by John Langan
“A knife?” From the tone of Dan’s voice, you would have thought I was the one threatening him. He tried to raise himself on his arms, but he must have injured the left one. It gave out on him, and he barely saved himself from falling on his face. He looked up at me. “It doesn’t matter.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. My heart was pounding, hammering against my chest as if I’d finished a short, fast race. To my left, a stone shifted. A glance in that direction showed one of the boys—I couldn’t tell them apart—toddling towards me. His brother was clambering in my direction from the right; Sophie was waiting a dozen feet behind me. I was about to call out to Dan, mock him for dragging his wife and babies into the dirty deed he was attempting, but something about whichever twin was on my left stilled my tongue. His chubby face, more baby than little boy, was wavering, the mouth stretching wider, splitting his cheeks most of the way to his ears, the blanched gums sprouting rows of serrated fangs that would not have been out of place in the mouth of a shark. His brother’s face had undergone a similar transformation, as had Sophie’s.
Dan had found his way to his feet, though he was rubbing that left arm. He had to have seen the change in Sophie and the boys, but nothing about him acknowledged it. Wincing, he stooped and scooped up a new, reddish rock with his right hand. Rising, he said, “It’s a shame, Abe. I always thought Sophie and you would have gotten along with one another, appreciated each other’s company.”
I licked my lips, which had gone dry. Attempting to keep my eyes on all four figures surrounding me, I said, “This isn’t your wife, Dan. You have to know that.”
“Shut up,” Dan said and, before I could offer a rejoinder, charged.
The last fight worth the name I had been in had occurred the better part of three decades ago. Dan was younger, at a guess stronger, and he was fighting for what he’d convinced himself was his family. He’d learned a little from his first pass at me: he faked a swing at my head with the stone, then whipped his left hand at me in a roundhouse that might have been smoother if he hadn’t injured that arm. It clouted my ear with less force than he intended, leaving me able to jerk my head out of the path of his rock. I slashed the knife right to left across him, felt it drag on his shirt. He hissed, and swept the stone at me in an uppercut that hit me high in the chest. I grunted, and slashed left to right, feeling the knife catch on his skin. Hugging his left arm to the vents I’d cut in his shirt, Dan stumbled back.
My chest was heaving, my temples pounding. “Dan,” I said, “please.” The tip of my knife wavered in front of me, Dan’s blood scarlet on more of the blade than I’d anticipated.
Crouched forward, his own breath coming in pants, Dan said, “You cut me. You son of a bitch.”
This did not seem the appropriate moment to point out that I had done so in response to his effort to crush my skull with the rock he continued to hold. To either side of me, the twins had drawn closer, their pudgy fingers ending in hooked claws. At my back, Sophie was also nearer, similarly changed. I’d cut Dan deeper than I’d intended. Where it pressed against him, his shirt sleeve was wet with blood. Without releasing his grip on the stone, he lowered himself to sitting. “Ow,” he said. “You son of a bitch. You cut me.”
“Sorry,” I said; although I wasn’t, not exactly. A mix of joy and revulsion swirled in my gut: joy that I’d survived Dan’s assault; revulsion at the blood soaking his sleeve. Was there any way to find him some kind of medical care in this place?
Dan didn’t answer me. Blood was dripping from his shirt cuff onto the rocks underneath him. The twins, their toes webbed and clawed, were less than a yard from me. I wasn’t as concerned with turning the knife on them or Sophie, not with their appearances so changed, but I wasn’t sure it would do me any good. Yes, they seemed solid, as much as Marie had earlier, in the forest, but the ease with which their forms shifted made me doubt the efficacy of any weapon I could muster against them. When the boys paused their flanking maneuver, I assumed it was to judge the best moment to strike. I didn’t think I could evade the two of them. I was hoping to hop out of the range of one and deal with his brother; though their wide mouths, crammed with fangs, troubled me far more than had Dan’s stones. Not to mention, as long as I was occupied with one of them, their mother would have the opportunity to move on me from behind.
It was the twin to my right who started towards Dan first. His brother looked at me quizzically, and turned after him. Dan raised his head to them. His skin was white, his eyes glazed—shock I guessed, at the wound I’d dealt him. He grinned sickly at the monsters working their way in his direction. “My boys,” he said. “Come to your papa.” The closer the things drew to him, the more their pale forms shimmered, until by the time they were standing beside Dan, they had resumed the appearance of toddlers, with the exception of their mouths, which retained their shark grins. Beneath Dan, the rocks were slick and red. With a broad tongue the color of liver, the boy on Dan’s right licked his lips. His mouth opened, as if in a yawn, and kept opening, wider and wider, his notched teeth ringing a gullet studded with clusters of additional fangs. His attention returned to the blood trickling from him, Dan didn’t notice the boy’s head pivoting in his direction, the better to deliver a massive bite to his shoulder. To his left, the other twin was spreading his jaws, readying his strike. I went to speak, to call out a warning to him, but Sophie shoved me aside and strode past me. Her mouth was likewise open, the full set of her teeth on display.
What must Dan have thought, watching the creature he had called his late wife’s name advance towards him, the lower portion of her face a stark refutation of the identity he’d tried to confer on her? Something was happening to Sophie, to the boys, another change rippling over them. Their flesh blackened as if burned, cracking and crumbling, showing charred muscle in some places, burnt bone in others. The odor of charcoaled meat filled the air. An expression of unutterable sadness dragged Dan’s features down. As if to ward off what Sophie had become, he held up his right hand, and the boy to his right snapped his jaws shut on Dan’s shoulder. At almost the same moment, the boy on Dan’s left clamped onto his chest. Dan’s head jerked up, his eyes starting, his arms flying out to either side of him, his back rigid, as if he’d been struck by lightning. His mouth worked to release some sound, a scream or a curse, but Sophie swallowed it in the terrible kiss she lowered on him. As her jaws closed around his face, what sounded like a frantic humming rose from deep in his chest; while his legs spasmed underneath him, as if he were trying to stand. The trio that had him in their teeth kept him in place. Without surrendering her hold on him, Sophie pressed Dan’s arms down.
His family’s attack on him could not have lasted more than a couple of seconds, yet it seemed as if I had been standing watching the three of them savage Dan for hours. So much useless, bloody metal, the knife hung in my hand. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, a voice was shouting at me to do something; it hadn’t been that long; though hurt, Dan might be savable; even if he weren’t, no one deserved to die like this, devoured alive. My eyes focused on the knife and shifted to Sophie. Her spine was visible at a couple of points through her burned flesh. If I stabbed the knife icepick-fashion on the back of her neck, that might be sufficient to cause her to release Dan. I switched my grip on the handle.
Whichever boy had bitten into Dan’s shoulder pulled his mouth from it and leveled his metallic gaze at me. His face was a patchwork of cinder and ash, his lips and chin splashed scarlet, his teeth hung with shreds of meat. Dan shuddered; his right arm lifted, the hand cupped, and swept in to his chest, as if beckoning me to approach. The boy stared at me with eyes in whose depthless shine I saw all the intelligence of a trout, or pike.
Before I fully understood what I was doing, I bolted. As fast as my feet could pick a path across the stones, I fled that place, ran from Dan and the family he had literally imagined for himself, from Marie looking out across the waves, from the Fisherman engaged in his titanic contest, from the unimaginable cre
ature with which he contested, from the black ocean roaring to the horizon. I made no attempt to retrace the route that had brought me here; instead, I headed straight for the Vivid Trees lining the top of the beach. Loose rocks rattled and snapped as my boots landed on them. I slipped and slid from side to side like someone trying ice skates for the first time. Point down, the knife was in my hand. Stones skipped and rolled away, kicked free by my boots. Beyond the clatter of my passage, I could hear nothing except the breath rushing in and out of my mouth and the waves foaming on the shore. Sophie and the twins—Marie, her bloodlust aroused—any of the pale creatures stationing the beach could be pacing me, waiting for the misstep that would allow them to share Dan’s fate with me.
At the head of the beach, calves and thighs burning from my sprint up the sandy margin, I stopped, bent over, chest heaving. A survey of the path I’d run showed no one following me, no one close, at all. Where Dan had been were several smaller shapes, islands in the crimson pool surrounding them. I could distinguish the forms of Sophie and the twins next to the carnage; although their features were difficult to pick out in any detail. Only their eyes were clearly visible, flashing across the distance, and that because they were watching me. All of the white things were. To a one, they had turned in my direction. Dozens, scores of gold eyes regarded me. In the midst of the heaving ocean beyond them, a tremor passed along the great beast held there. The earth rumbled under my feet. The tremor concentrated at the fissure above the waves in which the end of the Fisherman’s line was embedded. The split trembled, and widened, top and bottom retracting to reveal a gold expanse whose center was bisected by a black ellipse. An eye the size of a stadium cast its gaze out over the scene in front of it.
If the Fisherman’s regard had buffeted me like a strong wind, this creature’s attention howled over me with hurricane force. There was no emotion in it. What streamed from the enormous eye was either so deep below or so high above any discrete sentiment as to be unrecognizable as such. There was only absence, a void as big and grand as everything. It wasn’t white, or black; it wasn’t anything. Perfect in its nothingness, its nullity, it had been contravened, somehow, sundered, confined to the form before me. Imprisoned, but not separated, it was the black ocean, and the pale creatures grasping the lines that held it, and the Fisherman tied to his rock, and me. To understand this, to appreciate it, might be the beginning of a kind of wisdom.
It was not a wisdom I had any desire for. The great beast’s awareness saturating the very air, I ran into the woods. The trees grew more closely together, here, their leaf-crowns closer to the ground, the outermost branches weaving around one another. My arms brushed an especially low-hanging limb, and what felt like a dozen razor blades parted the sleeves of my raincoat and shirt, and the skin they covered, in as many places. I sucked in my breath, stumbling as the pain flared up my arm, but although the fingers of my other hand came away bloody from their exploration of my injuries, I did not slow my flight. Tiny white cracks had begun to open in my surroundings, the trees, the leaves, the ground, all of it, as if I were running through a very old painting whose surface had dried out. I struggled not to glance down, afraid I would see myself fracturing, too.
Horror so pure it arrested any thought more elaborate than Run, filled me. For that reason, though I saw the ground ahead fall away, heard the sound of moving water, I continued forward without pause, until I had raced over the top of the bank and was half-sliding, half-falling down it into the galloping stream below.
Warm water embraced me, tumbling me end over end. I seemed to pass a long time submerged in depths shot through with black currents. Dark shapes darted around me. I kicked my legs, pulled my arms, attempting to right myself. White cracks split the water. I pulled my arms and kicked my legs. All at once, the stream caught hold of me and whisked me forward. Lungs at the point of bursting, I pushed for the surface and broke through. Spitting out brackish water, I inhaled lungfuls of air. Already, my boots had filled with water and were dragging me back under. I slid my legs against one another and forced the right boot off. The other held tight, until I ducked my head beneath the waves so I could grab the boot and twist it off.
Feet unencumbered, it was easier for me to keep my head above water, which was good, because the stream slid into heavy rapids. Gray boulders rose amidst the churning foam, signposting the underwater labyrinth through which the stream was racing. A low slab of stone loomed in my path; I breast-stroked around it, skimming the tops of a cluster of rocks that smacked my knees and shins. The current took me between the halves of a massive, split boulder, and dumped me over a short waterfall onto a pile of stones close enough to the water’s surface for it to offer no cushion. Something cracked in my chest. I grasped at the stones below me, but they were too slippery, the current too strong. A rock like the finger of a giant thrust out of the water ahead of me. I threw my arm over my head. The impact shocked through me. The stream rolled me off the stone and spun me into a wide pool. Below me, clouds of sediment billowed in the water’s depths. I was finding it difficult to keep above them: my clothes were waterlogged, and my body seemed to consist of more bruises, breaks, and cuts than it did muscles to propel me to the edge of this quieter patch. To be sure, I was exhausted, but the image of that great eye unlocking, of Dan’s fate on the beach, offered sufficient incentive for me to force my limbs into an approximation of the dog-paddle.
I didn’t see the figure that swam up out of the murk below, wasn’t aware of anything until the hand seized my ankle and yanked me under. In the time it took me to realize what had happened, I was dragged to the edge of the churning sediment. I knew it must be one of the pale creatures, possibly Sophie, finishing what had begun on the beach. My knife was long gone, lost at some point during my flight. I kicked at the thing with my free foot, but even panicked, I had little strength left me. Releasing my leg, the creature caught my belt and hauled me down until we were floating face-to-face.
Her hair fluttering in the current, Marie regarded me with her shining eyes. My surprise was succeeded by resignation. Of course, I thought. Sophie takes care of Dan, and Marie sees to me. I could almost appreciate the symmetry. I hoped that she would simply keep me here until I had no choice but to inhale the stream; after the initial unpleasantness, I had heard, drowning was supposed to be a peaceful way to die—unlike being torn apart by mouths jammed with fangs. Marie caught my shoulders, and pushed me deeper, down into the sediment cloud.
Immediately, I lost sight of her, of everything but the murk tumbling about me. Bubbles leaked from my lips. Whatever acceptance I’d imagined I’d felt departed, swept aside by a desire to escape that had me twisting in Marie’s grasp, striking her arms with my fists. All at once, her hands were gone, and I swam for the surface with my lungs searing, my arms and legs full of lead. I emerged near a shore fronted by trees I recognized, hemlock and birch, maple. Screaming with the effort, I paddled until the water grew shallow. I crawled out of the water onto dry land, where I collapsed, coughing up the water that had found its way into my lungs. Spent, shivering, I surrendered to the blackness that rose around me in a tide.
VI
Hundred-Year Flood
A pair of high school kids, who claimed they were out on a hike, but who I suspect were searching for a secluded spot to experiment with illicit substances of one form or another, found me washed up on the south shore of Dutchman’s Creek, almost to the Hudson. My clothes were shredded, my body scraped, battered, and cut, and I was running a fever high enough to induce hallucinations, which was what the doctors, nurses, and police detectives who attended me made of my more fantastical claims. The doctors and nurses were present because I was in Wiltwyck Hospital, being treated for the infection that was causing my temperature to spike and was proving stubbornly resistant to a range of increasingly powerful antibiotics. The detectives drifted in and out of my room because, in my delirium, I ranted about Dan’s death. There was little trouble tracing my movements: the cops checked with Ho
ward, who verified that I’d been in for breakfast with another fellow, tall, with red hair and a scar all the way up the right-hand side of his face. The two of us had been bound for Dutchman’s Creek, Howard said, though he’d advised against it. (I don’t know for sure, but I doubt he shared Lottie Schmidt’s long, strange tale with them.) After a brief search, the detectives came across my tacklebox on the stone ledge where I’d caught what Marie had called a nymph; of course, the fish and my rod were nowhere to be found. Downstream a ways, the police located Dan’s gear, which apparently had been washed there by the flooded creek. Of Dan himself, there was no trace, and this, together with the wounds on my arm, which seemed to have been inflicted with a knife or similar weapon, raised their suspicions as to what, exactly, had transpired during our fishing trip.
I didn’t help matters any by ranting about Dan’s attempt to club me with a rock so he could feed my essence to a centuries-old magician, or his death at the teeth of his dead wife and children. It sounded mad, yes, but combined with Dan’s apparent disappearance and the cuts on me, the scenario I was narrating seemed as if it might be describing the substance, if not the exact details, of an actual event. I was under suspicion; though what friends and co-workers the detectives interviewed spoke well of me; nor did Dan’s friends or family voice any reservations about our fishing trips. Had the remains of Dan’s body turned up, I’m not certain what effect they would have had on the cops. I want to say they would have exonerated me beyond a shadow of a doubt, but the same evidence can lead to diametrically opposed conclusions, depending on who’s reviewing it. Of Dan, however, there remained no sign, despite a widening of the search area to include the stretch of the Hudson south of where Dutchman’s Creek empties into it. In the end, Dan would be declared officially missing, and a few of his cousins from up around Phoenicia would drive down to see to the disposition of his goods, the selling of his and Sophie’s house.
