The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy

by Johanna Sinisalo

  He saw something else. When the pikes stopped wriggling for a moment he could make out another, dead pike lying at the bottom of the trap. Its head had been gnawed away so much that its white jawbone shone and flashed in the sun. August lost his grip on the lever and the trap fell back into the water with a great splash. Once he had fished the trap out of the water again and tipped the pikes into the boat August was taken aback by the sheer size of the dead pike. It was almost a metre long and its exposed jawbone the size of a fox trap. What a fine addition to his collection that would make! The fish had already begun to decompose and the strong stench caught in August’s nose as he rowed briskly back to the shore. He had never encountered anything like this before: the pikes in the trap had killed and eaten one of their own kind; they were predators, after all.

  As he approached the shore August turned the boat around to back it in beside the jetty. Just then he thought he saw some movement by the corner of the house. He held the oars in the air, gleaming drops of water dripping from them. The oars protruded like a giant wingspan, the boat bobbed on the spot and August carefully examined the shore, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Finally he returned the oars to the water and calmly rowed back to the jetty. Not once did he lower his eyes from the house and the garden. After climbing on to the jetty with the red bucket of fish in his hand he quickened his step. He placed the bucket just in front of the door and bolted round the side of the house. Nothing, no one. August felt his heart relax and he was angry at himself for letting his imagination get the better of him.

  Later that evening August heated up the sauna. He went to the woodshed to collect some logs. The bones were stacked in a neat pile precisely where he had left them: shins, ribs, hips, wrist bones, thigh bones, ankle bones. On top of the pile sat the skull, a hole in its cranium, staring with empty eyes towards the doorway.

  That evening August went to bed early after drinking half a bottle of home brewed beer and eating a handful of fresh blueberries for supper. Again he lay dreaming all night. A giant pike with glorious feathered wings soared through the clouds. In flight it opened its mouth, an enormous contraption, then its jaws would snap shut. The creature flew down and landed on a spruce tree, opened its mouth wide, revealing its teeth – and began to sing. Standing at the base of the tree, August gazed up at the strange creature; even the birds had fallen silent to listen. Then, all of a sudden, the man from the previous night’s dream appeared again. He was running through the forest, leaping across the tufts of blueberries, weaving in and out between the tree trunks. August could hear the man gasping for breath, he could see sweat pouring down his young face, plastering his hair to his forehead. The man was dressed in a soldier’s uniform, the buttons on his jacket were dangling open, his vest was soaked with sweat. He ran stumbling up the gentle hillside, resting every now and then against a pine tree. The man did not appear to see or hear the pike, the giant fish singing its heart out at the top of the spruce, nor did he see August staring silently from the base of the tree. August could see that the soldier was afraid, terrified, every time he looked over his shoulder.

  August awoke with the taste of lead in his mouth, sat up in bed and listened. The silence of the summer’s night hissed around him. August was convinced something had disturbed that calm; a sound, just now, only a moment ago, and wrenched him from his dream world. He sat there listening, his ears pricked, barely daring to breathe. He gradually calmed down, got out of bed and plodded barefoot towards the window. It was already light outside, the dark branches of the apple trees were glimmering, dewdrops sparkled on the spiders’ webs. The lake was utterly calm, thin threads of mist hung here and there amongst the rushes.

  August gave an exhausted yawn, but did not go back to bed. That afternoon, as he was weeding the vegetable patch, he discovered a dead mole. He had always thought of moles as big-boned coulters, but there it lay on the palm of his hand, small and cold as the thick of a chisel. He raised the mole up to eye level and blew back the fur on its head until two small dark points appeared: the mole’s eyes. He lay the animal down and continued weeding. After half an hour he had found a selection of small bones buried in the soil, and two hours later he had discovered the skeletons of eight common moles. Using a watercolour brush he carefully dusted them clean of soil and laid them out on sheets of newspaper. With a few skilful swipes of his knife he quickly skinned the dead mole and looked for a place to display it alongside the other mole skeletons. As he stretched his back the thought occurred to him that he had been growing his vegetables in the moles’ graveyard. Looking out across the lake he imagined himself standing on top of the moles’ catacombs. Their tiny burial chambers extended several metres down, on top of each other, next to each other, and at the foot of each one; deep down, hidden by the black earth, lay a delicate collection of shining white bones.

  Before going to bed that evening August ate a slice of the blueberry pie he had baked. He fell asleep almost as soon as he had lain down and pulled the covers over himself. He could feel the effects of a day in the vegetable patch in his limbs, and the final thought in his head before he fell asleep was the knowledge that he was slowly growing old.

  This night too his dream was lively and vivid. The pike was still sitting up in the tree singing, this time it had piercing mole eyes, and the spruce’s grey bark smelt of dried resin. The soldier had stopped running and was now crouching by the side of a giant boulder, his back against the rock, holding his breath and listening. This time, August too could hear the footsteps approaching over the hillside. He could see the fear in the soldier’s eyes, the throbbing veins in his neck and forehead, the teeth biting into his lower lip, the ribs rising up and down beneath his shirt and rough cotton jacket. As the soldier turned his head to look back in the direction of the footsteps, something at his neck flashed. An identification tag, thought August and suddenly realised that it must have been the clink of the tag hitting the rock that had woken him the night before. He could hear two people approaching, they were marching up the hill side by side. At this the soldier dashed out from behind the rock and darted to the left, straight towards the other giant boulder. August could already see his two pursuers; two soldiers each carrying a rifle. He saw their uniforms, their collar badges. One of them knelt down, cocked his rifle and took aim. August did not hear the shot, but he saw the flash, and imagined the bullet shooting through the air until it pierced the back of the soldier’s head and sent him flying face first in amongst the heather. At this point August began to shout: Don’t shoot, he’s one of your own, for God’s sake don’t shoot your own! But in the dream not a sound passed his lips. The only sound to be heard was the pike’s song pealing out from the top of the tree: there it sat singing, a pike with the eyes of a mole, snapping its gigantic jaws, silencing every bird.

  The following morning August climbed back up the hillside to the place where he had found the skeleton. He got down on his knees and bent over to examine the spot where the skull had lain. He sifted through the cold sand, carefully scrutinising every handful, and discarded the sand in a pile beside him. After digging for a short while he finally found what he was looking for: a small, flat aluminium tag. It could easily have been broken in two, but both halves were still intact. August carefully wiped the tag, rubbing away the sand. He tried to decipher the numbers on the tag, but some of them were so worn away that he could not be sure whether they were in fact zeroes or eights.

  August rushed back to the house, changed into his town clothes, put the tag in his battered brown leather satchel and got into his car. He was gone for two days. On his arrival he parked the car in its usual place in front of the house, went inside, changed into his everyday clothes and reappeared carrying a black bin liner. He walked straight up to the woodshed, placed the skeleton he had found in the forest piece by piece into the bag and lifted it on to his shoulders. He then headed out to the forest, up the hill to the place he had originally discovered the bones, found the place where they had lain and knelt dow
n. He dug for a quarter of an hour, moving the grit and sand with his fingers, lifting it to the side of the hole in his bare, cupped hands. Then he proceeded to empty the contents of the bag, placing the bones one at a time in the freshly dug hole. On top he carefully lay the skull.

  Crouching there on his knees, looking at the hole in the back of the skull, he remembered the clip-clop of footsteps on the lacquered stone floor in the hallway of the archive building: he remembered the somewhat curious expression on the round face of the archivist as he had introduced himself, handed the man the identification tag and asked that he would like to know to whom it had belonged.

  The archivist had soon recovered from his surprise. When he had asked where August had found the tag, August had to explain as precisely as possible the time and place. He decided not to say anything about the skeleton; he simply said he had found it whilst out picking berries.

  ‘This is a tag lost in the war,’ the archivist had explained. ‘It hasn’t even been broken in two.’ Then he told August to go and have a coffee in town whilst he investigated the matter. ‘Come back in an hour.’

  An hour had been more than enough, because when August returned to the archive the assistant was already able to tell him who had originally carried the tag.

  ‘But … don’t you have the same surname?’ he exclaimed after telling August the name of the owner, as the truth had dawned on him.

  August could no longer remember what he had replied to that friendly, unknown person standing in front of him with a mixture of surprise and shock on his face, a small aluminium tag dangling from his right hand; a tag which during the war had dangled around the neck of August’s father. But he did remember that no sooner had he stepped out on to the street than he had decided never even to attempt to find out who was buried in his father’s grave; who was lying there next to his mother.

  The Explorer

  Dr. Klaus Nagel, the director of a remote meteorological station, went missing in the early hours of April 6th. The station was situated on top of a small hill on the outskirts of town. It was a windy night, low clouds drifted across the sky above the houses and the treetops. Between four and six o’clock in the morning it had rained, furrowing small trenches along the dirt track leading up to the station. Behind the station streams of rain water curled their way down the hillside.

  On night shift that evening, the meteorologist Johannes Dagny was waiting to go home. He was sitting drowsily at his desk and staring out into the yard by the light of a small table lamp. Every now and then his head bobbed down to his chest waking him with a start. Trying to stay awake he stood up, stretched his legs and peered outside. Puddles gleamed on the uneven yard and vapour rose from the sand. Raindrops sparkled on the branches of a birch tree growing behind the window. Dagny was waiting for Dr. Nagel, waiting for the headlights of his red Honda to caress the hillside and for his car to splash through the puddles, the crunch of sand beneath its tyres.

  An alarm clock ticked on the table. When the doctor had not appeared by seven o’clock Dagny assumed his colleague had overslept and decided to wake him.

  The telephone rang five times before a sleepy voice answered. It took him a moment to explain the situation to the doctor’s young wife Marianne, who had risen from a deep sleep to answer the telephone. ‘Just a moment,’ she sighed into his ear.

  Some time passed. The morning news could be heard on the radio. Dagny took a spoon and stirred the cold, stagnant coffee in his cup. Birds were chirping in the woods behind the station. He imagined Marianne rousing her husband, handing him the receiver, yawning, stretching her arms, running her fingers through her dark hair. Dagny had only met Marianne once at a reception at the doctor’s house. He would gladly have swapped roles with Nagel and woken up every morning next to a woman like that.

  ‘Hello?’ It was Marianne’s voice. ‘He’s not here, he must be on his way.’

  But Dr. Nagel was not on his way to work. He was not sitting behind the wheel of his Honda, nor was he driving past the town hall nor steering his car on to the main road leading out of the city. After the telephone call Marianne noticed the pile of clothes her husband had laid out for work lying carefully folded on the back of a chair. She slunk out from underneath the warm blankets and pattered barefoot into the kitchen. No one. No one in the hall or in the toilet. Once she had returned to the bedroom and tightened the belt on her dressing gown she noticed a piece of paper propped on her husband’s bedside table. She switched on the small lamp. The note contained a single sentence written in Dr. Nagel’s sharp, angular handwriting: ‘My dear Marianne! I have disappeared from your life in order to get inside your life. Klaus.’

  A few hours later a police constable with a serious expression upon his face was standing in the Nagels’ kitchen asking Marianne if she had the slightest idea what the note might mean. Marianne shook her head. Together they listened to the sounds of policemen searching the apartment: furniture being moved around upstairs, a bookcase being emptied in the living room. Someone coughed in the bathroom. The young constable was visibly uncomfortable. ‘There’s no need to worry, Mrs. Nagel,’ he said trying to comfort the woman standing in front of him and raised his eyes from her brown hair to an unspecified point on the ceiling. ‘We’ll find him.’

  But there the constable was wrong. Dr. Nagel was never found even though the investigation was conducted with great care and a notice of the disappearance was given out to the local media. It seemed that the last confirmed sightings of Dr. Nagel were on April 5th. In the morning he had been at the meteorological station, then at three o’clock the staff on evening shift relieved him and he went home. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened that evening either, Marianne told the police. At eleven o’clock the doctor had kissed her good night, whilst he had stayed in his office reading a book about conquering the North Pole, in which he had been immersed for the past few days. The following morning Mrs. Nagel had woken up to find herself alone in their large double bed.

  For a while the doctor’s disappearance fundamentally shook the lives of those it had affected. Daily routines at the weather station were in upheaval and the normally peaceful working conditions had been shattered. Amongst the maps, monitors, bookshelves and computers swarmed groups of reporters, photographers and newshounds. With powder puffs the police searched the station for fingerprints, of which there were plenty. Time and again Johannes Dagny was required to go over the events of his shift to the press. He saw himself on television and could not stop thinking whether this was what he really looked like in the eyes of other people. Even telling people about the case upturned the life of the generally very conscientious Dagny. He enjoyed a certain sensation of power as he sat in front of journalists thirsting for what he had to say. Each time he recounted it he became more and more excited by his story and soon began to colour it with some choice details: the overnight rain became ‘the flood of the century’, the streams swelled into ‘great currents’ and his boredom and fatigue were a ‘hibernation plagued with strange dreams’.

  The media furore surrounding the case also seemed to affect Marianne. Soon after the disappearance she confined herself to the house and refused to speak to any reporters. The only person she allowed inside was the young constable. His journey home appeared very often to take him past the doctor’s house, rising up on a pine-covered hillside on the outskirts of the city. Almost every day the constable’s car could be seen standing next to Nagel’s red Honda – even late into the evenings, when the blinds had been shut and the moon spilled light down upon the grass.

  The secretiveness of the doctor’s young wife only added fuel to the tabloids’ fire. Information about the Nagels’ failed marriage was leaked to the press. Marianne was painted as a fickle, neglectful woman with an insatiable hunger for men, even after she had married Dr. Nagel – for money, the papers claimed – a man twenty years her senior, killed him and hidden the body.

  Amidst all the fuss, the police investigation was going nowhere. Mariann
e later noticed that her husband’s rucksack and fishing equipment were missing, as well as a change of clothes he used to take on hiking expeditions. For some reason the police guessed that the doctor must have gone off on a night-time ramble. Some even suspected him of sleepwalking, but Marianne assured them that the doctor was not in the habit of wandering around at night; he always slept soundly. The woods around the city were searched thoroughly but to no avail: there was not a trace of Dr. Nagel.

  Several weeks had elapsed since the disappearance before the commotion began to die down. The newspapers were finally forced to think up some new headlines and uncover new revelations. The folder containing all the information on the doctor’s disappearance was moved into a tall metal cupboard in the police archives with the words ‘Unsolved Disappearances’ on the door. No one paid any attention to the fact that the young constable’s car still stood in the Nagels’ driveway every evening. No one seemed interested in the fact that Marianne, who still only rarely left the house, did not look the slightest bit devastated or grief-stricken, but was as radiant as any newly wed bride.

  There was however one person with knowledge of this matter: Dr. Nagel himself. He was only missing inasmuch as he had not yet been found. He was not hiding out in the woods around his house, peering through his binoculars as the silhouettes of his wife and the young constable merged behind the blinds in the light of the window, when dark had fallen outside. Neither was he lurking in the basement or in the garage in amongst sacks of potatoes, jam jars, tool boxes and piles of studded winter tyres, let alone creeping about inside the house at night, dodging furniture in the dark, listening silently from behind the bedroom door.