Then something unexpected happens.
There’s a crash and a fall, as if the earth has given way beneath them. A cavern opens up and the water in the cove rushes into it, as does the bow of the boat. As the stern rises into the air, Anne falls with a scream into Olli’s lap. Timi howls in panic and bites Riku’s leg. Riku curses loudly. Leo orders everybody to hold on.
Someone laughs.
Karri.
The others aren’t laughing. They’re lying on the bottom of the boat as it slides with the sludge into the darkness.
A secret passage.
Anne squeezes Olli’s arm and Olli holds the side of the boat with one hand and the girl with the other. He can feel her breast against his arm. They can’t see anything, and the noise of the fall blocks all other sounds.
The trip down seems to take hours, but the powerful M-particles in the secret passages make it impossible to tell; it may all be happening in a matter of minutes. Olli’s world shrinks to a clatter, a thud, a scream, darkness, sliding, tossing, falling and Anne’s aching grip on his arm, until he can no longer remember there ever being anything else.
At some point the boat’s side strikes a rock with a violent shake. Something soft, darker than the surrounding blackness, falls onto Olli, then climbs up him and flies away.
On many nights afterwards, at the border between waking and sleep, that moment returns to him. When it does, he tortures himself by imagining that through the noise he hears panicked barks, followed by a desperate, echoing howl.
They stop. Silence.
Then sound returns and the five children stumble to their feet. The wooden carcass of the boat creaks under their weight.
There’s a dripping of water somewhere.
Olli can hear and feel Anne breathing. As the particles of light begin to collect, diluting the darkness, he sees Leo and Riku looking around, their eyes wide. Anne, in shock, completely forgets to be mocking and self-assured.
Karri is already exploring the place. In the secret passages are many wondrous things, and although the memory of them never lasts the light of day, they’re still worth investigating.
If Olli can trust his eyes, they’ve come to some sort of underground chamber. In the passages, you can never be sure.
He sorts out his mind, which the M-particles have penetrated and muddled, and realizes that Timi is no longer with them.
He’s gone.
*
In the secret passages, it’s dangerous to stop; to keep crawling forward is life itself. The Five learnt that quickly, and as Olli becomes aware of a pain in his back and side, he realizes that he has stopped at that bend in the tunnel to gnaw on his memory like a dog on a bone, and he’s started to forget himself in the process.
In the nick of time, he gets a hold of that self and starts moving again, crawling forward for a time with his head humming empty.
Eventually he finds his name, straggling somewhere behind him, more than half disconnected. He gets hold of his Olliness and continues crawling, starts to collect himself from memories scattered in the dark passageway, and put his life back together one piece at a time.
One of the memories is of one of the numerous times that the Tourula Five returned from under the ground. It follows the earlier memory, but large portions are missing.
In the memory, Olli and the others are crawling, first in the dark, then in the light, although they don’t notice it at first. Finally they realize that they can let their bodies stop crawling, and they look around in stunned silence.
They’re in a large fenced garden. Higher up the slope is a grand, palatial house with pillars like the Greek temples in Olli’s geography book, curved, ornamented windows and some sort of glass pyramid attached to its side, with plants growing in it.
The house makes Olli tremble with excitement. He whispers that it’s exactly the sort of house he wants to live in when he grows up.
Karri turns and looks at him from under his hood, seeming to sniff at the words, trying to see the thoughts behind them.
Anne wrinkles her nose and says sure, it’s a fine house, but too small and modest for her taste. Once she’s rich she’ll be able to buy it for a place to stay whenever she has business in Jyväskylä. But her permanent home will be in France, or maybe Spain.
Leo and Riku chuckle. They don’t take their sister’s plans very seriously.
Then the balcony door opens and the occupant, an old woman, appears.
The Five take to their feet.
As he runs with the others, Olli notices that Timi isn’t with them.
He doesn’t have time to stop and mourn because the mistress of the house is now standing at the ground-floor entrance, in front of the pillars, and next to her is a German shepherd with a booming bark.
The memory ends with them running out to the road in relief, and at the very end Olli turns back to look one more time and sees apples carved into the curved top of an arch.
Olli puts the memory aside. He has to concentrate on crawling and keeping himself together. He thinks and remembers and organizes his thoughts as he turns right and left, up and down in the twists of the passages, making his way by instinct. Some of the memories are wrong and have to be discarded, and even the correct pieces don’t all fit together. But eventually he thinks he’s whole enough to venture to pay attention to what’s outside him.
There’s space around him now.
He stops, wraps his aching arms around his bruised and bloody knees and sits naked in the dark, waiting for the light particles to begin to gather around him.
Eventually he sees something. He’s in some kind of chamber. Or cave.
In the darkness he looks at his hands, his legs, his stomach, his hairy chest, his cold-bitten penis, his sad, muddy testicles and time-battered skin, and is amazed to realize how old he is, how adult, when just a moment ago he was a smooth, slim young boy.
If he could go back to the branch of the passageway he came from maybe he could reach his childhood and stay there…
But he remembers what he has to do: find the girl in the pear-print dress, the woman pianist, and bring her back.
He’s tempted to forget the whole thing, but the task must be very important to him above the ground.
So he gets up and gropes his way forward—until astonishment stops him. There’s a tree growing from the ceiling, upside-down, with branches sagging under a weight of pears.
He reaches out and finds he can touch them. Then his eye falls on two grey boys sitting among the branches, staring at him with pitch-black eyes.
They look at each other for a long time.
Olli recognizes them. Leo and Riku Blomroos.
Then the boys smile and point at their heads. They both have a small, black hole in the middle of their forehead, and a peculiar, thick darkness is seeping out of the holes.
The lips are moving on the one who looks like Leo, and although there’s no sound, Olli understands what he’s saying.
We’re dead now.
When Olli turns to the ghost that looks like Riku, it nods grimly and points at something.
Look over there. Look familiar?
Farther away, Olli sees the remains of Aunt Anna’s boat. He’s been to this place before.
We can’t eat the pears, but you can have one. Take a bite. That’s what she’s doing.
That’s when Olli notices the naked, golden-haired woman sitting on the other side of the tree.
Greta.
She’s tasting pears, which are arranged around her, taking a bite of one and then another, as if she were deciding which one is best to eat.
Her face is filled with utter pleasure.
Olli becomes curious, picks a pear from a branch and warily takes a bite.
A soft flavour spreads through his mouth and his mind fills with living images that are like memories of things that have never happened. They are clear and enthrallingly cinematic and they show him his life as it could have been if he had only made brave, cinematic choices
.
He has to see more, to finish the story. He takes another bite, and another.
When he’s eaten the first pear, he eats a second one, and a third. After that he takes just one or two bites from each fruit.
Every one shows him a different film version of his life. He bites a bitter pear that is a tragic story of survival, filled with illness and misfortune, and spits it out. The next one is sweet and filled with success, glory, riches. Almost all of them have larger-than-life love stories. Some of them are romantic comedies, others portentous melodramas. There are many different women that he’s met during his life, and others that he’s never heard or dreamt of.
He goes through hundreds of lives, forgetting each one as he tastes the next, smiling in the dark. The naked, golden-haired woman is eating pears nearby, but he doesn’t pay her any attention.
There are plenty of pears. The Blomroos brothers drop more for them. What kind of life is this? Good or bad? Sadness, fear, excitement or insane, intoxicating love?
Then, from out of the dark, a dog appears.
A cocker spaniel. It barks at him, growls and shows its teeth.
Timi, he says, testing the name.
The dog recognizes him and its tail wags joyfully, but it still approaches yapping and growling.
He realizes that the dog is looking at the bitten pear in his hand.
He throws the pear away, teeters and falls on his back. There’s something leathery beneath him, something fragile that crunches. Dead birds with delicate bones, he thinks, cringing. Or bats’ carcasses.
As the light particles gather around him, he sees that he was mistaken—he’s lying on umbrellas. There are umbrellas everywhere; the whole floor of the cave is covered with them.
He sits up and takes hold of one of them. It’s the starry-night umbrella that he lost at Sokos department store. It’s not the only one he recognizes—all the umbrellas he’s ever lost seem to be here.
He remembers now that he often saw the dog at the same time that he lost an umbrella.
He shakes his head, looks at Timi for a moment, then pushes him aside and goes back to the pear tree. There are still a lot of pears to taste, regardless of what that ghost dog thinks about it.
Riku and Leo each ply him with pears, their black eyes glittering, dark puffs of air coming out of the openings in their skulls.
Have a taste of this firm little one and tell me what you see!
No, take a bite of this one first. It’s got to be something amazing; look how juicy it is…
Olli chooses the pear Leo is offering. Timi comes back just as he takes a bite, and drops something at his feet.
Olli picks it up. It’s the dome umbrella from thirty years ago. His skin tingles.
Aunt Anna brought this umbrella home from France, and Olli and his girl in her pear-print dress kissed under it as they walked through the streets of Jyväskylä. Their very first kiss was under this umbrella, on the bridge over the Touru, on the first day of the summer they spent together.
It gleams in the dimness with the green light of distant summer.
The ghostly Blomroos brothers grimace and climb as high into the pear tree as they can, as far as the trunk that protrudes from the ceiling of the cave.
Olli and Greta look at the green dome of the umbrella, then at each other, and finally at the dog sitting under the tree with a look of contentment.
Then they look at each other again, and they recognize each other, and embrace.
50
HE’S CRAWLING.
He has what he came for, and now he’s crawling.
They’re both crawling, although it would be so nice to stop and forget themselves in the dark. His body hurts and his mind wants to give in to the M-particles, but the dog is following them, forcing them to keep moving.
The mermaids return and swim around them, sparkling and dancing, and the swirling dance grabs hold of him and spins him wildly. You’re not leaving, are you? Rest here awhile in our arms… We want so badly to kiss you all over… You can’t know how good we can be for you…
He smiles at them but then the dog chases them away. They recoil from the green umbrella he has in his mouth.
The darkness turns to light.
Olli’s battered, dazzled body crawls out into the bright cold, dragging Greta with it.
Gradually their minds and eyes adjust to the world above the ground. They stumble towards the house. It’s a cold morning. The ground is frozen but there’s no snow yet; the garden is still filled with autumn colours. They’re naked and filthy and covered in cuts, scrapes and gashes. They’re shaking uncontrollably. Their arms and legs jerk like clumsy marionettes; their bodies want to keep on crawling.
Olli thinks he hears something, and turns to look. At the place where they’ve come out of the ground stands a black and white cocker spaniel. It seems to have a green umbrella in its mouth. Olli rubs his eyes and looks again, and the dog is gone.
Everything that happened in the secret passage quickly fades and disappears. He knows he followed Greta into the passageway, and that they came back out together. All sorts of vague things linger at the edge of his consciousness. There’s a dog, for example, who has something to do with what happened down there.
Timi?
Olli strains his memory, then gives up and turns to Greta. She’s staring blankly at her dirty feet.
Inside the house Olli fills a hot bath and they clamber into it. When they’ve stopped shaking, he asks her why she went into the secret passageway.
She answers glumly, guiltily, that she has no idea, and asks him to forgive her. “All I remember is that I went downstairs to see if I could still play. Then we were there in the garden and it was horribly cold.”
“Crazy girl,” Olli sighs.
They look at each other for a long time without speaking.
“I wish we could remember what happened down there,” Olli says. “We were there for a long time. And the M-particles were… How do you feel? Any different?”
Greta shrugs.
Silence.
Finally they get out of the bath, dry each other off, go up the stairs and climb under the covers to sleep off their weariness.
“Olli, don’t go to sleep just yet,” Greta says. “Let’s make love first.”
Olli is tired, but he nods, takes her in his arms and kisses her. Then he realizes she’s snuffling, fast asleep.
When he wakes up, it’s evening.
Greta is awake. She’s lying beside him on her back, facing the ceiling, looking at him from a strange angle, out of the corner of her eye.
“What’s wrong?” he asks with a smile from under the blanket, laying his arm across her belly. It’s warm. “Is there a spider on the ceiling?”
Greta tries to smile.
“It’s just that I…” she says in a whisper. “I don’t seem to be able to move.”
51
AFTER EXAMINING GRETA, Dr Oksanen gives her an injection in the arm, strokes her hair, and leads Olli out into the hallway.
Greta watches them, her face peaceful.
“The exposure to cold has worsened Miss Kara’s condition. It’s a shame that it’s come to this,” the doctor mutters. “But mental confusion is a symptom of this illness, and there’s no telling what a patient may do when a spell like this comes over her. Some of her ability to move has returned and she’s calm now, but she’s experiencing arrhythmia and difficulty breathing and her internal organs are beginning to fail. And unfortunately all of these things indicate that her central nervous system seems to be entering its final paralysis. Her condition may change for the better temporarily, but it may also collapse completely at any moment. All I can do is alleviate her pain. I just gave her some morphine. She has a few hours, perhaps a day, or two at most. I’m very sorry.”
Olli bows his head and struggles to understand. “I’m sorry,” he laughs, “but this can’t be how it goes. Why don’t I take her to a hospital? Surely they can help her there?”
&
nbsp; Dr Oksanen lays a hand on Olli’s shoulder and looks at him closely, right in the eye, to be sure that he hears and understands.
“Mr Suominen,” he says emphatically. “Believe me when I say that nothing can be done. Nothing. The end is near, and the only thing left open is what happens before that. Yes, we could take Miss Kara to a hospital, but the strain of that would, I fear, only hasten her end. At least here the two of you can say goodbye to each other in peace. I’ll leave you now and go home. I live just fifteen minutes away, and my phone is always on. Call me if it seems necessary, and I’ll come. But I must tell you again that I can’t do anything for this patient but give her more pain medication if she needs it. There is no hope for her, but there’s enough of life left that while she is alive, something beautiful could still happen.”
When the doctor is gone, Olli goes back to Greta. She beckons him closer. “It doesn’t hurt any more,” she says quietly, and smiles.
“Good,” Olli says. “That’s very good.”
“I heard what the doctor said. We don’t have much more time.”
“No, we don’t.”
Olli can’t bear to look into her eyes.
Greta snorts, grabs his head and turns his face towards her. “My sweet fool,” she whispers. “Look at me while you still can! Let’s get all we can out of the time we have left. To start with, help me get out of this ridiculous nightgown. It’s like some sort of horrible shroud, and I don’t intend to be a corpse until the doctor pronounces me dead. Take off your clothes. Come lie beside me. Touch me. Let’s hold on to each other.”
Olli gets undressed and crawls in next to her, under the covers. Her skin feels cool.
“You’re so warm,” she whispers.
She’s pale and exhausted and her voice is like a fragile instrument, but the green in her eyes begins to burn with frightening power.
“Please kiss me, my darling. And don’t hold back. I won’t break. Kiss me for all the years we should have had together.”
Secret Passages in a Hillside Town Page 27
