The Forest for the Trees

by Mike Rogers

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts 1, 2, 3

conclusion

“Guilty, you mean? Not particularly. I told them what would happen. They chose not to believe me. Not a great loss. They were from Helsinki. And Finland has too many heavy-metal bands. What I actually did was extremely responsible. I put a padlock on the sauna and disconnected it from the electricity supply. Then I put another padlock on the gate of the timber yard and left a message on the boss’s phone that he should call me when he got back from his Christmas holiday, before he went into the office. But, as the Finns don’t say, it’s an ill sauna that blows nobody any good.”

“How so?” I asked.

* * *

The answer to the question I asked; an answer to a problem; and, as there always are, more questions...

“You will know, I am sure, since you have the air and manner of one who also tells stories and appreciates them when they are well told, that one does not earn that much money from telling stories. One can earn a lot more from not telling them.

“You see, though I was and am, a passionate teller of stories, my day job was at the sauna factory, and getting away from there to a place where anyone would pay to hear one of my stories would eat up so much of my holiday entitlement merely in travel time that I was condemned to remain an amateur all my life.

“However, when my boss returned, I made a bargain with him. I’m a storyteller: I know all about how to make the right kind of bargain with the devil, so I told him that I would not tell a story about what had gone on with the sauna he had made, if he paid me a supervisor’s monthly salary every month for the rest of my life without requiring me to turn up for work, subject naturally to the same increases as the salary he paid his workers.

“He looked at me sidelong, did the old boss, the way his granny would have done, and said, ‘What’s to stop you—’ But I interrupted him and said, ‘If I tell the truth, then the firm is closed down, and I lose my regular income. Oh, I might get something from the reporter I talk to, but I don’t want sudden riches, I want support to keep me fed and housed while I go all over the place telling stories. This,’ I told him, ‘will be the best bargain you’ve ever made, except you won’t ever be able to boast about it.’

“He saw that and nodded, and we shook hands on the deal. And that’s why I’m able to be here, telling stories... And talking to you! Which, apart from being delightful and enabling me to lighten my soul somewhat, is also going to be of financial benefit to both of us and some other people who deserve it.”

“How?” I asked, not quibbling, just curious.

“Information,” he said, “is always valuable, and you have information which I do not have, and which I did not even know existed until you spoke to me and showed me the picture on your phone. When I tell my uncle — oops! I mean the big boss, of course — that the sauna he told someone to dispose of safely has in fact been sold further to people in England and has been responsible for... how many disappearances so far?”

“Four, as far as I know: one couple and two singletons.”

“Then I am sure that, as a responsible businessman, he will want to offer some kind of financial compensation to those affected, even if he chooses to disguise it in some way. You, too, will be rewarded for bringing to his attention something which might adversely affect his enterprise, if steps were not taken. Where is the sauna at the moment?”

I told him, believing at the time that there was no danger to anyone from it.

“What would make him very happy,” said Antti, “would be a photograph of his firm’s nameplate still attached to burnt wreckage. That would definitely reassure him. Here is his phone number and mine...” Fortunately, he dictated them in English, and I took them down straight into my phone.

“Good,” he said. “Now, I believe that you have already done research into the unfortunate occurrences and have names and addresses, next of kin, etcetera, which you can forward to my uncle. I must ask you now to run me down to the pub in the village, where I have to meet the people who have organised this performance and persuade them to book me again.

“I would invite you, out of friendship, but out of friendship I will not invite you, because it will be incredibly boring for you and embarrassing for both of us to have you see how I must crawl round them. In extremis, I have a little bottle of lakka akvavit, homemade by my great-grandmother, not for me to drink but to put the others to sleep when I have had enough!

“It’s the Sá;mi spells, not the alcohol, that produce the effect. And out of friendship I will not offer you any, because you need to drive home... Tell me,” he said, as we drove down to the village, “where did you pick up the Finnish?”

I told him about the pretty Finnish girl and her friendly tubby friend.

“And there was I, thinking Finnish girls were specially trained never to pass on any useful information to a man!”

And with that, he was away...

One way and another, it was a month or more before I got round to going to see Malcolm. I knew his wife, Linda, had been very poorly and spending time in hospital, and I was fairly sure that Malcolm would be visiting her as often as he was permitted to, so there would have been little point going to their house in Petersfinger.

But, thinking about the need to put the sauna permanently out of action — I had already let Antti’s uncle have the details of its earlier presumed victims and the establishments where the incidents had occurred — I had used Google Earth again, to see where the spirits might choose to take up residence if they were driven out of their current lodgings by fire.

What I saw cheered me: there was, indeed, a scrubby little copse at the end of Malcolm’s garden, contained by what looked like a triangle of barbed wire fencing, a remnant of some previous division of the fields behind, which, when the photo had been taken, had been almost white with that bony plough tilth you get on fields with thin, light soil and chalk underneath, the way they so often are round Salisbury.

Time never stops, does it? And it was bringing us closer to Christmas, but I was relying on Malcolm’s endless list of things to do and things to fix until he texted me to say that they’d be letting Linda out over Christmas, to enjoy herself, and that he’d found time to put the sauna back together and was looking forward to enjoying it with Linda, all that wonderful steam was just what she needed, to get her lungs working properly again.

Malcolm believed in cogs and connections, in wheels and wires. I’d never be able to persuade him of the existence of the invisible. And he had his pride, too, in what he’d accomplished and his love of Linda.

My solution had to be radical and permanent. And I reckoned I knew how to do it. So I went to see him, a couple of days before Linda was due to be fetched home, but definitely in the danger period. Did I do that because I enjoyed risk? Or because I wanted to see for mysef, just to be sure.

“Can I try it out?” I asked, and Malcolm, generous as ever, agreed and fetched me a plastic bottle of tap water to sprinkle over the stones and told me about the push-button — which, of course, I knew about already — and the undressing-room (ditto), and I went out to take a look, relieved to discover that, cautious as he was and sensible, he’d put it up against the back wall of the garden, the one made of breese blocks, with that scrubby little copse just behind it, a good ways from the house. He’d taken the electric cable out of the back of the garage, much easier than trying to patch into any of the house circuits.

He was busy indoors, making the place tidy for Linda’s return, while I made my own preparations. First of all, I peeped into the garage, where I knew he kept DIY supplies and tools. In the absence of the stacked sauna, they were all accessible. I got an adaptable screw-driver, because I didn’t know what kind of heads the screws had that I needed to remove.

And I looked along the row of unmarked plastic bottles containing clear liquids, lifting the lids and sniffing, till I found the white spirit, by good fortune in exactly the same kind of bottle as the one he’d filled with tap water for me. At that point, I realised I could have done with a stiff drink, but I didn’t fancy trying another sampling run along the shelf full of bottles.

So I went out into the garden and up the steps to the Shed of the Spirits, as I’d decided to christen the sauna. Malcolm had put it together perfectly. It looked brand new, and the maker’s plate was sited just where I wanted it: to the right of the door, low down, on a transverse plank that covered the base-frame.

It seemed a pity to do what I knew had to be done... but it was the only way to make things safe, even though the safety to be achieved was on the far side of a bit of peril. Nonetheless, there were precautions I could take, and I took them.

First, I went into the undressing-room and looked around. The doors into the sauna itself were bat’s wing ones, like a saloon in the Wild West except they were full length. They had no fastening, just a gentle spring to keep them in position, and they swung both ways. You wouldn’t want to struggle with a doorknob or a handle when your hands were all sweaty.

Next, I turned the heat on. The stones needed to be hot, and that would take a little while. Then I went back out, leaving the outer door open. Thank goodness, it opened outwards, and I started unscrewing its hinges. I was counting on the fact that Malcolm had taken the whole thing apart to move it originally and had then put it back together pretty recently, which meant that the screws were used to being screwed and unscrewed. They slipped out like a dream. I propped the door back in position from the inside, so it looked closed, but could just be pushed over to let me out.

By now, I could sense the heat building inside the sauna, but I didn’t take off any clothes. I went into the main room with my two identical and anonymous plastic bottles and had a moment of panic when I couldn’t remember which one had what in it, but I loosened one cap and found I’d guessed right. Then I tightened it again and screwed it down and took the cap off the other completely, advanced slowly and poured the contents over the hot stones, jumping back at once.

Oh, how it hissed! How the steam billowed! As bad as boiling rice in a bed-sit! It might have been imagination, given the state I was in already, but I could have sworn I could see faces in the whirls and swirls of vapour, nasty, malevolent faces, creatures that were indifferent to me in the worst way, hostile indeed to everything that had blood and breath and walked on legs. They were like all the horrors my childhood delirium had ever conjured from patterns in the lino or the grain of the floor-boards.

How long could I stand it? Five seconds, maybe? I counted out loud, “Yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä!” I still didn’t know what five was!

It was time, it was more than time, I pushed the button again, just in case the heat might turn off too soon, and I dropped the plastic bottle with the white spirit in onto the hot stones. It was safer for me that way, I thought, than trying to pour it on and being licked all over by a tongue of flame.

I was through the bat’s-wing doors before the whoomp told me it had ignited. The flames came round the doors as they swung back and began to catch fire themselves but, by then, I was lying flat on top of the outer door in the garden, picking myself up and running back to the house, ignoring the handy garden hose because I didn’t want the blaze stopped prematurely.

Malcolm, working in the front room, had heard nothing. I told him in ragged breaths about my stupidity and my confusion in mixing up the bottles. He didn’t ask why I should still be completely clothed if I’d been intending to take a sauna. He was just glad that I was safe, bless him! And inclined to think that the fire must, in some way, have been his fault, a bad connection, somehow. I did my best to reassure him.

“A lucky thing it happened to you,” he said, “just think: it could have been Linda in there!”

And having thought of her, he rang her up immediately, to explain that he wouldn’t be able to give her the treat he’d promised her. Since he’d put the phone on speaker, I could hear how kindly she consoled him and how she said that all she really wanted for Christmas was to be back with him again, what they did or didn’t do didn’t matter at all.

I left them at it and went out to the back garden. Even in the absence of a wind, the destruction was complete. The wood had been bone-dry, the planking thin. The structural beams were charcoaled and still smouldering. I tossed the unhinged outer door onto them and was at once rewarded with bright flames. Fire’s appetite isn’t easily sated when it’s been roused, and the door panels were thin and combustible. I hoped that whatever had once inhabited those beams had been driven away. Malcolm would probably use the remnants in another, proper bonfire, or take them down to the tip.

The maker’s nameplate, in fire-resistant metal, was still there, in position on a fragment of plank attached to the blackened base joist. I photographed it and sent the photograph to Antti’s uncle. Any temptation to prise it loose as a souvenir was stilled by a sudden and unexpected burst of flame.

Do you know, before I’d got back to the house, where Malcolm and Linda were still talking to each other on the phone, I’d received a notification from my bank about the receipt of #15,000 from a Finnish sauna manufacturer, as reimbursement of what I’d paid for a faulty sauna? Maybe the bank suspected it of being money-laundering. Anyway, it was certainly an act of cleansing.

“Don’t worry about the sauna!” I said to Malcolm, interrupting the conjugal communication. “I’ve put in a claim for it on my Personal Liability Insurance, and they’ve responded immediately, so you’ve got fifteen thousand quid for a holiday!”

I really do have Personal Liability Insurance, so it was only half a lie. Now, you may think the story’s over, happy ever... But we storytellers have an Internet forum on which we share ideas and news and ask for stories to fit particular occasions where we’re booked to perform. Two days later, on that forum, I read how a promising Finnish storyteller had been killed in a car crash. No other vehicle involved, straight into a tree, on the road through the New Forest from Brockenhurst to Lyndhurst.

Well, I thought, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because he was trying to be a flying Finn rally driver, and I resolved, next time I have occasion to go between those two places, to take the train. Pity it happened here; if it had been in Finland, maybe his Sámi great-grandmother could have picked up the pieces, put him back together again and sung him back to life. Malcolm, too, if I’d asked him, would probably have had a go. It was always his passion, putting things back together again. When you get started, you see how it works. But, unlike buying things at auctions, he wouldn’t have known the song to sing.

As for the copse out the back of Malcolm’s garden... I keep an eye on the Salisbury Journal, to see if anybody round there has disappeared mysteriously. There are still hardware shops where you can buy plastic containers of paraffin and a box of matches.

When I go walking, I stick to the high chalk and walk round woods instead of going through them.

I still listen to Sibelius’s Tapiola, because it helps to remind me of Antti and the vast forests of the North. But, whereas I used to have plain wooden floorboards, sanded down and varnished, I’ve now got fitted carpets throughout, so I don’t have to look at the patterns in the grain and see things I’d rather not...