Read The Rabbit Back Literature Society Online
Authors: Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen
Tags: #Fantasy, #Contemporary
“I think I feel something for them, and if the need arose I
would probably even die for them, rescue them from a fire or something. But when you really think about it, isn’t that love just a hereditary, biologically determined reaction, part of my electrochemical makeup? If too much or too little of something was excreted, would that love disappear, just like that,
poof
? Would my children start to look like vermin to me, like little beasts? Is motherhood just based on the fact that chemicals from my organs drug me into imagining that taking care of my children is the most important thing in life? In the end, they’ll move away and become strangers to me, which is what they basically are.”
She looked as if she were waiting for an answer. Ella said she wouldn’t know anything about it.
“It’s a matter of surrendering to the obvious,” Jokinen said. “It’s frightening, but also liberating. Once you learn to wonder about things that are considered normal, you can keep a cool head, even when something less normal crosses your path.”
The two of them sat quietly in Laura White’s cold, dark, windowed room and looked at each other in the pale moonlight. The flashlight lay on the floor, its batteries fading. Jokinen’s thought structures wrapped around them in a spiral that both fascinated and frightened Ella.
“I want to ask a favour of you,” Jokinen said. “I brought you to this place because this is where Laura White lived her life, and where the Rabbit Back Literature Society was created and developed. The reason I brought you here particularly is that you have research training, and at this point I need your help.”
Ella lifted her hand and touched her lips with her
fingertips
. She noticed that her muscles were clenched. She said nervously, “Well, it’s fortunate for both of us that you saved my life tonight.”
The sci-fi author nodded and continued with a smile, “I want you to ask me an all-encompassing question about Laura White’s inherent nature, and make sure that I spill until you’re sure you’ve received a complete answer. Use Rule 21 freely if you need to. Otherwise I’m sure I won’t be able to get it out. I’ve tried, but I couldn’t do it. Something inside me always fights it, in spite of all my preparation. And after that…”
“Yes?”
“After that, I’ll ask you what an unbiased, intelligent young researcher can make of it.”
Ella got up, walked slowly over to Jokinen and stood behind her with her hands resting on Jokinen’s shoulders.
“We should play The Game all the way through on your terms?” Ella said. “And I should be glad to do it because you rescued me and betrayed your old comrades for my sake?”
“If that’s how you want to think of it,” Jokinen said humbly.
Ella watched the cloud of breath in the dimness. She smiled, leaned over, pressed her lips to Jokinen’s ear and whispered, “Help! Help! The fierce and dreaded Emperor Rat is after me and will be here any minute!”
Jokinen turned to look at her. Ella grabbed her by the nose and squeezed until she gave a squeal.
“When I look at you now,” Ella whispered, “I really can see the Odd Critter, alias Baron Bewilder, in the flesh. Tell me the truth now, and I won’t rip your nose off, and I’ll do what you ask. Did the Society really decide to murder me tonight?”
She gave Jokinen’s nose another twist and looked into her eyes from five centimetres away. The corners of Jokinen’s mouth turned upward and revealed her trick.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Jokinen whispered through her blocked nose.
Ella let go of Jokinen’s bloody nose and wiped her hand on her pink snow suit.
“What about the meeting? The one where you decided to murder me because of the notebook?”
“There was no meeting,” Jokinen laughed, gingerly feeling her nose. “We can’t stand each other. There’s no way in hell anything could make us get together for another meeting. I managed to challenge Ingrid, and Martti, too, after endless surveillance, with those damn dogs trying to bite me. I got them to spill everything they’d talked about with you.”
Ella slapped her on the back of the head. Jokinen gave a yelp and said, “It was filtered information, of course, which there’s generally no point in collecting. But it did make this whole thing seem believable.”
She looked Ella in the eye and said she wanted to play The Game all the way through with her and find out Laura White’s inherent nature.
“I could have just challenged you in the normal way. But I’m writing an escape story. I thought I would research how a person really behaves in a situation like that. But there’s another, more important reason I did it. I’m sorry for the shock I gave you, of course, but you must admit that it’s helped you understand something you absolutely have to understand.”
“Which is?”
Jokinen smiled.
“That anything at all can happen at any moment. There—I’ve got the blindfold on, and I’ve taken the yellow. Let The Game begin.”
“
Y
OU AND MY FATHER
knew each other,” Ella says. “You were with Laura White in that Renault they found in the woods.”
Aura Jokinen’s curls swung nervously. “Don’t start asking about your father. Hell, I can tell you about your father and that drive after The Game, free of charge, with as many details as you like. Ask me about Laura White.”
Ella coughs.
“What?” Jokinen says. “I didn’t hear what you said.”
“I didn’t say anything yet.”
“Oh. Why not? The Game has started. I’ve got the rag over my eyes and the yellow in my belly. I’m hellbent and ready. Ask me a basic question about Laura White.”
Ella doesn’t answer, she’s gathering her thoughts first. Jokinen huffs and cracks her knuckles.
“I had a dream a couple of nights ago,” Ella finally says. “When I was a kid, about ten years old, I got a jigsaw puzzle as a present from my father. On the box there was a picture of the finished puzzle. It was a picture of the inhabitants of Creatureville—Bobo Clickclack, Dampish, Crusty Bark, Mother Snow and the rest, in the middle of a forest. I had a dream about that puzzle.”
Jokinen tilted her head. “So?”
“In the dream, though,” Ella continued, “the pieces were different from what the picture on the box led you to expect. I started putting the puzzle together, and it was forming the wrong picture. In one corner you could see a hand—white, and obviously dead—and I knew that it was from Laura White’s body. And the Creatureville characters that had been smiling on the box were frightened now. They were looking at something behind the trees. I knew that if I followed the direction of their eyes, I would find Emperor Rat when I finished the puzzle.”
Ella is silent. She doesn’t remember any more and Aura Jokinen doesn’t say anything. She sits hunched over in Laura White’s chair with the blindfold on, completely still. Through the window Ella can see the moon and the garden bathed in moonlight. Farther off she can dimly see the tangled undergrowth of Hare Glen, which was once, they say, a very beautiful place.
A noise of dogs drifts over the valley. Ella guesses the sound is coming from Martti Winter’s house. Maybe they’re barking at the large man as he peeps out the window, or maybe they’re barking at the moon as it clatters along its invisible tracks.
“Why don’t you ask me a question?” Aura Jokinen says
irritably
. “Unless another interesting dream has occurred to you that you want to tell me about. We have to play The Game. Otherwise neither of us will be a member of the Society anymore. I’m sorry for being impatient, but I have a hell of a headache. My blood pressure keeps going up, and I left my medicine at home. And it’s damned cold in here. And I’m as ready as a trembling virgin. My head is splitting, so please will you play it all out of me and tell me what the hell you think it means?”
Jokinen’s face is pale, tense and sweaty. She holds her
trembling
hands to her temples as if her head really were about to
split in two from the pressure of her thoughts. Her blonde curly hair sticks out between her fingers as if she were pulling on it.
Ella takes pity on her and asks her question.
“What do I need to know if I want to get a clear idea of the true nature of Laura White?”
Ella waits for a flood of words, but Jokinen doesn’t seem to know what to say.
A minute passes.
Laura White’s chair creaks nervously as the sci-fi writer rocks herself back and forth.
Ella thinks about the house around them. She thinks about the walls and floors, the joists, the unlit stairway and the dozens of rooms. The house around them is empty now, but she can feel the Society’s past hiding just around a corner, almost palpable.
Ella blows on her fingers and rubs her hands together. Outside the windows the stars swing slowly into new positions.
Aura Jokinen sweeps back her curls, sighs gently and starts to speak, at first with care and concentration, then more quickly:
“The story that Laura White always told goes like this: Laura White wrote the Creatureville books, founded the Rabbit Back Literature Society, and trained nine children to be successful authors. It’s a very good story, of the deeds of an esteemed and beloved authoress. But when you look for answers to the question of who or what Laura White really is, you find all kinds of peculiar little
things that are hard to fit into any reasonable story. So you forget about them, because that’s what people generally do with things like that. People
can’t stand it if a thing doesn’t fit into any mould or conform to a ready pattern. Some things just can’t be fully explained.
For years I’ve been collecting these banal peculiarities, all the while living the story that everyone tells, the story that’s been built around us. I studied literature in the Society, then I wrote books, because that had become my nature and it was expected of me. And then when the time came I had sex and I had children and served as their mother. That fit into the larger story we were living, too. And I took great care to learn to see things as they really are, without any filters or forced patterns. It’s left its trace on everything I’ve ever done. On my books, too. A review of one of my books once said: “Arne Ahlqvist has once again whipped up some delicious gingerbread, but thrown away the recipe book—” Ha ha…
I’ll tell you the story now—sorry, I mean I’ll spill some things that are as much a part of a portrait of Laura White as anything else that’s known about her.
You already know about the book thing. It’s bizarre as hell. I’ve never completely understood exactly what it is. I just know that many of Laura White’s books turn volatile somehow. They start to change. And the same thing has happened to the books in the Rabbit Back library, to Ingrid’s delight. Laura said it was bacteria, but I don’t know. It could just as well have something to do with quantum mechanics. I’ve written lots of stories about that, just so I could learn to understand it as a phenomenon. Or maybe the books are haunted. I don’t know. But one thing I do know is that sometimes reality shrivels up and blisters around Laura White, almost as if she isn’t really completely suited to the reality she’s trying to fit into.
The things I’m talking about, there are so many of them… once, for instance, when I was about nine or ten, I happened to go into Laura White’s room while she was sleeping. She was amazingly beautiful lying there on her bed, like something out of a painting or a fairy tale. She was wearing a white summer dress and the window was open, and it was autumn outside.
I knew I ought to leave, but I sat down quietly on the bed and watched her while she slept. I even secretly sniffed her hair and her skin and her breath, and they were full of the smell of dying autumn flowers and fallen leaves. A sad smell, and I thought, I love Laura White so much, much more than I love my own mother.
Then I heard something. Laura was saying something to me. Whispering. Her lips were moving. But she wasn’t saying anything—a bee crawled out from between her lips: that’s what the noise was.
It was confusing. I was startled, and I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I just remember that the bee buzzed around the room and then suddenly it was on my face and it stung me on the cheek and it hurt awfully.
I ran out of the house and went home. I remember that my cheek was throbbing and I was crying. The next time I saw Laura White she said, “Oh, my, Something must have stung poor Aura’s face,” and I just said, “Yes, a bee stung me in the meadow.”
I’ve never told anyone about this until now.
Of course it could have been partly a dream. You can’t completely trust a child’s perceptions. I’m sure that’s what you’re thinking. That’s what I’d like to think, too. It would give me a way to comprehend these aberrations.
But bizarre little things like that happened again and again, and no one ever took any notice of them. How can you tell someone about these things? How do you go up to someone and say, “Laura White was just walking in the rain, and she sneezed, and for half a second I could see right through her?” There were lots of things like that—not really frightening. The worst things, the things that really weren’t according to the recipe, were still to come.
Oh yeah, before I get to that, I ought to mention something you should pay special attention to when you form your theory about Laura White’s nature. There’s an event connected with her childhood that… well, maybe if you get the chance you should talk to this retired doctor—his name is
Jansson and he knows more about the incident than I do. I don’t know if the two of you were introduced at the party, but he was there. Do you remember him? A thin, white-bearded gentleman, quite elderly? Anyway, he was the doctor who treated Laura White when she had the accident, when she was a child. What happened was that…
Ella grows nervous.
Aura Jokinen is still speaking, or at least trying to speak, but Ella can’t make out what she’s saying now. Her words start to slur, then fragment into mere babblings.
Jokinen sniffs a couple of times, tries to sit up straight, opens her mouth wide, leans to one side, then slumps onto the floor.
Ella jumps out of her chair, bends over Jokinen, and takes the blindfold off. She can see a helpless look in Jokinen’s eyes, and a flaccid shapelessness on one side of her face.
“It’s OK, my friend,” Ella whispers, stroking her hair. Drool runs out of one side of Jokinen’s mouth. “I’m sure this is reason enough to leave off playing The Game for now. I’m sure you’ll be all right. You probably just tried to spill too many big things all at once.”
Ella calls the emergency number and tells them that a middle-aged woman has suffered a stroke in front of Laura White’s house.
Then she drags Jokinen outside so they won’t have to explain, and won’t be blamed for the break-in.
They wait on the porch for the ambulance, Ella holding Aura Jokinen in her arms. Jokinen’s left eye is closed, but the right one is staring at her intently.
Her mouth keeps opening, as if she were still trying with all her might to spill.