Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hjalmar sat down to breakfast with an aggrieved air. He buttered a slice of toast to within an inch of its life and sawed a piece of bacon in two with such force that it was a wonder he didn't break the plate. All the time he pointedly avoided looking at Solvej. She sat across the table from him, daintily nibbling at a slice of toast and looking like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. From time to time her eyes stole to his still-damp hair, and she had to fight back a smile.

"Most people," said Hjalmar, addressing his remarks to his cup of coffee as if merely thinking aloud, "would allow someone to wake in their own time. If they had to wake someone, they would do so by calling their name or shaking them. They wouldn't throw things at them!"

"I didn't throw things at you. I dropped something on you. There's a difference. Don't you have any siblings?"

"Not much of a difference," Hjalmar muttered. "And yes, I have two sisters, if it's any of your business."

"No brothers?"

"No," Hjalmar said through gritted teeth.

"That explains it." Solvej sat back in her chair with the air of one who had solved a great mystery.

"What does it explain?" Hjalmar asked, feeling once more the bafflement caused by prolonged exposure to Solvej. Whether being dead had done something to her, or whether she had always been like that, he couldn't say. But there seemed to be two ways of looking at the world -- the normal way, and the Solvej way -- and rarely did the twain meet.

"Why, if you had brothers, then you'd be used to that sort of thing. But sisters..." She shrugged as if there was no more to say.

"Did you have any brothers?" Hjalmar asked, suddenly realising how little he knew about his self-appointed travelling companion.

"Four brothers. Two sisters," Solvej said around a mouthful of toast.

Hjalmar gaped. "Seven? My mother used to complain that three were enough to drive her mad!"

"My mother said similar things every time she got tired of all of us talking at once. Though she used words I'm sure your mother would never dream of using." A melancholy, far-away look crept into Solvej's eyes.

Hjalmar thought of his mother and the things she said when angry. "You'd be surprised. When she finds us especially annoying she uses words that would make a sailor blush."

They were silent for a moment, lost in their memories of their families. Then Solvej started to giggle.

"What's so funny?" Hjalmar asked, surprised.

"I was just wondering what your mother would say if she knew you were travelling with a ghost -- and for that matter, what my mother would say."

Hjalmar tried to imagine the scene. 'Oh, and by the way, Mother, I have a new travelling companion. She's a ghost with a habit of throwing sponges at people. Why, yes, I am perfectly sane. No, I haven't been drinking.' Hmm. Perhaps he should conveniently forget to mention Solvej in his letters.

"We should be on our way soon," Solvej was saying. "It's seven miles from here to Therlund."

"We can get the train," Hjalmar said, remembering an article in the newspapers back home. "They've finished laying the tracks between here and Therlund."

Solvej blinked. "What is a train?"

~~~~

There had been many new inventions and discoveries made since Solvej's death. The train was one of those. Such a thing had never been dreamt of when she was alive: a metal wagon that moved of its own accord.

It sat beside the train station's platform, big and black and billowing smoke. Had she not known what it was she would have been afraid of it. Even now, knowing what it was, she was still unnerved by it. The smoke rising from its funnel reminded her of the smoke from a dragon's mouth immediately before it breathed fire. The puff-puff noise its engines made sounded like the breaths of some giant monster.

Hjalmar, blissfully unaware of Solvej's thoughts on the train, viewed it with awe and wonder. In his hometown, far out in the country, such machines were as far removed from everyday life as a country on the other side of the planet was from the town. And now here he was, seeing a train for the first time!

Once aboard, Hjalmar took a window seat and peered curiously through the glass at the platform outside. Solvej settled herself in the seat opposite, clutching the edges of the seat so tightly that her knuckles turned white.

With a piercing whistle, an abrupt jolt and a chug-chug noise, the train began to move. Solvej's hat, dislodged by the movement, slipped half off her head. Since putting it back in place would require letting go of the seat, she let it stay that way.

Fields, houses, roads, rivers, all whirled past the windows almost too quick to be seen. At one point the train roared and clattered its way past a large lake in a valley.

"I hope this contraption doesn't disturb the nökur[1]," Solvej remarked, speaking for the first time since getting on the train.

Hjalmar tore his eyes away from the window to gape at her. "Nökur? They exist?"

She nodded with a grim sort of smile. "Oh, almost every fairy-tale creature exists. The nökur don't like too much noise; they say it disturbs their music."

"Do they really--"

"Draw those who hear them to their deaths? Foretell drowning? Yes." Solvej's tone forbade any further questioning.

Hjalmar tried anyway. "But--"

"Would you expect a wolf to act like an eagle?" Solvej interrupted.

Hjalmar gaped, baffled by this inexplicable remark. "Of course not!"

"And would you expect a mouse to act like a duck?"

"Certainly not!"

"Then," said Solvej, "why do you expect something that is not human to act human?"

With this she seemed to consider the conversation done. Hjalmar was left to wonder what on earth she'd been talking about.

~~~~

The train station in Inbur, the town they had left, had been small and quiet, with only a handful of people around the place. The train station in Therlund, on the other hand, was large and noisy. Crowds of people milled around, chattering until the station resounded with their voices. Porters rushed hither and thither, carting luggage on or off the train.

There was so much to see that Hjalmar couldn't concentrate on any one thing. He spun around, gazing with amazement at his surroundings. Colourful patterns cast on the floor by the sun shining through the glass roof; people getting on or off trains on different platforms; posters on the walls proclaiming where each train went and how much a ticket cost...

"Well?" Solvej asked with uncharacteristic waspishness. "Are we going to get anything done today or will you just stand there with your mouth open?" She scowled suddenly. "Oh, shut up."

"I said nothing," Hjalmar protested.

"I didn't mean you."

There was no one else she could have been speaking to, except a porter busily engaged in stacking suitcases on a trolley further down the platform. Hjalmar shrugged and put it down to Solvej being Solvej.

"Come on then," he said, picking up his suitcase and setting off in search of the exit.

~~~~

Meanwhile, back in Inbur, a toad-like creature was grumbling to itself.

"Go there! Come here! Do this! Find that! Never a "please" or "thank you" or "if you'd be so kind"; oh no, not from him. And now he expects me to find a ghost without telling me what a ghost looks like? Bah!"

The goblin, for it was a goblin, hid behind a garbage bin and watched the passersby, complaining all the while. "And of course he didn't give me any more instructions than "find her". What does he think I am? A miracle worker?"

It sat in silence for a while, glaring out at the people wandering past the garbage bin.

"Well," it announced at last, "I'm not going to stand for it. He didn't tell me when he expected me back, so I'm going on holiday for a few days!"

It nodded decisively and set off, keeping to the cover of the shadows.

~~~~

Hjalmar, having asked directions of a porter in the train station, set off for the nearest job market. That was his plan, anyway. It lasted until he stepped out of the train station and found himself on a busy street.

Tall buildings towered overhead. Horses and carriages clattered by. Hundreds of people hurried past. Small shops were clustered next to each other in the shade of expensive offices. The city was as unlike his hometown as it was possible to be.

This time, Solvej did not complain when he stopped to stare in wonder. Indeed, she stared too.

"What on Earth are those?" she exclaimed, pointing to several large, two-storey carriages moving up or down the street.

"I think they're called omnibuses," Hjalmar said, eyeing them with interest.

The two of them stood in silence, gaping at their surroundings and looking, if they could only have seen themselves, extremely foolish.

For once, it was Hjalmar to return to his senses first.

"We can't stand around here all day," he said, reluctantly tearing his eyes away from a brightly-painted omnibus parked further along the street. "Come on, or we won't reach the job market before it closes."

Solvej sighed and turned away from the coloured lights strung over a shop's window.

"To think all this could have happened in just a hundred years!" she remarked as they set off down the street.

"Well, a hundred years is a long time," Hjalmar pointed out. "Did you feel how long it was?"

"Not really. Sometimes, yes, the years seemed to drag on and on, but sometimes they flew past like lightning, and most of the time I wasn't even aware time was passing. It's hard to explain. I suppose it was like being asleep."

"I suppose that's a good thing," Hjalmar said after some thought. "It would have been dreadful to be aware of all that time passing."

Solvej gave him an odd look, as if he had mentioned something she'd never thought of before. "Yes. I suppose it would."

~~~~

They wandered up streets and down roads, through busy markets and past noisy pubs. Hjalmar kept a careful eye out for the job market. Solvej paid more attention to the shop windows they passed.

She stopped abruptly in front of a clothing store. "Good heavens! Who could wear a dress like that? She wouldn't be able to get through a door with such sleeves!"

At her first exclamation Hjalmar had stopped in fright, thinking something was badly wrong. Once he realised it was nothing more alarming than an example of the latest fashion, his alarm faded and was quickly replaced with irritation.

"For goodness's sake, we've more important things to worry about than clothes!"

"True," Solvej agreed reluctantly, still eyeing the dress with its enormous puffed sleeves as if it were some curiosity from another planet. "I never realised how odd modern clothes were. I think I'll keep wearing these clothes."

"Wear whatever you like," sighed Hjalmar, his patience thinning fast. "I won't try to stop you. But can we please get a move on?"

Solvej looked at the dress one last time, shook her head, and continued on.

~~~~

The job market was a large office at the end of a street. Its window was covered with small pieces of paper, advertising jobs and informing those interested in applying of where to go. Hjalmar scanned them row by row. Solvej stood off to the side in silence. When he glanced over at her he was puzzled to see she was gazing up at the sky with an air of grim concentration that would have been better suited to a matter of life and death than watching the clouds drift by. He shrugged and turned back to the advertisements.

One of them caught his eye for reasons he couldn't quite understand, and he found himself going back to it repeatedly. There was nothing unusual about it; it was merely a piece of paper saying that a bookshop on Noorrok Street needed a shop assistant, and anyone interested should apply to Vidar Ovesen at the shop itself or at 24 Knymuth Lane. Hjalmar couldn't understand why he kept looking back at it.

Then he remembered his dream, and his father's odd advice.

"Um, Solvej," he began uncertainly, "do you think dreams have any special significance?"

"Sometimes they do, other times they don't," was Solvej's exceedingly helpful response. At Hjalmar's rolling his eyes she offered some more information. "I can't be any more specific than that. It entirely depends on the dream, the person who had it, and the circumstances surrounding it."

Hjalmar fell silent, considering this. "So... suppose someone dreamt that someone they knew told them to go somewhere or do something. Would that have any special meaning?"

Solvej shrugged. "Impossible to say. Dreams are all but impossible to understand. A person may think they've received special guidance in a dream when it was really their subconsciousness. Another might think that some higher being has given them advice when it's really an evil spirit. Or they may have communicated with another person in their dream. No one can say for sure. There are witches who spend their whole lives studying dreams, and they tend to be the oddest, least sane witches around. It's best to rely on your own common sense, and avoid meddling with dreams."

"Hmm." This reassuring lecture understandably unnerved Hjalmar. He stared at the advert and thought again about his dream. Should he dismiss it as his imagination? Obey it and hope for the best?

Solvej muttered something that sounded oddly like, "What do you mean, I should keep my mouth shut? I'm trying to be helpful!" Since Hjalmar had said nothing, he decided this couldn't possibly be aimed at him.

"It can't do any harm," he said aloud after pondering the question for several minutes. "I'll write down the address."

Chapter Footnotes:

[1] nökur = Vardiholmish word for the water spirit known variously as a neck, nicor, nixie or nøkk.