Forest Ghost by Graham Masterton Page B

She isn’t making it up.’
    ‘They kill themself? Why?’
    ‘There was something in the forest that frightened them. Not the Germans. Something else. They heard the Germans call it
Der Waldgeist
.’
    Sparky looked up from his iPad for a moment, and stared at him, but then he went back to his star chart.
    Jack’s mother, however, was frowning, her thick dark eyebrows drawn together. ‘
Waldgeist
? Wood Ghost? Maybe they mean
nish-gite
?’
    ‘I don’t know. She said it was German for “Forest Ghost”. What’s a
nish-gite
when it’s at home?’
    ‘Same I suppose. When my family live on West Walton Street, when I am maybe six or seven, there is Polish-Jewish woman live next door. Mrs Rosen. She is always telling me stories about ghosts in the forests when she was little. Wherever there is trees that they can hide in, she says, you have
nish-gite
. Even when I am older, sixteen maybe, and I have to walk home through Humboldt Park in the evening after my work at Greenberg’s Store, I always run quick because I remember what Mrs Rosen tells me about
nish-gite
in trees.’
    She paused, her eyes darting from side to side as she remembered what her neighbor had told her all those years ago, and thought of herself hurrying home across Humboldt Park. But then she flapped her hand again and said, ‘
Fwoff!
It is only a story! Mrs Rosen trying to frighten me, silly woman! You not think your great-grandfather kill himself because he is scared of
ghost
?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Jack. ‘It doesn’t seem too likely, does it? But who knows what it was like when they were hiding in that forest? They could have been discovered by the Germans and shot at any moment. Maybe the stress made them all go bananas, and they started imagining stuff.’
    ‘But we didn’t imagine what
we
saw, did we, Dad?’ said Sparky, without looking up from his iPad.
    ‘
You
saw something?’ asked Jack’s mother. ‘Where you saw something? What do you mean, Alexis? Like
nish-gite
?’
    Sparky shrugged. ‘We don’t know what it was, Grandma, not for sure. But it scared us, didn’t it, Dad?’
    ‘It was in Michigan,
mamo
, in a scout camp,’ said Jack. ‘It could have been a cougar. In fact, it probably
was
a cougar, so it was just as well that we got the heck out of there.’
    Sparky didn’t comment on that, but after a pause he said, flatly, ‘Your stars for next week are so-o-o strange.’
    ‘What –
my
stars?’ Jack asked him.
    ‘Yes … somebody’s going to give you a message.’
    ‘A message? Who is? What’s it about?’
    ‘A woman. You haven’t met her yet. You won’t believe the message when you get it, but then somebody else far away will tell you that it’s true.’
    Jack didn’t know what to say to that. Just as he didn’t believe that our destiny is predetermined by the planets, he had never believed that it was possible to tell what was going to happen in the future, by any means – stars or crystal balls or tea leaves or Tarot cards. But Sparky’s forecasts often turned out to be startlingly accurate – even if some of them had been as non-specific as this one. To be fair, any woman could give him a message about anything. It might be Sally giving him some more news about the suicides at Owasippe; or it might turn out to be Mrs Debska from Polish Meat Supplies telling him that she had just had a new shipment of
swojska
sausage.
    But Sparky began to elaborate. ‘The person who tells you that it’s true … she’s a woman, too,’ said Sparky.
    ‘Oh, yes?’
    ‘You’re going to travel a long way, and you’re going to meet her.’
    ‘Really?’
    Sparky nodded. ‘You’re going to meet her and you’re going to fall in love with her.’
    On the way home, Jack said to Sparky, ‘You know I still love your mother, don’t you?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Sparky.
    They were just passing Skokie Lagoons when it started to rain, very hard – so hard that the windshield wipers of Jack’s Camaro could barely keep