Page 6 of Hallowed & Haunted
Emma laughs.
“Maybe. But also lovable.”
She’s not wrong. Even now, Sander has the full attention of four different people, and they’re all hanging on his every word. He throws his head back and laughs at something Henrik says, and the sound carries even over the music.
“You’re the new guy, right? From Rovaniemi?”
“Niillas,” he confirms.
“Jonas is scared you’ll put him through the boards. But also grateful that you’re playing on our team.”
“Hmm.”
They talk about hockey and then about coursework. Emma is in Arctic Studies too, easy to talk to, and obviously happy to have found someone who isn’t too drunk yet for reasonable conversation. But Niillas finds his attention drifting back to Sander. Someone has handed him a drink, something clear in a shot glass, and he knocks it back without hesitation. The liquid makes him grimace, but he grins through it, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Irritation makes Niillas frown. It’s not a good idea to take drinks from people you barely know. Acquaintances from uni. Friends of Jonas. Doesn’t Sander have some basic sense of self-preservation?
The evening progresses in a blur of alcohol and increasingly loud music. Niillas nurses his beer and watches the party evolve around him. Someone starts a drinking game in the living room. A group migrates to the heated pool, and Niillas ponders if he’s going to pull any of the guys out again when they hit their heads on the tiles due to increasingly risky jumps.
And through it all, he keeps tracking Sander like a predator following prey. It’s unconscious at first, but as the evening wearson, he becomes more aware of it. The way Sander’s laugh carries across the room. The way he touches people when he talks to them, a hand on an arm, a pat on a shoulder. The way the devil horns have gotten slightly askew, making him look more sexy, not less, by some miracle. It’s fun even. Conversation is awful after Emma has moved to another girl Niillas recognizes from uni with an interested glint in her eyes. Niillas should be bored out of his mind, but watching Sander is weirdly…satisfying.
It’s only half-past nine when Henrik shouts, ‘Ghost Stories’ from the living room.
“It’s Halloween! We need ghost stories!”
A cheer goes up, and people start gathering in the spacious living room, settling on couches, armchairs, and the floor. Someone dims the lights, and Henrik starts igniting honest-to-god candles that reflect in the floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the garden. The soft light plays across the glass, making it look like moving water, and Niillas is reminded of liminal places and two-sided lakes. Halloween might not hold any importance in these lands besides modern fancy, but Niillas can sense that the veil isthintonight.
He finds a place to sit cross-legged on the floor near the back of the group, close enough to hear but far enough away to escape if things get too ridiculous. Sander sits down on the couch directly in his line of sight, beer in hand and cheeks flushed.
“Right,” Henrik says, settling into an armchair with his own drink. “Who wants to go first?”
“You called for ghost stories, you start,” Lars calls out.
Henrik grins, his plastic fangs catching the candlelight.
“Fine. But I’m telling you about the Stállu farm.”
A few people groan, others laugh, but coldness settles in Niillas’ stomach. A stállu is a being not unlike a troll in Sámi folklore. And he knows the stories about the creatures that hunt in the deep forests with teeth like razors and an appetite for human flesh. His grandma has told him all of them.
“Oh, come on,” Jonas says from his spot on the couch. “Don’t bore us with this bullshit.”
“But is it really bullshit?” Henrik leans forward, clearly enjoying himself. “My cousin works for the real estate company that’s been trying to sell the place for three years now. Nobody will buy it. You know why?”
“Because it’s a ruin in the middle of nowhere?” Sander says with an air of indifference, like he’s too manly to be scared.
“Because every family that’s tried to live there has left within a month. Every. Single. One. The last family who tried came from Oslo. A young couple with two small kids. They packed up in the middle of the night and never came back. Left half their furniture behind, like in the fucking Conjuring.”
“Probably because of mice and boredom,” Emma says.
But the atmosphere has changed into something uneasy and charged, and Henrik shakes his head like a disappointed teacher.
“Mice don’t leave claw marks on the walls, sweetie. Mice don’t make the kind of sounds they heard at night. There’s something out there, deep in the forest. Something that’s breathing outside the windows, scratching at the doors.”
The room has gone completely quiet; the party atmosphere has now dimmed along with the lights.
“The old folks know what it is,” Henrik continues, and Niillas prepares for the racism packed in a gaudy horror story. “They say something lives in those woods now, something that came down from the mountains when the logging started. Something hungry.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Emma says loftily, but she has thrown an arm around the girl she’d been talking to as if she’s one second away from pulling her onto her lap.
“Am I? My cousin says there are scratches on the exterior walls, deep gouges in the wood, like something with claws like hunting knives was trying to get inside. He says that when they made their professional photographer take pictures, the claw marks wouldn’t show.”