Dick had less welcome news. Some results of the seismographic survey had come in, showing an apparent rock fault running across a stretch of the hillside upstream from their house. There was a tarn there that he had planned to incorporate into the hydroelectric scheme. They walked up a winding hill track that evening to look at it. When they reached it Mari caught her breath and stood, staring.
In front of her lay a strange feature like a miniature volcanic crater half way up the hillside, holding in its hollow a still, dark tarn that brimmed almost at her feet. The tarn was fed by several streams from the sunlit hills beyond, and spilt out down to the valley by way of a waterfall. Mari could both see and feel that this was a magical place. Dick, in his very different way, had seemed to sense so too.
“There’s something pretty big in here,” he’d said. “I’d like to have a go at it some day.”
“How can you tell?”
“Just a hunch. You get them. They seem to work.”
“What will your scheme do to this? I hope it doesn’t spoil it. It’s perfect now.”
“We’ve got some very stringent guidelines from the conservation people. We’re running everything underground as far as possible, but there’s bound to be a bit of upheaval while we’re working on it, especially if we have to find a way of filling the fault in. I’m going to have to go into that in detail.”
“Well, don’t spoil this. It’s part of the place.”
When they had been back a fortnight Doctor Tharlsen returned to Norway. Mari found a brief email from him waiting for her next morning. For the first time in their correspondence he had permitted himself an exclamation mark. More than one.
“Amazing! The whole of the oath exchange is in Old Story Measure! Terribly garbled, but unmistakable. I realised while on the aeroplane, and worked on it for the rest of the journey. I have the first seventeen lines as certain as they will ever be. I can barely stop to sleep. By Sunday night I may have enough to send you to read at your breakfast on Monday. Perhaps even earlier. Bless you! Bless you! Bless you!”
At first light next day, Dick slithered out from under the sheet, bent over the bed, and kissed Mari’s ear.
“Catch me some breakfast,” she murmured.
“Don’t count on it,” he said, kissed her again and left to catch the dawn rise. She lay listening to the hiss of the shower, and relishing her own contentment. She could feel it filling the whole valley, brimming along the hilltops, just as the still summer heat seemed to do. Normally she might have lain like that for the hour or more until sunrise before getting up, but today was clearly going to be a scorcher, literally so in her case by the time the sun had any strength in it, so she allowed herself only as long as it took Dick to finish his shower, and then rose and followed him.
She showered, washing her hair, and dried, then walked naked to the kitchen to make herself some morning tea. She was used to wandering round the house like that. The weather was more than warm enough for it. Even at the weekends there was no likelihood of anyone coming by. The nearest house was two and a half miles down the pot-holed track, with the public road another two beyond that, the entrance clearly marked as private. She brought her cup back to her desk in the living room and switched on her PC to check her email.
While she waited for the server to connect she watched Dick out of the window. Doctor Tharlsen’s gift covered a bit over half a mile of the near bank, as far as midstream. The bank plunged steeply down at this point, and continued the slope below the waterline, where the main current had carved out a deep channel, through which it ran steadily, with barely a ripple. No salmon would rise in such water. But a rock shelf jutted out from the further shore, creating broken and turbulent shallows, with stiller pools. Part of this reached within Dick’s rights, and the river baillie had told him that good fish had been caught here, and had lent him the dinghy to fish from. Using a rock for an anchor, he could moor in the current, which would then drag the anchor very slowly downstream, so that he could start at the top of the rock shelf and cover the whole length of it and then paddle upstream and begin again. He was now just about to start the process. Mari liked to watch him doing it, because of the characteristically deft fashion in which he accomplished everything on the unsteady little dinghy.
Now he was out in the middle of the river, shipping his oars, letting the current swing the dinghy down towards the shelf, picking up the anchor rock, balancing himself to slip it over the side . . .
Because she was watching, Mari saw exactly what happened. From the very first she was in no doubt about it.
Just he had the rock poised to let go, something reached up out of the water—a four-fingered hand, twice human size, the colour of granite, webbed to the top knuckles—and grasped the gunwale and dragged it violently down into the water. Unprepared, unbalanced by the rock, Dick toppled over. When the splash and pother had cleared he was gone. The empty dinghy bobbled at the end of its rope. His rod was being swept away downstream.
She ran for the door and headlong down the bank, and dived. No thought had taken place, but something in her had guessed at the speed of the current, so that she hit the water about twenty yards below the dinghy. The same something controlled her swimming, prolonging her dive and then driving into a breaststroke as it slowed, so that she could stay submerged as long as her breath held. Her eyes were wide open, searching. Immediately around her the water, a sky-reflecting mirror from above, seemed almost as clear as the outer air, but shaded into dimness at any distance. Straight ahead of her, close in against the rock shelf, on the border between the light and the shadows, something went surging past.
It was almost the same colour as the rock, so she saw it only dimly, and couldn’t make out its shape. But its movement, the powerful pulse of the legs that drove it upstream, told her what sort of thing it was. Something like a frog or toad. A toad the size of a large cow. As she fought to follow, the current carried her out of sight.
She surfaced, changed to a racing crawl, and reached the shelf. As soon as the current ran less strongly she turned upstream. As a child, before she’d given up competitive swimming, she’d done better at the longer distances than the sprints. Now, automatically, she struck the fastest pace that came naturally to her. Every few strokes, instead of twisting her head to gasp for air, she kept it submerged, peering for some sign of the thing that had taken Dick.
That was what had happened, she was sure. Again it was the glimpsed movement of the creature that had told her, the action of the near forelimb as it swam—something awkward about it—the other limb wasn’t being used to swim with, because it was clutching Dick—clutching effortfully—Dick had been struggling still . . .
There! Less than a glimpse this time, a shadow-shift only, uncertain, but she put on a spurt, not bothering to peer below until she had counted thirty strokes, and then only briefly. But yes, she was gaining. Her heart slammed, the air she gulped rasped in her throat and wasn’t enough. By now, if she’d been merely racing, her stroke would have been losing its rhythm, but strength came from somewhere, came with a passionate energy that told her it would keep on coming until she caught up.
She had no thought about what would happen then, no fear for herself. Indeed, since the first violent shock of horror as the grey arm had come out of the water, she’d felt nothing at all except the urgency to do what she was doing, to follow the thing that had taken Dick, and take him back. Nothing else existed, not pain, not exhaustion, not the cold of the deep tarn water, nothing.