They’d been driving around for less than half an hour when Aurora seemed to spot something in the trees.

“There,” she said. “I saw movement. Stop.”

Mauno, sitting behind the wheel, glanced at her, but did as he was bid. This had always been their dynamic: she led, he followed. Even when her obsessions took them into dark forests at the dead end of autumn, after the leaves had fallen but before snow had brightened the landscape. Even when he’d just gotten home for his first weekend off, the uniform still a little loose around his shoulders, and the countdown for when he had to return to the barracks on Sunday already ticking in his head. Apparently, even then. 

It was silent in the car without the steady hum of the engine. The road twisted deeper into the forest ahead of them. These were the same country roads they’d learned to ride their bikes on, the trees hemming them in, keeping them safe. It seemed unlikely to Mauno that anything at all lurked among them.

Aurora strained against her seatbelt. This was the first time they’d seen each other since Mauno started national service but Aurora had barely looked at him when she tossed him the car keys and told him to drive. He tried not to take it personally, though that made her treatment of him feel worse, as if he truly was just a useful piece of machinery to her, not the best friend she’d known all her life.

Now, her gaze was fixed on the treeline. She brought out her phone and started to film.

“Is that—”

“Shh,” she said.

Mauno shifted impatiently. Aurora had been looking for the creature for years. Since they were in secondary school, when her mother went missing. He’d never truly believed there was anything to be found. It was all Aurora’s dad’s stories. But it was what their friendship had been built around. If you were to peel back the layers of years, at its core you’d find Aurora’s methodical hunt for the thing that lived in the nearby woods. Mauno had accepted it as one of those things that just was, like his own inability to tell her no, he didn’t want to go driving around after he just got back.

Aurora held the phone perfectly still. A yellow outline of a square appeared on the screen. It took Mauno a moment to realise what it meant. A second later, Aurora gasped, as shocked as he was.

There was a face among the trees.

“Drive,” Aurora said.

Mauno was slow to move. The square fixed itself around a pale head on Aurora’s screen. He couldn’t tear his gaze away from it.

“Drive, now!”

A figure stepped out of the trees and looked at them. Mauno’s stomach jolted. His hands were so cold he struggled to grab the key in the ignition. The figure, ashen-faced and wide-mouthed, started to walk toward them.

Mauno stalled, twice, the figure still approaching, unhurried. Then the engine roared and Mauno fed it gas and the car sprang ahead. For the longest second of Mauno’s life, the rear end of the car drifted across the middle of the road. If another car had appeared from around the bend they would’ve crashed into it.

But the road was clear. It was nighttime, and it was cold, and there was no reason at all for anyone to be out here in these woods.

The car growled as Mauno hung onto the steering wheel to course-correct. Soon they were flying forward, the road spooling behind them.

Aurora started laughing, a low cackle that rolled out of her. “We got it.” She gripped Mauno’s arm and shook. “We got it!”

#

Mauno drove them to Aurora’s dad’s house. His mum’s house was visible just beyond the raggedy hedge between their two plots. Mauno knew his mum would’ve waited up and prepared a late dinner for him. The sauna would be on, there would be clean sheets on his bed, and in the morning, fresh coffee and eggs in the sun-yellow kitchen. Mauno ached to go home and take off the uniform, unlace the standard-issue boots and wiggle his toes.

Aurora’s dad’s house was dark. Mauno didn’t ask where he was. Chances were Aurora didn’t know.

“You coming?” Aurora grabbed her stuff and slammed the car door.

No, he imagined calling after her. Mauno sighed and climbed out of the car.

Inside, it smelled faintly rotten, like a bin bag hadn’t been taken out for a while. Mauno knocked his boots on the side of the door but didn’t take them off. It usually wasn’t a good idea in this house.

He followed Aurora to her bedroom in the attic. While she got the footage up on one of her screens, Mauno lingered by her bookshelf. Her collection had grown in just the three weeks he’d been gone. He picked up a book called Finnish Monsters: Survivor Stories, Vol. III. He opened it at random and read: She wouldn't surrender her eyes without a fight. The name on the spine belonged to Aurora’s dad. Mauno suppressed a scoff. He was probably out somewhere researching the next volume.

“Take a look at this,” Aurora called.

She’d paused the footage on the moment the figure stepped into the frame. Even from across the room, Mauno felt a tingle of unease in the back of his neck. A part of him worried the figure had kept pace with them and was now stalking the treeline visible through the triangular window by Aurora’s bed.

But that was silly. He hadn’t even decided yet that he believed they’d seen anything weird at all. The further in the past that moment of panic receded, the more likely it seemed it had just been someone camping out in the forest, for fun or out of necessity, who knew. People did odd things sometimes.

“Don't be such a wimp.”

Resolutely, he ignored the black night outside the window and went to hover over Aurora’s shoulder. The map above her desk where she traced sightings was filled with new pins. Mauno could tell she was trilling with excitement. He wondered, suddenly, when Aurora had last had a proper meal, or a full night’s sleep.

“Okay, this is when it starts coming toward us … Look at its mouth, it’s almost like a beak? Don't you think?” Aurora paused and zoomed in on the figure.

Mauno wasn’t sure he agreed. It could’ve been the beak of an ihtiriekko, or it could’ve simply been a shadow, or the tail of a scarf, or something—anything—else.

Aurora flicked the play button and on the screen, the figure twitched toward them. Mauno’s skin crawled. It was a relief when the footage changed, the phone relinquishing the figure it had captured, showing instead the interior of the car, the side of the road, the back of Mauno’s head as he propelled them forward.

Aurora rewound. “We have to go back. You shouldn't have driven off like that.”

Mauno stared at her. “You told me to drive,” he said. There was footage of it.

Aurora wouldn’t meet his gaze but a faint blush appeared in her cheeks. “No matter. We’ll go back tomorrow. In the afternoon, so we have a bit of daylight.” She looked up at him then, as if seeing him for the first time. “I'm so glad you’re home.” 

# 

They were back on the road the next day. It was light in that slanted way that meant the sun was already losing steam.

Mauno had slept fitfully despite being back in his own bed. He’d spent the morning helping his mum with a couple of chores around the house. Now, driving down the same road as last night, he felt a rare stirring of irritation. This wasn’t how he’d imagined spending his first weekend off. He’d wanted to go for a beer with Aurora, talk about life outside the confines of their tiny village, or university entrance exams, or the future, like people their age did. That would’ve been normal. Something to tell the guys in his barracks about.

He glanced at Aurora surreptitiously. She was wearing the same ratty blue hoodie under her parka as yesterday and was as pale as always, the fine web of blue veins visible at her temples. She was reading something on her phone. For maybe the first time ever, Mauno thought Aurora might never leave her dad’s house, not for university, not for a job. Not if she didn’t get her answers.

“How have things been with you?” Mauno asked, trying to sound nonchalant. It was true he hadn’t texted her, either, but at least he had a good excuse. Long days spent in training and various jobs around the barracks, evenings taken up by socializing with the other guys. He’d barely had a moment to himself, to think of who he was and who he was becoming. His boys—the phrase emitted a warm glow somewhere in his chest—his boys said he was funny, always down for a laugh. It wasn’t who he’d ever been with Aurora.

Aurora didn’t look up from her phone. Her fingers flew across the screen. “Dad says we should loop back to where we were. Apparently they grow attached to places.” 

“I didn't ask about your dad,” Mauno snapped, surprising himself. At least it made Aurora pay attention. She looked at him, open-mouthed. Immediately, he wanted to take it back. They never argued. 

Aurora’s expression shifted. Mauno didn’t know how to interpret it. “Let's just get there,” she said. The tone of her voice was cool. 

They drove the rest of the way in silence, Mauno feeling as if a deep well within him was fast filling with some substance he’d have to find a way to contain. He drove them to the bend in the road where they’d pulled up last night, and parked.

Aurora barely glanced at him as she got out of the car. She had her phone in her hand and was already filming, capturing the surroundings. Then she set off, footsteps crunching over dry leaves. Mauno followed, keeping pace with her.

They walked and walked. At some point Mauno had to stop to fix his sock that was rubbing a welt in his heel. When he stood he realized something was different. It had been quiet before, too. But now, the silence was watchful.

The knowing arrived as if a binary input in his brain was flicked. The creature was here, behind him.

Ahead of him, five, six, seven long strides away, Aurora kept walking, her white-blonde hair swishing at her back.

Mauno was frozen in place. He’d never understood the phrase to describe a literal feeling. But he felt brittle and immobile, as if he’d fused with the cold earth. He willed for Aurora to look back.

She slowed, then stopped. She turned around. Her face was as familiar to Mauno as his own, but he’d never seen this expression on it. The depth of shock and surprise and elation, chasing each other across her delicate features.

“Help,” Mauno said, or thought he said, or tried to say. He felt mired within himself, unable to think logically and to put to words what he needed.

Aurora reached for him. No, that wasn’t quite right.

She was holding out her phone. To call the emergency services? Yes, of course. But around here, the police were often at least fifteen or twenty minutes away, sometimes more.

Mauno felt the thing press itself against his back, fitting its legs against his. A warmth radiated from it. It was an alive body, then, not a dead one. Why Mauno would think such a thing was beyond him.

“Don't move,” Aurora whispered.

He couldn’t have, even if he tried. There was a touch on his shoulder now, sliding down his arm, squeezing, not hard enough to hurt. He caught the hand in the corner of his eye. The skin was flaky and discoloured, not just grey but absent of colour, like he saw it through a black-and-white filter. The nails were cracked, sickles of black grime sitting under the tips.

A hot breath, disconcerting in its impossibility, engulfed his face, and he thought of the molecules that were traveling, right now, from the creature’s mouth into his own, down his throat and into the branches of his lungs, seeping into him, colonising him, and he wanted to be sick. He wanted to turn himself inside out, step out of his skin and shake it free and clear of whatever this thing behind him was. 

He became aware that Aurora wasn’t saying anything. She was entirely silent as she kept her phone up.

He realized she was taking photos. Of him, and the creature. The ihtiriekko. 

Mauno imagined the focus of the lens on his face as a kind of pressure. He was stuck between the camera and the creature, slowly flattened between the two truths. The creature behind him inhaled deeply, or sniffed him, he wasn’t sure which. It began to screech, softly at first, the noise vibrating against Mauno’s back, then with a shocking intensity that rang in his ears and bones.

Feeling returned to his legs. His body buzzed. For one more moment the task appeared impossible, but then Mauno pushed off his heels and shot forward. There was a sense of resistance, maybe the thing holding onto his jacket, and then he was free.

Mauno’s legs pumped the ground and his arms scythed through the air. The cold was a physical impediment, his lungs stinging like they were filling with frost. He dodged a dry branch and then another, catching his balance when he tripped. It wasn’t so different from the field training exercises he’d already participated in, camping overnight and moving in small groups to try to ambush the others. Mauno clung to this idea, continuing his mad dash. A twig whipped his face, leaving a smarting patch across his cheek.

He didn’t know if he was pursued. Didn’t know if Aurora was behind him. Didn’t care.

When he thought of her taking photos of him it was like becoming unmoored from who he was. That terror he’d felt. It would never become just a memory. It was caught as evidence on Aurora’s phone, and from there it would make its way online, into articles and Reddit threads, the niche chat rooms that Aurora frequented, her dad’s books.

The car loomed behind the trees.

He accelerated, skidding when his boot hit the asphalt. It was cold enough for frost to have formed on the road. But he didn’t fall. He righted himself and swung to the driver’s side, throwing himself in.

Only when he had the engine running did he look to where he’d come from.

His wild run had created an uneven path through the dead undergrowth. He imagined Aurora’s white-blonde head materialising at the far end of the path, the creature smiling its beak-smile at him, its hand clasping her shoulder.

He forced himself to wait for a count of five, then ten, and when he couldn’t bear the sight of the empty path anymore he sped off, the wheels screeching, or maybe something else. 

#

That night, Mauno packed his bag for his return to the barracks the next day. Technically, he didn’t have to be back until 21:00 the following evening, and the drive wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours, but he decided to head off as soon as the day lightened. He couldn’t imagine driving back late in the afternoon when the sun had already started to set, keeping the trees in his line of sight, checking if a strange figure was following him, tracking his car. The thought made him feel a peculiar mix of nauseous and hollow.

Over dinner, he could tell his mum was concerned. She asked probing questions, mentioned Aurora a couple of times. Mauno was sickened by the mention of her name. When he thought of her he could only bring up the visual of her face when she looked at whatever was behind him, eyes round in wonder as she lifted her phone.

Mauno shrugged off the questions and told her he was eager to get back. To the boys, to the routine of army life. His mum didn’t look entirely convinced, but what was she going to do, call him a liar? So Mauno finished his dinner, and despite the unsteady feeling in the pit of his belly, grabbed a beer from the fridge and excused himself into his room.

Aurora’s house was dark. Mauno turned off the lights in his room and positioned himself by his window with the beer, waiting.

At some point he must’ve fallen asleep. The bottle had tipped over, spilling its contents on the windowsill and his sleeve. Mauno blinked. Something had awoken him.

Then he realised what it was. Aurora’s bedroom window was brightly lit, the glare like a lighthouse beam cutting through the night. It must have been hours later. It would’ve been a long walk back.

Aurora appeared in her window. Mauno would’ve known her silhouette anywhere. The obstinate tilt of the chin, the curtain of hair. They’d waved good night to each other for hundreds of nights, ever since they were kids. The thought of it was almost enough for Mauno to turn on his lights, signaling that he was fine. That he was here in his room, in his house, in this small corner of the world that Aurora inhabited too; here for her, like always.

Something stopped him.

Another silhouette. This one was tall, but hunched, like it was trying to make itself look smaller than it was. It was held there, in the triangular glare of the window, separate from Aurora but standing so close to her. Could it be her dad? 

Aurora drew the curtains, cutting off the light.