by Matt Haig
She didn’t know.
All she knew was that she was dirtying her dress on the ground—a dress her parents had bought for her birthday—but no one was there to tell her off about that.
Rising Smoke
Still walking in the direction of the scream, Samuel now noticed something else.
Smoke.
It was rising from the ground in the distance ahead of him and Ibsen. They walked through the ferns toward it, but kept looking around for a human form amid the trees.
“Martha? Martha? Are you there?”
If she was near, she certainly wasn’t making any sign of the fact.
Then something weird happened.
The smoke, which had until that point been thick and heavy, stopped completely. Samuel sped up, to see how the fire had gone out so quickly, but Ibsen stayed behind and growled.
“What’s up, you hairy idiot?” Samuel asked him.
Seeing that Samuel wasn’t going to listen to his growled warning about the imminent threat lying ahead, Ibsen followed a few paces behind. He kept growling and even barked as Samuel got closer to where the smoke had been.
“Ibsen, shut up! I’m trying to li—”
Samuel stepped onto the same trap as Martha and fell into empty nothingness. The smoke hadn’t stopped at all. It had just been hidden when the trapdoor had closed. Now it was all around him, and he could feel the terrible heat of the fire below.
As he’d been turning to talk to Ibsen, his hands were able to reach the side of the hole just in time. His fingers clawed desperately into the earth, trying to get a better grip.
Looking up, Samuel could see the low branch of a tree hanging over the hole, too far out of reach.
“Help!”
He looked down. Clouds of black smoke hit his face, and he flinched away from the intense heat of the fire. The blazing flames below almost reached his shoeless feet. Sparks rose and singed his socks.
“Ibsen!” he choked. “Ibsen! Help!”
Samuel managed to pull himself up enough to see Ibsen backing away from the hole.
“Ibsen!” he shouted as he started to lose his grip. “Come back!”
Of course, he didn’t know what Ibsen would have been able to do. He was only a dog, after all. But when you find yourself clinging on to the edge of a hole, hanging above a blazing fire that is already starting to cook your feet, you hold on to even the slightest of hopes.
“Ibsen…Ibsen, come here. Help! Come back, you coward!”
But Ibsen, although terrified, wasn’t a coward. He was only walking away from Samuel to take a run-up. Having paced back a few steps, he now ran directly toward the hole and jumped through the smoke to land on the other side. This was a truly remarkable thing to happen, especially as the size of the hole was considerably more than the size of the dog.
Once Ibsen was safely landed, he got his footing and jumped again, pushing off from his front paws first, then lifting up with his back legs. A second later, he had the low branch in his mouth and was dipping it down into the choking smoke.
“Help! Help!”
Earth crumbled under Samuel’s fingers. He was about to lose his grip and fall into the hellish flames below.
But then he felt something, prodding his shoulder. Turning his head, he saw it was the low branch that had been such a cruel tease moments earlier.
He didn’t know how the branch came to be there, but he was very pleased to see it. He had to be quick, though. The crumbling earth under his left hand meant that his right hand couldn’t take too long to grab hold of the branch.
It was an awkward move, especially in the smoke. But he did it. Once both hands were around the wood, the branch snapped and swung Samuel to the other side of the hole. The branch hung on just long enough to let him climb out and clamber away from the smoke.
He coughed, bending double, for about five minutes. Then he looked at Ibsen and realized he must have jumped over to save him.
“Thank you,” Samuel said, checking he still had the book tucked under his jumper. “And, I’m…er, sorry. For calling you stupid. And I don’t think you’re a hairy idiot.”
Ibsen gave a brief wag of his tail. “Apology accepted,” the wag seemed to say.
Then a terrible thought hit Samuel. What if Martha had fallen down the hole? What if she had been burned alive? There was no way of answering those questions, as the hole was now concealed again.
“Martha, where are you?” Samuel mumbled, looking around at all the trees for anything that might give him a clue.
Then he saw something. A flash of gray amid the landscape of tall brown trunks.
A house.
He felt cold with fear, yet there was a chance that whoever lived there might be able to help him find his sister. It was a small chance, but no smaller than that of escaping from the fire. So Samuel started walking toward the house, with Ibsen treading carefully by his side, checking the ground for hidden holes.
The Village
As they got closer, Samuel’s heart began to race. He realized the small house wasn’t on its own. There was another, farther back. And another, and another…
“It’s a village,” Samuel told Ibsen, although what Ibsen was to do with that information wasn’t exactly clear.
The village consisted of twelve small houses, with stone walls and wooden doors and roofs. The windows of each house were round, as was the layout of the village itself. Together, the houses formed the circumference of a perfect circle.
In the middle of that circle, there were tree stumps with pictures carved onto the part of the wood that faced the sky. Each picture was of the sun, with its rays flowing like a kind of mane. The exact same image was also carved into each of the houses’ doors.
Samuel went over to one of those doors and knocked, his hand beating against the middle of the wooden sun.
“Hello? Is anyone there?”
No answer.
“Hello? Excuse me, is anyone home?”
He went over to the glassless window and asked the same question. Poking his head inside the window, he got his answer. No one was there.
In fact, it looked like no one had been there for quite some time, as the whole place was shrouded in a veil of dust and cobwebs.
He found the same situation at the next house along. And the next. By the time he and Ibsen reached the fourth house in the circle, Samuel decided to try the door.
It creaked open, tearing the mesh of cobwebs along its top edge.
Ibsen growled his nervous warning.
“Stay there if you’re a scaredy-cat,” said Samuel, “I mean, scaredy-dog.”
But Samuel was the one who was really feeling scared. If it hadn’t been for his desperate need to find his sister, and find any clues that might lead to her, he would have been running as fast as he could in the opposite direction.
But what was he hoping to find?
A map of the forest? Some kind of creature, still living among the dust and cobwebs, who might be able to help him?
He looked right and saw a small kitchen with a wood-burning stove. There were logs inside, still waiting to be set on fire.
That’s strange, thought Samuel. Why put fresh logs in the stove if you were never going to use them?
There was a pot on the stove, which stank of rotten food. A meal no one ever got to eat.
Samuel inched his way into the dining room, which had a round wooden table with the same image of the sun carved upon its surface. Around that image were four wooden bowls and four wooden spoons.
As well as rotten food, there was another smell in the house. A foul, even more putrid smell that Samuel couldn’t quite identify.
“Ow!”
His toe hit something.
Something hard but light, that skidded a short distance across the floor.
He looked down and what he saw caused him to lose his breath.
It was a skull.
A skull that Samuel’s foot had just detached from the rest of its skeleton
.
For the second time today he was wishing he’d listened to Ibsen.
He was torn between the two different Samuels that lived inside his head. There was the Samuel who wanted to run away and the Samuel who wanted to stay and look. It was that second Samuel who won a short victory as he stared at the remains of the dead body on the floor.
The skull wasn’t human.
The eye sockets were too wide apart, as close to the sides as the front of the head. Samuel remembered the creatures of his nightmares—the huldre-folk he had seen with Aunt Eda—and thought of their strange eyes.
No, thought Samuel. It can’t be a huldre. Their homes are under the ground.
Samuel dared his own eyes to scan the rest of the skeleton, and tried to compare it with the pictures of human bones he had seen in science books. There were clear differences. Too many rib bones. Longer feet and hands. A tailbone. It was a huldre.
Whatever has killed this creature could be still around to kill me.
The door creaked shut behind him, in the breeze.
It was then that shock turned into total fear.
Samuel was so scared he felt sick.
His heart was a mad drum beating three times too fast.
Ibsen barked.
This time Samuel listened, and headed back outside.
“Come on,” he told the dog. “Let’s go.”
And they both ran as fast as they could away from the empty village. But even as they ran Samuel couldn’t shake the image of the skull, and the secrets that seemed to be lost somewhere in the hollow darkness of those wide-apart eyes.
A Rude Interruption from the Author
Now, you may be wondering what exactly Aunt Eda was doing at this time.
Of course, you may not be wondering this at all. You may just be wondering about what had happened to the huldre-folk to make them go underground, or you might be thinking about Martha in her prison cell, or you might just be wondering what you are going to have to eat for breakfast tomorrow. I don’t know. I’m only the author, I’m not a mind reader. But if you are wondering about what Aunt Eda was doing, then you’d better read this next chapter. If not, then you can skip this one and go straight to the one after, which is called “Troll-the-Left and Troll-the-Right.” But if you do that, it might make the ending a bit confusing. Not that I’m trying to tell you how to read the book or anything. You can read it back to front if you really want. It’s your book. Anyway, I just thought I’d better let you know that the next chapter is about Aunt Eda just in case she’s your least favorite character. She’s one of my favorites, but everyone’s different. And also, if you’ve just eaten your evening meal, you might want to let it digest before reading “The White Bracelet,” as it contains a rather disgusting kiss involving cheesy breath and a furry mustache.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The White Bracelet
Aunt Eda had never driven fast in her life. She had always been scared of the roads, and the wheeled boxes of metal they were made for. Since she had heard what had happened to her sister, Liv, fear had turned into mild terror.
But as she drove toward Flåm, she traveled so fast her battered old car had no idea what speed it was traveling. The numbers on the speedometer only went up to ninety, and she had passed that as soon as she’d hit the main road.
“Come on, old car,” she begged. “You can go faster than this.”
The car moaned its disagreement, but kept racing toward the village.
Outside the window, the grass became a blur. Only the distant mountains and fjords stayed still, as calm and beautiful as one of Old Tor’s paintings.
The car screeched into the village, past the houses, past the church, left at the crossroads and down the main street. Aunt Eda slammed on the brakes just outside Oskar’s store and ran inside.
Some of the villagers were there. Eda looked around to try to see Oskar, but he was nowhere to be seen. Instead, she saw his blond son, Fredrick, sitting on a stool and playing with his calculator.
“Fredrick, where is your father?” Aunt Eda asked in Norwegian.
The boy looked confused, as if Aunt Eda was a sum he couldn’t solve.
“Er…He’s upstairs.”
“I need to see him. It’s an emergency.”
Aunt Eda pushed past the tutting villagers and went through the doorway at the back of the shop.
“Wait!” said Fredrick. “My dad will kill me! I’ve broken his rule.”
But Aunt Eda knew there was no time left for following rules. She climbed a dark narrow staircase and followed the sound of Oskar’s voice to a large white room with wooden floors and a reindeer’s head looking down from one of the walls.
Oskar was on the phone to his new cheese supplier, and had his back to Aunt Eda.
“No, no, we don’t want any more of your Gjetost cheese. Your Jarlsberg cheese is fine. Very white and very creamy. But I am afraid your Gjetost cheese is no good. It is too brown. It needs to be more of a golden color, and it has to taste more like caramel…At the moment, I am afraid to say that it tastes like it came out of a reindeer’s—”
Aunt Eda cleared her throat.
Oskar jumped out of his skin, but looked relieved when he saw who it was. Maybe he thought it was going to be a two-headed troll.
“Eda. What are you doing here? Who let you up? Didn’t Fredrick try and stop you?”
“He tried,” said Aunt Eda. “But there is no stopping me today. I am sorry but I have come to ask you a very big favor.”
“A favor? Eda…I don’t know…”
“Well, think of it more as Henrik asking you a favor. After all, a favor for me is a favor for him. And you do remember how he helped you out, when your shop had no customers. He gave you free ‘Gold Medal’ cheese. A month’s supply.”
Oskar looked sorrowfully at the phone. “Oh, if only he was still here! If only I didn’t have to rely on these dimwits from Oslo with their stinky brown cheese. It’s like eating socks. They wouldn’t know proper Gjetost if it threw them down a mountain. If I still had Henrik’s ‘Gold Medal,’ I would have queues from my cheese counter all the way to Lillehammer.”
“So you will help me?”
Oskar nodded. “All right. What is it?”
Aunt Eda took a deep breath and then came straight out with it. “I need a man.”
Oskar straightened his yellow bow tie and raised his eyebrows.
“Aha,” he said. “Well, I must tell you, it is not a big surprise.”
Aunt Eda looked confused. “It isn’t?”
“I have a nose for these things, you see.” He wiggled his gigantic nostrils, to prove his point. Suddenly he was feeling quite happy that Henrik wasn’t there.
“You do?”
“Love is much like a cheese. It gets stronger with time. And people like us, Eda, we are not good at being alone. Sleeping in an empty bed is too much like eating flatbread with nothing on it. Don’t you think?”
He walked over to Aunt Eda and held her head in his hands, and before she had time to object, she was being kissed. Aunt Eda pushed Oskar and his cheese breath and furry mustache away.
“No,” she said, wiping her mouth. “No! Oskar. No!”
She was going to be cross but then she remembered why she was here. “Listen, Oskar, I think you might have gotten the wrong idea. You are a lovely man, but I don’t need you to warm my bed.”
Oskar paused, and looked up at the reindeer head as if he was worried it might tell someone what a fool he’d just made of himself.
“Oh, I see. So what do you need me for?”
Aunt Eda closed her eyes and blurted it out: “To go with me into the forest.”
“The forest? As in Shadow Forest? As in the most dangerous place in the whole world? The place where people disappear and never come back?”
“It’s Samuel and Martha,” Aunt Eda explained. “The two children I am looking after. They have gone into the forest. With Ibsen. And I have to find them.”
“Oh no. The children. Those poor children.”
“I have to bring them back, but I can’t do it alone. I know you’ve said no before, when I wanted you to help find Henrik. But you’ve got to help me this time. Please. I beg you.”
But Oskar was already shaking his head and talking over her words. “Eda, Eda, listen. I so want to help you, and I would do anything else…Anything…It’s just…terrible things are in that forest. Even the creatures are trying to escape. Old Tor saw another last night. I told you he had seen the two-headed troll. Well, he went back to the fjord last night and saw something else. A Tomtegubb, and more huldres.”
Aunt Eda gulped, knowing she and Samuel had seen the same thing.
“But this time they saw him,” said Oskar. “The huldres. They saw him and chased after him. And he ran away.”
Aunt Eda remembered how the huldres had galloped toward the fjord. “But Old Tor can’t run. He can hardly walk.”
Oskar nodded. “I know, it is something of a mystery…but he swears it is true.”
Aunt Eda didn’t see what this had to do with going into the forest, so she asked again.
“Please…Please, Oskar…”
But there was no persuading Oskar.
“I can’t go with you into the forest,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I have responsibilities. I have the shop. I have Fredrick. I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I am too old to be a hero.”
“Then what can I do?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “You must ask the other men in the village. Maybe they will help.”
“I might as well ask your reindeer for help. You know what the villagers think of me. They will think it was my fault for letting the children be so close to the forest.”
The rising of Oskar’s eyebrows told her that maybe he shared the same view. She thought about pleading some more, but she didn’t have the time. She left the room, and ran to Old Tor’s art shop.
Old Tor was perched on an antique chair painting a hideous-looking huldre on horseback, riding by the light of the moon.