“Hey!” The Keeper’s voice came from just outside. “You two in there?”
Saara was already at the front door. “Is the Hiisi gone?” she called.
“All clear,” the Keeper said. “Nobody out here but us saviors.”
Saara pawed at the dead bolt, and Axel hurried to unlatch it before she could bust the whole door down. Then he followed her out into the snow. Axel realized, right away, that the Keeper had lied to them. He was standing in the middle of the yard, glowing. He’d lost his hat when he’d run away from the little search party at the castle, and fluorescent light was reflecting off his skull. He wasn’t looking at them, Axel realized, but above them. He was staring over their heads, into the mouth of the Hiisi.
It had climbed onto the roof of the cottage. Axel turned just in time to see the thing come down upon him. What a soothing grip it had, cool and clean like washed sheets. The Hiisi took him up, pulling him into the sizzling bright. It was the same thing that it had always been. It was the wheelchair that had followed him to school. It was the numbness in his legs and arms. It was the quiet of an empty house, the loneliness of his father’s empty bedroom. The Hiisi was everything that Axel had ever been afraid of. Except, in that moment, it also wasn’t. In fact, in those seconds when the Hiisi was about to swallow him, Axel didn’t feel any fear at all. Because Axel was of the path now. If the Hiisi pulled him off it today, he would find his way back tomorrow. If Tess and Jaana caught him and brought him to Helsinki, he would walk right back here. Axel could read the blazes now. Every branch was a signpost, every tree a doorway to his new home.
The Hiisi hesitated, Axel still dangling over its shining maw. Then, all of a sudden, it tossed him aside. He landed hard on the ground, the snow burning his palms and bare cheeks. Saara’s jaws closed on the hood of his sweater, and she lifted him to his feet.
“So that’s it, then?” the Keeper said, his voice high and giddy. He was speaking to the Hiisi.
“The boy seems sure,” the Hiisi said, whispering the words through the frozen spruce needles. It sounded vaguely hesitant.
“He is sure. His threads are cut.” The old man took one short step toward the monster and then another. “His threads are cut,” he said again, all smooth and soothing, like he was trying to calm some wild animal. “He belongs now. He isn’t upsetting the balance.” Another step. “You’ve got what you need, and the woods do, too.” The Keeper was speaking right into the Hiisi’s gaping mouth now. With just a twitch, the monster could have ruined him. In the length of a breath, it could have swallowed him whole.
“Get away from it,” Axel said. He tried to take a step toward the Keeper, but Saara was still holding his hood in her reeking jaws. She began to back into the trees, and Axel’s ankles slid across the ice and powder.
“We have to go,” she whispered through her mouthful of cotton. “They’ll be here any minute.” She was right—Axel could see flashlights approaching from around the Hannula house. He could hear his name hurled out across the frozen lake.
“We can’t just leave him there,” Axel said.
“We absolutely can,” Saara said.
The Keeper had reached out his mangled left hand, as though he meant to try to touch the light inside the Hiisi. “One Keeper for every wood,” he said, almost whispering now into the bright abyss. “Just one. You promised.”
“What are you doing?” Axel called, still being dragged backward by his mother.
The old man turned back to him, his cheeks shining with black rivulets of ashen tears. “Going home,” he said. “Thank you.”
And then the Keeper’s hand vanished, sizzling away to nothing in the Hiisi. His arm disappeared and then his shoulder. The old man wasn’t being eaten—not at all. He was climbing through. The Hiisi hacked and coughed, as though trying to spit him back up. But the Keeper seemed as dead set on leaving the path as Axel was on staying there. Finally, the Hiisi gave up.
It swallowed, and the Keeper was gone.
19
The Boy in the Picture
The cold snap lasted four more days, and in that time the search party at Talvijärvi didn’t find so much as a footprint from Axel. Expectations had been high at the beginning of the week, when they’d missed him by a hair at the cottage. Chief Aarne requested emergency support from nearby Savonlinna, and by daybreak there was another pair of helicopters in the sky, and the woods were flush with hundreds of men and women in ski outfits and matching vests. They linked arms and walked slowly through the snow, like a chorus line singing a song with only one lyric—only one word. “Axel.” His shouted name reverberated for miles, a hot breath of hope cutting through the frozen woods.
Those hopes began to fray as the hours and days wore on without any sign and the temperature stayed murderously cold. One member of the search party discovered bear tracks in the overturned snow, and this animal was added to the whispered fates that were already being passed from volunteer to volunteer. Tess’s brother could have been kidnapped. Tess’s brother could have frozen to death. Tess’s brother could have been mauled and eaten whole. At the end of the third day, Chief Aarne distributed adjustable aluminum poles to the entire search party. Nobody told Tess what they were for, but it wasn’t hard to guess—they were to help search for Axel’s body, under the snow. Aarne and the police were still being coy about it. They hadn’t quit using the word “rescue.” Medics remained on standby in a mobile clinic parked in the Hannulas’ driveway, volunteers continued to arrive daily from town, and Finnish army helicopters were still doggedly skimming the woods and fields of Talvijärvi. But it was obvious that people were expecting the worst. The patrols went grimly about their work, skiing their assigned lengths of the grid, stabbing their poles into every rise in the snow.
Tess and her grandparents seemed to be the only ones who trusted, without question, that Axel was still alive. But at least for Tess’s part, simply trusting that her little brother was alive was very different from trusting that she’d actually see him again. Tess still had the note he’d left for her. Axel might have had a penchant for the dramatic, but that made him an exaggerator, not a liar. If he’d committed his good-bye to paper, he must have believed it to be real, and permanent.
Tess still participated in the search, of course. In the mornings she woke up well before dawn and joined Jaana and Kari and the rest of the volunteers. As the cold snap wore on and Axel remained missing, the search grid expanded farther and farther into the unfamiliar woods. But in Tess’s heart she knew that her expectations were no different from the rest of the grim-faced volunteers. They weren’t going to find Axel, at least not this way. It wasn’t until she returned to the Hannula house at night, slick with sweat and numb with cold, that Tess felt the work of recovering her brother really began.
She was determined to read everything she could about the Hiisi and the Keeper and anything else that might be of use. Tess started out by browsing the net on Kalle’s computer, but soon learned that what she could find online paled in comparison to what was in Otso’s old books. She knew that her grandfather had been a poetry professor back in Helsinki, but it turned out that “poetry” also meant history and mythology and ancient epics all at once. Over the years Otso had brought quite a bit of work up to the cottage, and Tess carted as much of it as she could carry over to the Hannula place. Every night, after a long day out in the woods, she’d settle in with Bigwig on a big, soft couch and continue her search in her grandfather’s yellowing books.
There was plenty to be learned about the Hiisi—or rather, about hiisis; there was more than just one. Tess had remembered the word to mean a kind of malevolent troll, or demon. It lived deep in the woods and would harass people that strayed inside, sometimes chasing them back to their farms and villages. But as it turned out, that was only one of several possible definitions for the word. Hiisis had been playing the part of magical villains only since the Christians arrived in Finland and got their hands on the mythology. Back in pagan times a hiisi wasn
’t always bad; it could even be helpful. And it wasn’t even necessarily a being—a hiisi could also be a place. A hiisi could be a grove or a clearing out in the wild, a place the early Finns believed to be sacred. A site for the worship of long-dead ancestors.
While this was all interesting, it didn’t offer Tess any useable clues about how to get her brother back. She was far more intent on finding information about the Keeper, but there her research was less fruitful. Otso’s books had no mention of anything like him . . . or at least not exactly. There was one spirit that tried to lure men into the forest in order to gain its freedom—sort of a corollary for the Hiisi, which tried to chase them out of those same forests. But this spirit was supposed to be a woman, a beautiful one—two things that the Keeper definitely wasn’t. And Tess had no better luck searching out more information on the famous ghost of Talvijärvi. All the stories focused on Aino’s tragic death and her periodic return to the pine island as a ghost. The fact that her husband had disappeared into the woods only to turn up dead months later certainly gave the tale some extra-morbid flavor, but Tess couldn’t find a single version of the story that gave any detail about what he actually said before he left. Everybody figured he was simply mad with grief, so there had been no reason to listen to him. And of course Tess had treated her own brother no differently during their last conversation back in Helsinki. But this was a mistake she meant to undo, if she could.
By the time the cold snap finally ended, Tess was running out of things to read and starting to feel as desperate as the dwindling volunteers. Kari suggested that they spend the morning searching the castle once again, and Tess agreed, if only on the chance that she’d missed something useful at that little exhibit on Väinö and Aino. They ate breakfast in silence with Jaana and Otso and left just before sunup.
Outside the weather was the warmest it had been since the day they’d all raced back to Talvijärvi in search of Axel. This would have been a welcome change, but for the rain. A spitting drizzle drifted in from the east with the gathering light, polishing the rounded mounds of snow, melting and freezing all at once. Icicles filled the woods behind the cottage, breaking off under the weight of the rain just as fast as they could form.
It was so slick and treacherous outside that Tess and Kari decided to leave their skis against the back wall of the cottage. They threw ponchos over their winter coats and headed out into the wet mess on foot, stomping hard through the crusting snow to keep from falling over. They were glazed with a film of ice by the time they arrived at Erikinlinna. Aarne was still maintaining a twenty-four-hour watch over the place, and one of his officers stood out in front of the stone archway, hands deep in the pockets of his soggy winter jacket. The officer nodded solemnly as Tess and Kari approached, water tipping off his frozen hood. But he was so afraid of saying the wrong thing to Tess that he said nothing at all, not even “hello.”
They passed him by and made for the covered picnic area beyond—though it wasn’t so covered anymore. The peaked roof was nearly gone, replaced by an odd jag of upturned beams and shingling. Tess had heard that the roof collapsed under the weight of the snow, but in person it looked a lot worse than that. Rather like a small truck had been dropped on the picnic area and then hauled away. The concrete floor sparkled with ice, and rain poured in through the destroyed roof. Part of the ceiling had pancaked a picnic table, and a stray beam landed right in the middle of the display table housing the historical model of Erikinlinna, leaving the tiny castle just as ruined as the real thing.
Tess picked her way around the debris to the far corner of the picnic area, where the little plaque on Talvijärvi’s famous resident spirit was thankfully undamaged. She stared again at the picture of Aino, her blur-faced husband, and their shattered-looking urchin of a son. Some text was stenciled just beneath the photo—Aino’s pulpy legend. According to this plaque, the woman had been haunting the pine island for the past sixty years, off and on. Property owners reported seeing her from their decks, and ice fishers said she’d sometimes stick her white face out of the holes they’d drilled. There was even a stretch of summers, back in the 1990s, when the Talvijärvi swimming society had declared the island and all the water around it off-limits—Aino had given some kid such a fright that he’d almost drowned. The plaque also included some text about Väinö, but it was much shorter. LOST IN HIS OWN GRIEF, AINO’S MAD HUSBAND DISAPPEARED.
“It doesn’t say here that he died,” Tess said, brushing a finger across Väinö’s laminated face, obscured by the cloud of its own movement.
Kari looked at her and shifted from boot to boot. He didn’t seem to know what she wanted him to say. The truth was that she didn’t either. The rain picked up outside, funneling down through the roof and out across the floor.
“You told us Väinö died,” Tess said.
Kari nodded. “Froze to death,” he said.
“Well, why doesn’t it say that here?”
Kari shrugged. “He’s not really the main character of that story,” he said, as though this explained everything. “Besides, his family was really, really angry. And Talvijärvi is a small town. It could be they didn’t want it printed?”
Tess chewed her lip, remembering now that Kari had said that Väinö’s family had refused to even attend his funeral. She stayed quiet for a while longer. The rain outside was heavy enough now that it had begun to win its argument with the snow, and the woods were filled with the bubbling sound of water percolating through the slush.
“Do you think any of his family are still alive?” Tess said.
Kari wrinkled his nose. “It was a long time ago,” he said.
“Not even him?” She reached out to touch the photo again, this time indicating the child that was huddled between his two doomed parents. He looked about the same age as Axel and nearly as scrawny.
“He’d be really old,” Kari said. He squinted at the name printed beneath the child and the date in the corner of the photograph. “It’s possible, I guess. We could try looking him up, but—” Kari swiveled as he spoke, turning to follow Tess, who was already making her way out of the picnic area at a fast walk. “But why would you want to?”
“I have a question for him,” Tess said, tightening her hood against the weather.
The name of the boy in the picture was Pyry Järvinen, and while the Internet couldn’t quite tell them if he was still alive, Tess and Kari did discover that someone by that name owned a house in Talvijärvi. They wrote down the address and caught a ride into town with Kalle, who had just returned from an all-night shift with the search parties out in the woods. Exhausted and bleary as he was, Kari’s brother insisted that he wait for them outside of Mr. Järvinen’s house, so that he could drive them back when they were finished. “I can nap in the truck,” he said, cheerfully pigheaded about it. “Besides, you don’t want to walk back to the bus station in this.” Kalle gestured out beyond the windshield and the freezing rain that was still pattering down. In the long days since Axel’s disappearance, Kalle had more than proven himself worthy of the faith that his younger brother had shown in him. Tess remembered that at one time she’d thought of this blind, defensive trust as a weakness on Kari’s part. But it wasn’t. Because people—especially family—don’t need to deserve your faith before you give it to them. Like Kalle, they could always grow into it.
Tess and Kari hurried up to the house and pressed the doorbell. There was no awning or cover of any kind over the front stoop, and each drop of rain that hit them felt as hard and as cold as a hailstone. They waited. Kari rang the doorbell again, and Tess rapped on the wood.
“Sorry about that,” a lady’s voice called from inside. “Couldn’t hear you over my . . .” The door swung open, revealing a middle-aged woman on the other side of it. She wore a baggy sweater over a pair of pale green scrubs, and her hair was done up in a relaxed bun. One of her ears still had a headphone in it, and the other headphone swung loose across her collar, pumping out faint jazz. Whatever the woman had been abo
ut to say, she seemed to see no need to finish it. “Can I help you?” she asked, a little curtly.
“Is this Pyry Järvinen’s house?” Tess said.
The woman took a moment before answering. “It is,” she said. “Can I help you?”
Had Tess not spoken Finnish, she’d have guessed from the woman’s tone that these repeated words meant “go away.” She wondered if the woman was the old man’s nurse, or maybe his daughter. “Is he at home?” she said. “Can we speak to him?”
“I’m afraid not today, no,” the woman said, already beginning to close the door.
“Why not?” Kari said.
“Ask your teacher.” The woman frowned at them. “I have half a mind to call her myself. Did you know more than ten students have come by this week alone? I don’t care if it’s for school—you’re all tiring him out.”
“We’re not in that class,” Tess said, slipping her foot into the doorframe.
The woman looked from one of them to the other. “So this isn’t another interview about his mother? The ‘famous spirit on the island’?” The nurse—and Tess was sure now that she was indeed a nurse and not a relative—actually used air quotes as she said this. “It’s a lousy idea for a class project, if you ask me.”
“That’s not why we’re here, ma’am,” Tess said. While this wasn’t entirely true, neither was it a full-on lie. After all, she didn’t have any questions about Aino. Tess was here to ask about the Keeper—a character who seemed to have been written out of Talvijärvi’s quaint little ghost story.
“What do you want with him, then?” the nurse said.
Tess wasn’t eager to go the sympathy route, but under the circumstances it seemed like her surest bet. The rain was still coming down, pinging against her skull. “I don’t know if you’ve been watching the news,” Tess said, “but my little brother—”
“Oh my.” The nurse’s eyes widened and her arms went slack. She let go of the doorknob, and the wet breeze blew the door further open. Tess knew that she already had the woman, but she pressed on anyway.
The Winter Place Page 25
