On A Small Island

by Grant Nicol

  Nothing I could say was going to change anything. This was an unstoppable journey that had started three decades earlier. I was so cold I could barely feel my fingers or toes any longer. My suffering didn’t appear to concern him in the slightest. He wasn’t going to continue until he had a response of some sort so finally I just shook my head in despair. It was about all I could manage but it seemed to do the trick.

  ‘I know he never took her to a hospital. He said she was being looked after and that we would be able to visit her when she was feeling better. Of course we never did. I never saw her again. He drove her away that night and killed her somewhere in the hills. She was in so much pain anyway that it was probably kinder to just finish her off.

  ‘He couldn’t have taken her anywhere for help without having to explain to someone how she’d become so badly hurt in the first place. She would have finally been able to ruin him and there was no way he could allow that to happen. As soon as he got back home he filled that pit in again as if it had never been there. Then he went back to his drinking as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. After that he had to find new ways to bring in money now his golden goose was dead and buried but he found ways to scrape by and still managed to keep himself drunk every day of the week. Eventually, though, his sick and twisted mind decided he could use me to satisfy his sexual needs now that his whore was no longer around. He wasn’t about to let that stop him having his fun.

  ‘After I ran away I tried for years to forget about those days but there were always times when I couldn’t help but wonder what had become of him. I guess he just got on with his life before eventually finding himself a wife. He must have straightened himself out before he met her, don’t you think? Margrét had no idea who she was really married to. If she had been told, she would never have believed that her beloved Einar was capable of such things and would have laughed at the foolishness of it all.

  ‘In some ways it’s a shame she wasn’t around long enough to see what became of her family. I would have liked to hear him try to explain all this to her. I would have liked to see him tell her all about what he once was. To tell all of you about the monster you were never allowed to know. That would have been some day for your family and some day for me. That I never got to see him do that is one of the few regrets I have left.’

  CHAPTER 27

  I wasn’t really ready to die, no matter what I had told him about killing me. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I thought I had prepared myself for the possibility of it happening as much as anyone actually can, but I was not ready for the finality it would bring. I wasn’t willing to become just another of his victims and I didn’t want to give him the pleasure of completing his heinous jigsaw puzzle. There were, however, some very serious problems that stood between my desire to carry on with my life and the fulfilment of that desire. I was totally drained of heat and energy, to the point where I could no longer feel my extremities and the drugs in my system were making me want to be sick all the time even though there was clearly no longer anything left in my stomach to expel.

  Worse than all those things, I was terrified. More terrified than I had ever thought possible; consumed by the relentless, funereal pace of the procession I was following to my death. As I sat staring at my captor’s feet, no longer wishing to look into the eyes of the man who was going to kill me, I realised that the game was most definitely up. I couldn’t be sure if I had hours to live or merely minutes. Whichever it was I knew it couldn’t be long before he let me join my sisters one last time.

  As I sat there listening to him explain his life and its consequences, to himself as much as anybody else, I decided that if the opportunity arose I would attempt to give him one last thorn in his side. Even if it cost me my life, which I figured was all but forfeit by now, anyway.

  ‘At some point it finally hit me. When he filled in the pit outside the front door, the spade he used to throw the earth into that hole he’d taken from the back of his car.

  ‘At the time it didn’t strike me as terribly strange but it should have. He didn’t keep his spade in the car and I had never once seen him put it in there. He had pulled it from the car because he’d just finished using it to bury her. Up in the hills somewhere, or down by the beach. Where he hid her away, I guess I’ll never know.

  ‘There were beaches nearby where I would walk along the black sand while dreaming of getting away and starting my life again. I would steal out of the house at night when I could get away unnoticed. Somewhere beyond those vicious breakers were other families much happier than my own in other countries, which may as well have been other worlds they were so far away.

  ‘Eventually, I did get away but not to some far-off land where I could start afresh and not before your father had ruined me. Where he grew up they didn’t have any girls to play with so they were forced to experiment with each other. I was five years old when he did that to me. He would have been at least twice that age before the same fate befell him. It builds such anger within you that it either destroys you or you pass it on, like a disease, so that it may ruin someone else’s life. Either way you’re never the same again. The only choice you have is between keeping it to yourself and letting it infect everything and everyone around you. It eats away at all that is good and leaves nothing of any use behind in its wake.

  ‘You’re only now discovering what it is capable of. Until recently the worst things you’d had to contend with had been your mother’s death, the fact that your father never talked to you as much as you might have liked and the fact that you think that your sisters were both a little bit strange.

  ‘I first tracked down your father over a year ago. I told him who I was and why I had come to see him. Of course, at first he didn’t believe me and pretended not to recognise me but it didn’t take long to jog his memory.

  ‘The funny thing is, I gave him a choice. I told him that he could tell all of you what he had done to me and my mother or I would take all of you from him and kill you. One by one. When I killed Jóhannes and that horse I thought the warning might cause him to change his mind, but I was wrong.

  ‘When I found Elín working late one night all on her own I acted again thinking he might change his mind and save you two, but again I was wrong. When Kristjana needed a lift to pick up her cello I acted again but that failed to change his mind as well. I’m not sure if I’m impressed by his determination to save his own hide or disgusted by his contempt for you all. I actually thought you meant more to him than his foolish pride.

  ‘There is no way he could ever be proud of what he did to us all those years ago but to do nothing now when he knew the consequences of his inaction, I found that fascinating. Even after both your sisters were dead I was still convinced that he would tell you and let you live.

  ‘Now, once you’re dead, he won’t have to worry about telling the truth ever again.’

  He smiled when he said that last bit. I guess he found humour in the darkest of places.

  ‘I’ve got to bring him up here, too, so I can bury you both together.’ He grinned again and disappeared back out through the old creaking door. The blast of freezing wind made me shiver so hard I thought I’d never stop.

  I pulled my knees towards my chest and rolled slowly onto them until I had balanced myself in an upright position. I leant forward and rested my head against the wall. If I could have made the choice to end my own life there and then I think I would have. Not just to deny him the pleasure of killing me but because I could genuinely see no point in continuing.

  On my knees, with my face pressed hard against the cold wall I was in just the right pose to do some praying. So, that is exactly what I did.

  There weren’t many things left I wanted any more. Nothing for myself, anyway. I had given up on getting out of that hut in one piece. What I wanted now was for my father to not be the man that was being described to me. I wanted all the things that Daníel had said about him not to be true. I wanted it to be a lie that Dad knew about this.
I wanted it to all be lies, nothing more than the product of a diseased mind.

  I could die knowing that my father had survived a hard childhood and that he had made some very poor choices in his life early on. Before we came along. I could handle knowing that he hadn’t always been the man I knew and loved. I could handle all that. People mess up, they make mistakes. It’s how you recover from them that makes you who you are.

  What I wanted most of all, what I prayed for more than anything, was that he never had the opportunity to do anything about what had happened to us now. I didn’t want him to be so weak that he would keep something like that to himself. I wanted him to be better than that so I could die knowing that a decent part of our family would live on.

  I didn’t want all the good bits to be gone and only the wreckage to remain. That’s all I asked for as I waited for Daníel to return.

  I rolled back to my original position as Daníel entered backwards through the door. He was dragging Stefán Jón’s body behind him as he did so. When he had him inside the door he let go of his shoulders with a tired-sounding grunt.

  I looked over at my friend, hoping that the uncomprehending look he had acquired in death had left his face. It had not.

  Daníel looked across at me as he wiped the sweat from his brow. He seemed to be searching my eyes for something. Exactly what that might have been I couldn’t tell.

  When he’d caught his breath he completed Stefán Jón’s journey by dropping him unceremoniously into the last open grave. As he did so I got a glimpse of the knife he had killed him with, still stuck into the waistband of his jeans. My legs twitched involuntarily when I saw it and I noticed for the first time that my ankles weren’t tied nearly as tightly as I had thought they were. If only I could muster the energy to work them a little looser, I would give myself a fighting chance of getting out of them. If only I had the energy required to do that. If only I had the energy to do anything apart from pitifully wait for the end to come at the end of that knife. I pulled my feet slowly up towards my hands and started work on getting the knot loosened further.

  It had been tied well as far as the knot went; it just hadn’t been tied when my ankles had been pressed tight together and so I had a little leeway to work with.

  Daníel’s attention was taken completely with his struggle to get Stefán Jón’s rather lanky body into the hole. As the grave had been dug with me in mind it was short by a good six inches or so.

  I let him curse and work up more of a sweat despite the chilling air as I fumbled about in the gloom trying to somehow unravel my bonds and take a small step towards my freedom. As he continued to fret I finally got one side of the knot to loosen slightly for me. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. Slowly, the knot loosened its grip on me as I fed one end of it carefully back through itself.

  As I unwound the rope from around my ankles, I strained to see if I could tell exactly what Daníel was up to. He still hadn’t turned to face me, so I rolled carefully onto my knees and very slowly and carefully inched my way across the floor until I was directly behind him. He let out another groan as he finally positioned Stefán Jón’s body to his satisfaction.

  Just as he was about to stand up again and come for me, I snatched the knife from his exposed waistband. He felt the movement on his buttock and one of his hands felt around his backside for the missing knife.

  Thinking that he must have let it fall to the floor, he turned and ran his fingers over the dirt in an attempt to locate his missing weapon. He had no idea where it was and what it was about to be used for. If he had, he would have put a lot more effort into finding it.

  Even though my hands were still tied at the wrists, I was able to get a good grip on the knife with both hands. As the realisation that all was not as it should be began to sink in for Daníel, he lifted his gaze from the floor up towards where I now stood. I used my whole weight to fall forward onto him and drive the blade as far as I could into whatever I hit. Even though it meant possibly saving my life, the thought of stabbing him made me close my eyes so that I would not have the sight of the knife disappearing into his flesh come back to haunt me at a later date.

  Despite my squeamishness, I managed to force the knife into him, all the way up to the handle. It entered him somewhere just in front of his collarbone on his left side. The metal of the blade slid into his body with disturbing ease at first but then hit bone and more solid connective tissue.

  I immediately let go of it as he began to scream in what had to be excruciating pain. I pulled away from him but not fast enough to stop him grabbing my ankles and pulling me back down to his level. Once he had me on the floor with him he tried to pull the blade from its gruesome new home. The first tug he gave it had him recoiling in desperate agony and that was when I pushed myself away from him and used my hands in the dirt to press myself upward to a standing position and stumble toward the door.

  It was still open from when Daníel had dragged Stefán Jon through it and I unsteadily put one foot after another towards the old broken frame, not wanting to trip and fall, only to seal my fate once and for all. Somewhere behind me Daníel was still trying to extricate the knife from his body. His screams growing in anger as he did so, like a wounded animal intent on taking its foe with it into the afterlife.

  As I felt the freezing air hit my face like a wave, I dared to dream that I was free. I don’t know what overcame me, but I was sure I had escaped. As soon as I thought that, though, I felt the sharp, unmistakeable pain of metal slicing into my body. My hip exploded in white-hot pain and I staggered no more than another foot like a drunkard rising too quickly from his barstool, only to stop dead in his tracks.

  The joy I had felt at the thought of escaping his clutches was quickly replaced with the feeling that I had only delayed the inevitable, perhaps even worsening what was already undoubtedly to be a terrible fate. This time, though, there would be no delay in his vengeance. He had seen chances come and go, and wasted them in his obsession to get everything just right and now he would not hesitate to take hold of me like a disobedient dog and drag me back to my hole in the ground. I instinctively kicked out as I was pulled backwards and connected with his head as we both tumbled to the ground. His knife slid home again, this time entering my calf.

  I pulled my leg free and squirmed out of his grasp. He had the desire to kill me but the injury I had inflicted on him was considerably lessening his ability to do so.

  I stood up once more, slipped on the wet ground and screamed as my right leg failed to fulfil its prime objective. If I wasn’t able to stand, how was I going to get away from him? Again, I pulled myself up and fought against the pain in order to force myself forward and away from him. A few steps and I fell once more, but the beginnings were there.

  Each time I rose again from the grass, to my knees and then to my feet, I could feel I was making progress. The pain wasn’t lessening any but I was forcing it away into a place where it was capable of doing less and less harm. I was too afraid of dying to let it win. If anything was going to save me, it was going to be fear. The greatest motivator I would ever find.

  Even once I was up and moving it seemed that every three or so steps I took, I fell down again. But each time I picked myself up and tried to run some more. At first it was little more than a hobble and I kept waiting for that crunching tackle from behind that was going to get me down and keep me down. As I ran I could hear my heart straining to keep up with the demand that was being placed on it. The pounding of it swelled in my ears until it had achieved a deafening roar.

  I could feel my pulse swelling again and again in my head as it beat in time with every step I took.

  By now, I reasoned, I had to have put enough distance between the two of us. I slowed momentarily to turn and see how far behind I had left him, the pounding in my head not lessening for a second. As it banged, again and again and again I saw to my horror that the noise I thought was all in my head was the footfalls of Daníel running behind me. He had risen and giv
en chase, almost catching me in the process before I had even noticed, such was my terror.

  Suddenly the ground fell away from under my feet as Daníel crashed into me, knocking the air from my lungs and the wind from my sails. As I stared down into the black void into which we were falling, I wondered how I hadn’t noticed earlier where I was headed. I guess between the fear and the adrenaline and the dark night all around me I just hadn’t noticed the river.

  We flew as one through the air before hitting the water. It was so unbelievably cold, glacial melt kind of cold, that it knocked the air right out of me all over again.

  We had fallen into the river that runs from the north of Hella all the way down to the sea, the Ytri-Rangá. In the dark, I hadn’t seen its banks approaching and had simply tumbled into its freezing maw.

  Freed from the hold of one assailant, I was now in the frozen arms of another even deadlier foe. Once I had resurfaced, I tried to pick out the bank closest to where I had fallen but quickly realised that I was hopelessly disorientated. We had turned as we had fallen and I could no longer tell from which direction we had come. To confuse matters further, I couldn’t see where Daníel was, if he had even resurfaced. I was so pathetically weak that my only option was to try to keep my head above the waterline and let the current take me away as far as it would. As far away from him as I could get.

  After what was probably only a few minutes but what felt like hours, I found myself being able to just make out the lights of an approaching car. I could barely keep air in my lungs long enough to draw breath though I cried out all the same as it passed by, but my voice was whisked away by the wind and the car disappeared into the night.

  Another eternity passed before I felt my knees being scraped against the gravel on the side of the river. I fought for purchase with what little strength I had left and eventually found my feet touching the bottom. The first two times I tried to stand I fell and was forced back into the current. The third time I scrambled towards the shore and grabbed a hold of something fibrous in the dark. Even once I was free of the freezing water the fear that I was going to die still wouldn’t leave me. I was so cold that I could hardly move and any adrenaline that had sustained me earlier was long gone.