Life and death feel smaller in the passageways than they do above ground. That makes moving underground easier, but it’s also one of the greatest dangers of the secret passages. Under the ground, it would be easy to forget yourself.
It’s not completely dark down here. Olli can see something. Faint shapes. Karri’s feet. His own hands. Fingers waved in front of his face. Or he might be imagining all this. Down here he can’t be sure of anything.
He focuses on crawling.
Olli thinks he’s lying in a bed. He’s sinking into sleep, and he smiles. Grandpa Notary is standing in the doorway. “Goodnight and sweet dreams, Olli. Did you have a good day? What did you get up to today?”
“We went somewhere,” Olli answers sleepily. “Hey, I don’t remember now. Let me sleep. I’m tired…”
Something knocks against the top of Olli’s head. He takes hold of it. It’s a shoe. Karri’s smelly shoe.
“Don’t stop.” Karri’s voice is sharp. “Keep moving!”
Olli remembers where he is and latches on to the idea of moving. Crawling is all that matters. Here underground, there is nothing but crawling.
It would be easy to lose himself here. The world left on the surface is too far away to feel real. The Blomrooses, Tourula, his mother and father… they’re all irrelevant. Meaningless.
But one thing is true here; there is one truth that they can’t forget even for a second. They must always remind each other of it: keep moving, keep crawling forward, otherwise the darkness will come and swallow you. It wants everything that comes here in its arms, wants everything for its own. It takes power to resist and return to the light.
It’s been a minute, or hours, since Olli hung his jacket on a branch and crawled into the hole. Since then centuries full of thoughts whispered by the dead have flowed through his mind.
They’ve changed him.
He’s different from the way he was when he crawled into that hole. The secret passages have purged him of all that he had accumulated around him. He no longer even remembers the name of the person he was before. The person who is here, crawling, is naked and nameless and weightless.
It crawls deep into the dark and smiles.
He’s crawling. His name and all the other things do come to him every so often. They land on him like crows and make him heavy and slow.
Under the ground, he can see things. There are faint particles of light that sometimes gather around one thing or another and attach themselves to it. Then, for a moment, the invisible is visible, until the particles break off and continue on their way.
Olli sees all kinds of things.
Roots poking through the ceiling of the tunnel.
Underground intersections.
Passages stretching up and down and off to the sides.
And figures—barely real, furtive; small, large, fast, slow; perhaps animals, perhaps something else.
No need to worry, Karri whispers. They’ll stay away from us.
Olli doesn’t worry. He just keeps crawling.
He bumps into Karri.
Karri has stopped in front of some kind of door. It’s small, like a little hatch. The light particles are attached to it. Olli doesn’t remember it from the last time they were here. But maybe it was here—your memory plays tricks on you under the ground.
Karri tugs at the hatch. It’s stuck. He has to wrench at it with all his strength. Stones fall down off the walls of the tunnel. For a moment it feels as if the passage will collapse. This doesn’t really worry Olli.
Karri tells Olli to go through the door.
He goes through.
On the other side of the hatch, it’s no less dark. But Olli senses that there is space around him now. The ceiling is high, the walls far apart. He stands up and walks farther in, his hands stretched out in front of him.
Karri is still in the doorway.
Then he asks Olli, “Can you see her?”
Olli doesn’t understand. “Who am I supposed to see?” he asks, his voice amused.
The answer is so long in coming that Olli thinks Karri must have gone away and left him here alone.
“Do you see the girl? Look at the girl.”
“It’s dark in here,” Olli protests. “I can’t see anyone.”
“Look hard and you’ll see her,” Karri whispers. His words hiss like insects. Olli starts to feel cold.
“Look at her hair,” Karri says.
It’s difficult to say which direction the voice is coming from. It sounds close by and far away. “Look how golden her hair is.”
Olli opens his eyes as wide as he can. The darkness is deeper here than in the other passages. Then the particles of light come. They start to gather together and he does see something.
Hair.
A girl’s curly hair.
Golden yellow.
Olli reaches his hand towards the light particles, then jerks it back with a start when he feels the strands of hair.
“And her lips,” Karri’s voice continues, tense and breathless. “Can you see them? Red lips. Soft and curving. Can you see them smiling at you?…”
Something red flickers in the blackness.
“And her eyes, Olli… What kind of eyes does she have?”
Olli meets the gaze of the stranger.
“Blue,” he says, trembling. “No, green. I don’t know. They make me think of the sea.”
He’s scared now.
“Do you think she has beautiful eyes?” Karri asks.
Olli whispers that he does. He is still staring into her green eyes. Then they disappear into the darkness they came from. There’s a scratching and rustling. Someone or something is moving in the dark.
“What about my voice?”
The voice is soft and musical. It sounds like it belongs to the girl he just saw.
“Do you like my voice?”
Olli can’t speak.
“Do you like me?”
Olli’s heart pounds. “Where’s Karri?” he asks.
“He went away,” the girl says, and sounds amused.
Olli feels a touch on his cheek.
The girl is caressing him.
“Away?”
She steps closer. The light particles gather on her skin and hair and make her visible.
“Yes,” she says rapturously, and kisses Olli on the cheek. “That poor, unfortunate boy finally left us all alone, and he’s never coming back.”
23
THE LIVING ROOM had always had its problems. But it was also bright and pleasant.
Now a darkness had settled in the corners and drained the life from the colours. Enough was enough. Olli felt a surge of energy, got up from the sofa, turned on the lights, and pulled open the curtains. Outside it was daytime. He looked at the trees and houses. The daylight came from a faraway land of ordinariness and clarity, where people didn’t disappear from their homes.
He went back to the sofa. The room was still dim. The light didn’t really illuminate it. Maybe the bulbs were wearing out, and the window was dirty. Or maybe over the years too much stuff had accumulated in the room and it was sucking up all the light.
Birds sat on the limbs of the trees peeping into the house. Olli realized that he didn’t like birds. They were just little animals that zipped around through the air. And they were noisy. They sounded like an alarm from some electronic device.
Then he started to make an inventory of everything in the house. Many rooms: the hallway, the living room, the corner room, the kitchen; and upstairs two bedrooms and the office with the computer, and on it Facebook. In the rooms were chairs, tables, sofas, beds, shelves, cabinets, lamps, decorative objects, electronic devices, dishes, medicines, cleaning supplies, tools, food, clothing, flowers, mirrors and photo albums.