The End of the World. Maybe

by Jo Nesbo

  “A cab?”

  “Yeah, he had to get back for a . . . uh, an important meeting.”

  “What kind of meeting?” Mrs Strobe asked slowly.

  “With a . . . uh, chorus,” Lisa said. She could hear how her voice revealed how little practise she had at lying.

  “A chorus?” Mrs Strobe’s eyebrows pressed themselves together into a scary V just over the bridge of her nose.

  “Yeah, a chorus from America,” Lisa said, swallowing. “They want him to be their conductor.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nilly crouching behind the car. And on the other side, she saw the bus with Beatrize and her friends, who were all pressing their incredulous faces against the windows.

  “I’m going to have to have a talk with Nilly about this tomorrow,” Mrs Strobe said. “Come on, we’re going.”

  “Okay,” Lisa said, following Mrs Strobe onto the bus. Lisa found an empty seat and gazed out of the window. Mr Galvanius got back in his car and revved his engine.

  “Hey, Lisa?”

  Lisa looked up. It was Beatrize, who asked, “Hey, uh, could I, uh, sit next to you?”

  Lisa shrugged in response and looked out of the window again.

  “So, uh,” said Beatrize, who pressed herself into the seat. “Since you know Nilly, and he’s going to, like, conduct this American chorus . . .”

  “Mm.”

  “Do you think it would be okay if vee kind of just went along . . . you know?”

  “Why?”

  “Well . . . then vee could be on American TV and vee’d be celebrities!”

  “I see,” Lisa said, watching Mr Galvanius drive away. And there – in the cloud of black exhaust behind his car – she thought she could just make out someone’s red hair.

  LISA WENT TO bed for the night, but couldn’t fall asleep. There was no light in Nilly’s bedroom window. What had happened? She wondered for a while if she shouldn’t say something to her parents, but of course they were hypnotised. She had decided to sneak over to Doctor Proctor’s and ask him what they should do, but a sudden bang made Lisa jump, rising three inches off her mattress. She stared at the dark window pane, which was still rattling from the impact. What was left of a snowball slid down the glass. Truls and Trym? No, they were much too cowardly to throw snow balls at a house where the Commandant lived. She leaped up in bed and stared out. And there, in the light of a lone streetlight, stood a guy with a coal black face, staring up at her. Her heart jumped more than three inches from pure joy. It was Nilly! Lisa turned on her light so he could see her.

  Nilly waved and motioned for her to come down. Lisa threw on her clothes and snuck down the stairs. As she tiptoed past the living room she heard a familiar TV voice say: “Norway is too small, my dear citizens. In my capacity as the president of Greater Norway, I called the king of Denmark and asked him if it would be okay for us to take over his country. Unfortunately, he was not in favour of this. And as if that weren’t enough, he got all mean and called us mountain monkeys and said we ‘ought to just stay up here in our trees. If you can even grow trees that far north, that is.’”

  Lisa pulled on her boots in the hall and put on her jacket.

  “The first question,” Hallvard Tenorsen thundered from the living room, “is whether we – the proud people of Norway – are going to just let him get away with such a cheeky comment. The second question is whether the king of Denmark means to imply, since we’re apparently monkeys, that he can just waltz over here and populate Norway with his Danish people whose language is so garbled they all sound like they’re trying to talk with potatoes in their mouths. My presidential recommendation is that we should consider striking Denmark first, before they strike us! Call in now and vote! And if you’re opposed, remember to leave your name and address. Now let’s sing the national anthem. Everyone ready? And a one, and a two, and a one, two, three . . .”

  Lisa grabbed Nilly’s ski poles and slipped out of the house.

  “I found out where he lives,” Nilly said as she stepped through her front gate.

  “I’m so happy to see you!” she whispered. “If your face weren’t so dirty, I’d give you a hug.”

  “Dirty?” Nilly asked.

  “Yeah, it’s totally black,” Lisa said, dragging her finger over his cheek to reveal a blinding milky-white stripe of freckled skin. She showed him her black fingertip.

  “Must be from the exhaust,” Nilly said. “Mr Galvanius needs to flush his spark plug constipators with blue oil. Beyond a doubt. Anyway, he drove straight home and parked on the street. I snuck after him and saw him go into a little brick house. So I snuck into the yard, climbed a tree outside his living room window and spied. And spied. And spied.”

  “What did you see?” Lisa asked, recognising that wonderful tingly feeling of excitement that always came right before adventures became truly adventurous.

  “Him sleeping,” Nilly said, accepting his ski poles, which Lisa was handing him.

  “What?”

  “Him sleeping. He filled his bathtub, undressed, climbed into the tub and slept. And slept and slept.”

  “He was lying in his bathtub? He’s still lying in his bathtub now?”

  “I’ve never seen so much bathing and sleeping,” Nilly said. “This must certainly have been the most boring spy assignment in history. And the coldest.”

  “I see,” Lisa said, a little disappointed that it hadn’t turned out to be very adventurous after all. “And now?”

  “Shift change. Perry is watching now, but it will be your turn to do the spying next.”

  “Spy on a man taking a bath, while he’s asleep?”

  “Come on,” Nilly said. “It’s not far, just climb onto the back of my skis.”

  And Lisa thought that maybe, maybe, the adventure might end up being a little adventurous if she just helped a little. So she positioned her winter boots behind Nilly’s on his puny skis, braced herself by holding his shoulders and said, “Ready!”

  And with that, Nilly pushed off so the ice underneath them rumbled.

  THEY ARRIVED ON a street of quiet homes. The moon was shining on the little brick house Nilly stopped in front of. There were no cars or people to be seen or heard anywhere.

  “Is this it?” Lisa asked.

  “Yes,” Nilly said, cautiously poling his way up to the front gate and putting one finger on the gatepost.

  “Come on in and warm up, buddy,” Nilly said.

  In the moonlight, Lisa could see Perry dart up Nilly’s hand and arm and then in under his hat.

  Nilly was about to open the gate when his hand suddenly stopped.

  “He went out again,” Nilly said.

  “How do you—?” Lisa started to ask.

  “Perry made this before I left,” Nilly said, pointing to the freshly made spiderweb stretched between the gatepost and the gate itself. It had been pulled off and was dangling loose.

  “Someone left recently,” Lisa confirmed. “But where’d they go?”

  In answer to her question, they heard an engine turn over a couple of times before it finally started hacking and spluttering in a familiar way.

  “Quick!” Nilly said. “Back onto the skis!”

  As they glided across the street, they saw that the green station wagon had already pulled out and was spewing out exhaust as it disappeared, heading towards the first intersection.

  “I have longer arms,” Lisa said, snatching the ski poles from Nilly. She pushed them along with the poles as hard as she could, and they started to speed up. But Mr Galvanius’s car was already through the first intersection and pulling away.

  “Faster!” Nilly screamed. “We’re losing him!”

  “This is as fast as it goes!” Lisa gasped, pumping the poles into the snow-covered street. “We have to give up!”

  “No, no!” Nilly cried. “There’s a stoplight coming. We can still catch him if it’s red!”

  “He has too much of a lead, Nilly.”

  “Oh yeah?” Ni
lly said, and pulled something out of his jacket pocket. “Here! Take the rest!”

  Lisa saw that it was the bag of Doctor Proctor’s Fartonaut Powder.

  “No way!” she said. “Girls don’t fart!”

  “Yes they do, and I’ve seen you rip a big one before. You have to do this. The end of the world, yadda, yadda, yadda!”

  “I said no! You take it!”

  “Don’t be fart shy now, Lisa! I’m standing in front of you. If I took it I would blast you right off the skis, as you well know.”

  Lisa was seething inside. She hated farting. But she hated being called fart shy even more.

  “Give it here,” she said, grabbing the bag. She tipped her head back and emptied the contents into her mouth.

  “Ho ho ho!” yelled Nilly, doubling over with glee. “Seven, six . . .”

  Way, way up ahead, ahead of the tiny dot of a car, Lisa thought she glimpsed a light. A green light. She could already feel her stomach tickling and boiling and bubbling.

  “Five, four . . .” said Nilly.

  No, wait, now the light was yellow. And the amount of pressure that had built up in her stomach made it feel more or less like she’d swallowed a blown-up balloon.

  “Three, two, one.”

  The light ahead of them turned red. Lisa could see the brake lights on Mr Galvanius’s car come on. And the balloon in her stomach wasn’t just fully inflated now, it was ready to burst.

  “Hold on tight!” Nilly cheered. “Lift off!”

  And with that came the explosion. Lisa thought she felt the seat of her pants tear as a warm jet stream of gas hissed and blasted out. And as if they had a rocket motor behind them – which in a way they did – they zoomed forwards. The gardens, the houses and the intersections flickered past. But gradually the stream of gas abated, as did their speed.

  “Hard landing!” Nilly yelled.

  Then seven things happened in quick succession.

  An audible thunk could be heard as they slammed into the back of the green station wagon.

  The traffic light turned from red to green.

  The green station wagon started driving.

  Nilly grabbed the bumper, but his hands slipped out of his mittens, which remained stuck to the bumper. (And Nilly thought his mother and Eva would really be annoyed now. Those were the mittens they’d given him for Christmas the year before last along with the admonition that if he lost them, they’d give him a noogie, a wedgie and a knuckle sandwich.)

  Nilly roared a word that unfortunately can’t be printed here since this is a children’s book.

  Lisa swung out her right arm and ski pole so that the basket near the bottom of the pole, at the last nanofraction of a second, hooked the inside of the bumper and pulled them away after the car.

  Nilly roared a word that happily can be printed: “Yippee!”

  BOTH LISA AND Nilly were hunkered down behind the car, holding on tight to the ski pole as they were hauled through the quiet nighttime city. The black smoke from the exhaust pipe made Lisa cough a little, but actually it wasn’t that bad. The skis slid over snow and icy ruts, and when Lisa looked up she saw the moon drifting across a clear nighttime sky filled with stars. And Lisa thought it had actually turned out to be a nice evening. Despite all that business about the end of the world and whatnot, it was a really nice evening.

  Suddenly they heard a loud scraping sound under their skis, and the car started braking.

  “What’s going on?” asked Lisa, who had her hands full trying to keep her balance.

  “We just drove over a manhole cover,” Nilly said.

  The car pulled to a stop. Lisa unhooked the ski pole from the bumper.

  “Come on, Nilly!” she whispered. “We have to hide!”

  Nilly snatched his mittens, which were still hanging from the bumper, and skated along behind Lisa over to the edge of the pavement. They crouched down behind a parked car.

  Mr Galvanius got out of the green station wagon.

  “Look,” Lisa whispered. “He’s only wearing his dressing gown!”

  “And his Vegard Ulvang commemorative Olympic cross-country skiing socks,” Nilly muttered. “That just reeks of moon chameleon if you ask me.”

  They followed him with their eyes as he walked over to the manhole cover they’d driven over. The warm air from the sewers underneath had melted the snow and ice on top of the manhole cover. Mr Galvanius reached down into the holes in the heavy iron circle and flipped it up. A second later he was gone.

  “He crawled down into the sewer!” Nilly said.

  “What in the world is he going to do down there?” Lisa asked. “Maybe he felt way too clean after all that bathing?”

  “Let’s find out,” Nilly said, undoing his skis. “Quick!”

  He darted over to the manhole cover on his short legs and tried to pick it up the way Mr Galvanius had, but it was too heavy.

  “Help me, would you?” he hissed between clenched teeth as he tugged and pulled.

  Lisa got her fingers down into the holes and tried her best to pick it up, but the lid wouldn’t budge.

  “Who would’ve thought that Mr Hiccup was so strong?” Nilly hissed, pulling so hard his face turned completely red.

  Lisa suddenly let go of the lid.

  “What is it?” Nilly asked.

  “We shouldn’t go down there.”

  “Why not?” Nilly asked.

  “Anaconda,” Lisa said.

  “Anna Conda?”

  “Anaconda! The snake, the constrictor. Big. As in biiiiig! I don’t want to have anything to do with big snakes.”

  Nilly let go of the lid and cocked his head to the side: “Lisa! Don’t tell me you believe that old urban legend?”

  Lisa gave Nilly an offended look. “Well, there’s believing and then there’s believing. You’re actually the one who told it in the first place, Nilly. You said there’s an eighteen-yard-long anaconda snake in Oslo’s sewers that is so insatiable that it eats absolutely everything it encounters. Yup, you even said it actually ate you on one occasion, but that you miraculously got out of the predicament.”

  “I did?” Nilly said, scratching his sideburns. “Hm, I suppose I’m beginning to get forgetful. But, of course, if your source is someone as reliable as me, I have to believe you. Fine, we won’t go down there. Because I don’t want to have anything to do with anaconda stuff either.”

  They stood there for a while peering down at the black manhole cover with the even blacker holes that led down to an even, even blacker darkness that led down to the blackest of the black: Oslo’s jumble of subterranean pipes and walkways where no one up here knew – or wanted to know – exactly what went on.

  “Well, should we call it quits on the spying for tonight, then?” Lisa asked hopefully.

  “Almost,” Nilly said. He had that little smile that Lisa knew almost always meant trouble.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, but she already suspected what the answer would be.

  “Gregory Galvanius’s house is empty. And as you know, seven-legged Peruvian sucking spiders are whizzes when it comes to picking locks.”

  “Nilly, no! We can’t go breaking into people’s houses.”

  “First of all, tiny little break-ins into people’s houses are nothing to make a stink about when we’re talking about saving the world from certain doom. Second of all, I thought we agreed that Mr Galvanius is not a person; he’s a moon chameleon. And the one place we’re most likely to find proof of that is in his house.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “Now’s our chance, Lisa.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not . . . we can’t . . .” Lisa tried and tried, but no matter how she thought about it, Nilly was right. And she hated it when Nilly was both crazy and right at the same time, especially when it meant that her life was about to become more difficult.

  “Oh slush and bother,” she said. “Let’s get this break-in over with, then.”

  “Yippee!” Nilly cried.

 
THERE WAS A little click and then Perry crawled back out of the keyhole.

  “Good job, Perry!” Nilly said. He turned the knob, and the door to Gregory Galvanius’s little brick house slid open. Nilly set Perry on the wall next to the doorbell and gave the spider a serious look: “Toca el timbre si ves al Señor Galvanius que viene, ¿de acuerdo?”

  “Huh?” Lisa asked.

  “I asked him to ring the doorbell if he sees Mr Galvanius coming.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lisa said. “What, like in spider language or something?”

  “Don’t be dumb. Spiders can’t talk. But they know Spanish. That’s what they speak in Peru.”

  Lisa was about to say something, but realised it wouldn’t do any good. She hurried in after Nilly instead and shut the door behind them. They stood there in the dark hallway holding their breath and listening.

  “What’s that sound?” Lisa whispered.

  “Your heart beating,” Nilly whispered.

  “No, listen.”

  “You’re hearing things, Lisa. There’s no one here besides us.”

  “There’s a buzzing sound.”

  “Cut it out. It’s just – wait! Do you hear that? There’s a buzzing sound.”

  “Uh, yeah. That’s what I just—”

  “Come on!” Nilly interrupted, pulling her by the arm.

  They continued down the hallway that led them past the living room and over to a door.

  “It’s coming from in there,” Nilly said.

  “Yup,” Lisa said.

  “Maybe you should open it?” Nilly suggested.

  “Or maybe you should open it,” Lisa replied.

  “Rock-paper-scissors,” Nilly said.

  They counted to three and then showed their hands.

  “Hah!” Lisa exclaimed triumphantly because she had chosen paper and Nilly had chosen rock.

  “What are you hah-ing for?” Nilly asked. “Rock beats paper.”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you hear about it? They changed the rules at the annual meeting this October.”

  “They?”

  “Yeah, the International Rock-Paper-Scissors Association.”