Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

He looks up. Maybe his grandmother, or his grandfather the notary, is watching him from a window. The windows are sooty black.

At the corner of one building is a fort made of blankets. It’s usually full of laughing girls with bows in their hair. Now it’s abandoned, and the hem of the blanket flutters in the wind, which is growing stronger and colder.

There’s a doll lying on the lawn in front of the fort. It has a rough hole in its head with black air flowing out of it and seeping into the ground. A little distance away are other discarded things: a small red patent-leather shoe, a half-eaten sweet bun.

The bun is covered in insects. Olli can hear their rushing feet.

The light dims. The sun loses most of its brightness, as if someone has turned a dimmer switch. Olli feels nervous. Maybe the picnic won’t amount to anything after all.

In the direction of town he sees a peculiar black pillar of cloud that swirls and dances, sending cars, trees and people flying through the air. He squints and for a moment he can see their mouths opened in shouts.

The tornado comes towards him, howling and humming like his mother’s vacuum cleaner, uprooting everything in its path.

Olli runs to the door of a building. He has to push against it with all his strength to get it open. Then he’s inside, and he starts up the stairs. His footsteps echo in the stone corridors. The roar of the cyclone still sounds close by.

His grandparents’ apartment should be on the second floor. He can’t find it. He climbs to the third floor, then the fourth and the fifth, but all the apartments seem to have vanished.

Olli holds on to the handrail. His chest feels tight. His lungs are wheezing so hard that the paint is coming off the walls of the stairwell.

Something has changed.

A moment ago he was a light, nimble boy. Now he has a large, heavy adult body that moves only with tremendous effort. Sweat seeps from his skin, soaks his clothes and trickles like a stream down the stairs. The sound of the dripping salt water echoes down the corridor.

Of course his grandma and grandpa don’t live here any more. They’re both dead and buried long ago. How could he have forgotten that?

He rubs his temples. Is he drunk, or having some kind of attack, so that he can’t think or remember clearly? Or maybe this is a dream. That must be it: he’s dreaming.

In any case he has to get out of this hallway; he can’t stay here.

It’s hard to move his feet. His bones creak and grind against each other when he tries to move. Bone dust sheds from his legs and makes him cough. The stairs are steep, but he has to go up; he can’t go back down again.

He struggles, his kneecaps screeching, his feet covered in white dust from his bones. Eventually he wrenches his feet from stair to stair with his hands because it’s the only way he can get them to move.

Finally he reaches the landing at the top. There’s only one door on this floor.

It’s open.

From the hallway he can see the only room in the apartment. No people. No furniture. Just a stack of newspapers in the middle of the floor. He picks up the paper on top. It’s the Jyväskylä free tabloid, an issue from more than three decades ago. On the front page is a headline in large print: LOCAL FAMOUS FIVE UNCOVER BURGLARY RING!

There actually were a couple of stories written about them in the local paper. Olli didn’t remember the articles being so prominent.

The other papers in the pile also have stories about the Famous Five of Tourula.

The darkness thickens. The letters and words won’t stay in place, as often happens in dreams, but when Olli concentrates hard he can read what the articles say. They tell the heroic exploits of Tourula’s Famous Five over several years. Everything that happened to them is there. Even things that he doesn’t remember.

In the beginning it was all fun and excitement. His teenage years, his chance misfortunes, the sheer ordinariness that came with growing up hadn’t yet spoilt it.

The first headline had their photograph below it.

The five of them, posed in front of the abandoned house. They were so small, adorable, innocent. In their own minds they had been big and worldly.

The house was where they found all the things the burglars had stolen from around Tourula: silverware, outboard motors, tape decks, Heikki Ojarinne’s money stash, televisions, Aunt Anna’s jewellery. The gang of kids had even rescued the Thesleff painting that the three men had stolen from Aunt Anna’s house while she was picnicking on the lake shore with Olli, Karri and the Blomroos children.

The article told how “this latter-day Famous Five” spent their summer holidays making their detective dreams come true:

Taking the popular Famous Five adventure books as their model, the children gathered clues and made deductions—and just two days before school was to begin, these young defenders of justice found the burglars and their loot in an abandoned house in the old Tourula area of Jyväskylä.

The article marvelled at their cleverness:

Anne, the youngest of these remarkable children, is only ten years old, and Leo, the heroic senior member of the group, is twelve. Olli, Karri and Richard all turned eleven this summer.

The author pointed out that the children had been in real danger when the criminals, taken by surprise, had attempted to defend their cache with knives:

Things could have taken a terrible turn if not for the cool nerves of Leo Blomroos, star athlete at his school in Espoo, who told the other children to hide and made himself a decoy to lure the burglars. A furious chase ensued. When Leo judged that enough time had passed for his sister, brother, cousin and friend to reach safety, he made a dodge and managed to elude his pursuers. The other children summoned the police to the house, who arrived just in time to catch the wrongdoers red-handed and arrest them.

Olli puts the newspaper back on the stack. He knows he’s dreaming, but he nevertheless decides to take the papers with him.

He hears a noise from the stairway.

A dog barking.

He steps outside into the hallway. The dog is a couple of floors below him. A black and white cocker spaniel, shambling up the stairs with ears hanging, his fur shedding mud and dirt onto the steps.

Timi.

Olli holds tight to the railing.

Timi has been in the secret passages for thirty years.

He disappeared. He simply didn’t come back up with the rest of them.

No one knew what had happened to him. Memories of the secret passages faded quickly when you came back to the surface. Once you left them you could only recall them in bits and pieces.

He had waited for a long time for his dog to come back. When the summer ended he’d had to go home without Timi. For months afterwards every time the telephone rang he was sure that it was his grandma calling to say: Guess who just showed up in the yard? It’s that famous dog of yours. You and your dad had better come quick and get him.

But Grandma didn’t call. Autumn had turned to winter and Olli’s father had come and sat down on the side of his bed and told him that it was time to give up hope and accept the truth.

Just as Olli is about to call Timi, the dog is gone and there are three children in his place: a pretty blonde girl and two boys. The Blomrooses. Olli was supposed to meet them in the yard. Only Karri is missing. The Famous Five of Tourula must be on their way to a picnic.

Olli faintly remembers that things haven’t been particularly good between him and the Blomrooses lately. They seem to have been avoiding each other.