Game Land

Welcome to Game Land, where your every pleasure will be satisfied.

The substitute asked the pupils to say their names. There was Onni, May, Jonna, Helmi, and Her Highness the Lovely Princess Rose. 

The substitute looked at the roster. 

“It says here that your name is Oona.”

“No,” the little girl said. “I am Her Highness the Lovely Princess Rose.”

The substitute tilted her head. 

“Oona, say your name.” 

The girl gave a yelp. The classroom window opened and a flock of willow tits flew in. They flew three times around the room in a chirruping black and gray cloud, gathered around the girl, and took hold of her blue dress, lifting it up as she giggled, her eyes twinkling. 

The substitute smiled. The child was adorable, but she still had to give her real name. 

When the substitute asked her again to say her name, the little girl gave a whistle, and four badgers came into the classroom. 

They came through the same window, smelling of the forest, and went over to the substitute and sniffed at her. The substitute shooed them away with her foot. The badgers didn’t care. They shoved their wedged heads under the substitute, lifted her onto their backs, and dashed out of the room. The next day there was an announcement that the substitute had gone on a trip to Badgerville. 

The badgers shoved their wedged heads under the substitute, lifted her onto their backs, and dashed out of the room.

The school principal called the little girl’s father. Her father was the Elf King, and he sat down in front of the principal in curled-up shoes and a frilly collar, wearing a headdress of reindeer antlers festooned with bells that jingled whenever he moved. His beard was dazzlingly white, starched, and as long as the map pointer. It reached all the way to the floor. 

The principal leaned forward in her chair. “Regarding Oona’s part in this incident . . .”

The Elf King held up a finger. “To you, my dearest principal, she is Her Highness the Lovely Princess Rose.” 

“Right. Her disruptive behavior . . .”

The Elf King, in a loud voice, expressed his admiration for the fine oak paneling and heavy furniture in the room. “What if this place was made into a casino?” 

The principal looked at him. “Huh?” 

The principal was never heard from again. The Elf King fired the teachers and invited the children’s parents to a parents’ night. The parents came, tired and cranky. They didn’t know about the changes to the school administration. They were expecting bitter coffee and a chance to scold the teachers and each other, so their eyes went wide as they walked into the school lobby, because it was full of elves. They were handing out glasses of champagne. The elves bowed to the parents and ushered them into a school that was unrecognizable—there was red carpet in the hallway and huge crystal chandeliers lit with real candles hanging from the ceiling. The principal’s office door opened and the Elf King walked out wearing a red satin cape with an ermine collar and gazelle horns that protruded from his forehead like spears. He smiled warmly and kissed the women’s hands and gave the men a wink and bade them all welcome to Game Land.

One of the men gathered himself up and announced that he had come to discuss Elmer’s grades. The Elf King told him he was mistaken. As the Elf King understood it, Elmer’s father had come to play blackjack and win cash prizes and mess around with some hot elf babes. 

Elmer’s mother shouted indignantly, but Elmer’s father had already dashed through the nearest door and was soon throwing dice at one of the tables, crowing with joy, his arm around some hussy while an elf dealer shoveled money at him. 

The Elf King twirled a finger to order another round. The elves filled the empty glasses and told those whose glasses were still full to open their mouths so they could pour champagne in straight from the bottle. The parents grew rowdy. The Elf King led them to the gaming rooms with pleasing gestures. Meanwhile, another door on the opposite side of Game Land was opened, and domovas, gnomes, wampuses, sprites, and fairies came inside. 

On the first floor of Game Land, the games were played for money. The parents threw dice and pulled levers and threw down cards and won fabulous sums. They laughed and doubled their bets and played some more. They lost. They guffawed at each other and raised their glasses and tripled their bets. They lost again, and kept playing, because it seemed like a good idea, until they had lost their houses, and land, and all of their savings. The laughter in the gaming room turned to wails of horror. The parents ran into the hallway, tearing at their hair, wondering at their stupidity and at how such a misfortune was possible. The elves consoled them and told them that they still had their most prized possessions. The parents asked what the elves were talking about. The elves gave them wise, merciful looks like angels descended to earth and said, Didn’t they still have their honor and their reputation? The parents nodded. They wiped their eyes and said that money was just money, after all, and the elves helped them up and led them up to the second floor, where those more precious stakes were played for. 

And after they had played those games, the parents sobbed even more inconsolably and swore that they would never show their faces in public again, and some of them were ready to kill themselves on the spot. They curled up in the fetal position, trembling, panic-stricken human ruins, and the elves gently stroked them, murmuring in soothing tones that they did still have their health, after all. And their trembling eventually subsided and they dared to look at each other and a few of them laughed and relaxed again and said of course they could recover from this. They stretched their limbs and told each other that they had two arms and two legs and a working digestive system, and what more does a person need? The elves smiled. With sweeping gestures, they led the parents to the third floor, where the domovas and goblins and sprites and other creatures were waiting for them. They grabbed the parents and the parents screamed and said there must be some misunderstanding, but there wasn’t, because on the third floor the stakes of the games were the players themselves. 

The elves gently stroked them, murmuring in soothing tones that they did still have their health, after all.

Relatives of the missing parents filed a criminal complaint against Game Land. The police commissioner stared grimly at his underlings. He had no doubt that Game Land was run by the Illuminati or the Jews or women, and that the place must be made a cautionary example. That very night, a police special-forces team was stationed around Game Land. The police commissioner and his forces were monitoring events from a command vehicle. When everything was ready, the commissioner gave a signal and the police—armed with helmets, batons, and rifles—made a rush through the doors, and some through the windows, too. After a few intense moments, the noise in the building went silent. The leaders waited for the police to come out with their prisoners, but there was no sign of them. Three hours passed. Then the garage doors opened and four golden sleighs came rushing out pulled by fallow deer, and in the sleighs were the police, all of them sloshed, puffing cigars, each with an arm around a woman or man, and in every sleigh an elf string ensemble played catchy fiddle tunes. The sleighs sped by one after the other, noisy and musical, and the leaders stared at the passing caravan as it disappeared into the hills. The leadership held a meeting. It was decided that it might not be a bad idea to get a peep inside themselves, and they walked to the building and the doors were opened to them, and they were never heard from again. 

The failed police raid attracted national attention. The Elf King sent out a press release saying that he understood the concern and promised to explain the whole thing live on TV. During the broadcast, the Elf King sat on a sofa with gigantic, paddlelike moose antlers on his head, and chipmunks and gray squirrels romped and turned somersaults and did goofy tricks in the cups of the antlers, and blinking lights were strung between the antler tips. The Elf King wore dozens of watches on his wrist and shiny leather boots on his feet. A reporter asked the Elf King for his response to the charges brought against Game Land. The Elf King replied that he was very concerned. 

“What about?” 

“About whether we can afford this.” 

“Can you be more specific?”

“Of course.”

The Elf King jumped up from his seat, and the squirrels and chipmunks held onto the antlers so they wouldn’t fall overboard, and the Elf King looked directly into the camera and said that for the first time the games in Game Land would now be stacked double, for double the excitement and double the winnings, and swimming pools had been consolidated to create an ocean in the basement with your choice of worlds—Tahiti or the Wonderful Caribbean Mystery. Everyone could play everything, and press all the buttons, and movies played nonstop, and this was their final clearance sale, and it would last as long as there was enough money and, of course, champagne.

A line a kilometer long formed in front of Game Land. They started charging a fee to get in, and when the line grew to two kilometers they doubled the price. The doors to Game Land were widened and extra wings were added until eventually the place didn’t even look like a building anymore, more like a collection of buildings growing out of the earth, like an enormous cubist lichen. Almost everyone who entered Game Land disappeared forever, and a rumor spread through the queue that there was a wormhole inside that led straight to heaven, or another dimension, or Mars.

A rumor spread through the queue that there was a wormhole inside that led straight to heaven, or another dimension, or Mars.

The moving crowd of people in front of the place attracted thieves and hookers and profiteers offering their services, and before long a sea of tents had grown up around the building, with its own city of services and a bank to loan money at insanely exorbitant rates. 

Inside, the gaming accelerated. Roulette wheels, wheels of fortune, and merry-go-rounds whirred and spun on their axles like enormous, mesmerizing tops. Winners were carried on golden chairs from one room to another, and losers had their own nursing stations where they were served drink after more intoxicating drink. At the center of this circus was the Elf King. His assistants put new antlers on his head every day. The last headdress he was seen in was a pair of two-meter elephant tusks wrapped in police tape, and he sat on a throne bolted to the wall of the first-floor gaming room with the tusks on his head and so much other finery that you almost couldn’t see him amid all the stuff and glitter.

The rampant crime and lasciviousness surrounding Game Land eventually reached a point where it became too much even for the power company. The company management decided to cut off the place’s electricity. A technician pressed the necessary buttons and the flow of electricity to Game Land ceased, but the power company managers saw with dismay that the lights in the building were still on and the indecent behavior continued unabated. 

The city council decided to raze Game Land to the ground. A column of dozens of bulldozers was sent to surround the building. The ne’er-do-wells ran from the dozers like vestiges of the human race fleeing an invasion of intelligent machines. When the tents and corrugated metal shacks had been leveled, the bulldozers turned toward the House itself. Then the forest began to move. The trees bent and large trolls emerged. They picked up the bulldozers in their arms and the drivers leapt out of their cabs as the machines rose into the air. The trolls crushed the bulldozers into little metal lumps in their hands. They gathered the lumps and built a four-sided pyramid with smooth, straight sides, its metal surface reflecting the sunlight like a dazzling prism. Then the trolls went back into the forest and the criminals crept out of their hiding places and put up new tents around this new landmark in front of Game Land, and their filthy activities commenced again, more feverishly than before. 

A decision was made at the highest levels of government that the best course of action was to destroy the building and its surroundings with cannon fire. A fire control team was sent to analyze the target. They reported that the area was emptying out. Tents were being torn down, trailers rounded up, and a long line of travelers was winding its way out of sight. The fire control team sent a scout into Game Land to confirm that there was no one in the building. The games and equipment were still there. With no people in it, the place was quiet, eerie, the annexes and stairways surrounding it like spontaneous cancerous growths, and the whole place seemed like a symbol for something whose meaning was yet to be conceived. The scout followed the tracks of the elves and the other creatures. They led to the edge of the forest, where the scout stopped. He looked up at the towering pines. In their branches perched dozens of finches, warblers, and titmice, looking at him the way birds will look at anything, their eyes like shining buttons.

Translation from the Finnish