JESSICA STANDS STILL for a moment and tries to make sense of what she’s seeing. There’s a person in the water. A woman. Jessica breaks out into a run; she bounds across the dock and jumps to the ice.
“Yusuf!” she roars at the top of her lungs, then drops to her knees next to the floundering woman. It takes Jessica a few seconds to run through her options in this incomprehensible situation and pull herself together. She sees black hair plastered to a bluish face distorted in horror. The woman alternates between coughing up icy water that has made its way into her lungs and screaming as loudly as she can.
The sound of running footsteps carries from the shore. Jessica grabs the woman’s arm and exerts every ounce of her strength in an attempt to pull her out of the water. The woman’s struggling makes it a challenge. The water is ice-cold; Jessica’s grip slips.
And just when the task starts to seem overpowering, the woman thrusts out of the water as if on her own and starts twitching on the ice like a landed fish.
“What the fuck!” Yusuf shouts, running up.
Jessica takes off her parka and wraps it around the shivering woman. “Something pushed her out! I felt it. . . . There was someone under the ice!” She grabs her gun and rises to her feet.
Yusuf lifts the shrieking, dripping creature into his arms. “We have to get her warm!”
Jessica’s frantic gaze moves between the hole in the ice and the woman’s face, the black curls and the terrified eyes peering out behind them. “A diver . . . There’s someone under the ice, goddamn it!” she shouts, pointing at the open water.
Yusuf pauses and stares at Jessica in alarm, then starts jogging toward the shore, the woman in his arms.
“A diver brought her here—”
“Come away from there,” Yusuf says, at first calmly, but then he raises his voice when the woman starts screaming again. “Get the fuck away from there, Jessica! We’ll take a look in a second. We have to get her inside.” He turns toward the Koponens’ house.
Jessica circles the hole and aims her gun at the water, traces the imagined route under the ice with the barrel, and then raises it toward the place where just a moment earlier she saw the horned figure.
It has vanished.