Through the Wormhole: Hildur Knútsdóttir’s <i>The Night Guest</i> (Part 3)

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 15–21 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 calls the health center first thing in the morning. Ásdís calls back around noon, and Iðunn rushes into a restroom stall before answering. She explains how she’s been sleepwalking and asks for sleeping pills. In fact, she begs. She’s exhausted, she can’t go on like this! Ásdís seems reluctant. Drugs aren’t the first solution for sleep problems. You need to get “to the root” of the disorder. By the way, has Iðunn seen that psychologist Ásdís recommended?

No, Iðunn admits, but if they can try both therapy and drugs, she’ll book an appointment right away. Ásdís agrees to post a prescription to Iðunn’s account, enough for a month, after which she and Iðunn will have a follow-up appointment.

Iðunn is so grateful she tears up. Looking at herself in the restroom mirror, she tells her heavy-eyed reflection “Goodbye, bags.”

Her reflection doesn’t reply.

Back in her office, she starts to worry that some (older, male) doctor may tell Ásdís to cancel the prescription. She hurries to the pharmacy. The slow-moving old man in front of her at the pickup counter makes her want to scream, but at last she has her pills in hand. That evening she makes her bedtime into a tranquil ritual by preceding it with a linen change, luxurious bath, and the application of expensive body cream. The pill has made her feel peaceful. Everything seems whole. She is whole, and sleep comes easily.

* * *

Waking the next morning, she feels like a spaceship captain who’s taken her vessel safely through a wormhole. She has no aches anywhere. She moves lightly, refreshed; her slight dizziness and the strange taste in her mouth are just common side effects of the drug. All day she looks forward to her next little white pill. She wishes she could trumpet her recovery to Ásdís or a friend, but sharing personal news isn’t her style.

She doubts it’s normal to have no one to tell her good news, but she pushes the troubling thought away and concentrates on her adventurous and beautiful future. Even the accusatory manner in which her workmate Stína snipes about Iðunn’s happiness can’t ruin her good mood. Maybe she’s been the person Stína always compared herself to, congratulating herself that at least she wasn’t like Iðunn.

Back home, her oldest neighborhood cat friend, Mavur, runs away from her. What’s up with him and the other cats is a mystery, but stars still sparkle with the promise of a beautiful life.

* * *

She wakes in the bleak, gray morning on the kitchen floor. Her right leg aches, bruised from hip to knee as if she’d fallen on that side. The cabinet where she keeps her pills is open—is the box closer to the edge than the night before? Dread dogs her all day, but she tries to ward off thoughts of the meaninglessness of life, the fact that no matter what people decide, they must die.

That night, she takes a pill and a half, and the ritual no longer seems holy.

* * *

She wakes up in bed, with nothing but residual aches from her bruised leg. She can breathe again. She can hope. The day passes smoothly, until she takes down her pill box—and finds that all the sleeping pills are gone.

* * *

Iðunn rigs her cell phone on the bottom shelf of her bedroom closet, its camera lens pointed at her bed. She will run the video recorder all night, with her lamp dimmed but not turned off.

* * *

Her thighs are sore in the morning. She reviews the recording: She slept a while, then got up and moved out of camera range. It was nearly four hours before she returned to bed again, on her side, back to camera.

Iðunn goes back to the part of the recording where she first sits up. Though her face is in shadow, she can see that her eyes are open. Attentive.

* * *

Where did she go?

What’s Cyclopean: “Somnambulism” sounds like “some kind of cannibalism.” Just a coincidence, right?

Weirdbuilding: If you can’t get a “beautiful life,” the next stop is “the void—the fundamental meaningless nature of life and the truth that despite the choices we make every day we all still die.”

Ruthanna’s Commentary

The disadvantage of planning longread segments before actually reading them is that sometimes the cutoff point is… inconvenient. And here I have to admit that when I got to Chapter 21 and it was one sentence—one question—I flipped a page and read Chapter 22, which is one paragraph and something perilously close to an answer. Which I now can’t discuss for two weeks.

Instead I will talk about Iðunn’s surprisingly sensible problem-solving this week. First, sleeping pills. I can see why Ásdís is nervous about letting Iðunn go on without a therapist, but at the same time Iðunn is right that sometimes you just need to cut the problem off at the neurochemical source. Indeed, getting a good night’s sleep (or getting storebought frontal lobe capacity or the overflow cut off your anxiety) is often necessary to making the longer-term stuff work. Sometimes it’s necessary to making the phone calls for that stuff in the first place. So bonus points to Iðunn for exhausted self-advocacy, and to Ásdís for listening.

Unfortunately, the “guest” has opinions about letting Iðunn sleep, and enough judgment/thumbs to get rid of a pill pack. Not, mind you, enough judgment to keep its nighttime perambulations to a level that wouldn’t push Iðunn to keep trying to solve the problem. It’s been clear throughout that Iðunn suffers from whatever she/her guest does at night, but this is the first point at which there’s clearly a direct, deliberate conflict between the two. “Whatever I do at night makes me exhausted” and “whatever I do at night actively wants to undermine my daytime activities rather than be undermined” feel like two very different things. Not just other self as inconvenience, but other self as enemy.

This brings us to sensible choice 2: filming her bedroom at night. That confirms that she’s sleep walking—or… sleep-something. She, or some version of her, does look awfully awake. And in contrast to the sleeping pills, doesn’t seem to treat the phone as a threat.

It certainly remains plausible that this other self grows from the things Iðunn suppresses. There are so many places this week where she thinks of expressing strong emotion, but doesn’t. In almost all cases this is in fact the correct decision—but it’s notable that she has to make the conscious effort. She is full of passions, of childlike anger and childlike gratitude, subsisting just under the surface.

To be fair, she’s not the only one—other people are regularly interacting with her in ways that they maybe should have suppressed. This week the role of Failed Shutting Up is played by Stína, who should definitely not have asked about “that masturbation class.” Here is a hint, which I am definitely aiming at Stína, and not at the stranger who recently responded to learning I was a married lesbian by telling me how to set up a Fetlife profile: before you say anything like that, shut up.

So this world is full of people who say, or manage not to say, annoying things, who can’t figure out the difference between expert advice and “something I heard on Facebook,” who bumble along not quite managing meaningful relationships, quietly comparing themselves to each other. Not hitting back, and managing to sorta hit the low-bar requirements of civilized interaction.

And, then, sometimes, there is blood.

Anne’s Commentary

Chapter 21 of The Night Guest contains four words, comprising the question Iðunn asks after viewing the cell phone video that confirms she’s been sleepwalking. Given that almost four hours elapsed between the time the camera captured her rising and the time it captured her returning to bed, the question’s a reasonable one:

“Where did I go?”

All the video can tell her is that, during those absent hours, she wasn’t within camera range. She needn’t have left her apartment, or even her bedroom if she avoided the camera. Similarly, when she woke on the floor with one leg bruised as if from a fall, she needn’t have traveled farther from her bedroom than the kitchen. Sleepwalkers are often clumsier than their waking counterparts. She more likely walked into a door frame than got into a cage match somewhere. Even so, if Iðunn’s right that sleepwalking explains all those nocturnal steps her fancy watch claims she racked up, she could have been ranging far afield in search of a mixed doubles fight club. Or she could just have been pacing her living room like a captive tiger, occasionally stumbling over the coffee table.

Are there no other clues? Does she always wake up in the jammies she went to bed in, or has she also been sleep-dressing for nights on the town or chilly moonlight hikes along the waterfront? Are there muddy footprints on her carpets she’s sure she didn’t track in the evening before? Something in her coat pocket she didn’t put there—in the smoky heyday of Hollywood, it would have been a souvenir matchbook from a club the heroine had never been to. Would never have gone to. That sort of thing, only updated for the digital age, so maybe phone pics she can’t remember taking of this club she’d never go to.

Where in the world, well, in greater Reykjavík, could Iðunn have gone this last night and on the other possibly-somnambulating nights? And if, as it appears, there aren’t more clues, why aren’t there? Could Iðunn be sleepcleaning after herself? Sleepdisappearing evidence to keep her waking self from knowing what her night self’s been up to?

But if that’s the deal, why wouldn’t the night self scrub stray red spots off her clothes and rust-smelling gook out from under her fingernails?

Blaming divided selves for causing Iðunn’s sleep woes may be premature. As Ásdís points out, knowing how to treat a sleep disorder requires getting to “the root of the problem. By “divided selves,” I’m thinking of stuff like doppelgängers and other supernatural manifestations of dual soul or being. More broadly on the supernatural front, I’m thinking possession—could be demonic, could be spectral, could be via black magic, what have you. I doubt Ásdís would think in terms of divided selves at all, or if she did, it would be as a perfectly natural mental health problem, like dissociative identity disorder (the Sensational Disease of the Week formerly known as multiple personality disorder, or split personality to its friends.)

Ásdís strikes me as a clinician who’d adhere to the rule of thumb that if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. A rare, dissociative identity disorder would be way down on her diagnostic checklist. On the mental health front, anxiety and stress would rank higher, then maybe trauma (new or childhood.) Sleep deprivation can trigger sleepwalking, as can apnea, alcohol ingestion, hyperthyroidism, Parkinson’s disease, and various environmental stimuli. Some medications can provoke sleepwalking, including the “sleeping pill” Ambien, and there apparently aren’t specific drugs to cure or control it. So it’s no wonder Ásdís hesitated to give Iðunn a prescription. She only agreed to do it if Iðunn would also, finally, call the psychologist Ásdís recommended earlier.

Did I miss it, or has Iðunn not actually booked a psychologist appointment since getting the little white pills of peace, tranquility, wholeness, and a vista of sparkling stars promising a beautiful life? The morning after her first pill, she wakes refreshed and painfree. She feels like a spaceship captain who’s negotiated a wormhole chaotic with possible futures, emerging with her ship intact and adventure ahead amongst unexplored stars! She can push aside the uncomfortable thought that she has no friend intimate enough to share her exaltation. She can even get over her favorite cat rejecting her as the other felines have. She’s got a pill waiting for the “holy moment” when it will “[lift her] up in a light embrace” before it lays her down to sleep.

Something less tender drops her awake on the kitchen floor with a painfully bruised leg and a sense her pill box has inched forward on its shelf. Clearly she’s sleepwalked again, in defiance of a one pill dosage. Did she come into the kitchen to take another pill? The spaceship captain realizes it’s not all stars ahead. There are dark spaces between them. Voids.

That day Iðunn has to struggle against perseverating about “the fundamental meaningless nature of life” when ultimately one’s choices can’t ward off death. On the third night, she takes an extra half a pill and wakes up in her bed. Her sleep wasn’t as quiet as on the first night, judging by the dishevelment of her bedclothes, but she has another good day until she opens the kitchen cabinet to find an empty pillbox.

Someone doesn’t want her to keep taking the sleeping pills. Unless that someone broke into her apartment to steal her precious supply, she must have sleepwalked to the kitchen to get rid of them herself.

Iðunn sets up her cellphone to record herself, the likely saboteur, sleeping. She wakes to sore thighs and aching fingers. The all-night video shows her sleeping, then rocking on the edge of the bed, then walking out of frame, not to return for three hours and forty-three minutes.

Iðunn’s back to the question that’s big enough to fill a whole chapter because she has no tentative answers to fill the blank space. All that’s clear is the person sitting on the bed, full frontal to the phone camera. Her face is in shadow, but when Iðunn zooms in, she can see her eyes.

They are not the eyes of a sleeper. They are open. They are attentive, aware.

The vital question shifts from “Where did I go?” to “Who’s there?” A sleepwalker’s eyes are generally open but look glazed, unfocused, without expression. Attentive and aware are both synonyms for awake. Wide awake. But if Iðunn’s wide awake when she goes on her ramble, why doesn’t she remember anything about those fourish hours?

Is it because Iðunn has fallen into profoundly oblivious depths of slumber, while someone or something else supplies consciousness and intent to her body and wears it for the evening?

Given the condition in which Iðunn gets her body back from this borrower, she should most definitely not a lender be. Not, I fear, that she has any choice in the matter.

Next week, join us for a lovely evening dance in Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s “The Wonderful Tune.” You can find it in Mike Ashley’s Queens of the Abyss anthology.