When Lampie’s mother became sick, she lost her voice. She had already had difficulty walking for some time. First she had to lean on her daughter, and when that became too difficult she just remained sitting. She was finding it harder and harder to pick things up, and she kept dropping everything, and then one day she started stumbling over her words as well. Before long, she was unable to make herself understood. No one knew how it had happened. But nothing could be done about it. Strange sounds fell from her mouth like marbles. She sounded like a drunk, like a madwoman. So she stopped speaking. She lay with her head on her pillow and stared and stared.
All that time though, Lampie could hear her talking inside her head. And when her mother died, her voice stayed with her. She usually says nice things. Sometimes she is a bit stern.
Come along, she is saying now. Nightdress on, wash your feet and into bed! Stop dawdling!
Lampie does not mind it when her mother is stern. Then it seems as if someone is still looking after her a bit. When she goes to take off her dress, she finds the shard in the pocket. She strokes it a few times before placing it on the bedside table. As she bends down to untie her laces, she hears something out in the corridor. Shuffling, snuffling. She jumps and looks up, but then she can’t hear it any more. Maybe it wasn’t even there.
She does not want to think about monsters. Her head is full of things she does not want to think about. But now that it is getting dark and she can’t see anything outside, she can’t stop herself, and she thinks about it all: Her own bed. The sound of the sea around the lighthouse. Her father’s snoring, at home in the night. She tugs at her laces, which are in a knot, and tries so very hard not to think about everything that it feels as if she can actually hear his snores. Or maybe it’s real.
It is as if, far off in the house, someone is snoring.
Or maybe growling.
Mother? There isn’t really a monster here, is there?
Her mother just laughs at her. A monster? Of course not – what nonsense! Wouldn’t it have gobbled up Martha and those men with the coffin?
But what was inside the coffin? wonders Lampie. Could it have been a girl, a girl just like her? Is she the monster’s next meal, a monster that only likes little girls? With claws and teeth, with hairy paws, a man with six arms and with no mercy… Lampie can imagine all kinds of things.
She tugs even harder, but the lace won’t come undone. In the darkness she can’t see the knot and her hands are too shaky. It smells a bit different now too – like rotten fish that has been lying around for a really long time.
The only monster she has ever seen for real smelt like that. A fisherman had caught it and half the town went out to take a look: a foredeck full of a tangle of black snakes, with two big dead eyes at its centre. Everyone went, “Aah” and “Ooh” and “Eeuw”, and the air above it was black with flies.
But if a thing like that were still alive… If those dead arms had muscles that could pull her down into the black night…
Stop it, Emilia! says her mother. When she says “Emilia”, she really means it. That’s enough. Shoes off, wash your feet and go to sleep right away.
Yes, but, Mother, I really did hear something. It might have been a monster.
Don’t be silly. Monsters don’t exist.
The growling turns into a gurgling, barking sound. Far away. Or is it coming closer?
Lampie does not dare to wash her feet now. She does not dare to take off her clothes. She does not even dare to lie in the bed, but crawls underneath it instead, wearing one shoe and one sock. If something comes into the room, maybe it won’t find her.
She can’t sleep. Again.
She rolls herself up around her fear, and lies there on the cold floor, listening. Sometimes the barking sounds far away, sometimes closer. One time she hears something prowling along the corridor, with heavy paws and tapping claws. When it comes closer, she makes herself even smaller and curls up in the corner, with her back against the wall.
She wishes she had checked to see if the door had a lock. Anything could just come into the room. But the paws walk by and the tapping disappears down the long corridor. Then it is silent.
So she goes looking for shells, on a beach inside her head. She finds some really pretty ones, pink and green, shining and wet. She washes off the sand and lays them out to dry on a rock in the sun.
By the time the whole rock is full, she has finally fallen asleep.