Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  The voice is soft and musical. It sounds like it belongs to the girl he just saw.

  “Do you like my voice?”

  Olli can’t speak.

  “Do you like me?”

  Olli’s heart pounds. “Where’s Karri?” he asks.

  “He went away,” the girl says, and sounds amused.

  Olli feels a touch on his cheek.

  The girl is caressing him.

  “Away?”

  She steps closer. The light particles gather on her skin and hair and make her visible.

  “Yes,” she says rapturously, and kisses Olli on the cheek. “That poor, unfortunate boy finally left us all alone, and he’s never coming back.”

  23

  THE LIVING ROOM had always had its problems. But it was also bright and pleasant.

  Now a darkness had settled in the corners and drained the life from the colours. Enough was enough. Olli felt a surge of energy, got up from the sofa, turned on the lights, and pulled open the curtains. Outside it was daytime. He looked at the trees and houses. The daylight came from a faraway land of ordinariness and clarity, where people didn’t disappear from their homes.

  He went back to the sofa. The room was still dim. The light didn’t really illuminate it. Maybe the bulbs were wearing out, and the window was dirty. Or maybe over the years too much stuff had accumulated in the room and it was sucking up all the light.

  Birds sat on the limbs of the trees peeping into the house. Olli realized that he didn’t like birds. They were just little animals that zipped around through the air. And they were noisy. They sounded like an alarm from some electronic device.

  Then he started to make an inventory of everything in the house. Many rooms: the hallway, the living room, the corner room, the kitchen; and upstairs two bedrooms and the office with the computer, and on it Facebook. In the rooms were chairs, tables, sofas, beds, shelves, cabinets, lamps, decorative objects, electronic devices, dishes, medicines, cleaning supplies, tools, food, clothing, flowers, mirrors and photo albums.

  In the albums there were a lot of pictures of his wife and son. He had piled all the albums on the living-room table so that he could look at the photos whenever he liked. And he had looked at them, many times.

  All in all, everything in the house was fine, except for the fact that the people pictured in the photographs were missing.

  Olli decided to clean. He vacuumed half the living room. Then he stopped and stood staring at the birds perched in the trees, turned off the vacuum and went back to the sofa.

  Olli was thinking.

  He really would have preferred to sleep. But since Aino had vanished into Facebook, and the boy with her, he had to gather his thoughts and memories, arrange them, separate the fact from the dreams they were mixed up with. The world is chaos, Notary Suominen had once said. A man’s job is to bring order to it.

  The thought of Grandpa Notary made Olli straighten his spine. What would his grandpa have done in this situation? Olli furrowed his brow and sat up, then stood up and walked around, thinking about the office upstairs and the computer with his Facebook profile and all his Facebook friends—workmates and colleagues, the author Greta Kara, the Blomroos siblings, and now his own vanished wife, with her own Facebook friends, and among them, as Olli had discovered, was Karri Kultanen.

  Karri?

  Olli rubbed his temples and tried to make his thoughts progress more clearly.

  The last time he had seen Karri Kultanen was about three decades ago. It was at the end of the Tourula Five’s seventh summer. He remembered the day as if he were looking at it though the wrong end of a telescope. All of the Tourula Five were there. They had probably just come from one of their endless picnics. The Blomrooses were off somewhere and Olli and Karri were left alone. They had been looking for something, probably playing at searching for secret passages. Anyway they had been playing at something.

  Then things had gone wrong. Maybe he and Karri had quarrelled. He didn’t remember the reason. All he remembered was a surge of emotion. He sometimes had confused, surreal dreams connected with that day and its dramatic turn.

  In the dreams there were always secret passages.

  Anyway, he had run to his grandma and grandpa’s house at the rifle factory and told them that he wanted to go home to Koirakkala.

  Grandma had clucked over him and wanted to know why. Grandpa Notary had come out of his office and said, “Well, there’s a time for everything and there is a certain wisdom in knowing when things are beginning and when they’re ending.” He had sensed that Olli didn’t want to talk about it. Or maybe he just wasn’t interested; maybe he just wanted to get rid of his moody grandson.

  In any case, Grandpa had immediately called Koirakkala and informed them that the summer traveller was coming home. Olli’s father must have tried to put it off because his grandpa’s voice had turned sharp and he had said firmly that yes, the boy really was coming home, right now.

  Olli stretched out on the sofa to sort through his thoughts, and fell asleep.

  The passageway is dark and narrow. Olli is crawling forward. He’s wearing his best suit. Dirt keeps pattering down on him. His knees and elbows are bloody. The fine Italian fabric of his coat and trousers is tearing, wearing through, getting filthy. Even the best tailor and dry cleaner couldn’t save it now. But he has to keep crawling. He has forgotten something very important down here in the dark.

  The passageway keeps pushing deeper and deeper. A great coldness radiates towards him. He sees a faint light ahead. Amid a swarm of light particles, there’s a heap of clothing. A grey sweatshirt. That’s what he came here for. He left it here years ago. Olli is relieved. Now he can go back to the daylight.

  When he touches the sweatshirt, his hand touches something else, something solid. There’s a person inside the clothes. A boy. Or the pale, withered ghost of a boy.

  It turns. It whispers in a voice rasping with the soil of the passageways. “Oh, it’s you. So. I guess you know the reason I’ve been sitting here all these years…”

  Olli opens his eyes and realizes he’s on the sofa. His clothes are damp with cold sweat.

  There was a picture on Aino’s profile now. It was a photo of Aino and the boy wading near the waterline on a deserted beach. In the background was the sea and an exotic point of land. The boy looked very happy. Aino was looking at the camera. There was panic in her eyes.

  In the foreground was a man in a suit with his head cut off by the edge of the picture. A security guard, Olli thought. Or a keeper. The man’s coat was open. The butt of a pistol peeked out from under it.

  Where are you?

  Olli’s question had received an answer.

  Hello, Olli. They’re letting me answer your message. I don’t know where we are. Somewhere warm, on the seashore. It might be an island. We were brought here by helicopter. We’re going to change our location soon, from what I understand. We’re all right, as long as we follow instructions. They tell me I should think of it as a luxury holiday, albeit an involuntary one. They apologized for their unorthodox actions, but they said that it has to do with some old story that you had a part in, and that you would no doubt understand the situation. You’re supposed to help these people to correct some past error that you witnessed. Once it’s taken care of, our forced holiday will be over and they’ll let us go home.

  Hopefully you can help them correct their problem, whatever it is.

  It’s very nice of you, by the way, to notice that I was gone. I don’t think you noticed when our son was kidnapped two weeks ago. I’m sorry I didn’t spell it out for you, but I was forbidden from telling anyone, including you. It seems that it was meant to be a lesson, as well as being practical in terms of the travel arrangements—they stole the child, and the mother dutifully followed. I eventually received instructions, left home while you were out meeting that author (I hope the meeting went well, dear, so that nothing bad happens to your publishing house) and the kidnappers—or “organizers” as they
like me to call them—brought me to him. But don’t be too worried. At least Lauri and I are together. We’re being treated well and we’ll be all right, as long as you do what’s expected of you, provided you can spare the time from work for it.

  :–)

  Olli stared at the smile added to the bottom of the message.

  Then he noticed that he had three new messages in his inbox.

  They were from the Blomroos siblings.

  PART TWO

  24

  WHEN AINO HAD BEEN MISSING for three days, Olli put down his book, got undressed, washed and put on pressed trousers, an Italian dress shirt, a tie and a pale-coloured jacket. He went to the living room and looked the portrait of Notary Suominen in the eye.

  Deeds are a man’s full-length mirror, the portrait reminded him.

  Olli stepped out into the yard, stopped and waited for the vertigo to subside. He went over the instructions he had received. Then he walked through Mäki-Matti, cheerily greeting his neighbours. His greetings were returned. Someone asked the news and said to say hello to Aino. I certainly will, Olli answered. How’s the boy? Fine, fine. Growing all the time. Having fun at the beach. They praised the weather and remarked that summer was, after all, a fleeting thing, and you ought to enjoy it just as long as you could.

  Olli felt better. It was fun to pretend that everything was fine, to share a moment of the sunny, unchanged ordinariness that his neighbours still inhabited.

  He climbed up Harju Ridge. When he got to the top of the Harju Steps he looked at the clock and thought that he should probably continue straight down the other side.

  Start down the Ridge at exactly 1 p.m.

  It was warm. The light over the city was dazzling. The rooftops glowed. The shadows on the steps and the cold rising up from the earth cooled him pleasantly. Olli prepared himself for the encounter. He put a smile on his face.

  You will meet Greta on the steps, quite by accident. Your mission is to buy her an ice cream and make her look forward to your next meeting.

  Olli could see that the girl from his dreams was coming up the stairs. The colours were so bright that it hurt his eyes, the outlines unnaturally sharp. For a moment he thought he could see the irises of her eyes from dozens of metres away. He felt dizzy again. His legs were shaking. What if he fell, tumbled down the stone steps and cracked his skull open? Would his family get to come home then, or would they end up dead, tossed in the ocean?

  Olli looked into Greta’s eyes as they approached each other. Her eyes sparkled. The surrounding foliage accentuated their greenness.

  They met at a landing that looked like a little stone fort, halfway up the steps. Greta was wearing a sleeveless green dress and black pumps. She was the grown woman again, the successful author that the girl in the pear-print dress had become.

  “Olli! What a pleasant surprise!”

  “Greta,” he sputtered.

  His throat was dry. He didn’t quite know what to do or what to say. He stood looking at her expectantly, nervous and embarrassed, a tight smile on his lips. They looked each other over. Greta laughed with a flirty tilt of her head.

  “That’s still my name. And now that we’ve remembered each other’s name it must be time to dive into a little small talk. Beautiful weather today, isn’t it? Where are you off to, Mr Suominen? To work again, I’ll bet. Off to publish those autumn titles?”

  No. I’ve come to meet you, so they don’t kill my family, Olli thought, and said, “I’m on my way to the supermarket.”

  “Ah.”

  “To buy some liver casserole,” he added, sounding reasonably natural.

  “Oh,” Greta said. “Do you like liver casserole?”

  “No. But…”

  They stared at each other.

  “But your wife told you to get some?” Greta eventually said.

  “Yes,” Olli said. He was angry with himself. He shouldn’t have brought his wife into this. It wouldn’t advance his task. But it was too late to take it back. “The boy wants liver casserole,” he said.

  Greta smiled sadly. “Children like liver casserole because it has raisins in it. Even I used to like it, years ago.”

  “Time changes everything,” Olli said with a smile.

  Greta gazed into the distance and whispered pensively, “Everything changes, and nothing changes. A person, anyway, always stays the same.”

  Amid an electric silence, Greta sat down on the edge of one of the stone steps. Olli settled in beside her. When they looked at each other Olli could see how pale and transparent their safe roles as a publisher and successful author were; at that moment they were looking into the depths of thirty years past.

  They felt embarrassed, as if they had both just realized they were naked.

  Olli blushed and coughed uncomfortably.

  Greta looked at her shoes. It was clear that she felt like running away.

  Olli couldn’t allow that. He had his instructions. He had to think of some snappy line to steer events in the right direction.

  As they got up again, there was a flash of disappointment on Greta’s face. She sighed like grass bending in the wind and mumbled, “So, I guess I…”

  Just then their stone sanctum was invaded by a passing crowd of French tourists. The middle-aged woman leading the group was explaining the history of the steps, gesturing vigorously. Greta’s voice was drowned out by a chatter of French as the tourists emitted admiring exclamations.

  Your mission is to buy her an ice cream and make her look forward to your next meeting.

  It was clear that Greta had hoped for more from this encounter. He had disappointed her every time. And he was doing it again.

  Olli understood her disappointment. He had been behaving like a distant acquaintance who by chance also happened to be her publisher.

  He couldn’t think of anything to say. Words failed him.

  And Greta was getting ready to leave.

  If he failed at his task, his family would suffer.

  Then Olli lifted his hands in the air like a praying Muslim, his palms towards the sky, surrendering to his inarticulateness. When there are no words, there are actions.

  He looked Greta in the eye, stepped closer and took hold of her slender arm.

  Her skin felt cool. Her startled, mint-scented breath brushed his face. Her surprise quickly changed to anger. Olli opened his mouth to explain himself before the situation became unsalvageable.

  “Greta…”

  Greta was waiting for him to say the right, conciliatory words, just as much as he was. An explosion was growing within the green of her eyes. Each failed encounter had built up the tension, and it was about to snap, one way or another.

  Olli had spent the previous night reading the manuscript of the Magical City Guide. Now a passage from the book came into his mind.

  And when it did, it activated the part of his brain where all good quotes come from.

  Memento mori! Live like you still can, and live in such a way that when the time comes to give it all up, you will know that you have lived. Life is a divine dream, an unexpected gift, a film reel in a camera that’s already running. Just as believers feel close to God when they are in a place like a cathedral, a temple or a mosque, so too, the cinematic possibilities of life are closer to us when we are in the magical places that this book is about. Under the influence of M-particles we can create ourselves anew, free ourselves from the slow continuum and learn to throw ourselves into the moment and surrender to the story that we are becoming at any given moment. So seek out cinematicness for your life in places where the M-particle radiation is strongest.

  M-particles and the secret passages might show us that we’re connected. Where there are M-particles there are often also secret passages, and vice versa. So beware, you visitors to magical places, for in the secret passages the M-particle radiation can be dangerously powerful, and for this reason the passages must be avoided if you do happen to find an entrance.

  GRETA KARA,

  M
agical City Guide Number One: Jyväskylä,

  INTRODUCTION

  25

  “I’M SORRY, but I can’t let you leave,” Olli whispers, not loosening his grip.

  The French tourists climbing the steps look back at them in curiosity.

  Greta’s eyes widen and her nostrils flare. Then she relaxes and the angry shadows fade from her face. They stare at each other. Finally she asks with a child’s wonder. “Why can’t you?”

  Olli gazes at her solemnly and says, “Because I have to buy you an ice cream. Otherwise something terrible will happen.”

  Greta’s jaw drops slightly.

  “I see,” she coos. A new sharpness comes over her; a new game has begun. “All right. But only if you can guess what kind of ice cream I want. If you don’t, I’m leaving and we’ll never have anything more to do with each other. I’ll even take my book to another publisher.”

  She says this with a smile. But Olli can see that she’s serious and has horrified even herself with what she has said.

  “Fine,” Olli says, feigning confidence. He hasn’t the slightest idea what Greta’s favourite ice cream is, but he can play for time.

  They start down the steps. At the bottom is an ice cream stand. They don’t say a word, just glance at each other now and then, Greta trying to hide her fear that Olli won’t remember, Olli trying not to look desperate. He has to calm down. His heart is pounding too fast; his ears are roaring so loud he can’t hear.

  He can’t help but notice that the cinematic beauty of the woman beside him draws the attention of passers-by. This gives him pleasure, and a fatalistic calm. Whatever will be will be. Everything has its own meaning. He tries to focus on that. Don’t think of what you’ve wagered in the middle of the game.

  When they reach the street, Greta sits down on the edge of the blue fountain. Olli goes to the kiosk window and looks at Greta one more time. Underneath her smile she’s like a frightened child.