John Langan - The Fisherman

A half-second, less, before I heard him speak, I registered the presence filling the archway that led to the back door. When he said, “Abe,” I knew it was Dan.

Or something that looked an awful lot like my old friend. Tall, sharp-featured, hair red and curly, he even bore the scar that lined the right side of Dan’s face, descending his neck to halfway down his chest. But his naked skin was a corpse-pale to which the candlelight added no warmth, and his eyes glittered flat and gold as any fish’s. On some floor of my brain, I suppose I must have been anticipating this, dreading it, yet the shock of seeing Dan standing at the entrance to my kitchen like this fell over like a wall of freezing water. Clutching the cooking spray to my chest as if it were some kind of relic, I said, “Dan?”

“The one and only,” he said with a pleasantness that was halfway to snarling.

“What are you doing here?”

“You didn’t think I’d forget about my old fishing buddy, did you? My old pal,” he said, bringing teeth that suddenly appeared sharp as a barracuda’s together on the last l.

“Dan,” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry, Abe: there’s no hard feelings,” he said. “At first, there were. There were a lot of hard feelings. I have to tell you. You can’t go through what I did and not emerge from it feeling a tad ornery. You were there for part of it; you can understand. If I could have come to you then…

“But that’s all in the past, isn’t it? I am what I’ve become, and you — you’ve gone back to fishing, haven’t you? With that family next door, that cute little girl. Not much chance of her trying to sacrifice you to an undying wizard, is there?”

“What is it you want?” I said. “Why are you here, now?”

“I’ve been close to you before,” Dan said, “you have no idea. But you’re right: this is different. The storm that’s just passed has widened the crack that leads to this place. With the situation this fluid — sorry — I couldn’t resist paying you a visit.”

“If I’d known you were coming—”

“You’d have baked a cake?”

“I was going to say, I’d have baited a hook.”

Dan’s brows lowered, his mouth rippling, filling with curved fangs that retreated a moment later. “You did this to me,” he said when his mouth was clear. “What I am is the work of your hand.”

Unexpected, a wave of pity threatened to swamp me. I swallowed it. “What you are is the result of your own actions,” I said. “Now get out.”

“It’s not that easy,” Dan said. “I’ve come a long way to see you, Abe, an unbelievably long way. You can’t ask me to turn away the second after I arrive.”

“I don’t believe the rules of hospitality apply to monsters,” I said.

“Abe,” Dan said, his face shimmering, another, inhuman one coming into view, “you’re starting to hurt my feelings.”

“Dan,” I said, “go.”

Whatever words he was trying to pronounce, he was having difficulty forcing through the fangs jutting from his mouth. His speech had become guttural, a harsh, grating noise that rasped against my ears. My vision wavered, and for an instant, something threatened to come into view, a huge shape that was somehow in the same place as Dan. He stepped into the kitchen, raising a hand whose fingertips had sprouted claws. I held the can of cooking spray out from me and depressed the button on its top. A narrow cone of pressurized oil hissed across the room at him. On its way, it touched the tops of the candles on the table and blossomed into a tongue of fire. Yellow and orange flame wreathed Dan’s torso and head. Shrieking, he stumbled backwards, while I emptied the rest of my improvised flame-thrower at him. Light and heat filled the kitchen. I threw my arm up to shield my face, feeling around the counter with my free hand for something else to spray through the candles at him.

I needn’t have bothered. Arms flailing, Dan ran from the house, out the screen door, and onto the porch, from which he vaulted into the surrounding water. Although I would have sworn it could not have been any more than one or two feet deep, the water swallowed him whole, sending up a great, hissing column of foul-smelling smoke where he’d entered. I’d followed close on his heels, a can of spray paint I hoped was flammable in my hand. When he did not resurface, I set it down on the porch and, suddenly dizzy to the point of fainting, slumped against the outside of the house. For what could have been a long time, I remained there, my heart galloping, my head full of white noise.

After my pulse had settled to a trot, I pushed myself to standing. The burner on the portable stove was still on. Absurdly, I was starving, but I crossed the porch and turned the gas off. I paused, surveying the flat reach of dark water behind my house for further signs of Dan. There were none I could see.

Which did not mean the water was empty. On the contrary, as my eyes adjusted to the early evening, I saw that the water was full of objects, crowded with shapes whose details my vision was on the verge of deciphering, until it did, and what I recognized had me in the house, the back door closed and me locking it. For the rest of the night, I stayed in the upstairs bedroom with the door locked and the bed and dresser pushed against it. I didn’t sleep. The next morning, when the Sheriff’s deputies pulled up in their boat to offer me the choice of rescue, I leapt onboard with tears in my eyes, which I let them attribute to my age. What I saw out there in the water set me to wrestling with this story, with the strange, knotted length of it. I’m not sure what else is left for me to do with it, except tell you what I saw in the water.

People — rows and rows of people floated there, most of them submerged to their shoulders, a few to their chins, fewer still to their eyes. I couldn’t guess their number, because they extended into the deeper dark. Their skin was damp, white, their hair lank, their eyes gleaming gold. It didn’t take me long to pick out Marie in the midst of them, not as close as I would have supposed. Her face was blank, as were those of the children to either side of her. A girl and a boy, their features in that in-between stage when childhood is beginning to make way for adolescence. Their mouths were open; I glimpsed rows of serrated teeth. Their eyes were vacant of any intelligence. They had, I fancied, my mother’s nose.

THE END

When I started writing the story that would become this book, my wife was pregnant with our son. He’s now twelve-going-on-thirteen. Needless to say, that’s a long time from start to finish. A lot has happened during that time, a lot has changed, but the love and support of my wife, Fiona, has remained a constant. More than that: as the years slid by, she was the one who said, every now and again, “You have to get back to The Fisherman .” This book wouldn’t be here without her. Thanks, love, for everything.

That twelve-going-on-thirteen-year-old has blossomed into quite the fisherman, himself, these last few years, pretty much on his own. (I basically sit nearby with a book and try to make comments that don’t sound too ignorant.) David Langan’s technical advice helped a great deal in making the fishing-related portions of this narrative more accurate, while his love and all-around awesomeness made the rest of my life better.

My older son, Nick, and my daughter-in-law, Mary, and their trio of astounding kids, my brilliant grandchildren, Inara, Asher, and Penelope the Bean, have brought and continue to bring more joy into my life than I probably deserve.

It’s becoming a critical commonplace to say that we’re currently experiencing a resurgence in the field of dark/horror/weird/whatever fiction. I happen to think this is true, but what matters more to me is the friendship so many of my fellow writers have offered me. Laird Barron and Paul Tremblay have been the other brothers I never knew I had, even as their work has made me grit my teeth and tell myself to do better. Sarah Langan, Brett Cox, and Michael Cisco are pretty good, too.