Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

He dreamt about his family.

Olli is lying naked on a towel. Aino is on her own towel next to him. The whole family is spending a holiday on the lake shore at Tuomiojärvi.

His son is building a sandcastle. The towers are surprisingly tall and the whole structure is truly a masterpiece of sand architecture with unbelievably precise details.

Olli is proud of the boy. As the castle grows more and more fantastic, Olli’s angst is also growing—he left the camera at home. Maybe he should go and get it and take as many photos as he can while he has the chance.

It’s Sunday and there’s no one else on the beach. They’re all at church. The bells at Taulumäki Church are pealing. Aino sighs guiltily and mumbles that next time they should go to church, too, no matter how beautiful the weather is.

Olli reminds her that because he’s in the parish council he’s ineligible to go to the services when they’re handing out tickets to heaven. “Unfortunately my position of trust prevents the two of you from getting into heaven as well, but somebody has to do this job. And spending eternity under the ground won’t be so bad. Even God himself is there, at the intersections of all the secret passages, watching movies.”

“Yes, that’s what you always say,” Aino sighs, and starts spreading suntan lotion on her legs. “And if that’s what they said at the parish-council meeting then I guess it must be true.”

The heat of the golden sand reaches their skin through the towels. Olli’s towel is blue and Aino’s is red. Olli wonders what it would be like to lie down with Aino on the red towel. The thought of it makes him feel aroused. Aino notices it and sits up. “Oh, no.”

Olli looks at her questioningly.

Aino takes a syringe out of her beach bag. “Maybe we should paralyse that, just to be safe,” she says, looking between Olli’s legs and smiling uncomfortably. “You know what I mean. So nothing inappropriate happens. Since you are having your midlife crisis.”

“No, thanks,” Olli says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Olli assures her. “Look, it’s already shrinking again… You can hardly even see it now. No need for an injection.”

Aino nods and lies back down again. The waves lap. Gulls float across the sky. The wind has a salty smell. Olli informs Aino that Tuomiojärvi isn’t a lake any more; it has turned into a sea. There was a long article about it in the newspaper.

“I know that,” Aino says. “I can hear the mermaids’ song.”

Olli notices that Aino’s skin is a lovely brown and her physique is statuesque and beautiful. It attracts him and arouses him again. He puts his hand between her legs.

Aino stiffens and looks at the sky. “We shouldn’t,” she says sadly, glancing around them meaningfully. “You know why…”

“They’re not here right now,” Olli says. “Besides, we still have one intercourse left in our marriage. If it’s all right, I’d like to use it now.”

Aino hesitates. “Our son is over there. We can’t do it where he can see us.”

The boy’s sandcastle is now several metres tall and wide. Olli realizes that it’s going to be a copy of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. What marvellous arches and ornamentation their child has built out of sand!

Then Olli notices something in the water. A school of bare-breasted mermaids has appeared among the waves, close to the shore. They’re playing with something that looks like a plastic boat.

“He can go and play for a little while with the mermaids,” Olli suggests, kissing his wife’s breast, which tastes like chocolate. “I saw on a nature show that they like human children and are happy to suckle them.”

Aino smiles, now obviously aroused. “Well, perhaps just for a little while. But if he starts to smell like fish, then you have to scrub him with soap and a brush…”

Aino gets up and leads their son by the hand into the waves, encouraging him to go in deeper, like a good boy—the mermaids are waiting for him. He obeys and the mermaids take him with them. Aino turns and looks at Olli, and Olli becomes frightened.

Her face is chalky white and registers a bottomless sorrow. Olli feels deep horror. The weather has turned dark and cold. Snow is falling.

The mermaids escape beneath the sea. Their son is nowhere to be seen. Aino shrieks like a bird, falls into the waves, and vanishes from sight.

Olli can’t move. Little by little the snow blocks his nostrils, his mouth, until his breathing finally stops.

When he woke up, Olli went to read his new instructions on Facebook.

Anne was happy to report that she had arranged for Aino to have an unpaid holiday lasting until Christmas, so Olli didn’t have to worry that the school was wondering where she was.

It goes without saying that we will reimburse your wife for all the income that she loses being away from work because of our little project, and we’ll pay her an executive level per diem as well. A sum has also been deposited into your account which should admirably cover any costs the project entails for you.

Anne assured Olli that he didn’t need to worry about anything, and that their collaboration seemed to be going swimmingly.

Olli tried to believe her, nodding to himself reassuringly. But he started to feel faint and had to go curl up on the sofa for a while before he felt able to look through the Facebook profiles of his wife, Greta and the Blomrooses.

Aino’s status said:

Aino Suominen is on holiday! Greetings to everyone in Mäki-Matti!

There was a new photo on her profile. A picture of the boy sitting on the beach building a sandcastle—though not a cathedral—and Aino rubbing suntan lotion on her legs. She was looking straight into the camera. Her mouth smiling, her eyes empty. Maybe they were feeding her tranquillizers, or maybe she was just stressed.

Olli wrote a comment under the photo:

Greetings from Jyväskylä. Don’t worry, I’m taking care of everything.

He would have liked to write his wife a long letter and apologize for the way that his past had been mixed up in their present and turned her life into an incomprehensible nightmare. He felt vaguely guilty. When exactly had the Blomrooses decided to meddle in the lives of Greta and the Suominen family? Had it only been once Facebook had thrown them all together?

Clearly the Blomrooses were in control of Aino’s Facebook account, and he definitely shouldn’t do anything to upset Anne as long as his family was at the mercy of her whims. So he always gave brief, businesslike answers to the Blomrooses’ messages and was careful what he wrote to Aino.

Greta’s status said:

Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By’.

Leo and Richard’s status hadn’t been updated for a long time. There were a couple of mentions of “meeting old friends” in posts from months past. Anne was a more diligent Facebook user. According to her most recent post she was “atoning for youthful sins before it was too late” and sorry for “any discomfort this is causing for those not involved.”

Olli clicked the Like button.

For the past few weeks Olli had, with the help of some acquaintances of his, found out what Anne Blomroos had been doing over the years. It was obvious that she was a charming but dangerous sociopath. Of course, Olli knew this already from his days with the Tourula Five, and in particular from the day that the Blomrooses, led by Anne, had destroyed Greta. Anne’s Facebook profile said only that she worked in “a leadership position in business”.

More thorough research—mostly Googling and enquiries to friends in the business world—told him that Anne Blomroos was a senior executive and leading shareholder in a chemical company. Olli knew a Dutch publisher who had connections to the firm. According to him, the stock value of the company had been falling lately, because of rumours that Anne Blomroos had incurable cancer that had spread to her brain. A brain tumour would certainly explain many things, and make the situation even more to be feared. A person with a terminal disease had nothing to lose.