The Rabbit Back Literature Society (13 page)

Ella’s own favourite Creatureville character had always been Crusty Bark, although most children shied away from him.
Crusty Bark wasn’t exhaustively described in any of the books, but he was apparently some kind of small tree that had to keep moving constantly so he wouldn’t take root in one place and forget the rest of the surrounding world.

Crusty Bark didn’t speak or understand speech, although he did enjoy the company of the other inhabitants of Creatureville. The only way to communicate with him was to take a nap at his roots, be visited by a dream, and talk things out using his personal symbolic language.

The dream images that Crusty Bark offered gave White’s books “a certain gothic gloominess that sometimes deepened almost to horror”, according to Ella’s thesis.

One entire chapter of Ella’s thesis was dedicated to Crusty Bark. In it, she managed to link Crusty not only to many
Finno-Ugric
myths, but also to mythological stories of farther flung cultures, such as Japan. Some of Crusty Bark’s adventures were also connected to Estonian legends of a wandering forest.

The creature known as Dampish, on the other hand, had to go about in a bucket. His advice often rescued the other inhabitants of Creatureville, but even he had a dark side. He tempted smaller creatures into his bucket, and the books were never explicit about whether he drowned his victims.

In one of the Creatureville books, Mother Snow says that Dampish is “just a confused little water sprite that we should all love very much”. The comment precedes an adventure in which a half-dead field mouse searching for medicine for her sick litter makes the mistake of consulting Dampish and has to be rescued from his bucket.

In her thesis, Ella points out that “a water sprite is an unusual choice for a character in a children’s book, since in the old
beliefs water sprites are the ghosts of the drowned, who envy the living”.

In the fifth book of the Creatureville series, Dampish himself comes to harm. Bobo Clickclack, the most human and at the same time the stupidest of all the creatures, tries to put out a fire and accidentally throws Dampish into the flames. Mother Snow baldly states that Dampish is no more, and Bobo Clickclack spends the rest of the book in the throes of terrible regret.

As a child, Ella was shocked by Dampish’s fate. She expected him to return somehow at the end of the book, but it didn’t happen. “The only happy ending offered the reader is the soothing of Bobo Clickclack’s guilt.” Even as she was writing her thesis, Ella found Dampish’s fate unfair, altogether too dark for a children’s book, but on the other hand “the episode provides fascinating interpretative viewpoints”.

Ella had also thought a lot about the character of the Odd Critter and its hidden symbolism. The Odd Critter was always cloaked in some kind of disguise and tried to look like something other than what it was.

In her thesis Ella wrote: “In the Odd Critter’s habit of
constantly
inventing new names for places and things one can see complex commonalities with phenomena of a postmodern era. Like the modern person, the Odd Critter is lost everywhere it goes, and tries constantly to spread to others the same
confusion
, the same feeling of estrangement from which it suffers.”

As a child, Ella had been particularly amused by the story that began with the Odd Critter showing up in the middle of a peaceful day and announcing, “Help! Help! The dreaded and terrible Emperor Rat is after me and will be here any moment!”

The inhabitants of Creatureville panic and flee in a mad
rush to East Meadow. Gradually, however, they realize that the Odd Critter invented the whole thing just to remind them that “anything at all could happen at any moment”.

Ella is caught up in her research ideas for a long while, smiling to herself, until Silja Saaristo interrupts her reverie.

“Hey, Ella, if you don’t have anything else to ask me, what do you say we put this rag around your head?”

“Wait,” Ella says, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “You join the Society when you’re nine, and a year later, the boy dies. So that was what year?”

“I was born in the year of our Lord 1961, so it would have happened, let’s see, in 1972.”

“What was his name?”

“I honestly don’t remember.”

“And you don’t remember how he died?”

“I don’t even remember ever hearing how he died,” Saaristo says. “I guess my interest in various causes of death didn’t come until later.”

Ella strokes the curve of her lip with a finger. “Did he drown? Car accident?”

Silja Saaristo shakes her head.

Ella wrinkles her brow. Then she draws breath in through her nose, filling her lungs.

“I’m invoking Rule 21,” she says, leaning towards Saaristo, taking her cheek between her thumb and forefinger, and
squeezing
and twisting it until the surprised woman bends over
sideways
with a gasp.

When Ella lets go, Saaristo rubs her cheek grumpily. “God damn it, I always get Rule 21. Same thing with everybody. The
last time I played this Aura Jokinen nearly tore my ear off. What did I do wrong, anyway? What story do you want to hear?”

“The way I understand this Game of yours,” Ella says calmly, “you aren’t supposed to tell me any ‘story’. You have to spill. I draw, you spill. You know how The Game is played.” She pauses for a moment, then continues. “I know that you’re going to draw me out and make me spill like I’ve been stabbed and after that I’ll be a wreck for a couple of days, and that’s fine, because it’s in the spirit of The Game. But before we do that, I want to see you spill. This isn’t a friendly coffee klatch. That ended when you put the blindfold on.”

“Yeah, but I’ve told you everything I know,” Saaristo protests. “There’s nothing more.”

Ella leans back on the sofa and breathes in so hard that her nose whistles. “That dream you had,” she says. “When you woke up in the night and screamed that the boy had been murdered. Tell me about that.”

Silja Saaristo rocks herself and sniffles like a little girl. “I don’t remember it at all. My mother told me about it.”

“Do you have any yellow?” Ella asks, smiling coolly, keeping her voice controlled. She wants to hide the fact that her own words shock and surprise her. Didn’t she want to treat her
partners
respectfully, play a sort of civilized version of The Game, which, judging by its rules, was a barbaric, frightening invention?

“Yellow? You want me to take yellow?” Saaristo says in
bewilderment
. “Isn’t tearing my face off enough? I know I started the whole yellow thing, but I don’t think it’s such a good idea now.”

Ella doesn’t say anything. Saaristo knows the rules.

“Well, then,” the woman sighs at last. “There’s still some in the medicine cabinet, I think. Top shelf, in the back, behind
the hairspray. Bring the wine bottle that’s next to the tub while you’re at it, so I can have a glass first. If it’ll help me spill enough to satisfy you, so much the better.”

Ella wouldn’t know anything about yellow if Ingrid Katz hadn’t told her about it at the end of their Game. The official rules didn’t mention it.

“I’m telling you this so you won’t be surprised if someone asks you to have a glass of yellow,” Ingrid explained as they went down the library staircase, adding that she herself had never thought it was a good idea, but had given in to the will of the majority.

Silja Saaristo had launched the idea sometime in the 1980s, Ingrid said.

Saaristo had discovered yellow on a trip to the United States. After that it was provided to the Society by an animal doctor—confidentially, of course.

The official name was sodium pentothal. It weakened the central nervous system, slowed the heart rate, and lowered blood pressure. “If you take too much, you fall asleep. The right amount will give you diarrhoea of the mouth, which is, of course, useful for our Game.”

“Diarrhoea of the mouth?” Ella exclaimed.

They were standing between the marble columns. Ella felt strange talking about such a thing in a place devoted to cultural enrichment. “Do you mean it’s a…”

“A kind of truth serum, yes. I tried it once. I found myself thinking out loud. It won’t prevent you from lying, but it does help you spill the truth, if talking about it is difficult.”

The bottle contains small, yellow crystals. Ella Milana drops one into the wine and hands the glass to Silja Saaristo. Saaristo, still blindfolded, drinks the entire contents and sets the glass down on the table next to the teapot and the plate of crackers.

Ella watches as she relaxes, seems to sink into the sofa. She wonders how many laws they’re breaking. Teachers probably aren’t supposed to do these sorts of things.

Silja Saaristo smiles faintly. “Sooo. Not too bad. Feeling mellow. Very mellow. No tightness in my head. What else do you want to know? More about my dream? I honestly don’t remember anything about it. Nothing at all, really. I remember it through my mother’s eyes, and how do I know she didn’t make the whole thing up to amuse people at parties? But hey, there is one thing I can tell you. I didn’t feel like talking about it just now because I didn’t want to talk bullshit, because I really don’t know anything. We’re just talking about my feelings, which I can’t logically defend, or Freudian slips or something. I don’t know. Ask the Freudians, maybe they would know.”

Saaristo breathes for a moment, her mouth gaping open, and Ella thinks she’s fallen asleep. Then she continues speaking, in a low, drawling voice.

“But you know, whenever I start talking about that boy that died, and I try to say ‘he died,’ my tongue ties itself in knots, and it’s like it wants really badly to say ‘he was murdered’.”

W
HEN ELLA MILANA
left Silja Saaristo’s house, she had a headache and a cinnamon jar. The mystery writer had wanted to give her the cinnamon jar and a pinch of the yellow
crystals
for the next round, saying, “Thanks for the inspiring Game.”

Saaristo started up her computer while Ella put on her coat and shoes. “I feel like writing,” she explained, although it was half past three in the morning.

Ella Milana opened the door. When she turned to look, Saaristo waved, smiling brightly.

The Triumph waited at the dead end around the corner. Ella thought about what she’d gleaned from this round of The Game, as far as her exhaustion allowed her to think. Was the history of Laura White and the Rabbit Back Literature Society hiding a child’s murder? Such a revelation would make news all over the world.

She wasn’t thrilled. Not at all.

She’d wanted to do literary-historical research that might bring to light a few smallish skeletons—secret relationships, homosexuality, that sort of thing. Pleasant little scandals. Murder victims weren’t the sort of thing she’d been hoping to dig up.

Amateur detectives in fiction had always annoyed Ella. They were so unrealistic. She didn’t intend to be the Rabbit Back version of Miss Marple or a cheap Baker Street knock-off, and she really didn’t like the idea of making the tabloids. That was no way to advance an academic career. She didn’t want to be
an instrument of justice. She just wanted to do some literary research and earn a living.

She felt tired, pessimistic and hollow as she scraped her departed father’s Triumph free of ice. Maybe she should stick to interpreting Laura White’s metaphorical language or break down and take a teaching post someplace up north. Ingrid Katz had warned her not to play The Game too much. Ingrid had stressed that recovering from it always took its own time and you could get overly spent in playing it if you didn’t remember to take long breaks between bouts.

Ingrid was right. First Ingrid had drawn the death of Paavo Emil Milana out of her. Then Silja Saaristo had scraped up some inspiration using Ella’s anguish over her childlessness. “I read your story in
Rabbit Tracks
,” Saaristo said. “It’s a nice little story, but you only put the tip of the iceberg in there. I want the rest of it.”

A person shouldn’t talk too much, Ella realized. With
writing
, you could construct a whole world, but talking too much could demolish it.

Four days later, Ella Milana woke up around noon and called the Rabbit Back library.

The library assistant told her that newspaper microfilms were only kept at the provincial branch. “But if you’re looking for back issues of
Rabbit Tracks
, you’ll have to ask at their offices.”

Ella picked up the most recent issue from the kitchen table, found the phone number, and called. She made an appointment with the office secretary to look at the archives that very day.

The archives were contained in cardboard boxes in a back room at the newspaper offices. The box containing 1972 came out of the middle of the stack without much trouble, in spite of
its difficult position. Ella gathered up the first part of the year up to May and began thumbing through the issues.

She trusted that deaths in the greater Rabbit Back area would have been noted in the paper. The first issue in April did, in fact, have an obituary for Jaakko Juhani Lindberg. There was a picture of Laura White on the same page. It announced that the authoress was holding a seminar on folk mythology in the school auditorium.

There were no other deaths of young people in the year 1972, assuming one could trust
Rabbit Tracks
. Ella checked 1971 and 1973, to make sure. She didn’t find anything.

She thanked the secretary and left. The offices of
Rabbit Tracks
were located in an old veterans’ housing bungalow on the main street of town. There was a cash machine across the street. Ella withdrew a little cash and went to Rabbit Market to buy some food.

She ran into the school principal at the dairy counter. They exchanged wary greetings. He said he had received her
message
. “It seems very peculiar for students’ papers to mould like that,” he said.

“It was a new one for me, too,” Ella answered. “There was an old newspaper in the same pile with them, and the mould spread amazingly quickly to the essays. A horrible fungus. Definitely not something you want in the school.”

It was good news that the only youth to die in Rabbit Back in 1972 was Jaakko Lindberg. Maybe the murder was just Silja Saaristo’s imagination, rather than a suppressed memory.

Ella put aside Society matters for a while and started making dinner. Her mother soon came back from drinking coffee with their neighbour, Mrs Salmela.

“You made real macaroni casserole,” her mother said. “It just occurred to me that I’ve never actually seen you cook anything. I was starting to think I would never eat anything I hadn’t cooked myself.”

They ate together. Ella’s mother looked intently at her. Ella smiled.

The smell of cheese wafted over the table. Ella noticed her mother closing her eyes now and then to breathe in the smell of the macaroni as if it were the finest perfume.

Her mother tried to ask her about things. Ella tried to answer without showing that she was thinking about The Game. Her mother thought she’d been working altogether too much on her research project. Of course, she couldn’t know that Ella had a gigantic, shapeless research subject that presented an unbelievable number of interesting things to find out and that working on it could make a person lose her bearings.

The Game demanded more strategic planning than Ella had imagined. After the first Game she’d wondered if she really needed to ambush every member of the Society and take them by surprise in order to play. It had been the custom of the Society from the beginning, and it had its own rationale, but couldn’t even old habits be changed?

Before The Game with Silja Saaristo, Ella had gone to ring the doorbells of five Society members in all, including Saaristo. Every one of them had obviously been at home. Ella could see their shadows in the windows. She could hear noises. No one had come to the door.

She had asked Silja Saaristo about this when they were starting The Game. Saaristo had grinned under her blindfold. “That’s the nature of The Game. It’s nothing personal. We
simply don’t open the door for each other after ten in the
evening
. Even though both players end up spilling, it’s always better to be the challenger than the challenged.”

After dinner Ella emptied the dishwasher of clean dishes and filled it with dirty ones. She told her mother not to get up,
insisting
that she relax and finish her cup of coffee.

Ella noticed that she was enjoying handling the dishes. She listened to the clitter-clatter and then she looked at her mother and was surprised at the peculiar feeling that drifted up from someplace deep inside, like a belch, and suddenly she laughed out loud.

“Well?” her mother snorted. “What is it?”

Ella blinked, realizing that she felt calm and happy.

The feeling lasted about ten seconds.

When it had passed, Ella formed a quick theory about it.

Happiness is contentment—the feeling that a person is content with the prevailing conditions. But people have an inherent need to achieve, to strive, to work at something—to always be
developing
. A happy creature stops developing, so happiness is a product of being content and development is a product of discontent.

Happiness, in other words, is a temporary glitch in evolution.

Ella knew very well that she wasn’t in danger of being content with anything. Her individual future was creaking and
swaying
like a rotting bridge. The Rabbit Back Literature Society’s secrets wouldn’t wait forever. She might be gathering nothing more than memories, and they dissolve and change constantly. If she didn’t act quickly and decisively, Laura White and the Society’s past would disappear, cease to exist.

The activities of the Rabbit Back Literature Society had never been documented. For instance, Laura White’s method of
training
nine children to be writers was entirely shrouded in mystery.

White’s own personality could also use some illumination. Professor Eljas Korpimäki had long complained of the fact that the authoress had never given a single proper interview. He called her “the world’s most unknown celebrity”.

Ella Milana knew that if she wanted to learn about Laura White and the Literature Society’s past, she had to divide the problem into sections and restrict and construct her questions in such a way that she drew out the essential and interesting information.

The most critical thing at this point was the question of the
tenth and clearly the most talented member of the Society, who died before his time.

If she could find out whether the boy really had been
murdered
, nothing else would matter. Her literary historical research would end there and the police and the scandal sheets would lay claim to her research. It might mean the end of the Society.

If Ella could show that the child had died a natural death, the whole thing would still be a tragedy, something to think about, a footnote to write into her literary history, and the real research could begin.

Ella’s phone started to make a racket just as she was drifting off to sleep.

She’d added the numbers of all the members of the Society to her contacts list. The display showed that the caller was Martti Winter.

Ella yawned and pressed the answer button.

Before she had time to say anything, Winter’s breathy voice was spilling into her ear. Suddenly she was wide awake.

“It’s out there again. It’s standing in the garden staring at the house. I’m sorry to bother you again, but I really don’t know what to do with the thing. I thought before that I wouldn’t tell anyone about it, that it would make it easier to bear, but I was wrong. I have to share it with somebody.” Ella opened her mouth but didn’t know what to say.

“Ingrid?” Winter’s voice said hesitantly. “Hello? Ingrid? Oh, hell, who did I call? Sorry, wrong number… I can’t work these tiny buttons with my fingers…”

He hung up.