Strange to say, perhaps because they had consigned themselves to the soil of their own volition, they did not sink; nor did any wound-eager entities wriggle evilly up. The coffin kept speeding away at a good pace, as if it were still somehow a ship under benefit of tailwind, and the skeleton stood motionless on it, watching them. Soon they could no longer distinguish its dark eye-holes. — What became of Captain Gull? I myself ask this after every funeral. Reader, you might suppose that he turned into a seagull and flew away, for his purpose was completed this time; he had brought the monsters their prey, and could now return to fetch more, such being the weird which had been cast upon him; how disappointed he felt at the Pedersons’ escape is another matter of which I feel uncertain, being unadept at reading the facial expressions of skulls. But there is no purpose in my going on about him.
Well, said Øistein, what now?
It’s too far to go back, replied his wife.
Yes—
Then we’d better dig.
And with Cousin Eyvind’s awl she began to bore them a crawling-hole. Øistein did his best to help. Feeling hard up in the clinch, as the saying goes, he kept muttering: No hope for it, no hope… — You may be sure that by now they both were homesick enough for the fish-perfumed grey cobblestones of Stavanger, but emigrants cannot take great account of sorrows and difficulties; they must keep right on; and so Øistein cleared away the dirt that his wife so magically loosened, while she for her part kept digging straight down, almost cheerfully as when she used to help her mother carry the family’s dirty clothes to the pond behind the Domkirke; sometimes the melodies of choir practice would reach them as faintly as if elves were singing from under a mountain, and then she and her mother would cinch up their skirts and wade into the cold water, soaping and scrubbing, chatting at first, until they grew too chilled to speak; and other women and children dirtied the water all around them, so that one could not expect to get one’s underdrawers much whiter than grey, which success being accomplished, Kristina and her mother walked shivering beneath the yellow-leafed trees, through the mucky meadows, circling the long steep spine of the Domkirke’s roof, fronted by its twin turrets, silent now, commanding the grove around it, beyond which the first hints of wooden-house multitudes peeked here and there, loud children weeping and fighting, outhouses stinking; although Stavanger hardly went much farther than Sølvberggata in those days, the walk home seemed to take forever, especially with the wet laundry so heavy, and they had to descend nearly all the stony narrow windings of Finklamauet Street to the house where they lived in those days, when her father was a herring fisherman and liked to be near the harbor; by then they would have warmed themselves into a sweat, and if her mother were cross she would stride on ahead as rapidly as the longhaired witch who bends her face toward the earth, while the girl struggled not to be left behind, but if her mother were in good temper she might tell the adoring child a story, for instance about the great fire, which broke out on Breigata Street and ruined more than two hundred homes; Kristina had been born before then, but of course she could not remember it; and by now they were nearly home, ahead of them the white sails shining in the silvery harbor, so her mother sent her with three copper coins to knock on the diagonal door cut under the corner of the neighbor’s house, and buy eggs and perhaps milk or carrots, then rush straight back to help cook supper: herring, of course. What was there to do but work, and never complain? The last shall be first and the first shall be last, said her mother. Before she was forty-five, she profited the coffin-maker’s shop.
Now they began to hear sounds below them, as if people were cutting up a stranded whale.
Kristina whispered: Dig more quietly, because if any of them hear us, we’ll be hard pressed—
Wife, your advice is always good.
Holding her breath, she pricked their course downward with Eyvind’s awl, which suddenly broke through into phosphorescence — at which point the dirt gave way, and the Pedersons tumbled down into a cavern where there were ever so many weird flames like the points of a skull’s yellow smile. In the air, smooth old Saami ships kept swimming through the long diagonals like rain or sunrays which possibly had already existed in the rock; perhaps it was rock they were in, not earth; or might it be the case that when darkness gets dark enough, the atmosphere itself thickens into something approaching coal? Anyhow, it was certainly a wide open country they’d fallen into. As far as the Pedersons could see, tall grey she-trolls, naked but for necklaces of whorled silver beads, stood smoking corpses over bone-fires. Although she said nothing to her husband, Kristina thought she recognized Bendik Hermansson’s carcass. In fact she was reminded of the cannery, with the lines of herring hanging down from skewers passed through their heads.
Howling like dogs and seals, the monsters now rushed toward them, ready to scream and harry, to burn and bite. Their lank grey hair was fishy-wet, and their teeth resembled the cracked dark rock between glaciers. Kristina overcame her horror by pretending they were women with bad skin from the burns of the herring-brine; she had known many like that back home in Stavanger.
Well, goodbye, wife, said Øistein.
Squeezing his hand, Kristina pityingly replied: It may be worse than that.
Indeed, Captain Gull’s skeleton now arrived, enthroned on the rotten coffin-lid which was all that remained of the Hyndla. Rising, the thing raised its yellow hand, at which the she-trolls halted and gruntingly returned to their business. — Well, well, you certainly made a fool out of me! it chuckled. Got both yourselves here, yes indeed, the full pair. Made an even shorter passage, you did… Quite an occasion, it breezed on. — Welcome, welcome to America! Now stand up tall, both of you, because it’s time to present you to the Great Troll. Kristina, my dear, have you saved the jewel that the reverend left you? You know, the one I helped you with—
Although she felt nothing for that monster but hatred and terror, the woman now found that she could not remove herself from its ascendancy. With a fixed smile she grabbled in her pockets, while Øistein quietly wiped the ooze out of her hair.
Perfect! the skeleton chortled, clapping its fingers together with a hateful hissing noise. Give it here.
The most unpleasant errand Kristina ever undertook was touching that bony hand, but she had to do it, so she did, and the skeleton received her talisman.
Thank you, my dear, it said. Now let me think… Oh, yes! — Capering and sniggering, it lobbed the dark stone into the nearest corpse-fire, while the troll-women ducked back, wiping their sweaty foreheads. For a moment nothing happened, and then the jewel exploded, giving off a sweet incense of blackberries, sunlight and church candles. The trolls wrinkled their noses. The vapor hung there for a moment, then darkened into dust. — One more illusion disposed of! explained Captain Gull.
It now began to lead them downward, into the same cold stillness which comes to Stavanger at the beginning of a rain, deeper and deeper, until the Pedersons had practically forgotten their names, and eternity glowed like blue cloud-light on the domes of their grey skulls.
Øistein said bitterly: A narrower passage than we expected, captain!
Well, man, you paid your money, so make the best of it, and after that no words were said.
Further they went, to Skullheim and below. Øistein felt ever more hopeless, although there was nothing to do but keep Kristina’s spirits up, after the example of that rich man in Stavanger who bought his family a grave beneath the choir, just in case they could still hear the music. Troll-women, muck-furred corpse-gulpers, stretched out their hands to touch them, cold yet hideously active. Everyone was toiling — and on that account, hope returned to the Pedersons like sunlight seen through many columns of drying sardines; they began to realize that they might do well enough for themselves, even here. For all they knew, there might be a passage back to Stavanger — a long one, to be sure, but given time enough they could dig their way with Cousin’s Eyvind’s awl. So, following their master, they entered the monsters’ larder as inevitably as baskets of herring getting winched up the sides of those narrow sharp-roofed warehouses; and there was even a simulacrum of the great wooden hand, ever so familiar, which pointed upward in the window of Mr. Kielland’s shop, with a necklace of amber and carnelian looped about its wrist; at this sight the Pedersons’ memories flew out of their hearts as bright as new wet clots of wool in a farmwife’s dark doorway, and Kristina, feeling ever more at peace, recollected from her girlhood, although she could not have said why it now so consolingly haunted her, the great dew-studded spiderweb of a nettle colony, all plants growing outward from an empty ring, interlacing their bristly leaves. As for Øistein, he contented himself with the faith that at least he and his wife would remain like-minded forever.