John Langan - The Fisherman

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.