Forest Ghost (15 page)

‘OK, Borys,
dzi
ę
kuj
ę
– thank you.’

‘We should go,’ said Krystyna, checking her over-large Tissot Chronograph. ‘We want to search as much as possible before it gets dark.’

‘I’ll go get Sparky,’ said Jack. He left the restaurant and walked across to the elevators. As he did so, he glimpsed something flicker across the mirror at the end of the corridor, something white. He quickly turned around to see what it was, but it had vanished, whatever it was. Probably nothing more threatening than one of the kitchen staff wearing a white apron, or a chambermaid bundling up a sheet. He told himself to stop being so jumpy. He was tired, that was all, and distracted.

He let himself into the hotel room. Sparky’s room-service tray was resting on the coffee table by the couch, and all his star maps were spread across the desk, but there was no sign of Sparky.

‘Sparks!’ Jack said, walking across to the bedroom door, which was open. ‘We’re leaving for the forest now! Are you ready?’

‘Dad?’ said Sparks. For some reason he sounded alarmed. ‘Dad – come listen to this!’

Jack found Sparky standing at the end of his bed, staring at the telephone receiver, which was lying on his pillow.

‘What’s up, Sparks?’

‘
Listen!
I was going to make a call to my friend Kenny at school and tell him I was in Poland, but when I picked up the phone I heard this voice!’

Jack picked up the phone and put it to his ear. ‘I don’t hear anything. It was probably the hotel switchboard, asking you what you wanted.’

‘No, it wasn’t! Listen!’

Jack listened hard. At first he heard nothing at all, not even static. But then he heard the faintest of voices say what sounded like ‘–
save us –!
’

It was so tiny and so strained that it was almost inaudible, like a tiny person in a fairy-story trapped under a bell-jar. All the same, Jack could tell that it was a woman.

He kept on listening, with Sparky staring at him anxiously, and then he heard it again, more distinctly this time: ‘–
save us, you have to – save us
…’

‘It’s a woman,’ said Jack. ‘I thought she was speaking Polish at first, but she’s not.’

‘It’s
Mom
,’ said Sparky. ‘I know it is. It’s Mom.’

‘Oh, come now, Sparks. It can’t be. I know it sounds a little like her, but it can’t be.’

‘
You
heard her, didn’t you, when you went to Bindy’s bookstore?’

‘I know I did, but that was inside of my head. I only imagined that I did. This is some real live woman. We can both hear her.’

‘–
you have to save us, please
…’

Jack said, into the receiver, ‘Who is this? Excuse me, ma’am – I think you probably have a wrong number here. This is the InterContinental Hotel, room two-seven-twelve.’

‘–
buried – we’re buried …
’

‘You’re buried? Where are you buried?’

‘–
both of us – buried
…’

‘Yes, I hear you. You’re buried. But where?’

‘–
where the path divides three ways – underneath the rocks
…’

Oh Jesus
, thought Jack,
it
is
her. It is Aggie. And she’s telling me the same thing that she told me during the séance
.

He sat down abruptly on the side of the bed. ‘What is it?’ Sparky asked him.

He held up the receiver so that Sparky could hear it, too. The voice came and went, sometimes quite clear and other times so faint that it was barely audible.

‘–
you have to save us – please – we can’t – not for ever
…’

Suddenly, the phone jangled loudly, which made Jack start, and frightened Sparky so much that he actually shouted out loud.

‘Yes?’ said Jack.

‘Jack? Are you OK? This is Krystyna.’

‘Oh, sure. Krystyna. Hi.’

‘Listen, Jack, I don’t mean to chase you but we should seriously think about leaving for Kampinos now. We want to give ourselves as much time as possible to look for Robert.’

‘Of course, yes. We’ll be right with you.’

He put down the phone and looked at Sparky. ‘They want to leave for the forest right now. Are you sure you want to do this? To tell you the God’s honest truth I don’t even know how we got ourselves involved in this. Maybe we should just forget about it and take the next plane home.’

‘But that was
Mom
. You heard her. She wants us to save those people.’

Jack didn’t need to remind Sparky that his mother was dead, and that those people who were buried under the rocks had been dead even longer. But neither could he deny that the voice on the phone had been Aggie’s, or somebody who had sounded uncannily like her.

‘I just want to make sure that you’re up for it, Sparks, that’s all. I don’t know whether this is going to be dangerous, but it could be scary.’

‘I’ve drawn up my
own
star chart, as well as yours,’ Sparky told him, although he kept glancing at the phone as if he expected to hear his mother’s voice again. ‘I don’t think the chances us of being killed or seriously injured are very much greater than normal.’

‘That’s not very reassuring.’

‘I know. But if we are going, we ought to go.’

They both looked at the telephone receiver lying on the bedcover. It remained silent. Whatever connection they had made before, in this world or the next, it was broken, at least for now.

T
hey drove out of Warsaw in two cars. Jack and Sparky were driven by Krystyna, in her Toyota, while Borys and Lidia followed behind in a mud-spattered Suzuki SUV with bull bars fitted on the front. Borys had brought his black-and-tan Rottweiler, which sat in the back seat with his tongue hanging out like a bright-red necktie.

This morning’s sun had been covered by high, thin clouds, so the afternoon looked hazy and out of focus.

Krystyna had changed into a light yellow cotton bush jacket and white jeans, and brown hiking shoes. As she drove she kept up an almost non-stop monolog, telling Jack and Sparky everything she knew about the way that the Germans had taken so many thousands of Polish intelligentsia out to the forest and shot them, burying them in mass graves and planting trees on top of the graves in the hope that nobody would ever discover what they had done.

Although more than two thousand bodies had been exhumed after the war, only four hundred of them had ever been identified.

‘I expect
God
knows who they are,’ said Sparky, solemnly, from the back seat.

Krystyna glanced at him in her rear-view mirror, and gave him a little smile. ‘Yes, Sparky,’ she said. ‘I am sure that He does.’

Beyond the outskirts of Warsaw, the highway north-westward toward the forest was straight and flat, for kilometer after kilometer, with scrubby landscape on either side, and occasional houses with orange-tiled roofs and gas stations advertising
Autoserwis
. Even as they approached the turnoff for Palmiry, which would take them into the forest toward Truskaw, the forest itself appeared very low on the horizon, more like a dark green ocean when the tide was out than a forest.

The narrow road to Palmiry was rough and pot-holed, and their car jolted and swayed from side to side. Behind them, Borys and Lidia’s Suzuki almost disappeared in the dust they were stirring up.

‘One day you must pay a special visit here to Palmiry Cemetery,’ said Krystyna. ‘For now, though, we can stop for just a moment and you can see for yourself what it means. I have brought you this way because I think it is important for you to have a feeling of what they suffered, men like your great-grandfather and Maria’s great-uncle.’

She parked by the side of the road and Borys parked close behind her. The five of them climbed out of their vehicles and walked through the trees. It was immensely silent here, although between the trees Jack could see the glitter of scores of cars in the parking lot.

They came to a huge clearing in the forest, surrounded by pines that seemed to be impossibly tall, their tops swaying in a breeze that couldn’t be felt down here on the ground. Here stood row after row of white stone crosses, between long concrete paths. At the very far end of the cemetery, among the trees, stood three crosses like the crosses that had been erected at Calvary.

On each grave there was a red-and-yellow glass candle holder. Some of them had fallen over and broken, but an elderly man was slowly walking up and down between the crosses, picking up the pieces.

Some of the visitors were moving up and down the pathways. Some were kneeling in front of the graves and praying. It was so silent, though, that Jack felt as if he were watching a movie with the sound turned off.

Krystyna crossed herself, and closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Sometimes I think I can hear them,’ she said. ‘They are like a crowd of people who fill up a town square during the day, all that hustle and bustle, but now there is no more hustle and bustle, and they have all gone. They have left nothing but emptiness behind them.’

They drove as far as they could down a track between the trees. Nearer Warsaw, the Kampinos Forest was swampy, almost like the Everglades, but out here, to the west, the pines grew on high white sand dunes, which gave the strange impression of a forest growing in a desert.

The track grew narrower and narrower, until the branches were scraping and squeaking against the sides of their vehicles. At last, however, they saw Krystyna’s pale-blue Land Rover in a small shady clearing up ahead, and they circled around and parked.

‘Your friend hasn’t been back here, then?’ said Jack, climbing out of the car and looking around. The forest was warm and smelled pungent with pine.

‘No. Oh, God. I hope nothing terrible has happened to him.’

‘If Robert is here to be found, Krystyna, we will find him,’ Borys asserted. He unfolded a map of the Kampinos Forest and spread it out across the hood of his Suzuki, pointing with his stubby index finger to a red X that he had drawn on the map. ‘Here – this is the place by the rocks where the bones are buried. It is just a few meters through the trees, that way. When Krystyna ran away, she went further south, to this village you see here, Truskaw. Robert on the other hand ran in almost exactly the opposite direction, to the north-west. In that direction it is all forest, kilometer after kilometer – pine forest and sand dunes. It is impossible to run through this kind of terrain without leaving a trace.

‘What we will do is start where the bones are buried, and then spread out and walk north-westward, but always within sight of each other. Look for footprints, of course, but also look for anything else strange. It doesn’t matter how insignificant.’

Lidia said, ‘What if we start to feel panicky, Krystyna, like you did?’

‘If that happens you must call out, and immediately we will all join up together again,’ said Krystyna. ‘I know that Robert and I both panicked, but yesterday evening I talked to a friend at the university who is a doctor. She says that nobody really knows what causes panic attacks, but you can almost always control them by regulating your breathing. Some people do this by breathing into paper bags.’

‘Which I’ll bet we conveniently forgot to bring with us,’ said Jack.

‘We shouldn’t need them. If
we
panic, my doctor friend said that all we need to do is join together and breathe steadily and reassure each other that there is nothing in this forest which can cause us harm.’

‘Well, let’s pray there isn’t.’

Borys laid his hand on Sparky’s shoulder and said, ‘
Boisz si
ę
, chłopcze?
Are you scared, young man?’

Sparky shook his head. In a flat, toneless voice, he said, ‘You can only be scared if you don’t know what’s going to happen to you.’

‘But you do?’

‘Yes.’

Jack looked at Sparky then and thought for a split-second how much he looked like his late mother. The sun was shining down through the pines in shafts, so that the forest appeared like the inside of a church.

Borys went to the back of his Suzuki, opened the tailgate and let his Rottweiler jump down. The dog immediately circled round and round him, excitedly wagging his tail. ‘This is Diablik,’ said Borys. ‘He is very stupid –
durny
– but he is a great tracker. He can smell a cat through concrete.’

Sparky edged back until he was standing close to Jack. Sparky had always been frightened of dogs, even little yappy ones. Jack said, ‘It’s OK, Sparks. He’s perfectly harmless,’ although he had to admit that he, too, found Diablik a little intimidating. There was something about the way Diablik kept licking his wet black lips and wuffling and baring his teeth, as if he couldn’t wait to take a bite out of somebody’s face.

Before he closed the tailgate, Borys lifted out a large under-and-over shotgun. ‘Extra insurance,’ he said, in Polish. ‘Just in case there
is
something there!’

‘Well, you just be very careful with that, Borys,’ Krystyna warned him. ‘We don’t want any accidents.’

They left their vehicles and walked through the trees until they came to one of the many cycle paths that criss-crossed the nature reserve.

About a hundred meters further along, the path divided into three, one branch heading almost due south, one due west, and one north-westward. Where it divided, the path was overshadowed by a lumpy outcropping of dark gray boulders, hunched up like a woman crouched over a cauldron. As they came nearer, Jack could see the resemblance to a witch even more distinctly. She had a pointed hat, a long sharp nose and a protuberant chin, and eyebrows made of shaggy dry roots.

Just past the witch-like rocks, the north-westward path had been cordoned off with blue-and-white tape with the words
Kampinoski Park Narodowy
–
Niewchodzic.

‘This is where we found the bones,’ said Krystyna, lifting up the tape and ducking underneath it. Borys held it up so that Lidia and Jack and Sparky could follow her.

The excavation was covered by a plastic sheet which was fastened down by tent-pegs. Krystyna pulled out the pegs and folded the sheet aside so that they could see where she and Robert had been digging. They didn’t appear to have gone down very deep, only about fifteen centimeters. Protruding from the sandy soil, however, Jack could see what looked like the end of an upper arm bone.