The Winter Place (33 page)

“So where are they?” Axel said.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” the Keeper said. He shrugged, but not unkindly. “I only know that they aren't on the path anymore. Remember—the
Hiisi decides who can stay on the path and who can leave it. If the Hiisi were to swallow you, you'd be spat back into that dreary little family just in time to be unpopular at school. But where do the dead go?” The Keeper skewed up his face, as though this were a question he'd never considered before. “That's as much a mystery to me as dying used to be to you.” And with that he offered out his left hand, now no more mangled than the rest of him was. Axel took it and pulled himself up. Guilt was settling in his stomach like a bad case of food poisoning, and he felt wobbly on his feet.

Saara took no notice of this conversation. She was peering intently back into the park. “We should be going,” Saara said, shifting her weight anxiously from paw to paw. “We're wasting time, just sitting here. I'm going to—”

The Keeper cut her off with a sigh that crackled through the ember in his pipe, expelling a little spiral of sparks out of the bowl. “I'd rather waste time sitting here than waste it walking around that lake one more damn time,” he said. “And besides, after last night, any of those Frenchies who made it are going to have zero patience for us.”

“I'm not interested in whether they do or they don't,” Saara said. She was so eager to get going that her whole body began to rock, and when she spoke again, it seemed mostly to herself. “Maybe
the boardwalk? Maybe we should check the boardwalk one more time.”

“It won't be any less empty than it was the last time, or the time before that,” the Keeper said. “You know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and—”

“The definition of insanity,” Saara said, wheeling back around on the Keeper with the broad horror of her head, “is interrupting me.”

The two of them went on like that for a while, irritable and bickering, but Axel ignored them. He just stood there, shocked and still in the jagged crater of his old life. And for the first time since he'd encountered the Keeper back in Helsinki, Axel began to seriously consider giving up. He'd come to a point where he could no longer deny that what he was doing had consequences—not just for a handful of eighteenth-century French ghosts, but also for people who were still alive. People who loved him and missed him. The memory of his sister's face, staring at Axel through a bend in the path back at Talvijärvi, straight-up haunted him. And for all the trouble he knew he'd caused, they were no closer to finding Sam than they'd ever been! Instead of clues in his old home, all Axel found was crumbling earth and scraps of garbage. Now it looked more like his Grandpa Paul's disaster of a yard down in the Boils than it did the home where Axel and Tess had grown
up. Axel's mind hit a snag on that last thought. It took him a few moments to realize why.

The Boils.
It wasn't just where Grandpa Paul lived, but where Sam had grown up. Axel used to suspect that part of the reason their family would visit so often was so that his father could get back out into the creeks and springs he remembered from his childhood. Wow. What an idiot he was.

“Guys,” Axel said. Saara had made for the edge of the property, and the Keeper was hobbling after her, still hectoring. “Hey!” he shouted.

“What?” Saara was crossing the road now. She made no indication that she intended to wait for either of them.

“I think I know where my father is,” Axel said.

Saara and the Keeper both stopped in their tracks and turned to stare at him. “Well, hell,” the old man said. “That's a load off my shoulders.”

It was hard to tell how long the three of them walked the path in search of the Boils, but Axel judged it to be at least a full day or two. He hadn't expected it to take that long—after all, the stroll from Talvijärvi to Baldwin was no more than a hundred paces, and a whole
ocean
lay between those places. He thought all he had to do was find the right blaze and follow it to his granddad's home. Simple enough, considering how well Axel knew
the Boils; the sulfury reek of the springwater creeks, the feel of fine white dirt between his toes. The stands of bald cypress and sand pine out behind Grandpa Paul's trailer were nearly as familiar to Axel as the black maples and hemlock trees of Mud Lake Park. And on top of that, he had his father's remembered lectures to guide him—Axel knew more about the home ranges of native hardwoods than was reasonable for anybody his age. But in the end these advantages proved to be worth very little. They weren't on the path five minutes before they got good and lost. Axel spotted a runty juniper down the embankment and followed it to a sudden and unfamiliar hillside. The three of them raced up the hill, and when they reached the top, they had a beautiful view of a little village spilling out of the valley below, all made of adobe and thatch. Talk about a wrong turn—this wasn't the Boils, or even America. Apparently, there was a whole lot of world between New York and Florida.

The reason Axel couldn't tell exactly how long they were lost was that time didn't really exist on the path. That's not to say that everything stood still. Clouds still blew from one end of the sky to the other; it rained and it stopped raining; Axel would get hungry and eat, and later on he would be hungry again. Time
passed
. But that passing didn't mean a whole lot without being tied down
to a specific place. And Axel had misjudged how disorienting it would be to slip from wood to wood, playing hopscotch across the light and dark sides of the planet. He realized, too late, that it was impossible to keep track of time without a watch or a cell phone. The sun burned high one minute, was gone the next, and set sluggishly moments later, like jet lag in a centrifuge. So they stopped and rested when they needed to rest, and they slept when they could no longer help themselves. Tiny days passed in truncated segments; who could say how many of them?

The fact that it was coming up on winter helped a little—even the slightest trace of snow was a clear sign they were going the wrong way. But it wasn't enough. They came close once, stepping from Vermont to the Everglades, only to turn a corner in the bush and come upon the Mud Lake visitors' center again, the glass double doors still shattered. Another time, after hitting a solidly Florida-like vein of muggy warmth, Axel found himself on the banks of a brown stream choked with sleeping hippos and bald-headed storks. Must have taken a wrong turn at the baobab back there. It would have been awesome if the journey was the point, but it wasn't. Axel's dad was out there, somewhere, and he wasn't about to rest until they found him.

His traveling companions didn't do much to
make the time fly, either. You'd think that a major upside to a foot journey with your long-dead mother would be the chance for a little conversation. The chance to get answers to niggling questions, such as: Mom, what's up with the whole secret-grandparents-in-Finland thing? Or: Mom, how to put this . . . ? Having me killed you, didn't it? But Axel had no such luck. For one thing, Saara didn't answer to “Mom,” no matter what form she was in. And for another, she was hardly motherly. Saara was a bear, full of hunger and want, usually stinking of whatever it was she'd just scavenged—garbage or beehive or half-rotten deer. The Keeper was no better. He'd been quiet and gloomy since what happened back at Mud Lake, limping along with his eyes on his boots. He only ever perked up when they heard the Hiisi shambling in the distance, which happened more often than Axel would have liked. The monster had been following them since Baldwin, always lingering just out of sight, making its presence known by the terrified birds that it sent hollering into the sky.

It was evening—or at least it was evening in whatever part of the world they'd just stumbled onto—when the Hiisi finally showed itself. The path had led them to an old rockfall of split granite, overlaid with lichen and yellowing scrub. With no way to go around the slope, they decided to climb,
scrambling up the stones as the sun set into their faces. It wasn't steep, but it was slow going, the Keeper prodding each stone with his stick before setting a foot down. They were nearly at the top when they began to hear noises up there—the crumble and tumble of loose rocks. Saara's nostrils flared, her head bobbing as she tried to catch a scent. Axel had been using Sam's sword as a walking stick, but he raised it now, holding it between himself and whatever was on top of the rise. Then it appeared, a silhouette against the setting sun. The Hiisi sashayed lightly from side to side, its bright mouth crackling. Smoke poured off it, trickling down the granite slope like fog out of an open freezer.

“I think we should go back down,” Saara said.

Difficult to argue with that wisdom. They turned and began to pick their way down the rockfall, keeping an eye over their shoulders. The Hiisi seemed content to just watch. When they got back down to the base of the hill, they found the woods from which they'd come to be completely transformed. There was ice underfoot, and the air was so cold that it felt solid. Up ahead there was a stone archway and beyond that a stand of bluish spruce. “This is fantastic,” the Keeper said, applauding limply, too exhausted to fully commit to his own sarcasm. “This is exactly where we want to be. Absolutely.”

Axel glanced back the way they'd come and saw that the rocky hill was growing steeper. The granite shook itself free of grass and lichen, the slope leaning farther and farther forward until it was standing upright. It took Axel a moment to understand that he was looking at the sheer wall of Erikinlinna. They'd come the fullest of full circles, back to Talvijärvi. He couldn't shake the strange feeling that the Hiisi had herded them here.

“It isn't right,” said a voice, in Finnish. It would have made Axel jump out of his skin if he weren't already so keyed up. It sounded like the voice had come from just outside the castle. Axel crept across the snow and peeked around the ruined archway. There were two men out there, seated on a bench at the far end of the covered picnic area. Both were outfitted in survival gear and neon vests. They each held wooden mugs up to their hooded faces, the steam freezing in their mustaches. After a long pause, the one who had spoken continued. “They should at least be honest with the girl.”

His companion took his time to answer, sipping loudly on whatever was in his mug. “Perhaps they have been,” he said.

“You know they haven't,” the first man said. “You saw her face. She hasn't even considered the possibility.”

The men were wearing skis, the back halves
jutting beneath the bench. Axel glanced out across the much-disturbed snow, where telltale tracks were everywhere. Two grooves, straight as train rails, dotted on either side by the punch holes of ski poles. A lot of people had been through these woods. A lot of people, searching for
him
.

“I suppose,” said the second man. In true Finnish fashion, he seemed to want to use as few words as possible. Nevertheless, their gossip was achieved.

“And how's she going to feel if he doesn't turn up? Or, heaven forbid . . .”

The second man nodded to spare his companion from having to complete the thought. “No worse,” he said.

“No worse?”

“No worse than if she'd been braced for it.” The second man polished off whatever was in his wooden mug. “That's not a thing you can soften. That's as bad as it ever gets.” Only then did it dawn on Axel that these two men were talking about his sister—about how she'd feel if no one found him. Or rather,
when
.

The Keeper joined him at the edge of the archway. “Stick around long enough, and maybe we can go to your funeral,” he whispered. The men on the bench clammed up and looked at each other, cocking their ears into the air.

“What?” the Keeper said, apparently too exhausted to care that he'd almost given them away. “I went to mine. More fun than you'd think.”

“Is someone there?” the first man called. He must have forgotten that his skis were still wedged under the bench, because when he stood, they got tangled up, sending him tumbling forward. His companion rose to help him.

“Shush,” Saara said, approaching as quietly as she could, the snow squealing under her pads.

“Hello?” the first man hollered. He was back on his feet now, held at the elbows by his friend. “Mrs. Kivi, is that you?”

“Lucky guess,” the Keeper whispered. “But not the one they're thinking of.”

“I said shut up!” Saara wagged her head up at the castle roof. “It's still here.”

She was talking about the Hiisi. Axel turned and saw it perched atop the stove-in tower like some kind of magnificently ugly crow, its mouth spilling light down the walls. As though it had ridden the crest of the hill like a wave. The men couldn't seem to see it, but they clearly heard the noises it was making. The Hiisi shifted on its perch, sending chunks of stone tumbling down the tower walls. They landed in the courtyard with a series of big, echoing thuds—clearly the Hiisi was doing this on purpose. The men in the neon vests
kicked their way out of the picnic area and began to approach the castle. “Hello?” they called again. Then, more tentatively, one of them said: “Axel? Axel Fortune?”