The Winter Place (26 page)

“Not to worry,” the Keeper said with grim cheer. “They should be here soon enough. Perhaps they'll make you some cocoa.”

Axel had run fresh out of patience with the old man's garbage. “Are you going to show me the way, or do I have to find it myself?”

The Keeper smiled, displaying those horrible rows of urgent teeth. “You should leave that toy behind,” he said. “It'll only slow you down.” He reached for Sam's sword, meaning to throw it away as he had the chain mail. Axel's body stepped back without his mind telling it to.

“You're not touching it,” he said, lifting the point to the Keeper's belly.

“Really, now?” The Keeper cocked his head and took a full step forward. To Axel's horror, the sword sank deep into the old man's stomach, pushing all the way through and tenting the back of his duster where it came out on the other side. It shouldn't have done that—replicas are way too blunt. But it was as though the Keeper were made
of soft cheese. “You can't scare a dog with threats of dinner,” he said, unsticking himself. “Hang on to it if you want, but it isn't my problem if you can't keep up. I don't wait for stragglers.”

And off the Keeper went, deeper into the woods, in search of the path. Axel stood there for a moment, staring down at his father's sword. The dull blade was coated in something dark, but it wasn't blood. It wasn't even a liquid. It was ash—tiny little grains that still smelled vaguely of old fires. The fine ash began to fly from the blade, scattered by the breeze, freckling the surface of the snow.

Axel wasn't a straggler. He could keep up with this.

D
espite his warnings against falling behind, the Keeper didn't exactly rush. A thin stream of ash poured out of his wound, tracing a dark line across the snow. He hardly seemed to notice. The Keeper puttered, glancing about absently, scanning the roof of blue spruce above their heads. At one point he squatted down to brush away some snow, plucking a little green tendril from the earth below—some kind of vetch or herb. The Keeper brought the frost-wilted thing up to his nose for a sniff and then put it into his mouth, working it over with his tongue. Then he spat it out, mumbling. He reached into his quilt-patched duster and pulled out his long-stemmed pipe, pausing to pack the bowl with tobacco, patting
himself down for matches. In the distance, they could hear the gathering hum of the snowmobile.

Axel didn't want to push—he was still spooked by the way the Keeper had impaled himself, by the way he'd seemed almost to enjoy the rush of dull metal into his amazingly soft guts—but this was getting ridiculous. Jaana and Tess would be here any minute. “What are you waiting for?” he said.

“Not waiting,” the Keeper said. He got his pipe going, souring the air with a thin veil of smoke. “
Looking.
There should be a blaze nearby, it seems to me.” He grabbed at one of the lolling branches above and pulled it down for inspection, loosing a small cascade of snow over Axel's head. The Keeper released the branch after plucking off a few needles, allowing it to spring back into the understory.

“What do you mean a blaze? Like a trail blaze?” Axel shook the snow out of his collar, briefly picturing the color-coordinated paint splashes that marked the paths in Mud Lake Park. Surely the way through the underworld couldn't be marked for tourists.

“In a manner of speaking,” the Keeper said.

The soft roar of the snowmobile was growing louder, and Axel heard a voice calling his name. It was Tess. “You mean you don't remember the way?”

“There is no remembering the way,” the Keeper said with an exasperated show of thinning patience. He took another branch in hand and shook it clean. “Because the way isn't set. Because the woods of the world are a tangle, and the path is just as . . . tangled.” The Keeper squinted—that word, “tangled,” seemed to be the best he could do on short notice. “Think of woods as water—as an ocean. With all its tides and currents, surges and waves. There are different oceans, but there's also only one. It's all the same ocean. And it's all the same wood. The path can take us from one part of it to another, but it changes every time the woods do. Which means that the path is different today than it was when you accidentally stumbled onto it last week. It's different at this moment than it was when I first said the word ‘moment.' ” The Keeper paused to scrutinize this second branch, plucking away another tuft of needles. But for the pitchy undercurrent of menace coursing beneath the old man's voice, Axel could just as well have been listening to his own father. “The map is in the details, and details always change.” The Keeper turned on Axel, a disquieting smile peeking out behind his pipe stem. He squatted down and held out his hands, revealing the little stack of needles in each palm.

“Which way home?” he said.

It struck Axel right off that the two piles were not identical. The needles in the Keeper's mangled left hand were a rich, deep green, thick and square-shaped about the middle. It was the same Norway spruce that Axel had been wandering beneath since daybreak. But the needles in the Keeper's right hand were totally different—lighter, flat, and faintly jagged. Canadian hemlock, the trees that clustered in thick hollows back in Baldwin. The trees that towered and pitched over the shore at Mud Lake; the trees his father used to lurk beneath, looking for woodpeckers and owls. God, how perfect was that? Sam had taught him this, and now Axel would use it to find him. He pointed at the hemlock.

The Keeper dropped the needles and brushed his palms clean. He took his pipe from his mouth and smacked his lips, as though savoring the rancid flavor. “Onward, then,” he said.

After they found that first blaze, the rest became more obvious. They passed a silvery set of ghost pipes peeking out of the ground like reverse icicles. They rushed under a quaking aspen, what few leaves it still had all spinning in the breeze. Up ahead the snow dispersed and then disappeared. Familiar birds began to flit here and there, cackling in the wavering trees—the birds of home. Blue jays and siskins, purple finches and
American robins. There was a strange darkness up ahead, a deepening smudge of gloom—like night was a place you could walk to. But the Keeper explained that it was nothing to be afraid of. The sun just hadn't risen yet in New York.

They'd gone no more than half a mile, but here they were. Home. Axel and the Keeper emerged from the woods, coming out into a grassy clearing ringed with pine and sugar maple. The moon dominated a cloudless night, and the stars were thick as buckshot on the rims of the sky. It was absolutely silent, Tess and Jaana's calls crushed under an ocean of distance. Axel knew this place—it was one of the meadows at Mud Lake Park, a spot that just some weeks ago had been filled with the striped tents of the Renaissance Faire. The moonlight was bright enough that Axel could even see where the grass had been worn away under horse hooves. This was the jousting field. Sam had ridden here, in the hours before he died. Pretending to fight, pretending to win.

Axel took a step into the field but was stopped by the Keeper's hand clamping firmly on his shoulder. “Maybe we'd better go around,” the old man said, eyes darting across the overgrown heaps of toppled grass. Axel had never heard anything like that in his voice before—it sounded like actual
concern. He followed the Keeper's gaze and saw them. Six, seven, more than a dozen corpses were sprawled across the dark. Their hands emerged here and there from the spume of wilting vegetation. Axel could see upturned feet and bent elbows, petrified postures of agony and rest. For an odd moment it seemed like they could be performers from the faire. Most wore layered leather, fur caps, and outdoorsy beards, like a convention of Davy Crockett impersonators. A few of them were still clutching muskets in their dead fingers. Among these frontier types, there was also a man in a fancy military uniform, his white overcoat stained with dirt and blood. This soldier had been run through with a cavalry sword, and his toppled tricorn hat covered his face. The rest of the dead seemed to have stocky reeds growing out of their chests and necks and stomachs, all fluffy at the tip. The tail ends of arrows.

“It's been a bad year for the dead,” a strangely familiar voice said. “A bad few decades, actually.”

Axel turned and saw a shape emerging from the shadows, round and pinkish. It was a woman wearing a cotton robe, plaid pajama bottoms, and a tattered set of fuzzy bunny slippers. Her hair was combed and sprayed, swooping down to cover exactly half of her round face. She had what looked like an antique telescope braced across her
shoulder, and the copper plating glowed wanly in the moonlight.

It was Mrs. Ridgeland.

“I always think they'll get sick of fighting, but they never do,” she said.

The Keeper, for his part, seemed not the least bit surprised to see her. Axel, on the other hand, had to sit down in the grass. Back in Helsinki, when he'd decided once and for all to return to the path and look for his parents, Axel had told himself that he was ready for anything. As it turned out, he was a liar.

“The dead in my woods are no different,” the Keeper said, stepping out to join Mrs. Ridgeland in the clearing. He sucked greedily on his pipe and used his walking stick to prod one of the ghostly soldiers, bumping the hat off his face. Axel wished he hadn't. “It's all new grudges on top of old grudges,” the Keeper said. “It's exhausting.”

“You're still a beginner,” Mrs. Ridgeland said. “Give it a century and then tell me how you feel.” Now she turned her attention away from the old man and squatted down in the grass beside Axel, using the folded-up legs of her telescope for balance. “It's polite to say hello,” she said.

“Hi,” Axel croaked.

But Mrs. Ridgeland didn't return his greeting. The half of her face that he could see was twisted
into a scowl. “Don't think for even a second that I'm happy to see you here,” she said.

“Now, now,” the Keeper said, his walking stick still pressed into the dead soldier's chest. “As soon as we find who we're looking for, we'll be out of your neat, neat hair.”

“That's what you promised me last time you were here,” Mrs. Ridgeland said, grabbing Axel under the arm and pulling him up out of the grass. She was surprisingly strong. “Look how well that turned out for everybody. And now that you've brought the kid, it'll be even worse.”

Axel felt like he was lagging behind just a bit. As he scrambled to make sense of what was going on, his mind went back to the day he and Tess had followed the bear tracks out of their garden. He remembered how the bristling prints had stuck to the side of the road, leading straight into Mrs. Ridgeland's yard. Saara must have gone there to ask her about Sam. And suddenly the explanation for what was happening was clear as day.

“You're a keeper, too,” Axel said.

“I'm
the
Keeper, thank you very much,” Mrs. Ridgeland said, puffing up in her robe just a bit. “When you're in my woods,
I'm
the Keeper. When you're in his woods, he can be.” She nodded over at the old man. “But here in Baldwin he's nothing more than an uninvited guest. You both are. I'd
appreciate it a great deal if you'd be on your way.”

“He never told me there were two of you,” Axel said.

The man that Axel knew only as the Keeper snorted loudly, twin plumes of smoke jetting out of his nostrils.

“A lot more than just two of us,” Mrs. Ridgeland said. “Every wood on earth has its Keeper.”

“Every wood
needs
its Keeper,” the old man said. It sounded like a correction. “It's part of the order of things. We're here to remember all the dead among the trees. You could think of us as the designated mourners. It's very glamorous, really.” His sarcasm was thick as spit.

“Well, then,” Axel said, turning back to Mrs. Ridgeland, “if you're the Keeper here, can't you tell us where my father is?”

Mrs. Ridgeland let out a long, dramatically put-out sigh. “I'll tell you the same thing I told your mother when she was rude enough to visit me at my home some weeks ago. The same thing I've told her many times since then. I haven't seen Sam Fortune. This could mean that he isn't in my woods—that Baldwin isn't his place. Or it could simply mean that I haven't seen him yet.” At this Mrs. Ridgeland gave a big, showy shrug. “My telescope is only so big,” she went on, “and my woods are brimming with dead. There are new
arrivals every hour. Almost all of them were loved by somebody before they died. And none of them are less, or more important, than Sam Fortune.”

She went quiet for a moment and stared down at Axel. When Mrs. Ridgeland spoke again her voice was a good deal softer. “You shouldn't mistake me. I'm very sorry about what happened to your father. After all, sorry is what we Keepers
do
. I don't usually get to know anybody well until they settle in my woods, but your father . . . He truly seemed to enjoy being alive. Not many do, or at least not as much as they should.” Her gaze drifted now, her voice hardening. “But one thing I can tell you for certain is that wherever Sam Fortune is, it's where he's
supposed to be
. And wherever your mother came from, that's where she's supposed to be. I don't know why you all can't just leave it at that.”