a while, though, he managed to climb up on to his feet again, and continue running, although he was lurching from side to side like a man on the deck of a storm-tossed ship.

  Oh God, it’s no good. Oh God, it’s going to get me. Oh God, please don’t let it get me.

  He was close to the point at which he could no longer put one leg in front of the other when he suddenly saw the flag flying above the tree tops. The Stars and Stripes, idly curling and uncurling in the afternoon sunlight. It was the flag that flew over the scout headquarters and he knew that he had nearly reached sanctuary.

  He hobbled and jogged alternately the rest of the way. As he approached the scout building, he could feel the wind dying down. A few last leaves flew around him, but as the wind dropped they pirouetted down to the ground, as if they were tired of chasing him. Now the forest was quiet again, except for Jack’s panting, and the crunch of his trainers on dry pine needles.

  He reached the scout building and climbed the steps to the balcony. This time he didn’t use the handrail to steady himself, as he had when he was hurtling down the steps in pursuit of Sparky, but wearily to haul himself up. He opened the glass door and went back into the hallway. There was a row of chairs in a side alcove, and he sat down with his hands on his knees and his head bent, sweating and trembling and trying to get his breath back.

  His panic was gradually subsiding. He was already beginning to think how absurd it had been, for him to run away like that. What was it that had terrified him so much he had considered bashing his own brains out against a tree?

  Nothing. And yet this nothing could create such panic that it was known almost everywhere, all around the world. Some people said it looked like a ghost. Others said it was an angel, or a cougar, or a white albino deer, or the great god Pan, with the body of a man and the legs of a goat. But Jack now believed beyond question that they were all manifestations of one and the same nothing. It was simply the panic people felt in isolated forests, no matter where they were. Here at Owasippe; or in the Kampinos Forest; or the Mato Grosso.

  Although his chest was still rising and falling with effort, he stood up and went across to the scout leader’s office. He had almost reached it when the door opened and Undersheriff Porter came out, followed by Sally and the scout leader himself.

  ‘Hey, Jack!’ Sally smiled. ‘I was hoping you would still be here!’ But then she frowned at him and said, ‘Are you OK? You look terrible! What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s Sparky,’ said Jack. He told them quickly how Sparky had thrown a temper-tantrum and run off into the forest.

  ‘So you couldn’t find him? But my God, what have you been doing to yourself? You’re covered in dirt and pine needles and you look absolutely bushed!’

  ‘I had one of those panic attacks, Sal, like I did before. I couldn’t find Sparky. I called him and called him but he didn’t answer. Then I just lost it. I saw that white figure again, behind the trees, and the wind started to blow, and I panicked. I can’t describe it to you. You feel like you’d rather kill yourself than let that thing get you, and that’s what happened to all of those scouts, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘We’d better go look for Sparky,’ said Sally. ‘Dan – if we can’t find him directly, will you be able to call for some back-up?’

  ‘I’ll come outside with you and take a look-see,’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘If it seems like he’s genuinely lost I can get in touch with the forest rangers and rustle up a search party. We’ve done it here before, quite a few times. Don’t you worry, sir. We’ll find him. We never failed to find anybody yet, even when it took us a little time – and even when they didn’t want us to find them.’

  ‘I just hope that nothing’s happened to him,’ the scout leader put in. ‘I mean, if he’s been injured, the CAC are going to be held liable for it.’

  ‘Let’s start worrying about the kid’s welfare before we start worrying about the insurance claim, shall we?’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘How long ago since he went missing?’

  ‘Thirty, thirty-five minutes,’ said Jack. ‘But I really think we need to be careful. I mean, I don’t think I panicked for nothing.’

  ‘You said you saw something before, the last time you were here. Something white, you said.’

  ‘I saw the same thing today.’

  ‘But you still don’t know what it was?’

  ‘No idea, Sheriff. A ghost, a deer, a spirit, a cougar. Jason Voorhees in his hockey mask, who knows? That’s what I’ve been trying to find out. That’s the whole reason that Sparky and I came here today.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s it!’ said the scout leader. ‘You didn’t come here to pay your respects after all!’

  Undersheriff Porter turned to the scout leader and said, ‘It doesn’t matter two hoots why they came, Ambrose. All that matters is that we find this kid before it gets dark. Now, you know this forest better’n any of us. Do you want to make some suggestions as to which way he might have headed?’

  ‘I think he may have headed toward Lake Wolverine,’ said Jack. ‘That’s where his friend killed himself, and that’s where we had our first panic attack.’

  ‘OK, let’s drive there now and see if we can maybe head him off. You don’t have to come with us, sir, if you don’t feel up to it.’

  ‘No, I want to come,’ Jack told him. ‘If anybody can calm Sparky down, then it’s me. But I will say one thing. If any of the three of us start to feel panicky – even the slightest bit panicky – we need to do a U-turn and get the hell out of there. I really mean that. That panic is like a kind of madness. You lose all sense of what’s right and what’s wrong.’

  Sally took hold of Jack’s hand and patted it. ‘We’ll be fine, Jack. I promise you. I never panicked in my life. I was kidnapped by three crack addicts once, and held hostage until their friend was sprung from jail. I never panicked once. What was the point? We ended up playing poker together, and I won eleven bucks.’

  ‘I don’t think you understand what this thing is like,’ said Jack. ‘Well – I hope you never do.’

  They went around to the side of the building, where Undersheriff Porter’s Jeep was parked. The scout leader followed them, looking deeply unhappy.

  ‘It’s OK, Ambrose,’ Undersheriff Porter told him. ‘You know and I know that there’s no such thing as ghosts.’

  The scout leader said nothing, but looked at Jack, and the expression on his face said it all. You know and I know that there may not be ghosts in that forest, not even Chief Owasippe and his two dead sons. But there are spirits of some kind, because we’ve seen them, and they’re terrifying – more terrifying than words can describe.

  ‘I’m going to have to call this in,’ he said, miserably.

  ‘You do that, Ambrose. But we’ll be back before you know it, and we’ll have this gentleman’s son with us, too.’

  Dead Voices Speak

  They drove along the forest track toward Lake Wolverine. As he drove, Undersheriff Porter asked Jack to remind him what Sparky looked like, and tell him what he was wearing, and why he had run off into the forest.

  Jack said, ‘He needs to understand why his best friend killed himself. He’s compulsive about it. They were bosom buddies, those two. Sparky’s a little off-center, if you know what I mean, and Malcolm was kind of a dweeb, God rest his soul, so both of them found it hard to make any other friends at school.’

  ‘Sure, I see,’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘Well – when we find him, I think I may be able to enlighten him. Our crime scene people re-examined the area where the bodies were discovered, and they came up with an explanation for what happened that so far seems the most plausible. That’s why I asked Detective Faulkner here to come back and take a look.

  ‘We know that there was no wacky quasi-religious cult thing going on in that particular scout group; an
d also that there was no sexual exploitation, nor bullying, neither. They were the normalest bunch of kids you could hope to meet, and their group leaders were all straight arrows, too.

  ‘But less than twenty feet away from where their bodies were found, there was a wide charred patch which we had originally assumed was the remains of their campfire. I mean – scouts, campfire, logical conclusion. But one of our deputies pointed out that it was pretty unusual for scouts to light a campfire that early in the day. They were supposed to be out orienteering, so they wouldn’t have lit a campfire and left it unattended.

  ‘When our forensics people took a closer look at this so-called campfire site, they found that there was no wood-ash, and that the ground-covering and surrounding vegetation had simply been subjected to intense heat. In fact it had all the characteristics of a major lightning strike.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jack, ‘they were nearly struck by lightning. But that wouldn’t have made them commit suicide, would it?’

  ‘It may well have,’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘Even though none of them were hit directly, they may all have received what they call a secondary strike through the ground. Now, I didn’t know this myself, but that secondary strike can travel up through the soles of your feet into your body and play all kinds of havoc with your brain function. In some cases your brain will forget to tell your body to go on breathing. In other cases you can get totally disoriented. You no longer know who you are, or even what you are, and what the hell you’re supposed to be doing.

  ‘When lightning travels through your skin, you get badly burned, but people who only get burned are the lucky ones. If lightning goes right through your body and zaps your brain, you can end up cuckoo for the rest of your life.

  ‘Our forensic people are pretty sure that this is what happened to those scouts. Like, when you think about it, what other explanation could there be?’

  As they drove, Jack was looking into the forest on either side to see if he could spot Sparky. Every time he saw sunlight flickering through the trees, he quickly looked twice, just to make sure. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Would it have made them all commit suicide?’

  ‘Maybe one started it and the rest copied him. Who knows? Maybe if one of the scout leaders did it, the rest of the group followed him because they thought that they were supposed to.’

  ‘Is there any recorded instance of this happening before?’

  ‘Our people are looking into that. It seems like some pretty detailed studies into the psychological effects of being struck by lightning have been carried out at Chicago University, and at Finch University, too.’

  Now they saw Lake Wolverine sparkling up ahead of them. Undersheriff Porter drove past the scout buildings and the jetty, and circled around the left-hand side of the lake until he reached the clearing where the scouts and their leaders had all been found dead. It was surrounded by metal stakes with yellow tape wound around them: SHERIFF LINE DO NOT CROSS.

  They climbed out of the Jeep and ducked under the tape. The forest was very hushed, although the blue jays were calling intermittently and the leaves were whispering, unlike before, when Jack had first gone looking for Sparky. The surface of the lake was glittering, and the boats tied up at the jetty were softly knocking against each other.

  ‘It’s idyllic here, isn’t it?’ said Sally. ‘At least it would be, if those poor kids hadn’t killed themselves here.’ But Jack kept turning around and around, looking not only for Sparky but for any sign of something white. He looked up. Were those oak leaves whispering because they were being stirred by the wind that was blowing off the lake? Or were they talking to each other, and passing on a warning to the white deer spirit that intruders had arrived in the forest?

  An outline of every scout and scout leader’s body had been marked out with white plastic tape and fastened to the ground with skewers. Undersheriff Porter guided them between the outlines and they trod as carefully and as reverently as if the bodies were still here. Beyond the array of outlines, he led them across to a circle of blackened soil about seven feet in diameter. In the center of it, the matted pine needles had been reduced to a fine gray ash, and Jack could see why the sheriff’s deputies had originally thought that it was a campfire.

  As Undersheriff Porter had said, though, there was no charred firewood here, and there was none of the usual campfire paraphernalia – no logs arranged around it for the Scouts to sit on, or a barbecue pit rotisserie, or long campfire forks for toasting hot dogs and marshmallows.

  ‘We checked with the weather people,’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘The skies were mostly clear over Owasippe that day but they recorded two or three thunder bumpers further up north and so there was every likelihood that this was a lightning strike. In any case, the coroners are going to be carrying out brain scans on all of the deceased to see if there’s any evidence of severe electric shock.’

  ‘Now we need to find Sparky so that we can tell him that,’ said Sally.

  Jack walked around the scorched patch of soil. It certainly looked as if there had been a lightning strike here, and he could quite understand that the police were feeling hard-pressed to come up with some kind of rational explanation for what had happened, so that they could say that the case was closed. But three times now he had felt that overwhelming compulsion to commit suicide himself – twice here at Owasippe and once at Kampinos – and it certainly hadn’t been caused by lightning.

  ‘Sparks!’ he shouted. ‘Sparks, can you hear me?’

  Several blue jays fluttered away in alarm, but otherwise there was no response. Only the trees rustling, and the clanking of the rowboats, like human skulls knocking together.

  ‘Sparks, if you can hear me, please come on out! We think we know what happened to Malcolm!’

  ‘Sparky!’ called Sally. ‘This is Sal – Detective Sally Faulkner, from Chicago! Don’t be afraid, Sparky! You’re not in any trouble! We just want to make sure that you’re safe!’

  ‘Sparky!’ Jack shouted. ‘It’s going to be getting dark pretty soon, and then what are you going to do? You can’t spend all night in the forest!’

  They called him a few more times, and then waited, but there was still no reply. The wind was rising, which made the rowboats knock louder and faster, and more erratically, and the water lapped against the shore.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Undersheriff Porter. ‘You’re his dad – any ideas what’s going through his mind? I mean, is he afraid of being punished? Or is he doing this because he’s angry with you, for some reason, and he’s trying to punish you? Or is he just being ornery?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘None of those. Not really. He believes there’s some kind of spiritual force in the forest, and that’s what caused these kids to kill themselves.’

  ‘You mean this white thing you were talking about? This thing that makes you panic?’

  ‘I think there has to be something there, Sheriff. Don’t ask me what it is. But I’m not the only person who thinks they’ve seen it, and I’m not the only person who’s panicked in a forest. It’s a well-known phenomenon, worldwide.’

  Undersheriff Porter took off his amber-tinted sunglasses and peered into the trees. After a while he put them back on, and said, ‘Well … no phenomenons that I can see. Not disputing what you say, sir, but I have to believe my own eyes.’

  Just as he turned away, there was a sharp, furtive rustling in the bushes, about fifty or sixty feet away from them. Immediately he turned back again.

  ‘What was that? Did you hear that, Sally? Where did that come from?’

  ‘Right over there,’ said Sally, pointing directly in front of them. ‘Just beside that pine. Look – there it goes again!’

  The bushes that surrounded the foot of the pine tree had started furiously shaking, as if a large animal were running around inside them.

  ‘Sparky!’ called Jack, and started to walk quickly toward them. ‘Sparky, is that you?’

  ‘Sir!’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘Sir – you
want to wait up for a moment! That could be your son in there but then maybe it’s not! Even the foxes around here can get pretty darn snappy if they think you’re a threat.’

  Jack slowed down and then stopped. The bushes stopped shaking and the forest became eerily quiet. Sally and Undersheriff Porter came up to join Jack and the three of them stood listening for over a minute.

  ‘Spark-eeee!’ Sally shrilled.

  ‘Jesus, Sal, you scared the living crap out of me then!’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘You don’t want to do that again without giving me notice!’

  ‘Sorry, Dan.’

  They waited and listened a little longer. Undersheriff Porter said, ‘That must have been a raccoon, or something. No way your boy wouldn’t have answered a scream like that. Goddamned dead person would’ve answered it.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Not a whole lot we can do, just the three of us. You had a hunch he might be here and maybe he is – but if he is here he doesn’t seem too keen to come out and show himself.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘How old did you say he was? Twelve?’

  ‘Twelve, going on thirteen.’

  Undersheriff Porter looked at his wristwatch. ‘Well, he ran off voluntarily. Like, he wasn’t forcibly abducted or nothing like that. And even if he’s suffering from Asperger’s, from what you’ve told me about him he seems to be reasonably capable of taking care of himself. I’m reluctant to put together a search party just yet. By the time we get everybody out here to Owasippe there won’t be too much daylight left. My suggestion is that we give him a little more time to come to his senses. He’s going to be feeling hungry soon, too, and it’s my experience that when the stomach calls, the brain listens.’

  ‘I’m still sure that there’s something in this forest,’ said Jack. ‘Whatever it is, I’m really not happy about leaving Sparky out here all alone.’