Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

She'd come in here because down below, in the dock, stood an unsold Princess.

And in the Princess, there was a multichannel VHF radio telephone.

The boat house lights weren't working, and hadn't been since the night of the party. But there were deck lights and cabin lights on the Princess, and the Princess was only one short flight of stairs away.

But short flight or not, this was going to be one of the toughest journeys that Diane had ever undertaken. Her ankle was giving her hell. She was sure that it was broken; she hadn't felt any snap as she'd gone over, but she was halfway convinced that she could feel the splintered ends of the bone as they ground together with each faltering step. She was still using the shotgun — unloaded, of course — as a makeshift crutch, but progress was slow and getting slower as the pain and the pressure increased. All the same, she couldn't help thinking that it was the most effective use she'd ever made of a twelve bore since she'd first begun to shoot.

Maybe there was something in the first aid kit that she could use. Painkillers, maybe even an emergency splint.

But before anything else, the call.

She checked that the boat house door was securely locked, and took out the key. She wasn't likely to forget that Wayne Hammond and his girlfriend had died in here. For that, if for no other reason, she'd have been happier if the light in here had been just a little better.

Childish fears, she told herself.

And, only halfway believing it, she began her slow shuffle toward the boat house stairs.

Pete was in the back of the Rover when he came around.

He didn't realise it straight away; for a time he hovered, half awake, while in his mind he followed his vision of an altered Alina through the dark spaces under that strange hotel. She led him along, her marbled and beautifully clawed hand beckoning him every now and again, until they reached a door at the corridor's end; and then, with a regretful smile and a sad shake of her head, she stepped through the door and closed it on him. Only then did he begin to see the kick-scuffed grey metal before his eyes, and to feel the coarse woollen blanket that had been placed under his head as a pillow.

It was the first time that he'd ever been knocked out and he decided, everything considered, that he wouldn't care to try it again.

He didn't much want to move, either, but he knew that he'd have to.

He'd been lying on the floor of the Rover's rear passenger section, cramped into the space in a near foetal curl. He felt dusty and gritty, and he had a five-aspirin headache. Alina was on the outside; she raised her head from whatever she'd been doing to look in through one of the rear door windows.

Her face, seen through the wire, seemed to show a genuine concern. Pete struggled up to sit on one of the Rover's inward facing bench seats.

"Are you all right?" she said.

"Considering." Pete made to touch the back of his head, and decided midway that it wouldn't be a good idea.

Alina said, "Don't bother trying to get out. You can't."

"Why are you doing this?"

"To make you safe."

"From you?"

She hesitated for a moment; and then she nodded once, making an admission that was obviously difficult for her. "You're safe as long as you don't try to follow," she said. "I won't be coming back. By the time someone finds you, I'll be gone."

"And the others will be dead."

"They don't die," she said. "I can't help what I do, Peter. I tried for a long time, and in the end it got me nowhere. I'm sorry."

"What do you mean, they don't die?"

"They join me," she said, her grey eyes open and empty of secrets. "They become my children of the lake." And then she turned her face away. "I am sorry, Peter. I wish there was some other way."

He stared at her through the glass, at that delicate, downturned head, as graceful and as heartless as a stone angel, and he knew then that he'd been wrong to think that she was anything other than lost. This was no fitful madness, no staged insanity; the depth and sincerity of her belief in her developed state were awesome. She was the Rusalka , in a faith that could be neither challenged nor shaken. In her own mind, she lived as the beast… and perhaps in the end, she could only be met and recognised as the beast.

"You're breaking your promise," he reminded her.

"A little," she said, looking at him again and smiling wanly. "As you broke yours, a little. I can leave you and you can't hurt me, no one will believe what you say. But I can't leave others to support you."

"What will happen to Diane?"

"Could she be in love with you?"

"I don't know. It's too early to say."

"If she is, then she'll call to you. And in the night, she may even come to you. And then perhaps you'll come down to the water's edge, and you'll beg me to take you."

"And will you?"

"Yes. Because then I'll be beyond promises." She took a step back from the wired window. "Goodbye, Peter," she said, and she turned to go.

She was going for Diane, to clear out the last of the cell, and Pete realised now that he'd engineered the entire setup himself when he'd broadcast his intentions to Ross Aldridge and to anybody else who might have been listening.

"You can't get to her," he shouted after Alina, and Alina, already halfway across the clearing, turned and looked back.

"I only wish that could be true," she said, and then she walked on.

He tried the rear doors but Alina had sealed them somehow, probably by tying the two handles together. Whatever she'd used, he couldn't force them open; after a few seconds he gave up trying, and looked around for another way out. Every window had a wire mesh cover on the outside, a way to protect the glass on badly kept and underused trails; there was a clear cutout section before the driver's position, but it would be too small to crawl through.

Pete scrambled over from the back and into the forward part of the cab, to take a look at the other doors.

Trying the driver's door would have been an obvious waste of time, not only because it had been crushed inward by the collision but also because it still had most of the Toyota holding it shut. Something like a tyre iron had been used to jam the passenger door handle on the outside; dismantling the lock from in here would make no difference, even if he'd had the tools to attempt it.

He lifted out the loose seat sections and started to throw them into the back. The usual locker space under the passenger seat was occupied by a second fuel tank but there was another, smaller locker in the middle that contained a pump and an X shaped wheel brace. Each arm of the X was for a different bolt size.

Think. Ignore this aching head, and concentrate on finding a way out. Alina was already on her way down to the shore. He'd serviced this Rover at least once before; it was ex-army and pretty ancient. He could think of a dozen ways out, but none of them was fast.

Except, perhaps, one.

He tore back the rubber mats on the floor, and then the dusty felt from underneath. The floor here was a single square panel held in place by bolts. He had a start; some of the bolts were already missing.

It was worth a try. He turned the wheelbrace around to see if anything came close to a fit.

Diane had thought that descending the stairway had been a tough job, until it came to getting aboard; there was no gangplank, just a wide step from the dockside across to a gap in the Princess's rail, and then to get around into the cabin she had to make an awkward shuffle and a high step up to the after deck. There were grab rails on the flying bridge above her, and she made full use of them.

God, this was a marathon. She all but collapsed onto the after deck, her ankle raging hot and feeling as if it had swollen to about five times its usual size. She was in near darkness here, the only illumination a kind of pale, dancing underlight from the water that flickered around the walls and through gaps in the boarded quayside. She knew that it was daylight from the lake, getting in under the water doors and being refracted upward, but it gave the place an atmosphere like some forgotten chamber in drowned Atlantis. The deck and flybridge of the Princess stood as an almost solid mass of darkness before her now. She didn't know her way around particularly well, but she did know that a set of keys was hidden under the cover of one of the deck filler points for fuel and water.