The Rabbit Back Literature Society (28 page)

Over the next hour the phone rings five times. Library patrons asking to reserve
The Return of Emperor Rat
and wanting to know how many people were already on the waiting list.

Finally Ingrid makes a decision. She leaves the check-out desk in the care of the new library assistant and goes into the back room. She takes the key from around her neck, opens the top drawer of the desk, and takes out the package wrapped in Christmas paper—the one containing the infected copy of
Creatureville
.

She unwraps the package.

What she sees makes her feel dizzy and sweaty, although she isn’t really surprised.

The cover says:

The cover illustration is of the familiar Creatureville characters and the dreaded Emperor Rat, whose name is of course
mentioned
in many Creatureville books, but who has never before actually appeared in them.

On the left side of the picture are all the Creatureville characters. They look shocked. Their features are grotesquely distorted with fear; Bobo Clickclack’s mouth is snapped open and the Odd Critter is holding its head in both paws. On the right side, Emperor Rat is holding on to Mother Snow, pulling her away from the others—not angrily, as you might expect,
but more like they’re old friends, if Ingrid is reading their expressions correctly.

Ingrid tries to still her trembling hands as she opens the book and looks at the first few pages.

The Return of Emperor Rat
seems like a perfectly ordinary book, with publication information, a title page—the only thing that amiss is that it’s a book that has never been written or printed.

Also, there’s only one page of actual text—only one
sentence
, in fact:

Ingrid Katz reads the sentence many times.

Then she wraps the book up again. It will have to be destroyed, of course. It’s as volatile as can be, and will spread the book plague. Tomorrow, at the very latest, she’ll drive to the cabin and heat the sauna with library discards.

But first she’ll show the book to Martti. And if that
fish-lipped
girl is hanging around, she can see it, too, since she’s so interested in everything to do with Laura White.

And that way Ingrid can check to make sure Martti is all right. She’s been having bad dreams lately, dreams that his house is surrounded and the dogs get in and eat him.

The hole is half a metre deep now.

The work advances slowly. Martti Winter is panting and
sweating
in his suit. Ella offers to take the shovel, but he shakes his head.

The gusts of wind increase. Ella’s skirt flaps and flutters. Her
legs are cold. The branches are thrashing with a wooden sound that whirls around within the walls like an invisible beast, while outside the walls the dogs continue their commotion. Ella rubs her arms and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. The garden feels dimmer and colder than it was a moment ago, although the sun is still shining in the sky.

The ground is hard and full of roots that have to be hacked away.

Then come the bees.

They rise out of the earth a little way off, circle the maple in a dark cloud, and come to swarm around them.

Martti Winter grimaces and stops digging.

“Dash it,” he says, fastening his gaze on the bees.

He hands the shovel to Ella.

Ella starts to dig.

Winter brushes bees from his shoulders, lures them away from Ella and the hole. The bees arrange themselves in attack formation around the large man—an easy target.

One of them stings him on the wrist, another on the back of the neck. He roars with each sting, spinning around with surprising agility and slashing at them with a stick like it was a sword.

Ella feels weaker than she expected. The shovel is too heavy for her and the ground too hard. But she doesn’t give up.

Finally something that looks like fabric comes into view.

The shovel falls from her hands.

A musky smell of earth rises to her nostrils.

She reaches towards the bundle of fabric, but doesn’t touch it—not yet.

With the discovery quivering on her lips, she turns around
and summons Winter, who seems—oh, no—to be even more harassed by the thick swarm of bees.

Just then a long shadow moves among the apple trees. It bends towards Martti Winter until it’s touching his feet.

The bees increase their altitude and veer away.

The dogs howl.

Winter looks at his legs in bewilderment.

“Cold,” he whispers.

He flops onto his back in the weeds and mud.

The dogs’ racket grows, members of the pack stoking each other’s fury. They dash back and forth on the other side of the wall, leaping against the stones in frustration.

Ella covers her ears and leans over. Sweat is running down Winter’s broad forehead, which is now as white as marble. He’s having difficulty breathing. His pupils are steadily
widening
—not a good sign.

Ella first pats, then slaps him on the cheeks.

He takes a breath, gestures with a limp hand towards
something
behind the trees, and gasps, “It’s over there. Can you see it? It touched me. Cold as the devil.”

Ella turns to look.

Among the trees and spring plants is a blur of something. She can’t see it clearly, but she feels a coldness radiating from it. It’s a piece of dark winter night, a gaping hole in the fabric of the day.

The phantom.

Its shadow stretches as far as Winter’s feet. His massive body is shaken with the power of some internal earthquake. Foam trickles from between his pale lips.

Ella pants in quick breaths.

She stretches out her hand.

She must be trying to touch him. Or maybe she just wants to know what a phantom’s shadow feels like.

She stretches out her hand, and the shadow hits her skin.

Her teeth knock together as her body stiffens to a steely tenseness that reaches to every muscle. She makes a feeble sound, and falls.

No names, no memories, no future. Just an empty vessel with the cold of a winter night coiled inside it. Ella collects herself. She gathers her thoughts and feelings like seashells on a deserted beach, searching out her nerve pathways, wiring commands to her muscles.

She is able to rise, but then the earth wrenches her back and her chin slams against the ground.

The tears begin to freeze in her eyes.

She can’t seem to direct her own gaze anymore—her eyes stare straight at the phantom. It’s moving across the grass, headed towards Winter.

This is what tore up the bird last winter.

Now it’s here.

Ingrid Katz bicycles to Martti Winter’s house with the Christmas package strapped to the rear rack.

Luckily, there are no dogs in the front garden. They’re
gathered
next to the wall surrounding the back garden, making a racket like it was the last day on earth, their last shred of sense vanished. They must have flushed out a rabbit or a cat, or perhaps Martti’s grilling sausages in the back garden and the dogs are complaining of empty stomachs.

Ingrid hurries up the steps, takes out the spare key and opens the door.

She doesn’t go directly inside. She holds the door open with her foot long enough to put the key back in her purse. If Martti sees it in her hand he might demand that she give it back.

Something heavy knocks against her side. She falls and tumbles down the stairs. Her tailbone hurts. Her ribs tingle. She screams. Something is pressing down on her chest.

She thinks she’s been knocked down by Winter’s door, but when she opens her eyes she sees a black snout above her belonging to a large German Shepherd. The dog’s front paws are holding her against the ground.

The dog looks off to the side as if unaware that it’s holding her down. Its breath stinks. Ingrid feels like throwing up.

When she tries to wriggle free there’s a rumble of thunder within the dog and she loses her desire to resist its authority.

She forces herself to breathe. There’s no hurry. She can wait for the dog to tire of her and go and do something else. She has a patient nature. The dog clearly doesn’t intend to bite her face off, provided she doesn’t do anything to make it angry.

Ingrid manages to calm herself. She’s a little nervous about what’s happening at this moment behind the German Shepherd. At the moment, it’s a bit difficult to see anything very well—the dog won’t let her—but Ingrid’s dreams unfortunately seem to be coming true.

The front door is open.

A parade of dogs is scrambling into Martti Winter’s house.

Ella wakes up to the sound of dogs barking.

She’s lying on her side on the ground. She sees a beetle
wriggling over her hand. The grass tickles her lips. Her head seems to have changed into an enormously large, heavy iceberg with her teeth chattering inside, but she gathers all her strength and manages to look in the direction the noise is coming from.

Dogs are streaming out of the terrace door into the garden.

She sees large dogs and small dogs, retrievers, collies and pugs, terriers, Great Danes, German Shepherds and spaniels, Belgian Shepherds, greyhounds and mutts.

The garden is full of dogs, and more keep coming. They bound through the trees, statues, and garden lights, an invasion covered in fur. They’re not barking now. A fierce war cry rises from their throats, a mixture of growls and howls and various small sounds as they rush with their mouths open towards Ella and Winter.

Ella closes her eyes and lets the cold lull her into oblivion.

A second passes, then perhaps a small eternity. Ella’s eyes blink open for a moment—a flash of yellow fangs, red mouths and slobber splashing through the air.

She wraps herself in darkness and breathes in the thick dog smell. The canine army streams over her in a heavy mass of fur. She crouches on her knees and covers her face with her hands as dozens of paws scratch and thud over her.

Somewhere very near the dogs sink their teeth into something and start ripping it to pieces. Ella’s consciousness and all the world is pierced by an inhuman cry.

Ella realizes that she’s relatively unscathed.

Her feet and hands are cold, stiff as wood and hurting, but when she examines herself she can see that she’s not bleeding. The dogs didn’t bite her. They just streamed over her and fell upon their enemy.

She crawls farther away from the ripping, snarling pack.

She sighs.

She wipes snot from her face, vomits and pisses her pants. She’s alive.

Then she freezes. She’s all right, but what about Martti? She turns her trembling head towards the pack of dogs, looking for him. All she can see are hairy paws, leaping rumps and tails.

And a spatter of red.

A cheery dog food commercial starts to churn mockingly through her mind—a woman with a small dog opens a can of “new, more nutritious, and best of all, tastier” dog food. Then she notices dogs running at her from all directions.

“Our best friends certainly know what they want for dinner!” she says.

T
HE RAGING
, snarling commotion doesn’t stay put.

The victim at its centre tries to get away. The pack of dogs shows no mercy, moving with its prey, not letting the biting circle break for even a second.

Ella can’t see anything through her tears. It’s all covered by flowing salt water. She sinks to her knees, her hands behind her neck, and sways back and forth.

“Dash it,” someone says, quite nearby.

Ella wipes her eyes and blinks.

The mêlée continues in a new place now, the dogs growling and howling. In the spot where they were a moment ago lies Martti Winter’s stout, unmoving body, looking like a beached whale. He sits up, takes out a white handkerchief, puts it over his face and expels the contents of his nose into it.

“I thought they’d never leave,” he mutters. He plucks hairs from his clothing and sneezes.

“I think you’re allergic to dogs,” Ella whispers.

She stares at him and then turns to look at the dogs, who continue as raucously as before, battling the thing the mapper called the phantom. They sniffed it out long ago, but it wasn’t until today, after a year of anticipation, that they finally got the opportunity to do what their instincts demanded.

The furry battlefield moves around the garden like a
whirlwind
, bounding and barking.

A grey spaniel is left lying on the ground, its side ripped open. Then a small German Shepherd puppy breaks off from the pack, turns around once and slumps limply onto the ground.

Over the next minute the dog army loses more blood into the garden soil. Ella sees eight dogs die in all. Others are left lying wounded, yelping quietly.

They cast dark glances at Ella and Winter.

The dogs refuse to surrender. When one is wounded or killed, the others fight that much more doggedly.

Then, just as the battle is at its most ferocious, the noise ceases totally unexpectedly and the garden is filled with a bewildered silence.

The dogs back away from the circle and start to disperse, glancing around them.

Ingrid Katz appears on the terrace.

“There you are,” she shouts. “I’ve been looking all over the house for you. Or rather, looking for your mournful remains. I was already planning a pretty funeral for you, and you’re out here smelling the flowers. You have a lot of nerve.”

Then she looks regretful and says, “Martti, I made a bit of a mistake. The dogs that were in the front garden got in the house. One of them came and… I don’t know where they are, but I think…”

She suddenly stops speaking. The German Shepherd lopes past her unconcerned and goes into the house, followed by two small mixed-breed dogs. Then the Shepherd stops, turns around and looks at her expectantly.

Martti Winter wipes his nose and shouts to Ingrid to call a
veterinarian. “Tell them there are injured dogs here. And could you let those dogs out? They want to go home.”

Ingrid looks flabbergasted. Martti Winter impatiently waves her back into the house. He’ll explain everything later. For now she should just do as he asks.

Ella and Winter walk deeper into the garden.

The day is still beautiful. Dead and wounded dogs are lying here and there. The vet can help the living, they can bury the dead in the garden in a formal ceremony (Winter is moved at this idea and his voice breaks), but first they should finish what they’ve started.

When they get to the hole, they take out the oilcloth bundle and lay it on the grass, kneel beside it and carefully unwrap the notebook.

They exchange a look. Winter nods, and Ella begins to examine the book. She turns it over in her hands. It smells like old potatoes. The cover is faded almost to grey. All in all it seems to be in one piece.

“Just as I remember it,” Winter says, bending over to touch the cover. “My dream book… Well, go ahead and open it. You’ll see his name on the first page, in a beautiful, intelligent hand.”

Ella opens the notebook.

On the first page there is indeed written, in ornate lettering:

“And on the next page,” Winter says, “his notes begin. Turn the page and you’ll find all the incredible, marvellous ideas that Oskar thought of and the Rabbit Back Literature Society
stole. For thirty years I’ve dreamed up my own books from the contents of this one.”

Ella turns the page. They look at it for a long time without speaking.

“Turn to the next page,” Winter says at last.

Ella obeys.

“The next one.”

After a few pages, Winter tears the book from her hands and starts flipping through it. They turn page after page, tense, not daring even to look at each other, until they reach the end of the book.

“Dash it,” Winter whispers.

Aside from Oskar Södergran’s name, not a single word is written in the notebook.

The pages are, however, filled with writing.

At first, the eye can almost make out ancient runes, or magical diagrams of some kind. But when you look more closely, you see that they’re just abstract patterns drawn in intricate detail.

It makes Ella think of an address book that you doodle in during long phone conversations—all of the marks obviously took a lot of time and effort, but with no hint of an idea or a purpose.

Martti Winter presses his fingertips against his face and says, “This notebook contained a thousand story ideas. A thousand ideas, just as we suspected. That’s how I remember it.”

Ella gets up and fetches the letter from the picnic blanket. “It’s time we looked at what Oskar’s mother has to say,” she says, and starts to read the letter aloud.