by Joonas Huhta
He attached a telephoto lens to his systems camera.
A few deep breaths.
He opened the car window.
14
THE WOMAN WAS a unique cocktail of difficulties.
“Do you have a light, handsome?” she asked.
Konrad evaluated the dark-haired woman, who had appeared out of nowhere while he had listened to Ruut’s voice on the line. Her eyes were unfocused in her bony face. In her black tattered pair of jeans and cheap jacket, she looked like an underfed vulture with a drug addiction.
“...Gideon called me,” Ruut said, “there’s something urgent he wants to show me in the woods. He used the word miracle. Not his vocabulary. He adores his father, but during difficult situations, he turns to me…”
“Hello? Light me up, baby,” the woman said, cracking an unreadable smile.
“Sorry, I don’t smoke.”
“Sure you do. I saw you there with your drinking pal.” She stepped into Konrad’s path.
Konrad gazed at her eyes, confused.
“... and needless to say,” Ruut spoke in his ear, “you are carrying a bag of gold with you. Do not leave it unguarded…”
“I’ll call you later.” Konrad shoved the phone into his pocket. “Look, Ma’am—”
The woman’s sharp intake of breath cut Konrad’s voice off. Blinking seductively, she moved closer to him, but her face blanched. Clumsily, she crashed to the ground at his feet.
Konrad knelt. “Are you okay?”
The woman looked up, an open wound bleeding from the corner of her eye.
Konrad’s stomach clenched in dread. Did she just cut herself?
She backed away on all fours. “Help! A rapist! Help me!”
Konrad’s heart skipped beats.
“Are you insane!?” Konrad walked after her, offering a helping hand.
“Stay away from me. Help!”
“I’m not going to hurt—”
“Help me! A rapist!”
The woman fumbled at her face with a trembling hand. The blood spread across her face.
“You did that on purpose!” Konrad shouted.
“Now did I?” The woman asked and flashed a questing smile: what are you going to do about it? “Help! HELP ME!”
Konrad clenched his fists. “Have it your way then.”
He threw his gloves to the ground, opened his jacket and took the ice claw around his neck. He hovered it in the air, threateningly. Then he raised the sharp edge of steel higher and lacerated the back of his neck. Hand and the ice claw pooling with blood, he stepped closer to the woman whose face was ghost white. Konrad grabbed her hand, put the ice claw to her open palm.
“Grab it.”
The woman looked at her fist in disbelief; the reality shoehorned into her mental box: her fingerprints on the assault weapon.
“Your move, sister.” Konrad watched her scrambling up and collecting herself. She let the bloody ice claw slip to the snow from her hand.
The woman staggered away, her arms creating a barrier across her chest.
Numbness set into Konrad’s body and pain in his neck started spreading. A disembodied voice called his name.
“Konrad?”
Ruut—did I forget the line was open?
Konrad put the phone to his ear only to find out that the battery was dead.
Does she think that I attacked the woman?
Exiled into despair, he missed Lennart moving behind him and putting his hand on his shoulder.
That single touch brought instant tears to his eyes, soothed the length of his body.
“That was a low blow,” Lennart said.
“Not the first attack.”
Concern dug deep lines into Lennart’s face. With the jerk of his head, he signaled there was something else to see.
Konrad focused his gaze to the east over the ice sheet.
Kaspar Nyman.
Shit. I’m finished.
“The man talking on his phone and entering his car photographed your confrontation with the woman.”
“He’s a cop. He’ll take me into custody.”
“Not exactly. He’s a freelancer. Born and raised in Russia, so he knows propaganda. Your improvised maneuver will look awful on you when he uploads or sells the photos. Another goddamned media spectacle awaits.”
Dread respawned in Konrad’s stomach. “He might demand money for the photos.” Or fool me out of money and still sell them.
Lennart coughed hard. The double-bent man’s pains overshadowed the pain in Konrad’s neck entirely.
“I want to offer more than my sympathies. Here are my keys. Stay in my house if that’s any help. I would like to see you nailing that guy’s ass on the front page. I’m off to the hospital for treatments. I hope I can still be there when you unearth this mystery. Which reminds me, I made a deliberate mistake with one of the membrane symbols. Show it to me, please.”
Konrad thanked Lennart for the offered keys and showed him the membrane.
“This symbol in the hut in the Upper World is not Akka. It’s Sáráhkká, generally depicted in The Middle World in Sámi arts, but in the lower parts of the drums. Sáráhkká, the Sámi first mother, is a female goddess equivalent of Venus. She’s the protector of home and family and especially of womanhood; she grows the flesh around the soul in the womb and protects girls and women from the cradle to the grave.”
Lennart paused to grimace at the pains that came on to him in waves.
Konrad found letters in the hut. “Mánná…? As in manna from the Bible?”
“A double meaning perhaps. Manna in the Bible refers to any divine or spiritual nourishment. The ark of the covenant included a jar of manna among others, such as the Tablets of Stone; the Ten Commandments. ‘I am the bread of life’ Jesus said. Mánná in Sámi language means a child.”
“I see.”
“I think there’s a promise of a messenger, but it could be a morbid prank,” Lennart said. “Playing with the dead brings living nightmares. The membrane portrays the world-view of Sámi peoples in the 1600s and 1700s, before the time when the witch trials swept through the northern regions of Europe. The Crusader-priests believed that the yoiking Lapps pounding their magic drums with transfixed eyes were possessed. They burned the drums and anyone with witch qualities. The fuck heads. Thought the runic drums were instruments of the Devil!” Lennart cursed, coughed, and spat in the wind.
The horrible sounds and helplessness drilled a caustic hole into Konrad’s heart.
“The Lapps were pushed aside if they didn’t convert. They were forced to morph their rituals into less prominent ways to be one with nature. Time passed, and more protesting Lapps vanished. The memory wore thin. The ones who still dared to yoik started to drink heavily. With that, drinking was bound with the practice of yoiking, serving false gods, and not long after there was nobody left to tap into the dead.”
Konrad stared at Lennart. “I wasn’t aware of your people’s plight.”
Lennart coughed forcefully. He dabbed his pain-moistened eyes to his sleeve. “I wasn’t aware of your plight either. You—the media—poisoned the very depths of my blood like some fucking fat blockage in my heart’s artery. Now I know better. The Gods balance everything in the end. Hopefully the times of great atonement is at hand. Whatever you decide to do now or what discoveries you shall make, respect the wilderness. Honor the dead. But piss on all around your enemies.”
Konrad nodded.
Lennart gave a handshake, not avoiding the blood in Konrad’s hand. The squeeze was nothing less than a juice extractor.
“Weird knowing you, Konrad,” Lennart said, his voice growing severe. “Can I get my wristwatch back?”
15
KASPAR LOWERED A GLASS of wine on the table next to the computer screen and checked his phone, pausing the check up on the RAW images briefly.
Seven calls from her.
You played your role well. But you just have to wait your turn…
Car lights strobe
through the busted blinds. He stood, opened them and checked the perimeter, confirming it was only the neighbor’s car.
It was full dark, no stars. A perfect moment for his new career.
He closed the blinds and pulled in the curtains. The vision of his journalistic firm started to get flesh around its skeleton as he smiled at the pictures he had been narrowing down and processing these past hours in Adobe Photoshop. Konrad’s self-inflicted wound was fabulously genius, but it had only raised the stakes. The pictures he had chosen left no room for questions. Konrad was going down. His carefully masterminded plan paid back all the invested hours and shed sweat.
Out of curiosity, Kaspar went through the pictures he had already abandoned before deleting them. The weather had been on his side, the horizon at the background perfectly balanced. He considered himself a famous artist whose name was on the rising tide.
But one detail made him frown.
The skeptic in him shook its head at the possibility. He scowled at his imagination.
But he made a duplicate and decided to zoom in.
The air around him grew crisp and cold. With a few mouse clicks, he magnified the background.
A man with binoculars he had taken for a birdwatcher who stood behind a black van at the far western edge of the pond held something familiar to Kaspar. Another camera-like object on a stick possibly aimed at the professor and his friend on the ice.
A laser microphone?
It was used to eavesdrop with zero chance of exposure. But it was usually used to hear a conversation in a room that was beyond access or bug. The two men weren’t behind a vibrating window that would record spoken sounds. Unless he was missing something.
From another picture, he recognized the man.
A Russian war veteran.
He took a sip of his glass of red wine. A draft raised his neck hair. He remembered talking on the phone with his woman assistant inside his car.
Behind a window…
A shadow flashed in the wine glass on the table, but before he could even react, he felt cold metal pressed against the back of his skull.
A man’s deep chilling voice said, “Do. Not. Move.”
THE STREETS WERE dark, wet, and asleep. Gideon strode faster on the road to home, squinting at the freezing drizzle of the night. Tomorrow he would lead his mother to the woods to witness an incredible phenomenon.
He had touched the tree, seen an unexplained darkness. As if it had touched him back.
She had suggested that the maniac university professor might also be interested in the tree because of some related mystery.
Not in a million years.
And to his father, he would say nothing. Maybe after he had taken more pictures, investigated the place and done his first report. He chuckled at the notion of doing something that began to sound like school. Perhaps there was light at the end of the tunnel after all. He occupied his mind with an image of himself boasting with a world-famous photo.
The dream stopped short.
A tall stranger came out of his home.
Gideon jammed his hands deeper into his hoodie’s pockets and walked past the path leading to the house. He quickly side-glanced at the man and noted an Easton ice hockey bag on the man’s shoulder. Its shape made him think of a body bag.
His heart leapt into his throat.
With the gaze of the dark man in his neck, he took a turn right at the dead-ending street. Walking on the path to his neighbor’s house, reading the resident’s name in the mailbox—Pantzar—he stole another glance.
The man and the bag disappeared into a big van Mercedes, but another man kept an eye on him via the wing mirror.
The house in front of him was dark. He was not friends with the owner, Iris. The first time he had taken a shortcut across her lawn to a playground, the cranky old granny had accused him of being a terrorist. He had tested her nerves more than he could recall. Once he had raised his middle finger at her, and she had called the cops on him. The cops had come to the playground to address him on false claims about destroying the old woman’s garden.
She had vandalized her own bushes, and his father had to pay the bill.
Gideon rang the bell, his stomach clenching.
He started counting to ten and repeated the ringing on four.
Nothing stirred in the house.
The driver of the car came out. Gideon could sense his alert gaze stab.
Another ring.
Please… please…
A reflection in the window of the house sent him into a panic: the driver moved toward him on the street.
A light sprang life inside the house.
Gideon could hear curses behind the door.
Quickly!
Iris’s short but quick steps were now audible, and Gideon knew he had only one option to get inside.
The door opened.
“This had better be important—” Iris initiated.
“I’m sorry,” Gideon said, teary-eyed.
The old woman opened her mouth but suppressed her hatred. Then something lit behind her cloudy eyes. She yelled over Gideon’s shoulder to the man behind him.
“Get your filthy ass off my yard! Now, or I’ll call the cops!”
She let Gideon inside and cast a grim dragon’s eye at the man, who withdrew to the car and gunned it away.
Fuming, the old woman slammed the door shut and turned to face Gideon. She had to unclench her teeth to get the word out.
“You little brat. You almost gave me a heart attack. Explain yourself, what was all that about?”
16
KONRAD PEEKED OUT of the frost-rimed window of Lennart’s old veteran’s house where an ongoing battle between wooden tar tools and mold made his head dizzy and stuck to his clothes. Here and there the walls bore creepy antlers of different sizes. There was also a balding and undecorated Christmas tree put into the stand, so he gave it water, but couldn’t locate any decorations.
Outside in the dark was Lennart’s sauna and a sawn hole in the ice for swimming. He flashed on an icy memory in which he came second in the ice swimming world championships held in Kemijoki in Rovaniemi in 2014. His pride switched to agony when at the opposite side of the partly frozen river, the more-recent memory of the explosion replayed. Oona had shattered his life and reputation all at once.
Now it was Winter Solstice, the shortest and darkest day of the year. The velvety cool blackness engulfing the house caused a surge of mistrust to wash over him, convincing him that everybody had their share in the lie, that the arc of morality had fallen flat.
He switched on the phone that was recharging. As the loading phase went on and on, Konrad tried to reach a consensus with himself whether Ruut was the only one he could trust.
A long, agonizing moment ticked by, then notifications hit the screen one after another.
Eight SMS messages from Ruut.
21.12.2017
10.54 a.m. Are you okay?
10.56 a.m. Did you get caught in a fight? Can’t reach you.
11.00 a.m. Call me. ASAP.
11.55 a.m. Netta is sick. I have to pick her up from school. Quality time, yay!
12.15 p.m. Sorry for bombarding u with these. Worried...
15.12 p.m. Konrad???
16.20 p.m. Gideon called. His father’s house hit by burglars. Father missing. Going to check the house.
17.34 p.m. What a glory hole… Men... My old neighbor who likes advising me in upbringing methods said that she had called the cops after Gideon…
The clock read 18.00 p.m. He dialed her.
“Konrad!” Ruut’s answer was instantaneous. “Thank God.”
Konrad laid out the conversation with Lennart and his encounter with the woman.
“What the hell was she thinking?”
“Tell me about it. There was also a freelancer immortalizing the whole episode. I met him in the hospital when I woke up from the coma.”
Ruut paused. “You were immediately questioned?”
�
��It turned out I was scammed. Kaspar Nyman was the guy’s name.”
“Excuse me?” Ruut said with a rise in her tone. “Kaspar Nyman?”
“Yes. I don’t know how he fooled the guards and the system. Perhaps bribes.”
“Jesus.”
“Not your problem. But Jesus is.”
“You always deflect sympathy like this?” Ruut said, concluding the funny games. “I remember seeing a picture of you in the media taken in the hospital. You were unconscious on the hospital bed. So, it was Kaspar…”
“It doesn’t matter… wait.... What? You know him?”
“He’s my ex-husband, Gideon’s father. I’m at his place as we speak.”
The schmuck’s name boiled Konrad’s blood. He counted to three in his head. “What’s going on there? Anything missing?”
“Nothing’s gone. Only Kaspar. Wait… you said he photographed you today. I’ll check his computer. I’m sure he hasn’t changed his password. Stay on the line.”
Konrad probed his memory. He returned to the moment of stealing Kaspar’s watch. The carving—abracadabra.
“Is a woman named Julia there?” he asked.
“Wait, I’ll put you on the speaker.”
“Is Julia there?” Konrad heard Ruut stop writing with the keyboard.
“How do you know her?”
“Kaspar mentioned her.”
Pause. Keyboard noises. “Liar. Kaspar never spoke of her. He harbored everything about her. Not even after she caused our marriage to break up did he talk about her.”
Third wheel. Crap.
There was no hint of sourness or condemnation in Ruut’s voice. Konrad gave in, “Alright, I confess. I—”
“You stole something from him.”
Unable to conceal surprise from his voice, “Actually—”
“Kleptomania. It would explain why you pocketed that silly saltshaker at the university while playing table chess.”
Konrad shook his head. “It’s more like the thrill-of-the-act kind of thing.”
“Uh-hm.” Ruut’s unarticulated comment made it clear she didn’t buy his explanations. “If a teen steals, it’s a crime and a perfect reason to demonize the youth. If an adult steals, it’s an illness and reason to feel sorry. But hey, it’s a fucked-up world, so who cares. Okay, I’ve checked the computer. There’s no trace of pictures being processed on the computer. It’s strange because Kaspar practically slept with a camera under a pillow and memory cards on his eyes.”
