by Stefan Spjut
She pushed her phone in under the mattress, plumped the pillow up under her cheek and felt the tranquil ticking of her pulse from inside the stuffing as she studied the texture of the wallpaper. What did Susso think about, lying here at night? Either a lot or very little. Probably very little. The idea of her lying there staring at the wall with an empty mind was so scary Diana immediately tried to turn her thoughts to something else.
She rolled over on her back and closed her eyes. Put an arm over her eyes to block out the light. What had really happened while she was brushing her teeth? She didn’t want to think about that either, but was unable to escape the memory of it.
She stuck her hand in under the mattress to get her phone out. To distract herself for a while. Her fingers touched something cold. That wasn’t her phone. She shifted to the side and folded the mattress up.
A gun. There was a gun under the mattress.
It was small and looked like an antique.
She stared at it but was afraid to touch it.
Then she flew into action, gathered up her clothes and grabbed them, along with the duvet and pillow, and stole down the stairs. She sprinted across the lawn, opened the door to her car and jumped in, pushed the back seat down, spread out the duvet and after lying down, folded it back over her.
Even on the diagonal, she wasn’t able to stretch out fully, but she was still convinced she’d sleep better in the car. At a less than reassuring distance that was nevertheless a distance from the room Susso had filled with a dark, ominous energy Diana hadn’t been fully aware of until she was removed from it.
*
When she woke up, it was four in the morning. Two minutes past four. The windows were fogged up; the car was filled with a grey light. She lay still, listening. Had a scratching against the metal woken her, or had that been a dream? Just then, she remembered something. A shrunken, wizened face cautiously approaching a condensation-covered windscreen, watching her with black, despondent eyes. The wrinkled face had been an unsettling shade of white. Like a foetus in a jar of formaldehyde. She figured it was something her overworked brain had dreamed up in the strange atmosphere inside the car, but she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure.
She got the car door open and stepped out with the duvet around her shoulders. There were no tracks in the film of dew beading the bonnet and the only thing moving in the pine trees were branches rocked by the wind. She snatched up her clothes, kicked the door closed, went into the house, lay down on the sofa and, against all odds, went back to sleep.
*
The percolator filled the kitchen with its bubbling; she was sitting at the table, staring at nothing. She was chilly and felt like she hadn’t slept a wink. Her phone dinged. A message from her mum. K has had nightmares all night long. She’s crying and asking for you. Can’t reach H.
There was suddenly a knot in her stomach. She poured the coffee and sat with the mug in front of her for a while before making the call.
‘How is she?’
‘Hold on, I’ll put her on.’
‘Hi, Mummy.’
‘Grandma says you had a bad dream?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was it, do you want to tell me?’
‘No.’
‘A lot of the time, you feel better if you tell someone. Because then you realise it wasn’t so scary.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Okay.’
‘But I can tell you about another dream I had.’
‘I’d like that.’
‘It was like a nightmare too, but only a bit.’
‘Okay.’
‘It was about a turtle.’
‘A turtle?’
‘Mm. I found a turtle. But it was just the shell, it was empty, just like a little bowl. And when I showed it to Daddy, he said there was a turtle in it, but that it was hiding, really far in, because it was dying. And then he pulled it out and you could tell it was dying because its face was all mouldy.’
‘Yuck.’
‘And it smelled awful.’
‘I hope Daddy threw it out.’
‘I don’t know. I woke up.’
‘I had a bad dream too.’
‘Mummy. Where are you?’
‘At my friend Susso’s. The one who’s missing. Remember how I told you she’s missing. And that I have to find her.’
‘But when are you coming back?’
‘Soon.’
‘I want you to come back now.’
‘Can I talk to Nana.’
The other end went quiet but before her mum could say anything, Diana had ended the call. She looked at the phone and noticed her thumb was trembling. Her heart rate was up because she knew she wasn’t alone in the kitchen.
He was sitting on the threshold. Upright with his front paws pressed against his chest. His ears were pricked up like two long horns leaning against one another.
She waited and it seemed like the squirrel was doing the same. She put the phone down on the table.
‘If you’re wondering where Susso is, I can tell you,’ she said.
The squirrel raised its nose as though it could divine the meaning of her words by sniffing them.
‘She’s in a village called Rumajärvi.’
The animal got down on all fours and stood that way for a bit before doing a one-eighty.
‘I’m going up there to get her back.’
Now it was looking at her.
‘And there’s room in the car, if you want to come.’
She poured out her coffee and put the mug in the sink. She could feel the squirrel studying her the whole time. When she headed toward it on her way out of the kitchen, it slunk aside and quickly leapt up the stairs.
She put her shoes on and went outside, leaving the door open a crack behind her. She walked over to her car and waited; after a while, the squirrel came bounding toward her through the grass. She smiled at it then, but she didn’t realise until she felt the pain in her cheek.
I had a message and when I picked up my phone from the kitchen table and saw it was from Diana, I became shamefully aware of how murky my wishes were. I was hoping it would say she hadn’t found the squirrel but that she was going to stay a while and look for it.
When instead I read ‘WE’RE OUTSIDE’, my whole body went cold. I stared at the letters and desperately tried to interpret them to mean anything other than that she was outside my building and that the squirrel was with her. The radio was on; it was playing music that had suddenly become unbearable; after turning it off, I sat down to have a think.
We’re outside. If she had had a cat, for instance, in the car with her, would she have referred to herself and the cat as a we? Hardly. The squirrel was already sinking its claws into her. But that was probably to be expected.
All the awful memories and corrosive guilt I had been sweeping under the rug for the past ten years washed over me; it was a while before I could muster enough strength to stand up and go outside.
*
One and only one car was parked outside the building, a grey Audi; when I looked at it, the door opened and Diana climbed out. She was wearing the baseball cap but no sunglasses. After watching her for a while, I crossed the street. I didn’t say anything and eventually she smiled, as much as her cut lip allowed.
‘Are you afraid of me?’ she said.
I glanced at the car. My hand was clutching the shoulder strap of my handbag.
It came as a complete surprise to me when I walked away; it was as though my feet took charge of my body. When she called out after me, I started jogging back toward the front door, and I didn’t dare to check if she was following until I had pulled it closed behind me. She wasn’t; she was standing where I’d left her on the pavement, and she looked so much like Susso I froze in confusion for a few moments.
When I got back inside my flat, I locked the door. Then I sat down in the kitchen with my shoes and jacket still on. My heart was racing in my chest and I stared at my phone. I thought she would text me
and nag, but she didn’t and when I looked out through the balcony door, I realised the car was gone. I hadn’t expected that and the relief I felt was difficult to disentangle. I hadn’t managed to remove my outerwear; my heels clattered against the parquet floor as I paced around the living room, wondering what I should do. For a while, I stood on the balcony, looking out at the street. But she didn’t come back.
In the end, I called Roland. I had told him what had happened to the police officers who had been dispatched to Rumajärvi, but I hadn’t let him in on my and Diana’s plan to go up there and now I needed to be told I’d been right not to go.
He did think I’d made the right decision.
‘So you don’t think I should go after her?’
‘What can you possibly do, Gudrun?’
‘I suppose I could talk to them.’
‘All right, look, I’m going to say something to you, and it’s just a hunch. Something I’ve been thinking. And you have to promise not to be cross with me.’
‘Okay.’
‘Have you considered that Susso may not be alive?’
‘It’s all I think about!’
‘You have to ask yourself why they kidnapped her at all. If what they were after was, in fact, revenge. Either way, I don’t think there’s any point talking to these people.’
‘So I’m just supposed to sit here?’
‘If what you’re saying, and what Harr and Nänne are affirming as well, is true, that this squirrel has special powers or whatever you want to call it, then maybe Diana can do what the police couldn’t. So we’ll have to see how she does. Or they do, rather.’
Diana sat with her hand around a can of fizzy drink in the shade under a parasol, watching the cars in the car park. One of them had Norwegian plates, so she disliked it. Like she had disliked the Norwegian girl at the till who had asked if she wanted the receipt when she paid for her petrol. She was aware it was a symptom of some kind of paranoia, but that changed nothing. She couldn’t fully escape the feeling everyone up here knew who she was and where she was going.
She hadn’t touched her burger and couldn’t understand why she’d bought it. Her stomach seemed to have shrivelled into a pointless appendix. She gave the meat patty’s rough surface an indifferent look. The napkin stuck under the plate, moving limply in the breeze. There was a couple speaking Dutch behind her. A cryptic conversation. The soft voices, the familiar but impenetrable words, the harsh ch sounds. She was pretty sure they were talking about the squirrel.
It had dashed about the outdoor seating area for a while, but now it was perched, motionless, on the backrest of the bench across from her. The greyish-red tufts of hair on its tail were so sparse the skin they grew from was clearly visible. The claws on its bony feet were long and curved like suture needles and just as sharp; she had felt them.
She picked up a portion of snus and pushed it in under her lip and just as she did, she was ambushed from the flank. It was the woman from the till. She tried to shoo the squirrel away with a towel, all the while yelling at it in a chattering language that might have been Filipino. The squirrel didn’t so much as flinch. It just sat there with its back arched, watching the woman. Who abruptly changed tack. She stopped waving her towel about and then backed up a few paces. She looked worn-out and depressed. Her brown cheeks pocked with acne scars. When Diana looked at her, she gestured toward the squirrel and said something. Then she retreated back inside. Since it seemed likely she would return with backup, Diana grabbed her tin of snus and can of fizzy drink and got to her feet. The Dutch couple were poring over a map and didn’t look up when she passed.
*
The road down to Rumajärvi consisted mostly of straights that were so long they disappeared like needles in the distance. There were no houses. No signs, no poles. Just the cracked and scarred strip of pitch and gravel, running mile after mile through the monotonous spruce forest.
She drove through Paittasjärvi and soon thereafter saw the sign for Rumajärvi. Someone had vandalised the sign, written something on it in Finnish. She rolled down a small gravel road. The squirrel must have realised they were close, because it was suddenly on the dashboard. Its tail was twitching.
She reached a boom barrier and sat staring at it for a while before climbing out of the car. A padlock lay discarded in the gravel, a shiny, silver code lock. The shackle had been cut. After establishing that there was a new lock on the barrier, she picked up the old one. She absent-mindedly rotated the numbered discs while she mulled things over. Then she got back in the car and reversed up to the main road. The squirrel immediately jumped down and sat staring out the rear window; it always wanted to see where they were going. She parked next to the road and let the squirrel out; it disappeared in an instant; it was like releasing a bird. She walked back and when she reached the boom barrier, she turned off into the woods.
It was hot. She grabbed the vizor of her baseball cap and rubbed the cap against her forehead. The forest was dead silent in the heat as she crept along between the motionless spruce branches.
Before long, the dark mirror of a lake appeared among the trees, the järvi in Rumajärvi, and after walking a bit further, she could make out houses too. A shed down by the shore and further up, the tin roof of a house. She sank into a squat and scanned the area for people. She buried her face in her hands and the air rushing out of her nostrils with each breath felt hot against her skin. She stayed in that position until the squirrel started making a racket above her head. When she looked up, it had jumped down into the underbrush, where it rolled about, emitting squeaking sounds. On closer inspection, however, it turned out it wasn’t the squirrel squeaking, but rather a swollen little lemming with dappled yellow-and-brown fur. The two animals circled each other in some kind of hostile dance that ended with the lemming disappearing like a ball among the ferns.
Diana picked the squirrel up, placed it in her kangaroo pocket and walked down toward the village. A rusty old banger was parked on the grass in front of an older house, a white Nissan Sunny, and she could see someone hiding behind it. Diana said hello, but the girl neither replied nor came out, so she walked around the car. She had seen that little face before. The mongoloid slits of her eyes, her flat nose, her thin upper lip. A textbook example of foetal alcohol syndrome. The girl had a grimy, hot-pink winter coat on over a floral-print dress and was holding the handlebar of an old-fashioned doll’s pram with its canopy up.
‘What’s your name then?’
‘Sästin.’
Diana was about to ask her the name of her doll but changed her mind after peeking in under the canopy. A squirrel was tucked in under the blanket. Both its eyes had popped out and were dangling on threads, one was a lingonberry, the other a wrinkled blueberry, and an ugly tooth glinted inside the contorted mouth.
The door to the house opened to reveal an elderly woman watching her with a severe expression.
Diana had forgotten why she was there and had to think about it for a second.
‘I’m looking for a person who’s supposed to be here.’
The woman waved over the child, who immediately ran in under her arm. Then she came outside. Diana followed her and was shown to a house surrounded by tarpaulins.
‘She’s my age,’ she said, but the woman just stared at her and then left.
*
Sitting outside the house were two men. One was an old man with a hat and a long grey beard; she knew that was Erasmus. The man sitting next to him looked like a criminal. He was topless and had gold chains around his neck. He was holding a knife, some kind of samurai knife, which he was testing with his ring-bedecked fingers.
They watched her in silence.
‘I’m looking for someone.’
‘Are you from the police?’
‘Is she here?’
‘Who?’
‘Susso.’
The old man was sitting with one leg folded over the other, bobbing his shoe up and down.
‘Who’s that in your pocket
?’ he said.
When she didn’t reply, he grinned at her and then started singing: ‘I have seen you, little mouse, running all about the house.’
‘I’m taking her with me.’
The man with all the bling grinned languidly.
‘What has done?’ he said. ‘Has been naughty?’
Erasmus muttered something to the man in Finnish that made him get up and shuffle into the house. Not long after, a young woman came out. She wore a cloth Alice band in her blonde hair and looked completely normal, as far as Diana could make out.
‘Where is she?’
The old man watched her in silence. Then he stood up and walked toward her. He had a limp. She took a step back and when he came closer still, she took another.
While he studied her face, his tongue popped out to moisten his lips, which were unnaturally hard and dark. Suddenly, his hand shot out. Diana turned aside, shielding her pocket, because she thought he was after the squirrel. But he wasn’t. He pinched her breast through her sweater and he pinched hard. She leapt back. Stared at him and then at the young woman.
‘Has anyone suckled these?’ he asked.
She was dumbfounded.
‘Do you have children?’ the woman said.
Diana barely heard the question. She was looking at the window. The man with the gold chains was moving around behind the glass and in front of him on the windowsill was a row of dolls of various heights. Some had hats on, some didn’t. They looked like something that might have crawled out of a box of Christmas decorations cursed by an evil sorcerer. Because they were not still like dolls. One of them had even placed its claw-fingered little rat hands against the glass; its cheerful face was twisted by a horrifying craniofacial deformity.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly, ‘I have children.’
‘A girl,’ the woman said. ‘It’s a girl, isn’t it?’
She nodded against her will.
‘How old,’ the man whispered, but not to Diana.
‘How old is she?’
‘Four.’