Troll: A Love Story (16 page)

Nesselius was soon attended by a few hundred followers. Especially great weight was given to his words by one Hirvas-Uula, a well-known reindeer-herdsman, who did not personally ally himself to the sect but did come when invited to confirm his sighting of trolls to the congregations. Nesselius in all probability rewarded the herdsman for this with money or drink, as the witness’s statements inevitably stamped him as a miserable sinner himself: he had seen “the forest demon,” according to his own testimony, half-a-dozen times, while hunting hares, for example, though, for the most part, very far off, it is true. In one of the most striking of his tales he described seeing as many as four trolls, working together to drive a wild reindeer onto stony ground to break its leg.

On the basis of the photographs he had seen and the drawings he made from them, Nesselius fashioned a wooden carving, representing a troll, which at the present time is preserved in Ylitornio church (though not for public view). The carving went with him on his preaching tours, and during exalted prayer sessions his assistant set it peering through a door left slightly ajar or from a window and, when it had been observed, snatched it briskly away. This may have powerfully increased the congregation’s sense of sin and Nesselius’ impact.

The statue fraud was disclosed in 1911, and thereafter the congregation soon faded away; but still in the year of his death Nesselius swore that the “Satan” peering from the doors and windows was genuine. The statue, therefore, was allegedly a genuine troll, which this time the Lord Almighty, to demonstrate his might, had transformed into wood and not into the conventionally expected stone.

According to Nesselius, then, the troll’s origin was divine, though it did represent evil. This was actually the only clear
factor the Kittilä Satan Sect had in common with Nesselius and his sect.

The Kittilä Satan Sect was not particularly well organized, nor did it have a leading figure such as Nesselius. When news of the troll findings arrived in the Kittilä neighborhood there was an eager revival of the local lore about trolls and earth sprites. Individuals were found who had had dealings with trolls, according to their own accounts or those of their relatives. Those who had had a personal encounter with earth sprites included the Old Lady of Koskama, Aapo Jänkkälä, Antti Vasara, and Reeta Helju, who had found behind a fence in Tepasto, in the parish of Ritalaakso, an actual earth sprite’s house. In the village of Sirkka, in the parish of Kittilä, the Mäkelä family had entertained a troll child as a changeling, and in Palo a householder had knowingly fraternized with a demon; and so forth.

The revival of the stories and their dramatic heightening briskly developed into a village cult in Kittilä. Along with this went an increase in social status, depending on the ability to demonstrate that a forefather, or even the individual himself, had had dealings with trolls. The knowledge of the trolls’ factual existence decisively changed tales and legends into supposedly valid histories, and the people associated with the stories became warlocks or “the tribe of the Devil,” revered and feared as semi-witches.

The Church became concerned about the Kittilä Satan Sect only when it began seriously to resemble a religious sect. Some of those who regarded themselves as belonging to the tribe of the Devil began to shun the church and churchgoing, for one of the most commonly believed myths about the trolls was that they had fled further into the wilderness
in order to avoid the Christian faith and, specifically, the sound of church-bells. The landmarks that the stories specified as troll dwelling-places began to become the sites of sacrificial gifts, like those typical of the ancient Lapp stone-idol culture. The people who belonged to the tribe of the Devil began to act as the community’s unofficial leaders, whose advice was sought on both public and personal questions. In the Kittilä cult, trolls were thus regarded as a species of forest gods that the human race had, in its mindlessness, driven into the deep forest; but the trolls could, as it were, transfer on to a person they met some part of their supernatural aura. An essential and characteristic viewpoint in the Kittilä stories is that the accounts repeatedly report a human resourcefulness that prevents the troll from harming the person encountered. The members of the tribe of the Devil were thus doubly exalted: they had received the right to have contact with the nature gods; and they had emerged from that contact alive.

Eerikki Nesselius heard of the cult of the tribe of the Devil, too, and he did attempt a short mission in Kittilä. Success in general remained poor, but this much effect Nesselius did have: the Kittilä folk were long tormented by their reputation as devil-worshipers. It is worth mentioning that precisely this reputation unquestionably led to a short “normal” outbreak of something resembling Satanism in the district as late as the 1980s. Still today there are evident remnants of the thinking of the tribe of the Devil in the Kittilä neighborhood and elsewhere in Lapland, especially among the older age-groups.

ANGEL

After that attack and the blow he received I thought Pessi would be a quivering mess, but no, he’s gone quite stiff—stiff as a wooden doll. Doesn’t even seem to be breathing. And when I hug Pessi—when I cradle him in my arms, rock him, drawing long, sobbing breaths—I see through the lianas of the sleeves and trench-coats blood pouring from the reeling Martes’s scalp and cheek, dripping through his fingers on to the floor. I also see that, for Martes now, our relationship, mine and his, mine and Pessi’s, is crystal clear.

MARTES

A troll. A real live troll! I’ve been a complete dupe.

There they are, incarnate: the Tops, the year’s Gold Standard, the Clio or whatever. In Mikael’s hall off Pyynikki Square.

The Tops, the year’s Gold Standard, the Clio will all drift away like smoke if this goes public. Get this on to the
Evening News
placards the day after tomorrow and the Stalker campaign’s kaput. I want my campaign.

I feel cold, though my heart’s still pounding a hundred to the minute.

As the door bangs behind me I’ll bet Angel doesn’t even spare me a look. He’s pushed his face so hard up against that monstrosity’s black mane—breathing it in, breathing in that horrible stiff black tar doll.

DR. SPIDERMAN

When the telephone rings in the middle of the night, I have to observe, with a sigh, that I’ve almost been expecting it.

ANGEL

Spiderman stares at Pessi in the hall, hands deep in his trench-coat pockets.

He gives a faint laugh, and it makes me want to clout him. Pessi looks quite dead, half curled up on the spot where he was driven by that bloody Martes going berserk with the umbrella.

Spider touches him, presses his large canine head against Pessi’s back for a moment, listens.

“What do you call him?” Spider’s voice is quiet and almost tender, but somewhere behind it you hear a demonic glee, annoyingly out of key with the situation. “Robin, the Boy Wonder?”

“Pessi.”

Spider cackles hysterically, cawing for a moment.

“Make us some coffee. And then we’ll have a little chat.”

DR. SPIDERMAN

His troll’s like a shred of night torn from the landscape and smuggled inside. It’s a sliver of tempestuous darkness, a black angel, a nature spirit.

Can you tame darkness?

Perhaps you can, if, to start off, it’s very, very young, helpless enough, in bad enough shape . . .

One of night’s small cubs.

ANGEL

“There’s something at the back of my mind,” Spider ponders. “A certain theory I once came across.”

Here in the kitchen, steam’s curling up from our coffee mugs, Spider’s thoughtfully munching on the liver-pâté sandwich I’ve made him, while my knee’s jerking up and down under the table: do something, do something, do something, dear Spiderman.

“According to this theory, it might simply be a defense mechanism. Somewhat similar to the opossum’s resort to faking dead. In situations of extreme threat, the troll doesn’t try to escape but goes into a catatonic condition, its body temperature going down and the whole organism’s activity slowing. Puts itself into cold storage. Bound to be a moderately effective factor in the survival of the species and not unique. On a pitch-dark night, completely motionless . . . extremely difficult to observe, and the lowered body temperature could also hinder detection of its scent or . . .”

I put my coffee mug on the table, grasp it again—can’t take a swig, not one. Pessi’s curled up in a corner of the hall, like a shining black masterpiece stolen from some morbid sculpture park and hidden away among the winter coats, the leather jackets, and the rubbery rain slickers.

“Will he come out of it?”

“How the hell should I know? The theory’s pure hypothesis, entirely based on serendipitous sightings and sheer hearsay. There are simply no systematic studies about these creatures. But, anyway, it would explain one thing . . .”

“In the tales the trolls can turn to stone in the light of day.”

Spider looks at me bemused, and then a smirk of amusement spreads across his face.

“Very good. Playing possum would at least account for how those tales arose. . . . But that’s not what I meant. Imagine the forest, imagine the untouched wilderness, where a troll’s on the run and feeling threatened, hunted. It makes no distinction between being hunted or studied: what it hears is the high-pitched whirr of a small plane or a helicopter’s clatter. An enemy’s coming from the air and, when the adrenaline peaks above a certain point, snap, the troll freezes into immobility, looking like a tree trunk, cool as night.”

“Yes, but what next?” I take a look into the hall. Pessi’s a striped shadow, one among the rest. You have to look hard to make him out amid the hanging coats.

“Short of that, there’s no evidence, nothing measurable, it’s all sheer speculation. Because nothing’s been recorded with thermographs. Or with any other human device—never, really. Think about that one.”

DR. SPIDERMAN

There’s the rustle of a jacket in the hall. The troll’s moved. Angel lifts his downcast, bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes from the table: new hope’s burning in them.

“I’d better be off, in case he gets upset again,” I say. I recover my jacket from the chair back, put it on, and try to walk with the greatest possible discretion into the hallway, prudently avoiding any sudden movement, as when a large menacing-looking dog is brought into reception.

“I have to warn you . . .” I say, keeping my voice low, while hearing on the parquet the brief, light scratch of a claw coming out of torpor.

“Oh, I’ll be safe with him. He’s terribly intelligent, he’s altogether tame—” Angel snaps, but I interrupt him with a weary raise of my hand.

“That I don’t doubt, but all this is completely illegal. Are you aware that, according to Finnish law, you’re committing a hunting offense?”

“A hunting offense?”

“A rare one, but there are precedents. Last year, near Kuhmo, two men trapped a bear just as it was coming out of hibernation, and for months they maintained it in a couple of square meters of cage. They used it for training hunting dogs.”

I see Angel blush. “There’s nothing at all like that going on here—”

“And if you succeed in keeping this injured friend of yours hush-hush, all well and good. But I should tell you, if anyone gets wind of my having had anything to do with this, I’ll lose my license.”

Angel nods, hardly even looking at me—his ears and eyes are fixed so rigidly on the waking troll that I feel a stab of irritation; no, outright jealousy—and that brings my mind around to the other thing.

“And for your information, too,” I say, and my tone does wake Angel up for a moment, so icy-chilly my voice is, “I’ve no way of verifying this precisely and scientifically, but the whole joint reeks of pheromones.”

“Pheromones?”

“Yes. The special scent molecules animals send out into the atmosphere. They signal rutting or fear or the state of health, or the status in the troop. They manipulate and control and tempt other members of the troop and the species. And your troll’s emitting some very powerful pheromones.”

I rub my eyes. I’m so tired, so hellishly tired.

“Those pheromones could be used to make a fortune. A colossal fortune. Luckily no one realizes it. Not even you.”

Angel stares at me. The words reach his eardrums but no further. His face is registering a defiance I recognize: a ten-year-old boy setting himself up against an adult’s authority, jaw jutting, mouth straightened to a line, ears deaf to all argument.

My imagination takes off: rows of troll-pens somewhere in the north—in Ostrobothnia, say—those supple black flashes of forest lightning now fettered behind chicken wire, and the most unpleasant ways possible found for milking every single homoerotic molecule from their glands. And I close the door behind me and fill my lungs with a deep draught of that stairwell smell of damp stone and dead coffee.

ANGEL

When I wake my first thought is: Pessi! I hear a scratching at my side and turn my head, and Pessi’s sitting—or, rather, sitting’s the wrong word; he’s knotted up in a modern dance posture with all his limbs sticking out in various gravity-defying aerial directions, and he’s licking one of his paws, trembling with exuberance. He seems breezy, contented, enveloped in an atmosphere resembling an inaudible echo, wafting up from a deep, gratified purring.