The End of the World. Maybe

by Jo Nesbo

  “Hm. Any other news?”

  “Let’s see . . .” Nilly said, squinting to read the tiny headline below the enormous picture of Hallvard Tenorsen. “Apparently there was a big earthquake somewhere.”

  “Where?” Nilly’s sister shrieked from the bathroom.

  Nilly squinted at the letters: “Impossible to say.”

  “Boring,” his mother said. “Read me more about Tenorsen.”

  “Tenorsen said time is of the essence,” Nilly read. “‘I’m willing to accept the job of steering Norway out of this mess if the people will have me,’ Tenorsen volunteered in his televised interview.”

  Nilly laughed out loud.

  “What are you laughing at, you nincompoop!” screamed his sister, who had emerged from the bathroom and was standing in the doorway with small, angry red craters all over her face.

  “Tenorsen,” Nilly said. “The guy thinks he should be put in charge of the Norwegian government. Can you imagine?!” Nilly wrote in the air, as if he were writing a newspaper headline: “Singing Swedish Chiro practor Takes Charge of Norway.”

  Nilly laughed so hard he started hiccuping, but stopped when he noticed his mother and Eva staring at him.

  “Who are vee going to trust if not Tenorsen?” his mother asked coolly. “You?”

  Eva laughed out loud at their mother’s joke, and their mother laughed louder because Eva had laughed at her joke, and Eva laughed even louder because her mother was laughing because she was laughing. Nilly looked at the time, set down the paper and went to get his backpack. His mother called after him: “Don’t forget to stop by the shop on your way home! We’re out of milk and bread, and could you pick up some sheddar sheese.”

  NILLY WAITED OUTSIDE Lisa’s gate as usual until she came out wearing her backpack. And as usual they didn’t say a word, just started walking down Cannon Avenue the way they usually did.

  “Everything is normal,” Lisa said as they approached Truls and Trym’s house. “And yet, it’s as if . . . as if . . .”

  “As if something is very abnormal?” Nilly said. “You feel like that too?”

  “My mum and dad – they kind of didn’t seem normal.”

  “Same here,” Nilly said. “Although, of course, it’s normal for my sister and my mother to be abnormal.”

  “And almost our whole band quit just all of a sudden like that. Do you think that’s normal?”

  “No, that is absolutely, unusually abnormal. Eerily abnormal, actually.”

  “But everything at the Thrane house is normal, anyway,” Lisa said, nodding at the fence surrounding the ostentatious home in front of them.

  And sure enough: Truls and Trym Thrane were hunkered down in their snow fort behind their fence, watching Nilly and Lisa with evil sneers of anticipation, their snowballs at the ready. Lisa and Nilly usually got a few snowballs lobbed at them as they ran by, but they almost always managed to duck out of the way of the feeble throws, because Truls and Trym had got so fat in the last year that they couldn’t swing their arms that well anymore.

  But Lisa quickly realised that they weren’t going to escape so easily today.

  The twins had hopped the fence and were now blocking the pavement. Each twin was holding an enormous snowball. And Lisa saw the first rays of the day’s sun light sparkling off their surfaces and realised that Truls and Trym had poured water on them. Ice-covered snowballs.

  Nilly said under his breath: “Don’t worry, Lisa. Let me take care of this.”

  Lisa looked down at her itty-bitty friend. He could be irritating, annoying and run roughshod over the truth. But she didn’t know anyone braver. Sometimes he was so brave you had to wonder if he wasn’t actually a little dumb.

  “Good morning, Captain Thrane and Captain Thrane!” Nilly proclaimed with a radiant smile. “Because those are captains’ hats you’re wearing on your heads, right?”

  “Chorus uniform hats,” the twins said in unison, looking rather proud. The hats were white with black glossy visors and tassels dangling by cords from the middle.

  “Chorus?” Nilly asked. “So you guys don’t just play drums, you sing, too? Who would’ve thought so much talent could fit into such small bodies.”

  Truls and Trym stared at Nilly with their mouths hanging open, their breath billowing out as if from two stove chimneys.

  “He’s just trying to fast-talk us,” Trym whispered to his brother. “Him being nice to us.”

  “But . . .” Truls whispered. “I believe him, because he’s saying we’re good drummers, right?”

  “That’s because you’ve been fast-talked,” Trym whispered.

  “I’ve been fast-talked,” Truls nodded.

  “Let’s crush him now,” Trym whispered. “Crush his head!”

  “Yeah, crush that irritating head,” Truls said, raising his hand and the clump of ice in it.

  “Let me make that head crushing a little easier for you, my dear Thrane brothers,” Nilly said, pulling off his orange hat.

  “Ha!” the twins laughed, bending their arms back as far as they were physically able.

  “What’s that on his head?” Trym asked.

  “It’s an animal,” Truls said.

  “I can see that, but what kind of animal?”

  “A small animal.”

  “Maybe it’s a flea?”

  “Yeah,” Trym laughed. “The gnome has fleas! Crush him!”

  “Have at it,” said Nilly, who stood there without moving and smiled. “But as a neighbour I feel I ought to warn you about the consequences of throwing an ice snowball at a seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider.”

  “Head crushing!” Truls yelled.

  “Wait!” Trym said. “What kind of con . . . congo . . . conto . . . quences?”

  “Well,” Nilly said. “Since it’s Peruvian, this sucking spider grew up in the snow-covered Andes Mountains and is quite used to snowballs since snowballs are a very common part of everyday life in the Andes. There are fierce snowball wars up there all the time between rival Inca tribes. Everyone throws snowballs in Peru. Even the llamas. They eat snow and spit it out again as snowballs with spit and snot and whatever else on it. But Perry can take it all. Although, there’s taking it and then there’s taking it. I mean, if he gets hit, it makes him mad. Very mad. And his revenge is grisly . . .”

  “Yeah!” exclaimed Lisa, who was surprised to hear her own voice. But continued, “Enraged, the spider will leap onto the snowball thrower’s head faster than you can blink, and slip into the thrower’s ear.”

  “His ear?” Truls asked.

  “And he just follows the ear canal inward,” Nilly said.

  “Ew!” said Trym.

  Just the idea made Truls itch, and he tried to stick a finger into his ear to scratch, but forgot he was wearing mittens.

  “And when it gets to your brain,” Lisa said, “it starts sucking.”

  “Sucking?!” the twins cried in unison.

  “Of course. That’s why it’s called a sucking spider,” Lisa said. “It sucks up . . .” She lowered her voice. Truls and Trym couldn’t help but lean in closer to hear her. “. . . your whole brain.” And then suddenly she made a loud slurping sound and the twins jumped back in fear.

  “Everything you remember about multiplication tables and the countries in Europe and everything else you ever learned in school disappears first,” Lisa said. When this didn’t seem to alarm them, she continued. “Then you’ll forget how to play the national anthem, all your friends’ names, how to get home and finally your own names.”

  But this just made Trym yawn.

  “Then . . . then . . .” Lisa said, trying to come up with something else, but drawing a blank.

  Truls raised the hand that was holding the clump of ice.

  “Then you’ll forget to eat,” Nilly said. “Pizza, chips, chocolate bars, you won’t care about them. You’ll be as thin as a string bean and then you’ll die of hunger.”

  Truls and Trym stared at Nilly, their terrified eyes bulg
ing wide.

  “He’s doing it again,” Truls gasped. “He’s fast-talking us!”

  “Nonsense,” Trym said, stretched his hand out to Nilly’s head, pulled it back and opened his mitten. There in his palm sat Perry.

  “Ha, ha!” Trym laughed triumphantly. “I took it! It’s just a totally normal everyday spider!”

  “Break off one of its legs!” Truls yelled, jumping up and down. “No, break off three legs! Then it’ll be a three-legged Peruvish . . . Peruvic . . . Pe . . . sucking spider!”

  “Four-legged,” Lisa said with a sigh.

  “Huh?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Seven minus three is four.”

  “Shut up!” Truls said. “We’ll just break off one more.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Nilly said.

  The twins turned to look at him.

  “Everyone knows that the three-legged Peruvian sucking spider is three times more dangerous than the seven-legged variety.”

  The twins stared at the spider.

  “You do it,” said Trym, passing the mitten with the spider on it to Truls.

  “Me?” Truls asked, pulling back. “You do it!”

  “No, you!” Trym said, waving the mitten around.

  “You!”

  “I’ll do it,” Nilly said, grabbing the mitten. He carefully picked Perry up and put him back on his head. Then he put on his orange hat and handed the mitten back to Trym.

  “But not until later, after I get back home,” Nilly said. “Spider leg operations like that have to be done under controlled conditions with cauterisation equipment, anesthesia and under adult supervision. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Trym said submissively.

  “Okay then,” Truls said.

  “Have an enlightening day,” Nilly said.

  And with that he and Lisa rushed off to school.

  “I didn’t know you had that in you,” Nilly said once they were out of earshot.

  “Had what in me?” Lisa asked.

  “That stuff about forgetting your multiplication tables and the national anthem. You’re worse about making stuff up than I am.”

  “No one is worse than you, Nilly.”

  “Even I wouldn’t have come up with . . .” And he repeated the loud, sucking, slurping sound Lisa had made for the twins.

  And that made them both laugh until they were jabbing their fingers into each other jokingly and practically collapsing onto the ice.

  And they walked the rest of the way like that, bonking into each other and laughing and making slurping sounds.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL well into their first class, when Mrs Strobe was giving the class an introduction to speech impediments commonly found among Norwegian speakers, that Lisa realised what it was. Realised what was wrong. Why she’d felt like something wasn’t right with her parents. And that they weren’t the only ones. Others too. Truls and Trym. And Beatrize. Actually, now that she thought about it, pretty much everyone around her was affected. And this realisation didn’t just make the hair on her head stand up, but even the fine, practically invisible hairs on her forearms.

  “DO YOU REMEMBER yesterday when Doctor Proctor said first ‘sock thief’ and then ‘speech impediment’?” Lisa asked during break. She and Nilly were standing on top of a snowdrift in the playground and gazing down at the other kids, who were excitedly discussing Hallvard Tenorsen and Funny Voices. “And yesterday my parents said ‘teasher’ instead of ‘teacher.’ And ‘vee’ instead of ‘we.’ Doesn’t that seem like a speech impediment?”

  “That could just be a coincidence,” Nilly said. “Maybe they just couldn’t quite make the sounds right for whatever reason. Like they were having an off day or something, you know.”

  “But think about it,” Lisa said. “Haven’t you noticed that in the last few days, almost everyone has started saying ‘sh’ when they should be saying ‘ch’?”

  Nilly thought about it.

  “Now that you mention it,” he said, “actually, my mum did ask me to pick up some ‘sheddar sheese’ at the store. And my sister called me a ‘chrimp’ instead of a shrimp.”

  “But that’s the other way around.”

  “My sister isn’t normal.”

  “And one other thing,” Lisa said. “Do you know what they said on the news last night?”

  “That in a global poll, women had selected Nilly as man of the year?” Nilly suggested helpfully.

  “No. That people have been losing more socks than usual.”

  “Oh no,” Nilly said. “Sock thieves. You think . . . ?”

  “I think something’s happening, Nilly. And I think Doctor Proctor knows something he’s not telling us.”

  “Quit scaring me, Lisa.”

  “I can feel it, Nilly! That thing with the missing O on the school banner, the wet sock footprints. What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to have to tell an adult.”

  “But the adults are the ones talking about ‘sheddar sheese’ and traveller’s ‘shecks’ and ‘sharitable’ contributions. Can we really trust them?”

  Nilly scratched his burnsides. Sorry, his sideburns.

  “Doctor Proctor,” Nilly said. “He still says ‘cheese’ the normal way.”

  “And whenever we ask him what’s going on, he talks his way out of it,” Lisa sighed. “Nilly, we’re going to have to figure this out by ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning, with the invisible thing that tracked wet footprints into school.”

  “Hm,” Nilly said. “Maybe it’s time we did a little research. And of course the place to start whenever creatures are involved is A.Y.W.D.E., Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist.”

  Lisa nodded. A.Y.W.D.E. Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist. That was the title of a six-hundred-page book that Nilly claimed was largely written by his grand father.

  AFTER SCHOOL, NILLY and Lisa raced back to Cannon Avenue.

  “I have the book up in my room,” Nilly said, turning around when he sensed that Lisa had stopped following him and was just standing out there on the front steps.

  She had just realised that she had never been inside Nilly’s house, even though they lived right across the street from each other.

  “Come on,” Nilly whispered.

  She hesitantly stepped in the front door. She assumed Nilly was whispering because he wasn’t actually allowed to have people over, and although she’d never asked him, that fit with the sense she’d always had. She supposed that was probably why she’d never bothered to ask. She had never wanted to come over here either. Nilly’s mother and sister were creepier than your average family. Lisa looked around and inhaled the scents. All homes smelled like something. Well, aside from her own, of course. But that must be the same for everyone, she thought. You just can’t perceive the scent of your own home. And Nilly’s house smelled like . . . well, what did it smell like actually? Cigarettes and perfume, maybe? It certainly didn’t smell the way Nilly smelled. He didn’t smell like anything, just a little like Nilly.

  She took off her boots and followed Nilly on her tiptoes. She saw the living room – a TV and a sofa with a big picture of his sister and mother hanging over it. Then she darted upstairs after Nilly. She ducked into his room. The walls were light blue, covered with pictures of every superhero she’d ever heard of, plus a few she hadn’t heard of. A model of a glider was hanging from the ceiling on a string. Nilly was already lying on his bed, flipping through a book with a worn brown leather binding. It was almost as big as he was.

  Lisa flopped down next to him.

  “Let’s see,” Nilly said. “Sock thief.”

  He browsed past the animals that started with M and N and O, and Lisa watched him flip past descriptions and drawings of animals she definitely wished didn’t exist. True, she wasn’t that sure they all did exist either. If Nilly’s grandfather really did write this book, it was possible that he was a little like his grandson in that he didn’t take the truth too seriously if it wasn’t funny enough.

  T
hey’d made it quite a way through the S entries. To “stork eater,” an animal that looked like a brick building with a mouth like a chimney, which was clearly meant to lure storks.

  “Nothing about sock thieves in here,” Nilly said. “Let’s look up ‘speech impediments.’”

  But there wasn’t anything listed under “speech impediments” either.

  “Hm,” Nilly mused. “That’s a little disappointing.” Then he lit up. “On the other hand, if that creature isn’t an animal you wish didn’t exist, it can’t be that dangerous, can it?” He moved to close the book.

  “Wait!” Lisa said. “Doctor Proctor said one more thing. He didn’t say the whole word, but it started with ‘moon.’” She concentrated so hard her hair curled. “Moonka something! He said ‘moonka.’”

  Nilly flipped to the M entries.

  “There’s an entry for ‘moa weevils,’” he said. “And ‘monster ants.’ But nothing about moonka.”

  “Right there!” Lisa said, pointing to the entry after “monster ants.”

  Nilly spelled his way through the creature’s long name: “M-O-O-N C-H-A-M-E-L-E-O-N.”

  Lisa read aloud, as she felt her curly hair straighten itself right out, “Chamaeleonus lunaris. Habitat: The moon (and hopefully only there). Eats: Anything with meat on its body, preferably humans. And preferably in waffle form. Drinks: Blood and freshly steeped tea. Appearance: Unfortunately, there are no known descriptions, pictures or sketches of this gruesome creature, because anyone who has seen a moon chameleon, well, it was probably the last thing they ever saw. But it is said that you can recognise the sound of a moon chameleon approaching. It is supposed to sound like a soft, dragging sound, like socks on a wood floor and—”

  “Shh!” Nilly interrupted.

  They listened. And heard it. Something outside the door was approaching. A soft, dragging sound of . . .

  “Get under the bed, quick!” Nilly whispered.

  Lisa moved as fast as she could and as she darted underneath, she heard the door being flung open. And a voice barked, “I’m hungry!”