The End of the World. Maybe

by Jo Nesbo

Lisa held her breath. Then she heard Nilly’s voice: “I’m just going to finish my homework first and then I’ll get started on dinner.”

  And then a scoffing sound: “Homework? You know what happens to people who do too much homework? People just give them more homework!”

  “I’ll be there soon, Mum. Just go back to bed, okay?”

  “And no fork holes in the potatoes today, or you won’t get to have a birthday party.”

  “I never get to have a birthday party, Mum.”

  “Whatever.”

  The door closed again.

  Lisa waited and waited until she was sure the mum-monster wasn’t coming back. Then she crawled out. Nilly was lying on the bed, still with his turned-up nose buried in the book.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t look good,” Nilly said, without looking up from the book. He looked serious, more serious than Lisa had ever seen him look, more serious than a cemetery – no, than two cemeteries.

  “Yeah, I heard,” Lisa said. “No birthday party.”

  “I’m not talking about a party,” Nilly said, pointing at the book. “What’s at stake here is whether any of us will ever have another birthday. Or Christmas, for that matter.”

  “Not . . . not Christmas,” Lisa repeated, hearing the tiny little tremor in her voice. Because even though Nilly joked around about a lot of things, he would never joke about Christmas. No matter what.

  “Wh-what do you mean?”

  “I mean that we’re looking at the end of the world,” Nilly said.

  LISA AND NILLY found Doctor Proctor in his workshop down in the cellar below the blue house. He was hammering on the soles of his balancing shoes. He lit up when he noticed them standing there.

  “Come!” he said, pulling his swim goggles up onto his forehead and leading them into the laundry room. He carefully placed the shoes on a clothesline that stretched across the length of the room, first one shoe, then the other. And sure enough, the shoes balanced there on top of the clothesline.

  “Awesome!” Nilly exclaimed, so happy and excited that Lisa had to loudly clear her throat twice before he remembered why they were there and his face took on a more serious look, more appropriate given the seriousness of the situation.

  “We read about the moon chameleon,” Lisa said.

  Doctor Proctor looked at her in terror: “You read about the . . . the . . .”

  “And we understand why you didn’t want to tell us about it,” Lisa said. “It’s not suitable for children.”

  “Where in the world did you read about the moon chameleon?”

  “In Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist,” Nilly said. “Page three hundred and fifteen.”

  Doctor Proctor sank into a chair. “But the moon chameleon is just a rumour. A ghost story from 1969, when the first moon rocket returned to Earth. The rumour went that something had come back with it. Or someone. Someone invisible. Or rather, someone that could camouflage itself to look like absolutely anything. Which is how it got the name ‘moon chameleon.’ People said it did the most awful things, but I forgot all that stuff until you told me about the invisible creature, the sock footprints and that spelling mistake. Everything fit, true, but I didn’t want to scare you. It was just a ghost story, and as we all know, there’s no such thing as ghosts.” He looked up at Lisa and Nilly. “Right?”

  They didn’t respond.

  Doctor Proctor wrung his hands. “Oh my, oh my. What did it say about it in the book?”

  Nilly summarised the entry, and Lisa helped out with the parts he forgot.

  “In addition to being able to blend in with any background, it steals,” Nilly said. “Simple and deliberate sock thievery. It walks right into people’s homes, sneaks right past them while they’re watching TV, camouflaging itself to look like a weather map or a football game and saunters right into their laundry room, where it grabs the socks out of the washing machine and puts them on. That’s what we saw in the school gym – wet sock footprints.”

  Doctor Proctor rubbed his chin: “I’ve heard about the sock-stealing thing, but I never quite believed it.”

  Nilly sighed and pointed at Doctor Proctor’s feet. “Look for yourself. You’re wearing one red and one blue sock. How do you explain that?”

  “Explain, schmexplain,” Doctor Proctor mumbled. “I’m missing a red sock.”

  “Exactly. Because mysteriously one red sock vanished right out of your washing machine, right?”

  “No, it burned up when I tried to dry it in the toaster.”

  Lisa laughed and Nilly groaned.

  “Well anyway,” Nilly continued. “Every day, all over the world, socks are disappearing. These daily sock mysteries remain unsolved. People look at each other in astonishment and say, ‘Where in the world did they all . . .’ But since they’re just socks, people forget about their disappearance and don’t think about it anymore. Millions of socks! A myriad of foot garments! Galaxies of sewn, knitted, crocheted, knitocheted socks!”

  “But what would a . . . uh, moon creature need socks for?” Doctor Proctor asked.

  “What do you think?” Nilly asked.

  “Uh . . .”

  “His tootsies are cold,” Nilly said.

  “But then wouldn’t shoes be better?”

  Nilly made a face. “His toes aren’t made for shoes. The footprints show that moon chameleons have the longest, sharpest and most unkempt toenails you can imagine. The kind that wear holes in socks right away. That’s why they have to steal new ones all the time. And, what’s worse, they’re invincible, they don’t have any vulnerabilities. Well, aside from a little bit of spelling trouble, that is.”

  “What did you just say?” Doctor Proctor exclaimed.

  Lisa cleared her throat: “According to Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist, moon chameleons are notoriously bad spellers.”

  “Really awful spellers, actually,” Nilly said.

  “And especially bad with double letters,” Lisa said. “That’s one of the few dead giveaways for a moon chameleon. When they try to camouflage themselves as a sign, let’s say one that says ‘Special on Vanilla Pudding,’ it usually ends up reading ‘Special on Vanila Puding.’

  “V-A-N-I-L-A,” Nilly spelled. “Did you catch that?”

  Doctor Proctor nodded.

  “And P-U-D-I . . . ,” Nilly began.

  “I think he’s got it now,” Lisa said.

  “Good,” Nilly said. “So, when Lisa looked at what she thought was our marching-band banner and noticed that it said ‘Dølgen Schol Marching Band,’ she actually wasn’t looking at the banner at all.” Nilly lowered his voice. “She was looking right at a moon chameleon who was standing in front of the banner, quiet as a mouse!”

  “Eeew,” Doctor Proctor said.

  “Double eeew,” Lisa said.

  “But what about speech impediments?” Doctor Proctor asked.

  “Hypnosis,” Lisa said.

  “Hypnosis?”

  Doctor Proctor looked first at Lisa and then at Nilly, who nodded slowly. “It’s in A.Y.W.D.E.,” he said. “If a camouflaged moon chameleon can look into your eyes for more than two minutes, it can hypnotise you and make you do whatever it says. The only way you can tell if someone has been hypnotised is that they’ll have some type of speech impediment.”

  “And the only way you can make them snap out of it,” Lisa continued, “is to use something that’s stronger than the hypnosis.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like something that’s even more hypnotic.”

  “Or you can scare the bejeezus out of them,” Nilly said, baring his teeth at them. “Grrr!”

  “Hm,” Doctor Proctor said. “I can see that you read the entry very carefully.”

  Nilly and Lisa nodded.

  “And that you’ve also understood that the speech impediments, misspellings and sock thefts are not why this creature ended up in this book.”

  They shook their heads. Lisa closed her eyes and concentrated.


  “Page three hundred and sixteen,” she said, and started quoting: “No one knows where the moon chameleon lives here on Earth, but we do know they avoid daylight. If you should be so unfortunate as to see a moon chameleon in broad daylight, it means that something awful is going to happen. Something super-awful, actually. Something ultra-massively super-awful, to be completely precise. Or to be completely, totally, absolutely ultra-precise: the end of the world.”

  It was so quiet in the cellar for a few seconds that you could have heard a pin fall into a haystack of dry grass. If not something even quieter. Then Doctor Proctor nodded gloomily. “The end of the world. That’s what the rumours used to say back then, too.”

  “Yeah, well,” Nilly said. “Let’s look at the bright side of all this. If the end of the world weren’t upon us, we wouldn’t have this opportunity to save the world now, would we?”

  “Ugh,” Doctor Proctor said with a shudder. Then he glanced out the cellar window and noticed that it was already dark. “This was such unpleasant business, I think we ought to head up to the kitchen and have ourselves some jelly!”

  AT THAT MOMENT one of the two sentries on duty at the gatehouse in front of the Royal Palace, which is a large, yellow, stuccoed-brick building in the middle of Oslo, pricked up his ears and stared at the open snow-covered square in front of him.

  “Hey, Gunnar, did you hear something?” he asked, running his finger over his handlebar mustache.

  “What did you hear, Rolf?” his colleague asked, tugging on his Fu Manchu mustache.

  “It sounded like someone just walked by in front of us.”

  “I don’t see anyone,” Mr Fu Manchu said, staring out into the darkness. Then he turned towards the facade of the building, where there were lights on in only one lone window. “Well, at any rate, it wasn’t the king. He’s still up, working on his crossword puzzles.”

  “Look!” Mr Handlebar said.

  Fu Manchu turned around. His colleague pointed at something in the snow in front of them. Fu Manchu pulled off his black uniform hat with that stupid tassel on top that looked like a horse’s tail, and bent down. “Looks like dog footprints,” he said.

  “A dog that hasn’t had its toenails clipped in a long time,” Handlebar said.

  “And walks on only two legs,” Fu Manchu said.

  “Yup,” Handlebar said with a yawn. “People do such weird things with their dogs these days.”

  “Excuse me,” a man said in a thick Swedish accent.

  The two guards looked up.

  In front of them stood a tall man with blond hair, dressed in something that looked sort of like an admiral’s uniform. A large van with the words MAJOR MOVERS painted on the side was parked behind him.

  “Yes?”

  “I won the contest,” the man said in Swedish.

  “Uh, yes?”

  “I’m the new president. Could you please tell the king he needs to pack? And then perhaps you could help me carry in my things?”

  IT WAS late, but the jelly in Doctor Proctor’s kitchen was only half eaten. When you got right down to it, it just wasn’t a perfect night for jelly eating. Because jelly doesn’t taste quite so jelly right after someone has asked the question “How do we save the world from doom?”

  It was quiet around the table. Doctor Proctor, Lisa and Nilly had rubbed their chins a fair amount and mumbled “hm,” “mm,” “umph,” and other noises that are helpful when you’re thinking, and which can also be made without opening your mouth.

  Then – finally – Doctor Proctor said “exactly” twice and then “precisely,” as if he were agreeing with himself. Then he straightened up in his chair and looked at Nilly and Lisa.

  “The first thing we have to do is find out how people are being hypnotised; then we can stop it from happening to us.”

  “And how are we going to do that?” Lisa asked.

  “The scientific process,” Doctor Proctor said. “We draw up a list of some people we know have been hypnotised and find out what they all have in common. And then we draw up a list of people who have not been hypnotised and what they have in common. And then the thing that all the hypnotised people have in common that the nonhypnotised people have in common that they haven’t got in common will be the cause of the hypnotisation. Did you follow that?”

  “Of course,” Nilly said.

  Lisa repeated Doctor Proctor’s long explanation to herself a couple of times. “I think so,” she said. “But just to be sure, maybe you could explain it to me, Nilly?”

  “Uh-huh,” Nilly said. “Well, it’s like this . . . it’s just so ingenious . . . that perhaps, well, could you explain it, Doctor Proctor?”

  “Sure. Let’s say that everyone who says ‘sheddar sheese’ instead of ‘cheddar cheese’ drank milk in the last week. And let’s say that one of the things that everyone who says ‘cheddar cheese’ has in common is that they didn’t drink milk—”

  “Then it was something in the milk that hypnotised them,” Lisa said.

  “Exactly,” said Doctor Proctor. “The scientific process.”

  “The spitting image of the scientific process,” Nilly said, pushing a small helping of jelly over to Perry, who seemed totally uninterested in it.

  “If we assume that most people now have a speech impediment, we can make a list of who doesn’t have one,” the professor said.

  “Us three,” Lisa said. “And Mrs Strobe.”

  “And Galvanius,” Nilly said.

  “That’s plenty,” Doctor Proctor said. “So then what do the five of us have in common aside from the fact that we don’t have a speech impediment?”

  They thought for a long time.

  “We don’t smoke, drink or tell lies,” Nilly said.

  The other two raised their eyebrows at him.

  “Uh, we don’t smoke or drink, that is,” Nilly corrected.

  “Not so fast,” Doctor Proctor said. “I enjoy the occasional cigar, actually. And every once in a while a glass of red wine.”

  “Jelly!” Nilly yelled. “I’m absolutely positive that Mrs Strobe said one time that she likes jelly.”

  “But we don’t know if Galvanius likes it,” Lisa said. “That’s the problem. We don’t know anything about him. Just that he’s rather odd.”

  “Wait a minute,” Nilly said. “Doctor, when we told you that Galvanius had fallen asleep in class, you said something about him being a creature. Does that mean you know him?”

  “He and I studied in Paris together at the same time,” Doctor Proctor said. “I was studying chemistry and he was studying biology, but we don’t need to get into that now.”

  “Come on!” Nilly said eagerly. “What’s the deal with Mr Hiccup?”

  “It’s just that this one day he was so foolish as to help himself to the things that were on my shelf in the refrigerator we all shared. Need I say more?”

  “Yes!” Lisa and Nilly cried in unison.

  Doctor Proctor sighed. “Gregory drank from a jug of what he thought was orange juice, but was actually a strength tonic I was working on.”

  “A strength tonic!” Nilly exclaimed. “Cool! What was in it?”

  “Nothing much. Just a mixture of different bodily fluids.” Doctor Proctor squeezed one eye shut and started counting on his fingers. “Let’s see . . . from the tiger shark mouse, the type A Norwegian lemming, and . . . yes, the endangered rhinoceros frog. I added anabolic asteroids. And finally a little super-strong Mexican thunder chili.”

  “To make people super-strong?”

  “No, for the taste. Unfortunately, AFSSAPS, the French Health Products Safety Agency, banned the strength tonic.”

  “Why in the world would they do that?” Nilly

  exclaimed, outraged. “It sounds great!”

  “Too much FD&C E18 colouring,” the professor sighed.

  “But Mr Hiccup drank it anyway?” Lisa asked.

  “Unfortunately,” Doctor Proctor said. “And the results were . . .” He searched for the right way to
put it. “. . . interesting. I’m afraid that’s why he ended up being an arts and crafts teacher instead of a biology teacher. But enough about Gregory. We need to find out how all these people are being hypnotised!”

  They kept brainstorming, but didn’t get anywhere.

  “I give up,” Nilly finally said.

  “Hm,” Doctor Proctor said. “Let’s try thinking of something that everyone else is doing that we’re not doing.”

  They started thinking again. Hard. And then a little harder. But it was no use.

  “That’s enough thinking for today,” Doctor Proctor said with a yawn. “Let’s sleep on it and talk about it again tomorrow.”

  LISA AND NILLY stood out on Cannon Avenue and were saying goodnight to each other when something occurred to Lisa:

  “Wait! Both of my parents and your mum were hypnotised. And Truls and Trym, right?”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Mr Hiccup!” Lisa exclaimed. “That’s what they have in common.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it!” Lisa whispered, looking around as if she were afraid someone might overhear them out in the darkness. “They all either went to the parentteacher meeting with Gregory Galvanius or had him for arts and crafts.”

  “No way!” Nilly exclaimed. “It’s true! We have to find out what happened. We need to question our parents.”

  “Question them?” Lisa asked. “How?”

  “Third-degree interrogation, of course,” Nilly said, rubbing his palms together in anticipation. “You go grill your parents, I’ll grill my mum. We’ll talk tomorrow. Heh, heh, heh!” And with that Nilly ran over to the door of his little yellow house, where Lisa could see the flickering light from the TV screen through the living room window. Lisa looked at her own house. Interrogate my own parents? she thought.

  Then she womaned up, walked through the gate, in the front door and marched into the living room, where her parents were sitting in front of the TV.

  “There are a couple of things I would like answers to,” Lisa announced.

  But her parents didn’t respond or even turn to look at her. They just kept staring at the TV screen, where Lisa saw a familiar face.