The Winter Place (28 page)

The battered officers broke off their consultations, and a thickset man with sad blue eyes approached the picnic table. He had a shallow gash across one powdered cheek, though Axel couldn't tell if that had come from the battle or from his
conversation with Saara. The thickset man cleared his throat. “We've agreed on some conditions,” he said in passable English. “If you three promise to leave immediately, we will grant you safe passage back to the edge of the wood. You can take the path to your home from there.”

“No,” Saara said. Simple as that.

“But . . . you must.” The officer looked a little desperate. “Him especially.” He pointed at Axel. This gesture whipped up a brief tempest of nodding agreement from the other surviving Frenchmen.

“Il est une menace!”
one grimly proclaimed.

“Il doit être tué. C'est le seul moyen!”
another hissed, fingering the decorative guard of his cavalry sword.

“He's too dangerous,” the thickset officer said.

“Dangerous?” The Keeper let out a startlingly false laugh. “Are we looking at the same kid?” He reached across Saara to pinch Axel around the biceps, little more than a twig of skin and bone. “A danger to himself, maybe.”

The officer waved the Keeper off. “Save your lies for the new dead, serpent.” Then he turned back to Axel. “Please understand me. Your mother, we can't kill. And neither can we kill this charlatan.” At this the Keeper grinned an unhappy grin. “If they're truly intent on staying in our woods,” the officer continued, “then we can't stop them.
They know this. But you . . .” The officer's beautiful blue eyes had become hard and impassive. “It would give us no pleasure to do such a thing. But if that's the only choice we have—if that's the only way we can get the Hiisi to leave us in peace . . . I'm begging you, please don't make it our only choice.”

Saara leaned forward, and the fat officer pulled his fingers away from the picnic table, as though afraid she'd bite them. Her eyes seemed not just to twinkle, but to spark. “If it's just the boy you're worried about, you might as well let
me
stay,” she said.

Axel hardly had time to tell himself that he shouldn't feel hurt by this—that his mother couldn't help it—because at that moment they were all interrupted by a terrible noise from deep within the shadowed parkland. It sounded something like a wheezy elephant, backfilled with static and reverb, drifting in from beyond a grove of young oaks. A single, trumpeting honk. Then there was silence so sharp and wanting that it made the faded sound seem all the worse. The Frenchmen turned out to the trees and began to whisper, tipping powder down the barrels of their weapons. The young soldier—the one who'd captured Axel and the Keeper back at the edge of the lot—took a few steps out across the asphalt, his musket shouldered.

“Do I have to beg you?” the thickset officer whispered. “Because I will.”

Axel was starting to feel a little guilty about this. After all, he had nothing against these people. But he hadn't made the rules, and he'd certainly never asked the Hiisi to start following him. The only choice these Frenchmen were offering him was to give up on finding his father, which wasn't a choice at all. “I'm not leaving,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“Me too,” the officer said.

The oak grove on the far side of the lot had begun to quake, the few leaves that still clung to their branches snapping off and drifting to the earth below. Then a whole tree snapped—a crack like a thunderclap. The big, broken thing tumbled down and crushed the little winterberry bush that they'd hidden behind with Mrs. Ridgeland. The two trees on either side also went down, their trunks twisting to wet ribbons. Axel could see it now, a proper monster at last. It was still the thing it used to be—still just as horrible as that neat little hospice wheelchair, reeking of the false welcome of antiseptic and artificial pine—but it was also something else. The Hiisi had neither legs nor wheels. Neither a snout nor a seat. It was made of padding and metal, of plastic and rubber, of wire and shadow and light.

The young soldier in the lot had enough time to get off a shot, but he simply didn't. He stood there, a white blip atop the asphalt, utterly awestruck. The Hiisi shambled brightly over to him and became for a moment nothing but a gaping blaze of light, a mouth without teeth or lips or a face to be set upon. Then the young soldier was gone, swallowed whole. That was enough to knock the officers out of their terrified stupor. The parking lot crackled with the smoky report of muskets, as the ancient Frenchmen scattered and took up firing positions. The thickset one began shoving the prisoners off the picnic table, which he overturned as a barricade. “Look what you've done,” he kept saying. “Look what you're doing!”

They didn't stand a chance. The Hiisi crab-walked and shimmied, cheeky and patient as smoke. It grabbed one of the men by his capped head, tossing him up with such incredible force that his body simply peeled away like an apple from its stem, flipping into the night sky. The Hiisi hurled a second officer over the roof of the visitors' center, where he was impaled on the novelty Peter Pan weathervane and spun in an absurd, grizzly waltz. A third officer slid past Axel's feet, screaming, held about the ankle by something like a claw and dragged slowly into the glittering nothing of the Hiisi's mouth.

Axel saw that one of the soldiers had dropped his father's sword, and it was lying just a few paces away. He darted out to grab it, meaning to cut the rope binding his mother's wrists. But when Axel turned back, he found that Saara wasn't there anymore. Not knowing what else to do, he dove for cover behind the overturned picnic table, joining the Keeper and the fat officer. It was lucky that he did, because at that very moment a body crashed into the spot where he'd been standing, cratering the fitted flagstones. The body had fallen straight down, as though dropped clean out of the sky. It was the soldier who'd lost his head, Axel realized, completing his return trip to earth.

Where the hell had his mom gone? When Axel peeked around the edge of the picnic table, he could just make out her bobbing ponytail at the far end of the lot, disappearing in the direction of their old A-frame. She must have slipped away while the Hiisi was busy feasting on Frenchmen.

“Nice of her to tell us what the plan was,” the Keeper said, pressing himself into the underside of the picnic table. His look of terror was one of the few honest expressions Axel had ever seen the old man wear. “Maybe now would be a good time to, you know, start fitting in,” the Keeper said.

“I'm trying,” Axel said. Another musket shot burst from the parking lot, followed by a single
fading scream. One by one, the Hiisi was finishing them off. “I'm trying, but I don't know how.”

“Just believe it,” the Keeper said. “You keep telling me this is where you want to be. But it's not me that you've got to convince.”

So Axel tried. He held tight to the hilt of his father's sword, drawing what courage he could from it, and stood. He could see the Hiisi over the rim of the overturned picnic table. The impossible thing twisted, gleeful and gurgling. Its blazing mouth hole opened and closed, and it began to slink closer. Then it stopped, seeming to stare back at him. There was a stretch of sudden and deep stillness.

“Stop,” Axel said. “Stop,” he said again. The Hiisi stayed exactly where it was, sizzling.

“Good boy,” the Keeper said, stepping out from behind the picnic table.

“Be quiet,” Axel told him. He was repeating the word “stop” over and over again in his head and was worried that if he quit—or took his eyes off the awful thing—then it would leap upon them.

The Hiisi leaned forward and then back. It shuffled from side to side but got no closer. Then it spoke. The voice seemed to emerge out of the wood itself—from every branch and wrinkled leaf, from all the mushrooms and the stones—but
there was no question that it belonged to the Hiisi. “Leave,” it said simply.

“I will not,” Axel said, adding this to the chorus in his mind.
I will not leave—I will not leave—I will not leave.

“Go home, or I will take you home,” the Hiisi said, its voice sprouting once again from the trees.

“This is home,” Axel said. “If you take me away from it, I will come back. I will keep coming back.”

The Hiisi paused, seeming to consider this. From the corner of his eye Axel could see that the Keeper had been moving all this while, slowly inching around the picnic table and toward the Hiisi. When the old man spoke again, it was to the monster. “You can hear him as well as I can,” he said. “He can cut his strings. He can be of the path.”

“What is he doing?” whispered the thickset French officer with sad blue eyes. He was standing as well now, gripping the upturned edge of the table.

“I don't know,” Axel whispered back.

The Keeper was just a few steps away from the Hiisi. He held his hands up high and threw his head back, leaving his chest and throat exposed. It was as though the old man were totally unafraid that the Hiisi might do to him what it had done to
the Frenchmen. “He can stay,” he shouted. “And you can keep your order!”

Axel was totally baffled.

The Hiisi leaned over the Keeper, singeing him with its horrible light. “I don't believe him,” said every tree and root and branch in the world. Then, what Axel could describe only as an elbow struck out, whacking the Keeper head over foot like a sack toy. The old man's body flew above the picnic table, crashing through the glass double doors of the Mud Lake visitors' center, knocking stuffed mallards and snow geese from their perches on the walls. Axel didn't watch long enough to see whether or not the Keeper was still moving, because suddenly the picnic table was gone, replaced by a drifting mist of splinters and bolts. The officer was gone, too. Or rather, he was elsewhere—hung like an ornament above Axel's head, held aloft by the Hiisi's sickeningly jointed metal trusses. He was silent as the monster swung him over the cold light of its mouth, seeming to savor the moment before the gulp. Axel would later wish that there were something he could have done for the man. Much later, though. Because at the time, all he could think was
run
.

T
he sharp smell of smoke hit Tess's nostrils the moment she opened the cottage door, crushing any doubt that her brother had been there. A muddle of Axel-size footprints, outlined in melt-water, were stamped across the kitchen floor. Tess followed the prints into the living room, where she found a splatter of ashy mud oozing out of the fireplace grate and over the hearthstone, staining the tasseled edges of the Kivis' rug. A half-empty tin of ruined sausages jutted from the mess, and when Tess reached down to touch it, she found the rim still warm on her fingertips. But Axel wasn't there. His bed was empty, the comforter lying beside it on the floor.

“He must have just left!” Tess shouted as she
stepped back out onto the freezing front stoop. “He can't be far.”

“All the better,” Jaana called back to her. She was down by the sauna, tracing deep-set tracks around the woodpile. “The forecast says it's supposed to get even colder in the afternoon.”

Tess scanned the tree line, looking to see if her brother's footprints led to the outhouse or the hillside cellar. And that's when she saw him. Or rather,
them
, because Axel wasn't alone. Her little brother was right there, staring at her from a small clearing in the birch trees. Sam's replica sword was clenched tightly in Axel's fist, and he had an intense, almost wild look on his face. But there was also a man, standing beside him, just visible at the edge of the clearing. Even before she processed his features, Tess knew in the pit of her stomach that this was the Keeper. He was dressed exactly as he had been back in Baldwin—the quilted duster, the hat and gum boots. He had the same storkish posture that Tess remembered, the same smile like a mouthful of beetles.

Just the sight of the Keeper was enough to bring back everything about that awful night back home, when Tess had lost her dad forever. Actually, it was worse than that, because now there was plenty of guilt in the stew. It was almost enough to paralyze her, right there, on the frozen
stoop of the Kivis' summer cottage. Almost.

“Hey.” Tess shook herself out of her own shock and bounded out into the deep snow. “Hey!” she shouted again. But Axel was gone—more than gone,
erased
—by the time she reached the trees. It was almost like he and the Keeper had never been there in the first place. Tess could see far into the winter-stripped forest, but there was nothing out there other than frozen crests and wavelets of untouched snow. The only footprints were her own, extending back to the Kivis' cottage. What the hell was happening?

“You saw him?” Jaana asked, already at Tess's side.

“I think so.”

“Think?” Jaana took her by the shoulders, the pressure of her grip almost painful through the down jacket.

“I did. I saw him.”
Him
, not
them
, because what could Tess possibly say about the Keeper? Who exactly was it that she'd just seen? The maudlin New York vagabond who'd somehow had a premonition about Sam's death; or the creepy Renaissance Faire carnie who traveled with a disappearing brown bear; or, strangest of all, the ghost shepherd from Axel's story—chaperone to their pissed-off, undead mom? If it sounded that absurd to Tess, how would it sound to Jaana?

“I think he might be trying to go to the castle,” Tess said.

“It isn't far from here,” her grandmother said, high-stepping through the powder, back to their idling snowmobile. “If we don't find him first, we can beat him there.” She and Tess hopped aboard and rocketed out into the woods.