The words of the story shone bright in my mind. A nøkk can be banished by a human voice calling its name.
What was it Clive said the fjord was called? The problem with depression was that it tended to turn your working memory into Swiss cheese, and this was a very bad moment to be forgetful. At least Gaia might live. I hoped she had turned back. She might make it up the ladder to Granhus, to Tom and Maren. Run, Gaia!
The creature pulled me lower into the water. I felt reeds pushing up my top and against my neck, the icy slop of waves against my shoulders.
The name began with an H.
“Hjørund!” I said, no louder than a whisper, but just then a last, ferocious tug yanked me under.
And everything went still.
42
the guest
NOW
Once upon a time I thought that I’d be better off dead.
Seriously. I thought I got in people’s way and that all the horrible things people had told me as I was growing up were actually true. That I’d be doing the world a massive favor if I just stepped off the planet. Auf Wiedersehen. Thanks for having me.
But when I woke up in the hospital to find that I was (a) alive and (b) holding Gaia’s hand, I thought that perhaps I’d been wrong. Maybe living was a good idea. Maybe I would give it a go.
I survived the fall after the crash; Derry didn’t. I probably would have died on the little bank at the bottom of the cliff, given that it was freezing cold and I had a chewed ankle and a pretty nasty head injury, but Gaia had been able to climb back up the bank to her dad and to raise the alarm. When they found me I was almost unconscious from hypothermia and a minute or so from being brain-dead. So I came back a second time. I guess I wasn’t meant to go just yet.
Sometime later, Clive waded into the fjord to look for Derry, but sadly her body had already been tugged away by the current. He swore blind that Derry had nothing to do with Aurelia’s death. He said it was an accident and yes, Derry had witnessed Aurelia drown, but she’d frozen in fear instead of helping her. I don’t think Tom believed him.
Nobody could work out why Derry had done this. She was friends with Aurelia. It didn’t make sense. Clive said she had acted strangely ever since they moved to Norway. She had been sleepwalking, he said, suffering from bad dreams. I told them what Derry had told me—that Aurelia’s diary hadn’t been written by Aurelia at all. Derry apparently ripped out the pages and rewrote what was essentially a bunch of lies. Maren suggested that Derry had been influenced by the nøkk. A nøkk could bewitch people, she said, stir up their baser natures. Some people were more susceptible to its influence than others, but if it had bewitched Derry, it could be why she had written the diary.
* * *
—
When I was able to leave the hospital, I returned not to England, and not to Granhus, but to Aurelia’s Nest on the side of the cliff. It was almost finished, and the result was truly breathtaking. I wasn’t even nervous about going inside, even though I’d almost died falling off the edge of said cliff. Tom had gone slightly off-piste when it came to the decorating and had abandoned Derry’s plans, preferring instead to be guided by photographs of Aurelia’s grandparents’ house. The girls’ bedrooms were super cute, with an entire art studio in Gaia’s bedroom and a climbing wall in Coco’s, replete with safety net and padded floor.
“I’ll show you the guest room,” Tom said, opening up the bedroom that sat at the front of the house. I gave a gasp. A deep copper bathtub was partly sunk into the wooden floor in one corner of the room. A large brass bed with a deep mattress, fluffy pillows, and a red Sherpa blanket was placed in the middle of the room, facing a roaring fire and a large velvet sofa in duck-egg blue. Tom pressed on one of the walls—showing me the wood cladding, I thought—and a cupboard slid forward very gently, revealing the “wall” to be a twenty-foot-long modular storage unit kitted out with a wardrobe, desk, bookcase, media center, and even a kitchenette. At the front of the room was a