I Remember You

Chapter 13

The storm had subsided but had left the house damp, making the cold unbearable. It had proved impossible for Líf to force herself into a fourth jumper, though she had struggled for some time to make it fit over the other three. She was restless and complained bitterly that she couldn’t stand the itching from the wiry threads that managed to poke through from her woolly socks to her cotton ones. Of the two evils she still felt it better to scratch than to freeze to death, so she settled for the itchiness and simply scratched herself more often with an old knitting needle that Garðar had found between two loose floorboards. Katrín found it difficult to witness Líf’s nervous agitation, as she herself shivered and shook on her kitchen stool; she couldn’t work out whether it was from the cold or the shock she’d suffered the night before. She was bruised all over from the fall, but considering how much worse it could have been, she wasn’t complaining.

It was impossible for her to recall how she’d fallen; which part of her body was hammered by which step and when it was that she’d hit her head so hard that she lost consciousness. Most likely it had occurred immediately after she lost her balance, judging by how little she remembered of the fall and Garðar’s description of how she’d tumbled down like a rag doll. According to him, what had saved her was how flexible her body had been as she tumbled. After Katrín regained consciousness she lay at the bottom of the stairs and stared bewildered at the worried faces of Garðar and Líf. But before she opened her eyes, what they were saying had managed to slip through the fog in her head, which cleared quickly, and she thought their words were probably the reason why she’d taken the accident so well. Líf had thought that she was dead, and in her peculiar state of mind Katrín had thought so too, and felt sadness at her own demise wash over her. When Garðar said that he had found a pulse, an incredible sense of relief washed over Katrín and nothing else mattered any longer, neither pain nor the headache from which she was still suffering, although she’d more or less managed to get used to it.

‘Are you sure you’re not feeling ill?’ Garðar looked at Katrín and she could read in his expression how bad she must look. ‘If you have concussion, we have to do something about it.’ He didn’t elaborate any further, and Katrín doubted he had any idea how they should treat her if this was indeed the case. They’d agreed to call the skipper and ask him to come and get them, and in fact there was nothing else they could do for her until help arrived.

‘No. That’s probably the one thing I’m not suffering from at the moment.’ Katrín’s voice was hoarse; she hadn’t said much since she’d woken up. She’d fallen asleep in the middle of speaking; the shock had overcome her after Garðar and Líf had helped her upstairs and into her sleeping bag. They hadn’t understood anything of what she was saying, since the words had tumbled from her lips either in a torrent or one by one between sobs. This had tested Garðar and Líf’s patience, as well as their interpretive abilities, but they tried as best they could to comfort her. Eventually sleep provided her with the solace that she so desired; one minute she was awake and whimpering about wanting to go home, and the next she was floating in a dreamland where she and Garðar were newlyweds once more and incredibly happy. Although she couldn’t recall the dream in detail, she remembered that when she woke she’d expected a dejected little person to be standing over her, staring at her from beneath its cap, its face hidden in darkness. She dared not open her eyes, but when she finally did, no such thing met her gaze; the only thing she saw was the room’s shabby, dirty ceiling.

Katrín rubbed her forehead. ‘Do you have a mirror, Líf?’ Curiosity plagued her, although she actually had no desire to see how she looked. But when she was handed the little cosmetic mirror, she swallowed twice before holding it up to her face. Fortunately, her appearance turned out to be better than she’d hoped: a scrape on one cheek and a bit of a bruise beneath one eye. She tilted the mirror upwards and held a finger to a large red mark extending outwards from beneath her hairline.

‘None of it’s permanent.’ Líf stood over Katrín and smiled, her expression melancholy. ‘You’ll look lovely again.’ She turned to Garðar. ‘That is, if the boy doesn’t manage to kill you.’

Garðar tried to conceal how annoyed he’d grown at Líf talking like this; ever since they’d woken up she had carried on a continual monologue of her concerns about recent developments, despite the fact that they’d already decided to abandon the place. She was convinced that the boy had been behind the accident, based on Katrín’s description of how quickly and unexpectedly the door had slammed into her. Garðar, on the other hand, tried to maintain that it had been caused by a draught, even though all the windows had been closed.

Katrín wasn’t willing to form an opinion on this, or at least not out loud. In her heart she knew that the wind hadn’t opened the door. On the other hand, she admired Garðar’s patience and his ability to rule out the more obvious, but less pleasant explanation. ‘That’s enough nonsense, Líf, just stop thinking about it. It’s not helping, you going on and on.’ He ran a box cutter along the brown tape on one of the boxes they thought the former owner had left behind. ‘We’ll go through this stuff while we wait for the light to get better, then we’ll hike up the hill and call the skipper. I thought we were agreed on that.’

‘Only if you tell us exactly what happened to the previous owner. I can’t believe you kept it a secret.’ Líf pouted. ‘I would never have let you drag me here if I’d known about it.’

Katrín paid little attention to this. Líf was the sort of person who heard only what she wanted to hear in any given situation. Einar, God rest his soul, probably had told her about it when he bought the house. And although Katrín was furious at Garðar for having hidden it from her, she felt she had to defend him. Until now she’d been content to listen to them bicker about it, but she’d gained new strength after seeing her own face and realizing that the scrapes and bruises on it didn’t make her look like the Elephant Man after all. ‘Are you quite sure he was here when he disappeared? Couldn’t he have been on a boat, or out hiking, or something like that?’

‘According to Einar he vanished from here.’ Garðar opened the box. ‘He was on the same mission as we are, to fix up the house, but when they came to get him they found no one. Obviously I have no idea whether he died of exposure somewhere outside, I have no way of knowing precisely what happened. He was never found. I didn’t want to bother you with it, but I think it matters in light of the bizarre break-in last night.’

‘He killed him.’ It was useless to argue with Líf; her words and tone of voice brooked no argument. ‘He pushed him down the stairs, then strangled him.’

‘Exactly how he died doesn’t matter now. We’ll go through this stuff and see if he left anything behind that could help us figure out what’s going on.’ Garðar didn’t look directly at either of them as he spoke. ‘You agreed that we would, remember?’ Katrín had had no say in the decision, since it had been made before she regained the power of speech. Just coming down the stairs had proved difficult enough for her; she’d only just managed to inch her way down and into the kitchen, where, shivering, she took a seat and listened to the others’ conversation. She’d refused to go down until Garðar had thrown the crosses out of the house and assured her that there were no new footprints.

‘Didn’t you say he disappeared three years ago?’ Katrín was praying this wasn’t linked to the incident last night, and the more she thought about it, the less likely it seemed. ‘The child can’t be older than eleven or twelve, so three years ago he would have been eight or nine. There’s no way such a young child could have killed a man, let alone survived here all this time.’

‘Not unless someone else is here with him.’ Líf did have a point, and she couldn’t conceal her satisfaction at having come up with such a clever theory.

Garðar didn’t reply, but continued to rummage through the box. ‘Maybe there’s a radio in with this stuff. Who knows? That would save us having to trek up the hill. I don’t know about you, but I’m not really looking forward to that.’

Katrín looked out of the window, at a scene very different from before. In place of the dull earth colours of sleeping vegetation, everything was white. The sleet had turned into snow during the night, and a thin layer of it covered the ground. The snow had stopped falling, but she quaked nonetheless at the thought of schlepping up the hill; she was in no fit state for the walk and there might be icy patches concealed beneath the snow, plus they had no spikes for their shoes or anything like that. And since there were three of them, there was no way to split the group in half without one of them ending up alone, meaning she had no choice but to go along. She wasn’t going to stay behind on her own, and she couldn’t imagine Garðar making the journey by himself. A sudden gust of wind blew up the snow in front of the wrecked porch and tiny snowflakes danced in the air. Then, just as suddenly, everything went completely still. Katrín turned her attention back to the kitchen table and the dusty boxes. Garðar had taken several items from the first box, none of which appeared likely to tell them much: two books, a hammer, a wallet and a torch. She reached for the latter and tried to turn it on, but the batteries were dead.

‘Doesn’t a radio need electricity?’ Líf went over to where Katrín sat and picked up the wallet.

‘I don’t know, but if there’s one here, it probably runs on batteries. Otherwise it would have been pointless to lug it up here.’ Garðar rearranged the things in the box in order to see deeper inside. ‘What a pile of fucking junk.’

‘Who do you suppose did this?’ Katrín put down the torch and picked distractedly at the tape on the side of the box. ‘He could hardly have packed all this up before he disappeared.’

‘Maybe the rescue teams that came to search for him. Or someone connected to his estate.’ Garðar pulled out two tea towels from the box and looked at them. ‘The stuff seems to have just been thrown in, so I doubt it was him, or anyone close to him. I know I wouldn’t pack my belongings this way. Everything’s all mixed up.’ He put the checked towels back and pulled out a brightly coloured plastic plate. ‘There’s no system at all.’

‘His name was Haukur. Haukur Grétarsson.’ Líf waved a credit card she’d found in the wallet.

‘We don’t know that’s his.’ Garðar grabbed the card and looked at it before handing it back to Líf and continuing with his rummaging.

‘Whoever packed the boxes probably thought they’d be taken to town soon after. The wallet is full of credit cards, receipts and coins.’ Líf flicked through the receipts. ‘But if the man put these in the boxes himself, he must have committed suicide. No one packs away his own wallet.’

‘What did he buy?’ Katrín picked up the bits of paper Líf had already examined. The receipts were just over three years old and the amounts were all quite small: a few thousand krónur at Hagkaup supermarket, a haircut at a barber’s near Hlemmur bus station, Domino’s pizza, Subway, petrol. The next batch was much the same; faded slips of paper containing useless memories, records of trivial everyday purchases. Suddenly goose bumps sprang up on Katrín’s arms. ‘These receipts suggest that Haukur was a bit of a loner. Most of them are from supermarkets and fast food places, and he never spent much.’

‘I guess they’re from three years ago and everything’s gone up since then, but he can’t have had many people to invite round for dinner,’ said Garðar. ‘I know the fact that he didn’t have any close relatives or a spouse made the sale of the estate much easier.’ He pulled out some folded pieces of paper, opened them, read what was written on them and grinned. ‘Awesome!’ He turned the two pages towards the others; a receipt from Byko Hardware Store and a pencil drawing marked with dimensions. ‘This is a drawing of the septic tank connections.’ Katrín and Líf stared at him in bewilderment, clearly not sharing his excitement. ‘Don’t you get it? We can connect the toilet.’ His joy faded slightly. ‘Well, maybe not now, but on the next trip.’

‘The next trip?’ Líf shook her head and laughed mirthlessly. ‘I’m about as likely to come back here to connect a septic tank as I am to take a bath in it once it’s full.’

Garðar put the pages down. ‘Okay. Maybe you won’t come with me, but I can still come.’ He seemed disappointed at their lack of reaction. ‘We can raise the price of the rooms if there’s a toilet here.’ He closed the box and grabbed another. ‘In the spring this will all seem like a bad dream. I promise you.’ Neither Líf nor Katrín uttered a word, although Katrín had her own opinion. She would never let him come here alone, or even accompanied. This was an evil place, full of bad feelings. Garðar, who had opened the second box, was rummaging silently through it. All this produced was a pair of binoculars, which Líf was quick to grab. She went over to the window and inspected the view.

‘There’s one thing we could do.’ Katrín watched as Garðar chose a third box and opened it. ‘We could move over to the doctor’s place. We could watch the house from there through the binoculars, and maybe we’ll see how the child gets in while we wait for the boat.’ Truth be told, Katrín was less interested in knowing how he got in than in getting out of this house and into alternative accommodation. Of course what she wanted most was to set sail immediately for Ísafjörður and fly home from there, but she knew the skipper would need time to get to them. He could hardly drop everything and come at a moment’s notice. She felt around in the pocket of her outermost jumper and felt the comforting shape of her mobile phone. She took it out and the familiar object warmed her cold palms. Soon they would be standing on the hilltop with the skipper at the other end of the line. Out of habit she turned it on. Nothing happened.

‘As I said before, it’s best if we stick to our original plan.’ Garðar took some notebooks out of the box and leafed through them. ‘It’ll soon be light enough for us to set off and go and call.’

Katrín stared at the grey screen. ‘My phone’s battery is dead. I must have turned it on by accident and the battery ran out.’ She shook the phone frantically, not believing her own explanation.

‘What?’ Garðar wiped the dust from his palms and went over to her. ‘That’s weird.’ He took out his own phone and turned it on. Holding it slightly away from him, he gawped at it in disbelief. ‘You’re kidding me,’ he said to himself, before shaking the phone in the same way as Katrín had shaken hers. He pushed the power button again, much more firmly than before. It made no difference. The phone was dead. ‘Oh, come on.’ He turned to Líf, who was still gazing complacently out of the window through the binoculars. ‘Líf. Try switching on your phone. There’s something wrong with ours.’

Líf turned around slowly and let the binoculars drop. The look of fear on her face was a familiar one to them by now. ‘No.’ She shook her head fervently. ‘I don’t want to. Let’s just go up the hill and try them there. I’m sure my phone is fine.’

‘Give me your phone, Líf.’ Garðar put out his hand. ‘We’re not going anywhere if we don’t have a phone that works.’ When he realized that Líf was once more on the verge of breaking down, he hurriedly added: ‘If it’s dead too, we’ll figure something out. There’s no reason to panic.’

Líf opened and closed her mouth twice without saying anything. Then she tentatively handed Garðar a bright pink clamshell phone, adorned with glittering rhinestone hearts. ‘Don’t tell me if it doesn’t work. I don’t want to know.’ She squeezed her eyes shut, but couldn’t resist the temptation to peek. Katrín realised she had crossed her fingers without meaning to.

‘I don’t fucking believe this.’ Garðar hammered on the keys of the little pink phone so hard that one of the hearts fell off.

‘How is this possible?’ Katrín uncrossed her fingers and took the phone from Garðar to see for herself. The screen of the gaudy little thing was just as blank as hers had been. ‘How can three phones that have been turned off the entire time be dead?’

Líf muttered something incomprehensible and let herself fall back against the wall. The dark blue of her irises stood out starkly in her pale face. ‘Why did you try it? Maybe it would have worked if we’d just gone up and turned it on when we were up there. You jinxed it.’

Garðar covered his eyes with his hand and took a slow, deep breath. He stood motionless for a few moments, before letting his hand drop and sighing loudly. ‘Okay. This isn’t exactly what I had planned.’ He tapped lightly with two fingers on the box. ‘I can’t deal with this right now. Unless you want me to punch a hole in the wall and add one more task to the list of renovations, I’ve got to pretend this thing with the phones isn’t happening.’ He looked at Líf and then at Katrín, who recognised this reaction all too well; he couldn’t cope with this sort of crisis at all. Her headache had intensified and it felt as if it were crushing her brain. ‘Maybe something will come out of these boxes to change things.’

Katrín could see Líf was stopping herself from saying something, obviously negative. Personally, she could think of nothing that would lighten the atmosphere, which at the moment she imagined was similar to that on board a submarine trapped under ice. So she followed Líf’s example, sat back down on her stool and watched miserably as Garðar rummaged through the latest box. In the silence they could now hear sounds that had escaped them as they were talking – the low groan of the wind and some cracks and creaks in the house, which made Katrín’s skin crawl. Líf twitched in fright at each sound. ‘Look!’ Garðar pulled a black zipped-up case out of the box. ‘Isn’t this a video camera?’ He unzipped the bag quickly. ‘It is!’ A neat silver camera emerged. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. ‘Please let the battery in it fit one of the phones.’

‘You’re not telling me that still works.’ Líf’s voice was devoid of its usual agitation and anxiety. ‘That would be ridiculous.’

After fiddling with the camera for a few moments, Garðar discovered how to turn it on, only to find out that of course the battery was dead. It was also a chunky block that was far too large for their phones; the idea had been ludicrous to begin with, formed from desperation rather than ingenuity. However, instead of putting the camera down, he continued to examine it, eventually opening a little compartment in its side that held the memory card. ‘I wonder if it’s possible to view this on a camera?’

‘It won’t fit in mine,’ said Líf. ‘The card is too big.’

Katrín reached for the card. ‘It’s like the one in our camera.’ They’d bought the camera five years ago when it was the latest model, but it looked rather lame now in comparison to Líf’s shiny new one. ‘Still, I don’t know whether you can look at videos on it.’

Garðar hurried to the front entrance to fetch the camera, ignoring Líf’s grumble that it wouldn’t work, since their camera battery was probably dead as well. He came back with the camera and immediately replaced its memory card with the other, smiling from ear to ear when the camera switched itself on.

‘There!’ He turned the little screen towards them where they could see the first frame of each piece of footage on the card. Most of them showed the house or its surroundings, and seemed to have been taken to document repairs or construction. ‘He probably wanted evidence of the work he put into the house. He must have had a lot to do.’ Garðar flipped to the next screen, which showed more opening frames. ‘These are completely black.’ He raised his eyebrows and tried to play one of them. Líf and Katrín had taken up position on either side of him in order to see better. Katrín’s headache eased off when she stood up, although other parts of her body moaned in pain with every movement.

They watched the dark screen and listened hard to catch the vague sound from the camera’s little built-in speakers. They heard several of the house’s familiar little creaks and groans, then the recording stopped without warning. Garðar tried the next one, which was also so dark that it seemed as if the screen were turned off. He was about to stop the playback and try another clip when a more rhythmic creaking, like footsteps on floorboards, came from the camera. It was only through sheer luck that he didn’t drop the camera when the frightened voice of the cameraman could be heard whispering: ‘He’s in here.’