John Langan - The Fisherman

Lottie doesn’t scream. She doesn’t drop the almonds, either. It’s funny, she later says the first thought to barge into her head was, Don’t drop the almonds . She clutches the bag to her chest. Helen lurches forward, tugging the door closed behind her and plunging the little space into blackness. Lottie breathes in sharply and retreats a step. The almonds , she’s thinking, the almonds . Helen stays where she is. Lottie can hear her breathing, a slow, labored inhale and a wet, bubbling exhale, what you might expect to hear from a fish dying on the shore, drowning in air. Lottie stands in the darkness, so afraid she can’t breathe. Dead , she thinks, I must be dead . Before Helen closed the door, Lottie had a quick look at her, at those yellow eyes, those blank, pitiless eyes, which she’s sure can see her plain as day. She can smell the woman, can smell her death, a reek of rotten flowers and spoiled flesh that rapidly fills the air in the closet. Lottie gags, momentarily feeling her breakfast churning at the back of her throat. At the sound of Lottie choking, Helen chuckles, a liquid wheeze that sends goosebumps chasing each other across Lottie’s skin. She swallows hard, forcing her legs to take two trembling steps back, until she’s pressed up against the closet’s rear wall. Her left hand pressing that bag of almonds to her chest as if it’s a bag of diamonds, her right hand flails out in the darkness, searching for anything with which she might defend herself. She tries to remember what she saw in this part of the closet and can’t. All she can feel are the ends of bags of salt, stacked one on top of the other and immovable as a heap of bricks. She digs her fingers into one of the bags of salt, waiting for the dead woman’s advance.

Helen chuckles again, that liquid wheeze. Her laugh goes on and on, filling the closet the way her awful smell has. She laughs and she laughs, and Lottie suddenly understands that the woman isn’t laughing, she’s speaking. What Lottie took for one continuous chuckle is actually sentences. They’re in no language she’s ever heard, and between Rainer and living in the camp, she’s encountered a few, living and dead. The words seem little more than phlegmy coughs, grunts, and clicks of the tongue. For the briefest of moments, Lottie wonders if this is Helen’s original language, what she spoke prior to coming to America, but she rejects that idea immediately. She knows, in the way you just know some things, that this is speech Helen has brought back with her from the grave. It is a death-tongue, the tongue you learn once you leave this life for lands uncharted, and Lottie realizes she understands what Helen is saying.

It isn’t so much that Lottie is able to translate Helen’s words as it is that she sees what the woman is saying. More than sees: for a moment, she’s there. One second, she’s standing in a dark closet full of the reek of death. The next, she’s looking out at a vast, black ocean. Great, foaming waves rear and collapse as far as the eye can see, while overhead churning clouds flicker with lightning. When Lottie and her family crossed the Atlantic, they passed through a storm, and she well remembers gazing out at the waves bursting themselves against and over their ship’s prow and deck. Boarding that ship, Lottie had thought it the most enormous thing she’d ever seen; but as it slid up and down the heaving ocean like a toy in a bathtub, its hull sounding the successive booms of the waves’ relentless pounding, she knew that she’d been wrong, that here was true enormity. Now, faced with the black ocean, she confronts a vastness that makes the Atlantic seem little more than a pond. As she watches, huge backs slide up out of and back under the waves; Lottie’s reasonably sure they aren’t whales, since no whale she knows of sports a row of spikes down its spine. She has the sense of more, and bigger, beasts waiting beneath the water’s surface, forms as immense as a nightmare. The ocean is everywhere. Not only does it stretch to the horizon in all directions, it’s under everything as well. I don’t mean underground, I mean — it’s fundamental, you might say. If what’s around us is a picture, then this is what it’s drawn on. Reverend Mapple had a word for it, the subjectile . Lottie said it was like, if you could cut a hole in the air, black water would come pouring out of it.

Helen keeps talking. Lottie hears her there a few feet away from her, but also from across a long distance, as if she isn’t just looking at the black ocean, she’s there. From where Lottie is, which is kind of floating above the scene, a little bit beyond the reach of the highest waves, like she’s in a hot-air balloon, she can see that the surface of the water is crowded, full of floating objects. There are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. She can’t tell how many there are. They cover the ocean in all directions. As she peers at them, she realizes that they’re heads, the heads of people submerged in the water up to their necks. It’s as if the biggest shipwreck in history has occurred, and here are the survivors. Only, they aren’t thrashing about and screaming, the way you’d expect people in fear of their lives to do. Lottie thinks they might be dead already, that this might be a sea of corpses. She focuses on one in particular, a girl, and it’s like looking through a telescope. Suddenly, she can see the girl’s face up-close. It’s frozen, the eyes open wide and unblinking, a strand of oily seaweed tangled in her matted hair. Her skin is alabaster-white, her lips blue, but her mouth is moving. She’s speaking, in a low monotone. If Lottie concentrates, she can pick out the girl’s words.

It isn’t very pretty. She’s joined a monologue about a man, one of the girl’s father’s friends. Using the kind of language that would earn Lottie a smack upside the head from Clara and a night in her room without supper, the girl is describing the most pornographic of fantasies about this fellow. Lottie wouldn’t repeat what she’d heard, and I don’t see any need to improvise, but the girl’s inventions made her cheeks burn. Nor is that the worst. From lust, the girl moves to anger. When she’s finished describing what she’d do with the older man, she starts in on her sisters. They’re younger, and has the girl ever stopped loathing them? From the first moment her mother had announced her pregnancy, there was that much less of her and the girl’s father for her. The birth of her first sister made a bad situation intolerable. Her second sister’s appearance, the following year, poured salt in a gaping wound. She, who had had nothing to do with these babies’ creation, no say in the decision to bring them into the world, was expected to act as their third parent, to surrender her life to her sisters. She never lost the sensation she’d experienced holding them when they were infants, the maddening awareness of their delicacy, their fragility. Their paper-thin skulls, the soft-spots gently throbbing, had offered her an almost unbearable temptation, kissing-cousin to what she felt handling her mother’s fine china, that urge to hurl the teacups against the wall, smash the saucers to the floor, watch it all burst into fine shards and powder. It was that same feeling, but magnified, intensified to the tenth power. Cradling her sisters in her arms, she sensed herself standing at the edge of a precipice, one step away from a lunge that would ever end. That sensation, that awareness of the violence trembling at the edge of her fingertips, was delicious. It was like drawing your nails slowly over a patch of skin that was itching, so that you felt it in the back of your mouth. There was the same mixture of pleasure and agony. As her sisters grew, so did the possibilities for harm. How often had she let her hands linger on their necks, trailing over their soft, downy skin, imagining what it would be like to slide her fingers around them and squeeze? How often, when she was drying the dishes, had she tested the heft of one of the sharp knives, imagining what it would be like to press the point against their throats, watch the skin dimple around it, then push until it slid all the way in? How often, playing with them, had she shoved a little too hard, pinched a little too fiercely, passed off as accident what was purest intention? How often had she stood at that precipice, one foot raised, balancing, feeling the emptiness in front of her beckoning, calling her as intimately as any lover? All it would take to send her plummeting was a sudden breeze, and how she prayed that breeze would come.