# MØRKETID — FOUR NIGHTS NORTH
## Night One: Denmark — "What Was Put Under"

# THE LIGHTING

In Japan, when you tell frightening stories, you light a hundred candles and blow one out with each tale, and the room gets darker, and at the end of it something arrives.

They don't do that in the north.

They can't. Because up there, past a certain line on the map, the dark doesn't have to be invited. In November the sun goes down and it does not come back. Not properly. Not for weeks. The Norwegians have a word for it — *mørketid.* The dark time. It isn't night. Night ends. This is a season.

So there's no game to be played with candles. You don't blow them out. You light one, and you sit with it, and you wait.

Four nights. That's what this is. Four countries, four nights, and no crime in any of them — nothing that happened to a real person with a real name. Only the things those people were afraid of.

Which, I've come to think, might be worse. A crime tells you what one man did. A folk tale tells you what an entire country was frightened of for eight hundred years, all of them, at once, in the dark, together.

So. Before we start.

Have you ever been in a building and felt certain — not thought, *felt* — that something was underneath you? Under the floor. Under the foundation. Down where nobody goes.

Have you ever woken in the night unable to move? Not asleep. Awake. Fully, completely awake, with your eyes open, and nothing in your body answering you?

And when that happened — and it happens to about one in five of us, so a fair few of you know exactly what I'm describing — did you feel like you were alone in the room?

Tonight we're in Denmark. Which is the flattest country in this series. Almost no mountains. Almost no forest, once they'd cut it. Nowhere for anything to hide.

So they put it all underneath.

I'm the Tale Teller. Night one of four. The sun is not coming back yet.

# TALE ONE: THE GREY LAMB

Here is a thing that was done in Denmark, and in Sweden, and in England, and in half the churchyards of northern Europe, and it was done for centuries, and there are churches standing today where you could put your hand on the wall and be within a few feet of it.

When you consecrate new ground for burial, somebody has to be first.

That's the belief. The first body laid in a new churchyard doesn't get to rest. It becomes the warden. It stays awake — down there, in the cold, in the dark, under the grass — and it guards that ground against whatever it is that comes for the dead. Forever. It doesn't get to move on. It doesn't get to go wherever the others go. It works.

Now. Nobody wants that for their mother.

So they cheated.

Before the first person was buried, before the ground was used at all, they took a living animal — usually a lamb — and they dug a hole in the churchyard, and they put it in, and they filled the hole in on top of it.

Alive. That was the point. It had to be alive.

And that animal became the *kirkegrim.* The church grim. The warden. It took the post so that no human soul would have to.

I want you to sit inside that for a second, because we tend to hear these things as quaint.

A man in a wool coat, on a cold morning, standing in a field that is about to become a graveyard, holding a lamb. And the lamb is not frightened, because lambs aren't frightened of people, and it's warm, and it's been carried, and it has absolutely no idea. And he puts it down in the hole. And he starts.

And in Denmark they said that afterwards, on nights when someone in the parish was about to die, you might see it. A grey lamb, moving along between the stones. Head down. Working.

Which sounds almost gentle, and it is gentle, and I want to be clear that the gentleness is the horror. That thing is still doing the job. Nobody ever let it go. Nobody ever thought to.

But that's the lamb. That's the polite version.

Because in Denmark there was a second one, and the second one is not a lamb.

When they founded a churchyard and the parish had a bit more to spend, or the ground was thought to need something stronger, they buried a horse.

And the thing that comes up out of that ground is called the **helhest.** Hel's horse. Named for Hel, the old goddess of the dead — the one whose face is fair on one side and rotted on the other — and named that way because it is not the horse they buried. Not any more. It's what the churchyard gave back.

It walks on three legs.

I've read a lot of folklore and I don't know of a detail that works better than that one. Not two legs, which would be a wound. Not four, which would be a horse. Three. Something is missing and something is upright anyway and it is still moving toward you.

It walks the streets of the parish at night. It doesn't run. It goes at the pace of a thing with nowhere to be by morning. And in Denmark, if a person was seen to be sickening — really sickening, past the point of medicine — the phrase people used, and this is a real Danish idiom, was that he goes with the hel-horse. *Han går med helhesten.*

That was how you said someone was dying. Not "he's ill." He's got company now. It's walking with him.

And here's the last piece, the piece that I think tells you what Denmark actually is.

To see the helhest is to die. That's the rule. It's not a warning, it's a notification.

But it doesn't kick a door in. It doesn't come through the window. It walks in the street outside, on three legs, in the dark, past every house on the road — and every single one of those houses has someone in it lying awake listening to it go by, and only one of them is being visited, and none of them know which.

They put a living animal under the ground to keep the dead in their places.

Nine hundred years later the churches are still standing, and they are beautiful, and there are tourists in them, and under the floor of a not-small number of them there is a very small set of bones in a position that no animal ever chose.

# TALE TWO: THE MARE

Now we go inside, and we lock the door, which will not help.

There is a word in English that you use all the time and have almost certainly never looked at. Nightmare.

The *mare* part isn't a horse. It's not "night horse." It's older than that, and it's the same word in Danish, and in Danish it isn't a metaphor.

A *mare* is a woman.

Here's how it goes.

You're asleep. Late — the dead middle of the night, the part where the house has stopped making noises. And she comes. She doesn't need the door. She comes in through the keyhole, or the crack under the sill, or a knothole in the wood, and every account agrees on this: she can get through anything with a hole in it, and a house is nothing but holes.

She crosses the room.

And then she gets onto your chest, and she sits down.

And you wake up.

That's the detail I want. You *wake up.* This is not a dream. In every telling of this, from Denmark to Sweden to Germany to the Faroes, the person is awake. Eyes open. Mind entirely clear. They can see the room. They can see the beam above the bed, the shape of the window, the dark.

And they cannot move. Not a finger. Not their head. The body has been switched off with the person still inside it.

And there is a weight on their chest that is making it difficult to draw breath.

And in the old accounts, the ones written down from the mouths of people who'd had it happen, there is nearly always one more thing. They say they could tell she was looking at them.

Now — I know. Some of you have been shouting the answer for two minutes.

Sleep paralysis. It's real, it's understood, it's the ordinary and harmless business of your body's paralysis system failing to switch off at exactly the moment your consciousness switches on. Roughly one person in five experiences it at least once. It is not dangerous. Nobody has ever been hurt by it.

And I want to say very clearly that knowing that has never helped anybody who was in it.

Because the other thing that comes with sleep paralysis, reliably, across every culture that's ever recorded it, is the absolute conviction that there is a presence in the room. Not a fear. A *certainty.* People describe it identically whether they're in a Danish farmhouse in 1780 or a flat in Copenhagen last Tuesday: something is here, it is close, and it knows I'm awake.

The Danes gave it a name and a shape and a way in, which is arguably a healthier response than what we do, which is to lie there for ninety seconds having the worst experience of the year and then tell nobody.

And she doesn't only do people.

If you went out to the stable in the morning and found a horse lathered in sweat, exhausted, trembling, standing in a stall it hadn't left — she'd ridden it. All night. Round and round the inside of a locked building. And if you looked at its mane and found it knotted and matted into tight little plaits that you could not comb out, those were mare-locks. That's where she held on.

So you protected the house. A knife driven into the door frame — she can't pass iron. Your shoes turned with the toes pointing away from the bed, so she'd get confused about which way you were lying. And best of all, a stone with a natural hole through it, hung above the bed — a hag-stone.

And there's one more remedy, and it's the strangest thing in this entire episode.

If you could work out the exact hole she'd come in by — the specific knot, the specific crack — and you stopped it up while she was still inside the room, then she was trapped. She couldn't leave the way she'd come, and it was the only way she could go.

And in the morning, they said, you'd find her. Standing there. In the corner of your bedroom in the daylight.

A woman. An ordinary woman. Frequently, in these stories, one you knew.

Because the last thing about the mare is that she isn't a monster and she never was. She's a person. Usually a woman from the parish who doesn't know she does it — who goes to sleep in her own bed in her own house and then goes out, without meaning to, without remembering, through the keyholes of the village.

She wakes up in the morning tired. And she cannot think why.

# TALE THREE: THE HILL THAT DANCES

Last one. And this is the one Denmark actually made — it's in the ballads, it's in the paintings, it's the thing Hans Christian Andersen grew up on.

You need to know two things first.

The first is that in Denmark the dead were buried in mounds. Long, low, grass-covered hills in the middle of fields — thousands of them, some four thousand years old, and you can still walk out and stand on one this afternoon. The farmers called them *elverhøje.* Elf-hills.

The second thing is what lives in them.

The *ellefolk.* The elf-folk. And if you're picturing anything from a film, put it down — these are not small, they are not sweet, and they are not on your side.

The women are extraordinarily beautiful. That's agreed everywhere. Tall, pale, long-haired, and they dance on the top of the mound in the low mist that gathers there on summer nights — the mist itself was called elf-mist, because they made it, because it came off them.

And they are beautiful from the front.

From behind, an elle-woman is hollow. There's no back to her. She's open, and empty, and rotted out, like a tree that's been dead a long time and has gone soft on the inside.

So you can be looking directly at the loveliest thing you've ever seen. And the whole time, if she turned around, you would be looking into her.

Now, the ballad.

There was a man called Oluf, and he was to be married in the morning. And the night before his wedding he rode out — nobody in the ballad ever says why, and I've always thought that's deliberate, because you know why, and so did everyone singing it.

And he came past the elf-hill. And the elves were dancing.

And the elf-king's daughter came out of the ring, and she put out her hand, and she asked him to dance with her.

And he said no.

He said: I mustn't dance, I daren't dance. Tomorrow is my wedding day.

So she offered him things. Two golden spurs. A silk shirt so white it was bleached in moonlight. A heap of gold.

And he said no again. Tomorrow is my wedding day.

And she said — and this is the line, this is the line the whole ballad is built to deliver —

*If you will not dance with me, then sickness and plague shall follow you.*

And she struck him. Between the shoulders. One blow, with the flat of her hand.

And he got back on his horse.

He rode home. And his mother was waiting at the gate, and she looked at him and said: why are you so pale? And he said: I have been to the elf-hill.

And she said — his mother, whose son is going to be married in a few hours — she said: what shall I tell your bride when she comes?

And Oluf said: tell her I've gone out to the woods, with my horse and my hound, to see how well they run.

And then he died. In the morning, before the wedding, in his own house.

And the bride came anyway. Because nobody had told her.

She arrived with the wedding party, in the clothes, with the music playing, and she asked the question you ask, which is: where is Oluf, why isn't he here?

And they told her the lie. He's gone to the woods with his horse and his hound.

And she said — and I think this is the coldest moment in Danish folklore — she said: *does he love his horse and his hound better than he loves me?*

Then she went through the house looking for him. Which is what anyone would do.

And she found him. And she lay down beside him. And by the time the sun was properly up there were three dead in that house — Oluf, and his bride, and his mother — and there is no version of the ballad in which anything is done about it, or anyone is punished, or the elf-king's daughter is ever seen again.

She asked him to dance. He said no. That's all he did.

# THE TURN

So. Three Danish things.

An animal put alive under a churchyard so that it would stand guard forever, and does. A woman who comes in through the keyhole and sits on your chest and looks at you while you lie there awake and unable to move. And a hill full of beautiful hollow people who kill you for declining them politely.

And what strikes me about all three is where they are.

Denmark is flat. It is the flattest country in this series by a long way — there's a hill somewhere in Jutland they call a mountain and it's about a hundred and seventy metres and they're being generous. There's almost no wilderness left, and there hasn't been for a thousand years. No deep forest to lose a monster in. No fells. No fjords. You can see, from most places in Denmark, essentially everywhere.

So the Danish horrors had nowhere to go except down.

Under the church. Inside the mound. Through the keyhole and into the house and onto the chest and down onto the lungs.

There is nothing out there in Danish folklore. That's the thing. Nothing waits in the wild, because there isn't any wild. Everything that frightened them was already inside the settlement — under the floor of the church they prayed in, in the field they ploughed, in the bedroom, on the body.

Which means the Danish version of the question isn't *what's out there.*

It's *what's underneath this*, and *how long has it been there*, and *what did we put there ourselves.*

# THE BLOWING OUT

Before you go.

Have you ever been in a building and felt certain something was underneath you?

Have you ever woken up unable to move, with your eyes open, in your own room?

And when it happened — did you feel like you were alone?

You weren't.

That's night one. Three to go. Tomorrow we go east, into Finland, into the woods — and I'll tell you now, so you can decide whether you want to be there: Finland is the worst of the four.

The candle stays lit. That's the whole point of this one. You don't put it out and you don't sleep too heavily, and if you wake up at three in the morning and you can't move —

— don't look at the corner of the room.