The Winter Place (20 page)

Axel was just about to cross the gravel drive and slip behind the house when he heard an odd popping sound from the boathouse deck, and
something jumped in the brush just behind him. His whole body went stiff. But then somebody on the deck called out: “That's one!” They were all out there, Axel realized. Kalle's friends had lined plastic cider bottles along the railing, and Kalle was taking aim with an air rifle. That jumping sound behind Axel had been a pellet, digging its way into a tree. Axel got down out of the light and the line of fire.

“Schnapps!” a girl on the deck hollered, after Kalle's third miss. It was hard to tell in the gloom, but it looked like her costume was undead Pocahontas. Kalle, who was decked out in a fairly authentic military uniform, obliged her by downing a shot of dark liquid. So it was a drinking game, with weaponry. Splendid.

“How about a turn for jumbo?” Kalle said, his voice sharp and wet after the schnapps. “He's, like, a genius at this.” He turned to the far end of the little gathering, where a pair of slightly smaller silhouettes were perched rigidly on deck chairs. This must have been Kari and Tess. Kari seemed reluctant at first, but then a chant of “Jum-
BO
, Jum-
BO
” went up among Kalle's friends. He stood, took a few steps forward, and shouldered the air rifle. Axel put his hands over the back of his head, but it was unnecessary. Kari struck down one bottle and the next, until they were all lying
label-up in the grass below the deck, urgently bleeding foam. The kids on the deck cheered in a way that didn't seem cheerful, and Kalle offered his brother a victory shot.

“Quit being lame,” he said, as Kari tried to hand it back. So Kari drank it. Or at least he pretended to—a lot of it seemed to be pouring down the sides of his face. Axel inchwormed deeper into the woods. Once he was safely consumed by shadow, he stood and made his way around the house. Kari was a nice guy, and he certainly didn't deserve to be humiliated, especially in front of a girl he so obviously had the hots for. But Axel had more important things to worry about tonight.

Now he'd come to the more difficult part. As Axel remembered it, they'd emerged from the spruce wood about a hundred yards down shore of Kari's place. They'd hit the rocky waterline head-on, so his plan was to count out a hundred lunging steps and then turn a sharp right into the forest. This had seemed fairly simple as he'd worked it out in the cottage, but now Axel couldn't count out ten paces before he had to change direction. The lakeshore was totally untended beyond the Hannula property, and the lichen-smeared boulders and dense patches of thorny bramble seemed arranged expressly to block his path. The horizontal corpses of trees bashed flat by summer
storms were everywhere, shelf fungus on their trunks pointing at the sky like the jagged teeth of upturned saws. Axel lost the lake and found it again. When he judged himself far enough from Kari's place, he turned, pressing his course into the dark.

Actually, a flashlight would have been a good idea. The moonlight was more than adequate along the lakeshore, but it was much darker in the forest. Axel could barely make out the spruce trunks, and all he had to orient himself by were the fading catcalls of Kalle's Finnish rap. Eventually even those sounds died out, but that was at least a sign that he wasn't going in circles. Axel counted out a thousand paces through the dark before realizing that he must have overshot the castle. He decided to trace his way back to the lake and start over, but as Axel turned, he noticed a man in the woods, watching him.

The man was standing a few paces away, peeking out from behind a rotted-out pine. He was short, he had wings, and he was holding a spear. He was so pale that he seemed to glow in the dark, and his bulging eyes were completely white. To hell with that. Axel braced one foot into the dirt and with the other he gave the glowing stranger a hard kick in the knee. The man wavered for a minute before falling backward, his outstretched wings bracing
him above the dirt. But he didn't cry out or writhe around in pain or even try to right himself again. Because he was a statue and Axel was a freaking dope. He took a step forward, feeling stupid and relieved. It was an archangel—probably Michael, given the spear. The stucco statue looked exactly like one that was in Mrs. Ridgeland's collection back home. But what was it doing out here?

Then, as Axel's heartbeat returned to normal, he noticed something behind the statue. There was a brighter clearing beyond the trees, and within it, a house. Odd—he could have sworn that the Kivi cottage and Hannula place were the only ones on this side of the lake. As Axel approached the house, he saw that it was clearly abandoned, the windows dark, caution tape webbed brightly across the doorframe, the whole thing encircled by a perimeter of orange cones. It was a humble little structure, more or less the size of their old A-frame back home. Actually, other than the fact that there was no homemade bivouac looming over the roof, it looked
exactly
like the A-frame. It was too dark inside to see anything through the windows, but the windows themselves looked right, as did the door, which had the exact same dragonhead knocker on it that they had at home. Those things were common enough, sold every year at the ren-faire, but what were the chances that one
would have made its way to Finland? Somewhere between tiny and zero.

Axel circled the house, noticing a little flap cut out of the wall, at ground level, exactly where Bigwig's outdoor hutch would have been. But there was no hutch. There was no garden patch, either. The whole backyard, if you could even call it that, was nothing more than an overturned lather of mud and roots. Treads had torn the ground bare, and a ginormous earthmover seemed to gloat among a skeletal crescent of birch trees. Beside the earthmover was a large metal garbage bin filled with debris. Axel approached the machine and prodded at the treads. It felt very cold and very real. He peeked inside the garbage bin and saw splintered beams and shingling, rain-rotted and funky—the remains of his father's bivouac.
ONONDAGA
COUNTY
was printed on the outside of the bin, and the earthmover had New York plates. It wasn't a replica. It wasn't oddly similar. He'd been waiting all his life for things to make as little sense as this. It was Axel's
house
, somehow transported to the woods of Finland.

Then, screaming. Somebody in the woods was screaming.

Like any ghost hunter worth his salt, Axel ran, not away from this sound, but toward it. The A-frame
seemed to disappear the moment he turned, lost in the ever-enfolding forest. Up ahead the woods thinned, patches of star-pocked night visible between the branches. A few sprigs of cloud had drifted into the sky, obscuring the moon and making the clearing as gloomy as the forest itself. But there was still enough light to see the white stone glow of Erikinlinna. Two stove-in towers loomed on either side of the main archway. And just as it had been the first time Axel saw it, the castle was filled with birds. It was more than just crows—magpies and woodpeckers, owls and doves all wheeled above the sundered courtyard, colliding in the air. Axel was sure that the scream he'd heard was human, but now there was nothing but an apocalypse of squawking. The birds pecked and scratched along the jagged walls, throwing up sprays of feathers as they fought. Some seemed too hurt to fly, perched knock-kneed on the stunted trees, shining darkly with blood. Others were scattered across the roof of the picnic area like tufts of dirty cotton, twisted and still.

And it wasn't even just birds—a reindeer came galloping out of the castle archway, its antlers large and ornate as a medieval chandelier. The bleating animal was dive-bombed by a magpie as it went. It was headed right in Axel's direction, making for the shelter of the darker forest. But before it
got close enough to see him, the most terrible, wonderful thing happened. The moon found a hole in the tufted clouds, spilling fire and people into the night. Like God was playing a board game and had swapped all the pieces while his opponents weren't looking. Those weren't birds fighting on the castle walls. They were
people
. All sorts of people—Axel saw armor, war axes, and old-fashioned military uniforms spangled with buttons and epaulets. Suddenly the shouts that he'd heard from a distance were back. There was the flinty pop of antique guns, the airy buzz of arrows, the cutlery-smash of swords. Birds that had just zipped over the wall were suddenly airborne humans in varicolored costume, landing atop the ruined stone like pole-vaulters, met there by Finnish irregulars with wood axes and grenades. It was very clear to Axel that the moonlight had done this—it had revealed these animals for what they truly were. Not simply crows and magpies, but ghosts.

This was happening. This was real.

As the moon came more fully into view, its light spread across the clearing, transforming the reindeer that was running Axel's way into a bearded man in scaled leather armor. He wore a peaked iron helmet with a nose guard and carried a big round shield with a metal spike at the center
of it. Before Axel had a chance to even think the word—Viking—the bearded man shouted and pitched forward into the grass, a little fountain of blood erupting out of the back of his neck. A soldier in a long white trench coat stood in the grass behind the Viking, his blunt machine gun smoking. This man wore a helmet as well, but it was mostly covered by the white hood of his trench coat. Axel recognized the uniform—it was a soldier from the Winter War, fought against the Soviets more than seventy years ago. The Viking crawled a short distance, his blood purpling the grass, his eyes clenched tight as though to shut out the pain. As though he could make it all go away.

And then it all did go away. Quick as could be, the moon was covered again, and there was no longer an officer standing there, his spent weapon smoking, but a magpie, slick as spilled oil. The bearded Viking, dying at Axel's feet, was a reindeer again, kind of adorable actually, and nowhere close to dying. The bodies that had been scattered across the grass, casualties of this carnival fighting, all got up again. The board was cleared, the pieces reset. The reindeer disappeared into the woods, making a sort of delighted coughing sound. The magpie uttered the Finnish equivalent of “Damnation!” And Axel couldn't help it—he
actually laughed. Because these were ghosts! This was a haunted wood with swords and battles and shape-shifting local fauna! It was like Axel had been the one to die—died and gone to heaven. Or at least it seemed that way until the Hiisi appeared.

Maybe it had been trailing him the whole time, waiting for the worst possible moment to show itself. The Hiisi nosed out of the trees beside Axel, tattered padding bristling like mange. The magpie didn't like this one bit, and sounded a horrible squawking alarm. “The kid is back!” he screamed. “And Hiisi is with him!”

Whatever these ghosts thought about this demon, it seemed to be enough to unite old foes. Within moments Axel had both sides of this ass-backward battle flying his way with murder in their eyes. The moon peeked out for all of a second, giving him a view of swords and guns, lances and cavalry. Axel turned heel and sprinted. He wondered if, in non-zombie circumstances, dead people could kill or even hurt living ones. The birds were way faster than him, so he figured he'd know soon enough.

The spruces bounced past, and squawking echoed all around. Up ahead Axel saw the house—his disassembled A-frame. But now there was a light in the window, and the front door was open, jagged threads of caution tape dangling
loose from the frame. A tall, skinny man stood in the doorway. It could just as well have been Axel's father or Grandpa Paul but for the sound of his voice and the words that he shaped it into.

“Moron!” the Keeper shouted. “Inside!”

Axel made for the open door, feathers brushing his neck and shoulders. Someone pecked him hard on the ear, taking out a little triangle of lobe. Not imaginary—that did
not
feel imaginary. Reaching the door, Axel dove in and rolled over the familiar flooring, crashing into something like a warm shag couch. The Keeper slammed the door shut behind them, bracing his shoulder against it as the birds hurled themselves into the wood.

“Idiot,” the Keeper said, fumbling with the dead bolt as he pressed back against the birds. “A whole week I've been waiting, and when you finally show up, you bring these psychopaths with you?”

Funny that he said
I've been waiting
and not
we've been waiting
. Because she was there, too. She was the warm wall of shag that Axel had fallen into. The room was exactly his old living room back home. Except there was no furniture. And where the couch used to be, there was a bear.

T
he Halloween party was still going strong when Kari walked Tess out, a little after midnight. He'd put on a brave face all evening, game and passive as his elder brother made him the butt of every joke, but now Kari's demeanor changed. He sat on the bottom step and cleaned his face with the hem of his shirt. He still smelled of the schnapps that Kalle had forced on him—distilled from pine tar. It made Kari's hair stick to his forehead and gave him the unfortunate odor of barbecue sauce. Tess sat down beside him, leaving a very unambiguous chunk of space between them. The last thing she wanted was for her new—and currently her only—friendship to be crushed under the weight of some groping, kissy misunderstanding. To Kari's credit, he didn't
make a move, though there was no telling if it was due to wisdom, fear, or the particular funk of the moment.