The Fisherman

by John Langan

  I’ve tried to find something to compare the sensation to, but the closest I’ve ever been able to come is the moment after you’ve swept your fingers down the guitar strings and sounded the opening note of your first song. Or the second after the baseball has slipped your fingertips and is turning in the air as it steaks toward the catcher’s open mitt. There’s a similar feeling of having started something whose outcome you can’t be one-hundred-percent sure of—sometimes, the percentage is significantly lower—but there isn’t the same openness that accompanies the lure’s trajectory. Sure, you think you know what’s waiting for you under the water, but believe you me, you can never be sure what’s going to take your hook.

  Right away, the fish I had aimed at were interested in my lure, a couple of them breaking away from the group to dart after it. I wound the handle faster, trying to goad them into striking, but they held back until I had the lure in sight, the spinner winking as it sped through the water, when each of them shot off in a different direction. I didn’t worry about them; I had the lure in and was lifting my arm for a second attempt at the spot where I could make out a number of fish maintaining their position. This time, I let the lure descend through the water for an extra –Mississippi before drawing it in. A new fish peeled away from the school after it. I decided not to speed up my retrieve, but kept winding the handle one-two one-two one-two. Below the fish, which appeared larger than either of the first pair by a couple of inches, the murk that hung in the water churned. I wound the line in, one-two one-two. The fish was at the lure—

  —and was gone, chased away by the thing that rose from the murk beneath it, took the bait in its mouth, and rolled into a dive. I had an impression of a body thick as the trunk of a small tree, covered with scales pale as the moon. Had I not left the drag loose, the fish would have snapped my line like thread. As it was, the rod bowed with the pressure the thing applied to it. The fish wasn’t swimming especially fast—the line spooled out of the reel at an almost leisurely pace—but it was going far. It sank deep into the murk, to what I estimated must be the bottom of the pool, before turning into a wide circle. I had no idea what had taken my lure. It certainly wasn’t a trout, or a bass, or any of the panfish. From its size and its strength, I guessed it might be a carp, which was not a fish I’d anticipated running into here. But there are times you pull something out of the water for which there’s no accounting, the only remnant of a story whose contours are a mystery. However it had come to inhabit this pool, a carp had the power to break my line with a toss of its head. If I wanted to land it, I was going to have to alter my usual strategy. I tested the handle, the rod dipping as the line tightened. “Easy,” I murmured, half to myself, half to the fish. I could feel him down there in the dark, feel his weight and his muscle. I gave the handle another turn, stopping when the fish began to draw more line, doubling back into a wider circle. I guessed he was testing this thing that had jabbed into him. I waited to see whether he would maintain his present course, or take off in a new direction. Once he appeared content to continue swimming in a broad circle, I started turning the handle slowly, gradually shifting his sweep closer to me.

  At some point during this long process, Dan noticed that I had something on the end of my line and that it wasn’t behaving in the usual fashion. I can’t say exactly how long his curiosity as to what, exactly, I was doing required to overcome his annoyance with my questioning him, but by the time I had the fish in near enough that I could see the murk churning as he plowed through it, Dan was standing at my right side. He said, “What’ve you got?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Carp, maybe.”

  “Carp? Here?”

  “Too big for a trout or bass.”

  “Maybe it’s a pike.”

  “Could be,” I said. “Doesn’t act like one.”

  “Doesn’t act much like a carp, either,” Dan said.

  “No argument there.”

  Because Dan was next to me, when the fish swam up out of the murk into view, I had his reaction to gauge mine against, his “What the hell?” to reassure me that he’d witnessed what I had. How I didn’t drop the rod, or jerk it up and snap the line, I can’t say. For one thing, the fish was huge, easily four feet from nose to tail. Too big, I would have said, to have survived in a spot this size for very long—unless it went much, much deeper than it seemed. For another thing, what I glimpsed of its head was unlike anything I’d encountered in any of the places I’d cast my line. Rounded, its large, dark eyes set forward, its mouth jammed with teeth like steak knives, the front end of the thing resembled what you’d expect to run across in the depths of the ocean.

  “Guess it isn’t a carp, after all,” I said.

  “What…” Dan’s voice trailed off.

  “I don’t know.” The fish was slowing, the tension on the line slacking. I turned the handle faster, tightening the line, ready for the fish to change course. If he didn’t, if he completed another circuit of the pool, his next pass would bring him close enough for me to attempt bringing him in. Although one part of my mind had picked up Dan’s “What the hell?” and was chanting it like a mantra, and another section of my mind was working at answering how an apparent denizen of the lower deep could have found its way into a small body of water in upstate New York, enough of my brain remained available to calculate the best trajectory for guiding the fish onto the spit of rock supporting me. The fish was swinging in my direction, rising in the water as he came. His dorsal fin, a fan of pale flesh stretched between spines the length of my forearm, broke into the air like the back of a dragon. I said, “Dan.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going to see if I can’t steer this fellow right up onto this ledge in front of me. You see what I’m talking about?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Once I get him on the rock, I’m going to hand the rod to you and do my best to manhandle him out of the water.”

  “But—”

  “Just be ready to take the rod from me.”

  The more I said, the better I felt, the more confident. It was as if, by speaking my plan, I was setting it up to happen. The fish was slowing, the spines on his back listing as he swam nearer. I resisted the urge to wind the handle as fast as I could. He might be done, or he might be readying for a dive. He was close, now, so close I could see his face in all its hideous glory. Dan leaned in to me, his hands out for the rod. “Almost there,” I said, “almost there.” The front half of the fish slid over the rock shelf. There was barely enough line for me to reel in, but I drew him up the shelf, to where the water shallowed. Once his tail was over the rock, I passed the rod to Dan and took a step towards the fish. As I did, he raised his head and neck partway out of the pool, as if readying to fling himself off the rock. His eyes, I saw, were empty pits. While I was debating whether to grab the line or tackle him, the fish settled back under the water and was still.

  I splashed into the pool and plunged my hands into it, well back of the fish’s weird head and its sharp teeth. His gills were barely moving. I gripped the forward gill on either side of him and backed up. Ready for a fight, I moved fast, hauling his bulk most of the way out of the water before releasing my hold and falling on my ass. I had been expecting the edges of his gills to be sharp, and was prepared to chance the injury to my hands to secure such a catch, but the flaps of skin were rubbery, almost soft. When it thumped onto the rock, tremors shivering its bulk, its entire body gave the impression that it was less solid than gelid. Strange, yes, but no more so than this creature being in this pool in the first place. I could feel the grin splitting my mouth. I was in a position the envy of everyone who’s ever spent any time working the rod and reel: I had my fantastic story, and I had the proof of it. Who knew what this would mean for me? My picture in the paper, an honored spot on Howard’s wall, at least. I turned to Dan, who had not relaxed his hold on the rod. “It’s okay,” I said, pushing myself to my feet, “we got him.” I held out my hand, and Dan returned the rod. “Thanks,
” I said. “Couldn’t have done it without you, buddy.”

  “Abe,” Dan said.

  “Definitely not a carp,” I said. “Definitely, positively.” I was trying to figure out the best means for transporting my catch over the hills to my truck. Maybe if I took off my raincoat, we could fashion a sling out of it that we could hoist on a pair of branches. It would require some work, but—

  “Abe,” Dan said.

  “What?”

  “I—that isn’t a fish.”

  “Come again?” I glanced at Dan. His eyes big, he was staring past me at the fish. “That isn’t,” he said. “Look at it, Abe. Look at it.”

  “Okay,” I said, “okay.” I did, and what Dan had seen slipped into focus for me. “Jesus!” I shouted, jumping back and colliding with him. “What the hell?”

  The fish’s face, as I’ve said, was rounded, its eyes a pair of large, forward-facing sockets. No doubt, its resemblance to a human skull had factored into my initial shock at its appearance. What I’d been too concerned with bringing the thing in to realize was that the face wasn’t shaped like a skull, it was shaped around a skull. Imagine a good-sized fish, something like a salmon, whose head has been cut away. In its place, someone has set a human skull, stretching the fish’s skin over the bone to hold it there. Finally, whoever has performed this bizarre transplant has given his new creation a mouth, a slit at the bottom of its face whose bloodless gums are jammed with fangs like a drawer of knives. Behind its gills, a sizable pair of pectoral fins splayed on the rock, while a smaller set of ventral fins spread out nearer the tail, whose top lobe drooped to the left. The sight of it hurt my eyes to behold. I wanted to turn my head; the breakfast boiled at the back of my mouth. Maybe there was a natural explanation for what I dragged out of the pool, but if there was, I didn’t want anything to do with the nature that could fashion such a creature. At the same time, I could not stop looking at the fish, which blew out air through its forest of teeth in a tired grunt.

  “It was in my grandfather’s fishing journal,” Dan said.

  I had no response—had no notion what he was talking about.

  “He was a fisherman, too,” Dan said. His voice shook with the strain of the sight before us. “He and my dad used to go fishing on weekends. Sometimes, they took me. Not too often, but sometimes. He kept a record of the places he’d fished. It was just a ruled notebook, the kind of thing you get for school. He was pretty thorough. For each spot, he recorded the date he went, the hours he spent there, the weather, the condition of the water, the lures he used, and the fish he caught. Once in a while, he’d add a comment underneath the data: ‘Good luck above dam,’ or, ‘Hooked huge catfish near 32 bridge but lost him.’ When he returned to a site, he updated the entry in different-colored ink. I never knew about his journal. He wasn’t exactly what you’d called a forthcoming man. It wouldn’t have mattered much if I had been aware of it. I liked to fish, but I wasn’t interested in that kind of exhaustive note-taking.

  “Then, this past February, my cousin, Martine, came to visit with her family. I think I told you about that. Right at the last possible minute, as they’re loading the car for the trip back to Cincinnati, she reaches into her suitcase and comes out with Grandpa’s journal. ‘Here,’ she says. I had no idea what she was handing me. She’d had the book bound in leather, with ‘Fishing Journal’ embossed on the cover in gold lettering. I thought it was a blank book, and she was going to tell me to write my feelings in it. She teaches high school English, and we’d talked about that. Well, she’d talked about it, as what she called a ‘therapeutic exercise.’

  “But no, it was our grandfather’s record of his fishing trips. Her mother had come into possession of it after Grandpa’s death, and she gave it to Martine. I couldn’t figure out what Aunt Eileen would have wanted with the notebook. From what I understood, she’d always been focused on religion, to the point she’d flirted with converting to Catholicism, so she could become a nun. No one had mentioned her being interested in fishing. She wasn’t, Martine said. Her mother hated fishing. She was jealous of it, of the time and attention Grandpa gave to it, and of him sharing it with my father. I had no idea; no one else did, either. I’m surprised she didn’t burn the journal, you know, take revenge that way. When Martine’s older son, Robin, was born, her mother passed the journal to her, for the baby. Robin wasn’t interested in fishing, though; neither was his younger sister. My cousin left the journal in her dresser drawer, said she’d practically forgotten it. Then, after,” his voice hitched, “everything happened with Sophie and the kids, and you and I started fishing together, Martine remembered our grandfather’s notebook. She dug it out from underneath the socks and underwear and decided it would be of more use to me than it had been to anyone in her family. She found a place to give the journal a nice binding, and here it was. ‘I hope you’ll find something in these pages that will be of help to you,’ she said.

  “It was a while before I looked inside the notebook. To be honest, Abe, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep fishing with you. No reflection on you: I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue fishing, period. You probably noticed, things with me got a little worse this winter. I know I kind of fell apart that night you had me over for dinner. As long as we were fishing, I was—I wasn’t good, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I was able to go from one day to the next. After the season ended, and I put away my rod and tacklebox in the spare room, everything became harder. It didn’t happen overnight. There were still the holidays and visits from family to distract me. But more and more, it seemed to me I was caught, trapped in a whirlpool that had swept me in the morning that truck—that truck…”

  Dan shook his head fiercely, tearing his gaze from the thing in front of us. Focusing on me, instead, he said, “A maelstrom: that’s what they call an especially big and bad whirlpool, the kind of funnel in the ocean that could draw down a ship. I was in a maelstrom, spun around and around a cone of black water, my wife and my children somewhere in there with me, their screams and cries impossible to pinpoint. The longer it had hold of me, the harder it was to believe that there had been anything else, any standing beside the Svartkil talking about work and waiting for a bite. All of those trips, those days sitting on the bank of this stream or that, were a dream, a delusion I’d foisted on myself to escape that relentless spin. Do you know—where the accident happened, they put a light, there.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Most mornings, I drive down there. We’re talking three, four a.m., when it still feels like nighttime. I have trouble sleeping very long. I pull off the road, turn off the car, and sit staring at that light.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You do?”

  “You told me,” I said, “the night you came over for dinner.”

  “I did?”

  “After a lot of wine.”

  “Oh.” For a moment, the thread of Dan’s narrative appeared to have slipped through his fingers. “Huh,” he said. “Okay. So. I watch the traffic light and think about things. I probably said what kind of things, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Night after night—or morning after morning—it’s the same. The light cycles through its commands and the maelstrom drags me deeper. I’m aware how bad conditions at work are, and I understand that I’m inviting management to add my head to the pile of those they’ve hacked off, already, but I can’t muster enough concern to lead to any action. I watch the green replaced by yellow, yellow by red, and…”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then, one morning, I glance at the passenger’s seat and there’s Grandpa’s fishing journal. I can’t remember putting it there—can’t remember why I would have put it there—but that’s all right. I go through a lot of my day on autopilot, I’ve noticed. Maybe I thought it was something else. Doesn’t matter. My curiosity’s been pricked. I pick up the book and start turning the pages. They’re stiff with the dried ink. As I go, I recognize some of the names he’s written. The Esopu
s. The Rondout. The Svartkil. I pause at some of the entries, trace my finger over the words as I try to decipher the old man’s handwriting. He caught whatever would take his hook, but it seems he preferred catfish. Caught an enormous channel cat right where the Rondout empties into the Hudson. Reading his notes, re-creating the days he’d had—it’s comforting, in a strange kind of way. I look at the pages for places I haven’t been. I see an entry for Dutchman’s Creek.”

  I don’t mind saying, I was feeling a tad story’d-out. First Howard’s extravaganza, and now Dan’s more restrained example, and in the meantime, a human skull wrapped in translucent skin was grinning at me over a mouth of fangs. “So that’s how you found out about this place,” I said. “Great. Now—”

  “‘Saw Eva,’” Dan said. “That’s why we’re here. Underneath all the usual information, he’d written those two words. Eva was his wife—my grandmother. She died in 1945, on New Year’s Day. A stroke, I think. My dad was only seven at the time, and was never able to find out exactly what had happened. Anyway, the point is, the entry Grandpa made for Dutchman’s Creek was dated July 1953. My grandmother had been dead eight and a half years, which means she couldn’t have accompanied him on the trip.