The Fisherman

by John Langan

  “It appears we have,” Rainer says.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Italo says.

  “That apparently, we have been successful.”

  “Why ‘apparently’?” Italo says.

  “Because it is too soon to know for sure,” Rainer says.

  “How long will that take?” Italo says.

  “When each of us dies in his own bed,” Rainer says, “from whatever has been ordained to end his days on this earth, then he may say that his work tonight was a success. If, in however much time has passed, his family has gone unharmed by anything other than the typical calamities, then he may breathe his last breath with ease. Should he never again hear the under-speech—the speech of the Fisherman’s creatures—then he may close his eyes for the last time in peace.”

  “And what if it’s our children who must answer for what we’ve done?” Italo says. “Or our grandchildren?”

  “We will be dead,” Rainer says, “and beyond caring.” Before Italo can add an objection to the frown this answer provokes, Rainer starts up the front walk, on his way back to the camp. First Andrea, then Jacob, and finally Italo follow him.

  XXVII

  None of them returns to the Dort house; although Jacob, Rainer, and Italo, the three who remain at the camp, keep their ears open for any mention of it. This will come several more months—almost a year later, when the crews clearing the valley reach the Station. As far as what you might call the general public knows, the Dort house is still the possession of the figure popularly referred to as Cornelius’s Guest, or the Guest. No one can recall the last time the man was seen outside the house, or inside it, for the matter. No light has troubled any of the mansion’s windows for a good while, since about the last time anyone caught a glimpse of the Guest. This has not stopped a steady stream of official-looking men from bustling up to the house’s front door, sounding the knocker, waiting for a response, trying it again, waiting again, and tramping away. Sometimes, they’ve left official-looking envelopes on the doorstep. The more dedicated fellows have persisted in knocking on the door for approaching a half-hour, and one particularly enterprising young man circled the house, fighting his way through the vegetation that overgrew its yard, in search of some sign of life. For his troubles, he received a bad case of poison ivy and a pants leg full of thorns.

  Each of these callers has been on a version of the same mission: to inform the Guest that his time in the house is at an end, that he has until this-and-such a date to depart the property and take with him whatever he doesn’t want destroyed. The visitors are empowered to write the Guest a not-inconsiderable check for the value of the land and buildings that are being taken from him. Were he resident at the majority of other dwellings in the valley, the Sheriff would have been called upon to evict him long ago. But something of old Cornelius Dort’s reputation adheres to his former estate, and when at last the Sheriff is summoned to clear the house of its inhabitant, it’s the last of a long line of attempts at removing him. A local boy, the Sheriff has grown up hearing the rumors attached to the Guest, which may explain why he doesn’t put in his appearance at the Dort house until the crews are a good portion of the way through their work on the Station proper. Nonetheless, he stands patiently awaiting an answer to his knock, and when it is clear that none is coming, orders the deputies he brought with him to break it open. This, they do, though not without some effort.

  Inside, the house is a wreck. The sight that greets the Sheriff and his men is not the typical disorder of a dwelling-place abandoned, left for the traveler, the animal in search of a more secure dwelling. Every last piece of furniture in this house has been broken, shattered, as if flung against the walls. The Sheriff doesn’t need to walk very far over the threshold to ascertain the extent of the damage, because the interior walls have been knocked down, the ceiling collapsed, leaving the Dort house a great shell. Black mold furs the ruined furnishings, scales the stone walls. What appears to be the largest pile of wreckage is heaped against the wall to the right of the doorway. Protruding from near the bottom of the pile is a limb—the Sheriff registers it as a hand and forearm. He steps towards it before one of the deputies catches him and recommends a second look at what’s hanging in the air, there. Though he shakes off the deputy’s hold, the Sheriff takes the man’s advice. When he focuses on the hand dangling towards the floor, he sees the extra joint in the fingers, the webbing between them, their flattened tips, nails that curve into points.

  Were the Sheriff a different kind of man, he might continue across the floor and clear away the debris until the rest of whatever this is lies exposed. But this is no champion of scientific inquiry, or even a reckless adventurer. This is a cautious man whose career has been a study in avoiding bold action. Ordering the deputies out of the house, he retreats after them, closing the broken door as best he can. The Sheriff is within his rights to declare the Dort house a public hazard, which he does, though the county attorney might question his subsequent order that the structure should be doused in whatever flammable liquids were close to hand, set alight, and, when the house was encased in flame, splashed with more gasoline, oil, anything to prolong the blaze. So hot does the fire burn that, while the stone walls remain standing, it is a full day before they’re safe to touch with a bare hand. The entirety of the house’s contents is reduced to ash, which the Sheriff makes certain is shoveled out and carted away—to where, exactly, isn’t clear: maybe a junkyard in Wiltwyck, maybe the waters of the Hudson. After the exterior walls of the house are leveled, a similarly mysterious fate befalls the stones that composed them.

  XXVIII

  The Dort house seen to, the Sheriff is satisfied. He’s already declared the estate abandoned, clearing the way for the crews to move in and begin working on the remainder of the property. Even with the dozens of men who report for duty at the end of the driveway, the task of removing all trace of the Dort estate from the earth is a daunting one. Not only are there a number of outbuildings, including a substantial barn, to be taken down, but the acres of Cornelius’s old home grown thick with trees, from apple orchards whose long rows haven’t been tended in too many years, to remnants of the forest the first European settlers cut their way through. There are rocks large and larger that have to be pried from the soil and carted away. Every last green thing, from bush to flower to weed to grass, must be uprooted, the socket it leaves behind filled in and smoothed over. It’s during this phase of the work, when the Sheriff has left and word of what he and his men found in the Dort house has sprinted to the work camp and run up and down its streets, that one of the work crews unearths the other oddity that will be associated with the place.

  They’re in one of the orchards. After cutting down the trees, the men fire the stumps, chain them to teams of mules, and haul them out of the ground. By this point, the crew has this process down to a science, and it runs smoothly until they arrive at the second-to-last stump, which, despite its firing, resists the efforts of the first and second team of mules to be chained to it. This stump demands three sets of mules straining mightily before it will move, shifting slightly and then tearing free of the earth all at once. When it does, it brings a good deal of its root system with it, far more than is usual. Later, at one of the local taverns, a couple members of the crew will compare the tangle of pale tendrils that rips out of the soil to the tentacles of a squid or octopus. Thicker than any of the branches from which the tree hung its fruit, the larger roots knot around a translucent stone the size of a man’s head. Pale blue shot through with white, the stone appears to be some variety of gem; though none of the crew can identify it. Snake your fingers in amongst the pallid wood, and the gem is warm to the touch. What the crew can see of its surface is faceted, quartz-like. One of the pair at the bar claims to have stared into one of those facets and seen a distant, fiery eye looking back at him, but the man is well in his cups by the time he delivers this proclamation, and no one gives his words much weight. Though reluctant to leave their find o
ut in the open, the crew doesn’t have much choice. They’ve discovered it at the end of a work day, and excited as they are by its appearance, they’re tired and can see that it will require a fair bit of careful sawing to free the gem from the roots. Not to mention, the crew boss, never one to miss a chance to curry favor with his bosses, has insisted on notifying those above him of the discovery, and ordered the crew to leave tree and gem where they are. Were any or all of the men more certain of the stone’s classification, those instructions might be cheerfully ignored. However, since the gem may have no more value than the dirt it was drawn from, they go along with their boss’s command. For his part, the boss assures the crew that, should the gem be worth anything, there’s no doubt the company will reward them, a statement so blatantly absurd, not one of the men bothers arguing with it.

  Generous or greedy, the company’s actions will remain a subject of speculation and debate, since when their representative arrives at the orchard the next morning, the gem is gone. The tree lies where it was left, the clutch of roots that cradled the gem undisturbed. Of course suspicion falls on the members of the crew, whose protestations of innocence and alibis do nothing to stop the company summoning the police to search their various dwellings. (It doesn’t help the members of the crew that they, like most of the other work crews, are black, while their superiors are white.) The gem unfound, the company turns is scrutiny on the crew boss, whose house likewise receives a visit from the police. Already, though, the higher-ups in the company are losing interest in what a few of them are starting to suspect was a case of misidentification. When one of the scientists on the company’s payroll speculates that what the crew unearthed was a kind of mineral deposit that, as he puts it, “spontaneously sublimated,” the rest of the higher-ups treat his suggestion as fact and let the matter drop.

  Rumors about the vanished stone will spread and persist much farther and longer than those about the interior of the Dort house. The majority of them treat the gem’s disappearance as theft, the responsibility for which is laid at the feet of those in power: the company, usually, whose men are imagined to have snuck out to the orchard in the middle of the night and made off with the stone. Some stories name the police as culprits; others blame more fanciful figures: agents of Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, even the Kaiser.

  Jacob Schmidt, who has commenced his lengthy courtship of Lottie Schmidt, listens attentively to the descriptions of the interior of the Dort house, of the blue-white stone. If he closes his eyes, he pictures the foaming edge of a tide of black water rushing through the house, lifting chairs, tables, cabinets, and smashing them against the house’s walls. Why the water doesn’t burst through those walls, flooding the valley ahead of schedule, bothers Jacob enough for him to ask Rainer about it, but his future father-in-law answers only that the water went as far as it could go. Nor is Rainer much help when Jacob queries him about the enormous gem. “The Eye?” Rainer says. He waves his hand. “Someone else will worry about that.”

  XXIX

  Jacob seeks out Italo’s opinion on both matters, but in each case, the older man offers a shrug and a “How the devil should I know?” Jacob attributes Italo’s shortness to the burdens of his expanded family. Since arriving at Italo and Regina’s house, Helen and George’s children haven’t left. There’s nowhere for them to go, no other relatives anyone knows of to claim them, and Regina grows livid should anyone mention the word “orphanage.” Practically speaking, Italo and Regina have adopted these children, and their house, already tight with their own family, is straining at the seams. Not to mention, feeding those extra mouths has stretched Italo’s pay thin. Once every three or four weeks, Clara will cook and send over a meal to them—nothing too extravagant, a pot roast, say, which one of her younger girls will deliver after school—and Lottie saves what extras she can from the bakery—to which she’s long returned—for them, but Italo and Regina’s act of charity has had its price.

  Secretly, too, Jacob has wondered how much of Italo’s gruffness with him has its roots in the memory of Angelo’s sightless eyes, the mortal wound Jacob’s axe had opened in his neck. There are moments Jacob can barely believe he struck Angelo down; the act feels as distant as Austria, a scene from a dream he had long ago. Other times, though, the shock of the axe chopping meat and bone echoes up his hands and arms as if it’s just happened. Perhaps, he thinks, it’s the same for Italo.

  Truth to tell, most of the time, Jacob’s presence appears barely to register on Italo. As the adage has it, the man has bigger fish to fry; despite what they went through the year before, Jacob can’t muster the courage to ask him about whatever’s in the skillet. As it turns out, he won’t need to. A couple of months after the Dort house and its surroundings have been reduced to a foundation and bare ground, there’s a morning Regina doesn’t rise from bed. Italo sends his oldest boy, Giovanni, for the doctor, but by the time the man arrives, she’s well on her way to her last breaths. Cancer, apparently of the uterus, which likely has spread to other places in her body, the doctor opines. Italo and the children sit with her as she completes the remainder of her journey out of this life. At the very end, Regina’s eyes flutter, her lips move as if she’s about to say something, utter a final instruction or bit of wisdom, but all she manages is, “The woman:” the rest is pulled down into death with her.

  Everyone who knows them expects that, with Regina gone, Italo will collapse, crushed by the weight of his sorrow and the responsibility of so large a family. After work, Clara stops at their house to lend what assistance she can with the cooking and cleaning, as do Lottie and her sisters, but mother and daughters alike judge it only a matter of time before Helen and George’s children finish their long-delayed trip to the orphanage, and take Italo and Regina’s brood with them. While Italo hasn’t retreated into the glassy depths of a bottle of alcohol, or mummified himself in layers of grief, the façade he shows to his family, to the rest of the camp, is riven with cracks. To Clara and her girls’ surprise, however, Maria, the oldest of the adopted children, steps forward and seizes the reins of the situation. The general expectation is that she’ll be no match for it, that it’ll whipsaw her back and forth and fling her away broken. But the girl digs in her heels, braces her legs, and winds the reins around her arms and shoulders. It’s neither easy nor smooth, but over a course of months, she settles what’s become her family into a new kind of normal. Nobody leaves school; nobody loses their job—except for Maria, herself, who doesn’t return to school and quits the part-time position she’s had at the bakery. There’s some suspicion she’s angling to marry Italo, about which opinion is more divided than you might expect, but gradually, it becomes clear that Maria’s assumed the role of maiden aunt, rather than wife-in-waiting. She’ll maintain the position for the remainder of the family’s stay at the camp.

  XXX

  Three years pass. Jacob’s slow courtship of Lottie progresses to a long engagement, which leads to marriage right around the time the Reservoir’s west basin starts being filled. The previous summer’s been hot and dry, leaving the Esopus shrunken within its banks, and the water collects slowly in the great bowl—so much so there’s fear that the Reservoir’s been built too big, that it’ll never be full. Those fears are put to rest the following fall, when a succession of storms pours rain into it and lifts the water level within sight of where it’s supposed to be. Next spring—on June 19, 1914, to be exact—all the whistles in the camp will blow for a solid hour, announcing the completion of the majority of work on the Reservoir. Although it’ll be another two years after that until the project is officially finished, the roar of the whistles echoing up the Esopus valley, off the surrounding mountains, overlapping itself to form layers of a sound, a geology of sound, serves notice to those working at the camp that the end is drawing nigh. Already, most of the crews who cleared the valley have been handed their walking papers. Some of the stoneworkers have been let go, too. What’s next for them is a topic Rainer and Clara, Jacob and Lottie, have
discussed, but after those whistles, there’s an element of urgency mixed into their conversations.

  Italo departs the camp first. Within six months of the whistles blowing, he’s secured a position with a stonemason in Wiltwyck. The next year, Lottie and Jacob and their first child, Greta, will settle in Woodstock, so that Jacob can take up a job with a fellow who carves headstones. In order to continue their schooling, and to help with the baby, Lottie’s sisters, Gretchen and Christina, accompany them. Rainer and Clara will remain at the camp the longest, as its streets empty, its houses become vacant, its bakery and general store close. At the end of 1916, when the Reservoir is formally pronounced done, Rainer and Clara will be among the only residents of the camp that’s in the process of being taken down. Through the same talent for persuasion that brought him and his family to this place, Rainer succeeds in obtaining a position with the Water Authority that’s been established to oversee the functioning and maintenance of the Reservoir and the tunnels that funnel its water to New York’s thirsty taps. This is a time when the U.S. is on its way into the First World War, and you might not expect a fellow with a German accent to be hired to so sensitive a position. He convinces whoever needs it of his loyalty and his trustworthiness, and for the next decade, he travels up and down Ulster County, inspecting its portion of the Catskill Aqueduct—that’s the tunnel that runs south out of the Reservoir. He and Clara relocate to Woodstock, to a modest house a couple of doors down from Lottie and Jacob, whose family has expanded to include a son, also Jacob, and another daughter, Clara. Christina, Rainer and Clara’s youngest, has scandalized everyone by falling pregnant with the child of a much older man who has come north from Beacon to tend to his sick brother. After a hasty wedding, Christina and Tom head back down the Hudson to settle. Gretchen, the middle sister, attends the teachers’ college in Huguenot, and takes a position teaching in Rhinebeck. She’ll marry late, a railroad conductor with whom she develops a romance over the course of trips to Manhattan to visit the museums there.