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About the Author
Copyright Page
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To Dad
Lullaby, my little Thrá,
may you sweetly sleep,
dreaming of the sunny lands
beyond the ocean deep.
– Thorsteinn Th. Thorsteinsson
(1879–1955)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This story takes place in the village of Skálar in the mid-1980s. In fact, Skálar has been abandoned since the mid-1950s, but the setting is nevertheless borrowed from reality, though the buildings are my own invention. The characters too are fictitious and bear no resemblance to any past residents of Skálar. In spite of this, I have tried to give an accurate representation of the historical facts about the settlement, with the help of information from works including Fridrik G. Olgeirsson’s Langnesingasaga (A History of the People of Langanes). I also refer to folk tales that are preserved in Sigfús Sigfússon’s collection of Icelandic folk tales and legends. Any mistakes in the book are of course my responsibility.
Thanks are due to Haukur Eggertsson for showing me around the Langanes Peninsula and the ruins of Skálathorp during the writing of this book. I am also grateful to my father, Jónas Ragnarsson, prosecutor Hulda María Stefánsdóttir and Hannes Mar Árnason, whose family came from Skálar, for their help in reading the manuscript. Thank you as well to Helgi Ellert Jóhannsson, who works as a doctor in London, for his advice on medical matters.
Towards the end of the book, I quote from the poem ‘Sleep Song’ by Davíd Stefánsson.
I also quote ‘Lullaby’ by Thorsteinn Th. Thorsteinsson, which was printed in the Heimskringla magazine in Winnipeg in 1910. Thorsteinn was born in Svarfadardalur in the north of Iceland in 1879 and died in Canada in 1955.
– Ragnar Jónasson
Una awoke with a jerk.
She opened her eyes but couldn’t see a thing for the darkness pressing in all around her. For a panicky moment she couldn’t work out where she was, though she had the feeling she was in a strange place, not in her own bed. She stiffened with fear. She was so cold. By the feel of it, she’d kicked the covers on to the floor, and the room was freezing.
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 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.
PART ONE
SEVERAL MONTHS EARLIER
I
Teacher wanted at the edge of the world.
Una read the unusual heading again.
She was sitting at the kitchen table in her little flat in the west end of Reykjavík, where she’d been living for four years, after scraping together the money for a deposit through sheer determination. Her mother – the only family she had left – hadn’t been able to lend her anything and Una had been forced, as always, to stand on her own two feet.
The kitchen had hardly changed since the day Una moved in. It
