John Langan - The Fisherman

With a shock, Lottie realizes that the girl she’s been listening to is herself. That’s her mouth saying those horrible things. That’s Gretchen and Christina whose lives are being threatened. That’s Italo playing lead in that x-rated fantasy. Glancing about, she sees that she — the other one, I mean — is surrounded by her family, Clara, Rainer, and her sisters forming a tight circle around her, her aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents encircling them. Everyone’s face is frozen in the same, blank stare, and everyone is carrying on their own monologue. None is any nicer than what Lottie hears her other-self saying. Quite a few are worse. Here’s Clara, regretting that she never brought that tinker who came around the house every other week up to her bedroom. He was tall, and his hands and feet were big, not to mention that nose. Maybe he’d have been able to satisfy her. Here’s Rainer, bemoaning the idiots who surround him, the buffoons he’s forced to spend his days beside and who wouldn’t understand the least of his thoughts, who understand only the satisfaction of their animal urges. Although, to be honest, none of his wretched family is as smart as even the dumbest of his co-workers, but what can you expect, with a house full of women? Here’s Gretchen, wishing she were strong enough to hold the pillow over Christina’s face until she could be the youngest again. Here’s Christina, wondering what it would be like to set fire to that dog that scares her with its barking every time she walks past it — and while she’s at it, why not set fire to the old woman who owns the dog and laughs at her fright? And so and so on out from there, everyone uttering their most secret depravities.

Lottie feels her skin crawling, as if the words she’s heard are ants scrambling across it. Her head spins. She claps her hands over her ears, but it’s too late. Those ants have already found their way into her head and are running madly round and round her brain. She pulls away from the scene, lowers the telescope, so to speak, until she’s back above the highest waves. The roar of the ocean, she understands, is the accumulated voices of this multitude, of who knows how many monologues of rage, pain, and frustration. She hangs in space, still listening to Helen speaking in the darkness, and the sea begins to churn beneath her. When the Schmidts crossed the Atlantic, Lottie had stood at the railing on the front deck watching the sea froth as the ship sliced through it. Now the water below bubbles and foams in much the same way, as if it’s a giant pot under which the gas has been turned to high. The people floating there are tossed in all directions; despite which, as far as Lottie can tell, they continue talking. Something is coming. Lottie can feel it rising beneath her, shouldering the ocean aside as it ascends from unimaginable depths. Something is coming. Lottie hears Helen’s voice rising, feels the bag of slivered almonds pressed against her breast. Something is coming. Lottie can see its outline forming in the water, a rounded shape larger than any object she’s ever seen, larger than the ship that brought her to America, larger than Brooklyn Bridge, larger than the dam her father is helping to build. It’s drawing closer, increasing in size as it comes, until it breaks the ocean’s surface and Lottie sees that it’s a mouth, a titanic maw ringed with jagged teeth the size of houses. It continues to rise toward her, waterfalls streaming down its sides, waves crashing against it, hundreds of people sliding down into its cavernous gullet. It’s like the mouth of an inconceivably huge snake, one of those monsters you read about in ancient myths, so big it wraps around the earth and holds its own tail in its mouth. Lottie sees that it’s closing, that its edges are rising to meet one another, and that when they do she’ll be caught within them, dragged down to wherever it is this thing calls home. Lottie tries to withdraw further, to raise herself to a safer distance, but it’s no use. She’s as high as she can go. Helen is shouting, the enormous jaws climbing with each guttural cough and grunt. Lottie feels herself overwhelmed. The sheer size of this thing — it’s as if the immensity alone threatens to extinguish her, blow her out the way a strong wind would a candle. Faced with that mouth, that throat leading down to endless depths, Lottie feels herself flicker. She tenses, pushing the bag of almonds into herself so fiercely it actually hurts, and in that momentary flare of pain she’s saved. Without really thinking about it, she clutches the bag, wheels back her arm, and throws the bag as hard as she can at the sound of Helen’s voice. The jaws are scaling the sky to either side of her, each one taller than any building, when the bag of slivered almonds strikes Helen full in the face.

With a squawk, she breaks off her speech. Instantly, the enormous jaws, the black ocean, the crowds of people, vanish, and Lottie’s in the darkened closet. All strength gone from her legs, she slumps against the wall. It’s as if she can breathe again. She sucks in lungfuls of air, not caring that it’s rich with Helen’s stench, while her heart throbs so hard it makes her nauseated. The closet spins around her, which squeezing her eyes closed helps only a little. She hears Helen shuffling toward her and does what she should have in the first place: she screams, as long and loud as she can. When Helen grabs her mouth with one cold, damp hand, Lottie lashes out, punching and kicking. The dead woman responds in kind, slamming Lottie’s head with her other hand. Fireworks flash behind Lottie’s eyes, and she swings out into unconsciousness and back. Someone is pounding on the closet door, shouting for whoever’s inside to open up. That voice rapidly becomes a chorus. Helen hisses, no word in her death-tongue, just a sign of frustration. She heaves Lottie into the air and pivots around. Frantic, Lottie tears at Helen’s fingers, trying to pry them loose. She can hear her mother’s voice among those at the door. She kicks furiously, connecting with her captor’s legs. Helen staggers, but maintains her grip. “He waits, girl,” she says. “He will always be waiting for you.”

Then Lottie’s flying through the air. One instant, she’s hanging suspended in space. The next, she’s colliding with the closet door. She falls to the floor, and the door springs open, spilling the crowd outside it in. Lottie’s co-workers pour into the closet so fast they don’t notice her lying in front of them, and they trip and fall over her. All at once, she’s at the bottom of a pile of men and women swearing furiously at one another as they try to regain their footing. Lottie’s voice, knocked out of her by the crash into the door, returns, and she screams for help, screams for her mother to help her. Clara hears her above the din and starts hauling bodies off her, yelling at them to get up, that’s her daughter they’re crushing under their fat asses. A pair of hands catches Lottie beneath the arms, and she scrambles to her feet and into Clara’s embrace. Lottie wraps herself around her mother, hugs her in that self-abandoned way she had as a child. “What?” Clara says, “All this over a bag of almonds?”

That’s it. At her mother’s joke, Lottie bursts into tears, sobbing as if her heart had broken. She continues to cry as Clara leads her out of the closet and out of the bakery. She cries all the way home, and after Clara has undressed her and put her to bed. She cries herself to uneasy sleep, and later, Clara will tell her that, even then, she continued crying.

As for Helen, she’s gone, disappeared from the closet as if she opened a door in the darkness and stepped through it. Traces of her remain. Her smell, which sickens half a dozen people to the point of vomiting, lingers in the air, while her muddy trail dirties its floor. Seeing the dirty footprints, Clara knew what had happened, which is why she removes Lottie to the safety of their home. Why Helen threatened her daughter Clara isn’t sure, but she guesses it’s connected to whatever it is that kept Rainer at his books for most of last night.