The Girl Who Died, Ragnar Jonasson [small books to read .TXT] 📗

should feel a greater need than ever to return to her mother’s warm embrace at this time of year, but, with her mother away, there was nothing in Reykjavík for her now.

After a long while she felt herself growing drowsy again. The tension left her body, the words on the page blurred together and her eyelids drooped.

III

Una woke up shivering. She was freezing. She must have kicked off her duvet in her sleep again but, even so, it was peculiarly cold in her room. Bracing herself, she got out of bed and checked the window in her bedroom, then the one in the sitting room, but both were firmly latched. Had there been a further drop in temperature outside?

The lights were still on and she meant to keep them that way. She glanced around, without really knowing why, then hurried back into bed and burrowed under her duvet as if hiding from something. She tried to get back to sleep, but her heart was still beating unnaturally fast.

IV

Una opened her eyes. She had been sound asleep with her head under the duvet. This time, she was sure she had been woken by the sound of the piano, by the faint notes of a tune she didn’t recognize. Closing her eyes again, she concentrated on listening.

To say she was sick with terror would be an understatement.

She couldn’t hear anything. But, just like the time she had been woken by the lullaby, the music had sounded uncannily real. So real that she kept expecting the sound to start up again any minute, convinced that someone was playing the old piano downstairs in the dining room, in the middle of the night, when Una was, or should have been, alone in the house.

Surely Salka couldn’t have come home already? She felt the cold sweat prickling her skin. She couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t make herself move, unless it was to flee outside into the darkness, away from the house and the village of Skálar for good. But the only option was to confront her fears, confront these horrible nightmares, by going downstairs to the dining room and reassuring herself once and for all that there was nobody there.

Salka had often practised in the evenings when Una was in the attic, so Una knew how well the sound carried between the floors; in that respect, her dream had been plausible. But she hadn’t recognized the melody. As far as she could remember, it had been a simple tune of the kind a child might play. Perhaps it was something that Edda had played during one of her piano lessons with her mother.

Una emerged from under the duvet, climbed out of bed and braced herself with a deep breath.

There’s nothing to be afraid of, she told herself, first in her head, then aloud.

‘There’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.’

V

She opened the door to the landing, which was brightly lit, like the rest of the house. She had deliberately left all the lights blazing when she went to bed, something she would never have dreamt of doing if Salka had been home.

She walked downstairs, forcing herself to take it slowly, into the hall, then paused and waited for a few seconds, straining her ears. Against her common sense, she was half-expecting to hear something, a voice singing, the tinkling of the piano, that would freeze her blood. It was cold downstairs but for some reason not as cold as up in the attic. She stood there, shivering slightly, hearing nothing in the silent house apart from the ever-present creaking of the timbers, but even that was muted tonight as there was hardly any wind.

She stood there for a moment longer, staring at the door to the dining room, then shook her head and smiled at her own folly. How ridiculous to drag herself out of bed and come all the way downstairs just because of some nightmare.

Finding her courage, she put out her hand and opened the door, only to reel back in shock.

There was somebody in there.

A split second later she realized that it was her own reflection in the dining-room window, against the backdrop woven from the black night outside.

Still breathless and trembling from her reaction, she peered round the corner and saw the piano.

There was nobody there.

Of course there was nobody there.

But the piano was open.

Had it been open when she came home?

Surely Salka usually closed it?

Or did she …?

Una wasn’t sure, couldn’t remember.

Feeling the cold clutching at her shrinking flesh, she dragged her eyes away from the piano and flinched again at the sight of her ghostly reflection in the glass.

Whirling round, she fled back upstairs to the attic.

VI

Christmas Eve was a bleak, lonely affair. It hadn’t snowed, but then no one had expected it to.

News had finally come through from the hospital, though Una had probably been the last to hear it. Edda had died. The doctors could find no explanation for what had happened. She had been fit and healthy, and the only clue they had to go on was that her face had turned yellow, which seemed to indicate liver failure, as Una had suspected.

She had heard the news the day before from Gudrún at the Co-op, where she had gone to find out what was happening, since Salka still hadn’t returned. Una hadn’t shed any tears when Gudrún told her. She had just stumbled out of the shop, dazed with shock. The moment when Edda had collapsed in church kept playing over and over in her mind.

Desperately sorry though she felt for Salka, Una dreaded seeing her again. What could she possibly say to her? But perhaps she would be spared the ordeal as she doubted Salka would come back to the village. How would she be able to face living in the house after what had happened? Una was finding it hard enough herself. It was clear now that she would be spending Christmas alone there, and she didn’t know how much