The Boat House

TWENTY

That night, after Alina had gone out, Pete decided to find out exactly where she went.

She couldn't have gone too far. She'd been out ten minutes, fifteen at the most. And wherever she might wander, she always set out in the same direction.

The path down to the lake shore was steep and difficult, and several times he almost fell. Roots tripped him and rocks made him slip, and in places the path was so soft-edged that it simply dropped away from under him in the darkness. And yet this was a descent that she made barefoot. Pete could only guess that she must move with the grace of a gazelle.

A breeze was coming in from the water, stirring the branches overhead and sending a low, unearthly moan through the woodland.

And as Pete emerged by the rocky edge of the water, he saw her.

She was fairly easy to make out against the glitter on the lake. She looked almost as if she was standing on the surface itself, although Pete knew that there were rocks and shallows and that the effect was no more than illusion. Her head was bowed, she was leaning forward.

And, as he could now hear, she was singing softly to the water.

It was strange music, full of strange sounds that he knew he couldn't hope to understand. She was keeping her voice low, much as one might while singing a lullaby to the one wakeful soul in a house full of sleeping children. He felt his skin tingle, he felt the fine hair all along his spine react as if a low current had been run through him.

She reached down and, for a moment, Pete was half expecting some response; a stag, perhaps, breaking the surface of the lake and climbing out to her, water streaming from its flanks as it came to her hand. She stood there like a dark messiah with some unseen flock before her, and Pete couldn't help but begin to assemble shapes out of the grainy darkness and to give them solidity and movement.

But nothing moved, and nothing save the breeze disturbed the calm of the water. And then she straightened, and the illusion faded.

She spoke.

"Don't ever follow me again, Peter," she said, totally unexpectedly; she hadn't even looked his way, and he felt as if he'd been caught in a searchlight's beam in the middle of some guilty act. Everything that he'd had in mind to say to her was suddenly gone from his head, his mind as blank as a new wall and his belly full of sudden, inexplicable dread.

She turned to him now. She was a silhouette against the moonlight that sparkled on the lake.

"It's not an easy path," she said. "You could fall."

There were a hundred things that he knew he ought to say.

But he simply said, "I know."

"Go back, now, Peter. Please."

He wanted to ask her what she thought she was doing.

But instead he turned, and slowly started to make his way back up toward the house.