We buried the dog down by the river. It seemed as good a place as any.
It was a silent affair, me and the tall man standing huddled together against a biting, unapologetic wind. Our part seemed to be done, having dragged the poor creature by its hind legs through the snow to its final resting place, and we now stood listening to the sound of Matti’s shovel rhythmically scraping against ice and frozen ground.
The headlights of the pick-up truck, parked along the road up a steep hillside, cut razor-sharp swathes out of the darkness.
A few hours earlier, before an early sunset had painted the sky lipstick pink and the weather had taken a turn for the worse again, my eyes had kept drifting from the road to linger on the harsh, breathtaking beauty of the glistering low valleys of Lemmenjoki national park, Finland – all snow-covered hills of pine and fir stretching out endlessly before us.
Now anything outside those two brilliant cones of light emanating from the truck might as well not have existed at all.
I cursed under my breath, squinted against the swirling snow and once again wondered how I had ended up there – surrounded by strangers next to a frozen river at the edge of the Arctic circle where everything and everyone had turned into nothing but contrast, hulking shadows and sharp angles.
Feeling like I ought to be doing something, anything, I slowly shuffled back up the slope to check on Matti’s wife Kaarina. She had remained behind with their newborn in the back of the car. I could feel the tall man follow my unsteady ascent with his gaze.
A melancholy Finnish rendition of Silent night, holy night on the radio could be heard over the running engine as I got closer, Jouluyö, juhlayö, päättynyt kaik on työ, and Kaarina offered me a forced smile as I slid into the passenger seat, careful to quickly close the door against the cold.
“I really am sorry,” I said. “It came out of nowhere.”“Don’t worry,” she sighed. “When you are traveling in the middle of nowhere, nowhere really is the only place a koira… a dog… can come from. It didn’t suffer.”
And with that she tucked a strand of her silver-white hair behind her ear and turned her attention back to the baby swaddled in her arms. It reached for the empty air with its long, slender fingers and stared at me with impossibly pale eyes.
There were a million questions I could have asked.
Should have asked.
But I wasn’t quite sure I wanted any of them answered.
Why were they taking the time to dig a grave when they were clearly in such a hurry? Why hadn’t they taken my suggestion to go back to the farms we had passed less than twenty minutes ago to ask about the dog? Why had they insisted on keeping to the back roads to begin with?
And how could we have spent more than eight hours in the car together at that point, and I still hadn’t heard the baby make a single sound?
In a few hours we would reach their home deep in the national park where I would drop them off before continuing to Rovaniemi.
Then we’d part ways and I could put all this behind me.Maybe it makes me a crap journalist, but something about my company made me more than happy to let sleeping buried dogs lie.
-–
It had seemed such a good idea at the time when I pitched my idea in the newsroom back in Manchester a few days earlier. The Christmas holidays were fast approaching, and the customary song, dance, panic and arguments ensued to figure out how to put a fresh spin on Christmas yet another year. What articles could there possibly be left to write?
“Did you know that Father Christmas doesn’t live on the North Pole at all, but in the town of Rovaniemi in northern Finland? At least according to the Finns, that is,” I blurted out, which clearly was unexpected enough to even make my editor-in-chief, Mr. Bloom, stop stealing glances down the intern’s blouse and pay attention.
I proceed to tell them that they’ve built this whole Christmas town there, where the old bugger was happy to inform you if you’ve been naughty or nice. That according to my internet research it somehow manages to simultaniously feel both very quaint and like an American shopping mall Santa on steroids. I also made sure to point out that we had never done a story on anything like it before.
It of course all led up to me asking “What if I went there to interview him?” as nonchalantly as I possibly could.
After a few seconds of silence a lively debate followed. Angles for potential articles were discussed, budget concerns addressed, and a few older colleagues’ eyebrows raised to insinuate that I was far too junior to try and trick my way to a “paid vacation” in exotic Scandinavia over the holidays.
But in the end calmer louder heads prevailed and the temptation to milk my trip for at least three separate articles and endless social media content proved too strong. The readers in the Greater Manchester area would get a good chuckle out of those silly foreigners and their silly traditions, not to mention that the old guard of the Manchester Herald would be getting home at a reasonable time at least a few evenings to celebrate the birth of baby Jesus with turkey, black pudding and gin.
I was deemed to handle a camera well enough to grudgingly be handed a DSLR by our head of photography. This particular model came with a reminder that it would mean both my job and my kneecaps if I returned it with so much as a scratch.
And all was well in the world. As long as I bought the cheapest tickets possible.
Less than 48 hours later I touched down at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport.
-–
The train north to Rovaniemi was scheduled to take almost 12 hours so I left my sleeping bunk for the restaurant to try to get a few hours or work in. It troubled me that I still hadn’t managed to track down any Brit (preferably Mancunian) living in the northern parts of the country, whom I could interview for a British (sane) perspective on Christmas in Finland.
The restaurant cart was clean, modern and offered a surprisingly stable Wi-Fi connection. The waitress was all calm efficiency when serving me a delicious (but definitely overpriced) local lager. Outside the window the capital slowly gave way to stretches of snow-covered fields and forest.
A steady stream of passengers trickled by and I soon found that my hopes to find some peace and quiet, not to mention keeping a table for four all to myself, had been naive. As the cart filled up and I was joined by one bored local after the next, I soon accepted defeat, packed up my laptop and made a few attempts at small talk, which were met with varying degrees of success.
They seemed a reserved bunch, the Finns, to say the least. But when they did speak, I was amazed at how well they spoke English, and throughout the evening I started to paint a first rough picture of the locals.
Besides a few gentlemen in business suits and a girl or two who would’ve fit right in on the covers of fashion magazines, I was surrounded by bushy beards, piercings, black fingernails and dark hoodies with various death metal logos.
“Have you ever been to Rovaniemi and visited Father Christmas?” I asked a middle-aged man in a flatcap who smelled like cough medicine and I suspect was wearing just a touch of black eyeliner.
“Father Christmas? You mean Santa Claus, the Joulupukki?” he asked with a raspy laugh. “Oh no, that stuff is only for Children and Japanese tourists.”
“I come from just outside Rovaniemi, though, and I know his sister,” he added while picking at something between his teeth.
“She sings beautiful karaoke.”
He downed the last third of his beer and touched the brim of his cap to wish me a good night. I couldn’t help cringing on his behalf as he zigzagged his way towards the rear of the train, taking turns bumping into passengers on either side of the narrow aisle.
That’s when I first noticed them.
Two men and a woman with a baby in her arms had sat down one table down across the aisle from me – all skinny as sticks and so pale their skin might as well have been translucent. They all shared the same silver-white hair which almost seemed to reflect the light from the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling – her’s cascading freely down to her shoulders, the men’s tied up in severe buns.
The longer I looked at them, the more something felt… off.
Neither of them spoke. Not a word. No food or drinks on the table. And as the woman and the man sitting next to her gazed out the window the tallest of the men, who was facing me, kept staring at everyone passing by as if to warn them off. The best way I can describe it is that he reminded me of a buck in those nature documentaries safeguarding a herd of deer from intruders.
And then he noticed me watching them.His eyes met mine and a chill ran down my spine. A chill that felt all the colder when the other two, without a word having been spoken, slowly turned their heads to stare at me as well.
I tried nodding a hesitant greeting, having been raised to be polite to a fault no matter the situation, after all. But nothing. They just kept staring well past the point of what I imagine normal social protocols would allow – no matter where in the world you find yourself. Unnerved doesn’t even begin to describe how it made me feel.
And then his lips moved.
The tall man whispered something, far to quietly for me to make out, but suddenly it felt as if the walls were closing in, as if the lights dimmed, and every instinct in my body screamed at me that I had to get as far away from them as possible as fast as humanly possible.
I stood up, grabbed my shoulder bag and half sprinted down the aisle.
Whatever the opposite of cool, calm and collected is, that was me in that moment.
As I reached the door I threw a quick look over my shoulder, and I could have sworn that the tall man’s dark eyes, still firmly set on me, flashed a fiery red just before I stumbled through the automatic sliding door.
-–
I didn’t get a wink of sleep. The wind had gathered strength outside and the squeaking of the train and the hypnotic rhythm of the tracks rushing by underneath should have been enough to put anyone to sleep.
I, on the other hand, found myself huddled up under a blanket soaked in cold sweat with my own pulse pounding in my ears.
I tried to convince myself that I had imagined it all, but failed miserably, and every time I heard the slow shuffle of anyone walking past the cabin door the hair on my arms stood on end.
A few minutes after midnight I could feel the train slowing to a halt.