Jaska jerked the wheel of the Nissan, sliding across the snow-covered road into what would’ve been oncoming traffic in Helsinki. In the Lapland province of Finland, however, between Skalluvaara and Patoniva, traffic came only in the form of a sauntering reindeer herd or an overturned vehicle that took a curve too quickly on the winding road.
Jaska loosened his grip on the wheel and corrected back into his lane, dropping the phone he’d been looking at onto the passenger seat. Nothing from Inka. She was probably in bed with her husband, not thinking of her lover now that he’d left town again. Spotty service anyway.
Shadows draped themselves gently over the all-encompassing sheet of snow. Fresh flakes drifted from the sky, caught in the headlights, falling like stars against a black curtain. He glanced at the glowing clock on the dashboard. 14:05. Winter above the arctic circle was impervious to the sun. One either embraced the long, dark night or stayed in the comforts of the cities many kilometers south.
Jaska liked comfort. He also liked to be able to eat. As a disgraced nature photographer searching for a rare albino reindeer with jet black horns in the woods outside Skalluvaara, he didn’t have the luxury to pine for sunlight.
Fucking Thomas. Jaska had been sent to the United States six months before to photograph Bighorn sheep in the armpit of west Texas. In a bar across the border, he’d met a man—a drunk American named Thomas—who dabbled in drug running and amateur photography. On his final day, Jaska had borrowed one of Thomas’s Bighorn photos and had turned it over to Nat Geo as his own. The photo was published and somehow that illiterate redneck from the other side of nowhere had seen it. No one had bought Jaska’s work since. He was a shit smudge on the breeches of the entire photography community.
And then the call came. The white reindeer. Jaska was the closest photographer on payroll. “The best option,” his editor had said through gritted teeth. This was his final chance, the only redemption he could hope for. He had less than forty-eight hours to find the beast, take the shot, and get back to the airstrip at Ivalon.
He’d had enough of the snow. Enough of the deep darkness and shitty beer he’d picked up at Skalluvaara’s only excuse for a pub. It was really just someone’s—Inka’s husband’s—plywood garage with an old workbench and a few rusty stools. The Lakka was diluted with water. The whiskey may as well have been diluted with piss. The beer was likely brewed in a boot someone pulled from the sewer.
“Show yourself, you damn poro,” Jaska whispered in the empty vehicle. “I’ve got to get the fuck out of here.”
A black and white world lurked outside. Snow clung to the trees in heavy clumps, turning them from sentinel conifers into wicked winter shadows. The Aurora Borealis would not show itself for another few months, so the only light came from Jaska’s headlights and a frozen moon hiding behind a veil of wispy clouds.
His cellphone beeped. He lunged for it and cradled it in his palm against the steering wheel.
Mulla on ikävä sua. I miss you.
He ran his free hand across his forehead, trying not to react too much to Inka’s words. He had a headache; too many hours trudging through the frozen north in search of an animal that didn’t want to be found; too little sleep. The darkness made it difficult to know day from night. Up from down. Anger from hurt.
Valehtelija. Liar, he wrote back. His finger hovered over ‘send.’ His anger was temporary. In a few minutes, he’d want to say that he missed her too. Jaska had a problem of falling in love too quickly with the wrong women. He’d been called sensitive. Needy. Desperate. But Inka had been sad and lonely too—carrying some silent burden that could only be relieved by lying with another man. She’d needed him like he’d needed her.
He’d first met her six years earlier, when he’d been sent to Lapland to photograph the northern lights. Their relationship had been the same then. Sneaking off into the woods. Bending her over the frozen woodpile. Laughing drunkenly as he made love to her behind the entire town’s back. They hadn’t seen each other since. Until this trip.
The tires hit a bump in the snowy road. His finger touched the screen. Send. Another bump and the phone bounced from his hand into the passenger footwell.
“Paska!”
He glanced at the road. Clear. Straight.
With his right hand, he reached for the phone. He’d already changed his mind. She wasn’t a liar. He missed her. She was the only person in his life who didn’t treat him like a crook.
The phone was too far. He peered back up at the dark road. Still nothing. A white lane. Jagged pine limbs extending over it. Jaska removed his seatbelt and scooted closer to the console. The lights illuminated a vacant stretch ahead. He bent down, snatched the phone, and sat up. The road was still clear. An endless stretch of—
The Nissan smashed into something solid. Steel bellowed and cracked. Jaska registered something spiked outside. Darkness consumed the headlights. He left his seat. Floating, weightless, in a void. Flesh met the glass. A flash of pain. An eye like an obscure marble watching him.
Then nothing.
* * *
Jaska sucked at the air but there was nothing to inhale. His cheeks burned. His mouth ached. And his head. Oh, God, his head. His eyelids scraped against something cold and stiff as he tried to see. He tasted iron—warm, wet, sticky iron. He ran his tongue along the front of his mouth. It caught on something jagged. Blistering pain rippled through his skull.
“Jumala,” he whispered through cracked lips. God help me.
Something touched him. A soft nudge in his side. Waves of agony rippled from his ribcage.
“Argh!” His hand scraped across the cold wetness to grasp his side. Slowly, he rolled onto his back. He could breathe. He could see. But he must have been run over by a train. Or a car.
The car.
He raised his head. The muscles in his neck throbbed as they fought to lift what felt like a five-kilo bowling ball. Nearby, his shattered cell phone lay darker and more silent than the night sky. At his feet lay a crumpled heap of steel and shattered glass. It hissed and smoked like a ripe volcano. Ten kilometers from the nearest village. A light-year from a fucking hospital. Jaska dropped his head back into the snow and tried not to pray for death.
Something grunted. Blew out a breath of hot, stale air. Stomped the ground centimeters from his ear. Jaska opened his eyes and tilted his head back. Blood slid from the corner of his lip, across his cheek, and into his eye. He swiped it away with a cold hand and found himself gazing at a hairy leg and a coal-colored hoof. He followed the leg to an enormous body and beyond, to the head with a pair of glassy eyes and a massive, jet-black spread of antlers. White. The reindeer was whiter than the snow around it.
“Bastard.” His words gurgled with the blood in his throat. Lisped out across a swollen tongue. The deer’s body had destroyed his car, yet the creature wore no blood, bore no signs of broken bones or torn flesh.
“Hiisi?” Jaska glared at the reindeer and felt foolish for letting himself believe in fairy tales. Finland had no shortage of eerie creatures crafted by the imaginations of old hags centuries before. He’d heard the tales from his mummo. The hiisi were spirits of the forest, orcs or goblins, who controlled hoofed animals like horses and reindeer. Of course, he believed in them as much as he believed in the utburd, the ghostlike apparitions of dead children who’d been abandoned in the woods and sought vengeance on unfortunate travelers. The fairies and elves, trolls beneath the bridges…rubbish, all of it.
The reindeer watched him but didn’t move.
Even as Jaska rolled onto his stomach and crawled along the icy road toward what was once his vehicle. He glanced back. The poro remained in place. It watched as he wriggled like a worm through the snow, trailing behind him a smear of blood and vulgarisms. The word hiisi popped into his brain again but was quickly replaced by a wave of nausea.
He reached the car’s trunk and used the handle to pull himself to his knees. Leaning his forehead against the frigid metal, he took stock of his situation. Some of his teeth were chipped, some missing. His ribs were bruised, if not worse. Two twisted fingers on his left hand. Certainly a concussion. Contusions galore. A completely fucked car. No phone. It was well below zero degrees. And it would continue to drop.
He needed help. A miracle. The frozen ground whispered threats of death and eternal slumber as he knelt upon it. But the reindeer he’d been searching for, that goddamned reindeer, had practically been waiting for him. Had caused all of this. Maybe that was the payment for a good photo. Comeuppance for plagiarism.
Your life for this magnificent shot. Your life for your reputation.
He slapped his forehead and regretted it as the pain flung vomit up his broken body and out onto the car. Jaska wiped his sleeve across his mouth and crawled around to the door. He pulled on the handle and the door squealed open. On the floor, wedged behind the buckled driver’s seat and the back bench, was the camera box. Thank God he’d splurged on the indestructible box for his adventures to mountain summits, over waterfalls, across barren deserts…
Tears trickled down his cheek, though he didn’t want to cry. Weakness now would kill him.
Darkness consumed the shattered headlights. With a deep breath that seared his insides, he forced the rest of the tears back into their ducts and jerked the box out into the snow.
“Please,” he hissed, dropping to his knees. “Please, please, please.” He unsnapped the lid and slowly raised it. With shaking hands, he lifted the camera, removed the cap, and stared into the lens. It didn’t look cracked. He peered through the viewfinder and didn’t see a fractured world. Relief came out as a misty sigh and he stood.
Jaska heaved his heavy down coat, gloves, and beanie from the back seat. Gingerly, he pulled them on, crying out as he tried to force crooked digits into the promised warmth. He stood on trembling legs. His tibia—or maybe his fibula—caught fire. His knees quaked and threatened to buckle. Jaska took a shaking step toward the front of the car and peered around the heap of inoperative metal.
The reindeer hadn’t moved.
Not a drop of color blotted its white fur, the only break in its pallid body from shiny rounds of coal for eyes and the black velvet coating its antlers. It stood nearly two and half meters high and looked like it weighed as much as a loaded dumpster.
Just as Jaska lifted his camera, the deer leapt, taking several bounds off the road until it was masked by the pines. He could see the white fur of its rear, but it wouldn’t be good enough to get him off professional life-support.
He limped toward the forest. The deer moved again, a slow, steady trudge through the snow. Jaska glanced at his cargo pants and waterproof boots. A few minutes in deep snow and he’d be damp. A death sentence out here. But he couldn’t go back without this photo. This was it.
At least when they pulled the camera from his frozen hands, they’d have the perfect print. They’d speak his name with reverence instead of disgust.
He stepped into the snow, into the forest, behind the reindeer. It walked on, unperturbed by his ambling. Almost as if it wanted him to follow.
Hiisi.
Every berm of snow Jaska crossed felt deeper, trickier to maneuver. His broken fingers had lost sensation beneath the gloves. Still the deer kept its distance. Kept moving. Jaska’s breath guided him through the tall slender pines and the scraggly birches. A misty trail beckoned him. His broken teeth chattered. Each time a nerve ending crashed against ivory, he flinched, until he reached the point of perpetually chattering, wincing, and softly crying out.
Deeper into darkness. Deeper into a wood he knew nothing about.
The blood on his cheeks began to freeze. Jaska followed the animal, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something followed him in turn. Something as dark as the darkness, blending into the gloom at the edge of his vision. Another of Mummo’s creatures maybe. Perhaps a side effect from the concussion.
“It’s just the cold,” he told himself. “I am cold and broken.” Still, he jumped at every cracking twig or sudden flap of wings. The farther he walked, the tighter his nerves coiled. The lower his core temperature dropped. The harder it was to focus on white fur and black velvet bone. The trees tightened around him. Their limbs scratched his flesh and poked his wounds. He wanted to turn back, but he kept reminding himself there was nothing but an empty road and ten kilometers between him and any reprieve from the pain, the cold, and the emergent fear.
Eventually, the deer stopped. A soft beam of moonlight filtered through the canopy, illuminating the creature in a halo of light and falling snow.
It turned its large head and met Jaska’s gaze with steely eyes. Jaska lifted his camera. The animal. The lighting. The eerie contrast between shades of white and black. The heavy flakes cascading in silent urgency. This was his photo. His finger moved over the shutter release and he pressed down.
The hushed forest exploded in a flash. Startled by the snapping shutter and the sudden blaze of light, Jaska stumbled backward into the snow.
There was something else.
Just beyond the deer. He’d seen it in the viewfinder. In the bright flash of light. He hurried to sit up but the reindeer had vanished. He was alone.
The halo of moonlight faded. Jaska scooted back until he was propped against a tree. His heart pounded like it wanted to escape before it stopped pumping. He peered into the darkness beyond where the deer had stood. Nothing moved. Of course it didn’t. With quaking hands, Jaska tilted the screen of his camera and pushed the image playback button.
There was the deer. Broad white shoulders and a dark velvet rack. The poro’s black eyes stared straight into the camera. Its lips were parted like it was asking Jaska to come closer. Trees pressed close to it, filling the frame. Jaska took a deep breath and zoomed in on the lower left corner. One click at a time. To the spindly little trunk of a spruce. He inhaled a cold clattering breath. Peered more closely.
A matted swath of blonde hair. Lips so blue and cracked they could be crevasse ice on the Khumbu glacier. A pair of brown eyes staring at him through the haze of death.
“Vittu.” Jaska pressed a gloved hand over his mouth and dropped the camera into the snow.
Jaska sat in the darkness, taking shallow breaths, trembling. His heart screamed for safety, clawing at his broken ribcage. Not five meters from where he sat, those dead eyes gazed at nothing. At him. Or maybe the head was turning in slow circles. Twisting upon a rigid neck until it snapped off. Maybe the child was already crawling toward him, scraping its cold, dead belly across the ice. The rotten flesh peeling off, leaving a trail of decay as it made its way to Jaska.
Utburd.
Something jabbed into his side. He screamed. The sound of his fear cut into his nerves. He sank lower into the snow. It was just a small tree limb. Just a small limb…the size of a child’s reaching arm. He thought he might black out.
“Get it together, Jaska,” he commanded. “Take control. The utburd aren’t real.”
He took a few shaky breaths and reached for his camera. It was the only light source he had. The only way to keep the darkness at bay. Jaska pulled himself to his feet and pointed the camera in the direction of the body.
Click. The flash lit up the tree trunk. The dead eyes gazed. He took a few steps forward then snapped another photo. Closer now. The dead eyes grew larger. It was a child. A young boy. No more than six.
Utburd. He shook the thought away.
A few more steps. Another photo. The body was a meter away. Jaska took two steps then sank to his knees. He raised the camera once more. His hands rattled. His finger hesitated.
Click.
The face illuminated in a jarring burst of light.
It was only inches from his camera. Jaska screamed and leapt back. The lips of the dead boy had curled into a smile. The brown, clouded eyes had turned black. Dark marbles like the eyes of the reindeer. Or maybe they’d always been like that. They must have always been like that.
“Fuck me dead.” He took deep breaths but couldn’t get enough air. The cold strangled him. The cold and a sick sense of dread.
A rattling breath crept toward him through the darkness. A slow exhalation, like wind groaning through a cracked door.
“No,” he mumbled. “Please, God.”
The exhalation stopped. Silence descended. Jaska couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move.
And then he heard something scrape against the snow’s crust. A hand digging into the frozen ground.
Bile and stale beer erupted into his mouth, mixing with the blood seeping from his shredded mouth. He scurried backward through the snow. Bumped into the trunk of a birch. His cracked fingers cried out. His ribs screamed. His mind threatened to go dark.
The breathing followed, slow and steady. Jaska rolled onto his stomach and crawled away. The powdery snow clung to him like a million tiny burrs as he pushed himself to his knees and pulled himself up by a tree limb.
He stood, straightened, and took a step into deep powder. He listened. Silence. An owl hooted and took flight from a nearby branch. A thick hush blanketed the dark forest.
It was all in his head. Of course, it was. Jaska had been flung through the windshield. Was concussed and tired and cold. The utburd were creatures created to scare young people into having safe sex. And into staying out of the woods. They were as real as Inka’s love. As present as the pagan gods of his ancestors.
There was only one way to find out for certain. He turned around and lifted the camera. It was a body, not a spirit, and it would still be tied to the tree where it had been left to die. Maybe he’d made up the whole thing—the reindeer, the child, the scraping. Maybe his own body was still crumpled in the road, fighting to return from the brink of death ten kilometers from Skalluvaara.
Click. Flash. Scraggly trees. Blinding snow.
The body tied to the trunk.
It was there. It was real.
His relief vanished mid-breath as his eyes caught the dark shape hovering by his feet.
The shadow crouched, staring up at him through endless dark pits. Extending a blackened hand toward his ankle. Jaska leapt as the umbra’s gnarled fingers gripped his leg. A cold vise clamping down.
The thing pulled itself up his frozen leg. At first, it was as light as a falling pine needle. But it grew heavier with each centimeter. Jaska’s breath rolled out in a wispy fume that shrouded the ascending shape in a haze. He tried to shove it off but when his hand touched the darkness, it went straight through.
Jaska stared at the nearest tree, not wanting to look down. His jaw rattled with chilled terror. A shadowy tuft of hair crept into his vision. The blotched skin of a frostbitten forehead came into view.
“Please,” Jaska whispered, closing his eyes. “No.”
The thing stopped. Jaska felt pressure around his midsection. Arms clasping his aching ribs, clutching to stay in place. A breath of stale, cold air tickled his face.
Jaska squeezed his eyes more tightly. “What do you want?” His voice squeaked out as if uttered by a pubescent boy and not a grown man.
The cold breath chilled his nose. Clattered out from some empty, forgotten space. “Take me to her.”
Jaska’s heart solidified into a brick of ice. His body quavered. He stopped breathing. Cracked one eyelid.
A pair of clouded eyes rimmed in black stared out from a blotched face. Wide and rolled back, empty yet full of rage. The nose had fallen off, leaving a hollow, blackened pit. The mouth gaped, frozen in a pained scream. Cracked skin peeled from the lips in small jagged strips. The thing tried to smile but the result was horrifying—a frozen hole splitting at the edges as it rose into something resembling joy. Or satisfaction.
“Take me to her.”
The mouth hardly moved as it formed words. Jaska tried again to fling the creature from his side but it clung more tightly. And every second he stood there, the thing grew heavier.
“Who?” The fog of Jaska’s breath danced over the dead boy’s face.
The shadowy head canted to the side. Fetid breath filtered from the open mouth. “You know.”
“No.” Jaska shook his head. “No, I don’t. Please.”
The creature smiled that same terrifying smile. It raised a rotted hand and pointed in the direction of the road.
Jaska grimaced as he looked over his shoulder. “Please. Just leave me alone.”
The thing ignored Jaska and crawled from his side to his back. It wrapped icy, putrid arms around his neck. Strips of blackened flesh peeled away from the small bicep and clung to Jaska’s parka. Jaska’s temperature dropped. He slumped to his knees and wept. Racking sobs convulsed his body. His pants were wet from melted snow and urine. “I don’t want to die.”
The voice hissed into Jaska’s ear. Both high-pitched like a young boy, and gravelly like a life-long smoker. “Take me to her.”
Jaska pushed himself up and took a step. His tears fell faster than the snow. This can’t be real, he thought. I must have died in the car crash. I’ve been sent to hell because of a single goddamned stolen photo.
He trudged through the woods and powder drifts as the thing on his back grew heavier with each step. The extra weight compressed his tender ribs. He whimpered but the creature said nothing.
They reached the road. Jaska saw his totaled car. The place in the snow where his body had been flung. But he was not a ghost looking down at his corpse; he was still alive and this hell he’d been cast into was a hell manifested on earth.
The dead finger jutted in his peripheral vision, pointing east.
Jaska looked down the road, down the ten kilometers to Skalluvaara. “I can’t walk that far. I can’t. I can’t.”
The rotted mouth touched his ear. “Then I will kill you too.”
Jaska’s tears turned to slush before they hit the snowy ground. He glanced at his ruined car and took a step down the road. And then another. He thought of Inka and wondered if he’d ever see her again. His flat in Helsinki. The clock on the mantel. He thought of the photo of the reindeer on his camera that would have earned him a pass for his blunder. None of it mattered anymore.
Halfway to Skalluvaara, Jaska collapsed. He lay with his face in the snow. His head throbbed and his vision blurred at the edges. His fingers and toes had long since gone numb, and the wet fabric of his pants had frozen into sheets of ice.
“Get up.”
The thing grew noticeably heavier, pressing Jaska’s head farther into the snow. The snow filled Jaska’s mouth. He flailed to free himself before he suffocated.
“The only way you live is to get up.”
Jaska pushed himself to his knees. “You are an utburd. Someone left you in the woods to die. And you wish for me to take you to the cemetery and give you a proper burial.” He stared down the road. Snow fell silently. Darkness pressed in.
“You will dig many graves tonight.”
“No.” Jaska sobbed. “Please. I want to live.”
“Then move.”
Jaska struggled to his feet and walked on. Lights appeared in the distance. They looked warm and inviting and utterly unreachable. The utburd had grown so heavy, it felt like Jaska was carrying a block of concrete on his back.
The creature sucked in a greedy breath when it saw the lights.
“What’s your name?” Jaska asked. He blinked rapidly as his vision tunneled in and out. “Who are you and why did someone leave you? It wasn’t me, you know. Please. I’ll do anything. Anything.”
The thing laughed. It sounded like a wet gurgle. “Turn here.”
Jaska flinched. “But…we’re not there yet.” The arms tightened around his throat, and he turned, plunging into the dark forest, through the snow, deeper into the dense trees. He shoved his way through sharp limbs until he came to a clearing.
“Stop.”
Jaska stopped.
“Your camera.”
Icy dread trickled down his spine. “Please,” he whispered.
“Take the picture.”
Jaska lifted the camera and held it out. “I don’t want to see.”
“You must.”
Jaska’s hand rattled more than his teeth and knees. He pressed the shutter release and gazed around the clearing as it lit up. Faces stared at him from every direction. Faces of dead children, babies even, with hollow eyes and gaping mouths. And from four of the dead children crawled mangled shadows. Scraping across the snow toward him.
Stars flashed behind his closed lids. He collapsed against the nearest pine. “What is this? What the fuck happened here?”
“Evil.” The thing on his back hissed. “Men like you.”
“I would never.” Jaska whimpered and clung to the tree trunk. “Please, just let me go.”
Something tugged at his ankle. And then another. They climbed up his legs just like the first. Jaska sank into the snow. So much weight pressed down upon his lungs. He tried to move, to head back to the road, but more and more of the dead shadows took hold of him.
“Take us to her,” a chilling voice said.
“Take us to her,” another echoed.
“Take us to her.”
“Take us to her.”
The voices came from all directions, clambering over one another like Kumbaya out of tune.
“Who?” Jaska begged. “Where must I go?”
“Inka. She is the only one who can save your life.”
The chill he’d felt earlier froze so solidly in his core, it cracked. He let out a frightened whimper that echoed through the trees and trailed him through the snow. He stumbled into Skalluvaara and made for Inka’s place, praying she truly could save him.
What kind of man would steal another man’s photo and try to pass it off as his own? What kind of man would sacrifice the woman he loved for his own life?
The road was dark. The dilapidated bar empty. Jaska trudged toward her door.
The things hanging off him grew excited. Their rank breaths quickened. Jaska collapsed in the parking lot. He crawled on his hands and knees across the hard-packed snow until he reached the small wooden porch to the side. A sheet of ice hung from the roof. Icicles as long as broom handles and as sharp as daggers hung from the eaves.
“Help me,” he croaked. He tapped weakly on the wooden door. “Help.”
He heard footsteps on the other side. “Who is it?” Floorboards creaked. A long click. The squealing of rusted iron hinges. “Jaska?” A sweet voice, the sweetest voice he’d ever heard, uttered through a crack in the door. “What the hell are you doing here? You can’t be here when—what happened to you?”
“Help me, Inka. Please.” He reached for her.
She opened the door. “Oh, God.” She screamed and backed into the house. Many weights lifted off Jaska’s back.
He could breathe. He collapsed face down on the porch and sucked at the air.
Somewhere in the back of his brain, he registered a woman’s wail. Something wet and sticky ran beneath his fingers. But he could barely see, barely understand where he was. He heard one final shriek and a thunk before the darkness claimed him.
* * *
Jaska awoke with his cheek frozen to the ground. He lifted his head with enough force to pull it free, leaving behind a thin flap of flesh but hardly registering the sting. Numbly, he gaped at the red ice caked beneath him.
“Pick her up.”
Jaska blinked and looked around. The ghosts of the dead children sat around him, staring. The one he’d found first pointed at something just inside the door.
Jaska turned and gasped.
Inka lay on the floor with long, melting icicles protruding from her belly. Blood pooled around her and flowed out onto the porch. Her face was frozen in a pained scream. Eyes bulging.
“Inka,” he cried, pulling himself toward her. “Why, why, why?” He grabbed her wrist. Felt for a pulse on her neck. Dead.
“Pick her up,” the voice demanded again.
He wanted to ignore them, to lie down next to Inka and cry, but he didn’t want to end up as she did. He crouched and scooped her lifeless form into his arms.
The first utburd crawled onto his back and whispered in his ear, “I need you to bury my mother, Jaska.”
“Your mother?” He glanced from the sunken eyed ghost to the dead woman and around at the unworldly remnants of the other dead children. “She…she did this to you.” The utburd legend: a mother took her unwanted children into the woods to die. Inka was a murderer. “Vittu,” he whispered, clutching at his heart. “But why me?”
The utburd’s mouth curved into a grotesque smile. “Men like you made us. Men who come and go. You make us. Then our mothers, unable to feed themselves, bring us to her.” A dead finger traced longingly across Inka’s still-warm cheek. “Because they can’t bear to do it themselves.”
Bile danced at the back of Jaska’s throat. He’d thought Inka loved him. That she was kind and caring. The children. Jaska gulped down his sickness. He’d seen the cemetery, a small grouping of headstones within a knobby pine fence at the edge of the village. Maybe if he did as he was told, they would leave him be.
He carried Inka’s bloody body and the ghosts of five dead children through the darkened lane. Heavier and heavier his load grew.
Jaska reached the cemetery and pulled a shovel from the groundskeeper’s shed. Dropping Inka’s body, he began to dig in the frozen earth. The shovel ricocheted in his hands. He dug until his skin was cracked and bleeding and his sweat froze against his hairline. The utburd grew heavier. Jaska’s joints compressed. His lungs grasped at the little oxygen he could gather.
Finally, he rolled Inka’s body into the hole and buried her beneath the frozen dirt.
“Keep going.”
Jaska grabbed the shovel. He dug four shallow graves. Each time he finished, one of the utburd crawled from his back and lay down in the earth, until he was left with only the ghost of the blonde-haired boy. Jaska sank to his knees. The utburd had grown so heavy, Jaska could no longer stand. He could barely lift the shovel.
“Get up,” it hissed. “You have to dig.”
Jaska closed his eyes and exhaled. “I can’t. I can hardly breathe. You have to get off my back if you want me to continue.”
“Get up,” the utburd hissed again as if he hadn’t heard. “This grave will either be mine or it will be yours.”
“Why?” Jaska removed his gloves and stared at his bleeding hands. “Why me?”
The weight on his back grew.
He pitched forward until his face was pressed against the ground. It felt like someone forced a boot to his head and placed a piano on his back. “Why me?”
The utburd leaned its decaying head down so it was next to Jaska’s. Immobilized by the weight, all Jaska could do was cringe and fight to drag oxygen into his lungs.
“Six years ago, a man came to these parts to photograph the northern lights. He impregnated a murderous woman. That woman had a child. That child was forced to live locked in a cellar, separated from the world, until a few months ago when that woman decided she no longer wanted him. She took him into the woods, tied him to a tree, and left him to freeze to death. He screamed. Begged for his life. Cried as his blood froze in his veins and his tears froze in his lap. That child would never have been born, never had to suffer, if it weren’t for the man who drove in and out of town without a backward glance.”
Jaska’s vision teetered. The blood struggled to move from his heart to his brain. He felt cold, the kind of cold that can only come from freezing to death. Or from horrible understanding.
“You can’t mean…” He fought to maintain consciousness.
“Dig,” the ghost child demanded.
“How could I have known? If I’d have known…”
“Reckless deeds. Reckless men. It is not just you. You are only the first. There are many of us in the forest. Many men down in the cities who will pay. Many mothers safe in their beds with the children they decided deserved to live. More must go in the ground. Many, many more.”
Jaska tried to shake his head. To sit up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
The utburd rattled a breath and blew icy air into Jaska’s ear. “It’s okay, Jaska. You know now. You know now what it’s like to be cold and alone. Cold, alone, and afraid when you die.”
Jaska watched a large snowflake land on his nose. Felt a tear freeze against his cheek.
And then closed his eyes to dream of white reindeer.