The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jonasson (ap literature book list .txt) 📕

She sat up slowly, experiencing a moment of dizziness, but the feeling soon passed as she remembered where she was.

In Skálar on the Langanes Peninsula. In the little attic flat. Alone.

And then she knew what it was that had woken her. Or thought she knew … It was hard to distinguish dream from reality with her senses still wandering in the vague borderland between sleep and waking.

She had heard something. What, though? As the memory gradually came back to her, she felt the skin prickling on her arms. It had been a high little voice – the voice of a young girl, she thought. Yes, now she could hear it again in her head: a young girl singing a haunting lullaby.

Unable to bear it a moment longer, she got out of bed and blundered across the pitch-black room towards the light switch on the wall. Not for the first time she cursed the fact that she didn’t have a reading lamp by her bed. Yet she felt a moment’s reluctance to turn on the light, for fear of what the retreating shadows might reveal.

The high voice echoed eerily in her head, but she couldn’t recall the words of the girl’s song. It must have been a dream, however real it had seemed.

Suddenly there was a loud crack, followed by a tinkling sound and a stabbing pain in her foot that caused her to stumble and fall heavily to her knees. What the hell?

She bit back a scream, only for it to dawn on her a second later that she had trodden on the wine glass she had left on the floor the previous evening. Fumbling for her foot, she found a shard of glass sticking out of it and felt something hot and wet oozing from the wound. Gingerly, she extracted the glass. The pain was excruciating.

It took all her willpower to force herself back on to her feet, then grope along the wall for the switch, but finally she found it and turned on the light. As the room sprang into view, she shot a glance around, half-expecting to see a small figure in there with her, while telling herself that she’d imagined the whole thing: the voice hadn’t been real, the lullaby had been an illusion, a trick played on her by her sleeping mind.

Limping back to the bed, she sat down, drew up her foot and examined the cut, which, luckily, turned out not to be as deep as she’d feared. Now she had satisfied herself that she was alone in the room, she could feel her heartbeat slowing and returning to normal.

Then, in a flash, the words of the girl’s song came back to her:

Lullaby, my little Thrá,

may you sweetly sleep …

A chill spread through her flesh.

XVI

It had been a bad night.

After stumbling around in the dark and treading on the wine glass, Una had managed to dress the wound herself. She didn’t think the cut was serious, although it had bled quite a lot at first. She had cleaned it with antiseptic, then closed it with a plaster. If she’d been in Reykjavík, she might have taken herself to hospital, but there was no doctor in the village and the last thing she’d wanted was to drag herself out in the middle of the night to drive thirty kilometres to Thórshöfn, only to be told that all it needed was a plaster. In the event, it had taken her ages to get back to sleep, and she hadn’t been able to bring herself to turn out the light. She had finally dropped off towards morning and only just woken up now. It was unusually late for her, but fortunately it was a Saturday.

She glanced at the alarm clock to find that it was past 10 a.m., and the pale morning light was trying to force its way between the curtains – that fickle light which was quick to disappear at this time of year if it so much as clouded over. She could still remember the lullaby, or the first few lines of it, anyway, but by the light of day the night’s events seemed quite different. Yet a hint of doubt remained in her mind: the little girl’s voice had been so real, and Una was sure she had never heard the song before. Surely she couldn’t have composed a lullaby in her sleep?

The very first night after being told Kolbeinn’s ghost story, she had started hearing voices.

Damn it, she thought to herself, it must have been my imagination.

It was time to get up. She just hoped the cut would heal quickly. She would try to have a relaxing day and avoid going downstairs, even though Salka usually cooked a hot lunch on Saturdays. She wanted to allow herself the luxury of not doing anything at all, and hoped that the effects of her peculiar dream would wear off. She didn’t want to go outside either, as the very last thing she wanted right now was to bump into Kolbeinn.

She got out of bed, taking care not to put any weight on her injured foot, and hobbled into the kitchen. Better start the day with some coffee. But even as she was making it, the high, eerie voice continued to echo in her head, singing that damned lullaby.

She sat in the dark, trying to make herself breathe evenly, calmly. She mustn’t let her fear take control. If she did, she really would be lost in the darkness, in the fullest sense of the word. Fear was her greatest enemy right now, apart from the police, perhaps. The fear of being locked in, the fear of being deprived of her freedom, of not being able to breathe.

She still wasn’t sure what had happened; it had all been so fast. Almost before she knew what was happening, she was sitting in prison, locked up in a windowless cell, no longer aware of the time, or even of what day it was.