“I’m here,” Sagal said.
“That’s right,” Maisa replied, hugging her harder. “I found you.”
“I’m over here.”
Momentary confusion.
Maisa must’ve heard wrong. The cellar walls echoed oddly, so who knows where the voice came from. She stroked the matted hair in her lap.
That’s what was wrong.
There was no scarf. Just dry, matted hair that was sticking to Maisa’s fingers.
“I’m over here,” Sagal repeated.
The girl’s voice trembled in fear.
It came from the door. Behind Maisa. What sort of trickery was this?
Maisa felt with her hands and touched a piece of fabric riddled with holes. A heaving body. The sobbing against her shoulder. She slowly loosened her grip. The head was still resting on her shoulder.
“Then who is—?” she asked the darkness.
Sobbing.
Movement.
Whoever it was, it was in tears. Who cares if it had once been a hysterical teenage girl. But something was wrong. The tears were held back, as if someone were trying hard not to cry.
Or laugh.
The darkness shuffled. Changed.
The muddy wave was gathering in force.
“Over here,” Sagal whispered, far away.
Then someone laughing. Laughing so hard that spittle fell on Maisa’s hand. It was slightly warm.
Maisa struggled to get free, stumbled away, and turned the flashlight back on.
Sagal screamed. It filled the entire cellar, and for a moment it sounded like the walls and rocks themselves were howling. Maisa peed herself but was unable to make a sound. She just stared at the shaking beam of light that revealed a grimacing face in the corner. She gasped for breath, because darkness had turned into water and was slowly blocking her airways, disregarding the protective glow of the light.
The figure stood up. Metal scraped against rock.
When Maisa regained her voice she shrieked.
“Run!”
Seeing Sagal listen to her was barely a comfort. Maisa herself stood paralyzed like prey, the cocksure idiot who had returned to the place where children were killed.
Maybe she had never grown up.
They arrived on Bondorff Island out of breath and scared, carrying a single bag for Julia. Samuel promised he’d go back for his stuff later, including the money he’d saved up in a tin box. The wind was tossing the trees on the island, but the villa and the yard were just as immobile as before.
Julia fell down on the grass first. Samuel gave up and did the same.
“We can’t stay here,” she said, sitting on the grass. “This is no place for people to live.”
“But that woman lives here,” he said, looking at the house. The front door was ajar.
“She told me we could always come back,” he continued. “To live here.”
Julia followed his gaze.
“Shit,” she said and buried her face in her hands. “Why was I ever born?”
Samuel had felt the same way ever since Julia’s dad had called him. Why was he born? Why did he exist? Why did he have to stand at the edge of a deep oblong hole, watching his mother’s coffin descend into the ground and seeing one of the pallbearers accidentally toss the strap into the grave? And after all that, why was he granted a promise of great happiness in the form of Julia just to lose it? How could anyone live to be thirty or older if shit like this was all you got?
The evening was turning into night. Yet they just sat there.
“Oh, no,” Julia whispered and pointed.
Samuel looked toward the rocks they had just used to cross the bay. A human figure wobbled on the opposite shore. It stumbled back and forth, seemingly drunk, and punched at the reeds in its way. Its incomprehensible mewling carried across the bay, but they couldn’t distinguish any words. Until one word rang clear.
“Julia.”
The voice broke, either from panic or rage, or both.
“Dad,” Julia whispered.
They looked at each other with wide eyes.
“Come on,” Samuel said and pulled her up by her hand. They crouched and ran toward the villa, then up the stairs, all the way into the stench of the still air inside. He glanced around, the whites of his eyes shining in the darkness, but didn’t see anyone or hear anything. He almost wished the woman would appear. Anything would have been better than what waited for them outside.
“He saw us,” Julia said, peeking out the window in the door.
Samuel walked up to her. The window was broken, warped, and dirty, but he could easily see Julia’s dad approaching. He stepped clumsily from one rock to another, then jumped into the water and waded the rest of the way in mud, looking like his legs were tied down with iron shackles.
“Julia . . .”
It was the voice of a madman. They could tell no amount of reasoning would get through to him. Now the man was climbing up the shore, almost on all fours. Then he straightened himself.
“Oh, no,” Julia said again. “He has a gun.”
Samuel saw it now, too. He’d never seen anyone brandish a pistol, except on TV or at the starting line of a race. Julia’s dad stood in the middle of the yard, looking toward the door. A stumble, a step to steady himself, more mewling.
“What do we do now?” Julia whispered.
Her dad began to walk toward the door.
“Into the cellar, now,” Samuel said and pulled her with him. They staggered down the stairs.
“He’ll find us here,” Julia protested.
“No, he won’t,” he said, lifting the wooden plank away from the door. “Tunnels. Remember what Helge told us? The island is full of tunnels.”
Julia didn’t seem impressed.
“It stinks,” she said, as if that mattered.
They heard footsteps thumping on the steps outside.
“Let’s go already,” Samuel hissed and pulled Julia into the cellar, closing the door behind them.
They crouched in the darkness right next to each other.
The front door opened.
“Julia?”
There was a moment of silence. Then the steps proceeded farther into the house.
“We could run—”
Samuel covered Julia’s mouth with his hand.
The footsteps boomed back and forth until it was hard to say where they were coming from. Samuel stared at the slit of light above the cellar door, waiting for Mike’s shadow to cover it. When the conversation began, he thought he was hallucinating.
First Julia’s dad said something. Then a woman.
“Are you hearing this?” Samuel whispered.
Julia nodded.
Mike’s voice grew louder. They couldn’t tell individual words apart, but the tone was crystal clear: he was swearing up a storm—“fucking retard,” probably. Samuel’s memory filled in the gaps.
The woman responded with her monotonous, unexcited mumbling. The same way she had recited the Koskenniemi poem.
A gunshot silenced her.
The sound startled them both. They leaned into each other even more. Then it was quiet again. No footsteps, no talking. The darkness enveloped them in cold black ice.
Then that sound.
It at first reminded Samuel of a cat in heat, but as it grew louder it turned into an unrecognizable howling. It made his skin crawl. He thought that if the ball lightning that had crashed into Helge’s cabin had been blessed with the ability to speak, it would’ve sounded exactly like this.
Chaotic footsteps followed, then stumbling, then clanking. Another voice rang out. Julia’s dad was screaming. Cursing. Footsteps boomed now closer to them. The front door flew open and then wind blew in. Footsteps stomped on the stairs outside and then softly on the lawn.
“He’s gone,” Julia whispered.
They stayed hunched over for a while, until Samuel stood up and told her to stay there. He cracked the cellar door open. Nobody there. He didn’t hear a peep. He saw the front door swinging slowly back and forth.
“Wait here,” he whispered into the darkness behind him.
Samuel walked up the stairs. He stopped whenever his shoes made even the slightest creaking noise. At the top of the stairs he turned to look outside.
Julia’s dad was up to his thighs in seawater, wading back to the opposite shore. He was holding his right hand. Samuel didn’t see whether he still had his gun.
Suddenly he detected a thick smoky smell emanating from the house. He followed it deeper into the rooms. The floorboards creaked.
He came to a room full of dusty, old furniture. The walls were covered in paintings in which grave-looking men and women posed in fancy clothes. The wallpaper had peeled off and rolled down where the walls met the ceiling, revealing dark wood beneath.
There was blood on the floor. Bloody handprints. And a hatchet.
Samuel jumped and turned around. He went to check the front door to make sure that Mike wasn’t coming back. He saw a bloodstain in the doorway.
He went back down to the cellar and opened the door.
“He’s gone,” he said.
Julia turned the flashlight on and crouched in the harsh light that illuminated her swollen face.
“He’s too scared to come here,” Samuel said. “We’re safe.”
“How do you know?” she asked. “What happened up there?”
“I’m telling you, we’re safe. I’ll go get some food and my stuff from home. You wait here.”
“The fuck I will!” Julia yelled.
“Your dad won’t be coming back.”
“But that woman is here.”
“She won’t hurt you. She saved you.”
She shook her head. “Take me to Helge’s cabin,” she said. “This is much worse than any—”
“Your dad will find you there.”
“I don’t care, but I know I can’t stay here.”
“All you need to do is—”
Julia began to scream.
Samuel did what he had to do.
“You can’t leave me here!” she yelled.
He pushed Julia back into the cellar and shut the door. He dropped the wooden latch back into its groove.
“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” he said, his lips touching the rough surface of the door.
He could still hear her screaming when he took off running. The scream became shrieking howls, but in his heart Samuel knew Julia would eventually forgive him. Everything would be fine when he got back.
Samuel sprinted until he was past the rocks and the path. He slowed down when the thought of Julia’s dad waiting in ambush popped into his head. He also realized how suspicious his running looked. He thought all kinds of things, yet he kept running.
The gravel near the garages crunched under his shoes. That July night smelled of grass and asphalt that was slowly cooling down. Samuel registered headlights in the corner of his eye as he crossed the street, but he didn’t react. For whatever reason people liked speeding and circling the buildings in their cars at night. Samuel had never cared for cars or understood why he’d need to. This was especially true now, when they had nothing to do with Julia or his plans. Cars belonged to the people he intended to leave behind.
First the world swayed, then it rolled over. Samuel tried to grab ahold of the slick windshield with his palm, but the impact was too sudden and immediate. He had never experienced anything like it, not even when he’d ridden a bike down a hill and crashed, or when he had jumped off the tallest of the diving boards at the swimming pool. He rolled onto the car roof and tumbled down.
As he lay in the street, Samuel expected to feel pain. He wished it would be so intense that the darkness he saw approaching the edge of his vision would be kept at bay. He knew right away that this darkness was like the thunder. It would suffocate him underneath it and cast its shadow on everything, and then something irreversible would happen and nothing that came before would mean anything ever again. His pain would be an anchor, and he’d hold on to its rope until the storm had passed.
Instead he only felt numb. He heard the bass thumping from the car stereo when the doors opened. It was Popeda and their song “Long, Hot Summer.” How fitting.
When the first people to arrive at the scene leaned over Samuel, blocking the sky from his view and asking stupid questions, he wanted to tell them to step aside. He wanted to see the moon and its moronic smile, its left eye. He needed to remember why he was lying there.
Julia is still there, Samuel screamed in his head. I can’t leave Julia—
His scream took over his world, but outside of it his tongue and lips only twitched mutely, as if tiny electric shocks had been routed through them.
There was no pain. Only darkness.
NOBODY TALKS
Sagal ran down the path surrounded by waving reeds and didn’t look back once. She didn’t know whether it was morning or evening, but the light shed by the sun felt odd, cold, and cruel—as if she were on Mars. She wheezed as if her lungs resisted the air she breathed.
Sagal fell over. Her hands sank into the cold, wet mud.
Her father had been right. This wasn’t home. This was a frozen, unfamiliar planet.
She panted and listened.
Nobody was following her. She saw the path curve ahead of her, but the large beech was not yet visible. They’d carried her past it to the island. Sagal had not actually seen it, but she’d grabbed ahold of the tree’s crooked branches with both hands before someone had loosened her grip one finger at a time. Someone had bit her on the thumb, huffing and growling like an animal. Sagal had not had enough time to figure out where they were taking her before she’d had to let go. Only later in the darkness, once her panic had subsided, did she remember the shape of the branches in her hands. The Bondorff villa. The missing children.
She tried to clear her head. She’d been able to do it in the cellar, so why couldn’t she do it now? She was sure someone was waiting for her at the end of the path. They had more pranks up their sleeves.
Sagal stood up and rushed into the reeds. The leaves cut her hands and cheeks, but she was not going to be predictable. She was not going to run straight into their arms. They had probably planned everything. And now they were just listening for her footsteps. Sagal slowed down, moving in the knee-high water and crackling reeds as quietly as she could.
After wading for a while, she stopped.
She should’ve felt the shore under her shoes already. The reed panicles waved in the dim light. Sagal looked around and listened. She heard only dry rustling, like candy wrappers rubbing against each other, the calm lapping of the waves, and the screams of the seagulls.
And a voice. A whispering girl’s voice.
“Sagal,” it said.
She turned her head left and right, trying to locate the source. But what if there was none? In the pitch-black cellar she’d heard so many whispers and murmurs and rustling of clothes and giggling that she couldn’t trust her ears anymore. Sagal had even heard the voices of her father and mother and brother while she was down there, but she always knew they’d come when she was about to fall asleep and hallucinated.
Yet this whisper was now clearer.
Sagal wrapped her fingers around the reeds next to her to keep them still, as if it would stop them from rustling.
“Over here,” the voice said.
She stared right in front of her, listening, until she realized that the day had gotten lighter. So it was morning after all. Relief washed over her. The light would grow, and nothing could hide in the shadows. She just needed to get to the shore. There she could shout as loud as she could, and someone on t
heir way to work would hear her. The smartest thing would be to not walk toward the whisper, because that’s where they waited for her.
Suddenly the wind picked up, and Sagal jumped. She looked at the reeds around her, now waving furiously in the wind, the panicles twirling in little vortices. She thought how Mira and the others were behind this all. They had powers over natural forces on this bizarre planet. It was a ludicrous thought, because she knew only God could command the wind. Sagal waited to hear the whisper again to make sure which way not to go.
The dry, crackling rustle of the reeds grew louder behind her until she heard a tearing, crunching sound. Sagal turned around and held her breath.
Something was moving behind the frantically waving reeds. First Sagal thought it was them—they’d seen where she’d run and simply followed the path of crushed stalks.
But this sound was different. There were no sloshing footsteps. The sound came in waves. She heard the roar of the roiling waters. The tops of the reeds suddenly dropped out of view, as if someone were tugging a large boat through them with forceful jerks.
Sagal faced the sound, frozen in fear. The dawn light had now stripped the reeds of their golden hue, turning them grayish blue.
“Hey!” she yelled. “Who’s there?”
She had to speak to the rumbling sound. She had to do something—anything but just stand there, waiting to see who would appear among the endless bed of reeds.
The sound grew louder as the panicles closer to her were slashed down. The water bubbled and swirled. The waves began to hit Sagal up to her thighs.
“Who’s there?” she whispered.
Her stomach had become a cold pit, radiating its iciness all through her body, her fingers, her toes.
She finally saw movement in the stalks. A dark figure that Sagal couldn’t even describe. There was no boat. No people. For whatever reason she thought of the wind, and how it had transformed into a clumsy beast. Then she thought of the large beech. How someone must’ve cut it down and was now dragging it through the reeds. That was yet another stupid thought. She had to clear her head.
The Black Tongue Page 23
