The Fisherman

by John Langan

  Get a grip, I told myself. After all, Howard’s wasn’t the only tale I’d heard about what was supposed to lie beneath the Reservoir’s waters. I believe the first must have concerned the towns that had been abandoned to make way for it. I encountered it when I was still at college, during what was likely my first visit to the place. A half-dozen of us had driven up in someone’s station wagon to drink beers and gaze up at the stars. I’d been included because I had a guitar on which I could pick out some of the more popular songs on the radio. While I was taking a break from playing beside the modest fire we’d built, one of the girls who’d made the trip sat down next to me and asked if I knew about the Reservoir. I can’t remember what I said, probably no. It had been built, the girl said, on the spot where a town had stood. The residents were evicted, and their home was flooded. Supposedly, the girl went on, if you rowed out on the water when the weather was calm, and your boat drifted over the town’s location, and you looked down, you would see the top of the church steeple, rising out of the depths below.

  To be honest, for a long time, I believed that story, even passed it along, myself, a few times, until another friend set me straight, years later. It’s one of those tales I’ve noticed attaches to spots where water covers the site of human dwelling. There’s something haunting about the image of those houses, those shops, those churches, submerged in darkness, schools of fish darting amongst them, the light a distant glow overhead. It’s as if you’re seeing how time works, or some such.

  Now the road climbed, scaling the faces of the hills that overlooked the Reservoir’s southern shore. To our right, the ground dropped, lowering the trees there half-, then all the way, down, leaving us looking out over green crowns poking through the low clouds drifting up the hillside. In the distance, the Reservoir was a reach of gray water framed by mist and mountain, a blank piece of paper available for anyone to write on. And if the story you put there featured a woman whose ruined body left a trail of water behind her as she staggered along in search of her children, and a language that could force you to see the other side of the veil screening this world from another, where the original greatest catch coiled beneath the surface of the ocean, then what?

  “So,” I said, the sound of my voice unexpectedly loud, “what did you make of old Howard’s story?”

  “I think if that shaggy-dog story had been any hairier,” Dan said, “it would have been a carpet.”

  “All the same…”

  “All the same what?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It was strange, was all.”

  For an answer, Dan snorted.

  The other tale I’d heard about this place concerned an actual ghostly encounter. Not long after my inaugural visit to it, a friend—who was more of an acquaintance—claimed that a guy he’d met down at Pete’s had told him something insane. According to this random stranger, he had been driving home along the eastern end of the Reservoir the previous week when he’d noticed a girl, standing at the side of the road ahead. She was barefoot, wearing a long, white dress. The stranger had rolled up beside her and asked if she needed a ride. Without answering, the girl had opened the door and slid into the passenger’s seat. She had directed the fellow down unfamiliar roads until they’d arrived at a gate set back a ways from the asphalt. Here, the girl had left the car, though not before kissing her driver’s cheek with lips so cold they burned. The next day, when the curious stranger returned to the spot where he’d dropped the girl the previous night, he discovered that the gates through which she’d passed led to a cemetery. As my friendly acquaintance told it, what had leant the stranger’s tale that tiny bit of extra credibility had been the spot on his right cheek where the girl’s kiss had landed. The skin was raw, red, the outline of her lips still visible.

  They call this second story The Phantom Hitchhiker, and you find versions of it all over the place—all around the world, I’d bet. That I heard a variation connected to the Reservoir was pure chance. It could as easily have been set any location with no effect to its integrity. Most of the ghost and strange stories I’ve heard are like this, local riffs on a more general theme. If you tried, I suppose you could find a meaning for them, a moral they embody. In the case of the Hitchhiker, I guess it would have to do with being leery of strangers, and there’s probably a caution about desire in there, too, isn’t there? With Howard’s tale, I couldn’t figure out what lesson to draw from it, what message it was trying to convey. What was I supposed to think about, say, the stone those workers had unearthed on the Dort House’s property? Stone? I thought. Howard hadn’t said anything about a stone. What was this? Only, I knew exactly what stone, the large, blue one in whose depths a worker had glimpsed a distant, fiery eye. My foot slacked on the gas.

  To our left, one end of a driveway looped towards a sizable house whose fieldstone walls, tall windows, and jagged roofline appeared intended to suggest a fairy castle, a suggestion the no-less-sizable outbuildings gathered near it picked up and reinforced. At the top of the manicured lawn next to it, an Italianate villa brooded over a yard full of statuary. Beside me, Dan was silent, his thoughts his own. I kept on 28A as it descended the hillside, past a boxy church, a pair of semitrailers parked in an improvised lot, and houses whose pretensions skewed middle-class, until the road leveled. I veered left, onto Stone Church Way, away from the Reservoir, and took it till Ashokan Lane branched to the right. I was reasonably sure Howard had mentioned the Sheriff who saw to the Dort House’s eventual destruction, but I was less certain whether he had described that official’s look at the interior. Here, the houses tucked in amidst the trees were more modest than those we’d passed at the top of the hillside, raised ranches, cottages, the occasional farmhouse. The cars in their driveways were not the newest models; their bumper stickers proclaimed their pride in their honor students, their loyalties in the last couple of elections. A mile or so up the road, past a heavy stand of trees, a sign for Tashtego Way marked the opening to a narrow lane on the left. I turned onto it.

  Trees grew at the very edge of the road. Their branches and in some cases trunks weighted with rain, they leaned towards one another, forming a tunnel of bark and leaf. Concerned I might clip one of them, I eased off the gas and steered towards the middle of the blacktop. Overhead, the rain clung to the branches and swelled into large drops that dangled and then dropped, striking the roof of the cab with a bang. Dutchman’s Creek was supposed to be somewhere off this road, but as yet, I had not spotted any potential parking spots, only trees walling us in on either side. Briefly, I wondered if the Creek actually existed—if it might not be some kind of local legend—but the trees on the right fell away to reveal a stretch of marsh, a meadow along from it, a low ridge backing both. I braked to a crawl, rolling past the marsh until we came to the meadow. After about ten feet, I turned the wheel slightly, testing the soil with the right-hand tires. The truck had four-wheel drive, so I most likely could have driven straight into the tall grass with full confidence I’d be able to drive out again, but I hated to tear up a stretch of land like that if I didn’t have to. Not to mention, if I was wrong, it would be an expensive proposition to have a tow-truck come all the way out here to extricate me from my error. The ground felt solid enough. I turned the wheel a little more, until the truck was completely in the meadow, with a good five-foot margin between my door and the road. I shifted into park, set the parking brake, and cut the engine.

  As if my turning the key had summoned it, the rain fell with renewed force, washing away the view out the windows. Dan sighed and reached for his hat, but I caught his arm. “Let’s wait a minute,” I said. “It won’t last for long like this.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Anyway, it’ll give me a chance to ask you something.”

  “Oh?” He raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Exactly how did you find out about this place?”

  He had to have known what my question was going to be. After Howard’s story, what else would I h
ave wanted to know? Yet he jerked his head back, shifted in his seat, and said, “What? I told you, Alf Evers’s book.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, not unkindly.

  “What do you—”

  “I’m guessing if we had a copy of that book, we wouldn’t find a single reference to Dutchman’s Creek in it.” I held up a hand to forestall his protest. “What is it you aren’t telling me?”

  “Jesus, Abe,” Dan said. He grabbed his hat, jammed it on his head, and flung open his door with sufficient force to shake the truck. He stepped down into the rain, and reached behind the seat to where we’d stored our gear. I sat where I was while he removed his rod and tacklebox and the knapsack holding our food and drink. Once he had the knapsack shouldered, he glared at me, his face red, and said, “Well? Are you coming?”

  There was no way I wasn’t going with him. I opened my door as he slammed his and stormed off across the meadow. I fetched my gear, locked the truck, and set after him. The rain had not let up the way I’d predicted, and the grass and ground were soaked. Water streamed off the bill of my cap, and mud tugged at the boots I was glad I’d worn. By the time I was at the bottom of the ridge, which is to say, not much time, at all, the lower halves of my jeans were wet and heavy. My cap was saturated. The ridge was forested with decent-sized trees, which offered a modicum of shelter. I ducked in among them and continued on my way. It’s funny: although the air was full of the sound of the rain thundering down, and, closer to home, my breathing as I pushed up the slope, I could hear a couple of birds in the branches somewhere nearby, chirping these snippets of song that cut through all the water. It was such a cheering sound, I thought, I’ll have to figure out what bird that is.

  The crest of the ridge didn’t take that long to reach. To be honest, it was more a hump in the earth than a proper hill. From its top, I saw Dan starting down the other side, into a valley formed by the low hill we were on and the larger wall of earth and rock behind it. I don’t mind a walk to a fishing spot, but I have to admit, as the years have piled on, I’ve come to like climbing to a location less and less. I feel it in my knees, my problems with which, I guess I inherited from my pa, who was plagued with knee trouble for almost as long as I could remember. I suppose I should have been grateful my knees had held out the length of time they had. Well, in for a penny, and all that; with a sigh, I started my descent.

  Just beyond the foot of the first ridge, a ribbon of water crossed the valley. You would have been forgiven for calling it a puddle, except that it was flowing, trickling from left to right through the black, muddy ground. Something—some trick of the light, I judged, the effect of all the trees looming over it, the earth below it—made the water look black as ink. What light there was didn’t skip on its surface; it seemed to float further down in it, as if the rivulet ran far deeper than I knew must be the case. I thought of Howard’s black ocean, and the memory angered me. I was half-tempted to stomp my boot in it, to prove it was no more than the overflow from some nearby pond or stream, but the prospect of my foot touching that black water made my mouth go dry, my heart hammer. “Damn fool,” I muttered, and hopped over it.

  My progress up the second ridge was not as quick. The ground was steeper, its surface broken by stretches of rock washed slick by the rain. Caution was the order of the day. Above me, Dan was at the top of the hill. Should I slip, fall, and injure myself, I wasn’t sure he’d hear me calling for help from the other side of it. Tacklebox and rod in one hand, the other free to catch hold of the nearest tree, I started up the ridge, leaning forward to help my balance. The soil was shallow, crisscrossed by exposed tree roots. I stepped carefully, using the roots as footholds. Patches of pale green lichen wrapped the tree trunks, flaking off onto my palms when I grabbed them. I know I was ruminating over Howard’s story, but it had been pushed from the forefront of my thoughts by a vague unease that I attributed to Dan’s behavior, his lying and his outburst. I’d witnessed his difficulties at work; I’d had a much closer view of them this past February, the night he’d come to dinner. I’d told myself that fishing was an oasis for him, a place of respite from the desert of his days. Now, pushing up this steep hill, I wondered if I’d been wrong, if the scorched ruin of his life had swept over his refuge, burying its sweet water under burning sand. I wasn’t afraid of Dan, but I was concerned for him, and for me, chasing him through rows of Hemlock and Maple.

  In front of me, a large birch had fallen across the hillside. I half-climbed over it, and saw the remains of a campfire and a pile of empty beer cans. The aftermath of a teenage party, no doubt. The mess grated on me, as such carelessness always did, but mixed in with that sourness was a faint taste of, not relief, exactly, but reassurance. The dented and crushed aluminum, the charred sticks, meant that someone else had been here, and not that long ago, either.

  As I drew nearer to the top of the ridge, the Hemlocks grew closer together, and taller, which seemed a good thing, since from the sound of it, the rain was heavier than ever. Feeling somewhat like a mouse in a maze, I picked my way through the trunks, until the ground leveled and I was at the crest of the hill. Because of the trees, there wasn’t much of a view in any direction, but in the distance across from me, I could make out the bulk of another ridge I prayed I wouldn’t have to climb. The surface of this hill already sloped down, at a steeper angle than the one I’d just ascended, but the trees continued dense enough for me to use them and their roots to help my footing. There had better be some Goddamned monster fish in this stream, I thought as I placed my foot between a pair of roots. I was sweating, and the lightweight raincoat of which I was so proud had trapped the moisture within itself, giving me my own portable sauna.

  For what felt like much longer than I’m sure it was, I mountain-goated it down the ridge. Not until I was almost at its foot, and the trees were spreading out, allowing me a better view of the torrent of water below me, did I realize that roar I’d been listening to wasn’t the rain, but Dutchman’s Creek. Swollen with the past week’s downpour, the stream galloped over this stretch of rapids in a white rush. Something about the acoustics of the place—the closeness of the ridge on the other side of the creek—caught the water’s noise and amplified it. To the eye, the stream was maybe thirty feet across, not as large as many of the spots I’d fished much further into the Catskills. To the ear, however, Dutchman’s Creek was a river in flood.

  At the base of the hill, earth gave way to bare rock, which shelved this side of the stream to left and right. A quick survey showed Dan off to the right, downstream. I sighed. I was straining to be patient with him. I had decided he must have had the name of the place from a woman, one with whom he’d had some measure of involvement. Their affair might have lasted no longer than a single night, but the loss of his family was recent enough for Dan to fear he’d betrayed them. Whatever comfort he’d sought, I didn’t begrudge him. His wounds cut down to the bone—through the bone, to the marrow—and any relief you can find from that kind of pain, however temporary, you take. The trick is, enduring the guilt that grabs you in its broken teeth the minute that comfort ebbs. What came across as a snit, I reminded myself, was symptom of an affliction more profound, one with which I was only too well-acquainted. So although I was tempted to turn left, upstream, in search of solitude to cast my line, I opted to go right.

  Even without the addition of seven days’ worth of rain, the rapids I had emerged beside would have been serious business. For a good hundred yards, they descended in a series of drops so regular they might have been enormous steps. This entire portion of the stream was strewn with boulders, gray blocks whose edges the water appeared to have done little to soften. It was as if the side of a mountain had let go and come to rest here. There are fish that will brave such turbulent conditions, and under other, less extreme circumstances, I might have tried my luck for one. I caught a glimpse of a good-sized something sporting in the spray. My ambition, however, is tempered by my common sense, and while every fisherman understands that he’s g
oing to sacrifice his fair share of tackle to his passion, there’s no point in throwing it away, which was what I’d be doing if I cast into this white roaring. Not to mention, between the rain and the spray, the shore was dangerously slick. I continued toward Dan.

  When I caught up to him, he had his line in the water. He was standing at the opposite side of a wide pool into which the creek poured itself over a waterfall. Thirty yards across, the pool was a stone cup whose sides fell sharply into the water. Where the stream splashed into it, the pool churned and foamed, cloudy with sediment. Out towards the middle, the water cleared to the point of glass, and despite the raindrops puckering its surface, I picked out the shapes of several large-ish fish congregating there. Trout, I hoped, below whom the water darkened—the dirt and whatnot that had been flung over the waterfall billowing across the pool’s bottom. That I could tell, Dan hadn’t hooked anything, yet. He had positioned himself at the spot where the water exited the pool through a broad channel. His tacklebox was open on the rock next to him, its shelves up and extended, which I took as an indication he planned to stay here a little while. I wasn’t in a hurry to make conversation with him; as long as I could see him, that was fine with me. About halfway round the pool’s circumference, the edge dipped to a ledge that slanted into and under the water. I set down my gear at the top of the incline, bent to open my tacklebox, and in short order was raising my arm to cast.

  God, but I love that first cast. You pinch the line to the rod, open the bail, lift the rod over your head, and snap your wrist, releasing the line as you do. The motion whips up the rod, taking the pink and green spinner-bait at the end of the line back and then out, out and out and out, trailing line like a jet speeding ahead of its contrail, climbing to the top of the parabola whose far end is going to put the lure right next to those fish. The reel feeds out more and more line, making a quick, whizzing sound as it spins; while the lure nears the apex of its flight and starts to slow, causing the line to bunch up right behind it. When the lure falls toward the water, it takes longer than it seems it should, so that for a moment, you wonder if it’s already hit the surface and somehow you missed it, and you’re almost to the point of searching for the spot where it went in when the spinner flashes and you look in time to see the water leap up with a plunk. You drop the bail to secure the line, counting, “One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi,” trying to let that little assembly of wood and metal you call your watermelon spinner sink to the level of those fish, watching the line that had fallen slack on the water straighten and submerge, and then it’s four-Mississippi and you start drawing in that line, and the day’s fishing is well and truly underway.