Yrsa Sigurdardóttir - My Soul to Take

“I know you’re not particularly inclined toward spiritual matters,” said Jónas levelly. “You’re bound to be surprised when I tell you what’s going on here, but I beg you to believe what I say.” He paused for a moment before coming out with it: “The house is haunted.”

Thóra closed her eyes. Haunted. Right. “Well, well,” she said, twirling her index finger against her temple to signal to Bragi that Jónas’s “defect” was just crazy talk. Bragi moved closer in the hope of eavesdropping.

“I knew you’d be skeptical,” Jónas grumbled. “But it’s true, and common knowledge among the locals here. The sellers knew but kept quiet about it while the sale went through. I call that fraudulent, especially when they knew of my plans for the farmhouse and the land. I have exceptionally sensitive people here, customers and staff alike. They feel bad.”

Thóra interrupted him. “Can you describe this ‘haunting’ for me, please?”

“There’s just a horrible atmosphere in the house. Also, things go missing, strange noises are heard in the middle of the night, and people have seen a child appear out of nowhere.”

“So?” Thóra asked. That was nothing special. In her household, things always went missing, particularly the car keys, there were noises day and night, and children appeared out of nowhere all the time.

“There’s no child here, Thóra. Nowhere in the vicinity either.” He paused. “The child is not of this world. I saw her behind me when I was looking in the mirror, and words can’t describe how … unalive she is.”

A shiver ran down Thóra’s spine. The tone of Jónas’s voice left no doubt that he believed this himself and was convinced he’d seen something unnatural, however incredible it might seem to her. “What do you want me to do?” she asked. “Do you want to discuss it with the sellers and try to negotiate a discount? Isn’t that the point? One thing I do know—I can’t exorcise ghosts for you, or improve the atmosphere in the house.”

“Come up here for the weekend,” Jónas said suddenly. “I want to show you some stuff that’s been found here and see what you make of it. The best suite in the hotel is vacant, and you can give yourself a treat at the same time. Have a hot-stone massage, whatever you want. You can recharge your batteries, and of course I’ll pay you handsomely for it.”

Thóra could do with recharging, though she felt he was contradicting himself by promising relaxation in one breath and claiming the place was haunted in the next. At that moment her life was moving in ever-decreasing circles, mostly centered around the expected grandchild her son had fathered before the age of sixteen and her strained relations with her ex-husband, who insisted that the child had been conceived because Thóra was an unfit mother. Their son’s hormones were a minor factor, in his view; it was all her fault. This opinion was shared by the parents of the little mother-to-be, who was fifteen years old. Thóra sighed. It would take pretty powerful stones to massage away all the cares from her poor soul.

“What do you want me to look at? Can’t you just send it to my office?”

Jónas laughed coldly. “No, not really. It’s boxes of old books, drawings, pictures, and all kinds of junk.”

“So why do you think this old stuff is relevant to the so-called hidden defect in the property?” she asked skeptically. “And why don’t you just look at it yourself?”

“I can’t. I tried, but it gives me the creeps. I can’t go near it. You’re much more down-to-earth; you could probably go through it all without feeling anything.”

Thóra couldn’t argue with that. Ghosts, ghouls, and fairies had not bothered her much until now. The real world gave her enough trouble without needing to cross the borders into fantasy. “Give me a little while to think about it, Jónas. All I can promise is to try and make arrangements to come and visit. I’ll call you tomorrow afternoon. Is that okay?”

“Oh, yes. You can call. I’ll be in all day.” Jónas hesitated before continuing. “You asked why I thought this old stuff was relevant.”

“Yes?” said Thóra.

Again Jónas paused before speaking. “I found a photograph in the box I started going through.”

“And?”

“It’s a picture of the girl I saw in the mirror.”

Thóra fetched the file containing the documents regarding the property on Snæfellsnes. She couldn’t glean much from reading through them; in any case, she found nothing to suggest Jónas’s peculiar “hidden defect.” It had been a relatively straightforward transaction, apart from Jónas’s many stipulations over dates, such as insisting on signing the deeds on a Saturday. Thóra had gone along with it, asking no questions in case she prompted a lecture on celestial configurations. On Saturday, luck comes your way, she remembered, from the old proverb. Nothing else about the sale was out of the ordinary. It involved the land and everything on it, including chattels and resources. The sellers were a brother and sister in their fifties, Börkur Thórdarson and Elín Thórdardóttir. They were acting under power of attorney for their mother, who had inherited the land from her own father long before. They had made a lot of money on the deal, and Thóra had been green with envy at the time.

She smiled to herself as she wondered how to assess the haunting in order to devalue the property by ten percent, but her smile vanished when she visualized herself trying to persuade the sellers to pay compensation for the damage and citing ghosts as the reason. The brother had mainly handled the transaction on his mother’s behalf, and Thóra had only met his sister once, when the deeds were signed. She had never met their mother, who according to Börkur was extremely old and bedridden, but the son struck her as pushy and overconfident. His sister, Elín, on the other hand, had been silent and withdrawn. At the time, Thóra had the impression that she was not as keen as her brother to sell the property. Recalling all this, she doubted that he would take a claim for compensation lying down. She put the documents to one side and crossed her fingers, hoping Jónas would change his mind. If not, it would take every ounce of her persuasive powers to get him to back down.

She turned to her other pending cases, but the few that had come in were pretty uninspiring. Unfortunately business was slow. With a groan she cursed her own financial stupidity. At the end of the previous year, she had worked on a case for a wealthy German who had paid her handsomely, and if she had had an iota of common sense, she would have used the money to pay off some of her debts. Instead she had put it toward a trailer and an SUV. She didn’t know what had come over her. Even worse, she had taken out a loan to help pay for them, plunging herself further into debt. She vaguely recalled having a vision of touring the countryside in the summer sun, a typical modern family on holiday—a divorced mother with her two children, and in her case a daughter of six and a son of sixteen who was himself soon to become a father. The grandchild had not yet been written into this rose-tinted dream, because Thóra would probably only see it every other week-end. Hopefully that would not be the same weekend that her own children were spending with their father. It would make an interesting sociological study, she thought: a weekend father who was still so young that he spent every other weekend with his own weekend father.

When Thóra had finished going through work stuff, she went on the Internet and on a whim searched for information about the land on Snæfellsnes or the old farmsteads situated on the grounds. She Googled the names of the farms that occurred in the deeds of sale, Kirkjustétt and Kreppa, but found nothing. With a shrug, she gave up. She decided to check her e-mail and noted, a little wearily, that there was a message from Matthew. She had got to know the German while investigating the case that ultimately earned her the trailer and the SUV, along with the accompanying debts. In fact, she had done more than get to know him—she had got to know him “intimately,” as her grandmother would say—and now he wanted to visit her to renew their “intimate” acquaintance. Matthew was inquiring about the best time for him to take a short break in Iceland. Thóra was dying for him to come over, but was well aware that the best time would be around 2020, when her daughter turned twenty. She wasn’t sure Matthew could wait that long. She closed the message, deciding to wait until the morning before replying.