The Morning Star

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Behind it was one that was even more unsettling. It showed a naked man, he too in the forest, but here against a background of dense spruce in the half-light of dusk. He was walking away, his head bowed, holding something spherical in one hand.

  I turned the desk lamp toward it for a better look, the drooping ash of my cigarette dropping to the floor before I could do anything about it, and I took another deep drag, feeling the filter become hot against my lips.

  It wasn’t a man, I saw then, but a humanoid being of some sort. The body was that of a human, though exceptionally strong-looking, the head bald apart from a pigtail of hair that ran down between the shoulders from the rear of the scalp, while the face . . . The face was crude, like a Neanderthal’s. The ears looked like animal ears, and the eyes . . .

  But the strangest thing was that a star was shining brightly above the forest.

  I touched a corner of the canvas and examined my finger. It was dry. She must have painted it before the new star appeared.

  Unless she’d added it to something she’d already done?

  Tentatively, I put my finger to the star.

  It was just as dry.

  When had she painted it? I definitely hadn’t seen her working on it.

  And the star!

  It had to be a coincidence, but strange all the same, I thought, and I put it back among the others, switched off the light and went outside into the rain as I pressed Egil’s number again.

  Still no answer.

  He must have run his battery down, I thought, stepping into the living room.

  “I’m just going to pop over to Egil’s,” I said to Mum. “He’s not answering his phone and I need to sort some things with him about the house. Will you be OK? You can read to the twins when they go to bed, if you want. Or they can manage themselves. Can’t you, boys?”

  They both nodded.

  “Don’t be too long,” Mum said.

  “I won’t,” I said. “I’ll stop for a coffee on his veranda, that’s all.”

  She followed me out into the passage.

  “Is this absolutely necessary?” she said. “In this weather?”

  “It won’t take long,” I said, and put my rain jacket on.

  “There’s something restless about the house tonight,” she said. “Can’t you feel it?”

  “No,” I said. “Just the opposite, in fact. The restlessness is all gone now Tove isn’t here. You’re just being a bit sensitive, that’s all. It’ll be the weather.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “Are you going in my car?”

  “Yes,” I said, opening the door to the noise of the pouring rain and wind. “If that’s OK?”

  She nodded.

  “Drive carefully,” she said, and went back into the living room.

  I turned the wipers on full and backed out onto the track. Great puddles had already collected in the potholes, picked out by the beam of the headlights. I felt a childish glee at the forces that were loose, the rain, the lightning, the thunder, and there wasn’t another car out, so as soon as I got onto the road I could put my foot down, speeding through the weather and darkness, the trees on either side of me, like the walls of a tunnel.

  She must have painted the star later, I reasoned. She probably saw all sorts of things in her mind’s eye when she was psychotic, but I doubted that she had psychic abilities too.

  I only hope the children haven’t inherited whatever it is she’s got, I thought to myself, slowing down the last bit of the way, where the road narrowed and ran along the curve of the inlet, offering poor visibility to anything coming the other way. The whole bay was in uproar, waves crashing against the shore, boats tossing and heaving at their moorings.

  His car was there, I noticed, as my headlights flooded his garage farther up the slope. His bike too. But of course he wouldn’t be mad enough to cycle anywhere in weather like this. Certainly not with his son.

  I pulled up, turned the engine off and got out. The rain battered against the roof and rushed in the woods, and from the shore came the thunderous clamor of the waves as they pounded the land.

  I knocked on the door.

  Stood there and waited awhile before pressing the handle. It was locked, so I went round the back to the veranda. Perhaps he’d be sitting in the living room with a book in his lap, under the light of the single lamp where he usually read.

  A bolt of lightning ripped the sky.

  Fucking hell, that was close!

  The crash that followed only seconds later sounded like an explosion.

  I crossed over the rock and stepped up onto the veranda.

  The door was open. I assumed it meant they were home, only it was dark inside, so maybe they’d gone to bed.

  Should I wake him?

  I’d come all this way, I reasoned, and knocked on the glass.

  “Hello?” I called out. “Egil?”

  The place was quiet.

  Entering the house while they were asleep wasn’t really on. But then again, I could say I was worried about them, the door being open in the storm and all.

  I stepped inside, pausing in the middle of the room.

  “Egil?” I said. “Are you here?”

  The only sounds to be heard were the sounds of the storm.

  I went into his bedroom. It was empty. The bed was unmade, as if someone had been lying in it and had then got up again. But it was no use thinking of normal behavior when it came to Egil, I thought with a smile. I couldn’t really imagine him making his bed.

  It struck me they might be sleeping in the other bedroom.

  But it too was empty.

  They weren’t here.

  I switched the ceiling light on and looked around me.

  An enormous Bible had been abandoned on the floor. It was the only unusual thing I could see. That, and the food that had been left out in the kitchen.

  I went over to the typewriter on the table and cautiously turned the pile of papers next to it to look at the title page.

  On Death and the Dead

  An essay by Egil Stray

  Was that what he’d been writing about?

  I looked around, expecting to hear his voice all of a sudden: What are you doing here? But there was no one there, and instead I began to leaf through the pages, reading now and again at random.

  “As we know, death is not necessary. Thus wrote Georges Bataille in 1949, and ever since I read that sentence for the first time, it has lived inside me,” it said at one point.

  “What is occurring with death is that it is becoming smaller and smaller, and so compelling as this development has been, it is no longer inconceivable that death at some point will reach its nadir and vanish,” I read elsewhere.

  It was a relief to see how pretentious it was. Here sat the rich man’s son, alone in his summer house, thinking himself a philosopher!

  I flipped the pile and left it exactly as I’d found it, turning round again to make sure he wasn’t standing in the corner watching me.

  “Egil?” I called out.

  Wasn’t there a sleeping space in the garage too? They could be spending the night there, a bit of adventure for the boy.

  I swiped down on my phone and tapped the flashlight function as I went round the side of the house again, into the garage where the old Saab was, and shone the beam on the platform below the roof.

  “Egil?” I said, knowing that there was no one there, the way a person knows such things.

  I closed the door behind me.

  Where could they be?

  I decided to check the boat for good measure, tied the hood of my jacket tight and went out into the storm that roared and surged around me, lashing from the sea as I lit a path down to the boathouse.

  His boat was inside, tossing up and down.

  It was only what I’d expecte
d.

  Unless they’d gone out before it began and been taken by surprise? Maybe they were stranded on some islet out there?

  But then his boat was hardly likely to be here, I realized, and laughed at how stupid I was.

  The vessel tore at its moorings like an animal trying to writhe its way free.

  The foaming waves hurled themselves at the flat rock of the shore, now and then bearing down from a great height.

  I returned to the house, switched the light off, pulled the sliding veranda door shut and went back to the car. With his car, boat and bike all still here, the only explanation could be that they’d gone for a walk to enjoy the thrill of the storm.

  In which case, they would soon be back. But I couldn’t be bothered to sit and wait, we had an early start in the morning, so instead I turned the ignition, put the car into gear, backed out toward the woods and set off down the hill, the beam of the headlights forming an illuminated tunnel in the darkness, lacerated by rain.

  TURID

  I was so scared I closed my eyes to escape it all. But the terror remained, he could come for me without me sensing it, and so I opened them again.

  He was standing with his body angled away from me.

  He tipped his head back and stared up at the sky, baring his teeth. Then he walked toward the trees and slipped away between them.

  Everything was suddenly quiet. Not a sound from the woods.

  I stood motionless for some time, my eyes glancing this way and that. Nothing moved. Kenneth too was still.

  Everything inside me trembled. My legs were so weak and soft that I had to hold on to a tree so as not to fall.

  Was he really gone?

  I stood there for perhaps ten minutes before slowly walking forward into the clearing. I stopped, looked around me, continued a few paces, stopped.

  Everything was quiet.

  There was no one there.

  It was over, I told myself. The creature was gone.

  I bent down beside Kenneth. He was lying on his back with his arms at his sides as if he’d been shot.

  I felt for a pulse, and found it, beating between my thumb and index finger.

  I hardly dared say his name out loud, afraid that my voice would call them back.

  I smoothed my hand over his cheek.

  “Kenneth,” I whispered. “Kenneth.”

  He opened his eyes.

  At first, he looked vacantly into the sky above us.

  “We’re in the woods,” I whispered. “We’ve got to go home now.”

  He scrutinized me as he sat up.

  His gaze frightened me. There was something different about it. Something that hadn’t been there before.

  The way he looked at me.

  “Come on,” I said softly. “We’re going home now.”

  He got to his feet.

  I looked around, but saw no movement, heard no sound.

  I took his hand, and he let me. When I started to walk, he walked too. Away, along the stream, between the two fallen trees, slowly up the bank, through the heather.

  Kenneth didn’t seem to know he was naked, or else attached no significance to it, for he seemed quite unperturbed.

  It would be someone from the prison, it occurred to me. An escaped prisoner. Some of them looked terrifying. Pumped up on steroids. Big as oxen. Raw, brutal faces.

  That would be it.

  He’d escaped from the prison and was lying low here until they stopped looking for him.

  The great birds were just birds.

  The darkness, and my anxiety, had made everything so harrowing.

  And Kenneth’s gaze was unchanged, I told myself, glancing at him discreetly. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, showing no emotion. It was the way Kenneth had always been, a single face was all he had, and his staring eyes. Not vacant entirely, but expressionless. As if nothing was ever of any concern.

  My breathing became labored about halfway up the slope, and I stopped. I couldn’t get enough air. It felt like every capillary tightened, to twist and writhe inside my body. My heart pounded and I bent double, my body crumpling, though I knew I had to stand straight and open my lungs.

  It felt like the only air was coming in through a tiny straw, yet my lungs were so big, how could they ever be filled?

  hhhhii hhhhaa, hhhhii hhhhaa

  I sensed Kenneth staring at me.

  hhhhii hhhhaa, hhhhii hhhhaa

  And then the blockage seemed to release. Air streamed abruptly into my lungs, into my blood, and the pain ceased.

  I drew myself upright and realized we’d been holding hands the whole time.

  “We can carry on now, Kenneth,” I said. “We’ll soon be home.”

  I looked down from the top of the ridge at the institution’s cluster of buildings. They seemed almost to be asleep beside each other in the flat terrain. The prison looked different, a harshly illuminated rectangle in the dark forest, wide awake and angry.

  But the vessel and the blood, what was that about?

  He must have killed an animal and butchered it. Probably out of his head on something, and then Kenneth had appeared.

  We followed the path cautiously through the last bit of the woods.

  Now I had to get him back inside unnoticed.

  I crossed my fingers for Sølve to be asleep. If he was, it’d be as if nothing had happened.

  The light from the buildings fell faintly over the ground in front of us. After a few moments I saw the windows and the lamps from which it shone, and then we were crossing the lawn.

  There was no one on the veranda, at least. And no one to be seen about the buildings either. If they’d found out we were gone, there’d have been some sort of activity.

  But there wasn’t a soul.

  I unlocked the door while Kenneth stood passively waiting.

  In the corridor, I opened the door to the toilets, moistened a paper towel and wiped away the red mark on his forehead. It was sticky and could only be blood.

  Now that we were back inside, it was the only sign that something had happened. As for him being naked, all I needed to say was that he’d tried to get away, only I’d managed to stop him. He couldn’t talk, and there was no way he could communicate anything else. I certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone, not even Jostein.

  Not that he’d believe me.

  I went up the stairs, leading Kenneth by the hand, his face expressionless as always, his movements stiff and mechanical.

  The corridor was empty. Tentatively, I went toward the duty room and looked in. Sølve was sitting on the sofa. His head was tipped back and his mouth was open.

  Thank God for that.

  “Come on, Kenneth, we’ll get you to bed,” I said, and opened the door for him. I stood for a moment in the doorway and watched him as he pulled the duvet aside and climbed into bed.

  “Sleep well,” I said.

  He turned his head and stared at me, then opened his mouth as if about to speak.

  His eyes blinked several times in succession.

  “Ah ah ah,” he said.

  “What’s that? Is there something you want?” I said.

  He coughed.

  “Yuh . . .” he said.

  “Do you want some water, is that it?”

  He was still staring at me.

  “Yuh . . . a . . . ahh . . .” he said.

  His voice was a faint rattle from somewhere deep inside him.

  You are?

  Was he speaking?

  No, of course he wasn’t. He was making sounds, that’s all.

  “Goodnight, then,” I said.

  “You . . . ahh . . .” he said again.

  Was he speaking? Were the sounds words?

  He put his hand in the air.

  “You . . . are . . . doomed
. . .”

  And then he lay down, closed his eyes and turned his back to me.

  “What was that? Did you say something? Kenneth, did you say something? What did you say? Kenneth?”

  I stepped forward and touched his shoulder, trying to make contact with him.

  He was lying heavy and still, breathing with the regularity of sleep.

  I went back out into the corridor. He can’t talk, he can’t talk, I told myself. It was sounds, that’s all. Turid, it was only sounds.

  Could I be suffering from withdrawal, was that it?

  Seeing and hearing things that weren’t there?

  If I couldn’t get my hands on some Sobril tonight, at least I could have a smoke, I thought, and went into the duty room, opened Sølve’s bag, not caring if he woke up or not, found a packet of Prince Mild and a lighter in the side pocket, and went out onto the veranda, where I sat down in the chair and lit up.

  “I must have fallen asleep,” said Sølve’s voice from the doorway. “Did I miss anything?”

  “No,” I said. “What would you do if I reported you?”

  “You wouldn’t, surely?” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said, drawing the smoke into my lungs with a splutter.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.

  I didn’t answer him, but coughed and gasped for breath in succession. I couldn’t smoke with my damn chest. I knew that, it stood to reason.

  Such a damn bind.

  I bent forward and stubbed it out on the concrete.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got a Sobril on you?” I said.

  “Sobril? No. I’ve got a Xanor, though. Do you want one?”

  “You haven’t? Seriously?”

  “Yes, I have. Relax. But if I give you one, it means you’re not going to report me, right?”

  He laughed.

  “Have you got two?” I said.

  A moment later he handed me two pills and a glass of water.

  “Good old Turid,” he said.

  I sighed and swallowed.

  I’d be paying a high price for the favor. We were partners in crime now.