by Matt Haig
“I was in despair. I didn’t know what to do. I would lie awake thinking about what might haff happened to him in the forest. But I got hold of such thoughts and kept them in check—I wasn’t ready to lose my mind just yet.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering if I was tempted to go and follow him into the forest. Well, I can tell you, there were many occasions when I packed my rucksack, put on my boots and grabbed hold of my jaffelin, ready to go and find him.
“But effery time I headed up through that goatless field, I always felt something hold me back. I remembered him telling me to wait in the house and I kept on hearing his last words: ‘Whatever happens, I will find my way back to you.’ Maybe it was my own weakness. Maybe I was too frightened. But I never was able to step into the forest.
“I just stayed in the house and occupied myself as much as I could with books or knitting or other things that might distract me. I kept praying for some company, for something to keep me busy, and someone decided to take note of my prayers because one morning I found a stray dog asleep on the grass. That’s right. It was Ibsen. He might not have been as good company as your uncle, but he was certainly a lot better than a goat. And he made me feel safe. He was my protector from the trolls.
“Over time, I am pleased to tell you that the horrible thoughts about what might have happened to Henrik in the forest were replaced with better things. Like memories of him flying through the air on his skis, or smiling at the smell of his ‘Gold Medal.’
“Of course, it would be easier if I didn’t have to look at those horrible dark trees every day. But I can’t moof house, any more than I can head out into the forest. And anyway, I’ve got you and Martha now…What a team, eh? Ibsen, Samuel, Martha and old Aunt Eda.”
Samuel looked at his aunt and saw the tears she was trying to hold back glaze her eyes. He sipped his cloudberry juice, as if trying to get rid of a bad taste.
Trolls and huldres and a hundred other creatures, all living in the forest behind the house. It was too much to believe in, and he didn’t. Not fully, anyway. After all, what does a footprint in the snow prove? And why should anyone believe a mad professor?
But he remembered his own fear when he had stared into the darkness of the forest, and gulped back the rest of the juice.
“So,” said Aunt Eda. “Now you know.”
“Yes,” said Samuel, although he didn’t really.
He went and joined his sister in the sitting room. She was staring out of the back window, toward the forest.
“Martha,” he said.
His sister turned to him.
“Martha—”
But he didn’t know what to say.
Night Songs
Samuel woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of singing.
It was only a faint sound, but as he couldn’t sleep deeply, it was loud enough to make him open his eyes and wonder at what he’d heard.
He lay in the dark, and waited for the voice to return, but there was nothing. Just the gentle patter of rain against the window. He rolled over, and saw the dark shape of his sister, sleeping her deep and dreamless sleep.
Then he heard it again. The singing.
“I once knew a tree,
That could talk like you and me,
And I taught it how to smile.
“I said, ‘Excuse me, tree,
If you wear a face like me
You’ll never go out of style.’”
It sounded familiar, like a nursery rhyme his mum used to sing, and he recognized the voice. And the language. Samuel pulled back the covers and went to the window. Peeping through the curtains, he looked out into the dark and rainy night and couldn’t see anything at first. Everything was the same purple black as the sky.
But then slowly, as his eyes adjusted to the pale moonlight, he could see varying degrees of darkness. The thick black of the distant forest and the lesser dark of the grass slope in front. He scanned the grass slope, letting his ears lead his eyes until he saw a small round shape, like a walking barrel, heading down the hill toward the fjord. A creature. From the forest. He opened the window, to hear the creature’s voice a bit clearer.
“It’s raining, it’s raining,
But I’m not complaining.
For what’s the worst it can get?
“It might soak your clothes
Or drip on your nose,
And make you a little bit wet.
“But why try and be dry,
When the sky wants to cry,
And send tears that rain down on your head?”
Samuel stayed there at the window, listening to the creature’s funny songs as he watched its small, fat silhouette walk down the hill.
“I’d better be right,
To escape in the night,
When the darkness wears its cloak.
“But if I am wrong,
I’ll be singing my song
Till the huldres make me choke.”
The rain stopped and the singing died with it, after which there was nothing to be heard but the eerie silence of the moon.
Samuel lost sight of the creature, and the pitter patter of the rain began again. Or at least, that is what it sounded like. Yet when Samuel put his hand out of the window, he felt no drops on his skin.
That’s not rain.
He was right. And within moments he saw something in the distance. A dull throb of light from inside the forest, like a dying and fallen sun. As this golden glow grew closer, Samuel felt his heart begin to race, almost in time with the sound that was moving forward, out of the forest.
And then he realized what the noise was. It was horses. Three white stallions, and the figures riding them were each holding a flaming torch. They were out of the forest, now, although the faces of the riders were still too dark and far away to be seen.
Samuel, believing he’d get a better view downstairs, left the bedroom. He tiptoed past Aunt Eda’s door, and headed softly down to the living room. Once there, he went to the window and pushed his head between the curtains. He could see the flaming torches move closer, illuminating the three riders. At first he’d thought they were humans, but now, by the light of the flickering torches, he could see that they were strange and bony gray-skinned creatures, with wide-apart eyes and flattened, screwed-up noses. It was them. The monsters of his nightmares. I’m dreaming, he told himself. I must be dreaming.
They were shouting orders, and whipping their horses, as they galloped after the barrel-shaped singing silhouette.
“Samuel? Samuel? What is the matter?”
Aunt Eda was standing behind him, in her nightgown, looking very worried indeed.
“I don’t know,” Samuel said as his aunt joined him at the window. He now realized this wasn’t a dream.
“Huldres,” his aunt whispered urgently.
The huldres rode out of view, heading toward the fjord. It went quiet for a while, and Samuel and Aunt Eda stood as still and silent as the glass vases on the shelves. When the huldres galloped back into sight, they were dragging the singing creature inside a net.
“Come away,” Aunt Eda said. “Away from the window. Away! Now!”
“Ow,” said Samuel as she yanked his arm. “Get off me.”
Samuel resisted his aunt’s grip and stayed looking out of the window.
“Samuel. Come away or they’ll see you. Come away. Now…If they see you, they will come for you. And me. And your sister.”
“You’re boring,” he told her, but he couldn’t hide the fear in his voice.
“Boring people stay alife,” she said.
Samuel could hear the genuine terror in his aunt’s voice, so he stepped back and listened as the huldres and their horses dragged the poor singing creature back to the thick darkness of the trees.
Aunt Eda held Samuel, and this time he didn’t resist. He felt the fading gallop of her heart and the tight grip of her strong arms.
“Who was that creature? The one who sang?” Samuel asked.
“A Tomtegubb,” said Aunt Eda.
“Have you seen one before?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice trembling like a loose log. “Yes, I have. And…and so have you.”
Samuel didn’t understand. “I don’t understand.”
“Was that singing not familiar to you? Like the wardrobe and the wallpaper you recognized.”
“I…” said Samuel, pulling away, “I…don’t…I…”
And that is when Aunt Eda told Samuel something she hadn’t told him before. About the time her sister—Samuel’s mother—came to visit, bringing her husband and children along too.
“That’s right, Samuel. You…you…came here when you were two and Martha was just a baby. Your mother heard about Uncle Henrik going missing and came to comfort me. She didn’t beleef my stories about the creatures of the forest, of course. Well, not until she heard you scream in the night.”
Samuel was more than confused as he stood there, straining to see his aunt’s face in the dark.
“No. My mum said she’d never gone back to Norway. You’re lying. She said—”
“She said that to protect you, Samuel,” interrupted Aunt Eda. “She wanted you to forget you’d ever been here and forget that you saw something similar to what you’ve just seen now. Your parents never came back after she knew the creatures were real because they thought you and Martha would be unsafe here. And I was never able to see you in England, because I wanted to stay here for when Henrik returned.”
Samuel wanted to think this was all a lie, but he remembered the strange dreams he had always had, about creatures he now knew were huldres.
“I’ve been here before,” he whispered as the thought became solid in his mind. “I knew it. I’ve been here before. The monsters were real.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Eda. “And now do you realize why my rules are so important? Why you can’t go out after dark or go near the forest?”
“But I don’t get it,” Samuel said. “Why don’t you just move?”
He could hear his aunt gulp back her sadness. “I told Henrik I would stay,” she said. “If I left the house, I’d be giffing up on him. Do you understand?”
“Henrik’s not coming back,” Samuel said.
“No,” said Aunt Eda. “He will. I know it. He made a promise, and he never broke a promise in all his life.”
Five Slices of Brown Cheese
The next morning, Samuel was surprised to see Aunt Eda acting like nothing had happened. He wanted to talk about huldres, but knew he shouldn’t in front of his sister, so he tried to act normal too.
Unbeknownst to Samuel, Aunt Eda had made a decision. They were going to move. They could not stay another night here. Oskar had been right. It was one thing stopping them from going into the forest and quite another stopping the forest from coming to them. It was what Henrik would want, she’d told herself. But she wasn’t going to tell the children until later, until she’d done all the washing and the packing, because it would only worry Martha and put her off her breakfast.
“Take this to the table,” Aunt Eda said, handing Samuel a breakfast tray full of plates of flatbread and cheese.
Samuel didn’t like cheese at the best of times, but he had never seen one that looked like the one on the tray. The cheeses he had tried at home had been yellow or white, but this one was a strange brown color.
“What is the matter with your face, young man?” Aunt Eda asked him as she handed both children glasses of cloudberry juice. “Haven’t you seen cheese before?”
“Not cheese that is brown,” came Samuel’s reply.
“That is because you haff neffer seen Gjetost cheese,” said Aunt Eda. “Like the cheese Uncle Henrik used to make. It is very popular with skiers. They take chunks of it on the slopes to keep themselves going. This particular one is not as nice as Henrik’s ‘Gold Medal’ cheese, but it is still a Norwegian speciality. It’s a sweet goat’s cheese. The taste is a little bit like caramel. Or even chocolate. Children haff it for breakfast, and grown-ups haff it as well.” She was speaking faster than usual, as if scared of the silence between words.
As she spoke Aunt Eda was peeling paper-thin slices of the strange cheese with a funny looking slicer. Samuel noticed her hand was trembling. Ibsen was also watching very closely, as he loved cheese more than anything. Even steak. Not that he was ever given any. He just had to make do with the smell, which teased his nostrils and made him drool saliva into his basket.
“You see this handle?” Aunt Eda asked Martha, but didn’t wait for a reply. “It is made with the horn of a reindeer.”
Samuel sighed, remembering the sight of the huldres. “Who cares?”
Aunt Eda decided to ignore the sulky face that accompanied the question. “Well,” she said. “I should imagine the reindeer cared werry much indeed.”
She smiled, like she had made a joke, but her eyes looked scared.
“I don’t like goat’s cheese,” said Samuel. “I like cow’s cheese.”
Aunt Eda’s shaking hands placed five thin slices of Gjetost on his plate, along with some flatbread. “Well, young man, in this part of Norway we haff goats, not cows.”
She gave Martha the same amount of cheese and flatbread, and Samuel watched as his sister started to eat it without any sign of complaint or enthusiasm. Then he looked out of the dining-room window at the empty grass fields that lay in front of the forest, and thought of the charging huldres and the creature they had captured. A shudder went through him.
Again, Samuel shook the feeling away and picked up his brown cheese and flatbread.
If a stranger had arrived in the room during those five minutes it took Samuel to finish his breakfast, he could have been perfectly mistaken for thinking that the suddenly quiet young man was the most well-behaved twelve-year-old on the face of the earth.
However, if the stranger had a sharp eye—a sharper eye than those belonging to Aunt Eda—he would have noticed that Samuel was only eating the flatbread.
He flicked his wrist before taking his first mouthful. This meant the cheese fell onto his lap. He could then place the fallen slices in his pocket with the hand he kept out of view under the table. He smiled, knowing he was breaking his aunt’s fifth rule.
And then, right after breakfast, Samuel decided to break another of Aunt Eda’s rules.
“I’m going to go up to the attic,” he told his sister, when they were sitting upstairs on their beds.
Martha shook her head.
“Yes,” said Samuel. “When she goes out to the washing line, I’m going to see what’s so special up there that she doesn’t want us to see.” Samuel was determined to find out more about the forest, especially after last night, and he was convinced there would be clues in the attic.
Again Martha shook her head, for a moment looking like she was genuinely concerned.
“Yes,” said Samuel. “I’m going.”
And so, when Samuel heard his aunt head out to the washing line, he left his sister on her bed and walked down the landing toward the ladder. The ladder led up to a small, square wooden door in the ceiling.
Halfway up, Samuel faced a problem. The problem had four legs and a wagging tail and was starting to bark.
“No, Ibsen! Ssssh!” pleaded Samuel.
But Ibsen was not a dog to be shushed, and kept on barking the news of Samuel’s rule breaking out to Aunt Eda.
And then Samuel remembered. The cheese! He pulled out the thin slices of Gjetost from his pocket and let them fall onto the landing.
It worked. The barking stopped. Ibsen’s silence was bought for five slices of brown cheese.
He undid the latch and pushed open the door, before clambering up into a room full of dust and cobwebs.
The Tea Chest
It was dark in the attic, and Samuel had to wait for his eyes to adjust. There was a tiny window, but it was so caked with cobwebs that the weak Norwegian sunlight hardly made it past the glass.
The ceiling was low, and anyone
taller than Samuel would have had to hunch their back as they walked over the creaking floorboards. Being considerably smaller than his aunt, Samuel could walk around the dark room with relative ease, although he did manage to bang his knee on a tea chest that had been sneakily hiding in the semidark.
“Ow!” Samuel said, then covered his mouth.
He felt inside the box, expecting to find something interesting, but found nothing but old clothes. They were men’s clothes, so Samuel guessed they had belonged to his uncle Henrik.
There were pictures on the wall. Photographs in frames. Samuel squinted and saw a man standing on a snowy mountainside, clutching a pair of skis. The man was smiling—or laughing maybe—and he was wearing a purple bodysuit that clung so tight to his body that if his skin had been purple, you wouldn’t have been able to tell where the bodysuit ended and his skin began.
There was another photograph, next to it. A man jumping through the air on his skis. And another, of the same man standing in front of a large block of brown cheese.
Samuel looked back at the photo of him standing in the snow, and as he looked Samuel got a strange feeling that he had seen this man only yesterday. The laughing eyes seemed as familiar to him as those of Aunt Eda. He realized it was Uncle Henrik, but the sense of recognition was still strange.
“Weird,” he said to himself.
He looked around and saw something lying behind the tea chest along the side of the room. It was the skis that he had seen in the photo. Then he noticed something else on another wall. A framed glass case, containing his uncle’s silver medal.
Samuel went over, to get a closer look, but became distracted by another tea chest. The chest was covered with an old tablecloth, as if it was hiding something. He looked around at all the other tea chests, but it was the only one hidden in this manner.