A Ghost Story - Part XI
Image: Dave Reed
They didn’t find Jim until daylight. Three young men went out on ATVs to comb the forest, and when they came upon Jim he was passed out beneath some trees, covered in bites and murmuring to himself. He’d managed to remove the sneaker from his injured foot, and the skin was incredibly red and swollen, hot to the touch. Once loaded on an ATV, he was taken back to the lodge and then to a local hospital where he spent a day being treated for exposure, shock, and a badly twisted ankle.
Jennifer was treated for exposure, too. It was two AM when she was delivered from the forest, and she learned that her father had taken his last breath a few minutes before midnight and that a light had been visible, hovering in the air as he left his body. When she did the math, she realized that Danny had passed a little before one in the morning Canadian time, just about when she began seeing the hazy beam of light that led her out of the forest.
Had magic happened? Was it Danny who had come and saved her? Jim scoffed at the idea, saying the night he’d spent in the woods was the worst night of his life, a traumatic ordeal that would take years to recover from. For Jennifer the experience had been mystical, even thrilling as she went over and over it in her mind -- the danger of falling, breaking a limb, the challenge of keeping steady and balanced in a world where everything looked like everything else and darkness fell quickly. In retrospect, weirdly, she had enjoyed every minute of it.
When she compared notes with Lydia, who’d seen the light, the life force, leave Danny’s body and travel from the room, Jennifer had no doubt that it was the same light as the one that had descended from the nighttime sky to form a path out of the forest.
“See,” she told Jim. “Now we know for sure that life continues after you take your last breath, that all sorts of mysterious things happen.”
Image: Benn McGuinness
Jim didn’t agree. After the ordeal in the forest, he grew more cautious, driving slower, eating better, going to the gym, spending more precious time with his children. For Jennifer, it was the opposite. She felt closer to her father than she ever had in life, and she felt a recklessness, a wild abandon, a freedom that made her want to take up running the empty streets at night, buy a gun and teach herself to shoot, travel to the jungles of Brazil to take hallucinogenic drugs that would show her the way forward. She cut off her braid and allowed her hair to curl loosely around her head. While Jim took up bridge, Jennifer, age forty-six, decided to explore shamanism -- perhaps she herself possessed the witchy, other-worldly traits necessary to communicate with the beyond. Eventually Jim fell in love with one of his bridge partners, and the marriage dissolved. Jennifer sensed her father would be happy about that. She bought a house with huge windows overlooking the greenbelt where she could constantly watch the changing patterns of shadow and light moving across the landscape. She wasn’t sure if she would ever marry again, or if that mattered. From her night in the forest -- the night of her father’s death -- she had grown into a larger person, a woman with questions that it would take a whole lifetime to answer.
Cover photo: Podu Stricat