The Rabbit Back Literature Society

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  The two of them sat quietly in Laura White’s cold, dark, windowed room and looked at each other in the pale moonlight. The flashlight lay on the floor, its batteries fading. Jokinen’s thought structures wrapped around them in a spiral that both fascinated and frightened Ella.

  “I want to ask a favour of you,” Jokinen said. “I brought you to this place because this is where Laura White lived her life, and where the Rabbit Back Literature Society was created and developed. The reason I brought you here particularly is that you have research training, and at this point I need your help.”

  Ella lifted her hand and touched her lips with her fingertips. She noticed that her muscles were clenched. She said nervously, “Well, it’s fortunate for both of us that you saved my life tonight.”

  The sci-fi author nodded and continued with a smile, “I want you to ask me an all-encompassing question about Laura White’s inherent nature, and make sure that I spill until you’re sure you’ve received a complete answer. Use Rule 21 freely if you need to. Otherwise I’m sure I won’t be able to get it out. I’ve tried, but I couldn’t do it. Something inside me always fights it, in spite of all my preparation. And after that…”

  “Yes?”

  “After that, I’ll ask you what an unbiased, intelligent young researcher can make of it.”

  Ella got up, walked slowly over to Jokinen and stood behind her with her hands resting on Jokinen’s shoulders.

  “We should play The Game all the way through on your terms?” Ella said. “And I should be glad to do it because you rescued me and betrayed your old comrades for my sake?”

  “If that’s how you want to think of it,” Jokinen said humbly.

  Ella watched the cloud of breath in the dimness. She smiled, leaned over, pressed her lips to Jokinen’s ear and whispered, “Help! Help! The fierce and dreaded Emperor Rat is after me and will be here any minute!”

  Jokinen turned to look at her. Ella grabbed her by the nose and squeezed until she gave a squeal.

  “When I look at you now,” Ella whispered, “I really can see the Odd Critter, alias Baron Bewilder, in the flesh. Tell me the truth now, and I won’t rip your nose off, and I’ll do what you ask. Did the Society really decide to murder me tonight?”

  She gave Jokinen’s nose another twist and looked into her eyes from five centimetres away. The corners of Jokinen’s mouth turned upward and revealed her trick.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Jokinen whispered through her blocked nose.

  Ella let go of Jokinen’s bloody nose and wiped her hand on her pink snow suit.

  “What about the meeting? The one where you decided to murder me because of the notebook?”

  “There was no meeting,” Jokinen laughed, gingerly feeling her nose. “We can’t stand each other. There’s no way in hell anything could make us get together for another meeting. I managed to challenge Ingrid, and Martti, too, after endless surveillance, with those damn dogs trying to bite me. I got them to spill everything they’d talked about with you.”

  Ella slapped her on the back of the head. Jokinen gave a yelp and said, “It was filtered information, of course, which there’s generally no point in collecting. But it did make this whole thing seem believable.”

  She looked Ella in the eye and said she wanted to play The Game all the way through with her and find out Laura White’s inherent nature.

  “I could have just challenged you in the normal way. But I’m writing an escape story. I thought I would research how a person really behaves in a situation like that. But there’s another, more important reason I did it. I’m sorry for the shock I gave you, of course, but you must admit that it’s helped you understand something you absolutely have to understand.”

  “Which is?”

  Jokinen smiled.

  “That anything at all can happen at any moment. There—I’ve got the blindfold on, and I’ve taken the yellow. Let The Game begin.”

  35

  Arne C. Ahlqvist Spills

  “YOU AND MY FATHER knew each other,” Ella says. “You were with Laura White in that Renault they found in the woods.”

  Aura Jokinen’s curls swung nervously. “Don’t start asking about your father. Hell, I can tell you about your father and that drive after The Game, free of charge, with as many details as you like. Ask me about Laura White.”

  Ella coughs.

  “What?” Jokinen says. “I didn’t hear what you said.”

  “I didn’t say anything yet.”

  “Oh. Why not? The Game has started. I’ve got the rag over my eyes and the yellow in my belly. I’m hellbent and ready. Ask me a basic question about Laura White.”

  Ella doesn’t answer, she’s gathering her thoughts first. Jokinen huffs and cracks her knuckles.

  “I had a dream a couple of nights ago,” Ella finally says. “When I was a kid, about ten years old, I got a jigsaw puzzle as a present from my father. On the box there was a picture of the finished puzzle. It was a picture of the inhabitants of Creatureville—Bobo Clickclack, Dampish, Crusty Bark, Mother Snow and the rest, in the middle of a forest. I had a dream about that puzzle.”

  Jokinen tilted her head. “So?”

  “In the dream, though,” Ella continued, “the pieces were different from what the picture on the box led you to expect. I started putting the puzzle together, and it was forming the wrong picture. In one corner you could see a hand—white, and obviously dead—and I knew that it was from Laura White’s body. And the Creatureville characters that had been smiling on the box were frightened now. They were looking at something behind the trees. I knew that if I followed the direction of their eyes, I would find Emperor Rat when I finished the puzzle.”

  Ella is silent. She doesn’t remember any more and Aura Jokinen doesn’t say anything. She sits hunched over in Laura White’s chair with the blindfold on, completely still. Through the window Ella can see the moon and the garden bathed in moonlight. Farther off she can dimly see the tangled undergrowth of Hare Glen, which was once, they say, a very beautiful place.

  A noise of dogs drifts over the valley. Ella guesses the sound is coming from Martti Winter’s house. Maybe they’re barking at the large man as he peeps out the window, or maybe they’re barking at the moon as it clatters along its invisible tracks.

  “Why don’t you ask me a question?” Aura Jokinen says irritably. “Unless another interesting dream has occurred to you that you want to tell me about. We have to play The Game. Otherwise neither of us will be a member of the Society anymore. I’m sorry for being impatient, but I have a hell of a headache. My blood pressure keeps going up, and I left my medicine at home. And it’s damned cold in here. And I’m as ready as a trembling virgin. My head is splitting, so please will you play it all out of me and tell me what the hell you think it means?”

  Jokinen’s face is pale, tense and sweaty. She holds her trembling hands to her temples as if her head really were about to split in two from the pressure of her thoughts. Her blonde curly hair sticks out between her fingers as if she were pulling on it.

  Ella takes pity on her and asks her question.

  “What do I need to know if I want to get a clear idea of the true nature of Laura White?”

  Ella waits for a flood of words, but Jokinen doesn’t seem to know what to say.

  A minute passes.

  Laura White’s chair creaks nervously as the sci-fi writer rocks herself back and forth.

  Ella thinks about the house around them. She thinks about the walls and floors, the joists, the unlit stairway and the dozens of rooms. The house around them is empty now, but she can feel the Society’s past hiding just around a corner, almost palpable.

  Ella blows on her fingers and rubs her hands together. Outside the windows the stars swing slowly into new positions.

  Aura Jokinen sweeps back her curls, sighs gently and starts to speak, at first with care and concentration, then more quickly:

  “The story that Laura White always told goes like this: Laura White
wrote the Creatureville books, founded the Rabbit Back Literature Society, and trained nine children to be successful authors. It’s a very good story, of the deeds of an esteemed and beloved authoress. But when you look for answers to the question of who or what Laura White really is, you find all kinds of peculiar little

  things that are hard to fit into any reasonable story. So you forget about them, because that’s what people generally do with things like that. People can’t stand it if a thing doesn’t fit into any mould or conform to a ready pattern. Some things just can’t be fully explained.

  For years I’ve been collecting these banal peculiarities, all the while living the story that everyone tells, the story that’s been built around us. I studied literature in the Society, then I wrote books, because that had become my nature and it was expected of me. And then when the time came I had sex and I had children and served as their mother. That fit into the larger story we were living, too. And I took great care to learn to see things as they really are, without any filters or forced patterns. It’s left its trace on everything I’ve ever done. On my books, too. A review of one of my books once said: “Arne Ahlqvist has once again whipped up some delicious gingerbread, but thrown away the recipe book—” Ha ha…

  I’ll tell you the story now—sorry, I mean I’ll spill some things that are as much a part of a portrait of Laura White as anything else that’s known about her.

  You already know about the book thing. It’s bizarre as hell. I’ve never completely understood exactly what it is. I just know that many of Laura White’s books turn volatile somehow. They start to change. And the same thing has happened to the books in the Rabbit Back library, to Ingrid’s delight. Laura said it was bacteria, but I don’t know. It could just as well have something to do with quantum mechanics. I’ve written lots of stories about that, just so I could learn to understand it as a phenomenon. Or maybe the books are haunted. I don’t know. But one thing I do know is that sometimes reality shrivels up and blisters around Laura White, almost as if she isn’t really completely suited to the reality she’s trying to fit into.

  The things I’m talking about, there are so many of them… once, for instance, when I was about nine or ten, I happened to go into Laura White’s room while she was sleeping. She was amazingly beautiful lying there on her bed, like something out of a painting or a fairy tale. She was wearing a white summer dress and the window was open, and it was autumn outside.

  I knew I ought to leave, but I sat down quietly on the bed and watched her while she slept. I even secretly sniffed her hair and her skin and her breath, and they were full of the smell of dying autumn flowers and fallen leaves. A sad smell, and I thought, I love Laura White so much, much more than I love my own mother.

  Then I heard something. Laura was saying something to me. Whispering. Her lips were moving. But she wasn’t saying anything—a bee crawled out from between her lips: that’s what the noise was.

  It was confusing. I was startled, and I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I just remember that the bee buzzed around the room and then suddenly it was on my face and it stung me on the cheek and it hurt awfully.

  I ran out of the house and went home. I remember that my cheek was throbbing and I was crying. The next time I saw Laura White she said, “Oh, my, Something must have stung poor Aura’s face,” and I just said, “Yes, a bee stung me in the meadow.”

  I’ve never told anyone about this until now.

  Of course it could have been partly a dream. You can’t completely trust a child’s perceptions. I’m sure that’s what you’re thinking. That’s what I’d like to think, too. It would give me a way to comprehend these aberrations.

  But bizarre little things like that happened again and again, and no one ever took any notice of them. How can you tell someone about these things? How do you go up to someone and say, “Laura White was just walking in the rain, and she sneezed, and for half a second I could see right through her?” There were lots of things like that—not really frightening. The worst things, the things that really weren’t according to the recipe, were still to come.

  Oh yeah, before I get to that, I ought to mention something you should pay special attention to when you form your theory about Laura White’s nature. There’s an event connected with her childhood that… well, maybe if you get the chance you should talk to this retired doctor—his name is Jansson and he knows more about the incident than I do. I don’t know if the two of you were introduced at the party, but he was there. Do you remember him? A thin, white-bearded gentleman, quite elderly? Anyway, he was the doctor who treated Laura White when she had the accident, when she was a child. What happened was that…

  Ella grows nervous.

  Aura Jokinen is still speaking, or at least trying to speak, but Ella can’t make out what she’s saying now. Her words start to slur, then fragment into mere babblings.

  Jokinen sniffs a couple of times, tries to sit up straight, opens her mouth wide, leans to one side, then slumps onto the floor.

  Ella jumps out of her chair, bends over Jokinen, and takes the blindfold off. She can see a helpless look in Jokinen’s eyes, and a flaccid shapelessness on one side of her face.

  “It’s OK, my friend,” Ella whispers, stroking her hair. Drool runs out of one side of Jokinen’s mouth. “I’m sure this is reason enough to leave off playing The Game for now. I’m sure you’ll be all right. You probably just tried to spill too many big things all at once.”

  Ella calls the emergency number and tells them that a middle-aged woman has suffered a stroke in front of Laura White’s house.

  Then she drags Jokinen outside so they won’t have to explain, and won’t be blamed for the break-in.

  They wait on the porch for the ambulance, Ella holding Aura Jokinen in her arms. Jokinen’s left eye is closed, but the right one is staring at her intently.

  Her mouth keeps opening, as if she were still trying with all her might to spill.

  36

  PROFESSOR KORPIMÄKI called the next morning, wished Ella a good day, and, without waiting for a response, started to comment on the coffee klatch stories she’d sent him.

  “Very interesting. Very interesting indeed. Those are just the kind of anecdotes that let you see Laura White’s work and the work of the writers in the Society in a whole new, more exciting light. I’ve already incorporated several of them into my lectures. I hardly need to tell you that the lecture hall’s filled to the rafters these days. Laura White always draws them in. But what about your earlier finds? Have you dug up anything new?”

  “Definitely,” Ella said. “I’m finding new stuff all the time. But…”

  She raked her fingers through her hair and tried to gather her thoughts. She’d been up most of the night.

  “Yes?” her professor said expectantly.

  “Um, d’you think we’d have any use for… um, what should I call it… inappropriate material?”

  The professor whistled. “Do you mean material related to Ms White’s sexuality? Have you come across any revelations? Or scandals?”

  “I’m talking about ghost stories,” Ella said, and immediately thought she ought to have used more academic terminology. “Yesterday one of my informants had an attack of illness during an interview. Probably a stroke. Before it happened, she told me an anecdote about Laura White that… um… had many of the characteristics of a miracle narrative or ghost story.”

  The complete silence on the other end of the phone chilled her. She could hear the professor breathing. This was what she had been afraid would happen—even attempting to work non-standard puzzle pieces into official literary history could destroy her research career before it started.

  “Well, we’re trying to form as complete a picture of Laura White as we can in order to get a deeper understanding of her oeuvre,” the professor said thoughtfully.

  Ella could hear a ballpoint pen scratching on paper on the other end of the line. He was writing something down.

  “We
’ll have to see. Part of the research has to address Laura White as a person, so we should look at her personality and human relationships. Your anecdote may serve nicely as material for that aspect of it. Another part should relate her life story, from childhood to her disappearance, as comprehensively as possible. We have some general facts, but we definitely need to get more details, so keep that in mind as you gather information.” He coughed and continued. “The third, most important part is the analysis and interpretation of Laura White’s literary output. Your thesis will serve as a wonderful starting point for that, not necessarily for the project in its entirety, but as one possible direction to take. Naturally, it’s appropriate to include biographical particulars in relation to her work. You may find something valuable in it.”

  He clicked his ballpoint pen.

  “We must remember, though, as we look at all of this personal information, that the most important thing is what Laura White wrote. We should, of course, gather all the information we can about her life as well, by all means. It’s our duty to literary history. But when you look at the big picture, Laura White’s life isn’t terribly important. In the end, from a literary point of view, it hardly matters what the person who wrote the books did, or thought, or felt, although such things naturally arouse our human curiosity.”

  The scratching of his pen ceased for a moment.

  “As far as these ‘ghost stories’ you mention,” he said, “perhaps they could be attached as a small footnote to the biographical section.”

  After talking to her professor Ella drank some coffee, looked up a couple of things on her phone, then called the other eight writers.

  Although the members of the Society didn’t enjoy each other’s company, long friendship weighs heavily, and every one of them agreed to go the next day to the university central hospital to visit Aura Jokinen—particularly since Ella told every one of them that all of the others had already agreed.