The Forest for the Trees
by Mike Rogers
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
I reasoned correctly that after one of these untoward incidents occurred, the establishment concerned would waste no time in disposing of the attraction that was to blame. And, since the name I had been given was that of a formerly famous pop-star, who’d already been on the slide when the event occurred, the search engine didn’t disappoint.
It was another disappearance, just before Christmas, many reasons suggested, some by his manager, some by his publicist, one or two by the sharp-tongued pop columnists in the papers — Rolling Stone, NME — no conclusive explanations, no follow-ups. No interest in has-beens.
So I had three events, incidents, instances, nothing connecting them apart from the sauna, each one just about explicable, if you’d known the backgrounds and the possible motives, which, of course, I didn’t. If you don’t have information, then you need imagination. And that I had in superfluity.
* * *
“All stories are true; and some of them actually happened.” — Storytellers’ standard answer to people who ask about the truth of what they’ve just heard
Then I went to a storytelling gig at the Earthouse, in Cranborne, Dorset. When people ask me what it’s like, I say, “It’s an Iron Age O2,” which is completely accurate. It’s part of the Ancient Technology Centre, out the back of Cranborne Middle School. It is a timber-framed roundhouse, with a turf roof, a central fire pit and a smoke hole. Lighting is provided by hurricane lamps. It is obscenely atmospheric. The acoustics aren’t bad, the sight-lines are middling disastrous, but the tellers usually have sense enough to move out into the middle of the central space and twirl enough to give everyone a sight of them from one side or the other.
The teller that night was Finnish, doing bits of the Kalevala, with some trickster stories as trimmings, and I managed to get near him in the interval. Don’t grab them at the end; they want to go home, which may be a long, long way away. I whipped out my phone — I’d prepared for it, you see — and said, “Tell me about saunas... ”
When I say I’d prepared for it, I’d looked him up on line and seen which bit of Finland he came from. My subliminal memory said, I’ve seen that name before... and it happened to be the place where the Disappearing Sauna had been made, and nobody could look a gift-horse like that in the mouth!
“Why do you want to know?” he asked, looking at me with his head on one side, like a robin, wondering if the worm that’s just popped out of the ground right in front of him is a kamikaze worm who has taken poison and is sacrificing himself to preserve all the siblings and cousins and odd bits that have been severed from him in the past.
So I told him, as briefly and concisely as I could, and he swore in Finnish. I had been taught some Finnish once, when I was teaching English on that summer course in Torquay I mentioned earlier. The numbers from 1 to 4 and the word for “dog” and, of course, a swear-word. But I remembered and recognised it only when he said it, with the force of horrified recognition when he saw the manufacturer’s name-plate. “Bastards!” he said. “I thought they’d undertaken not to sell that batch overseas.”
Just then, his minder, the person from the Crick-Crack Club who was running the gig, turned up and told him he had to start the second half. He turned back to me and said, “Be outside at the end. You have a car here? I’ll come and talk to you in your car. This isn’t something for everybody’s ears.”
So, after Lemminkäinen’s mother had finished running her rake through the dark waters of the Lake of Death in dim Tuonela, — the Swan must have been on her nest at the other end of it — scooped up the scattered pieces of her son’s body and sung the magic song that joined them all together again and breathed the breath of life back into him — not something they cover in your average first-aid course on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation — and the audience had predictably gone wild. I hung about outside, between the wattle-hurdle pen with the wild boar in it — normal pigs will breed back in a couple of generations — and the one containing the pre-metallic Soay sheep — you don’t need to shear them, you pluck them; the wool just comes off in tufts — until Antti came over to me, and we went and sat in my car.
“When you make a claim,” he said, “about something that may go wrong, do you say ‘touch wood’ ?”
I nodded.
“Good,” he said, “then you believe in the spirits of the trees and the influence they can have on our lives. We have big forests, you have only very small ones. Even so, there will be places — perhaps only tiny ones — where you feel something malevolent, yes?”
I nodded again, because I knew those places and avoided them. The places where there were more shadows than could be accounted for by the branches overhead, where the lichens on the trees grew in patterns that looked like the nastier kind of runes, where the webs the spiders spun had a different kind of symmetry and more dead insects in them than you would have expected.
“Sometimes,” he said, “these forces reach out to human beings and affect their behaviour.”
I thought again, about that stretch of the dead-straight tree-lined road through the New Forest from Lyndhurst to Brockenhurst, where it seems that someone is always trying to kill me by overtaking. Either they’re coming towards me on the wrong side of the road or they cut in too sharply after they’ve just passed me. Sharp braking on wet leaves is never a good thing.
“Well,” continued Antti, “there are some places where the spirits of the trees take on separate forms. People who glimpse them — and you never get more than a glimpse — see them as monstrous versions of themselves, which is why the Norwegians talk about trolls, big hulking hairy brutes. We Finns, well, we’re shiftier, we’ve always had to be; it’s in our history, we didn’t go a-Viking or hire ourselves out as bodyguards to the Emperor of Byzantium. So what we see is a lot mistier but no less deadly.
“Anyway, the people who make saunas up there, where I come from, know which trees to cut down and which to leave alone; but when they brought in an American efficiency expert, he didn’t. If he’d had a proper logging background, he might have listened to them, but he hadn’t and he didn’t. So he decided to clear-fell an entire grove.
“The locals, knowing that he’d have them fired if they simply refused, all went sick; there’s plenty of plants in the forest you can rub yourself with to get spots and a temperature. The American, intent on carrying out his efficient plan, brought in construction workers from Helsinki who couldn’t tell a pine from a plum tree, mostly because they didn’t have that many trees in the countries they originally came from, and they did the job with some ‘accidents’, naturally, which he blamed on their incompetence. That’s the good thing about being a boss: if something goes wrong, you can always blame it on your workers.
“Well, the real boss, the Finnish boss, came back from his vacation, to see how his new hiring had got on and was understandably horrified. He couldn’t tell the American the real reason, of course, because a business school graduate never believes anything the locals say to him on principle — they’re just shiftless natives, instinctively opposed to progress and working to undermine it at every turn — so the boss just terminated the American’s contract on the grounds of the extra expense incurred by hiring workers from Helsinki.
“But he still had the problem of the wood. It sat in a big pile in the corner of his timber yard and seethed at him. He never went near it in the hours of darkness and, as I’m sure you know, Finland is quite rich in hours of darkness at certain times of year... Perhaps we should try to export it. Maybe that’s what I’m doing, when I tell my Finnish stories... He wondered what to do. There is, of course, a simple way to dispose of wood, but that releases not only greenhouse gases but also whatever else is in the wood, with unpredictable consequences...
“Now, the big boss has a Sámi grandmother — I say has, because I want her still to be alive, however old she is, because she deserves to be — and he respects her, because she made him a talisman when he was a child. And if I told you about all the occasions on which he has come out on top, quite unexpectedly, from an unpromising beginning, we’d be here until sunrise. He has always trusted her advice, and he drove off to consult her... Once she’d buried her husband and seen that her son was successful, she went back to her native land, and it was a long drive.
“But it was worth it. She advised him to use the wood to make saunas. That, she said, would keep the spirits trapped. But what if... he objected. And she explained to him that, trapped in dead wood, the spirits would be active only around the time of the winter solstice. So, he manufactured the saunas and put his maker’s nameplate on every single one made from that load of timber, with a warning that they must never be used between the 10th of December and the 10th of January. Check it, if you don’t believe me. ”
I got out my phone and made the picture as big as I could, but I could sense Antti smiling beside me, his teeth shining between his bushy moustache and beard.
“Do you have any Finnish?” he asked, politely.
I complied, by producing the five words I knew. “Yksi,” I said, ”kaksi, kolme, neljä.” I paused. ”Koira.”
”Very good pronunciation,” said Antti, ”but don’t say those words in a restaurant. We, too, have immigrants who do all the crap jobs and, while they have a reasonable vocabulary — mostly nouns — they are inclined to be literal in their interpretation, so you’ll either get one dog, neatly jointed for four people or possibly four dogs, whether baked, boiled, steamed or fried remains uncertain. Yes, I fear the boss’s national pride was misplaced in the way he issued his warning. Symbols and numbers are the way to go, though even there, you have to contend with differing ways of writing dates.”
He sat quietly for a moment, staring down, shaking his head. ”Well,” he said, “from your curiosity, I have to deduce that certain untoward events have occurred in connection with a sauna bearing this nameplate. Being Finnish and a storyteller, I have enough dark stuff of my own to deal with, thank you very much, so instead of listening to your grim tales which, with the exception of the local details, I can imagine for myself, I will unburden myself of one of mine, from which you can derive confirmation, if not information.”
He wriggled in the car-seat, in what I knew, but did not tell him, would be a vain attempt to get comfortable, and began. “As you probably know, the Forests of the North are a favourite spot for heavy metal bands to have photo-shoots for their album covers and accompanying music videos.
“The dark calls to The Dark is probably how they or their publicity machine, would put it, forgetting that if you look into the abyss for too long, the abyss starts looking back into you. They also tend to get lost, being too proud or too mean to hire local guides.
“I had occasion to be involved in rescuing one of those groups about five years ago, just before I gave up my day job to become a full-time professional storyteller. The Rescue Group round my home town was made up of volunteers, like the mountain rescue people in this country.
”Well, we found them, and we brought them back into town. Normally, I blame the Americans for all forms of stupidity, just as I blame the Russians for all forms of malice but, in this case, it was a French public relations firm: a photographer and film crew all too used to the sharp shadows of the Midi to understand the darker shadows we have up here. Maybe the miraculous sight of snow, as far as they could see, had turned their minds. ‘Over-exposure’ one might call it. But white isn’t always a sign of the good.
”So, to celebrate the return of their four-fold meal-ticket — they’re usually male quartets, these heavy metal bands — the happy-snappers wanted to film them going into a sauna and coming out again. Those actions alone would probably have been harmless, even if it was just before Christmas, but the boys themselves wanted the whole shebang: a free sauna! They assumed the owner would be glad of the publicity.
“The owner wasn’t there to stop them. I don’t know if he was with his mistress or his granny in the Northland or had done a quick house exchange with the boss of the PR firm in St Tropez, but he wasn’t around, and I was the only one in the timber yard at the time, where the sauna had been set up as a kind of show house, the only one who knew the truth and tried to argue with them. They took a look at me and listened to my accent and said, ‘Get out of the way, reindeer-shagger!’ So I did.”
He sat there, silent, with his eyes closed, blowing out a long breath through pursed lips. Then he breathed it all back in and let it out again, more gradually and completely, before he was ready to speak.
”The publicity team just stood there waiting. They’d done pictures and video as they went in, one by one, waving, as if they were the Beatles, and all they had to wait for was the cheery, mop-headed lads to come out again, one by one, waving. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen.
“Snow was starting, so I went into the site office that was toasty warm, with a clear view, had a good strong coffee with the boss’s beans and sat behind his desk. After half an hour one of the camera-crazies, snow-capped like a mountain, came knocking at the door and said, ‘Do you think something’s happened?’
”Well, of course, being French, they hadn’t understood a word of the heated exchanges I’d had with the Metalheads, and I had no desire to explain something to them that they wouldn’t have comprehended, let alone believed, so I just said, ‘Why don’t you go and have a look? It’s not locked, you know.’ So they went in.
”It was the deluxe model, with the undressing cabin first, so you didn’t have to run straight out into the snow unless you wanted to, and there was an auto-timer on the heating-elements, set for ten minutes per push — really powerful, you know — so if anyone collapsed from the heat, the heat would go off all on its own, the heat under the stones which you splash the water on, to make the steam... I reckoned that whatever happened would happen within the first ten minutes, and the heat wouldn’t be turned on again, so all the steam would dissipate.
”What you have to know is that in Finnish we have two words for steam. There’s höyry, which is vapour, the kind of steam that comes out of kettles or drives steam engines; it’s what you get when you boil water. And there’s löyly, which is the kind of steam you find in a sauna and is used to mean ‘spirit, breath, soul’ — and if you’re thinking about how the spirits in the wood might make themselves bodies, that’s the kind they would use, though what they might be capable of, once they’d taken on that form, is another matter.
”Anyway, Lensman came running back, rapping on the door, throwing it open and shouting, ‘They’re not there, they’re not there!’
“I nearly said, Serves them right. I told them not to go in, and they wouldn’t listen. But I reckoned that would get me into trouble, so I only said, ‘Have you looked thoroughly? Are there other ways out? Any footprints in the snow?’
“Well, that was less helpful than it sounded, because by now they were sure to have trampled all round it, but it sounded good. I’m afraid I didn’t offer to go looking. I’d found them the first time, after all, and this time, being sure that they weren’t anywhere to be found, I wasn’t going to waste time and energy looking.”
”But what happens when they... vanish?”
Antti shrugged. “Strange to say, but the digestive processes of forest spirits do not figure in any of the biology textbooks in Finnish schools, not even in Sá;mi areas. I assume that whatever is left over is dust: tiny fragments of skin and hair that we all shed. The clothes they took off in the undressing areas will all have been fine, apart from their bad taste.”
”But how did you feel?” I asked.
Copyright © 2026 by Mike Rogers
