by John Langan
Angelo notices it, too. “What?” he says. “What’s wrong?”
“It is nothing,” Rainer says, which the three of them know is a lie but which neither Jacob nor Angelo disputes.
As they walk the remaining distance to the Dort house, the water lapping the nearest trees flows over them—Jacob thinks that it’s rising, except that that’s the wrong word, the wrong direction. It’s more as if the five of them are passing between walls of water that are sliding steadily closer to them. By the time the Dort house is in view, the treeline is barely visible beneath ten feet of water that is oddly dark. The men glance to either side of themselves nervously. Even Rainer spares the nearing water a look. Not far enough away for comfort, several of the white things Jacob saw keep pace with them. There isn’t one of the men who doesn’t want to say something, but it’s Italo who finally says, “Rainer. What the devil is this?”
“The dark ocean,” Rainer says. “Here, it is leaking through.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Italo says.
“It means our friend is further along than I had hoped,” Rainer says.
Jacob is desperate to ask about the white things shadowing them. It’s the face of the one he confronted that bothers him the most—not its inhumanity, the eyes, the scales, but the maddening suggestion of the human, its proximity to any, to all, of them. If he could shape his unease into a question, he would force it out of his trembling lips.
In front of them, the Dort house sits lightless. It’s the kind of structure you encounter throughout this part of the state, its lower storey constructed of round stones of a variety of sizes cemented together, its upper storey and attic wood. The house isn’t especially tall, but it is wide, at least twice as much as any of the Station’s other houses. Both ends of the house are difficult to make out clearly, because the walls of water that flank the men extend across the distance to it, where they intersect it seamlessly, leaving only the central portion dry. Jacob is reminded of a tunnel, and the similarity does nothing for the nervousness that’s made every square inch of his skin feel supersensitive, responsive to stimulus too subtle for him to notice otherwise. As ever, Rainer leads the way, but Jacob is gratified—and guesses the others must be, too—to catch the slight hesitation before he steps forward.
“Like Moses at the Red Sea,” Angelo says. The allusion hadn’t occurred to Jacob, but he supposes it’s a fair one. There are no trees visible at all in the recesses of the water, only the white creatures, maintaining their distance. Odd as it might sound, the absence of trees makes the walls of water loom with added menace. As long as there were trees at or close to the water’s surface, Jacob could convince himself that their trunks and branches were helping to restrain the dark water. Without them, the great blocks of water appear that much more tremulous. There’s nothing Jacob would love better right now than to cross the remaining yards to the house’s wide front door as fast as his legs would carry him, but he’s certain with a kind of dream-logic that, the second he started to run, the water would crash down on him. So he controls himself and does his best not to look at the white things, which are darting back and forth amongst themselves with what appears to be ever-growing excitement. And when something much larger than the group of them combined darkens the distance behind them, swimming with the lazy back-and-forth of a turtle riding the current, Jacob tells himself that he didn’t see anything. The door to the house can’t be ten feet away from him. It’s plain, made of heavy planks of dark wood bound together with strips of metal dull with neglect. In the center of the door, a large ring hangs from the mouth of a creature Jacob can’t identify. It might be a snake, except its mouth is closed in a very human grin around the top of the ring. Rainer’s pace has picked up, these last few feet. He has both hands on his axe, all the way at the end of it. Without breaking stride, he heaves the axe up over his shoulder and brings it crashing down into the middle of that smiling snake face. As axe meets knocker, Rainer shouts a word Jacob doesn’t understand.
There’s a flash of light—only, Jacob will tell Lottie, it was black light, momentary dark instead of momentary bright. The effect on their vision is the same. They can’t see anything; they keep blinking and rubbing their eyes until the black spots in front of them have faded enough for them to make out the door, split apart and forced in as if by a small explosion. Jacob wouldn’t be surprised to smell gunpowder. Instead, the air reeks with scorched metal. Whatever the knocker was supposed to represent, it’s so many smoking pieces.
Emboldened by this show of force, Italo goes to climb through the door’s wreckage, the others following close behind. Rainer holds up his left hand, and they stop. The weird radiance that Clara first saw on her husband’s face, as if someone were focusing a white light on it, and which each of his companions has remarked, has grown stronger. It doesn’t shed any light of its own. All it does is overwhelm Rainer’s features, make them harder to distinguish. Without speaking, Rainer picks his way between the door’s planks. His right hand holds the axe up, the symbol he engraved on its haft facing out. His left hand forms a gesture, the thumb touching the middle finger, the other fingers curled into the palm, making a rough oval that he positions in line with his heart. It’s the way you or I might hold a flashlight. Once he’s crossed the threshold he says, “Come. Keep close.”
XX
Jacob is prepared for the interior of the house to be dark. He isn’t prepared for it to be full of trees, evergreens, from the feel of their branches. It’s as if he and the others have walked into a thicket. The sharp odor of pine threads the air. Needles tickle his cheeks and neck. Branches rustle as he follows the others through them. Who plants a forest inside his front door? he thinks, and the question strikes him as so ridiculous, he laughs out loud, a high-pitched whinny that rings on the tree trunks. It isn’t happy laughter. It’s the sound of someone who’s watched a woman who should’ve been dead days ago collapse into a pool of foul water, of someone who’s stared at a white creature whose gold eyes hold too much of knowledge, of someone who’s passed slowly between rippling walls of water. Rainer’s, “Steady,” quiets Jacob’s laughter, but it’s still there at the base of his throat, ready to geyser out.
A dim light whose source Jacob cannot locate renders the trees visible. The evergreens extend far back into the house. Although he couldn’t see how deep the house was, Jacob is fairly certain he and the others must be a good part of the way into it. Overhead, the trees are so high and so dense he can’t see the roof. Nor is the floor visible, though it feels more like dirt, rather than wood or stone, underfoot. Jacob supposes it makes sense. If you wanted to fill your house with a forest, you would need soil to plant it in. My God, he thinks, I’m reasoning like a crazy person.
The dirt floor angles down, gradually, at first, then more sharply. The trees appear to be thinning, drawing apart enough for Jacob to see Andrea in front of him, Angelo in front of him. To his left, Jacob hears a dull roar, like a storm blowing through a wood. The trees around him are still. If anything, the ground seems to be responding to the noise, shuddering slightly. As the trees yield to a small clearing, Jacob identifies the source of the roar. It’s a small stream foaming through a narrow ravine running roughly parallel to the course the five of them have been descending. White, the water gallops down the ravine as if it’s in flood. Rainer waits on the far side of the clearing, observing his companions.
Almost immediately, Jacob’s first thought—This man has a stream inside his house, too?—is replaced by another—We are not in the house, anymore—and a third—We never were. A look the way they came shows only evergreens ascending the slope. Above, the sky glows with the same dim light that’s disclosed their way. Beyond where Rainer stands observing them, the ground drops more dramatically—still passable, Jacob estimates, but with need of the trees that continue down it to help keep their descent manageable. Past that, his vision will not reach.
He is nervous, but not as much as he was walking the last few yards b
etween those walls of water. To be frank, he would rather Rainer had not brought him wherever he is, but he assumes that, if Rainer has led them here, then Rainer will be able to lead them out of here. (He understands that this is not necessarily the case, but does not dwell on it.) Neither Italo nor Angelo appears particularly delighted, either, but they appear to be managing their emotions. Andrea is not doing as well. He passes his axe from his right hand to his left hand and back again. Whatever hand is not occupied with the tool steals to his face, where it rubs his jaw as if there’s a weighty problem he’s deliberating. Jacob supposes there is. The cast of the man’s features suggests his deliberations have stuck, if they ever got moving in the first place.
Rainer’s noticed Andrea, too, and is walking towards him. His lips are moving, but he’s speaking too softly for Jacob to pick out his words over the stream’s roaring. No doubt, he’s offering Andrea some form of reassurance. Andrea’s features relax. His hand leaves his jaw. Whatever Rainer’s saying to him, Jacob hopes he’ll repeat it for the rest of them. Rainer’s standing next to Andrea. He puts his left hand on the younger man’s shoulder, and that’s when Andrea bolts. Knocking Rainer over, he sprints straight downhill.
For a moment, Jacob, Italo, and Angelo stare at one another, open-mouthed. Then they’re at Rainer’s side, helping him to his feet. “What did you say to him?” Italo says.
“Never mind that,” Rainer says. “We must—” He waves after Andrea.
Angelo plunges after him, and before he can think better of it, so does Jacob. Past the clearing, the ground slants so sharply he finds himself in more of a controlled fall than a downhill run. He tries to dig his heels in, slow himself, but that almost tumbles him face-forward, so he’s forced to let gravity pull him along, his arms out for balance, his legs kicking up behind him, almost snagging on an exposed root and tripping him. To his left, the stream is practically a waterfall. To his right and in front of him, the trees have spread even further. He’s too busy keeping himself upright to devote much attention to it, but he’s reasonably sure the trees aren’t evergreens, anymore. No expert, Jacob doesn’t recognize the type at all. These trees are tall, slender, their branches and leaves clustered at their crowns. It’s another detail to put to the side, like the ground, which has lost its carpet of pine needles and is a dark, brownish-red. Already, the muscles up and down Jacob’s legs are protesting, and there’s at least half the slope left to go. Ahead and to the right, Angelo twists, trying to avoid the trunk directly in his path. He almost succeeds, but at the last second, his left shoulder connects with it, spinning him around and off his feet, into a roll. Jacob would stop to help him, if he could figure a way to do so that wouldn’t send him flying ass-over-teakettle. Besides, he’s sighted Andrea, almost at the foot of this steep hill. So he pushes past Angelo, who’s managed to throw himself onto his back and is sliding down feet-first, the leading edge of a plume of red dust. Beyond Andrea, Jacob can see something—he isn’t certain what, because he’d have to hold his head up to look for longer than he’s willing to risk running at this speed. Trees whip past him. To his left, the stream leaps and foams. To his right, in the middle distance, the reddish ground climbs to a ridge stationed with trees. His legs are on the verge of moving too fast for him. Andrea has reached the bottom of the slope, where, Jacob is relieved to see, he has come to a halt. Through the tops of the trees in front of and below him, Jacob glimpses something vast, something in motion. Andrea sees it, too; the sight of it seems to have fixed him to the spot. Jacob’s lungs are burning in his chest, his pulse drumming in his ears. His feet kick up sprays of dirt as they carry him down the hill. The axe threatens to fly from his grasp. Andrea has not moved from his place. Jacob is almost upon him.
And then the ground levels, and he’s running towards Andrea. He tries to bring himself to a stop, but it’s as if there’s a weight hung from his neck, pulling him on. On legs at their very limit, legs like taffy, he stumbles past Andrea, one, two, three steps, when the weight around his neck pulls him to his knees. Hand still on his axe, Jacob leans forward. Andrea—he has to see to Andrea. If only his heart wouldn’t beat so fast. It seems to be taking all his strength into itself. Muscles trembling, he tries to stand, cannot. There is a noise in front of him, a sound his brain is telling him he should know. He raises his head and what he beholds chases all thought of his discomfort—all thought—from his mind.
XXI
Maybe fifty yards away, an ocean crashes its waves against a rocky shore. Jacob has seen the ocean, before—he had to cross one to travel to America—but that in no way prepared him for this one. This is an ocean whose water is dark, as if Jacob is seeing it at night, as if it’s made of night. It’s an ocean in storm. Even though the sky above is clear, the dark water lifts itself in frothing waves large as houses. Some of these burst on the jagged boulders that constitute the beach, shooting spray high into the air. Others smash into one another, larger waves sweeping over smaller ones, consuming them, rows of smaller waves angling into larger ones, collapsing them. It’s as if this is a spot where a host of opposing currents converge. A few hundred yards from the stony beach—it’s hard to estimate distances with any accuracy in this tumult, but much too close for comfort, let alone sanity—something enormous raises itself amidst the waves. For a moment, Jacob’s mind insists that what arcs out of the water is an island, because there is no living creature that big in all of creation. Then it moves, first rising even higher, into a more severe arch, then subsiding, lifting itself from the waves at both ends while relaxing its middle into a gradual curve, the whole of its dull surface traversed by the ripples of what Jacob understands are great muscles flexing and releasing, and there’s no doubt this is alive. Before now, if you had asked Jacob to name the largest thing he’s ever seen, he might have answered with St. Stephen’s cathedral, in Vienna. But the beast against whose scaly side the black water batters itself dwarfs that structure. There is so much of it that its very presence presses on Jacob, as if mere proximity to it might be sufficient to snuff him out, like a candle in a hurricane.
Because of the creature, Jacob fails to notice any of what’s closer to him until Angelo comes huffing behind him. His “Mother of God!” jolts Jacob out of the fog that’s enveloped him. It requires a vigorous shaking to bring Andrea out of his reverie, but by the time Italo and Rainer have joined the three of them, Jacob has risen to his feet and is surveying the ground between the beach and himself. He sees the blood first. The soil bordering the beach is soaked in it. It collects in bright red puddles, winds its red way to the rocky shore. Its source is a trio of carcasses, two to the right, and one to the left. They’re cattle—bulls, Jacob thinks—but of such a breed as might inhabit a child’s fairy tale. Each animal is large as a small elephant, its hide a rich, sunset gold. Were it not for the beast filling the ocean, Jacob would be awed by the cattle’s size; as it is, he is impressed by them. The bull to the left, and one of those to the right, have been decapitated, the heavy heads set between them, beside what seems to be an anchor; albeit, an anchor that might have held fast the ship that brought him across the Atlantic. Instead of splitting into a pair of arms, the thick shank divides into three upward-curving lengths of metal, all of them tipped with a barb longer than Jacob is tall. It’s a hook, he understands, the bulls’ heads the bait to be impaled on the points. There’s no line tied to the eye, though there are plenty to choose from. The ground this side of the slaughtered cattle is full of rope, coils of it, stacks of it, heaps of it. There is coarse rope wide as a strong man’s arm. There is smooth rope slender as a shoelace. There’s rope smeared with what might be pitch. There’s rope white as milk.
Some of the rope has already been put to use. Between where it’s piled and Jacob and his fellows stand are what appear to be a half-dozen round, wooden tables, each of such a dimension as to suggest it’s for the herders who raise the giant cattle. They’re stumps, Jacob realizes, the stumps of trees that must have towered overhead like skyscraper
s. None of them is higher than his chest, now. At varying distances from the ground, holes have been bored through the stumps. Rope has been threaded through the holes and out around the remnants of the trees, tied at irregular intervals into elaborate knots, secured to the wood at other spots with large metal staples. From the wrap around each abbreviated trunk, a length of rope runs out to the left of the dead bulls, into the ocean. Most of the ropes stretch taut into and under the waves. Jacob can see them thrumming, like guitar strings being tightened to the point of snapping. These lines are joined by a dozen or so from the left, on the far side of the stream that raced Jacob down the hill and surges to the ocean. These ropes, too, are held fast by a group of enormous tree stumps. Beyond them, the headless remains of more of the great cattle lie under a buzzing cloud of greenish flies.
“What?” a voice calls. “What is it you want?” The words are uttered in German, but it is a version of the tongue that is crusted with age. The man who asked the question is standing behind the one bull whose head has not been removed. The animal’s bulk must have concealed him. He is wearing a rugged apron that appears to have been stitched together from a number of mismatched pieces of material, and that is spattered and caked with gore, as is the sizable knife in his right hand. Beneath the patchwork apron, he is dressed in a white shirt and black pants whose best days are long behind them. His hair is lank, greasy, his chin fringed by a stringy beard, the face between young, almost boyish. He must be Rainer’s Fisherman, but if you told Jacob he was a junior butcher, he’d believe you.
