Forest Ghost (26 page)

‘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 could 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.’

A
s 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 the 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.’

Jack spooned coffee into the percolator and switched it on. ‘Nice dream. Who was he, this man? Did you know him?’

‘No. I never saw him before.’

‘OK. But next time you have that dream, make sure that the man with Mom is me.’

‘It was only a dream, Dad. How can you be jealous?’

‘You’ll understand one day. At least I hope you will.’

Jack sat down at the table while he waited for his coffee to perk. He watched Sparky eating for a while, and then he said, ‘Did you do today’s star chart yet?’

Sparky shook his head. ‘I don’t have to. We
are
going back to Owasippe, aren’t we? We have to.’

‘I don’t know, Sparks. Don’t you think it’s better if we just try to forget about all this Forest Ghost stuff?’

‘I
can’t
, Dad.’

‘But after what happened in Poland—’

‘We
have
to go back. You know we do. We have to know what happened to Malcolm and all the rest of those scouts. We have to know what happened to my great-great-grandfather. We have to find out why they all killed themselves. Why do you think we’ve been hearing Mom’s voice? She wants us to find out. It’s really, really important.’

‘But what if we actually find this ghost, or whatever it is? That’s if
we
don’t kill ourselves first.’

‘Something will happen. I know it will.’

‘Something like what?’

‘I don’t know. I just feel it. I feel it inside of myself.’

‘Aren’t you scared?’ Jack asked him. ‘I know I am. Well, maybe not quite so much as I was. You know when I went out yesterday evening? I met a woman round at Bindy’s bookstore and she thinks that
she’s
seen the Forest Ghost, too.’

‘Really? Who was she?’

‘Oh … just some woman who works for the forest conservation service.’ Jack didn’t want to tell Sparky that she was the same woman he had found in the pool at Owasippe, with her head cut off. ‘If it’s any consolation, she thinks that the Forest Ghost is more frightened of
us
than we are of
it
. That’s her opinion, anyhow. She says that she saw it when a ranger showed up, and all it did was run away and hide.’

Sparky was silent for a long time. Then he said, ‘I think I’m more scared of
me
.’

‘What does that mean, you’re scared of
you
? How can you be scared of yourself?’

‘I’m scared of what’s inside of me. Who I am.’

Jack laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re just a boy, Sparks. A regular normal boy. OK, your brain works a little differently from other people, but everybody’s different in some way, aren’t they? Apart from that, you’re my son and your mother’s son, and that’s what you have inside of you. Us. That’s all.’

‘No. There’s something else.’

‘Something else like what?’

‘I don’t know. It’s hiding inside of me. Every time I try to see what it is, it disappears.

‘Come on, Sparks. You’re letting your imagination run away with you. You’re still tired, that’s all. Have a rest today. We’ll talk about going back to Owasippe tomorrow.’

‘We
will
go, though? We have to.’

Jack didn’t answer him. But when he looked at him, he still had that odd feeling that Sparky wasn’t quite himself. There was something different about him, but he couldn’t work out exactly what it was. He looked so pale, with dark circles under his eyes, almost as if he were a ghost.