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Una awoke with a jerk.
She opened her eyes but couldn’t see a thing for the darkness pressing in all around her. For a panicky moment she couldn’t work out where she was, though she had the feeling she was in a strange place, not in her own bed. She stiffened with fear. She was so cold. By the feel of it, she’d kicked the covers on to the floor, and the room was freezing.
She sat up slowly, experiencing a moment of dizziness, but the feeling soon passed as she remembered where she was.
In Skálar on the Langanes Peninsula. In the little attic flat. Alone.
And then she knew what it was that had woken her. Or thought she knew … It was hard to distinguish dream from reality with her senses still wandering in the vague borderland between sleep and waking.
She had heard something. What, though? As the memory gradually came back to her, she felt the skin prickling on her arms. It had been a high little voice – the voice of a young girl, she thought. Yes, now she could hear it again in her head: a young girl singing a lullaby.
Unable to bear it a moment longer, she got out of bed and blundered across the pitch-black room towards the light switch on the wall. Not for the first time she cursed the fact that she didn’t have a reading lamp by her bed. Yet she felt a moment’s reluctance to turn on the light, for fear of what the retreating shadows might reveal.
The high voice echoed eerily in her head, but she couldn’t recall the words of the girl’s song. It must have been a dream, however real it had seemed.
Suddenly there was a loud crack, followed by a tinkling sound and a stabbing pain in her foot that caused her to stumble and fall heavily to her knees. What the hell?
She bit back a scream, only for it to dawn on her a second later that she had trodden on the wine glass she had left on the floor the previous evening. Fumbling for her foot, she found a shard of glass sticking out of it and felt something hot and wet oozing from the wound. Gingerly, she extracted the glass. The pain was excruciating.
It took all her willpower to force herself back on to her feet, then grope along the wall for the switch, but finally she found it and turned on the light. As the room sprang into view, she shot a glance around, half-expecting to see a small figure in there with her, while telling herself that she’d imagined the whole thing: the voice hadn’t been real, the lullaby had been an illusion, a trick played on her by her sleeping mind.
Limping back to the bed, she sat down, drew up her foot and examined the cut, which, luckily, turned out not to be as deep as she’d feared. Now she had satisfied herself that she was alone in the room, she could feel her heartbeat slowing and returning to normal.
Then, in a flash, the words of the girl’s song came back to her:
Lullaby, my little Thrá,
may you sweetly sleep …
A chill spread through her flesh.
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