John Langan - The Fisherman

Now, though, I shook my head and said, “No, Dan, I’m afraid not.”

“What?” Dan said. “Why not?”

“I have…appreciated my visit with Marie. But it’s time for it to be done.”

“You can’t be serious. It’s your wife: she can be yours, again.”

“I understand what’s on offer.”

“Then how can you turn it down?”

“It’s — I think I prefer to meet up with her in my own time.”

“But—”

“You want to stay here. I get it.”

“You could help him,” Dan said.

“He’ll have to make do without me.”

“You would be helping me.”

“I thought you already had everything you wanted.”

“It’s the Fisherman,” Dan said. “What I’m giving him may not be enough. He might have to conserve his energy. If he does, I could lose Sophie and the boys. I can’t do that, Abe, not again. The first time almost killed me. A second would be too much. If you joined with us—”

I glanced at the Fisherman, held fast beside us. With his skin bleached and worn by brine, his scraggle of a beard a-crawl with something like sand lice, his robes grown part of his body through the hooks that had driven them into him, he looked almost a natural formation, himself. His white eyes stared at the colossal form to which he was connected with such intensity, it was no trouble believing that all his being was bent to his struggle with it. It was hard to credit him having spoken to Dan, at all, even drops of information dripped out over a course of days. Easier to imagine him absorbed by the black water smashing against the flanks of the beast he’d snared.

Those pale eyes swung a second, longer glance in my direction, bringing with them the weight of the Fisherman’s full attention. Most everyone, I suppose, has felt the gaze of someone whose burden of experience renders their regard a tangible thing. What poured from the Fisherman’s eyes drove me back a step, would have forced me to my knees had he not returned it to the scene before him. It was threaded with currents of emotion so powerful they were visible. There was rage, a short man in a dirty tunic and pants gripping his sword two-handed and swinging it down onto the back of a tall woman with long brown hair as she bent over the bodies of her children. There was pain, that same woman and children lying mutilated in wide pools of blood. There was hope, a suggestive passage in what might have been Greek, beneath a woodcut of a fanciful sea-serpent, sporting amidst stylized waves. There was determination, a knock on yet another door to ask yet another old man or woman if they were in possession of certain books. The emotions flowed into a current whose name I couldn’t give; if pressed, I would have said something like want, a gap or crack through the very core of the man. It was what had sustained this man when he had been dragged into the black ocean by one of the ropes he had employed in catching what he’d once glimpsed in a book. It had allowed him to struggle against the great beast, to reach through this underplace to a place that lay deeper still, and to draw on what he found there until he could begin to bring the monster that had broken free of his control once more under his sway. It had permitted him to rope himself to this rock as ballast to hold the beast. Sudden and overwhelming, the impression swept over me that the figure I was seeing was only part of the Fisherman, and a fairly small one, at that. The greater portion of him, I understood, was out of view, a giant with the marble skin and blank eyes of a classical sculpture. The apprehension was terrifying, made more so by the other emotions that impressed themselves on me: an amusement bitter as lemon, and a malice keen as the edge of a razor.

Someone was talking — Dan, continuing to plead his case. Without another word to him, I turned and started back the way that had brought me here. I managed half a dozen steps before Dan caught my shoulder and spun me around. His face was scarlet, the scar descending its right side bone white. He was shouting, spittle flying from his lips. “What the fuck, Abe? What the fuck? You’re going to leave? You’re going to abandon me? What about Sophie? What about Jonas and Jason? Are you thinking of us? Are you thinking of Marie? What about Marie, Abe? What about her?” Behind him, Marie maintained her vigil of the beast.

“Dan,” I said. “Stop. It’s too much. He’s—”

“He’s what?” Dan punctuated his question with a shove from his big hands that had the force of his long legs behind it. It sent me stumbling over the smooth, rounded stones. My foot slipped, and my balance went. I twisted as I fell, trying to catch myself, but all that accomplished was to bring me down on my right side. My arm, my ribs, my hip smashed into the waiting rocks; the pain forced the air from my lungs. Through some miracle, my head escaped colliding with a stone, and when I saw Dan bending towards me, my first thought was, He’s helping me . But he wasn’t close enough to offer me a hand, and he straightened almost immediately. Not until I saw the large, bluish rock his fingers stretched around did I understand what he was doing. “I don’t want to do this,” he said, “I really don’t. It’s — if he has your strength, then he won’t have to take them away from me. I — if there were any other way, Abe. Honestly. I don’t want to do this.”

“Then don’t,” I managed, already aware that my words hadn’t registered, because Dan was raising the stone, his body tensing as he made ready to lunge into a blow. That the man I counted my closest friend was about to inflict grievous harm on me, if not kill me outright, was the most monstrous thing I had encountered yet this strange, awful day. A wave of nausea rolled over me. Even as I watched him shift his grip, moving his fingers to one end of his improvised weapon in order to better control it, I half-expected him to pause, lower and allow the rock to fall from his hand, and shake the sense back into his head. Only when Dan was moving forward, swinging the stone towards me, his eyes wide, his lips pressed tightly together, did a surge of adrenaline send me rolling out of his way. His attack missed, the rock cracking on the one that had been under my head and flying from his grasp. My feet tangled with his, sweeping him to the ground but preventing me from rising. Instead, I kicked furiously, pushing away from where he lay stunned. This entire time, I had not forgotten the knife in my pocket, and as I struggled to my feet, I had it out and in hand.

“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.”