The Mist

alone in the house with that stranger. She pulled on a thick woollen lopapeysa, a padded down jacket and boots, then went out into the cold. In fact, the cold wasn’t the worst part. She enjoyed filling her lungs with the clean air blown in with the winter winds and her warm clothes kept out the worst of the frost. The scene that met her eyes was bleak and featureless, all landmarks obliterated by a smothering whiteness. It was a grey day, the clouds swollen with unshed snow, scudding overhead with the fierce wind, and in another couple of hours it would be dark. It was the darkness that got to her. In winter, when the nights closed in, she avoided going outside at all if she could help it, so she didn’t have to witness the unrelieved gloom stretching out as far as the eye could see, without the faintest pinprick of light anywhere to give one hope. Anna’s house was too far off, hidden by higher ground, for the glow from her windows to be visible. Only when the moon was shining could Erla bear to go out in the evenings. The moon was her friend; they got on well together. But even in the moonlight there was no getting away from the isolation, the cursed isolation. The crushing knowledge that she couldn’t go anywhere; that if anything went wrong, it might not be possible to get help … She hastily pushed these thoughts away.
Although there was a temporary let-up in the snow, judging by the threatening sky it wouldn’t be long before it started coming down heavily again. The drifts mounted up at this time of year and froze hard in the bitter temperatures, lasting until February if they were lucky; into March if they were not.
It was then that she spotted Leó’s footprints. Without really knowing why, she started to follow them down the slope, noting that he had indeed followed the road, as he had said. The only road. The road that led here from the village, first to Anna’s, then to their farm.
The guest had clearly indicated that he hadn’t seen another house. How was that possible, unless he had been lying? In spite of the cold, she broke out in a sweat under her thick woollen jumper and coat. Slowly, deliberately, she turned, hearing only the moaning of the wind, blinkered by her hood. She was suddenly convinced that their visitor, Leó – if that was really his name – had followed her outside and was standing right behind her.
There was nobody there. She was standing alone in the snow, allowing herself to be frightened by imaginary phantoms, as so often before.
She began wading back towards the farmhouse as fast as she could go, her boots sinking in the powdery drifts, slowing her down until she felt as if she were caught in a bad dream, struggling, unable to make any headway.
Reaching the front door at last, she opened it and stamped on the mat to remove the worst of the snow, then glanced up quickly, because now she really had seen a ghost. Her heart lurched as she found herself looking straight into Leó’s white face. He was standing in the passage, but she could have sworn that he had just emerged, hastily, from her and Einar’s bedroom.

VI
‘All we can think of is that she must have accepted a lift with the wrong man,’ said the police inspector over the phone from Selfoss. ‘Nothing else has turned up at our end that can shed any light on the case.’
‘I see,’ said Hulda. It bothered her that the incident remained unsolved, although there was every chance the girl’s disappearance had been deliberate. Sadly, suicide wasn’t that uncommon. But another theory the police had considered at the time was that she might have hitched a lift with a driver who had attacked her.
The girl, a twenty-year-old from the upmarket Reykjavík suburb of Gardabær, had been taking a year off between school and university. She came from a good family: her father was a lawyer, her mother a nurse. Hulda had spoken to the parents repeatedly in the course of the investigation but hadn’t detected any hint of problems at home. All the indications were that she was a perfectly normal girl who had simply vanished into thin air.
‘What about at your end?’ asked the inspector from Selfoss.
‘Our end?’
‘How’s the inquiry going? You’re in charge of it, aren’t you?’
‘Oh, yes, I am,’ said Hulda. ‘We’re making zero progress, I’m afraid. The trail’s gone completely cold. That’s why I’m calling. I was hoping something new might have turned up.’
When last heard of, the girl had been staying in an old summer house outside the small town of Selfoss, in the southern lowlands some fifty kilometres east of Reykjavík. Her parents had heard from her while she was there, and the locals had been aware of her presence, but after that nothing more was known of her movements. The police had examined every inch of the summer house but could find no evidence of a struggle or any signs that anyone else had been there. The girl’s belongings had vanished too, which suggested that she had left of her own volition.
The police had combed the banks of the Ölfúsá, the milky glacial river that flowed through the town, as well as a wide swathe of the countryside around the summer house. They had searched the neighbouring buildings and put out an appeal for information, but no one had come forward. At this point, the worrying suspicion had occurred to the police that she might, as the inspector put it, have got into a car with the wrong man. She was young, vulnerable and stunningly pretty, judging from the photos of the tall, willowy redhead. And quite an experienced traveller too, in spite of her youth. Everyone agreed that she had been a lovely girl, and a budding artist as well – she had taken time off