"I'm on my way," he said.
"Get a message out. Call the police and make sure they know what they're heading for. She's been fooling people for too long."
"Will do," Ted said, but already his voice was beginning to break up.
There was nothing after that.
Now she didn't have time to mess around looking for the first aid kit. She shut down the radio, but she left on the lights. Now she had to travel all the way back along the quay and up the stairway and across the upper level to the door, and it would probably take her at least as long to do this as it would take Ted Hammond to cover the distance across the water. She didn't know what kind of craft he'd been showing to his customers, but she hoped that it was something fast.
The temptation to stay and relax in the helmsman's chair, just for one minute, was immense. But she knew that one minute would turn into two, and then four, and in the end she'd have as tough a time prising herself out as she did getting Jed out of bed for school on a dark winter's morning. There was urgency, here.
There was urgency…
She snapped out of it, and started to move.
She'd once heard that one of the main requirements for any kind of success was the kind of doggedness that led one to persist way beyond the point where anyone else would have thrown in the towel and turned to other pursuits. She had a (probable) broken ankle, she had distance to cover. Maybe she was adding to the damage this way, it was impossible to tell — it was hard to imagine it hurting any more than it already did.
But she would persist, and she would succeed.
Because let's face it, she was thinking, her range of other choices was more or less nil.
With the lights of the cabin behind her, she prepared to make the transfer back from the Princess to the quay. She couldn't be sure, perhaps it was just a trick of the lights, but it seemed as if the boat had shifted in its mooring a little and the gap had widened. Holding onto the stanchioned safety wires that took the place of rails along this section, Diane lowered herself to sit on the narrow walkway with the angled cabin wall against her back almost seeming to be pushing her out toward the drop. With her good leg, she got a tentative foothold on the quay. There was an unused mooring ring about a yard further along; if she could reach over and get a hold on that, she'd be more than halfway there. She'd have to face an unnerving point of balance as she moved her weight from ship to shore over the drop, but as long as she held tight to the iron ring she was unlikely to fall.
She reached out. It was a stretch, but she caught it. She was now at that point of balance, her bad leg hanging uselessly as her body bridged the gap. She couldn't help but look down into the flickering semidarkness of the water.
Where a hand which came shooting up in a cloud of erupting spray, and grasped her leg around the ankle.
FORTY-NINE
Shock and pain ran through Diane's nervous system like two trains running head-to-head on the same line; she was being pulled downward as they hit, and their explosion doused her in white heat and fire. A body was coming half up out of the water, raising itself on the nailed grip that it was exerting on Diane's tortured flesh.
She hung onto the ring. It was all that she could think to do. Her good leg slipped from the quay, and swung down.
Her foot connected with something solid.
The grip was released.
Spray drenched her as she saw Alina make a messy, uncontrolled backward landing in the dock. The water seemed to part and enfold her, and then she was gone. Diane swung herself up onto the quay, and started to run. She's actually made it almost to the stairway when her body remembered that it was already hurt, and seemed to pull the plugs on her; she went sprawling, and landed hard on the planks.
She rolled over and looked back. Alina was rising from the dock, dripping, gleaming in the underlight. Behind her was the dark Princess, cabin lights ablaze, a sinister looking beacon that cast her long shadow across the quay. Her hair lay sleek and wet and her thin cotton dress had plastered itself to her body. She was pure hostility, looking to do harm.
Diane started to push herself back. With the upper level door locked from the inside, she was safe from nothing other than rescue. She had to get to it, but all that she could do now was to crawl. She kept on pushing herself back before this slight, dangerous figure that was advancing on her from the zone where the nightmares played.
The stairs were at her back. She could go no further.
"What did they do with my book?" Alina said quietly.
"I don't… I don't know what you mean," Diane heard herself say.
"My pictures. Did they move them? Did they hide them? I really have to know."
The photographs? Was she kidding? Diane's mind raced, looking for an angle, any angle, that she could exploit. She'd had two shotgun shells in her pocket; but she seemed to have lost even these in the scramble and, besides, the shotgun itself was still on the far side of the quay.
She'd have to improvise.
"I think they burned it," she said.
Alina stopped.
"You're lying," she said.
"Why would I lie? All that's left is this." Propping herself on one elbow, Diane reached inside her jacket. She pulled out a single sheet of stiff coloured paper, made awkward by the photographs that had been glued onto either side. It was the loose page with the photograph of Pavel that Aldridge, hardly concentrating, had told her to keep as evidence. The way that he'd said it, Diane had been able to tell that precise details of procedure weren't uppermost in his mind. She'd had to fold it to put it away, and it had taken more creases since. As a last surviving remnant, it looked pretty convincing.
"Please," Alina said. She was staring at the page like a junkie in the presence of the world's last fix.
"Why do you need this?"
"It's my last dream of home," Alina said bleakly.
Diane wondered how she saw herself. Did she hold up her own hand and see scales, claws? Did she see the souls of her victims as she released them to stand in that dark country beyond death itself? Diane wondered how profound a belief had to be before others were drawn in and persuaded by it. An easy trap to fall into; Diane had already begun to think of Alina and the Rusalka as two separate entities, each intertwining with the other like a body and its disease.
But which was she talking to now?
"Give me the photographs," Alina said carefully, as if each word was a test, "and I'll let you leave."
"Can you really promise that?"
There was a struggle for a while.
And then Alina admitted, "No. I don't have that much control."
"Over what you do?"
"Over what I've turned into."
"Looks like we've got a stalemate, then," Diane said, and she wished that she could make herself sound more convinced; because it was a pretty unequal balance with only one crumpled sheet of paper on her side against the Rusalka's track record on the other. All that she could do would be to start tearing the photographs up, and it wouldn't take much to stop her from doing even this. Alina was holding back, but she was under patient assault from within. It couldn't last.
Even she seemed to know it, and after a tense silence she was the first one to speak.
"I'll do what I can," she said. "Go up the stairs, let yourself out of the door. Leave the photographs inside, and lock yourself out. I'll try to hold back. But do one thing for me, please."
"What?"
"Whatever happens, try to remember me as I was. Don't hate me for what I became."
And then, as Diane hesitated in her uncertainty as to whether or not this was a ruse, she added, "Go!" with such urgency that Diane struggled to stand and turned to face the stairway, the page clutched tightly in her hand.