Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we’re reading Chapters 8-16 of Hildur Knútsdóttir’s The Night Guest. The English version, translated by Mary Robinette Kowal, was first published in 2024; the original was published in 2021. Spoilers ahead!
Iðunn tells her new (young! female!) doctor that she doesn’t feel any better since their first meeting. Not that she’s blaming Asdis, who must be more imaginative than she is, and much more knowledgeable. Asdis doublechecks Iðunn’s blood work: All good. Has she been under stress, depressed? No, Iðunn answers, though it’s no fun to be exhausted all the time.
Asdis gives her a questionnaire. The score indicates that Iðunn does show signs of depression. Iðunn googles the recommended psychologist. Though he specializes in working with the chronically ill (and is very handsome), she doesn’t book an appointment.
* * *
Iðunn wakes to burning pain in her leg. Her pillow smells of brine. Her hair is damp and smells of the sea. Her back hurts, too. She forgot to take off her new watch the night before, and is shocked to see it recorded over forty-seven thousand steps since resetting at midnight. She only walked about six thousand yesterday! It’s impossible; the watch must be broken.
* * *
At work, Iðunn searches the internet for pedometer malfunctions, finding none. She leaves a message at the watch store, then reads an email from her ex Stefan, whom she’s been avoiding but who works for the same company. It’s a mass-mailing about how to save data on the shared drive. Its tone is kind, its instructions detailed. She thinks it must have taken him hours.
At lunch, she gets a reply from the watch store: no clue about her error. That night she takes off the watch and manually resets it to zero steps. It still reads zero steps in the morning.
* * *
Iðunn has a minor superpower: She knows all the cats in her area. When people ask on the neighborhood Facebook, she could share that that’s not a stray, it’s Mavur, or that Sushi’s roaming because her owners got a dog. But she rarely posts on Facebook, just “uses it to spy”.
Nevertheless, she knows the cats, and they know her, and will usually come when she calls. Lately, though, they distrust her. Even Tigger Tiggersson stares suspiciously and hisses. Tigger, whom she’s known for eight years! Is he put off by her new perfume, a sample from Mom? The internet reports no connections between the perfume and cat animosity.
* * *
Iðunn goes to her parents’ house for dinner. Their script varies little except for different seasons and the diners’ physical condition. Mom dominates the conversation. This time it centers on Dad’s bad back, and how this summer they want to go to Florence. Iðunn’s sister always wanted to go to Florence, remember? Iðunn should come with them.
Iðunn declines the invitation, nor does she want more chicken since she’s vegetarian. Remember? Some more red wine, then a can of beer with Dad. Before ten o’clock, she’s home, calling her friend Linda. If she’s going to have a hangover, she might as well enjoy earning it.
She meets Linda and two of Linda’s friends at a sushi restaurant. They gossip about people she doesn’t know. From the restaurant they go to a trendy bar. A man stares at Iðunn oddly—the same guy who stared at her at happy hour. This time, he approaches. She glares, but relaxes at a closer look—he doesn’t seem the sleazy type. He says, “I thought you were…” He hesitates, and Linda steps in. “Mar,” she says quietly, “This is her sister. Iðunn.”
* * *
Iðunn’s been in this situation before, with someone scrutinizing her face, comparing it to her sister’s. Mar is wondering if she would have looked like this, if she’d lived. Mar finds a table for the party. Iðunn feels sorry for him, especially when he cries (in a masculine sort of way). He explains that he and her sister were together at university. Didn’t her sister ever speak of him?
She spoke of plenty of men, waking two-years-younger Iðunn after college parties to describe her sexual adventures. Then she would go to bed, leaving Iðunn to wonder if she’d ever have that kind of life. Mar says he was “enchanted” with her sister. Then, after graduation, he heard what happened to her. It must have been very sad for Iðunn.
Iðunn almost admits that it was a relief, corrects to saying it was a big shock. Mars has beautiful green eyes, full of kind consideration. When they sit together in silence, it isn’t unpleasant, and there’s a gleam when they say goodbye.
* * *
Next day she wakes exhausted and aching everywhere. Her watch has recorded six thousand more steps than she can account for. She tears it off as if it were a leech, then notices the brown crusting under her nails. It washes off pinkish. It smells of rust.
A brainstorm hits: her watch isn’t broken! She’s been sleepwalking! That would explain everything. Initial relief turns to anxiety when she learns that many sleepwalkers turn violent. But Iðunn’s never been violent, even as a kid when her sister hit her.
She wants to see Asdis, but it’s Saturday. The internet advises sleepwalkers to lock their doors and windows, and store weapons and knives in a safe place.
The Degenerate Dutch: Oh, good—Iðunn has apparently broken up with the extremely rude Stefán.
Libronomicon: One of the neighborhood cats is named for Kitten Brandur, a popular Icelandic kids’ book. Another is named for A. A. Milne’s Tigger
Madness Takes Its Toll: Especially if you don’t make your recommended therapy appointment. Admittedly therapy might be less than useful for Iðunn’s particular situation.
Anne’s Commentary
The cornstarch that thickens the plot in these chapters is the fragmented revelation that Iðunn has a sister. The first time she’s mentioned is in Chapter 12, when their mother talks over dinner about summer vacation plans. She adds that “your [Iðunn’s] sister always told me she wanted to go to Florence.” If this reminiscence is meant to entice Iðunn into joining the excursion, it fails—she immediately turns down Mom’s invitation.
The sister goes unnamed, now and throughout the chapters under consideration. That Mom uses the past tense in referring to Sis’s interest in Florence provokes speculation. Has Sis scratched Italy off her destination wishlist? Or has she estranged herself from the family, so that she’s no longer telling Mom anything? Or—
Can she be beyond all travel plans and communication?
Later in Chapter 12, the two-time barroom starer notches up the weirdness of his interest by tapping Iðunn’s shoulder and saying simply, “You.” Iðunn’s defensive step backwards draws the implied apology of “I thought you were…”
But he hesitates to say whom he’s mistaken her for. Linda tactfully steps between them, calls the man by name, and quickly introduces the object of his interest as “this is her sister, Iðunn.”
If the novel had a soundtrack, it would punctuate Linda’s words—and the abrupt chapter break—with ominous bass notes signifying a Sinister But As Yet Mysterious Revelation.
Chapter 13 opens with Iðunn’s interior monologue confirming that she’s often been taken for Sis, a misidentification she finds uncomfortable. She feels Mar is comparing her to her sister, face and body. She supposes he’s wondering whether Sis would have looked like Iðunn if (more ominous bass notes) “she had lived.”
So it’s out in the open now. Sis is dead. No wonder Mar’s mistaking Iðunn for her was an embarrassing situation. Who wants to admit he thought he was seeing a ghost? Nor, if one is a nice guy, does one want to mortify a surviving sister with painful memories. Mar proves he’s nice by both showing his own pain at Sis’s loss and acknowledging what Iðunn must have felt. Plus he has gorgeous almost-green eyes. Double-plus, when they look into Iðunn’s eyes, they see Iðunn, not Sis.
Mar seems hurt that Sis never told Iðunn about their relationship. At the same time, he seems uncertain about exactly what that relationship was. He says they were a couple, but admits he might be exaggerating and falls back to the vaguer “we were together.” Iðunn isn’t surprised a guy might have trouble knowing where he stood with Sis. She remembers all the times Sis would boast about her college-scene flirtations and adventures. Rather callously, or at least obtusely, she tells Mar that Sis would talk about boys, sure, but not so Iðunn can remember any of their names.
No wonder Mar gazes sadly out the bar windows with his moss-green eyes. “I was enchanted with her,” he says.
Not infatuated with. Not in love with. Enchanted with. Or would that more accurately be, enchanted by?
Mar talks about Sis’s death, which he evidently heard of secondhand, as “very sad” and no doubt “a great loss” to Iðunn. Iðunn terms it “a great shock.” But what she thought and almost let out was that Sis’s death was a “relief.” A release of pressure, though the pressure would come back “a thousand times over.” An “emptiness.”
Sounds like a complicated sibling relationship, there. Chapter 14 adds one more reference to Sis. Having decided that sleepwalking, not an awful neurodegenerative disease, is the cause of her exhaustion, aches, and injuries, Iðunn is at first relieved. But then, as is her habit, she falls too deep into the internet rabbit hole and reads that sleepwalkers can not only seriously hurt themselves, they can get violent toward others.
Iðunn actually panics, sweating coldly, heart pounding. She hurriedly reassures herself that never in her life has she been violent. Hell, she never even fought with Sis. Sis hit her, but she never hit back. Nor could it have been a drop of blood on her chin or dried blood under her nails when she woke up unrested, extra steps on her pedometer watch.
No blood, nope, none. Bruises on herself, okay. She can deal with clumsiness, or even hits from others, but hell-to-the-NO, Iðunn is not violent!
If she were, the cats wouldn’t come to her. She knows the cats, and the cats know her.
But—the cats know her? And now the cats don’t come?
Uh oh. You can fool other people, but cats? In the literature of the weird, never.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Clues are beginning to emerge. Slightly blood-crusted clues. While sleep violence is indeed a relatively common component of sleepwalking, it’s most likely when some poor shmo has to share a bed with a sleep-fighter. I don’t think what’s happening here is quite that simple. Also Iceland isn’t exactly a high-violence society, and yet none of Iðunn’s gossipy friends is gossiping about bloody barehanded midnight attacks.
The cats, though… I may not like what we’re eventually to learn about where that blood comes from. And Iðunn certainly won’t.
Another clue: Iðunn’s dead sister, with whom she had a… fraught… relationship. Late-night secret-sharing, the smell of smoke, and the release (and then return) of some kind of pressure when she died. Comparison between the two of them by their parents? The expectation of a specific type of life? The way her sister hit her, but she never hit back? Maybe the dead sister has some role as the night guest—or maybe the guest is Iðunn’s own repressed anger and violence.
Her parents never let Iðunn finish a sentence. I wonder if that’s because there are things they’ve never wanted to risk hearing. Hell, they don’t even want to remember that she’s vegetarian. It certainly explains her iffy information-seeking efforts—they don’t seem like the sort of people who would teach you the best ways to learn what you want to know. Or provide answers you could trust.
The step-counter, once believed, is a different sort of clue. I started to write “the first concrete clue,” but that isn’t true. The blood, the muscle aches, those are all solid, physical indicators. But doctors aren’t the only people more comfortable with quantitative evidence, or with something that can be sensed by technology. We want metrics, tick marks on a screen, number-go-up. Blood on your chin is easy to dismiss, and Iðunn is already doing so. 47,325 steps, on the other hand. Or 16,000, on another night—apparently drunk werewolves don’t run as far. The data is visceral: a leech “suckling” on flesh, or on information. If you don’t collect it, you won’t know, and maybe it won’t be real.
Maybe, following up on the cats, a microchip would do some good. Though if Iðunn’s worried about the cybersecurity implications of step-counters, maybe not. And really, we all hope microchip reader lady doesn’t bump into Iðunn in the middle of the night. Either she’ll get mauled, or she’ll get judged for having purchased a cat scanner (as distinct from a CAT scanner). Who does that, Iðunn wants to know. (I do, I want to tell her. We kept finding strays, and thought it might save vet bills to be able to scan for microchips at home. Only, unlike Iðunn’s pedometer, it didn’t work.) She’s been trying to be non-judgmental; she has not been succeeding.
So here we are: more clues, more fear, and a little more dried blood. And someone who’s nearly as frightened of harming a living creature as of having a neurodegenerative disease. She’s almost certainly in for some bad news.
Next week, join us for Eugenia Triantafyllou’s Nebula-nominated “Joanna’s Bodies,” and a return-with-twists to the old trope of homoerotic occult-practicing besties.