On that evening Magnhild was dreaming of a group of hooded women in long dresses carrying water from the well. In this well lay something poisonous, and these women, whoever they were, were coming to make her drink of it. She woke up with her heart rattling in her dry old chest.
The next dream proved worse; yes, here lies the tale of a woman who lives overlooking a graveyard and one dark night hears something scratching against her window; when she parts the curtains she finds herself looking into a hateful whitish-yellow face framed in long hair, and before she can even scream, the thing has smashed out the glass with a single furious blow of its skull; then its bony fingers reach through, gripping the ledge fast; it pulls up its shoulderblades, locks its skinny arms; and in another rush it is through and biting her to death.
Magnhild woke up screaming. She lit a candle, rose and went to the head of the stairs. Something was ascending toward her; perhaps it had an osprey’s white neck and dark breast. No, its breasts were as pallid as the autumn cabbages which they sell in the street near the cathedral. As for hair, there seemed to be none. It opened out long black rakes of fingers. It said: Magnhild, give me your hair, just for awhile. Magnhild, give me your hair.
With her mouth wide open, the old lady backed away, all the way into the wall, believing that she whispered the verse I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers, when in fact her tongue would not move. Gruesomely smiling (when it comes to ghosts, any expression is worse than none), the specter drew near to her, so that all her nightmares of her life grew as bright as the reflections of ships in the cold harbor. Its stench took root in her nostrils. She closed her eyes. But not seeing proved unendurable, so she looked, and found that the thing was upon her. Its eyes were red, its teeth had the chilly glitter of a stained glass image late in an autumn’s day, and its groping fingers resembled the dark high ribs in the ceiling of the Domkirke. Magnhild now realized who it was.
It commenced to caress her head. The worst thing was the way it looked at her. Wherever it touched her, her tresses fell out. Once Magnhild had been utterly denuded, the ghost removed its skull, rolled it around the floor, and thus gathered up her hair unto itself. Replacing its death’s-head upon its spine, it rose, hovering near the ceiling and preening itself, as if it too were now one of those blue-eyed blonde Norwegian women who retain the beauty of health as they age. And it smiled with its withered black lips, which had once been pink like the bells of a valurt-flower.
When the dirt gave way in the Gudmundsson family plot, and several monuments upended themselves, the sexton took both helpers and commenced smoothing everything over as decently and rapidly as possible. By then Magnhild had already been dead for eighteen years, with the paint going grey on her rotting house, which no one could afford to buy; and several prominent men had erected a statue of Loden Gudmundsson, who inspired the rational modernization of timbercutting in this part of Rogaland. Around his gravestone the earth appeared especially disturbed. Feeling called upon to disprove a rumor that certain graves had been tampered with, the sexton fetched a crowbar, which turned out to be unnecessary in Loden’s case, since the lid of his box had collapsed. Strange to relate, in place of the viscera which the ribcage had once contained there lay a hoard of old silver coins as variably irregular as scales of herring-skin. The sexton could not help remembering the verse which runs: Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Magnhild and Astrid had been placed on either side of that wicked miser.
Near the century’s turn, on a winter night when the men had been drinking until they grew as cheerfully red as the enamel on a housewife’s coffee mill, and the talk turned on old times, when herring had enriched the sea, bread sold for a fair price and children obeyed their parents, the sexton, now retired, confided to his son Eirik, who was himself somewhere between middle-aged and elderly, that the most hideous experience of his life had been opening a certain woman’s coffin and finding it choked with its decomposed occupant’s tresses which had grown out with such unnatural vitality as to be on the verge of worming through the lid. — Yes, father, said Eirik. I know who you’re talking about.
And well you should. Parish history is our family’s bread and butter.
Come spring I’ll renew the sod on that section. Blonde hair, isn’t it? It’s coming up again.
Silently the old man poured himself more brandy.
And what about Magnhild?
No, son, it’s Magnhild I’ve been speaking of.
But she—
Went bald in her old age, quite suddenly, it seems. Was it the scurvy? I remember seeing her coming to church, always with her bonnet on, summer or winter. Almost a scandal it was. Your mother used to say—
You see, father, that hair, wherever it might be rooted, it’s spread all through the Gudmundsson section, just like dead grass. So I thought—
No, it’s Magnhild’s. Astrid, now, perhaps I should have left her in peace, since her coffin was perfectly sound, but in those days I was still curious about things, like you. Marianne Olafsdottir, who used to serve in that house, was not yet demented, so on the following Sunday I had a chat with her. She said that in her youth Astrid used to have beautiful long hair, which I didn’t remember at all, but one woman’s not likely to forget such a thing about another.
What else did she tell you?
That poor Astrid always returned good for evil. Marianne was fond of her, for a fact. Once she dropped a porcelain cup, and Loden was out for blood! Somehow Astrid helped her make up the money — in secret, of course.
All right, father. So what was in Astrid’s coffin?
Nothing.
How belatedly these unpleasant happenings might have been prevented is another of the deep matters unknown to me; but Lady Justice (when she isn’t blinking) can descry murder’s signature even on the rottenest corpse ever carried on a hurdle to the coroner’s jury. Ten or twenty years in the ground need not leave a case unknowable, in witness of which I remind you of those occasions when daring memento-hunters (whom the law calls by other names) have recognized this or that disarticulated skeleton by the nitrous jewel amidst its bric-a-brac. And so, had someone dared to exhume Astrid, he might have noticed that her skull was half smashed in! Then what? We could have pulled out Loden’s remains and burned them, or at least cast them out of the churchyard. The Devil already held that soul, without a doubt, but the living would have been edified, and Astrid gratified. Or we could have burned her; that’s what grim old Bishop Eriksøn would have done, had this story taken place in his time.
Were justice too much to expect, why not appeasement? In the Domkirke I have found people praying as industriously as ever bondsmaids can turn a millstone; so what if we had uttered heart-winged words for Astrid’s comfort? Some say the dead know nothing, but the minister assures me that at every funeral he perceives ghosts screaming around our prayers like a flock of gulls. And so when Astrid died, we could have had a sermon on the subject of Blessed are those who are persecuted, or, if that was too daring, Blessed are the meek; at least we could have paused en route to the churchyard and offered her a eulogy, even one as simple as any of the heliographic cutouts on my cast-iron stove; for the old people remember that she was easily pleased.