“Where is my brother?”
“Cottage.” The Hiisi coughed the word out over her shoulder, and it bounced about between the dancing trees. “I have chased him off the path, but his threads are straining. If they break, they cannot be mended.”
“I don’t know what that means.” Tess spun around to get a look at the Hiisi, but her skis had become tangled in a mess of succulent creepers, and she fell down hard. Frustration was making her fearless. “I swear to God,” Tess said, “if you hurt my brother, I will find a way to hurt you back.”
It seemed, for the briefest moment, like the demon was taken aback. “I will not,” the Hiisi said, every tree an amplifier for its awful, butchering voice. “You could not.” When it spoke again, the words came slowly. “Go. To. The. Cottage.” As though Tess were a baby, or a pet. “And get your brother.”
Before Tess could ask why it would want to help her, the Hiisi seemed to draw itself up close. The wind of its breath passed over her neck, cold as the morning air in Finland. “I hate him on the path. But he will not be frightened off. You’re the only way home he has left. Go, now, or you will lose him.”
Tess felt something clawing at the back of her jacket, and she twisted around, trying once more to get a look. But it was only her grandmother. It was only Talvijärvi. The trees around her were frozen spruces and nothing more.
“How deep did you go?” Jaana said, helping Tess back up onto her skis. “I lost sight of you for . . .” The blood drained from Jaana’s face as soon as she got a good look at Tess’s expression. It was as though the impression that the Hiisi had left on Tess, so distinctly strange and terrifying, were contagious.
“Give me your knapsack,” Tess said.
Jaana unslung it and handed it over. Tess turned the knapsack around so that it hung across her chest, and then she quickly placed Bigwig inside. As soon as she was in the pack, the hare curled up and went to sleep. Her job was done, apparently.
“We’re going to the cottage,” Tess said.
Her tone told Jaana all that she needed to know. They weren’t quite halfway around the lake, so the quickest route home was the way they’d come. The fact that their skis had already laid down a slick track made the going easier. Tess and Jaana shot across the shattered surface of the snow, catching air on little crests. Her grandmother retrieved her phone from her jacket, and she somehow managed to dial as they went, compensating by leaning into her opposite pole. She called Otso and asked if he could check on the volunteers who were supposed to be staking out the cottage. She called Kalle, who was out searching the western edge of the lake with Kari, and asked if he could do the same. She called Chief Aarne and told him a straight-up lie: “I think we saw Axel. I’m almost sure of it. Please, tell everybody that he might be nearby.” The news went out quickly. Shortly after Jaana hung up, they began to hear shouting in the distance, newly electrified with hope. Axel’s name, coming from everywhere.
Tess knew that the police had never believed her. They’d released the Keeper’s cartoonish likeness to the local TV station yesterday and handed out his picture to the baffled search parties only at Jaana’s insistence. But despite that outward support, Tess had no idea what her grandmother actually thought about her story. Jaana had been uncharacteristically evasive on that point, committing only to: “I know you’re not lying.” Which could have meant: “Yes, you really saw your brother, and we should act accordingly.” But also: “Yes, you think you saw him. Poor little thing . . .” But in these last few minutes, everything had changed. Jaana may not have been able to see the Hiisi, but Bigwig was undeniable.
Jaana had held the hare in her own hands back in Baldwin.
She’d watched her disappear into the park.
And now Bigwig was here, snug in the hammock of Jaana’s knapsack, sleeping beside a thermos of porridge. ’Twas the hare who took the tidings—the verse sprang up suddenly in Tess’s mind. It took her a moment to remember where it came from—The Kalevala, that big-ass compendium of Finnish song-poetry and for years her most dreaded study book. It was a random coincidence and also kind of a crappy one. Because the hare in the poem brought a mournful story. Your child is dead. Your child is drowned. Tess shook the poem from her thoughts, skiing faster.
They swung down along the southern shore and could soon see the Hannula house through the spruces up ahead. Just beyond, the Kivis’ outside lights were all blazing, a flashlight beam raking the yard. By now Jaana was going at a pace that even Tess couldn’t match, the waxed undersides of her skis clattering loudly on the icy gravel of the Hannulas’ plowed driveway. A figure in a neon vest appeared up ahead. He was skiing toward them, one gloved hand held high in a frantic wave. It was Kalle.
“Someone’s been inside the cottage!” Kalle shouted. Though by the time he was done, he didn’t have to shout anymore—Jaana was already at his side.
“Axel? Did they find Axel?”
Kalle shook his head, struggling for breath. “Otso is sure it was him, though. And the police think it hasn’t been very long. They’ve called everybody in to search the woods behind our houses—” As quick as that, Kalle had to shout again, because Jaana was already gone. She sprinted the final distance to the cottage, hardly slowing as she kicked off her skis, flying boots-first through the open door. Tess lagged behind her by only a moment, rushing inside with such speed that she crashed right into Otso’s empty wheelchair and sent it rolling back into one of the unadorned walls, knocking rinds of slush from its spokes and stirrups. Otso himself was sitting on the couch in the living room, his trousers soaked to the knees from his trip through the snow, his head in his hands. The entire living room floor was wet with melt. Tess guessed that only moments ago the room had been filled with police and volunteers, but now the only ones left were Otso and Kari. The boy was plopped down on the damp carpet, panting in near agony, still spent from racing back to the cottage with his brother. Jaana ignored him and set upon her husband. She grabbed Otso’s hands away from his face and held them. His eyes were pink with frustration.
“They were supposed to stay here,” he said. “The volunteers weren’t supposed to move, in case he came back!”
“They didn’t see Axel?”
Otso shook his head. “The searchers posted to Erikinlinna reported a stranger in the woods. Just some crazy old drunk, apparently.” Even as he said this, Tess was sure that the crazy old drunk in question could only be the Keeper. “They pulled everyone nearby over to help round him up, but he got away. And in the meantime, they left the cottage empty.” Otso was shaking—so mad that it looked like he was about to cry. “Axel was right here, and they missed him.”
“You’re sure it was Axel? You’re positive?”
For a moment Otso gave no answer, and Jaana looked as though she might actually shake him. Then he pulled one of his hands out of her grip and cast it in the direction of the coffee table at his knees. There was a piece of unlined paper on it, the top edge jagged from where it had been torn from a pad. It was one of the sketches that Tess had rejected yesterday, the Keeper looking like some toothy moonshiner up for parole.
“The other side,” Otso said.
Jaana picked the paper up and turned it over. Tess watched her pupils ping from side to side. “This isn’t a bad thing,” she said, her voice measured. “It isn’t. It means he was close.” Otso made no answer. Jaana handed the paper to Tess. Then she returned to the front door to collect her skis. The woods out back were screaming with activity, Aarne and all the other searchers convinced that Axel was still somewhere nearby. But somehow, even before Tess read her brother’s note, she knew that he wasn’t. Axel was as far away from her as he’d ever been.
The letter on the back of the sketch was written in neat, cautious penmanship. It was maddeningly brief.
Dear Everybody,
Dear Tess,
I`m really sorry, but I`m not coming back.
Your brother,
Axel
18
The Long
Way
If it weren’t for his mother, Axel might not have gotten away from the Hiisi that night back at Mud Lake. The thing chased him through the parking lot, still littered with human-shaped bodies in the moonlight, and out across the big meadows. Axel lost it briefly in the maples edging the road and snuck across to where he thought his old house should have been. But he must have gotten lost in the dark—the A-frame was nowhere to be seen, and the Hiisi was getting closer, gnashing its way through the trees. But for Saara, Axel would have kept right on running. She was hiding in a garbage bin set back from the road and granted him the lean courtesy of a single hoot as he approached. He jumped in beside her, and they held their breath as they waited for the Hiisi to pass them by. The thing took its sweet time, crashing languidly through the forest, jabber-walking this way and that. But these sounds subsided over time. The moon sank, and his mom became a bear again, filling the garbage bin. Axel waited until he was sure she was asleep—ghosts slept, apparently—before leaning against her and closing his eyes.
It was only after sunup the next morning that Axel realized that he hadn’t gotten lost at all—the A-frame simply didn’t exist anymore. The garbage bin that he and Saara had slept in was the same one he’d seen on his first trip back to Baldwin. Axel remembered how Sam’s homemade bivouac had been dismantled and how the house itself had been surrounded with orange safety cones and tasseled with caution tape. But that had apparently been just the beginning of Mrs. Ridgeland’s plans. In the intervening week, she had weeded every last trace of the Fortunes out of her land. His mother’s birch trees were all cut down, the yard leveled, the A-frame stripped to its foundations and then the foundations themselves pried out of the earth like rotten teeth. In the sharp, late-autumn daylight, Axel could see that the garbage bin was filled with the last remains of his life in New York. The curdled chicken wire of Bigwig’s hutch and jagged swatches of his father’s Birds of the Northeast wallpaper.
Axel climbed out of the garbage bin, walked out across the overturned mud, and sat down roughly in the spot where his living room used to be. Saara leaped out of the bin as well, landing on her wide paws with a snort. She began sniffing about the edges of the property, maybe searching out some lingering whiff of the Hiisi. “What’s wrong with you?” she said, glancing back at him. “Why are you crying?”
“It’s all gone,” was all Axel could say.
Saara took a heavy step toward him, stopping at the edge of the A-frame’s fading footprint. “I don’t understand,” she said. “It was made out of wood, yes? There are other houses, yes? Tons of them, all over the place.” It was hard to tell if she was trying to make a point, or if she really didn’t understand. Her little bear eyes squinted, making her look simple and mean.
“Lady speaks the truth.” This was the Keeper’s voice. Axel looked up and saw him standing in what had once been Saara’s vegetable garden, sucking forlornly on his recovered pipe. The Keeper looked like he’d had a rough night. Quills and bent feathers jutted from his duster, and a translucent gravel of safety glass had collected along the brim of his hat. When he shifted his weight, a fine shower of ash drifted down from his gaping joints.
“Looks like you made it,” Saara said, turning back to the trees. She didn’t seem particularly pleased by this—she was only remarking upon the facts.
“Don’t I always, though?” the Keeper said, sounding just as ambivalent about his survival as she did. He took a few creaking steps across the mud, leaning heavily on his gnarly walking stick as he did so. When he reached Axel, he stopped and stared down at him. The old man was either wearing a patronizing sneer, or that was just the new shape of his ruined features. “No thanks to you, I’m afraid,” the Keeper said. “Judging by the beastly way the Hiisi treated our French friends, I think it’s safe to say that it still thinks that you can be frightened off the path. The Hiisi must reckon you a coward. And who knows . . .” The Keeper let out a mean little snort but then had to hug himself about the ribs for a moment, shrinking into a full-body wince. “Maybe it’s right,” he finally managed.
This stung, but not in the way that the Keeper had meant it to. Axel knew that he wasn’t a coward. But he felt sick about what had happened to those soldiers. As far as Axel knew, the dead were indestructible, but still, thoughts of those Frenchmen disappearing into the Hiisi’s impossible mouth had kept him up almost all night.
“They’re going to come back, right?” he said.
“I don’t follow,” the Keeper said.
“The soldiers. The next time the moon comes out, they’ll be back.” Axel didn’t want this to sound like a question. He didn’t want there to be any question about it.
“Oh, my dear child,” the Keeper said, aping sympathy. “No, they most certainly will not be back.” Then, when he saw the color drain from Axel’s face, the old man’s expression softened. The next time he spoke, he actually did sound sympathetic. “If it makes you feel any better, they’re no more dead today than they were yesterday.”
That did not make Axel feel better. He felt, rather, like he was sinking into the mud hole left behind by the A-frame. Mrs. Ridgeland had warned Axel last night that he was putting everybody in danger by luring the Hiisi out, but he’d hardly taken her seriously. Because up until that point, the dangers on this little quest had been vivid and exciting, but also mostly toothless. Ghostly soldiers died as men only to spring back to life as birds. Parents died in unacceptable accidents only to be whisked into the woods as ghosts. Here on the path, all losses were supposed to be temporary, all loneliness fleeting.
“So where are they?” Axel said.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” the Keeper said. He shrugged, but not unkindly. “I only know that they aren’t on the path anymore. Remember—the Hiisi decides who can stay on the path and who can leave it. If the Hiisi were to swallow you, you’d be spat back into that dreary little family just in time to be unpopular at school. But where do the dead go?” The Keeper skewed up his face, as though this were a question he’d never considered before. “That’s as much a mystery to me as dying used to be to you.” And with that he offered out his left hand, now no more mangled than the rest of him was. Axel took it and pulled himself up. Guilt was settling in his stomach like a bad case of food poisoning, and he felt wobbly on his feet.
Saara took no notice of this conversation. She was peering intently back into the park. “We should be going,” Saara said, shifting her weight anxiously from paw to paw. “We’re wasting time, just sitting here. I’m going to—”
The Keeper cut her off with a sigh that crackled through the ember in his pipe, expelling a little spiral of sparks out of the bowl. “I’d rather waste time sitting here than waste it walking around that lake one more damn time,” he said. “And besides, after last night, any of those Frenchies who made it are going to have zero patience for us.”
“I’m not interested in whether they do or they don’t,” Saara said. She was so eager to get going that her whole body began to rock, and when she spoke again, it seemed mostly to herself. “Maybe the boardwalk? Maybe we should check the boardwalk one more time.”
“It won’t be any less empty than it was the last time, or the time before that,” the Keeper said. “You know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and—”
“The definition of insanity,” Saara said, wheeling back around on the Keeper with the broad horror of her head, “is interrupting me.”
The two of them went on like that for a while, irritable and bickering, but Axel ignored them. He just stood there, shocked and still in the jagged crater of his old life. And for the first time since he’d encountered the Keeper back in Helsinki, Axel began to seriously consider giving up. He’d come to a point where he could no longer deny that what he was doing had consequences—not just for a handful of eighteenth-century French ghosts, but also for people who were still alive. People who loved him and missed him. The memory of his sister’s face, staring at Axel through a bend in t
he path back at Talvijärvi, straight-up haunted him. And for all the trouble he knew he’d caused, they were no closer to finding Sam than they’d ever been! Instead of clues in his old home, all Axel found was crumbling earth and scraps of garbage. Now it looked more like his Grandpa Paul’s disaster of a yard down in the Boils than it did the home where Axel and Tess had grown up. Axel’s mind hit a snag on that last thought. It took him a few moments to realize why.
The Boils. It wasn’t just where Grandpa Paul lived, but where Sam had grown up. Axel used to suspect that part of the reason their family would visit so often was so that his father could get back out into the creeks and springs he remembered from his childhood. Wow. What an idiot he was.
“Guys,” Axel said. Saara had made for the edge of the property, and the Keeper was hobbling after her, still hectoring. “Hey!” he shouted.
“What?” Saara was crossing the road now. She made no indication that she intended to wait for either of them.
“I think I know where my father is,” Axel said.
Saara and the Keeper both stopped in their tracks and turned to stare at him. “Well, hell,” the old man said. “That’s a load off my shoulders.”
It was hard to tell how long the three of them walked the path in search of the Boils, but Axel judged it to be at least a full day or two. He hadn’t expected it to take that long—after all, the stroll from Talvijärvi to Baldwin was no more than a hundred paces, and a whole ocean lay between those places. He thought all he had to do was find the right blaze and follow it to his granddad’s home. Simple enough, considering how well Axel knew the Boils; the sulfury reek of the springwater creeks, the feel of fine white dirt between his toes. The stands of bald cypress and sand pine out behind Grandpa Paul’s trailer were nearly as familiar to Axel as the black maples and hemlock trees of Mud Lake Park. And on top of that, he had his father’s remembered lectures to guide him—Axel knew more about the home ranges of native hardwoods than was reasonable for anybody his age. But in the end these advantages proved to be worth very little. They weren’t on the path five minutes before they got good and lost. Axel spotted a runty juniper down the embankment and followed it to a sudden and unfamiliar hillside. The three of them raced up the hill, and when they reached the top, they had a beautiful view of a little village spilling out of the valley below, all made of adobe and thatch. Talk about a wrong turn—this wasn’t the Boils, or even America. Apparently, there was a whole lot of world between New York and Florida.
The Winter Place Page 23