Forest Ghost (4 page)

As they approached the double doors that led into the assembly hall, Corinne took hold of Jack’s hand and said, ‘Will you come in with me? I don’t think I can face this on my own.’

Jack looked at Sparky, who said, ‘That’s OK. I’ll wait outside. I want to remember him the way he was when he was alive. And I need to see the woods, because that’s where it is.’

Jack said, ‘OK.’ He didn’t ask what ‘it’ was. He was used to Sparky coming out with odd remarks like that and most of time he took no notice. They almost made sense and that was good enough.

Sparky went off toward the back of the building and Jack saw him asking directions from an Eagle Scout. The Eagle Scout had his hand on Sparky’s shoulder and was pointing to the glass doors that led outside to the verandah.

‘You ready for this?’ he asked Corinne.

She nodded, and took hold of his hand, and gripped it tight. Together they pushed their way into the assembly hall, where medical staff were already lifting up several green sheets so that relatives could identify their dead.

Across the end of the hall, Jack saw a banner with the scout rallying cry
Attawaytago!
sewn on to it in bright red cotton letters.
God
, he thought,
you couldn’t get any more
bitterly appropriate than that. That’s the way to go.

He couldn’t stop himself from looking as they made their way between the trestle tables. He saw an African-American boy, no older than thirteen, whose face was completely unblemished, as if he were smiling in his sleep. He saw another boy, white, with tousled brown hair, but this boy looked more bewildered, as if he couldn’t understand why he was killing himself. He had a bruise on his cheek and his neck was covered right up to the chin by a thick white crêpe bandage.

‘Cusack?’ asked a large red-cheeked woman with a frizzy black perm and a clipboard.

‘That’s right,’ said Jack.

The woman folded back the green sheet and there he was: Malcolm Cusack, with his gingery hair and his freckles. He looked ridiculously boyish to be dead, and Jack half-expected him to suddenly open up his eyes and say: ‘Surprise!’ But he didn’t open his eyes, and he wasn’t moving, and he wasn’t breathing. Like the brown-haired boy, he too had a bandage covering his neck.

‘Why does he have that bandage?’ asked Connie. She was gripping Jack’s hand so tight that his wedding band was digging painfully into his middle finger.

The woman consulted her clipboard. Jack noticed that she had a large brown mole on her upper lip. He tried gently to twist his hand free but Corinne still wouldn’t let go.

The woman said, ‘Cusack, Malcolm J.? The cause of death was … his external carotid artery was severed.’

‘What? What does that mean?’ asked Corinne. Under normal circumstances, she would have known, or guessed, but here in this makeshift mortuary with all of its green-sheeted bodies and its smell of lavender room spray, she needed to have it spelled out to her.

The woman looked at Jack, raising her thick black eyebrows like two crows taking off from a field. Jack leaned closer to Corinne and said, ‘He cut his throat, Corinne. I’m sorry.’

Corinne stared back at him in green-eyed disbelief. ‘He cut his throat? He wouldn’t! He
couldn’t
have. Why would he
do
that?’

‘Why did any of these kids kill themselves? And these adults, too. That’s for the cops to work out. I can’t think of any explanation at all.’

Corinne reached out and touched Malcolm’s forehead with her fingertips.

‘He’s so cold,’ she whispered, and then her knees buckled and she almost fell to the floor. Jack managed to catch her around the waist, and hold her upright. She was too heavy for him to lift and carry out of the assembly hall, but he managed to support her as they made their way back between the green-sheeted tables to the doors.

As the doors swung closed behind them, she stared at Jack, and her face was bloodlessly white. ‘My God, Jack. He’s really, really dead.’

‘Come on,’ Jack told her. ‘Sparky’s outside. Let’s go join him and get ourselves some fresh air.’

When all the relatives had identified their dead, they boarded the bus again and drove through the trees to Lake Wolverine. The clearing where Bill had found all of the bodies was still cordoned off with yellow tape, and five forensic officers in white Tyvek suits were crawling around it on their hands and knees, sifting through the twigs and the leaf mold.

‘How are you feeling now?’ Jack asked Corinne, as he helped her down from the bus.

‘Oh, much better, thanks, Jack. It was so terrible to see Malcolm like that, but I’m still glad I came here. If I hadn’t, I always would have wondered what it was like, where he died.’

They looked around. The sky was beginning to grow more overcast now, and the color of Lake Wolverine was changing from blue to slate-gray. A whippet-thin sheriff’s deputy with a bristly little moustache came up to them and said, ‘Deputy Jeppersen. OK if I ask you folks some questions?’

‘Of course,’ said Corinne. ‘Whatever I can do to help.’

Deputy Jeppersen made a note of Malcolm’s name and Corinne’s contact numbers. Then he said, ‘Did your boy ever talk about taking his own life, for any reason?’

Corinne shook her head. ‘His father died suddenly last year and Malcolm was naturally very upset. He was always talking about seeing him again when he got to heaven, but he never gave me the impression that he would take his own life to do that.’

‘Did he ever talk about suicide pacts? Or mass suicides, like Jonestown, that kind of thing?’

‘Never. He liked his video games, and I guess some of them were quite violent. What’s that one called? Grand Theft Auto? But that was all. He liked building model airplanes, too.’

‘Did you supervise his internet activity?’

‘No. I didn’t see the need for it. He was always real quiet and well-behaved.’

‘Those quiet and well-behaved ones, ma’am, sometimes they can turn out to cause the most mayhem.’

‘Malcolm was never any trouble, Deputy,’ said Jack, sharply. ‘I can vouch for that.’

‘OK, sir. No offense meant. But you won’t object if your local PD takes away your son’s PC, just to check his hard drive for anything that might give us a clue?’

‘No, I won’t object to that.’

‘Just one more question, if you don’t mind, and I know that this is kind of touchy, to say the least. Did you ever get the feeling that your boy might be engaged in some inappropriate relationship with any of the adult scout leaders or any of the other boys?’

Corinne stared at him hard. ‘You’re asking me if my twelve-year-old son who committed suicide by cutting his throat only yesterday morning was
gay
?’

‘I apologize for having to ask it, ma’am, but if there was something of that nature going on in your boy’s scout troop, and it was on the point of being discovered – well, that could have been a motive for mass suicide.’

Corinne said, ‘I think you need to get the hell away from me. Right now.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Like I say, ma’am, I apologize for having to ask it, but we have to consider every possibility.’

At that moment, Sparky came up to them and said, in that clear, expressionless voice of his, ‘It was something very much scarier than that.’

Deputy Jeppersen looked at him, and then at Corinne, and then at Jack. Then back to Sparky again. ‘What makes you say that, kid?’

‘Because it’s true.’

‘So – OK – what was it, this something that was so much scarier?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘No.’

With that, Sparky turned around and walked away toward the edge of the lake. A sudden gust of wind made the trees swish and the surface of the water ruffle, and over in the distance Jack saw lightning flicker.

Deputy Jeppersen stood there, confused, with his pencil poised.

‘My son has Asperger’s,’ Jack explained.

‘Oh, yeah?’ Deputy Jeppersen obviously had no idea what that meant, but he tucked away his pencil and folded his notebook and said, ‘Thanks for your help, anyhow. And I’m sorry if some of my questions offended you.’

He walked off to question some of the other bereaved relatives. Jack and Corinne followed Sparky to the edge of the lake, where he was standing with his face tilted toward the wind and his arms held stiffly down by his sides.

‘What was that about?’ Jack asked him.

‘There’s something here,’ said Sparky. ‘I told you there was.’

‘There’s something here but you don’t have any idea exactly what it is?’

Sparky looked around. ‘It’s in the woods,’ he said, at last.

‘Do you think it’s still here?’

Sparky nodded. ‘It’s watching us. Can’t you feel it watching us?’

‘I can’t say that I can, no.’

Sparky pointed toward the trees. ‘It’s over there somewhere. It’s watching us.’

Corinne said, ‘Is it a person? Or what? Don’t you have
any
idea?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Sparky. ‘But I can feel it.’

‘You’re scaring me now,’ said Corinne.

Jack said, ‘Maybe we should go take a look. I mean, whatever it is, how can it hurt us? None of us are in the mood for committing suicide, are we? We don’t even have any knives, do we, that we could kill ourselves with?’

‘I think we should tell the police,’ said Corinne.

‘The police won’t believe us,’ said Sparky.

Jack said, ‘OK. You can feel that it’s watching us. Where from, exactly?’

‘Over there.’

‘Can’t you be more specific?’

Sparky shielded his eyes with both hands and peered toward the woods. After a long pause, he pointed again, and said, ‘
There
. Between those two big trees. That’s where it’s watching us from.’

‘Well, come on then,’ said Jack. ‘Let’s see if we can flush it out.’

He didn’t really think that there was anything there. This was just Sparky’s autistic imagination inventing an explanation for something that was inexplicable. Sparky always believed that there had to be a logical reason for everything, no matter how trivial it was, and if he couldn’t work out what it was, he would become highly agitated and start biting his lips and twisting his hair around the end of his finger.

They circled around the clearing where the CSIs were still hunched over like a family of large white bears. Corinne was hesitant at first, but Jack took hold of her hand and said, ‘Listen – it’s going to be fine. There’s nothing here, but if I don’t give Sparky the chance to look for whatever it is, he’s going to be upset for hours. Days, even.’

Sparky led them through the woods, between the beech trees. There was no wind in here, and no birds singing. Even the blue jays had stopped calling to each other. They could hear their own footsteps, and every now and then they heard a sudden furtive scamper, as squirrels ran across the dry leaves in between the trees. Apart from that, though, the woods were unnaturally hushed.

As they walked further, Jack began to experience the strangest feeling. There was nothing in the woods to give him any idea of scale. The trees could have been enormous, or they could have been little more than saplings. He looked up and saw the blue sky through their branches, but there was no way of telling how tall they were. For all he knew, he and Corinne and Sparky could have been giants, or as small as action figures.

Sparky kept about six or seven paces ahead of them, although every now and then he stopped, and listened, and looked around.

‘I don’t think there’s anything here, Sparks,’ said Jack. ‘Not now, anyhow.’

Sparky stood perfectly still, with one finger raised, as if he were saying
wait.

The silence was overwhelming. They waited – and as they waited, Jack began to feel that something was rushing toward them through the woods, something invisible and noiseless and still some distance away from them, but something tempestuous. He was seized by a sudden urge to snatch at Corinne’s hand and turn around and start running back to the lake. The woods seemed claustrophobic, as if it were impossible to breathe in here.

Corinne said, ‘What is it? What’s happening?’ while Sparky spun around and around, as if he couldn’t make up his mind what direction the threat was coming from.

Jack saw something flickering behind the trees, something white. It could have been an animal leaping or a man running or …
what
? He couldn’t tell. All he knew was that it filled him with panic, and that they had to get out of those woods, and fast.

‘Come on!’ he shouted. His voice sounded strangely flat, as if he were shouting in a locked, empty room. ‘Sparks! Let’s get out of here!’

Neither Sparky nor Corinne needed any further urging. Jack took hold of Corinne’s hand again and the three of them began to run back toward the lake. Jack’s vision was blurred as he ran, and he was deafened by the sound of their feet hurtling through the leaves. But there was another sound, too – a whistling sound, like a strong wind gusting through the woods behind them, and catching up with them, fast. He felt dry leaves pattering against his back, and even the leaves on the ground ahead of them began to dance.

They came bursting out of the woods and into the clearing around the edge of the lake, all three of them gasping for breath. They turned around, to look behind them, but the wind had already died down, and the last few leaves had fluttered to the ground. Two of the CSIs raised their hooded heads to stare at them, but then they went back to their sifting.

‘Did you see it?’ asked Sparky. His eyes were wide and his face was as white as paper.

Jack said, ‘I don’t know. I saw something. I don’t have any idea what it was. Corinne? How about you? Did you see it?’

Corinne shook her head. ‘I didn’t see anything, but I
heard
something, for sure, and I
felt
something. I don’t know … it was like a tsunami coming, only air instead of water.’

‘I’m going to talk to the cops,’ said Jack. ‘There
is
something out there, and they really need to find it, and fast.’

J
ack could tell that Deputy Jeppersen thought they were simply being hysterical. As they tried to explain to him what they had seen and felt in the woods, however, a beefy gray-haired man in uniform came across to them and said, ‘What’s the problem here, Deputy?’