Forest Ghost (31 page)

He quickly looked back over his shoulder, and his heart almost stopped when he saw that the Forest Ghost was very much closer, so much closer that it was playing beams of intense white light between the trees. He thought he could hear a howling sound, too, like a distant pack of hounds. What had the headless woman called the Forest Ghost?
A howling angel.

He looked back at Sally, just in time to see her shoot herself in the ear. He didn’t hear the shot, but the left half of her head burst open and sprayed her brains across the forest floor. Her gun was a subcompact Glock which took only 9mm ammunition, compared to the huge bullet that Undersheriff Porter had used to blow his head off. Its entry wound was hardly bigger than the hole in her ear, but it would have bounced around inside her skull and caused devastating damage before it exited.

Sally – oh God, Sally!
he thought, but as she collapsed on to the ground he was already diving down to snatch the automatic as it tumbled out of her hand.

Now it’s
my turn to escape. Now it’s my turn to blot everything out.

He knelt down and picked up the gun, which was still warm. He wasn’t at all experienced with guns, but his father used to own a Colt automatic which he had bought when some of the local hoods had started to demand protection money from the restaurant, and two or three times he had taken Jack down to the range so that he could fire it.

He suddenly thought of that when he picked up Sally’s gun and held it upside-down, butt upward, so that its muzzle was pointing at his mouth. He had now entered that stage of panic in which he was totally composed, and calm, and reflective. He thought of his father, standing outside the kitchen, wreathed in cigarette smoke. He thought of his schooldays, and playing football, and of all those Chicago winters, so cold that people’s eyeballs froze up.

Most of all he thought of Agnieszka. He could see her now, looking up from her sewing, but there was so much sunlight flooding into the living room that she looked ethereal, unreal, which of course she now was.

He opened his mouth and placed the muzzle against his front teeth. It smelled bitterly of cordite, and he felt as if he were breathing in Sally’s last second of life. If he angled the gun upward, the bullet would go straight through his palate and into his brain, and he wouldn’t even feel it.

Here I come, Aggie
, he thought to himself, closing his eyes tightly.
No more pain, no more grief, no more panic.

‘
J
ack
,’ she said, and she sounded as if she were breathing it into his ear. ‘Can you hear me, Jack?
Słyszysz mnie?
Don’t do that.’

He opened his eyes. Even as he did so, he felt the wind subsiding, and all the leaves that had been dancing in the air began gently to see-saw back to earth. All around him there was a soft hushing sound as the trees stopped frantically waving and the bushes stopped rustling, and the forest became still again.

He lowered the gun. He had heard Aggie’s voice, he was sure of it, but when he turned around he saw not Aggie but Sparky. He was standing about thirty feet away, his arms by his sides, not smiling but looking unusually relaxed. The sun was shining on him down through the trees so that he appeared to have a golden aura, the way that Aggie had looked when he had come into the living room and found her sewing.

‘Sparks? Are you OK?’

Sparky nodded. ‘I’m fine, Dad. Everything’s fine.’

Jack stood up, and looked down at both Sally and Undersheriff Porter. They both would have seemed to be sleeping, if their heads had still been intact.

‘How can you say that everything’s
fine
, Sparks? These two good people have just shot themselves. And
I
would have done, too, if you hadn’t stopped me.’

‘It was self-defense, Dad. We can’t help it. It’s the only way that we can protect ourselves.’

‘What the hell are you talking about? Who the hell is “we”? And where the hell have you been? I’m going to have to call the sheriff. Jesus.’

He wished he could stop looking at Undersheriff Porter, whose single remaining eye was fixed on a nettle growing right in front of what was left of his face, as if he were studying it for a botany test.

‘They’re dead, Dad. There’s nothing you can do for them. It’s sad, but that’s the way of the world. It’s a shock when you find out that the world isn’t at all like you thought it was.’

‘I thought I heard your mother,’ said Jack.

‘You did,’ said Sparky, in Aggie’s voice.

Jack felt a prickling all over. ‘That was
you
? How do you do that? You sound exactly like her.’

‘That’s because I’m here, Jack,’ Sparky continued, still in Aggie’s voice. ‘The spirits of the dead stay close to you after they die. They look out for you, as best they can, to make sure that you get over your grief at losing them. Of course, sooner or later, they have to rest. We all have to rest in the end.’

‘This is driving me nuts,’ said Jack. ‘Let’s get one thing sorted at a time. First of all, we have to go tell somebody that Sally and this deputy have shot themselves. The spirit stuff can wait until later. Come on. Do you know how to work a police radio?’

‘Yes, but I’m not going to.’

‘Come on, Sparks, for Christ’s sake. These two law officers have just killed themselves right in front of us. We have to report it.’

Sparky made no attempt to come any closer. ‘You don’t understand, Dad. It’s over. We’re not going to take care of you any more. We started to leave you years ago and now we’re the last few left. By this time next week, we’ll all be gone, and then you’ll have to fend for yourselves.’

‘Sparks, I don’t understand one word of what you’re saying. Now, come on, let’s get going.’

Jack suddenly realized that he would need the keys to the Sheriff Department Jeep. He had to kneel down next to Undersheriff Porter’s body, roll him over, all heavy and soft, and tug the keys out of his pants pocket on a chain. Glittering green blowflies were already starting to cluster inside the half-broken mixing bowl of the undersheriff’s head.

He stood up again and said, ‘Sparks. Come on.’

Sparky shook his head. ‘I told you, Dad. It’s over. We tried to protect you but all you did was show us that you don’t value anything. You don’t even value your own souls.’

‘
Sparks
,’ said Jack, and he was growing angry now. He was still trembling with shock from having witnessed Sally and Undersheriff Porter shoot themselves, and he hadn’t fully recovered from his own hysterical panic. Now here was Sparky talking in Aggie’s voice and spouting meaningless nonsense about leaving. He was seriously beginning to think that at last Sparky had lost it. He should never have brought him here to Owasippe to identify Malcolm’s body, and he certainly should never have agreed to take him to Poland, or bring him back here a second time. He would have to make another appointment with his therapist when they got home.

‘It’s no use, Dad,’ said Sparky. ‘I’m not coming with you. I
can’t
come with you. I’m leaving. We’re all leaving. We don’t know how you’re going to manage on your own, without us, but we really don’t have the strength or the will to do this any longer. What do you call it? We’ve reached the tipping-point.’

The tipping-point? What the hell was he talking about? Jack stood staring at Sparky in bewilderment. His voice sounded like Sparky’s, flat and expressionless, and he
looked
like Sparky, with his washed-out face and the sun shining in his fine blond hair. Yet somehow, inexplicably, he wasn’t Sparky. His words bore no relation to anything that Sparky had ever said or done before, and Jack simply didn’t understand what he was trying to tell him. This wasn’t just a symptom of Asperger’s syndrome. This was something else altogether. Jack could almost believe that Sparky was hypnotized, or that somebody was using him like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

‘Sparks,’ Jack said, trying to keep his voice steady, ‘I’m going to drive back to the scout headquarters and I’m going to get some help. I’d prefer it if you came with me, but if you really don’t want to, then I’m asking you to please stay right here. I shouldn’t be too long. Just make sure you don’t touch anything.’

‘It’s over, Dad,’ said Sparky. ‘We’ll be going soon.’

‘OK, you’ll be going soon. I get it. But please wait here until I get back.’

‘This was the very last place where people believed in us. The first place, too. Strange, isn’t it? No matter how far you travel, no matter what you do, you always come back to the place where you started.’

Jack took two or three steps backward. He was beginning to feel panicky again, and he didn’t want to turn his back on Sparky, not until he had put some distance between them. He had the irrational fear that Sparky would come running up behind him and jump on him.

‘You promise to stay here, then?’ he repeated, raising one warning finger to show that he really meant it.

‘It’s over, Dad,’ said Sparky, but this time he didn’t sound like Sparky at all. He didn’t sound like Aggie, either, or the headless girl he had found in the pool. His voice was thick and harsh, with a heavy accent. ‘I am sorry for what I did. I apologize. But then I was panicking, and I was not thinking straight. I did not think of the future, or of anybody else. I thought only of that moment, and of myself.’

As he spoke, Sparky began to shine, brighter and brighter. His face became blurry, with only dark smudges to show where his eyes were. Soon he was incandescent, as bright as burning magnesium, and Jack had to raise his hand to shield his eyes. Right in front of him, Sparky had turned into the same dazzling figure that he had seen in the hotel bathroom in Warsaw.

Still shielding his eyes, Jack looked around him in disbelief. The forest was bleached with brilliant white light, like a movie set, even brighter than the sunlight that was still shining through the trees. And here, right in front of him, almost too bright to look at, stood the Forest Ghost, the
nish-gite
, the white deer spirit. Here, right in front of him, was the actual apparition that the Ancient Greeks had called Pan, the god of panic.

‘Where’s Sparky?’ he shouted at it. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘What have you done with my son?’

Sparky spoke to him again, in his flat Sparky voice, although this time he sounded as if he were right inside his own head.
‘
It’s over, Dad. I told you. We’re going now.’

‘Where’s my son? I want my son back!’

He took a step toward the figure, and then another, and then another. The figure hesitated, but then it appeared to back away from him.

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

‘Where’s my son?’ Jack demanded. ‘What – the – fuck – have – you – done – with – my – son?’

He suddenly thought: this Forest Ghost is going to hurt me. It’s going to rip me apart if I come any closer. But he took another step forward, and yet another, and the figure backed away again.

It
was
frightened. He was sure of it now. As the headless woman had told him, it was much more frightened than he was.

He saw it now. It was like a revelation. Whatever they were, these things protected themselves not by attacking people who ventured into the forests, but by causing them to panic. They made them mad with fear – so terrified that they might be torn apart limb from limb that they would rather kill themselves first. And this is what these things had been doing for centuries, in forests all over the world.

‘Who are you?’ he said, hoarsely. ‘
What
are you? What have you done with my son?’

‘We needed your son,’ said Sparky’s voice, still inside his head.

‘What? Why? What did you need him for?’

‘He was one of many who were promised to us. We began to realize that the time would soon come when we would have to leave. There was only one way for us to gather here, from all the places where we were scattered.’

As the figure spoke, Jack saw more white figures appearing through the trees. None of them were as dazzling as the creature in front of him, but they still had an eerie luminescence. They were approaching from all directions now, at least twenty of them, and maybe more. They came within fifty feet or so but then they stopped, and stayed where they were, utterly silent, watching and waiting. The sun was going down now, and the forest was filling up with shadows, as if hundreds of dark spiders were weaving webs among the branches. As the gloom gathered, the figures looked even more ghostly.

‘These are all that remain,’ said Sparky’s voice. ‘You won’t try to harm us, will you, Dad? We’ll be gone before you bring help.’

‘Why should I try to harm you? I just want to know where my son is. I can hear him talking – I saw him – I thought
you
were him. So where is he?’

‘We came here many thousands of years ago to protect your world,’ said the figure. ‘We came to protect your forests and your oceans and to teach you that you and your world are one. Some of you are beginning to understand that, but far too few of you, and now – well, now it is much too late.

‘We tried to stop you from destroying your forests and poisoning your oceans, but now they are beyond saving. There is nothing more that we can do.’

‘So what the hell are you?’ asked Jack. ‘Martians, or what? How can you say that you’re protecting us when you make young kids panic so much that they cut their own throats?’

The figure wavered slightly, and began to grow dimmer. Jack sensed by the tone of its voice that it was growing tired, as if it was an effort to stay shining so brightly.

‘We hoped … we very much hoped …’

‘Go on. What did you hope?’

‘We hoped that you would eventually understand that everything in the universe is connected inextricably to everything else.
Everything
. Plants, animals, people, spirits. Every move you make is dictated by the movement of the planets, and of the stars; and you, in your turn, affect
them
. Some of you began to understand that, but it was only regarded as superstition, or a game.’