by John Langan
You can be sure, throughout the journey Marie had taken me on, Howard’s story had not been far from my thoughts. How could it have been anywhere else, right? But the sight of all those curved bits of metal, some wound tightly into the rope’s fibers, others tied to those fibers by their eyes, a few of sufficient size to be hung on the rope properly—more than the Vivid Trees, or the black ocean, more than Marie, even, this was the detail that made me think, Oh my God. I believe old Howard was telling the truth. Or close enough. As Marie led me around to what I thought of as the front of the boulder, the man who was bound to it came into view, and any doubts that might have remained were swept away by the sight of the rope that crossed him from right hip to left shoulder, secured to him by the fishhooks that dug through the leather apron and worn robes to his flesh. The rope circled the stone behind him a few times, then ran out across the black waves to the end of the barrier.
The strangest thing was, I recognized this man. I’d met him in the woods on the way here, speaking a language I didn’t understand, until Marie chased him off. What had been a matter of an hour, less, for me, had been much, much longer for him. At a glance, you might have mistaken him for my age, a tad older, but subject him to closer inspection, and the number of years piled on him was apparent. This fellow had seen enough time pass that he should have crumbled to dust several times over. His skin was more like parchment paper, and his face was speckled with some kind of barnacle. All the color had been washed from his eyes. They flicked toward me, and a spark of recognition flared in them. He didn’t speak, though; he left that to Dan.
Dan was sitting cross-legged at the man’s feet, his back to him and me. To his right, a slender naked woman, her skin pale as pearl, sat leaning against him. To his left, a pair of toddler boys, their bare bodies equally white, crawled in and out of his lap. His hat and raincoat were gone, his hair tousled, his clothes rumpled, as if he’d slept in them. When he turned to me, the stubble shadowing his face, way later than five o’clock, reinforced my impression that he’d already spent some time in this place. “Abe,” he said. “I was wondering if you’d make it.”
“Here I am.”
Marie lowered herself to the ground next to the woman beside Dan—to Sophie. Dan eased himself from under Sophie, helped the boy who was crawling off him the rest of the way down, and stood, the wince as he did testament to how long he must have been holding that position. He smiled at Sophie. “This is my wife, Sophie.” His hand swept over the boys. “And these young men are Jason and Jonas.” The three of them swiveled their heads to regard me with flat, gold eyes.
“Dan,” I said, “what is all this?”
“Isn’t it obvious? It’s what your friend was telling us about, at the diner. He got some of the details wrong, but as far as the big picture goes, he was pretty much on target.”
“Big—I don’t know what that means.” I inclined my head to the man bound to the rock. “Is this the Fisherman?”
Dan nodded. “He doesn’t say much. All of his energy is focused on…” He pointed to the end of the barrier and its web of ropes.
“Which is what, exactly?”
“I guess you could call it the great-grandfather of all fishing stories.”
“The…” My voice died in my mouth. I must have noticed it during the walk to this spot, observed the odd striations in the stone of which the barrier was composed, even made the comparison to the scales of a titanic reptile. I must have seen the way the end of the barrier curved out and around from the main body the way the head of a snake flares from its neck. Maybe I’d likened the broken rocks ornamenting its crest to the ridges and horns that decorate the skulls of some serpents; maybe I’d judged the crack in which the Fisherman’s rope was lodged to be in the approximate location of an eye, were this headland an actual head. Whatever I’d imagined, I’d done so because this was what you did when you saw something new, especially something large: you found the patterns in it, saw the profiles of giants in the outlines of mountains, found dragons rearing in the clouds overhead. It was a game your mind played with unfamiliar terrain, not an act of recognition, for God’s sake. Of course it explained what all the ropes were for, identified the task towards which all the pale things were bent, but it was ridiculous, it was impossible, you could not have a creature that size, it violated I didn’t know how many laws of nature.
The beach, Dan, the thing in the water, lost focus, receded from me. I felt Dan’s hand on my arm, heard him saying, “Abe? Are you okay? Abe?”
I stepped away from him. “Fine,” I said thickly. “I’m fine.”
“It’s a lot to take in,” he said.
“Dan,” I said. “Where do I—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dan said. “It’s fine. Everything is fine. I was right.”
“Right?”
“Look at them,” Dan said, gesturing at Sophie and the twins. “I was right. I was more than right—I was—look at them, Abe. There they are.”
“Dan—”
“That’s Marie beside them, isn’t it?”
“That’s—”
“You see: I was right.”
I stared at my feet, forcing myself to breathe deeply. “Just tell me what happened to you.”
“There isn’t much to tell. I followed the creek upstream. Not that far—maybe a quarter-mile along—it swings to the right. Sophie was waiting for me there. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, it was what I’d wanted, but I was sure I was hallucinating. You must have had the same reaction to meeting Marie.”
“Close enough.”
“Once I realized it was Sophie…” Dan blushed. “I—I let her know how happy I was to see her. Afterwards, she led me into the woods. I think I saw the tree Howard mentioned in his story, the one the guy marked. There’s a crack running through the middle of it, looks as if lightning struck it. Sophie brought me here, where I met Jonas and Jason, met my boys.”
“Did you cross the road?” I said. “What about the temple?”
Dan shook his head. “One minute, we were surrounded by trees, the next, we were at the beach.”
“With the Fisherman.”
“He lost his wife, too—his family,” Dan said. “In front of him—in his house—he watched Hungarian soldiers butcher his wife and children, beat and hack them to death with clubs and swords, axes. The soldiers stabbed him first, when they broke down the door, so there was nothing he could do to stop them. He listened to his wife begging for their children’s lives; he heard his children screaming as they were murdered. He saw their bodies split open, their blood, their…insides, their organs spilled on the floor. Everything that was good in his life was ripped from him. If he could have, he would have died there, with them, in the house whose walls had been painted with their blood. But he survived, and afterwards, once he had finished burying his family, he set off to find the means to get them back, to reclaim them from the axes and swords that had cut them from him.
“And the thing is, Abe, he did it. He learned how to retrieve them.”
“I take it that has something to do with what he’s got on the hook—hooks, I guess.”
“He broke through the mask,” Dan said. “It’s like, what surrounds you is only a cover for what really is. This guy went through the cover—he punched a hole in the mask and came out here.”
“It’s not what I would have expected,” I said.
“This place—you have to understand, it’s like a metaphor that’s real, a myth that’s true.”
“That sounds a little over my head.”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is, here, conditions are more…flexible than they are where we live. If you can master certain forces, you can accomplish,” Dan waved his hands, “anything.”
“That’s a lot of information for an hour or two,” I said.
“An hour?” Dan’s eyes narrowed. “Abe, I’ve been here for days.”
“Days?”
“It’s kind of hard to be sure with the way the light is in
this place, but I must’ve been here for three days, minimum.”
“Three…” After everything I’d been part of, already, there was no sense in protesting. “Are you planning on returning to—”
“To what? The place where everything is a reminder of what I’ve lost?”
“Your home,” I said.
“How is that my home?” Dan said. He strode to Sophie and his boys, who stood and gathered about him. “Where my family is—that’s where my home is.” He uttered the words with such conviction, I could almost take the sight of this tall man with his wild red hair and his wrinkled clothing, embraced by a wife and sons whose eyes shone gold and whose white skin appeared damp, as the portrait of happy family.
“And the Fisherman, there, is okay with you staying?”
“He’s in rough shape,” Dan said. He nodded at the man. “He exhausted himself regaining control of Apophis. It’s pretty amazing, when you think of it. He caught that.” He pointed towards what I still didn’t want to think of as a vast head. “He had it pretty much secured when the guys from the camp showed up and started cutting lines. It’s taken him decades to repair the damage they did. He isn’t done, yet. I can help him.”
“No offense,” I said, “but I don’t see how. You aren’t talking about bringing in anything we’ve ever fished for. Hell, I don’t know if you can call this fishing; I don’t know what the name for it is.”
“He needs strength,” Dan said. “I can give that to him.”
“How?”
Dan’s eyes flicked away from me. “There are ways.”
I thought about the grieving husband in Howard’s tale, vomiting black water full of wriggling things like eyeballs with tails. I said, “He gets your strength. You get—”
“My family.”
It felt odd, almost rude, to do so with the three of them hanging onto him, but I said, “Are you sure this is your family?”
“What do you mean?” Dan said, the tone of his voice one of indignation, but the expression that flitted across his face one of surprise, as if I’d given voice to a doubt he’d harbored in secret. “Are you saying they look different—changed?” he went on. “Isn’t that what we’ve always been told happens to you after you die? You gain a new form?”
“I’m not sure this is what the religious folks had in mind.”
“They didn’t predict any of this, did they?”
He had a point there; though I had the suspicion I was listening to the arguments Dan had used to convince himself that what he’d found was what he’d been searching for, all along. “I don’t suppose they did,” I said.
“Has Marie acted the way you remember her acting?”
“She has.”
“Then what more do you need?”
The more I needed was not to have seen that other, inhuman face staring back at me when I turned toward her; it was not having witnessed Marie’s transfiguration into the savaged figure who had screamed at the younger version of the man bound to the boulder. I was on the verge of saying so, but something in the expressions of Sophie and the boys, a kind of attentiveness, chased the nerve from me. I settled for, “I don’t know.”
“It’s hard,” Dan said, “I understand. But you know, you could help.”
“Oh?”
Dan disengaged himself from his family and approached me. “You could have Marie back, all the time. You could make up for those lost years.”
“I could.” I considered her, still sitting with her back to me, facing the black ocean and its monstrous resident. “How, exactly, could I do that?”
“Like I said, the Fisherman is weak.”
“And he could use my strength.”
“Yes.”
I thought about it; I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. Whatever this Marie was, she wasn’t my Marie, just as I was certain this Sophie and twins weren’t Dan’s Sophie and twins. Maybe that didn’t matter; maybe it would be enough to stay with this echo of my dead wife as the Fisherman siphoned the vitality from me. Might be, I wouldn’t notice myself any weaker, too caught up in the illusion I’d surrendered to. At another moment in my life, when my grief was as proximate as Dan’s, I wouldn’t have debated the offer at all.
Now, though, I shook my head and said, “No, Dan, I’m afraid not.”
“What?” Dan said. “Why not?”
“I have…appreciated my visit with Marie. But it’s time for it to be done.”
“You can’t be serious. It’s your wife: she can be yours, again.”
“I understand what’s on offer.”
“Then how can you turn it down?”
“It’s—I think I prefer to meet up with her in my own time.”
“But—”
“You want to stay here. I get it.”
“You could help him,” Dan said.
“He’ll have to make do without me.”
“You would be helping me.”
“I thought you already had everything you wanted.”
“It’s the Fisherman,” Dan said. “What I’m giving him may not be enough. He might have to conserve his energy. If he does, I could lose Sophie and the boys. I can’t do that, Abe, not again. The first time almost killed me. A second would be too much. If you joined with us—”
I glanced at the Fisherman, held fast beside us. With his skin bleached and worn by brine, his scraggle of a beard a-crawl with something like sand lice, his robes grown part of his body through the hooks that had driven them into him, he looked almost a natural formation, himself. His white eyes stared at the colossal form to which he was connected with such intensity, it was no trouble believing that all his being was bent to his struggle with it. It was hard to credit him having spoken to Dan, at all, even drops of information dripped out over a course of days. Easier to imagine him absorbed by the black water smashing against the flanks of the beast he’d snared.
Those pale eyes swung a second, longer glance in my direction, bringing with them the weight of the Fisherman’s full attention. Most everyone, I suppose, has felt the gaze of someone whose burden of experience renders their regard a tangible thing. What poured from the Fisherman’s eyes drove me back a step, would have forced me to my knees had he not returned it to the scene before him. It was threaded with currents of emotion so powerful they were visible. There was rage, a short man in a dirty tunic and pants gripping his sword two-handed and swinging it down onto the back of a tall woman with long brown hair as she bent over the bodies of her children. There was pain, that same woman and children lying mutilated in wide pools of blood. There was hope, a suggestive passage in what might have been Greek, beneath a woodcut of a fanciful sea-serpent, sporting amidst stylized waves. There was determination, a knock on yet another door to ask yet another old man or woman if they were in possession of certain books. The emotions flowed into a current whose name I couldn’t give; if pressed, I would have said something like want, a gap or crack through the very core of the man. It was what had sustained this man when he had been dragged into the black ocean by one of the ropes he had employed in catching what he’d once glimpsed in a book. It had allowed him to struggle against the great beast, to reach through this underplace to a place that lay deeper still, and to draw on what he found there until he could begin to bring the monster that had broken free of his control once more under his sway. It had permitted him to rope himself to this rock as ballast to hold the beast. Sudden and overwhelming, the impression swept over me that the figure I was seeing was only part of the Fisherman, and a fairly small one, at that. The greater portion of him, I understood, was out of view, a giant with the marble skin and blank eyes of a classical sculpture. The apprehension was terrifying, made more so by the other emotions that impressed themselves on me: an amusement bitter as lemon, and a malice keen as the edge of a razor.
Someone was talking—Dan, continuing to plead his case. Without another word to him, I turned and started back the way that had brought me here. I managed half a dozen steps before Dan caught my shou
lder and spun me around. His face was scarlet, the scar descending its right side bone white. He was shouting, spittle flying from his lips. “What the fuck, Abe? What the fuck? You’re going to leave? You’re going to abandon me? What about Sophie? What about Jonas and Jason? Are you thinking of us? Are you thinking of Marie? What about Marie, Abe? What about her?” Behind him, Marie maintained her vigil of the beast.
“Dan,” I said. “Stop. It’s too much. He’s—”
“He’s what?” Dan punctuated his question with a shove from his big hands that had the force of his long legs behind it. It sent me stumbling over the smooth, rounded stones. My foot slipped, and my balance went. I twisted as I fell, trying to catch myself, but all that accomplished was to bring me down on my right side. My arm, my ribs, my hip smashed into the waiting rocks; the pain forced the air from my lungs. Through some miracle, my head escaped colliding with a stone, and when I saw Dan bending towards me, my first thought was, He’s helping me. But he wasn’t close enough to offer me a hand, and he straightened almost immediately. Not until I saw the large, bluish rock his fingers stretched around did I understand what he was doing. “I don’t want to do this,” he said, “I really don’t. It’s—if he has your strength, then he won’t have to take them away from me. I—if there were any other way, Abe. Honestly. I don’t want to do this.”
“Then don’t,” I managed, already aware that my words hadn’t registered, because Dan was raising the stone, his body tensing as he made ready to lunge into a blow. That the man I counted my closest friend was about to inflict grievous harm on me, if not kill me outright, was the most monstrous thing I had encountered yet this strange, awful day. A wave of nausea rolled over me. Even as I watched him shift his grip, moving his fingers to one end of his improvised weapon in order to better control it, I half-expected him to pause, lower and allow the rock to fall from his hand, and shake the sense back into his head. Only when Dan was moving forward, swinging the stone towards me, his eyes wide, his lips pressed tightly together, did a surge of adrenaline send me rolling out of his way. His attack missed, the rock cracking on the one that had been under my head and flying from his grasp. My feet tangled with his, sweeping him to the ground but preventing me from rising. Instead, I kicked furiously, pushing away from where he lay stunned. This entire time, I had not forgotten the knife in my pocket, and as I struggled to my feet, I had it out and in hand.
