The Boat House

by Stephen Gallagher

  Someone raps on the window.

  Pavel is jerked awake; he sees a uniform.

  The man mouths at him through the glass.

  "This is the hotel's car park, you know. Not a public doss house."

  Pavel nods, embarrassed, and he doesn't meet the parking attendant's eyes as he starts the car.

  And as he drives away, he's thinking not about the assertiveness of a petty official, but about the horizon. In the province of Karelia, close to the border with Finland, the horizon beyond the land and the lakes is always flat and far away. This was the landscape in which Alina spent her childhood; he wonders in what kind of landscape she finds herself now, and if her chances of happiness are any greater.

  He's doubtful.

  Because he knows that no matter how hard you might try to reach it, no horizon ever gets any closer.

  PART FIVE

  Rusalka (1)

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The next time that he saw Diane was at the funeral, some three weeks later. She came alone, as a representative of the Liston Estate, and she stood alongside him in Three Oaks Bay's tiny hillside churchyard. Together they watched across the old gravestones as Ted Hammond waited patiently by the lych gate, thanking each of the mourners as they left.

  "I don't know what to say to him," she admitted.

  "Who does?" Pete said.

  Ted was looking dignified, but broken. His clothes didn't fit, his skin was grey, his eyes were dead. His sister had come over with her family from the next valley and was standing just behind him; Shaun had flown home as well, a taller, broader Wayne-that-might-have-been, but he hadn't yet come out of the church.

  When Pete finally turned to move away, Diane had gone. Standing in her place was Alina, red-eyed and waiting to be taken home.

  They'd found them after five days, with Sandy's parents hammering at Ted every minute of the time. Ted's initial fear was that they'd done something stupid and run away together, but then after a while he'd begun to hope for this and nothing worse. The missing keys to the boat house and to the Princess had been the clue, spotted by Pete and reported to Ross Aldridge in a phonecall when Ted was out of earshot. It all made a horrible kind of sense, and he hoped that he was wrong. But he wasn't. Aldridge had found the lights shorted out, the cruiser's batteries run down, and the two children lying just under the surface of the water inside the big sliding gates. They'd been entwined in an embrace, and Sandy's hair had been spread like a fan; by Aldridge's account it had been a touching, harrowing sight.

  The inquest was local, held in the parish hall and presided over by a doctor from the big resort town further down the lake. The locked doors, the circumstances, and the lack of contradictory medical evidence led to a verdict of misadventure within fifteen minutes. One of the tabloids got a couple of columns out of it — Teen Lovers' Nude Death Riddle on Dizzy's Yacht — but mostly the papers left it alone. The entire village closed down on the day of the funeral, and the trickle of early-season trippers found themselves looking around bemused at the drawn curtains in the houses and the handwritten notes in the shop windows before shrugging to themselves and passing on through. Two kids drowning in an accident didn't sound like much to the world outside.

  Neither Pete nor Alina spoke during the drive home afterwards. Alina had sniffled her way through half a box of Kleenex from the glove compartment, and she seemed even more disinclined toward conversation than Pete. He couldn't help noticing how much she was being affected; it was a sign, he supposed, of how she'd come to consider the valley her home and its people her own. On a day when good feelings were pretty scarce, it didn't seem wrong to spare just one moment to be glad for her.

  As always, she went straight to her room when they got home. Pete went to the refrigerator, took out a beer, and then carried it along with a kitchen chair out onto the porch. His inclination was to be down at the yard. But Ted had his real family around him now.

  Pete was remembering the night — it seemed like years ago, but it wasn't so long — that the three of them had sat in the Zodiac down in the workshop and Wayne had made some gentle fun of Pete's funeral suit. He was wearing it again today. So much change, in so short a time; Pete felt as if he'd aged more in ten weeks than in the ten years that had gone before. Now he sat out on the porch with his chair tilted back and his feet up on the rail, and he sipped at his beer as he watched the patterns of sunlight on the forest over on the far side of the track.

  He remembered what Alina had said to him, way back at that first dawn. Her instincts were right, this was a fine place to be.

  It was just that some days could be rather less fine than others.

  After an hour he went to see how she was doing, and to see if she needed anything. She smiled weakly, and said not. She was sitting on the bed with her album — that sparsely peopled record of whatever it was that she'd left behind — and she wasn't leafing through it hugging it close, as if it was a physical source of comfort to her when times were at their lowest.

  She said, "I've been trying to think about Wayne, but instead I've been thinking about myself. Isn't that terrible?"

  But Pete said that it wasn't, because for much of the hour he'd been doing the same. It wasn't something that he'd intended, but it wasn't something he could help. All through the valley people would be reflecting on the brevity of life and their own missed chances at happiness, and thinking of their common frailty in the shadow of the dark beast that had passed so close and taken someone so young.

  And then he said, "You want to come for a ride in the car? Get out of the valley for a while, see somewhere new?" But again she smiled and she shook her head, saying that she preferred to stay here for a while and… just think about things. And Pete was relieved, because he hadn't really felt like going anywhere, either.

  He left her in her room, thinking that perhaps he'd climb up to the rocks on the crest of the headland and watch the sunlight on the lake until the mountain shadows took it away.

  He left her there, on the bed, with the book held close.

  And then, when Pete McCarthy was safely out of the way, she opened the book, and the book spoke to her.

  You've been unwell, the book said. My name is Belov. I'm a doctor.

  INTERLUDE

  What the Book Said

  He didn't look much like a doctor to Alina. He crouched in the corner by the big tiled kitchen range, his sleeves rolled up and his shirt and trousers covered in white ash. He'd been cleaning out the fireplace and clearing the flue, neither of which appeared to have been used in years. He was a big, dark, heavy man something in the manner of a friendly black bear going a little thin on top.

  He smiled at her, and started to get to his feet.

  Alina said, "Am I still in prison?"

  "Technically," he said, "you never were. But no, this isn't a prison."

  "It doesn't look like a hospital."

  "No."

  What it looked like was a long deserted log farmhouse, with stale rush matting on the floor and at the windows coarse-woven net curtains that had faded almost to nothing. Alina was holding onto the door, because the six steps that she'd taken to reach it had almost been enough to exhaust her; Belov dusted off his hands and came over to her now, and he took her by the shoulders and turned her around and steered her back toward the bed that she'd just left.

  His touch was like a doctor's, firm and impersonal. And, of course, she'd seen him before; he'd been the third man on the commission that had interviewed her, the one who'd sat next to the Cheka's doctor and who'd listened to her slurred responses without ever saying anything. Now he was straightening the covers over her as she lay, utterly spent, and he was promising her answers to her unspoken questions in the morning. She could barely turn her head to watch him as he backed out of the room and closed the door; a moment later, the sounds of the fire irons against stone resumed. It was this strange subterranean thumping that had wakened and drawn her in the first place.

  She was still wearing the th
in cotton dress that she'd worn in the prison hospital, but now there was a shawl around her shoulders as well. She didn't know how she'd come by it, and she'd only the vaguest memories of her journey to this place. Why she was here, she couldn't imagine; but her head was clearer than it had been in a long time, which meant that she must have gone for some hours without any kind of an injection.

  There was no denying the fact that there were gaps in her memory because of the drugs. There was no way of being certain how long she'd spent on the ward; it might have been six weeks or six years, but she was guessing at six months because this had been the first commission review that she'd received.

  Unless there had been others, and she hadn't remembered.

  They'd taken her from the police cells after two days. She'd been half expecting a trial and then a labour camp but instead, there was an ambulance. Seeing this, she'd known what lay ahead. They took her out, across the wide Neva river to the north east of the city, to a long street of factories and high concrete walls where tourists and visitors had little reason to go. The prison hospital fitted into its surroundings perfectly, a four storey warehouse of human cargo. It had small, dark windows in a main building set back from the road behind a staff block and a perimeter wall of newer red brick. Grim and forbidding were the two well-used words that came to mind as she looked up at the building for the first time; but there were no words that could easily describe the helpless terror that she felt as the side gate opened before them and the ambulance had driven through.

  She'd thought that at least she'd be put with her own kind — border crossers and minor political dissidents — but it didn't happen. Her 'own kind' were in a minority. Instead she was confined for twenty hours a day on a ward for the criminally insane, most of them doped and many of them bruised from the warders' heavy handling. She'd sit in her dressing gown by the window and try to listen for the electric trams on the distant street, anything to give some kind of shape or structure to her day, but the noise made even this impossible.

  And then her programme of treatment started, and the idea seemed to lose its importance to her.

  This was better, she thought as she lay on her cot in the farmhouse. Anything was better than the ward. At least now she was beginning to get her focus back, even if her strength hadn't yet come with it.

  Belov brought her some broth about an hour later, and he helped her up to the bowl. Apparently his efforts with the kitchen range had finally paid off. For a while Alina was afraid that she was going to throw it all up again, but she didn't.

  Tomorrow, he promised her whenever she tried to ask him anything. Tomorrow, when she'd be stronger. And then he left her alone, climbing the wooden stairs to what she would later learn were his own makeshift quarters on the floor above. If he locked her in, she didn't hear it.

  The next morning, she got to go outside.

  It was only a few steps, but now she was leaning on his arm for steadiness rather than support. She felt almost weightless, as if she was made out of eggshells. The daylight brought tears, and not only because of its brightness.

  They were in a village of perhaps a dozen houses and a white log church, out on a plain somewhere under a big, big sky; each building stood well apart from its neighbours with just open common land between them, and the grass on that common land was deep and uncut. It rippled in the light breeze like a sea.

  Alina said, "I don't see anyone."

  "No," Belov agreed. "Nobody lives here now."

  "No one at all?"

  "The entire community was resettled a long time ago. The place hasn't been used since then."

  "But why?"

  "Well, you know the military. We're not so far from the border. Maybe there's a radar station over in the woods, or maybe they want everyone to think there is."

  They were making a slow circuit of the farmhouse and its barn, a lean-to of roughly dressed timber made dark and smooth with age. The roof was of shingle with planks nailed over.

  Alina said, "What if we're found?" But it wasn't something that seemed to worry Belov.

  "I've got permission for us to be here," he said. "As long as you stay around the village and the paths I'll show you tomorrow, you shouldn't have any problems."

  "You said it wasn't a prison."

  "No more so than anywhere else."

  So, another tomorrow.

  Alina woke to this one feeling sharp and dangerous and — within limits — ready to go. She found that Belov had laid out her own clothes as she slept; she'd lost weight, she noticed as she dressed, and she hadn't really had much to lose.

  After a plain breakfast they went out again, still taking it slowly but this time with more of a distance in mind. Belov told her the name of the village. It meant nothing to her.

  "I don't suppose it would," Belov said. "It's the kind of place that no one ever hears of, where nothing ever happens. Something happened here, though."

  "And that's why you've brought me?"

  "Let me tell you the story. Questions later."

  They took a winding dirt alley that led through the back of the village between houses and outhouses. By the sides of the outhouses were stacks of trimmed poles and branches and brushwood, all grown over with moss. Alina had assumed that Belov was taking her to another of the buildings, but it seemed now that he was going to lead her out of the settlement altogether.

  He said, "The farmhouse we're staying in, a small girl lived there. She slept in the room where you're sleeping now. She was bright, and she did very well at school. Most families in a village like this expect their children to work on the farm when they get older, but in this case it was different. She was an only child, and her parents wanted more for her. As soon as she was old enough, they were going to send her to stay with relatives in the city so that she could get a better education. They were tied to the land, but their daughter wouldn't be. With me so far?"

  "Yes," Alina said, although in truth she was wondering what point he might be trying to make. As far as she could tell, they were completely alone in the village. Back at the farmhouse they had food supplies in a cardboard box, and Belov himself had taken the role of housekeeper as well as doctor. Today he was tousled, and even more in need of a shave; under his suit jacket, he now wore an old pullover.

  They were passing the last of the houses now. Ahead lay marshy fields, neatly divided by a raised path consisting of two parallel rails of wood pegged into the ground.

  Belov said, "This girl was small, and very fair. They say she looked like an angel." He waved his hand. "Now, see this house. The Markevitch family lived here, very big family, lots of sons. Not enough brains to go around, though, according to the neighbours, and the youngest boy was out of luck. He was born a simpleton. When he was seventeen years old, he was still playing with wooden blocks. But happy. His name was Viktor."

  They moved on, out toward the fields, and Belov continued with the story.

  "He followed the girl around all the time. He was like a puppy, completely devoted. She was only nine years old and she wasn't much of a size for that, but everybody knew that Viktor was harmless. A lot of the time she just seemed to forget that he was there, and he'd shamble along behind her just happy to stay close."

  "How long ago was this?"

  "Quite a few years. The girl's still alive, but Viktor was drowned. I'm going to show you where."

  They came to a simple fence which was crossed by a stile, and here Alina rested for a couple of minutes before going on. The place that Belov had in mind was just a couple of hundred meters further, he told her. It was reedy marshland here, the grasses awash in several inches of diamond-clear water. The path zigzagged between dry rises in the land. On one of these, Belov stepped down from the wooden rails.

  "A lot of this would have been different then," he explained. "The shape of the marsh has changed over the years, but we're somewhere close to the spot. They came out along the track we just followed, the very same one. Only the girl came back, and she was soaked
and muddy and she could hardly speak. Two of Viktor's brothers came out, and found him."

  "How could he drown?" Alina said. She was looking down at the water, which was only inches deep.

  "Nobody knows. It could have been that someone forced him down, and held his face under. But that wouldn't have been easy. He wasn't bright, but he was big and he was very strong. He'd have struggled hard." Belov looked thoughtfully at the ground around them, as if he might still read signs that had long ago disappeared. "They called the doctor in from the nearest town, and the local militia chief questioned the girl. I've seen both of their reports — the file on the case has never been closed, in all this time. They asked her what had happened, and she said that a Rusalka from the lake had hurt Viktor. You know what the Rusalki are?"

  Alina peered toward the lake, which was hardly more than a sliver on the horizon. She said nothing.

  "They're an old superstition, lake spirits in female form. Very beautiful, very dangerous. Men can't resist them. They're supposed to bring a strange kind of ecstatic death by drowning — although it isn't really described as a death at all, more a passage from one world to another. There's something like it in the folklore of just about every culture. And no matter how many times they asked the girl, no matter how many different ways they approached it, her story was always the same."

  "So nobody believed her."

  "She was a child. She looked even younger than she was. What were they going to do, beat it out of her? Maybe they even tried that. They didn't put it in the records, if they did. But the harder they pressed her, the more confused she would have become. Children's fantasies are as real to them as anything else; but not many get thrown up against them so hard."