Pasi Jääskeläinen - Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

The piano plays until wrong notes creep into the composition. Olli sits up.

Silence.

There is a bang from downstairs and a cold draught flows through the house.

Olli runs to the window.

Greta is pacing back and forth in the garden, oblivious to the rain, wearing nothing but a dressing gown.

She seems to be looking for something.

Olli pulls on his pyjamas, stuffs his feet into his slippers and goes down to bring her inside.

When he gets outside he doesn’t see Greta anywhere.

The rain is increasing and growing colder. The plants in the garden tremble under it. Olli shouts for Greta. The large, dark garden is filled with hiding places. He checks the storage shed, peeks into the greenhouse and goes to the Apple Gate to make sure she hasn’t wandered out into the street. Then he returns to the yard and checks every inch of it, several times. He even looks in the apple trees, in case she’s taken it into her head to climb one of them.

His wet pyjamas are clinging to his skin. He’s shivering, but he’s too worried to notice the cold. Finally he stops in the middle of the garden and stands in his striped pyjamas looking around helplessly, trying to think.

Could she have gone back inside? No, he’s sure he would have seen her.

Then he notices Greta’s dressing gown lying under a bush, and his heart sinks. Now she’s naked, and will surely take a bad chill.

He walks over to the dressing gown. It is, of course, soaking wet and dirty, but looking more closely Olli notices that part of it has also been pulled down into some kind of hole.

An animal’s burrow.

Some dirty, diseased, yellow-toothed animal, probably oozing bacteria.

Olli feels like he’s going to throw up. His head is buzzing. He has a tremendous desire to forget he saw the dressing gown, to look the other way and get out of there, get away from that revolting hole.

But he makes himself stay because the feeling itself tells him what is happening. He falls on all fours and finds the narrow opening in the tall grass where Greta crawled in. He starts to tear away the grass and withered flowers and wet leaves, until the entrance to the secret passage is finally visible.

He starts to shiver harder as he looks into the darkness that waits under the ground. No person in his right mind would even put his hand in there. There could be beetles, snakes, centipedes, rotted carcasses, rats or larger, sharp-toothed animals…

All his instincts tell him to cover the hole up again.

Right now.

Before something awful happens.

He takes a deep breath, willing his pulse to level off, his stress hormones to dissipate. He empties his mind of thought and focuses, as though preparing to dive into cold water.

Then, without thinking, he sticks his hand into the hole in the ground.

Then his head.

Followed by his upper body.

The smell of earth strikes his face and he almost pulls himself out again. What in heaven’s name is he doing? The only sensible thing to do is of course to run into the house and call the police, or the fire department, to come and get Greta.

Olli sobs and trembles as he forces himself farther under the ground.

Eventually his body begins to crawl, automatically, like he learnt to do as a child with the other members of the Tourula Five. He can still remember Karri’s words: Think of your body as a crawling machine. Don’t think about anything else .

You can only go into a secret passage if you learn to eliminate your natural psychological resistance.

Wet mud gets into his nostrils, his mouth, his eyes. The cold earth tears at his skin. His pyjamas are no protection. He coughs and snorts. He doesn’t just fear, he knows that in a moment he will suffocate and die, get stuck, have a heart attack, or bleed to death when some fierce animal—a weasel, or maybe a badger—bites his face, goes for his throat.

But Olli’s body remembers thirty years ago, ignores his instinct for self-preservation, and crawls ahead, deeper into the cold and the dark.

OLLI CRAWLS.

Once you manage to get inside a secret passage, moving forward becomes easier. Your mind stops struggling, opens up to the M-particles, and starts to move.

Then the secret passages begin to lure you deeper and deeper.

Reality becomes a Rubik’s cube played with by invisible fingers. Olli starts to remember things he’s forgotten, and at the same time to forget the parts of his life that he left above the ground a moment ago—or maybe hundreds of years ago. Time has no meaning here. In the secret passages, the past and the present are touching, as are what is and what simply could be. In the secret passages you can remember every choice you’ve ever had to make and all of those crossroads are spread out in alternative continuums. You just have to know how to listen to the music of the M-particles.

Karri once warned them that the magical feeling in the secret passages is powerful and dangerous and can rinse your mind so clean of all human connection that there is no return.

Even a short visit there always changes a person somehow.

Olli crawls. He knows he’s searching for something. But what?

A girl.

Not a girl.

A woman.

The woman that the girl became.

Greta, the girl in the pear-print dress, is here somewhere. It’s dark. Olli holds on to that name, and to the shadow of Greta; he can’t drop them, no matter how hard the M-particles shake him.

Shadows waver in the blackness. Sometimes he thinks he sees something, but in the secret passages you can’t trust your eyes. You might see all kinds of things and become so confused that you forget to crawl. And you can’t stop crawling, not for more than a second, or something bad could happen.

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.