Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

Pete jumped the gap. The wharf shifted as he hit it, a telling sign of deep structural damage. Down below, the water still heaved as if boiling. Ted was out of the Princess and crossing the wharf behind him now; Pete threw himself flat on the decking and reached down over the edge. The boards were sprung and uneven.

He stretched his hand out as far as he could. His fingers brushed Alina's wrist, and she looked up.

She appeared to be in some pain; he wondered if she might be trapped somehow beneath the surface. "Give me your hand," he said, although over the violent swell and the roar of marine engines in the confined space it wasn't easy to make himself heard.

Someone was calling his name. He didn't respond, but concentrated on trying to reach just a little further.

Alina's hand closed around his own in a life grip. He held onto hers just as tightly.

"You followed me," she said wonderingly, as if such a thing simply couldn't be. Pete was locked to her eyes, seeing her fear as she stood at the edge and looked into the darkness beyond. Her face was as pale as a stone from a riverbed, her hair darker than in reality because it was so wet; but he thought that he could recognise the true Alina, the Alina that only he knew, the frightened girl that he'd reassured on the eve of the Liston Hall party.

But he was wrong.

He knew that he was wrong because suddenly he wasn't pulling her up; she was drawing him down. And now he could see that there was a strange light in those eyes, a hint of something almost feral in its intensity.

He grabbed at the edge and held on. But he could feel the long board starting to give, its nails already prised half out and his pressure increasing the strain on them. He began to panic, and looked around for some kind of help. They were still calling to him, and didn't seem to realise that he could no longer move to respond.

There they were… Ted had carried Diane across to the Birchwood, and they were yelling to him to follow. They were yelling because there was fire in the Princess. How, he didn't know… but they were lit by a hell-light and shrouded in smoke, and before them the windows of the Princess glowed like holes punched in a nightshade.

There was fuel aboard both cruisers, there were gas tanks in the galleys. Suddenly the boat house was not a good place to be.

And still Alina was drawing him down toward the water. Its heaving surface was greasy with spilled marine fuel. He'd braced himself as hard as he could, but already his shoulders were over the edge and his feet were beginning to slide.

He looked back to her.

"You can be with me now," she said in a tense whisper, a voice meant for only him to hear. In her own mind she seemed to be detached from her surroundings, and from her desperate situation. "You can be with me forever. Isn't that what you always wanted from the beginning? Isn't it really?

"Just let me help you," Pete said, hanging on grimly and wondering for how much longer. "That's all I want to do."

Something changed in her expression. At first, he wasn't sure what. Her grip didn't slacken, but there was a difference in her grey eyes. A moment ago, he hadn't known her.

And now he did.

"So many people have said that to me. And you were the only one who ever really meant it. I'm sorry, Peter. I'm sorry it didn't work out."

"Me too," he said. "Come on, try to pull yourself up."

Diane was still calling his name. Desperately, now.

Alina glanced over his shoulder. Wet hair fell across her face and she shook it free with a single, violent flip.

"I told you she'd be right for you," she said. "I told you I could help the two of you to get together. I wasn't wrong, was I?"

"No, you weren't wrong," Pete managed to say. "Now climb, damn it!" His arm, now lifting her, was starting to shake with the upkeep of the pressure.

She responded by raising herself a little, so that their faces were closer together. The strain on Pete's arm grew fiercer. His entire body was braced and trembling. In spite of everything that was going on around them, she could now lower her voice almost to a breath and still be heard.

"Remember when you first brought me to the valley?" she said. "We made a deal. You had to promise never to fall in love with me. And I said I'd try never to hurt you. I suppose you thought that was a strange thing to say."

"Grab the edge!" he said, "You can do it!"

But unexpectedly, she opened her hand. He was left holding on alone. Already he could feel her wet skin beginning to slide.

"Now perhaps you can understand," she said.

Her hand slipped through his own like smoke, leaving him not knowing whether he let her or whether he lost her, just staring at the oily surface of the water where she'd been not an instant before.

The Birchwood was reversing out again with Ted at the helm, releasing more daylight to pierce the smoke as it withdrew. The nose was crumpled, but the hull was in one piece. The Princess was listing badly and its interior furnishings were beginning to blaze. Something inside her fireballed with a soft thump.

The gap was widening; Pete took it at a run, and almost didn't make it.

The explosion that followed blew the roof off the boat house, scared the birds out of the trees for miles around, and echoed off into heaven like a distant thunder.

It was two years later to the day — or rather, to the night — that Ted Hammond took a plastic office chair out to the end of an empty jetty so that he could sit and watch the lake and the valley's few lights. It was a warm evening, but he had some cool beers that were going to stay cool because he'd put them in a net bag and lowered the bag into the water. He also had Wayne's radio-cassette player and a couple of his tapes, and he set this out beside him on the jetty and turned the volume up good and loud. Chuck and Bob lay on the boards, waiting for the empty cans to crunch.

He sat back, breathed the air. He'd done this a few times before, but tonight seemed special; almost an anniversary.

Wayne didn't talk to him any more. He missed it, but he was also relieved because it meant that his mind wasn't going after all. His doctor had told him that such a thing wasn't common but it wasn't exactly abnormal either, and after a period of attendance in an out patients' clinic and a course of antidepressants they considered that he'd been 'stabilised' — which mostly meant that he'd ceased in his reporting of symptoms that they couldn't explain.

And the doctors hadn't even heard the worst of it.

Out across the bay, he saw the lights in the restaurant go out at the end of the evening's business. Further lights on the north shore were so dim that they were like dying stars. Ted fished up the net, took out his second can, and dropped the others back over the side.

It was about half an hour later when a van door slammed and the two dogs came suddenly alert. He calmed them with a word, but they stayed watchful.

Then, after a minute or so, Angelica Venetz walked out along the jetty toward them.

She'd picked up a chair for herself along the way. Ted didn't stand, or look surprised; this, again, was nothing new, but neither was it yet a routine so familiar that the formalities of it could be skipped.

Ted said, "Is it the noise? I didn't think it would reach you from here."

"It doesn't," Angelica said. "I just came to join you for a while. Assuming that's all right."

"'Course it is," Ted told her, and gestured for her to set her chair next to his own.

They'd had three or four of these informal late night get-togethers since Adele's second, more major stroke back in February. Ted had been the one who'd stepped in when the usually competent Angelica had been caught wrong-footed, when without being asked and without needing to be invited he hired them a relief chef and kept their business ticking over until Angelica had been able to give it some attention once again. Shouldering someone else's worries had been an unexpected recreation for him; at least, it had been a break from his own.