Maia turned to him – and because I thought, at first, that she didn’t know him, it seemed to me, preposterous as it sounds, that she was underestimating him. Because Kyrre Opdahl knew exactly who she was. ‘A beautiful day,’ she said, echoing him, with only the slightest hint of mockery in her voice. ‘Akkurat.’
The word sounded odd, coming from her – and he almost smiled. Then his expression altered. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Better make the most of it. Because it won’t last much longer.’
Maia detected the change of tone – and at that moment she understood, if she hadn’t guessed before, that this old fool wasn’t what he pretended to be. She didn’t appear to be disturbed by that knowledge, however. On the contrary, she was, or gave the appearance of being, amused by him. ‘You’re absolutely right,’ she said. ‘Winter is coming. And what will a poor girl do then?’ She was smiling, but there was no mistaking the provocation in her voice – and, of course, I saw then that she knew who he was. She had to know. She’d probably seen him about the place, and she would no doubt have heard about him from Martin. Maybe she’d even seen him come to the hytte that day, just after the last drowning, to clear everything out and secure it against intruders. Against her, in other words. I wondered again where she was sleeping, and what she was doing for food.
Kyrre shook his head. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s shelter down below, for anyone with nowhere else to lay her head.’ He wasn’t smiling. He said what he had to say, then he stood with his eyes fixed on hers, his mouth set, waiting for her reply – but he wasn’t speaking to a young girl, he was addressing the huldra. ‘It’s not much,’ he said. ‘But there’s room enough for a winter guest.’
It was absurd, of course, but that was how he framed his invitation. He just came out with it, and he didn’t seem to mind that it sounded completely inappropriate, a transparent case of a dirty old man propositioning a young girl, trying to take advantage of her, when she was at her most vulnerable. And even though I knew what he thought of her, even though I knew that, in his own mind, he was addressing the huldra, I couldn’t help but notice a trace of excitement – an infinitesimal trace of dark pleasure – that was almost, but not quite, concealed behind that casual invitation. Of course, I knew what he wanted to do right away. He was protecting me, protecting Mother, by playing decoy, putting himself in harm’s way to divert the huldra from her intended prey – and in that moment I had a sudden glimpse of Maia through his eyes. A glimpse, no more, of someone, or something, as alluring as she was repugnant to him and his assent to this allure seemed, at that moment, as real as his determination to draw her away from Mother and me.
I was appalled. What did he think he was doing? Did he really hope to deceive her? Was he imagining that he could charm her? How could he have believed that such a thing was possible? Maia was still smiling, but I could see in her eyes that she was suspicious, too – suspicious, but not afraid, because she had to know that she had nothing to fear from a silly old man who believed in trolls and sprites. Besides, she really did need a place to stay, now that Martin was gone. Maybe she had been trying to win Mother over, by sitting for her, but I can’t imagine she received anything in exchange. If she had, it had come to nothing and winter was approaching fast.
There was a moment’s pause – and I don’t know, now, why I didn’t intervene. I wanted to take Kyrre by the arm and lead him away, I wanted to give him a good shake and make him see how ridiculous all this was, but I simply couldn’t. I just stood and watched, as he made what he must have believed was a pact with the devil. Then, having taken that moment to work out what was going on – I look back now and I don’t think of her as a girl any more, I see what Kyrre saw: I see the huldra – Maia laughed. She turned to me briefly, then she looked back at Kyrre, and her manner changed again. A moment before, she had been suspicious, as any eighteen-year-old might be when presented with such an offer; now, she was flirtatious, and quite brazen. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘How much room is there?’
Kyrre’s head shook almost imperceptibly. ‘Enough,’ he said.
Maia studied his face. I didn’t think she was going to accept Kyrre’s offer, but she wanted to know why he had made it. She wanted to know what he knew, or thought he knew, about her. ‘I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you,’ she said.
‘No inconvenience.’
‘Well,’ Maia said, ‘I’m not sure … I mean, I don’t even know you –’
‘Nor I you,’ Kyrre said, ‘But that’s not a problem, is it? And I’m sure we could come to some arrangement –’
Maia jumped at that. ‘What arrangement?’ she said.
‘Well,’ Kyrre said, ‘come and have a look. It’s not far. We can talk about that while we walk.’
I couldn’t believe it. What was happening was grotesque, and I wanted to say something. I wanted to stop him pursuing this mad course, but I didn’t know how. Besides, I was sure, still, that Maia would refuse his offer. She would string him along, till he did something stupid, then she would show him up and let everybody know what a dirty old man he was – because surely that was what she was thinking, surely she had assumed that he wanted something from her, the one thing that was hers to give, now that she was alone in the world. The one thing that, presumably, she had been able to offer Martin Crosbie. There was no way for her to know how badly she was misjudging him. Or was there? Maybe she knew exactly what he intended and, maybe, she enjoyed the challenge. Maybe, as the huldra, she wanted to show him how invulnerable she really was. Maybe she had it in mind to seduce this foolish old man, just as she had seduced the others – and I wasn’t altogether sure that Kyrre Opdahl was beyond seduction. I was ashamed of that thought but, considering what happened afterwards, I cannot rule out the possibility that my suspicions were justified. At the time, though, it was nothing more than an idle thought, a flicker of mischief and superstition that would, I knew, be immediately dispelled, when Maia laughed off this bizarre invitation.
Only, she didn’t laugh it off. Not at all. She regarded him for a long moment with a mix of suspicion and amusement; then her face softened, and she moved over to where he was standing and took him lightly by the arm. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll take a look at this shelter.’ She glanced at me, as if we were together in some girls’ conspiracy, then she laughed. ‘Though I warn you,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.’
I turned to Kyrre. I could see that he hadn’t fallen under her spell. He was clinging to some plan that he had hatched over the last few days, ever since he’d first seen Maia at our house and decided Mother was in danger. I could see that he was up to something and I could also see that his cunning plan was just as obvious to Maia. She had put on a face – an expression that she must have thought made her seem the gullible and needy girl that Kyrre so clearly believed she was not – but there was, in the dark glitter of her eyes, a knowingness that made me afraid, for Kyrre, of course, but also for her. He was pretending that he wanted to help, but he wasn’t making a very good job of it, not because he wasn’t good at pretending, but because he couldn’t care less whether she trusted him or not. All he wanted was for her to go with him, away from this house, away from the only people he loved in the whole world. I didn’t know what he intended – did he think he could save Mother from her grim fascination with the shadow that she saw in this disturbed girl, the shadow that he knew, against all reason, was the huldra? If he did, how was he going to do it? I don’t recall, now, how much I suspected at the time, and how much came later, but I think, even then, when something could still have been done to divert him, I already knew he wanted to destroy her. What was worse was that Maia knew it too. She wasn’t deceived for a second – which meant that, for her, whatever Kyrre had in mind was a challenge she was prepared to accept, quite gladly. A challenge that she welcomed. She thought that she was stronger than him. She knew it, in fact, because she was the huldra, and he was just an old man.
I don’t recall
how much of this I believed at the time, but I do know that, just as he had deceived himself, Kyrre had deceived me, because I was thinking of this girl – who, in the plain light of day, seemed nothing more than a lost, possibly abused child with nowhere to go – I was looking at this lost girl and I was seeing the huldra, seeing her with Kyrre’s eyes, making her a character from one of the old stories, a creature possessed, whether temporarily or intrinsically, by some random wave of malice. Maia had always been strange, and there were questions about her that I couldn’t answer; she had invaded my home and she had taunted me with what she must have imagined was a power that I envied; she was inextricably connected to three unexplained deaths, at least one of which she had watched, without lifting a finger to help or to raise the alarm; but surely common sense should have told me that she was still nothing more than a young girl – troubled no doubt, malicious even, but only in the way that damaged children often are. Common sense should have told me that she wasn’t the huldra, because – why did I forget it, even for a moment? – the huldra did not exist. The huldra was just a notion, a metaphor no doubt, for something harder to pin down and more painful to consider, an ugly spirit from an old story, told to keep young men in line, or to explain away the darkness. A story, a warning, a zone on the map that allows us to navigate an impossible world.
I looked at Kyrre, and I could see, in the set of his mouth, in the fixity of his eyes, the expression of a man who has made up his mind to do something terrible – and, beguiled by a fairy tale, I did nothing to stop him. Instead, I turned to Maia and, through a fog of doubt and absurd fantasy, I made a desperate appeal to the plain light of day in her that I had already given up on. ‘You can’t go now,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Mother’s finished the painting yet.’
Maia laughed. ‘I think she has,’ she said, without a hint of regret. ‘I think it was finished on the first day. In fact –’ she looked at Kyrre and then back to me with a defiant smile – ‘I think she knew what she was going to paint even before I sat down in that lovely studio of hers.’ She slipped her hand into her jacket pocket – and I knew that she had something in there, something that Mother had given her, or possibly some small treasure that she had stolen. She looked at me, and her face was pleasant, and utterly calm – yet I knew that she had sensed my suspicion and she was hurt by it. ‘I think,’ she said, and there was no shift in her manner, no shadow of malice or judgement in her voice, ‘if I’m not mistaken, your mother began that painting a long time ago, and has only just got round to finishing it.’
That stung me – and, for the first time, I realised that, to sit for Mother, Maia would have had to climb the stairs, to pass the door to my room and cross the landing and, as she did, she would have seen the portrait of me that Mother had begun so long ago, begun and abandoned, without ever offering a word of explanation. She had seen it, and she had seen through it – or so she thought. But what she had seen wasn’t the truth. How could it be? I wasn’t like her, and Mother knew that. She knew – and what she wanted to capture in this portrait was the same thing, more or less, that Kyrre had seen when he decided that Maia was the huldra. She would have laughed at the old man’s superstitions, no doubt, but what she saw in Maia was a girl touched by a darkness that could have been ordinary bad luck – a talent, almost, for tragedy – but might just as easily have been a form of possession, a weakness of spirit or resolve that allowed the darkness to work through her. A weakness that had allowed her to welcome the darkness in, perhaps unwittingly – and that was what Mother had wanted to capture. Susceptibility, in the abstract – not this lost girl.
I shook my head, but I refused to respond to the provocation. Perhaps I saw in it a wish to draw me into whatever was about to unfold with Kyrre, a wish to drag me down with the old man and make me an accomplice in whatever she imagined he was planning. ‘I’m sure, when she’s finished, she’ll let you see the picture,’ I said. ‘Don’t you want to see –’
She burst out laughing then. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I don’t have to see it. But you take a look, and let me know what you think.’ She turned to Kyrre, with a sweet, absurd smile. ‘Thanks to your kind neighbour,’ she said, ‘I’ll just be down the road … For a while, at least.’
Kyrre nodded. ‘Akkurat,’ he said.
Maia nodded back and made to leave. Then, as if as an afterthought, she took what she was clutching from her pocket and held it out to me. It was money, of course. She hadn’t stolen it – and she wanted me to see that my suspicions had been unfounded. It was payment for the sitting. ‘Give this back to your mother,’ she said, with that same mocking glitter in her eyes. ‘I didn’t earn it.’
I shook my head again, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to touch the money. I didn’t want to touch anything she had touched – and, at that moment, I had a sense of the house behind me as contaminated, everywhere, by contact with her. With her fingers, her breath, the scent of her and, most of all, those dark, glittering eyes. ‘Keep it,’ I said, at last. ‘You might need it.’
Her hand wavered a moment, then she slipped the money back into her jacket. All this time Kyrre had been standing by, watching, waiting, patient with the dull resolve of the desperate. For a split second, I thought I had one last chance to intervene, one last chance to dissuade – and then even that moment was gone. Maybe it hadn’t existed anyhow. Maybe everything was already decided, the way it is in fairy tales. For too long, I had flickered back and forth between that world where nothing can be done and the plain light of day, where reason is supposed to prevail and now it was too late. Ryvold had said, once, that trolls exist, whether we like it or not, but we had a choice about the forms they took, and the powers they could assume. It all depended on whether we allowed ourselves to be deceived, on whether we succumbed to superstition – but at that moment, and just for that moment, I didn’t believe him. And by the time I did, there was nothing I could do.
I watched them walk away. In some far part of my mind, I was praying, or hoping at least, that Kyrre would abandon whatever plan he had made to divert the huldra away from us, but I knew it was too late. He was determined to see this through, they both were – and all of a sudden I pictured them together, in that house of his, a few hundred metres along the shore, sitting at the kitchen table over coffee, as Kyrre and I had always done, surrounded by cogs and spark plugs, in a fug of engine oil and white spirit, each waiting for the other to make a decisive move. It was a terrible image – and I wondered what Kyrre thought he was doing, inviting the huldra into his house, when he, of all people, knew that she could not be contained or defeated. They walked slowly, side by side, neither talking nor even looking at the other – and yet, for a moment, just before they disappeared, they looked, not like strangers who have only just met, but like kith and kin, family members who, whether they were fond of one another or not, would always be irreversibly united by blood and history. That impression lasted for a few seconds, no more, before they disappeared at the first curve of the track, but it was undeniable. Then, for a long moment, I was gazing at nothing but leaves and air, the birches paler now, and touched here and there with streaks and blemishes of gold, the light thin and unconvincing at the far end of the track, as if something that had been there for years, some high tree or carved stone, had been uprooted overnight, leaving only a gap where substance should have been. I waited there for a long time – several minutes, I think, though it is hard to tell, looking back – and all that time I was in doubt, ready to believe that what I had just witnessed hadn’t happened at all, or was, at least, capable of being reversed. Then, with a sense, not so much of having been defeated as of having given up too easily, I turned to go in. I was still there, at the gate, just a few yards from the front door, but I suddenly felt exposed and, as ridiculous as it sounds, in danger – and it took a considerable effort not to give in to that sudden fear, a sense of apprehension that, in the space between one breath and the next, was transformed into blind, unreasoning pani
c.
I was almost inside, almost out of harm’s way, when I heard the scream. It was a sound unlike anything I had ever heard before, a scream, a shriek, a wild cry laced with horror that seemed just inches away for one awful moment, before I placed it, and realised that it must have come from further along the track, in the direction that Kyrre and Maia had taken a few minutes earlier. It was a sudden, high-pitched shriek, the last cry of something that had been caught and pulled down, and it was startling in its finality, but I couldn’t have said whether it was the scream of a girl, or an old man, or an animal that some predator had taken, down in the meadows or somewhere in the woods. It could have been any one of those, and it could have been none of them – and in the old stories, certainly, it would have been the cry of no living thing, but the other-worldly shriek of a harpy or a fetch, echoing on the still air of an afternoon that, by some logic that no mortal could follow, had turned out to be cursed.
I try to think that, on any other day, I could have been rational about what I heard. As that shriek died away – though that’s not an accurate description for the sense I had of something moving off into the distance, not fading so much as being absorbed into the land for miles around, absorbed by the birches and the meadows and the white air out over the Sound, absorbed so thoroughly that it would never disappear – as that terrible scream soaked into the fabric of the world around me, I should have tried to explain it as a natural event of some kind. A kill, in the far grass, say, where some predator had pulled down a bird or a hare, or the sound a foreign ship might make, as it navigated its way out of the channel into open water. I could have said it was a tyre blowing out, down on the Brensholmen road, or a seabird calling from further up shore. I had heard sounds here that I couldn’t explain often enough, odd wailings in the wind in the small hours of midnattsol, a high-pitched keening over the snow in the dark time, bird calls where no bird could have been, animal cries in the woods when I was out in the noonday darkness and imagining the wolverine, come down from the far north to track me by my torchlight. No sound is improbable, here – but that sound was impossible and, as it faded away, sinking into my skin and my bones as surely as it was soaking into the land around me, I knew it had come from some point along the track between our house and Kyrre Opdahl’s. It startled me, that cry, and it held me for a moment, as it faded – but it was only a moment and, as soon as that moment passed, I was running blindly towards it, running out through the gate and along the path towards the scene of whatever crime had been committed within calling distance of the house where Mother was, no doubt, standing in front of a canvas, putting the finishing touches to a picture she should never have begun, and, absurd as it sounds now, I had a vision of her in what Maia had called her lovely studio, smiling at the finished portrait, happy to have captured whatever it was she had set out to capture, in features that were both girlish and inhuman. It lasted no more than a second, that fleeting vision, but it was as vivid as the cry had been – a cry she probably hadn’t even heard, at work on the far side of the house, oblivious to everything, as she always was when her work absorbed her.
A Summer of Drowning Page 29
