At the same time, more white figures were swarming all over the other deputies, and were pulling them apart, too. Jack saw blood flying across the clearing, and dismembered arms and legs, and even though the figures kept up their howling, the screams of the deputies were even more penetrating.
He backed away, between the pines, and Ambrose the scout leader came after him. The scout leader kept crossing himself and mumbling, ‘Holy Mary Mother of God, Holy Mary Mother of God.’
Jack thought that they had managed to escape from the clearing unnoticed by the white figures. He was just about to turn around and start running when five of them caught sight of them and immediately came rushing toward them.
‘No!’ screamed the scout leader. ‘No! I always took care of you! I always protected the forest! No! I never hurt you! I never told anyone about you! No!’
But four of the white figures took hold of him, and forced him on to his back on the ground. The fifth figure came after Jack.
Jack ran as hard as he could into the darkness, dodging and jinking like a football player as he tried to avoid hitting the trees. But he could hear the white figure catching up with him, its footsteps close behind his back and its pale light shining on the trees up ahead of him.
He bounded down into a hollow, and as he did so the figure leapt on top of him, bringing him crashing down into the bushes. The figure was cold, and strong, and Jack was exhausted. He lay there, with his cheek against the dirt and the leaf mold, gasping for breath and resigned to die. Only two or three hundred yards behind him, he could hear the scout leader screeching as he was torn to pieces.
Jack closed his eyes. Think of nothing, he told himself, and it will soon be over. The white figure remained sitting on top of him, keeping him pressed down against the ground, but seconds went by and it made no attempt to pull off his arms or to turn him over and disembowel him. He heard the scout leader screaming, ‘Jesus! Oh, Jesus!’ He was almost singing it, like a hymn.
After that, the forest fell silent, except for an occasional blue jay screeching. Even the howling had died away.
‘You should go now, Dad,’ said the white figure, in Sparky’s voice.
‘Sparks? Is that you?’
‘It was me, Dad. Not any more.’
‘Where’s Sparky? What have you done with him?’
‘We needed him. We needed many. Sparky was just one of them. We had to bring them all here, from wherever they were scattered. This is the place where we first arrived, and this is the only place from which we can leave.’
‘I said, where’s Sparky? I want to know what the hell you’ve done with him.’
There was a lengthy pause. A cool breeze was blowing through the forest, and for some reason Jack detected a note of sadness in the white figure’s voice.
‘Sparky was promised as so many were promised. We had no way of knowing then when one of your family would be needed. For all we knew at that time, it could have been many hundreds of years before we had to leave. But you could not be stopped from wantonly destroying all the beauty and the riches that were given to you, with greater and greater destructiveness, and we have no wish to witness you doing it, or to try to stop you any longer.’
‘Is Sparky dead?’
‘It depends what you mean by dead. It depends if you understand what happens when you pass from one level of existence to the next. Some of your cultures almost grasped it. But none of you have ever understood it enough to protect it.’
The white figure climbed off Jack’s back and stood up. Jack sat up, wiping the dirt from his face with the back of his hand. The white figure was only faintly phosphorescent now, but he could just make out the features of a face, which looked like Sparky, only older.
‘So – aren’t you going to rip my arms off and tear my guts out, like everybody else? Or make me panic and kill myself?’
The white figure not only sounded sad; it looked sad, too. ‘No, Dad. It’s too late for that now, and you’ve given us enough. You should go now. Forget about Sparky. Forget that you ever saw us. You will have to live a new life now. A very different kind of life.’
With that, the figure turned around and began to walk back toward the clearing where the rest of the figures were gathered.
‘Sparks!’ Jack called after it. The white figure hesitated, but didn’t look back at him.
‘Sparks, I love you!’
Three long seconds went by, and then the white figure continued walking. Jack could have done what it had told him to do, and leave the forest, but he needed to see where Sparky was going, and what all of those figures were going to do next. How could he ever forget him, or forget what had happened here?
He followed the white figure, keeping his distance. As he approached the clearing, however, he looked up into the trees and saw the remains of the scout leader, and for a few moments he had to stop and press his hand over his mouth to stop himself from retching. The scout leader’s arms and legs had all been wrenched off, and then his trunk had been split open and suspended from an overhanging branch by loops of intestines. The scout leader was swaying from side to side, and staring down at him with a slightly mystified expression, as if he were thinking, this wasn’t the way I was supposed to die, was it? I was supposed to die in bed, when I was old, with a priest to give me the last rites.
He stayed well back amongst the trees while the white figure rejoined the rest of the figures, and crouched down behind the bushes. He didn’t want to go too close in case the other figures couldn’t be trusted to spare his life, and also because he didn’t want to see too much of the bloody litter of human bodies that was scattered around.
The figures gathered in their circle again, with their arms linked together, and began to howl. They howled higher and louder, and they flickered faster and faster, until it was like watching the last blank frames of a movie film flapping through a projector.
As their howling reached a crescendo, it sounded as if every bird and animal in the Owasippe forest was joining in. The circle of white figures started to rotate, very slowly at first, but gradually they spun around faster and faster until they were only a blur of light. The light rose up in the air, up to treetop height. It hesitated there, as if the spirits were reluctant to leave the forest which they had guarded for so long.
Beneath them, the matted vegetation on the forest floor began to smolder, and turn black. Acrid smoke drifted across the clearing and through the trees, as gray and silent as ghosts. Jack now saw what had caused the patch of scorched earth beside the lake – not a campfire, not a lightning strike, but the heat created by the first of the white figures rising up into the air, and returning to wherever it was they originally came from.
He walked out into the clearing, with burning pine needles sparkling all around him like the lights of a miniature city. He stood looking up at the white figures and he had never felt such radiant power in his life, such a palpable sense of inspiration, and it moved him to tears that they were going. He had felt desperately lonely ever since Aggie had died, but to see these spirits leaving the world gave him an even deeper feeling of loneliness, as if the whole of mankind was now being abandoned to the cold, dark emptiness of space. Nobody to watch over us any more, nobody to save us from our own ignorance and our own greed and our own blind destructiveness.
Standing beneath that light, as it gradually rose higher and higher, he could understand what angels were; and he could almost understand what God was.
The light kept on rising until it looked as small as a paper lantern. It passed through a high skein of cirrus clouds, and after that, Jack could see only the faintest spot of white light, and then nothing at all. Whatever the Forest Ghosts had been, the white deer spirits, the nish-gites, had gone forever.
Jack walked back through the forest. He was beginning to feel very chilly now, and he was in shock. He reached the edge of Lake Wolverine and stood there for a while, breathing slowly and deeply and feeling the breeze that was blowing off the water. On the other
side of the lake, he could see more headlights approaching, and he guessed the forest rangers had arrived. He couldn’t even begin to think what he was going to say to them.
He was still standing there when he heard a voice in his ear.
‘Jack? Can you hear me?’
It was such a soft whisper that it could have been nothing but the breeze, rustling in the trees behind him.
‘Jack, słyszysz mnie?’
‘Aggie,’ he said, but so quietly that nobody else could have heard him, even if they had been standing close.
‘You will find him where you left him, Jack.’
‘What do you mean, “where I left him”? Where did I leave him?’
‘He doesn’t blame you, Jack. He always saw it coming, in his stars. He knew what his destiny was.’
‘Aggie, I don’t know what you mean. Tell me.’
But now the forest rangers’ Jeeps were coming around the edge of the lake, and he could no longer hear her. And as they approached, there was an immense bang high in the sky directly above him – more like a sonic boom than a burst of thunder. He looked up just in time to see an intense flash of white light.
He was still staring up at the sky when one of the forest rangers walked up to him, a thin, wiry-looking man in flappy shorts and with a Frank Zappa moustache. The forest ranger looked up, too, and said, ‘What in the name of all that’s holy was that?’
The Promise
And then, two weeks later, at 6.07 in the morning, Krystyna called Jack from Warsaw. He reached out from under the bedcovers and dropped the phone on the floor. After he had leaned over and retrieved it he frowned at his bedside clock and said, ‘Krystyna? What time is it?’
‘I’m really sorry. It’s one p.m. here. I know it’s early for you.’
‘Well, I’m usually up by now but I had a late night. I’ve just re-opened the restaurant after closing for a week.’
‘I’m sorry. But I have found out something very important concerning your great-grandfather and I thought you would like to know about it as soon as possible.’
‘Did you get your permission to dig?’
‘Yes, I did. The Kampinos National Park authorities gave me the go-ahead on Friday, so a colleague and I have been excavating the site all weekend.’
‘OK. Good. So what did you find?’
‘I found the bones of Mrs Koczerska’s great-uncle Andrzej.’
‘Go on.’
‘Nobody else’s bones. Only great-uncle Andrzej. It does look, from the damage to his skull, though, that he may well have committed suicide.’
‘But what about all that stuff in his diary about them both committing suicide together, him and my great-grandfather?’
‘That’s why I’m calling. There was a message, left with the bones, in a tobacco pouch. Most of it is still legible. Do you want me to read it to you?’
Jack sat on the end of the bed while she read him the message. It took her only a few minutes, but when she had finished, he sat in silence for a very long time.
‘Do you want me to read it again?’ she asked him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you can do it face-to-face. I’m catching the first plane I can get to Warsaw.’
Jack left Tomasz in charge of the restaurant again, and promised him an even bigger bonus this time. Tomasz said, ‘You don’t have to pay more, Boss. I know grief, too. I lose baby girl by woman who is not my wife. My heart is broken, but who can I tell?’
Jack said nothing, but gave Tomasz a hug, and slapped his back.
That evening, he took a cab out to O’Hare and caught the direct 9.50 p.m. flight to Warsaw. He tried to sleep on the plane but the message that Krystyna had read to him was rolling over and over in his mind. It was the first hope that he had been given since Sparky had disappeared into the Owasippe forest that he might be able to find out what had happened to him, and not spend the rest of his life wondering if he was still alive – or, if he had died, how he had died, and where. At the very least, he might be able to give him a grave.
It was warm and sunny when he arrived at Chopin airport the following afternoon, and Krystyna was there to meet him – wearing the same librarian spectacles that she had worn when she first picked him up. He kissed her and she still smelled as fragrant, too.
As she drove them into the city center, she said, ‘Do you believe what your great-grandfather wrote? You don’t think it was just an excuse? Maybe he and Andrzej were caught by the Germans before they could commit suicide, and the Germans made him do it, and took him prisoner. He was a very famous person, after all, your great-grandfather. Maybe they just never had the chance to boast that they had caught him – the world-famous violinist who had fought with the Home Army.’
‘No,’ said Jack. ‘I’m sure he was telling the truth.’
He paused, because he found it hard to tell Krystyna what had happened to Sparky without developing a painful catch in his throat. But slowly, and with as little drama as he could, he explained how they had gone back to Owasippe. He told her about Sally and Undersheriff Porter shooting themselves; and how the Forest Ghosts had torn all those sheriff’s deputies to pieces; and how they had gathered together and risen into the clouds, like some ascension from the Bible.
Krystyna listened without interrupting him. After all, she had seen for herself what panic could do to people in a forest. When he had finished, she said, ‘What did your police say, when they found all of this massacre?’
‘They questioned me for twenty-three hours straight, but it was obvious that I hadn’t done it. They found Undersheriff Porter and my friend Detective Faulkner in a shallow grave, covered with pine needles and leaves. That was the Forest Ghosts for you … I think they loved us, and cared for us. Well, they must have done to stay here for so many thousands of years. But I think they were just like parents when their teenage kids go bad. There comes a time when they wash their hands of them, and say, like, you made your bed, you damn well lie in it.’
‘So how did they explain all of those officers being torn to pieces?’
‘Cougars.’
‘Cougars?’
‘Yes, we still have a few big wild cats in our forests, just like you have lynxes in Poland. I don’t think the medical examiners really believed it, not for a moment. Even the most dexterous cougar couldn’t twist a man’s arms and legs off like that. But the media were satisfied, and that was all that mattered.’
Krystyna drove Jack to her apartment in Sadyba. It was on the fifth floor of a quiet brown-brick block in a gated community, surrounded by trees. The apartment itself was furnished in a modern, minimalist style, with a white leather couch and a large abstract mural in gray and white, and a tall rough-textured sculpture of a sad-looking nude.
‘Beer?’ asked Krystyna.
‘You read my mind.’
She poured him a beer and a glass of chilled white wine for herself, and sat down on the couch next to him with her legs tucked up under her. On the glass-topped table in front of them lay a red folder, and two or three books, and a worn, dark-brown pouch made of oilskin, of the kind used by sailors and soldiers to keep their tobacco dry.
She opened the pouch and took out two folded sheets of paper. One had been torn from a notepad, and was crowded with scrawly writing in green ink. It was stained and faded, but most of it looked legible. The other was a music score, with five or six lines of crotchets and quavers.
She held up the sheet from the notepad and said, ‘This was signed by “Grzegorz Walach” and dated April 17, 1946, so it must have been buried with Maria Koczerska’s great-uncle Andrzej’s remains after the war was over. Whoever put it there must have known exactly where his remains were located, and there was only one person who could have known that.’
‘My late wife Aggie knew,’ said Jack. ‘Otherwise we never would have found them, would we?’
‘Come on, Jack. It was somebody who sounded like her. But you told me yourself that the spirits always talk to you in the voices of people you ca
re for. I suppose that’s how they get your attention, and your trust.’
‘So read me this letter again,’ Jack asked her.
Krystyna took off her spectacles. ‘“To any of my descendants whom I have hurt and betrayed, I address this message, and pray that the time never comes when any of them read it. I beg your forgiveness with all of my heart. On November twenty-ninth, 1940, Andrzej buried his diary and his notes for safekeeping, and then we walked deeper into the forest to take our own lives.
‘“Once we had found a quiet place, poor Andrzej shot himself. I then knelt down to follow his example, praying to the Lord to receive my soul. As I knelt there, however, I heard the voice of my dead sister Danuta speaking to me, so close that I could have believed that she was standing next to me. She said that if I made a solemn promise to the Forest Ghost, it would not harm me, and that I would no longer feel that the only way to stop feeling such terror was to take my own life.
‘“I opened my eyes but there was nobody visible. I continued to listen, though, because I had loved Danuta dearly. She died of pneumonia when she was only nine years old, and after all those years I still missed her sorely. She said that it was possible that, many years in the future, the Forest Ghost would have to leave this forest and journey to another forest in another part of the world. There were spirits in every forest, and they had been here for thousands of years, but the time might come when they had to leave this Earth, which they could only do from the first place where they had arrived.
‘“In order to accomplish this journey, said Danuta, the Forest Ghost would need to possess the shape of a living human being. It would spare my life and relieve me of my panic if I promised that one day in the future it could take the shape of one of my descendants. She said that this would probably never happen, and that even if it did, it would be many hundreds of years from now. It was, however, a binding promise, and one day it was possible that a descendant of mine, not yet born, perhaps, would pay the price for it.
‘“I agreed to make such a promise. It was cruel and it was craven of me to do so, but it is hard to describe to you the abject terror that I was feeling, and quite simply I wanted to live, and not to die. I do not know if any of my descendants will ever pay the price for it, but if they do, I can only tell you that I will be ashamed of my promise for the rest of my life.
Forest Ghost: A Novel of Horror and Suicide in America and Poland Page 27
