“You are not taking your work very seriously, are you?” Sigrid asked. “You are here so that you can say you came here. You don’t believe. You have no faith, so you cannot bargain in good faith. You are hoping to influence the local people that way. But not the hidden folk.”
“Do the hidden folk vote?” Jonsson asked. With Sigrid’s tea in his system, he could no longer hide his scorn. Her tea was useful, that way. It helped people to tell the truth. “Do they pay tax? Because until they do, they don’t really get a say in this.”
“You don’t even think they might exist, do you?” Sigrid asked. “Do you know the story?”
“I know all the stories—”
“The story of how the hidden folk went into hiding,” Sigrid said. “Do you know it?”
The assistant knew it. She had told it to him enough times. But Mr. Jonsson appeared to be at a loss.
“Soon after he had created the heavens and the earth, and all the animals and the beasts of the sea, and breathed life into Adam and fashioned Eve from Adam’s rib, God visited the couple at home in the Garden.”
The expression on Jonsson’s face closely matched the industry standard for embarrassment. He had come for witchcraft, not Sunday school. And while a passing superstition regarding the elves was common, belief in God was considered gauche at best.
“This was before they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, you see. So they had been rutting like animals, and they had already borne a litter of children. It was painless, because Eve had not yet been punished with the pangs of childbirth. So they already had a boy and a girl.”
Jonsson tried to stand. Sigrid’s arm shot out. Her gnarled hand gripped his forearm. Jonsson’s pale eyebrows climbed toward his thinning hairline. Few knew the strength that remained in Sigrid’s arms. Under the fat and the liver spots was muscle as tough as that of any shepherd’s horse. It was part of the reason why Sigrid’s daughter had purchased the assistant. Sigrid was too big for most home-care workers to wrestle.
“Although they did not understand nakedness, they did understand filth,” she intoned. “And their children were filthy. They were too filthy—from play, from exploring the Garden, from tending the animals—to meet the Lord their God. So Adam and Eve hid them in a field of stones.”
“I believe that qualifies as neglect,” Jonsson said, staring at the half-moons her yellowed fingernails made in his arm.
“But God saw them anyway, because God sees all that is. And for their dishonesty and foolishness, he punished Adam and Eve by hiding their children from human sight. Forever.”
“That seems a tad harsh, but then so was the flood.”
“You’ve never taken me seriously, have you?” Sigrid asked.
Jonsson pinked. He tried unsuccessfully to withdraw his arm. “I assure you, I have the greatest respect for your position in the community, and—”
“Bullshit,” Sigrid said. She didn’t let him go so much as cast his arm away in order to fold her own. “Respect. Pah. You don’t even know what that word means.”
Jonsson glanced quickly at the assistant. Not for the first time, the assistant wished that his shoulder joints had the ability to shrug. As it was, he had to remain still and wait.
“I’m sorry. I did not mean to offend you—”
“I’m not giving Erika your name, you know,” Sigrid said. “She’ll be Erika Sigridsdottir. And she’ll never have to put up with your bullshit.”
Now Jonsson’s mortification took on a different element. The assistant, like everyone on his network, had collated the various organic reactions to patients with Sigrid’s condition. Fear was not unusual. Disgust, discomfort, annoyance, frustration, anger, these were all common. They manifested in the face, in rolled eyes and huffed breath and lips that pulled back into a thing that looked like a smile but meant something different. But Jonsson handled things better than most: his years as a public servant had doubtless prepared him for some outbursts of madness and derangement among his constituents. Doubtless some of those constituents had Alzheimer’s too, just like Sigrid. His face froze, and became what for him might have been a real smile.
“That’s a good idea,” he said, apparently deciding to play along with Sigrid’s momentary lapse of memory. “I think she’ll prefer that.”
“Don’t you go taking credit for it,” Sigrid said. “It’s my idea.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Jonsson said. After a long moment, he added, “Perhaps it’s best if I got going.”
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Jonsson nodded, stood, and made his way to the door. He looked as though he might say something to the assistant, and then appeared to think better of it. The assistant rolled back to let him stand on the threshold.
“I’ll speak to them sooner rather than later,” Sigrid said. “About the elfstone. Maybe you can move it, to a location they like better. But you have to learn how to show some respect. That’s always been your problem. No respect.”
“Thank you,” Jonsson said. He shot the assistant a glance that could only be interpreted as sympathetic. “Good afternoon.”
*
That night, long after her talk with Erika (during which Erika sent the assistant several texts and pings and questions about the meeting with Jonsson), Sigrid crept out of her room. Subroutines in the house alerted the assistant to her movements; he was prepared to let her sleepwalk until she pulled a milk crate full of scarves and balaclavas down over her head.
“You can’t come with me,” Sigrid said through the balaclava she’d selected. It took an extra second to register her words for what they were. “Just help me with my boots and then find me the good oil lantern. Those damn LEDs never show me what I really need to see.” She frowned at the sudden explosion of patterned wool on the floor. “Oh, and tidy these up, please.”
“Do we have an appointment that is not on the calendar?” the assistant asked.
“No,” Sigrid said. “But the moon phase is right for treating with the elves. I don’t want any more visits from the road authority. That man has a toxic energy.”
The assistant checked the lunar calendar. Indeed, the moon was full, and that was the phase during which Sigrid had the most difficult time sleeping. In the past, before the assistant arrived, she’d frequently tried to go out for what she referred to in English as a “moonwalk.” Only the light of the full moon, she said, made it possible to see the elves as they truly were.
“I’m afraid that I cannot permit you to go out alone, without me,” the assistant said. “Your daughter made that very clear, and the three of us have spoken about it over five different times.”
“You can’t come with me,” Sigrid repeated. “The aurora. It’ll play hell with . . .” She gestured at him. “You know. You. It’ll fry your brain.”
There was a chance that the shifting waves of electromagnetic energy could disrupt the effectiveness of some of his functions. Other assistants on the network had reported similar problems. On the other hand, the chance of the aurora was only 20 percent that evening; he would have received a local alert, as all townspeople did, if there was one in the sky.