Someone to Watch Over Me

PREFACE Saturday, 8 November 2008

The cat was keeping a low profile, concealing itself in the darkness behind the dense but leafless bushes. It crouched there, motionless, the only movement its yellow eyes flickering back and forth; its defences were up against whatever else shared the night. The humans who used to feed it had long since forgotten it, and the cat knew there were things hidden in the dark that didn’t come out in daylight. It always made itself invisible as the hush of night descended, when people let down their guard as the shadows either vanished or took over, depending on your point of view. The cat still hadn’t made up its mind which it was, and it didn’t care: it liked this time of day, even though its hackles rose from time to time in anticipation of the unexpected, of whatever bad thing was just around the corner. Everything that hated the light was now set free; the dark corners merged with their surroundings, all around was darkness and solitude.

A dull cracking sound made the cat flex its claws into the damp, cold soil. It couldn’t see anything but still it resisted drawing attention to itself, breathing more shallowly and pressing its scrawny body as flat to the ground as possible. The cold air, which moments before had felt so refreshing after a day sleeping on the sofa, became oppressive, and each inhalation left an unpleasant flavour on the creature’s rough tongue. Inadvertently, it hissed low in its throat, and frantically tensed itself to spring away from the terrible thing that was there somewhere but invisible, like the owners of the voices on the radio of the people it shared the house with. Suddenly the cat turned, darted out from under the bushes and ran as fast as its feet could carry it, away from the house.

Berglind sat up in bed, wide awake. When she woke in the middle of the night it usually happened gradually, while she tossed and turned in search of the perfect sleeping position. But this time she’d seemed to jolt awake from a deep sleep, feeling as if she hadn’t slept at all. It was completely dark in the master bedroom and outside was a pitch-black, starless sky. The illuminated hands on the alarm clock revealed that it was just gone three thirty. Had she been woken by crying from the child’s room? Berglind listened carefully, but heard only the low ticking of the alarm clock and her husband’s heavy breathing.

Berglind pushed back the duvet, taking care not to wake Halli. He’d had enough to put up with these past few months and the last thing she wanted was to disturb him. Although the holy men seemed to have done their job well, she didn’t dare to hope the matter was settled so soon after their visit. But she couldn’t express that to her husband, or to anyone else, in case people thought she was doing it for attention and ended up doubting her word – or rather, doubting it even more – over what had happened recently. Even Halli, who had experienced it all with her, had tried to find rational explanations, but most of them were so unlikely as to be ridiculous. He had never fully accepted her theories, although over time he stopped objecting to them, since nothing else seemed possible as the strange events kept multiplying. Still, it was to Halli’s credit that he had held back and tried his best to support her, despite the cracks that had formed in the foundations of their marriage. They weren’t on the home straight yet; their problems were far from over, although at least one of their biggest issues seemed to be behind them now. At work Halli’s hours had been cut back and seemed unlikely to be reinstated, and although Berglind’s job as a civil servant was supposedly secure there were financial issues there, too. Who knew, perhaps she would be next to suffer from the cutbacks.

Berglind’s eyes adjusted quickly to the darkness and she got out of bed carefully. There was no point lying back down yet. She would have a glass of water and check Pési was sound asleep; hopefully then she would be tired again. Otherwise she would play a couple of hands of solitaire on the computer or surf the Internet until her eyelids started drooping. Long ago she’d mastered the art of distracting herself with pointless and repetitive tasks in order to restore her peace of mind. Otherwise she would never have been able to stay in the house so long. Berglind shut the bedroom door behind her, trying not to let the hinges creak. They had been planning to replace all the doors when they bought the house, but they’d never got round to it. The hallway was cold as ice; the chilly tiles made the soles of her feet tingle and she regretted not having stopped to look for her slippers. In her heart she knew she never would have; it would be a long time before she could bring herself to poke around in the darkness under the bed. Hopefully it would happen. No, not hopefully, it had to. Otherwise she would lose her mind.

The water in the kitchen tap was lukewarm so she let it run for a while as she stared out at the familiar street and the houses opposite. The road was shrouded in darkness, although it looked like someone had forgotten to turn off the light in the garage directly opposite. Presumably a window had been left open as well, because a bare light bulb swung there slowly, as if in a gentle breeze. Otherwise the row of houses was dark. The yellowish gleam from the streetlight did not spread to the front gardens, but died out at the edge of the pavement where the shadows took over. Berglind looked downhill, across rooftops, ignoring the running water as she let her eyes wander along to where Vesturlandsvegur Road turned up towards the suburb of Kjalarnes. She let go of the tap and rubbed the goose bumps on her upper arm. A car drove along the main road and she thought she could hear its engine whine as it splashed through the rain-filled tyre ruts. Had they been there since the accident? The weather hadn’t been like this, that night. The road was in need of repair, but it wouldn’t happen any time soon. Berglind dragged her gaze away from the window and stuck a glass under the stream of water.

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.’