The Black Tongue

by Marko Hautala

  “What are you guarding?”

  Julia had stood up from the couch. Helge glanced at her, then looked outside again. He let out a joyless little laugh.

  “I don’t even know. Nobody knows anymore.”

  He sighed and rubbed his face. His eyes were still hazy from all the alcohol, but his mind was slowly sobering up.

  “Maybe I guarded the island.”

  “Why?” Julia asked.

  “You tell me. It was always so mysterious. Come to think of it, my family was full of secrets. Everyone just dropped hints, and I was supposed to know what to do without anyone telling me outright.”

  They didn’t dare to question him further. They just waited.

  “The Bondorffs used to be fine folk. People of principle. Real patriots. Then things began to go . . . wrong. They became obsessed, even paranoid. That island of theirs is a curious place: some say there are caverns underneath where water flows throughout the year. The Ice Age moved large boulders in such a way that a labyrinth formed beneath the island, like a termite’s nest. You can hide anything under there. Regina von Bondorff began to claim that she had . . .”

  Helge laughed again but didn’t smile. Samuel looked at his hand and the papers it was weighing down. Old biology tests from school. Writing in the margins in a red pen. Helge hadn’t taught for at least the past five years, and yet he was going through his old tests. Samuel paused to think how peculiar this was. It was also strange that the ball lightning hadn’t burned any of the papers. It hadn’t even charred the edges. Helge removed the tests off the top of the pile to reveal black-and-white pictures and yellowed papers full of scribbling in small letters and strange drawings. Helge tossed a photo to Samuel.

  “That’s a picture from the coast of Norway from 1954.”

  The photo wasn’t exactly clear: it seemed to depict a man dressed in a long white coat, leaning over a shapeless mass that had been laid out on black fabric or a tarp. Another man stood next to it, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and smoking a pipe. Whoever had taken the picture had perhaps climbed up onto a ladder for the angle to make sure the creature on the ground would be entirely visible.

  “What’s that?”

  “Architeuthis dux.”

  The reply seemed fittingly strange. Julia was now leaning over to examine the picture.

  “Wow,” she said. “Gross.”

  She was still upset over what had happened to Arvid, but there was already a hint of excitement in her voice.

  “Almost fifteen meters long. They found it dead on the shore. Back then it made headlines all over the world. People have seen even larger ones. During the war there were stories about the creature picking men off their lifeboats when ships were torpedoed. It’s a beast. It holds on to you with its tentacles and pulls you into its mouth, and you can see it . . . Here.”

  Helge’s shaky finger pointed at the photograph.

  “Its mouth looks like a parrot’s beak. The tongue has tiny teeth in it. It cuts any food it eats into fine bits. The esophagus runs through its brain, so it has to chew on the food carefully.”

  Julia gagged. A strange expression had come over Helge’s face, as if he were proud of what he was telling them. She grabbed the photo, looking mildly alert now.

  “You’re telling me this thing lives under the island?” she said.

  Helge looked through her. An unsettling smile spread across his face. Samuel was sure he wouldn’t have recognized Helge from a picture if he had looked like that.

  “Are you?” Julia repeated.

  Helge was knocked out of his reverie. He blinked a couple of times and began to howl in laughter. It startled both of them.

  “Of course not,” he said. He took the photo from Julia and placed it on the table, picture side down.

  “Well, who lives on that island, then?” Samuel asked.

  “I don’t know,” Helge said. “I don’t know if anyone lives there these days. Maybe Raaska is guarding an empty lot. The Bondorffs always stressed how important it was to keep things the way they had been. To them, death didn’t change a thing.”

  The clicking of the grandfather clock. A dead sea monster in the photograph.

  When they left, Helge grabbed Samuel by the arm.

  “Don’t go there,” he whispered.

  Helge never touched anyone. He definitely never squeezed anyone’s arm. Julia was already marching across the yard.

  “The island may be abandoned, but it’s a nasty place,” Helge said. “You will be eighteen in three years. Then you can get the hell out of here.”

  “Come on, we don’t plan on going there,” Samuel said.

  “Some things remain secrets because that’s how it’s meant to be. You’re a young and beautiful boy . . .”

  Samuel yanked his arm away.

  “Just keep your hands to yourself and sober up,” he said.

  He regretted his words immediately but didn’t turn back to apologize.

  Julia was waiting for him at the edge of the woods.

  “You know where we’re going today, right?” she asked when they were out of Helge’s earshot.

  Samuel had a pretty good idea. He thought about Helge’s warning and looked down at his feet, carefully avoiding each tree root and rock.

  “We’re going there right now,” Julia said. “I’m getting my camera. I don’t want to miss another spectacle again, the way I missed that ball lightning.”

  He was about to tell her that they shouldn’t go to the villa when his ears popped. He stopped, then laughed.

  “What is it?” Julia asked.

  The sounds of the woods flooded his head. Then the smells came. The smell of soil and bark, and the mixture of all green living things and all that was decaying. And Julia stood in the middle of it all.

  “Nothing,” Samuel said. “Go get the camera.”

  Pasi called Maisa when she least expected it. She’d actually been certain that the caller was Samuel. What a ludicrous idea. Maisa had begun to carry the newspaper clipping about his disappearance in her pocket. It had only been two years. There was no reason to declare him dead yet. Men under fifty who wanted to take a break from their formulaic lives ran away surprisingly often. There were statistics about this.

  Yet there was Pasi’s name on the screen. Maisa didn’t pick up right away. That gave her two advantages: first, she had time to think about counterarguments; and second, she could create the illusion that she was living a busy life that he was not a part of.

  “Hi there,” Maisa said.

  She pretended to be out of breath and walked out onto her balcony to catch the sounds of life going on around her in the background.

  “Do you know what I’m doing right now?” Pasi asked.

  She could hear that he was either drunk or high or both.

  “I don’t know,” Maisa said. “Braiding your wife’s hair?”

  Pasi laughed. “Even better. I’m waiting for you to come here.”

  “But I’m in Vaasa.”

  “So am I.”

  Maisa jumped. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I’m at Hotel Astor. The town’s oldest hotel. Want to come over for a drink?”

  Maisa turned to look at the motionless reality of the dark courtyard. Under no circumstances should you go, the courtyard seemed to advise her.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  Pasi sat alone in the lobby bar. A deer head was mounted on the wall, along with paintings of men posing with shotguns and dogs. How appropriate for Pasi. Maisa sat down.

  “Praise the Lord,” he said, raising his pint glass.

  “What’s Herodes doing here in the provinces?” Maisa asked and ordered a coffee.

  “What wouldn’t Herodes be doing in the provinces?” Pasi responded.

  He w
as even more wasted than she’d assumed from the phone call.

  “I’m serious. What are you doing here?”

  Pasi slurped his beer and shrugged. “My protégé received a bizarre threat while on a job. What else could I have done? I protect my herd.”

  “Be real with me for once,” Maisa said. “Cut the Jesus act.”

  Pasi pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He clearly wanted to smoke, then remembered that smoking wasn’t allowed in bars anymore. He probably hadn’t been to a bar since the new law passed, limiting his drinking to appearances at faculty or student parties.

  “Fine, no Jesus acts. Carl von Bondorff. Does that name ring a bell?”

  Maisa didn’t answer. “Go on,” she said.

  “Quite an influential fellow from your old haunt. From Suvikylä.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “A former intelligence officer told me that he was an important figure in the area.”

  “I see.”

  The waiter brought Maisa’s coffee and lit a candle at the table. She thanked him and resisted the urge to blow it out.

  “He had some sort of special status in the community,” Pasi continued. “He was allowed to practice”—it was obviously hard for him to swallow his pride—“his religion.”

  “How interesting,” Maisa said. “That doesn’t sound like a ghost story at all. Or like the Yakuza. Or the Nivala BB-gun rituals.”

  “Touché,” Pasi said. “Want to go up to my room?”

  “What for?”

  “To fuck, of course.”

  Maisa laughed. “Only if I can call your wife and ask for tips on how to work on my abs first.”

  Pasi calmly looked straight into her eyes.

  “You have a good case here,” he said. “I’ll support you any way possible.”

  “Only business students, lawyers, and journalists who write sensationalist crap talk about ‘cases.’”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “But I don’t. This is really important to me—it’s not just an anonymous case file. You thought I was making shit up, and you were wrong. Your instincts failed you. And now you’re trying to get a slice of my pie.”

  “Whatever, Maisa, but face it—you need me. Did you know they used the ice-road routes across the sea to bring goods through Sweden? They brought in lead-based poison that would make people go cuckoo. It was entirely against the Geneva Conventions. This Bondorff couple were middlemen in the operation. Top-secret stuff.”

  “And?”

  “And the Bondorffs believed in the mythical idea of the fatherland. The wife was apparently a real Madame Blavatsky. They were cultists, but with an Ostrobothnian flavor thrown into the mix. Children were disciplined without sparing the rod, and anyone snooping around would quickly get their comeuppance. ‘Our dear country Finland, O thee,’ that sort of thing. Have you ever actually stopped to think about the lyrics to that old ‘Citizens’ Song’? They talk about ‘the wonderland of wonders.’ ‘Wake up,’ a Jehovah’s Witness would say.”

  “You’re drunk. I don’t think I can listen to you much longer.”

  Of course Maisa was interested in what Pasi had to say, but she had a headache. Bondorff Island was tangled up in a thick, misty shroud of legends, and it was making her head hurt.

  “I did spend a few hours in the restaurant car on the train ride here, but do you see how lucid my thinking is? Anyway, back to that place, Suvikylä.”

  “What about it?”

  “There were all sorts of wild rumors about the place before the suburban neighborhood was built. An overly zealous bishop from Lapua tried to get the Bondorffs excommunicated, but his higher-ups reminded him that only the Pope had the power to decide such matters. He also had to be reminded that the Finns had been Protestants for quite a long time. Have you ever heard of confusarius maris baltici?”

  Maisa sipped her coffee. “No,” she said coolly. “Tell me more.”

  Pasi smiled and jabbed her with his index finger. “Your eyes betray you. You’ve heard about this!”

  “Just tell me.”

  “A sea monster,” he said. “I had never heard about us Finns having our very own little Nessie. But it’s mentioned over a hundred times in official documents spanning multiple years. The latest police report came from—you guessed it—Carl von Bondorff. Apparently some creepy-crawly was splashing around in the waters of Kvarken. And it was a large one, too. Most likely it was a whale that had lost its way, but of course locals were convinced it was the Leviathan, or at least Iku-Turso straight from the myth in the Kalevala, sent here to ignite the apocalypse. These folks prayed to the sea. And whatever they preached was inspired by Hermes Trismegistus: the road to holiness could only be obtained either through extreme good or extreme evil. Alms for the poor or human sacrifice, either worked—as long as you took it to the absolute extremes. The locals were rumored to opt for sacrifice rather than put in the effort to organize benefit concerts. They dabbled in animal sacrifice at least, but some children went missing, too. Did you know about this?”

  Maisa was sure he could read the answer on her face.

  “And all this while secretly under government protection. So are we in this together or not?” Pasi asked.

  In this together. It meant that Pasi would take credit. He’d fuck his protégé a couple of times and then remember to mention in passing that she was an assistant.

  “I’m only interested in how religions are born in modern times,” Maisa lied.

  Pasi raised his palm like an umbrella against a flood of bullshit. “Don’t fuck with me.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  “Be afraid all you want,” Maisa said. “Feel free to chase headlines with your stories about ‘secretly under government protection.’ Conspiracy theories are your field. At least at the university. I’m serious. There’s not a dishonest bone in my body.”

  Pasi shook his head, convulsing with fake laughter. Maisa knew that jab had hit him where it hurt. Behind his pompous demeanor, Pasi was nothing but a forgotten loser in a small and underfunded department; he was the joke that faculty members from other, sexier disciplines laughed at behind his back all year long, and to his face at the university Christmas parties.

  “Not a dishonest bone in your body, huh?” Pasi took an unnecessarily long drink from his glass. “But we already know how religions are born,” he finally said. “We’ve known this since the beginning of the last century. Who’s interested in researching that anymore?”

  “I don’t know,” Maisa said.

  “You don’t know what?”

  “How religions are born.”

  “Yes, you do. You’ve sat through my lectures. Unless you’ve gone gaga over those Jung quotations. This issue was resolved ages ago, so you’re wasting your time dwelling on it. The prehistory of religion involves apes incapable of speech thinking that thunder and earthquakes were living beings. Just like when our computers don’t cooperate, we tend to instinctually treat them like living beings that need to be punished by a flood of curse words and a couple of quick smacks at the screen.”

  Maisa remembered these examples from the first lecture she’d attended as a naïve freshman: if we stub a toe on a door, our first reaction is to protect the toe by holding it in the air or warming it with our hands. The next reaction for the majority of people is to hit the door or aim other hostile actions toward it, as if the door were a conscious being. But if the source of our discomfort is not a door or a crashing computer, but, let’s say, a tsunami, we don’t react with threats—we react with holy terror. This is completely irrational, but even the most cool-headed of rationalists will follow this route without it ever even registering. “That’s the explanation behind all religious behavior in a nutshell,” Pasi had said under the admiring gaze of freshman girls. “Only a
tiny minority of us is immune to empathetic animism.”

  Naturally, Pasi counted himself among the minority.

  Maisa also recalled her disappointment. She felt like Pasi had cracked open a door that revealed a basic human experience, but had then immediately shut it in her face. He’d even locked the door behind him. Now Maisa felt transported back to that same lecture, except this time she had almost a decade’s worth of confidence and stubbornness to back her up.

  “Apes would scream in terror during a thunderstorm,” Pasi continued. “Throughout the centuries those screams became ritualistic, until at some point they decided that whenever the sky raged, this was how they should scream. That’s how thunder got its name. That’s how their god got its name. Then the number of gods began to multiply, and someone came up with a theology for them, but that’s the long and short of it. Case closed. That’s what religious studies is all about. If I could turn back time, I’d go to business school, or the theater academy. Money has little room for interpretation. Same with applause. I would happily walk onto a stage every single night just to hear the applause, and occasionally have someone recognize me on the street. So how about it? Want to fuck?”

  Pasi suddenly looked exhausted, his hair streaked with gray. He’d forgotten his wedding ring in the hotel room. The deer head on the wall stared at the two of them with its empty black eyes.

  “No,” Maisa said. “Can I use your informant?”

  He was smirking again. “If you’ll go upstairs with me.”

  “You sound incredibly lewd when you’re a stammering drunk. Come on, I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  They stared at each other. Then Pasi leaned back nonchalantly and glanced at the empty tables around them. A barely audible clink of glass rang from the bar. Neither of them had raised their voices, but their intensity had probably stirred some interest on a quiet night.

  “You’re so like your apes,” Maisa said.