Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

And what exactly was he expecting to find, here?

Nothing, he hoped.

Which was exactly what he found.

There were signs of Amis everywhere, but no Amis. There was a varnishing job in the foyer that was only half done, the brushes wrapped in polythene bags to keep them soft while the varnish itself had set hard. His old Bedford van stood out around the back, bonnet half open, keys in, battery dead. Aldridge stood in the carpenter's makeshift bedroom, looking down at the man's neat stack of second-hand paperbacks and wondering where he could be. He'd already checked on the generator in its open cage in the utility shed; switched on but stalled, the generator had been cold.

He found the bathroom that Amis had been using, a small private suite next to what would eventually be the manager's office. It had a toilet, a shower stall, a mirror, and a washbasin. On a glass shelf above the basin were a battered leather travelling case with shaving kit laid out alongside it.

This bothered him. He stood looking at the setup for a while, half aware of his own reflection in the mirror. Damn it, he ought to be able to concentrate better than this. He kept thinking of the two of them, himself and Loren, as if they were chained together and drowning. She'd tried, he couldn't pretend that she hadn't. For a few months in the winter she'd joined a housewives' guitar group, where they all wore long dresses and sang John Denver songs to deaf old people. It hadn't lasted.

There was a vehicle approaching, somewhere outside. He turned and walked through the manager's office and out into the foyer, and there he stopped. The Venetz sisters' Renault van was turning onto the forecourt, its windscreen flaring in a momentary double reflection from the window behind which he now stood. He knew the van, he'd walked past it barely half an hour before; it had the name of the business and their telephone number on its panelled sides. What did the sisters want here? Were they looking for him?

But no, neither of the sisters was driving. It was one of the waitresses, the one that always seemed to fade into the background whenever he called by. What was her name, again?

He couldn't remember. He'd heard it somewhere, perhaps that evening at the Hall; he was sure that it would come back to him. She'd stopped now, and began to reverse the van toward the cafeteria block. She seemed to be in a hurry.

Perhaps she'd overheard him. It wouldn't have been impossible.

Aldridge was now having no problems with his concentration at all.

He saw her get out of the Renault. She was small and graceful, and she was moving with purpose; no looking around to see who might be there, no calling out, no waiting to see if anyone emerged to meet her. She took a couple of grey plastic trash bags out of the Renault, and went straight in through the unsecured doors of the cafeteria block. As they swung shut behind her, the last fierce rays of the sunset began to die in the distant mountains.

Aldridge moved across the foyer. The cafeteria block was the one part of the site that he hadn't yet checked. His own car was around the side and out of sight, so the waitress wouldn't yet know that he was here; and for the next few minutes, at least, that was how he wanted it to stay.

This entire situation was probably innocent.

But he was going to make sure of it, his own way.

Here's a dream that Pete McCarthy's been having, on and off, for the past five or six weeks:

Alina is leading him through the lobby of an expensive-looking hotel. He's acutely aware of the fact that he looks out of place in his work clothes, but the people who pass them on either side don't seem to notice; they're programmed, unseeing, mere walk ons in the dreamscape.

Alina looks back over her shoulder at him.

You'll have to see this in the end, she tells him. So, let's get it over with now.

They come to an unmarked door. She tries it, and it opens. They go on through.

Everything changes on the other side of the door. They move from the plush of the lobby to the bare cast concrete of a service passageway, one side of it stacked waist high with unopened boxes of cleaning materials. The lighting is patchy; only two of the bulbs are working, one just inside the door and the other about halfway along to the fire door at the far end. The pools they cast are pale and sharp-edged, leaving a good part of the area in near darkness.

Pete closes the door behind him, shutting out the lobby muzak and all the set dressing that lies no more than an inch deep over the low rent reality that surrounds them now. Alina has stopped. She's a silhouette in the darkness, no more than a step beyond the light.

I can't deceive you any longer, she says. And she raises her hand.

It comes into the light.

But it isn't her hand, not as he remembers it; this one is fishbelly white, delicately veined in moss green. It's slim and elegant like Alina's… but it's clawed.

I warned you, she says. I told you to stay away from me.

The hand turns. She holds it relaxed, palm upward. Pete is transfixed. When she flexes her fingers in a lazy kind of gesture, he hears a faint clicking like that of well oiled gears.

She takes a step forward, and comes fully into the light. She seems to stand a little taller, her eyes blazing with the green of the deep, her skin washed with the pallor of the drowned. Her hair is coiled, wet, dark, glistening like weed.

Pete tries to look into her eyes, but can see nothing deeper than their glittering surface.

And then he wakes, remembering nothing.

The waitress was having a problem.

She'd gone through the empty cafeteria block and into the kitchens at the back; watching at a window, Aldridge had witnessed the bizarre setup inside. A deep chest freezer, its power line trailing and unconnected, had been dragged out from its place against the wall so that it was now over by the double-drainer basins. The freezer's lid had been roped down with several turns of a nylon line that went around and under the body of the appliance to leave it securely, if messily, trussed.

But the oddest feature of the setup was the short length of hose that ran from one of the basin taps. At a guess, the freezer had been dragged out so that the hose would be able to reach; it disappeared under the freezer lid like some weird drip feed. Aldridge could see that the tap had to be running, because the sides of the appliance streamed with water and the floor was awash. It must have been running unchecked for hours.

Days, even.

The waitress had untied the knots and then withdrawn the nylon line, throwing it aside; then she'd raised the lid and bent over to reach in. Aldridge couldn't see what she was reaching for, but he saw the water which cascaded out over the sides. Whatever she was trying to drag out from under, it wouldn't come. She soaked herself in the effort.

But this was something that she hardly seemed to notice as she stepped back, considering. The light wasn't so good now that the sun was going down, but Aldridge could see the quiet concentration in her stance. After a moment she picked up the nylon line from the floor and made a big noose with it, and with this in her hand she climbed over the side and into the appliance to get a better angle on whatever lay within. Yet more water poured out onto the tiles, spilling over with a noise that he could hear through the glass. Whatever it was, it was lying so awkwardly that even this approach didn't seem to be working. By the time that she gave up she'd immersed herself completely several times, so that when she finally climbed out again her hair and her dress were plastered to her and dripping.

Aldridge now had his first indication of the freezer's contents. A hand, stiff and bloodless, reached vainly for heaven; she'd hauled it up and there it stayed, the ivory white hand of a showman of death making a call for eternal silence.