Nathan Hill - The Nix

“It’s very old,” he said.

He handed it to Faye and she studied it, ran her fingers over it. It was hollow and thin and brittle, the colors yellowed, about the size of a small teacup. The figure looked like a smaller, thinner Santa Claus, though with a very different attitude: Whereas Santa always seemed so animated and cheerful, this thing seemed nasty. It was the ugly smirk on his face, maybe, and the way he held the bowl so guardedly, like a dog tensing over food.

“What is it?” Faye asked, and her father said it was a house spirit, a ghost that usually hid in basements, back in old Norway, in a time more enchanted than this one, it seemed to Faye, a time when everything in the world must have been paranormal: spirits of the air, sea, hills, wilderness, house. You had to look for ghosts everywhere back then. Anything in the world might have been another thing incognito. A leaf, a horse, a stone. You could not take them literally, the things of the world. You always had to find the real truth the first truth concealed.

“Did you have one in your basement?” Faye asked. “On the farm?”

Her father brightened as he thought of it. He always brightened at the thought of the old house. He was a serious man who only seemed to cheer up when describing that place: a wide salmon-red three-story wooden house on the edge of town, a view of the ocean out back, a long pier where he fished on quiet afternoons, a field in the front bounded by spruce trees, a pen for the few goats and sheep they owned, and a horse. A house at the top of the world, he said, in Hammerfest, Norway. Talking about it always seemed to restore him.

“Yes,” he said, “even that house was haunted.”

“Do you wish you still lived there?”

“Yes, sometimes,” he said. “It was haunted, but not in a bad way.”

He explained that house spirits weren’t evil. They were sometimes even kind, would take care of the farm, help with the crops, brush the horse’s hair. They kept to themselves and got angry if you didn’t bring them cream porridge on Thursday nights. With loads of butter. They weren’t friendly ghosts, but they weren’t cruel either. They did what they pleased. They were selfish ghosts.

“And this is what they looked like?” Faye said, turning the figurine around in her palm.

“Most of the time they’re invisible,” Frank said. “You can only see them if they want you to see them. So you don’t see them very much.”

“What’s it really called?” she said.

“A nisse, ” he said, and she nodded. She loved the weird names her father gave his ghosts: nisse, nix, gangferd, draug. Faye understood that these were old words, European words. Her father used these words sometimes, sometimes accidentally, when he was excited or angry. He once showed her a book full of these words, incomprehensible. It was a Bible, he said, and on the first page was a family tree. There was her name, he pointed out: Faye. And her parents’ names, and names above them too, names she’d never heard before, strange names with strange marks. The paper was thin and fragile and yellow, the black ink faded to lavender and blue. All of these people, she was told, stayed behind, while Fridtjof Andresen changed his name to Frank and came bravely to America.

“Do you think we have a nisse here?” Faye asked.

“You never know,” her father said. “Sometimes they’ll follow you around your whole life.”

“Are they nice?”

“Now and then. They’re temperamental. You mustn’t ever insult them.”

“I wouldn’t insult them,” she said.

“You could do it accidentally.”

“How?”

“When you take your bath, do you splash water on the floor?”

She considered it and admitted yes, she did do that.

“If you spill any water, you must clean it up quickly. So the water doesn’t seep into the basement and drip on your nisse. That would be a big insult.”

“What would happen?”

“He would get angry.”

“Then what would happen?”

“I’ll tell you a story,” he said. And this was the story he told her:

At a farm near Hammerfest, many years ago, there was a beautiful little girl named Freya (and Faye smiled at this, at the proximity of the beautiful girl’s name to her own). One Thursday night, Freya’s father told her to take cream porridge to the nisse. And the little girl was planning to obey her father, but on her way to the basement she grew very hungry. Her mother had made a special batch of porridge that night, with brown sugar and cinnamon and raisins and even thin slices of mutton on top. Freya thought it was a pity to waste all that good food on a ghost. So once she was in the basement and hidden from view, she ate it herself. She licked it from the bowl, then drank the drippings. And scarcely had she finished wiping her chin clean when the nisse rushed out and grabbed her and started to dance. She tried to break free but the grip of the nisse was strong. He crushed her into him and sang “From the nisse did you steal! So dance now until you reel!” and she screamed and screamed, but the nisse pressed her face into his wiry beard so nobody heard. He twirled her around and galloped from one end of the basement to the other. He was too fast. She couldn’t keep up. She kept falling and tripping, but the nisse pulled her up again and yanked her arms and tore her clothes, and he did this until finally she lay on the ground, in bloody rags, gasping for breath. In the morning, when they found her, she was pale and sick and nearly dead. She was bedridden for months, and even after she was well enough to walk, her father never asked her to take food to the nisse again.

“I’m sorry I took those boys to the basement,” Faye said after he finished the story.

“Go to sleep,” her father said.

“Someday I want to see your home,” Faye said. “The farm in Hammerfest, with the salmon-red house. I’ll go visit.”

“No,” he said, and when he looked at her he looked tired, maybe sad, like when he was standing outside, over those dying coals, alone. “You’ll never see that house.”

That night she couldn’t sleep. She was kept awake for hours by every squeak — every little crack, every rustle of wind and she thought there was an intruder or an apparition. The lights outside shined through tossing leaves and phantomed hideous forms on her wall: burglars, wolves, the devil. She felt hot and fevered and tried to cool herself down with the bedside glass of water, pressing it to her forehead and chest. She sipped the water and thought about her father’s story, about the house spirit: Sometimes they’ll follow you around your whole life. It was a horrifying thought, this beast downstairs, watching them, speaking gibberish.

She looked at the floor as if she could see through it, down to the basement where the ghost was prowling, greedily waiting. She tipped the glass and poured out the water. She felt a bolt of panic as she watched what she was doing, watched the water puddle, a dark brown blot on the light brown carpet. She imagined the water as it seeped into the floor, dripped down through cracks in the wood, over metal slats and across nails and glue and slunk its way beneath her, picking up dust and dirt as it washed into the basement and coldly fell on whatever angry thing was down there, lurking in the darkness.

At some point in the night — this is the truth — they found Faye in the basement.

In some dead hour of the morning, they heard a scream. They found her downstairs. She was shaking and shivering, her head rattling on the concrete floor. Her parents didn’t know how she got there. She couldn’t talk, couldn’t see, her eyes rolled blindly into her head. At the hospital she eventually calmed down, and the doctors said she had a nervous fever, a nervous disposition, a case of hysteria, which is to say they had no diagnosis at all. Rest in bed, they said. Drink milk. Don’t get too excited.