The Boat House

by Stephen Gallagher

  "What happened?"

  "Officially, it became an accident. What else could they say? There was nobody else in the area, and there were no other tracks through the reeds. The girl became so ill that she had to be taken away. She stayed in the city and never came back. And that's all anyone knows… except for the girl herself."

  Alina looked at him, but his face gave nothing away. He seemed open, empty of guile. She said, "I think you're trying to tell me that I should remember something of this."

  "And do you?"

  "No."

  "Then I'm saying nothing of the kind."

  They went back. The subject wasn't raised again.

  That evening, Belov set the fire as Alina opened some canned stew. She was feeling as if she'd made a long, exhausting hike instead of just the kilometre or so that she'd actually walked, but it wasn't a bad feeling. Most of the food was of a kind that she'd never seen in the shops; there was no wine or beer, but Belov had a hip flask of vodka.

  There was no electricity, either, but as night fell they lit candles. Belov chatted easily, although his real talent lay in persuading her to talk without her realising that she'd been persuaded. All that she really learned about him was that yes, he was a psychiatrist — 'one of the dissertation writers', as he referred to himself — and that his wife had died after an illness about five years before. Through all of this there was a shadow falling across the conversation, and it was a while before Alina could bring herself to give it a name.

  But it had to be faced, and so she finally said, "How long can I stay here?"

  It seemed that Belov had only been waiting for her to ask. "What you're really asking, is whether you'll have to go back."

  "Will I?"

  "In theory, yes." But there was a faint glimmer in his eyes, like those of a favourite uncle hiding something unexpected behind his back. "I may be able to arrange something. It's mostly a matter of timing… but I'll do what I can. Please don't get your hopes up."

  There was a long pause.

  And then Alina said, "Who was the child?"

  But now it was Belov's turn to say nothing.

  Some time later, she lay in her bed without sleeping. She was wondering if it was true, if he could somehow arrange her release; doctors had ordered her internment, so surely it was possible for another doctor to end it. But did Belov have the power? Borrowing her for dissertation research was one thing — she was sure now that this was the reason behind her removal from the hospital — but a release seemed, frankly, unlikely.

  She'd seen no trace of anyone else in the village, and no sign of anyone along the afternoon's walk. There were no locks on the farmhouse doors. Perhaps, when she'd grown stronger, she could slip away into the night and keep on walking… after all, what was the worst that could possibly happen to her? The answer to that was, nothing that hadn't happened already. If they caught her, they caught her. And if they shot her instead — well, perhaps that wouldn't be quite so bad. With this thought in her mind and the sound of Belov's restless pacing on the boards up above, she finally drifted away.

  When she awoke late in the morning, Belov wasn't there.

  She checked his room, but his bed was cold. His small suitcase had been packed, and looked as if it was ready to go. She went straight back downstairs, got her own clothes together, and made a bundle with some of the provisions. Then she let herself out of the farmhouse, and started to walk.

  There was nothing to indicate that he was anywhere in the village, and she didn't want to waste time on being any more thorough than this. She struck out across-country, heading away from the marshes and the distant water with its old-time tales of death.

  At any moment he expected to hear his voice behind her, calling her back. If it came, she wouldn't respond. There was a woodland of spruce and pine ahead, where the ground began to climb toward a low, sinuous ridge that was the only feature on this otherwise flat horizon; it rose like a shadow from the plain, dense with trees but delicately etched around the edges.

  It took her an hour to reach it, and a patrol was waiting.

  There were three of them. With the binoculars that they carried, they must have been able to see her from the moment that she set out. Two of them stood with their rifles levelled at her and the third raised his palm and made a short, brusque, fly swatting kind of gesture. Not a word was spoken, but the meaning was clear; go back, or else.

  The 'or else' was a possibility that she'd already considered and decided to embrace, if it came.

  But she turned around, and began the long, slow walk back to the village.

  There was a red car waiting outside the farmhouse when she reached it; the car's wheels had cut deep tracks through the long grass, tracks that were only just beginning to fade as the plains wind breathed across them. Belov was loading up, getting ready to leave, and he seemed to be in a hurry. He showed no surprise at her obviously unsuccessful attempt to run, nor did he even comment on it.

  Instead, he said, "In the car, quickly. We have to go back to the city." And then, when she only stared at the car without responding, he added, "I said it was a matter of timing. Trust me."

  What else could she do? She trusted him, and climbed in. As they left the village and found the dirt road by which he'd arrived, she could see that he was nervous. The road was crossed by a locked-down barrier about two kilometres further on, but Belov had a key and the barrier hardly slowed them at all.

  Somebody was out of town for two days, he explained, somebody who would block any proposal for her release as a matter of course. They'd have to move fast.

  Alina said, "Are you taking a risk for me?"

  But instead of answering, Belov said, "Is there anyone you can contact? A friend you can stay with? It's better that you shouldn't be too easy to find."

  Alina didn't have to think for long. She said, "There's Pavel."

  "What does he do?"

  "He's just… well, he's someone I know. He offered me a place to stay, if ever I should need it."

  Her nerve almost failed her when, more than three hours later, they came into the city along Karl Marx Prospekt and made the turn towards Arsenal Street, where number nine waited for her like the transit house to a hundred-year-old hell. Belov warned her that she'd have to go in, but he promised her that she'd be going no further than the administration block on the street. She followed him obediently, out of the daylight. Once inside he left her in a dim, dingy room where she sat with her bundle and the firm belief that the cruel joke would soon be over and she'd be taken back to her ward. It had all been a dream; perhaps she'd never even left it. She signed the forms that he brought her to sign, even though the name on them wasn't always her own, and then Belov slipped them into a file under a stack of others and took them away again.

  Half an hour later, he was back. He led her to a door; the door opened out onto the street. "Hurry," he urged, checking behind him for witnesses, but she had one more question.

  "Why?" she said.

  But even his eyes gave her no answer.

  She saw him once more, a couple of months later. Somehow he'd managed to trace the block where Pavel lived, and he stood in the stairwell and called her name. This was all that he could do, because the numbers on the apartment doors had all been defaced by the people who lived behind them.

  He was turning to leave, when he heard a door opening somewhere above.

  They found her file lying open on the desk in his office. They'd suspected him of rigging her escape, and now their suspicions were confirmed. They found no mention of Pavel in the file, nor any address for Alina.

  Nor did they find one on Belov's body, when they pulled it out of the river the next morning.

  PART SIX

  Rusalka (2)

  TWENTY-SIX

  Dimly doing her best to remember what they'd taught her at school, Diane believed that she'd managed to work out the map reference by the time that Ross Aldridge arrived at the hall. She'd left a message for him about an hour be
fore, within minutes of receiving a call from the foresters' agents. Together they climbed into her Toyota and, with Aldridge keeping the map open on his knees, they drove down toward the lake shore.

  Instead of taking the boat house turning, they followed the shoreline in the opposite direction. After a few minutes they passed the first of the estate workers' cottages, two-storey, stone built, and around three hundred years old. After the last of these (which, being the keeper's, now stood empty) the road degenerated into a track, and the track degenerated even more over the next mile until it was only twin ruts with grass between them. Roots had split the ground in places, and the thickest of these jarred the Toyota so hard that Diane had an uneasy vision of the entire truck falling apart as every spot-weld gave at once, leaving her sitting in the driver's seat with the steering wheel in her hands and nothing but open air all around.

  Aldridge, hanging on grimly, said, "Does it get any worse?"

  "Don't ask me," Diane said. "I never came this way before."

  What looked like another fifty yards on the map turned out to be another quarter mile of cart track. It brought them out into a grassy clearing by the lake, a shallow bay with a fringe of stony beach. Diane pulled in as soon as the ground was level enough.

  They got out.

  This was one of the older parts of the forest, and its silence was a thousand-year atmosphere so distilled that it was almost physically affecting. There were high dark trees on every side with slanting shafts of late morning sunlight, with the lake beyond flat and faintly glittering like a slow moving mirror.

  "Hardly anyone ever comes out this far," Diane said, walking toward the middle of the clearing where about half a dozen mounds of earth appeared to have been dug over. "We lease the land out to the forestry people, and they've been doing a helicopter survey."

  "When did you get the call?"

  "This morning. It showed up when they looked at Friday's photographs."

  Diane stopped by the first of the mounds, not too close, and waited for Aldridge to catch up. She already knew what she was going to see, but the knowledge didn't make it any less unpleasant. The mound was no mound at all, but actually a deer; a very dead deer, and a long way from fresh. Its eyes and part of its face were gone, and its belly had swollen up hard and tight.

  "You explain it," Diane said. "I can't."

  Aldridge glanced around the clearing at the others. "You'd do better to ask your gamekeeper," he said.

  "I would, but he quit just after I got here."

  "Why's that?"

  "I told him to. He was taking more from local butchers than he was in wages. I've advertised for a replacement, but I haven't filled the job yet. Could this be a revenge thing?"

  "I wouldn't have thought so," Aldridge said, walking over to the next one. "Not from a keeper, killing stock."

  "Poachers, then, using poison?"

  "We'll need a vet's report to be sure. But poisoned meat isn't much use to anybody, is it?"

  "Well," Diane said, with an edge of exasperation in her voice that she couldn't fully conceal, "what do you reckon?"

  Aldridge shook his head. He seemed to be finding it more than puzzling. The bodies all appeared to be at slightly different stages of decomposition; the one before them now looked to be the most recent of them all. It carried flies like a nimbus of stars.

  He prodded a limb with the toe of his boot, but it was rigid. He tried harder, and the whole carcase moved a little and water came from the animal's nose and mouth. Weird, Diane was thinking, as he then put a foot on the animal's side and pressed down.

  The reaction was immediate. It collapsed like a punctured airbag, except that what came forth was not air but rank, fetid water, vomiting out in a copious stream and bringing with it a stench that sent them both staggering back several paces.

  "Christ," Aldridge said. "I only ever had that once before. It's a drowning smell."

  Diane knew that she'd gone pale. "How could they drown?" she said. "They're yards from the lake."

  "I don't know. Could be a disease with the same kind of effect, some kind of bloat. Look, could you get hold of some petrol and some plastic sheet?"

  "I should think so."

  "Well, get some of your lads down here before dark." He indicated the most recent looking of the bodies. "Have them cover that stag with the polythene and then drag the others together and burn them. Tell them to use gloves and then throw the gloves on the fire when they've done, and then make sure they all go back and have a good scrub down."

  "You think it's that serious?" Diane said as they walked back toward the pickup.

  "I don't think anything. I'm only playing safe. I'll get in touch with the agriculture people and get them to send someone out first thing tomorrow."

  Diane nodded, and then sighed. "I could have done without this," she said, and then she got into the truck.

  Ross Aldridge looked back at the six deer.

  "So could they, I should think," he said.

  That evening Ted Hammond emerged from his house, wearing the old dressing gown in which he seemed to be spending most of his time these days, and carrying a stiff drink. He took one of the outdoor chairs from the stack at the end of the nearest jetty. It was a fine night, no mist on the lake at all. The air was warm, and the stars were sharp and cold. Someone on a boat out there was having a party, people singing and making more noise than the music they were playing. He wished them well. But he didn't wish that he was with them.

  He sat, contemplating the few lights that showed at this hour. Some kind of a fire appeared to be burning far away on the opposite shore, a tiny pinhole in the screen of night. Ted was awake and out here because he'd been hearing Wayne speaking to him, and he was worried about his sanity.

  It had happened several times in the weeks since the funeral, and it scared him. The voice always seemed to come from the shadows or from somewhere just aside from where he was looking; and usually the words didn't make any sense, and they passed through his mind so quickly that they'd gone before he could reach for them. He resisted the temptation to treat this as some kind of a revelation because Wayne was dead, and talked to nobody.

  The plain message to Ted, actual words apart, was that he was cracking up.

  He'd spent most of the evening wrestling with the one fragment that he'd managed to retain, picked out of the air behind him as he'd been standing at the cooker watching his soup boil. He couldn't be sure, but it had sounded like, We're with her, now. But with who? His best guess was that the reference was to Nerys, that his unconscious mind had been looking for comfort in the prospect that Wayne would at least be with his mother, in which case he decided that there was probably some hope for his mental state after all. In many ways, he would have preferred to have been able to give himself over to the delusion and accept it as truth; but there seemed to be a definite boundary here, and it wasn't his choice whether or not he crossed it. Just before coming out, he'd phoned the health centre and left a message on their answering machine as his first step in getting himself along to a psychiatrist.

  It still wasn't too late to back out. But he didn't think that he would.

  The blaze across the water flared, and then died down a little. The party boat came to the end of its song, and the party people gave themselves a round of applause. Two small signals in the night, affirmations of existence from two groups of people who knew nothing of Ted or of each other.

  We're with her, now.

  Ted didn't feel good.

  But he felt a little better.

  Tom Amis lay on his fold-down bed in a back room of the ski centre, an unread paperback lying open on his chest. He was bored, and he was lonely. The road gang had turned up unexpectedly that afternoon and had laid and rolled more than two hundred yards of hot tarmac from the main building all the way around to the other side of the restaurant block; now the place didn't look quite so much like a building site anymore, and winter opening seemed more of a possibility. It had made for a lively few
hours but now that they'd gone the place seemed oddly, unnaturally quiet again. He didn't know when they'd be back; all he knew was that his boss had some kind of private deal going with the gang foreman of a motorway subcontractor, and the boys always appeared without notice, worked at the speed of practised moonlighters, and probably got their money in a plain envelope passed under a pub table somewhere. There were five of them, and whenever they arrived they came up the woodland track on a big spreader wagon with a battered old van bouncing along behind. They were as ugly as sin and they had no conversation, and he missed them already.

  Christ, he thought to himself, I must be getting desperate.

  He could have taken the isolation better if it wasn't for the batteries in his radio dying on him without warning; usually they faded over a couple of nights but this time it was just zonk, no signal. He couldn't even run down to the village to get a new set — they had them in the marina shop at the auto marine — because his van was temporarily off the road. Now, when he tried to read instead, the lights kept flickering and screwing up his concentration. He knew what it was — tank sediment kept getting into the fuel pipe that fed the generator but short of a total drain and cleanout, he didn't know of any way to cure it. When it got really bad, like when it cut out completely, he'd take a wrench out and tap all the way along the pipe; sometimes that would help, but having to do it could be a real pain.

  Especially if it meant he had to go out into the dark.

  He'd never had any particular fear of darkness, but over the past few weeks he seemed to have grown more and more nervous at night. He couldn't explain it. But his skin would crawl as if he'd somehow sensed that he was being watched, and he'd switch on every light that he could find including the big spotlights out over what would one day become the car park. The entire ski centre would then be laid out before him, a brightly lit, deserted playland with one sole scared occupant looking out toward the woods. And then he'd lock the doors to the reception block, and he'd retire to his back room and make himself as small as a child on his bunk in the corner.