When Ella gets out of the car on the day of the picnic she realizes it’s been a long time since she’s paid any attention to the dogs. She’s started to think of them as a normal part of Winter’s front garden. The dogs, for their part, haven’t shown any interest in her comings and goings lately. When she opens the back of the Triumph, however, and takes out a shovel, the dogs prick up their ears and the atmosphere turns tense.
The hair on the back of Ella’s neck stands up.
To get to the front steps she has to pass a large Great Dane.
She gets nervous, of course, and stumbles, and the shovel falls to the ground with a clang.
The Great Dane shows its teeth and lets out a deep growl.
The snarl continues as she goes into the house and pushes the door shut behind her.
*
For the picnic they take along a picnic basket, a blanket and the iron shovel.
Ella and Winter go out to the garden. When they’ve found a pleasant spot under an apple tree, they spread the blanket out on the grass and sit down to drink some coffee and eat some chocolate cookies.
They smile at each other with shared understanding.
They might be about to rewrite the history of Finnish literature. They’ll probably destroy the Rabbit Back Literature Society in the process. But first they intend to enjoy their picnic. It’s a beautiful day.
They have a long, meandering conversation about the chocolate cookies. Winter ordered them especially from Rabbit Market, as well as the cream puffs.
Their relationship is founded on an agreement that they will only talk about unimportant things. Over the spring they’ve kept their physical experiments, banter and laughing paramount.
Summer has started outside the walls, but inside the garden there are still wintry spots—there’s even some ice still at the base of a few of the statues. This Thursday, however, is a sunny one, in honour of which Ella is wearing a short skirt and a red summer blouse with white polka dots.
She feels a little chilled.
Her blouse amuses Martti Winter, who makes some discourteous comments about it that cause Ella to laugh out loud.
Winter is wearing a brown suit, more sporty in cut than usual. He calls it his “sauntering suit”. It has a tie embroidered with gold thread, which is now hanging over a limb of the apple tree, where Ella perfunctorily placed it.
They sit on the blanket and eat their picnic lunch.
The shovel is leaning against the tree behind them. It isn’t yet time to pay any mind to it.
Ella is still researching the history of Laura White and the Rabbit Back Literature Society. That’s what she’s being paid to do, after all.
Martti Winter tells her brief anecdotes about the authoress during their afternoon coffee conversations. Since the information spilled in The Game can only be used as literary raw material, their coffee chats keep Professor Korpimäki satisfied without breaking the rules of The Game.
Ella plays The Game with all the members of the Society except for Winter.
In addition to her research, she’s begun writing a novel. She’s already written ten pages and filled numerous journals with notes. No one knows about this, not even Martti Winter.
The developing novel is based on Laura White’s story—or rather, on the nine different stories Ella has gathered from the things that have been spilled to her.
Some of the stories are more usable than others.
Two weeks ago, Ella finished The Game she’d started with Aura Jokinen. The still-recovering sci-fi writer did her best to spill, but it was difficult to make out what she was saying. Her thoughts were fragmented and vague, and many things remained unclear, which she herself understood all too well. “I’m sorry, friend, but my mind isn’t quite working. Or my speech.”
Ella felt sorry for her, but she knew when she started The Game that Jokinen’s view of Laura White would be unsuitable for her purposes. She doesn’t want to write science fiction, and she isn’t thrilled with the idea of a supernatural horror story, either. She intends to write a proper psychological novel, respectful of the realistic tradition of Finnish literature.
Ella has acquired some useful material from The Games she’s played over the past few weeks with Helinä Oksala, Elias Kangasniemi and Oona Kariniemi. Two days ago she finally got to play with Anna-Maija Seläntö. Seläntö came to Rabbit Back to speak to an amateur writing club and got it into her head to go out for a late dinner, to the delight of Ella, who was stalking her in the Triumph.
Ella’s been thinking she’ll use Seläntö’s succinct point of view about Laura White’s nature as a starting point for her book. A novel about “a schizophrenic personality trying to heal itself by pumping out children’s books and making the children who read them see the monsters” is much more likely to be taken seriously than one about the ghost that’s sprung up in Aura Jokinen’s suffering mind.
Ella is made of slender stuff, but she casts a surprisingly large shadow over Winter.
She’s standing behind him. She got up a moment ago to stretch her legs, and now she has the shovel in her hand. Winter glances at the rusty shovel and continues to eat his cookies.
Ella notices him looking at the letter lying unopened on the blanket. It came four days ago. The sender’s name is on the envelope: Mirja Södergran. Ella showed it to him as soon as it came and said that they should open it together—once they dug up the dead boy’s notebook.
“We had the mythological mapper come over three days ago,” Ella says.
She’s chatting idly, as if she doesn’t know that the shovel she’s nonchalantly holding has become a scalpel with which to excise the Rabbit Back Literature Society from literary history.
“My mother entered a raffle last year, I guess, and she won a free mapping. It got overlooked last autumn for some reason, and the mapper showed up the other day to do it. You know me—I would have sent her to bother the neighbours, but Mum was at the house and she said that when you win something you ought to accept your prize. So the mapper went out to our garden with a sleeping bag and slept for a couple of hours under the berry bushes.”
“Did you get a good report?” Winter asked, giving her such a mournful look that she felt guilty.
She forced herself to smile and showed him the document the mapper had written for them:
MYTHOLOGICAL MAPPING CERTIFICATE
Location: The Milanas’ Garden, Rabbit Back
A complete mythological mapping of the above-mentioned location was performed by an accredited mapper, and the following mythological creatures were detected.
After this introductory statement there was a form with a long list of possible mythological creatures. The mapper had detected two different types in the Milanas’ garden:
8 house elves or elves of other buildings (barns, playhouses, sheds, etc.) 3 gnomes
Additional information about creatures or other beings detected:
Notes—The elves (or house spirits) on this land are particularly cranky, because they are in a struggle with an invading elf. This may cause occasional disturbances for the house’s inhabitants. The situation can be mitigated by leaving milk and bread under the large stone behind the currant bushes in the evening and absolutely avoiding the garden after the sun has set.
Ella remembers the other mythological mapping—the one the mapper wrote for Martti Winter, warning him not to show it to anyone. She looks at him and guesses that he’s thinking about the same thing.
Ella thinks about the ground under her feet.
The names and order of the layers of earth that she learned in school pass through her mind. She can see the soil, the stones and moraine. She can smell the little animals burrowing in their dens. She can hear the moles, ants, beetles and centipedes scratching in their tunnels.
She closes her eyes and feels the quiet, deeply nested mysteriousness of the earth.
She starts to feel dizzy.
She opens her eyes and glances at the sky, where the fluffy parade
of clouds continues its noiseless march. Martti Winter looks in the same direction and mutters something about “flaming, vengeful eyes” and a “retreating enemy”. Ella looks at him worriedly—it takes her a moment to realize he’s reciting poetry.
As the sun disappears behind a blanket of clouds, the air cools and the shadows pour their darkness over the whole garden.
They look at the darkness of the sky until the sun bursts through and shines on their faces again.
Martti Winter turns to Ella and says they might as well get started—now is as good a time as any.
Ella nods, then immediately shakes her head. She opens her mouth to say something clever, but nothing appropriate comes to mind. She stands there, blinking like a mute, simple-minded child.
Martti Winter’s eyes are murky. He smiles patiently and takes the shovel out of her hands. Then he walks away and wades through the raspberry bushes holding the shovel, which looks very tiny in the grasp of such a large man.
Ella hurries after him. This is her project, after all, she reminds herself; this corrective surgery on literary history is a fulfilment of her wishes.
Winter tramps a path for her through the rattling underbrush, wider than is necessary. The thorns on the berry bushes nevertheless scratch her legs and catch on her skirt—she’s apparently too clumsy for a trek through nature. She tries to avoid the thorny branches and Winter leaves her behind, and just then she turns her head and notices a figure looking at her from the bushes.
Ella stiffens and puts her hand over her mouth so she won’t yell.
The sun cuts out a silhouette of the figure on her retina.
She can’t make it out very well even when she squints, but when she takes a couple of sideways steps, the sun is hidden behind a tree trunk and she can see it better.
It’s standing near an apple tree and two maples, in the most inconspicuous of places: a naked wood nymph.
It’s carved out of dark wood. Its surface skilfully mimics the forms of living flesh. No wonder her hurried eye was fooled.
Ella steps closer and sees that the nymph’s wooden features are badly worn. Her delicate lips, the thin edges of her nostrils, and the nipples on her small breasts have nearly disappeared, but a memory of them is still perceptible. Her slender hands are cracked, pressed against her body as if she were trying to stop them from decaying completely.
A melancholy expression plays across the nymph’s face. Ella carefully touches the smooth wood of her cheek, then hurries after Winter.
As she walks past the nymph her skin tingles. She can’t help turning to look behind her.
Now she can see the figure from the back. It’s bark-covered wood, with dry branches growing out of it. From this angle the illusion is lost. There’s no woman at all—just an old, broken stump quietly decaying in a garden.
Ella reaches Winter. He’s stopped near the wall under a large maple tree. She asks if they’re in the right spot—is this where little Martti Winter hid the dead boy’s notebook?
Winter starts to dig.
Ella stands a little ways off. Winter swings the shovel in a dangerous-looking manner. Dirt patters over Ella’s shoes. The deepening hole fascinates her and she doesn’t notice at first that the pack of dogs has broken into a pandemonium of howls and a cold gust of wind is rushing through the garden, whipping up leaves, rattling branches and settling around them in a whirlwind.
Ingrid Katz wrinkles her brow at a noise in the library foyer.
She snorts and leans over the check-out desk.
Aura Jokinen is rolling towards her in an electric wheelchair that needs to be oiled. Beside her walks a thin man dressed in black with a frizzy mane of hair and lots of jewellery.
Ingrid guesses that the leather-coated man is a member of an organization that worships the works of Arne C. Ahlqvist and their paranoid-schizophrenic vision of reality. The club holds regular Arne C. Ahlqvist discussion groups. Sometimes they come to her house to interview her for their newspaper, to deliver the assorted prizes she is invariably awarded and to ask for autographs.
“He came to do an article on Arne C. Ahlqvist,” Jokinen explains after greeting Ingrid. “And to bring me a prize, for the seventh time.”
Jokinen’s mumblings are hard to understand, though she tries to speak clearly. She says that she dropped in to ask if the library has a new book that isn’t yet in the bookstore.
“Let me guess,” Ingrid Katz says. “The book you’re looking for is The Return of Emperor Rat, by Laura White.”
Aura Jokinen nods and nervously fingers the wheelchair controls.
Ingrid Katz sighs. “You’re only the tenth person to ask about it since the library opened half an hour ago. I called the bookstore—it’s the same story there. People asking for a book that they don’t have for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist.”
Aura Jokinen shakes her head, drools a little down her front, and says, “I’m sure I heard, or maybe read somewhere, that it had been published. I heard the publisher found it…”
“They didn’t,” Ingrid Katz says. “Someone must have dreamed it and talked about it and at some point the dream became a news item. Trust me—I just called Laura White’s publisher and he, at least, doesn’t seem to have found any such manuscript.”
Over the next hour the phone rings five times. Library patrons asking to reserve The Return of Emperor Rat and wanting to know how many people were already on the waiting list.
Finally Ingrid makes a decision. She leaves the check-out desk in the care of the new library assistant and goes into the back room. She takes the key from around her neck, opens the top drawer of the desk, and takes out the package wrapped in Christmas paper—the one containing the infected copy of Creatureville.
She unwraps the package.
What she sees makes her feel dizzy and sweaty, although she isn’t really surprised.
The cover says:
LAURA WHITE
THE RETURN OF EMPEROR RAT
The cover illustration is of the familiar Creatureville characters and the dreaded Emperor Rat, whose name is of course mentioned in many Creatureville books, but who has never before actually appeared in them.
On the left side of the picture are all the Creatureville characters. They look shocked. Their features are grotesquely distorted with fear; Bobo Clickclack’s mouth is snapped open and the Odd Critter is holding its head in both paws. On the right side, Emperor Rat is holding on to Mother Snow, pulling her away from the others—not angrily, as you might expect, but more like they’re old friends, if Ingrid is reading their expressions correctly.
Ingrid tries to still her trembling hands as she opens the book and looks at the first few pages.
The Return of Emperor Rat seems like a perfectly ordinary book, with publication information, a title page—the only thing that amiss is that it’s a book that has never been written or printed.
Also, there’s only one page of actual text—only one sentence, in fact:
CHAPTER ONE
I saw the girl coming over the ice, and her shadow fell over me.
Ingrid Katz reads the sentence many times.
Then she wraps the book up again. It will have to be destroyed, of course. It’s as volatile as can be, and will spread the book plague. Tomorrow, at the very latest, she’ll drive to the cabin and heat the sauna with library discards.
But first she’ll show the book to Martti. And if that fish-lipped girl is hanging around, she can see it, too, since she’s so interested in everything to do with Laura White.
And that way Ingrid can check to make sure Martti is all right. She’s been having bad dreams lately, dreams that his house is surrounded and the dogs get in and eat him.
The hole is half a metre deep now.
The work advances slowly. Martti Winter is panting and sweating in his suit. Ella offers to take the shovel, but he shakes his head.
The gusts of wind increase. Ella’s skirt flaps and flutters. Her legs are cold. The branches are thrash
ing with a wooden sound that whirls around within the walls like an invisible beast, while outside the walls the dogs continue their commotion. Ella rubs her arms and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. The garden feels dimmer and colder than it was a moment ago, although the sun is still shining in the sky.
The ground is hard and full of roots that have to be hacked away.
Then come the bees.
They rise out of the earth a little way off, circle the maple in a dark cloud, and come to swarm around them.
Martti Winter grimaces and stops digging.
“Dash it,” he says, fastening his gaze on the bees.
He hands the shovel to Ella.
Ella starts to dig.
Winter brushes bees from his shoulders, lures them away from Ella and the hole. The bees arrange themselves in attack formation around the large man—an easy target.
One of them stings him on the wrist, another on the back of the neck. He roars with each sting, spinning around with surprising agility and slashing at them with a stick like it was a sword.
Ella feels weaker than she expected. The shovel is too heavy for her and the ground too hard. But she doesn’t give up.
Finally something that looks like fabric comes into view.
The shovel falls from her hands.
A musky smell of earth rises to her nostrils.
She reaches towards the bundle of fabric, but doesn’t touch it—not yet.
With the discovery quivering on her lips, she turns around and summons Winter, who seems—oh, no—to be even more harassed by the thick swarm of bees.
Just then a long shadow moves among the apple trees. It bends towards Martti Winter until it’s touching his feet.
The bees increase their altitude and veer away.
The dogs howl.
Winter looks at his legs in bewilderment.
The Rabbit Back Literature Society Page 27