The Boat House

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 before, 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.

Nothing was hanging together right any more. Everything seemed to be falling apart. You could even sense it in the village, ever since those two kids had been drowned; business was running as usual, but the spirit of the place somehow wasn't quite the same. Most people probably noticed nothing but Amis, perhaps because he was an outsider, could feel it like a pulse. Sometimes he thought that he'd have liked nothing more than to be like Michael of the tarmac boys, gap toothed and thick headed and with no greater concern than that of pissing his money away at a speed roughly equal to that at which he made it, but he had to make do with the hand that he'd been dealt — thin-skinned and solitary, one of nature's observers.

The lights went out on him.

Damn.

Well, it was late — the simplest answer would be to drop the book on the floor, throw off his T shirt and his jeans, and crawl under the covers and go to sleep. But it wasn't that late, and he wasn't particularly tired, and he knew that he'd do little more than lie there on the hard mattress tormenting himself with thoughts of that waitress. It had been fun, for a while, but he was too old to be entirely at ease with such fantasies. They were for teenagers, looking ahead to a life where anything wonderful could happen. At Amis's stage of existence, the options were narrowing fast and he knew that out of all the possibilities, wonderful was hardly the most likely.

He'd spoken to her often enough. For a while, there, he'd as good as haunted the place in the late afternoons… but then the van had broken down and getting into town hadn't been so easy, and besides the restaurant had become so damned busy that he'd become just another face in an ever-changing crowd. It didn't seem hopeless. It was hopeless, and he knew it.

He tossed the book aside and swung his legs off the bed, reaching underneath for the flashlight that he always kept handy. The generator itself was around the back of the reception block, protected from interference or vandalism by a welded metal walk in cage inside a lean to shed. Amis never bothered to close the cage door; he had enough keys to lug around and remember, and didn't want to add to them.

The night was warm. He could see stars. He'd never seen stars like he'd seen them around here, cold and diamond-sharp and so many. He walked barefoot around the reception building, on the new tarmac for the first few strides and then onto the beaten earth pathway that would lead to the back, his flashlight beam ranging over the ground as he moved. There was silence, no regular chug chug chug of the working generator, which meant that it had to have stalled. In the silence he was aware of the woodland, standing just out of reach. Sometimes he could feel as if this were a frontier post, with everything out there just waiting and passing time until the opportunity came to grab the territory back.

Well, it wouldn't happen. Too much money had gone into the place for that, now. Pity that it hadn't extended to something better than this undersized diesel driven power supply. Mains electricity was supposedly going to be brought in at some stage, but God only knew when that would be.

Once inside the shed, Amis entered the cage and cast around for the big wrench that he'd taken to keeping in here. When he found it, he tapped along the feed pipe at random and then gave a couple of good, square bangs on the connectors before he tried the starter button. The generator caught immediately, coughed once, and then ran on smoothly.

He switched off the flashlight as he came back around the dirt path. The big lights were on again now, and he wouldn't need it.

Someone was waiting for him.

He stopped, and she turned.

It seemed as bright as day out on the newly laid forecourt and it was as if she'd been caught by the lights, trapped and dazed like a rabbit on a long country road. He tried to speak, and all that he could say was, "Where did you come from?"

And Alina said, "Is that what you call a welcome?"

For a moment, he couldn't move. There was no way of explaining this, no parallel that he could reach for other than to say: that he'd once made a wish, and the wish now appeared to have come true.

And then he took a step toward her, the dead flashlight still in his hand, and he said, "I'm sorry, you gave me a scare. How did you get here?"

"I walked." He must have looked disbelieving, because she went on, "I walk a lot at night, on my own. It's a good time for thinking things over."

"But it's miles."

"Not so many. And at this hour, I have all the time that I need." A sudden realisation seemed to trouble her. "Were you sleeping? Did I come too late?"

"Sleeping? No," Amis reassured her, hurriedly. "Just kind of… lazing around."

She nodded, as if this was what she'd been expecting, and then she took what was probably her first real look at her surroundings.

A designer village, was the intended effect; sidelights along the pathways, mauve tinted floods on the buildings, and a mini spot on each of the directional signs wherever two paths joined. When the place was up and running, with guests in all the woodland chalets and the cafeteria open until late, it would feel safe at any hour; and now that he was no longer alone here, it seemed that way now.

She said, "So this is where you've been working."

"Yeah," Amis said. "Want to take a look around?"

His head was spinning as he led her into the reception building. What was he going to say to her? And why was she really here? All that he could think of was to show her his work on the counter and the panelling, which was probably as good as anything that he'd ever done. For a moment, when he'd first stepped back from it, he'd experienced the satisfaction of the true craftsman. By comparison, what he'd been doing in the cafeteria block was mere journeyman stuff. He'd show her, and even if she didn't appreciate the work it would perhaps give him a moment to think, to recover his poise.

She said, "Did I really scare you?"

"Surprised me, that's all. I don't see many people up here."

She looked out of the big foyer window, which ran from the floor almost to the ceiling, at the empty pathways and the silent buildings outside. She said, "It's quiet. I think I could like it here."

"So did I. The feeling wears off."

She stared out for a moment longer, and then she turned her attention back inside. She gave him a brief smile, and a thrill ran through him like a low current of electricity. She moved over and touched the polished wood of the counter.

She said, "How much of this did you do?"

"All of it," he said. "All of this, and the panelling, and all the carving. Are you really interested?"

"Of course," she said, and then she looked at him. "You always work alone?"

"It's what I prefer."

"And there's no one else here."

"No."

She let her hand fall from the counter, her eyes still on him and seeming to see deeper into him than was immediately comfortable. She said, "And are you happy?"

She'd caught him off guard again, because this wasn't what he was expecting. It was a serious question. But he couldn't bring himself to give it a serious answer.

"Well," he said, "What's happy, anyway?"

But she wouldn't be put off. "I know what you're feeling," she said earnestly, "that's why I came." She took a step toward him. "I think I can help you."

Oh, wow… but now, inexplicably, he felt an urge to back away, to turn and run from her. Still trying vainly to keep it light, he said, "Thanks for the thought."

"I mean it," Alina said, her gaze so searching now that Amis couldn't break contact or look away. "I know what it's like. You sit up here alone and you think of all the friends you made, and lost. You think of women you've known and wish you'd known better, and you wonder what they're doing now. You look at your life, and it's like all the good things you ever wanted are loaded up onto a train that you didn't run quite fast enough to catch. And you know what you miss most of all?"

He tried to crack a grin, and his face felt like breaking plaster.

He said, "Why don't you tell me?"

"You miss having someone you can trust enough to tell them about it. You think that you'll die without there being anyone who's ever seen who you really are. Now, tell me if I'm wrong."

"What do you expect me to say?"

But her gaze was beyond words; even if he said nothing at all, she could read him with ease.

"Look," she said, "I can give you what you need."

"Really?" One simple word, and his voice caught on it and gave him away.

"Turn around," she suggested, her hand on his arm as she steered him to face the big window. "Look outside."

The lights out there were flickering again, probably getting themselves ready for their second failure of the night. He'd be alone, in the dark, with Alina.

He said, "I thought about asking you up here, sometime. I thought about it a lot."

"I know," she said. "Hold your breath."

"Why?"

"Don't speak, just listen."

By now, he was ready to do anything that she asked. She stood on tiptoe and reached up to cover the lower part of his face with her hand. To do this, she had to press against him. He was putty, she was the sculptor.

She whispered softly into his ear, "Do you see the lake from here?"

He couldn't speak because of her hand, but he made a negative sounding grunt. This wasn't exactly comfortable, but he could stand it for a while longer.

"It doesn't matter," she went on. "Try to think about it. And think about this. When I first came here, I was like you. An outsider. We're all outsiders in our way, but for me it was even worse than most. But then I finally stopped resisting and found that there's a life in the land beyond the life of any one person, Thomas; the lives of the people only stand in the way."

He didn't want to push her away, but he was getting close to his limit; his blood was starting to pound in his ears and he was seeing haloes around all of the lights outside.

"Join us," she whispered, and then two things happened; there was a sharp pain, almost as if he'd swallowed broken glass, as she started to take her hand away, and in that same moment the generator missed another beat and caused the lights to drop for barely a fraction of a second. The blip of darkness seemed to sweep around the site like a wave. The glass before them became like a mirror for the briefest time but it was a distorting, ghost train mirror, more shadow than substance with his mind adding hallucinatory details to the little that he could see. He saw not Alina, but something with eyes of blazing green; her hair a long mane strewn with weeds, her dress a dripping shroud, her teeth sharp, her skin pale and scaly as a snake's.

It was over as soon as it had happened, and as he turned in panic he could see that in reality she was exactly as before… except that she was looking at him now in a way that was more detached, stepping back as if to observe whatever he was going to do next.

He took a breath.

But nothing happened.

He tried again, but the air simply wouldn't come. He looked at Alina, wanting to ask her what she'd done; but she was standing just out of his reach, and watching him with something that looked like compassion. He was straining hard now, and still nothing was happening; everything had gone a couple of shades darker, and the roaring in his ears drowned out everything else. He put his hands to his throat, anything to ease the pain and help him to get just a little air…

To find that she'd pinched his windpipe shut.

It must have been in that one moment of darkness, as she'd been taking her hand away. He couldn't believe the strength that it must have taken.

But he had to.

Why? Why had she done this to him? His chest, his entire frame, were like a fire walker's bed of coals. But he wouldn't give in to it. Oh, Christ, just for one breath! He turned from Alina, trying to retch but with his clogged windpipe preventing even that; he threw himself toward the doors, trying to get out into air, air that he couldn't quite reach.

He burst out into the open. His tools were all over in the cafeteria, there had to be something that he could use to open himself up. He'd saw his own damned throat open, if he had to, but he wouldn't let this happen.

He was lying at the bottom of the steps where he'd fallen, pulling up into a near foetal curl that he couldn't prevent. He was being drawn into that single point of pain that burned like a hot light. He was only dimly aware of Alina coming down the steps toward him, only dimly aware of her crouching by him to smooth the hair from his forehead. He started to shiver, completely out of control now. He could see the end coming, and it was just as she'd said; the friends he'd made and lost, and the women that he wished he'd known better.

"There, there," he heard her say. "It'll soon be over."

And it was.