The Rabbit Back Literature Society (24 page)

“Being a member doesn’t seem that important to me,” Ella said. “In fact, at the moment I wish I’d never…”

Jokinen patted her and flashed a bright smile. “Yes, yes, I’m sure you feel bad right now. But you don’t give up membership in the Society just like that. These things happen, even in the best societies. Let’s go inside. The lady of the house isn’t home, of course, but we are her heirs, after all—provided we remain in the Society and play The Game.”

They walked towards the front door. The snow was knee deep. The façade was closed up and dark.

When she was on her way to the party here Ella had been bubbling with excitement. She had admired the large house, thought of it like an ocean liner in an old movie, full of festivity, light, life and possibility, full of interesting people and clever conversation. Now it felt like a mausoleum.

A couple of nights earlier she’d had a dream. Laura White’s house was completely filled with black water. All of the missing authoress’s furniture was drifting around on the current. Ella was swimming among the floating chairs, buffet tables and dishes, looking for the exit.

A bed floated into view. On it sat Laura White’s pale body, tapping on a typewriter.

When she woke up, Ella imagined she could still hear the typewriter. Then she realized that the sound was coming from the plumbing.

They went up the snowy steps. The front door was locked. Aura Jokinen took out a coil of thick wire.

“To pick the lock,” she said. “We can get in the side door, if the locks haven’t been changed.”

Jokinen picked at the lock for a minute, grinned and tugged the door open.

They stomped the snow off their feet and walked through the house. They didn’t turn on the lights because they would have been visible across the valley, all the way to where Martti Winter’s house stood, besieged by dogs.

Aura Jokinen led the way with a pocket flashlight. The light bounced off dusty furniture, paintings and empty bookshelves.

They stopped at the foot of the staircase where Laura White had disappeared. There was dust on the stairs, and small
footprints
visible in the dust. Jokinen examined the tracks. “One of the women from the Society, I should think. I haven’t been here since the party.”

They went up the stairs. “I’ll show you the room where Laura White wrote. She was sitting in there the night of the party, while her guests waited. Here it is!”

Jokinen opened a door, revealing a darkened room. She turned on the light—Laura White’s office had no windows.

The room was surprisingly small. The walls were hung with dozens of paintings. Each was by a different artist, and every one was of Laura White.

“She was an inspiration to artists,” Jokinen said. “Do you know much about art? A few of these are well-known names. Laura didn’t like photographs. She said she wanted to be
properly
seen before she became an image. She felt that the quick, dead eye of a camera was too ghostly.”

On the desk was an old typewriter. There was paper in it, with writing on it.

A little bird leaped in Ella’s breast. There were three lines written on the paper.

The first two said:

On the third line were two words:

“An unusual beginning,” Aura Jokinen said, sitting down in a rococo chair.

Ella thought she understood what Jokinen meant. None of the Creatureville books used the first person.

“I came here twice that evening,” Jokinen said. “The first time was a couple of hours before the disappearing act. I thought I’d remind the authoress about when the party was starting and who the guests were. Then I saw those words. I came back again half an hour later, after everything ended in chaos. I had to come and see if she’d finished that sentence. She’d tried her best, but for some reason that next word was an insurmountable obstacle.”

Ella looked at the paintings. In some of them, Laura White was in her twenties, in some she was clearly older. There were nudes among them, too. You could tell from the brushstrokes that the painters would have liked to touch her, lie down with her. But the expression on her face was withdrawn, guarded, and Ella didn’t think that any of the artists would have dared to try.

She would have to come here again and take photos of them.

Aura Jokinen continued. “I knocked on the door and came in without asking. I walked right up behind her as she was
writing
. I saw what she had written and I asked her what exactly she had seen.

“She jumped up so fast that the chair fell over and nearly frightened me to death. I said I was sorry but the party had begun and she stood there looking pale and sick and said she would be down soon. She was sweating terribly. She smelled like illness. I knew she wasn’t well, but she said she would be down momentarily and asked me to go back to the party and make sure that the new girl felt welcome.”

Jokinen got up, turned out the lights and opened the door.

“Let’s go, Ella. I have a headache. This place still has the same strange smell it had that night. I remember I thought I could smell Laura’s cold sweat.”

Ella sniffed the air. There was a whiff of something, faint but perceptible—something sour, stale and damp.

She walked quickly out of the room.

Ella descended the same stairs that Laura White had been descending the moment before the snow storm.

She looked down at where she had been waiting to meet the authoress and marvelled at how insignificant this experience was. She had imagined she would feel something special, something affirming about walking up those stairs and looking down at the drawing room from the same place where Laura White had stood. But the stairs were very ordinary stairs, and the house was just a dark house. She wasn’t thinking about the mystery of Laura White, she was just focused on not stumbling
in the dark and falling on her head. She would have to come back here to do some literary research.

Of course, as a member of the Society, she could come back here—provided she avoided being murdered.

There was dust everywhere, but the house was otherwise clean. The aftermath of the storm had been cleared away. The furniture had been put right, the broken windows replaced, the floors swept.

Then Aura Jokinen started to wonder out loud about the missing books. The house had been full of books before, hadn’t it? There used to be a shelf full there, and another one over there, and now they were empty. They started looking for books. The dark, bookless rooms seemed to go on forever.

Finally they came to a room made of nothing but windows. Even the ceiling was a window. During the daytime it was no doubt a cradle of light, but now it seemed crushed under the weight of the winter night.

One of the large windows was ajar. There were almost-fresh footprints in the snow just outside. A little farther off was a flat, pitch-black hole. Jokinen shone the flashlight through the window and into the hole. At the bottom was charred paper and the remains of book covers.

“Ingrid has been here,” she said. “Of course. She’s still
carrying
on her holy war against the book plague. That woman is a complete obsessive, by the way—off the charts.”

They stared a little longer at the place where Laura White’s amazing library had been burned to ashes.

Then Jokinen sighed, turned from the window and started to speak in the rote style of a museum guide. As she spoke, she walked slowly around the room, her pink snow suit rustling.

“This, then, is the room where we read stories out loud. You know, there’s never been a single person as interested in my thoughts as Laura White was. Not my parents, not one of my friends or lovers. Laura had a burning need to understand what we thought and felt and did.”

Ella looked at the curly-haired woman with a slight feeling of amusement. The books she wrote had a photo of a man inside the cover. Ella had heard that it was a photo of Jokinen’s grandfather, who’d once sold encyclopaedias door to door.

There were eleven chairs ranged around the darkened floor. Ten of them were in a half circle. One chair had a higher back and more ornamental carving than the others. Aura Jokinen sat down in the half circle and stared at the chair—the one that Laura White had sat in.

With her gaze fiercely fixed on the chair, speaking as if from beyond time, she said, “My parents always said I ought to be nice and quiet when adults were talking. They talked constantly, about the obligations of a social democracy and cash flow and the German Democratic Republic, while I sat in the corner.

“But Laura White listened to my every thought. She would even ask me questions until she was sure she understood what was really on my mind. It was intoxicating.

“I thought she must love us very much and think of us as very important people. I decided that I would be eternally grateful and faithful to her and do everything I could to be worthy of her respect.”

Ella stood farther back and looked at Jokinen in profile. The chair under Jokinen creaked when she moved.

Ella’s gaze wandered over the chairs. In the thick darkness it was easy to imagine the children in them and in the most
important chair the woman Jokinen was talking about. Her words were as light as snowflakes, but they were forming an ever-heavier load.

“Later on I realized that the whole time she was teaching us, she was actually studying us. She was interested in us, but to her we were little bugs under a magnifying glass. She taught us to play The Game and see inside each other and write down what we found. And once she had us figured out, she put every one of us in her Creatureville books.” Jokinen laughed. “You probably didn’t know that, even though you studied literature. Martti was so proud and beautiful as a child that it made your heart ache, and of course he thought he was very important. When Laura White got to know him thoroughly, he showed up in her books as Bobo Clickclack. Before that Bobo was just a name, a shadow, a sort of empty husk. If Martti had
realized
what she’d done he probably would have fallen apart. He always used to laugh at Bobo Clickclack and say that Bobo was without a doubt the stupidest, most disgusting character in the whole series. Poor Martti. He never understood how Laura had come up with such a horrible character.”

Ella chose a chair and sat down—she had a right to her own chair in this room. “Which character are you, then?”

They both looked at Laura White’s chair.

“Yeah…” Jokinen said. “When I realized that Laura was putting replicas of us in her books, I tried to hide my true
personality
. I started to take on new personas, a different me from one day to the next. I piled different emotions around myself until even I wasn’t sure what I really thought or felt. But Laura eventually broke my code.”

She turned to look at Ella across the dark room, a sly smile
on her face. “Why don’t you guess? You’ve studied the books. Which Creatureville character best represents world-famous science-fiction writer Arne C. Ahlqvist, alias housewife Aura Jokinen?”

Ella looked at her for a long time. Jokinen aimed the beam of the flashlight at her own face so that Ella could see her changing expressions. Powerful, conflicting emotions passed over her face.

“There’s one character in the books who could fit your profile,” Ella said at last. “Who tries to hide, to appear to be something other than what it is. A character who makes up new names for familiar places and things, tries to make the familiar seem strange and the strange familiar, to make other people as bewildered as itself.”

“Yes?”

Ella took a breath and said, “You’re the Odd Critter, also known as Baron Bewilder.”

Jokinen clapped her hands and nodded. Ella gave her a
dubious
look. Jokinen got up, went to stand next to Laura White’s chair and continued her presentation.

“When I realized that Laura White was studying us, I decided I would study Laura White. All the others adored her—behold the pride of Rabbit Back! I tried to practise looking at her more closely, looking in a different way. I wanted to find out exactly who Laura White was.
What
she was.”

Jokinen’s hands shook as she pointed at her own head and said, “I’ve been collecting observations of Laura White for thirty years. It’s all up here. That’s why, I’m sorry to say, my head is more than a little cluttered. It’s like my kids’ room. And messy rooms get on my nerves. They make me really angry.” She sighed. “I’m not saying that Laura wasn’t a wonderful teacher.
But the main goal wasn’t to teach, it was to learn. She taught us one particularly important thing that I used as a weapon against her. She said that a writer should know how to think about everything there is to think about, even when everyone else is thinking only about the possible, or the probable. That was damn good advice.

“It’s been my guiding thought whenever I contemplate Laura’s essential nature. And everything I’ve written and published over the years—all of my prize-winning novels and acclaimed short stories, all that vaunted Hollywood adaptation crap—it’s all been my way of preparing myself for understanding what I was about to discover.”

She grinned at Ella now, and sat down in Laura White’s chair. She took the scarf off her head and placed it on her knees, took a bottle of yellow out of her pocket, and said, “Of course, all of this mental preparation has taken its toll. Once you start wondering about things, you end up wondering about your own turds. Take the children, for instance. I have children. At least, we call them ‘children’, but what are they really? What do they mean? They came into the world from between my legs and at first they lived off a fluid that started oozing out of my breasts. Now they live in my house and perform endless rituals they call ‘playing’. They use words that are strange to me. When they look at me I can never be sure what’s going on behind their eyes. They might as well be aliens from another planet.”

Because of the open window it was cold in the room. Ella rubbed her thighs. Aura Jokinen laughed out loud, threw her head back and let out such a cloud of steam that it looked like her guts were on fire.