The Boat House

by Stephen Gallagher

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

A dark love story, and a disturbing tale of a divided soul. In the days leading to the fall of the Soviet empire, a young woman with a deadly secret slips unnoticed into the West. And when Alina Petrovna first appears in Three Oaks Bay it's clear that her frail, luminous beauty is likely to cause some ripples in the surface calm of the peaceful resort town. For Pete McCarthy, the boatyard worker who gives her shelter, she's an enigma. A complex, well-meaning young woman with a difficult past. Someone whose mystery deepens as the season gets under way, and the deaths by drowning begin...

Release date: March 12, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 315

Sample

HE HADN’T been out to McCarthy’s old place on the Step in almost a year. It held too many memories for him, and not only recent ones; the bad and the good were all thrown in together, and sometimes it seemed as if the good could be almost as painful. He’d think of childhood summers, spent in that same shaky wooden cottage with his sister and her family after their parents had died. Of the three years with Nerys when they’d just been married, both of them too poor to afford anywhere better as they saved for a stake in the boatyard. Now the boatyard was all his, had been since before Wayne had learned to walk, but Nerys was long gone.

Those had been hard times, but happy ones. He only wished that he could have realised it then.

“Come on, Ted,” he told himself. “Don’t get morbid.” And he tried not to crash the van’s worn gears as he made the turn onto the leaf-strewn headland track.

If only.

If only that last, terrible summer could be wiped away. Not just burned out of his mind with a controlled dose of lightning, but actually wiped away like a poem on a blackboard that had somehow turned wrong, and the rhythm picked up again as if nothing bad had ever happened. What would he give? The answer to that one was anything, right down to his soul. Anything, just to have it all back the way it had been. The memories, he’d keep. As memories alone they wouldn’t be able to hurt him then but, by God, how they’d make him appreciate what he’d had.

So much for not getting morbid.

The track was fairly rough, and had begun to get overgrown. The van bounced where old ruts had dried-in, and in some places low branches slashed at the windshield. As a child, he’d always loved the Step best of anywhere in the valley. It was a high, wooded headland jutting out into the lake, with a steep climb to its summit from the shore and a tortuous drive from the road; easier access would have made it less private and less privacy might have taken away some of the magic, and the magic was what had made it so special. He’d played here, he’d grown here; and the last time he’d been here, he’d sat on the high rocks overlooking the water and he’d wept in solitude and without shame.

He didn’t need to wonder what the view from the top would be like today. It would be of the valley, and whether the sun shone or the clouds cast a shadow across it or the rain came down, it was the homeland that would never let him go.

The track was coming to an end. The old place—lately McCarthy’s place, although Pete McCarthy had moved out almost a year ago—lay just ahead.

Most of the valley people felt that autumn was the best time of year around these parts. Then the sunsets were like red gold in the mountains, and the woodland stood as dark and shady as anything out of a fairy tale. Strangers had been known to spend an hour or more out on the terrace behind the Venetz sisters’ restaurant, watching the evening mists rise from the lake with tears in their eyes.

The valley people, meanwhile, were checking the high season’s take and wondering if this was going to be the year that they could afford a new Volvo or even a winter cruise. They’d worked flat-out through the summer, sometimes so hard that they’d forget to raise their heads and remind themselves of the real reason for living here. It wasn’t the money, or the uncertain pleasure of servicing the tourist trade; it was just the valley, a subtle presence which seemed to get into people and which never let them go.

Ted Hammond knew that he could never leave. It was too late to stop the dance; the valley had held him close for too long. Friends might come and go, but he’d always be the one to stay behind.

He pulled in before the old house, onto the strip of rough ground before the covered wooden porch. A few yards ahead, the overgrown track petered out and became an even more overgrown footpath. The house stood in the silence of desertion. Neither the track nor the path had any destination other than this.

It had been given a name, once, Rosedale, but the board had weathered away and the name had been mostly forgotten. It was a one-storey frame building, too run-down to sell or even to rent; the walls and the roof were sound, but it would need a lot of paint and timberwork as well as some new windows before it could charm the holiday crowd.

Letting it was his sister’s plan, anyway, and she was still the owner even though she let Ted look after the key and the box with all the paperwork. And it was the reason for his coming up here today, because she’d asked him to clean out the gutters and fix the blocked stove and generally check the place over before she advertised it. Ted’s feeling was that he’d rather see it left to fade away. It already had the air of some forgotten corner in a churchyard, with the roses long-dead and the side-garden turned to moss and the trees crowding in too close. A gingerbread house, gone stale and old. Better to let the valley take it back.

Or keep it as-is until McCarthy returns, was the thought in the back of his mind,

He stepped out of the van, and looked across the porch. He could almost see the front door standing open and Pete McCarthy coming down the hallway and into the light, carrying a Heinz Soup box crammed with his shirts and a radio balanced on top. Not the best mechanic that Ted had ever employed, but easily the best to work with. He forgot the punchlines to jokes and his whistling was a public embarrassment, but Ted had known even then that he was going to miss him.

And he did. He missed the two of them, a lot.

That was the last time he’d been out here. To say goodbye. Their car had already been loaded and the boy sat playing behind the wheel as the three of them stood out on the porch and talked around everything other than what really needed to be said. They were putting off the moment, and they knew it; much better if they all just shook hands, and then they got into their car and went.

Oh, Ted, Diane had said simply, and she’d stepped up to him and hugged him hard. Ted had put his arms around her, and it had come to him in a sudden realisation that Diane was about the same age that Nerys had been when she died, the age that she’d be in his memory forever. There hadn’t been a week in which he hadn’t wished for her back at least once; and for a moment it was as if that wish had come true.

He’d hugged her back, and then she’d become Diane again; a different scent, a different presence, a different life ahead of her. No less dear, but not the young woman who had quietly slipped away from him on that November night. There had been tears in Diane’s eyes as she’d finally let go and taken a step back.

Then Pete had stretched out his hand. Goodbye, Ted, he’d said seriously. I’m sorry for what I brought you.

It wasn’t your fault, Ted had told him. You couldn’t know.

But Pete, being Pete, was probably blaming himself still.

As he unlocked the main door, Ted was wondering where the two of them were, how they were doing. He’d had a couple of postcards in the early months, but nothing since. They’d checked out the south coast where Pete had been offered boatyard work but they couldn’t find anywhere cheap enough to rent, so then they’d headed over to the east somewhere. Opening the door, he found himself overtaken by a certainty that, in spite of everything that had happened here, they would come back; the worst of the memories finally buried, perhaps, and that under-the-skin presence of the valley drawing them home.

Let his sister think that he was getting the house ready for Spring rental. He’d get it ready, all right, but he’d tell her that the roof needed work, that some of the boards were too rotten to be safe. He’d say that he’d fix it when he could, maybe in time for next year.

And in the meantime, if Pete and Diane should return, the old place would be waiting.

A cool, musty smell hit him as he stepped inside. There was a stillness in the air that made any sound seem hollow and intrusive; the atmosphere was as empty as at four o’clock in the morning, here in the middle of this afternoon. He felt as if he were standing in a doll’s house. Doorways along the hall before him; a couple of bedrooms and a sitting room, a bathroom with an old castiron tub, the big kitchen at the back with the wood-burning stove that didn’t work and the electric ring that did. All of the doors leading off the hallway had been left open, except for one.

The door that had led to Alina’s room.

HE MIGHT as well start there, since he couldn’t skip it. He felt a strange kind of anticipation as he started to turn the doorknob. Would Pete and Diane have cleared everything out before they left? They must have. Surely one of them would have said something if they hadn’t.

He opened the door, and stepped through.

With some relief, he saw that the room was bare. The bed had been stripped to the mattress and there was nothing on the walls, nothing on the dresser. He checked the drawers and they were empty, too. It was as if she’d never been here.

Which left another question, occurring to him as he gave a couple of tugs at the sash of the window which looked out onto the overgrown side-garden. What had they done with Alina’s stuff? He couldn’t imagine either of them wanting to take it away.

He found the answer a short time later, when he came to work on the wood-burning stove in the kitchen.

It was dimmer in here than in any other room in the cottage, because the trees around the back had been left to get so wild that their branches scratched against the windows in anything more than the mildest breeze. Some other time, he’d bring along a chainsaw and trim them back. Right now, the job was to clear out the stove.

But when he opened everything up to take a look, he found that it had already been done.

The flue had apparently been unblocked some time ago, and the stove had then been used. Pete had said nothing about it but there was the evidence, there in the cold ashes. Ted unhooked the iron poker from its nail on the wall alongside and gave the ashes a stir.

Whatever had been burned, it hadn’t burned completely. He turned up hairpins, part of a melted comb. A piece of fabric with some of the pattern still discernible. And paper ash, lots of it. In amongst the ash there was the corner of a postcard or a photo. He tilted it to the light with the tip of the poker, but it showed no recognisable detail.

He raked the cold embers together in a mound and then, using deadwood that he found within a few yards of the house, he relit the stove and clamped everything down tight. This way it would burn hot, and it would burn until only the ashes of ashes remained. For Ted Hammond, even one surviving scrap of Alina Peterson would be one scrap too many.

He waited until he was sure. Then he turned to go.

Leaving the cottage and locking the door behind him, Ted was thinking of something that Diane had once said. That of those who’d known the truth, they were the only ones who had made it through. She hadn’t put it like that, but it was what she’d meant; that they were a survivors’ club, whether they liked the idea or not.

He went down the porch steps to the van, climbed in, and started the engine. And then he sat for a few moments, letting it idle as he found himself looking at the faint line of the path that picked up from the track only a few yards ahead. It led on up through the woodland to the high rocks where he’d gone to look down on the flat expanse of the lake after the goodbyes.

It was a path that Alina had walked before him, many times.

Diane was wrong. The three of them weren’t alone. Others knew what had happened, and how.

But they’d never speak out again.

BUT THERE’S no clear point at which one could say, here it began.

Instead, there are many. Like the day that Pete McCarthy turned up at Ted Hammond’s auto-marine with nothing more than a cardboard suitcase and the hope of a season’s maintenance work (a season that ran on into a year, and then into the next, and seemed set to run on indefinitely should nothing ever happen to break up their growing friendship), or perhaps the one some years before when a seven-year-old Russian girl named Alina Petrovna led a teenaged boy out into the marshlands near her village and came back alone. Or the day that Alina, now grown, gathered whatever possessions she could carry and made her first, unsuccessful attempt to cross the border out of her Karelian homeland.

Or perhaps, getting closer to it, the night that Pete McCarthy set out from the valley to attend his mother’s funeral, while Alina Petrovna, hardened if not chastened by her punishment, got most of those same possessions together and tried it again. As beginnings go, this one’s probably better than most.

McCarthy first.

I

AS THE woman who was to change his life was boarding the train that would, indirectly, bring her to him, Pete McCarthy was doing his best to kick some life into his old heap of a car.

But the old heap simply didn’t want to know; it sat under the workshop lights, mean and dark and uncooperative, its chromed grin shining dully and a spirit of mischief showing deep in its sixty-watt eyes. It was a black Zodiac, close to twenty years old and easily the ugliest car to be seen on the roads around Three Oaks Bay, and even if its colour was appropriate for a funeral it was going to be of no use at all to Pete if it didn’t get him there.

This was all he needed. This, after three hours of tweaking and tuning and a once-over with the Turtle Wax to make it look halfway presentable. He’d given it loving care, he’d given it attention. What more did it expect of him?

There was nothing else for it.

He took off his suit jacket, rolled up the sleeves of the shirt that he’d changed into in the back washroom less than ten minutes before, and reached for the bonnet release.

He was still working at it when Ted Hammond called by after a late session in the auto-marine’s office. “Problems, Pete?” he said, and Pete growled and kicked the nearest wheel. The Zodiac’s hubcap fell off and rolled into the grease pit. The two of them had the carburettor in pieces by the time that Wayne, Ted’s sixteen-year-old boy, put in an appearance; Wayne spent no more than a few seconds contemplating the engine before saying that he knew what was needed.

“Give me some money,” he said, and then he went off in the breakdown wagon (which, in only seven months, he’d be able to drive legally), and returned fifteen minutes later with a party can of beer.

It was almost midnight when Ted found the fault.

The fault was in the new set of contact breakers that Pete had fitted as part of the routine service. If he’d left everything alone, he’d have had no trouble. Nobody, was unkind enough to say so out loud.

They put everything back together, and Pete tidied himself up again. Because there were no chairs around the workshop, they opened up the Zodiac and all three of them sat inside as they finished what remained of the party can. Or rather, Ted and Wayne took care of it, seated in the back of the car; Pete turned around the rear view mirror in the front and tried, without much success, to make a decent job of knotting his borrowed black tie.

Ted said, “Wayne can check on the cottage every now and again while you’re away.” Wayne raised his plastic cup, and belched in assent.

Pete said, “If anybody’s desperate enough to steal my stuff, they’re welcome to it.” He gave the knot a final check in the mirror before half-turning himself to face the two in the back. They were sitting there patiently like a bleary-eyed jury, Ted looking like a Toby Jug in a frayed old sweater, and Wayne slumped into the corner with the skull on his Judge Death T-shirt grinning out of the shadows.

Pete said, “How do I look?”

“You want the truth?” Ted asked.

“Not necessarily.”

“You look fine.”

“Like they just let you out of prison,” Wayne added.

“Thanks,” Pete said. “Just what I need.” And then, to signal that the brief and sober goodbye party was over, he got out of the car and went around the back to close the boot lid on his suitcase. The drive ahead would take most of the night. His brother had promised to fix him up with a borrowed flat for the stopover, but now he’d have to skip it and catch up on his sleep sometime later. Big brother Michael—the respectable one in the family, who’d taken it upon himself to make all the funeral arrangements—probably wouldn’t be pleased at the change in schedule, but that would cause Pete no extra grief at all. Mike was so uptight, he probably couldn’t even fart without the aid of a shoehorn.

Ted Hammond and Wayne climbed out and then Pete walked all around the Zodiac, slamming and checking the doors. Wayne followed him, looking doubtful. No denying it, the car was a rust bucket; in the past Pete had welded so many pieces onto the underside that he could have driven over a landmine without personally suffering a scratch.

“Think you’ll make it?” Wayne said.

“Are you kidding? She’s running like a dream.”

Wayne stepped back, so that he could take the whole car in at once; the pitted grille, the yellowing headlamps, the small chip-crack in the windshield that had never quite become bad enough to star, the wrapping of black tape that held the radio
aerial into the bodywork.

“Yeah,” he said, finally, “I had a dream like that, once.” And then he moved to open the workshop’s big double doors as Pete got in behind the wheel.

Ted bent to speak to Pete through the car’s half-open window. “Anyway,” he said quietly and seriously, “I’m sorry about your mother.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “We could see it coming, but … ” And he shrugged; it was a thought that he’d been unable to complete in any satisfactory way since the news had first come through, in a phone call from Michael three days before.

Ted took a step back; Wayne now had the doors open to the darkness, standing just inside the workshop and trying not to shiver in the March night’s chill. Pete nodded to Ted and smiled briefly, and then he reached for the key to start the engine.

THE ZODIAC eased out into the lake-misted night, smoothly and in silence.

It moved in silence because Ted and Wayne were pushing it; Pete’s earlier attempts had run the battery down, and the jump-starter was way over on the marina side of the yard. Grunting and wheezing, they got him across the dusty forecourt and onto the stony track that went on to the main road, and after a few yards the engine kicked and turned over and coughed into a ragged kind of life.

On came the lights, making sudden and bizarre shapes out of the boat hulls, trailers, and half-dismantled cruisers that were crowded in along the trackside verge, and then the car was out from under their hands and pulling away as the two of them stopped to catch their breath.

They watched his tail-lights all the way down the track, until the turn around behind the trees. A few moments after he’d gone from sight, there came a faint singsong of tyres on metal as the Zodiac crossed the iron bridge that was their link to Three Oaks Bay. The sound lasted less than a second, and left silence behind.

Ted put his hand on Wayne’s shoulder as they turned to go back inside.

And then he winced as, somewhere far off, there was a loud backfire. The high valley sides caught and echoed it, like a gunshot deep in some vast, empty building.

“Don’t worry,” Wayne said. “Think of it as advertising.”

“In what way?”

“If he can keep that old banger on the road, he can probably fix anything on wheels.”

Wayne closed the big workshop doors, and turned the handle to lock them from the inside. Ted stood by the smaller back exit, his hand ready on the light switch. He was thinking that, with Pete away, things were going to seem strange around here for a while. He had another mechanic, a quiet, intensely private man named Frank Lowry, but their relationship wasn’t the same; in the four years since he’d joined them Pete had become like another son to him, and almost an older brother to Wayne. Maybe it wasn’t your standard family unit, but in a world where it seemed that just about everyone was damaged goods in one way or another, they’d made themselves a fairly happy corner of the junk heap.

It wouldn’t last forever, of course, because nothing did. Wayne was starting to spread his wings a little, swapping Custom Bike for Playboy and getting into a relationship with a girl named Sandy which seemed to consist mostly of baiting each other and trading insults and playing music somewhere around the pain threshold. And Pete; Pete, eventually, was going to hook up with someone who really appreciated him, and then it would be goodbye to those shared evenings of beer and popcorn and rented videos. Both of them would leave, and then he’d be alone.

But maybe not this year, was his thought as they moved out into the main part of the yard and he closed and locked the door behind them. It wasn’t much of a lock, but then it didn’t need to be; Chuck and Bob, Ted’s two German shepherd dogs, were let to run free in the yard on all but the coldest of nights.

Wayne Hammond was a likeable boy, much as his father had been at the same age. He wasn’t academically bright, but he was sharp in all the ways that counted. He was taller than his father, with a lithe swimmer’s body and an averagely pleasant face that
wouldn’t break any hearts—but then it wouldn’t stop any clocks, either. Ted would look at him sometimes and, just for a moment, he’d see the boy’s mother again.

As the two of them crossed the yard to their unlit house—Wayne going along to raid the fridge before returning to his two-roomed teenager’s den above the workshop—the woman who would bring disaster to their lives and to the valley was making a crossing of a different kind, more than two thousand miles away.

II

NIKOLAI HAD done little more than to sit watching her for the first couple of hours, until he’d realised that he was making her nervous. That was when he’d climbed to lie full-length on the compartment’s upper berth, leaving Alina below to gaze out of the window at the passing landscape. This was continuous and unvarying, birch and pine forests standing dark in the moonlight; occasionally the trees thinned out for settlements of low wooden houses with small-paned windows and snow-laden roofs, but for the most part it was just a rolling backdrop for their dreams and fears.

He adored her. One dream, at least, seemed to be coming true for him.

He was nervous about their situation, but nothing more. This wasn’t like the dark old days, where people were let out of the USSR grudgingly if at all and only with the certainty of family ties to draw them back; Nikolai knew that, had he chosen to travel alone now, he’d almost certainly have faced no difficulty in getting permission. Border controls were easing, the Berlin wall had fallen, there was a different kind of outlook all around. The problem lay with Alina. She had some kind of a criminal record, and there were outstanding charges she’d have to answer if ever they caught up with her.

He’d never asked her what the charges were. He trusted her. But he knew that she’d spent time in a prison psychiatric hospital, and that she’d slipped out on a technicality and they wanted her back, and that before he’d met her she’d already lived without a permanent address or identity for at least two years.

He couldn’t imagine himself surviving in that way, but he could see what it was doing to her. There was no question about it, she had to leave; and after he’d known her for only a short time, there had been no question but that he’d have to go with her.

A sharp rap on the wall by the door brought him slithering down from the berth. Alina was already standing as the guard came in, a boy soldier in an iron-grey uniform and with a deep cheek-scar like a cattle brand. He was carrying a short stepladder in one hand, their passports in the other. After setting the ladder down he read out the names on their papers, mispronouncing them, and then turned to the photographs. They were French passports, guaranteed stolen but not yet reported, and the flimsy visa forms inside were simple forgeries.

There wasn’t much room. Alina was standing close beside Nikolai, her head only just level with his shoulder, and she was looking at the floor. Nikolai felt a small flame of apprehension coming to life inside him at this, and the flame became a steady heat as the guard—barely out of school but already as tough and as ugly as a board—looked up from her picture to find her avoiding his eyes.

Nikolai began to feel scared.

It wasn’t as if he needed to be here. He’d chosen to be here, gone out of his way to take the risk, elected to travel on forged documents instead of legitimately under his own name because it meant that Alina would be less conspicuous than if she made the journey alone; but if her . . .