Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

She'd have to improvise.

"I think they burned it," she said.

Alina stopped.

"You're lying," she said.

"Why would I lie? All that's left is this." Propping herself on one elbow, Diane reached inside her jacket. She pulled out a single sheet of stiff coloured paper, made awkward by the photographs that had been glued onto either side. It was the loose page with the photograph of Pavel that Aldridge, hardly concentrating, had told her to keep as evidence. The way that he'd said it, Diane had been able to tell that precise details of procedure weren't uppermost in his mind. She'd had to fold it to put it away, and it had taken more creases since. As a last surviving remnant, it looked pretty convincing.

"Please," Alina said. She was staring at the page like a junkie in the presence of the world's last fix.

"Why do you need this?"

"It's my last dream of home," Alina said bleakly.

Diane wondered how she saw herself. Did she hold up her own hand and see scales, claws? Did she see the souls of her victims as she released them to stand in that dark country beyond death itself? Diane wondered how profound a belief had to be before others were drawn in and persuaded by it. An easy trap to fall into; Diane had already begun to think of Alina and the Rusalka as two separate entities, each intertwining with the other like a body and its disease.

But which was she talking to now?

"Give me the photographs," Alina said carefully, as if each word was a test, "and I'll let you leave."

"Can you really promise that?"

There was a struggle for a while.

And then Alina admitted, "No. I don't have that much control."

"Over what you do?"

"Over what I've turned into."

"Looks like we've got a stalemate, then," Diane said, and she wished that she could make herself sound more convinced; because it was a pretty unequal balance with only one crumpled sheet of paper on her side against the Rusalka 's track record on the other. All that she could do would be to start tearing the photographs up, and it wouldn't take much to stop her from doing even this. Alina was holding back, but she was under patient assault from within. It couldn't last.

Even she seemed to know it, and after a tense silence she was the first one to speak.

"I'll do what I can," she said. "Go up the stairs, let yourself out of the door. Leave the photographs inside, and lock yourself out. I'll try to hold back. But do one thing for me, please."

"What?"

"Whatever happens, try to remember me as I was. Don't hate me for what I became."

And then, as Diane hesitated in her uncertainty as to whether or not this was a ruse, she added, " Go! " with such urgency that Diane struggled to stand and turned to face the stairway, the page clutched tightly in her hand.

There was at least one moment when the Rusalka could have flown at her unseen.

But she didn't.

It was a long haul, one step at a time. She had to hold the folded page in her teeth in order to free both hands for the climb. Having her back toward Alina was the hardest part, but nothing happened. Except that, from behind and below her, there came a sound like that of quiet, frustrated weeping.

Diane's shadow was long across the ceiling as she hobbled toward the door, reaching for her pocket as she went.

"Why have you stopped?" Alina shouted to her a few moments later. There was a new harshness in her voice that set Diane on her guard, but she had no choice but to reply.

"I must have lost the key when I fell," she said, hearing her own voice as if it was coming from somebody else. "Will you throw it to me?" And please, she thought, don't let it have fallen into the dock or else the whole thing ends right here.

No weeping noises now, but a sound like a nest of snakes coiling around one another. The pattern of water-reflected shadows on the high roof changed as Alina moved, unseen beyond the edge of the platform. Was she doing as Diane had asked?

Or was she coming for her?

The tension buzzed in Diane's ears.

The key came spinning through the air, and it landed on the boards close to the top of the stairs. Diane crouched awkwardly and, still holding the paper that had bought her some safety, she reached for it.

As her hand made contact, there was a low, rattling rasp… she looked over the topmost stair, and saw the Rusalka almost flying toward her with its eyes blazing like green lasers.

Diane threw the paper into the air. It flipped open like a kite, slowed, and began to flutter downward. Alina switched direction and followed it like a leaping fish, away from the stairs and out over the dock; it seemed an impossibility but she caught the page in midair, grabbing it to her as she fell in a headfirst dive toward the open water. One of the photographs had come loose, and it followed her down like a spiralling leaf.

She hit the surface just as the world exploded.

A big motor cruiser came rearing in through the bursting doors on a high bow wave, its nose barely damaged by an impact that had torn through slatted wood like so much paper. The huge white dart of the GRP hull came running in like a spear, ramming the Princess off-centre and causing her mass to ride up in the dock as she was slammed back into the wharf timbers. Diane had a brief glimpse of Alina being swept up and tumbled under as the cruiser's bow fell, but then there was so much heaving water and so much spray that she couldn't see any more as she screwed her eyes up against the welcome daylight.

Down below, the newly arrived boat's engines were still idling. She saw Pete scrambling out of the deck cabin and onto the coachroof.

Pete had come down through the woodland like Death's own carriage running late to a hanging; as he'd fought his way through bracken to the shoreline he'd seen Ted Hammond on the flybridge of one of the Birchwoods, bringing the craft in for a mooring at the boat house's narrow extended jetty. He didn't stop to wonder how or why or even to give thanks; he simply kept on running, his legs beginning to feel drained and unsteady and his breath like knives in his chest, until he'd hit the jetty and covered the last dozen yards. One of Ted's clients, an obvious weekender in a bright green lifejacket, was already ashore with a line; Pete said, "Thanks," and took it from him and threw it back aboard before clambering after.

"I think I just lost you a sale," Pete said as he gunned the still-idling engines and backed the craft away from the jetty. The weekender was standing there, as stunned looking as a Jesuit being welcomed at the gates of Hell.

"Get away," Ted said drily from beside him on the flybridge. "Now what?"

"Duck," Pete suggested, and with the Birchwood's nose aimed at the boat house doors he slammed open the throttles.

The Birchwood was in one piece but the Princess had taken serious damage, and he could guess why; any one of those badly protected girders underpinning the wharf would have been enough to rip the hull. The Princess was taking on water, and starting to list already.

"Diane!" Pete called over the noise of the engines. "Are you all right?" And to his relief, she answered him from somewhere above.

"I'm fine," Diane shouted, "but she's here!"

"Where?"

"She's in the water!"

The deck fell suddenly, ripping free of the joist on which the hull had been snagged. Pete grabbed the rail as they hit, spray thrown up all around and drenching him. By now Ted had boarded the Princess as well, but Pete couldn't see what he was doing. Pete shouted, and Ted shouted something unintelligible back.

And then, as the spray fell, Pete saw Alina.

She was down by the side of the boat, almost under the collapsed part of the wharf. She was holding onto one of the cross-braces but seemed unable to climb any further; her knuckles were showing white, and her head was only just out of the water.