The Winter Place (24 page)

“Heaven forbid!” the Keeper said, placing his mangled left hand on Axel's shoulder, a gesture that was in no way comforting. “If you want the Hiisi to stop, your choices are simple. You can leave the path and go back to, you know, whatever it was you were planning to do with the rest of your life. Or you can just
start belonging
.”

“Start belonging?” No one had ever told Axel it was that simple.

The Keeper smiled wide, his awful teeth abuzz. “Fake it, son. The only way to really fit in anywhere is simply to decide that you do. Right now you're upsetting the balance.” The Keeper gripped down harder on Axel's shoulder, swaying him forward and back. “But if you can get
both
feet on the path, if you really commit to staying here with your mother and father, then the Hiisi will have no choice but to leave you alone.”

“That's it?” Axel said, sort of surprised.

“Oh, I'm sorry.” The Keeper scowled down at him. “Did I make that sound easy?”

Now Axel held the tarp over his head and scooted back to the tailgate to get a better view of the Hiisi. It still looked more or less like a wheelchair, but it had lost almost all of its padding, like a bird in molt. The tires were nothing but dented
metal rims, toothed with jagged spokes. And the armrests—more like arms now—were twice as long as they should have been, spattered with blood, tufted with sprigs of feather and giblet. There seemed to be a light coming from inside the Hiisi—an electric glow pouring from the gap between the seat and the backrest. It looked kind of like a mouth. The Hiisi matched their speed, cruising at just about sixty miles an hour.

Axel locked his gaze on it and did his best to sort of think in its direction.
Go away,
he thought.
Go away, go away, go away. I am where I'm supposed to be. I am of the path.
When that didn't work, Axel tried saying it aloud. “Leave me alone,” he whispered. “I'm going to go find my mother and father, and there's nothing you can do to stop me.” The Hiisi rolled on, undeterred. There was a bend in the road, and it turned right after them, going up for a moment on one wheel. Axel decided to stick with what worked. Kalle had brought along a cooler of beer, and he reached back to tip it open and pull out a hefty tallboy can. Then Axel popped above the tailgate, took aim, and threw. The can hit the Hiisi right in the middle of its tatty backrest, flipping the thing. It skidded along the road, hit the embankment, and tumbled into the woods.

“Keep coming,” Axel said, “and I'll keep knocking you over.”

It was dark by the time they finally left the highway. A big swing gate spanned the gravel drive to the Hannula property, a mile or so away from the lakeshore. The pickup stopped, and Axel felt the shocks stretch as Kalle got out. He could hear the slushy crunch of footsteps across the gravel, followed by the long complaint of metal hinges. As the gate swung noisily open, Axel tossed himself and his gear over the tailgate. He crouched upon the drive, bathed in the red brake lights, while Kalle returned to the pickup. Then, as it pulled away, Axel slipped into the trees.

To have made it this far was already a great sign. The fact that Kalle hadn't received any frantic calls from Helsinki meant that Axel's family still didn't realize he was missing. He'd lie low in the cottage tonight, and as soon as it was light, he'd find the path and follow it back to Baldwin, all the way back to America and his mom. Really, he ought never to have let her leave in the first place. When Saara stalked out of the A-frame, Axel should have gone right with her. But instead he'd just lain there, all weepy and sorry for himself. Mommy hadn't come to rescue him. And also: Mommy was kind of terrifying. Big deal. She needed help, and so did his dad.
Axel wasn't about to give up on either of them.

He traced his way back up the gravel drive, to where it met the dirt branch off for the Kivis' property. He hadn't brought the key for the cottage—slipping it off Jaana's ring would have been a dead giveaway—but Otso kept a spare in the padlocked hillside cellar. Axel wedged the tip of Sam's sword under the latch and leaned his shoulder into the hobbity door. It gave way without objection, and a minute later Axel had recovered the spare key and unlocked the Kivis' darkened summer place. It was just about as cold inside as it had been in the woods, but he'd have to do without a fire tonight. Smoke or lights would have been plainly visible from the Hannula house.

Axel ate his tinned sardines atop one of the rye crisps and then climbed into bed under a steep drift of blankets. He slept deeply, waking up only once to the feel of rough shag on his cheeks. The curled heft of a brown bear, beside him in the bed. But no, it was only a dream. Which, at this point, made it as real as just about anything else.

Axel's first thought when he woke up was that it was unreasonably, unacceptably cold. In the hours since he'd fallen asleep—how many, he couldn't tell, but it was still dark inside the cottage—every bit of heat had drifted away, vented through cracks
in the walls, sucked down whole by Talvijärvi. His knees shot up to his chest, and he had to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. It was then that Axel had his second thought of the day; it wasn't just too cold, but it was also too
noisy
. There was a faint banging, a metallic jostling, coming from the back door. That must have been what woke him up—the sound of something trying to get in.

Axel's hope that it might be Saara lasted only briefly—if his mother's ghost wanted
in
, then
in
is where she would have been, the door flat beneath her paws like a splintery welcome mat. And besides, he was pretty sure he'd be able to smell her, even through the walls. The jostling stopped, and then Axel heard footsteps. They landed with a strange foamy squeak, tapping out a path around the cottage, toward the front door. That ruled out the Hiisi. After a moment of silence, the banging recommenced—first a few noncommittal knocks and then more vague fumbling. The door puckered as whoever was out there pushed on it. Thank goodness Axel had thought to turn the dead bolt before going to sleep.

“No, ma'am,” came a muffled voice from outside. “It's still locked.” It was Kalle. The fact that Axel had heard only one set of footsteps meant Kalle must be on the phone—no doubt talking to
Jaana, seething in Helsinki. He could only imagine how pissed his grandmother was. There was a long pause as Kalle listened to whatever Jaana had to say. “It really doesn't look like it,” he said finally. “But I'll check.”

Kalle's steps continued a little farther, followed by the squeal of a glove against glass. That's why it was so dark in the cottage, Axel realized, not to mention so ungodly cold. An early snowfall had blanketed Talvijärvi overnight, crusting the windows. Fuzzy light began to leak into the entryway, that particular blue of predawn, enhanced and reflected by the snow. A moment later the soft glow was sliced open by a yellow flashlight beam. Axel could make out Kalle's dark head pressed up against the window as he searched inside. From that angle, Kalle could see half of the living room and straight into the kitchen. But from the next window he'd have a direct view of Axel, freezing and pathetic. Axel waited until the beam shut off. Then he shimmied silently to the far side of the bed and rolled off the edge, clutching all the blankets to his chest as he did so, stripping the mattress bare. Kalle scraped the snow from the second window and raked the mattress with light. Then he switched his flashlight off.

“It's totally empty,” Kalle said—Jaana must have been holding this whole time. “And it doesn't
look like anyone's been here since you left. Are you sure you shouldn't check with . . . No? Of course. I understand.” Kalle was quiet for a while, kicking his boots against the back wall, maybe loosing ice from the treads. “That makes sense to me,” he said. “I have to go into town. The contractors are having trouble getting out with the snow, so I promised I'd give them a ride. But while I'm out there, I'll ask if anybody has seen him. It could be he slipped—” Another long pause. “Yes, but really, Mrs. Kivi, I'm sure I would have noticed. He must be in the city. Yes. Absolutely. I'll speak to you soon. You gigantic thunder bitch. Why don't you go make yourself a pain in somebody else's ass for a change?”

Jaana must have already hung up, because there was no way Kalle had the guts for that. He tramped off noisily, muttering. Axel waited for the sound to fade before getting up off the floor and peeking through one of the cleared windows. Dawn still seemed a little ways off, but the confluence of moonlight and snowlight gave him a clear view of the unfolding shoreline. A quilt of fresh powder hung heavy over the sauna roof and gathered in aquamarine clumps over the rocks at water's edge. The snow had given flesh to the nude birch trees, and the spruces held massive handfuls of it aloft, as though offering to return it to the sky. The scene
was totally beautiful and an absolute freaking disaster. This was no dainty autumn dusting; this was a full-on, upstate-caliber dump. The snow wouldn't just slow Axel down—not to mention potentially freeze his toes off as it trickled into his sneakers—it would also betray him. There was no way to go outside without leaving a set of way-conspicuous tracks. He might as well post signs:
This way to the runaway!

Axel's breath fogged the inside of the window and crusted to frost. He gathered the blankets tightly around his shoulders, waiting for Kalle to disappear. Before long he could see the faint burn of headlamps through the trees, followed by the rasping protest of a plow on gravel. Kalle should be gone for a few hours, and Axel figured he had time enough for a quick breakfast before setting out. But when he unzipped his backpack, all he found was a mess of glass and petrified orange froth. The two jars of cloudberry preserves that he'd swiped from Jaana and Otso's pantry had frozen overnight and burst. Worse, he'd placed them right next to the open box of rye crisps, which had made a catcher's mitt for the glass shards and frozen berries. Axel had polished off the sardines the night before, so all that remained were a few tins of sausages. The cans looked bloated as a dead fish, frozen as well. The idea of reconstituted
meat-sicle was fairly revolting, but Axel was starving. He pried at the pull top of one of the cans and gave the contents a lick.

Okay, maybe he wasn't technically starving.

Still wrapped in his blankets, Axel waddled over to the front door, turning the dead bolt and cracking it open. It was quiet outside, save the ruffle of spruces, the dusty thud of snow clods loosed from their branches by the breeze. Standing there, looking out at the frozen world, Axel very nearly lost his nerve. But this was probably due to the cold and his empty stomach—both things that he could fix, at least in the near term. He slipped on his shoes and headed out to the woodpile, tapping the logs clean of powder against the sauna wall and hauling them back into the cottage. There was an iron lever jutting out of the brickwork above the fireplace, and Axel pulled it wide to open up the flue. A few minutes later he was warming his hands before a perfect little fire. He set the open tin of sausages in the crook between two logs. It very quickly went from looking foul to smelling awesome, the sauce liquefying and bubbling about the rims. Axel set his canteen kitty-corner to the fire as well. Tea or warm mead would have been more fitting, but some hot water would do just fine.

It took Axel a little while to realize that
something was wrong. The sausages were partly to blame—he picked them out as they thawed, using a fork to pluck them from the bubbling sauce. Under any other circumstances they would have tasted gross, but on that cold morning they had him nearly grunting with pleasure. But after a while the smell of smoke became too much to ignore. Axel glanced up and saw it thickly pooled about the ceiling. “Oh hell,” he said, sort of matter-of-factly. He jimmied the flue lever to make sure it had gone all the way. He closed it and opened it again. The smoke was coming down quickly now, passing the windowsills, like floodwater in reverse. So much for being warm. Axel opened the door again and charged outside, coughing. The powdery snow turned to slush in his hands and sizzled into a sooty mud as he dumped it atop his proud little fire. It took four trips in and out to quench the thing and another twenty minutes of flapping the door open and shut to air out the smoke. It was when Axel was out there, watching the oily curls disappear into the lightening sky, that he realized his mistake. The chimney lid was still on, topped by a neat, triangular dunce cap of snow.