Forest Ghost by Graham Masterton

then at last by silence.
    Tamara Thorne, with her eyes still closed, said, ‘You will all have read in my book that it is not necessary for you to
summon
any particular spirit. Well,
nearly
all of you will have read that in my book. In other words it is not necessary to call on the one you love, or the one to whom you wish to speak.
    ‘All you have to do is empty your mind of noise and clutter and petty arguments and day-to-day concerns. Turn the inside of your head into an echo-chamber, totally dark and totally silent, in which the voice of your loved ones may resonate. They will speak to you, the spirits, if you listen. Not always – and not always the spirits of your choice. But the spirit world is like a social network, it’s like a celestial Twitter, and if you converse with
one
spirit, it is almost certain that your words will be conveyed to the spirit with whom you originally wanted to talk.’
    She paused for a very long moment, her eyes still closed, her arms swaying from side to side, as if she were floating on a shallow tide. After a while, she said, ‘Thelma says that it wasn’t your fault, Bruce. She’s very faint, but can you hear her?’
    A bald middle-aged man in the audience said, ‘
Thelma?
’
    ‘Can you hear her, Bruce? I know she sounds very far away, but that’s because she is.’
    ‘I can hear her! I can hear her! Thelma?’
    ‘Stay calm, Bruce,’ said Tamara Thorne, in a flat, soothing voice. ‘Stay calm and listen to what she has to say.’
    Jack turned to look at the man. His face was scrunched up in concentration and his fists were clenched. Tears were running freely down his cheeks, and the woman sitting next to him had put her arm around his shoulders to comfort him. Every now and then he nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ and ‘yes,’ and ‘oh, Thelma, I miss you, sweetheart!’
    At last he opened his eyes and looked around. The woman gave him a tissue and he dabbed his face, and sniffed. He tried to say something, but he was too overwhelmed to speak, and all he could do was shake his head.
    Jack’s first thought was that he was a plant. After all, nobody else in the audience had heard Thelma’s voice, even if Thelma really had been speaking to him.
    One or two people started to murmur to each other, but Tamara Thorne called out, ‘Silence, please! Absolute silence! The spirits are not easy to hear at the best of times, and if you want to hear your own loved ones, like Bruce here, then you will have to be totally receptive!’
    Again, she sat with her eyes closed, waving her arms. Jack was wondering how long he was going to have to sit here, listening to this charade, when a voice said, with cut-glass clarity, ‘Jack –
słyszysz mnie
?’
    Jack felt the same cold shrinking sensation down his back that he had experienced when Tamara Thorne had asked him if he had come here to talk to Aggie. Inside his head he could hear this clearest of voices, and it was unmistakably Aggie’s.
    ‘
Jack, can you hear me
?’ That was what she had asked him, in Polish.
    Like the bald man who had heard from his Thelma, Jack’s eyes immediately filled with tears, and his throat tightened up so much that he wouldn’t have been able to say anything out loud if he had wanted to. It was Aggie, his beautiful lost Aggie, there was no mistaking it. He looked across at Tamara Thorne, and his chest was physically hurting with grief and resentment, but Tamara Thorne still had her eyes closed, and was still waving her arms from side to side.
    Aggie –
he thought
– Agnieszka, is that really you
?
    There was a long moment of silence, but then he heard Aggie’s voice again, still quite clear, but much smaller this time, as if she were speaking to him from very far away.
    ‘Jack,
słyszysz mnie
?’
    He had no tissue so he had to smear the tears away from his eyes with the back of his hand.
Yes, Aggie,
I can hear you. Where are you
?
Speak to me, Aggie!
    Another long silence, and then Aggie said, ‘
S ą