As Agnes and Heather, the stubborn young woman, sink into the scalding baths of the Nordic spa, the air begins to turn to rain. All around, in faraway mountains and up in tree branches and under the earth in warrens and dens, creatures great and small get ready for the coming downpour. The women are content to watch the fog twist and knot itself before their eyes, hiding and revealing snatches of landscape.
‘I love water,’ says Heather suddenly.
Though it’s pointless, she paddles her arms like fins to stay in place.
‘You’ll see. We’ll be completely new women after this,’ she rasps.
Submerged in turquoise water in the middle of the mountains, Agnes still feels like the stagnant, lethargic woman she has become at work. She inhales, to take in the moment and hold it tightly in her lungs and stomach, but it seems to be constantly dissipating.
‘Are you from around here?’ she finally asks.
‘Not really. You?’
‘I needed to get far away. From work.’
A little laugh pierces the fog.
‘You came to the right place. We’re far away from everything, here.’
Heather’s voice shifts strangely between deep and high-pitched, but she doesn’t seem to care, and shoves her head under the water.
Agnes finds this young woman’s forthrightness dizzying. Such lightness inhabits her every move, her very being, as she dives right into the shallowest section of the water and out again, and traverses the pool with the ease of an undine.
This might all seem less strange if Agnes weren’t emerging from a drawn-out corporate restructuring. In recent months she’s laid off so many people that their tears and sobs have come to seem more normal than the beatific, almost unsettling joy emanating from the bather beside her.
Truth be told, Agnes needs more than a week at the spa; it would take a thousand years of ablutions to rinse off the worries encrusting her body. Her muscles remain tense even as she sinks ever deeper into the hot water. All around her torso and her arms, small whirlpools live and die, leaving a wake of sparkling foam. Hot steam rises to caress her face. She’d like to fill herself up with emptiness, but she’s breathing in less and less air, more and more water. Her skin drips with sweat and vapour.
When Agnes gets out of the water to head to her cabin, Heather follows, bent on further interaction. Soon, in Shivering Heights, two trembling shapes in Lycra bathing suits and flip-flops will make their way through massive clouds of fog. They’ll tiptoe along, so small and alone next to the forest and mountains and river and upside-down abyss of the sky, the source of all this smoke.
The two women spend the following day in the spa’s many pools, sweating or shivering, shedding dead skin. Without other guests to welcome, the owner leaves them to their own devices, then stops appearing altogether. Eager for new experiences, Heather slips into every bath, tries out the hammam and the sauna. Agnes becomes less disconcerted, learns to be still. Like the herons that sometimes come to rest in the spa in Shivering Heights, or the black bass riding the river’s current, she’ll drink, and eat, and wait, soaking wet, for the day to pass. Her muscles will relax; her breathing will slow down.
Little by little, the downpour smudges out the borders between spa and forest. In the afternoon, seams of muck seep down from the undergrowth in small furrows, extending their black tentacles into adjacent pools. Under cover of rainfall, Heather strips off her bikini top and throws it skyward. She swims easily, with precise strokes, but there is something forced about the way she stands: erect, shoulders thrust back, streaming water accentuating the contrast between her muscular body and soft, full breasts.
‘Loosen up, Agnes. We’re the only ones here.’
Heather lifts up her arms to redo her ponytail. As her chest thrusts out and lips part to reveal her small, pointy teeth, her wide-apart eyes gaze at Agnes, who looks away.
In Shivering Heights, the ambient humidity obscures vision. Drop by drop, it distills its musty aroma. Agnes reluctantly undoes her bikini straps and dives right back into breaststroke position. Heather’s strange lightness is both seductive and somehow disconcerting.
‘You have a great body,’ she hears through the splashing.
Agnes wishes she could be left cold by the sight of Heather’s dappled skin, whose suppleness accentuates her bone structure and musculature, or the athletic stomach scored by the thin, glistening line of a scar. But shivers run down her legs and arms. She suddenly feels an invasive presence in the cold water and another, even more sinister, beyond.
She grabs a towel and heads toward a distant yurt that’s almost hidden by the trees. From the corner of her eye she sees Heather flapping in the water, then shedding the final patch of colour, her bikini bottom.
Occupied by even the most trivial things, the human mind can stay calm. That’s what they say, or at any rate what Agnes’s therapist believes. That’s why she booked a stay at this spa. Stretched out in a hammock that encloses her like a cocoon, Agnes focuses on the crackling of the fire in the centre of the room, the squeals in the distance every time Heather is shocked by the steaming-hot pools or the icy cold river, and the points of light that dance inside her eyelids when they close.
After a few minutes, she falls asleep.
In her dream, Agnes is back in the fog. She sees ill-defined animal shapes, a forest of pinwheeling silhouettes brushing up against each other. Deer, foxes. Elongated creatures that are neither garter snakes nor worms emerge from the vaporous mass and slither off into the waters. She sees them swarming together in a writhing knot, a floating vipers’ nest that morphs into a woman whose pale transparent skin reveals bones and veins and the blood circulating through her body. This infrared apparition opens its mouth unnaturally wide, exposing its skull. Agnes is drawn to the gaping chasm, as if pulled by a magnetic force she can’t possibly resist toward this opening as wide as a storm drain. When her eyes open and her arms thrust out into the pitch dark where they find no hold, Agnes discerns that she has seen this girl’s true nature.
A spasm runs over her body, then she wakes.
The ceiling above her is worn, cracked, water-spotted. When she gets out of the hammock, the woodsmoke makes her cough. She runs her fingers along the hammock’s fabric and feels an honest roughness, a profound materiality.
Through the window she can see Heather singing to herself, draping a towel over her shoulder and putting on her flip-flops.
Above, the rainstorm marshals its forces.
That night Heather makes a meal of roots and berries, fragrant herbs, and other items foraged from the grounds. On the dining room’s sole table she lays out a black mushroom stew, a tart earthy soup, and tiny whole fish with fire-blackened heads. She eats voraciously. Determined to relax, Agnes sits at the table and deliberately chases all thoughts from her mind. She has taken her time getting dressed, called her assistant, then turned off her phone again – for good this time, she is determined. With a few important matters dispatched, she can relax. Rest has brought on a new-found clarity, even as the edges of the world blur behind a curtain of rain.
‘So,’ asks Heather. ‘Feel like a new woman?’ A half-smile creeps over her pale face.
‘I feel totally calm,’ Agnes lies.
‘Great. That calls for a celebration,’ says Heather.
She bends over to get something from under the table, re-emerges with a bottle of red, drinks straight from the bottle, and passes it to Agnes.
In Shivering Heights, between four walls assailed by rain and wind, perched up