The Undesired: A Thriller

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  Aldís sat up. They had ordered her to clean the room and change the bed, and she could still smell the iron reek of blood. The smell alone would hardly have haunted her like this; she might have felt a little queasy at the memory for a few days afterwards, before forgetting all about it. But Veigar had tripped as he staggered away from the house and the sheet had slipped. Aldís expelled a breath and rubbed her eyes. If only she hadn’t seen that deformed, grey head. At first she had taken it for a plastic doll whose head had been bashed in. Then she had realised that it was a baby, covered in some kind of white grease. The head appeared to stop short just above the eyes, yet there was no sign of any injury. Fine black tendrils of hair were plastered to the skin and the skull appeared to have been squashed flat by natural causes. The eyes were closed but, as she gaped in horror, they opened, seeming to meet her gaze. Staring, black eyes, like those of the boys in her dream. Either she was mistaken or the eyelids had flipped open when Veigar tripped. Neither theory seemed plausible for more than a moment, but they were at least bearable, unlike the third possibility – that the child had not in fact been born dead.

  Aldís pulled the pillow over her head and lay face down on the mattress, humming a tune her mother used to sing when she was absorbed in her knitting. Aldís didn’t want to think about her mother either, but even she was preferable to a deformed, dead baby. Thinking about her mother stirred up only hurt resentment, not horror.

  As she was dropping off again, she was disturbed by a rustling outside the window. It wasn’t the noise itself that made her strain her ears but the thought that there might be someone out there. Was the window open or shut? The curtain didn’t appear to be moving, which was a good sign, but then the evening had been airless and still.

  Aldís listened to the sound of her own breathing, prey to unsettling thoughts. No one knew what Veigar had done with the baby. He hadn’t left the farm for days after the birth and, as far as anyone was aware, no priest or doctor had taken the child away for burial. If Hákon was to be believed, Lilja and Veigar were too God-fearing to consider burying an unbaptised child in consecrated ground. He reckoned the infant had been shoved in a hole somewhere on the property or quite simply thrown in the dustbin. Aldís refused to believe that anyone could be so heartless as to treat the body of their own child like rubbish, so in the following days she had searched the area for any trace of a small grave. In the end she concluded that if the child had been buried on the farm it wasn’t anywhere obvious, as there was no sign that the soil had been disturbed. She had no idea what had become of the poor little mite.

  The quiet scratching started up again and Aldís squashed the pillow over her ears. Hard as she tried, she couldn’t remember if she had closed the window. And absolutely nothing would induce her to get up and check.

  Chapter 3

  There were so many things Ódinn wished he had done differently in life; so many decisions he’d made that had seemed unimportant at the time but were to have far-reaching consequences. One was the impulse to stay in town that fateful night instead of heading home with his friends once the fun had begun to wear thin. It wasn’t the first or the last time, and as a rule it didn’t matter; he’d just wake up a bit more hungover than usual, having run his card through the machine once too often, but on this particular night his loitering downtown had cost him more than a sick headache.

  He’d got chatting to a young woman in the taxi queue. Her name was Lára and she’d been as unsteady on her legs as he was. He couldn’t for the life of him recall what they had talked about but she had evidently fallen for his slurring, drunken chat-up lines, since they had ended up back at his place. The sex on that occasion had also failed to leave any impression on his memory, though if it had been anything like it became later on, that was no great loss. Unless the first time had been different. In any case, he had rung her a fortnight later after the woman at the dry cleaner’s had handed him a crumpled note with Lára’s phone number on it, which had turned up in his trouser pocket. Never before or since had a dry cleaner returned to him so much as an old credit-card receipt.

  But it had happened and there was no going back. Ódinn had smoothed out the note and called to invite Lára out to dinner, setting in motion a chain of events that still showed no signs of ending, though her part in it was over. He’d had countless opportunities to extricate himself after that first proper date but instead they had moved in together and finally got married, despite all the evidence that they were unsuited. There were moments when Ódinn had been on the point of suggesting they go their separate ways, but each time she’d done something to charm the pants off him, and he’d abandoned the idea. Not until after the wedding did they realise the truth, and when the subject of divorce came up, they found themselves, almost for the first time, in agreement. But to their mutual surprise, Lára discovered she was pregnant, so nothing had come of it.

  The arrival of their daughter had only made matters worse. She was a difficult baby from day one, constantly colicky and always crying, and although Ódinn adored the little creature, his love faded in inverse proportion to the growing bags under his eyes. Shortly after their wedding, he and Lára had purchased a small attic flat in the town centre, and this had gradually come to seem like a prison to him. It didn’t help that Lára suffered from postnatal depression, and even when awake was reluctant to talk. After four months he could take no more. When he walked out he left the flat to Lára, taking it for granted that she would take custody of their daughter, or he wouldn’t have left. To his mind, Lára had got by far the worse end of the bargain, so he didn’t like to demand back his half of their small deposit. She kept the child and the roof over their heads; he got his freedom.

  What a shit he had been. He could see that now that everything had fallen apart in his hands. After moving out, he’d only needed to look after his daughter every other weekend or when things were difficult for Lára. Not that he’d even kept to this part of the deal. The more time passed after their divorce, the less often she turned to him for help, and ashamed as he was of the fact now, he’d justified it to himself at the time on the grounds that his job was so hectic, he needed to rest on his days off, et cetera. Lára had always got her child maintenance regularly, at the beginning of every month, which was surely what mattered most. Actually, the state had taken care of that before sending him the bill, but still … One thing was certain: he wasn’t proud of his conduct now.

  He was sitting in his car outside the sports hall, waiting for Rún. Feeling a sudden icy chill, he reached out to turn up the heater, only to discover that it was on full. He pushed the blower up as high as it would go but nothing happened. Irritably he blew on his hands, consoling himself with the thought that the car had never gone wrong before. Perhaps it was a temporary glitch. But it would be impossible to drive with a broken heater in this freezing weather, so he tried banging the dashboard. Nothing happened. He raised his fist again, only to stiffen at a sudden creaking noise from the back seat. There was nothing inherently menacing in the sound, yet his heart began to pound. A series of news items about drug addicts and drunks attacking taxi drivers late at night ran through his mind, and implausible though it was, it occurred to Ódinn that a criminal might have hidden in his car. There was a rustling noise from the shopping bag he had chucked in the back earlier. Perhaps some undesirable had been lurking in the supermarket car park. But of course that was impossible because the car had been empty when he put the shopping in. Resisting the impulse to open the door and jump out, he forced himself to snatch a glance over his shoulder. The back seat was as empty as it had been when he got behind the wheel. It must have been the contents of the bag settling. He heaved a sigh of relief, grateful that no one had witnessed his foolish panic.

  It was probably his conscience pricking him because he had been thinking about Lára. He’d never admit it, even to himself, but for a split second he’d had the feeling she was sitting there behind him, horribly mangled from her fall, gloating over h
is regrets. Absurd. Nevertheless, he switched on the radio to drown out any further sounds from the back.

  A few minutes later he spotted Rún’s small figure emerging from the sports hall, and switched off the radio. Her name struck him now as rather an adolescent choice, but then he and Lára hadn’t been very old when they’d pored over the baby books in search of the perfect, unique name, after the ultrasound had revealed their child’s sex. She was eleven now, but had little in common with her age group. She walked out alone, head down, while the other girls had already left the car park in a chattering, giggling bunch. This didn’t necessarily mean there had been an incident; Rún was unsociable and subdued by nature. When she caught sight of the car, however, she smiled, waved and speeded up.

  Considering his shortcomings as a father, it was amazing how she had always idolised him. At the end of her daddy weekends she had invariably asked why she couldn’t live with him instead, and, coward that he was, he had always told her that her mother wouldn’t allow it. He had done other things he was more ashamed of, but it stung to recall it now. Still, a white lie was better than admitting that he didn’t feel up to taking her on, or, if he was being honest, couldn’t be bothered. Well, that was no longer an option. She lived with him now and would do so until she left home.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart.’ Ódinn squeezed her thin shoulder and the shiny orange fabric of her anorak crackled. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘All right.’ Rún smiled thinly, not showing her teeth. ‘I want to give up handball.’

  Ódinn bit back a comment. They’d had this discussion three times a week for months – after every single session, in other words. But he was adamant: she had promised to keep it up all winter, and she was to stick to her word. She hadn’t made any friends yet at her new school, and he’d hoped that handball practice would help bring her out of her shell. Not that he had a clue how little girls made friends. When he was her age they’d barely existed for him; sure, there were girls in his class, but he and the other boys hadn’t associated with them. What he did remember, though, was that the handball girls used to hang around together. ‘Give it time. Soon you’ll be furious with me if you have to miss a session.’ He squeezed her shoulder tighter as if by doing this he could toughen her up a little. ‘Remember the deal. You stick it out and we’ll go somewhere nice this summer.’

  Rún chewed her upper lip and stared out of the window. Her eyes were filled with an inexpressible pain that Ódinn had no idea how to address. He felt guilty for not having sought professional grief-counselling for her, as their GP had urged. Instead he had trusted his gut instinct, which didn’t seem to have turned out particularly well. Suddenly, she turned to him, no longer looking sad. ‘Let’s go home. I’m hungry.’ She didn’t mention their deal, and neither did Ódinn. What was the point? She was going to the next handball session and they both knew it.

  They didn’t speak much on the way home, but that wasn’t unusual. Neither was chatty by nature. They were alike in this, though so different in appearance. She was uncommonly petite and delicate, whereas he was big and burly; she had dark hair and eyes, and strikingly pale skin that never seemed to tan; he was fair and blue-eyed, and caught the sun the moment he set foot out of doors. Chalk and cheese.

  Ódinn drove straight home. His brother Baldur, who had built their block of flats, liked to refer to it as a condominium, but even that wasn’t enough to shift the apartments. Apart from the old lady on the ground floor, and him and Rún on the second, the building was empty. Baldur had sold Ódinn the flat for a knockdown price when Rún unexpectedly came to live with him and he’d been forced to say goodbye to his bachelor pad in Hlídar. At the same time Ódinn had quit his demanding job with his brother’s firm and started at his current workplace. New flat, new job, new life.

  He smiled as he drove up to their block. The advantage of their new home was that there was never any shortage of parking spaces. He generally used the ones outside because there was something so depressing about the empty underground garage. As the old lady didn’t own a car, the garage resembled the set of a disaster movie in which he and Rún were the sole survivors. He ignored the real reason for his reluctance: the vague fear that someone was lying in wait for them, lurking behind the rough grey concrete pillars. Ridiculous, of course.

  They stepped over the pile of junk mail in the entrance hall and climbed up to the second floor. From the old lady’s flat came the faint sound of a radio; otherwise all was quiet. The lift had never worked, but father and daughter didn’t mind the stairs since the shopping bag was light, containing nothing but flat-cakes, butter and cheese for Rún’s packed lunch. Ódinn hadn’t yet got the hang of organising the food shopping for the week, so was forever having to pop out for small purchases and then again for things he had forgotten. He’d learn eventually, as he would in all the other areas of their life that required improvement.

  Involuntarily he hesitated before turning the key in the lock. Rún looked at him in surprise. ‘Why don’t you open the door?’ She put down her sports bag as if prepared for a lengthy wait.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Ódinn gave her a foolish smile. ‘Just being silly.’ Silly was the word. He’d had a premonition that he shouldn’t open it, though he didn’t know why. Perhaps his nerves were still on edge after what he had imagined earlier in the car. But he sensed that something had changed. Not necessarily inside the house, but something was different or was about to overturn all his certainties. A year or so ago he would have laughed at this but now he knew better, for he had experienced the same sort of premonition the day Lára died. He had been lying in bed with a truly epic hangover when his phone lit up with an unknown number on the screen. And he hadn’t wanted to answer.

  Don’t answer. Your life will never be the same. Don’t answer.

  Only at the third call from the same number had he given in and picked up. Bye-bye, Weekend Daddy.

  But this time the message wasn’t as clear, as if it didn’t really matter whether he opened the door or not. So perhaps the premonition didn’t relate to what awaited them inside; at least, there was no incessant voice echoing in his head: Don’t open! He must still be jumpy from the bag rustling like that in the car. Ódinn shook off his feeling of trepidation and smiled at Rún. It was silly. And, come to think of it, the premonition about the phone call had been wrong. Though his life had undeniably become more complicated and restricted since Rún entered it, he had no desire to turn the clock back. He had been offered a chance to mend his ways and for that he was grateful. He turned the key in the lock.

  They were met by a fresh breeze and Rún frowned. At first Ódinn didn’t understand her reaction, then he twigged.

  ‘Who opened a window?’ Her voice was even higher than usual and she looked terrified. It was an unspoken rule with them that no window should be opened unless for a specific reason. Once he was sure she was asleep, Ódinn would open his bedroom window a crack, but he was always careful to close it before waking her in the morning. It didn’t take a psychologist to guess what lay behind this phobia; her mother had died falling out of a window. The attic flat Ódinn had handed over to Lára had eventually cost her her life. To Rún, open windows were death traps, and Ódinn hadn’t even tried to explain the difference between the narrow gap of a slightly open sash window and a large, wide open dormer window like the one her mother had fallen from. Plenty of time for that later. Nor did he try to explain that her mother had not been irresistibly pulled to the open window by ungovernable forces. She had been perched smoking, as was her habit, half in and half out of the window. In the gutter at the bottom of the steep roof they had found a small flower pot and the household broom. The assumption was that Lára had knocked over the pot, which rolled down into the gutter, and in trying to fish for it with the broom she had lost her balance.

  ‘I must have forgotten to close the window in my room, sweetheart. I was boiling last night and opened it a teeny-tiny crack. A fly would have had difficulty squeezing through it.
’ Ódinn tried to make light of the situation, concealing from Rún that this couldn’t possibly be the explanation. He distinctly remembered shutting the window, though he could conceivably be confusing this with another day. The faint whiff of cigarette smoke did nothing to help. He didn’t smoke, and Rún certainly didn’t. Had the old lady downstairs started sneaking the odd fag?

  Rún sniffed the air, her face even more anxious. ‘I don’t want to go in.’

  ‘OK.’ Ódinn impressed himself with his new-found skill at handling their relationship. ‘I’ll go in and close the window. When I’ve done that and made sure everything’s absolutely fine, you’re to come in. You can’t stay out on the landing forever. I’m not lugging your bed out here. Remember what a job we had forcing it through the door in the first place?’

  Her smile was not amused. ‘It smells of cigarettes inside. Like at Mummy’s.’

  There was a time for truth and a time for white lies. ‘I know. Baldur mentioned that there were some workmen round today, doing something down in the basement. He warned me there might be a smell of smoke in the building.’ There must be a natural explanation but Ódinn didn’t think now was the right time to run through the possibilities, all or none of which might have been correct. Rún needed a single concrete reason, even if it meant having to pretend he had spoken to his brother. ‘Maybe they had to go into our flat, and opened a window while they were there.’ He regretted adding this last bit. Now there were two possible reasons for the open window instead of the simple explanation that he’d forgotten to close it. Rún looked even more dismayed. ‘Wait here while I close it.’

  Ódinn walked straight into his bedroom and swept back the curtain. The window was shut, as he’d remembered. Spinning on his heel, he went into the kitchen, not even bothering to glance into the sitting room. Deep down he had known all along where the draught and smell of smoke were coming from.