The Black Tongue

by Marko Hautala

  “Really?” Julia said. She had apparently noticed the glint, too, because her voice was tinged with distress.

  The woman began to walk in jerking motions. They moved out of her way too quickly to be considered polite. She walked next to the front steps of the house, lifted up her skirt, and squatted.

  “I’m taking a piss,” she said over her shoulder.

  “All right,” Julia said, glancing quickly at Samuel. “Go ahead.”

  Their eye contact was brief, but it was enough to dissipate their fears. He saw how Julia was trying hard not to laugh. This would make a great story once they were back on the mainland, where there were people and mopeds and cars.

  “But does it want to leave?”

  The woman spoke to the side of the house while peeing. The screams had stopped.

  “I think it does,” Samuel responded.

  The woman turned her head toward him deliberately.

  “Don’t know about that,” she said. “It’s been so . . . peaceful.”

  So it seems, he thought. Like in a Jehovah’s Witness’s paradise.

  “Let’s go ask,” Julia suggested. “Then we’ll find out.”

  The woman stood up and absentmindedly straightened her dress.

  “Are we allowed to do that?” she asked, looking first at one of them, then at the other.

  “Of course,” Julia said. Samuel could hear she was still about to laugh.

  The woman thought about it for a moment, then walked up the stairs and didn’t say another word.

  “Come on,” Julia whispered and followed the woman.

  Samuel looked one last time at their escape route and followed her. He’d already gotten used to the smell, but as they walked into the villa, it became stronger again. The woman stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at them.

  “I don’t want to open it,” she said.

  “Samuel can open it,” Julia suggested. “Can’t you, Samuel?”

  “Of course,” he said and handed the camera to her. The faster they’d get this done, the better. He reluctantly descended the stairs until he was close enough to the woman for their clothes to touch. That’s when Samuel was no longer amused. They touched for a split second, but even that slight brush electrified his skin. He concentrated on holding the dry heaves back. Someone screamed behind the door again. It was a hoarse voice that couldn’t scream anymore. But now he could distinguish a single word.

  “Please.”

  Samuel yanked at the latch, but it was stuck. He pulled harder. The latch popped up and the door screeched open. The stench was now so overwhelming, he gagged and fell over on his back. An unrecognizable lump rushed out at him from the darkness. All he saw was a dirty face and a gaping mouth.

  “Take me away from here . . .”

  The lump held on to Samuel so tight that his ligaments cracked. The stone stairs pressed into his vertebrae. He was sure he was going to pass out.

  “Take it easy. We’ll get you out of here.”

  Julia’s voice. She had appeared next to Samuel.

  “You’re Maisa, right?” she asked. “You’re going to be all right.”

  The name brought Samuel back from his stupor. He looked at the dirty face and the wide, wild eyes.

  Maisa.

  Speaking the name out loud made her loosen her grip. He pushed Maisa off him and looked around nervously. The woman had disappeared. The hallway was narrow, so it didn’t make sense that she would’ve just vanished.

  “Where did she go?” Samuel asked, leaning against the wall. “Where the hell did she go?”

  He thought about that brief touch and was suddenly afraid that she was right behind him, ready to attack.

  Julia didn’t hear him. She held Maisa by her wrists and tried to calm her down. The girl shook and sniffled in a monotonous tone. The crotch of her light-blue shorts was wet. Her white T-shirt was covered in black stains, as if she’d been pulled through a chimney.

  “We’re leaving now,” Julia said and began to pull her up the stairs. Samuel gladly agreed. Maisa’s feet were unsteady, so he pushed her in front of him. Julia stopped.

  “The camera,” she said down the stairs to him.

  “What about it?” he asked in a desperate voice.

  “I put it down.”

  Julia’s eyes grew wide in panic. Samuel could see the horror on her face, more serious than her response to anything they’d experienced on Bondorff Island so far.

  There were no other options. He cursed and turned around. He walked down two steps and looked for the camera. Not a trace.

  “Find it,” she demanded. “I’ll walk Maisa out of here.”

  “I’m not fucking staying here,” Samuel mumbled, but Julia was already on her way out with Maisa.

  He turned to look at the open door that led into the cellar.

  He felt the air wafting up from the cellar. It was like the worst possible morning breath, and all he saw was pitch-blackness—except one small red dot. Samuel had to squint to make sure he really saw it. In the commotion the camera had been kicked into the cellar, and it was still running. Julia could watch the tape later. It would show either a determined hero marching toward it or a coward trembling at the cellar door. Samuel forced his legs to move. He rushed toward the darkness and its morning breath, his arm extended to grab the camera.

  “Hey, boy.”

  He stopped so abruptly his sneakers slipped on the floor. He almost fell over. He peered into the darkness where the voice had come from.

  “My name is Siiri.”

  “All right,” Samuel responded.

  The ensuing silence tingled along his spine. He realized he was thinking about how the stench of the cellar would stick to his clothes and skin and couldn’t be removed with regular detergent. He’d smell it even when he’d be back at school, and then he’d have to sit at the front of the bus alone, where none of the cool kids ever sat.

  “I’m Samuel,” he whispered into the darkness.

  The camera was so close. It would record everything. He thought he saw a figure behind the camera, but his eyes may have been playing tricks on him.

  “Siiri used to be a beautiful woman,” the voice said.

  It still stammered, but now it was more excited, hurried. The moist s’s hissed. It reminded Samuel of how he and Harri had tried to pronounce song titles from the band Celtic Frost with mouths full of chocolate.

  He didn’t know what to say. So he blurted, “You’re still . . . really beautiful.”

  He thought about the woman squatting next to the stairs outside. The dark, wrinkly skin around her eyes.

  I’m taking a piss.

  “You’re a nice boy,” the woman said. “But I’m no longer beautiful. Can you imagine—my hair used to be completely red.”

  But her hair was still red. Hadn’t she looked at herself in the mirror lately?

  “That does not matter anymore, because I’ve seen something so beautiful that everything else has become meaningless.”

  “I see.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to see it, too?”

  “See what?”

  “My soul.”

  Now Samuel could clearly discern a pale shape in the darkness. An outstretched arm.

  “Some other time, thanks,” he said. “I have to go. My . . .”

  Girlfriend?

  “. . . friend is waiting.”

  He slowly moved his hand over the camera. Its plastic shell was warm and clammy.

  “I’m sure you’d love to see it,” the woman said.

  “I’m sorry, I just don’t have the time—”

  “It changes color when it’s angry or afraid. Can you imagine that?”

  Samuel could not.

  “Do you know what it’s called?”

  He shook his head. Hi
s hand was on the camera. The escape route was wide open behind him.

  “Its name is the Ever-Devouring Night,” the woman said. “I made it up myself.”

  Samuel picked up the camera and flipped the screen closed. He made sure that its light was off. Julia was always careful about conserving battery. The woman didn’t seem to care that he was slowly backing out of the cellar. The outstretched arm remained where it was. It would not grab him.

  The Ever-Devouring Night. Samuel realized he was tasting the words in his mouth. The way the woman said it, the sounds were mixed up, the words melting into each other.

  Theevadevahrahnigh.

  But it was familiar.

  “‘So I see you eye-to-eye,’” Samuel said, “‘the Ever-Devouring Night.’”

  Silence. Then a question.

  “You know that one?”

  “It’s from a poem by Koskenniemi,” he said. “I know it.”

  Another step backward. The outstretched arm floated without a body in the darkness.

  “People still read them?” she asked.

  “What, poems?”

  “Yes, Koskenniemi poems.”

  “I read . . . all sorts of things.”

  The arm remained unnaturally still. Samuel couldn’t help but think it was bait. The darkness pretended to be human and held that arm out like a lure, and he was the fish mesmerized by it.

  “We had to memorize poems at school,” she said.

  Muhmuriz.

  Samuel was still walking backward. He tried to recall what the woman looked like. Maybe she wasn’t such a monster after all. First impressions had merely done her disservice. She was just a lonely woman who read poetry. And her name was Siiri. Samuel had never known anyone called Siiri.

  “I was good at it,” she added. “At memorizing. I only needed to read a passage once and I remembered it, and I read everything I got my hands on. But it wasn’t until down here that I truly understood the words I’d read. That the Ever-Devouring Night exists, that there is a place where a full moon glows over stalks of wheat, that there is a homeland of poetry and truth, where we swim on the surface of the cold eyes of gods forever, and . . .”

  Shuffling. A thick fabric was pulled across the rocks. The outline of the arm became clearer.

  It was obvious he should’ve run. He should’ve taken off and laughed about an old lady squatting and pissing. He should’ve laughed so hard he cried, but something stopped Samuel in his tracks. Something told him that the door behind him would always remain open, that he didn’t need to hurry to go through it, that it would always be there, that those boys on the mainland would always fix their mopeds or ride their buses and think about whether to go to trade school or high school, and of course they’d go to trade school and then order a pizza and see the new Bond movie.

  The hand reached closer.

  “Your friend could join us, too. We’ll be one big family—”

  Her sentence was cut off. Samuel heard heavy sloshing in the darkness. Like deep sighs. The clattering of rocks.

  The hand stopped near his face. Then it pulled back quickly, into the darkness. He jumped and backed away.

  He hadn’t seen the woman, but he knew she had turned to look deeper into the cellar.

  Then he had an alarming thought: how far did the cellar go? The floor under his sneakers didn’t feel like any ordinary floor. The cellar at his grandmother’s house hadn’t sloped downward, and its floor hadn’t been uneven or covered in sharp rocks. Samuel recalled Helge’s stories about caves under the island, like a nest of termites. The pictures of a slimy creature stranded on the coast of Norway, observed by a man coolly smoking a pipe.

  Then another thought. The most ludicrous of them all.

  Could it all be real?

  Was he actually smelling the odor emanating from some creature in its death throes that had woken up from its slumber, moving its limbs only to realize it was still trapped in an unknown hole?

  “Did you hear what I said?” the woman asked.

  “Yeah,” Samuel replied. “But I have to go now.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to take a piss,” he said and turned to clamber up the stairs to the front door. He had taken only two steps when his shirt tightened around his neck and he fell backward. He tried to grab ahold of the wall, but he fell all the way to the floor. He landed on a sharp rock, hitting the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades.

  “Stay,” the woman said into his ear. “Nobody will come looking for you, and we’ll always be—”

  Samuel yanked so hard he tore his shirt. Then he pushed himself up, which was not easy because the ground was slanted and slippery under his sneakers. But he got up and ran up the stairs. The door grew larger and larger until Samuel was outside. In the still, damp air. His stomach was cramping. His entire body jackknifed as he threw up. His ears were ringing. He had a hard time focusing his eyes. But he saw a boat on the shore. A man had gotten out of the boat. He had a fishing reel over his shoulder. He stopped.

  “Hey, boy.”

  Samuel took off running. He sprinted so fast he couldn’t feel his legs. At the shore he didn’t jump from rock to rock, but instead rushed splashing into the sea. His sneakers got stuck in the mud, but he waded onward with the camera above his head, the leaves of the reeds making small cuts in his arms. As soon as he had crossed the water, he took off running again, down the path through the woods, past the garages. He didn’t stop until he reached the yard at home. He fell onto his knees at the sandbox, then onto all fours. He panted like a sick dog.

  Granny Huhtala came over to ask what was wrong.

  Samuel pushed her hand away. It was too similar to the touch he’d felt in the cellar.

  “You smell like an old person, young man,” she said, insulted by his rudeness, and walked away.

  If Granny Huhtala said so, then you really did stink. Any other time Samuel would’ve been worried about who would see him and who would smell him. Now there was no time for that.

  He looked at the sandbox and the crumbled sand castles, and thought about how they existed in the same world as whatever he had just seen and heard only moments ago.

  “Young man stinks of old shit!”

  Granny Huhtala’s shouting in the distance would have been embarrassing at any other time, but now it was meaningless. The sun was shining. An unrecognizable bird sang in the trees. A trash can lid fell with a boom somewhere. An unknown woman’s voice told some children to stop whatever they were doing. Music was playing near the garages. It was some mindless pop tune.

  “Let me, darling, let me come right next to you . . .”

  Samuel looked at his shadow. It was a panting stowaway that had followed him from the cellar. A rotting sea creature had transformed itself into darkness, corrupting sunlight and sand castles in its wake. Their crumbling walls and wind-whipped rounded edges appeared sadder and larger under his cast shadow, creating their own private world. A desert town at night, consumed by time.

  We’ll swim forever on the surface of the cold eyes of gods.

  Samuel thought about living among the sand-castle ruins: they had enough life in them to create a world. He and Julia would walk past that toppled steeple and look up to see the moronically smiling moon.

  “Is everything all right?”

  He stared at the sand castle and muttered an answer. The camera was yanked out of his hands. Samuel couldn’t hold on to it, even if he had wanted to.

  “You hear me?”

  A smack on the head. He turned to look at Julia.

  “Or do you want to play in the sand?”

  Julia’s smile was wider than ever. She had a small cut above her right eye. Probably from a reed.

  “Wasn’t that fucking great?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Say it once more.
To the camera.”

  Samuel looked at the red dot, although he should’ve looked into the lens.

  “It was fucking great.”

  Only then did he turn his gaze to the lens. He observed the convex figure reflected back at him. It could’ve been human, or a hand reaching out in the darkness.

  “You smell a little,” Julia said and held out her hand. It was a hand Samuel wasn’t afraid to hold.

  As the night fell they walked to the cape to look at Bondorff Island.

  “Where is that man now?” Julia asked. It wasn’t actually a question. Neither of them could’ve known.

  There was no point in asking about the woman.

  Lights moved within the villa: glowing flames of candles, then a colder, silver flickering.

  Samuel wrapped his arms around Julia. They both knew it was the woman pacing inside the villa. She walked the empty rooms, performing strange rituals. Maybe she pissed indoors, talked to shadows, didn’t remember the visitors earlier that day.

  “How’s Maisa?” he asked. He’d thought about her all day but had not wanted to ask.

  Julia just shrugged.

  And that was that.

  The lights continued to wander within the Bondorff villa.

  The moon above was pale and partially consumed.

  Maisa woke up to her cell phone ringing. She turned over, annoyed that she’d forgotten to mute the damned thing. Her knuckles brushed against the wooden box under the pillow.

  Her eyes flew open. Maisa grunted and pushed herself out of bed. It was three thirty in the morning. Her steps were unsteady as she navigated toward the glowing phone somewhere in the living room. It was Pasi. Of course it was.

  “What?” she mumbled.

  “Guess where I am?”

  His voice was just a stammering whisper. Maisa heard wind in the background. It made the line rustle as if Pasi were stomping on cardboard boxes while talking on the phone.

  “Downstairs at the front door, where else?” she said. “Go back to the hotel. I’m not letting you in.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  “Come on, not at this hour,” Maisa begged.

  “Here’s a hint,” Pasi whispered.

  A pause.