“It isn’t my fault that I don’t know any of this,” she said, working salad dressing into the stain. Soap would have been better, but it was bad for the lake and therefore forbidden. “I know a little, though. I know that you never even called.”
“Sam couldn’t have been more clear about how he felt,” Jaana said. “He didn’t want us to have anything to do with you. He stopped us.”
“And you let him,” Tess said.
She was totally unprepared for how deeply this would cut. The sight of a gouge in Jaana’s plated armor was exhilarating, and she regretted it immediately. Still, there was no going back. She kept her attention on the stain, her voice falsely casual. “Blaming my father for everything is just a way for you to let yourself and Otso off the hook.”
For a moment she thought that her grandmother might slap her. Jaana leaned forward, as though considering it, but then shifted her weight back onto her haunches and stood. “I don’t let anyone off the hook,” she said. “Not myself. Not your father. Not even my daughter. Being gone doesn’t make either of them guiltless. It just means they aren’t around for you to be awful to.” Well. That felt enough like a slap. Jaana stooped down to collect her hammer and the spent, useless nails. Out on the pine island the swan let fly a long, quavering call. But it wasn’t appropriately poignant or mournful. It sounded like somebody was murdering a clown with a shoehorn.
Jaana disappeared into the cottage without another word. Kari, who’d had the good sense to hide out behind the sauna, slunk back toward the dock. He joined Tess at the end, both of them facing the water.
“I knew your mom and dad weren’t in Zanzibar,” he said.
Tess didn’t know what she expected him to say, but that wasn’t it.
“Axel told me a few days ago,” he said. “I’m really sorry.” He took her hand and held it. It could have seemed creepily opportunistic, but it didn’t. It occurred to Tess, suddenly and intensely, that Kari deserved better parents. And a better brother. By every measure, he had more than her—and less.
Tess cried a little then. Kari said nothing. He just held her hand and sat with her. And when she was done, he asked if she wanted to celebrate Halloween.
12
The Castle
Otso had been insistent, back on the day that Tess and Kari brought Axel home from the castle, that the boy join him for a steam. They’d stripped naked together in the little pine sauna, and Otso ladled water over a pile of heated, sizzling stones. It filled the room with steam, dropping a cloak of prickling heat down over their heads. The walls oozed, and the air smoldered in their lungs. “Just breathe,” Otso said. He held a whisk of dried birch, which he dipped into a bucket of lake water and then used to strike himself sharply about the shoulders. None of this was even in the running for weirdest thing to happen that day.
Otso’s wheelchair sat outside the sauna door, his clothes piled neatly on the seat. Axel’s wheelchair was out there as well—though now he finally had a name for the thing. The Hiisi. It had followed them from the castle, beating birds from the bushes, and now it was circling the sauna like a weasel sniffing around a henhouse. It appeared that the Keeper’s prediction had held true; the Hiisi was slowly shedding its disguise. The thing had grown bigger than it ever was back home, turning strangely bent and shaggy. The armrests went jointed, jagged—stretched. They pulled at the trunks, dragging the Hiisi over log and root as the thing went crawling and rolling, clicking and growling. Axel had been hoping for fantastical, and fantastical had arrived in spades.
Jaana tried to send him straight to bed after the sauna, but Axel resisted. Instead he wandered from window to window, peering out. The Hiisi was still out there, ramming itself into the cottage walls, making framed photographs shake on their nails. But nobody seemed to notice. The thing lingered in the yard for the rest of the afternoon, haunting and hunting. Come nightfall it settled in outside Axel’s bedroom, pressing its impossible self up against the glass. Axel watched it from the narrow slab of his mother’s bed, never drifting off long enough to dream. But that hardly mattered. His life had all but become one.
It took several days for Axel’s strength to return, and in that time the Hiisi slowly faded into the surrounding woods. But optimist that he was, Axel decided that its sudden appearance could only be a good sign. After all, in Kari’s story the Hiisi had been trying to keep poor Väinö away from his wife—away from what Kari had called “the underworld.” So if the Hiisi had shown itself at the castle, that must mean that Axel was getting close. And even if the legend of Väinö and Aino were nothing but a fiction, the Hiisi’s presence offered a more general hope. Because Axel had come to Talvijärvi to search for his mother’s ghost, and when you’re looking for a ghost, a demon can hardly mean you’re on the wrong track—like some kind of paranormal indicator species. Axel’s father used to teach a whole unit on indicators, back at the college. Sam could go into maddening detail about the things you could infer from orchids, wild strawberry, or epiphytic lichens—the calling cards of real, ancient woodlands. “Don’t worry about missing the forest for the trees,” Sam would say. “Because the forest is the trees. The forest is the tree. The forest is the branch, and the leaf, and the acorn.” When Axel applied this principal to his new magical circumstances, he could only conclude that in a world where the Hiisi existed, his mother could, too.
Axel had plenty of time to mull this over as he convalesced, stranded in the Kivis’ little cottage. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that Talvijärvi also made perfect sense, habitat-wise. This cottage had been in Jaana’s family for three generations, and Saara had all but grown up here. What more appropriate place, then, for his mom’s bear-shaped ghost to go a’haunting? Sure, Baldwin had been Saara’s home too. But she’d lived there for only a few years, and a green card hardly gave her roots. If Saara existed anywhere other than as a pile of bones in the Oakwood Cemetery, she had to exist here, under these old blue spruce trees. Among the rocks and pines of her childhood.
Axel knew that he had no choice but to return to the castle—those ruins were still his best and only lead. He waited as long as he could for his energy to come back, but their impending return to Helsinki forced the issue. He decided to sneak out on their last night at Talvijärvi, the sort of now-or-never moment at the root of most good adventures. And tragedies.
It turned out to be an ideal night for subterfuge—a good chunk of moon swung into the sky, and it gave off such a glow that there was no need for Axel to risk giving himself away with a flashlight. Better yet, Tess had left early for a party at Kari’s place and wouldn’t be around to catch him sneaking out. Axel waited until after his grandparents’ usual bedtime. He dressed quietly, layering sweaters against the dull autumn chill. But as he slipped into the den, he saw that Jaana was still awake, sitting upright on the little sofa. She was crying. Or maybe it would be better described as tearing—her face looked exactly as it always did, only wetter. She hadn’t noticed him, so Axel doubled back through the kitchen and slipped out the back door. If Jaana’s week of upkeep hadn’t included oiling all the hinges, his quest would have ended then and there.
Outside he could hear the breeze in the treetops and faint music coming from the distant party. No creaking wheels, though; no Hiisi. Axel made for the shadows of the birch thicket. His plan was to follow the shoreline past the Hannula house and then cut through the forest toward Erikinlinna. Getting to Kari’s was easy enough, thanks to the blazing windows up ahead. Speakers thumped Finnish rap into the forest, and through the windows he could see what appeared to be a Christmas movie playing on the big screen. Or, no—it was definitely a Halloween movie. Santa had a knife, and he was using it.
Axel was just about to cross the gravel drive and slip behind the house when he heard an odd popping sound from the boathouse deck, and something jumped in the brush just behind him. His whole body went stiff. But then somebody on the deck called out: “That’s one!” They were all out there, Axel realized. Ka
lle’s friends had lined plastic cider bottles along the railing, and Kalle was taking aim with an air rifle. That jumping sound behind Axel had been a pellet, digging its way into a tree. Axel got down out of the light and the line of fire.
“Schnapps!” a girl on the deck hollered, after Kalle’s third miss. It was hard to tell in the gloom, but it looked like her costume was undead Pocahontas. Kalle, who was decked out in a fairly authentic military uniform, obliged her by downing a shot of dark liquid. So it was a drinking game, with weaponry. Splendid.
“How about a turn for jumbo?” Kalle said, his voice sharp and wet after the schnapps. “He’s, like, a genius at this.” He turned to the far end of the little gathering, where a pair of slightly smaller silhouettes were perched rigidly on deck chairs. This must have been Kari and Tess. Kari seemed reluctant at first, but then a chant of “Jum-BO, Jum-BO” went up among Kalle’s friends. He stood, took a few steps forward, and shouldered the air rifle. Axel put his hands over the back of his head, but it was unnecessary. Kari struck down one bottle and the next, until they were all lying label-up in the grass below the deck, urgently bleeding foam. The kids on the deck cheered in a way that didn’t seem cheerful, and Kalle offered his brother a victory shot.
“Quit being lame,” he said, as Kari tried to hand it back. So Kari drank it. Or at least he pretended to—a lot of it seemed to be pouring down the sides of his face. Axel inchwormed deeper into the woods. Once he was safely consumed by shadow, he stood and made his way around the house. Kari was a nice guy, and he certainly didn’t deserve to be humiliated, especially in front of a girl he so obviously had the hots for. But Axel had more important things to worry about tonight.
Now he’d come to the more difficult part. As Axel remembered it, they’d emerged from the spruce wood about a hundred yards down shore of Kari’s place. They’d hit the rocky waterline head-on, so his plan was to count out a hundred lunging steps and then turn a sharp right into the forest. This had seemed fairly simple as he’d worked it out in the cottage, but now Axel couldn’t count out ten paces before he had to change direction. The lakeshore was totally untended beyond the Hannula property, and the lichen-smeared boulders and dense patches of thorny bramble seemed arranged expressly to block his path. The horizontal corpses of trees bashed flat by summer storms were everywhere, shelf fungus on their trunks pointing at the sky like the jagged teeth of upturned saws. Axel lost the lake and found it again. When he judged himself far enough from Kari’s place, he turned, pressing his course into the dark.
Actually, a flashlight would have been a good idea. The moonlight was more than adequate along the lakeshore, but it was much darker in the forest. Axel could barely make out the spruce trunks, and all he had to orient himself by were the fading catcalls of Kalle’s Finnish rap. Eventually even those sounds died out, but that was at least a sign that he wasn’t going in circles. Axel counted out a thousand paces through the dark before realizing that he must have overshot the castle. He decided to trace his way back to the lake and start over, but as Axel turned, he noticed a man in the woods, watching him.
The man was standing a few paces away, peeking out from behind a rotted-out pine. He was short, he had wings, and he was holding a spear. He was so pale that he seemed to glow in the dark, and his bulging eyes were completely white. To hell with that. Axel braced one foot into the dirt and with the other he gave the glowing stranger a hard kick in the knee. The man wavered for a minute before falling backward, his outstretched wings bracing him above the dirt. But he didn’t cry out or writhe around in pain or even try to right himself again. Because he was a statue and Axel was a freaking dope. He took a step forward, feeling stupid and relieved. It was an archangel—probably Michael, given the spear. The stucco statue looked exactly like one that was in Mrs. Ridgeland’s collection back home. But what was it doing out here?
Then, as Axel’s heartbeat returned to normal, he noticed something behind the statue. There was a brighter clearing beyond the trees, and within it, a house. Odd—he could have sworn that the Kivi cottage and Hannula place were the only ones on this side of the lake. As Axel approached the house, he saw that it was clearly abandoned, the windows dark, caution tape webbed brightly across the doorframe, the whole thing encircled by a perimeter of orange cones. It was a humble little structure, more or less the size of their old A-frame back home. Actually, other than the fact that there was no homemade bivouac looming over the roof, it looked exactly like the A-frame. It was too dark inside to see anything through the windows, but the windows themselves looked right, as did the door, which had the exact same dragonhead knocker on it that they had at home. Those things were common enough, sold every year at the ren-faire, but what were the chances that one would have made its way to Finland? Somewhere between tiny and zero.
Axel circled the house, noticing a little flap cut out of the wall, at ground level, exactly where Bigwig’s outdoor hutch would have been. But there was no hutch. There was no garden patch, either. The whole backyard, if you could even call it that, was nothing more than an overturned lather of mud and roots. Treads had torn the ground bare, and a ginormous earthmover seemed to gloat among a skeletal crescent of birch trees. Beside the earthmover was a large metal garbage bin filled with debris. Axel approached the machine and prodded at the treads. It felt very cold and very real. He peeked inside the garbage bin and saw splintered beams and shingling, rain-rotted and funky—the remains of his father’s bivouac. ONONDAGA COUNTY was printed on the outside of the bin, and the earthmover had New York plates. It wasn’t a replica. It wasn’t oddly similar. He’d been waiting all his life for things to make as little sense as this. It was Axel’s house, somehow transported to the woods of Finland.
Then, screaming. Somebody in the woods was screaming.
Like any ghost hunter worth his salt, Axel ran, not away from this sound, but toward it. The A-frame seemed to disappear the moment he turned, lost in the ever-enfolding forest. Up ahead the woods thinned, patches of star-pocked night visible between the branches. A few sprigs of cloud had drifted into the sky, obscuring the moon and making the clearing as gloomy as the forest itself. But there was still enough light to see the white stone glow of Erikinlinna. Two stove-in towers loomed on either side of the main archway. And just as it had been the first time Axel saw it, the castle was filled with birds. It was more than just crows—magpies and woodpeckers, owls and doves all wheeled above the sundered courtyard, colliding in the air. Axel was sure that the scream he’d heard was human, but now there was nothing but an apocalypse of squawking. The birds pecked and scratched along the jagged walls, throwing up sprays of feathers as they fought. Some seemed too hurt to fly, perched knock-kneed on the stunted trees, shining darkly with blood. Others were scattered across the roof of the picnic area like tufts of dirty cotton, twisted and still.
And it wasn’t even just birds—a reindeer came galloping out of the castle archway, its antlers large and ornate as a medieval chandelier. The bleating animal was dive-bombed by a magpie as it went. It was headed right in Axel’s direction, making for the shelter of the darker forest. But before it got close enough to see him, the most terrible, wonderful thing happened. The moon found a hole in the tufted clouds, spilling fire and people into the night. Like God was playing a board game and had swapped all the pieces while his opponents weren’t looking. Those weren’t birds fighting on the castle walls. They were people. All sorts of people—Axel saw armor, war axes, and old-fashioned military uniforms spangled with buttons and epaulets. Suddenly the shouts that he’d heard from a distance were back. There was the flinty pop of antique guns, the airy buzz of arrows, the cutlery-smash of swords. Birds that had just zipped over the wall were suddenly airborne humans in varicolored costume, landing atop the ruined stone like pole-vaulters, met there by Finnish irregulars with wood axes and grenades. It was very clear to Axel that the moonlight had done this—it had revealed these animals for what they truly were. Not simply crows and magpies, but ghosts.
As the moon came more fully into view, its light spread across the clearing, transforming the reindeer that was running Axel’s way into a bearded man in scaled leather armor. He wore a peaked iron helmet with a nose guard and carried a big round shield with a metal spike at the center of it. Before Axel had a chance to even think the word—Viking—the bearded man shouted and pitched forward into the grass, a little fountain of blood erupting out of the back of his neck. A soldier in a long white trench coat stood in the grass behind the Viking, his blunt machine gun smoking. This man wore a helmet as well, but it was mostly covered by the white hood of his trench coat. Axel recognized the uniform—it was a soldier from the Winter War, fought against the Soviets more than seventy years ago. The Viking crawled a short distance, his blood purpling the grass, his eyes clenched tight as though to shut out the pain. As though he could make it all go away.
And then it all did go away. Quick as could be, the moon was covered again, and there was no longer an officer standing there, his spent weapon smoking, but a magpie, slick as spilled oil. The bearded Viking, dying at Axel’s feet, was a reindeer again, kind of adorable actually, and nowhere close to dying. The bodies that had been scattered across the grass, casualties of this carnival fighting, all got up again. The board was cleared, the pieces reset. The reindeer disappeared into the woods, making a sort of delighted coughing sound. The magpie uttered the Finnish equivalent of “Damnation!” And Axel couldn’t help it—he actually laughed. Because these were ghosts! This was a haunted wood with swords and battles and shape-shifting local fauna! It was like Axel had been the one to die—died and gone to heaven. Or at least it seemed that way until the Hiisi appeared.
The Winter Place Page 14