John Langan - The Fisherman

“Sadly,” Rainer says with a grin, “we do not have a handsome prince at our disposal to ride in and save our daughter. We have only her father and his books. Those books tell me that to break the spell Lottie is under is a dangerous thing. I must step carefully, or Lottie will fall into the mirror and be lost. So we must go ahead slowly. Trapping that woman is the first step.”

“And the second?” Clara asks.

“We leave her there,” Rainer says. When he sees the panic flash across Clara’s face, he adds, “Not for long. A few hours should do. She must be weakened.”

“So you can destroy her.”

“Eventually, yes, I will destroy her,” Rainer says. “But first I must make her answer questions.”

“Questions?” Clara says.

“Yes,” Rainer says. “Bad as she is, the woman is not the true source of what has befallen Lottie. That is—”

“The man in the big house,” Clara says.

“Exactly,” Rainer says. “He may not be the true source, but I do not think I need to go any further. I think I can stop all this if I can deal with him. The problem facing me is, I don’t know anything about him. This is why I must question the woman. Once I have learned what I can from her, I will be more ready to meet her creator.”

“What about him?” Clara asks.

“What about him?” Rainer answers. “I told you, I don’t know anything—”

“I heard you,” Clara says, “and I’m wondering, if you don’t know anything about him, how you are so sure you can destroy him, too? For the matter, how do you know you can destroy the woman?”

“Ach, her, she is a water-thing. As for her master…” Rainer frowns. “I don’t know if I can overcome him, not for sure. If the man is a dabbler, someone playing with fancy toys — someone like me — then I will settle with him and settle quickly. If he is more serious — if he is a true Schwarzkunstler, then — let us say there is room for doubt. I believe I have learned a way to — compromise him, you could say — so much that he will no longer be of concern to us. I could be mistaken, of course.”

“Whoever this man is,” Clara says, “surely he must be what you call a dabbler. What would an actual Schwarzkunstler want with this place?”

Rainer shrugs. “Who can say? In the books, such men’s motives are often unclear, mysterious. They appear in strange places, in little, out-of-the-way villages, or in the middle of forests, or on the tops of mountains. Remember the fairy tales, all the witches and wizards with their houses in the woods. Maybe they want privacy for their work. Maybe there is something about the places they choose to live. Maybe the world is thinner there. Maybe they can hear the sounds they are listening for more clearly.”

“You think this is one of those spots?” Clara says, waving her hand at the camp, taking it in and dismissing it with the same gesture.

“There are stories about this part of the country,” Rainer says. “There is Irving and his Sketch Book , with old Rip Van Winkle meeting the strange little men in the mountains.”

“That tripe?” Clara says. “The man stole those stories from German sources. They have nothing to do with this place.”

“The same stories may hold true for different places,” Rainer says, “or different times. It does not matter. What matters is that the water-thing has been contained and will not be able to work any more of her mischief. Lottie has been removed from immediate danger. When I return from work, we see this bad business through to its end.”

Clara believes her husband, but she’s less than happy at having to wait until the later afternoon for him to resolve this situation. Of course she isn’t going to the bakery today. Even if she were willing to leave Lottie alone in such a state, with the dead woman in the house across the street — trapped, Rainer says, but who can be sure? — she figures her place is here. So after he’s gone, his face still lit by that strange light, she pulls a chair up to Lottie’s bedside, and settles in to wait.

It would be a lie to say the time passes quickly. It never does, when you want it to. Lottie does not awaken, but her sleep appears to be more restful. It is. For Lottie, it’s as if a curtain has been drawn over her vision of the black ocean, the other her. She’s in a dim place, surrounded by a kind of heavy fog. On the other side of it, she can sense the black ocean’s heave and fall, but the fog insulates her from its worst effects. Though far from happy, she is calm.

When Rainer walks up the street to his house later that day, he’s accompanied by a small group of men. There’s Italo, naturally, and a pair of brothers, Angelo and Andrea — also Italian, obviously — and a fellow named Jacob Schmidt. That’s right, same as Lottie’s family. No relation, though. Jacob’s Austrian, a tall fellow with thick brown hair and a big round chin; his eyes set too close to a short nose that was broken at some point in the past and that sits above a mustache which droops down either side of his mouth. Because of a bad stutter, he mostly keeps to himself. He’s sweet on Lottie, always waits to be served by her at the bakery. Clara’s noted his interest, teased her daughter about it. In response, Lottie’s turned scarlet and told her mother to hush. Once Rainer learned what was going on, he declared that he hadn’t left his home and crossed the ocean to have his child marry a damned Austrian. I don’t know what Rainer had against the Austrians. Whatever it was, it didn’t stop him from accepting Jacob’s offer to join his little company.

It will be from Jacob Schmidt that Lottie will learn the events of that afternoon and evening; although it will take her the better part of two decades to hear all of it. Neither her father nor her mother nor Italo will say anything about what happens first at the house across the street, and then up at the Dort house. To say that Lottie will accept Jacob’s proposal in a few years’ time so that she can finally find out what took place while she lingered in that gray space would not be fair to the man. He’s a hard worker, a kind man who will do everything in his power to ensure that she and their eventual children do not want for anything. It is fair to say, however, that Jacob’s conduct that afternoon and evening will help ensure that, when he goes to Rainer to ask for his daughter’s hand, the older man will put aside his distaste for Austrians and give Jacob his consent.

By the time Lottie’s husband forces the last words of his account past his quivering lips, her father will have been dead five years, taken by what’s at the time called senility. Most likely, it was Alzheimer’s of a particularly aggressive stripe, hacking away great slabs of Rainer’s personality in a few months, until there was nothing left but an empty shell the disease would claim soon thereafter. Clara will have relocated south to Beacon, to live with her youngest, Christina, and her family. When she at last has the story complete, Lottie will be near the age her parents were as its events were unfolding, and I’d be surprised if she doesn’t reflect on that fact. What happens in those few days looms over the rest of her life like a mountain in whose shadow she’s been fated to dwell. How strange to think that the people in the thick of it, the man and woman whose decisions set her beside that peak, might be herself, Jacob, their neighbors in Woodstock.

At quitting time, Rainer and his group don’t waste any time. They march up the street to the house formerly occupied by George, Helen, and their children, now covered in marks it makes your eyes ache to look at. They’re carrying axes they’ve borrowed from work — as you might suppose, not the kind of activity the company favors, or allows, for the matter, but the clerk from whom Rainer asked for them raised no objection, nor did any of the other men milling around. Everyone knows about what’s been happening, and about Rainer’s increasing involvement with it, and if he and the quartet of men with him are on their way to do something about it, then no one will notice if a few axes are misplaced for a night. Rainer halts the group outside the front door to the dead woman’s house, where the silver knife he flung into the dirt has continued to vibrate, ever-so-slightly, throughout the day. The men can feel whatever it is is causing the knife to shiver, a wrongness in the air that floods their mouths with the taste of metal, twists their stomachs like spoiled milk. They grimace, spit. Rainer asks Italo for his clasp knife, which Italo fishes from his trouser pocket, opens, and passes to him. Gripping his axe midway down the shaft, Rainer uses the knife to cut three marks into the wood just below the blade. Without being asked, Italo holds his axe out for the same treatment, and the others follow suit. The symbol Rainer cuts into each shaft resembles a cross, or an x, a pair of lines bisecting one another — except for the third line, which loops around the other two in an arabesque that looks too elaborate for the casual flick of the wrist Rainer uses to produce it. It’s hard to tell where this line begins and where it ends. The more Jacob studies it, the more of it there is to study. He can hear Rainer speaking, giving them some sort of command, but he can’t yoke the words together into any kind of sense. That third line seems to pass behind the other two; there seems to be a tremendous depth concealed there, and Jacob is aware of himself floating over this depth, high, high over it—