by John Langan
What Howard told us next took the better part of an hour, during which the diner was as still as a church, sealed off from the world beyond by the wall of water pouring from the sky. His story was long, certainly the longest I’ve had from one man at one time. While he was telling it, I couldn’t believe how much he’d remembered, how many details of speech and act, of thought and intent, and a little voice inside my head kept whispering, “This is impossible. There’s no way anyone could have a memory this accurate, this precise. He’s inventing this. He has to be.” And although I’d had some strange experiences myself, the events Howard related made the weirdest of them seem plain as a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie.
Funny thing is, while he was telling his tale, I believed much more than I would have guessed likely. Only once his voice had stopped was I convinced I’d just been buried under the greatest load of horseshit anyone ever had shoveled. Yet even after Dan and I had paid for our meals and left the diner and were continuing our drive to the creek, it was as if I were still listening to Howard’s voice, as if I were inside his story, looking out at everything, as the story uncoiled around me.
If I say there was more truth to Howard’s tale than I first believed, I don’t suppose it’ll come as much surprise. What I find almost as remarkable is that I can recall pretty much everything Howard said, verbatim. Given what was to happen to Dan and me, maybe that isn’t such a surprise. But I can recall everything Howard didn’t say, as well:
Some months after all this, when the summer turned hot and dry, I sat down at the kitchen table, a pen in one hand, a pad of legal paper in front of me. Howard’s story had been gnawing at me for weeks, and I had decided to write down what I could remember of it. I expected the task would take me an afternoon, maybe a little longer. How long could it take you to write down an hour’s worth of talking, right? I’ve never been much of a writer, and I spent as much time lining things out as I did putting them down, but I wanted to copy down everything I could recall of what Howard had said, get all of it exactly right. By the time the first night had rolled around, my hand was still moving that pen across the paper. For the next four days, I wrote. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, and I understood that the story had passed to me, that somehow, Howard had tucked it inside me.
In the process, it had brought details with it Howard hadn’t included, enough that they would have stretched what he told us through the rest of the morning and right through the afternoon into the evening. All sorts of tangents about the figures whose stories he was relating, Lottie Schmidt and her father, Rainer, as well as stories about men and women he hadn’t mentioned, at all, like Otto Schalken and Miller Jeffries, crowded the pages. And yet, at the same time, every last detail I wrote down seemed familiar. I had the maddening sense that, even though Howard hadn’t related anything like the complete story to us, I had carried it with me out of the diner all the same, had known it—or maybe been known by it, folded into its embrace.
I offer that much longer version of the story here, when and where we were first introduced to its principle players. Doing so means stepping away from my own tale for a lot more time than I’d like. Without what I can’t help calling Howard’s story, however, everything that happened to Dan and me, all that badness that found us out and chased us down, makes far less sense than it does with it. Maybe that isn’t saying so much. You might imagine Dan and me sitting somewhere off to the side of the drama that’s about to debut, while Howard points out to us who’s who and what’s what. Or maybe you should imagine us walking the margins, watching the story unfold across the page.
This is what I received from Howard, whose last name I never did learn:
Part 2:
Der Fischer:
A Tale of Terror
I
I had most of it [Howard said] from Reverend Mapple. He was minister at the Lutheran Church in Woodstock, and what you’d call a local history buff. After I heard the story I’m going to tell you, I did some rooting around in different books, histories, that kind of thing, so I think the Reverend was onto something. He used to come in here early on a Sunday morning, before his services, for his Sunday breakfast. Big fellow, barrel-chested, looked more like a circus strongman than a man of the cloth. He had this long fuzzy beard like something you see in the pictures of those guys from the Civil War, you know?
Anyway, the Reverend got curious about the Creek. I’m not sure how exactly. Something he overheard one of the older members of his congregation say, I think, that stirred up his interest. He asked me about it one Sunday morning, but I was new here myself, just come down from Providence, where I’d made a go at writing a novel no one wanted to publish. I told the Reverend I couldn’t help him, but added that he was right, the locals were kind of funny when it came to that creek. I like to do a spot of fishing myself, in case you didn’t notice, and the one time I’d mentioned trying out the creek, which I’d stumbled across on a map, a couple of customers had done their level best persuading me you couldn’t pull anything worth eating out of it. They’d been emphatic, and the thing was, these guys weren’t that old—you expect weird advice from old guys, right?—in fact, they were younger than I was, barely out of high school. They raised my curiosity, yes, but they spooked me, too. I tried to learn what more I could, asked some of the regulars, the older fellows, what they knew, but no one was talking.
Reverend Mapple had an idea. Part of his duties as minister included making the rounds to visit the sick members of the congregation. Some were in the hospital; some were shut in at home. Like me, he realized that, if anyone would know what the story behind the creek was, it would be the old people. He hadn’t had any luck getting them talking when he saw them together at church or in town, try though he did. But he thought if he could talk to one of them alone, his chances would be better. Like I said, he was a big man, and his presence could be pretty imposing. Hell, he almost had me going to his church, and I was raised Catholic. I guess his plan makes him sound a bit cold-blooded, doesn’t it? I suppose it was, at that.
Even speaking to people one-on-one, though, in the privacies of their own homes, he had the devil’s own time learning anything. The most anyone wanted to say was a handful of words, and few said that much. He did learn that the stream had originally been called “Deutschman’s Creek,” as in German’s Creek; it’s like the Pennsylvania Dutch, you know? Same thing. One old lady said her daddy had made reference to it as “Der Platz das Fischer,” but she wasn’t sure what the words meant. When she asked her pa, he gave her about the only beating she ever had.
The Reverend looked the words up. As you might have guessed, they were German, too, and meant something like “the place of the fisherman.”
[At the word “Fischer,” I had the briefest sensation of déjà vu, as if I’d heard that word once before, as if I’d dreamed it, and hearing Howard pronounce it, it was as if my dreams and my waking life had momentarily overlapped. I shook my head.]
To make a long story short—well, to make this part of a long story short—the Reverend was asking questions for a good year before he found any answers. These came from an old woman. Her name was Lottie, Lottie Schmidt. He went to visit her down in Fishkill. Her family had put her in a nursing home down there; I think so she’d be close to them. Yeah—her son was a guard at Downstate Correctional. Reverend Mapple would go to visit her every other week, because she asked for him and because he was that kind of man. He’d asked her about the creek, of course, and like everyone else she hadn’t had anything to say.
Until this one Saturday. Lottie’d been sliding downhill at a pretty brisk clip ever since she’d been put in the home. That kind of thing happens to a lot of old folks, doesn’t it? Whether she had Alzheimer’s, was going senile, or had just decided to give up the ghost, I can’t say, but it wasn’t too long before the Reverend found it a challenge to do much more than pray with her when he visited. Sometimes, after they were done praying, he’d talk to her, although from the blank look on he
r face he suspected it was mostly a case of him talking at her. Still, as he said to me once, “There may be someone in there, Howard, way deep down, and it’s important to let them know they haven’t been forgotten.” So he’d ramble on about his life, tell her what he’d been up to since he’d been around last.
He got to talking about his researches into the creek, asking her did she remember him asking her about it and her not telling him anything? Well, he’d finally learned something: it wasn’t much, but it was a start. He’d found out about Deutschman’s Creek, he said, and Der Platz das Fischer.
The Reverend had turned away from Lottie while he was speaking. He was filling a paper cup from the sink in the corner of the room. When he turned back around, the cup held to his mouth, what he saw made him jump and spill his water all over himself. There was Lottie standing not two feet away, her eyes open and clear and fixed on him. Reverend Mapple was speechless. He hadn’t heard her get out of bed, cross the floor to him, anything. Before he could say anything, Lottie said, “That is a bad place, Reverend. It is a bad place, and you should not be asking about it.” Her voice—well, that only made everything that much stranger. Lottie’s parents had been German and Lottie herself had been born over there. The family had moved when she was a girl; although her English was fine, she had never completely lost her accent. You’d hear reminders of it every once in a while. When she prayed the Lord’s Prayer with the Reverend, “Father” was “Fadter,” that kind of thing. Now, Lottie spoke as if English were a language she was still trying to master, as if her mouth were still full of German. That wasn’t all. Lottie had what you might call a typical little-old-lady voice, kind of high-pitched and crackly, like your grandmother’s. It had vanished, replaced with a strong, clear voice, the voice of someone six decades younger.
Thrown as he was by all of this, the Reverend managed to ask Lottie why Deutschman’s Creek was such a bad place. His curiosity was that strong. At first, Lottie wouldn’t say anything, just shook her head and refused to look at him. Finally, he said, “Now Lottie, you can’t tell me the creek is bad and not say any more. That isn’t fair. In fact,” the Reverend said, “that kind of talk makes me think I should take a stroll out that way, see what all the fuss is about.” Without exactly intending to, he’d lapsed into talking to Lottie as if she were a girl again.
When he threatened to visit the Creek, Lottie near lost her mind. She grabbed Reverend Mapple’s hands and said he mustn’t, he couldn’t, it was too awful, it was terrible, and then a flood of German came pouring out of her, all of it, I’m sure, saying more of the same. She was truly agitated, the Reverend said, it was all he could do to keep her from collapsing into sobs. She kept asking him—begging him to promise he wouldn’t go to the Creek. For sheer pity’s sake he almost promised, too. But Lottie’s agitation—well, it seemed like proof there must be one hell of a story connected to Dutchman’s Creek. Suddenly, the Reverend was on the verge of finding out the answer to the question that had been obsessing him for the past twelve months, and you can appreciate how that feels. He told Lottie the only way he was going to know if he should avoid the Creek was if someone told him the truth about it, the whole story, and didn’t hold anything back. Then, if he thought the reason was sound, he’d give Dutchman’s Creek a wide berth.
Lottie still held out. Her father, she claimed, had sworn her to secrecy. At that, the Reverend lost his temper a little bit, and said, “Am I not a minister of the Lord? Are not all things disclosed to Almighty God? Is there anything that can be hidden from Him? And if the Lord God knows all, then should His minister not be trusted with a secret?” When he told me about this later, Reverend Mapple looked kind of sheepish. I guess ministers have their own temptations.
Wrong or not, his outburst convinced Lottie. She would tell him, she said, but he must promise not to judge the men in her story too harshly. Her father had been one of them, and whatever she thought of what he’d been part of, she loved him and would not have him thought poorly of because of any tale she might tell. Yes, yes, the Reverend promised, of course.
II
The story Lottie told began before her family had departed the old country. She didn’t know much of what had occurred while she was still a child in Germany—before she or either of her parents were born. Reverend Mapple pieced most of that together after he had Lottie’s story, from visiting local libraries and museums, digging through archives, reading old newspapers and letters. Where most of it took place is under three hundred feet of water now, out beneath the Reservoir. I’m sure you fellows know that the Reservoir dates back to the First World War. Before that, it was the Esopus river valley, with eleven and a half towns in it. From west to east, you had Boiceville, West Shokan, Shokan, Broadhead’s Bridge, Olive City, Olive Bridge, Brown’s Station, Olive, Olive Branch, Glenford, and West Hurley. West-northwest of West Hurley was a half-dozen houses some people called Hurley Station, others the Station. A lot of folks didn’t call it anything, either because they didn’t know it was there or because they assumed it was part of West Hurley. It wasn’t, though. Near as the Reverend could figure, the Station had been there first, built a good few decades prior to the settlers who streamed into the area in the early seventeen-hundreds. When the town had been put up, the Catskills were still Indian country, and that’s no exaggeration. Twice the tribes swept down from the mountains and burned Wiltwyck. The families who founded the Station were Dutch. I don’t know what led them to that spot, except that the Dutch as a whole kept moving further north up the Hudson to get away from newer settlers. Why those families called their settlement the Station is something of a mystery as well, since the railroad was close enough to two centuries in the future when they started clearing the land for their stone houses. The name could have had to do with the spring they built the town around. Reverend Mapple guessed that traders and trappers might have used the place as a way station on their journeys up from Wiltwyck.
Anyway, as far as the record shows, the Indians left the Station alone. And for a long time, until the eighteen-forties, not much of interest happened there. The other towns in the Esopus valley grew up around it. The hemlock tanneries were established and became a thriving concern—that was the big business here, the tanneries. Then, one summer’s day, this man comes riding out of the west, along the turnpike. He isn’t much to look at. Even for the time, he’s a little fellow, with black, stringy hair—kind of greasy—and a black, stringy beard that hangs down from his chin like a cheap disguise. His features are delicate, boyish, even, what you can see of them under the wide brim of his hat. He’s dressed in a black suit that’s been whitened by the dust of too many days on the road. This man comes riding on a one-horse cart, and there isn’t much remarkable about either horse—a brown nag that’s wearing the same thick coat of dust as the man’s clothes—or the cart. Oh, except for the cart’s wheels: apparently, their rims are twice as thick as they need to be, and covered in pictures. Actually, this is a little unclear. Some folks who see the man making his slow way along the turnpike say that the wheels are wrapped around with symbols like hieroglyphs, you know? While others declare that the wheels are decorated with pictures that look like writing but aren’t. A language that looks like pictures, or pictures that look like language: whichever it is, everyone who studies the cart for any length of time agrees that whatever is on those broad wheels seems to move in a way that isn’t quite in sync with their turning. When greeted, the stranger doesn’t say much, doesn’t volunteer his name, certainly. If you call out hello, he’ll touch the brim of his hat to you. If you ask him where he’s coming from, he’ll answer, “The western mountains,” and that’s that, won’t tell if he means Oneonta or Syracuse or what. His English isn’t too clear, his speech refracted by a heavy accent that folks think sounds German, though there’s debate about the matter. He rides up the turnpike for several days, meandering along at what is, by any standards, a snail’s pace. A few kids from the various towns along the way who’re ducking their
chores try to spy on his cart from up in trees along the side of the road, but they’re out of luck. Everything is in boxes and bags and under tarps, none of it marked except for one sizable crate covered with the same strange markings as the cart’s wheels. One daring lad tries for the stranger’s hat with an apple, but the branch he’s standing on snaps just as he throws, and the missile flies wide. He breaks his arm for his trouble, that boy. The stranger, who’s moving slowly enough to hear the boy’s cries for a good long while, ignores them.
Finally, the fellow takes the turn off for Hurley Station. By now, most of the residents of the towns up and down the Esopus have heard about this man in his black suit. A good portion of them could describe him better than I can, regardless of whether they’ve seen him in the flesh. Something about the man sets people’s interest boiling. When the stranger halts his horse at Cornelius Dort’s front door, speculation, already at a brisk canter, runs riot. The Dorts are one of the six families who founded the Station. When the foundations were dug and the first stones laid, they were the wealthiest, and that’s a condition time has only improved. The Dort estate, I guess you’d call it, is considerable, as are their holdings in and around the area. Cornelius is in charge of the lot; there was a younger brother, Henrick, but he left as a young man and didn’t return—lost on a whaling ship, was the report. There’s a portrait of Cornelius, a painting, hanging in City Hall in Wiltwyck today. Seems in his younger days he was quite friendly with one of the mayors, so much so that he gifted the man with an addition to his house. What Cornelius received in exchange for this I don’t know; aside from his picture in City Hall, I mean. Maybe that was all, though I doubt it. The portrait’s not that good. It makes Cornelius look just a little more mad than you think he would have wanted. His eyes are open too wide, and his eyebrows climb halfway up his forehead, which is saying something. I think the artist, whose name escapes me at the moment, meant Cornelius’s mouth to look stern, but it wobbles at one end, so it’s more like he’s on the verge of laughing or crying. Honestly, the more you look at the thing, the more you wonder how Cornelius didn’t have the man who painted it horsewhipped. Graves, that was the artist’s name. Did I mention the hair? This great wave of red hair that looks as if it’s rearing up to strike. I guess it’s lucky for Mr. Graves Cornelius Dort wasn’t much of an art critic.
