The Rabbit Back Literature Society (7 page)

Martti Winter saw the new member of the Society slip through the crowd and stop at the foot of the stairs. Everyone else stood motionless. The room was thick with veneration. You could hardly breathe.

All children devoured the Creatureville books. Adults read them, too. There was a new Creatureville cartoon that was shown on television all over the world. Laura White’s creation had long fed the spiritual soil of Rabbit Back and her books and merchandise had spread around the globe.

There she stood.

Everyone knew she had a serious migraine. It was said that there had been times when such attacks had nearly killed her. Everyone was relieved to see the hostess of the evening there at the top of the stairs.

Laura White was the only woman dressed in white. It was one of the unwritten rules, as was the ban on bringing any
mythological figurines into her house. Any ladies who had mistakenly come in white had been informed of this rule and had their slip of etiquette corrected with a colourful shawl or other accessory.

Laura White’s dress left her slender arms and legs bare. She smiled, but it was clear that she still had a headache. The pain dimmed her eyes and doubled her over slightly.

She wasn’t going to let it spoil the evening. Her audience sighed with relief.

She touched her forehead with her fingertips, nodded and started her descent.

Like many others, Winter thought afterwards of those five steps that Laura White took before she fell.

The first two steps had meaning, naturalness. Her left hand slid along the dark, lacquered banister. Her head was slightly tilted, her face shone with intelligent irony.

She smiled at the people. She noticed the new literary talent she had discovered at the foot of the stairs. Ella Milana had at this point risen to the first step and Winter wondered if the girl would be able to wait at the bottom or if she would break into a run up the stairs like an eager child.

Laura White’s right eye closed for a moment, as if she were winking. Then it opened and her head jerked in a way that showed a sudden pain.

She quickly touched her hair and lowered her hand back to the banister, achieving a sedate expression again.

The third step was unsteady, as if she couldn’t see her way down. She tried to smile broader than before, but panic burst through her smile.

With her fourth step, Laura White collapsed.

She stretched both hands out in front of her.

She was like a sleep walker in a farcical pantomime. She blinked her eyes, opened them wide, and dropped into the emptiness above her audience’s heads.

As Laura White’s foot took that last step, the thing happened that everyone later tried so hard to understand, to explain, to analyse.

The party guests looked around them.

The house was full of snow. Martti Winter didn’t know what to do so he just watched as those who’d fallen stumbled to their feet and adjusted their clothing. They counted their buttons, straightened their socks, skirts and neckties, shook the snow from inside their clothes.

Someone picked up some snow from the sofa, made it into a ball, and then was embarrassed, not knowing why they’d done it.

One woman found a small mirror on the floor. She started to straighten her dishevelled hair and smeared make-up. A moment before she had looked like a blooming forty-year-old. She shook her head at her image in the mirror. It would be so hard to put it back together in all this mess.

Some people tried to close the windows but their glass panes had fallen out. They drew the curtains over them. The musicians slipped on the snow. The bassist found a woman unconscious inside his broken instrument and made a feeble attempt to help her up, then decided to leave the task to the professionals.

“Where’s Laura White?” Ella Milana asked Winter. She was
holding up the bodice of her dress with one hand—the thin straps had broken. There was ice in her hair.

This question of the authoress’s whereabouts was repeated many times. They searched for the evening’s hostess in every room. Some doors were locked, and were only broken open when she couldn’t be found in any of the others. Her name was shouted. They looked on the balcony and in the garden. They opened the wardrobes. They searched under the furniture.

Some stood looking at the staircase is if waiting for Laura White to somehow appear where she was last seen. Perhaps her disappearance was part of the plan and she would appear again at any moment, smiling, ready to accept their applause.

Martti Winter made his way across the slippery ground in front of the house. People wandered here and there around him, lost, stupid, bustling about. Winter didn’t know what to think. The whole situation seemed ridiculous, like one of those group games Laura White used to like to organize.

He didn’t want to play any more.

He stopped at the pond. The ice had been cleared of snow. Lamp-posts and lime trees along the shore formed a jumble of light and shadow. The pond wasn’t a pond anymore so much as a little ice rink reflecting the golden warmth of the lamps.

Laura White’s winter parties always included skating on Nixie Pond. Guests skated in twos and were offered hot cocoa, with whipped cream on top if they liked. There were a couple of benches set up on the shore now, as well, and a long table and a large wooden box full of skates.

Farther off a police car splashed blue light. Someone was trying to move it out of the way of the ambulance, rocking it
back and forth, the motor screaming. People talked into radios and cell phones. Search parties were formed and the first of them left to sweep the surrounding area.

Winter was hungry.

The police had already talked to him. He hadn’t known what to tell them, had no idea what had happened. He wanted to go home to eat and sleep.

He sat on a bench, kicked off his dress shoes, and searched the box for the skates he had always used. He stumbled onto the ice and lurched forward.

The ice of the pond crackled as he slashed sharply over its surface. Decades ago, in an interview in
Rabbit Tracks
, Rabbit Back historian P. Mäkelä had spoken of the history of Nixie Pond. It was said that numerous people who didn’t know how to swim had drowned in the pond in the early 1800s, including five children, and that someone had once spotted a bizarre creature there, which dived into the water and never resurfaced. Mäkelä had said the story had numerous sources, and emphasized that stories of water nixies should be taken for what they were worth, but that the drownings were well documented fact.

The problem was that, impressive as the story was, this Nixie Pond hadn’t been built until after the war. Laura White’s father had dug the hole for a root cellar originally, but had left the work unfinished in 1951. After that, water started to collect in it.

Winter had once discussed the matter with a place name researcher. According to him, someplace in the vicinity was another Nixie Pond, the original one, where people had drowned in the 1800s. For some reason the original pond had been forgotten and its name had been transferred to Laura White’s pond. This was apparently quite common with place names.

The ice was clear and the water beneath it black. Winter skated onward, clumsily kicking up speed. His legs were
shaking
. When he was ten years old, he had been a little afraid of the skating evenings on the pond ice, although at that age he didn’t believe in water nixies anymore. When the other young members of the Literature Society were with him, as terrified as he was, the fear had only made the whole thing more exciting.

Winter remembered how Ingrid had once collided with him. They both fell, and their mouths knocked together.

He remembered how Laura White used to clap for them from the shore and urge them to ever more reckless tricks.
Skate! Skate, my future authors! Get moving, or the nixie will get you!

Winter felt dizzy, staggered and fell. He shrieked like a little girl and landed on his side with a thud.

He yelled with pain, gasped for breath. His ribs tingled and sent a shock through his nerves. His ankles were starting to swell inside his skates.

The ice grew colder. The frosty air went through his clothes to his skin and seeped into his body. He felt sick to his stomach. He trembled. He tried to get up, but couldn’t make his limbs obey him.

His cheek was flattened against the ice. The cold penetrated his flesh, reached into his gums and the nerves of his teeth.

From the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow. It was moving under the ice, rising towards him. The water was black, but the shadow was still blacker. He couldn’t quite make it out, but it came up quite close to him and tried to press against him, wanted to come into his arms.

Then it whispered something in his ear in a blind black voice.

“What happened?” someone was asking.

Winter opened his eyes. He was lying on the front steps of the house. Two men held him by the arms. One was wearing a yellow scarf that hung in front of Winter’s face and fluttered in the wind.

Behind the men appeared the old café owner, Eleanoora Kauppinen, looking pale and sickly. She looked at him, shook her head, and continued on her way. The chaotic circus of police lights and bustle continued around him.

Winter wiggled his legs and realized he was still wearing the skates.

“I hurt my leg,” he said.

They started taking the skates off.

“Did I faint?”

“You fell on your side on the ice,” one of the men said. “And you didn’t get up. When we came to where you were, you were out cold. It might be a good idea to go to the hospital.”

“It’s nothing,” Winter said.

The yellow-scarfed man looked serious. “A person can’t live without their brain. You may have a concussion. A relative of mine once hit his head on a sailboat boom and forgot five years of his life, just like that. Turned a nice guy into a real prick, to put it bluntly.”

Winter finally got his shoes on his feet. He took a few steps and then stopped to look around him.

More cars were arriving, others leaving. Three parties on
snowmobiles
were headed into the woods. Their headlights stabbed through the night and retreated in distant, random twinkles.

Ella Milana strode past him, stiff and silent. Ingrid Katz hurried after her, hissing to Winter as she passed, “I’ll take her home. She must be quite shattered.”

T
HE SEARCH
was still going on the next morning. The news about Laura White’s disappearance spread rapidly and shocked the community.

New theories to explain the incident were reported constantly. The woods were searched by helicopter with a thermographic camera. The snowmobile teams searched as far as Rabbit Bog during the night and went back again in daylight for good measure, checking on new tip-offs they’d received.

The searchers found two elk carcasses, five stolen bicycles, and some old moonshine stills. Their most interesting find was the remains of an abandoned car. It was a white Renault, a model called a Quatrelle. The woods had made it their own. There was a tree growing out of the hood. Later it was learned that the car had been stolen in June of 1984.

The perplexing thing was that the car was sitting in the middle of dense spruce forest. There was no sign of any road that it could have driven to get to where it was.

“There’s no rational way of explaining it,” one of the
searchers
commented in
Rabbit Tracks
.

The article included a plea to the unknown person who had stolen the car, asking them to send a letter, anonymously if they wished, explaining exactly how the car had got there. There was also an assurance from the owner that they held no grudge against the thief, and that the statute of limitations had long ago expired in any case. A reward of a free, one-year
subscription to
Rabbit Tracks
was offered to anyone with
information
on the matter.

The searchers also found dozens of stray dogs. For some reason the dogs of Rabbit Back wouldn’t stay at home. Some of them eventually tired of roaming and returned home, but others enjoyed the freedom and forgot their masters entirely.

It was common knowledge that packs of wild dogs lived in the woods around town and sometimes came skulking around people’s houses. Many were afraid of them, although they were hardly any sort of menace. Hunters had been given permission to shoot stray dogs, and sometimes the men in town talked about knocking off so-and-so’s mutt.

One of the search party, a dentist and violinist in the Rabbit Back Chamber Orchestra, thought she had seen her own dog, a golden retriever named Stradivarius, in a pack with five other dogs. She went after them on her snowmobile and was very nearly led into a blind ravine.

She managed to jump off at the last moment, but the
snowmobile
fell over the cliff and was completely destroyed.

“What Rabbit Wood takes, Rabbit Wood keeps,” said the unemployed logger who came to pick her up.

Many people had been lost in the woods over the years, and not all of them had been found. Berry pickers, mushroomers, and hunters were warned not to go too deep into Rabbit Wood by themselves because the area wasn’t well mapped and there was no way of locating every ravine and boghole.

Children’s author Laura White was not found in the dark halls of the forest.

The case became a regular feature in the press and was talked about on radio and television. The evening tabloids whipped up their readership with increasingly
attention-grabbing
headlines.

The police expressed indignation at the press’s hastiness. There was nothing to indicate that anyone had orchestrated a kidnapping of the famed children’s author, and there had been no pronouncement of her death. She remained at large, of her own volition.

Months passed, and there was no trace of the missing author. It was assumed that her body was lying somewhere. It could be anywhere in Rabbit Wood.

Laura White’s books were read with very mixed feelings. It was difficult to concentrate on enjoying the story when you knew the writer was lying dead somewhere in the vicinity, eaten by dogs, her body disintegrating.

Children suffered from nightmares. One first-grader told the rest of his class that he’d had a dream where Laura White’s dead body climbed into his window and started reading the Creatureville books to him. The next night another child who’d heard the story had her own version of the dream. The school sent home a note asking parents to calm their children and warning them about what they talked about within their hearing. The teachers forbade pupils from talking about their nightmares at school.

The statement from a police spokesman two days after White’s disappearance was replayed now and then on television. According to the spokesman, Laura White would no doubt be found soon, or at most in a short time—people don’t just cease to exist, especially not world-famous children’s authors, he argued.