THE NOVEMBER KING

THE NOVEMBER KING
by Nicklas Berild Lundblad

The lawyer asked me to stay after the reading of Uncle Erik’s will. He had left the small cottage on Vårholma island to me – a cottage he had built himself, and where we spent summers when I was a child. It was located in the middle of the archipelago outside of Stockholm – and with the real estate prices being what they had become, I was inheriting a minor fortune, but also a very rickety cottage. No real work had been done on the cottage since it was built in 1936, in the great wave of summer house projects that were launched to ensure that everyone would be able to afford a summer home in an increasingly social-democratic Sweden. Now, of course, those same cottages were being taxed at levels that often forced families to sell – but the Lord giveth and He taketh away, I guess.

“My condolences”, he began and then cleared his throat. “It is just that there is a minor clause in the will that we need to take care of. Your uncle left a letter that he required that you read, and then that you do what the letter says, at the end, there is a … condition.”

“What do you mean? I inherited the cottage, didn’t I?”

“Well, yes – but on this condition. That you read the letter, and then do what it says. Otherwise, I am to sell the cottage and donate the proceeds to a home for stray dogs, you see. I did not read that part, because the will also said that no-one else needs to know about this particular provision of the will.”

“Sure. I am happy to read the letter.”

He breathed what looked like a sigh of relief and handed me a small envelope, addressed to me in my uncle’s distinct, spidery handwriting.

“Do I need to read it now?”

“Yes. Now. I am sorry, but the will…”

“It is fine. I will read it now.”

+++

I sat down and opened the letter. It smelled of burned firewood and tar, the smell of the cottage on the island, and I smiled. He had written it out there, at his little writing desk, I was sure. He was a kind man, but he was also all-over what people now refer to as “the spectrum” – autistic in his own way. He preferred time spent with the fir and pine over shallow talk with neighbors and was often seen kayaking around the islands in a small wooden kayak that he had built, painstakingly, himself. He lived on the island – not many people do these days – and was a source of constant concern for the municipality of Värmdö, who wanted him to move to the mainland and stay at an old people’s home. He absolutely refused to even meet them. When one of them came out to the island to inspect his house to see that it had all of the latest technology for safety in the home, he said that the only thing he missed was some salt to throw on the ice that led to the outhouse that served as his restroom, since it “got somewhat slippery when the temperature went below -10 degrees”. The safety inspector fled the island, and no further attempts to recruit him to the “Cloudberry Retirement Home” were made. Which was probably for the best – both for him and the current residents of that fine establishment.

The letter was a few pages, and I started reading – amazed at how he had composed this. Usually, he only sat at his writing desk to write short notes on the weather and whatever luck he had had fishing that day – he kept meticulous notes about the nature, weather and fishing, in small books with wax covers, and kept them in a small bookcase over the desk. When I once asked him, when I was a child, why he did this – he said that if no-one keeps notes, then things never happened, as if noting down the days made them real, in some way.

“Dear Ludvig,

I am writing this letter to you because I know that I am dying. I haven’t been to the medicine man in the city – they just want to cut you open – but I can feel it in my bones. Death is coming for me, and that is just as it should be. He keeps his notes as well, and nothing is real if we do not die. But that is not why I am writing.

I will give you the cottage.

I know you belong here; I could see it in you when you were a child, how you could spend hours playing in the woods. You would sit quietly under your dream pine, the one that was a little bent and looked almost like a palm, and I swear that you looked as if you had always been there. But you were only here in the summer, and that is the thing. The summer in the archipelago – it is different. The tourists, the boats, the parties – oh, I know you liked the parties too, but now you may be spending time here outside of those summer months, and there is something that you need to know. And I need you to do something for me.

We often forget that the archipelago lies in the Baltic Sea. She is the cruelest of seas. You may think that the Mediterranean has killed more people, or that the oceans have swallowed more lives, but you would only be partially right. The Baltic Sea is cold, Ludvig, and so if you fall into it you will drown. Fast. It has claimed many, and will claim many still that do not know just how hungry she is – she does not let you survive for days; she first devours your warmth and then she drags you down into the gray.

The same sea that is the bluest blue on a Midsummer’s Eve is gray and deadly already late in September. In October it becomes ravenous, but it is in November it really changes.

November is a place, Ludvig. Out here it is a place. The laughter is gone, and the firs and pines eat all daylight in a matter of hours. The sea turns quiet, and if you look closely when you are kayaking across the sound you can see the drowned, their hands swaying in the depths. The skies are not of this world, they become milky white like the blind eyes of a dying god, and they will seep into your soul.

The old islanders, the ones that lived here when we came with our summer laughter and built our little cottages, knew this. Do you remember Nils? He was the last of a long line of farmers on the island, but he never stayed on the island in November. He would travel to the city, and rent an apartment, and then come back just before Christmas. I asked him once why, and he looked me straight in the eye, and he said, softly:

“Because in November we do not belong here. It belongs to him. And if you have met him once, well, you never want to meet him again – if you get away.”

He refused to say anymore, and I made fun of him for it. I even called him a scared old man, but he just laughed.

“You stay, then, and we can speak after that.”

How could a young man not take up a challenge like that? And I was young then – and brave, or braver than I am now. I believed that I would prove the old fool wrong, and so went to Waxholm with the ferry, loaded up on provisions and returned to the island. In those days the ferry was not what it is today – it only came once ever second week, and only if the weather allowed. It was not unusual of the island to be ice-locked in late November, and so then you had to manage on what provisions you had gathered over the summer. Luckily, I had a large cellar, and I had stuffed with a little bit of everything, so I had no worries that I would be wanting anything.

So, I stayed as October withered into the darkness that is November.

My grandfather used to say “no hope, no mercy, November.” The darkness of November in this country is dense, it is almost possible to cut, like a cloth, and it falls early. The sun starts burning out in beautiful embers by 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and sets completely after three. The dusk is whisked away by night quickly and after that the darkness descends, quietly like an ancient predator.

The first couple of days I found depressing, and I missed the light, and someone to speak to. I had not moved to the island then, and I missed the company of a few friends, a game of chess and perhaps a drink or two. The island offered just the crackling fire and then books, but I found that I quickly fell asleep if I tried to read – it was the damndest thing, as if the darkness sapped me of all strength. I started going to bed around 7 and wake up around 8 when the sun rose. The days grew shorter, and I started to worry that I would indeed go insane here on the island. I had resolved to give up and travel back when the ice settled. At first slowly, and then sickeningly fast. The water cracked into ice and the darkness beneath it seemed trapped in time.

I understood then that the ferry would not come, and that I would be stuck here until the ice-breakers came to clear a path for them – and that would take at least a week. There was nothing else to do than to accept my fate, so I started to chop more wood for the stove.

That was the first time I saw him.

It was dusk, and I was standing outside with my axe, next to the woodshed. I was about to start chopping when I caught a glimpse of something in the dusk, just a small distance into the wood. It was large, almost 3 meters tall, but the weak light of dusk shone through it. When I looked directly at it, it disappeared, but as soon as I turned my eyes I saw it again – it was as if it was only visible in my peripheral vision.

The milky white light of the sky shone through it, and after a while I realized why. It was made almost entirely of bones, animal bones.

I tried not to look directly at it, and after a few moments I was able to see it more clearly at the edges of my vision. It was a thing of bones, and something more. Seaweed? It must have been, it looked like it was draped over some of bones and it gave the impression of tying the being to the ground where it stood, like it was anchored.

You may find it curious, but I was not afraid. That is not the feeling that flows over you, no, it was a feeling of insignificance. Of being without any import or value. The thing stood there watching me, and I almost felt honored that it would look at me. There was something about time. It gave off a sense of a different time, of existing in between moments. It was old. Really, really old. And for it to watch me – it was like being watched by one of the prophets from the Old Testament, if they turned up today. Something that old has a gaze that cuts through you. Leaves you exposed.

I had stopped chopping and now just stood there, not looking directly at it.

Darkness was coming fast, and I realized I had some 100 meters to the relative safety of the cottage. What would it do to me if I was out here when the darkness fell? Could it move only in darkness? Was that its true element? And what would happen if I was caught in that same darkness as it was?

I had absolutely no interest in finding that out.

I ran for the house, and all the time tried to keep an eye on the thing, falling, stumbling and running like a child. I reached the door, and closed it, locked it behind me. I ran into the cottage, and I am not afraid to admit that I hid under the bed. Like a small boy!

But when darkness fell, I heard it. I could hear the heavy footsteps of the thing as it walked up the small deck that we have outside the cottage. I could hear fishbones rasp against the windows. All the time lying still, almost without even breathing under the bed. I could hear the clickety-clack of the deer bones, as if the thing was not completely held together by the sea weed, as if it was just loosely joined, cobbled together by the winds and the darkness.

I stayed under the bed the entire night, and in the day, I braced the weather – it was damned near a storm – and took my kayak to the mainland. I thought I saw it twice, once standing on the harbor, watching as a paddled away. The second time I thought I saw it beneath me, in the depths, swimming with great big wings of bones, slowly floating down there beneath the gray waves.

I didn’t come back until May the next year.

I met Nils down at the ferry, and he smiled at me first – and then he looked me in the eye.

“You saw him, did you not? The November King?”

I slowly shook my head. He laughed again, mostly to himself.

“I can see him in your eyes.”

“What is he”, I blurted out.

“He is the king of those moments in time. He has always been, and this island is a part of his endless realm, a realm cut out of dusk and darkness. There are secret spaces everywhere, cracks in our world. And things live there. Always have. The old islanders called him He Who Lives in the Bones and they sacrificed all the bones of animals hunted or killed on the island to him, in October.”

“Why?”

“Well, so that he would have a fresh supply of bones, and not come for theirs. That is what he needs you see. He needs bones. You should be lucky he did not take yours.”

He turned around and walked away.

Ever since I have been taking time, in October, and I have gathered animal bones. The bones of bird and fish, some from deer and elk – and the occasional cow, it must be admitted, and I have stacked them high in my small boat, gone out a quiet night and offered them up for him. I make sure to sink them in the middle of October, way ahead of the shift into November, and this, Ludvig, brings me to my ask.

I need you to continue this. You get the cottage on the condition that you continue this, because I know – I just know – that otherwise he will come for me, and dig up my bones, the bones I cheated him of that night, as I lay there under my bed.

And I could imagine no worse fate than for him to slowly take my bones and tie them together with that dark seaweed, weave them into his ancient body with all that cold and darkness.

That is what I imagine hell is.”

+++

I folded the letter carefully and looked at the lawyer.

“So you want me to promise that I will continue to sacrifice bones to this imaginary entity?”

The lawyer nodded, and looked relieved.

“That is right. That is the condition.”

“Any bones?”

“The quantity and kind will be noted in your uncle’s wax notebooks, as I understand.”

“What if I forget to do it one year?”

“I don’t think you will”, said the lawyer. And he smiled. “Read the last bit.”

I looked down and found that there was a little bit of writing on the reverse page.

+++

“I am not just asking this for myself. This thing now knows my bones, and that means that it knows your bones too. You will start seeing it, at the edges of your vision, as early as in September. It is keyed to you now. Every time you are on the island you will sense it. It is always there, just behind the summer nights and the early spring mornings, waiting for the crack in time, waiting for November. And if you really want the cottage you will need to do this, because I am sure that it can break out from its prison. I saw it once during a Midsummer’s Eve, emerging from the sea, down at the harbor and then shimmering and disappearing. It is getting stronger. The bones – they keep it at bay, but I do not know for how long. I am sorry, Ludvig.”

+++

I handed the letter back to the lawyer. Something flickered at the edge of my peripheral, and I smelled the distinct scent of sun-bleached bird bones for just a second.

“I will do it”, I said.

Fiction © Copyright Nicklas Berild Lundblad
Image by Jakub Zeman from Pixabay