The Rabbit Back Literature Society (23 page)

As a child, Ella Milana had thought as a matter of course that there existed somewhere a vast archive where all possible information about the life of the Finnish citizenry was collected.

She had heard of a place called the National Archive, and
looked it up. The encyclopaedia said:
The Finnish National Archive is a central agency of the Ministry of Education that leads and oversees the activities, governance and development of the general archives and acts as the nation’s public archive and its associated centre of research.

Ella had assumed that such a place must have gathered and recorded everything, especially all the people’s most valued moments. It seemed only reasonable.

The first time she could remember thinking about it was when she was six years old.

She’s at the lake, chasing a beach ball that someone has kicked to her. Her feet sink into the hot sand with each step, but she feels light, almost flies. She breathes in the smell of the lake and feels very clearly and strongly that somewhere, someone is recording all of this on her behalf, so that nothing she sees around her can ever really disappear—not her mother and father, who are laughing, nor the ice cream stand, nor her buoyant joy.

Ella had never believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or God; what gave her strength was her belief in this act of recording for all eternity.

Ella dropped her toothbrush in the sink and put her face up against the mirror.

She examined her face so closely that it made her eyes cross. Then she went upstairs—careful not to step on the fifth and fourteenth steps—undressed, turned on the lamp and opened her wardrobe.

There was a full-length mirror fastened to the inside of the door.

Ella had secretly undressed in front of the mirror for years. She had flirted and done calisthenics and examined her appearance critically, admiringly, hornily.

Now the mirror was showing her the features of a grown woman. The same features she had spilled for Martti Winter.

She realized that she hoped Winter would use those features, immortalize them in one of his books so that years from now, readers would recreate an image of her as she was now, over and over.

The thought brightened the eyes of the woman in the mirror.

Finally Ella grew bored and closed the wardrobe.

She started to feel guilty about the stamp. She put on a nightgown, went downstairs and wrote the
Rabbit Tracks
address on a blank envelope. Then she read her mother’s contest entry letter.

E
LLA LAY
in her old room, in a bed that was too short for her, and wiggled her toes. She closed her eyes tight and waited in vain for sleep. She had been lying there for two hours already, thinking about the letter.

“For heaven’s sake, Mum,” she whispered in the darkness. “You and your free
Rabbit Tracks
subscription…”

The fifth and fourteenth steps of the staircase creaked when stepped on.

Someone stepped on the fifth step.

Ella opened her eyes.

Then the fourteenth step creaked.

When the door to her room started to open, Ella was standing on the hinge side of it, her back to the wall. She held her breath, a heavy vase hoisted over her head.

Her arms started to ache. The vase trembled, but she couldn’t put it down yet.

A shadow slipped into the room and stole over to the bed.

Ella roared and flung the vase at the intruder.

It shattered on the floor.

The shadow jumped, crashed into the desk and fell, pulling the items on the desktop with it. Ella hit the wall three times before she found the light switch.

A pink form clambered to its feet behind the desk—a small,
slightly plump woman in a pink snowsuit. A grin spread over her hamster face.

There had been an article about Aura Jokinen in the Helsinki paper when she won a prize that read:
Aura Jokinen, alias Arne Ahlqvist, is one of the most significant sci-fi writers at present, a winner of international awards and a respected visionary whose works are sought after as far away as Hollywood
.

Now she was standing in Ella Milana’s room brushing bits of broken vase off her feet and rubbing her hands together.

“Hi,” she said. “Nice room. Phew! You really scared me there. If you hadn’t missed me, you know, you would have been able to tell everyone what really is in my head. So many people have asked about it, ha ha…”

They looked each other in the eye. Ella acted before she knew what she was doing.

“Aura Jokinen, I challenge you to The Game.”

Jokinen smiled.

“Well that’s a pretty picture. I go to all this trouble to pick your lock and nearly get my head broken, and then you
challenge
me? Shame on you, Ella Milana.”

Ella said that the rules didn’t prohibit the ambusher from being ambushed, and besides, it was always better to challenge than to be challenged.

Jokinen admitted that she was correct, but added that she hadn’t come for The Game, she’d come for an entirely different reason. Suddenly serious, she urged Ella to sit down. What she had to say wouldn’t be at all pleasant to hear.

Without waiting for a reaction, Jokinen whispered, “I came to warn you, Ella. And to betray the other eight members of the Society while I’m at it, so this isn’t easy.”

Ella blinked.

Jokinen smiled and brushed her hair out of her eyes with a thumb.

“Little Ella, we all know you want that notebook. You see, Martti called all of us and warned us about what you’ve been up to. I hear you’ve used The Game to find out the secrets of the Society. And you plan to dig things up that are better left buried.”

Aura Jokinen’s eyes filled with tears that flowed in salty rivulets down her cheeks. She shuffled over to sit on the edge of the bed, crossed her arms in front of her and started
speaking
, as if to herself.

“Oh, Ella. Oh, oh, oh. If only you had understood in time that the notebook belongs more to you than to literary history. It’s always been a private Society matter, and it will stay that way as long as it stays within the Society.”

Ella felt weak. She crouched down and rubbed her temples.

“A notebook stolen from a dead child is a private Society matter? You don’t all have the right to steal, and hide what you’ve stolen and then declare it a private matter. The notebook belongs to literary studies research and to the dead boy’s parents.”

“Right. But listen—that’s not the opinion of the Society.”

Ella said it wasn’t for the Society to decide, and that even though the Society was guilty of the theft, the members had been children at the time, and besides, it all happened a long time ago, over thirty years ago. “You have nothing to fear. Except…”

A shadow passed over Jokinen’s eyes, and Ella stopped mid-sentence.

“We may have nothing to fear but the loss of our
reputations
,” Jokinen said, “but you do have something to fear. There’s
a plan to murder you tonight. Whether it will be carried out remains to be seen.”

Ella opened her mouth, but couldn’t get a word out. She looked at the little woman sitting on her bed, searching for a sign that this was some kind of bizarre joke.

“You needn’t be afraid of me,” Jokinen said. “I’m here to rescue you. I’m the only one who wants you to still be alive in the morning. The other members are terribly nervous.”

Jokinen glanced at the clock on the wall. “Is that the correct time? You ought to know that in forty minutes, at two-twenty, four members of the Society will come into this house and…”

She swallowed and grabbed hold of her chin, unable to go on.

Ella opened her mouth but Jokinen raised a hand and said she didn’t intend to tell her which four planned to murder her.

“I’m between a rock and a hard place here. Murderer or traitor, those are my choices. I don’t want to be a murderer, but the Society plans to silence you. For good. Click. Snuff you out. Pow.”

Ella’s legs went numb.

“So they’re on their way to take my life so I won’t reveal the secret,” Ella said. “Why are you against it?”

Jokinen explained.

“Aside from Ingrid, I’m the only member who didn’t go to the water tower that night. I would have gone—I’m no saint—but I fell asleep, and when I woke up it was morning and Martti had already taken the notebook away.”

She took out a handkerchief and a small mirror and tidied her dishevelled face.

“I’ve always used my own ideas in my books, so I have
nothing
to fear,” she said with a smile. “But I do think the whole
thing should be kept secret. Let sleeping dogs lie. I’m with the others on that.” Her gaze sharpened. “If it comes to murder, I can’t condone that. But if I had made it to the water tower on time, I might very well be with the others tonight.”

Ella tried to make sense of the situation. “That’s quite a story,” she began with feigned nonchalance. “Let’s assume I believe you…”

Jokinen jumped to her feet with surprising agility, leaped across the room, grabbed Ella by the sides of her mouth, spread them in a clown smile, and whispered, “Ella, little one, you must know by now what kind of a bunch this little literary club is. Fine, talented writers, yes, great contributors to our culture, indisputably. Long live the Rabbit Back school of literature!”

Ella’s mouth was starting to hurt. Jokinen flashed her a tight smile, let go of her lips, then grabbed her temples, her eyes glittering.

“That literary history of yours probably doesn’t mention that a lot of us older writers have a history of trouble in the head. Ding dong. Laura White succeeded in mixing our little heads up pretty well all those years we went to her school for writers. She knew where literature comes from, all right.”

“What do you mean?”

Jokinen let out a laugh and almost shouted. “Everybody knows that no healthy person would take up writing novels. Healthy people do healthy things. All this darned hoopla and hot air about literature—what is it really but mental
derangement
run through a printing press? And when you’ve written as many stories about murders and acts of desperation as we have, it doesn’t take much skewing to get you to thinking you might be up to all kinds of things, should the need ever arise.
It’s remarkable how much easier it is to do something if you’ve written believably about it.

“So now four fixtures of the literary firmament are on their way here,” Jokinen sighed, touching her cheek with trembling fingers. “You want to know how they’ve prepared for their visit? At this point they’ve finished off a generous dose of good whisky and equipped themselves with two baseball bats, two metres of wire, a roll of duct tape, and a sufficiently large garbage sack. I provided the duct tape. I got it from my kids’ hobby box. They told me to bring it. It’s to keep you from making too much noise when they strangle you with the wire and beat you with the baseball bats.”

Ella crouched in the middle of the floor, no longer listening to what Jokinen was saying. She was analysing the situation she’d somehow ended up in.

One possible definition of murder would be “an illegal
activity
that causes its target to cease to exist”. One of the many murders committed annually was about to happen in Rabbit Back, and its target was Ella Milana.

Like everybody, Ella lived inside herself. That’s why she was apt to think of herself as an exceptional case when it came to statistical facts. She understood in theory that she could be the victim of a violent crime just like anyone else, but it hadn’t occurred to her that her literary-historical research could put her at risk of being murdered.

Murder was a criminological, ethical and physiological phenomenon. The Society had failed ethics thirty years ago, when all of this began. Murder in the physiological sense was a simple, mechanical process, a breaking of a body so thorough
that the body ceased to live. Old people and little children and housewives did it; why not writers who felt threatened?

Sci-fi writer Aura Jokinen turned out the lights and Ella’s reality was broken to pieces. The pieces shifted: the new reality was for the most part like the old one, but in this reality Ella Milana couldn’t go back to sleep because in a moment her murderers would arrive with tape, wire and baseball bats.

Ella’s heart beat three times. Then she realized that she felt like she’d just been born—born into a reality where she
really could
die.

Like all newborns, Ella filled her lungs with air and wailed. This gave Aura Jokinen, who was peering out the window, a terrible fright.

Ella sputtered out her first words in this new reality. “Duct tape! Duct tape! Shit. How did this happen?”

She looked at Aura Jokinen. She couldn’t remember ever having felt this helpless. Jokinen looked at her, picked up a pile of clothes from the back of the chair, threw them at her and told her to get dressed quickly.

“I have a feeling they’re out there. I saw something moving in the woods. We have to go.”

They ran from the house to Jokinen’s old Volvo.

Jokinen backed the car up onto the road and hit the gas so hard she knocked the mailboxes over.

“Can you see anything?” she asked.

She shifted gears and the car sprang forward.

“I don’t think so,” Ella answered. “I don’t know. There might be someone hiding there.”

“They wouldn’t stand in plain sight.” She was barely able to keep the car on the road. “We’ve been ambushing each other for thirty years. It gives you quite an adrenaline rush to sneak up on somebody, unheard and unseen. Oy yoy. Let’s play, my friend. Let’s spill so long that we’re drained empty, cold and empty. You can really develop an addiction to the Nosferatu game. You might stop playing for a while, but only for a while.”

“Unheard and unseen,” Ella said quietly. “I’ve tried it a couple of times. But you weren’t unheard today. I heard you.”

“The stairs,” Jokinen said with a sigh. “When we were planning your murder at Martti’s house, Ingrid Katz said the stairs were quiet. Shoddy fieldwork. By the way, did you get the book plague under control at your house? Ingrid mentioned that you were having a problem with it. It got into the kids’ room at our house when I got a book from Ingrid and the kids stuck it on the shelf. The Bram Stoker classic, don’t you know. It changed remarkably. But in the end it had to be burned. So did the children’s books that were infected. Kukka Kaalinen got mixed up with Pippi Longstocking…”

Ella asked if Ingrid Katz was really in on the murder. It was hard to imagine the librarian approving the order to kill.

Aura Jokinen’s curls shook with laughter. “It was Ingrid who first suggested it. They all wanted to rub you out. And I didn’t object out loud when I realized how united they were. I thought if I did, I wouldn’t get away alive to warn you.”

Ella felt like throwing up. “What about Martti Winter? Did he…?”

Jokinen nodded. “Kill your darlings. That’s the first rule of a writer. Martti does like you, but you could spoil everything. Literature is forever, but people are fleeting butterflies. Put her in a jar. That’s what he said when he voted to murder you. It wasn’t easy for him, though.”

Jokinen glanced at Ella and smiled. “Shall we put on some music? It might take our minds off unpleasant things.”

She turned on the radio. The car filled with a lecture on Dostoevsky, and Ella recognized Professor Korpimäki’s voice. She changed the station and found some
international
pop.

They drove about a hundred metres along the tree-lined road. Ella noticed they’d come to Hare Glen.

She closed her eyes and tried to think. The woman in pink at the wheel couldn’t be taking her to Martti Winter’s house, could she? What if this was a trick? It was possible. But what could she do?

Then Jokinen turned off the engine. Ella opened her eyes. Laura White’s house loomed in the darkness.

“What are we doing here?” Ella asked.

“Not much. But we’ll be safe here for a little while,” Jokinen said. “It won’t occur to them to look for us here. And we can play The Game you challenged me to.”

“The Game can wait,” Ella said. “I’d rather concentrate on staying alive.”

“Nyet. If we don’t play The Game sometime tonight, we’ll no longer be members of the Society. Rules are rules. It’s a shame no one thought to add a rule specifically forbidding members of the Society from murdering each other.”

“Killing people is forbidden by law,” Ella said.

“That may well be. But breaking the rules of The Game voids your membership in the Society. If we end up outside the Society, we can never get back in. We’ll lose everything.”