Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

A couple of minutes later, she was letting herself in through the sliding glass door and descending the three steps into the after deck saloon.

She tried to remember the layout. How many times had she been on board? Not many. She could remember a chart table to her left, a dinette area ahead of it, the helm and all the instruments forward and to her right. She hopped forward, dragging her heavy boot of molten iron, and with every hop she felt a stab of pain as she jarred the injury. Halfway across the cabin she stumbled and fell. The carpet was intended for hard wear, and wasn't as soft as it might have been. The temptation to give up and lie still was there, but it wasn't quite overpowering. So she dragged herself up, and went on.

At the end of the cabin, she dropped into the padded helmsman's chair.

The control position came alive as she turned the key. Lever controls, twin-scale echo sounder, high speed compass, engine hour meter, rudder position indicator… she found a cabin light switch and turned it on, and the layout immediately became a little less intimidating.

She found the radio telephone. She was hoping that it would work from here inside the boat house because, if it didn't, she'd gone about as far as she could get and for nothing. She had about as much hope of being able to open the lake doors and take the Princess out as she did of dancing Giselle .

She picked up the handset and set one of the frequencies. She didn't know which would be the best, but she could try them all.

"Hello," she said, swivelling the helmsman's chair a little so that she could stretch out her bad leg. "Hello, Mayday. Is anyone receiving me? Mayday."

She turned up the receiver volume, and listened.

Nothing.

She worked her way through every frequency on the set, with no variation in the results. Just the audio snowstorm, the same white noise across all of the channels. She could only suppose that her signal wasn't getting out beyond the walls, or that if it was it was too poor to carry for any useful distance. The valley was notorious for its radio reception at the best of times, and this was hardly one of those.

She tried again, taking frequencies at random.

"Mayday. Mayday. This is Diane Jackson. Can anybody hear me? Mayday."

And then

" Diane? Is that you? Are you serious? "

It was Ted Hammond. The signal wasn't good, but it was definitely Ted Hammond.

"Never more serious in my life, Ted," she said. "Where are you?"

" I'm on the lake with some customers. We just left the marina. What's the problem? "

And so, in as concise and unsensational a manner as she could manage, she told him.

There was silence. "Ted?" she said anxiously, thinking that the signal must have faded as she was speaking and wondering if he'd heard enough to realise the seriousness of the situation, but then he came back on.

" I'm on my way, " he said.

"Get a message out. Call the police and make sure they know what they're heading for. She's been fooling people for too long."

" Will do, " Ted said, but already his voice was beginning to break up.

There was nothing after that.

Now she didn't have time to mess around looking for the first aid kit. She shut down the radio, but she left on the lights. Now she had to travel all the way back along the quay and up the stairway and across the upper level to the door, and it would probably take her at least as long to do this as it would take Ted Hammond to cover the distance across the water. She didn't know what kind of craft he'd been showing to his customers, but she hoped that it was something fast.

The temptation to stay and relax in the helmsman's chair, just for one minute, was immense. But she knew that one minute would turn into two, and then four, and in the end she'd have as tough a time prising herself out as she did getting Jed out of bed for school on a dark winter's morning. There was urgency, here.

There was urgency…

She snapped out of it, and started to move.

She'd once heard that one of the main requirements for any kind of success was the kind of doggedness that led one to persist way beyond the point where anyone else would have thrown in the towel and turned to other pursuits. She had a (probable) broken ankle, she had distance to cover. Maybe she was adding to the damage this way, it was impossible to tell — it was hard to imagine it hurting any more than it already did.

But she would persist, and she would succeed.

Because let's face it, she was thinking, her range of other choices was more or less nil.

With the lights of the cabin behind her, she prepared to make the transfer back from the Princess to the quay. She couldn't be sure, perhaps it was just a trick of the lights, but it seemed as if the boat had shifted in its mooring a little and the gap had widened. Holding onto the stanchioned safety wires that took the place of rails along this section, Diane lowered herself to sit on the narrow walkway with the angled cabin wall against her back almost seeming to be pushing her out toward the drop. With her good leg, she got a tentative foothold on the quay. There was an unused mooring ring about a yard further along; if she could reach over and get a hold on that, she'd be more than halfway there. She'd have to face an unnerving point of balance as she moved her weight from ship to shore over the drop, but as long as she held tight to the iron ring she was unlikely to fall.

She reached out. It was a stretch, but she caught it. She was now at that point of balance, her bad leg hanging uselessly as her body bridged the gap. She couldn't help but look down into the flickering semidarkness of the water.

Where a hand which came shooting up in a cloud of erupting spray, and grasped her leg around the ankle.

Shock and pain ran through Diane's nervous system like two trains running head-to-head on the same line; she was being pulled downward as they hit, and their explosion doused her in white heat and fire. A body was coming half up out of the water, raising itself on the nailed grip that it was exerting on Diane's tortured flesh.

She hung onto the ring. It was all that she could think to do. Her good leg slipped from the quay, and swung down.

Her foot connected with something solid.

The grip was released.

Spray drenched her as she saw Alina make a messy, uncontrolled backward landing in the dock. The water seemed to part and enfold her, and then she was gone. Diane swung herself up onto the quay, and started to run. She's actually made it almost to the stairway when her body remembered that it was already hurt, and seemed to pull the plugs on her; she went sprawling, and landed hard on the planks.

She rolled over and looked back. Alina was rising from the dock, dripping, gleaming in the underlight. Behind her was the dark Princess, cabin lights ablaze, a sinister looking beacon that cast her long shadow across the quay. Her hair lay sleek and wet and her thin cotton dress had plastered itself to her body. She was pure hostility, looking to do harm.

Diane started to push herself back. With the upper level door locked from the inside, she was safe from nothing other than rescue. She had to get to it, but all that she could do now was to crawl. She kept on pushing herself back before this slight, dangerous figure that was advancing on her from the zone where the nightmares played.

The stairs were at her back. She could go no further.

"What did they do with my book?" Alina said quietly.

"I don't… I don't know what you mean," Diane heard herself say.

"My pictures. Did they move them? Did they hide them? I really have to know."

The photographs? Was she kidding? Diane's mind raced, looking for an angle, any angle, that she could exploit. She'd had two shotgun shells in her pocket; but she seemed to have lost even these in the scramble and, besides, the shotgun itself was still on the far side of the quay.