The Winter Place

by Alexander Yates

  She was completely still, standing exactly between the two pines. It was hard to be sure at this distance, but it looked like she was barefoot. She had a lot of hair, half of it piled in a loose bun atop her head, the rest standing at ends in a wiry haze. She was staring at him.

  Axel had to take a moment. The sun was burning through the trees at the southeast end of the lake, looking like the beginnings of a forest fire, but the moon was still out. It surrendered the far horizon, pierced by the crowns of spruce trees. And it was the moonlight that must have been revealing the swan—revealing the ghost—for who she really was. It was Aino, the lady Kari had told him about. The one whose laminated picture hung in the picnic area outside the ruined castle—Talvijärvi’s local legend. Axel realized that in all the commotion back at the A-frame, he’d completely forgotten to ask the Keeper about her. More important, he’d forgotten to ask about Väinö, the grief-sick husband who had set out to find her. The one who froze to death inside the castle. Did that mean that Väinö had failed? Or, worse, did it mean that he’d succeeded? Probably not, Axel decided, because Aino certainly looked like she was alone. In another minute or two the moon would die, and she’d go back to being a swan, roosting on an island of fish bones and her own droppings. Axel suddenly felt very sorry for this lady. It seemed like a bummer of an afterlife.

  Aino kept staring as he continued along the shoreline, and just as he was about to turn into the trees, she raised her hand and waved. Not really knowing what else to do, Axel waved back. Hi there, dead lady. She went still for a moment, her arm suspended aloft as though held taut by a string. Then her hand started moving again, not side to side, but back and forth. A clumsy, beckoning gesture. The woman took a step forward, lifting a naked foot out of the snow. Her voice glided across the ice, high-pitched and hollow. “Come here,” she was saying.

  Oh, hell no. Axel’s mom was scary enough, and that was his mom. He felt sorry for this Aino lady, stuck all alone on that speck of an island, in this frozen nowhere. But her problems were her own, and he certainly wasn’t about to take up any side quests. Axel started to back into the trees. Aino took another step toward him, and another, and before Axel realized what was happening, this half-naked lady with cue-ball eyes and electrified hair was flat-out sprinting across the ice. She was waving her skinny arms over her head, shouting: “Come here! Come here!” Axel felt like he couldn’t move, as though the weight of his chain mail had suddenly quadrupled. He groped at his sides for the handle of Sam’s sword, but before he could pull it out, Aino disappeared with a wet, reverberating crunch.

  The dead woman had fallen neatly through the ice, like a nail hammered home in one strike.

  Axel ran into the woods. The snow was shallower in there, under the dense canopy of needles, and he was able to pick up some speed. The chain mail bounced across his shoulders, sounding like a rattling jar of pennies. Up ahead there was a fallen tree, and with some difficulty Axel hoisted his heavy metal self over it, squatting for cover on the opposite side. He stayed there for a few minutes, hacking for breath and sweating under the weight of the mail. He strained his ears for any sign that the madwoman might still be chasing him. All he heard was the breeze and the occasional call of songbirds in the treetops. He peeked back over the log and saw nothing but his own scrambling footprints.

  When Axel was finally sure that he was alone, he pressed the tip of his sword into the ground like a walking stick and hoisted himself to his feet. But no sooner had he gotten vertical than something struck him, hard, in the middle of his back. Axel dropped his sword and pitched face-first into the snow. He tried to get up but found he couldn’t, the mail a leaden blanket over his back.

  “This is you, about to die.” Even though he couldn’t see him, Axel recognized the Keeper’s voice immediately. He heard the grating squeak of gum boots on the snow and felt a sudden closeness beside his ear. The old man’s breath stank of tobacco and pine.

  “And this is me,” the Keeper said, “eating your idiot face.”

  “You didn’t have to hit me,” Axel said, still trying to lift himself up. He felt like an overturned turtle. Man, was it embarrassing.

  “I suppose I didn’t, no,” the Keeper said. He watched Axel writhe for another moment before reaching down to help him. Then, once Axel was upright, the old man stripped the chain mail off him and flung it overhand into the woods. “But I could hardly have made my point any better. If the dead want to hurt you, they’ll hurt you, metal pajamas or no. Running away is usually going to be your best bet.”

  “But why would Aino want to hurt me?” Axel said, rubbing his still-sore back with his fist. The Keeper had gotten him square between the shoulder blades with the head of his walking stick.

  “Why would I know what she wants?” the old man said. “All I could tell you about Aino is that she’s lonely and crazy and mean as hell.” The Keeper’s eyebrows arched up slightly. “Tell me . . . how do you know her name, exactly?”

  “Our neighbor told us about her,” Axel said. “And besides, her story is pasted up in front of the castle.” He went to retrieve his father’s sword from the snow. “And speaking of that, I need to talk to you about her husband, Väinö.”

  For a moment it seemed like the Keeper was about to drop his walking stick. Though Axel couldn’t tell what was so surprising. “What about him?” the Keeper said.

  “For starters, what happened to him? I know that you’re that man in the castle. I know that you promised to bring him to Aino and that the Hiisi was trying to stop him. And I know that the spring after he disappeared, they found his body in Erikinlinna.”

  For a brief but unmistakable moment, a look of relief flooded across the Keeper’s broad face. He swung his leg over the fallen tree trunk and sat, knock-kneed as a cartoon cricket. “You know, I offered that coward everything he wanted,” the Keeper said. “It isn’t my fault that he couldn’t cope. Drunks ooze nothing more than doubt and fear, and our dear Hiisi gorged upon this.”

  “Did the Hiisi kill him?” Axel said.

  “Hardly!” The Keeper snorted. “That isn’t the Hiisi’s style. Remember that the Hiisi keeps order on the path and in the worlds of the dead. It wanted Väinö to leave, but killing him would have been as good as a permanent invitation to stay. All it did was frighten him.” The old man removed his hat, casually dusting the snow off it. There were still flowers in the band, but they were limp and shriveled. “The Hiisi got so very big and terrifying that it scared Väinö off the path entirely. He must have decided to find his dead wife the old-fashioned way. Drinking himself silly and falling asleep in the snow. That’ll do it every time. As I said, he was a coward, through and through.”

  The Keeper put his hat back on, obscuring his rigid lick of red hair. Then he braced his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in the nest of his eight fingers. “This is why you went through all the trouble to sneak up here, I suppose. Burning questions about a pair of country Finns, dead sixty years now? I can’t say I see the appeal, but go ahead. Fire away. Would you like to know who attended their funerals?”

  Axel hesitated for a moment. It seemed there was something more to this, but what it was he couldn’t quite say. Whatever—it couldn’t have been as important as Saara. “My mother,” Axel said. “Is she still on the path?”

  The Keeper extended his arms out, gesturing at the trees all around them. “I’m afraid so. The hunt is fruitless, but it continues all the same.”

  “You need to bring me to her,” Axel said.

  “I do, do I?” The Keeper cocked his head and squinted. “But if I remember correctly, the last time you had a chance to be with Saara, you elected instead to mope. You were so sad that she hadn’t come to rescue you from your mundane little orphan drama that you walked right out on her.”

  “I know that, but—”

  “Tut-tut-tut,” the Keeper cut him off. “It gives me no pleasure to say this, but your last chance was exactly one chance ago. And anyhow, it’s not your decision an
ymore. They’ve already come to take you away.”

  For a moment Axel had zero idea who they could have been.

  “Jaana,” the Keeper said. “Tess too. You running off really upset them. I’m sure they’ll want you to speak with someone. There are specialists, you know, to deal with ruined children. It might be good for you—”

  “How do you know?” Axel interrupted. He’d begun to get the distinct sense that this was all nothing but a preamble—that the old man just wanted him to twist a bit. It was plain enough to see that the Keeper was, in fact, delighted that Axel had come back.

  “Because I have eyes,” the Keeper said. “They’re just down the path.” He pointed with his mangled hand. At first Axel couldn’t see anything in the trees, but he did detect a faint sound—a sort of whining grumble. As the sound grew louder, the spruces seemed to thrum with it. Their trunks began to bend. To shimmer and curl, the way the city park had on that day back at the harbor market. And then, quite suddenly, Axel could see the Kivis’ summer place. It wasn’t that anything had moved—he hadn’t, and the cottage sure as hell hadn’t. But nevertheless, there it was, not thirty yards away, through a stretch of airy woodland. The sound was coming from a snowmobile idling out front, hopping and gurgling. The cottage door was wide open, and after a moment Tess appeared on the threshold. “He’s been here!” she called to Jaana, who was down on her hands and knees in the snow, scrutinizing footprints. They must have already been well on their way when Jaana called Kalle that morning. Axel had hoped to have most of the daylight, but with that snowmobile and his tracks, he probably didn’t have twenty minutes.

  Then, as though to prove this wasn’t simply a hallucination, Tess noticed him. She’d been scanning the trees and her eyes passed over Axel once before actually processing the fact that he was there. “Hey,” she said, her voice momentarily flattened by surprise. “Hey!” louder now. Tess raced down the front steps of the cottage and into the woods. But the deeper she went, the more it seemed like she was running away from him. The spruce wood folded in upon itself, the trunks rolling over and under one another, obscuring Axel’s view of his sister and the Kivis’ cottage. Making them far again.

  “Not to worry,” the Keeper said with grim cheer. “They should be here soon enough. Perhaps they’ll make you some cocoa.”

  Axel had run fresh out of patience with the old man’s garbage. “Are you going to show me the way, or do I have to find it myself?”

  The Keeper smiled, displaying those horrible rows of urgent teeth. “You should leave that toy behind,” he said. “It’ll only slow you down.” He reached for Sam’s sword, meaning to throw it away as he had the chain mail. Axel’s body stepped back without his mind telling it to.

  “You’re not touching it,” he said, lifting the point to the Keeper’s belly.

  “Really, now?” The Keeper cocked his head and took a full step forward. To Axel’s horror, the sword sank deep into the old man’s stomach, pushing all the way through and tenting the back of his duster where it came out on the other side. It shouldn’t have done that—replicas are way too blunt. But it was as though the Keeper were made of soft cheese. “You can’t scare a dog with threats of dinner,” he said, unsticking himself. “Hang on to it if you want, but it isn’t my problem if you can’t keep up. I don’t wait for stragglers.”

  And off the Keeper went, deeper into the woods, in search of the path. Axel stood there for a moment, staring down at his father’s sword. The dull blade was coated in something dark, but it wasn’t blood. It wasn’t even a liquid. It was ash—tiny little grains that still smelled vaguely of old fires. The fine ash began to fly from the blade, scattered by the breeze, freckling the surface of the snow.

  Axel wasn’t a straggler. He could keep up with this.

  15

  The Blazes

  Despite his warnings against falling behind, the Keeper didn’t exactly rush. A thin stream of ash poured out of his wound, tracing a dark line across the snow. He hardly seemed to notice. The Keeper puttered, glancing about absently, scanning the roof of blue spruce above their heads. At one point he squatted down to brush away some snow, plucking a little green tendril from the earth below—some kind of vetch or herb. The Keeper brought the frost-wilted thing up to his nose for a sniff and then put it into his mouth, working it over with his tongue. Then he spat it out, mumbling. He reached into his quilt-patched duster and pulled out his long-stemmed pipe, pausing to pack the bowl with tobacco, patting himself down for matches. In the distance, they could hear the gathering hum of the snowmobile.

  Axel didn’t want to push—he was still spooked by the way the Keeper had impaled himself, by the way he’d seemed almost to enjoy the rush of dull metal into his amazingly soft guts—but this was getting ridiculous. Jaana and Tess would be here any minute. “What are you waiting for?” he said.

  “Not waiting,” the Keeper said. He got his pipe going, souring the air with a thin veil of smoke. “Looking. There should be a blaze nearby, it seems to me.” He grabbed at one of the lolling branches above and pulled it down for inspection, loosing a small cascade of snow over Axel’s head. The Keeper released the branch after plucking off a few needles, allowing it to spring back into the understory.

  “What do you mean a blaze? Like a trail blaze?” Axel shook the snow out of his collar, briefly picturing the color-coordinated paint splashes that marked the paths in Mud Lake Park. Surely the way through the underworld couldn’t be marked for tourists.

  “In a manner of speaking,” the Keeper said.

  The soft roar of the snowmobile was growing louder, and Axel heard a voice calling his name. It was Tess. “You mean you don’t remember the way?”

  “There is no remembering the way,” the Keeper said with an exasperated show of thinning patience. He took another branch in hand and shook it clean. “Because the way isn’t set. Because the woods of the world are a tangle, and the path is just as . . . tangled.” The Keeper squinted—that word, “tangled,” seemed to be the best he could do on short notice. “Think of woods as water—as an ocean. With all its tides and currents, surges and waves. There are different oceans, but there’s also only one. It’s all the same ocean. And it’s all the same wood. The path can take us from one part of it to another, but it changes every time the woods do. Which means that the path is different today than it was when you accidentally stumbled onto it last week. It’s different at this moment than it was when I first said the word ‘moment.’ ” The Keeper paused to scrutinize this second branch, plucking away another tuft of needles. But for the pitchy undercurrent of menace coursing beneath the old man’s voice, Axel could just as well have been listening to his own father. “The map is in the details, and details always change.” The Keeper turned on Axel, a disquieting smile peeking out behind his pipe stem. He squatted down and held out his hands, revealing the little stack of needles in each palm.

  “Which way home?” he said.

  It struck Axel right off that the two piles were not identical. The needles in the Keeper’s mangled left hand were a rich, deep green, thick and square-shaped about the middle. It was the same Norway spruce that Axel had been wandering beneath since daybreak. But the needles in the Keeper’s right hand were totally different—lighter, flat, and faintly jagged. Canadian hemlock, the trees that clustered in thick hollows back in Baldwin. The trees that towered and pitched over the shore at Mud Lake; the trees his father used to lurk beneath, looking for woodpeckers and owls. God, how perfect was that? Sam had taught him this, and now Axel would use it to find him. He pointed at the hemlock.

  The Keeper dropped the needles and brushed his palms clean. He took his pipe from his mouth and smacked his lips, as though savoring the rancid flavor. “Onward, then,” he said.

  After they found that first blaze, the rest became more obvious. They passed a silvery set of ghost pipes peeking out of the ground like reverse icicles. They rushed under a quaking aspen, what few leaves it still had all spinning in the breeze. U
p ahead the snow dispersed and then disappeared. Familiar birds began to flit here and there, cackling in the wavering trees—the birds of home. Blue jays and siskins, purple finches and American robins. There was a strange darkness up ahead, a deepening smudge of gloom—like night was a place you could walk to. But the Keeper explained that it was nothing to be afraid of. The sun just hadn’t risen yet in New York.

  They’d gone no more than half a mile, but here they were. Home. Axel and the Keeper emerged from the woods, coming out into a grassy clearing ringed with pine and sugar maple. The moon dominated a cloudless night, and the stars were thick as buckshot on the rims of the sky. It was absolutely silent, Tess and Jaana’s calls crushed under an ocean of distance. Axel knew this place—it was one of the meadows at Mud Lake Park, a spot that just some weeks ago had been filled with the striped tents of the Renaissance Faire. The moonlight was bright enough that Axel could even see where the grass had been worn away under horse hooves. This was the jousting field. Sam had ridden here, in the hours before he died. Pretending to fight, pretending to win.

  Axel took a step into the field but was stopped by the Keeper’s hand clamping firmly on his shoulder. “Maybe we’d better go around,” the old man said, eyes darting across the overgrown heaps of toppled grass. Axel had never heard anything like that in his voice before—it sounded like actual concern. He followed the Keeper’s gaze and saw them. Six, seven, more than a dozen corpses were sprawled across the dark. Their hands emerged here and there from the spume of wilting vegetation. Axel could see upturned feet and bent elbows, petrified postures of agony and rest. For an odd moment it seemed like they could be performers from the faire. Most wore layered leather, fur caps, and outdoorsy beards, like a convention of Davy Crockett impersonators. A few of them were still clutching muskets in their dead fingers. Among these frontier types, there was also a man in a fancy military uniform, his white overcoat stained with dirt and blood. This soldier had been run through with a cavalry sword, and his toppled tricorn hat covered his face. The rest of the dead seemed to have stocky reeds growing out of their chests and necks and stomachs, all fluffy at the tip. The tail ends of arrows.