The Winter Place (25 page)

“Stupid,” Axel said. “Get on with it.”

Axel hoped he wouldn't run into any of the battling ghosts that he'd seen at the castle, but
just to be on the safe side, he decided to put on his father's chain mail before setting out. He slipped the jangling thing over his layered sweaters, nearly falling over in the process. The chain mail was absurdly heavy, but Axel though it a reasonable burden to bear, given all the ghost arrows and musket balls that had whizzed by him the last time he was in these haunted woods. Then he left the key in the cottage door and stepped out into the cold.

It was slow going. The snow reached his knees as he passed the freestanding sauna, and his chain mail threatened to tip him over with each lunging step. The Hannula place was quiet up ahead, nothing more than the plowed drive to indicate that anybody had been there since the night of the party. As Axel got closer, he could see that Halloween decorations were still pasted on the windows—cardboard skeletons dancing across the glass. He cut behind the house, slipping between the posts that supported the boathouse deck. Axel had been here just over a week ago, but in that short time the shallows had already frozen over. The far shore was so snowbound that it looked like a bank of cloud, and the only real color to be seen was the orange of the stunted pines on their island. And the light green of the lady's nightdress. Because there was a lady on the island.

She was completely still, standing exactly between the two pines. It was hard to be sure at this distance, but it looked like she was barefoot. She had a lot of hair, half of it piled in a loose bun atop her head, the rest standing at ends in a wiry haze. She was staring at him.

Axel had to take a moment. The sun was burning through the trees at the southeast end of the lake, looking like the beginnings of a forest fire, but the moon was still out. It surrendered the far horizon, pierced by the crowns of spruce trees. And it was the moonlight that must have been revealing the swan—revealing the
ghost
—for who she really was. It was Aino, the lady Kari had told him about. The one whose laminated picture hung in the picnic area outside the ruined castle—Talvijärvi's local legend. Axel realized that in all the commotion back at the A-frame, he'd completely forgotten to ask the Keeper about her. More important, he'd forgotten to ask about Väinö, the grief-sick husband who had set out to find her. The one who froze to death inside the castle. Did that mean that Väinö had failed? Or, worse, did it mean that he'd succeeded? Probably not, Axel decided, because Aino certainly looked like she was alone. In another minute or two the moon would die, and she'd go back to being a swan, roosting on an island of fish bones and her
own droppings. Axel suddenly felt very sorry for this lady. It seemed like a bummer of an afterlife.

Aino kept staring as he continued along the shoreline, and just as he was about to turn into the trees, she raised her hand and waved. Not really knowing what else to do, Axel waved back.
Hi there, dead lady.
She went still for a moment, her arm suspended aloft as though held taut by a string. Then her hand started moving again, not side to side, but back and forth. A clumsy, beckoning gesture. The woman took a step forward, lifting a naked foot out of the snow. Her voice glided across the ice, high-pitched and hollow. “Come here,” she was saying.

Oh, hell no. Axel's mom was scary enough, and that was his
mom
. He felt sorry for this Aino lady, stuck all alone on that speck of an island, in this frozen nowhere. But her problems were her own, and he certainly wasn't about to take up any side quests. Axel started to back into the trees. Aino took another step toward him, and another, and before Axel realized what was happening, this half-naked lady with cue-ball eyes and electrified hair was flat-out sprinting across the ice. She was waving her skinny arms over her head, shouting: “Come here! Come
here
!” Axel felt like he couldn't move, as though the weight of his chain mail had suddenly quadrupled. He groped at his sides for
the handle of Sam's sword, but before he could pull it out, Aino disappeared with a wet, reverberating
crunch
.

The dead woman had fallen neatly through the ice, like a nail hammered home in one strike.

Axel ran into the woods. The snow was shallower in there, under the dense canopy of needles, and he was able to pick up some speed. The chain mail bounced across his shoulders, sounding like a rattling jar of pennies. Up ahead there was a fallen tree, and with some difficulty Axel hoisted his heavy metal self over it, squatting for cover on the opposite side. He stayed there for a few minutes, hacking for breath and sweating under the weight of the mail. He strained his ears for any sign that the madwoman might still be chasing him. All he heard was the breeze and the occasional call of songbirds in the treetops. He peeked back over the log and saw nothing but his own scrambling footprints.

When Axel was finally sure that he was alone, he pressed the tip of his sword into the ground like a walking stick and hoisted himself to his feet. But no sooner had he gotten vertical than something struck him, hard, in the middle of his back. Axel dropped his sword and pitched face-first into the snow. He tried to get up but found he couldn't, the mail a leaden blanket over his back.

“This is you, about to die.” Even though he couldn't see him, Axel recognized the Keeper's voice immediately. He heard the grating squeak of gum boots on the snow and felt a sudden closeness beside his ear. The old man's breath stank of tobacco and pine.

“And this is me,” the Keeper said, “eating your idiot face.”

“You didn't have to hit me,” Axel said, still trying to lift himself up. He felt like an overturned turtle. Man, was it embarrassing.

“I suppose I didn't, no,” the Keeper said. He watched Axel writhe for another moment before reaching down to help him. Then, once Axel was upright, the old man stripped the chain mail off him and flung it overhand into the woods. “But I could hardly have made my point any better. If the dead want to hurt you, they'll hurt you, metal pajamas or no. Running away is usually going to be your best bet.”

“But why would Aino want to hurt me?” Axel said, rubbing his still-sore back with his fist. The Keeper had gotten him square between the shoulder blades with the head of his walking stick.

“Why would I know what she wants?” the old man said. “All I could tell you about Aino is that she's lonely and crazy and mean as hell.” The
Keeper's eyebrows arched up slightly. “Tell me . . . how do you know her name, exactly?”

“Our neighbor told us about her,” Axel said. “And besides, her story is pasted up in front of the castle.” He went to retrieve his father's sword from the snow. “And speaking of that, I need to talk to you about her husband, Väinö.”

For a moment it seemed like the Keeper was about to drop his walking stick. Though Axel couldn't tell what was so surprising. “What about him?” the Keeper said.

“For starters, what happened to him? I know that you're that man in the castle. I know that you promised to bring him to Aino and that the Hiisi was trying to stop him. And I know that the spring after he disappeared, they found his body in Erikinlinna.”

For a brief but unmistakable moment, a look of relief flooded across the Keeper's broad face. He swung his leg over the fallen tree trunk and sat, knock-kneed as a cartoon cricket. “You know, I offered that coward everything he wanted,” the Keeper said. “It isn't my fault that he couldn't cope. Drunks ooze nothing more than doubt and fear, and our dear Hiisi gorged upon this.”

“Did the Hiisi kill him?” Axel said.

“Hardly!” The Keeper snorted. “That isn't the Hiisi's style. Remember that the Hiisi keeps order
on the path and in the worlds of the dead. It wanted Väinö to
leave
, but killing him would have been as good as a permanent invitation to
stay
. All it did was frighten him.” The old man removed his hat, casually dusting the snow off it. There were still flowers in the band, but they were limp and shriveled. “The Hiisi got so very big and terrifying that it scared Väinö off the path entirely. He must have decided to find his dead wife the old-fashioned way. Drinking himself silly and falling asleep in the snow. That'll do it every time. As I said, he was a coward, through and through.”

The Keeper put his hat back on, obscuring his rigid lick of red hair. Then he braced his elbows on his knees and rested his chin in the nest of his eight fingers. “This is why you went through all the trouble to sneak up here, I suppose. Burning questions about a pair of country Finns, dead sixty years now? I can't say I see the appeal, but go ahead. Fire away. Would you like to know who attended their funerals?”

Axel hesitated for a moment. It seemed there was something more to this, but what it was he couldn't quite say. Whatever—it couldn't have been as important as Saara. “My mother,” Axel said. “Is she still on the path?”

The Keeper extended his arms out, gesturing at the trees all around them. “I'm afraid so. The
hunt is fruitless, but it continues all the same.”

“You need to bring me to her,” Axel said.

“I do, do I?” The Keeper cocked his head and squinted. “But if I remember correctly, the last time you had a chance to be with Saara, you elected instead to mope. You were so sad that she hadn't come to rescue you from your mundane little orphan drama that you walked right out on her.”

“I know that, but—”

“Tut-tut-tut,” the Keeper cut him off. “It gives me no pleasure to say this, but your last chance was exactly one chance ago. And anyhow, it's not your decision anymore. They've already come to take you away.”

For a moment Axel had zero idea who
they
could have been.

“Jaana,” the Keeper said. “Tess too. You running off really upset them. I'm sure they'll want you to speak with someone. There are specialists, you know, to deal with ruined children. It might be good for you—”

“How do you know?” Axel interrupted. He'd begun to get the distinct sense that this was all nothing but a preamble—that the old man just wanted him to twist a bit. It was plain enough to see that the Keeper was, in fact, delighted that Axel had come back.

“Because I have eyes,” the Keeper said. “They're
just down the path.” He pointed with his mangled hand. At first Axel couldn't see anything in the trees, but he did detect a faint sound—a sort of whining grumble. As the sound grew louder, the spruces seemed to thrum with it. Their trunks began to bend. To shimmer and curl, the way the city park had on that day back at the harbor market. And then, quite suddenly, Axel could see the Kivis' summer place. It wasn't that anything had moved—he hadn't, and the cottage sure as hell hadn't. But nevertheless, there it was, not thirty yards away, through a stretch of airy woodland. The sound was coming from a snowmobile idling out front, hopping and gurgling. The cottage door was wide open, and after a moment Tess appeared on the threshold. “He's been here!” she called to Jaana, who was down on her hands and knees in the snow, scrutinizing footprints. They must have already been well on their way when Jaana called Kalle that morning. Axel had hoped to have most of the daylight, but with that snowmobile and his tracks, he probably didn't have twenty minutes.

Then, as though to prove this wasn't simply a hallucination, Tess noticed him. She'd been scanning the trees and her eyes passed over Axel once before actually processing the fact that he was there. “Hey,” she said, her voice momentarily flattened by surprise. “Hey!” louder now. Tess
raced down the front steps of the cottage and into the woods. But the deeper she went, the more it seemed like she was running
away
from him. The spruce wood folded in upon itself, the trunks rolling over and under one another, obscuring Axel's view of his sister and the Kivis' cottage. Making them far again.