The Winter Place (17 page)

“That's Erikinlinna,” Kari said when he'd asked. It meant, roughly, “Erik's fort.” Or, more promisingly: “Erik's castle.” The way Kari said it was so cool, like a castle was no big deal. Oh, it's just the castle—hundreds of years old, filled with knights' spirits, whatever. Axel couldn't help but grin like a fool. It seemed like everything at Talvijärvi was eminently hauntable. If his life was ever going to get magical, this was the place for it to happen.

“Snacks?” Kari asked, plainly tickled that his little outing seemed to be going well. He opened the cooler to reveal a stash of cold sodas and salmiakki—a kind of Finnish licorice that Sam used to get mailed in from a specialty store in Michigan. It was an acquired taste. Axel and Tess loved it because they'd grown up with it, but their father said it was like chewing on
boiled-down sweat. He ordered it only because he missed Saara and got a kick out of the fact that his kids liked it as much as she used to. Just like he got a kick out of hearing them speak Finnish. What would Sam have thought if he could see the two of them now? Axel suddenly felt something deep inside, lurching for the surface. Tess must have felt it, too, because when she spoke her voice cracked.

“Sure.” Tess coughed. She quickly took a cold cola and handed another to Axel, who held it through his scarf. The three of them sat silently, sipping and snacking. The sun, for all its sluggish rising, shown brightly and clearly now. Down on the far shore, Jaana stepped out of the sauna, ran down the dock, and dove into the frigid water. They were too far away, thank goodness, to tell if she was wearing a skin-tone swimsuit or if, in true Finnish tradition, she was stark naked.

“This place doesn't exactly seem haunted,” Tess said.

“Well, it
is
.” Kari had all the showy enthusiasm of a scoutmaster. He was shivering like mad but seemed gleefully determined to ignore it. “You don't even know. We're at the epicenter.” He pointed meaningfully at the foundation walls.

“What do you mean?” Axel shifted position to get more comfortable and realized that his legs
had gone stiff. They must have just fallen asleep.

“You know what this used to be?” Kari said. “A
still
. There used to be a little hut here, and the woodsmen who lived on the lake would row out to the island to escape their wives and children and get drunk on homemade vodka. That was right after the war, when a lot of people came from the east, because their old homes were now in Russia.” By “the war,” Kari could only have meant the Continuation War, which was what the Finns called their part in World War II—they hadn't been in one since. That made the ruins at least sixty years old. Axel started to get the very beginnings of a bad feeling. The more of this story Kari told, the less promising it sounded.

“You can still see what they used to make the vodka.” Kari nodded at the rusted pots and coiled piping at the corner of the foundation. “The way the story goes is that there was this woodsman named Väinö. He had a beautiful wife named Aino, and he loved her very much. But he also loved to drink. All the money he had, the woodsman put into the still and drank. One summer he even went so far as to sell the family boat. The island wasn't that far away, and he could always paddle out to it on a raft. But it made Aino furious. So she decided to sneak out one night and wreck the still.”

Here Kari paused again, rubbing his fingers
against the foundation. The blackened bricks were weather-pocked, cracked from years of winter and thaw. “She waited for the lake to freeze. Then, after Väinö fell asleep, Aino lit a lantern and walked out across the ice. She'd stolen her husband's wood ax, and she used it to break open all the jars of vodka and to cut the roof and walls to pieces. Nobody knows if she dropped the lantern by accident, or if she was really trying to set the whole building on fire. But either way, the thing went up. Like—
boom
.” Kari cupped his hands in the air and flung them apart.

“So the lady died in the fire?” Tess said.

“Almost,” Kari said, trying his best to look severe. “The explosion woke her husband up, and he saw Aino running away from the burning still, her night coat all in flames. Maybe if it had been later in the season, she'd have had time to get the coat off or jump into the snow. But the ice was still so thin. Aino was going to burn to death. But instead she fell through the ice and drowned. She's been haunting this little island ever since.”

Under normal circumstances Axel totally would have appreciated the breathy, painfully rehearsed flourish with which Kari had ended his story. But as it was he couldn't even muster a smile. Because it was the wrong ghost! Even if Saara were hiding behind a false story, the timeline didn't fit.
Her ghost should be as old as Axel was,
to the day
. This Aino lady, real or not, was a stranger to him. He had no time for her. Axel stood, which took more effort than it should have.

“You could have told us that story back on the dock,” he said, suddenly testy.

Tess looked at her brother, surprised. Kari seemed a little lost. “But I thought . . . Didn't you want to come here?”

Axel said nothing. He bent over and rubbed his hands up and down his legs, trying to rid them of pins and needles.

“And what about the woodsman?” Tess said—a peace offering for poor Kari. “What happened to him?”

“Actually, that's part of the story,” Kari said, glancing at Axel, trying to reel him back in. “Väinö had been a pretty bad drunk before, but after his wife died, he went a little crazy. He started telling people that he'd met a strange man living in the castle. Now, you understand, this was impossible. The castle had no roof or heat, and there was no chance anybody could survive there in the winter. But Väinö insisted. He said that this man had promised to bring him into the underworld and reunite him with his dead wife.”

At these words Axel's head snapped back up, the growing numbness in his legs forgotten.
“You mean
that
castle?” He pointed out across the water, at the emergent little chunk of Erikinlinna.

“That's the one,” Kari said, looking relieved to have Axel aboard once more. “And you know, that's not even the weirdest thing. During this time, Väinö also became obsessed with trolls and goblins. He was convinced that one of them was following him—a
hiisi
, you know? He said that it was guarding the underworld, keeping him from his wife. He even tried to get the villagers to go into the woods and help him kill it. But, of course, nobody took him seriously. So one day he packed his rifle and some clothes and extra food and marched off into the forest all by himself.” Kari paused, but they all knew what was coming next.

“It was the last time anybody ever saw him.”

That certainly seemed consistent with the Keeper's vague warnings about the Hiisi. But it also wasn't reason enough to slow down. “Do you know how to get to Erikinlinna?” Axel asked. “Is it far?”

“It's not,” Kari said. “The shoreline cuts around that way. We could take the boat, but maybe we'd better save that for—”

“Let's go.” Axel straightened up and hoisted himself over the shallow lip of the foundation, trying hard not to show how difficult this had suddenly become. He reached the pine and began to
untie the rowboat. It was only when Axel climbed inside and began to work the oars back into the oarlocks that they realized he meant
now
.

Kari rowed them around a little spit of birch land, bringing the boat ashore onto a bank of yellow grass. The sun had melted away most of the frost from that morning, but it persisted in the retreating shadows of the trees—the outlines of an ice forest drawn across the ground. Kari walked well ahead of them, either because he was getting ready to be done with this little outing or because he had sense enough to give Tess and Axel some space. They lagged out of earshot.

“What's up with you?” his sister said.

“Nothing's up with me,” Axel said, trying his best to keep the effort of walking out of his face. There was no more denying what was happening to him. A bad day was coming, and it was coming fast.

“You're lying,” she said. “And you shouldn't be taking advantage of him like this.” She nodded up at Kari, who was blazing a careful path for them around a big patch of stinging nettles.

“You're the one leading him on, not me,” Axel said. He regretted this even before his mouth closed. His sister missed a step, and in the brief moment before anger flooded her face, he could tell that he'd hurt her. Of course she wasn't
leading Kari on. She only wanted a friend. “You guys don't have to bring me,” Axel added quickly. “I can probably find it by myself from here.”

Tess eyeballed him for a minute and then went to join Kari up ahead. Axel had to push to keep up with them, his legs going rubbery beneath him. There was no question in his mind that the man in the story, the man who lived in the castle, was the Keeper. And he had to find him before the numbness and exhaustion took over. Whenever it came on this quickly, it tended to take its sweet time letting him go again. For all Axel knew, he was looking at two or three useless days, stuck in his little bed in the Kivis' cottage.

It wasn't long before the ruins became visible through the trees ahead. Minas Tirith it sure as hell wasn't—all that remained of Erikinlinna were a pair of low towers flanking a stone archway and beyond that a courtyard filled with stunted trees and rock confetti. It was obvious, even from a distance, that the puny castle had been done up for tourists. There was a covered picnic area out front and shiny new garbage bins with swinging lids. Plaques and posters had been tacked up within the picnic area—a sort of mini-exhibit on the history of the castle. Kari led them here first, pausing by a glass-capped display table that housed a tiny model of Erikinlinna as it was thought to have looked some
eight hundred years ago, bedecked with banners and primed for siege. Stenciled lettering beside the model told of how the castle had been built by the Swedish count Erik Kagg—a boss name, which Axel would have appreciated more if he weren't so focused—and went on to detail how the castle had served as one of the easternmost outposts of the Swedish kingdom. In its long history, Erikinlinna had been seized by the tsar's army, bartered back to Sweden, only to be seized once more. It had served as a rallying point for the White Guard in the Finnish Civil War and a munitions cache during with Winter War with the Soviets. Axel glanced from the model to the crumbling ruin beyond it, wondering how long the Keeper had lived there. After all, if Kari's ghost story was true, the Keeper had already been an old man sixty years ago. But was he as ancient as those towers? How much of this history had he seen?

“Back here,” Kari said, continuing on to the rear of the picnic area. There was another plaque there, bearing a single laminated photograph. Text at the top of the plaque read:
THE FAMOUS GHOST OF TALVIJÄRVI, AND HER MAD HUSBAND.
“What did I tell you?” Kari said, tapping his finger on the picture—a family photo. “Here they are.”

Old, black-and-white portraits have a tendency to be supercreepy, and this one didn't disappoint.
Aino stared out at them over sunken cheeks and a long, squared chin. Her hair was covered by a white shawl, which was tucked neatly behind her ears and flowed loosely down her neck. She wasn't beautiful—not even in that hard-bitten way that people in difficult circumstances can look beautiful. But her husband, Väinö, looked even worse. He stood slightly apart in a patchy suit, both hands shoved deep into his pockets. His face was nothing but a blur—a fleshy gray cloud with diagonal lines for eyes and a dark mess of indistinct hair. Väinö must have turned his head to look at something just as the camera went off, and the unfocused effect made him look just as mad as the little plaque claimed him to be. Between Aino and Väinö was a kid, about Axel's own age. He already seemed braced for what was to come.

“You didn't mention they had a son,” Tess said.

“Oh.” Kari shrugged. “The son isn't really part of the story.”

“He should be,” Tess said. “It makes what his father did even worse. Running off like that.”

“Do you think he ever found her?” Axel asked. Both Kari and Tess turned from the plaque to look at him. “What? You said that he was looking for his wife. Do you think he found her?”

“He was just a crazy drunk, Axel,” Tess said.

“That's right,” Kari said. “And anyway, he died.”

“But I thought you said nobody ever saw him again.”

“Not alive,” Kari said. “They found his body the following spring—he'd frozen to death, in the castle. His family was so angry that they refused to go to his funeral. According to the story, they didn't even want to take his body back.”

Axel wasn't going to lie—that last bit was troubling. He made a note to ask the Keeper about Väinö's fate as soon as he found him and then followed Tess and Kari out of the covered picnic area. They stepped through the arched entrance of Erikinlinna, into a courtyard thickly carpeted with feathers and weeds. A few spruce trees had managed to push their way through the stone-laid floor, and they stretched skyward, their trunks like columns in the big open space. A flock of strange birds seemed to have taken up residence inside the courtyard. Some perched in the lower branches of the spruce trees, stretching their wings. Others peered down at Axel from atop the scant remains of a bombed-out keep. They looked like crows—similar to crows back home but done up in gray jackets and executioner's hoods.