Yrsa Sigurðardóttir - I Remember You

‘What did you say?’ Garðar walked in, half limping himself. His sore heel was apparently playing up again after the day’s walk and the trip down to the doctor’s house. ‘We didn’t see anyone.’ He sat down opposite Katrín at the kitchen table and placed a white medicine bottle in front of her. ‘Take four. You should feel better afterwards.’

‘Doesn’t she get anything to drink with that?’ Líf looked around for water or juice, but the limited light from the candle did little more than cast shadows beyond the kitchen table.

‘It’s all right.’ Katrín took four white tablets from the bottle. They seemed unnecessarily large and when she put them in her mouth it was as if all the saliva drained from it, forcing her to make a real effort to swallow them. ‘How long do they take to work?’ She didn’t ask what she was swallowing, nor did she feel like reading the label on the bottle. The only thing that mattered to her was to reduce her intolerable pain.

Garðar watched her take the pills. ‘Half an hour. Something like that. Maybe less, since it’s been so long since we ate.’ His brow was furrowed with worry; there seemed little left of the cheerfulness that had accompanied him and Líf to the door. ‘Tell me what you saw. We’ve got to take precautions before we sleep, if that little bastard is around.’

Líf’s laughter also seemed remote when she said in a trembling voice: ‘What precautions? What can we do?’ She pulled the chair closer to the table. ‘Why didn’t we go and stay at the doctor’s again? We could just as easily have helped you down there, Katrín.’

‘I can’t go anywhere. Maybe tomorrow, but now I would have to hop on one foot and I wouldn’t trust myself to do that. You two could hardly carry me and all the stuff back down. How would we cross the stream, for example?’ Katrín’s pitch continued to rise and she stopped before she started sounding like a banshee. ‘We’re not going anywhere now. My foot is killing me again.’

Garðar’s frown had deepened. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, we’ll sleep in shifts. One child can’t handle all three of us. His only weapon is surprise, and the only time he could really do us any harm is when we’re all asleep.’ Garðar pulled the candle closer to the centre of the table. ‘We have enough candles now and it’s easier to stay awake that way than when everything’s pitch-dark. I’ll take the first watch, and I suggest you go straight to bed. It’s silly for us all to be awake if we’re going to do it this way.’

‘I wonder what he wants from us.’ Katrín was too drained physically and emotionally to have an opinion on Garðar’s idea, much less to suggest any other solution. She was immensely relieved not to have to make the decision and would even have accepted one of Líf’s ridiculous suggestions, so long as she didn’t have to walk anywhere. ‘I mean, why is he hanging around here? He hasn’t given the impression of wanting to steal anything; he’s had enough opportunity to do that, and he’s not looking for companionship or help.’ She sighed. ‘I just don’t get it.’

Líf looked over her shoulder as if she expected to see the boy staring at her through the window. On the other side of the pane was sheer darkness. ‘The boy isn’t alive. Why don’t we admit that? It’s not as if the situation would get any worse.’

‘That’s enough of that nonsense, Líf.’ Garðar looked at neither of them as he said this. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, and there’s no reason to imagine the worst. Things are fucked-up enough as it is.’

Katrín was in agreement with Líf. There was something more than a little peculiar going on, and it couldn’t be explained by the presence of any normal child. She was going to tell Líf this when a creak in the floorboards silenced them all. ‘Was that one of you?’ Katrín whispered, though there was no reason to lower her voice. ‘That’s how it started before.’ The sound seemed to originate there in the little kitchen.

No one wanted to admit to having caused the noise. ‘Putti?’ Líf bent down and took the dog in her arms. ‘Was it him, maybe?’ She glanced around furtively and squeezed the little animal tightly to her chest. ‘Is he heavy enough?’

‘Are you kidding? He weighs as much as a cork. He wouldn’t make the floor creak even if he started jumping on it with all his weight.’ The creaking sound came again, now much more softly than before. Líf muttered something under her breath and in her attempt to move closer to them bumped the table; Garðar just managed to grab the candle before it toppled over. He held the candlestick aloft, illuminating the room better. Then he stood up and stared towards where the sound seemed to originate. ‘Don’t say anything.’ He focused his eyes firmly on the spot and when the sound came again he walked with the candle away from the table, towards the internal wall of the kitchen. There was nothing to see besides the damaged floorboards and the ends of the broken planks. Garðar was only one step away from the damaged patch when the creak came again, now so softly that they would hardly have noticed it if they hadn’t been completely silent. ‘There’s nothing here.’ Garðar seemed surprised. He bent down and swept the candle along the wall and floor in search of an explanation. When he stood up he was much calmer. ‘There must be something wrong with the foundations here. Do you remember the planks? Maybe the mould, or whatever it is, is damaging the wood and the house is shifting because of it.’ He turned round, satisfied to have come up with an explanation, but also quite worried since he knew he was the only one of them who hadn’t given up on the house. ‘Damn it.’ He walked back over to them. ‘I think there’s nothing we can do but tear up the floor and see what’s underneath.’

‘Not now. Please.’ Líf had loosened her grip on Putti slightly and he struggled weakly in her arms, desperate to get back down to the floor. ‘What if there’s something under there?’

‘Like what? A ghost?’ Garðar grimaced and shook his head.

Líf let Putti go and rearranged her jumper, which had been pulled out of place by the dog’s wriggling. ‘Or maybe a perfect breeding ground for an infestation of some disgusting fungus. I read online that you can become horribly ill breathing in that kind of fungal growth. It occurs precisely in old houses like this one. If I remember correctly, the spores float around in the air; they’re so small you can’t see them.’

‘If that’s the case, then we’re already affected, Líf.’ Garðar placed the candle back on the table and sat down.

‘Was there anything in the article about the fungus causing hallucinations?’ Katrín wondered whether what she’d seen and heard when she was alone in the house had been due to skewed perception from toxic poisoning. That would explain a lot of what had happened since their arrival at the house. If it was life-threatening, the fungus could also explain why the former owner had left the house and died outdoors somewhere. ‘Maybe we’re getting high without realizing it.’ A stab of pain that went all the way up her leg when she moved slightly in her chair didn’t suggest that she was all that doped up.

‘There was nothing about that, but it wasn’t a very scientific article.’ Líf seemed to cheer up at this weak hope that everything had a logical explanation, but she hadn’t thought it all the way through: if they were on some sort of mushroom trip, they were probably seriously ill. ‘Wow, that would be awesome! Then there’s probably nothing wrong here and we’ve just been imagining all this shit.’ She looked at Katrín’s leg, resting outstretched on a chair. ‘Except maybe this. I think you’re seriously injured.’