The Black Tongue

by Marko Hautala

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Marko Hautala

  Translation copyright © 2015 Jenni Salmi

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Kuokkamummo by Tammi Publishers in Finland in 2014. Translated from Finnish by Jenni Salmi. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2015.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503945845

  ISBN-10: 1503945847

  Cover design by Scott Barrie

  CONTENTS

  Start Reading

  THE GRANNY AND HER HATCHET

  You’re all sitting . . .

  All the little . . .

  SAGAL YUSUF’S SECRET

  “Well, that was . . .

  HIS FATHER’S HAND . . .

  Samuel Autio was . . .

  MAISA RIIPINEN’S NAILS

  “Nobody talks about . . .

  As Samuel exited . . .

  Maisa woke up . . .

  The yard in . . .

  THE MORONIC MOON

  When Samuel was . . .

  Maisa’s reaction to . . .

  The phone kept . . .

  Maisa’s phone rang . . .

  Samuel saw Julia . . .

  After that eventful . . .

  When Samuel called . . .

  Samuel walked in . . .

  As the outline . . .

  HOW THUNDER GOT ITS NAME

  Julia went inside . . .

  Maisa’s finger hovered . . .

  The red box . . .

  Samuel dug a . . .

  Pasi called Maisa . . .

  Maisa called Pasi . . .

  The storm left . . .

  Maisa woke up . . .

  KILLS CHILDREN

  “Let’s go somewhere . . .

  VIDEO TAPE

  Samuel and Julia . . .

  “Some man has . . .

  In one pocket . . .

  They arrived on . . .

  NOBODY TALKS

  Sagal ran down . . .

  ANTS DEVOUR THE MOON

  Ants were slowly . . .

  LUCKY GIRL

  The Inspector already . . .

  THE BLACK TONGUE

  Maisa opened her . . .

  The doorbell. Maisa . . .

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  As long as a working capital of accumulated hatred and suspicion exists at the center of the community, it will continue to increase no matter what men do.

  —René Girard, Violence and the Sacred

  THE GRANNY AND HER HATCHET

  You’re all sitting here wondering what Granny Hatchet does. Granny Hatchet kills children.

  She’s as old as the oceans and the sky. She lurks along the seashore, shuffling her feet between large rocks and behind fallen trees. She minces like a mink on her bare, slim toes. And everyone who happens upon her yard without permission either dies or goes insane. She waits until some foul-mouthed girl or boy drops behind the rest of the group, either to take a piss or to text a friend or to look at a butterfly or to save a little baby bird. She waits until you turn your back on her. Then she whacks you right between your shoulder blades with her hatchet and all the air is knocked out of your lungs and your legs go numb.

  She turns you over.

  She sticks her black tongue out at you.

  She has a wispy old-lady mustache.

  And then you’re done.

  You just want to crawl into a hole where you wait to die.

  Sometimes she eats your heart. She digs it out of your chest with that hatchet of hers, even if you’re still alive. She plants these hearts among her potatoes and waits until they’ve turned almost black. Then she chews on the hearts with her toothless mouth. She thinks wearing dentures is demeaning. And this chewing can take up to an hour. She closes her eyes and remembers the good old days and how everything used to be right in the world.

  She sees everything in the Suvikylä woods. She knows who you are just by the way you smell. When she takes a whiff of the wind, she looks like a fox sniffing gasoline, nostrils flared, alert.

  She sneaks around in the shadows and stares at all the apartment buildings with their lights turned on and TV screens flashing and people’s shadows moving behind curtains, and she mutters nasty things at those shadows.

  She’s invisible to most, unless she wants to be seen. She can stand so still that you will look past her although she’s standing right in front of you. She’s been on Earth for so long that you can’t tell her apart from a knotty burl growing on a tree. So if you’re walking along a forest path and suddenly the air around you smells like potatoes in a damp root cellar, you’d better run. Don’t stop and look around. You’d better haul ass.

  She lived in Suvikylä before the apartment buildings and town houses and rich folks’ homes at the end of Patteriniemi Road, and she loathes them all. The buildings are too straight and square, and their walls echo everything back at her. She trudges across yards, but only when it’s dark, moving slowly and hunched over as if all her muscles were wracked by uncontrollable spasms.

  But in the woods she can hold her breath for an hour. Sometimes she lies down so still that moss spreads across her shoulders and maggots squirm their way into her mouth, thinking, This ripe carcass here is a real treat. When she coughs, maggots shoot out of her mouth.

  One time, the son of that gypsy family, the Hagerts, was walking home drunk along the seashore when he spotted a burl on a tree. He was sure the burl hadn’t been there before. “Hey!” he called out. “Don’t you be hiding from me or I’ll choke you like a rat.” The burl didn’t move, so this Hagert boy pulled a knife out of his boot, sat down on the side of the road, and waited. He woke up the next morning with a crumpled piece of paper stuffed in his mouth. As he pulled it out, three baby teeth fell out of the folds. On the paper was a message: Rokelou yike a chat.

  Afterward, no Suvikylä gypsy ever walked after dusk. They all rushed to the parking lot and piled into an old Mercedes, glowering at people through fogged-up windows as they drove off.

  Granny Hatchet despises electric lights. She loathes them. At night, in the dark, you can hear her shrieking and cursing. The noise is frightful—she sounds like a woman who has lost her voice but is still forcing herself to keep on screaming.

  She hacks at rotten trees with her hatchet and yanks moss off rocks as she scurries by. She nails squirrels onto tree stumps, leaving their little skeletons for berry pickers to find in the fall. When she sees a robin’s nest, she whacks at it until only bloodied feathers remain.

  She won’t tolerate any sort of screwing around on her land. Should she catch you making out on her property, she won’t forget until your shameful deeds are settled with blood the color of an overripe lingonberry.

  She drinks brown sewage water straight out of the canal and uses it to brew coffee in an old pot. She has at least a thousand glass jars in her cellar, all filled with what looks like black milk. That’s why her tongue is always so black. Nobody knows what the
black milk actually is, but it keeps her alive. She never gets sick, not even when she eats poisonous white amanita mushrooms and weaves ropes out of live adders.

  Someone saw her dragging a boat in the canal one misty morning with one of those ropes made of adders, and the boat brimmed with a thousand live adders. A human child was seen struggling underneath the pile of snakes, but nobody saw the child’s face.

  She won’t set foot in that boat herself, no way, because she’s afraid of water—except the shallow water in the canal and the sewage water she drinks. She also won’t wet her feet in the sea, not even if the shore were on fire. The sea is her enemy. She can’t even stand its smell. Yet she stays near the shore and won’t leave. The Devil only knows why.

  Sometimes when dusk falls, she pretends to be a little girl. She squeezes her bones into her body’s cavities and slumps to look shorter. She hides her hatchet between rocks and walks straight up to fishermen on the shore, cooing to them in a child-like voice that there’s some fine pussy available and nobody else ever needs to know.

  Those who have talked about this have described her pussy looking like a sucking mouth that mumbles and smacks its lips. If you have sex with her, you end up going to the hospital, where they won’t be able to recognize the weird bacteria they see under the microscope.

  When the first Somalis moved into the apartment buildings, you could hear her hissing at the edge of the woods and parking lots after it got dark. When the first girl was delivered to the Granny, she kept her alive and wondered what the hell this is, this thing that’s darker than her sewage-water coffee. She tore the girl’s scarf off and allowed the wind to press it to her own face, and then she just stood there blindly facing the sea, probably smelling the bazaars from distant lands. She stood like that for so long that the girl slipped away. Granny’s taken many others since her, and now she knows that inside, their hearts are all the same color. They all turn black and tender. They all taste the same as her gums gnaw on them.

  Somalis are not safe.

  Arabs are not safe.

  If you don’t respect her or leave gifts for her at the peninsula, then you are not safe, no matter what your religion makes you believe.

  If you’re home alone or your parents are out singing karaoke, she will use her master key made out of animal bones to let herself into the stairwell and ring your doorbell. You’ll see a police officer through the peephole, but when you open the door there she’ll be, sticking her tongue out at you.

  And then it’s curtains.

  No one’s safe, except the gypsies.

  Maybe that Hagert kid made a pact with her.

  Rokelou yike a chat.

  Nobody knows what she meant by that. Maybe it was her idea of a joke.

  Or maybe she killed the entire Hagert family. After all, they each disappeared one by one. Some say they moved, but who knows—maybe their hearts are buried in the potato patch.

  Usually, though, she kills kids who have wandered off the beaten path. Kids whose heads are filled with ideas they’ve learned from the Internet or their teachers. Kids who think they can snoop around.

  When she crawls on the rocks at the seashore, she pauses for a second, twists back and forth like reeds, and smells the air with her toothless mouth wide open, breath steaming out of her.

  And when she’s really excited she lets her hatchet fly at boulders, the blade sparking as it scrapes the rock face. One time a rod of light was seen in the forest during a thunderstorm. The adults claimed it was ball lightning, but what do they know?

  Do you wonder what color her heart is? That muscle has been twitching and pumping blood for hundreds of years. Her blood is probably thick and sluggish in her veins, like blueberry jam forced into a tube.

  Why is her mouth open?

  Does she smell with her nose and mouth? Does she taste with her nose and mouth?

  And I haven’t even talked about her eyes yet.

  It looks like she’s blind, but she’s not.

  She can see in the dark.

  Or maybe she’s been in Suvikylä for so long that she doesn’t need to see—she knows where everything is. Except anything brand new, like the parking lots and apartment buildings and town houses and the homes owned by the rich. Maybe that’s why she hates them so much. All that evenly laid asphalt, flashing windows, the echoes from the concrete walls.

  Maybe she actually is blind.

  Whatever. I’ve got more important questions.

  Why does she shout at the sea?

  Why does she sing to the sea?

  Why is she out and about during thunderstorms?

  Why hasn’t she left us?

  Is she really guarding something?

  Nobody knows.

  You don’t know.

  All you need to know is that Granny Hatchet kills children. But she means no harm. She only kills those who do wrong. She protects this place. Without her, it would be like anywhere else. This place would be like the Ristinummi neighborhood or Hervanta in Tampere or some slum in east Helsinki.

  I so wish you could hear her wail. She cries like a child whose mother has drowned. Or a mother whose kid has drowned. It sends chills through you.

  So never, ever joke about Granny Hatchet.

  Either take her seriously or don’t talk about her at all.

  Go ahead and laugh at church during a sermon or during your confirmation this summer if the priest can’t roll his r’s or if he’s sniffing his fingers. But you shut your mouth about Granny Hatchet.

  If you tell anyone about her you’ll come to regret it; you’ll regret it even more than the time you cried in front of everyone while you were drunk off your ass or when you accidentally sent your mom a picture of you giving head to a neighbor boy. Granny Hatchet will stick her tongue out at you and then chop you in the back with her hatchet. She’ll bury your heart in the potato patch.

  Just think about Granny Hatchet and how she’ll crouch and dig out your heart in the potato patch. How she’ll remember the good old days and how you know shit about life and how she’s suffered.

  Your heart can’t die, no matter how much she gnaws on it and smacks her toothless gums. Is your soul imprisoned inside that heart? And if it is, what happens to your heart when Granny Hatchet swallows it? Only the Devil knows, but you can’t help thinking about it, can you?

  Sure, try everything once while you’re still young, but you’d better not try that.

  Whatever Granny Hatchet is mourning is too much for you to even comprehend.

  Her insides are so dark that even the blind will beg for light.

  There’s no use in crying once she’s eaten you.

  All you’ll find is the Ever-Devouring Night and the smell of a damp root cellar filled with potatoes.

  Once you’re there it’s too late for regrets.

  All the little brats were dead quiet when the Sermon ended.

  The High Priest’s hatchet landed on the concrete floor with an echoless thud.

  He turned a flashlight on.

  The kids blinked as if they’d just woken up. The High Priest’s raincoat was moss green and torn. The sleeves and the hem were covered in red stains. Everyone knew it was fake blood, but the sight of it was still unsettling.

  The High Priest shone the flashlight on the little brats.

  Six huddled in the light beam. The Sermon forced them to grow up. Their pupils flashed and shrunk. Their adult shadows stretched out on the wall behind them, like six larger and older animals standing behind clumsy pups.

  The High Priest stood up and flailed for a second; his legs had gone numb. His mask almost fell off as he steadied himself.

  The kids lined up to kiss the hatchet. Some, for good luck, ran their tongues along the blade. Someone giggled but stopped abruptly. After the kisses, the High Priest leaned over and whispered a name into each ear—thi
s way the brats will find out which one they’re supposed to keep in check. Nobody knows who is whose Guardian. They’ll only find out if someone makes a mistake and all goes to hell. That’s when the Guardian has to step in to punish the wrongdoer.

  “And nobody talks about this,” the High Priest said. “Ever.”

  They repeated these words together.

  “Nobody talks about this. Ever.”

  “Now go.”

  The High Priest took his seat again and turned the flashlight off. A green afterimage of his raincoat burned into everyone’s retina. It twitched in the air when they blinked their eyes again.

  The kids got up and felt for their way out, bumping in the darkness and complaining about their numb legs until they found the bomb-shelter door. It was heavy and hard to open in the dark. Too many hands were reaching for the handle at the same time. Someone stubbed a toe on the threshold. Another said, “Fuck.” One let out a raspy laugh. The lights in the hallway got turned on. Whoever was last began to close the door.

  Before it closed, the last one out saw the High Priest inside the bomb shelter in a beam of light.

  He was crouched down, looking up. It was clear now that his mask was made of rubber, but even then, right before the door closed shut, it looked like a burl on a dead tree.

  SAGAL YUSUF’S SECRET

  “Well, that was fucked up,” Mira whispered to Sagal as they emerged from the apartment building’s bomb shelter and into the yard.

  Sagal was the only girl who could hold Mira’s hand without it getting all gross and lesbian-y. Others had taken off to the peninsula for a party, even though it was a school night. They had laughed and joked and pretended like they were fine. What the hell did he mean by us being grown up now? But Sagal couldn’t help but feel like she’d woken up from a nightmare. She could tell by the furtive looks on the faces of the others that they felt the same way, too. The rest of them were better at returning to reality than she was.

  They’d all turned to look at Mira, waiting for her reaction. Nobody had dared to say what they’d thought of the Sermon before she said what she thought. But Mira just told others to leave her and Sagal alone. The others always listened to Mira. They envied Sagal because she was the only one who wasn’t afraid to be honest with Mira. She was the only one Mira took care of.