‘Some – ah – dry clothes?’ Jack prompted him.
‘Oh. Yes. For sure. By cracky, you are wet, aren’t you? You see that door at the end of the corridor, on the right? That’s the storeroom, for the shop. You should find some Owasippe sweatshirts in there, and some sweatpants. Leave them a note to say you’ve taken them, and your address, so they can bill you.’
‘Thanks,’ said Jack. But before he turned away, he said, ‘What “things in the woods”, exactly?’
‘What?’ The scout leader blinked at him. Tucking his papers back under his arm, he took off his spectacles and used one of the pointed ends of his boy-scout scarf to wipe the fingerprints off them.
‘You said that “things in the woods” would fight back, too.’
‘Well …’ said the scout leader. ‘Anybody who knows anything about woods will tell you the same.’
Jack was just about to ask him what ‘the same’ actually meant when Sally appeared. She looked tired and harassed and her hair was all messed up.
‘My God, Jack, have you been swimming?’
‘Oh, very funny. I got caught in the rain. Did they tell you what we found?’
‘Yes,’ she said, with a grimace. ‘I’ve just been talking to the undersheriff. He wants me to keep these poor people in Muskegon overnight so he can ask them some more questions tomorrow morning about their children. Most of them just want to go back home.’
‘Why does he need to talk to them again? The bodies we found in that pool must have been there for days, long before any of us got here.’
‘He’s just being an overzealous a-hole, I’m afraid. What exactly was their condition, these bodies, if you don’t mind my asking you? All the undersheriff told me was that they were a male and a female and it appeared to be a murder-suicide.’
‘Well, he’s probably right. The woman’s head had been cut clean off, and the guy was curled up under the water clutching it, like a goddamned football. He may have committed suicide but she sure didn’t.’
Then he said, ‘Just a second, Sal,’ and turned around to apologize to the scout leader for interrupting their conversation, but the scout leader had gone. Jack could just see his coppery doorknob head bobbing away through the crowd. ‘Shit,’ he said.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Sally.
‘I’m not sure. I was talking to that scout leader and he said something about “things in the woods”. He said that the scout council wanted to sell off all of this land for redevelopment, but that there were “things in the woods” which would fight back, if they tried. He shot off before I could ask him what he meant.’
Sally patted the front of Jack’s soaking-wet shirt. ‘I expect he meant the wildlife. Nothing more aggressive than a pissed-off raccoon, and I can tell you that from experience. Right now, though, I have to persuade fifty-one tired, grieving and impatient people that they would be better off staying the night at the Holiday Inn in Muskegon rather than their own much more comfortable beds. And you need to get yourself out of these clothes.’
‘OK. You’re right. Maybe I can catch up with that scout leader again before we leave.’
‘What time are you going?’
Jack checked his watch. ‘We have a flight at seven-twelve. Which means we have to be out of here in less than forty-five minutes.’
‘Jack,’ said Sally, as he turned to go. ‘I just want to thank you for coming today, and for everything you’ve done. You and Sparky, both of you. It was over and above the call of duty, and I really appreciate it.’
Jack said, ‘Thanks, Sal.’ He felt again that there could be something between them, but that was probably because she reminded him so much of Agnieszka, and because he was feeling tired, and it would have been so comforting just to have somebody hold him close. Apart from that, he knew that if they became lovers, their relationship couldn’t possibly last, and then he would lose her as a friend.
He went along to the storeroom, which was a small, stifling room stacked with Owasippe T-shirts and Owasippe sweatpants and other souvenirs, like Owasippe mugs and Owasippe tote bags, all of them marked with the head of Chief Owasippe, in his full-feathered war bonnet.
He quickly changed into a baggy green-and-white tracksuit, bundled his wet shirt and pants into a plastic Owasippe shopping sack, and went back outside. As he came out, he almost collided with Undersheriff Porter.
‘Oh – I was looking for you, sir,’ said Undersheriff Porter. ‘I wanted to tell you how much we appreciate your help in locating those cadavers. Also to ask you for your contact details. The medical examiner in Lansing will be carrying out autopsies on both of them and she may need to ask you a few additional questions.’
‘Jack Wallace,’ said Jack, shaking the undersheriff’s hand. It was dry and horny, as if he spent as much time chopping up firewood as he did undersheriffing.
‘Interested to know exactly what it was you saw in those woods,’ he remarked.
‘Like I said before, something white, running behind the trees. It could have been anything.’
‘Maybe it was a cougar. We do have cougars in the woods around here, but you hardly ever see them. You can go your whole life and never catch sight of one. Ghost cats, they call them. On the other hand, maybe it was the ghosts of Chief Owasippe and his two sons. There’s plenty of people who swear they’ve heard them, on a really quiet night.’
‘You’re not serious.’
‘It’s a local legend. Back in the eighteen-somethings, Chief Owasippe gave his sons a canoe and sent them off into the unknown to prove their manhood. They made it all the way to Chicago, and they made friends with the settlers at Fort Dearborn. But they were away for so long that Chief Owasippe went and sat under a pine and waited for them to come back, and he wouldn’t touch food or drink until they did.’
‘And did they come back?’
‘Nope. They were only two nights short of home when they sheltered their canoe under a riverside bluff, and while they were sleeping the bluff collapsed on them and buried them. And that’s a true story, because years later some trappers found their canoe, and their cooking-pots, and their two skeletons.’
‘So what happened to Chief Owasippe?’
‘He fasted himself to death. And that’s why you can hear him and his sons walking through the woods here at night, and some say that if you call out to them, they’ll answer you.’
Jack looked at Undersheriff Porter narrow-eyed. Maybe the undersheriff was shooting him a line, but he didn’t detect the slightest flicker on his face that might have given that away.
‘Well, it’s a good story,’ he said. ‘But I don’t believe that what we saw was a ghost – or ghosts, plural.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Undersheriff Porter, still expressionless. ‘Personally, I don’t believe in ghosts. But some pretty unaccountable things happen in these woods from time to time. One of my deputies took his boys camping out here once and he says that in the middle of the night they all got the willies so bad that they packed up their tent without even waiting until first light, and hightailed it home. He said he couldn’t understand what made them feel that way, but whatever it was it frightened two shades of shit out of all of them.’
He sniffed, and then he said, ‘What I’m trying to tell you, Mr Wallace, is that I’m a skeptic. I don’t think there’s any such thing as the supernatural, or ghosts, or even life after death. But I do believe that there are things on this earth that we don’t yet know about, or understand, and that they deserve to be thoroughly investigated to find out what they really are. Either we’ll laugh at ourselves for having been so scared of them, or else we’ll run for the hills, screaming.’
Premonition
They arrived back at the restaurant at a quarter of ten, in the middle of the evening sitting. Every table was taken, and there were several customers sitting at the bar waiting. A five-piece Polish band was playing a noisy folk song, ‘Ja Tu I Ty Tu’, accompanied by a drum and two fiddles, and the conversation was so loud that Jack had
to shout when his manager Tomasz came up to greet them.
‘Glad you are back!’ bellowed Tomasz, in his ear. ‘Very, very busy tonight!’
‘I’m not complaining!’ Jack told him. ‘Can you take care of things for the rest of the night? I’m bushed!’
‘No problem!’ Tomasz replied. He was a big man, with prickly gray hair and a big bovine face. He wore a scarlet coat with the restaurant’s signature letter N embroidered on the pocket, a black shirt and a red bow tie. He had worked for the Wallaces ever since the restaurant opened seven years ago, and he was unceasingly cheery, always telling jokes and slapping his customers on the back as if he had known them all his life.
Two months ago, however, Jack had come out of the restaurant into the yard at the back to get some fresh air and found Tomasz standing by the wall, silently crying. Tomasz had wiped his eyes and gone back inside without saying a word, and Jack had never asked him what had upset him so much, but ever since then he had suspected that there was much more to Tomasz than back-slapping and humorous banter.
‘Sparks – you go up to bed now,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll be up in a couple of minutes. Don’t forget to brush your teeth!’
Sparky plodded tiredly up the stairs while Jack went behind the bar and opened a cold bottle of Źywiec beer.
‘Long day, huh?’ asked Tomasz.
‘Long, and horrendous, believe me.’ Jack didn’t really want to talk about it, or even think about it. He looked around the restaurant and said, ‘How’s the new goląbki recipe going down?’
‘From Mikhail, nothing but complaint. From diners, nothing but compliment. We sold maybe eight or nine, and every time people say how much they like it. More tasty than before, they say.’
‘OK. I’ll just have a word with Mikhail and then I think I’ll call it a day.’
‘By the way,’ said Tomasz, ‘you have visitor.’
Jack looked around. ‘What – here, now?’
‘No, no. She come here maybe eight o’clock, eight-thirty. When I tell her that you will not be back until much later, she leave. But she leave address and contact number. Here.’
Tomasz took a dog-eared visiting card out of his breast pocket and handed it to Jack. It was printed in italics, and the address had been corrected in purple ink. The name on it was Maria Wiktoria Koczerska and the amended address was in Belmont Gardens, which was a little over five miles away, to the south-west, a quiet residential area on the outer limits of the Polish district of Avondale.
‘Did she say what she wanted?’
Tomasz shook his head. ‘No. But she did say that it was important. She said to call her as soon as you can.’
‘What was she like? Young? Pretty?’
Again Tomasz shook his head. ‘Once, maybe. But not now.’
‘OK, Tomek, thank you. I’ll give her a call in the morning. You’re sure you can manage down here tonight?’
‘Don’t you worry, Boss. Everything is under control.’
Jack went through to the kitchen to see how Mikhail was coping with tonight’s crowds. He was shouting and swearing at Piotr and Duane, as usual, but the food was coming out fast and it was looking good.
‘One borsch with meat roll! Two Polish plates with pierogi! One Silesian dumplings! Where is fucking Silesian dumplings? One bigos!’
‘Tomasz tells me the new goląbki recipe is going down well,’ Jack told him.
Mikhail flipped over a veal cutlet in his skillet, with a burst of flame. ‘So … must all be Slovaks in tonight,’ he said, violently shaking a pan of sauerkraut with his other hand.
Jack gave him a reassuring pat on his fat, sweaty shoulder. ‘So long as they like the food and they pay for it, I don’t care what they are.’
‘No Russian though,’ said Mikhail. ‘All I feed to Russian is cyanide.’
Jack went upstairs to the landing, unlocked his apartment door and went inside. He could still hear the clatter and the hubbub from the restaurant downstairs, with an occasional burst of laughter, but up here it was very muted.
Sparky’s bedroom door was ajar and his bedside lamp was still on, but Sparky was fast asleep, wearing his Star Trek pajamas. His hair was tousled and he was breathing through his mouth. Jack stood over him for a while, watching him, feeling even more sorry for him than he did for himself. Jack had lost his wife, and his lover, and his best friend, but Sparky had lost his mother.
He went over to the window and tugged the drapes closer together. Outside, on the brick wall facing him, the yellow-eyed face of Capricorn grinned at him maliciously. Saw death today, did you, Jack? Saw it again, in all its ghastly glory?
He looked around the room, at all the star maps that Sparky had pinned on the wall, and on the photograph of Agnieszka that he had stuck over the head of his bed. Agnieszka, smiling under a summer tree, in her orange dress. That picture had been taken less than three years ago.
If only we knew what was coming, thought Jack. He was sure that Sparky’s interest in astrology had been inspired by Agnieszka’s death. I don’t want anything like that to happen to me again, not without my knowing in advance. Not without my doing everything I can to stop it.
He switched off Sparky’s lamp and closed his bedroom door, and then he went into the kitchen and took another bottle of Źywiec out of the icebox. The living room was silent and stuffy. He switched on the wide-screen TV but he kept it on mute because he wanted to think about what had happened today at the scout reservation, and what he had seen there. He couldn’t begin to imagine how that woman had been buried up to her knees in the bottom of that pool, or had her head cut off. God – in his mind’s eye he could still see those maggots writhing. Had the man decapitated her, and then drowned himself, or had somebody else killed both of them? And if so, why?
Two and a Half Men flickered on the screen in front of him. It must have been a repeat because it still had Charlie Sheen in it. On the side table next to the couch there was another photograph of Agnieszka, in a silver frame, looking at him almost coyly. He remembered the day he had taken that picture, and he wished now that he could have said, Don’t look at me like that, Aggie; one day that look is going to make me miss you more than you can know.
He took the visiting card that Tomasz had given him out of his pocket. He didn’t recognize the name and he couldn’t think what anybody could have to tell him that was so important. Then, however, he turned it over, and saw that a name was handwritten on the back. Grzegorz Walach.
Now, that did mean something. Grzegorz Walach had been his great-grandfather. His grandfather had always been telling him colorful stories about him. He had been a famous violinist in Poland before World War Two, and played for the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. The great conductor Leopold Stokowski had heard him playing and been so impressed that he had invited him to join the Chicago Philharmonic, and that was why in 1937 the family had emigrated to America.
When Germany had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, however, Grzegorz Walach had been playing for a season in Warsaw, and he had sent a telegram saying that he had decided to stay and fight in the defense of his country. The family had never heard from him again.
Jack turned the card over and over. For some reason he couldn’t understand, it unsettled him, a message from a past that may be better if it stayed forgotten. He looked at the clock on the table next to Agnieszka’s picture. It was nearly ten-thirty now, and he wondered if it was too late to give this mysterious Maria Wiktoria Koczerska a call.
He heard more laughter from the restaurant, and the band striking up with ‘Hej Sokoły’ – ‘Hey, Falcons’ – which was still popular in Poland not only today, but had been sung by Home Army guerrillas during the war. That decided him. He reached over and picked up the phone.
As he did so, however, the living-room door opened wider and Sparky came in, his hair sticking up at the back and his eyes bleary.
‘Hey, Sparks, what’s wrong?’
Sparky came over and sat down close to him.
‘I’m g
oing to bed myself in a minute,’ said Jack. ‘Come on, it’s been a very long day.’
‘I had a nightmare,’ said Sparky, his eyes roaming around the room as if he were worried that something out of his nightmare might have followed him in here.
‘Well, I’m not surprised,’ said Jack. ‘But it’s only your brain trying to make sense of things. Losing Malcolm like that – that’s really so tragic. And nobody even knows why.’
‘I didn’t have a nightmare about Malcolm. I had a nightmare about the woods.’
Jack put his arm around him and gave him a reassuring squeeze. ‘That doesn’t surprise me, either. They were pretty scary those woods, weren’t they? And what we saw there – even if it was a cougar, which it probably was – they can attack people, too. Like, not very often, I don’t think. But they do. Especially young kids.’
‘It wasn’t those woods. It was some different woods.’
‘In your nightmare, you mean? What woods were they, then?’
‘I don’t know. But they were different. They had different trees and they smelled different.’
‘You can smell things, in your nightmares?’
Sparky nodded. ‘I smelled a campfire, too. And there were some men, talking.’
‘Oh, yes? What were they saying?’
‘Był bialy. Wglądał jak duch.’
‘It was white and it looked like a ghost?’
‘Yes. Over and over.’
Jack gave Sparky another squeeze. ‘Listen, Sparks, you’re overtired and all stressed out, that’s all. How about some warm milk to help you sleep?’
‘But it wasn’t a nightmare like I usually get.’
‘Well, all nightmares aren’t the same. It depends what things have been worrying you during the day. Today it was obviously woods, and spooky-looking white things. I don’t blame you for having nightmares about that. I was pretty freaked out myself.’
‘But it was real.’
Forest Ghost: A Novel of Horror and Suicide in America and Poland Page 5