The size of the passage varies. Sometimes it’s open and he can walk in a stoop. Sometimes he can even stand up straight. Then he has to crouch again, hold his breath and wriggle forward like a snake or a lizard.
Holding on to the name, and the thought of the pear-print dress, Olli crawls and crawls.
At some point the darkness begins to flow around him like water and mermaids swim up to him. They smile sweetly and beckon him to come and play. He smiles back.
Rest a while and look at us. Are we not beautiful?
You are, he answers, not stopping, remembering the importance of crawling.
Wouldn’t you like to touch us, caress our salty skin, kiss our breasts? Let us take away your burden and everything you’ve left behind up there. We can give you sweet forgetfulness in our arms…
Olli shakes his head.
You can have your little plastic boat back, too. Remember? Perhaps we won’t need it any more once we have you… At least tell us your name. What do you say—the boat for your name?
No, Olli whispers.
The mermaids’ playfulness vanishes.
Then maybe we will take your son. He likes our song so much, because he can hear the M-particles in it, and he might wade too far out at some moment when his poor mother is looking the other way…
Olli stops, flings a handful of gravel at the mermaids, and keeps crawling as they scatter into the darkness.
Then comes a tight turn.
It leads to the right and down.
He gropes at the darkness, feels the walls, twists and turns his body to make his way forward. Gravel scrapes his belly bloody. His trousers come off. A root on the ceiling tears at his face.
As he pulls himself a little farther forward a root catches at his testicles, like the cold hand of a witch, and he has to stop to keep them from being torn off.
Then a memory begins to unwrap itself in his mind, so powerful that it makes him stop where he is, his body painfully twisted.
In the memory he’s in a boat on the Touru River with the Blomrooses and Karri. Three days of heavy rain has just ended a couple of hours earlier. The air is still damp. A thick mist hangs over the river, hiding the shores and making the world dim and cottony.
Leo is rowing upstream. Anne is at the rudder. Her white panties peak out from under her plaid skirt. Anne notices Olli looking at them and smiles teasingly. Karri in his hood is crouched at the bow, a grey lump, peering out at the ravine. Riku is sitting next to Olli in the middle of the boat, sourly playing with his Coca-Cola yo-yo.
Anne eventually tells him to put the yo-yo away so the boat won’t rock.
The weight of the five of them makes the little boat ride dangerously low. They couldn’t fit Timi in the boat, but he follows along on the shore. They can’t see him, but they can hear him panting and barking through the fog, and they shout encouragement so he won’t give up and wander off.
On their right, invisible on the high ridge, is the beginning of the grounds of the paper mill. On the left is thick forest. Beyond the trees the land rises up in a steep hillside with the old cemetery at the top.
When they left the house they told each other that it was a perfect day for an expedition.
Yesterday they looked at a map and saw that it was only two kilometres upstream to where the lake emptied into the Touru, and they decided to take the boat to the river’s source. Aunt Anna, however, told them not to go beyond the dam at the paper mill. They lamented this for a moment, then decided that they could still explore the ravine in the boat and go ashore somewhere interesting.
Such a place seems to have just been found.
Timi starts to bark excitedly and comes to a stop somewhere in the mist.
Karri points towards the sound and Anne steers the boat in that direction.
The shore comes into view through the fog. They’re headed towards it fast. Olli takes hold of the sides of the boat and prepares himself for a crash.
But they don’t crash.
The boat clatters and scrapes through a wall of bushes and branches and up a narrow bank of sludge. They come to a rocking stop in a cove just slightly larger than the boat.
Timi weaves his way towards them through the trees, then leaps into the boat, barking happily, and licks Olli’s hand.
They crouch under the encroaching branches for a moment, then start pushing the limbs aside, preparing to get out and explore the riverbank.
Timi dashes between Riku and Olli to greet Leo and Karri, and the boat lists out of balance.
Then something unexpected happens.
There’s a crash and a fall, as if the earth has given way beneath them. A cavern opens up and the water in the cove rushes into it, as does the bow of the boat. As the stern rises into the air, Anne falls with a scream into Olli’s lap. Timi howls in panic and bites Riku’s leg. Riku curses loudly. Leo orders everybody to hold on.
Someone laughs.
Karri.
The others aren’t laughing. They’re lying on the bottom of the boat as it slides with the sludge into the darkness.
A secret passage.
Anne squeezes Olli’s arm and Olli holds the side of the boat with one hand and the girl with the other. He can feel her breast against his arm. They can’t see anything, and the noise of the fall blocks all other sounds.
The trip down seems to take hours, but the powerful M-particles in the secret passages make it impossible to tell; it may all be happening in a matter of minutes. Olli’s world shrinks to a clatter, a thud, a scream, darkness, sliding, tossing, falling and Anne’s aching grip on his arm, until he can no longer remember there ever being anything else.
At some point the boat’s side strikes a rock with a violent shake. Something soft, darker than the surrounding blackness, falls onto Olli, then climbs up him and flies away.
On many nights afterwards, at the border between waking and sleep, that moment returns to him. When it does, he tortures himself by imagining that through the noise he hears panicked barks, followed by a desperate, echoing howl.
They stop. Silence.
Then sound returns and the five children stumble to their feet. The wooden carcass of the boat creaks under their weight.
There’s a dripping of water somewhere.
Olli can hear and feel Anne breathing. As the particles of light begin to collect, diluting the darkness, he sees Leo and Riku looking around, their eyes wide. Anne, in shock, completely forgets to be mocking and self-assured.
Karri is already exploring the place. In the secret passages are many wondrous things, and although the memory of them never lasts the light of day, they’re still worth investigating.
If Olli can trust his eyes, they’ve come to some sort of underground chamber. In the passages, you can never be sure.
He sorts out his mind, which the M-particles have penetrated and muddled, and realizes that Timi is no longer with them.
He’s gone.
In the secret passages, it’s dangerous to stop; to keep crawling forward is life itself. The Five learnt that quickly, and as Olli becomes aware of a pain in his back and side, he realizes that he has stopped at that bend in the tunnel to gnaw on his memory like a dog on a bone, and he’s started to forget himself in the process.
In the nick of time, he gets a hold of that self and starts moving again, crawling forward for a time with his head humming empty.
Eventually he finds his name, straggling somewhere behind him, more than half disconnected. He gets hold of his Olliness and continues crawling, starts to collect himself from memories scattered in the dark passageway, and put his life back together one piece at a time.