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At some point I let her know that Vellamo said we shouldn’t stray far from the river, but Telly pays me no mind and keeps going.
Finally she comes to a stop in an old growth forest, where a babbling brook runs beneath the relics of dead cedars, the trunks split open and charred like they’ve all been decimated by lightning.
“You get any big storms here?” I whisper to her as she looks around. Whispering seems appropriate in this place.
Her expressive face looks incredulous. “Yes. Depending on Death’s mood.”
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t know his moods control the weather in Tuonela?” she asks so solemnly that I feel like a real idiot.
I decide to embrace my mortal idiot status. “I did not. In fact, I don’t know much.”
She looks me up and down with those innocent eyes. “I can see that,” she says, but it’s hard to take offense. She starts walking again and I’m right behind her, the dead forest giving me the creeps.
“That’s why it’s always cloudy,” she goes on. “Because he’s always in a foul mood. The only time the sky clears is when he’s either happy, which is never, when he’s drunk, which is sometimes, or when he’s asleep. Hence why you can usually see the moon and stars and planets at night. There are a few times each year where we’ll get a few days of sunshine and clear nights in a row, but my father says that’s when Death is on a bender. I believe that’s a mortal term that means drinking alcohol for too many days in a row and acting foolish.”
“Sounds lovely,” I mumble.
“Who? Death or my father?”
“I was being sarcastic,” I quickly point out. “About Death. I’m sure your father truly is a lovely man. Um, I mean God.”
She shoots me a charming smile over her shoulder. “Thank you. He is. And your father must be too, if you’re going after him. I would do the same.” She pauses. “And Death, well, everyone has an opinion about him. He does rule this land after all, and the other Gods don’t always agree with him. But I think he’s just misunderstood.”
My brows go up. “You think Death is misunderstood?”
She nods. “Yes. He’s just doing his job. And to hear my father talk about it, things were much worse here before Death came along. People had died, of course, but there was no proper afterlife. They called it Kaaos. There was no justice, no rhyme or reason to anything, just pain.” She shivers, her red hair rippling down her back. “The Old Gods just wanted the mortals to suffer.”
Telly suddenly stops and I nearly run into her back. She slowly holds her finger to her lips and holds still. I do the same, trying not to breathe, listening.
Then I hear it.
In the distance, behind the charred trees, is a sound that can only be described as both giggling and snarling. Gurgling, maybe, but with sinister tones. Either way it makes every single hair on my body stand on end, my bones vibrating with uneasiness.
“Hiisi,” Telly says in a low voice. Then she raises her chin and yells into the forest, “Come out, come out, I know you’re there. I have a mortal under my protection, so there’s no use trying anything.”
The gurgling noise gets high-pitched and at any moment I expect Gollum to come out from behind the cedars.
Instead, a small sickly green creature with large black eyes, no nose, and a line of teeth comes crawling out on all fours, ram-like horns curling back from a bald head. So it’s not Gollum, but it’s pretty damn close. For a brief moment I’m wondering if Tolkien actually did stumble upon Tuonela at some point, but then the creature hisses at us and my mind goes blank with fear.
“I’m Goddess of the Forest,” Telly says to me, not taking her eyes off the creature. “But this is the Hiisi, and this part of the forest is allotted to them. I don’t interfere with their games and torture, and they leave my family alone. They know we can take it all back from them at any moment.”
The Hiisi thing lets out a snarl and comes bounding toward us, only to stop a few feet away. At this close distance, it’s a lot more disgusting than I originally thought, with its skin peeling away in slices like the cedar trunks, black fungus collecting on its long fingers and toes, and a row of branches poking out of its spine. Gooey centipedes slither from its ears to its mouth to its eyes and then back again and it takes everything in me not to vomit up the corned beef from last night.
Telly doesn’t seem bothered. She crosses her arms. “We shall be out of your way in a moment, if only you’d tell us if you’ve seen a mortal. A shaman, to be more precise.”
