Someone to Watch Over Me (2 page)

If only they’d turned down the invitation to the Christmas buffet. She didn’t ask herself if she was only thinking this in hindsight; in her mind they had never wanted to go in the first place, but they had let friends persuade them. If this hadn’t been the case, she didn’t want to admit it; it was easier to deal with the consequences if it was someone else’s fault that they had dressed up, asked Magga to babysit, and gone along. They hadn’t used a babysitter since then, and didn’t intend to. Their social life was now restricted to their home or places where they could take their four-year-old son.

She just couldn’t imagine enjoying an evening out knowing he was at home with a babysitter, not since that terrible night and everything that had happened since. For the thousandth time she thought to herself that everything would have gone differently if they’d skipped the Christmas buffet altogether, or at least if they hadn’t decided to have a drink at home to avoid having to buy one at the restaurant. But thinking that way only rubbed salt in the wound. They had accepted the invitation, and they had made childcare arrangements. Berglind’s eyes automatically went back to the window and she stared at the black tarmac of Vesturlandsvegur Road, which ran like a dark, currentless river along the edge of the neighbourhood. She closed her eyes and immediately saw the image she’d been faced with that fateful night. The flashing lights of the ambulance and the police cars had eclipsed both the Christmas lights on the roof of the house opposite and the heavy snow that was falling. The tiny white lights, which should have stood for peace on Earth and the hope of a new year, could not compete with the bright colours flashing from the vehicles. With the same hindsight she had used to convince herself they’d initially planned not to go to the dinner, Berglind now told herself that at the time she had immediately connected the accident on Vesturlandsvegur Road to their babysitter Magga, who hadn’t yet shown up.

She opened her eyes and gulped down the water. It was still a bit warm and she regretted not having let the tap run even longer. Recently everything she did seemed tinged with regret, not that one could compare the temperature of drinking water to the death of a young girl, and not that the accident had been her fault. Nevertheless she felt terribly guilty. Magga’s parents, who they’d met several times after the accident, had been devastated, and the look on their faces would haunt both Berglind and Halli for the rest of their lives, if not longer. Of course no one blamed them for the accident, at least not openly, but Berglind thought she could see in the mother’s anguished eyes the belief that they were responsible in some way – if they had to go out, why hadn’t they gone to pick Magga up? If they’d just made the effort to come and collect her, the girl wouldn’t have been crossing the road, and would still be alive now. But because they had let themselves be persuaded to go out, Magga had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and some heartless bastard had run her over. He probably hadn’t even looked back, let alone stopped to help the child crumpled in the street. Neither driver nor car had been traced; there had been no other traffic on that part of the road when the accident occurred, and no witnesses came forward despite repeated requests in the media. So Magga died alone, abandoned on the icy tarmac; she had stopped breathing by the time the driver of the next car spotted her and stopped. It was lucky he hadn’t run over her as well, since a thin layer of snow had already covered her small body. Berglind squeezed her eyes shut again and rubbed them with her damp fingers. How wide was a car? Six feet? Nine? The girl had been at least half a mile away from their house, if not a mile. Such a random twist of fate, to have been on that exact spot in the road when that despicable driver showed up. She was too tired to try to calculate the odds but knew they must be tiny. When you thought about it, the odds of bad news always seemed to get exaggerated more than good, no matter how unlikely the event; hardly anyone won the lottery, but loads of people contracted rare, fatal diseases in unlikely ways.

Berglind opened her eyes again and drained the glass of water. Although the accident still haunted her, the hardest part hadn’t been dealing with the tragic death of a girl who’d had so much to live for. That part of it was logical, at least: when a girl weighing not much more than seven stone meets a ton of steel travelling at over sixty miles an hour, there can only be one outcome. Of course it was a terrible tragedy, but the possibility of sudden death was part of the human condition. It had been harder to come to terms with what had happened next: Magga – or rather some sort of projection of her spirit – seemed to have resolved to keep her promise to take care of Pési, and came to watch over him whenever dusk fell. Perhaps the violence of her death had left her spirit unable to rest in peace? As far as Berglind could glean from the few horror movies she’d seen, people returned as ghosts if their deaths were unresolved. At first she and Halli hadn’t understood what was going on, assuming when Pési said Magga was with him that he had been affected by hearing them talking about the accident. He was too young to understand death, so it seemed probable that he was trying to make sense of her disappearance. It was only natural that Pési missed her; she’d been babysitting for them since he was one and he was very attached to her. But alarm bells rang for Berglind when the boy began repeating over and over that Magga felt poorly and that everything was
all hurty
. That’s when Berglind first started listening to him properly, trying to overcome the numbness that had consumed her since the accident. With all the inexplicable and frightening things that had happened since the accident, she no longer doubted what was going on.

It had grown colder in Pési’s room, with condensation forming on the windows as soon as darkness fell. Turning up the thermostat had made no difference, and the plumber they called stood and scratched his head for an hour before leaving them in exactly the same boat but with a hefty bill. An old mobile that hung over the boy’s bed, one they’d meant to get rid of long ago, moved even when there was no breeze, and there were continual electrical disturbances just in that one room: the light flickered constantly, no matter how often they changed its bulb. The air in the room would begin to feel dense and heavy towards the end of the day, even if they opened the window. It was as if all the oxygen had been sucked out of it, and every breath left behind a disagreeable metallic taste. Of course, this could all have had a logical explanation that time and patience would help them discover. The house was old and needed a lot of work. However, some of the phenomena couldn’t possibly be attributed to that: Pési’s pile of cuddly toys was always arranged in a neat row in the morning; they’d find his clothing folded on a stool in the corner, even if it had been lying in a heap on the floor when he went to sleep. Pési often woke up in the night, but now they didn’t need to fetch him a drink, take him into their bed to sleep or go to his room to calm him down, because when they went to check on him they would find him smiling in bed, saying: ‘You didn’t have to get up, Magga is looking after me.’

This sometimes led them to take him into their own bed, but the girl’s spirit seemed not to like this. The family frequently woke to find the duvet slipping slowly off them and down onto the floor. A scraping sound would come from under the bed; it always started quietly, then suddenly intensified into violent scrabbling. The sound would cease when Halli peered under the bed, muttering sleepily about the bloody mice, although they had never seen a single mouse. The chill they had noticed in Pési’s room was now manifesting in the master bedroom, along with the condensation on the windowpanes and the electrical disturbances. On top of this, little dark puddles had started forming in the doorway; they looked like blood in the semi-darkness, but turned out to be water when the lights were turned on. Twice they called carpenters to search the roof for leaks; neither of them found anything.

It was incredible, really, how long they had suffered all this with only tradesmen to help them. One morning Berglind announced that she couldn’t take it any more; the house would be put up for sale immediately, never mind the recession and the declining property market. That morning they’d woken to find some of their clothes hanging on the outside of their wardrobe. And not just random items: Halli’s smart suit, a shirt and tie inside it, and one of Berglind’s dresses, with a matching bolero jacket. The outfits they had been wearing the evening of the Christmas buffet. There had been nothing there when they had gone to sleep. Berglind’s fear was intensified by the fact that for the first time since this had all started, Halli seemed as frightened as her. Instead of trying to sell the house at the worst possible time, they decided to bring in a medium to try to get rid of the ghost – or whatever this was. As Halli had pointed out, they couldn’t even be sure that selling the property would help, since the ghost seemed to be haunting Pési, not the house.

They hired a medium who said that he could sense a tormented and unhappy soul hanging around Pési, but that he didn’t know how to free them from its presence. The same went for the psychic woman they called next, who came with an enthusiastic recommendation from Berglind’s aunt. Neither of them reached this conclusion free of charge, and the household’s finances weren’t robust enough for Berglind and Halli to work their way through the relevant column in the classified ads. Their last resort was the parish priest, whom they hadn’t seen since Pési’s christening. At first the man was reluctant, perhaps suspecting he was the butt of some sort of joke. However, Berglind’s helpless terror must have been clear as soon as he saw her; the priest’s attitude changed, though he told them he couldn’t promise anything. Over the course of several visits he experienced the cold that seemed to surround Pési at dusk, and the static electricity in the air around the child. The priest called in the bishop, and together they performed Iceland’s first exorcism in over a century. After going from room to room, the bishop had announced to them ceremoniously that the spirit of the girl would no longer enter their home. And by some miracle, it seemed to have worked.

As if a magic wand had been waved, it was immediately different in the house, though it was hard to pinpoint what exactly had changed. The atmosphere at home felt like it used to. Of course it would be difficult to rid themselves of the constant fear that something was about to happen, and it would doubtless take time for their hands to stop trembling. But time healed all wounds, and Berglind thought to herself now that she would settle for a slow but steady recovery.

The parquet creaked upstairs, in Pési’s room. Berglind put down her glass and turned around slowly. The sound continued, as though the boy was walking around. Her mouth went dry and her goose bumps sprang up again. She was ridiculous, still jumping at shadows. With measured steps she climbed the stairs, and when she reached the door to her son’s room she could hear his muffled voice inside. She wanted to put her ear to the door and listen, but instead she opened it calmly. Pési was standing on tiptoe at the window, looking out. He stopped talking and turned around when he heard the door open, and Berglind’s hand flew to her mouth when she saw the condensation on the windowpane.

‘Hello, Mummy.’ Pési smiled at her sadly.

Berglind hurried to her son and pulled him forcefully from the window. She held him close and tried at the same time to wipe the windowpane. But the haze couldn’t be wiped away. It was on the outside of the glass.

Pési looked up at her. ‘Magga’s outside. She can’t get in. She wants to look after me.’ He pointed at the window and frowned. ‘She’s a little bit angry.’

The building looked quite ordinary from the road. Tourists probably assumed it was just another farm where men toiled and sweated happily, at peace with God and the world. Perhaps they thought it was an unusually large and imposing family home, but either way they wouldn’t have dwelled on it too long and probably wouldn’t have looked back once they had passed it. Actually, it was just as likely that Icelanders thought much the same, but the place hardly ever came up in conversation; the rare times it was mentioned in the press, it was usually because something tragic had happened to one of the poor unfortunates inside. As they always do, readers would have skimmed over the general details in search of the juicier parts that described the most shocking and bizarre aspects of the residents’ behaviour, then skipped ahead in the hope of finding something more positive. After closing the paper it was unlikely they would retain much information about the place or its inhabitants; it was easier to forget about people like them. Even within the system there was a tendency to sideline the unit; certainly people understood the value of the work they did there, but there seemed to be a silent consensus among government officials to have as little to do with it as possible.

Thóra was sure that if they’d had more work at the law firm right then, she might have turned down the case that had brought her here. Of course, it was possible that her curiosity about the vaguely worded assignment would have made her take it on even if she were busy – it wasn’t every day that an inmate of the Secure Psychiatric Unit at Sogn requested her assistance.

Actually, the history of the SPU was short; until
1992
prisoners with mental health problems had either been placed in institutions abroad or simply kept among the general population at Litla-Hraun prison. Neither option was ideal. In the first eventuality the language barrier must have caused patients untold hardships, not to mention the distance from their family and friends; and in the second, the prison was not an adequate healthcare facility. Thóra didn’t know how well the prisoners considered to be of sound mind would interact with those suffering from mental illness, and she couldn’t imagine how the harsh conditions of prison life could possibly be conducive to the treatment of the criminally insane. All seven places at Sogn were always occupied.