The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell Page 3

  Certainly his own mother hadn’t hated her mormor, hadn’t hated the woman he had come to think of as Mormor. If she had, she wouldn’t have visited her. Though perhaps that in itself was nothing but his mother’s rebellion against her own mother.

  “What was she like?” he asked now.

  “Who? Mormor?” his mother asked.

  He nodded.

  His mother sighed. “She was … complex.”

  He waited for her to go on, still staring at the photograph, still unable to divine the old woman in it.

  “She did not have an easy life,” his mother said. “Her husband died just after turning forty. He was a potato farmer, healthy, ruddy, broad shouldered. You look a great deal like him. In the middle of plowing a field, he clutched his chest and died.”

  “That’s awful,” Jussi said.

  “It happens,” his mother said. “That’s not the awful part.”

  Again he waited, at once seemingly disinterested but gently attentive.

  His mother sighed again. “She was pregnant when he died. She lost the baby not long after she lost her husband.”

  For a while they were both silent. Then he reached out and touched the other frame. “Why does Grandmother hate her?” he asked.

  His mother offered a noncommittal noise, a voiced exhalation of breath. “Ask her,” she said. “Perhaps she will tell you.”

  He went back to college, forgot all about it. Eight months went by. His second year of school started. Soon, the first semester had mostly slipped away.

  He went home the day before Thanksgiving to find his grandmother in the house. She was standing in the living room, leaning on her cane, a sour expression on her face that smoothed into delight the moment she saw him.

  He embraced her, led her to the couch in the parlor, sat talking to her. The arrangement of photographs on the mantel was different, he suddenly realized: the one of his great-grandmother was absent. Or, rather, not absent, he realized a moment later—he could see the black edge of its cardboard support sticking up between two of the other photographs. It had been turned facedown behind the others.

  “Where’s Mother?” he asked.

  His grandmother waved an idle hand. “Here and there,” she said. “Preparations for the holiday feast.”

  “I didn’t know you were coming,” Jussi said.

  “Your parents tell you nothing,” she said. “But you didn’t ask me. Had you asked me, I would have told you.”

  It was perhaps that, her phrasing, that made him wonder, What else might she tell me? And so, fifteen or twenty minutes later, after a certain amount of what his grandmother called idle chatter, he asked, gently as he could, “Will you tell me about your mother?”

  The question caught her off guard. For a long moment she just looked at him, as if frozen, and then, suddenly, she relaxed. “We weren’t friends. We didn’t talk for many years.” She looked at him quizzically. “Why do you care to know?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. Why did he want to know? Did he have a good reason?

  “I don’t know,” he finally said.

  His grandmother gave a curt nod—as if the conversation was over, he thought at first. But then he realized, as she began to speak, that this response had somehow satisfied her.

  “My mother was a terrible woman,” she said. “So severe with me. Do you know what she would do? She would have me clean and then she would put white gloves on her hands and travel from room to room as if she were a duchess, touching everything. If, at the end, there was the slightest bit of dust on her gloves, well, then I would do the cleaning all over again, every inch.” She gestured at the mantel. “Did you find her picture and put it up?”

  “Mother did,” he admitted.

  “Your mother,” she said, frowning. “She knows better.”

  “You still don’t like her?” asked Jussi. “Even though she’s dead?”

  His grandmother shook her head. “You are young,” she said. “You don’t understand these things.”

  Jussi didn’t say anything, just looked at her. Unlike his mother, his grandmother turned and met his gaze with no hesitation at all.

  “I cannot forgive her the baby,” she said.

  “The baby?”

  “My brother. My father gave it to her, rendered her pregnant, and then he died. Did you know that?”

  He nodded. “Mother told me.”

  “Did she tell you that she lost the baby?”

  He nodded again.

  “This is a lie,” she said. “A fantasy. She did not lose the baby. She killed it. I heard her killing it. She was weeping, but still, she killed it. She could not see herself raising another child without my father. Perhaps I am lucky she didn’t kill me as well.”

  He had no idea how to respond to this.

  “As soon as I could, I left,” she said. “I took charge of my own life, and I never spoke to her again. Your mother chose to find her and make friends. She needed this sense of … connection. I never did. Because I was the one to hear her kill the baby.”

  She leaned forward, confidential now, close, uncomfortably so. “But she is suffering now, you can be sure. I taught it how to find her.” She leaned back, satisfied. She patted his knee.

  “Taught what?” he asked.

  “Why the myling, of course. Her dead child.”

  Myling kommer, he remembered later that night. His mother had made him a bed on the couch in the living room since his grandmother had been offered his room. It was too bright there, the curtains too gauzy to keep the streetlights’ glow out. Each time he started to fall asleep, the refrigerator motor would kick on and awaken him. He could have returned to sleep in his dorm, but it was too late to catch a bus and much too late to wake his mother and have her drive him back. Myling kommer. He could even remember the wavery script she had written it in, just barely legible, at least to him, and the scratching sound the pen made as she wrote.

  His mother had told him a myling was a ghost of sorts, but not a ghost exactly. Something that had been alive. Or, rather, alive only briefly before being abandoned by its mother.

  But not quite dead either, she also said.

  What sort of creature was that, not exactly alive and not exactly dead? Not exactly a ghost, but not not a ghost either?

  Certainly his mother had not lied to him. She had just been vague. Understandable, perhaps, considering he was only five at the time. Or six.

  But his grandmother had not lied either, and had been quite a bit more specific. His grandmother had always been like that: direct, merciless, unforgiving. Clearly she had been like that with her own mother as well.

  “A myling,” she told him, “is a child that you kill with your own hands before it is baptized. It is taken out and abandoned and then it is trapped there, near its own corpse, crying for someone to come bury it.”

  “What if nobody comes to bury it?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Then it grows hungrier. And then hungrier still. Its form changes, and it becomes very strong. Then it waits. It waits for someone to come along, and when someone does, it takes them.”

  “Takes them?”

  She nodded. “Takes them.”

  “You mean, kills them?”

  “Only slowly,” she said. “It finds its way onto your back first.”

  “Onto your back?”

  “Onto your back. It climbs on and clutches you and doesn’t let go. It grows heavier and heavier. Soon you can hardly move. It doesn’t kill you, only makes you wish you were dead.” She smiled at him. “Wasn’t that the way it was with my mother near the end? When you saw her, could she move?”

  “No,” he said. “Hardly at all.”

  “There, you see. If that was how it was for her when she was alive, you can only imagine how much worse it must be now, now that she’s dead.”

  He had a hard time looking at his grandmother, and an even harder time for a moment thinking of her as being related to him. “It’s a ghost?”
he finally asked.

  “It is a ghost but not a ghost,” she said. “Yes and no.”

  But that was crazy. A ghost was already something caught halfway between things, between life and death. So where would that leave the ghost-but-not-ghost myling? What was it caught between?

  III.

  Late at night, dozing in and out of sleep in the half-lit room, he began to hear a sound, a scratching. At first, he thought perhaps there was a mouse in the walls, scratching away, despite there never having been such a thing in the house before.

  Then, suddenly, he was less sure about what it was.

  For a long time he lay there, listening, idly wondering about the sound but still half-asleep. He saw in his mind’s eye the bony fingers holding the pen, letters appearing on the paper without coming into words, scratch, scratch, scratch. Mormor, he thought, and was suddenly wide awake.

  He sat up and turned on the table lamp, and the sound abruptly stopped. No, he was imagining it, he told himself once his heart slowed a little. Bad dreams after his strange, morbid discussion with his grandmother.

  He allowed himself to calm down. He rubbed his eyes and looked around the room, tried to settle again and prepare for sleep. But something still felt wrong. What was it?

  Nothing he could place a finger on. He let his eyes wander, then finally lay back down and switched off the lights.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been lying down, trying to sleep, when he heard it again, the scratching. In his head, he saw again his grandmother’s pencil sketching the words he could not understand.

  Myling kommer, she wrote inside his head. Hjelp meg.

  He got up again and turned on the light. It stopped again. He stayed there, waiting for his heartbeat to subside. It took longer this time. Perhaps, he told himself, he should keep the light on.

  He lay back down, light still on. He closed his eyes, found the insides of his lids lit red. No sound of scratching at least. But how could he sleep with so much light?

  He sighed and opened his eyes, let his gaze wander.

  He had been staring at it for some time before he realized what it was. A new photograph, one that had not been on the mantel when he had fallen asleep. At first he thought it was just the photograph of his great-grandmother that his grandmother had turned facedown—perhaps Jussi’s mother had turned it up again—but no, he could still see the cardboard edge of that picture’s stand. It was still facedown.

  What was it then? A similar picture certainly, but not identical.

  He pushed the blanket off and stood. Slowly, he made his way to the mantel.

  The frame was different from that of the other picture, a burnished brass maybe. It was of his great-grandmother. Of, anyway, the young woman his mother claimed was his great-grandmother. It was black and white, identical in every respect to the other photograph of the same woman, except for one thing. In this photograph, her eyes were open. She seemed, no matter where he stood, to be looking right at him.

  He stared. Was it the same woman? Suddenly he wasn’t sure.

  He reached behind the other photographs and turned the facedown picture up. Yes, he saw, it was the same woman, but now her eyes were open wide in this photograph as well. How could that be?

  He thought at first it must be his grandmother’s doing, a trick of some sort, one photograph swapped for another. But why would she do that? When would she even have had the chance? He had been in the room the whole time. Is the room itself haunted? he wondered. Had he ever slept in it before?

  No, he told himself, don’t be ridiculous. But yet here they were, these two photographs, identical now though they had not been so before. And now, too, he was seeing that what he had thought to be black and white had been tinted slightly, perhaps by hand, in the smallest of ways: each pair of eyes was a pale, pale blue, icy, almost white.

  He turned both photographs facedown and stumbled his way back to the couch, which, for a moment, hardly seemed like the same couch to him at all. Am I still dreaming? he wondered.

  But if he was, why did it feel so real? If it was a dream, it was not like any he had ever experienced.

  He closed his eyes. Still too hard to sleep with the lamp on.

  He lay still for a while, thinking, then finally stretched and turned the lamp off. There, he thought. Better, at least until the scratching starts again. He lay there waiting for it, ready to switch on the lamp again as soon as it began.

  But it did not start again. Whatever had been making the sound was gone now, or at least abeyant. Maybe, he tried to tell himself, this has all been a dream. But he was not sure he could make himself believe it.

  At some point, either he did start dreaming or the dream he was already in shifted and changed. This time, he was sure it was a dream. In it, he was being carried. He was much smaller. He could not control his body. A woman was carrying him. He could feel the heat coming off her and could smell her skin too, but it was not a smell he recognized. The side of his body that was pressed against her had grown warm, comfortably so; the other side was cold. He did not know who she was; her face for him was little more than a white circle with two slightly darker spots where her eyes were.

  Hjelp meg, he thought, and then thought in wonder, Where did that come from?

  And then suddenly he could no longer smell her, no longer feel her heat. Whatever was against his back was very cold. He felt his body arch away from it, his tiny arms stiff and flung out to the side, his fingers grasping at empty air. There, far above him, that same pale oval that must be a face, the slightly less pale eyes marring the regular surface. And then she was closer again; he could smell her but not feel her. He heard his throat give a bleating cry. Her warm fingers cupped his head gently before falling slowly down around his neck to cut off his breath.

  IV.

  In the morning he woke up. He was tired, almost felt hungover, but otherwise was fine. In the night the blankets had become twisted all around him, and he had a hard time working his way free. Once he had, he went to the mantel and looked for the second photograph of Mormor.

  It was not there. All a dream, then. The first photograph was gone as well, taken away perhaps by his grandmother.

  He didn’t ask about the photograph. He decided to forget it. The dream too. He did his best to enjoy Thanksgiving with his parents and grandmother, helped stir the gravy to keep it from boiling over, ate too much, volunteered to do the dishes. It was all just as it always was. Then the day ended, and his grandmother drove away.

  He stayed through the weekend, then packed himself up and went back to the dorms to finish his semester. Nothing was wrong, everything was normal. He threw himself into his final week of classes, finished the work he should have finished before leaving for Thanksgiving. It was a crazy week, but in the end he finished his papers and got them in on time. Then he had to study all night for his exams.

  It happened in his last exam period, the one for his eighteenth-century literature class. He was waiting with a blank blue book and a sharpened pencil for the exam to begin. He was a few minutes early, or perhaps the professor was a few minutes late. In any case, he was so tired he could barely hold his head up. He shook it. He wrote his name on the cover of his blue book and opened it to the first page. He was ready. His pencil was poised. All he needed was for the professor to arrive and give him the questions, and then he would answer them and go back to his room and fall asleep.

  …

  But he must have fallen asleep briefly already, for suddenly the paper with the exam questions was on the desk beside him. The rest of the class was madly writing, and the professor was at his desk, reading a mystery novel. Jussi heard a scratching sound, and, he realized, he had been hearing it for some time.

  Suddenly it stopped. There was his hand, holding the pencil, poised over the open blue book. There were words there, but in a language he didn’t understand. But the word that began it he did understand: Myling.

  He tore the page out of the blue book and stuffed it int
o his back pocket. The professor glanced up from his novel, frowning suspiciously at him. Jussi bent his head, read the sheet of questions, and muddled his way through the exam.

  Later, back in his dorm, he smoothed out the page and typed the words into a translation program. His grandmother or mother would have been able to tell him what the words meant, but he was not sure he wanted them to know about the message. There would be too much to explain.

  Myling, the translation read. I had thought to have killed you, but here you are alive. You are found again. I am coming for you. I come to mother you.

  He turned away from the computer screen. Strange how the unconscious mind works, he tried to believe. He could, if he thought hard enough, probably put all the pieces together. Sure, he might have overheard enough of the language between his grandmother and mother at a very young age to have metabolized it. What he experienced at the house with the photographs, too, might be a dream. There was no reason, either, to think that he was the message’s recipient. It was, after all, he who had written it. Wasn’t it?

  Yes, he told himself, over time he could use the cold logic of reason to slowly kill the appearance of the words, to make them harmless. But for now, just now, he was exhausted yet afraid to sleep. He was afraid that if he closed his eyes, Mormor would find and reclaim him. Or, rather, claim him in place of the child she killed.

  He shook his head and struggled to stay awake. He could hold out for a little while, but eventually he would have to sleep. Who he would be when he woke up—or if he even would wake up at all—it was too early to say.

  Come Up

  1.

  In late June, Martin’s wife dove off the dock behind their house and into the lake and never came up again. At the time, Martin was sitting on the patio, lazily reading. She walked past him, smiled shyly, and padded barefoot down the dock. Having already returned to his book, he did not see her dive off, only heard the splash.

  How much time passed before he realized something was wrong? A minute, maybe two. He was reading, still reading, but his mind kept catching on something and soon couldn’t thread the words into sentences. What was wrong? It was, somehow, too quiet. Marking his place with a finger, he looked up, saw the empty dock, the placid, smooth waters of the lake beyond.